Lily Crozier

Hard to know how much is informing the decisions and how much is the adrenaline of the situation.

Do you know what I mean?

Did you feel that it was, like, realistic, though?

I think so, insofar that we could comment on that intense...

I mean, yeah.

Yes, yeah, there's none of that.

Like they are experiencing it.

They are living it.

And I find everyone is good, but... Oh, no, sorry.

Everyone is flawed, but there is a bad.

And so I thought that was an interesting approach where in a story there's so much about the morally grey that the big bad is just the big bad.

There's sort of... You don't ever really see a reason why they're following him, which I thought was an interesting approach.

But I did really like, especially Crowther and how dark he kind of gets...

I suppose how warped the resistance becomes and how that is played with in, I suppose, a genre that is so good and evil and it is so...

un-nuanced typically with fantasy war books, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I think it's that distance and, like, jump in if I'm completely way off base, but I think that distance allows us to process it in a totally different way because if it's too close and it's too realistic, people kind of look away because it becomes confronting and then you kind of get mixed in with your world views and everyone else's world views and there's kind of a presumed way that you should be experiencing the world, if that makes sense.

You know what I mean.

I do.

But then, yeah, once it's fantasy, it's quite,

like everyone can kind of engage with it on it, engage with it in the same level.