 So, a while ago, I did a video that was the top ten books I hate that everyone else loves. And that one was books that everyone seems to really be into. Like, the general consensus is very positive, and I just don't like them. Like, for one reason or another, I just couldn't stand them. Like, I had the giver, the road, things like that. And this one, as the title suggests, is gonna be the other way around. These are books that I don't necessarily love. I'm not saying that there are no problems with any of these, but I do view most of them in a positive light. There is one entry on this list that I think is bad, but the general consensus for it is like way worse than I feel it should be. And that's basically all these. Like, the general consensus for them is way more harsh and negative than I would have thought it should be, but, you know, just I feel that there's more positive stuff to be said here. Because obviously this is always going to be subjective, it's always going to be a matter of opinion, and I'm not saying I don't understand why people don't like some of these, because again, like, I recognize the problems with a lot of them, and I'll go over those. But sometimes I just, I just don't care about the problems, or I look at them and say, yeah, that's not great, but why are you people so harsh on it? Because, I don't know, in this day and age, it seems like people will have a mild distaste for something, and then they'll just get locked into an internet echo chamber where they're constantly trying to one-up each other for how much they hate it and how bad they think it is. Like, it's this bad. Oh yeah, it's actually this bad. And just trying to go more and more ridiculous with it until by the end they've just bought into their own hype, essentially. And so they genuinely hate it with a seething passion when before they just had a mild distaste for it. Like, that seems to happen a lot. And I don't see it getting better anytime soon, but whatever, that's not important. We're about to start now, and there will be spoilers for everything I mentioned here, so be aware of that. Like, there's chapters here. You can just skip to the next one if you find something you don't want to get spoiled. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Starting off the list here at number 10, we're gonna have The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. This is the prequel to The Hunger Games, which the movie of it is coming out later this year. Maybe it'll be good, maybe it won't be. And this one is odd to me because I read it and I was a little disappointed for like the first third to half of the book because, like I said, it's a prequel to The Hunger Games and I wanted it to be about like the origins of Panem, the original Rebellion, and the origins of The Hunger Games, but that's really not what it is. It's about the origin of President Snow, the primary villain of the original series. And once I got over that this book was not what I wanted it to be and I just took it for what it was trying to be. I realized, okay, what it's trying to do, it's doing extremely well. Like upon hearing the setup for the story, you would probably just assume that, okay, it's gonna try and make President Snow out to be all sympathetic. And he'll be like, oh, I only became evil because my dad was mean to me. And at first it does kind of seem that way. Like it's like, oh, I suffered so much during the rebellion. Can you believe how much I suffered? It's not like they suffered really. Like they just started it for no reason. But then as the story goes on, you realize like, oh no, okay, Snow is just a psychopath. And especially once you get to the ending, you're like, oh yeah, this dude was always just crazy. You know, he didn't slowly become crazy over the years of ruling or anything. Like he's just always been entitled and he has always wanted more than he has. And when I realized that, I was like, okay, this is a more interesting villain origin story than I originally thought it would be. There are so many parts in this story where it seems like it's going to go like a really traditional route and then it just goes in a completely different direction. Like the romance, it seems like it's gonna be traditional. Oh, we come from two different worlds, but we just are attracted to each other and we wanna make it work. But it turns out much, much different because again, Snow is just a psychopath and he's willing to sacrifice her in order to go back to his old life where he has wealth and riches and everything. And so once you understand that, you understand why he's willing to go to such crazy lengths to keep the districts under control and why he fights until the bitter end in the final book. And on top of that, I just appreciate it because for a while, The Hunger Games was the biggest book franchise in the world by a huge margin, like Suzanne Collins could have shout out 100 prequels and sequels and spin-offs and everything and people would have read them and she could have cashed in on that like crazy but she decided not to. You know, like she wrote a prequel and it wasn't a super marketable prequel that the fans were clamoring for. It was something that she wanted to make and had a part of the story that she wanted to tell and it does add to the original story. So I don't know, I just appreciate it for that. Number nine is gonna be Bleach. That is Bleach the manga series, not Bleach the thing you clean