The most compelling resistance in fantasy is the kind that does not look like resistance from the outside.
Rebellion in fantasy has a tendency toward spectacle. The chosen one leads the oppressed to the barricades. The peasants rise. The tyrant falls. The story is organized around a visible confrontation between a recognizable power structure and the people it has wronged. This works — it is satisfying in the way that clear moral stakes are always satisfying — but it is not the only way rebellion functions in fiction, and it is arguably not the most interesting way.
The most compelling resistance narratives in epic fantasy are the ones that depict rebellion before it becomes visible — the long, quiet, unglamorous work that happens before anyone declares war. This is the kind of resistance that operates through information rather than armies, that is organized around the question of who can be trusted rather than the question of who will fight, and that is constrained by the need to remain invisible until it is strong enough to survive exposure.
Martin's most interesting political plots work this way. The Lannisters did not seize power in a visible coup — they captured it incrementally, through marriages and appointments and quiet eliminations of the people who would have noticed. The resistance to them — what survives of it — has to operate the same way. Abercrombie understands this too: the First Law universe's politics are driven by the kind of institutional corruption that does not look like corruption from inside the institution.
The Kingsmen Chronicles is built around exactly this kind of resistance. The conspiracy that the story's heroes are fighting has been in place for a long time. It operates through legitimate authority. The people running it are not obvious villains — they are officials, commanders, court advisors who have been systematically replacing independent actors with loyal ones for decades. The result is a power structure that looks like itself while no longer being itself: a kingdom that still has a queen and a throne and a palace guard, all of which have been quietly captured.
Fighting this requires a different skill set than fighting an obvious tyrant. It requires Olea to work from inside a guard corps that may be compromised at every level. It requires Ghrenna to maintain a cover inside the enemy operation while extracting the information that makes resistance possible. It requires Elohl to find allies through a country that does not yet know it is occupied, without being visible enough to trigger the purge that the conspirators are waiting to launch.
This is why the resistance narrative in the Kingsmen Chronicles is more interesting than most: it does not get to be heroic until it has first been invisible. The story is about the invisible part. By the time the confrontation comes, the reader understands what it cost to get there.