rereading in preparation for the last chapter. man, this series is so good at making tone switches (tone mixing?) feel natural.
maybe it's because it's my second/third time through, but while the action here is objectively pretty grim ("the party tries to assemble faryln's mostly digested corpse") it doesn't come off as being arbitrarily grim -- it's just what's happening. and if there's a joke on the next panel, that fits too, somehow. it doesn't feel jarring/manipulative, it's just a story that has a little of everything, so sometimes you have panels like that one.
i guess what I'm noticing is that while some authors would play that up for shock value to keep you interested, she just doesn't have to, because everything else (characters, plot, world building, dialogue...) is going to have you hooked either way. what a pro.