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flightworks2025-08-19 11:19 pm
feralphoenix) wrote in flightworks2025-08-19 11:19 pm
THE BIG GAY SPITFIRE REKINDLED REVIEW
NB: this review is based on an ARC of spitfire rekindled kindly provided by maya & friends!
maya kern's spitfire rekindled is roughly the first half of what's been retroactively renamed spitfire the legacy edition, which itself is the first half of a planned duology that's been retooled as a tetralogy. it is a fantasy geopolitical drama/romance/erotica series centering on the confluence of four blisteringly hot, deeply idiotic 20somethings and their romantic entanglements. these four blisteringly hot, deeply idiotic 20somethings are also heads of state! 423975928347923853724 dead 34792857892879286927839248797928734947234 injured... and counting!!!
the first of these four leads to be introduced is feon, a dragon with shapeshifting magic who spends most of his time wearing his humansona. in the country of nadara every monarch since the kingdom's founding is traditionally soulbonded to a dragon via nadara's trademark blood magic, and feon is bound to nadara's current prince caederyn. feon has literally been in love with caed since first sight and has always assumed that this bond means they are guaranteed romance someday even if caed keeps matrix dodging feon's affections... so when caed announces he's going to get married to princess allene of voswain feon Loses His Whole Entire Mind and vows to foil whatever vile plot this homewrecking hussy definitely probably must have.
princess allene, who is the secondary protagonist of spitire rekindled, obviously has no such vile plot. in fact, coming from a country where polyamory is the social norm and the monoamorous nadarans are all thought of as weirdo prudes, allene is baffled as to why her presence should be any sort of barrier to feon's affections, because caed has two whole hands, after all! plus, allene has more fish than feon to fry right now: moving to a strange new land to get married is turning out to mean approximately one (1) rude culture shock per 30 seconds. allene's first exposure to how little she knows about nadara involves her being about one (1) foot away from the latest assassination attempt on her fiance, and she is determined to help unravel the identity of the attackers even as she must also juggle convincing the nadaran populace to like her, feon's big baby tantrums, and caed's impossible temperament.
caught between his bombastic fiancee and his jealous dragon, prince caederyn cannot bring himself to believe that either of them really and genuinely loves him. part of this is because a lifetime of emotional neglect and abuse from his distant father has convinced caed that he is a perennial disappointment who will never live up to the royal legacy... and part of this is because he feels he can never know how much of feon's love for him is influenced by their soul bond! all caed wants is to do right by the people he's convinced he'll never deserve, but how is he supposed to do right by a woman and a dragon he'll never feel worthy of?!
alongside these three horrible fools circling one another in a whirlwind of romantic and sexual confusion, there is professional fuckboy lesbian lysithea. as the daughter of the ambassador of laruze, a country with which nadara shares an ugly history, she's been in the same social circle as allene, caed, and feon since childhood. she therefore lives to drop diss tracks on caed, needle feon, and make sad cow eyes over the oblivious allene. invited to nadara for allene and caed's wedding, lysithea is not any happier about it than feon. does their mutual misery hold any chance for a change in their relationship, and how will lysithea endure being stuck in a land where she and her parent are considered Public Enemy Number One?
this is roughly what i've covered already in my old blurb for spitfire the legacy edition, which means that now i get to EXPOUND. hold onto your butt.
Traditional Romance Genre TM has an extremely strict plot structure/series of beats that genre scholars have down to a science SO exact that if you give someone the page length of your book (and it's always One Single Book--the trilogies you see genre titans like nora roberts et al crank out at breakneck speeds are omnibus stories that cover a different couple per entry) they will be able to tell you the acceptable range of pages for your main characters to meet cute, to first attempt a relationship, to have their relationship blow up, and to get back together for the big finale.
spitfire is not like that. for one thing spitfire rekindled is Literally the first quarter-ish of a longer narrative that's been separated into parts repeatedly; for another, Traditional Romance Beats are somewhat harder to fit polyamory into, especially if each pair of characters in the relationship have different dynamics and are at different relationship stages when the story starts. there will not be full romantic resolution here until we hit the back half of the tetralogy and you should not come into spitfire rekindled expecting any.
