Shané Oosthuizen

Like, that image is just kind of, like, seared in my brain.

And I think it really drove home, like, the human cost of some of the things that are, like, working in the mechanisms of this society.

But also, Sinead, just to actually take it back to... You kind of made that point about...

Like showing gender through Tomlin and Siona's relationship.

I actually read, so I was reading a bit of like what Emma Wong has actually said about this.

And she had originally had their roles switched.

Interesting.

So Siona's character was going to be the male and Tomlin's character was going to be the female.

And then she made the decision to change it around because she thought it was a more interesting exploration of gender.

I do.

I really enjoy the inclusion of like religion as like a tenant of this society's means of oppression over the Queen.

It's such a like parallel to like the civilising mission in our own histories in real life.

And you see religion being tied so explicitly into industry as well.

So like they're using religion to justify like this kind of like

capitalist expansion and there's like a like at the beginning of each chapter there's kind of like a little excerpt from like their texts within world and there's one in particular where they kind of say

like the quinn suffer from sloth and it's kind of like our job to to bring them out of that and to and we do that through labor um and they use that to kind of justify their treatment of them as essentially slaves um in this city um and i just think like it came through in so many aspects in that kind of way and um like their entire high mage order is based like

They're essentially like the clergy of this world.

And you kind of get like references to throughout the text to how they sort of also control like the state.

And so I just thought that was really smart.

She makes so many offhand comments like that and you can just see Tomo, he never questions her because his life is on the line but you see his reaction to each thing in that silence.