 So, action scenes. I don't really think I need to explain what those are. There's a lot of different things they can be. They can be martial arts fights between Bruce Lee and like 20 other dudes. They can be fights where one side shoots lasers at the others. They can be giant battles with thousands of soldiers on each side. They can be chase sequences or just people running away from monsters. There's a million different things that they can be. People usually talk about them in visual form for obvious reasons. You know, like, while books can have fun action scenes, if there's not a visual element to it, it can be very difficult to hook readers in. Whereas with Jackie Chan movies or Bruce Lee movies or just hell, anything visual like that, you can just sit there and watch that and even if you're not into it, you can still be entertained. But that doesn't mean that action scenes from books are bad. In fact, a lot of them are pretty frickin' great at least in my humble opinion, which I'm a person who has a YouTube channel. So therefore my opinion is more important than everyone else's. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules. You did. But anyways, you know how top 10 list works, you know how action scenes works. I'm just gonna go through all my favorite action scenes that I've read over the years. Now, the criteria for this is obviously it has to be a book. I'm not gonna be talking about movies or anything. And that applies to adaptations of stuff too. Like if someone says, oh, you should have talked about the Battle of the Blackwater. Well, that was really good in the show, but I didn't think it was all that impressive in the books. So I'm not mentioning it here. And likewise, this can obviously lead to a lot of spoilers. So I will be splitting the video up into chapters and I'm not going to specify which scene I'm talking about in them, but I will specify what series that's from. So just be aware that when it gets to that chapter, there will be spoilers for that series in there. So just don't get upset with me if anything is spoiled. And obviously, like I said, the term action scene can be pretty broad. So some of these are gonna be like battles. Some of them are gonna be one-on-one fights or things like that. But I mean, mostly battles if I'm being honest. And beyond that, it's just, yeah, ones I think are cool. And let's go. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Number 10, Escaping the Chromaria from The Broken Eye. Now this is the third book in the Lightbringer trilogy, which is really the book where that series started to go downhill. Like I did a video on it not long ago and I talked about, yeah, the first two books were great, but the third one kind of lost focus in the story and it went on too long and it introduced a few things which sounded interesting at first, but they never really went anywhere with it. And so this is the book where things started to go downhill. However, the climax for it is still pretty freaking great because it is about Kip and his other friends, the mighty, just trying to escape the Chromaria while a bunch of soldiers there are trying to kill them. And I mean, I say that and that sounds pretty cool, but like, no, you don't understand. The Chromaria is this massive, massive tower complex. Like it's the seat of government, but it's also their magical academy and the people attacking them individually, they're not that strong. Like they're just, you know, regular guards, they're light guards who are not particularly well trained or anything, but there's a lot of them and they do have some fighting experience. And I mean, plus in this world, even though there's magic and stuff, they have muskets and shit too. And even if they didn't have that, all it takes is a single second to get unlucky in battle and then you're dead. So Kip and them have to, one, figure out which way they're gonna go to escape. Like after they escaped the Chromaria, they're still trapped on an island in the ocean, so they need to find a boat and get the fuck out of there. And then once they figure out where they're gonna go, they keep running into obstacles along the way. They keep running, oh shit, there's a giant group of light guards there, let's run. Or, oh, hey, here's some, we have to fight our way through and people get hurt and people get killed while they're running. You know, it's not like, oh, they're such amazing drafters, they're such amazing fighters that they just blow through every fight that they run into, like no, they're severely outnumbered. One of their friends dies along the way, one of them gets shot in the leg and is crippled for the rest of the series. Like, they make sure to show you what the stakes are and eventually they wind up having to fight their way to the roof and uncover this like ancient escape system that they set up basically. So they make giant zip lines going off the island and then they jump on those and go away. And I know that sounds kind of silly, but that's the thing about all of these is that the setup for action scenes is oftentimes much more important than the scenes themselves. And so it's just about caring about the characters. You know, fundamentally speaking, action scenes are characters trying to reach a goal and it's being shown in an interesting way. And I don't think I have much else to say about this, it's just like a big fight where things constantly escalate and people constantly think, oh, okay, let's do this. Oh, shit, that didn't work. And so they're just getting back to more and more into a corner until they finally escape. Number nine, the Battle of Yonkers from World War Z. Now, World War Z is an amazing book for a lot of reasons. Like, I'm not the biggest fan of zombie stuff anymore. I mean, I was when I first read this book, but a lot of the stuff I read and watched back then doesn't appeal to me much anymore because it's just like, okay, zombies are fine and all, but it's just they eat people and then other people turn into zombies. It's been done a lot, but World