clothes with. Now, this is a series that for whatever reason has gotten a lot of hate over the years and I don't mean like people dislike it or they just aren't into it. I mean like genuine hate, especially back when it was still running and it was still really popular. Like a lot of people just despised it so much and back then I didn't understand why. Now like again, I see there's problems with it but I still don't understand why. Like it is at least on the surface a pretty standard shonen battle manga story. You know, you have a main character who's a really young person who suddenly gets really crazy powers and then he goes off and fights bad guys with them and the bad guys just get more and more powerful so the heroes have to get more and more powerful to match them and by the end he's barely recognizable from what he was at the beginning and he's taken on gods and shit. On the surface that does seem like very traditional shonen stuff and in a lot of ways bleach is. I'm not trying to say it's like completely subversive or completely different or anything but it is different in some key ways. Like for example, the main character Ichigo is not a kid like a lot of them are or at least a lot of them were at the time that the series was written because some of this doesn't seem quite as innovative now because it's like 20 years later but still Ichigo is not a kid he's a teenager and he's not like super energetic and optimistic and just wanting to go off and like be a Pokemon master or whatever like he's surly and at the beginning it seems almost like he's forced into his role as a Shinigami and he's forced to go around and help save people and it's really satisfying to watch him grow from somebody who has this responsibility thrust upon him and looks for any excuse to get rid of it into somebody that accepts it and just decides yeah he wants to do his part to help save the world and that's great. On top of that the artwork is just fantastic like again this is a manga series so I have to talk about the artwork or well I guess I don't have to but whatever the artwork is fantastic because they say a picture is worth a thousand words in Bleach a lot of them are worth like three or four thousand I mean the way that he can draw characters and give them just so much emotion and so much history in a single panel is incredible and yeah admittedly he does like to not draw backgrounds which is kind of obnoxious sometimes but I'm willing to put up with that because that just means he has more time to spend on giving detail to the character models and everything and that's great and then the fights are all amazing too like the amount of time between them is perfect they all get the perfect amount of hype and build up you know it's not just getting thrown out there so we're just being hit with a bunch of noise all right in a row they get a little repetitive but I mean it's not that big a deal like there's only so many different ways you can have dudes swinging swords at each other anyways like it it didn't bother me that much like the fact that the fights are similar is fine because the build up to them and the emotional payoff and everything for them is also fine but on top of all that Bleach is a bit smarter than people want to give it credit for like for a while I've been contemplating doing a video about how Bleach is really all about religion specifically how religion works in Japanese society and culture and I might do it at some point I don't know but basically one of the ideas I would put in that is that the series has a lot of really strong Buddhist themes in it like the idea of balance is a huge part of the story like it's not about killing the bad guys in a lot of cases it's about finding a way to coexist with them which often times means like killing the leaders of the bad guys and everything but it doesn't mean subsuming and destroying and taking over other groups like and this is all represented in the character of Ichigo himself because at the beginning he's a human and then he has his shinigami powers thrust upon him and at first he doesn't want them he tries to get rid of them but no matter how hard he tries he just can't get rid of this it's a part of him whether he likes it or not and it's only once Rukia gets taken to the soul society and he has to go and rescue her that he finally accepts these powers and realizes okay I need to accept this part of myself in order to save my friend and he unlocks his Zanpakuto and achieves his true potential like he's not giving up his humanity he's just merging his shinigami powers with his human side and so they achieve balance and then later on he finds out okay he also has hollow powers at first he tries to subsume that part and destroy it and cast it out and that doesn't work so what does he do? again he like embraces it and makes it a part of himself and brings it into harmony with the other parts and then in the final arc we have the same thing with his Quincy powers and while yes it is definitely a bit of an asshole that all of this is him like this clearly wasn't planned from the beginning and you could say that about a lot of parts of Bleach to be honest like once you get to the final arc like yeah some stuff does come together and it does come to a head but it doesn't feel like oh yeah this was all written out from the beginning however it still works because the arcs all thematically build on one another and do tie into that idea of balance