 Hello there! So a little while ago I realized that in the month of June, I have a lot of big videos that are going to take a while to get out. Like, you just saw Save the Pearls a little while ago, but it's going to take me a little while to get Zabiba and the King out. In fact, I don't know if it'll even be out this month. I have a scripted video on The Giver coming out, which you'll see. I want to get my video on Wattpad stories out because I just, I know I promised it a while ago, but it just, it takes a while to put together. And so I realized I needed something kind of quick to put out there. And I realized, you know what, let's just do another top 10 video. And this is going to be the top 10 series I will not finish. And by that I mean, it's books that have sequels. And I've read at least one in the series, but I just have no interest in continuing for whatever reason. And that's pretty simple. So I guess let's get started. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Starting off the list at number 10 is going to be The Rain. Now, this is not to be confused with The Rain, which was a zombie series I read last year, which I think is pretty good. This is The Rain, which in the United Kingdom I believe is called H2O, which is a little confusing. And I read it just a couple of months ago at the beginning of the year, just while I was, you know, on a trip. So I was flying in airports and stuff. And it has a neat premise. Basically, some meteor hit the earth and spread a bunch of space bacteria throughout the atmosphere. And this bacteria hangs out in water and it's flesh eating. So basically, if you're out in the rain or anything that's interactive with the rain and you touch it, it'll start slowly killing you. And if you drink it, it'll kill you very quickly. And basically, it's just about a teenage girl who gets caught up in all this. Most of her family dies pretty early on. And she's just like, okay, how am I going to survive? And it's a good premise, but that's kind of it. You know, like she starts off on a journey, which is even mentioned in the summary. But it's not, she doesn't actually start until what halfway through the book. And well, that's kind of all there is to it really. Is this a terrible book? No, I think there's some moments in there which really hammer home just how awful the situation is getting. And we do see societies start to break down and then very quickly crumble because so many people are dying right away. You know, you can't just drink water out of the tap anymore. And there's very few sources left. And you know, people are killing each other. And it's kind of interesting. But then by the end, you start getting to this point where I don't know why, but the government is evil all of a sudden and the main character girl meets up with like four other people who are refugees and we're supposed to suddenly care about them after not knowing them at all. And it's just, I don't know. I know there's only one sequel, but I don't know where the story is even supposed to go from this point. So I just didn't see the point continuing. Number nine is obsidian. And this is one that I did a video on a few months ago. If you want to check it out, go ahead. And the title of that video was just that obsidian is basically twilight with aliens. And yeah, pretty much that's it. Now I don't think it's a terrible book series or rather I don't think the first book is terrible. I thought it was okay. It was done competently in a few points. You know, it's basically just girl moves to a town has a weird mysterious neighbor who she's kind of into finds out he's an alien finds out there's evil aliens, etc. And I think it's fine for the most part. But there's just nothing that's really drawing me in to continue, you know, like, I know that we have the good alien Damon, who is like a light alien, and he's fighting the nightmen who are the evil shadow aliens, which could maybe be kind of interesting, but the lore surrounding them is a little weird. And it seems like even Damon and most of his other light aliens don't actually know much about their origins. And, you know, maybe that could work as like an adventure story type deal. But it's a romance story. So it's really not going to focus on that. And that's a frustrating part about a lot of romance stories is that the romance overtakes everything else, even when the other stuff is kind of interesting. And I will say that the first book also ends in such a way where it you don't it's not a cliffhanger, you know, you don't need to read more to feel like you're getting the whole story. It feels like, yeah, okay, they they had more adventures, they lived happily ever after yada fricking yada. And honestly, maybe I would have continued this whole series if the video I made on it got a whole bunch more attention. But it, I mean, I just looked a little while ago, it barely broke 10k views. And I mean, I'm fine with that, but I just don't feel like investing a lot more time in it for my own personal enjoyment. And I don't feel like investing more time in it for like the entertainment of the YouTube masses. So it's just gonna fade into the background of my memory and be like, yeah, that was that was a thing that happened. I don't know, maybe the other books are terrible anyways. But that's all. Number eight will be the first really controversial one on this list, I think. And that's Hunter Hunter. Now Hunter Hunter is a manga series. It's been around for a very long time. It's very popular. It's about this kid named Gown, who decides he wants to go and find his father one day, who he's never really met. And he joins up with an organization, which is called The Hunters. And it's a weird secret society of like martial artists who just kind of go around doing stuff that they feel like doing. It's actually pretty vague. I've actually