War Z still works because it's a very complex, very interesting criticism of society. You know, it shows a lot of weaknesses in our government and our various institutions and the way people act and all that sort of stuff and how once that collapses, well, it collapses. It's very difficult to get it back in place and at the end of the day it is very sensitive and I think that appeals to a lot more people once they saw the COVID-19 pandemic and how a large portion of the planet just decided to actively do the stupidest shit they could think of. But all that said, the Battle of Yonkers is probably the point in the book where people realize like, oh shit, even if you have all the resources in the world, if you don't know how to use them properly, the zombies will still overwhelm you and they'll still kill you because Battle of Yonkers was basically meant to be the US government trying to reassure the public and the rest of the world that yes, we can take care of this, okay? You don't need to worry too much, like yeah, there's some bad shit going down, but we can handle these zombies. So they just tried to attract them to this town of Yonkers outside of New York City and they set up all these defensive barriers but they did a really shit job of it because no one in command really knew how to deal with zombies. They were too stuck in the old ways, you know, kind of similar to a lot of conflicts. Now I'm thinking about World War I is the first one that comes to mind, like commanders were stuck in the old ways so they tried fighting that way and it didn't work. And so over a million zombies just overwhelm and destroy this huge chunk of the US military or maybe it's not a huge chunk of the US military but it's a couple of thousand soldiers who even though they had all this newest high-tech equipment and everything, if you don't know how to use it properly, it does you no fucking good and that's the moment that not only the people in the books world but also the readers realized, oh shit, this is not going to go well. This is going to go extremely poorly for everyone involved. And yeah, not a lot of other details to the fight is just really, really cool and it's one of the biggest oh shit moments that I've ever read. Number eight, the Battle of O'Rourke's Drift from On the Oceans of Eternity. Now some of you may realize that the name O'Rourke's Drift is very similar to the Battle of O'Rourke's Drift which was a real life battle between British colonial soldiers and a bunch of Zulus in South Africa. And this one is kind of similar to it, I suppose but you know, it's obviously kind of science fiction away. So basically, Island in the Sea of Time is a series where the entire island of Nantucket gets transported back to around 1250 BCE and the people there are like, well shit, we're stuck here now. Using all our knowledge and our technology and stuff, let's survive basically. And there's obviously some more complicated stuff that goes on there but by the time you get to the third book, that's where all the giant battles start happening because they're fighting against a rogue faction of their own people from the future who created their own empire and shit and O'Rourke's Drift is led by a fellow named O'Rourke or rather all the soldiers there are led by a fellow named O'Rourke, O'Rourke. Why is it so hard to say that? O'Rourke's Drift, I don't know why that's so difficult for me to say but it's very difficult for me to say and anyways, it's this hill in Anatolia and they're not fighting against people who are technologically on their level. Like they are kind of limited to single shot rifles. You know, they don't have modern, modern weaponry but that's still way better than what a lot of or what anybody back then would have had but basically the bad guy Walker gave a whole bunch of tribesmen some primitive weapons like blunderbuses and muskets and stuff and then they also have all their own spears, swords, axes, that sort of thing and there's like, hey, overwhelm this position and so that's what they do. They just desert rush them. You know, it's not exactly a smart tactical decision but there's just so many of them. They outnumber the people at O'Rourke's Drift by orders of magnitude. Like to the point where the people at O'Rourke's Drift dig trenches like 10 feet deep in front of their defensive positions and they kill so many attacking tribesmen that the trenches get filled up with dead bodies and they can just walk across it and they still keep coming after that. Like that's a crazy thing to think about. You know, if they were aliens or something then that might be understandable that they could just keep going even knowing they're probably going to die but like these are human beings that are that determined to kill them and it's just crazy and they just keep getting pushed back further and further and further until eventually they do win out like a bunch of them die in the process but they do win out and they do push back all the tribesmen and then reinforcements arrive and they survive and when the reinforcements get there they even mention like, hey, why didn't you dig trenches? And they said, we did. They filled it up with corpses because there were so many of them and then even the people in the book are going, wow, that is really fucking impressive. How'd you do that? And yeah, that's basically my reaction here. It's not a one-for-one parallel of the Battle of O'Rourke's Drift for a couple of reasons. Like, I don't know if you could ever have a real battle like that in real life for a variety of reasons anyways but man, it was cool. And then you might be noticing a pattern here. A lot of these entries are just things that make me go, oh, that was so cool. Like, and sure I can examine the technical aspects of how it worked and all that but it just worked. It was nice, it was nice, it was neat. Number seven, Alex versus the guard dogs in Deathsends. Okay, so the escape from Furnace series is weird. Like, those of you who have read it know exactly what I'm talking