Realm of the Elderlings Project, The Liveship Traders Book 2: Mad Ship

In which themes are thematic, brilliantly so

Cover art by Stephen Youll

One thing that Mad Ship does NOT do, in any possible way, is suffer from Book-2-itis. Instead, the plot thickens, and thematic resonances start flying thick and fast, in a way that your ninth grade English teacher tried so, so hard to make you recognize in Return of the Native or Hard Times or whatever piece of literature was being mistaught to you. Mr. Teagarten should have picked up some Robin Hobb if he wanted to make us see why recurring ideas and intertwining themes are so brilliant, but perhaps 850-page tomes is a bit of a big ask for a 14-year-old. (That said, I definitely was reading Robin Hobb in 9th grade.) Anyway, because I cannot discuss all 850 pages of this piece of magnificence in anything like justice, I've decided to talk about its recurring ideas and intertwining motifs. Or rather, a subset of them. The three I've selected are far from the only three, but they are the ones that made me stop and (literally!) take notes when they popped up. They are: the need to accept things you cannot change; the plot-thickening dangers of blind rescue; and the concept of personhood.

When last we left our Vestrits and pirates at the end of Ship of Magic, Kyle Haven (ptooey) had turned the liveship Vivacia into a slaver, and Kennit had captured her. In the sea battle that frees the enslaved captives, Kennit gets his leg chomped off by one of the ubiquitous sea serpents who always follow slave ships. (They do this because slave ships are deadly places, after all, the consequences of which deadliness get thrown overboard. Free lunch.)

Wintrow, with his unique position of both having been officially enslaved and also being the requisite family member whose presence is necessary for any liveship to sail, does not share the fate of the sailors who were complicit in the slave trade (i.e., serpent lunch). Instead, Kennit keeps him aboard Vivacia, and a fascinating kind of relationship triangle forms between the three of them. Kennit woos Vivacia with charm and respect and deference, exactly what she never got from Kyle Haven (ptooey), and never had the chance to receive from Althea. But Vivacia is a liveship, and needs to be with her family, and so she continues to reach out to Wintrow, who resents her presence but also feels an obligation to her. In a perfect world, Wintrow would give his allegiance to Kennit, so Vivacia would not feel torn between the two of them. Kennit knows this, and so alongside Vivacia, he also tries to woo Wintrow. In his logical conscious thinking, this wooing makes sense, a way of tying Vivacia more securely to his goals. But underneath that, Kennit sees in Wintrow the boy that he, Kennit, once was, the boy who was taken under the wing of a pirate and grew into the man he is now. For Kennit, that was salvation; and so in Kennit’s mind, he must do the same for Wintrow, as a duty to the boy he once was.

This triangle is one fertile ground to find the first theme: the struggle to accept (or refuse to accept) one’s fate. The point is first articulated by Etta, Kennit’s… lover? She identifies herself as Kennit’s whore, but it’s clear that her devotion and loyalty to him are strong and terrifying in ways that go far beyond sex worker and client. When she sees that Kennit wants Wintrow on his side, while Wintrow struggles to accept it, she takes matters into her hands. You can never return to the monastery, she tells him bluntly. That path is closed to you. You can either accept this life, and make what you can of it, or you can fight it and die pointlessly. One learns such things in a brothel, she says—but she says it without self-pity. She does not see herself as mistreated, though she undoubtedly has been. I do not think she could have developed such a violent loyalty to Kennit if she had known other types of real kindness. However, she has accepted her life, and works within its constraints to find purpose and strength. In her case, that purpose and strength usually leads to murderous protectiveness of Kennit’s interests. In Wintrow’s case, that purpose is to seek out the wisdom and ways of Sa, regardless of his proximity to any monastery.

