“It is good to be a cynic–it is better to be a contented cat–and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world–we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death–the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.”
– H.P. Lovecraft, the original edgelord
Iron Dragon’s Daughter stars Jane, a changeling girl kidnapped by fairies to be a slave in a factory producing the eponymous iron dragons that are sorta used as jet fighters. Due to shenanigans, she finds a grimoire describing how to contact and bond with dragons. As she reads it, she starts hearing a voice in her head belonging to the dragon Melanchthon. Melanchthon feels that he, too, is a prisoner in the factory, and offers Jane freedom in she would become his pilot and help him with some unspecified goals in the future. Jane takes him up on the offer.
The novel is structured in a cyclical way: we see Jane at various points in her life< with certain elements and characters constantly reoccurring in new situations. Of particular note are two characters whose true names are Tetigistus and Kunosoura. Their reincarnations, unaware of each other existence but sharing the same souls and essence, are present in one form or another in each of Jane’s life stages. Always they die at least partially due to Jane’s actions.
That ties into one of the core themes of the novel: nihilism. Jane’s actions are not always moral or particularly sympathetic, but they’re always understandable. If you put yourself in your shoes, imagine yourself subjected to the same pressures and incentives, it’s easy to understand why she does what she does. And, inevitably, it leads to tragedy.
Even outside of the repeating deaths, Jane’s life is full of misery from the moment she was forced to work herself to the bone at the factory, all through different part of cycle. It’s not something she has any control over, it’s not something she has deserved in some way, it just is.
“Life exists, and all who live are born to suffer. The best moments are fleeting and bought with the coin of exquisite torment. All attachments end. All loved ones die. All that you value passes away. In such a vexatious existence laughter is madness and joy is folly.”
– Melanchthon
Over the course of the novel, Melanchthon slowly leads Jane to the realization encapsulated in the quote above: suffering is inevitable. There is no meaning to it. Even death is not an escape as reincarnation is a thing Jane is acutely familiar with, and which enables the cycle of torment to just continue forever.
The only solution, therefore, is to assault the Spiral Castle in which the Goddess of this world resides, and annihilate all of the existence.
This is where the novel provides a counterpoint to the nihilism found in a spiritual experience and divine revelation. Melanchthon proves incapable of actually destroying or even reaching the Spiral Castle, and Jane gets to experience a number of cryptic encounters with the Goddess wearing various guises.
Those encounters are… not particularly convincing as a counterpoint. The Goddess points out various ways in which Jane could have escaped tragedy following her and hints in a metaphor that the suffering plaguing life is the result of people exercising their free will, which is the usual theological solution for the problem of evil, but, well, the problem of evil remains.
The suffering and misery as depicted by the novel are undeniable, the ways to escape them are ephemeral. If there is a higher being who has created us for a purpose and provided us with means to achieve happiness, but is unwilling or unable to guide us, while the natural flow of society results in creation of hell, is it really any different from the nihilistic vision of Melanchthon? Jane suffers due to the acts of forces outside of her knowledge and control. Personal relationship with divinity and commitment to act righteously won’t stop them, so how can she be expected to reach salvation?
Nevertheless, the novel ends on an ambiguously optimistic note, with Jane returning to her old world and putting her life back together. Though then he encounters a man who may or may not be Tetigistus, indicating that the cycle may start again.
The novel was in large part written as a response to what the author called “interchangeable fantasy trilogies”, and, yeah, one can definitely see how various elements of the novel are deliberately constructed in opposition with the prevailing fantasy trends of the time. The novel was critically acclaimed and fairly popular, so it’s possible it contributed to the decline of generic fantasy.
However, much like the cycle of misery in the novel, such things always return, this time in the form of the isekai genre, containing the worst excesses of old school fantasy while adding its own on top of it.
Iron Dragon’s Daughter remains an effective rebuke of such works. Let’s take a look at some of the most prevalent trends in isekai stories and see how the novel addresses them:
1) The blend of contemporary and mundane.
For all that isekai stories are set in fantastic worlds and have their very name derived from this fact, by and large they have little interest in actually delving into the fantastic beyond the most superficial. Act has talked about how Grimgar (still a hilarious name) is filled with long descriptions of utterly banal shit like banking systems and shish-kebab. While Grimgar (in the grim garness of the future, there is only Archer shipping wars) is an extreme example of such a thing, it’s far from the only one.
