 Alright, if this is your first world-building analysis video, then I'll give you a basic idea of what it's like. Sometimes fantastical worlds that are created by authors aren't very logical. Sometimes they outright contradict themselves, or don't follow any sort of patterns, and I've talked about it in the past with videos like this. Fantasy is a very broad genre, with everything from large epic fantasy based on medieval Europe to the real world with a few basic magical elements. Think Lord of the Rings as one, and Twilight as the other. For this one, I didn't have a whole lot to say about any individual fantasy series, but I did have plenty of small complaints about a bunch of them. That doesn't mean I hate all the books I mention here, some of them are great. They just have problems that are worth bringing up, because I feel that criticizing things helps to improve them. Or maybe I just obsess over small details as a way to distract myself from the unending size of the void between stars. Also, assume that there will be big spoilers for everything I talk about here, so skip ahead if you come across something like that, or just put it on mute to preserve my watch time. K, thanks. Yeah, we're starting off with only the finest vintage today. This book is terrible in every way, so forget everything I just said about liking some of these books because I hate this one a lot. The setup here is that there's a typical fantasy land called Utrasia, which is based on medieval Europe that had a war against some evil sorceresses 300 years before the story begins, where the good guys emerged victorious. The sorceress leaders were exiled across the ocean where they rebuilt their power and thus the story unfolds. So the first problem. The sorceresses are taken on a ship and sent off in a lifeboat 14 days into the voyage. No one has ever gone farther than that and returned. As far as anyone knows, the ocean just goes on forever, so they're expected to die on the trip. They do it this way because wizards can't kill people except in self-defense, so rather than behead the sorceresses, they had to exile them in a way that they knew would kill them, but they still technically had a chance to survive. Possibly. Theoretically. On paper. That sounds like you expected them to die though, which goes against your own rules. Instead, they come across a bunch of magical giant heads that hang out underwater and eat everyone who tries to sail over them. But the sorceresses manage to convince the heads to let them pass in exchange for giving them a bunch of other people to eat later. For starters, 14 days of sailing isn't a great unit of measurement. How far you go in a day is determined by stuff like what kind of ship you're in, what the wind is like, and where the currents go. All of this can change depending on the season or even from day to day, but whatever. Not a huge problem on its own. My problem is that no one else ever thought to do this. No one ever sailed out, saw that they were about to be eaten by giant talking heads and tried to negotiate. Even if you don't want to sacrifice other people to save yourself, the heads have no way of holding you to that bargain. All you have to do is never come back. So after the sorceresses get their army back to Eutrasia, they kill the king and destroy a bunch of stuff so they can complete their evil plan and stuff. As soon as the royal family and army's leadership are beheaded, the entire country falls into complete chaos. Apparently there's no other authority in the country. None. No local nobility who survived the attack. No prime minister who knew how to run a kingdom. No mayors, no magistrates, no constables, no bishops, no guilds, no town councils. No one at all who could help keep things together. And I'm not saying they were all killed. Most of the country was untouched. If they existed, they'd still be there. Even in the harshest dictatorships, no man rules alone. A king can't defend his own borders, build his own roads, or settle every little dispute in every village. That's why most governments which are larger than one community have some sort of local jurisdictions that can handle the smaller problems. How much autonomy they have varies, but the authority is there. The United States has had eight presidents die in office over the years, and even if there was no succession afterwards, the whole rest of the federal government would be there to run things. And if that was gone, every state, territory, county, and municipality would have its own leaders. The instant I read that part, I knew the author hadn't put any sort of thought into the setting and just sort of threw things together like he was writing a Kingdom Hearts spin-off game. And this is hardly the only time he does that. There's also the fact that there's no magic outside of Eutrasia for some reason, or how the massive war that occurred only 300 years ago is unknown to most people, or how every king gives up power when his son turns 30 for some reason. How does that even work? What if he has no sons? Does the throne go to a woman? Does it go to the next male relative? How did this get started? What purpose does it serve? It's implied that the directorate of wizards might have strong-armed the monarchy into accepting this arrangement. Wouldn't this create an unstable political environment where one or two former kings might still be alive and filled with a desire to come back into power? Of course not. That would be neat. Despite all of this, I haven't even begun to touch on the worst this book has to offer, but I don't want to talk about how much incest is involved in the villain's plan, so let's keep going. Time for a palette cleanser. Yeah, this series was written by a teenager, but it's pretty good considering that. I can acknowledge the