Ship of Destiny: Spoiler Discussion!

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Hello everybody and welcome back to the channel. Today I am recording a video that is very very overdue and that is my spoiler chat of Ship of Destiny. So hopefully this video is a good surprise because I didn't actually tell any >> [laughter] >> of my friends that I was reading this book. I just decided last week that I was going to finally do it. I had a little bit of a lighter week in terms of being on call, doing work, that kind of stuff and I thought, you know, what better time to read a 900 page book that you have been putting off for I don't remember now if it's 3 years or 4 years. I don't know if it was 2022 when I read Mad Ship or 2023, but regardless, that is a significant amount of time. And also, you know, funny that I'm going to come back and attempt to review a book that is, as I said, a 900 page epic, emotionally tumultuous finale of an incredibly dense series that I haven't picked up in 3 to 4 years. So, you know what? You If you're going to aim you may as well aim high.

[00:01:03]So, this is going to be my attempt at reviewing Ship of Destiny and I'm going to kind of break it down into all of the components that I use to review books, but also this is probably going to be a more casual discussion because there's just a lot to talk about and this is going to be difficult to organize at the best of times, but I will start off, you know, I got to give the plot away. I loved this book.

[00:01:25]So, this is an absolute five-star read for me. It may in fact be my favorite book of the year. I think it is my favorite book of the year. I just and I knew this would happen and everybody kept saying that this would happen, but the minute that I picked it up and started reading, I was just angry at myself that I had waited so long to do it, which is the exact same thing that I said when I started the Liveship Traders trilogy because I had had this huge fallout after reading Farseer and I loved it so much and we were shifting over to something that theoretically I should like less because I enjoy kind of classic fantasy more than nautical fantasy. I enjoy single POV more than multi POV and I was so attached to Fitz that I was unhappy to be leaving him behind and going to a different part of the world, but now I just feel like a brat because I loved this book. So many people told me I would love this book.

[00:02:16]They were absolutely right and I should have read it sooner. However, here it is. I finished it today and actually at around 1:00 this morning because I had about 100 pages left around midnight. I thought I could go to sleep and wake up and read it before work, but I didn't want to. So I just stayed up and read it until [laughter] 1:00 and then went to sleep. I was very, very tired when I woke up this morning, but it was worth it because it was excellent. Absolute five stars.

[00:02:42]What to talk about? I mean, I'm going Like I said, I'll I'll try to break this down into a somewhat organized walk through the book. And the first thing that I'll talk about, I guess, is the plotting.

[00:02:54]Robin Hobb gets a lot of praise for her characterization, for her prose, a lot of well-earned praise. She is a master of character relationships, complex characters. The way that she writes is beautiful, immersive, and very much fits that kind of slow burn emotionally heavy fantasy that the Realm of the Elderlings is.

[00:03:19]However, after finishing the Farseer Trilogy, which is the only trilogy that I finished in the Realm of the Elderling Elderlings so far, people seem to be split on that last book, 50/50. You know, this was a terrible ending versus I really liked this ending. This was a long meandering story that relied too much on character development or I really enjoyed spending this time in Fitz's head. And people seem to be divided. I actually don't know what the common consensus is on Liveship except that I think most people like it, but I don't know what people think about how this story comes together. And I will be really, really sad if the prevailing opinion is not this was a masterpiece because it was. Robin Hobb laid down clues and hints for all of the reveals that happen in Ship of Destiny, and the way that she put the story together while balancing a huge cast of characters who are all incredibly complex, who all have their own part in moving the story forward. She balanced that so well, and to me at least, it felt like a very satisfying end for all of those characters.

[00:04:29]This was an intensely personal story, so it was very much about the live ship traders, about the commerce and the culture, and the changing lens of Bingtown and all of the outlying provinces, but she has also managed to tie the events of this book into the greater world that she is building without it ever feeling heavy-handed.

[00:04:52]Things blended together and came together in such a seamless way. It felt like magic. I I cannot describe it in any other way. The Rain and Malta story and how that ties back to the earlier Elderlings and the return of the dragons exquisite. The way that the politics of the world are obviously going to have repercussions on the greater world, you know, where if we go back to Buckkeep or wherever we're going for the next installment of this, wherever Tony man takes place, wherever Fitz is going to travel, having hints at what happened in the Farseer trilogy and what is potentially going to happen coming down the road, it all fit together so well, and I I was blown away.