This same lesson recurs with other characters. Kennit himself, struggling to adapt to life without a leg, must figure out how to be a one-legged pirate. And we see it again towards the end, as word of Vivacia’s capture finally makes it back to Bingtown, and Althea Vestrit and Brashen Trell mount an expedition to go after her. Such an expedition needs a ship, and the only ship is the titular mad ship, Paragon. Paragon is a liveship himself, but he has been beached for decades after a series of catastrophes at sea killed the family who sailed on him, left his face blinded from axe blows that destroyed the wizardwood of his eyes, and destroyed his logbooks—and with them his memories. And now Althea and Brashen and the Fool Amber are refitting him, preparing to sail in him, despite his madness and the risk that he might kill them as he seems to have killed his previous crews. In his moments of lucidity, he had accepted his fate to be a forgotten hulk, but he struggles to accept that he might have a part to play in the world once again.

Paragon also serves as a locus of the second theme: the idea of rescue, and the consequences thereof. We already saw it with Kennit: he rescues enslaved captives and reaps broadly positive consequences: acclaim, reputation, and, eventually, his dearest wish: a liveship of his own. But that liveship is going to be another link in a chain of consequences, because Bingtown will never let a pirate keep a liveship—hence Paragon’s refit, and Althea and Brashen’s mission. In Althea’s eyes, the rescue is aimed at recovering Vivacia (and maybe her nephew Wintrow). In Malta’s eyes, the rescue is for her father Kyle Haven (ptooey). And Malta has a unique opportunity to help, by means of indulging in a bit of rescue of her own. In the course of her magic-infused courtship with Reyn, the son of a prominent Rain Wilds trader family, she has become linked with the voice of a trapped dragon entombed in a buried log of wizardwood. This dragon haunts Malta’s dreams, demanding, threatening, begging for release. So Malta makes a deal: she will rescue the dragon if the dragon rescues her father. The consequences of that will have to wait for the third book.

But wait—a dragon, trapped in wizardwood? How did that happen?

The relationship between dragons and wizardwood brings us to our third theme, the one that I think is the truly brilliant revelation of this book, the discovery that both tarnishes and deepens the sense of wonder of liveships. Thus far, wizardwood has been seen as a rare, magical, magnificent substance that makes liveships into the glorious sentient creatures that they are. But in this book, we learn the whole truth: wizardwood is not mere wood, but instead a cocoon, formed when a sea serpent finishes its larval stage at sea, and returns up the Rain Wild River to hibernate and grow into a dragon. Historically the serpents were shepherded in this migration by the living dragons who guide them, and watched over in their transformation by the now-disappeared Elderlings who lived symbiotically with them. But centuries ago, the Elderling city by the dragons’ hibernation spot was buried in an earthquake, and the cocoons were blocked from the sun, unable to hatch. This is why dragons disappeared from the land; this is why they had to be built with Skill and sacrifice in the Farseer trilogy. The living dragons gradually died, and their successors were buried during the disaster, unable to hatch. For every liveship constructed from wizardwood, one of those cocoons was cut open, and the embryo dragon inside tossed away like trash. The magic and sentience that makes liveships what they are is in fact nothing more than the ghostly remnants of a dead dragon’s memories that the wizardwood absorbed from them. Liveships are dead before they ever quicken; and in their construction, an entire race of creatures was destroyed.

Can you imagine learning such a thing about yourself? To imagine yourself a living, thinking, sentient magical being, a liveship, who has a family, and memories, and agency in the world—only to learn that your entire existence is the consequence of a horrific genocide? That your ability to move and speak, to form memories, is not true life, but instead a simulacrum, a husk, a shell, an existence stolen from another being? Are you even a real person?

What does it mean, then, to be a person? In a way, this question has a kind of resonance with a lot of science fiction stories about the personhood of AI. In the framing of one of those tales—let's say, arbitrarily, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Measure of a Man”—a liveship’s identity, personality, agency, and sentience would unquestionably endow it with personhood. But what those stories lack is the horrifying cost of the liveships’ creation. To waken one, four lives must be given: the dragon, and then the three generations of family members whose deaths are needed to quicken the ship. Traditionally, those last three lives are given willingly, lovingly—but they don’t have to be. Paragon’s quickening happened prematurely, during the mysterious violent death that killed his crew and the last two generations of his family. In principle, a liveship could be wakened by taking a grandparent, parent, and child aboard and slitting their throats. Four people (including the dragon) must die to create this artificial person. Does that matter in determining personhood?