about and most of the people who read it are pretty big fans. I don't know if there's many people who read the whole series and didn't enjoy it at least a little bit. So they're gonna know exactly what I'm talking about and a lot of them are probably going, oh yeah, I like that bit from the end of the third book but it's a weird series and it honestly switches genres halfway through so it's kind of difficult to explain exactly what makes it good without being here all day and also sounding like an insane person. Basically, the main character is a kid named Alex who gets accused of a murder he didn't commit and he gets sent to this prison which is just called Furnace and for whatever reason, prison in Great Britain in this book's universe is considerably worse than it is in real life. Like, it's an underground complex which makes it much more difficult to escape but in addition to that, the guards are, they look human but they're mutated somehow so they're all seven feet tall and are full of muscles and they can bend steel bars with their bare hands and then there's also these weird mutated guard dogs and other creatures and stuff that prevent them from escaping and the first two books are about the characters trying to escape and they fail a couple of times and then the third book, Alex gets turned into one of the guards basically like they inject him with these weird chemicals and stuff which makes him, well it makes him big and strong just like them but it also makes him crazy at least for a while until he kinda gets back to himself and then he helps all the other kids try and escape. Like, they manage to push out the guards and take over the cell block temporarily and they're thinking, okay, let's escape and I know I'm, sounds like I'm really glossing over a lot of stuff but trust me, there's some weird stuff that happens in this series because I don't know what it is about authors from Great Britain and Ireland but they seem to have this real talent for making protagonists who are just awful, awful people and then putting them into situations which are so bad that even though they're awful people you still feel really terrible for them and you want them to escape from it so I don't know why they in particular are so good at that, I assume it's because they never see sunlight but I don't know, the point is Alex and the other kids take over the cell block and they manage to fight off a couple of attempts at the guards taking back over and then they just say, okay, you know what, fuck it, we're sending in like the worst mutated creatures we have and so they throw them in out there and then Alex just injects himself with more of the chemicals which means he'll never get back to normal like if he had managed to stop taking them for a while he might have eventually gotten back to being a regular kid but it's a life or death situation so he just does that and then he beats these things to death with his bare hands or at least he beats one of them to death with his bare hands and the other one escapes by tearing a hole in the elevator and then it escapes outside and then all the kids escape outside and that's the end of that book and the other books are about them being fugitives on the run and I should do a video on the Furnace series one day because I don't know exactly what I would say other than man, this is weird and it gets crazier and it's really good but I don't know just out of all of the exciting sequences in that series because there are quite a few, I'll tell you that right now, out of all of them I remember that fight the most because I just remember these mutant creatures coming in tearing these kids to pieces and then Alex is just like, all right, fuck you, we're doing this and it is just cool. Number six, The Reckoners versus Steelheart from Steelheart. Now, pretty much anyone who's read Much Brandon Sanderson knows that the man's biggest gift for writing is probably when he's writing Climaxes, like he's just extremely, extremely good at it and in the Reckoners series, the first book is no exception to that. The second and third ones dips a bit but that's a separate discussion I think, they spend this entire first book, like they're in this post-apocalyptic Chicago which has been taken over by this Superman figure named Steelheart who as far as most people know is unkillable, they spend the whole book looking for ways to try and kill him and they're just escalating the conflict more and more and more until eventually they lure him and a bunch of his soldiers to this old abandoned baseball stadium and they try several different ways of killing him. They go, okay, maybe he can only be killed if he's shot by accident so they get some of his own men to hit him and it does nothing and then as this is going on they also have to fight off the other soldiers and they have to fight off some of his minions that are around who also has superpowers and so it's a big, big sequence with a lot of things going on and eventually Steelheart comes out and he beats them, like they have no other tricks up their sleeves, they're about to all die and main character just has his dad's old gun and Steelheart takes it from him and he's about to shoot him but then Steelheart blows up and he dies and it turns out that the big twist of the story is that Steelheart can only be hurt by someone who doesn't fear him so the main character had to basically, without going into too much detail he had to basically set it up so that when Steelheart fired the gun it would set off some bombs that were nearby and it killed him and man, not only is that a really good twist that I didn't see coming but it's a huge sequence, there's a lot going on and it's simultaneously a very, very good satisfying climax to that book while also setting up the rest of the series very well and so it is kind of a shame that the second and third books couldn't be as good as the first one but I'll never let anyone say that the first Steelheart book is bad for a couple of reasons but mostly because that final