All the Resentment and Violence in the Queen’s Thief is Actually Rooted in Love.
They all felt each other in their souls long before they knew each other personally: Irene only hates the gods and chooses not to worship them because they betrayed her husband twice. (once to herself, once to the Mede)
Costis only punched the King in the face because the King was being rude to Teleus and he was coming to Teleus’s rescue.
Eugenides was only nasty to Teleus because Teleus failed to protect his wife from HIMSELF, at least twice (or, countless times he got into the palace by outsmarting its security).
Irene only had Relius’s mind, body, and spirit destroyed because she was doing what he told her to do to protect herself and her country.
Irene only poisons her first husband because she has real reasons to save her country from him.
Relius and Teleus were only terrified of what Attolis could do to their country (and acting against him accordingly) because that’s how we all have been conditioned to believe “a Thief’s” motivations to be. They are products of Attolian culture too.
I’d say that about the majority of Eugenides’s attendants (with the exception of Sejanus). They were cruel to their King because they were afraid of the epitome of the kind of person they’d been conditioned to fear. And maybe some of them also loved their Queen and believed they were acting in defense of her. In assistance to her.
Eugenides is bullied and picked on all his childhood in the same way because his cousins are just like his attendants. Mainstream, regular people didn’t get that while it looked like he was taking from them, he was actually giving on behalf of them, and training for bigger, multi-step, intangible things in the future that would affect them all on a level that is the most opposite of petty that I can think of. All the petty things he did were the opposite of petty. It inspires me to use pettiness as a distraction, or a curtain to hide the bigger things that are happening behind the scenes until it is time for their reveal.
Kamet is only snooty and proud and clinging to what power he does have (which ironically, is a lot, even without any personal power) because when we have been diminished by enslavement we try to inflate the small bit of worth we do have in hopes that it will compensate for what we had stolen from us.
In a way, Sophos did to Akretenesh what all his friends wanted to do to Nahusaresh this whole time. (interesting that the gunshot wasn’t lethal, it wings him in the arm and merely disables him for the moment). Sophos himself isn’t petty, and yet there’s this pettiness to the actual gunshot wound-- it’s almost as if Eugenides (god and man) are acting through him.
It’s interesting how the series started in Sounis, but we know the least about Sounisian culture. Attolia was under constant threat of civil war. Sounis actually had a civil war. We didn’t hear much about it only because Sophos was kept in isolation either being educated and kept away from the Magus on an island, or as a slave.
When I learned I was assigned at work to read and make a teaching curriculum for a book called “The Thief,” I was not super excited. I had narrow preconceived notions about what a thief actually is. Just another story about robbers, or whatever. Little did I know the shift in my life this series would create. Through it, I Iearned how to turn everything we know in our egos upside down to reveal the Love that’s actually all around us. In real, daily life.
We see a person, a Thief. We assume that he’s there to take from us. To undermine us, to violate us. Little do we know that he’s actually there to give to us, things that we didn’t even realize we need and want, and have subconsciously yearned for since the moment we took our first breath.
If we could approach every person we meet and every experience we have with the Queen’s Thief Wisdom in mind, what huge leap in evolution we will create in the world.