To the liveships it does. Or it can. Because under the right circumstances, they can gain direct access to the memories of the dead dragon whose husk was used to build them. When this happens, they realize—or perhaps decide?—that they are dead, that their lives as ships, as the person they had been, are false, a dishonor to the memory of what they might have been. They renounce their identity built from their liveship existence, but have nothing to replace it with other than the knowledge that their intended life as a dragon has been stolen from them. It is like a kind of madness, or a return to sanity. Or a shattering of delusions that is worse than madness. One finds oneself wondering if such a revelation is responsible for Paragon’s current state.

These three themes (acceptance, rescue, and personhood) wind together as sinuously as any sea serpent. Memory builds the personhood that defines the liveships, built from the bodies of dead dragons; but it also defines the sea serpents that follow behind the liveships, feasting on the bodies of dead humans—and, at times, the wizardwood of liveships too. Because the serpents’ memories are faulty. They have no adult dragons to guide them back to their nesting places, and so they stagnate, withering, losing themselves, forgetting their names. They cease to be people, and become instead beasts. Then toward the end, Wintrow comes across a trapped sea serpent, one which carries the memories that are necessary to keep the other serpents aware long enough for them to find their way back to the Rain Wild River. Being Wintrow, he naturally frees the trapped serpent (rescue again!), thus making it possible for these lost creatures to find a guide and make their way home before their identities are lost forever.

And finally, while I’m talking about what this book does so well, let me take a moment to discuss Malta. Remember Malta? The unspeakable brat? She begins her transformation in this book. The pivotal moment, as I see it, is on page 319, when she sneaks out to meet a suitor, the brother of one of her friends, named Cerwin. Certainly she goes about it in a very Malta-ish way. She flirted with Cerwin, and in her head she knows exactly how she wants Cerwin to behave. She wants him to be big and manly and passionate with her, to see her as a mistreated maiden sacrifice who must marry for the sake of her family’s welfare, while simultaneously calculating every facial expression, every gesture, every apparently unconscious movement. She presents herself as someone who needs rescuing, (rescue!), and presents an identity built upon lies (personhood!). Yet when Cerwin falls for her manipulations and asks how he can serve her, she does not ask for something selfish. She is smart: she asks him to persuade his father to come to a Bingtown Council Meeting to support her family’s agenda about slave trading and pirates. This is the moment when Malta stops thinking of herself, stops wallowing in frustration about what she cannot have. Instead, she accepts (accepts!) the hand that she is dealt and puts to use her wiles and manipulations and skills at bending people to her will.

Do you see? Do you see how it all intersects? And I’ve left so much out! And Book 3 has so much more! The more I write about this series, the more I am agog at this astonishing tapestry Hobb has woven. I’ll see you next month to talk about Book 3, Ship of Destiny.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Mad Ship [Bantam, 1999].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Microreview [Game]: Spiritfarer by Thunder Lotus Games

A gentle, joyful experience that doesn't shy away from the complexity of its central premise

CW: Discussions of death, illness, some references to abuse and trauma, ableism. For a fuller discussion of themes, see the paragraph beginning "Content Note" below.

It took one sentence and two screenshots from someone else in a Discord group to make me realise I needed Spiritfarer in my life. The screenshots were of a set of ghostly characters in a factory, talking about tearing down capitalism and seizing the means of production. The comment was about the experience of escorting their first in-game friend into the afterlife, and letting them go. Anti-capitalism, cute ghosts, and gentle but ever-present exploration of death and loss would have sold me on their own, but then I learned that the entire game was set on a boat and my heart was lost entirely.

