 Hello there, internet. It has, by now it's been a long time since I bought that giant pile of angel young adult romance novels. Like, I think it's two and a half years, maybe three years, I don't know. But it was like a bunch of crappy paranormal romance that mostly involved a teenage human girl falling for an angel boy. And it was just a weirdly common trope that I just, I was curious about why there were so many of them. So I just bought a whole bunch of them. And I've gone through most of them by now, like just see the playlist that this video is on, and you'll be able to go through and see all of them. I've done a lot of these. And the latest is Angel Fire, of course. And this one was actually a lot different than I expected though, which I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it is a thing. Like, I expected it to be similar to others because of the setup and because of the release date. Like, it released in 2011, is when the first book came out. And that was around the time that all these other ones came out. And it was also, I mean, just reading the summary, it's a setup of teenage human girl meets some sort of angel boy finds out she has weird angel powers, like, it's pretty much the same shit as before, or so I thought. But it's, it's really not, it's not a crappy paranormal romance. It is an adventure story. Like, there are heroes and villains, and they actually go out and do stuff. It just has a lot of romance focus. You know, the main character, Ellie, is an action hero slash chosen one who fights to save the world. You know, she doesn't just fawn over boys and wait to get saved and then do maybe one helpful thing at the climax, which is how a lot of these end. Again, go through the playlist if you want to see more of that. Ellie actually does form plans and she trains and learns to use her powers better and she learns about the world, which this world has surprisingly deep lore actually. She has relationships with family and friends. She goes toe to toes with demons and archangels. And she also happens to fall in love. Like, normally it would just be that last part. And they might pretend that all the rest of the stuff is there. Like, Angelfall, I would say overall is, well, okay. Sometimes it's a good series. I was about to say it's a good series, but no, that's, that's not quite. Other times it is really boring or really cringy. But it does have a real story with characters that have actual personalities and the world takes advantage of the source material, that is Christian mythology, to make something new and unique and kind of cool. And help main character, Ellie, on the front cover, you can see her here. She has an actual personality. As weird as that sounds, she has an actual personality. She is not just a blank slate that falls in insta-love with an angel boy and then gets pushed around by the events of the story. Like, she actually struggles to get better. She has triumphs. She does some dumb stuff, and she's also called out on it. She is occasionally kind of a jerk, which we'll get into more later. But the thing is that last bit, her being a jerk, that's really not uncommon in this genre. You know, like a lot of other main characters here are nasty, selfish people, but the story never acknowledges that they're nasty and selfish. You know, it treats them almost with a sort of reverence. Like, there are paragon of virtue and all morality flows from them. Like, if they do it, it's okay, whether it matches up with what they say is okay or not, and if they say it's bad, then it's bad, period. Like, it's a lot of them do that. And Ellie gets acknowledged as flawed and tries to change. And the thing is, having a main character be a jerk is fine if, again, number one, you acknowledge the character's flawed and she changes, which Ellie does, or number two, you just lean into it. But the thing is, you have to acknowledge that they're a bad person. Like, right here is the Broken Empire trilogy, which I read not that long ago. You should check out my video on it if you haven't. And the main character of that is George Ancrath, and he is a horrendous person. But from the beginning, he makes it clear in his narration that, yeah, I'm a horrible person, get over it, I'm not changing for you. And I sometimes just felt dirty whenever I had to be in his head and had to follow him around, but he wasn't boring. And that's the thing. Having a character just be a blank slate is boring, and having them be an awful person, but you never acknowledge that they're awful, is far, far worse because that just makes you hate them substantially more, as opposed to George, where we don't necessarily like him, but we are intrigued enough by him to want to see him on his journey. Now, Angel Fall, like I said, I thought it would just be another paranormal romance. And in my defense, a lot of these try to pretend that they're adventure, you know, they try to pretend that they'll have a whole bunch of crazy action stuff in there, but then they just abandon that as soon as they draw you in, you know, like it just becomes a crappy teen romance with bizarre world building and abusive love interests. And I mean, that's not inherently a bad thing, but at least to be honest about what you are and what you're trying to do, you know? Angel Fire is easily, easily the best entry in the pile that I have reviewed so far, but it's really not the same genre. You know, it just isn't like other than some elements, including a lot of elements, which are pretty superficial. It's just not the same genre, so I'm not counting it as part of the journey. Like, I'm gonna find another terrible Angel YA romance series to review after this because, trust me, there are so many of these. I've done like six now. There are so many more, trust me. I'll find another one as a replacement for this, and that's to be decided later. You know, feel free to throw suggestions down below, but please check the playlist again to see which ones I've already done. And if you choose one I've already done, I'm coming to your house and I'm shitting in your bed. Also, I'm not doing Sweet Evil because that one's already been done by people on YouTube, but I mean, again, there's like 30 trillion of these things, so if you have any suggestions, just let me know. Now, despite all the praise I gave to the series a minute ago, there are a lot of problems here, including some really, really big ones. Like, the narration has a lot of strange lines that just made me pause, and I don't know if I would even say these are bad necessarily, but I had to stop and go, what the hell did she just say more than once? Like maybe it's deliberate to try and give Ellie some personality, but the thing is she's not really odd outside of that. You know, she doesn't act like a strange person. People don't see her as being weird or quirky or anything like that. She just occasionally has very strange thoughts when describing things, and I'm not sure how to... I don't know. The structure of the plot is a mess, man. Like this is one of the worst structured plots I've seen in a long time. All of the books feel way too long, especially the second book, and it's also just really repetitive. Like they will have characters go out to try and find something and then find it without trouble, but then realize it's not the thing they need and then move on to find something else that they need to get, and then they get that without trouble. And it's just things like that where it gets really, really repetitive, and also with like character developments and stuff. Like there are characters who seem to reach a new understanding in their relationship, or they seem to reach a new understanding in themselves, and that's like a big moment near the end of one of the books, but then in the next one they'll be right back where they started, and it's just, I don't know, it's really annoying and repetitive. And Ellie is a good character, but the world still seems to revolve around her, and I know this is common in young adult stuff, but just because it is doesn't mean it should be. It seems like a lot of people who she meets over the course of the story are just kind of standing around and waiting for her to interact with them, and also it feels like just some of the rules of the universe don't apply to her for whatever reason, and we're never given a real explanation for that. You know, she's the only one who can save the day, even though the world is set up in such a way where others could probably save the day, but at the same time others are constantly going on about how only you can save the day, like they're just metaphorically sucking her dick a lot of the time. And then in the final battle there's like a whole bunch of other stuff going on, but Ellie is ignored most of the time. You know what I mean? Overall after the first book this series goes downhill really, really fast. Like the series isn't awful, but I want to be clear on that. It's not awful at all. Overall I'd say it's okay, or fine, because there are good parts here, but there are still some very bad and very silly parts that I can mock. Like it's easy to see that this was the author's debut series, and since this video will be shorter I'm gonna try and get my next ultra long in-depth review out sooner than I normally would, because normally I wait like three months between these because they do take a lot of time and effort, but this time I'll try and get it out in like a month, maybe a month and a half, but we'll get more into that on the end. And let's get started so there are spoilers ahead. So the first book here is Angel Fire, and I'm aware I didn't really go into a summary of what the series is about, but it's pretty simple, and you've probably seen stuff similar to this. Like Ellie is a regular teenage girl who one day runs into this boy named Will who seems to have these weird angel powers, and then demons start attacking and then he tells her she's very special, and she needs to come with him and train in order to fight demons and save the world. Like that, that really is all you need to know about this. It's almost comical how cliched that is at this stage. Like I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but this really is a very simple straightforward. Ellie's setup for the story, not that the rest of it gets super complex, but you know a little bit more than that. Now this first book starts with a bang. Ellie is sitting in class and she's bored, and it's Ben's a while describing how she's bored. Just sitting there saying, yep, life is boring, like that's the exact opposite of what you should be doing. When people say start with a bang, they don't necessarily mean start with an action scene, but start with something intriguing. Like in fantasy, which this is technically a type of fantasy, prologues are weirdly common. They are almost ubiquitous across the entire genre and across all the various sub-genres of it, from epic fantasy to urban fantasy, heroic fantasy, whatever. Like prologues are everywhere, and sometimes they do feel unneeded and out of place, that's true, but they do let the audience know that interesting stuff is going to happen later at the very least. You know, like the first Wheel of Time book, the prologue is like really confusing, and I had no idea what was going on the first time I read it, but it did at least let me know that later on there's going to be like crazy powerful wizards and stuff doing crazy things, so when it goes into just a bunch of characters living in a really boring village and going on about how, yeah, this is not a particularly interesting place to live, I'm thinking that more important and more interesting stuff is at least going to happen later so I can get through all the boring bits. There's also this particularly weird line in here. Meanwhile, I was reduced to staring at the wiry gray chest hair puffing out of the collar of Mr. Meyer's polo shirt, like overgrown steel wool and wondering whether he'd ever considered waxing. That's a very strange thing to wonder. Luckily, that doesn't go on long though. She has a quick conversation with her teacher, Mr. Meyer about her grade dropping, which is also not very long, and then she goes to hang out with her friend Kate, and in her narration she complains about how she's just so ugly and so pasty. We're an obese 15 year old, seeing ourselves naked for the first time. Because we need her to be relatable, which means she has to be beautiful, which I assume based on the cover model, but she's not allowed to put in