issues and shrug them off. It's still an enjoyable series overall. That said, the setting has some problems. It's mostly stemming from the fact that in some ways it tries to be Middle Earth, in some ways it tries to be a light-hearted realm that operates on fairy tale logic, and in some ways it tries to be dark and serious. The first problem is small. The Empire is literally just called the Empire. I know some of the expanded universe stuff refers to it as the Brodering Empire, but in the books it's never given a real name. That just sounds really weird. Imagine if France was referred to as the country. It would be odd. Names are used to differentiate things. Why we have them in the first place. That aside, the role of humans in Allagazia doesn't add up. Okay, I can accept that Galbathorix and the Forceworn are powerful enough to kill off the other dragonriders, and I can accept that the political situation would be destabilized enough for them to take over the human kingdom, especially since the elves and dwarves decided not to help. But the idea that Galbathorix's new empire could dominate Allagazia so thoroughly that other races would be forced to hide in the wilderness is ridiculous. He barely held his empire together for several decades, to the point where Cerda was able to secede, and even if it wasn't barely functional, humans are far weaker than the elves, and magic is far less common among them. The elves would cut through all but the Forceworn like... What's something softer than butter? Not important. The dwarves would do well for themselves too, so how the hell do the humans command so much fear? Maybe you could justify this setup by saying that the humans have a gigantic numbers advantage, but that doesn't check out either. There are between 1 and 2 million sentient beings in Allagazia. That includes humans, urgals, dragons, elves, and dwarves. The humans are the most recent arrivals to the continent. A few hundred years ago, a nobleman named Palinkar sailed there with his house. Then they colonized everything on the west coast and populated enough to have several large cities along with tons of smaller towns and villages. One noble house of humans came, and within a few hundred years they had that many people? There weren't any other waves of migration that could have explained this. Aragon and others know next to nothing about the old human homeland. There's no contact with it whatsoever. Population growth can account for some of that, but it's glacial in pre-industrial societies. Stuff like being able to grow more food, create the tools needed to grow all that food, and get the food where it needs to be all require technology that they simply don't have. In the year zero, the Earth's population was around 300 million people. A thousand years later, it was 310 million. A thousand years after that, it was 5 billion. Industry matters. And all of this was after losing a series of wars against the elves, e.g. a bunch of them died immediately after arriving. Despite this tiny population, Galbathorix was somehow able to muster an army of over 100,000 men in Eldist, which was not his only army, and he could replenish it when people died. Look, suspension of disbelief is a thing that has to exist in every story to one extent or another. You have to believe that magic can exist in this world, that humans would evolve in the exact same way they did on Earth despite different circumstances, and while everyone has a different threshold for what divergence from reality is acceptable, some things are just too much to overlook completely. Let's review. A few hundred thousand humans got on boats and colonized a new continent with no contact back home. Out of charity, they were given a big chunk of land to live on, and some humans became dragonriders. Then some riders killed all the others before taking over the human kingdom, while the other races did nothing to prevent the political situation from falling to pieces. Then that new human empire, despite being run so poorly that pieces broke off and being completely cut off from most trade with other countries, somehow becomes a superpower of such overwhelming might that it takes the combined forces of all other races and a new dragonrider to defeat. When it gets to that level, it starts to feel like the author is propping the villains up so that the heroes can defeat them through some equally artificial bullshit. Nah, I'm just fucking with you. This series is basically perfect. It's no secret that I hate thrown-of-lass. I spent over three hours bitching about it a while ago. I went over a lot of things. However, there was plenty of material that I skipped or glossed over, which isn't surprising when you remember that it consists of eight books that clock in at an average of over 400 pages. Also, the protagonist will be referred to as Aelin throughout this, even though she changes her name midway through the series. Okay, so the gist of this is that there's an evil empire called Otterlin that's gone around conquering stuff for a few decades. Then this super cool badass assassin named Aelin comes in and leads a rebellion and stuff because no other plotlines exist in young adult fantasy. Then Aelin decides she's the chosen one, and also the king of Otterlin was possessed by a demon who is the real bad guy, and they have to defeat him. So let's start with Otterlin's power base, or lack thereof. The king of Otterlin is an absolute ruler, but as I said earlier, no man rules alone, not really. Other people have to fight wars and such for him, which means he has to assure the loyalty of at least part of his population. He needs some sort of power base, whether that be the common people, nobility, or certain ethnic slash religious groups, which means that he needs to run things in such a way