I know I'm mad late to the Priory of the Orange tree craze, but I'm about halfway through and I have thoughts. Specifically thoughts on the religion of the western half of the book's world.
I don't super love how religion is handled in terms of overall rhetoric. The religions on a ground level are really well done; they're realistic and believable without being too direct a rip from existing religions. Though, the Saint and the Virtues are more clearly Christianity than the rest of the other religions are anything else. And I think this really effects how the narrative treats that religion in relation to all the others. I find it really cheap and uninteresting when books have two 'opposing' religions where one is obviously wrong and the other is obviously right. That's not how any religion has ever worked, for starters, and it also lacks nuance. You can tell from the get go that the Saint and Virtues are meant to be the bad/wrong religion. Even if Ead wasn't our primary narrator and perspective into Inys culture, the way things are written have an obvious derision for the Saint. Now, I don't hate the idea of a false religion built on lies, but the way it's set up against the vastly superior and narratively favoured woman-led counter religion is just, well, boring. You have the 'bad' religion founded by a man who is a liar, and the good religion founded by a cool woman. The whole, one religion is good and one is bad just lacks any sense of real intrigue, especially when the book flat out tells you which one is bad and which one is good. I would really love for there to be truth in both the Saint's and the Mother's stories, but I can tell that that's not the direction the book is headed and it bums me out, because it makes the religious divide in the west into obvious moralism that plays on what we as readers are apt to agree with. The rest of the world-building bangs, so why cant we have nuance in the two main religions, too?
The narrative and Ead + the rest of the priory are generally unfairly shitty to those who believe in the Saint. Fuck those guys for believing their religious leader, I guess? It's not like they chose to be lied to, and they don't know any other truth, so having all the other characters treating Inys citizens like deliberately ignorant and hateful doesent have the same punch as if they did know their origins. Getting pissed at another culture for not knowing your real history when you deliberately hide it from everyone is petty, esp when you know they've been lied to for the past thousand years. It also makes Ead's perspective vaguely annoying because she has an obvious bias against the Saint and Inys, which isn't inherently wrong because, again, she follows the good/real religion. But it does feel a bit, i dunno, unfair, because Ead knows they don't know their religion is a lie, and she still thinks poorly of them for it. Like, i cannot emphasize how little empathy is spared to these people who do not know their entire religion a lie, they're just treated how we would treat a nation of christian colonizers. Except, the people of Virtudom aren't colonizers and, I cannot stress this enough, do not know that their religion is wrong, as far as they are aware, it is actual history. I can smell from a while away that Ead is going to convince Sabran to convert, and that Sabran in turn is going to forcibly convert her entire queeendom, because she has that power as a monarch. And the book is going to treat this like a 'good ending' and not the massive cultural and life upheaval it actually is.
The whole 'there is only one right sect of this religion, and all others are inherently bad' thing just reeks of christian rhetoric, even though the 'good' religion is supposed to be from a more Arabic leaning culture. It reads a lot like an ex-christian trying to overcompensate for their former religion, whilst still maintaining all of that religious rhetoric about sin and 'true good' and there being only one right way of life and that the people who don't follow this right way are bad and morally inferior by default.
The book is still great (could use more dragons, tbh, I feel like they oversold how many dragons are in this book) I just hate that one specific narrative aspect.