you know and even on top of that I do kind of like how a lot of the world building is not overly explained like it's just kind of hinted at and a lot of the characters don't understand it that much so it gives you the sense that this world is much bigger and deeper than we see on the surface it's just enjoyable that's all I really like Bleach number 8 is Light Lark and I just want to remind you all I don't necessarily like everything on this list I just think that the general consensus is way harsher than it should be and Light Lark I've done multiple videos on it you can go watch them if you don't believe me I do not like this book it is a freaking mess the characters are I was going to call them two-dimensional I think it might be more accurate to call them the outlines of two-dimensional characters the world makes no sense and the plot just meanders all over but overall I would just say that yeah it doesn't make sense and most of the pieces don't fit together but that makes it nonsensical it doesn't make it horrible you know like it's bad because like yeah the character personalities are great, the story is kind of a mess and doesn't really lead anywhere until like the very end and the world doesn't fit together well so like I couldn't get into any of this but that doesn't make it horrible like I wasn't actively offended by any of this except that it wasted my spare time which I have increasingly little of as my life goes on but the thing is everyone just despises Light Lark and YouTube it seems I don't know why people feel the need to make like multi-hour long video essays on how awful this book is because like yeah it's bad and yeah you can point out all the ways in which it doesn't make sense but I just can't summon the hate for it like a lot of others seem to and I don't know if I can explain exactly why maybe it's just because I do like some of the ideas brought up here you know the idea of like an island being hidden by a storm 100 years at a time and that storm lifts and then people can travel there in order to fight in a tournament and try and end the curses which have afflicted their kingdoms for hundreds of years now like okay that could be that sounds cool okay I can't explain exactly why but it sounds cool and then a lot of like the individual bits of world building and some of the individual plot points do sound cool on their own it's just that the way they're put together doesn't make sense and they're usually not written in such a way which justifies their inclusion in the story so it doesn't fit together and as such it's a bad book but I just can't summon the hatred that everyone else has for it I I don't know I just can't and for number seven we have Rhythm of War this is the fourth book in the Stormlight Archive the most recent one as of the time in this recording and in my personal opinion the second best in the series because Way of Kings is still the best for me but the Rhythm of War is like right below that and again I understand a lot of the problems people have with this those books are crazy long to begin with and Rhythm of War is the longest by a decent margin I think it's around four hundred and sixty thousand words that is insane like how could you possibly just even write that and call it a single book that's like an entire series it's it's absolutely ludicrous I can't I just can't and large parts of Rhythm of War straight up didn't need to be there or could have been condensed significantly like I've heard from people who said like yeah it's at times one of the most boring books I've ever read and I I feel you on that one like I was into some of the subplots like I was into Calladin pulling a die hard and just trying to fight bad guys in the magical tower I was into that I was into Calladin also trying to essentially invent therapy and become the first psychiatrist in this world I especially like that because like it makes it clear that Calladin has not gotten over his problems and he probably never will like becoming better and healing is a process that never ends it's a road that just continues forever and that ties really closely into one of the central themes of Stormlight Archive which is journey before destination the journey is what shapes us and they're like I got that put on my arm for a reason I mean not the journey is what shapes us but whatever you get my point it's a quote from the Stormlight Archive and Calladin having to do this it invent this therapy idea is part of that theme it ties into it very well and then other parts of it were really obnoxious but then we also like learn more about the world and we learn a bit more about the nature of magic and you know just things like that which are really cool so I was into that don't get me wrong but it is really long and at times really really boring and at times it feels like almost like a commercial for later books as opposed to just being a book right now but then you get to the ending and the ending is insane like the main villain of the series the evil god named odium is killed by taravangian who is a minor villain in the series and then taravangian takes on all his powers and taravangian is far smarter than odium and also seems to have a lot more self-control than odium ever did and so he's way more dangerous like we see in the epilogue he's the first person to ever outsmart hoid like hoid has been 10 steps ahead of everybody else throughout the entire cosmere including in the stormlight archive