effort or acknowledge that she's beautiful. You know, she can't like spend time doing her hair or anything because that might make her look vain. She has to be pretty but she can't put effort into it. Also, she didn't have any freckles. A lot of people think all redheads are completely covered in freckles. Not true. I only have six on the bridge of my nose. You can poke at my face and count them. There are six. You see what I mean? There's just weird lines like that scattered throughout. I'm not going to read everyone in these books, but there's enough of them that it felt odd and I would have to bring it up. And then we get introduced to her other friend, Landon, because you know how these work, she has to have one best friend who's a girl and then one male friend who's there just because. He was one of those guys who thought surfer hair was the only way to go, even here in Michigan where there is nowhere to surf. Yeah, we know there's nowhere to surf in Michigan. That last bit was kind of redundant. You could have just cut that out. Like I said, this was the author's first series, at least first published book series and you can tell. Like there's clumsy bits like that spread all over the place. So Landon is her childhood friend who from the beginning is very obviously into her romantically, but she doesn't notice it and over the course of the story, even though she finds out he's into her, she is not into him at all, which is a common trope in all sorts of romance novels. You know, like she gets this new guy who comes in who is her one true love and everything, but she also has her friend who's been there forever who she just is no longer interested in if she ever was. And it rarely ever works out well, you know. Like it always comes across as either her old friend is an annoying sex pest who won't leave her alone, or he's nicer than her abusive love interest, but main character doesn't return his feelings because there's no spark or something, so we just kind of feel bad for him. Or there's a half-hearted love triangle where he never really had a chance. Like it's one of those three and none of those options are really good, you know. And Landon is unfortunately the sex pest version of this trope. Like he bothers Ellie about that a lot and it doesn't work out well for him, but you know, just wait until later, we'll get to that. So Ellie has just turned 17 and she is planning her birthday party on the coming weekend in a couple of days. And as she's leaving school for the day, she sees an older boy who is around 20 or 21, and she thinks, huh, that's weird. And then she goes home. And she has a pretty normal home life. She gets along great with her mom. Her dad has gotten to be a real jerk lately. Like he's yelling a lot, he's being loud and insulting or belittling her for any sorts of small mistakes and doing the same to her mother. Like he's not a nice guy. He comes across as a massive jerk, but it is mentioned he used to be nicer and it doesn't really lead anywhere until the next book, but you know, it's there. So while watching the news that night, Ellie sees that her teacher she was talking to, Mr. Meyer, has been murdered. Like he was shredded apart, eviscerated, and his body was left in a dumpster. And she's upset by this. And then she has a nightmare about her tracking down some sort of demon before it kills her and she's all frightened by it and stuff. And as the audience, we're pretty sure this is like seeing a vision of the past or something, but we don't know for certain yet. She just thinks it's a dream. Honestly, I would have had that part be a prologue, you know, because like, again, the audience already knows it's not happening in the present. It's just hinting at info that it'll be important later. You may as well just throw it at the beginning and have Ellie mention, wow, that was a terrible nightmare. Like that's not an amazing way to start it either, but it is better than what we got. So then she meets the strange boy from earlier, and she learns his name is Will, and then they part ways again. And just that's that's it. Nothing happens there. Like I know they're trying to build suspense here. Like I know between Will and her teacher being dead, they're trying to build suspense. And that's fine. It's like it's not a bad thing, but it would be a lot better to just do one at a time, you know, like we meet Will, we learn his name, we think he looks suspicious, right? So we get all that at once because it doesn't take a long time to do any of that. Then we find dead teacher or hear about the dead teacher at least and think maybe there's a connection between the two of them. You know, maybe there's some detail that makes it seem like there's two of them. I don't know. But luckily, this all doesn't last long. Like I said, it's pretty clumsy and weird, but it doesn't go on that long because she runs into Will again outside at night and he kind of creeps her out because she thinks he's stalking her. But then a giant black dog appears and it attacks. Yeah, so like we're 30 pages in. So we're really not wasting any time avoiding supernatural stuff, which I appreciate because a lot of books like this, they spend forever just hinting at stuff and skirting around it and waiting for the main character to finally figure out what's going on. Like this one, we get into it pretty quick. So Will saves her from the demon and she manages to summon these two swords called co-peshes, which are what she's holding on the cover of all the books, and they're surrounded by white flames and then she kills the creature without much trouble. And she passes out because of course, like we need the main character to go to a different location so they have to pass out whatever. Okay, she wakes up at home. She thinks it's a dream. She freaks out a bit for several pages and then she sees Will again and he apologizes for ruining her jacket and she sees it's like shredded and covered in blood. So obviously the fight was real. And Will tells her that the creature is called a reaper and wonders why she doesn't remember important details about who she is because apparently she is supposed to do that. And this could have come right after the fight. We didn't need the whole bit where she wakes up at home, but whatever. It's not an enormous problem, but it is indicative of issues with the entire series, you know? The author Courtney Allison Moulton has a tendency to have these plot points happen but then cut away from them for a while for Ellie to think about what happened and then go back to others to repeat what she thought. Like it's just, like I said, it's very, very repetitive. There's also a tendency to have short subplots that don't lead anywhere and then they end in very unsatisfactory ways. Like for example, the subplot about Landon being in love with Ellie or later on we have characters search for objects, go to the place where the object is and they say, nope, that's not here or nope, that's not what we're looking for and then leave without much struggle. So like it really, really feels like wasting time. And together these problems make the books way longer than necessary. Like you can see the first one is 450 pages. So you can see it's pretty thick. I don't have that many tabs there though. Like, you know, with really bad books, you can't even see the pages anymore. But with this one, there's like, there's some in there, but it's, you can tell it's not that bad on the surface. But the first book is 450 pages, which is somewhat lengthy. The second one is over 500 pages. And the third one's around 460. And I will be honest, all of these books could probably have been 400 pages or less without losing anything. So it's time for exposition. Ellie and Will talk for a bit. He says that reapers are demonic entities who eat humans and drag their souls to hell. Like they saw one that was in the shape of a big black dog, but then there's others that are like shapeshifters, or they're in the shapes of bears, or like humans with wings, you know, things like that. And Ellie is the preliator, which is the Latin word for warrior. And she is, at least according to this first bit of exposition, the only human who can kill reapers. And Will is her guardian. He's hundreds of years old. And he guides her and helps her fight. And Ellie actually reincarnates every 18 years, but she also dies around that same age. Like she'll learn she's the preliator, she'll fight for a little while, and then something will happen she'll die. And then she'll reincarnate somewhere and like 18 years later, she'll be back and then she'll die really quick. And this time she's been dead for 28 years. And Will doesn't know why she's been gone so much longer. He thinks it might be why she doesn't remember things. I don't believe there's ever an explanation given for why she was gone longer, but whatever. And Will gives her a pendant, which has apparently belonged to her in all of her past lives. She has white, it's white wings on a gold chain, and it doesn't come up again until much later. But again, keep it in mind. There's a lot of stuff in here that is seems like a really small detail that becomes important later. But more importantly than that, this is yet another bookseer. He's, I'm reading, where the main character is a girl who keeps dying and being reincarnated through magical means, and then she meets and falls in love with the same immortal boy in every one of her lives over and over again, and she dies before they get the chance to be together. Apparently this was like a huge fantasy for girls in my generation. I don't know why, because like, this is Elixir, this is Evermore, this is Fallen, and now it's Angel Fire. And honestly, some parts of this feel like the author read Fallen and thought it was crap, because it is. It is crap. If you haven't seen my video on it, watch it. Fallen is really bad. But then she decided to do a better version of it, but then she wasn't quite experienced enough to make it work, you know? And that's kind of a shame, because Fallen does have some neat ideas, like the whole idea of reincarnating like that is kind of cool, and I still have yet to see a series do it well. But yes, this just feels like Fallen, except turned into more of an action-adventure story. Because the thing is, when this came out, 2011, this was when there were a million and one paranormal romances that were coming out left, right, and center. Like Twilight Mania was still at its height at that time, and there were a bunch of people trying to rip it off and cash in on some of that success. But Twilight Mockery was also at its height. Like people making fun of it, making parodies of it, all that sort of thing. That was at its height. That was all over the place back then. And a lot of this mockery was contrasting Bella Swan's boring helplessness with Katniss from The Hunger Games, because Hunger Games was also pretty popular at this time. And a lot of the time this contrasting boiled down to Katniss shoots people with a bow, therefore she's better, because Bella is just boring and stands by while people do stuff. And okay, obviously Katniss is a better character than Bella, but it's because she has an actual personality and growth over the course of the story, and it's not because she's good at violence. Like that's just one aspect to her. And the entire time reading Angel Fire, I couldn't shake the feeling that this was really just someone playing into that idea. You know, like a strong female character means she has to be good at fighting, which I mean that can be a part of it, but that's not the only way to do it, or even the best way to do it, I don't think. But it feels like she was just trying to be anti-Twilight and anti-fallen and all that, as opposed to coming up with a unique story she wanted to tell. Being bored or frustrated by this genre or whatever else is fine, but I mean you really have to have some passion for your own ideas as opposed to just trying to be different than what's there already, because otherwise it's not going to work out great. So then more Reaper's attack again, and Ellie nearly dies, and then Will appears and gives her a pet talk, and then she kills the Reaper and she's fine. And I have to read this line. I could feel and see Will's power as he stood beside me. He looked dark and beautiful. So we get some more exposition. It turns out that Ellie, as the Preliator, is the only one who can use Angel Fire, like when her swords come out, there's white flames around it, and that is Angel Fire. And at this