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booksthatburn's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
SAVAGE LEGION deals with entangled systems of oppression and marginalization in a colonial empire which does its best to hide its wars from the citizens. It engages with classism, xenophobia, ableism, and transphobia in a complex way that understands these biases as tools of subjugation by empire, within and without their borders. Moreover, it does it in a setting where the connections between these bigotries make sense in how they would arise in this particular setting. The titular "Savages" are the epitome of the civilization’s hunger: people torn from their lives to die in service of perpetuating myths of rightness and hope. For all that, their underlying ordinariness is central to this churning machine of power and subjugation: those within the empire are tools to maintain its myths, those outside are irrelevant (except when they’re being attacked).
The core of the tangle of marginalization and bigotry is this: in the Empire, people should be useful and definable. Anyone who fails one of these criteria usually does so by being poor, disabled, refusing to declare a binary gender, or making too much noise to be worth leaving alone. The mix of protagonists means that there’s someone for all of these supposed failings, perhaps more than one. What they have in common is the way they impede the system or highlight its failures, neither of which is acceptable to those in power. I’ve become used to stories which pick one or two marginalizations and ignore the rest, or which treat them as individual problems which happen to coexist. Disability in particular tends to get ignored in fantasy unless it's the entire point of the book. That is not the case here. Not only is one of the main characters physically disabled, she's far from the only disabled character who is named and matters to the story.
I’m intrigued by where this late-stage-empire story will head next, but no matter what it promises to be fascinating.
The core of the tangle of marginalization and bigotry is this: in the Empire, people should be useful and definable. Anyone who fails one of these criteria usually does so by being poor, disabled, refusing to declare a binary gender, or making too much noise to be worth leaving alone. The mix of protagonists means that there’s someone for all of these supposed failings, perhaps more than one. What they have in common is the way they impede the system or highlight its failures, neither of which is acceptable to those in power. I’ve become used to stories which pick one or two marginalizations and ignore the rest, or which treat them as individual problems which happen to coexist. Disability in particular tends to get ignored in fantasy unless it's the entire point of the book. That is not the case here. Not only is one of the main characters physically disabled, she's far from the only disabled character who is named and matters to the story.
I’m intrigued by where this late-stage-empire story will head next, but no matter what it promises to be fascinating.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation
Moderate: Transphobia, Medical content, War, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Animal death, Animal cruelty, Ableism, Violence, Genocide, and Murder
Minor: Excrement and Rape
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