and at the end hoid at the end he gets outsmarted by taravangian and I mean I can't help it that just caught me so off guard like taravangian stabs him with the magic sword and then takes on his powers and it makes total sense like it's not the first time in the cosmere that somebody has taken on the power of a shard after killing their host like I'm sorry if you don't understand what I mean by that but I just I do not have the time to go over a lot of cosmere lore in this video we just we just can't but the point is like it makes sense it was properly built up to and foreshadowed like they mentioned that taravangian has to have really strong emotions and very strong intellect at the same time and so he's the only one that can not only take on the powers of odium but control them so that makes perfect sense and I just really want to know what happens next like the fact that this is an epic fantasy story where the primary villain dies less than halfway through it just makes me want to know what happens next I'm sorry I just loved the ending of Rhythm of War so much that it blows all the other problems I had with it earlier out of the water number six love Hina and also if you're wondering why my thumb is so stiff here it's because I sprained it yesterday so I'm just trying not to move it right now hopefully I don't have to go to the hospital because that's expensive but yeah love Hina and again I want to emphasize I don't necessarily love all of these but love Hina I do have a soft spot for you know it is a really dumb harem manga from the 90s right it's about a guy who tries to get into university and he keeps failing and he goes to live with his grandmother but finds out that his grandmother runs a dormitory full of a bunch of other girls who live there and he just now lives on his own with a bunch of girls like it's something that probably sounds very familiar to you if you have seen any anime or read any manga over the past like 30 goddamn years it's a harem story you know how it's gonna be there's gonna be stupid hijinks there's gonna be some romantic tension or at least what passes for romantic tension in most manga between the main character and a whole bunch of girls there's gonna be like risqué shots there's never actually gonna be any full on nudity and characters are never gonna be allowed to actually have sex but they will be surrounded by it you know how it is but the thing about that is that after a long time it just became a cliche which has been so done to death that even joking about how it's been done to death has been done to death but back in the 90s when love Hina first came out that wasn't the case these tropes hadn't been beaten into the ground yet and so they were still relatively fresh and at the time I read it it was still relatively fresh to me as well you see something becomes a cliche when people stop trying to justify it and just start throwing it into the story because they feel like well it's what you're supposed to do like that's what makes something a cliche really as opposed to just being something that you've seen before and love Hina was made again at a time where this hadn't really been faked into the entire industry yet so the author Ken Akamatsu was actually trying to justify it you know he was actually giving the character some personality and even though they do ridiculous things and go through ridiculous hijinks and everything their personalities do usually justify it and this odd world that it takes place in also justifies it and so I didn't find myself hating all the weird jokes and everything as much because like it feels like there's a bedrock it feels like there's a foundation there even the tsundere trope which I despise because it usually just boils down to a girl is really mean to somebody but he is still in love with her and still treats her very nice and does everything great for her I don't know I don't like that cliche I don't like that archetype but it is done at least passively in love Hina and on top of that I can't help it it's just a cute story you know it doesn't go on forever it is a reasonably short manga and I just liked watching the main couple fall in love and at the end they get married and it genuinely warms my heart and I had a couple of really dumb laughs along the way because the humor here is extremely juvenile I'll admit and I don't know it's not that deep I just I was into it and if I read this today I would probably not like it very much but again that's just because I've seen similar things done so often but this was done back when they were still fresh and they were at least trying to do something good and different with them number five is going to be the inheritance cycle aka Aragon now this one years ago I did a video on it explaining why I really liked it even despite all its flaws and I stand by pretty much everything in there you know it is basically the best Star Wars with dragons you know like the story is pretty derivative but it was written by a 15 year old like yeah what would you expect no one is going to write something super world changing and unique when they're 15 like you've all seen the two and a half hour video I made years ago about the crappy novel I wrote when I was 15 like Aragon is leagues beyond anything I could write at the time well yeah it is basically just the original Star Wars trilogy but with dragon riders instead of Jedi the books are pretty long and they use that extra time to do