part, they tell us that that's the only thing that can kill Reaper's, so she's the only one that can do it. But then not long after, they say, oh, actually cutting off the head or destroying the heart can kill them, too. So you're not the only one. Like, you're really good at killing them, but other people can, too. So, you know, she doesn't seem quite so special when she puts it that way. You know, there's also this thing called the Grim, which is like a parallel dimension laid over our own that most mortals can't see into, and Reapers will spend time there, but while they're doing it, they can still interact with the mortal world. So they'll walk around and knock a chair over or something, and the chair will actually fall over in the real world, but no one will see what did it. There are also some humans who are psychic and can see into the Grim, but it's rare. Will is 500 years old. Both he and Ellie have super healing, and she can also use her energy to push against things. So, like, those are her powers. Like, she's way stronger and faster than a regular human. She has super healing. She can summon her swords at will. She can coat those swords in Angel Fire, which is deadly to demons and demonic Reapers, but we'll get into those in a minute. Like, they're different things. And she can also just send out like blast of energy, almost like telekinesis, but all it does is push away from her. And this is the part where Ellie finally accepts that the supernatural world exists and that she is a part of it like it or not. So we're less than a fifth of the way through, and she's already like just accepted, okay, let's do this. Let's get into the story now. Which is pretty quick. It's... I actually appreciated that. Like I said, this book does not really waste a whole lot of time getting Ellie involved in the supernatural world. So it's just a little weird for the story to have such quick pacing in some ways, and really slow pacing in others. And I'm sorry if this is just turning into me summarizing a bunch of small events, but that's kind of how these books work. And if I don't bring all of them up, then the whole will not make sense. So Will takes Ellie to an abandoned warehouse and they start training her how to fight. And actually spend a lot of time doing this, which overall I do enjoy. I think that's a good thing. I think it's great that the main character has to learn to control her abilities and get stronger over time, as opposed to knowing how to do all this. There are some odd moments in the training though. Stop running, Will shouted. Fight me. You're going to kill me, I shrieked. Only if you let me. Yeah, so training can be harsh, but this idea that you see in a lot of fiction where it's nearly deadly or kills half the people who try it is just dumb. It's not how it works. You're more likely to seriously hurt them or push them away. And if you do seriously hurt or kill them, then a lot of people aren't going to want to do it. So you'll just have fewer and fewer people to do it. And if you do seriously hurt or kill them, then you just don't have whatever you are training them for, like a warrior or soldier, whatever you're going for. I'm not releasing you. He said, you've lost. You stopped fighting and took your eye off me. Please, please, Will, I gasped. My windpipe closing. Panic grabbed me and my eyes welled with tears. You're going to kill me. Then do something about it, he roared into my face. That is so romantic. Hey, Ellie, do you feel guarded right now? Does this man feel like you're guardian? So Will says that she lost because she hesitated. Ellie says she's just afraid of hurting someone so she doesn't want to use her full power. And this is a pretty small obstacle. She does get over it quick. And so Ellie continues training like this for a while. You know, she meets with her friends, she denies she likes Will, et cetera. You know, things like what you would expect at the beginning of the story. She's trying to maintain her regular life while slowly getting involved in the supernatural world. And I do like how Ellie spends a lot of time with her friends and her regular family. You know, they're not just introduced early on and then pushed aside, except for the occasional moment where she's like, this is what I'm fighting for, or anything like that. Like, no, she does see them regularly up until pretty much the end of the series, actually. So it makes her feel like she has a more well-rounded life and everything, as opposed to just being the chosen one who must do this. After a while, we meet some of Will's friends who are named Nathaniel and Lauren. Lauren is a human psychic who helps them fight. She can see into the Grim, and she's also clairvoyant, which means she can like, sense things. It's not explained super well, but it's never a get out of jail free card either, you know. So it just doesn't mean much. And then Nathaniel is immortal like Will, but he's cagey about his exact nature. We later find out that he is a demonic reaper, and we'll get into that in a minute, but basically demonic reapers and demons are not always evil is the point that Nathaniel's character is supposed to make. We also learned that Ellie's teacher who was killed was also a psychic, and he worked with these guys, and he was actually tracking down a reaper when he was killed. And this, along with some other stuff after this, is just many long chapters filled with conversations which are just pure exposition. Like, I get that there's a lot of information to get across, but some of this could probably have been streamlined. Some of it could probably have been left out, and you could have found a better way to give it all to us, because there's just a lot here. So we learned about something called the Enshi, and the characters don't know what it is. They think it's some sort of creature, and there's somebody named Bastion, who is a reaper. Specifically, he's a type of reaper called a Veer, who looks human and can also shapeshift. And Bastion's the main villain for the next two books, and this is not a great way to introduce him. Like, I think it's good to build up a villain a little bit before we actually see them. I think that's fine. But Bastion's build up is really just characters saying, oh, maybe Bastion's involved. Who's Bastion? He's a bad guy. So there's really nothing to it, you know? Like, if they had hyped him up a little and said, oh, he took on an entire army of angelic reapers and came out on top, or something like that, it might have worked, but we get nothing like that. They also think that maybe the Enshi is some sort of demonic preliator, but we don't know. We also talked some more about Christian mythology and how, basically, if you're unfamiliar, a bunch of angels tried to rebel led by Lucifer, and then God cast them all out of heaven. And the ones that were thrown out, those are fallen angels, which are demons. Like, demons and fallen angels are the same thing in Christian myth. And the demonic reapers are actually the descendants of those fallen angels. However, angelic reapers, which are like Will, that's what he is, their descendants of the Grigori, and those are fallen angels who were cast out of heaven, but God thought they could maybe be redeemed. So, yeah, that's a thing. And they treat it mostly as good versus evil, but we do see a couple of demonic reapers like Nathaniel who are not evil. I mean, this is all just important stuff, I know. It's probably not the most exciting, but you have to know it to understand the story. And they're unsure what Ellie is. Like, she's not an angelic reaper or anything because those don't reincarnate. And she's also not Nephilim, which Nephilim are beings that were half human and half angel, but they're all dead. So she can't be that. They aren't sure what she is. The Grigori also have four lords called the Elemental Watchers. And again, you have to pay attention to all of this because it's not important now, but it becomes important much, much later. And all of this lasts like over 30 pages. It's kind of annoying to get through. Ellie throws a party at her house. All goes well. And then Landon, who's super drunk, asks her to be his girlfriend. She says no, but he doesn't want to take no for an answer. He gets slightly aggressive and then a reaper attacks and he falls over, knocks his head, gets knocked unconscious. He winds up being okay, but it seems like he might have very serious damage at first. So Ellie fights the reaper and drives it off. And Landon is okay, but there's a broken window and she's covered in blood, so people are concerned and confused. And at this stage, I should talk about this book's action scenes because they're not bad. In fact, individually, I would say they're all pretty good. Like the action scenes are, well, what action scenes and books should be. Like they feature Ellie and others being strong and being tough, but also thinking of strategies and interacting with their environment and coming up with different counters for different opponents. They're thrilling and they're fun and they made me like the characters more. Like they made me like both the heroes and the villains more because seeing them excel at things is great. But there are just too many big action scenes. You know, the author probably threw them in there to break up the boring stretches, but whatever the case is, like there are just too many that go on for too long. Like this one I just mentioned lasts about seven pages, which doesn't sound that long, but when you're describing every strike, even with breaks for dialogue and descriptions, it goes on for a while. And there are a lot of long scenes like that. What I would suggest is putting in a few small or medium scenes, like similar to what we got here, but just shorter, and maybe one or two big ones, including the climax of each book. And the big ones should usually involve more than two or three characters. You know, think of like large battles that you see in epic fantasy like Lord of the Rings or hell, even the last battle in this series has thousands of combatants. And if you just have a bunch of people like that, you can show a whole bunch of different stuff without it getting boring. Whereas if it's just two people, like visually, if it's in a movie or something, you can just have two people fight for a while and it's fun, but in writing it gets tedious. So like if you're not careful, if you abuse it, it becomes white noise after a while. And plus this line from the Reaper is really, really stupid. The Reaper steps toward me. I am Ragnuk and I am going to eat you now. A glob of yellowed saliva fell from his mouth to the ground. So Ragnuk comes back later. He's told not to kill Ellie by a Reaper named Evar, even though he has the chance to kill her, and then Evar taunts her and leaves because reasons. And we also learned that Angel Fire can't hurt Angelic Reapers and Demon Fire, which is a thing, can't hurt demonic Reapers. And this never comes back, but it's there. And Will mentions that Reapers don't have an afterlife. Like when they die, they just vanish, they disappear, they don't go to heaven or hell or anything. Just, I don't know, just a bunch more exposition. You know, if Lucifer's army breaks out of hell, then Earth and Heaven will be destroyed. Will's mother was an Angel Reaper. He hasn't seen her in hundreds of years. He was born in Scotland and his mother just vanished one day, etc. And finally the plot gets going again when they hear about an antiques collector who got some massive sarcophagus that they think might contain the enchi and they decide to seal it. So they rent a moving truck, they drive across the country to this man's house, they break in, and then he finds them and he turns out to be a Reaper. And then they fight him and they flee with the sarcophagus. And, you know, I know I'm glossing over that pretty quick, but it's a fun sequence. You know, it's done pretty well. I just don't have a whole lot else to say about it. Nathaniel's gonna take some time to study the sarcophagus, and in the meantime, Ellie continues living her life. You know, going to school, hanging out with friends, makes jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. And I will say that it is nice for this series to take place over many months. You know, for a lot of other paranormal stuff, especially paranormal young adult stuff for some reason, all the character relationships and all these world-changing events and everything will happen over the course of a couple of weeks. You