 So I just completed The Wise Man's Fear, which is the sequel to The Name of the Wind, which I reviewed last year, and I do not get why this one is popular. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. See, with The Name of the Wind, I personally just thought it was pretty good. I feel it's overrated, definitely, but I get why people would love it. You know, I get why people would say, oh, that's my favorite book, or I really love that book, something like that. I get that, because, like I said, it's pretty good. The good parts are really good. I just feel that it spends way too much time pedering around doing stuff that doesn't tie into the main story very much. And The Wise Man's Fear is nothing but that. Okay, we make zero progress in the main story with this one, at all. And I know that the middle parts of trilogies are usually a bit emptier than the first and the third entries, but this one takes it to a whole new level. It is horrendous. So this one, this one will have a spoiler section at the end, don't worry. I can get more into that if you feel like it, but the beginning section part, man, let's start with K'Voth. So K'Voth is, you know, the one telling the story, and the whole conceit of the story is that he becomes a legendary hero dude. So it does make sense that he would talk himself up a bit and that he's kind of arrogant. And yeah, it's not that he isn't an intelligent guy or anything, but this one really goes out of its way to make him just way too perfect. The first example is how the first big chunk of the book is all about him getting revenge on his school bully, Ambrose. And, I mean, that's kind of pointless because he really did that at the end of the first book anyways. So I feel like it should just be, yeah, Ambrose and I avoided each other after that. Like, you could just put that in and most readers would just accept that as is. And then after that it goes into how he's so smart that he figured out a bunch of stuff other people never could. He invented new things that no one had ever invented before. He finds out, or excuse me, he learns how to fight in like two months and he becomes this ultra mega badass. He learns how to have sex from a fairy and then after that women are falling all over themselves to fuck him. It's just, it's really stupid and really annoying. Like, I could deal with it in the first book because it's made pretty clear that yes, Kavoth is an unreliable narrator and so this isn't totally true. It was still a little annoying, but it was made clear. But with this one, oh my God, it just kicks it up to a whole other level. Like, I can't even just set it aside because the story is good or because the prose is really good because the prose is still really good. It makes going through this a lot easier and quicker. But still, I can't just set that aside anymore because most of the good stuff is no longer there and Kavoth is just a million times more annoying than he was before. And some people have said to me that they're okay with him being so perfect because they know based on like the flash forwards, the present day, that he screws up at some point, that his arrogance is his downfall, that he does some stuff wrong and it not only causes his own life to fall apart, but it causes destruction all over the world. And to an extent, yeah, I do, I get that, but there's literally almost 2,000 pages worth of him just showing off how cool he is now. Like, we need to have him screw up at some point or at the very least advance to being a more mature person. And then there's the story which, as I mentioned, we get no progress on that at all. Okay, well, this is supposed to be a story about Kavoth finding the chandry and trying to get revenge on them and presumably his quest for revenge is what screws up the world in the present day. Like, he does something wrong or maybe killing the chandry and has unintended side effects. Who knows? I am still kind of excited to learn that, but we make no progress towards that whatsoever in this book. Like, the beginning part has him finally gaining access back to the university archives and doing some research in there and he finds nothing in the course of his research. That's all. That's that entire segment of the book. Like, he finds out about these guys called the Amir who are supposedly working in opposition to the chandrium, but they're also kind of legendary and it's also hard to find information on them. So then he starts going out looking for information on the Amir and by the end he finds nothing. Like, in the first book, he found a little bit of information on the chandry and at the end. Like, he just, he found out why they were going around killing people and why they killed his family in particular. And that was interesting. It wasn't a lot and I was still kind of disappointed by it, but it was interesting and at least we got a little bit. This has absolutely nothing and I'm very, very disappointed in that. Really this whole, the story of this one is just a series of like one-off adventures that feel more like, well, short stories because they're all like a hundred pages each. Like, first there's him getting revenge on Ambrose, which I already mentioned and that goes on for like a quarter of the book. And then he leaves the university for a while and he goes off to be in the service of this noble way off in a foreign land and that takes up like another quarter of the book. And that one was pretty good. You know, I was happy that we were seeing a change of scenery. I was happy we were getting to see Kovoth in a different environment. I was happy we were getting to see like some political maneuvering and stuff, but pretty much all that happens is there is in there is that Kovoth shows off how cool he is to the mayor and like at the end that changes around a little bit. But nonetheless, it's not like there's not that much happening even if I was kind of interested at the time looking back on it. I'm like, wow, that was stupid. Then there's Kovoth going on his adventures in The Eld, which is this big forest. Basically, he's hunting down some bandits with some other people and that goes on way longer than it needs to because the majority of it is just them walking through the woods not finding anything and then camping and