 So this horse by now is very very dead but its corpse is too big for me to move so I may as well keep beating it. Lightlark was a book series that came out last year and it was a massive success sort of like it uh it sold a lot it blew up a lot but a large part of that was just people hating it and a lot of the people hated it because it didn't pander to them correctly but also it is a pretty bad book on its own that and the author really did not take criticism well like at all she responded remarkably poorly to it but when the first book came out I did a regular review on it because I figured whatever the drama is surrounding it it does deserve a fair shake and the verdict was that yeah Lightlark is a bad book but mostly it's just incoherent you know like most of the stuff in there just doesn't make sense like there's other people who made multi-hour long videos about this go check those out if you want more info and you aren't familiar with Lightlark but mostly yeah it's just stupid and incoherent and it's a mess of random tropes that don't fit together and there's zero in-universe justification for them and because it's young adult fantasy it really is just isekai but it's aimed at young girls instead of young boys like that that really is what it is because it's a total self-insert main character the world is set up to do nothing except make the main character look as cool as possible the story of Lightlark has zero structure and it's just a mess you know the second book Nightbane just came out recently and there hasn't been much discussion or fanfare about it so far like months ago when they announced it and they announced the release date there was a little bit of talk about it but since it came out which at the time of filming it's been like two weeks now and I've seen very little people very few people talk about it very little discussion of it so I figured let's let's see what's in here and I can confidently tell you after finishing that Nightbane is not good at all I can't say it's really worse than the first book but I can't I can say that it seems as if none of the criticism or feedback that Alex Astor got was listened to like or none of it landed like this is exactly the same as the first book and it feels like there was zero effort to improve here which is kind of annoying to be frank there's also several really really dumb plot twists in here but you know we'll get to those later I will say that at least there's a map in this one because the first book didn't have a map I don't believe so I personally had trouble figuring out where everything is in relation to everything else and this one had that and fixed it so that's kind of nice and I will say the cover is also pretty cool because like this one has a crown on the cover but it's also an island in the shape of a crown it's it's cool looking I liked it and while I was reading I kept thinking of ways to roast the book you know I kept thinking of ways to go okay here's how I'll make fun of this here's how I'll make fun of that but I was basically just re-signing the entire plot when I did that so I guess I'll do that now yeah I'm gonna recite the entire plot of Nightbane and go over all the problems with it as we go and that also works out for all the people who are curious about this book but don't want to go to the trouble of reading it so yeah you're you're welcome I guess uh spoilers ahead obviously no god no god please no so from the very first line Nightbane is not good Isla Crown tasted death on the back of her tongue that is dumb also yes people were telling me that the main character's name is pronounced Isla but I don't really care I'm gonna say Isla I don't respect her enough to say her name properly now if you remember the first book at the very end of it there was a magical door that Isla was about to open and the book ends with her about to open it and then this book starts with her about to open it and then she opens it partway and she feels some power and she hears the voice of Grim coming through Grim being the guy that she was in love with but also kind of betrayed her in the first book and then the door is mysteriously slammed shut so the mystery remains we didn't actually find out what was in it which is not how cliffhangers are supposed to work and I might as well tell you now we only open that book and learn what's in it near the very end of the book or excuse me we only open that door and find out what's in it near the very end of the book and I gotta say the phrase filler is thrown around a lot nowadays like way more often than it should be it is thrown around a lot but nightbane is entirely filler I am not joking when I say that in the slightest it is 100 percent filler because it's literally just a slow drip of information that the audience needs to know in order to understand what's happening and then there's a battle at the end because isla has selective amnesia that selectively goes away one chapter at a time giving us little bits of exposition about stuff that isla should already know I swear to god amnesia has been a disaster for literary canon it is just one of the worst ideas that writers can use most of the time I swear to god I hate it so much so after the door throws isla out and we don't know what's inside even though the cliffhanger of the last book was hey we're about to find out what's inside we don't get to find out what's inside uh oro who is the king of light lark and isla is also in love with him uh he says that she can only enter the vault's door if she masters her wildling powers and remember wildling is the realm that she's from that she's the ruler of now how does oro know that the vault will only open if she masters her wildling powers because he doesn't know much about this either unimportant I guess he just knows it now he also offers to teach her how to control and use her powers how does he know how to do that because he doesn't have wildling powers unimportant I guess now remember in the first book we learned