Per my title, the book starts off well, but then it goes out of it’s way to hamfist modern ideology propaganda into the story in a way that just killed my immersion.
It starts with a random character being introduced who immediately kills themselves, and many of the characters are all torn up about it for seemingly no reason. Jason and Henry it makes sense, it’s part of their character to take responsibility for every random person that needs help. But Beze Eeby (no idea how to spell)? The boy grinned his face off at the first sight of Jason and Henry slaughtering people mercilessly. It doesn’t make sense for him to have some kind of identity crisis in response to some random terran who called him a devil offing herself in the night while he was on guard. Ludus is a brutal world, you would expect him to be hardened to death, particularly against those who fail to demonstrate even the smallest amount of perseverance.
Then everyone but Henry and Jason go “bigot mode” against a cross dresser that shows up. You want to explore the idea of alternative gender expression and how people who do so face discrimination? Sure, but please do so in a manner more skilled than a high schooler blatantly shoving surface level allegory into their English writing assignment. And for the love of god, don’t throw info dumps about well known, real life Earth religions into your fantasy book about a planet completely divorced from Earth culture. The Catholic church has zero relevance to the story as a whole, if the reader doesn’t know what it is they can go look it up themselves. You don’t have to subject us to boring, time wasting exposition about it.