Really appreciated this view because I couldn't understand all the praise for this series.

I agree with you so much on this review! Especially the part with when Rin finds that character getting high and says it's the most terrible thing she's seen during the war. I was astounded when I read that. The author gave all these vivid descriptions on how all these people were tortured and mutilated, and then Rin says that?? Ridiculous.

@mrstrangeworld5977

Жыл бұрын

because she's become use to see that she isn't use to seeing people get high

@ericlimon9718

Жыл бұрын

@@mrstrangeworld5977 yea totally because as someone who has seen shit like that and had a friend dying in my arms gasping and vomiting seeing someone get high isn’t shit just sad but nothing compared to the horrors of death

@ericlimon9718

Жыл бұрын

@@mrstrangeworld5977 and harming cutting with glass or getting stabbed or failed suicides

yess i'm glad someone finally mentions the anachronism in the wrighting. and i'm glad i'm not the only one who was confused as if they had guns or not because of it. Phrases like "ceasefire" don't apply to bows and arrows

I really liked the series overall but definitely had some problems and very much appreciated the review: ( I realise now I’ve made a lot of references to later books and I don’t know if you’ve read them, but the points still stand) 1) Setting: this was a massive problem for me as well, I understand the theme the author was setting up in the first book about shamanism becoming obsolete but considering the series was so clearly inspired by history I found it very difficult to place. I was thinking initially around the time of the Tang Dynasty in the first book, but the introduction of muskets made me push my assumption up to the 16th century. At this point I assumed the chemical weapons were just some form of poisons adapted by the mungenese, similar to how Su Daju poisoned the water down to Arlong in the second book. I feel like the Hesperians were intended to be an amalgamation of the Spanish Inquisition and the British empire, so 16th century still felt like a push to me but aligned best with the technology. The introduction of the dirigibles on the other hand kinda blew the immersive experience apart for me, as that could only really bring the story up to the early 19th century, very late 18th century at a push. The leap from ancient China to 19th century really affected my reading, and while I liked the first book for its setting because it made sense, particularly considering standardised testing for government officials was open for everyone in the Tang Dynasty but a lack of national education meant inequality was still a given, the timeframe problem overshadowed the second and third book. 2) I very much agree with your point on Rin removing her uterus. I actually don’t mind the way it played out for her, because aside from getting through her education she didn’t have other priorities, and was understandably very focused on immediate survival, but I would have loved to see how this would affect women such as venka, who were from aristocratic families and presumably expected to marry and raise a family after her tenure as a soldier. 3) I personally don’t really care much about whether a book is labelled as adult fantasy, young adult or grim dark, but I do think a large part of the series was trying to stay so far away from young adult that in some cases hindered the characters. There were some relationships that I think the author should have just let develop that got relatively stifled because the series was trying to be more gritty than character focused. The friendship between Kitay and Rin in my opinion was brilliant in the second and third book, and in the second and part of the third book the interactions between Nezha, Rin and Kitay were done well, but in the first book they seemed fairly rushed, and later in the series stifled in favour of focus on the military campaigns. I personally believe that the first book should have been split into two, the first half entirely focused on Sinegard and setting up these characters and their dynamics, and the second on the war itself. These books were at their best in small character moments in my opinion but we rarely saw them, and I think that was a deliberate attempt to stay away from young adult fantasy. There were other relationships in the series that didn’t feel developed, particularly the relationships with Rin and people who were a) her subordinates or b) women, especially Venka because that was so close to being an incredibly rewarding relationship. This was mainly a problem in the later books tbf so I won’t focus much on it. 4) Overall I really enjoyed Rin’s character and don’t have as much problems with her as I’ve seen a lot of people have. I definitely understand the criticism that she appears arrogant but to me it came off far more as her having something to prove, and the validation she finally got from the Keju. My major problem with Rin’s character personally is that she displays vastly inconsistent levels of skill through the series. She is setup as having an advanced affinity for strategy, and her convincing her tutor to help her prepare for the Keju implies she’s good at dealing with people. It’s not so much an issue in the first book, but in the second and especially the third the inconsistency becomes a massive problem when she gains command. It is heavily implied she’s descending into madness, but the absolute recklessness of some of her decisions become really out of character. From time to time she displays a really impressive ability to strategise, but by the latter part of the series she seems to have lost all her competency and common sense in a way that ‘she’s gone mad with power’ doesn’t quite cover. We see from the start of the series that Rin is always impulsive and bites off way more than she can chew at times, but there’s always been good reason to back it up, and can be really cunning in some of her plans. By the third book it seems like the author has given up on Rin’s strategy abilities. A dynamic is sort of created where Rin is the bloodthirsty and bold one, while Kitay is the one who does all the thinking and strategising, which is a real shame because in the first book it felt more as though Kitay and Rin were both extremely creative with strategy. Honestly despite all this criticism I still really enjoyed the series. The author was quite young when she wrote it I think so I feel like it’s almost more a case of it being written too soon in her career, and with more experience all these criticisms would have been written differently.