know, whereas it's over, I think, 10 months about? So it does make sense how people would, you know, get really good at using their powers and grow attached to one another and stuff like that over such a long period of time as opposed to, like, a month. You know, it's just kind of weird. And I don't have a whole lot else worth mentioning here. Like, it's all decent. I have very few notes. So Nathaniel decipheres the sarcophagus, and it appears that the enchi is some sort of reaper that can destroy Ellie's soul. Like, they call him the reaper and think that he's the origin of the Grim Reaper legend, and possibly an archangel. And they decide they don't want to try destroying it here because that might just release whatever's inside, and they don't know if they'd be able to kill it. So they decide they're gonna go to Puerto Rico and go far off the coast to a trench and just dump it in. That's the deepest part of the ocean that they can throw it in on short notice. And, you know, they think either the ocean will destroy it or no one will be able to get to it while it's down there. And again, this is all pretty good. It just goes on too long. There's a few more fights. There's some more flirting between Will and Ellie. We learn a few small details about the world and angels and stuff. And finally, they go to Puerto Rico, they take a boat out with the sarcophagus, and then Bastion and others attack. And this is the first time we're seeing Bastion in the entire book. We're like 80% through at this point. So, you know, there's a moment where Ellie stabs one in the gut with her copesh, which is weird. Like, you can just look at the sword. You can tell it's designed for slashing. It's not really good at stabbing. Try to imagine doing that. Okay, whatever. And yeah, like I said, Bastion, this is the first time we're seeing him, but his entrance is really underwhelming considering all the time they spent building him up. Like, he is a reaper. And he doesn't look crazy. He just looks like a human. And he has some underlings. You know, he doesn't really feel that powerful. He doesn't do anything all that impressive in this book or the next one. He doesn't really outsmart the heroes or anything. They just kind of treat him like he's this big powerful threat. And he never comes across as one. So, there's a battle. They manage to throw the sarcophagus overboard. And then Bastion and the others are upset by this and they leave. And there's a demonic reaper named Caden who stays behind for a little bit. And he does seem friendly and they talk a little bit and then he flies off again. And then a voice speaks in Ellie's head. And suddenly the Archangel Michael appears. And long story short, it turns out that Ellie is the Archangel Gabriel given human form. And every time her human form dies, she reincarnates. Does that make her trans? Like, I mean, I guess you could say angels don't have gender the way humans do. But also Gabriel is often referred to as a he. And all the other angels were always referred to as a he. So like, eh? Fuck it. Ellie says trans rights. Michael confirms that the enchi is in the sarcophagus. And the demons are probably going to fish him out of the sea soon. Like, all they've done is delay them. And then he leaves. And that, you know, that's the climax. There's a little bit left after that. Like, Ellie confesses that she loves Will. And the two of them kiss and decide that they're a couple now. And then when Ellie goes home, her mom finds out that she went off with Will. Because she had lied and said she was staying with a friend for a couple of days. But then her mom found out that was a lie. And she knows that she was with Will. She doesn't find out about the supernatural stuff. But she does get in trouble for lying. And her mom, weirdly enough, is very understanding of her being with boys. She's like, okay, look, I'm not gonna forbid you from seeing him or anything because you're gonna do it anyways. But just please be careful. And I'm gonna be honest, it's very weird to see a healthy parental relationship here. Like, that's so rare and so appreciated, you know? Like the author clearly understood that there doesn't have to be constant fighting for there to be drama. And I liked that. And then it ends with yet another Reaper attacking Ellie. And then she fights back and she gives a badass line where she says, I'm the preliator. And then it ends like I'm imagining like end credits start rolling in a rock song place. It, I don't know, it's a good way to end it. And yeah, overall, that was Angel Fire. It was a fun read. It was clumsy and uneven at times. But it has heart, you know, the person making it clearly understood the sort of story they were making and they just were passionate about it. Like, Ellie has some personality that comes through in narration and interactions and in her dialogue. There are some odd, odd lines like I mentioned, but I guess I can't say they're bad because I think it's supposed to match with her personality. Her romance with Will is shallow, but it's also sweet. The action is really fun and the final twist about her being Gabriel feels like a giant middle finger to all the helpless female main characters of the time period. You know, like I mentioned Fallen earlier. And in that series, there was a big twist about the main character being an angel, but there was nothing special about her other than she fell in love with Lucifer and her love triangle caused Hell to exist. I'm not making that up, by the way. Fallen is a very strange series. It's odd that it's so bad. But in this series, Ellie gets to be a force of nature. She gets to be the ultimate demon killing machine. And you know, a lot of books aimed at young boys do similar things, like main character is like the most powerful chosen one, magical warrior, whatever, of all time. And I don't know, it's kind of nice to see something similar aimed at girls. Like, there's a lot of issues here, but it was nice to see that. And the biggest issue by far is length. Like, I complained about that already, but I think you could have cut this by at least 20 to 25%. And I don't know, I don't have a whole lot else to complain about. So let's go to book two, which is Wings of the Wicked. Got caught on something there. Now Wings of the Wicked is very much where things start to go downhill. Like, this series suffers from a really, really bad case of saggy middle syndrome, or middle book syndrome, if you'd rather call it that. And basically, if you're unfamiliar with saggy middle syndrome, it's when the pacing slows down and either there are no events happening, or the events happen, but they don't feel like they're adding to anything. And usually this seems to happen because the author has a really good idea of where they want the story to begin, and a good idea of how they want it to end. But they have difficulty connecting those two things. And so the middle just becomes this amorphous blob, which is not very good. Wheel of Time has this problem really badly. Like, both individual books in the series and the series as a whole have this problem. Like, the first book in the series is Eye of the World, which starts strong with like an attack on the village and a crazy prologue, and a reveal that the dark one is after some of the characters and them having to flee home. And then the ending is strong because the final battle, where everything comes to a head, is a lot of fun. And we learn a whole lot of new things about the characters and just it's great. But the middle is really just Matt and Ran running from innkeepers for 200 fricking pages. And it's awful. Like, if you haven't read Wheel of Time, it's a good series, but oof, that's hard to get through. And the whole series is also similar, like the first few books overall are pretty great. And the last few are also pretty great. But the middle, it just feels like a bunch of characters are wandering around preparing for something cool to maybe possibly happen sometime in the future. Maybe? Now, Sagi Middle Syndrome is an especially big problem in trilogies, because Book One is our introduction to the world. We meet the heroes. The love interest will usually confess their love by the end, and we get to see some cool stuff, and at the end they do have some sort of triumph. And then in Book Three, they have a big final battle where characters die, and arcs are concluded, and all the secrets are revealed, and everything finally comes to a head. So that leaves Book Two with something of an identity crisis. You know, what is Book Two? What defines it? What is it about? And a lot of authors run into this problem, because like I said, they know how it begins, they know how it ends, they have trouble connecting it. And they can't just jump into the climax, so they have to find a way to bridge the opening with the end. And there are two main ways that they do that. Either, Number One, throw in a bunch of new subplots that both start and end in the middle book, and add nothing to the story as a whole. Or Number Two, they come up with smaller goals for the characters to reach on their way to their greater goal, and unfortunately, Wings of the Wicked goes with Option Number One. Now, if you want some advice on how to avoid this, look at the Harry Potter series, because it has very good examples of both. Now, the first three books, they're not really long enough to have Saggy Middle Syndrome, so don't worry about that. But Goblet of Fire Onward, Rowling really got away from her editor, and those get pretty stretched out. However, Goblet of Fire, the fourth book, and then the last book, Deathly Hallows, don't really have a problem with Saggy Middle Syndrome, but then Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince very much do. Because Order of Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince have a pretty good beginning and a pretty good ending, but they're bridged by a bunch of stuff that just doesn't contribute or doesn't feel like it contributes much. Whereas Goblet of Fire, we have an overall goal for the book, which is Harry wants to win the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and he has to complete several challenges on the way. So he has these like exciting mini-adventures along the way where he makes progress towards winning. You know, there's the first task where he has to find out what it is, and then once he finds out what it is, he has to find to think of a counter strategy for it. And then once he thinks of a counter strategy for it, he has to practice, and then once he practices, the event happens, and it's a whole exciting thing. And so he has this like small goal he works towards, and then he reaches it and triumph, and it's just a small step towards the bigger one until we hit the climax. And Deathly Hallows has the same thing because they have to defeat Voldemort, and in order to do so, they have to find and destroy his Horcruxes. So like they find one, and that's one step, and then they find a second one that's another step, a third, fourth, and every time they destroy one, it gets them closer and closer to defeating him. And I think JK Rowling did this on accident because she's not a great writer, but you know, that's not important. Anyway, Wings of the Wicked. Notice I've barely talked about this actual book, or what it's about so far, because it's almost entirely teen drama and stuff that, or setup rather, for stuff that might be cool later. Like there's really nothing here, but it is the longest book by a pretty big margin. Like I said earlier, it's over 500 pages. It did not need to be that. The author didn't seem to know how to bridge the beginning and end, so she just threw in as many subplots as possible, but most of the subplots end before the book does, and they feel disconnected from the story as a whole. So as a result, the whole thing just comes across as filler. Like even if there is character development, you still need to give a sense of forward progression and forward momentum most of the time. Like not every scene, but most of the time. For example, Kaden, the demonic reaper from the end of the first book, who was there with Bastion and seemed a little bit more friendly, he forms a relationship with Ellie and there is something of a love triangle, because she finds out pretty early on that, okay, he's a demonic reaper, but demonic reapers aren't always evil and he doesn't seem to like Bastion very much. So cool. We can be friends with him. But the love triangle is really, really low energy, because Ellie and Kaden