Something I've noticed authors struggling with in recent books, is writing characters who operate within existing systems of power without compromising the morals in their book. It's really present in this book, but I also noticed it in "The Helm of Midnight", "The Jasad Crown", "This Woven Kingdom", "The Tainted Cup", etc, to different extents.

These authors clearly understand many of the inequalities within their worlds, but they want their characters to have important social roles for the plot and also be likeable and sympathetic to the audience. This means you end up with characters like monarchs or soldiers who make occasional random comments about how their specific occupation enforces inequalities and harms people, but never go further than surface level observations. Their lives remain unchanged by this information, and they have seemingly no care for the suffering they know they're inflicting on others. It creates a strange friction between what the author is clearly trying to communicate and what the characters themselves actually do (though not in "The Tainted Cup", which has a shit message).

I understand the impluse from authors to share their own political views in their works, but this method of solving the clash between their story and their views just makes annoying and honestly cruel characters. Like it sure is nice that your king character knows poor people are suffering... am I supposed to like him more now that he acknowledged it? Because he doesn't seem to be doing anything helpful, despite being the literal cause of the problem (I'll make a seperate post for The Knight and the Moth becuase this one seems particularly egregious to me, but I don't want to spoil anything). We just end up with characters who know that their position in society harms others, but continue to maintain the systems of power because the story needs them to function.

The issue then, of course, is what should authors do? To me it seems to be a bit of a lose-lose depending on what they want their story to be. They can either choose to have unlikeable/imperfect characters, make their story about revolution/social reform/etc, or only have characters who aren't a part of these systems (which likely means their story won't work at all). I don't really have anything interesting to say about this tbh, it's just something that's been bothering me recently. It feels almost performative or perfunctory when authors try to both make their characters & story socially aware while not focusing the story on inequality. It harms the book overall when the protagonist is a massive hypocrite and it really annoys me when I'm reading, but I can't really think of a way out of it if you want to make your story about anything other than inequality and also have sympathetic characters.