Spiritfarer opens with you, Stella, and your cat Daffodil, inheriting the role of Spiritfarer. Your task, from this point is to find lost spirits in the strange realm you've ended up in, and bring them to the Everdoor, the bridge between this reality and the next. Before you do so, you need to guide them through their final tasks, helping them to the point where they're ready to move on. In the meantime, you bring them onto your boat, build them nice things, feed them their favourite foods, and generally hang out as you sail through the odd, fantastic purgatorial landscape in which you've found yourselves: up until they decide it's time to say goodbye. It's a heavy premise, and Spiritfarer treats it with all the respect it deserves, making it clear from the start what sort of game it is going to be, and following through on its promises in a way that feels thoughtful and well-considered.

The quests all feel, on one level, like standard fare for the genre - build something new, learn to collect a new resource, visit a new place, all while trying to help people to untangle their last requests. Despite the initial introduction, however, it quickly becomes apparent that none of the character arcs in Spiritfarer are going to tie up these individuals' lives and motivations into a tidy, complete "life well lived, lessons learned" package before sending them off. Most of your Spiritfarer passengers mean well, and the relationships they build with you (as a silent protagonist, there seems to be an element of projection in this, but it doesn't really affect the power of these moments) are heartwarming and sweet, but most are coming from lives shaped by tragedy and some are downright challenging. All of them have regrets, all of them have aspirations for their time in the Spiritfarer realm which are left largely unrealised, most request help from you that doesn't quite turn out as they hope. None of it matters: at some point, they still have to make the final journey, and that this moment isn't one of gamified triumph is one of the most important elements of the Spiritfarer experience. Death isn't the end of a tidy story arc, but a messy, incomplete process, and that's OK.

One of the most heartbreaking goodbyes is the one to Alice, a grandmotherly hedgehog who joins - bringing a pet sheep with her - and initially sets about being as helpful and demanding as all the other passengers, asking for upgrades and buildings and then requesting a special trip to the setting of one of her favourite stories. When fulfilling that request and escorting her around the a desolate, snow-covered town which she views with total, unmitigated delight from start to finish - Alice's health starts to take a turn. From that point onwards, every progression in Alice's storyline is about her mental and physical decline, and it becomes clear that no fetch quest or story progression is going to reverse the effects of dementia. It was a story that hit close to home, and Spiritfarer manages to strike a balance with it that could easily have gone badly wrong. As it is, Alice's arc is one of the most impactful and bittersweet in a game that's already packed with high quality moments, an incorporation of end-of-life care that's respectful to its characters and the concept it is trying to portray within a game that still manages to do what game narratives need to do.

Spiritfarer definitely delivers on the gaming experience too, helped by the bonds it creates with characters and the way its arcs question some of the underlying assumptions behind resource management and fetch quests. One of the things that impressed me early was the game's ability to create a sense of epic, cinematic challenge without any genuine threat to progress. Many resources are collected through challenge sequences, usually tied to one of the characters - for instance, during my first lightning storm my Uncle Atul teaches me how to capture lightning in a bottle, and proceeds to call down lightning onto the deck of the ship with his flute while I run around trying to catch the strikes. Nothing will happen to me if I don't get the lightning strike lined up - though Daffodil has a hilarious animation every time she accidentally gets in the way of one - but the atmosphere, the soundtrack, and the animation all combine to make a relatively simple platforming challenge into something exhilarating. Tying these challenges to individual characters, and then keeping them open without their presence once they leave, is also a neat way to keep the memories of these past residents in your mind as you progress through the game. For catching lightning, which became a ritual with my favourite character which I kept repeating well after I needed to - finding the minigame after Atul's departure meant confronting his loss all over again, and the game makes you feel that every time.

