Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6986530-20160727023152/@comment-23.122.217.39-20160816070248

It sounds to me like your issue with this is less that the song confuses the order of events and more that a fantasy series wherein a 9 year old is able to lead an army period doesn't adhere to real-world logic.

Mothy is not in the military. He is not even from the culture or time period that he's writing the events taking places in. It's possible he hasn't taken any of this into account.

A different order of events that would make all of this more plausible are simply impossible based on all of the information that mothy has given us in the story. You could send him an email and ask but I personally don't think it's necessary at all. The timeline is clear. Does it make sense based on how things work in the real world? No. Does it make sense based on the internal logic presented in the story? I think so, yes. Just because the song didn't mention Mariam having the qualities of a leader doesn't mean she didn't have them at all. And again--Abyss IR did a lot of things to her. She's definitely not an average person, and she wasn't picked up by average people. I mean we even have an example of the same thing happening with Gast, who started out as a street urchin hiding his family history and the emperor brought him into his own palace because he liked him.

The series is filled to the brim with exceptionalism and to take issue with it now, when Mariam's nature as an insanely precocious prodigy has been well-known for some time, seems unnecessary to me.