IDK why I thought this might be better than Fables in it's handling of women but at least now I know not to expect much improvement from what we got there. If anything, the misogyny is just allowed to take center stage, and the quality of storytelling has gone down so much that there's nothing to distract from it. 
 Most of the development of the "plot" centers around interpersonal relationships that haven't been established, much less >seen< by the reader (SQ loves AB so much he's become her "reason to live"? What? THEY HAVE HAD LIKE ZERO SCENES TOGETHER WHAT THE FUCK). Absent motivations abound (why is the bottle imp doing ANY of this?), and even the characters are forced to acknowledge in-universe that there's no REAL reason for them to do much of what they do, eh, but fuck it, we're here already, right? 
 To top it off, once again Willingham creates powerful, autonomous women and decides that their powerful autonomy was simply a phase, and that in the end, all it really takes to "tame" them - fucking TAME, they ACTUALLY USE THAT WORD - and is a man. A man, clearly the endgame for any and every woman. 
 SQ gets the shittiest end of the stick here. At least in Fables she was allowed to have a smidge of agency - presumably she'd at least >chosen< to become one of the Emperor's generals - but here it's all explained away, her villainy retconned into victimhood. If the book were about exploring that, devoted more to the SQ's personal journey, then it might not be SO bad, but instead it's just used to justify giving a former villain a shoddily-arranged happy, man-ful ending despite her past atrocities. What the fuck ever. 
 BR doesn't make it out much better. Her relationship with AB is barely touched on, and most of their scenes together have her pretty reasonably rebuffing his advances (they've literally only just met). Yet by the end of the book she's dressed down for being such a "bitch" to him, where it's revealed that she's acting so (apparently unreasonably?!? SORRY I GUESS YOU FORGOT TO SHOW THAT SCENE) hostilely toward him because she's jealous that he's "in love" with someone else. 
 WHHHHAAAT? WHERE DID ANY OF THIS COME FROM? OH I GUESS YOU FORGOT TO SHOW US THOSE SCENES TOO. 
 This book was a clusterfuck of awful, worse than usual for Willingham. Phil Jimenez's art is nice, but 100% not worth the rest of this crap.