different stuff for example it spends a lot more time really hammering home that Aragon is just a farm boy who is in way over his head like in the first book he can't read at the beginning he has to be taught how to read later on in the story and other characters are like oh yeah I guess it makes sense he wouldn't know how to read and that is just a small detail but number one it makes sense in this world because like yeah again he's a farm boy why would he know how to read but probably more importantly than that it illustrates that this kid is just being thrown into the deep end you know he has all these powers and the responsibility that comes with those powers thrust upon him kind of out of nowhere and he has no idea how to deal with it you know he doesn't know how to use magic he doesn't know how to fight he doesn't know how to read he doesn't know how to navigate all these politics and he's probably going to have to be the leader of a new dragon rider order and he knows that from pretty early on in the story but he has no idea how to do that and so it's really satisfying to watch him learn to do all this over the course of the story I mean if Aragon had just said oh I got these powers cool show me how to use them and then he'd been like super happy and he just somehow knew how to read from the beginning and he somehow knew how to fight at least a little bit from the beginning then it wouldn't really hammer home as much that yeah this kid is going to be in trouble and he needs all the help he can get and on top of that the world again it's derivative cliched but it has depth to it and it has breadth to it there are a lot of different races and cultures and locations and I did really like how at the end it breaks away from the traditional hero's journey format because again the original Star Wars trilogy has that where the hero leaves home, goes on an adventure, comes back home grows over simplification but that's the general idea and then Aragon though in the final book he realizes I can't go home like I am a completely different person than I used to be and even if I wasn't I have all of this responsibility I can't just abandon that so I am not that farm boy anymore and at the end he leaves home forever and that was just different I liked it and also the romance between him and Arya is also very different it didn't work out between them because Arya was never really into him because he was just really young he's a young child and she's over 100 years old and she just has a much different view of the world than he does so it's almost like a small school child having a crush on someone much older than them and on top of all of that I just really liked that Aragon got me into fantasy like if I hadn't read this I don't know if I would have read a lot of other stuff that I've loved over the years so for that reason I just love it number four is another series of books that I have made a video defending in the past sort of and this is The Mortal Instruments again I made a video on it but that one I just concluded that The Mortal Instruments is fine and I'm talking about the original trilogy there which is City of Bones, City of Ashes and City of Glass I am not referring to the 18 shit gazillion prequels and spin-offs and sequels that Cassandra Clare has written because in contrast to Suzanne Collins who wrote The Hunger Games and just kind of left it at that because she didn't feel the story needed more Cassandra Clare saw dollar signs and just decided to keep pumping out more and more and I believe she's still writing more today and I mean I guess if people are buying them then sure more power to you but it just really detracts from the story when you have the original trilogy and like everything wraps up and they're like oh no actually there's more after that there's a lot to complain about here I hate Jace the main love interest of the story I hate him he is an asshole to everyone and the story treats that as like oh he's snarky because his dad was mean to him he has to have this harsh exterior in order to hide the sweet sensitive soul that's inside except they never show us the sweet sensitive soul so there's not a whole lot to like about him there I did like some of the world building like them putting runes on their skin in order to give themselves power was kind of cool but the way that the different races like vampires and werewolves and shadow hunters all coexisted was pretty cool as well I like some of that I did like the climax at the end where Claria confronts Valentine but then at the same time again there's many more problems like how they're supposed to be demon hunters but they do very little demon hunting the weird pseudo incest subplot is bizarre and not handled super well the main romance isn't great but at the same time there's just there's genuinely stuff I liked here you know I liked that other characters also got to have romances which were fairly well written it wasn't just Jason Clary being focused on all the time like the other side characters and other members of the main cast also got to have their own little love stories which were halfway decent I did like some of the fighting and action bits there wasn't a whole lot of them but they were cool I did like the villain Valentine there's not a lot to him but he has some cool bits and like I said I like the climax of the series at the end where Clary manages to summon the angel whose name is escaping me right now and just