have just no chemistry. Like it is never even pretending or hinting that they might be a threat to the main pairing. And by the end of the book, Ellie straight up tells him that there's nothing there, and he seems fine with that. And so there's no more conflict. Well, sort of. It seems like there will be no more conflict. It seems like everything gets finished off, but it doesn't. And it is better to end the love triangle now than to drag it on for another book. But then that just makes it feel like a waste of time. There's a lot of other subplots like that. And I'm not going to go into all of them because it would get really obnoxious to try and go through all of them. But trust me, there's a lot. So this book starts with Ellie fighting some reapers and then some allies come along and save her. Their names are Eva and Marcus. And upon seeing Marcus, some memories from Ellie's past lives enter her mind. And she just instantly knows he's a friend, which is a very weird intro. Like they just threw him in there and pretended he'd always been part of the gang, you know? It's just kind of weird. And they talk about how it seems reapers aren't trying to kill Ellie. They're trying to capture her alive. And then they part ways. And then she runs into Caden at school the next day. And now he has feathered angel wings instead of leathery bat wings like he had before, because just like Bastion, he's a shape shifter. And like I said, he's a demonic reaper, but he's not evil. And he is also Bastion's son. But I mean, again, Ellie decides he's trustworthy fairly early on. And he seems like, how do I put this? Like he almost seems like he's supposed to be the bad boy love interest to contrast Will as the nice traditional love interest. Nice traditional love interest. But again, Will is not always super nice. Like I wouldn't say he goes into bad boy territory or anything, but he is at least, I don't know, I wouldn't think of him as being like super nice boy. And the only reason that this really turns into a love triangle is because Ellie and Will have a contrived fight. And the main reason that they start having this contrived fight is that while Ellie was dead, and before she reincarnated, Will had a sexual relationship with Eva, like one of the people they just met. And Ellie is upset about this. Small world. Girl, the two of you were separated for something like 40 years. I think that's a pretty good excuse for him to move on for a while. Like it, that is the most we were on a break that I could possibly have come up with. And she says that, Oh, I'm sorry, you can't have sex with people who are only friends as a way of telling him she's upset. And you can. You definitely can. Like platonic love, romantic love and sexual attraction are three different things. Like there's a lot of overlap between romantic love and sexual attraction. That's true, but they aren't the same thing. Like you can have one without the others just throwing that out there. But yeah, that's why Ellie decides Kaden might be the one for her for a while. And they think, Oh, maybe he's evil, but not really. The only really bad thing he did was stand aside when Ellie was killed in her last life, which was several decades ago. But I mean, back then he was kind of evil, but he's changed. And also he didn't kill her. And also she's not dead. So can she really be that upset about it? I don't know. But they can't be together because apparently it's not real love. Like Ellie is an archangel, which means Reapers are instinctively attracted to her. Therefore, Kaden doesn't really love her, but they can be friends. But also her love for Will and Will's love for her are real. Instead, how do we know the difference? Anyways, when they get to the end of the book and she tells Kaden, like, look, nothing's ever gonna happen between us. He just says, like, okay, I'll wait for you to change your mind, which like if a guy said that the friendship should really be over, what the shit? Like if he's only pretending to be her friend as an opportunity to try and get into her pants, like, no, that's that's not good. That's not good. So Marcus, the other guy they meet at the beginning, starts dating Ellie's friend, Kate. That's fine, I guess. You know, he's nice and respectful and everything. But he's also 200 years old. And we learned that Bastion is looking for angelic relics for some nefarious purpose. And they spend a lot of time studying old books to try and figure out what's going on and what he's looking for. And Ellie's dad is getting worse and more abusive, like, just cartoonishly so in some ways. Like at one point after Ellie sneaks out at night and comes home, he berates her and he calls her a slut and then he hits her. And Ellie's mom loses her shit and throws him out and then confirms to her daughter, like, yeah, she she's divorcing him. But she is still upset with Ellie for lying and sneaking around. So Ellie continues to lie and sneak around after that. Without her mom's permission, she goes to a college party with her friend, Kate, and she nearly gets dated by an older boy, but then Will comes in because apparently he was following her and he gets her out. And during this couple, he nearly kills or severely injures a couple of boys. And Ellie is like, upset with him for this, for some reason. Like, all right, I'm, I'm gonna be honest, I have no idea why the attempt is here. But there is a line where Ellie says that she knows that Will loves her now because if he didn't love her, he wouldn't have saved her. What? What the fuck? Like, are you saying that the average person would not stop her unless it was someone they were in love with? Is that, is that the point we're making here? Because I don't think that's true. I don't know. This is just like a very strange plot beat in here. And I'm not sure where they were going with it or what they were trying to do with it. And it doesn't really come back up after this. The only genuinely good shocking plot moments in this book comes around halfway through. See, Ellie comes home and everything seems normal. And then her dad kills her mom. Yeah, it turns out that years ago, her dad was killed and replaced by a reaper. And he actually got a tattoo on that cast a spell on him that makes him able to resist sunlight, because most of the time demonic reapers will die if they touch the sun. They can only attack at night. Like at first, Ellie comes in and she sees her dad holding their mama by her neck and everything. And it seems like Ellie is gonna have a daring battle to rescue her mom since, you know, she's still alive at that point. But then right after the reveal of her dad going, Haha, I'm actually a reaper. And then taunting her a little bit, he just breaks her mom's neck, like just snaps it and throws her side. She's dead right away. And honestly, this part is dark as fuck. But it was hinted at in the first book, you know, like the whole thing about her dad used to be a lot better. But now he's just so much meaner and so much worse. Like this twist actually does make sense. So I will give the author a lot of credit that yeah, she did set this up pretty far ahead of time. And then Ellie kills the reaper and she just shuts down emotionally. Like she goes through the funeral and stuff in a total blur. And she winds up moving in with her grandmother who thanks thankfully lives nearby. And her and Will and the others make the police think that her dad killed her mom and then went on the run. So he's he's a wanted man now, but it doesn't matter because he's actually dead. And the public all believes that her dad is a murderer. And the whole rest of the series, Ellie has to deal with the trauma of this moment of not only losing her both her parents at once, but also losing them in such a brutal, unpleasant fashion. Like it's very surprising. And it's not just for shock value. So that's genuinely the only really good moments in this entire book. Yeah, there's a there's not much else to go over in this one. Go door bad. It just it just exists. You get the point. And finally, some reapers attack again. Nathaniel is killed and Ellie is taken captive. And she wakes up in a cellar with a young girl chained up on the wall. And she frees the young girl. But then it turns out that the young girl was Lilith, who was referred to as the demon queen. I mean, I thought Lilith was the first human woman like she was the first wife of Adam. But then she was cast out of the Garden of Eden and Eve was created. Okay, whatever. This is this is just based on the mythology. It's not a direct adaptation, I guess that's fine. The sarcophagus with the end she is also there, like they apparently got it from the bottom of the ocean. And they reveal that the end she is a fallen angel of death. It's actually the angel Sam, Sam, I L, I think that's how you pronounce it, and who is also Liliths, Liliths, Liliths, beloved. And Ellie is a relic that they need to awaken Samuel. Sure. Okay, we'll go with that. And also Bastion is there too. So they open the sarcophagus and awaken Samuel. And he is a very nuanced, very, very subtle villain. I am anxious to devour Gabriel's human soul. Samuel said, tightening his grip on the scythe, my stomach growls for her. So Will comes in to save the day again. And it turns out that he is also Bastion's son. So yeah, he and Caden are half brothers. And actually this whole bit has a lot of talking, actually, which is kind of weird considering how much fighting there is in these books. But you know, this this sequence, it's like a lot of long conversations and stuff, instead of people trying to kill each other. And then Marcus appears to help them, they shift into the grim, they fly away. But Bastion chases them, and then Caden and Bastion fight for a bit. Caden shook his head. Humans are inherently good. You and I, we don't belong here, or anywhere. We weren't meant to be. And the humans, not us, we're meant to go to heaven. You can't destroy seven billion souls just because you envy them. I don't know if I would agree with humans being inherently good, but sure. So they fight, and Caden kills Bastion. Yeah, like, way to switch out the main villain, guys. Like, Bastion wasn't a very good villain, but at least we knew him. And he had done a couple of things before this. And so he could have been this overarching force which connected the whole trilogy. Whereas, Samayel and Lilith are also generic and unintimidating, but we also don't know anything about them, and they just pop up near the end of the second book. So, you know, not a great way of handling your villains. But they managed to summon the Archangel Azrael, and he drives off Samayel and Lilith, because Samayel, having just awoken, is still weak and needs time to gain back his powers. So they decide to lie low for a bit, and, I mean, that sounds like it would be the climax. And I think it is. I think it's supposed to be, but the book just continues for another 80 pages. Like, geez, guys. Having a falling action after the climax is important. You know, you do need to have a little bit of time to unwind and make sure that they can resolve things, and we know where things stand, and the characters have a moment to step back and go, okay, what next? Because, you know, this is the second part of a trilogy. It's supposed to be where they're at their lowest. But there is a limit, because most of this last 80 pages is resolving a bunch more subplots, and having some more exposition, all of which could have been handled earlier or just cut out entirely. Like, Ellie decides to repair any divides she has with her friends, she goes to prom with Will, etc. The only really important bit here is that Ellie, apparently her grandmother knew about her being the preliator the whole time, and just said nothing until now. Because her grandma is, like, a psychic she knows about angels and stuff. Which, not saying anything was kind of a dick move, grandma. Like, you could have supported your granddaughter. You could have helped her hide her actions without getting in trouble with her parents. You know, you could have been there for her. This isn't the time to be keeping secrets, but whatever. I'm pretty sure that the author actually made this up on the spot as an excuse for Ellie to not have to make excuses for going on adventures. You know, like, before she had to, like, lie to her parents and get in trouble and stuff for it, but now she doesn't need to do that. You know, she doesn't need to lie to her parents, she doesn't need to have a fake job or anything. Just head on out