sequence is genuinely fantastic. Number five, The Battle of the Bands from Kings of the Wild. Now, if you haven't read the book then that title might sound a little strange but well, the thing to note about the Kings of the Wild is that while it is a very good book it has a sense of humor and it is not afraid to poke fun at itself so basically the plot is that the main characters all used to be in this mercenary band around 20 years ago and they were like a legendary mercenary band they hunted monsters, they fought other people and they were really good at all of it but they're all retired now they're all old and fat and shit but they all get back together to do one last mission to save one of their daughters and they refer to it as getting the band back together which obviously that sounds like they're talking about a musical band so it's kind of a pun and it's meant to be funny and then at the very end of the book they bring in a whole bunch of other mercenary bands and use them to just attack this army of monsters which is besieging a city and they call it The Battle of the Bands and so like, yeah, obviously this is not taking itself 100% serious it's a bit tongue in cheek but it still manages to work really well in spite of that you know, I could give a play-by-play of The Battle but I don't think I need to in this case I think you get the idea it's like a whole bunch of old mercenaries or excuse me, a whole bunch of young mercenaries led by a couple of old ones, let's say fighting off this army of monsters led by an insane person, let's just say all to just save this one person and it works you know, it's a very big, exciting battle they fight off some villains they kill a bunch of monsters the heroes almost die but they manage to win and they save the day the end number four, The End from In Death Ground now I haven't talked about this book or this series very much I believe I put this one on my top 10 cliffhangers because well, it's a really fucking good cliffhanger but long story short there's a bunch of aliens that they just refer to as arachnids or bugs who are kind of a mindless hive mind and they're just attacking humanity and all their allies ruthlessly, let's say very ruthlessly to the point where they have to bring in an old retired admiral out of retirement and they bring him in and he leads them really well and they're winning a little bit and they take most of their fleets and go really, really deep into bug territory and they're thinking, okay, yeah we might actually be able to strike a lethal blow against them or something but turns out it was a trap they get cut off they all get destroyed the admiral dies and then at the very end of the book it's just the bugs sending basically their entire fleet through the swarm hole to attack this earth colony and it just ends with oh shit, oh shit, oh shit attack them, attack them don't let them through and it just ends there and that's a really good cliffhanger it's well, you know what, I don't wanna go into much more detail about that, you know just it's a really good cliffhanger it's a huge moment where you're just like, oh shit I hope they manage to pull this off and it's just exciting to read about cause you know a lot of characters that you're attached to can and have died at this point and you know that the bugs very well could win and you don't want them to win because they'll eat people number three, defeating the yurks from Animorphs now this one is, I'll be honest this one's cheating a bit because it takes place over the course of several books but they're all pretty short books and I mean it is the climax to a really big massive series so it makes sense that it would be a big massive battle so for those of you who have not read Animorphs the yurks are these parasitic aliens that are invading the earth and they go into your brain and take over which makes it very difficult to track where they are and it's difficult to fight them at times and the Animorphs actually spend most of the series as guerrilla fighters, you know they're not a straight up army they just are there to disrupt the yurks' operations and prevent them from taking over until reinforcements arrive from a friendly group of aliens called the Andalites and then in the last, let's say 10 or 12 books things start to escalate more and more and more like the yurks are putting more and more resources into fighting them eventually their secret identities get found out and so they have to go into the wilderness and hide they wind up having to recruit a bunch more Animorphs to their cause which given how that didn't go well the first time they tried it that it's showing that they're getting desperate they wind up recruiting a general in the National Guard onto their side and him and his soldiers help them and what makes this probably worse than all of that is that the Andalites are coming but they're not coming to help see they've realized that if the yurks manage to take earth it'll make them and their empire pretty much unstoppable so instead they've just decided to send a fleet there that will glass the planet you know it'll kill everyone there and deprive the yurks from letting them have it so the Animorphs realize, oh shit not only are we on our own but there is a time limit if we cannot defeat these guys quickly, we're dead all of humanity is dead the earth is gonna be dead what are we gonna do and so they just have this one big last ditch offensive to destroy the ships that the yurks have in orbit and they managed to destroy most of them they managed to kill millions of yurks I don't know if that's the exact number they give but they actually shoot a bunch of them out into space where they all die which is surprisingly dark for a kid's series but I think you could just use that to describe Animorphs in general like it is surprisingly dark for a kid's series anyone who's read it knows exactly what I'm talking about and they managed to capture most of their leaders a couple of yurks get away but that's a different thing to worry