and personally im like oh thank god because i have long since gotten bored with the romcom beat structure and find it incredibly stale as the Main Plot of any story. imo romcom beats are best when they're employed for relationship arcs in proper genre fiction: for prime examples of this see gideon and harrow in taz muir's wonderful gideon the ninth, and also cora and ampersand in lindsay ellis' delightful axiom's end. (note also that both of these books are the first entries in series and that both relationships continue to evolve beyond the romance beat structure from the second book on.) i eat that shit up.
but my point is that it feels a lot better & more in tune with the pacing of the spitfire series as a whole that maya allows the characters and relationships really marinate and grow at speeds that feel organic and appropriate to each of them. feon and allene going from feon hissing and spitting every time she gets within 5 miles of him to a tentative friends with benefits is probably the closest to romcom beats that spitfire ever comes, and most of that is hateboners and feon getting pantsed emotionally + the reagent of caed's relentless toxicity putting their dynamic in new lights. it's good. it's fresh. my lettuce is not flaccid and my tomatoes are not mushy. it is Ideal Texture(tm).
speaking of the relationship progression... let's talk sex scenes!!! spitfire rekindled is most decidedly a book for grownups and so it gets to have as much erotica as it wants, as a treat, but the real treat for the readers is that all the sex meets my personal rubric for what makes a sex scene good in fiction. cheesecake for cheesecake's sake is perfectly fine and i will never knock it (it is called cheesecake because cheesecake is delicious lbr), but for a story that's really plot-centric, you want your sex scenes to:
1. develop or explore the relationship dynamic between the characters involved, and/or
2. tell you something about the character's relationship with sex and sexuality--what is their attitude towards sex and why, what are their kinks and how do those fit into their psyche, etc.
after all, the main social functions of sex are a) intimate communication, b) exchange of power, and c) personal pleasure. and all of these things are a GREAT window into your characters so it's a waste NOT to use sex scenes as character/relationship studies. write it down this will be on the test.
i am very happy to announce that spitfire's erotic scenes get full marks here. the allene/caed scenes, for instance, mark a clear progression of the characters becoming more physically comfortable with one another as caed's various emotional hangups and his relative inexperience compared to the other leads make it hard for him to let allene in emotionally and physically. as he opens up to her he becomes more willing to try new sex acts, and allene gets to discover where their proclivities synthesize.
the allene/feon scenes on the other hand are explosive, often playfully competitive, and don't begin until their relationship hits an emotional peak that changes their dynamic. the scenes are also somewhat less vanilla in ways that reflect the characters' curiosity towards and growing acceptance of one another.
feon gets sex scenes with minor characters of varying importance too, and these tell us a lot about him as a person; one of the new additions to rekindled is lysithea with a secondary cast member, and it's very revealing not just of her sexual persona but of some of the social difficulties she faces due to her place in the series' geopolitics. it is a+++++.
also the most assertive/dominant character of the bunch is allene, which is another big a+++++ two thumbs way up thank god out of me. heteronormative m/f sex dynamics are too common in romance genre and it is BORING. let girlies top in peace ffs. if he dies he dies. go touch the ground and you will feel it for yourself, nature is healing!!!
just generally speaking the erotica is high quality. in addition to all the above the blocking is clear & there's a sense of setting, there's no awkward euphemisms, the prose is good. possibly my favorite phrase in the entire spitfire "thingsome jungle" actually comes from the leadup to one of the sex scenes LMAO
one of the other main things i appreciate about spitfire as a piece of fiction is that, as you may have noticed me mention several times... the main characters are all shitheads!!! by which i mean, they're all flawed--sometimes eye-poppingly so--but they're all readily sympathetic, so when you're asking WHY is [he/she/they] LIKE that, it is always rhetorical.