uses him to take out her dad I did like the pseudo incest plotline that was kind of weird but I did genuinely feel bad for Jason Clary because they think that they're siblings for a while and they still have this really strong attraction to one another and they're trying to fight against that and just like they're not sure how to deal with it like I did feel bad for them and I think that was the point but I think the main reason I have a soft spot for the mortal instruments even though so many other people have just hated on them for years is that I've also seen a lot of other young adult fantasy over the years and let me tell you it can get so much worse like a lot of young adult fantasy like thrown of glass and such is just so soulless and so paint by numbers and so just not even trying that I look at something like mortal instruments which has a lot of flaws and a lot of stupid bits and a lot of things and cringe but at the same time it does feel earnest enough that I just have to say you know what you were trying something there and plus it has a pretty equal focus on romance and like the actual story you know it doesn't just have romance overtake everything like again a lot of young adult fantasy does so I feel like I should hate mortal instruments more than I do but honestly just comparing it to what it could be I just don't I think mortal instruments is fine number three is the death cure and that is the death cure is in the final book in the maze runner series and you could kind of put just the series as a whole on here but the thing is people will generally think the first two books are fine and you know I'll defend both the books and the movies they're pretty different from another but they are enjoyable in their own ways but talking about the first two books people will point out plenty of problems which I agree with like how the world building makes very little sense and the story doesn't have a great setup even if like the events and the pacing and everything are pretty good and working towards the end goal is pretty good and the mystery in the first book is pretty good like people will point out problems but then also point out the positives so the overall consensus on the maze runner books is yeah they're alright there's a couple people that really like them a couple people that really hate them but they just think yeah they're okay except for the death cure which a lot of people seem to hate and I'm not sure why because at the end Thomas realizes along with some others that they're not gonna be able to make a cure for the flare virus which is essentially a zombie virus if you haven't read them or seen the movies and all they can do is take the small percentage of people who are immune take them somewhere far away so that they can escape the collapse of civilization and then they just wait for the rest of the world to die and then they can rebuild and it's a bit of a downer ending yeah and I think that's part of why people don't like it they just don't like downer endings they prefer something happier which I mean if you do more power to you but I also think part of the reason people don't like it is because they were mistakenly thinking that Thomas the main character was working towards making a cure and then he doesn't do it at the end but Thomas wasn't like the villains were working towards making a cure and they were torturing all the characters in order to do so and Thomas was just trying to save himself and his friends and in fact in the last book he straight up comes out and says I don't care if we have to let the entire world die it is wrong to torture people like this and that's you can disagree with that I probably would if I that he was a real person but you can't deny that that's a very strong uh trait let's say for a main character to have and going into the ways in which the movies are different than the books like again I do enjoy the movies but I didn't like the ending of the last one quite as much because in the last movie there is actually a cure that's made like it's made from Thomas's blood but it's just it comes way too late and it doesn't actually save anybody like the cure but then he and the others have to go off to an island away from everybody else and then they're still waiting out to the death of humanity and it seems to end kind of ambiguous like oh maybe Thomas will go out and try to make more of the cure in order to save people but like obviously there's nothing after that in the story so we're not going to get more and I feel like that kind of misses the point of the ending of the book because there's a scene in the movie where he just really dramatically yells there is no cure and they like show that in every fucking trailer before it came out but the thing is that was the point you know in the book at least that that was the point there is no cure no matter what they did they weren't going to find a cure for the flare virus like sometimes things are broken and you can't fix them all you can do is get out of the way like we all pay for the mistakes of others we we pay for the mistakes of powerful people who live now we pay for the mistakes of our loved ones who live now we pay for the mistakes of our ancestors who died hundreds of years ago like we're still feeling the ramifications of some of that and there's no avoiding that sometimes all you can do is get out of the way of the disaster and like that is the message at the end of the death cure