that isla's father was a nightshade so she also has nightshade powers and at the end of the last book she killed Aurora who's the leader of the starlings the ruler of the starlings as they put it uh and now isla also has starling powers and also she's the queen queen of the wildlings and the starlings there's a big party to celebrate the curses being lifted because everyone wants to talk about how awesome isla is and how she saved them and how she's just the best but she is also like I said a nightshade and they would hate her if they found out that she was a nightshade which means that she gets to be horribly persecuted and put upon and misunderstood and abused while also being effortlessly powerful and wealthy look if you're gonna do those do one or the other either have the mc be super powerful and wealthy for no reason and for with no effort or have them be hated for something that everyone just hates them for even though it's not really fair and if you're going to have somebody or excuse me if you're going to have society hate them rather than having them be hated for something that they are having be hated for something that they did a good example of this is a movie that came out a while ago called no one will save you like the main character that movie is really hated by everyone in her town and near the end of the movie we find out it's because when she was a kid she killed one of her friends and it obviously it's a horrible thing but she was a child and it was an accident so like there's some moral gray area here is what i'm saying as opposed to just having it be pure wish fulfillment look at them they're put upon now king oro says that maybe grim and the other nightshades are going to attack so he is going to prepare the army and there's also a moonling who is named soren and he asked asks isla some questions about wildlings that she doesn't know the answers to questions that a ruler really should know like how many of them are there do they have enough food and shelter like isla is in charge of these people and and she doesn't know these things like she has two realms that she has to look after now and she doesn't know that she's a really shitty ruler i gotta say now she also realizes how that she needs to make an air a sap because she doesn't have an air and if she dies without having produced one then her entire realms will die like both the starlings and the wildlings like that's been a thing since the first book i don't blame you if you didn't forget it and also this thing about her needing to create an air never comes back in fact i kind of forgot about it until i was going over my notes for this video like i just i just forgot oh yeah uh she needed to make an air but it just wasn't a thing something about light lark causes everything in it to just slip out of my mind immediately after i read it like just immediately it's gone which is why i took copious notes while i was reading this time so i could actually go through and do a proper summary for you isla gets coronated without much fanfare it just it just sort of happens and then this big crack appears in the ground and a bunch of flying monsters come out of it and start attacking people and isla tries to help them but her powers just don't work very well and once they manage to beat off the attackers people are angry with her and they blame her for the attack because the protagonist must be oppressed it doesn't make any sense for isla to bring an attack there but she's blamed for it and also the creatures that attack are these like dragon-like things they're called drex which is a weird name now the ruler of the moonlings a woman named clio says that she is leaving and her realm is not siding with light lark like essentially they are declaring independence and they're going to side with the nightshades because again the nightshades might be attacking soon now during the night some rebels try to kill isla they use the ocean to pull her from her room and into some underground tunnels and then they attack her but she manages to use her powers even though she couldn't really use them before and then she runs away and this assassination thing doesn't really come back again but it does happen now a nightshade man named remlar does try to separate isla's wilding powers from her nightshade powers like because she inherited both they're like mixed together in weird ways and that's probably what's preventing her from using them properly now while this is happening she passes out and she flashes back to when she met grim apparently she just accidentally teleported over to the nightshade island where he was because let's not forget she also has a magical teleporting stick which nobody else has she just has had that since before the first book even begins she just she just has that and that's also how she met grim and in the present she passes out and then when she wakes up her powers work she doesn't have great control over them but they work and then she's sick for a couple of days after this and she speaks to oro and we get one of the few good lines in the book she nodded and it didn't do anything to make her head feel better before she could respond she added do you wish i wasn't everything i am he was quiet for a moment her eyes slowly began to close suddenly heavy fighting against sleep was useless in this state no isla he finally said it's the part you don't seem to like about yourself that i love the most like come on that's a cute line now isla is still really bad at actually using her powers like i said earlier but she can use them like she tries to move pebbles using telepathy which is her starling power but she can't really do much with them and so she decides to go train in the wildling new land which i straight up don't remember if the new lands were even in the first book but they're in this one it's like other islands that are a little farther out that people from various realms went to and have started colonizing while she goes to train she brings some