people tell stories to each other. And considering that at that point we're hearing a story within a story within the book. Every time that came up I wanted to punch Patrick Rothfuss in the face. It was so obnoxious. I did not come here to hear about some boy who wanted to capture the moon or whatever. I came here to read about Kovoth and his journey and ideally I'd be here reading about Kovoth who is less insufferable than the one we got, but you know, I will take the insufferable one if that means we can actually have something happen, something interesting, something that applies to the main story happen. But yeah, it's him listening to people tell stories, him telling a couple of stories, them traipsing around the woods and he starts learning another language from this other dude and that's about it. And I won't really go into much more because of spoilers and even then I've only covered it in broad strokes so far. But that's like the first two-thirds of the book and in the last third it's just a couple more stories like that and they also don't tie into anything. And in a vacuum they're all fine. The issue is that they don't tie into anything. Like if they wanted to just have a collection of short stories about this one dude who's super cool and super badass so that we can see him become this super cool legendary badass hero, then that's fine, but advertise it that way. Advertise it as just, this is a collection of short stories. You know, there's no overarching theme other than this one character. Like don't pretend that there's a plot here and then get rid of it partway through. And I might get a little bit of hate for this but I'm kind of falling out of love with the magic system here. Now don't get me wrong, the first part of this book there's a lot of talk about naming and both learning about that. And I like naming still because it's just so mysterious and so hard to teach. Like they can't just say, okay the name of the wind is this, like you have to learn it yourself and the best they can do is help guide you or the best any teachers can do is help guide you I think. But sympathy, the main one, the hard magic system that they spend the majority of the time with, I'm not as into that anymore because, well it's just a little too weak. You know, it's a little too weak, you can't do that much that's cool with it. You can do a couple of neat things with it but overall it's just too limited and too weak so you can't do any fancy displays or anything all that cool really. And I think I have the same issue with Warbreaker, I just didn't really know how to put it into words. Like Warbreaker, the magic is so limited for your average person because you only have one breath that you can use to do things and you can't really do much with that. So you need to collect breath from like hundreds of other people before you have enough to really do anything impressive like bring things to life and sympathy is kind of the same way. Like you can do some neat things with it and once in a while that does pop up but it's just a little too limited to be all that cool with me. But even then that could work because that would force K'Voth to actually, well think through a lot of his problems rather than just throw magic at it. And for the first book that worked out pretty well and for most of the second book that also worked out but then near the end he, like I mentioned before, he goes off somewhere and spends like a hundred pages from learning from these basically their warrior monks how to be an amazing badass fighter both barehanded and with sword. And like that was the last thing about K'Voth that I was kind of identifying with and I was kind of into. It was that he wasn't a super amazing fighter so he had to think his way out of trouble most of the time. And I liked that because it forces the author to come up with creative solutions as well rather than just the characters fought the bad guys and then it was a really difficult battle but they won. And now, well we haven't totally lost that but we've lost out at least part of it. I think that's mostly it for the non-spoiler section. Like I don't know how much else I can say without getting into specifics. It's just like K'Voth becomes pretty insufferable. The story makes no progress. I guess I was still really like in the world building. You know when we were getting expanded parts of that we were seeing different cultures and stuff. That was still pretty cool. We still we got a little more information on the fairies and how they live. That was pretty neat as well. But other than that there's just not much here that I can point to that I said, yeah that was cool I liked that. And so I mean this is far from the worst book I've ever read. Very very far from it. But it's still it's still bad. You know it's still bad and I'm far from the first person to say this but this is the reason that the final book has taken nine years and counting to come out because Patrick Ruffus wasted the entire second book. He did nothing with it. He's done nothing but ask questions and ask questions and putter around and show how cool K'Voth is. And now he's struggling to fit everything he needs to into the last book. And at this point honestly I would just say he should tear the bandage off like write it out as best he can and then just shove it out the door because it's not going to be perfect. One it's never going to be perfect because nothing is ever perfect. That's not how art works. It never has worked that way and it never will work that way. But in addition a bad ending is better than no ending. Like Ruffus can learn his lesson from that and then say okay I won't do that with my next series and then go off to write something new and better. Like if your first series that you write is your best one then well that just means you haven't improved in any way and that kind of sucks. Like Ruffus I know he probably thinks of this as like his magnum opus and he must get it right but sometimes that's not how it works. And like yeah a big part of that is that you wasted the entire middle part of your trilogy. Like the thing is by the end of this K'Voth is only 16 years old. And apparently in the present he's like only 25 which is also weird because I thought he'd be like 40. You know that