AND!!!!!!! AND!!!!!!!!!!!! as is true to real life, many of these characters' flaws are directly connected to their best traits. this is most noticeable with caed, who's just one of those kinds of characters that fandoms generally go nuts for, because he is just SO sad and pathetic all of the time, and his backstory is SO awful, and he is trying so very very hard. he has a deep-seated sense of honor and a clear moral compass... and these very aspects of his personality can make him RADIOACTIVE. he is incapable of respecting anyone's agency: he refuses to take feon seriously because he doesn't want to overstep feon's boundaries, he deliberately withholds information about nadara from allene in the name of protecting her even though that ignorance actively puts her in more danger, and so on.
allene herself is perhaps the best-written low empathy character in all of fiction since rose quartz of steven universe! (and you better take that as writ because rose is my favorite character in that show) she cares deeply for everyone around her and wants the best for them and tries with a deep and enduring earnestness to help them but she is sooooooooooo bad at understanding why they feel the way they feel. she has an endless academic curiosity but she's spent so much time pickling in academia she looks down her nose at anything voswainian culture dismisses as worthless, such as other nations' magical traditions. her insensitivity and casual voswainian supercessionism (for lack of a better term) occasionally coalesce into profoundly inappropriate behavior: in one such incident she goes full antitheist redditor on a character whose religion was devastated by cultural genocide, and steamrolls over her conversation partner's attempt to dial her in.
the piece de resistance here is that maya is not just willing to let her characters be flawed and make mistakes and even hurt their loved ones profoundly via their own bad behavior, she does not let them avoid the consequences, either. if while reading you find yourself thinking "oh my god maya i love [so-and-so] but im begging you to kill [them] for non-fatal damage" rest assured that their comeuppance will come down the pike sooner or later. if not in spitfire rekindled, it Will be arriving in the next book.
this allows me to segue into my one... not really critique, but caveat...? about rekindled. spitfire legacy edition was a complete first act that resolves in an explosive, intensely satisfying conclusion that cashes in on all its plot developments and foreshadowing and perfectly sets the stage for the series' second half, firebrand.
rekindled... does... not end at a particularly natural or satisfying moment. this is simply the consequence of the original story composition--most of the big climactic setpieces in spitfire og are concentrated in its back third, and continuing rekindled until one of those would leave a lot less content to put into rekindled 2 if that's going to wrap up at the same perfect spot as the legacy version.
instead rekindled forcibly puts your bookmark after a new revelation about the assassination attempt that happened early in the story, which answers some questions but raises many others, and doesn't really land at any of the big benchmarks in any given relationship. (like, i may or may not have gone to pick up my physical copy of the legacy edition to continue right where rekindled leaves off immediately after finishing my ARC, lol.)
it's not a perfect solution by any means especially if you're already a fan and know where we're headed for the series halfway mark, BUT (!!!), it's absolutely the lesser of two evils considering that the other option would've been to completely rewrite spitfire from the ground up with a more tetralogy-friendly composition in mind. (yes, that's the best way to do it if you have to dramatically reorder the events in your story--anything else has a high risk of leaving lots of logic errors in continuity and unevenness in pacing that will require numerous slow and careful editing passes to fix.) maya has a small business to run in addition to whatever other things are happening in her life; a total rewrite is an ass ton of work and a huge delay to your release even if you DON'T have a day job. simply choosing a stopping point that's maybe not ideal vis a vis pacing preserves the overall integrity of spitfire rekindled and spitfire 2 While Also getting the books out faster.
(obligatory hey wow did you know about maya kerns super cool fashion line maybe you should check it out if you like clothing. ive bought some clothing here and i like it. perhaps you will too??????)
but anyway: i am here as a frothing spitfire fan who's been onboard since the first draft on ao3 to tell you the overall conclusion to the first half of the story is super worth it. you may trust me. get the first one, and also the second one, and read them, and i promise you will see what i mean.