[00:05:39]This is a long book, and I can imagine that if there is a criticism, people might say, you know, this this took a lot a lot of time to get through. There was a lot of build-up and maybe some characters didn't get maybe as glorious an ending as some people might be hoping and we'll talk about that in a little bit, but I really do think that it was masterful the way that everything came together. I think that it can be very easy when you're writing a series with such a broad scope to make your machinations, the way that you shift your characters across the board, the way that the plot unfurls that to feel heavy-handed, but in this case I absolutely did not think that that happened. I think that it was very subtle.

[00:06:23]Even if there were things that you figured out before they were ultimately revealed in the novel, it felt like you were understanding them or figuring them out at the right time. It didn't feel like oh no, like she was clearly trying to get me with that one and I figured it out before her like if you figure out the plot of a murder mystery too quickly. No, it would just it all as I learned things, it felt like I was learning them at the right time, the right pace and I don't know I don't know what else to say. It was just I loved the way that everything came together. The writing, again, I don't have a ton to add to this. I do think that Robin Hobb's prose is masterful. I think as I said before, the way that she writes, the particular care she takes with her descriptions, how she writes her dialogue, how she writes her character interactions, fits very well with this incredibly emotionally heavy, sweeping, grand fantasy that she is that she is writing. You know, do I think that her style of prose would be great for a thriller? Probably not. But for the kind of books that she is writing, it lines up perfectly. And I think sometimes when we decipher prose, when we look at prose, when we break down prose, it can be hard to look at it within the appropriate lens. And this is why it's difficult to say, you know, this person writes well or this person writes poorly. This prose is good. This prose is bad.

[00:07:39]Because you can't it it is not a singular entity. You can't look at it through one very restrictive lens and say that it works well for everything because you don't want the way that an epic fantasy is written to sound the way that a thriller is written.

[00:07:52]You know, those are two very different skills, but I think for the type of book that this is, Robin Hobb's prose is perfect. It is grand in just the right way. It is not purple, it is not over the top, it is not it is not any of those things. It is stark, it is haunting, it is emotional, and I think that that works very well because there's a lot of pain here, I think.

[00:08:14][laughter] Thematically and emotionally, that was the biggest struggle of reading Liveship. There's been a couple of times over the last few days that I've been reading this book where I felt drained and I had to think for a second, what's happening?

[00:08:28]>> [laughter] >> Why do I feel this way? And it is 100% because I was reading this book.

[00:08:33]This is and again, if I'm trying to open up the empathy doors and and understand if you didn't enjoy this book, what a reason for that might be, it is likely because this is really, really hard. This to get to the end of this book takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort, and it takes a lot of emotional investment. And if you love these characters, which I can imagine that you wouldn't after spending so much time with them, watching them go through everything that they go through is incredibly difficult.

[00:09:07]I there was a point in this book where I thought, what more?

[00:09:11]What [laughter] more could happen? How what next? I just had to steel myself for the likely reality that something terrible was coming for somebody that I cared about.

[00:09:21]>> [clears throat] >> And on that note, sometimes I think that Robin Hobb's goal with this book was to make me hate everybody. There were she is so good and I guess we're we're rolling right write character development right now because that kind of a thinking of you know themes and emotion kind of rolls you right into character development, I guess. But, there were times when I hated everyone in this book except the one person that I hated before I started this book.

[00:09:50]>> [laughter] >> Going into this, I would have said, you know, Malta was insufferable. I could not stand to read her point of view. I did not like her. And I knew, because this is one of the things that I did know going into this book, that she was going to have a character arc. There were going to be a lot of changes. She was going to undergo a lot of changes.

[00:10:08]But, that aside, I still had my own share of frustrations with her when I entered into this book. And I think she's the only character in this book that I didn't despise at >> [laughter] >> one point or another. They're all so frustrating, which just means that they're all so human, right? Robin Hobb does not shy away. Even the characters that we are feeling sympathy for, the people who go through hard times, the people who have been mistreated, the people who have been done wrong by, they'll turn around and do something that is so human and so frustrating, whether they're lashing out, whether they're burying themselves in, whether trying to protect themselves, they'll do something that will then frustrate you so much that it it can only feel like real life.

[00:10:51]I'm sure we've all had these interactions with people we care about because humans are complex and they don't react in stoic and noble ways to hardship, right? We get angry, we fight back, we bite, we you don't always react the way that people want you to under circum- under certain circumstances. And that is something that comes through so well in these books. And I think I can't Ship of Destiny without talking about some characters in particular. So, I'll start off, I guess, with the serpents and the dragons. So, I'm very excited that dragons seem to be back in the Realm of the Elderlings. They seem to be back in this world. It's very interesting to have one dragon who has very specific memories about how the world moved on, about what used to be, you know, she's responsible for the future of her entire species.