had a video in the back of my mind for quite a while that I still want to do at some point about how Hunter Hunter is overrated. And I don't think it's bad. I think it's a good series. It just annoys me when people sing its praises to high heaven. And I think part of the issue here, after thinking it over for a bit, is that part of the appeal of Hunter Hunter is that it is really subversive and plays around with a lot of tropes that are common in Shonen Battle Manga. But specifically, it's playing around with tropes that were popular in Shonen Battle Manga in the 90s. So stuff like Yu Yu Hakusho, which was written by the same author as Hunter Hunter, or Ruroni Kenshin, or the early stages of Naruto, things like that. And so if you've read all those, then Hunter Hunter is a lot better because it's actually doing new stuff. It's kind of like how Game of Thrones is a good series on its own, but it's better if you have read a bunch of Epic Fantasy because then you see how it's playing around with all these ideas and doing them in a new way. It's similar to that. The issue here is that Shonen Manga has changed quite a bit since the 90s. You know, like throughout the 2000s, and especially in the 2010s, we had, I don't want to say like a resurgence or anything that dramatic, but like things do change, you know, different things become popular and different character types are starting to be used, different storylines are starting to be used, the art style changes, you know, something like Ruroni Kenshin in something like Fairy Tale or My Hero Academia or Black Clover or anything like that. They're all quite a bit different than the older stuff. And so because Hunter Hunter was playing around with tropes and stuff from the 90s, nowadays it just doesn't seem as subversive and original as it used to, you know what I mean? And so part of my enjoyment for the series has slipped off, died off, however you want to put that just because of that reason. Like we already have a bunch of other stuff that's doing it differently and so it just feels out of date. And another reason for this being that I feel the series reached a good stopping point, like it reached a point where it could have been like, yep, this is the end and that's all. Have a nice day, folks. But that was not the end, it kept going after that. Like without going into too much spoilers, basically it reaches a point where it completes all of his life goals and then it decides to just bring in more stuff. It's like, oh, hey, the world's actually much bigger than you thought. Here's some more adventures and all that. Here you go. Here's some more stuff. That's what you want, right? Which maybe would have been fine. However, the author, Togashi Yoshihiro, is a very sick man and he constantly has to go on hiatus, partially because he just doesn't have the motivation to like write anymore and partially because he just has health problems. You know what I mean? And I totally understand him not wanting to do it. Like you do you, man. Like if you just want to retire, enjoy your life, that's totally fine. I get it. But the problem is that we're never going to finish Hunter Hunter. Like we're never going to reach the end. Whether Yoshihiro just dies before he gets to finish it or he just says, I'm going on hiatus and then never comes back. We're never going to get a proper ending. And so that's why it's frustrating and I'm just not really interested in the dark content and stuff. So in my mind, after the election arc, that's it. You know, we only need, we don't need anything more. Number seven, The Fallen. Again, not to be confused with Fallen, which I already read in that series was terrible, but it was terrible in a funny way. So The Fallen also deals with Fallen Angels and stuff. And I checked it out a couple months ago because, you know, after reading all those weird Young Adult Angel romances, I was kind of interested in seeing Angel Young Adult action adventure stuff because there were a whole bunch of those as well. And who knows, I might do a video on some of those someday, but we'll see. And the Fallen is kind of like that. You know, it's just main character kid who is a foster child. He never knew his real parents. He lives a normal life beyond that. Suddenly gets swept into this hidden magical world, finds out he has angel powers, and goes on adventures. You know, pretty standard stuff. The main issue I had here, and I actually read the first two books of this series because I checked it out from the library and I didn't realize it was the first two books in one. So it was, I was like halfway through thinking, wow, this first book is really long for this type of series. And then it got to the end and I realized, oh, okay, it's not that crazy. The thing is the main character doesn't actually get pulled into the adventure really until the end of the first book. You know, like he's going around seeing all these hints of this magical world finds out that there's like angels and stuff out there, finds out he has these crazy powers, and then gets sucked into it. But most of the time in this sort of story, like whether you're talking about Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, you know, things like that, them getting sucked into the story and possibly going off to try and save a loved one or something like that, that's usually like the first act of the story. You know, Percy Jackson, he has all these hints of what's going on. He has some investigating and then his mom dies and he goes off to save her. But that's like the first act of the story. And then the majority of it is him actually going on this adventure. Whereas, like the climax of the first The Fallen book is main character realizing, okay, I have to go off and save my brother now. And then the second book is mostly just a road trip. Like I straight up barely