The values of the isekai worlds are contemporary. The views of isekai characters (and not just the protagonist) are contemporary views. The land may be governed by a king with gods above him, and you may have knights espouse the virtues of chivalry, but in the end of the day, there is very little culture shock for the protagonist to experience.
You may walk into an isekai world, and find your worldview fundamentally shared by the majority of characters around you, with a few exceptions being convertible if you play your cards right.
(Honestly, if anything, the values dissonance between you and the author of an isekai story is often a bigger barrier than dimension-hopping. See Shield “If you cared about slaves, you’d have one” Hero as a particularly vile example.)
It’s just familiar enough to be comfortable while being exotic enough to provide an escape from the monotony of life.
Iron Dragon’s Daughter turns this formula on its head. It, too, presents a blend of contemporary and alien, but in an entirely different configuration.
The world of the novel is post-industrialist, with factories and malls and television all being omnipresent. It’s aggressively capitalistic and aggressively classist, reflecting the world we live in…
…Even while twisting it, for the world of Iron Dragon’s Daughter follows rules very much not our own. A good example of this is the second part of the cycle in which Jane pretends to be a fairy attending a school. That part of the novel focuses on a story of a wicker queen: a girl chosen each year to live a life of luxury only to be burned at the end as a sacrifice to the Goddess. She is treated as a modern celebrity and the event itself is translated across the nation so everyone could see it on their screens. This forms a twisted combination of modern aesthetics and ancient cruelty.
This trend continues throughout the novel, presenting us with a familiar facade only to reveal an unsettling truth: this is not our world, you don’t belong here.
It is just familiar enough to provide to escape, it’s just alien enough to be frightening.
2) Cut ties.
This, admittedly, applies mostly to modern crop of isekai stories specifically rather than a genre as a whole, but did you notice there is a lot more isekai stories starting with the protagonist dying, usually via an encounter with a truck? Part of it, I think, is just convenience: nobody knows what happens after death, after all, so why not an isekai adventure? However, another part, I think, is to cut the protagonist from his previous life.
See, in older isekai stories, there is an inherent tension between the protagonist’s goals and the audience’s desires: the protagonist wants to go home. After all, the whole premise of the isekai story is that the protagonist gets stranded in a strange alien world. They may have great adventure there, they may have fun, but in the end, it’s only natural for them to want to go back. They have family at home, they have a life.
It is natural from the character perspective, but the perspective of the audience is different. People read isekai stories because the protagonist leaves, not because they return. While good authors can, of course, make real world sections of such stories good and meaningful, the hook remains on the other side of the portal.
Modern isekai stories are somewhat different from the older stuff. The genre has become quite incestuous, for one thing, with “isekai setting” becoming its own defined thing rather than a collection of vastly different worlds. For another, it more and more focuses on wish-fulfillment, on giving the protagonist validation rather than challenge, and a part of it is erasing the boundary between the protagonist and the audience.
In this context, the conflict between protagonist’s and the audience’s goals, between the desire to stay and leave, becomes a serious issue.
Death is the solution. By killing the protagonist, the author can absolve him of a need to look back. He’s dead, his family grieved and moved on (possibly after having a good laugh at his expense). What more do you want from him? (Reincarnation scenarios are a more extreme version of it, where even if the protagonist wanted to leave, he can’t, what with being a completely different person with a new family or, like, a slime or something.)
It’s a neat way to resolve the inherent contradiction in perspective as well as possibly award the protagonist with hero points if he fell under a truck while saving a bystander from the same fate (though if falling under a truck sends you to a good place, one have to wonder whether saving someone from such a fate is actually a moral thing to do).
Iron Dragon’s Daughter have none of it. See, in a particularly surreal scene the novel reveals that changelings are not spirited away to the fairyland bodily. Only their souls go, while their bodies… I’m just going to quote this scene because it’s great.
“Jane?”
She did not turn. She was staring at the window, mesmerized by the horrible thing there. The panes were streaked and filthy, and there were the blown husks of dead houseflies on the sill. The paint on the wood was white and chalky and broke away in sharp flakes if you pushed down on it hard enough with your thumb. Doing that pricked the flesh hard enough to hurt, but never enough to draw blood.
But none of that was the horrible thing.
“I brought you some nice fruit,” Sylvia said. “Apples and bananas. And a carton of Salem Menthols, hundreds this time, just like you like. I gave them to the nurse at the station, and I wish there was some way you could tell me how many you actually smoke. I’m sure she’s been stealing some.”
