YMMV / The Long Price Quartet

• Awesome Moments: Despite being a rather demoralising story most of the time, there are a few to be found.
  • Cehmai, having been driven to a personal breakdown by Stone-Turns-Soft's scheming and on the verge of losing the binding in A Betrayal in Winter, managing to rally simply by picking one of the options of the Sadistic Choice that's been put to him and thus giving himself enough peace of mind to regain control over Stone-Turns-Soft. After Heshai in the last book, it's pretty cool to see what an actual functional poet is like.
  • Otah managing to pull off a cunning strategem in An Autumn War. He sabotages the coal in a soon-to-be-taken city so that the Galts will use it for their steam wagons, not realising that the sabotage will make it burn too hot and overload their boilers. Then he sets up an ambush outside of Machi where archers with oversized bows shoot the steam wagons, causing the boilers to burst and explode, after which Otah's troops charge in from both sides. Pretty slick for a man who'd never fought a war before, coming from a culture that's never fought a war before.
  • Eiah towards the end of The Price of Spring telling Idaan, basically, "yes, we get it, you killed your family! It was thirty years ago! No one cares! You can stop making ominous veiled references to it every third sentence!" Especially since she does it in a tone of distracted annoyance, because she's dealing with more important things right now and has had it with old people and their self-loathing.
• Moral Event Horizon: Vanjit when she blinds every person in the nation of Galt and then, again, when she blinds every living creature in the entire world!
• Squick: Vanjit's Andat takes the form of the baby she lost to Corrupting-the-Generative, and she nurses it as part of its binding.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The culture and institutions of the Khaiate at the start of the series. Otah (who is presented as, if not perfect, then at least as the most morally sound character) considered the whole thing to be a horrific dystopia that deserved to end, only mourning that it had to end with so much bloodshed. But really now... all the instances of cruelty and abuse seems to have been suffered by the poets and the Khaiem - both of whom greatly benefitted from the system in other ways and who with the exception of Otah all seemed to accept and even approve of their lot, making it hard to feel too sorry for them - and just about everyone else actually seemed very happy with living in a land of supernaturally ensured peace and prosperity. The only real losers of the situation were the andat, and since their complaint wasn't with their treatment but with being forced to be alive at all it's a little hard to relate to their suffering, either. In addition, the brutal methods of the poets that seem to have been what made Otah get so disgusted with the system to start with turn out to have had a pretty good reason for them; we see in the last two books what the horrifying consequences are of having poets who didn't need to pass the traditional Secret Test of Character and therefore don't have the right combination of iron will and empathy.
• The Woobie: Heshai. The Andat he bound is defined by his self-loathing, and so spends its existence hating him, and itself, and everything. Oh, and Heshai feels it in the back of his head.

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