Please, for your interest and edification, note this Bluesky “skeet” from me, written roughly four months ago:

At the time I wrote that, I believed it to be true. And it is possible that it’s still correct; after all, Paige Mahoney has been getting knocked out for five books now, and Vis from Hierarchy has only had two. But it has got to be true that Domitor Vis Telimus Catenicus Leathfhear Diago Carnifex Deaglán Silverhand Siamun has been grievously injured more than any other character in the history of the written word. And it gets so much worse when he gets split into three, because then they can just totally throw logic to the wind and hurt the hell out of him in every chapter, because you’re not going to remember that spear wound in his thigh in six chapters when you come back to him, and the other two versions of him don’t have the spear wound. It’s absolutely nuts, and it’s one of those things that can’t be unnoticed once you notice it. This man has had at least seventy concussions. You’re ideally not supposed to be knocked out so hard you don’t wake up for a week even once in your life, and Vis has it happen multiple times over the course of the maybe a handful of years that both books take place over.

The second special bonus gripe is connected to Islington’s world-building, although this is not at all something that is unique to him, and in fact I’ve been seeing it a lot lately across multiple authors. Y’all, if you’re going to make “Gods!” or “Hells!” a swear word in your fantasy series, the gods or the hells need to have some presence in your book other than the swearing. Maybe this is another example of me being a sloppy reader, but there are a handful of gods named in a glossary at the end of the book, and there’s whatever the hell Religion is (I don’t know! There’s literally just a thing that the graduates can join called Religion! I don’t know what it is or what they do.) but worship and/or fear of and/or basic acknowledgment of divinity is damn near entirely absent from the book. Vis certainly doesn’t worship anything. And I’m sorry, but if any form of the concept of Hell made it onto the page at all beyond “Hells” being a swear word, I missed it. It’s lazy, especially in a world where they already both use standard English profanity and a made-up word, “vek,” that is a pure expletive in the way you might yell “Shit!” or “Fuck!” if something bad or startling happened. There’s no verb form. No one veks, and nothing is ever described as veking (vekking?) anything. But we don’t need “gods” or “hells” or “gods-damned,” which is somehow worse, and it’s one more annoying detail in a book full of them.

Okay, I’m done now.