Hit 'em with a longpostbot response and dock 2 weeks pay

Do you know of any good books on the early Dutch Republic. It fascinates me, but I yet to read anything on it yet

Like I said, I'm only halfway through. As of this point, she's been involved with an anti-government group that did some bombings and assassinations, like an early 20th century anarchist. The Oz regime's actions are bad enough that this is at least arguably justifiable. Elphaba's actual role was limited, and in the one scene where she's about to attack someone on-page, she refrains from doing so because innocent children get in harm's way.

Most of her involvement with this cell takes place during a multi-year time skip, and we only catch up with her from her lover Fiyero's perspective. So we don't really know how what she actually did. It's left to the imagination. I think the idea is that everyone in this world judges her on incomplete information, and so the reader must too. But based on what I've seen, she's generally (though not ostentatiously) good.

Interestingly, as a baby she shows more "evil" traits. One of her first actions after birth is biting someone's finger off with her unnaturally sharp teeth, and her first word is "horrors." The adult Elphaba doesn't really seem like a continuation of this character (at least not yet).

Random trivia: book Elphaba is actually a really good singer

Following up on this since I finished the book. By the end she's behaving very erratically and irrationally, and she does start to feel like a dangerous person with hints of the Margaret Hamilton performance. She has wild mood swings towards Dorothy and her friends, sometimes seeming to want to help them and other times wanting to kill them (Toto included). In general she's lost interest in the animal rights cause, and become hyper-fixated on this very self-oriented question of whether her life was rigged from the beginning by shadowy forces beyond her control. By the end she has no claim to being a "good guy," although she's still better by default than most of the people that populate Maguire's Oz.

I think her worst action was creating the winged monkeys as scientific experiments, for little defined in-text reason

!deathtomicks it's british literature !bookworms

I think it's Tom Clancy's best amongst his early books. the book reminds me of Predator movie, which changes genre midway from bonehead action, to horror, so too does Rising change from spy thriller to all out war drama novel

but the twist which makes Clancy stand out is that his portrayal of "modern" combat in 1980 was very realistic and well reseacrhed when he tried to portray a peer-equal war between superpowers, and the supreme dominancy im which precision weapons like guided missles would play in tactical combat, he portrays submarine warfare well.

Characters are charismatic, even the russian antagonists are portrayed as extremely likeable

Might be. Only 7 chapters in so far. The first season of the podcast was pretty good, but the second season and comics where kinda meh.