So excited for this

Couldn’t agree more about the dialogue. It really did seem like 2000’s era teens talking to each other and destroyed any chance of me becoming engrossed in the story.

the more of your videos I watch, the more liking I take to your channal. I like your indipendent raking and choice of books .

I skipped the spoiler part because I still haven't decided whether or not to read it. I do love reading polarizing books to see where I fall, so I might give it a try! Definitely fun to see a negative review of this book. :)

You are not alone! Cannot understand all the love for it....

Thank you for this. Bc I just DNFed this at like 3/4 of the way through. Idk why I even stuck with it that long. 👎 Agree with basically everything you said in this video.

I'm on chapter one and am already in shock about how bad the writing is, I haven't read a book this bad since Lightlark

Thanks for the review. I was planning to get to this eventually because of good reviews even though it didn’t sound quite up my alley. I’ll scratch it off the TBR.

Totally agree with all the criticisms. I cannot understand all the hype at all….

Lmao you know how I felt about the book

OMG, I'm on the last couple of chapters of the last book and I do not like it. I made it this after and hoped it would be better but it's not. I agree with everything you said. I do not like Ren at throughout the three books. I was hoping for some character development but I did not see that at all. So disappointed.

thank you for speaking up

@chevalierdulys

3 жыл бұрын

to me it felt like a woke nonsense - anti-american thing. Where nowadays people think they are entitled just because... well because! I am baffled so many people like this kind of nonsense... oh she is so young, she is poc etc. IT MAKES NO DIFERENCE. You get no valours because any of that. You get points if you write a good. Everything about your race, gender or politics doesn't matter to me. Only your writing... now if you write a book about a poc character or a lesbian character - that's another thing. This is the same person who got offended because someone (George Martin) tell her name wrong. My god. The audacity. The racist. This woke trend that it's getting so far in news and tv is now getting on books. Don't even response to my message because some screeching people will get mad at you :)

@AndrewsWizardlyReads

3 жыл бұрын

@@chevalierdulys it made no sense to me she is a peasant girl beating up nobles and being extremely insubordinate. Eastern culture would have killed her so quick. She would have been dead the first day after she kicked old boy in the fruits

I just finished this book and absolutely hated it

Agree with you 100%.Yeah, it wasn't good, I agree. I DNFd it about 2/3rds in. I found the dialogue fake also, prevented me from getting into it. Main character didn't seem 'real' and was confusing. The setting and slang/terms being used were all over the place. The amount of tropes was suffocating.

The more I hear about this book the happier I am that I didn't waste my time reading it. I saw an interview with the writer and got a little biased because she looked and acted a lot younger than she was. And she even seemed clueless about the contents of her own book. She had a "I write YA fanfic" vibe. Which I know is biased of me. And I wanted to give the book a chance. Esp since everyone keeps talking about it like it's some grimdark book. But the writer + cover for the book made me pretty certain that the book would be very YA'ish and I could already predict much of the story (and hilariously turns out I was right, wrote my story prediction under another video, and other than the love triangle romance I seem to have gotten everything right lol) But yeah, YA only with a lot of cursing to make it more edgy and occasionally stuff that shows the horrors of war. Which are likely the parts that people love so much and are also likely parts that she took from Chinese accounts of the Japanese invasion and then just pasted into her book. Also, ooo.. that sun tzu stuff would really really piss me off. I hate Dan Simmons partially because he did a mix of that in his Hyperion books. One that comes to mind was how he kept calling cyberpunks "cyberpuke" .. that .. that doesn't even make sense and pissed me off endlessly. That said almost everything about that man's prose, style, shtty story, plotholes etc annoyed me endlessly and the book is praised as if it was some brilliant book when it was nothing but pretentious insipid drivel

This is an horribly pretentious thing to say, but the only thing I can figure is that the people who liked this book have never read any truly good books. The prose was amateurish, the story unoriginal, the plot insonsistent, characters flat and unbelievable. I do not get the hype. At all. You couldn't pay me to finish the rest of the series.