that some people will benefit from his rule. You see this sort of thing in all sorts of governments. In pre-revolution France, the kings kept control through loyalty of the aristocracy and clergy. They held all the important positions and made up the bulk of the army depending on the time period. Without their support, the monarchy would crumble. The peasants may not have benefited from this arrangement, but they didn't have any power, so it was a moot point. After the revolution, most of the old nobility were dead or exiled, and their old positions were filled with loyal revolutionaries, who were mostly either the old middle class or peasants. For a while anyhow. In democratic countries, politicians need votes to grab onto or stay in power, and they do that by establishing a base, and that always means alienating yourself from a segment of the population. If you establish support by whipping up hate against a certain ethnic group, then members of that group probably won't vote for you. That's not to say no one you rail against will support you. People are individuals, and individuals do stupid things. Just look at the association of German national Jews. You don't matter as an individual, only as a voting bloc. Whoever is in power, or is seeking power, tends to play up to their base more than anyone else. They enact or promise policies that can benefit those who keep them in power, not always to the detriment of others, but sometimes. For example, promising attacks on those above a certain level of wealth for social programs that benefit the lower classes will win you support from one, and hate from another. As for the king of Otterland, his policies seem to be detrimental to literally everyone. Peasants, nobles, the middle class, foreigners, humans, fey, everyone is worse off with him around. His main source of authority seems to be brute force. All opposition is met with death, even when it comes from nobility. The king doesn't seem to exercise control by making people like him, or by controlling resources or taxation, so his power flows entirely from his armed forces. This raises the question of how he inspires loyalty in his soldiers, and where he gets the money to pay them. Although those are kind of the same question. If the army offered good pay for anyone who joined, then I could see a lot of peasants joining up. But there's no hint or indication as to where the king's wealth comes from. If his personal lands had gold mines or something, that would be one thing, but there's nothing ever mentioned. As an aside, there's a point in the first book where Eileen mentions that Otterland's standing army is over a million men strong and... I've made this point before, but pre-modern societies, with pre-modern economies, and pre-modern technology didn't have the capability to maintain an army that large for any significant length of time. Magic can handwave some of that, but this series never does. Enough about that. Let's talk about how demifay and witches don't make sense either. The three sentient races we see in this series are the humans, the witches, and the fey. And the ways they reproduce with one another is... odd. The witches are all female and reproduced by canoodling with human men, and their offspring are stated to always be girls. Girl witches specifically. Okay, that makes an odd sort of sense. But then it later comes up that one of the main witch characters, named Manon, is a witch whose father is also a witch. This is possibly the most blatant clumsy attempt at a retcon I've ever seen, and I read The Cursed Child. If some witches can have male children, then obviously they aren't all females. And if their male children are humans instead, then what exactly sets witches apart from humans? Why are they a different species if they need humans to... Fuck it. The fey are even worse though. They fall into that standard fantasy race that is very powerful and lives a long time but is nerfed by not having many offspring, trope, like elves in Lord of the Rings. However, they can breed with humans to make demi-fey that have some of their powers and longevity. Even someone like Aelyn, who only has one eighth fey ancestry, has a lot of magic power, both when she has the god's blessing and after she loses it. She also has a longer lifespan and super senses because the self-insert must be the best. The thing is, Aelyn has fey ancestry because she's a member of a human royal family which intermarried with a fey royal family. If this is something that happens, then every noble in the world should have some fey ancestry, or just outright be fey. In monarchies, marriages are ways of forging alliances, bringing new wealth to dynasties, and sometimes for religious reasons. By the end of the Middle Ages, most of the noble houses of Europe were related. That's how you wind up with the monarchs of Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom all being first cousins and all going to war with one another during World War I. If fey queens are willing to shackle up with human kings and having even a drop of fey blood makes you a god, then every royal family should be full of gods, not just Dear Mary Sue. The map is a mess too. As is common with terrible young adult fantasy series, and terrible regular fantasy series for that matter, the map is just a blob with words on it. Take a look at the ecology. We have a forest jammed up against the coastline between two deserts, a river that flows uphill, and... Is that a jungle in the middle of the arctic? Are you joking? Then there's this big chunk of terrason that's behind the mountains, and has nothing in it. Most of the national borders here make sense since they're drawn along rivers of mountain ranges. This one just expands outward into nothing. There aren't any towns or cities