and grandma knows what's up. Like, it's basically just pushing her authority figures all to one side so that she can go and have adventures. Like, I don't, and now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think Granny has a line of dialogue in the last book. I don't know if she shows up or is even mentioned in the last book. Geez. That's a lazy and boring way of handling this, to be honest. Like, the conflicts between trying to live a normal life and also saving the world while maintaining, like, a hidden identity and maintaining separation between those two things is a key part of a lot of really good stories. Like, especially superhero stories, because those are ones where people often have, uh, secret identities. Like, imagine Batman without Bruce Wayne. You know, he would just be a much less interesting character, or Spider-Man without Peter Parker. You know, just, it feels like we're throwing that away. So Ellie tells Kate that her dad didn't kill her mom, somebody killed them both. She doesn't quite reveal that there are demons, but she says that, oh, yes, someone killed them both. And Kate is like, hey, you should tell the police about this. It's their job to solve crimes. They'll do it. They'll do a good job. Sure. And finally, we reach the actual ending, which is at prom. Will and Ellie have made up by this point. They go outside and dance by themselves for a little bit. And then some Reapers attack, and one bites Will with poison fangs. And rather than continuing the attack, they just run off cackling because they're evil. And Will collapses and starts dying, and it turns out the poison will take several days to kill him. And Ellie calls Caden for asking for help. And he immediately makes a joke about her calling him for a booty call, which is like, this is right after he just accepted that she didn't love him. Like, geez, dude, there's no need to harass her like that. You know, they think, okay, if they were friends for a while and it had been some time and he'd gotten over this and everything, then it'd be okay to joke about that sort of thing. But that's clearly not the case with Caden. Like, he just is still into Ellie and he's still trying to get her to be with him. It's not great. And anyways, they say they're going to the Grigori in order to save Will, and just that's the end. So I guess Will getting bitten is the real Climax here? I don't know, does this book have two Climaxes? Is this like a four act structure? Is that what's going on? I don't know, but it just feels like a cheap shocking ending because the author realized that she put her Climax too early in the story, and rather than just moving it ahead a little bit, she decided to throw some more stuff in there to make it more of a cliffhanger and make the audience want to read more. I do have to read you this line, though, from when Kate and Ellie are in the school's bathroom and trying to get some privacy. Did you piss on your hands or something? Kate barked sharply. Get out of here, there are pure old dispensers in every hallway. Keep your pee fingers off the faucet. What an odd thing to say to another person. Yeah, the storyline here is very time-wasting, because the heroes are really just reacting to the villain's actions, and the author wants the big reveal when Sam Ayl comes out of the sarcophagus, but she also wants the big moment at the end where Will gets poisoned. So yeah, there's just not a lot going on here, and it is really a waste of time. If the heroes learned that there are some relics that the villains need in order to do their evil plans, and the heroes went after them and grabbed all the relics before they did, then that could have been more fun, and it could have been shorter, but that's it. Yeah, that was Wings of the Wicked. Finally, we reached the finale, which is Shadows in the Silence, and this book does not suffer from Saggy Middle Syndrome. It suffers from focusing on everything except the fucking interesting parts syndrome. Like, you notice how few tabs there are there? Like, yeah, that's not because this is a good book. That's just because there's nothing to say. Like, there's very little here that's truly bad or clumsy, because, you know, if it was bad or clumsy, that would be something. This one keeps hinting at cool stuff, but then it goes far away from the cool stuff somewhere else, and then it hints at different cool stuff, and it just repeats that over and over again until the end. Again, this book isn't terrible. Like, there's some neat lore here. The characters do develop more, and sometimes in ways I really didn't expect them to, and the ending of the story is satisfying, or at least it's satisfying on paper, but all of that stuff that I enjoy is 10 to 15% of the book. Like, the rest is, yeah, no. So this one starts up right as the last one ended. Ellie asked Caden how to save Will from the poison, and the only one who would know how to save Will is Antares, who is the Watcher of the West, who is one of the Grigori. Yeah, remember I said they had the four Watchers who were their lords? Like, told you that'd be important eventually. So they fight some people because Caden doesn't actually want to trifle with Antares and wants to just find a different Grigori, and maybe they can get information from them, and we also need to have a fight scene. And afterwards it turns out that Samuel has been killing Reapers, and the one they were looking for is dead. So Caden just straight up says he doesn't care about saving Will's life, and he's only doing it because of Ellie. This is why she doesn't love you, bro. So the Antares is in Colorado. They drive there. They go really deep into the mountains. This is all very, very exciting, I assure you. And they find Antares, and she's imprisoned in a tree. She briefly taunts Ellie for being a weak human now. This doesn't really go anywhere, but she does that. And she is willing to give them the cure, but only if Ellie releases her from her prison and sends her back up to heaven. Ellie agrees, and she releases her by basically just saying, okay, you're forgiven. You can go back now. And then she ascends back up to heaven. Like, I guess she can do that. Like, I know she's the Archangel Gabriel, but okay. Basically, it turns out the thing that can heal Will is the root of the tree she's trapped in, which is really convenient. You'd think they would have to go somewhere else to get it, but nope, they just grabbed what was already there, so they would have had to come here, no matter what. I figured they would have to do more to cure Will, but nah, he gets cured fairly early on. Like, this is still 100 pages, which is longer than it should have been in my opinion, but it is shorter than I was expecting. And it does, unfortunately, ignore the interesting bits, like Caden's relationship with Antares, because she's actually one of his ancestors. Like, that's why Bastion and him are more powerful than other demonic reapers, because they're descended from her. Or Ellie's nature as an Archangel who can apparently phone up God. Like, these are interesting things, but there's nothing to say about them, because the book does absolutely nothing with them. So they cure Will, they go home, Ellie goes back to school. Once Will is back on his feet, he has a dick-measuring contest, because we can't have the love triangle resolved in the second book, and now we have to bring it back up and continue longer. Admittedly, it doesn't take up that much time in this last one, but oh my god, it's annoying. So Ellie goes to a party, because she's graduating from high school soon. And it's an unusual party. The white tank top I would wear would inevitably be covered in vulgar sayings and genitalia by the end of the night. I wasn't sure I'd ever understand Boy's obsession with drawing penises all over everything, including other people. That's an odd line, but I think it's odd on purpose. Like, I think it's meant to give Ellie a personality as someone who doesn't quite understand social interaction. Like, I hope it was deliberate. I hope that wasn't something else that the author was trying to do, but I can't imagine what else she would be trying to do with it. I don't know. Whatever the case is, it did make me laugh the first time I read it, so hey, that's something. So then some reapers attack the party. They kill several kids, including Landon, because apparently the love triangle wasn't resolved in the first book when Ellie told him no, and it now has to continue a little bit, but now he's dead, so it's over again. It's, I don't know, like I said, the structure of the plot in this book is not good. He was killed by a reaper named Zaster, and Ellie swears revenge and they go look for him. They find him right away, and they torture him for some information. And basically, after talking to him for a bit, they think that the only way to possibly defeat Samayo is with the power of an archangel. And they would use Ellie slash Gabriel's archangel power, but they're not sure how to unleash it, and also if they did so, it would kill her. So they're like, okay, why don't we just summon the archangel Azrael again instead? And so they ask the reaper where a book of spells with a way to summon him is, and apparently is with a human who collects these relics by the name of Ethan Stone. And while they're doing this, Ellie is, you know, torturing him, but she also tells him, if you tell us what we want to know, then we won't kill you, I'll let you go. But then once they get what they need, she kills him. And I gotta admit, I kind of liked that, like Ellie is becoming a darker character in this book. You know, losing her mom, almost losing Will, losing her friend, like it's clearly changed her a lot, and she is starting to crack under the pressure of the situation. And it would have been so easy for this to be a story about how she's just a generic chosen one, you know, a bland, inoffensive main character who everyone loves and who saves the world. Like it's so many books I read fall into that trap, but this one doesn't do that. It's just kind of, it's kind of nice to see her be a little darker and a little more of a jerk. But instead of leaning into it, she also just broods about how she's evil now or whatever. And unfortunately, it doesn't really carry through the rest of the book. They just do it for a little while and then forget about it, which is unfortunate. And so they spend a long time figuring out where Ethan lives and going there, not important. They just go to his home slash compound, they fight through some human guards, and they meet Ethan. And when they meet him, he just says, oh yeah, you can have the book. Like I want to help you. I don't want the world to be destroyed. I want to help you. There you go. So this entire exercise was pointless. It might not sound that long from the way I described it, but trust me, this goes on for a while. And it is just one of many subplots in this book that go on for a while like that and wind up being pointless. So when they find the book, it mentions something called the Ring of the Pentalfa, or sorry, just the Pentalfa, which is, it allows the wearer to control fallen angels in hell. So really, this whole book is just a series of MacGuffin hunts, if I'm being honest. We need to go here and get this thing. Okay, we need to go here and get this thing now. We need to go here and get this thing now. Like, just a series of hunts like that, which a lot of books are that, but it shouldn't feel that way. We also learned that apparently King Solomon was a psychic who hunted reapers. Can I read that book? Because that sounds really cool. So they have some more fights with reapers, obviously. And one of them is in public and some stuff gets destroyed and people see them and film them. And then cops are coming so they run away and later they see the footage end up on the news. And none of them can be identified from it, but it is still a thing that's out there. So it seems like maybe they're saying, okay, angels and demons and stuff are going to be revealed to the public, but no, nothing ever comes of it. It's really just this brief moment and then they kind of forget about it. So at a funeral for all the kids who were killed at the party, somebody confronts Ellie for being in the footage fighting and accuses her of being the one to kill the kids, which she obviously didn't do. And Kate comes over and gets the other girl to leave. And it's all well and good, you know, she's protecting her friend. But then this line happens, Ellie, I'm so