[00:11:41]It's very Last Unicorn, it's very sad in that haunting way.

[00:11:46]But there is hope, obviously. And it was very interesting to see the interaction between the serpents and the ships, the dragons and the ships, the serpents and the dragon, the dragon and the people, and just It also makes you reflect, I think it also made me reflect on just your role in the world as a human. And I think what little I know of Robin Hobb is that she lives in Alaska, I think, out in nature. And I'm sure, just based on reading her writing, that she thinks a lot about our role with nature and how humanity interacts with the world and how we interact with other creatures and what that means about us and how what a responsibility that is and how we should handle that. And that very much comes across in this book, and I think it's that intersection between ship and dragon, where we get to see that loss of self, that loss of sense of self, something that humanity has done to strip such a majestic creature of its power, to subjugate something that is so powerful and beautiful for its own means, whether willingly or unwillingly, because I'd argue that humanity has unwittingly, not willingly, unwittingly done much harm that, you know, we then still have to account and atone for, right? And so that that is very much the case with the Rain Wilds people, you know, they have done this terrible thing without any knowledge that it was terrible, but there's still some sense of responsibility that needs to be taken there. So, I think overwhelmingly that was the saddest part of the book for me.

[00:13:10]There were obviously very sad character moments, characters went through things that were very upsetting.

[00:13:15]But [snorts] just watching Vivacia and Paragon go through this split in identity, this loss of what could have been, this kind of second-guessing, all of that, and then finding out that you are something that is neither one thing nor another, and you have to try to find and carve out some identity for yourself in the middle of all that.

[00:13:37]That's very sad and and very complicated, but I did really like the moment at the end where you get Ophelia, who is made of the kind of dead wizard wood, and so doesn't have this crisis of personality, and Vivacia, who are having a conversation, and she they're talking about the sky and the ocean, and you know, how the ocean is also a place of freedom, where you can find yourself and make new memories. And so, it was a very positive kind of way [snorts] to leave off the story, and I did I did really like that. The ships themselves were just as awe-inspiring, just as terrifying as they were in the previous two books. I honestly think this is one of my favorite and most creative fantasy changes to something that exists in the real world. The live ships are just a really cool concept, and I believe I said this way back when I reviewed one of the other books, but I really wish we could watch live live ship traders as a TV series.

[00:14:35]I really think it would do well in that medium, and I would love to see a live ship on screen. I'm not going to lie. I think they're really cool concept. And I'm hoping that maybe when we get back into the Rain Wilds for that quartet, that we'll see a little bit more of that, because I imagine I imagine that Robin Hobb kept the the that part with the Ophelia where she was made of wizard wood, where the the dragon had already died, and so there aren't any of those memories, that she kept that in there so that live ships can continue to be a part of trade and a part of this world.

[00:15:05]And as we know from the end of Ship of Destiny, there are a lot of serpents that unfortunately are not going to make it through the cocooning process, and so there will be wizard wood, I imagine, for ships.

[00:15:15]I don't know how the dragons are going to respond to that, if they're okay with that being used, if they're going to want to devour those themselves. I'm not sure, but it it it does leave open an avenue, so it makes me interested in that Rain Wilds quartet. So, it'll be fun to read those and see what comes of that. So, the ships, the dragons, the serpents, I had no clue why any of it was important in book one, and now I love the serpents chapters at the end of book three. So, it just again is a testament to Robin Hobb's slow game, right? She was there, she was giving us what we needed, and we didn't appreciate it until the very end.

[00:15:49]Um other characters, I mean Malta, as I said, huge character change, huge development.

[00:15:55]Not a lot to say other than that. I like the way that her and Rain are going to fit into this greater world. The, you know, are the Elderlings coming back?

[00:16:01]That's something very interesting to think about. Again, I'm hoping that maybe I'll get more answers about that in the Rain Wild quartet. Um I I would discuss Amber, but unfortunately, I did something that I never do, which was I tried to look up something innocuous when I was already finished the book, and it got spoiled for something about Amber. So, I'm not going to discuss Amber here cuz I'm now I'm thinking like is this something that would have come to me? I wasn't finished the book, sorry. I would I had about 100 pages left.