COOL ADDENDUM FOR OTHER AO3/LEGACY EDITION FANS:
so, if you like me got onboard the spitfire series on ao3 or have bought the legacy edition, you may be thinking that ok, yes, spitfire rules, but i read the ao3 draft/already have the legacy edition, so what new stuff is there in rekindled that means i should buy it again?
and like listen. if youre not the kind of truck freak who has the cash available to Collect Every Release Just Because You Love Spitfire. thats understandable, and valid. many things are bad in the world. the cost of living is not getting cheaper.
rekindled has had an overall continuity edit and the prose has been brushed up; some of the longer chapters have been split in two, and there are a couple of completely new subplots, such as allene uncovering a historical Very Sekret Sex Diary to much fireworks and fanfare. but the main draw is that there are two (2) completely new lysithea pov chapters, as well as a brief epilogue from the perspective of [redacted] (if you know then you'll know. new readers dont worry about it).
and i think the lysithea chapters Absolutely merit getting your wallet out. like first because we all love lysithea, but ALSO because her perspective gives laruze a voice in the overall geopolitical tapestry of spitfire where it did not have one before. this gives maya the chance to lay a little more foreshadowing for Hashed Tag Book 2 Stuff but it's also very humanizing for characters whom caed and feon and the nadaran majority would have you believe are simply an evil scourge whomst up to no good--not every reader is particularly skilled at identifying propaganda in fiction the first time they see it, or at recognizing when a narrator is biased and their words need to be taken with a grain of salt.
but even if you did clock all the Nadara Water You Doin stuff in previous editions of spitfire, actually getting to See the ballards at work in the early game is worlds apart from the reading level skill checks we've always had. it really adds a dimension to spitfire that was lacking in older versions and brings the narrative overall to a higher level of completion in many different ways.
tl;dr new content very good and worth it, maybe get the ebook if money is tight. holds up a collage of all mayas art of lysithea spitfire Do It For Her
IN CONCLUSION: surprising no one who knows mayas full artistic oevure, spitfire real good. fans of messy polyamorous romances and fantasy stories with solid worldbuilding and geopolitics will definitely enjoy. fans of steven universe style Everyone In This Bar Is Terrible And All Of Them Will Get Thoroughly Roasted By The End Of The Thing character writing will eat spitfire out of mayas hand like the you are safe now sweet child meme.
spitfire is probably not for people who dont want to see explicit sexual content in their fiction and/or only want to read about idealized nice characters... but i don't think there are many of those folks in my audience, so, Lmao.
if at any point this review had you making the eyes emoji... Buy That Thang !
https://books.mayakern.com/ https://books.mayakern.com/ https://books.mayakern.com/
maya kern's spitfire rekindled is roughly the first half of what's been retroactively renamed spitfire the legacy edition, which itself is the first half of a planned duology that's been retooled as a tetralogy. it is a fantasy geopolitical drama/romance/erotica series centering on the confluence of four blisteringly hot, deeply idiotic 20somethings and their romantic entanglements. these four blisteringly hot, deeply idiotic 20somethings are also heads of state! 423975928347923853724 dead 34792857892879286927839248797928734947234 injured... and counting!!!
the first of these four leads to be introduced is feon, a dragon with shapeshifting magic who spends most of his time wearing his humansona. in the country of nadara every monarch since the kingdom's founding is traditionally soulbonded to a dragon via nadara's trademark blood magic, and feon is bound to nadara's current prince caederyn. feon has literally been in love with caed since first sight and has always assumed that this bond means they are guaranteed romance someday even if caed keeps matrix dodging feon's affections... so when caed announces he's going to get married to princess allene of voswain feon Loses His Whole Entire Mind and vows to foil whatever vile plot this homewrecking hussy definitely probably must have.
princess allene, who is the secondary protagonist of spitire rekindled, obviously has no such vile plot. in fact, coming from a country where polyamory is the social norm and the monoamorous nadarans are all thought of as weirdo prudes, allene is baffled as to why her presence should be any sort of barrier to feon's affections, because caed has two whole hands, after all! plus, allene has more fish than feon to fry right now: moving to a strange new land to get married is turning out to mean approximately one (1) rude culture shock per 30 seconds. allene's first exposure to how little she knows about nadara involves her being about one (1) foot away from the latest assassination attempt on her fiance, and she is determined to help unravel the identity of the attackers even as she must also juggle convincing the nadaran populace to like her, feon's big baby tantrums, and caed's impossible temperament.