or at least the one I took from it and that's a very powerful one so again in addition to the ending catching me off guard because it really did I just really liked that it made me stop and think for a while number two is an ember in the ashes and despite being number two on this list I don't think I have a whole lot to say about this series like it is overall good I think like I wouldn't say it's amazing with the exception of the first book which I genuinely think is great but overall it's like yeah I enjoyed that and I don't have a whole lot of justification why other than that it feels very earnest because again this is another young adult fantasy series and again I've seen just how awful those can get and at ember in the ashes does follow a lot of the like cliches we would expect from that genre nowadays but it does them like kinda similar to the moral instruments it does them earnestly like at the beginning of the first book main character girls grandparents are killed like her parents are already dead long ago and her older brother gets kidnapped and she escapes and so she goes on this quest to rescue her sibling which is something we've probably seen a lot like that's just the Hunger Games still echoing throughout the larger culture but anyways the point is she's going out to save her sibling and she does that by being a spy in a place full of wealthy people which is again something we've seen a lot but hey at least it feels earnest you know and that's the thing everything that happens in these books feels earnest like the characters don't feel like they're just meant to feel an archetype they feel like a person who just happens to fit into that archetype and also breaks away from it in some small ways not in big ways but in small ways the storyline and the world building as well also feel like yeah they're following stuff we've seen before but it does break out of it in some small ways and there is justification for it so like that's what I mean when I say it feels earnest at the end of the day on top of that it's not generic medieval European fantasy world it is based much more on Middle Eastern mythology and folklore which is a little bit different at the very least that's kinda cool I did like that but probably the number one thing which really just made me actually get into this series and care about what was happening is that it doesn't half-ass the fact that this is a very dangerous, deadly situation that the characters are in and a lot of them are going to die there are a lot of books especially ones aimed at younger audiences where they try to act like things are super deadly dangerous but then they will not have any characters die or they'll have one maybe two die near the end or they'll just have like one die at the very beginning to show oh look anyone can go but then everyone is just fine after that you know what I mean whereas Ember in the ashes people meet horrible fates throughout you know like the villains do not shy away from the fact that they're committing a genocide throughout half the series and people are on the receiving end of that and sometimes they get like heroic last stands where they get to be the heroes one last time before finally succumbing and then they manage to let their friends escape other times they just die and it doesn't really lead to anything like sometimes the villains just kill them to make a point and again because these are actual characters that I was kind into I felt bad for them and I also felt bad for the main characters who like they're losing their friends and loved ones so it doesn't half-ass it you know it doesn't pretend to be dark and gritty and then act all light-hearted and sweet like thrown a glass often did it is just kind of a dark story at times or I say kind of again there's a genocide here like it is a dark story and it doesn't shy away from that but at the same time it doesn't revel in being dark and gritty it is just characters trying to find light in the darkness you know that that's where the title of the series comes from it's an ember in the ashes like it's all dark but there is one little spark of hope which you can use to start a fire and the number one book that I love that everyone else seems to hate is the dinosaur lords I've mentioned this multiple times like I read this series a little over a year ago and I've brought it up several times since then because it's a it's a great series it unfortunately it's only half of a series really because the author wrote three books and then died before the next three because he planned for there to be six and that is very unfortunate but the first three are just so great that I don't care that much you know it is as the title suggests it's about knights who ride dinosaurs and fight each other and they also fight evil angels who bring down hordes of undead well not exactly undead but we'll get to that in a minute and religious fanatics to just exterminate all of humanity and that's awesome I can't help it that's just awesome it actually surprised me after I finished reading this series and I looked at other reviews of it online to see that people didn't seem to like this one that much it got pretty mixed reviews and it never really took off in terms of popularity either which is I think the main reason why we're not seeing the rest of them like you know they could hire somebody to finish off the series but that's just not going to happen because it's not that popular it's