The Mad Ship

I'm so fucking upset with this book.

I've been struggling with Liveship Trader's since the first book, wherein my biggest problems were not liking most of the characters and how it felt like the ‘good guys' were just endlessly going through the shit and the ‘bad guys' just kept getting away with it. Disheartening as someone trying to be invested in the plot and repetitive from a technical standpoint. I managed to get through to the end by skimming and leaving it at a low rating, and finally moved on to The Mad Ship.

As I'm sitting here writing this I'm literally sick to my stomach.

This book? Almost completely torture porn. And I might be exaggerating that because of how awful a mood I'm in now because of it but there's just genuinely no excuse for this. Not only are all the problems I had with the first book still present and worse, there's a whole new bevy of traumatic situations the author is just dropping in for fun, it seems like.

Spoilers below.

• The plotline with Malta who is 12?? 13?? And her suitor who I'm almost completely sure is close to 20? Disgusting. Not only is this man relentlessly pursuing a CHILD, but her family gives in after a few token protests because it makes things EASIER on them financially. Let it be said I don't actually like Malta one bit, but I can recognize most of her awfulness is from being a child who doesn't know any better. That is NO excuse to let this grown man groom her and have everyone act like it's perfectly fine. Not making this a separate point because I don't know if it actually comes to be something later on in the story, but I'm getting serious creep vibes between Kennit and Wintrow as well. I'll provide quotes for you to see what I mean:
  •  He had expected Etta. Instead, it was the boy. He stood uncertainly in the door. The dim companionway framed him and the light from the stern windows fell on his face. His tattoo was hidden in shadow. His face was unflawed and open. ‘Captain Kennit?' he queried in a low voice. ‘Did I wake you?'
    ‘Not at all. Come in.' He could not say why the sight of Wintrow was like balm to his spirit. Perhaps it had to do with the ship's feelings. The boy's appearance had improved since he had been in Kennit's care. He smiled at the youth as he approached the bed, and had the pleasure of seeing the boy shyly return it. His coarse black hair was sleeked back from his face and bound into the traditional seaman's queue. The clothing Etta had sewn suited him well. The loose white shirt, a bit large for him, was tucked into his dark blue trousers. He was small for his age, a lean and supple youth. Wind and sun had weathered the boy's face. The warm colour of his skin, his white teeth and dark eyes, the dark trousers merging into the darkness of the corridor behind him: it was all a chance composition of perfect light and shadow. Even the hesitant, questioning look on his face was perfect as he emerged from dimness into the muted light of the chamber. 
  •   It brought him great satisfaction to see Wintrow hasten to obey his commands. The boy knew how to take an order; now, that was a useful thing in a pretty lad, and no mistake. He did not know his way about Kennit's possessions. Etta was better at matching up his clothes, but what Wintrow had set out was serviceable enough. There would be plenty of time to educate his eye for dress.  
  • I do not like reading about Adult/Minor relationships. Especially when those minors are 12 and 14.
• A shorter point but there is so much graphic slavery in this book. I knew that going in from the last book but the amount of detail into it feels very unnecessary. We know slavery is bad. We don't need repeated detail about how awful these people are being treated.
• The MAIN thing that made me decide to DNF this is the Satrap (a king/emperor title in this universe for those of you who do not know) orders one of his Companions of the Heart (sort of a mix between an advisor and a platonic concubine?) to be raped by the crew of the ship they're on because she refused to have sex with him. This scene made me genuinely sick to my stomach because I, somewhat feebly after the torture ride of this series I've already been through so far, thought he would falter at the last minute or change his mind in some sort of sick power play. But no. I skipped ahead to her next POV chapter and while it doesn't go into too much graphic detail (too much for me, but my tolerance for rape in fiction isn't particularly high) it's the scene that comes right after that, when she goes back to her rooms and he's waiting for her there, whining and crying at the fact that she's mad at him. I literally never want to lay eyes on this paragraph again but I need to put it here so you can understand the depths of my anger and disgust.
  •   ‘I do not see that you took great hurt from it,' he declared defensively. ‘You are walking and talking and being as cruel to me as you always were. You women make so much of this! After all, it is what men naturally do to women. It is what you were made for, but refused to grant me!' He plucked petulantly at his blankets and muttered, ‘Rape is nothing but an idea women created, to pretend that a man can steal what you have an infinite supply of. You took no permanent harm from it. It was a rough jest, I admit, and ill considered...but I do not deserve to die for it.' He turned his head and faced the bulkhead. ‘No doubt when I am dead, you will experience more of it,' he pointed out with childish satisfaction.
• I am in genuine disbelief that a woman wrote this book. I don't give a single fuck that it's made obvious to the reader that what happened was morally wrong, there is NO excuse in my mind to write something so horrifyingly evil towards women. I cannot believe this is the same woman who wrote the Farseer Trilogy. Not to say that nothing bad ever happened in those books, but when bad things did happen they had a PURPOSE. They didn't feel sprinkled in just for the sake of it, they felt necessary to plot and character development. This? This feels almost...cheap. A cop-out to develop this character by using the extremely misogynistic trope of “rape making a woman stronger” that I absolutely loathe. I wanted to push through these books even if I didn't like much about them to get back to the main characters but it's not an exaggeration to say this plot point ruined the entire series for me. Hobb writing this scene feels like her giving blanket warning that she will use the abuse and rape of women to further plot even moreso in later books, and I'm not going to put myself through that. It's heartbreaking to see as much potential as the Farseer Trilogy had go down the drain with one decision but there's nothing in mind that justifies what she did here. I'm done.