The sky was low, but it didn’t look like it was going to rain. It looked like it was going to stay gray and overcast forever. The view was ugly here, though it was not supposed to be. The rolling grounds existed only to be mowed, every other day it seemed, cropped so close that from up here the dirt could be seen through the stubble. They were afraid, she supposed, lest a blade of grass might briefly rise up and grow freely. To Jane, the lawn was the perfect symbol of oppression. But that wasn’t the horrible thing either.
“Sit down on the edge of the bed and I’ll do your hair.”
Jane turned then to face her mother. How worn Sylvia looked, how unhappy, how old. She had that brave little look she always wore on entering, that reassuring everything-is-okay smile that was more then contradicted by the weary misery of her eyes.
Jane walked to the bed and sat down. Her body felt heavy, lumpish, awkward. It was the starchy diet, the lack of exercise, the fact that there had never been any reason not to let herself go.
Sylvia sat down beside her, took out a brush, and began putting Jane’s hair in order. How her hands flew! Contemplating them, Jane could imagine how graceful her mother must have been in her youth, how gay and flirty back before Jane had happened to her. “I saw your Aunt Lillian the other day,” Sylvia said lightly. “She said that young Albert is going back to his wife again, can you imagine that? That’s what—the third time? There’s something off about that relationship if you ask me, something more than meets the eye.” She paused to light a cigarette, eyed Jane critically. “How would you like it if I braided your hair in cornrows?”
Mom, she tried to say. I want to come home.
But nothing came out.
Nothing ever did.
She raised her head slightly and stared at the window again. Though it was not visible from this angle, in her imagination she could see the horrible thing she had been staring at when her mother entered. It was her own reflection. The round, puffy face, the carelessly applied makeup, the dark, resentful eyes. The cast of expression that said her attention was a million light-years distant.
Suddenly it came to Jane that things weren’t going to get any better. She was trapped. She was going to stay in the institution forever, slowly growing older and heavier, draining off the sap of her mother’s life a shriveling drop at a time until it was all gone. Then there would be no more visits. She would be alone, decaying, growing ever more silently bitter, creeping toward zero.
She began to cry.
Astonished, her mother dropped the brush. It clattered loudly on the floor.
Yeeeeah. There is no escape from reality in the novel. The real world is a breath away, normally intangible to Jane but always present.
3) The heart of the isekai world.
There is a common thread running through most of isekai stories, even older, more varied stuff, even Western-style portal fantasy. Despite their differences and cultural foundations, all of them are based on one simple assumption:
You can be a hero.
It manifests differently in different stories, of course. In Vision of Escaflowne, the protagonist is courageous, compassionate, and psychic. In Now and Then, Here and There, the protagonist has a strong moral compass and aversion to killing in a world designed to break people down and build them up as cogs in a machine of an oppressive warmongering regime. In more modern stuff, protagonists get their geek interests (gaming, mostly) validated as the laws of the world they find themselves in can be mastered by meager skills they already have.
Whatever the case, they matter to this world. What they do matters. They get to do great things, effect great change.
Jane is not a hero. She is a subject of social currents and realities of the world she finds herself in, she has to accept the order of things as it is lest it would crush her, and in the end, even her grand act of rebellion against reality itself is meaningless: the dragon could never have reached the Spiral Castle. He’s dissolved before he could even approach it, leaving Jane alone.
Her story is small like people are small, and it’s a struggle even then.
In conclusion, Iron Dragon’s Daughter is not exactly a light read, as you may guess. It’s disempowering (autocorrect suggests disemboweling, which, OK, fair), it creates a suffocating atmosphere, and it doesn’t even really have a release as it depicts a cycle of suffering that never truly ends. If you struggle with depression or just feel down, I really wouldn’t recommend it.
But it’s interesting, which is more than I can say about modern isekai stories.
Haha, yeah, it does sound pretty wild and horrific. I get enough negativity IRL now, though.
One weird thing about isekai as a genre is, like, its conventions have bled into fantasy stories/genres that don’t have to be isekai. It reminds me of the big dystopia kick awhile back. I guess that’s what happens when any one genre gets popular enough.
Yeah. I’m thinking back to Grimgar, and, like, is there any reason for the protagonists to not just be rookie adventurers who went to the frontier in search of riches only to find out that they suck?