of her friends along and the wildlings tell her that isla needs to bond with an animal and the way to bond with one is to shoot it with an arrow okay sure whatever it's magic now while she's out looking for an animal to bond with she gets attacked by a bear and this bear has horns i don't know if that's an important detail but i felt the need to mention it like bears just i guess have horns in this world that's a thing and uh while it chases her she manages to throw it out of a tree and then this black leopard appears and it seems really friendly and then it allows her to stab it with an arrow and now they're bonded and she jumps on the back of this black leopard and rides back to her friends and the others are shocked and they recognize it because apparently his name is lynx and he was bonded to her mother naming a leopard lynx is kind of like naming a dog dachshund but whatever that that's the thing that happens then isla goes to starling isle because things are pretty bad there and i'm not sure exactly what's going on there like the book seems to say that there's only a hundred starlings left i i think it's kind of unclear the way it's written is very straight i don't know but like sure there's only a hundred starlings left and then we go to a flashback and actually the rest of the book from this point forward is kind of one chapter present one chapter flashback it's very obnoxious and i'll get into more detail later but in the flashback she duels grim and then she loses and then he throws her out of his realm and the flashbacks only happen a little bit at a time because isla only remembers a little bit at a time like there's a bunch of chapters that end with oh this event reminded isla of something that she had forgotten before and now that it's now it's back and remember this entire book is just exposition like that's all that's there and if all this information that again isla really should know if all of this was given to the audience at once it would be like 30 pages long and that just there wouldn't be a book because that's all that there is now in the present isla takes a shower in her room i don't know how that's possible again this is like a medieval castle and i get that there's magic but i don't know i feel like this book is so allergic to making the protagonist work or suffer for anything that she gets to have hot running water in a medieval castle like that's that's the only reason i can think up for why this is even a thing it's so stupid so her and oro are hanging out still and he's like avoiding her touch and she asks if he's not attracted to her and he says no i totally am and then he gets a boner and then they have sex and they keep having sex a whole bunch it happens and finally something happens because grim actually sends out a warning to the island of light lark he says everyone vacate the island within 30 days because he's going to destroy it and then the moonlings again join the night with the nightshades because they don't want to die alongside everyone else and if isla wants to stop grim from destroying light lark she has to remember her time with him at least according to the oracle she speaks to the oracle might have been in the first book she might not have been i don't remember and i'm not going to check and honestly the fact that there's prophecies in these books means nothing the prophecies make no sense it's literally just excuses for the plot to happen basically without isla and her memories and her being so special everyone will die and so the more she masters her powers the more she will remember which i guess that does make some kind of sense but it's still not a great way to structure your story so we go into a flashback where isla is wandering a bazaar there's a stand there that sells human teeth that doesn't lead anywhere but i felt the need to mention it and there's another stall that isla makes note of that sells nightbane which is a potion of some sort that takes away troubles and pain and based on the way they describe it later it seems like a magical opiate of some sort because it sounds like it's really addictive a man in the bazaar attacks her and she stabs him in self-defense but the crowd sees her stab a guy and then chases her like just an instant lynch mob forms and then grim catches her and throws her in the dungeon and that's that and then we go to the present and oro says that there's a magical medal that can make weapons to fight drecks because their scales are really hard and it's hard to hurt them with normal weapons but there is a magical ore that he knows about which is awful convenient and then a man named zed appears who is apparently an old friend of oro and he likes to steal and break into places that's about all we learn about him but you know he likes to steal and break into places and then isla oro and the other rulers start coming up with a plan to defend the island from grim in the nightshades when they attack basically they want the wildlings to cover a bunch of the island in thorns and poison plants to force the nightshades to attack in a specific spot which is actually not a bad plan it's not a particularly complicated one but it's not a bad one either but wait the skylings we need the skylings because they need to cover the air and protect them from the drecks because the drecks can fly around and the skylings might vote to leave because the skylings are not a hereditary monarchy they are a democracy even though if the island is destroyed they will all die anyways it doesn't matter where they are they just they'll die so it's kind of dumb for them to vote to leave instead of trying to defend the island because without the okay whatever the contrived conflict really is the best kind of conflict so isla decides to go to this area called the vinderlands to recruit people there were the vinderlands mentioned before maybe i don't know all i know is that it's a place near the moonling realm and the people there are not cursed they're not part of one of the