marked, and we never hear about any important reasons for the royal family to want to go to the trouble of holding onto it. And when we go outside of Aralea, we see stuff like this lake that spawns about 12 billion different rivers all going in different directions. On the southern continent, there are several mountain ranges that aren't even ranges so much as bunched up groups of rocks along the coasts. There's no signs of tectonic plate movement here, which is a bit too analytical even for me, but the fact that I have to think about it at all is a sign of how badly this series fails at immersion. Okay, last one. Skull's Bay. Skull's Bay is a giant pirate haven off the coast of Otterland. It's not part of the Empire's territory. In fact, it's a country in all but name, run by its own pseudo hereditary monarchy. The guy in charge, whose name is Rolf, seems to have a fair degree of control over the other pirates. He orders them around like they're a traditional navy, yet they still attack and raid Otterland frequently. So here's a question for you. What do you get when you cross an expansionist, continent-spanning empire, and a small country right off its shores which keeps attacking it? You won't have a small country for long. The only reason this thing exists is so that Empire of Storms can spend 400 pages talking about how important it is. God, these books are shit. It's hard to complain too much about the world building of this series, namely because it doesn't fucking have any. Basically, Christian mythology is true, at least partially. So there are fallen angels who fell to Earth millennia ago, and they just kind of hang out doing stuff. Being a fallen angel kind of sucks though, since they can't feel anything. However, once a year during the Jewish month of... Heshvon? Cheshvon? I can't pronounce that. They can possess the bodies of Nephilim, and they can feel stuff during that time. What's a Nephilim? A person who is descended from humans and fallen angels. If a fallen angel possessing someone has sex with a human, then the resulting child will be a Nephilim, and sometimes one of their ancestors will also be a Nephilim because reasons. But if angels can only possess Nephilim, and Nephilim are only created by an angel possessing a Nephil to slap genitals with a human, then how was the first Nephil created at all? Maybe an angel just had sex with a human the regular way, even though they couldn't feel anything. And I guess that could work, but it doesn't fit the explanation given in the text, so I suppose your view on it will depend on if you're an orthodox or reform member of the fandom. This also flies in the face of later developments, since it's possible to possess people outside of Heshvon. Nora possesses Nephilim and fallen angels more than once using her awesome Nephilim powers. Patch even possesses another angel to escape from hell because apparently that's a thing he can do, which brings up questions about how angels possess people in the first place, since when Nephilim do it they just sort of mind control them, while when angels do it they actually enter the other person's body. Angels have a physical presence, so are they made of some sort of heaven particles that can break apart when they want to possess someone? Also, near the end of the last book, some guy just went to the gates of hell and let a bunch of souls out without God or Lucifer or anyone interfering. It's kind of hard to expand on how weird that is, because it's such a small part of the story, which is never explained at all, even a little. That's kind of what I mean by this series not having any world building. It doesn't create a setting for the characters to inhabit, it just sort of tosses a few things together in a way that creates drama without making all that much sense. There's not even enough detail here for it to be a real world, just a see-through facsimile of one. What does all of this pedantry mean? In the grand scheme of things, it means that crafting a proper fantasy setting is far more difficult than a lot of people, fans and detractors alike, want to admit, and crafting a compelling story that'll get people to look past other flaws is even more difficult. Aragon has issues with the setup of its story, but that story is a lot of fun, so most people don't notice it, and those who do can shrug it off. The fifth sorceress is a bizarre attempt at writing an old-school epic fantasy tale done without laying any of the groundwork needed for it to succeed, so when Tristan goes off to save the world from the mystical inbred gobbly gorks or whatever, the audience has no reason to care about the world, no reason to fear the villains, and thus no reason to give a shit about anything that happens. And Throne of Glass is a naked, self-insert story. Everything there is done for one reason, make Aelin look cool. The villain is strong because the story demands that he be strong so that Aelin looks cool for beating him. Faye and humans can breed so that Aelin can be a cool hybrid with all those neat powers. Aelin is the lynchpin of the entire universe, and that makes the universe dull. This is why I focus on bad world-building so much. Even if you don't consciously understand that something is wrong, you can often sense that something is off and that prevents you from fully getting into the story. The opposite is also true. If the story is unengaging, then that forces the audience to notice the places where the setting is a bit thin. You need to do at least one of those things well in order to properly draw people in so that they either don't notice or don't care about the flaws. While this all seems pedantic, I have real reasons for doing it. Plus, it's just fun to rag on stuff that annoys me. Subscribe. 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