The memory loss is obviously here to make them interact with the world on its own terms rather than use modern knowledge and introduce the setting to the soul-crushing joy of the industrial revolution or something (and also to cut ties, of course), but it also means there isn’t really any benefit to them being isekai’d.
And, like, being there because they wanted to be would give them more agency and potentially character depth. You could explore why they decided to become adventurers, like maybe some of them are running from something or just want to get rich quick or whatever, and you can say things about the world as well if, say, petty criminals are just sent there.
Yeah, using the memory wipe was a cheap way to make it quasi-non-isekai. They’re more like the player characters in an RPG than the players themselves: unfamiliar with their own world but divorced from any other origin.
Then there’s the RPG-style class system and adventurer’s guild that have spread like the plague to anything tangentially fantasy-based. No story has been willing to do away with those trappings even when it inevitably locks the story into a certain shape and turns heroism into a terrible day job. That’s not bad for silly slice-of-life like Konosuba, but are we supposed to look at Goblin Slayer and think yes, this is how society should organize itself to combat encroaching gangs of murder-rapists that only one man seems at all interested in fighting for some reason?
Ugh, the RPGisms are fucking awful. I’m particularly annoyed at the utetrly bland magic systems propagating through such stories.
I mean, normally magic is a great way to emphasize the themes you want to explore as you can design the system to function as a metaphor of whatever you want to talk about as well as generally enhance the world and provide the protagonists with unusual ways to approach various problems.
And, like, even if we look at (tabletop) RPG systems only rather than at broader fantasy genre, there are some real gems:
In Unknown Armies, magick is born out of obsession and often drives you to self-destruction even as it gives you power to drag more people with you. There are people who gain power by doing drugs, by cutting themselves, by playing Russian Roulette and, in 3rd edition, by killing cops (as well as doing other anti-establishment stunts, killing cops is just the quickest route to power). Not all magick schools are so blatantly self-destructive, but all of them push you outside the common sense of society you live in, confront you with paradoxes of mundane life and ask how much you’re willing to sacrifice for power.
In the Spire, a game about drow rebellion against an oppressive elven regime, magic is just everywhere, interwoven into everyday life, so even character types that aren’t, like, about magic get some. Idols, for example, are artists and celebrities who combine being a social jaggernaut with “borderline illegal backalley dark magic” and get abilities like “you’re so beautiful, nobody dares to strike you”, which sorta exist in a liminal space between actual magic and being just that good.
Or Firebrand, who’s a public agitator. You start with perfectly mundane stuff like “you can rile up a crowd” and “you have contacts everywhere” and such, but if you live long enough and advance long enough, you can go full “You can’t kill the Messiah!”, so right before you die you get to dematerialize and live in the minds of people who carry the flame of revolution in their hearts and rematerialize without any negative effects when they need you once more because you are the revolution.
And then there are more occult-oriented characters, like Midwifes, who are terrifying drow/spider hybrids… dedicated to protecting the children. See, in the lore of the game, drow have a fucked up reproductive cycle due to an ancient curse that requires outside assistance to complete, specifically that of drow blessed by a spider goddess. So you have those monstrous figures organized in a pretty morally upstanding order of nurturers and protectors. Many of them also expand their duty to include protecting the powerless and speaking for the voiceless in general, making them pretty sympathetic to the rebellion.
Overall, there is a huge emphasis on how magic fits into the everyday life, how it shapes people and is shaped by people in return, and how something being weird or scary doesn’t make it evil.
Then there is Mage: the Awakening, which goes full gnostic and postulates that murdering the gods and toppling their thrones is a good thing, for they are tyrants who have created (well, modified, more like) this world as a prison for us. Magic is a thing of hidden wisdom and sudden revelation, and one of the best ways to advance it is to go out into the world and poke mysterious phenomena with a stick in hope of catching glimpses of the Truth.
Anyway, I’m rambling. The point is, there is a lot of different ways to approach magic, even in the RPG context, that would make it mean something. That isekai stories tend to go for the most bland possible option rather clearly points at the creative bankruptcy of the genre.
I honestly don’t remember any anime trend that’s had the market saturation of isekai in my lifetime. Even during the magical girl heyday, not every single thing being released was magical girl, but each time I see a new anime/LN announcement it’s another fucking isekai.