sorry, Josie sniffled. I know I shouldn't make excuses for her, but she's angry and hurt. One of the kids who was killed was her new boyfriend. That doesn't make it okay for her to lash out at you though. Yet that's a very weird thing to say. Like, and there's several passages like that in this book for several side characters. Like, for starters, it's weird just because no one talks like that. But secondly, if you want that sort of characterization to have an impact, you can't just say it out loud. You know, the saying show, don't tell is basically just shorthand for I didn't believe the emotions you wanted me to believe. Like, you have to let us figure it out through their words and actions. Like, it is a good thing that the author is thinking this through and she's not just going, oh yeah, that girl's just a bitch for some reason. Like, no, she's clearly thinking it through and in her mind while she's writing she understands why the characters act the way they do, but you can't just come out and say it otherwise it's meaningless. But Kate eventually convinces Ellie to reveal to her that she is the preliator and she tells her about angels and everything and it's great. This moment could have been between Ellie and her mom, you know, and it would have her mom accepting that her daughter has grown up and has responsibilities and she's supporting her but her mom is dead because we needed the authority figures out of the way, so we can't have that. I don't know, just saying. Anyways, Elle and Willie go to find a relic that's nearby because they think it might be the pentalfa. It's guarded by a reaper named Icarus. Not sure why he's named after a character from Greek myth but whatever and it's not what they're going for, it's not the relic they're looking for so they decide to go for another spot and that was a waste of little over 30 pages. And then the archangel Michael shows up and is mad at Will for having sex with Ellie because Guardians shouldn't do that. Oh yeah, also they had sex earlier. It's not really that important but you know, it is a thing that happened. But oh, the places she let me go. And Ellie is annoyed because she's like, hey Michael you should be focusing on other stuff and then he fucks off so there was really no point to any of this and again, it never comes back but like this trilogy in some ways feels like it should be four books. I like, I don't know, I'm not saying it would be better if it were four books, it would not, but in some ways it feels like they keep bringing up these other plot points which will be explored later but then they just never are. So they make their way to a castle in Belgium and they fight a reaper that is inside and while fighting they realize it's Will's mom. She's still alive and she's actually guarding the pentalfa and then she just gives it to Ellie but with very little struggle or conflict. I really hate repeating myself so much but like you have to understand this is what reading the book is like. So they all have an epiphany that Ellie's angelic grace which is like her archangel powers, those are inside the pendant that Will gave her way back in book one. And that pendant has been mentioned like twice up until this point but it's never been even hinted at to have crazy powers in it. So part of me is impressed that this was set up that far in advance but the other part of me is annoyed that there were no other details hinting at this so I don't know, it's something. So they use the pentalfa to summon Azrael, they ask him to kill Samayel. He says no because his powers are weaker than before which renders pretty much this whole search for the pentalfa and for a way to summon Azrael pointless. However Azrael does tell Ellie that if she wants to unleash her angel powers she has to kill a Nathal which is the singular form of Nephilim. Although I've seen other books where it's Nethal and here it's Nathal, I don't know what which one it is but whatever. And there's this brief passage where they talk about how when God wanted to cleanse the earth he sent down a flood which is like the story of Noah and the ark but it was not a flood of water it was a flood of angels and they killed all of the Nephilim except for one like there is still one that's alive somewhere and Azrael also gives her this spear which they call the hallowed glaive and they know where the last Nephilim where the last Nathal is I don't know I'm just gonna keep saying Nephilim I don't care if it's grammatically incorrect. So they go to Syria to find the last Nephilim that like Syria and this book was published in 2013 but everything seems totally peaceful while they're there so while Will and Ellie are going out to find the last Nephilim the others that they're working with like Marcus and Eva and Caden go out to gather allies for the final battle because they know it's coming and they can't that like there's like five or six of them they can't fight an entire army so they're going out to find more people on their side which sounds great and so Will and Ellie go to this giant underground city that archaeologists are excavating actually apparently it's they found hundreds of underground cities in Turkey and Syria and they're all connected by these series of massive tunnels which again this just kind of comes up and we barely touch on it and then we leave like there's so many cool ideas in these books that could have been explored more and I'm very disappointed that they weren't so while they're down there with an archaeologist Ethan Stone reappears and now he has a bunch of mercenaries with him and these mercenaries aren't reapers or anything but they do give him the opportunity to have the best line in the entire series to creatures who have the ability to live forever mortality is a weakness we may not have wings and claws but we have explosives can I get a book about this guy you know like he's just a rich psychic who goes off and fights demons you know he doesn't have any special powers or anything but he wants to help and he wants to contribute and he does I really wish that Ethan would get more focus but it is great that even such a small character who only has a couple of scenes in this last book gets some stuff to do here and he does get some personality like again that's what I'm saying like despite all of the problems in these books the author clearly had some idea what she was doing and she was having fun with it so they walk through some tunnels there's a cave in so that they can pretend they face some adversity they reach a final door and it has to be opened by speaking a phrase in old Hittite like I don't know what the Hittites really have to do with Christian mythology or the Bible like the people who built the city apparently thought that angels and Nephilim were gods so I guess they could magically enchant the door that makes sense but wouldn't it make more sense for the phrase to have to be spoken in Hebrew or Inokian or something I don't know but they find the last Nephilim and he's like an eight foot tall human he's just chained up in a room somewhere and they talk to him for a bit and he's like yeah I was evil you can just kill me now so like evil or Ellie just kills him without any trouble like again there's just it's too easy for the characters to do all of these smaller goals like there's no conflict along the way which makes this really repetitive and really boring to get through so it turns out that apocalypse is a place it's not an event like it there's a hill somewhere in Jerusalem where the final battle is supposed to happen and they're supposed to fight the forces of hell there so they're like okay now that Ellie has she hasn't quite unlocked her archangel powers but she now has the ability to so we have to go to Jerusalem and so they just go to Jerusalem again they're in Syria I don't think it's that easy to cross the border from Syria to Israel but okay sure whatever so once they're in Jerusalem Ellie breaks open her pendant and she becomes Gabriel like she becomes the archangel and now that she is an angel she starts forgetting her human life and her human feelings and she's a completely different person for about 15 pages that is one chapter you know like she she goes around for a while saying I don't have time to worry about your puny human feelings and then Will is like but I love you and she's like oh yeah I love you too like I guess I guess his dick is just that powerful it makes her remember how to love like and later it says that her human self is real and her angel power and her angel memories and everything are just an alien extension on top of that so it describes her as quote an archangel with a human soul I I don't know like again I think that's a cool idea exploring her losing herself and then rediscovering herself would have been really cool but there's just no time devoted to it there's no time for to sink in you know it kind of reminds me of like the ending of the fifth wave where the main character absorbs like the memories of thousands of other people and starts losing track of whose memories are whose and who she even is anymore but then the book just kind of ignores it and we have to have the climax so I don't know like I said shadows in the silence just focuses on everything except the interesting stuff it's not doing anything phenomenally bad for the most part but there's just so many things sprinkled throughout that I wish the book had been about that instead so because he can't fight Ethan just leaves uh some of his mercenaries stay behind and fight with the heroes and in fact they stay there for the last battle and I want a book about those mercenaries you know like they're just regular dudes who suddenly find themselves in the middle of the final battle against the forces of hell but none of these guys even get names like I don't think they get dialogue they don't get names we don't get a whole lot of description of what they do leading up to the final battle and during the final battle and they all just roll with this apparently they're fine with it like apparently they do well in the fight too so it's kind of disappointing that they don't get some focus so Caden and the others have recruited several thousand soldiers to fight like several thousand reapers both angelic and demonic are out there and they're ready to go I kind of wish that Will and Ellie had helped with that instead of going on several pointless relic hunts but okay and then like yeah the battle begins like Samuel and Lilith bring their forces up and they're about to fight and if they can kill Ellie and everybody then they will swarm over the earth and destroy everything so Ellie fights Samuel and Lilith and tries to summon Azrael but he doesn't come when he's supposed to and she seems to be losing and we really hear almost nothing about the rest of the battle so it's hard to say say how that's going but I think they're meant to be losing uh I don't know that's that's disappointing but I guess the main character is the only important thing in the universe and everything in the battle hinges on her ability to fight these two it has nothing to do with the thousands of other people sacrificing their lives the only thing we learn is that Caden and his forces are supposed to attack at a specific time in place but they don't and Ellie is wondering what's going on and then Azrael comes out of heaven at the last second with an army of angels and they come in and they start mowing down the reapers and I they mentioned earlier that God didn't want to send in uh another angel army because there was too much destruction the last time when he sent them you know to wipe out the nephilim but I guess now he's okay with it so all right so Ellie kills Lilith and then she wants to know why Caden's forces didn't attack when they were supposed to and she asks him why didn't you attack and he says that Anders betrayed them who is Anders he's somebody who has mentioned like twice before this so the fact that he's a traitor it means nothing it means less than nothing if I'm being honest like Caden could literally have said oh shit I forgot I'm sorry and it would have had the same amount of impact and it would have meant the exact same stuff for the story is very dumb then Ellie fights Samael and kills him and the day is saved and the final battle lasted about 20 pages and we don't see the vast majority of it like after the battle we find out that Eva has died and that may have had some impact if we saw it but we don't and so they're all cleaning up afterwards and Ellie is