remember anything that happened there. And I only read it a couple of months ago, which is not a good sign because I usually have a pretty good memory, not always. Sometimes things slip by me. I'm only human, but I usually have a pretty good memory. And basically all I remember is, yeah, he's driving down the road for a while. He has a talking dog who only he can really talk to because he healed him with his angel powers. It's not very well explained. He's just kind of powerful, just because. And then he at the end just fights the Leviathan, which again kind of comes out of nowhere. But I guess he's just really powerful without any training or anything. And so yeah, like part of this is just like, okay, it's aimed at a younger audience. So I'm just not that interested in continuing. But even then I can point out how it's clumsily done. You know, again, I still love stuff like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson partially because of nostalgia, but also partially because they're just well done stories. They're well put together. And the fall in is clumsily done. And plus it's a fairly long series. It's like seven books. So I just, I don't know, it's not bad enough to make fun of. It's not enjoyable enough to justify going through it on my own. And it's just, it would be a big time sink. So I'm not really going to continue. That's all. Number six, children of time. Now, let me, before anyone gets upset, let me finish, I really love children of time. I think it's a great book. It's about, well, basically humans try to colonize other planets after Earth has died. And then some things go horribly wrong during the terraforming process. And one of the planets winds up getting taken over by a civilization of intelligent giant spiders. And that sounds horrifying, but it kind of is. But they wind up making their own civilization. It's really interesting and neat to see how that would go and to look at how different evolutionary paths could have taken place. You know, the way things work on Earth is not the way it would have had to 100% have worked on every other planet out there. So that's really interesting. There's a very tense story about just trying to save the remnants of humanity and can they even coexist with these spiders? And you know, that sort of thing. It's a very good story. It's definitely a niche. It's not for everybody. I think a lot of people would not be as interested in all these weird sci-fi concepts as I am, certainly. But it's just, I don't think they can really do anything more with this concept. You know, like I know the sequels have them going to a planet with Octopi instead of spiders and how Octopi are all kind of schizophrenic because of the way their brains are set up or something. And so I guess maybe that could be interesting, but I just, I already spent a long time going through this book because it's a long book. And like I said, it's a very fascinating concept to just see, okay, things can be very different than the way they happen here. You know, our civilization, our evolutionary process could have been very different, but it seems like the Octopi are just going to be doing that same thing again, only it's different than before. And like, I get the idea, you know, there's a bunch of different ways it could have gone. And so once you lose that big concept, you're stuck with like, you know, story and characters and world building and all that. And it's not that that was bad in the first book, it's just that that's not what I was there for. And I don't know if they would have carried the whole thing on its own, but I don't know, I don't have a whole lot to say here. Like I don't hate children of time by any means, I think it's great. I just think that the series has done all it can and there's no need for more of it. Number five, Ascendance of a Bookworm. This one is going to be controversial too, because I mean, I talked about it a while ago and for some reason, whenever I talk about anime, manga or light novel things, those are the most controversial takes I can have. Like I get more hate for those than even like political stuff that I make. It's really obnoxious and annoying, but you know, Ascendance of a Bookworm, I don't think is very good. The story is about a young Japanese woman who dies one day and then she's reincarnated in a fantasy world in the body of a young girl and she thinks, I'd be happy as long as I can have books, but she's a peasant in another world, so most people can't read and even when they can read books are super expensive, so she's just trying to do that. And here's the thing. In anime, light novels, manga, Isakai stories have really taken over in the past like 10-ish years and if you're unfamiliar, Isakai is just the Japanese word for another world or different world, and it's basically just stories about characters getting transported to a fantasy world and going on adventures there. Like this is not an anime exclusive thing, you know, things like The Wizard of Oz or Gulliver's Travels or Alice in Wonderland, like those would also be Isakai stories, you know. But Ascendance of a Bookworm is a very different way of doing it, because rather than just a teenage boy going there and having crazy powers and soaking up attention from all these hot women all around him, which is basically every Isakai story that has come out lately, this one is different and it's a bit more low-key, you know. It's not about saving the world or anything, it's just she wants books so she's trying to make them. And I've heard that later it goes on and more interesting stuff happens, but frankly if I need to read like eight volumes before anything happens I'm not going to read those eight fucking volumes, I'm sorry. I have a limited amount of time in my life, I have other stuff I want to do, you know, video games I want to play, books I