about at a later point and then they win a bunch of the Animorphs die in the process as well in fact they send off a bunch of them on a suicide mission or multiple suicide missions shit now that I'm thinking about it cause Rachel goes off on her own and she dies and then they send all of the second string Animorphs the new ones that they just recently recruited off on a suicide mission and a bunch of them die and man it is intense like I said it happens over the course of several books and even though they're not long it is still a big battle and fuck me man it is like when I was a kid if I had made this when I was a kid this would have been the number one contender like no doubt about it cause it is an amazing sequence and it's not afraid to show you what the stakes are and there's some constant ups and downs and the characters have to change up their tactics on the fly and man it just really drives home how even though the yurks are kind of pathetic they're just little parasites that are no threat if you just meet them out on their own but fuck me dude they are still scary number two the tower from Way of Kings I have gotten a little bit of flak over the years for still saying that Way of Kings is my favorite entry in the Stormlight Archive because well some people just think oath bringer and words of radiance are better I don't know if anyone has said that rhythm of war is better cause that one was disappointing in some ways it's still really good but it's still they're all a step down from Way of Kings for me for a couple of reasons one because Caledon I just identify with more than most of the other protagonist in the series you know his struggle with depression and everything like I relate to that and two we don't know that much about this world in this one and we learn more and more about it as the book goes on obviously but it's mostly focused on just this one dude who is a slave who is trying to help these other slaves out and make sure that they don't die and they become his family and even though they are little more than sacrificial pawns that they're used to well I say sacrificial pawns they're human shields that's even worse but they still manage to bring themselves together and they still manage to well they aren't quite soldiers in this book but they're on their way to becoming soldiers and at the end of the book one of the other protagonists Dalinar and his son and his armies are trapped on a plateau because they were betrayed and they have no way of getting off and they're surrounded by Parshmen and they're outnumbered like two or three to one and Kaladin and the rest of Bridge Four see this and they go oh well that sucks but we actually have an opportunity to escape now but Kaladin just cannot bring himself to abandon people who need his help so him and the rest of the Bridgemen decide alright fuck it let's let's go we'll go save those guys and so that's what they do and because Kaladin does not abandon people in their time of need he finally becomes a full on Knights Radiant and I know there's other oaths that he has to take before he unlocks all of his powers but to me in my mind that's the moment he truly becomes one of the Knights Radiant in my mind that moment where he decides I could run away we could be selfish but no we're gonna run over there we're going to go up against overwhelming odds to save a bunch of total strangers and quite frankly it just warms my heart when that happens and then Kaladin takes his oath he uses his powers to fight some dudes and all the fighting is obviously a lot of fun but the heroes just barely escape with their lives and that's what makes it really good and finally drumroll please the number one action sequence that I've ever read in any book ever is unsurprisingly the last battle from Wheel of Time like yeah what what the fuck else could it even be like do you see this? this is the final book in the Wheel of Time series it's it's pretty thick it's the memory of like the last battle is basically this entire book you know there's a few bits there that do not relate directly to the battle but this is what's been building for thirteen previous books you know this is why Moiraine had to go out and find the chosen one this is why Rand had to master his powers that's why he had to cleanse Sidene that's why he had to gather up the Oshaman that's why they had to uh heal the split in the White Tower and root out the Black Aja that's why they had to go around and uh deal with all the various political shenanigans all over the world so that they could build up their armies that's why they had to put down the rebel Aial that's why they had to make peace with the Shonchan even though the Shonchan are awful everything in the series up until this point has been building to this moment because if humanity loses well not only will they go extinct the entire universe will cease to exist like the dark one will take over and then just it's all all done it'll all be destroyed and since the book is this fucking long there's obviously a lot of shit that goes down in it like it's a huge battle which takes place over a gigantic area and I mean well there's Zerg rushing enemies there's intelligent enemies there's powerful enemies uh there's heroes having to feign retreats and come up with new plans on the fly after their old ones fall through just there's one-on-one duels there's heroes destroying huge armies by themselves everything about it is awesome and that's all that's that's my favorite action sequence that's it and nothing else will ever be that I don't think unless someone else is willing to spend thirteen very long books building up to it that's all good bye special thanks to everyone who watched this far including and especially my patrons and channel members my ten dollar not patrons include oppo savelain and Olivia ran brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay christopher quintan dan antliss ants ants dan echo joel carcat kitsune liza rudakova lord 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