caught between his bombastic fiancee and his jealous dragon, prince caederyn cannot bring himself to believe that either of them really and genuinely loves him. part of this is because a lifetime of emotional neglect and abuse from his distant father has convinced caed that he is a perennial disappointment who will never live up to the royal legacy... and part of this is because he feels he can never know how much of feon's love for him is influenced by their soul bond! all caed wants is to do right by the people he's convinced he'll never deserve, but how is he supposed to do right by a woman and a dragon he'll never feel worthy of?!
alongside these three horrible fools circling one another in a whirlwind of romantic and sexual confusion, there is professional fuckboy lesbian lysithea. as the daughter of the ambassador of laruze, a country with which nadara shares an ugly history, she's been in the same social circle as allene, caed, and feon since childhood. she therefore lives to drop diss tracks on caed, needle feon, and make sad cow eyes over the oblivious allene. invited to nadara for allene and caed's wedding, lysithea is not any happier about it than feon. does their mutual misery hold any chance for a change in their relationship, and how will lysithea endure being stuck in a land where she and her parent are considered Public Enemy Number One?
this is roughly what i've covered already in my old blurb for spitfire the legacy edition, which means that now i get to EXPOUND. hold onto your butt.
Traditional Romance Genre TM has an extremely strict plot structure/series of beats that genre scholars have down to a science SO exact that if you give someone the page length of your book (and it's always One Single Book--the trilogies you see genre titans like nora roberts et al crank out at breakneck speeds are omnibus stories that cover a different couple per entry) they will be able to tell you the acceptable range of pages for your main characters to meet cute, to first attempt a relationship, to have their relationship blow up, and to get back together for the big finale.
spitfire is not like that. for one thing spitfire rekindled is Literally the first quarter-ish of a longer narrative that's been separated into parts repeatedly; for another, Traditional Romance Beats are somewhat harder to fit polyamory into, especially if each pair of characters in the relationship have different dynamics and are at different relationship stages when the story starts. there will not be full romantic resolution here until we hit the back half of the tetralogy and you should not come into spitfire rekindled expecting any.
and personally im like oh thank god because i have long since gotten bored with the romcom beat structure and find it incredibly stale as the Main Plot of any story. imo romcom beats are best when they're employed for relationship arcs in proper genre fiction: for prime examples of this see gideon and harrow in taz muir's wonderful gideon the ninth, and also cora and ampersand in lindsay ellis' delightful axiom's end. (note also that both of these books are the first entries in series and that both relationships continue to evolve beyond the romance beat structure from the second book on.) i eat that shit up.
but my point is that it feels a lot better & more in tune with the pacing of the spitfire series as a whole that maya allows the characters and relationships really marinate and grow at speeds that feel organic and appropriate to each of them. feon and allene going from feon hissing and spitting every time she gets within 5 miles of him to a tentative friends with benefits is probably the closest to romcom beats that spitfire ever comes, and most of that is hateboners and feon getting pantsed emotionally + the reagent of caed's relentless toxicity putting their dynamic in new lights. it's good. it's fresh. my lettuce is not flaccid and my tomatoes are not mushy. it is Ideal Texture(tm).
speaking of the relationship progression... let's talk sex scenes!!! spitfire rekindled is most decidedly a book for grownups and so it gets to have as much erotica as it wants, as a treat, but the real treat for the readers is that all the sex meets my personal rubric for what makes a sex scene good in fiction. cheesecake for cheesecake's sake is perfectly fine and i will never knock it (it is called cheesecake because cheesecake is delicious lbr), but for a story that's really plot-centric, you want your sex scenes to:
1. develop or explore the relationship dynamic between the characters involved, and/or
2. tell you something about the character's relationship with sex and sexuality--what is their attitude towards sex and why, what are their kinks and how do those fit into their psyche, etc.
after all, the main social functions of sex are a) intimate communication, b) exchange of power, and c) personal pleasure. and all of these things are a GREAT window into your characters so it's a waste NOT to use sex scenes as character/relationship studies. write it down this will be on the test.