beginning to succumb to her power and her and Will have this tearful goodbye before she fades away returning to heaven forever like she's not going to be reincarnated back as a human and remember Reapers have no afterlife so Will will never see her again like they can't he can't just go up to heaven to visit or anything and if this was the if this was the ending I would have loved it as it stands I do like this moment because it is very bittersweet you know the main character saves the day but she gives up her life and she also gives up the person she loves in order to save the day like she doesn't get to have it all she doesn't get to be a perfect hero she has to sacrifice and give things up I liked that but then there's an epilogue and that kind of ruins everything the epilogue is told from Will's perspective and he's just like all sad and trying to move on from Ellie and stuff it seems to be a couple of weeks or months later but then he's just walking around and she crashes to the ground in front of him and says yo I'm back and he's like oh my god Gabriel you're back and she's like no call me Ellie and I have no idea how she's able to do this it goes against all the rules we know of like did God allow archangels to go down to earth and live as humans I I don't know but that's it that's that's the true ending it's a pure happy ending where the main character didn't really have to sacrifice anything look epilogues that undo the sacrifices that heroes had to make near the end of the story are horrible like it is an attempt to be dark and serious without committing like it's basically just saying oh readers will be upset if we kill off character X because that's a fan favorite so we have to make it seem like they died and then bring them back in the epilogue like it's just it's really dumb like there's an old manga called rave master which did something similar to this like the final battle is genuinely amazing and a whole bunch of people die and I was like oh wow this series seemed relatively lighthearted and happy go lucky for a long time but like shits getting real at the end here and the characters have to make a lot of sacrifices which makes their final victory over the bad guys seem huge and so great but then the epilogue comes and it's like oh yeah there was some time travel shenanigans so everybody who died has come back and this is just something similar to that I didn't like it so angel fire I have plenty of complaints but I kind of liked it you know there there is dumb stuff here but overall the good stuff does overpower it you know Ellie is a good protagonist she's not perfect but she's a good protagonist she skirts the line of Mary Soonis a bit at the end but for most of the series she doesn't she is like a pretty solid character she's competent but she is flawed she makes mistakes her power is limited and she's not really a jerk or anything except near the end when it is more understandable and it makes for more complex as well like I wish they had explored that a bit more but you know they do at least acknowledge hey Ellie you're doing some not cool stuff it's probably because you're cracking under the pressure of the situation very few stories have the balls to make their main characters not only be a jerk but to acknowledge that they're a jerk so it's just it's nice to see that here even if it's only a little bit uh then there's characters like will who have less to them but they're generally likable and they do contribute to things like the only real moment with will where I was like yo dude chill is the training bit but I mean he's doing that because he needs to like break down mental barriers in Ellie's mind and make her be willing to hurt things so I guess it's fine and like I said a lot of the small side characters who are even if they're only there for a scene or two they do have depth to it's not always uh delivered in a great way but they do all have some depth to them and it's clear that while writing them the author was thinking about okay what's going on in their own inner world you know they're not just NPCs that Ellie the main character interacts with which I like that and then the lore here like I said at the beginning there is a surprising amount of it and it's not half bad I do wonder why the angels and everything are kept a secret but I don't know whatever like the the lore and the story it really does make it feel like the world is a dangerous place and everything is just hanging on by a thread like Lucifer is never shown he might not even be mentioned but as a force of evil you still feel his presence in the background you know he's represented by people like Bastion and Samuel and they never feel like overwhelming threats but it does feel like the world is starting to crumble if that makes sense and it's the same thing with God you know like he doesn't directly interfere on like a lot of other series in this vein you know young adult stuff involving angels based on Christian mythology so you're not left wondering why okay how come God helps sometimes but other times he leaves the heroes on their own how come he does that I don't I don't get it like for example the ending of Fallen which I've already brought up several times here uh at the end of that series if you haven't read it the main characters are like going to stop Lucifer from doing his evil plan and they're not having much luck with it and then God just literally comes in and says okay I will stop them and saves the day and then gives the main characters their happy ending it's it's very unsatisfying and Angel Fire avoids that trap magic is all over the place but it still manages to be you know magical and mysterious so like there's a lot of fun stuff in this series there's a lot of really good stuff that I want to praise but at the same time the story is all over the place the pacing is a it's a bloody mess I mean so many events here are just pure filler there are so many characters and so many important ideas and important facts that just pop in and out of the story at complete random I can't discern any notable themes in the story because it usually shies away from anything deeper before actually exploring it and maybe giving it some more impact you know for example the death of Ellie's mother like that affects her but it's a little too subtle you know what I mean like I don't even know if it's mentioned in the last book like they could have just had a moment or two where she breaks down and she's like I I miss my mom I wish I had been better I wish I could have saved her you know something like that uh or how it hints that angels are maybe gonna be revealed to the world but they don't really do anything with that or how Ellie is being subsumed by Gabriel but they don't really do anything with that or the genocide of the Nephilim which nothing has ever really done with that like there's just a lot of stuff that could have gone on here and it nothing happens with it it's very disappointing also at the end of the book right after the final battle when Ellie is about to ascend to heaven she never says goodbye to her grandmother you know the last family she has in the world like she could have called or something but no she has to say goodbye to her boyfriend first and then there's some other stuff which is just dumb and made me roll my eyes like how most of the demonic reapers are animal shaped and there's only a few that can shapeshift and a few that appear human and the only good demonic reapers are the ones that appear human and all of the angelic reapers are pretty humans or they look like pretty humans because pretty people are good and ugly mean monsters are bad yeah just just dumb or how the main character has to spend some time at the beginning thinking about how she's so plain and so ugly but then it never comes back up you know just look if you're gonna have the main character be insecure about her looks that's cliche but if you're gonna do it then do it otherwise just cut it out you know and Kate never has an ending to her arc either she's she's largely just there when Ellie needs emotional support and beyond that she barely exists I don't know it's just weird that you have a best friend character who has a somewhat large role in the story and does show up throughout the whole story but then she doesn't really get a climax to her own arc or anything you know not even a oh yeah she went off to college and she's doing great now at the end yeah something like that would have been nice but I don't know what else is there to say like these books they have heart the execution is uneven but the the passion and the heart behind it just shines through in every chapter like I can tell the author really loved writing this series it's very much a first time author series don't get me wrong like I was saying it's it's not polished it is just something that was thrown together and thrown out by somebody who was very excited to do it and you can tell she was excited to do it like you can't force passion like this and I would rather read something that's very clumsy written by a passionate amateur than something that was written by a competent author but is completely soulless and dead unfortunately Courtney Allison Moulton hasn't written much else uh which is you know I'm a little disappointed by that I want to see what she could do with practice like I think if she wrote a few more books then she could make something really special and different than angel fire she could use that as a stepping stone but you know but whatever I I hope she's doing all right I don't know if I would recommend anyone else read this series especially since I just spoiled most of the important stuff that happens here but I don't know despite all of the issues and despite me going in really expecting to hate it and expecting it to be a lot worse than it was I kind of enjoyed it and there's not a whole lot here for me to make fun of but I don't know maybe you'll like it if it sounds like your cup of tea like the action and stuff in here is fun like I said and I couldn't really get that across in this format so you'll just have to read it for yourself if you want to see it but that might add to your enjoyment I don't know people are a little obsessive over spoilers anyways like you know even if you know what's gonna happen the journey can still be fun but whatever I don't know I don't have a whole lot else to say that that's it for angel fire it's a pretty simple story I don't have a whole lot of complicated thoughts on it and as I said I will replace it with a different angel young adult romance series later so let me know your suggestions down below like I'm going to do blue bloods because that's the last of the pile but it'll be a while because I just I don't feel like digging in this same trench right now as for my next ultra long book review if you saw my evermore video you already know what's next I found a christian fantasy novel written or a series of christian fantasy novels written by a guy who thinks that dragons are real and also produces propaganda for the russian government so if that sounds like fun to you then meet me here next time for Leviathan by RM Huffman here's a small sample the tallest man the one nama had first noticed through the mist gazed directly at her she met his eyes their crystal unearthly beauty caused butterflies to flutter in her chest but the intensity almost intimacy in the way he looked at her made them race down to her legs had she been standing on dry land her trembling knees might have failed her I think she just came from looking at that guy wow you you're still watching I I mean I guess I appreciate it but I'm not sure why I mean at this point all that we have left is all these names here these are my patrons and including my ten dollar and up patrons oppo savalainen olivia reyan brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay dan antcelliovich dark king dawn deo echo flax carcat kitsune lexy delorm lyza rudakova lord tiebreaker microphone mist boy peep the toad roby reviews sad martigan sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla shark vei victus and wesley these are all great people you know let me let me just let me tell you if you want to get your name on here then consider donating to me once a month become a patron or if you don't feel like doing that or you just can't because you know you're like poor or whatever no shame in that uh then just you know rate the video comment on it subscribe share it around spam it to all your friends and uh yeah goodbye