realms that were cursed they're just different people who happen to live in this area isla starts training some more and remlar who is helping to train her tells her to kill a tree with her nightshade powers and she doesn't want to and she has trouble doing it but eventually she manages to kill it and then she uses the power from the tree to make a whole bunch of saplings sprout around her so basically she's combining her wildling powers with her nightshade powers which is actually kind of cool you know this this scene does work it's not amazing but it does work which is why i can't really hate lightlark as much as a lot of other people do like there it has moments which are kind of okay like the idea of a character having power over death and power over life and rather than distracting from each other or canceling each other out they actually reinforce each other that's kind of cool and it could be an interesting metaphor for something this book isn't smart enough to do that but you know it could be so then flashback again grim says he needs some sort of magical sword he doesn't say why he needs it he just needs islas help in finding it and then they go to a place guarded by a man who is called the blacksmith although grim also calls him baron at a couple of points and then he tries finding them and islas stabs him in the eye and he barely reacts to that just okay that's a thing that happens uh and basically the sword whatever it is whatever grim needs it it has been enchanted so that no nightshade ruler can claim it so that's why he needs somebody's help and then grim takes the blacksmith's memories uh but the blacksmith doesn't know where the sword is and neither do they and later also in flashback grim teleports into islas room because remember he can do that that him and her are pretty much the only ones that can do that from when i can gather uh and he actually wants her to continue helping him go look for the sword and the nightshades at this time are still cursed remember so they can't go outdoors at night but grim has a charm which negates his curse so he can go out at night no problem why doesn't everybody get a charm that can counteract their curse no idea maybe they don't know how to make them and they're super rare maybe i don't know there's no explanation given at all so they think the sword might be at a thieves base so they go there to go check some people attack them while they're there isla kills some of them and she's upset about it because she's never killed people before but you know isla kills some of them because she's just so cool and badass grim interrogates one of the thieves and actually cuts off his hand while doing so he's pretty brutal while torturing this guy uh he finds out that a man named victor might have the sword so grim kills the thief after he gives him the information because he's an edgy emo bad boy that the main character is attracted to despite him being a fucking sociopath seriously guys like that there is a difference between bad boy and evil boy a very very big difference so in the present isla goes to moon isle and ever since the moonlings left the place is apparently a lot warmer than it used to be which okay that's worth noting i guess uh and then they go looking for the vinderlands and a whole army of them appear in front of isla which remember the vinderlands is the name of the place but the people from the vinderlands are also called vinderlands it's a it's a little weird but you know that's a thing that happens they try to kill isla but when they do uh she actually touches the blade that they're swinging at her and it turns to ash and they're all oppressed because they're like whoa she's a nightshade and a wildling that's so cool main character girl gets to be awesome and beloved without actually doing anything she was just born this way and they agree to help her if she helps heal some of them because they're having issues with magical sickness and injuries in the past she has a weird conversation with grim about painkillers and how he needed to get used to pain so they like peeled skin off of his back to do it okay sure and also grim seems to be the one who taught her how to fight even though she was taught by her tutors before so i again this book these books just contradict each other all the time i don't know why i'm even bothering to mention it when it happens you should just assume that things are being contradictory when we're talking about light lark but you know that's a thing that happened anyways they learned that the magical sort they're looking for is probably in uh this place on nightshade called the caves of irida and they're guarded by a monster of some sort and then we go to the present again in the presence of the skylings i i think they vote to leave i'm honestly not sure like i read this passage several times and i'm still a little bit confused like i think they vote to leave but then there's some of them that decide to stay behind if if they were voting to stay or leave but then some of them could just disobey why did it even matter i'm not sure i don't know just go with it man uh but yeah i had to read that passage a couple of times sometimes you really just need a character to come out and say yep they voted to leave because i'm sure this made sense in alex aster's head but it doesn't make sense in anyone else's and also isla decides that she might turn the starlings into a democracy later now i'm not sure how she moves the magical curse because you know again this is a magical curse which is supposed to affect hereditary monarchs i'm not sure how they would change it from a hereditary ruler to an elected one but okay whatever zed also found the magical ore that the characters needed down in the mines but he needs isla to mine it for him because the main character has to be the center of fucking everything now in the past isla and grim go to the cave where they think the sword is and they they see it but it's being guarded by a dragon and there's also