want to read, I'm not going to waste all this time going through all that stuff, because that's just really boring. I'll give it points for originality, but just because you're different does not mean you're good. Ascendance of a Bookworm is fucking boring, and the fact that I get so much hate when I say that is part of the reason why my channel doesn't talk about anime and manga that much. Number four, Dragon Conjurer. So this is another one where I did a review of it months ago, and the only reason I did that is because a friend of mine asked me to. Dragon Conjurer is, well basically this dude discovers he has the magic power to summon dragons one day and then he gets pulled into this magical academy which most of the world doesn't know about, and then he goes on adventures and then women start clamoring over themselves to hop on his dick. So again, this is very similar to a lot of stories from anime and manga, which I did talk about in the review. It's basically just a magical harem anime in book form, which before I read it I didn't realize that that's actually super common. Like you can check Amazon, there's a ton of these all over the place, and it's not a horrible story is the thing. Like it's bad, yes, but it's not so bad that I can laugh at it for the most part. It's just kind of very straightforward wish fulfillment, and honestly you can tell that the book's kind of just having fun with itself, so I'm not, I'm not too upset with it for any real reason. And there are a couple of positives that set it aside, set it apart from all of the other entries in that genre. Like for starters, the characters are college-aged rather than high school-aged, so when things get sexual I feel less weird about it. You know, I'm not sitting there going, oh she's 16. I should not be watching this or reading this. You know, there's that, and characters are also old enough that they can actually have sex rather than just having it be like hinted at and surrounding the main character and all that. So yeah, overall it's like, again, it's just dumb, but it's not bad enough where it's really funny, and I can have a lot of content and material to mine from it. It's just kind of dull overall, and I don't feel like investing more time in it, but I totally understand if you're a fan of this series either ironically or unironically. I just, I don't want to spend more time going over it. Number three, Honor Harrington. So I read the first book in the series several years ago, and it was good. It's a very famous series, or very famous. It's big in circles who are fans of military sci-fi. You know, like it's David Weber's flagship series sort of, and I was introduced to him through the Starfire series, which I maintain is very, very good. But the thing about the Starfire series is that a lot of the strategy and tactics in the battles were really great because all their technology was so limited. Like the way they traveled between different solar systems was through these wormholes basically. And so that would have a choke point for ships and stuff to go in and out. And so ships also were much slower. You know, they couldn't go speed of light. It would take them days or weeks to go across space. And so that limits them quite a bit in what they can and can't do, which means that they have to work within those limits and try and find ways around those limits when they're fighting. And that makes the battles a lot of fun because, you know, you're watching all these intelligent strategies go off and it's, it's nice. It's nice. Whereas Honor Harrington, the ships just kind of like go through warp space or something. It wasn't super well explained, at least not in the first book. Maybe they do later. And I don't know, it just felt like they could do too much. And so the tactics were a lot simpler. And it felt like Honor Harrington, the main character just wins because she's the main character and because other people are dumb. And it feels weird saying that because she's not a terrible main character by any means. She's fine. She's just a little perfect, I guess, you know. And it's the type of series which just has a perfect main character, you know, like Dirk Pitt is another good example. He's just a perfect main character. So you're supposed to have fun watching him, which is fine. It's just not my cup of tea. And then outside of that, there was this whole political conflict, which I appreciate that they went into a lot of detail with it. I thought that was neat. I thought this whole morality about colonizing alien planets where the aliens are really primitive and how you can utilize them to your advantage and play them off of other colonial powers. I thought that was kind of neat. And I did like the battle at the end where all the aliens were basically high on on amphetamines and then they all just zerg rush to the human defensive point. Sorry, I could not think of the word there. The human defensive point and even though the aliens had primitive technology, the humans still had to use some clever tactics to win. I thought that was a pretty good part of the climax. It just was the space battle that bothered me. However, outside of that, some of the political stuff was just weird or annoying. For instance, the main country that the main characters come from is like a monarchy which was set up in space. And they actually go into some history about how and why it's a monarchy. And it was kind of weird and at first it seemed almost like it was promoting monarchy and saying, hey, this is the best form of government, which I thought was dumb. But after looking over some of David Weber's blog and some things he said about how governments work over the years, I don't think he was saying that. He was basically just saying like, hey, liberal democracy is not like the pinnacle of human civilization. We can backslide or