i am very happy to announce that spitfire's erotic scenes get full marks here. the allene/caed scenes, for instance, mark a clear progression of the characters becoming more physically comfortable with one another as caed's various emotional hangups and his relative inexperience compared to the other leads make it hard for him to let allene in emotionally and physically. as he opens up to her he becomes more willing to try new sex acts, and allene gets to discover where their proclivities synthesize.
the allene/feon scenes on the other hand are explosive, often playfully competitive, and don't begin until their relationship hits an emotional peak that changes their dynamic. the scenes are also somewhat less vanilla in ways that reflect the characters' curiosity towards and growing acceptance of one another.
feon gets sex scenes with minor characters of varying importance too, and these tell us a lot about him as a person; one of the new additions to rekindled is lysithea with a secondary cast member, and it's very revealing not just of her sexual persona but of some of the social difficulties she faces due to her place in the series' geopolitics. it is a+++++.
also the most assertive/dominant character of the bunch is allene, which is another big a+++++ two thumbs way up thank god out of me. heteronormative m/f sex dynamics are too common in romance genre and it is BORING. let girlies top in peace ffs. if he dies he dies. go touch the ground and you will feel it for yourself, nature is healing!!!
just generally speaking the erotica is high quality. in addition to all the above the blocking is clear & there's a sense of setting, there's no awkward euphemisms, the prose is good. possibly my favorite phrase in the entire spitfire "thingsome jungle" actually comes from the leadup to one of the sex scenes LMAO
one of the other main things i appreciate about spitfire as a piece of fiction is that, as you may have noticed me mention several times... the main characters are all shitheads!!! by which i mean, they're all flawed--sometimes eye-poppingly so--but they're all readily sympathetic, so when you're asking WHY is [he/she/they] LIKE that, it is always rhetorical.
AND!!!!!!! AND!!!!!!!!!!!! as is true to real life, many of these characters' flaws are directly connected to their best traits. this is most noticeable with caed, who's just one of those kinds of characters that fandoms generally go nuts for, because he is just SO sad and pathetic all of the time, and his backstory is SO awful, and he is trying so very very hard. he has a deep-seated sense of honor and a clear moral compass... and these very aspects of his personality can make him RADIOACTIVE. he is incapable of respecting anyone's agency: he refuses to take feon seriously because he doesn't want to overstep feon's boundaries, he deliberately withholds information about nadara from allene in the name of protecting her even though that ignorance actively puts her in more danger, and so on.
allene herself is perhaps the best-written low empathy character in all of fiction since rose quartz of steven universe! (and you better take that as writ because rose is my favorite character in that show) she cares deeply for everyone around her and wants the best for them and tries with a deep and enduring earnestness to help them but she is sooooooooooo bad at understanding why they feel the way they feel. she has an endless academic curiosity but she's spent so much time pickling in academia she looks down her nose at anything voswainian culture dismisses as worthless, such as other nations' magical traditions. her insensitivity and casual voswainian supercessionism (for lack of a better term) occasionally coalesce into profoundly inappropriate behavior: in one such incident she goes full antitheist redditor on a character whose religion was devastated by cultural genocide, and steamrolls over her conversation partner's attempt to dial her in.
the piece de resistance here is that maya is not just willing to let her characters be flawed and make mistakes and even hurt their loved ones profoundly via their own bad behavior, she does not let them avoid the consequences, either. if while reading you find yourself thinking "oh my god maya i love [so-and-so] but im begging you to kill [them] for non-fatal damage" rest assured that their comeuppance will come down the pike sooner or later. if not in spitfire rekindled, it Will be arriving in the next book.
this allows me to segue into my one... not really critique, but caveat...? about rekindled. spitfire legacy edition was a complete first act that resolves in an explosive, intensely satisfying conclusion that cashes in on all its plot developments and foreshadowing and perfectly sets the stage for the series' second half, firebrand.
rekindled... does... not end at a particularly natural or satisfying moment. this is simply the consequence of the original story composition--most of the big climactic setpieces in spitfire og are concentrated in its back third, and continuing rekindled until one of those would leave a lot less content to put into rekindled 2 if that's going to wrap up at the same perfect spot as the legacy version.