[00:16:31]And I was like, is this something that would come to me? Is this Because then as I read the rest of it and looked at some of the word play and the context, I thought, okay. But I I don't know how big a spoiler this is for someone who has also finished Liveship but hasn't yet gone on to Tawny Man. So, I won't really talk about Amber, except to say that I did really enjoy the part where she recarved Paragon's face to be Fitz, presumably. She [laughter] was carving I was like, is this Fitz?

[00:16:58]Um and then the axe in the part where he gets in the battle, and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is just like berserker mode Fitz from from book two. So, I I really enjoyed that. It was again like a fun little Easter egg coming over from one series to the next. And also, you know, I love seeing hints at the broader world in these limited kind of subseries within the greater series. So, that was good. Um Um Althea had a very difficult journey in this book as well, and I did enjoy how she was able to recognize that maybe the life she envisioned for herself was not the life that she was going to have, that she had to let go of her family ship, how she moved forward on her own, and decided what was going to make her happy. And obviously the sexual assault scenes were very difficult, very challenging.

[00:17:44]You know, unfortunately again a reflection of what happens in life when women go through that. But, I did like the scenes between her and Paragon, kind of the parallels between him taking Kennett's pain, and then at the end him taking Althea's pain and saying it's okay, you don't have to hold on to it for it to have happened, for it for you to recognize that it was something impactful for you. It's okay for it to become a memory, and knowing that Paragon is now strong enough to take that pain because he is complete, and he has come to terms with who he is, and why he's important, and why his life has meaning was also a very full circle and satisfying moment. So, I really enjoyed that.

[00:18:26]The biggest character to talk about, I think, is Kennett, and you kind of talk about Kennett, Edwyn, and Wintrow all at once. I will say that Wintrow shot to the top of my I loathe you list for this [laughter] for this book. I feel like Wintrow's the character that I've waffled about the most in this whole series because I empathize with him. I feel bad for anybody who had to have Kyle Haven for a father, and that definitely messed up his his various children in various ways.

[00:18:54]But, I just I'm glad that he acknowledged near the end of the novel that the good things that Kennett did, he wanted to be a part of that, and he wanted it so badly that it made him overlook the terrible things that he knew were happening. Because there's no way that you can convince me that someone as smart and capable as Winter didn't know the the awful things that were living within Kennet. And absolutely, you can get caught up in people like that. We see that with Edda. She loves him despite all of his flaws knowing the terrible things that he has done.

[00:19:32]They all feel like their destinies are tied together. But it was nice to hear Winter acknowledge it was that was the the point in the books in which I forgave him for being insufferable is when he admitted to Althea, you know, I I know that this is bad. I know that he did bad things. I feel ashamed of myself. I wanted to only see the good because he, you know, he also did good things. Whether or not they were for a good reason, the outcome was good. And you can argue philosophies and what's important what's not important. That's going to differ from from person to person. But I can sit here comfortably and say that Kennet was a monster. Kennet [clears throat] was created, you know, by a different monster. And Kennet did things that both benefited humanity, the world as a whole, and also was awful. Right? He did terrible things. And I think it's interesting >> [snorts] >> again, it says something about storytelling and myth and how we build people up. Because of course his name will go down in history. That was, you know, the whole prophecy surrounding him to begin with. And people sometimes see what they want to see. They're going to remember the grand romance of Kennet and Edda when he would have happily fed her to a serpent if it served his purpose, right? He was not going to go out on a limb for her or for anybody. Anybody was expendable because he needed to protect himself. And that was the biggest reveal, I guess, or the biggest shift in understanding in this book is that I had not had any empathy for Kennet before this. And I this book did open that up.

[00:21:05]Did it mean Does that mean that I like Kennit any more than I did before? No, I don't. I like him even less after this book. The things that he he does in this book are even more reprehensible than in previous books.

[00:21:18]I just understand how he became that way and this cycle of abuse and mistreatment, this kind of becoming of the monster when he betrays his past self, when he carries out that unspeakable violence and it totally turns his tide and changes his destiny and leads to his downfall. You know, he becomes the monster that scared him. And just understanding his childhood and then by consequence, understanding how Paragon became the way that he was was incredibly emotional. The scene where Kennit dies, which I was actually kind of happy that it was a very lackluster death. You know, he got stabbed as they were trying to stab someone else and I I didn't want him to have a glorious end. To be honest, I'm happy that it was just like some random guy on a ship that we don't really know. We don't hear anything else from.

