This actually ties into “the points I will eventually make if I ever write that essay,” so I’m gonna sketch out the broad points:
The second half of King’s Rising is both completely irrelevant and completely necessary, to the structure of the series as it exists.
It is completely irrelevant because almost no further character growth or emotional development happens in it, but completely necessary to exist *exactly as it does* if you are trying to avoid the rest of the emotional development that needs to happen to get your characters to a satisfying conclusion.
I agree 100% that some of the questions that are most vital - “Will Laurent forgive Damen? When will he find out who Damen is? Where will this relationship go?” - are answered by the midpoint, but I had other questions too at the end of Prince’s Gambit: Will Damen forgive Laurent? How will he reconcile being in love with the man who mistreated him as a slave? How will he deal with being openly in a relationship with the master who owned him in front of the men he has to lead, especially given Akielos’s cultural ideas about dominance and status?
The answer King’s Rising gives us is that Damen doesn’t have to forgive Laurent because he already did that back in PG, and I know not everyone interprets it this way, but I don’t think that’s true. In my reading, what happens in PG is that Damen spends the bulk of the book trying to fight being increasingly drawn to Laurent by reminding himself of how angry he is about what Laurent did to him, but is ultimately unable to do so - and at some point after that, he lets his anger drop because he is, as Nikandros will point out in KR, too straightforward a person to hold two conflicting and strong emotions about a person at the same time, and having failed to stop himself from falling in love with Laurent, he cannot continue being angry at him, regardless of what Laurent has done. That’s not the same thing as forgiveness, and to get a happily ever after that feels right, there needed to be a moment where Damen acknowledges everything that happened to him and looks the fact that Laurent is the one who did that to him in the face and chooses to forgive him for it, in the same way that Laurent eventually accepts that Damianos and his beloved slave are the same person and chooses to forgive him for killing Auguste. That should have happened in KR, but it didn’t.
Also, I’ve read some fan meta arguing that Damen doesn’t have to reconcile Laurent-the-master-who-hurt-him with Laurent-the-man-he-loves because he wasn’t really traumatized by what happened to him in Arles, and I respect that interpretation, but that’s not how it reads to me. To me, Damen reads less as someone genuinely not traumatized by what he has endured, but as someone experiencing a delayed trauma response. It happens all throughout the first book, but it’s most strongly displayed in the scene with Ancel. While you’re reading that scene, while it’s extremely kinky, it’s also clear that Damen experiences it as massively humiliating and demeaning that the way he wants his own body to react is being overwritten by someone else’s words, made worse by the fact that it’s in public and with someone he actively hates, and he ends that scene infuriated and wanting revenge (also, to assert himself sexually over Laurent in order to regain dominance). Not two days later, he’s comfortably joking with Laurent about Ancel’s social climbing. While I think the f-ed up ideas of consent under which he’s been raised that determine his interpretation of what happened is a factor, I also think it speaks to how deeply he’s pushing everything down in order to continue functioning and surviving in the permanent emergency he’s in as Laurent’s slave. The ring, the whipping, and other various indignities and injuries get the same response: it’s awful while it’s happening, and stops really mattering as soon as it stops. Damen is repressing everything with the same sense of unreality he felt in the ring when he realized Govart was close to winning in order to keep going. I haven’t watched Killing Eve, but it’s like that moment I’ve seen gif’d where Sandra Oh’s character says that she’s fine for now, but in about two years she’s going to have a breakdown about all this. I don’t think he’d necessarily have what you would call a breakdown, but I do think that he’s primarily dealing with things by putting off dealing with them in CP, and there are moments throughout PG and KR (like the scene where he doesn’t know how to feel about taking the cuffs off, or the one where he automatically stands as a slave to fetch Laurent iron tea and then is confused and horrified by what he’s done) that imply that that’s the state he’s still in. The state of emotional safety he’s in in the second half of KR, when he no longer has the threat of Laurent finding out who he is hanging over him, when Laurent has forgiven him and promised to be on this side, is the perfect time for that delayed trauma response (whatever it is and however mild it might be) to happen, and for the characters to deal with it before they get their happy ending. Instead, the other shoe never drops.* The closest they get to addressing this is that scene in Summer Palace where Damen admits he’s still not OK about Laurent having “made [him] kneel” and Laurent tries to equalize things between them by serving him in the bath the way he tried to make Damen serve him in the first two books - which is not a problem in itself, but comes as a “too little, too late.”
But if you interpret the latter half of a book as a juggling act to keep that other shoe in the air, everything snaps into place like a puzzle piece and starts making *perfect* sense.
Jokaste’s abrupt heel-face turn is both too extreme and too little explored to feel genuine, as is her flattening into basically fem!Laurent, but if the narrative’s goal is to excuse Laurent’s mistreatment of Damen without needing a moment of forgiveness, then by reinterpreting Jokaste as a feminine mirror of Laurent and redeeming her, then by the transitive property of symbolism, you’ve made strides towards that goal without Laurent having to do anything
The shell game with the baby makes no sense and ultimately leads nowhere, but if you want to shunt the characters into a good place immediately after Laurent’s forgiveness without having to do any of the work to get them there organically, then you need an excuse to get them on an undercover adventure right away. Undercover work has always been a honeymoon period for them, even in the first book when they suddenly started weirdly getting along once Laurent asked Damen to play along in his scheme to help the other slaves, and being in disguise and on a quest just jumps them into a better relationship without them having to get there
The worldbuilding at the Kingsmeet, a sacred place devoted to the old kings used for negotiations because even kings can’t draw arms there, but actually a place where the true king of Akielos has no power but any “king,” even a pretender to a foreign throne, can just override the sacred rules, again makes no sense and is anti-climactic - but if you want to get Laurent and Damen away from CP without Laurent offering any real apology or atonement, arranging a situation where he can literally give his life for Damen functions better than anything else in lieu of that
Damen’s speech at the trial is embarrassing and cringey and dumb, but again, if you’re trying to avoid needing a forgiveness storyline, having Damen make a speech about how he doesn’t have to forgive Laurent because he was wrong to be angry or think ill of him in the first place, he just didn’t know him well enough - then that wraps up that effort pretty well
King’s Rising ultimately falls apart because everything is designed to get the characters to a happy ending without having them do the other half of what they need to do to earn their happy ending, and it doesn’t have time for politics or secondary characters’ motives or anything else that distracts from the primal avoidance.
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