instead rekindled forcibly puts your bookmark after a new revelation about the assassination attempt that happened early in the story, which answers some questions but raises many others, and doesn't really land at any of the big benchmarks in any given relationship. (like, i may or may not have gone to pick up my physical copy of the legacy edition to continue right where rekindled leaves off immediately after finishing my ARC, lol.)
it's not a perfect solution by any means especially if you're already a fan and know where we're headed for the series halfway mark, BUT (!!!), it's absolutely the lesser of two evils considering that the other option would've been to completely rewrite spitfire from the ground up with a more tetralogy-friendly composition in mind. (yes, that's the best way to do it if you have to dramatically reorder the events in your story--anything else has a high risk of leaving lots of logic errors in continuity and unevenness in pacing that will require numerous slow and careful editing passes to fix.) maya has a small business to run in addition to whatever other things are happening in her life; a total rewrite is an ass ton of work and a huge delay to your release even if you DON'T have a day job. simply choosing a stopping point that's maybe not ideal vis a vis pacing preserves the overall integrity of spitfire rekindled and spitfire 2 While Also getting the books out faster.
(obligatory hey wow did you know about maya kerns super cool fashion line maybe you should check it out if you like clothing. ive bought some clothing here and i like it. perhaps you will too??????)
but anyway: i am here as a frothing spitfire fan who's been onboard since the first draft on ao3 to tell you the overall conclusion to the first half of the story is super worth it. you may trust me. get the first one, and also the second one, and read them, and i promise you will see what i mean.
COOL ADDENDUM FOR OTHER AO3/LEGACY EDITION FANS:
so, if you like me got onboard the spitfire series on ao3 or have bought the legacy edition, you may be thinking that ok, yes, spitfire rules, but i read the ao3 draft/already have the legacy edition, so what new stuff is there in rekindled that means i should buy it again?
and like listen. if youre not the kind of truck freak who has the cash available to Collect Every Release Just Because You Love Spitfire. thats understandable, and valid. many things are bad in the world. the cost of living is not getting cheaper.
rekindled has had an overall continuity edit and the prose has been brushed up; some of the longer chapters have been split in two, and there are a couple of completely new subplots, such as allene uncovering a historical Very Sekret Sex Diary to much fireworks and fanfare. but the main draw is that there are two (2) completely new lysithea pov chapters, as well as a brief epilogue from the perspective of [redacted] (if you know then you'll know. new readers dont worry about it).
and i think the lysithea chapters Absolutely merit getting your wallet out. like first because we all love lysithea, but ALSO because her perspective gives laruze a voice in the overall geopolitical tapestry of spitfire where it did not have one before. this gives maya the chance to lay a little more foreshadowing for Hashed Tag Book 2 Stuff but it's also very humanizing for characters whom caed and feon and the nadaran majority would have you believe are simply an evil scourge whomst up to no good--not every reader is particularly skilled at identifying propaganda in fiction the first time they see it, or at recognizing when a narrator is biased and their words need to be taken with a grain of salt.
but even if you did clock all the Nadara Water You Doin stuff in previous editions of spitfire, actually getting to See the ballards at work in the early game is worlds apart from the reading level skill checks we've always had. it really adds a dimension to spitfire that was lacking in older versions and brings the narrative overall to a higher level of completion in many different ways.
tl;dr new content very good and worth it, maybe get the ebook if money is tight. holds up a collage of all mayas art of lysithea spitfire Do It For Her
IN CONCLUSION: surprising no one who knows mayas full artistic oevure, spitfire real good. fans of messy polyamorous romances and fantasy stories with solid worldbuilding and geopolitics will definitely enjoy. fans of steven universe style Everyone In This Bar Is Terrible And All Of Them Will Get Thoroughly Roasted By The End Of The Thing character writing will eat spitfire out of mayas hand like the you are safe now sweet child meme.
spitfire is probably not for people who dont want to see explicit sexual content in their fiction and/or only want to read about idealized nice characters... but i don't think there are many of those folks in my audience, so, Lmao.
if at any point this review had you making the eyes emoji... Buy That Thang !
https://books.mayakern.com/ https://books.mayakern.com/ https://books.mayakern.com/