There is no music more pleasing than the lamentation of our bones for you

Is a pretty metal thing to say standing before the wall of storms and breaking prisoners' bones for sacrificial ritual screams.

One of the characters is writing stores from her motherland in a non-native tongue and catches flack from the locals who say that she's trying to appropriate her own culture. Instead she's retelling a love story, or the story of how much she loves her nation through a new lens so that others might appreciate it as well. Funnily enough, this parallels precisely what Liu is doing with this series.

There's several fun, if not tilting, discussions of engineering at scale with detailed descriptions of the wartime inventions spacing out the three or four chapters cataloguing the battle of Crescent Gulf. Creating one bellum ex machina, then creating a bigger machine to build the first machine is just a fun progression on par with Seveneves. There are, however, some immersion-breaking if not outright cringe moments when Roti creates instruction-following machines and has a discussion with someone else about how she's "artificing intelligence."

And not to nitpick the mechanics too much, but the charging technique of the ornithopters wouldn't have any impact on the duration of charge. Perhaps the discharging technique could be more efficient, but the static electricity standing that silkmatic shocks work with doesn't make sense, like it's not even internally consistent.

Also doesn't make any sense how Goztan would be able to communicate with the rest of the riders instantly during the battle. Also Goztan telling Phyro that she'll never accept his victory is insane - like the battle has been one but now she's parlaying about optics of victory? And what's stupider is that Phyro seems to give a shit about it... like he could literally kill them all and win indisputably and honorably and not leave it to be a matter of who "believes" who won, and instead he accepts a 1:1 duel against Goztan - when he literally doesn't have to...

What's then supposed to be an epic duel between them feels rushed and corny. Whereas in a similar moment before battle Stannis and the Onion knight discuss always having to shit the night before battle and not being able to sleep - humanizing the conflict at hand in that book, this sequence just felt like Liu was trying to speedrun a mega awesome epic win feeling.

Court politics are annoying more than anything else, like the Dara people stop acting rationally – old man arguing in favor of appeasement without any sort of logic but keeps interrupting people with fallacies needs to die bro. I do like how much of this book is steeped in the lore which was established in realtime in the first book with Mata, Kuni, and their predecessor Mapidere – these names which we know are mentioned with reverie now, which evinces the generational epic Liu has crafted.

Okay and finally we get to why this book ended up being awesome – Jia. At first I thought it was annoying of her to explain her master plan to Phyro, however it's not like it's anything which has been kept secret from us as the reader, it also has already happened (Ozymandias-style) so there's nothing Phyro can do about it, Jia's just cluing him in to gauge his reaction because she still has faith in him to be a strong leader. This sort of prima facie evil move which is hiding legitimately benevolent intention makes her such a cool and complex character. Like it's the obvious trope of "ruler who thinks they're the only one smart enough to rule" but in this sense, she kind of actually is, but she's still looking for an off ramp. When she describes pen testing her own system when the guards turn against her, it seemed aloof and like a huge cope, but we learn 1) that only is she tormented by the deaths of those she shouldered to keep the peace, but 2) that everything is actually going according to plan.

Additionally, Cogo being so merciful to Jia and asking her to free herself, and to see herself the end of history is demonstrative of his absolute wisdom serving as a foil against Jia's absolute connivery. Chapter 54 is perhaps the best chapter in the whole series.

Ukyu Gonde arc is so sad – Noda Mi beheading Timu et al is savage. Timu's final logogram containing a riddle communicating how he had actually been betrayed and his daughter immediately picking up on it is a cool "final" usage of the significance of the bespoke logogrammatic worldbuilding thing.

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