[00:22:10]There's no chance to save him. He has to die, but him going back to Paragon's decks becoming a part of that ship I thought that was again another very satisfying full circle moment and I'm glad that it helped to heal something in Paragon because that's who I did have a lot of empathy for is that, you know, this ship that has been described as a child essentially, you know, who's having tantrums, who will is desperate for affection but doesn't know how to give it, doesn't know how to receive it, is very disgruntled, feels very invalidated the second something doesn't go his way.

[00:22:46]Makes sense and I think this might be one of my favorite things or my favorite thing about the Liveship Traders minus just the existence of Liveships cuz I think they're really cool is how Robin Hobb took the concept of living through trauma and adapted that to a fantasy world. The fact that Kenneth bled all of his fear and sorrow and also his good memories into Paragon, let him take them, made them take them, and then became this very walled-off, closed-off version of himself is essentially what does happen to people or does happen to some people who go through an immense trauma, right? You You develop a way of coping with that trauma that serves you until it doesn't, which is what happened with Kenneth, right? You You develop ways of looking at the world, dealing with the world, whether that is shutting yourself off from emotion.

[00:23:39]There's a line where Kenneth says, you know, he couldn't love anything because he saw how much Paragon loved him and what that did to him. You know, he was willing to sacrifice himself for Kenneth. He was willing to drown himself, to be dragged to the bottom of the sea because of the depth of love that he had, and Kenneth was not willing to love anything like that ever because he knew that that was something that couldn't be controlled. It was something that went beyond logic, beyond rationality, that was just pure emotion, and he would not allow himself to have that, and that shutting down of emotion that becoming cold and calculated, of ensuring that nothing is ever going to hurt you again, that nothing is ever going to touch you again, obviously that closes you off to the warmer enjoyable things in life because you always have to be vigilant, you always have to be watching, you always have to be waiting, and that served Kenneth very well until the moment that it did not, and that's where we see, you know, people who have gone through traumatic things when they were 6, 7, 8 years old like Kenneth, and then by the time they're 45, 50, they're saying, "Why now?" Like, "Why did I not?" And it's because you can only shut all that down, you can only push all that down for so long until it bubbles back up in a way that no longer serves you as an adult as it did when you were a teenager, a young adult, you know, someone who's just learning their life.

[00:24:53]And so, I thought that that was very well done.

[00:24:56]It was very true to the human experience and it's It was very interesting to see how Robin Hobb translated that to fantasy because she could force Paragon or she could write Paragon as taking physically that pain, that suffering, those memories and instead of it being the kind of mental block or mental gate that we see in real life, it becomes this very magical experience, this very magical transfer. And then we see the cracking in Paragon obviously and everything that had happened to him.

[00:25:27]But it was very well done. It made me very emotional as I said. I could hate Kennit and also appreciate what happened.

[00:25:35]Speaking of hatred, so very glad that Kyle was just chucked over the side of the ship because I knew when they were going back to that island that he was going to be there and I was like, "Oh, no. Kennit's mom is going to take him off this island and then I have to deal with him." But thankfully he just got to be nasty to a couple of people. I also very much enjoyed Kephria's acknowledgement that you know, "I loved this man because I wanted to feel protected and now that I've had to fend for myself, defend myself, I know that we are not compatible anymore." And so I know you can't just kill people off so that other characters can have an easier time, but I would argue everybody had a really hard time and shoving Kyle off the side of the boat is the least of anyone's crimes in this series including Robin Hobb. She has far greater crimes than that. So that is it. This was a very rambling exploration of why I loved this book.

[00:26:24]But hopefully what you take away from this this discussion is that I just I really loved it. I could talk about it for a much longer time.

[00:26:31]Maybe somebody will want to talk about it sometime and we can have a longer discussion. So if anybody does want to do that, then let me know because I would love to talk more about it. But if you did read Ship of Destiny, I'd love to know what you thought of the plot and how it came together, if you enjoyed the way all the pieces fell together, how you felt about live ship as a whole. And I am super excited. Actually, the first Tony Man book last night. So, I'm determined to not make this a pattern. I am not going to wait. I am going to finish up the couple books that I have started right now, and then I'm going to get to Tony Man because I'm super excited to see fits again. And probably will be contrarian sad that I'm not seeing any live ships. So, you know, >> [laughter] >> I've just got to live with that personality trait. But, thank you for sitting through this. I hope you enjoyed it, and I will see you with another video soon.

[00:27:14]Bye.