go forward and back in different ways. So okay, in that sense, it's interesting. It also goes into detail about how most of their people in their parliament are really stupid. Like it says, the right wing is dumb for this reason, the left wing is dumb for this reason. And it just mentions like the centrist parties are more rational and more intelligent in the way they deal with things. And I mean, it doesn't go into a lot of detail about that. It is a little simplistic, but it's not like he was trying to push any harsh agendas or anything. It's just on top of all these issues that I had, which are not too terrible when it's in one book, but they would probably stack up over time. Honor Harrington is also just a very, very long series. And I don't feel like investing that much time in it. So yeah, it's a long-winded explanation. But that's all. Number two, this one's also going to be controversial, I think. Malazan. You know, I do not feel like reading more Malazan. I read the first book years and years ago, but I'm just, I'm not continuing after that. Like I, the thing about Malazan is that everyone talks about how amazing it is. And I read the first book and I just went, what the fuck were you people talking about? This is not amazing. This is shit. Like, okay, okay, it's not shit. That's not, that's being harsh. I think I gave it like three stars when I first read it because there are some bits that are kind of interesting, kind of droomy. And here's my question. If you're a massive fan of Malazan, what is it about? Like, explain to me in a couple of sentences what the actual story of that series is. It's kind of difficult to do because it's more just the story of this entire world from what I've gathered. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. However, you still need some characters to draw us in and they're just way too many that are introduced and they just sort of throw them at you and don't give you any real detail about who they are or what sort of lives they lead. It's just, yeah, these people are here. You like them, right? They're cool. In some cases, I guess, but for the most part, they're just eyes through which we're watching this. And they're not particularly interesting eyes through which we're watching this. But then we also don't get that much detail about the world. I don't need it to be explained in a bunch of monologues or anything, but you've got to give me some detail that I can work things out of my own. We didn't get that here in any real way. I remember there was some big empire, but beyond that, I don't remember getting a feel for this world and how it works and what it's like. It's just like, okay, it's fantasy world. There's a medieval level of technology. There's some magic, and that's everything. And that's about it. So, I mean, if you're gonna write a story where it's the story of the world, you have to make the world interesting. That's all. I'm not reading more fucking Malzans. Stop asking me. And number one, drumroll please, is the giver. Look, like I said, I have a video coming out on this later. I'm gonna go into plenty of detail about why I hate this book, why it's terrible. But the gist of it is that it's a horrible dystopia where everything is awful and the world, the society is terrible and don't you hate it? And it doesn't do a very good job of arguing that the society is terrible. Like in some ways, sure, it seems bad, but in a lot of ways, it seems pretty good overall. And it just seems almost like a privileged position that it's coming from to say like, oh, this is so terrible. But so then it just tries to go over the top by making it evil and saying like, oh, look, they kill babies. Look, they murder all these babies. Isn't that terrible? And it just, it just didn't work for me, not even when I was 12 years old. And that might have been fine if the book didn't break its own rules at times, because like it tries to make it seem like this society, everyone has to be basically the same, except for a couple of small differences. But they also don't allow twins to exist because they're too similar. It, like things like that, you know, it just doesn't make any sense. And then we have like an actual story where the main character rather than just overthrowing everything at the end and making it a power fantasy or anything like that, he just runs off and it's very heavily implied that him running off changes things significantly. But we don't know exactly what happens and we don't really need to know exactly what happens. But he might be dead, he might not be. And then there's apparently a bunch of sequels which focus on different societies and it's revealed that he's still alive. And I don't know, it's just, it's just dumb, I'm not reading more. And so, yep, that was my top 10 list. If there are any other series that you started and will never finish, talk about them down below. And if you want me to kill myself, please don't say that. But you know, you probably will because I insulted your anime. Oh boy, that was, that was a long one. Thank you so much for watching if you made it this far. If you see all these names on the screen here, those are the names of my patrons. They give me money over on Patreon. And if you want to get your name here and get access to things like early access to videos, then consider donating. My $10 up patrons are Appo Savalainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotis, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Anceliovic, Dark King, Dio, Echo, Eevee, Flax, Great Griebo, Carcat Katsune, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Matthew Bodro, Microphone, Peep the Toad, Return of Cardamom, Sad Martigan, Celia the Vixen, Tesla Shark, Vaivictus, and Wesley. Without you guys, I don't know if I'd be able to do this. 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