Because the game is so well thought out from almost every angle, the one or two missteps it contains are a little more obvious. The platforming elements are good but not outstanding, with the controls around when one hits a platform or a zipline and when one falls through sometimes feeling arbitrary. There's some very light Metroidvania elements around picking up new skills (bought with the tokens that your passengers give you as payment for their stay), but the game isn't brilliant at signposting things that are deliberately inaccessible until a new skill is gained. None of this really affected my enjoyment, and some of the late game skills are just so fun to mess around with that it's hard to be annoyed that you've missed a platform you really felt you should have landed on if it means you get to do the wild leaps that got you close again. But for players less experienced or enamoured with platforming, some of these elements may become more irritating, and it definitely feels like the weakest part of the gameplay. As is par for the course in management games, the sheer number of tasks the game requires of you also becomes daunting (In particular, please note you do not need that many sheep) and can get repetitive and boring (though the beautiful animations and Stella's constant grin kept me doing many things well beyond my usual threshhold of annoyance). At a certain point, I basically felt encouraged to let most of the management go, spending the endgame selectively picking up resources that I actually needed, letting my fields be empty, and spending large parts of my voyages sat on the balcony of my by-then ridiculously full boat, taking in the game's music and ambience, rather than feeling everything needed to be all productivity all the time.

I also encountered a couple of frustrations with more story-driven game elements. Two quests rely on getting a group of characters together at one point, then travelling somewhere to continue the quest, but the way one of these gets realised (and a possible glitch in the "asking" mechanic) meant that I was left with an entirely empty "audience" for one scene, undermining the way the character's subsequent reaction played out.There is also one very significant deviation from the core formula with the Everdoor, which works well for the character on one level, but was the only point that had me reaching for the internet to figure out if my game had glitched, because it came so suddenly and felt like a betrayal of expectations that I didn't expect from the game at that point. It turned out to have been an intended mechanic, and one which I came to terms with, but this was the only point where I felt the game didn't have my back when it came to guiding me through its emotionally driven content.

Content Note: Spiritfarer's gentleness shouldn't obscure the fact that there are some heavy themes involved here. As noted above, one character's arc is centred around old age and dementia; another involves child abuse, while others deal with negative family relationships in more general terms. Two of the most challenging characters engage in negative, controlling behaviour over Stella, although as the characters have no power over you in-game (it is, of course, the opposite), it's easier to view this in the tragic context it seems to be intended. Also, one of the characters talks about the effect that disability - specifically, becoming a wheelchair user - had on their life in entirely negative terms. The way this is raised makes it clear that their intention is to discuss how they were objectified and dismissed by the people around them as a result of their wheelchair, rather than it being the disability itself that got in the way of achieving what they wanted to. However, other players may find that this portrayal falls short of offering a sensitively realised disabled character, especially as the character is once again able-bodied in the afterlife. (Update: the portrayal of this character has indeed been raised over Twitter, specifically a second conversation, which I didn't properly catch the implications of during the game. Thunder Lotus has apologised and will hopefully be addressing this dialogue and the character's arc in an update.)

None of these got in the way of my enjoyment of Spiritfarer, and all felt sensitively handled, but in a game that's already trading in on a challenging premise, many players will benefit from a clear sense of what the game is asking from them. And, of course, despite its nuance and careful treatment of the concept, this is a game that portrays a degree of beauty and closure in choosing death: for many of us, this is a concept that needs to be approached carefully and in the right headspace, and I urge all prospective players to take that into account before picking this game up.

All in all, though, Spiritfarer is a game that I adored playing, from its beautiful art and entertaining gameplay, to its immersive and luscious set pieces, to the deep, resonant, heartbreaking arcs of all of its characters. In creating a game around end of life care, Thunder Lotus have taken on an immensely challenging brief and have realised it with impressive thoughtfulness and flair. This is a game experience that is going to say with me for an awfully long time, and I can't wait to see what this studio does next.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 every character has their own unique hug animation! +1 thoughtful character storylines that are heartbreaking in just the right way

Penalties: -1 the few awkward moments stand out all the more in what's overall a highly thoughtful package

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.