I wonder if this isn’t some unholy conglomeration of anime, web writing, globalization, and late-stage capitalism, where as long as amateur writers keep pumping these out so they’re cheap to produce and weebs keep buying them they’re going to stay around because no one gives a fuck about art when a buck is to be made.
Miyazaki’s whole “anime was a mistake” thing has become a punchline, but this is exactly the trend he was afraid of, where the art form ran away anything meaningful as pandering to otaku became the norm.
anyway I should probably read the post
I would say that harem rom-coms taking place in a high school had more prevalence at one point, but the isekai genre devoured them by coopting the harem aspect, which it turns out was all the otaku cared about. Harem + power fantasy is formidable.
I don’t think we’re quite into an isekai apocalypse just yet, but I fear it will always have a slot even when the tide falls. Fortunately they can’t sink their claws into video games. Video games have perfected their tricks already.
I would say that harem rom-coms taking place in a high school had more prevalence at one point, but the isekai genre devoured them by coopting the harem aspect, which it turns out was all the otaku cared about. Harem + power fantasy is formidable.
Well, they’re also often high schoolers, so isekai co-opted the protagonists of those as well. And many high school settings put a big focus on the transfer student aspect… And many high school settings were batshit insane with magic and/or superpowers and/or monsters. So really, it was just the scant bits of normality that got dropped.
Isekai may be what you get when you start going down the peacock route of amping up everything that gets
peahenotaku attention until the result is barely able to move under the weight but you just can’t look away.To be fair, I’ve heard it’s less about isekai stories being omnipresent and more about anime imports being easier to organize, so we get a lot of shit that back in the day wouldn’t have left Japan because it wouldn’t have been worth the effort and money.
IDK how accurate it is, though, and it definitely feels like isekai is fucking everywhere.
So it’s kind of like the same thing that happened to video games, then. I guess it’s not surprising, ultimately. Especially now that faster translations are happening for money.
I think isekai is the fantasy version of reality TV, right down to the race to find the exact line of just how crappy it can be and still be profitable due to how quickly and cheaply it can be made.
The resolution reminds me very uncomfortably of my own Christian upbringing’s “you’re suffering because god says you deserve, stop being a shit and you’ll stop suffering” morality. I’m suspicious of the story ending with her deciding God is right and we should suffer if we suck instead of killing god and freeing the world. The options in a truly subversive work shouldn’t be “let god torture us” or “we don’t exist,” it should be “let god torture us” or “free ourselves from god and live our lives.”
Or, as in the plot summary for the very first SaGa game way back in 1989:
As the heroes climb stairs that wrap outside of the tower, they engage each of the fiends revived and defeat them. They find the Creator at the summit, and learn that the fiends and the tower itself are actually part of a game created by him to see heroes defeat evil; for succeeding they would be granted a wish as a reward. Angry at his manipulation, they reject the reward and challenge the Creator, who insists that because he created everything he was allowed to use them as he saw fit. They then attack and defeat the Creator in a fierce battle.[46] The heroes then discover a door leading to an unknown location; they consider entering, but decide to return to their own world.[47]
Dang, that makes me actually want to play SaGa. Every Final Fantasy fan I’ve heard from said it sucked because of the FF2-style stat grinding system, so I never paid it much attention.
The “kill God and free ourselves” angle is also something I liked about Devil Survivor, and it is especially explicit in the second game.
I suspect this may be related to the (Christian?) idea that there can be no existence without God. If God must exist for you to exist, “let God torture us” and “we don’t exist” are the only options.
It’s probably an SMT standard, since IV’s best ending has you defy YHWH’s planned perfect world and instead make the best world for humanity, and IVA has you outright kill YHWH.
I found the first three GameBoy games to be surprisingly playable considering their age. I’ve honestly never had a problem with the levelling system; it’s weird, but it works surprisingly well, and it’s pretty nice to see an RPG trying something that isn’t just Final Fantasy’s system reskinned.
Yeah, this is the weakest part of the novel to me.
I mean, to be fair, it is fairly ambigous in how right the Goddess is, and it definitely postulates that people have no idea how to establish relationship with her in any case (there is a lot of blood sacrifice going on that may or may not actually be needed), but ultimately it does postulate a world where hope for a better tomorrow is only possible through divine grace, which, as you say, can easily lead to justifications of abuse.