a booby trap there that they trip and it fills grim with like a dozen arrows he's fine but he gets shot with like a dozen arrows and then rather than continuing trying to get the sword they just go to a ball which is being held at his palace because fuck it you know this this book doesn't have enough balls yet just just throwing some more who cares and while while isla is walking around at this ball she mentions that there is quote music so loud and fast it drowned out the moan she could hear when she passed by the dark halls which we get no other information about what type of music this is but i like to imagine that this medieval palace they're just playing edm or heavy metal music you know it's just drowning everything out like i just like the mental image of grim being a really big fan of mastodon you know while they're there somebody tries to roofie isla like they give her a magical roofie and grim saves her from being magically roofied which i i guess that is pretty much the only way you can make grim look good is by comparing him to an actual rapist so you know grim looks a little better than he did a minute ago you would also think that this experience might you know change isla a little bit like you know maybe she's fearful and paranoid brown strangers from this point forward but no it never comes back it's just hey you almost got sexually assaulted but you didn't and now you're fine like again that's the sort of thing that tends to stick with people in the present isla makes some super cool armor for lynx you remember lynx her magical black leopard that she bonded with like yeah i forgot about him until just now when i read about him in my notes so i don't blame you if you forgot like he does very little in this book but yeah she makes some armor for him he does nothing he only exists to show that isla is so cool because she has an animal companion and other people don't at this stage we do get one reveal which is actually kind of cool we learned that everyone all their lives are tied to the lives of their rulers because one of oro's ancestors cursed the people of light lark to prevent them from staging any sort of uprising so if any ruler dies and they don't have any heirs then everyone will die and that actually is kind of cool you know that's a good detail they probably should have mentioned it in the first book but you know it's it's there now a skyling named maren tells isla that she is immune to curses and that she has also freed the wildlings and the starlings which means that neither realm is tied to her life like if she dies then the people in the wildling realm and the starling realm won't also all die which is again something i'm not sure how he knows that but he knows it and he tells her or more accurately he tells the audience because isla doesn't do much with this and in order to free the rest though to free all the rest of the realms oro has to die again i don't know how he knows this i'm not exactly sure how this plan works but he tells her hey we're going to have to kill the king if we want to you know free everybody else from that nasty curse and isla does not agree to the plan because she doesn't want to kill the king and then she leaves and nobody tries to stop her again they just told her about this super secret plan to try and kill the king and they just let her go after she says fuck no i'm not being part of that like that that seems like a security risk to me but i guess i don't know anything in the past we learned that grim only needs this magical sword because not only does it create dregs like the flying creatures from the beginning but it allows whoever wields it to control the dregs why we couldn't be told this from the beginning i was well okay i was about to say i'm not sure why we couldn't be told this from the beginning but i know exactly why we couldn't be told this from the beginning we couldn't be told this from the beginning because well again this whole book is just exposition so if we just give the exposition then that's boring and we don't have an actual book we need to stretch it out and pad it out by pretending that there's some sort of plot and adding fake intrigue then back to the present grim apparently has the sword in the present we again we haven't found out how he got it yet but he has the sword in the present and he kidnaps a bunch of wildlings and then tells everybody to surrender and isla decides that she's gonna try and cut off his powers using a love bond which is a thing from the first book again it doesn't make much sense but basically if you're in love with somebody who has different powers than you then you can take their powers away temporarily and use them for yourself like it this is just a thing that exists in the world of lightlark because the world of lightlark is dumb and so there's multiple steamy scenes in the present between grim and isla in the past they go to get the sword in you know the dragon's den and it doesn't go very well isla nearly dies and grim uses her powers his powers to save her and because he used his powers near the sword the sword disappears like it got transported somewhere else far away and isla is like oh my gosh grim i'm so sorry i messed this up for you and he's like yeah that's okay you're the main character i'm not gonna actually be mad at you and then she wanders in the woods for a little while and she finds a small dragon a baby dragon and then she gives it to him as a pet in the present isla has finally mastered her powers and she goes to open the vault and inside is a vision of terra who her old teacher who was supposed to be dead i'm not sure if this is an illusion or just like the spirit of terra or maybe isla is just hallucinating whatever it is terra is there and we get more flashback after that so after all of this isla is literally just wandering the woods and then she finds the sword just chill in there and then she gets it and gives it to grim and apparently even though the sword was cursed so that a nightshade