not gonna make much money but it's just it's so good like one thing I really appreciate about it in addition to just having a bunch of cool shit because again it's knights riding dinosaurs what's not to like about that one of the main villains is a knight who rides an albino t-rex named snowflake into battle that just makes my inner 10 year old go oh yeah it's so cool but one thing I do appreciate on top of that is that it's not really a fantasy story it is a fiction story disguised as a fantasy story because this is kind of a cliche at this point but it comes to light over the course of the story that this is some point far in the future and they're not on earth they're on another planet which was colonized by humans and all of the magic we see is actually just very advanced technology like the evil angels who are trying to wipe out humanity are implied to just be some sort of androids it's it's weird but okay kind of interesting and it's it works better than a lot of other things that try to do this because normally it's like a big twist near the end of the story where it's like oh my gosh it's science fiction it was earth all along what that's crazy but it's usually even if it's foreshadowed it winds up detracting from a lot of the story whereas in this case it is none of the characters come right out and say it because none of them seem to know it it is just hinted at from the beginning and if you pay attention you can figure it out yourself and go oh okay that makes sense but why is the world like this and instead it just opens a mystery and that mystery is part of why I wanted to keep reading and unfortunately we never got it you know revealed but still it's cool all of the fights and battles in here are just fantastic especially the giant battle at the end of book 2 that's just straight up one of the best I've ever read and if we just count like battles in epic fantasy that would have to be easily top 3 I think there's not many others that would go about that it is amazing and part of the reason it's so amazing is because this series does like a different take on a zombie apocalypse formula for a while which is not something you see often like zombie apocalypse is something that has been done a lot it's been done to death but it's not something you see that has any real changes to it most of the time it is usually stuff we've seen 100 times over but this was different because a grey angel comes down and starts a grey angel crusade which is you know go out and kill a bunch of sinners and a lot of people join with him out of like genuine religious devotion they're like oh yes we have to go kill the sinners we shall do that yes of course and then some people feel coerced into it like I don't want to join but there's an angry army that says join or die I'll just join up with them and go along with them which it's hard to blame them for doing that and then there's a whole bunch of people who are just straight up brainwashed by the angel like and they don't turn into mindless husks like you imagine when you hear zombies like they are still themselves they have all the same thoughts and they can still talk and use weapons and tools and everything they're exactly as they were before except that they just have this insane religious fervor inside them and they will not stop until they've killed everyone in their path as the angel tells them to like you can cut off their legs they will crawl after you and try clawing you to death with their bare hands like it's scary to think about but it is way different than any other zombie apocalypse thing I've seen before and so that's when we get the giant battle at the end of book 2 where a whole bunch this just a gigantic horde of these people is coming up against an army and the giant horde is also getting the locerefters and the angel is riding in in dominus rex which is like a t-rex but bigger and just it's so cool like at the end of the day that's what this boils down to like a lot of people just thought the dinosaur lords was stupid I didn't care it was just there's so much cool stuff it makes me giddy and I loved it and I really wish we could see an ending to it we're not going to but you know what journey before destination you know I just love the dinosaur lords so much and if you don't like it bite my shiny middle ass and I don't know do you have anything like this you know book series or comic series or anything like that where everyone seems to really dislike it the general consensus is sharply negative but you just really like it or otherwise you just don't see where all the hate comes from you know just I don't know let me know down below and also rate the video and comment and subscribe on it because I'm supposed to say that at the end here and also follow me on social media and stuff look at me promoting myself like you're supposed to and yeah that's about all have a nice day goodbye 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 Appo Savilane and Olivia Ray and brother Santotis Buffy Valentine Carolina Clay Dan Anceliovic Dark King Dawn Dio Echo Flax Carcat Kitsune Lexi DeLorm Liza Rutakova Lord Tiebreaker Microphone Mist Boy Peep the Toad Robi Reviews Sad Martigan Celia the Vixen Stone Stairs Tesla Shark Vei Victus and Wesley these are all great people you know 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 then just you know rate the video comment on it subscribe share it around spam it to all your friends and yeah goodbye