I’ve never read this book, but I have read the sequel-ish short story “King Dragon” enough to give a good summary, and I’ve read the short story continued into a full novel The Dragons of Babel, but I don’t remember too much of that. I didn’t even realize it was an isekai world, since the protagonist of the short story/sequel is a (half-)elf native of the world, albeit one from a tiny village that’s mostly isolated from the war and falls to the first injured dragon to crawl into it and claim ownership. The protagonist also had more of an effect on the world than it sounds like Jane had.
Whenever fiction that seems to be a deconstruction of isekai comes up I always think of Erfworld. In some ways it seems like a direct answer to the current isekai boom, except it started running well before the boom started. It has the weird blend of contemporary values and alien ones, but it feels like that’s more a consequence of the author thinking about what a world that’s essentially just a tabletop war strategy game would be like. Sexuality is no big deal, for example, since sex has nothing to do with procreation (cities “pop” new people if directed to do so, whether or not the leader is boinking anyone). The inhabitants don’t have any understanding of civilians or children, either, since neither exist; all new people pop as adults with a basic understanding of their function, and everyone has some combat use. It also leads to weird things like the cities being mostly empty, as there are no civilians and resource production and distribution happens automatically.
“This is where the novel provides a counterpoint to the nihilism found in a spiritual experience and divine revelation. Melanchthon proves incapable of actually destroying or even reaching the Spiral Castle, and Jane gets to experience a number of cryptic encounters with the Goddess wearing various guises.
Those encounters are… not particularly convincing as a counterpoint. The Goddess points out various ways in which Jane could have escaped tragedy following her and hints in a metaphor that the suffering plaguing life is the result of people exercising their free will, which is the usual theological solution for the problem of evil, but, well, the problem of evil remains.
The suffering and misery as depicted by the novel are undeniable, the ways to escape them are ephemeral. If there is a higher being who has created us for a purpose and provided us with means to achieve happiness, but is unwilling or unable to guide us, while the natural flow of society results in creation of hell, is it really any different from the nihilistic vision of Melanchthon? Jane suffers due to the acts of forces outside of her knowledge and control. Personal relationship with divinity and commitment to act righteously won’t stop them, so how can she be expected to reach salvation?”
That’s a very Christian reading, but the Goddess doesn’t really work as a stand in for the Christian god. The problem of evil arises from an all powerful, all loving creator god – while the Goddess seems more sympathetic in her appearance than the blood rituals of her followers or the sinister nature of her messenger would suggest, we don’t know that any of those three things are true of her. The concept of salvation is fairly clearly foreign – there’s no afterlife, and no idea of sin.
Most importantly, we don’t know that she’s the architect of the system or merely its personification. They’re quite different ideas, theologically, but theology is not the point of the book and so it’s not really examined. Jane’s existentialism isn’t fundamentally religious – she’s not Kierkegaard or a disillusioned pastor – it’s born of misery, and it doesn’t really make any odds whether the Goddess is even real or not. The two things that do matter are 1) does she have control over her life? and 2) can she be happy? Or: is it possible for her to live a life where her happiness outweighs her suffering?
And that’s why those are the things the Goddess talks about.
The answer to the first question is yes. Jane can’t overthrow the government or destroy the univerese, but she has quite a lot of control over her own life after she escapes the factory. She can’t overthrow a government or destory the universe, but other than that, she has a lot of agency (especially in the last section).
As Melanchthon (I think? been a while) remarks, she’s peverse – she actively sabotages her own life out of bitterness over how shit her life is. It’s one of my favourite things about the character, or, rather, the particular ways it manifests in terms of bad behaviour is. But obviously it’s terrrible for her as a person.
So the things she needs to do to be happy aren’t ephemeral at all, and the advice she gest from the Goddess is very practical – stop killing Tegistus, for a start. And her relatively quiet life back in the human world is putting it into practice.
I’d say the book is a lot more about depression than it is about philosophy, and especially more than it is about theology, and so 2) is always going to be ambiguous – but as you say, the ending leans towards optimism.
I second Act’s opinion on the book. Personally, I hated the lukewarm faux Christian philosophy at its core, more so because the author seems to think this philosophy is universally shared by all cultures. “God good, humans bad” is the most boring and obnoxious take on the issue, especially jarring because it doesn’t mesh well with the book’s setting. In a way, Iron Dragon’s Daughter reminded me of His Dark Materials: the author posits his work as subversive but ultimately doesn’t challenge, nor seems to be aware of his own biases.
(Sorry, I just. Really don’t like this book)