u/Corkmars

I'm on HoC now, and I feel like the character descriptions are quite sparse. Only Tattersail's curves every get a clear description lol. I looked up Paran on the malazan wiki and it just said black hair. In the fan art he looks southern European but I saw someone say Quon Tali have huge racial diversity (from nothern European to east asian to sub-saharan african as closest real world equivalents). Obviously this is nit something I would normally think about when reading a fantasy book, but given that anthropology is so baked in the DNA of the series, it really has me wondering. Reading the books, we come to understand why certain races are distributed in certain areas, so I was wondering if human ethnic diversity/ evolution follows a similar pattern to our earth. Plus random blue people of course. For how small Napan looks on the map, there sure seems to be a ton of Napan characters.

I'm loving this series so far. Excellent worldbuilding and a rich history. But reading MoI, I need to ask... what the hell was that battle?

First you have Dujek and WJ sacrifice the entire Malazan army just to make a quick claim to some shitty little city in the middle of the continent that has nothing of value as far as I can tell. No citizenry, no commodities, literally nothing to help the Malazan Empire. They basically blow up their alliance and get everyone killed to get to Coral first even though they seem to know that they cannot take the city on their own.

Then you have Rake. It seems like he sacrificed the most powerful weapon that any of the good guys have against the Crippled God. The Seer said that Rake didn't really understand Moon's Spawn, but he should've at least realized that he was giving up the weapon for pretty much nothing. Again, is Coral just the most valuable city in the world for some reason? Why is every general willing to sacrifice everything for it? The battle was already won and then Rake just showed up and detonated his home/weapon. Doesn't seem very wise.

Brood also didn't really make much of an effort to do anything and when it looked like they were going to lose, he got ready to just destroy the world. C'mon man...

But the worst of them all is definitely Itkovian. So many good soldiers died so he could give the T'lan Imass peace. I get it, but couldn't you have waited like one hour?

Lady Envy just watched a bunch of Bridgeburners die before realizing that she needed to do something.

The ending just has me angry with so many characters. The threat of the Pannion Seer also seems really minimal when three mortals with no magic basically handled his entire army (the Seguleh). I think ten Seguleh could've wiped out the Pannion Domin and saved everyone a lot of trouble. Also, the Malazans and Brood's army could've fought together like they did at Capustan and probably defeated the Domin.

I really don't understand anyone's motivation—or Erikson's, for that matter. Were there just too many characters so he had to do a cleanup?

I was loving the series before this ending. I'm also surprised by how many people rate MoI so highly. The ending was so poor compared to the first two books, in my opinion.

I really hope I'm misunderstanding something and that one of you lovely fans can explain, without spoilers, that Rake, Brood, Dujek, Itkovian, and WJ aren't actually strategic idiots and that there's something going on that I don't understand yet.

Reading MOI and wondering this.