Yeah, I think our feelings of uncertainty about the ending are similar. To me it seems like maybe there's an unexamined assumption about the world that either Gladstone is making or I'm making, and I'm not sure quite what it is.
Possibly it's a question about how evil it is to murder a God... If they're merely agglomerations of soul-wealth that are often abusive to their worshipers when they have the power, as the New World Craftspeople who fought the God Wars clearly thought, then what Jace did is a petty act of theft (bankrupting a few idols) to prevent a far greater act of theft (the transfer of all of the soul-wealth of all the idols to the Lady that happens at the end of the book). But if Gods are sentient beings with rights and dignity, if deicide is a crime against the world, then what Jace did is horrific. And I'm just not certain how I feel about that.
But then you add the dynamic that the Lady has reached out mostly to the disenfranchised, to people like Izza, and there's a further political dynamic to it that I'm also unclear about, because for all of Gladstone's anti-capitalist rattling and talk of revolution, the book ends in a coup d'etat where Izza and Kai seize power from Jace, establish their new God(dess), but ultimately make no serious gesture toward re-inventing the nation's economy.
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Possibly it's a question about how evil it is to murder a God... If they're merely agglomerations of soul-wealth that are often abusive to their worshipers when they have the power, as the New World Craftspeople who fought the God Wars clearly thought, then what Jace did is a petty act of theft (bankrupting a few idols) to prevent a far greater act of theft (the transfer of all of the soul-wealth of all the idols to the Lady that happens at the end of the book). But if Gods are sentient beings with rights and dignity, if deicide is a crime against the world, then what Jace did is horrific. And I'm just not certain how I feel about that.
But then you add the dynamic that the Lady has reached out mostly to the disenfranchised, to people like Izza, and there's a further political dynamic to it that I'm also unclear about, because for all of Gladstone's anti-capitalist rattling and talk of revolution, the book ends in a coup d'etat where Izza and Kai seize power from Jace, establish their new God(dess), but ultimately make no serious gesture toward re-inventing the nation's economy.