okay so i finished it. i think overall it’s a 3.5/5 for me. the beginning and the end are the strongest parts with good set ups for the sequel(s) and everything but i think the pacing of the middle section is just so poor and breaks tension a lot.
the nml group parts were severely lacking. most of it was spent with n bitching at m, and then somehow developing feelings for l out of nowhere?
this is just a general problem i have with this book actually the romantic subplots are severely lacking. both e and r’s relationship thing, even if it was said by mn that they aren’t gonna end up together just felt annoying, forced, and disjointed. it felt a bit stronger at the end kind of? but literally barely. and i still don’t get why n fell for l and vice versa out of nowhere it feels rushed like why is she suddenly confessing her feelings despite her duty and then hes basically like “yeah im finna die so keep that shit” like it was really jarring for me esp bc we don’t get a lot of scenes showing this shit develop at all
i also think there’s too many plot threads woven in that are clearly gonna be important later but it’s distracting there’s too much going on fr.
i actually think in general the relationships between characters plus how the characters act overall is a kind of hit and miss. i can’t really explain why but it just kinda feels that way. i do like some of them and i think they’re interesting but the book is honestly more focused on worldbuilding than plot and character, which i can respect generally speaking but it is just kind of annoying a lot of the time
i would be happy if i never read a dream sequence again. they just get so exceedingly repetitive.
sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on? the ending conceptually was good but i was having a hard time following the forsaken stuff a bit and why that dude burst into ash or whatever the fuck was going on
there’s literally too many named people. like i appreciate (generally) that the world is dense and it’s hard to have a big cast and make everyone feel equally important but i feel like it struggles a lot. for example, mt and e don’t have any narration from their perspective unless you count the preprologue with e as a 9 year old. then mt is the only one without one which feels weird since he’s another main character sorta? but tbh in general p and r feel like the most main of the main characters. i don’t really love p’s personality switch with the wolves tho it feels a bit eh and again bc the worldbuilding is dense i still don’t 100% get it but im kinda willing to suspend my thoughts about it
the characters feel weirdly one note to me. their personalities are so set in stone and are pretty straight forward until they just. aren’t occasionally. it’s not really fair of me to say overall bc it may just be that i’m not into this specific style of character building but that’s how i feel
also this book is genuinely too damn long. like you could condense half of this shit and probably make a tighter better paced story fr.
i lowkey don’t like but also found it funny that t just disappeared after that fight with the fade lmao it’s so funny to me fr.
also i think the power system is unique but i lowkey hate all the random misogyny and gendering about it at the same time. i get this was the 80s so im kinda willing to let it slide but overall i’m not the biggest lover of this extreme gender binary shit
overall i can maybe see myself reading the second book / rest of the series ig but i really hope that the middle doesn’t drag the same way as this one did for me.
none of my thoughts make sense but like idc i did it i read 1400 pages in 5 days technically wahoo.