it would take that long for the word of his exploits to spread around and to turn him into the semi-mythical figure but whatever. The important part is it spent the entire first two books just on his childhood and now we have to try and squeeze his entire adult life with all the important stuff that happens there into one last book and excuse me we still don't know why he's called K'Voth king killer. Like presumably he kills a king but which one and where. Like we haven't even gotten any hints as towards that yet. And so this last book is gonna have to build up that entire thing, show how the world fell apart, show how K'Voth faded into obscurity and then also go to present day and maybe it'll just end where it started there where K'Voth's still being like yeah I run this in and life kind of sucks but you know that's where I am now and it just ends on that depressing note or maybe something else will happen. I don't know either way I would really rather just have a bad ending where we get our questions answered even if it's not answered in the most satisfactory way than just never get an ending at all. So now it's the spoiler section so like I said before this book is split into several short stories. There's a K'Voth getting revenge on Ambrose which doesn't even work completely because at the very end Ambrose is still messing with him. We really needed that much but and then there's him going off and helping this noble who his position is a mayor but it's much bigger than just running one town basically without going into much detail but basically while he's there K'Voth learns that one of the mayor's servants is actually poisoning him but he has to find a way to prove it to the mayor and then they have to catch the dude and it's not a terrible sequence don't get me wrong but it does go on longer than it needs to and it doesn't contribute all that much like the main reason they put that in there is to show how K'Voth winds up getting money so when he eventually goes back to the university at the end of the book he has money to do with stuff and like okay I'm glad that he has that now like he can finally make his way and we don't have to spend huge sections of the story talking about how he pays off his student loans which was obnoxious in the first book and just ungodly annoying in the first quarter of this one but okay whatever it's not that big of a deal and then the third one is where he's walking through the eld hunting down bandits who are stealing the mayor's taxes and like I said before it's just them traipsing through the woods and hanging around telling stories and then at the end when they actually fight the bandits it's kind of cool but then right after that K'Voth winds up going into the fairy world and he meets this woman fairy who has sex with all the men she meets and she spends a very long time having sex with K'Voth and just teaching him how to be good at fucking and God I did not I don't care even setting aside the fact that the the phrase kissing the woman's flower is used unironically it's just really cringy to see this guy who is feeling more and more like a self-insert and has sex with this beautiful ethereal creature and she tells him about how amazing he is it it's just really obnoxious and then after that when he becomes a little more confident with women he goes out into the real world and starts having sex all over it's really weird and obnoxious but while he is there he does run into this thing called the cafe which is one of the most fascinating concepts for a villain that I've ever heard in fantasy basically it's this demon tree that can see the future and so when it talks to you it can make you it can tell you information that it'll tell you information and it knows exactly how you'll react to it so that when you go out into the world it'll cause the largest amount of chaos even if you mean to do good things which is that's really cool but then other than that he eventually leaves also he finds out the true name of the fairy lady and that's how he's able to beat her because he's just that cool and that's smart and then while he's out he saves some women who are kidnapped which I mean that's that's good and all I'd be fine if they had that bit in there I would make it shorter but the fact that it's in there just to show off how cool both is and how amazing he is and how everyone loves him and then after that his story starts to get spread I don't know I just wish it tied into the main story at least a little bit and then he finally gets back to the mayor and he gets kicked out and he goes back to the university and just that's where the book ends there's not even really a climax this time like the first book had a couple different things that you could look at as the climax this one just doesn't have one and I I really want to know who's dick Patrick Rothfuss sucked to get so many five-star reviews on Goodreads I really I genuinely don't get it people that love this book I don't get it okay I can understand loving the first one and this one I guess if you can look past some of the problems I had with it I can see how you'd like it I don't get how you could love it that much I am genuinely at a loss here like I don't I don't think I've ever read a fantasy series that started off this strong and then flopped this hard in the middle and maybe the doors of stone when it eventually comes out will be better but oh my God this is this was a giant waste of my time you know I hate to say that but that's what it was it's not like the worst book I've ever read but it was a waste of my time special thanks to all of my Patreons including but not limited to up of Savillian Alex Humva Ashley Watson Eva tumor be Quinn brother Santotis Christopher Quintan Elizabeth Violet Emily Miller Joel Johnny St. Clair Madison Lewis Bennett Ronnie Taylor Briggs Tobacco Crow Tom Beanie Tofer Wheeler Vacuous Silas and all of you including the people who watch this far you're all pretty great and I should probably actually promote some other stuff now and again so check out my new subreddit and my new Twitter as well they're all linked in the description down below so you know you can follow that and never fall behind always know what I'm doing all that fun stuff and anyways I will see you next time bye.