Soooo... TPW trilogy is far from perfect but I just wanted to point out some things based on the points you raised. 1) What’s the issue with the “mish mash”? Is it that typically secondary worlds don’t mix different time periods? I personally thought it was cool to see Song dynasty in the setting and analogues of the Second Sino-Japanese war in the plot. I thought the dialogue sounding contemporary was fun too, something different from the “stiff” or overly formal way I’d come to expect characters from historical fantasy worlds to sound like... Also, pretty sure even people during the Song dynasty did fart jokes. 2) About Rin’s character... I would think you would also have problems with authority if most of the adults in your life were abusing you (the Fangs) or looking down on you and actively trying to prevent you from achieving your goals because of their own prejudices (Jun). Just two examples out of MANY from these “authority figures.” I also don’t get pretty much everything else you said about her character. Taking things for granted? Thinking she’s superior to everyone? Rin is bullied pretty much as soon as she steps into the Academy and she spends the whole of Part 1 not forgetting how everyone treats her like she’s nothing and doing everything in her power not to continue being treated that way. And wouldn’t you say that anger and fear are closely related? Especially given Rin’s context? 3) It’s interesting that you mentioned it’s Western but supposed to be Chinese or something like that because the author is a diaspora writer and has said herself in many interviews that as such she’s not just coming from one singular tradition. Not being from the West or Chinese, I didn’t see how they “sounded Western” but were “supposed to be Chinese.” 4) “Dark parts ripped out of history.” Yep, like white authors do. 5) Just to reiterate, the setting doesn’t have to be JUST Song dynasty China or JUST 20th century China since it’s a secondary world. 6) I think she changed the names because it’s supposed to an analogue/secondary world. The country is called Nikara after all, not China. 5) About Rin’s menstruation. As a girl, I didn’t need further “commentary” on what it’s supposed to mean. Readers have had different takes on it too (girl power and whatnot). I didn’t see Rin being flippant. I saw a kid not being given a good choice by a fucked up system. 6) Rin’s problem with abusive men is... the point. For me it was pretty obvious that this was a problem that Rin had to overcome. I don’t think the narrative was encouraging abusive relationships because... the narrative shows how these men fuck her up pretty quickly or later on. 7) I agree about Jiang, the magic system, the Cike’s role in the narrative, etc. The narrative not being able to explain/make the magic system make sense for the reader is one of my main critiques. 8) Seeing Altan as an addict being worse than Golyn Niis... I don’t remember that specific line. You’re right if that’s exactly what it means/how it’s said, but to say that the narrative was tone deaf or somehow does not take war atrocities as the worst consequences of colonialism is... just objectively not true. You can’t based it on one line, if that is even what the line meant. 9) Yes, the Nikarans were fighting with swords and arrows while the Mugenese were more advanced with pretty much everything... which is used by the Mugenese as justification for their dehumanization of Nikarans. Same thing with Hesperians later on... (When Spain colonized the Philippines, they also thought they were more advanced, with their fleet and all, and therefore justified to colonize. The “natives” didn’t have a fleet of ships, but they were building rice terraces by hand (like how???).) The Nikarans fought with swords and arrows but later on we find out their silks and goods are highly valued and exported (book 3 I think?) It makes sense why in a secondary fantasy world that’s a historical analogue, some nations are seemingly more technologically “advanced” than others.

@nikosbookreviews

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks for such a thoughtful response! You raise some really good points throughout. I think it comes down to the story just not meshing with me overall, though of course any book is subjective so different people can get totally different things out of it. The world felt confused to me with the oddly contrasting facets of dialogue and setting, and the character issues with Rin/messaging around her relationships is just honestly what I took away. I'm sure a lot was intentional, but the way it was done just didn't work for me. I know many have loved this series and I'm glad you and others took something different away from the story, this one just wasn't for me.

It’s an Asian Name of the Wind fanfic. And not a good one. The second part was better IMO, but I’ve had huge issues with the first half of it.

@nikosbookreviews

3 жыл бұрын

I had heard that but haven't read Name of the Wind myself, so can't confirm, but yeah, I had a lot of problems as well obviously.

😂💀

I disagree