ruler could never use it somebody else finding the sword and then giving it to them apparently broke the curse which is a very easy curse to break so now grim just has the sword and he can use it that's stupid use your common sense and he explains that lightlark like the island and all the surrounding areas was actually created a long time ago by people fleeing other lands and when he says other lands i think he means like other dimensions other worlds that they had to get to magically not people from like another island or something like this was magical they came here they created lightlark and if the portal that they used to come here is ever opened then lightlark will be destroyed again i think that's what's happening nothing in these books is explained super well or super clearly but i'm pretty sure that's what he says here now he mentions that the portal is somewhere in the wildling palace and that only a wildling ruler can open it why is that because the main character is a wildling ruler so obviously she has to be the special one that gets to do everything and it turns out that the vault that isla just opened was actually the portal and now grim is coming to take control of it and again remember this is isla just remembering something that was magically erased from her memory if she had known this from the beginning then she just wouldn't have opened the vault like they would have already known what it was and they wouldn't have done it so all of this her only slowly getting her memories back is not only really obnoxious in terms of hey the two different storylines are distracting from one another and we keep switching back and forth and we are learning all this information that we should have known way earlier way late because the author just doesn't know how to do anything here uh on top of all that this is the only reason that the villains plan works at all so after that we just the final battle happens you know like we just the final battle just sort of occurs now grim teleports his army into the middle of everything which sounds like a shitty idea to me but whatever i suppose that doesn't matter because he's the bad guy bad guys do stupid shit and then they come really close to winning and then the heroes also do a bunch of stupid shit but they managed to stop the bad guy at the last second because that's just that's just how that works uh and then the drecks appear and the battle starts going poorly for the heroes and then isla winds up cornered by grim so that plan that they spent the whole book making all the preparations that they were doing the magical ore that they needed isla to mine that is all irrelevant literally none of that matters in this last bit like this all comes down to the main characters the army plays no role in anything that goes down in the climax and because the army plays no role in anything everything to do with the army is just pure filler like again the the term filler is overused nowadays but in this book it fits like out i would honestly rather this book just be like 80 or 90 flashback than have all the present stuff be this irrelevant you know i would rather just spend most of the book reading about stuff that happened several years ago than switch back and forth between stuff that happened several years ago and is important and stuff that's happening now and is very unimportant like that sounds better uh and anyways while isla is cornered oro appears and he fights grim because even with a female protagonist that everything revolves around only men can be strong enough to actually fight the villains especially if the villains are other men like girls are only allowed to come in at the last second and give a final burst of magical power that saves the day because young adult fantasy is a very feminist genre now some drecks come and attack them and grim can no longer control them for some reason so isla takes the sword and tells the drecks hey you quit it you stop that and then they stop and then she takes grim's powers temporarily through the love bond and oro is about to kill him but it turns out that isla is actually bonded to grim like she just remembers at the last second and he tells them which means that if one of them dies so does the other like apparently at the very end of the flashback they were going to go to a place where some drecks were attacking and apparently while they were there isla killed a bunch of people while fighting them and we only hear about this afterwards in very vague terms because again the memories only appear when the plot conveniently needs them to also isla and grim are married now apparently and she only remembered now because we needed a plot twist at the end of the book and he says that if isla leaves with him and goes back to nightshade then he will call off the attack and so she agrees to it she tells oro hey i love you but i love grim too and then she goes with him in the book ends like that that is it that's where it ends what the hell was that i have done my best to make the summary of this book makes sense but it has required not only some thought on my part but also some serious trimming because there's just other details and other stuff in here which does nothing and means nothing at all like the book is so committed to the slow drip flashbacks that every other chapter is a flashback they get flashback then present and flashback then present throughout most of the book even when there's nothing important there like there's a lot of points where we get important flashback and then important present and then unimportant flashback important present unimportant flashback important present because alex aster was just so locked into the uh going back and forth uh every other chapter way so this structure shoots itself in the foot because both plot lines distract from each other like every time there was something that kind of intrigued me like again isla using her powers of life and death to reinforce each other every time there was something like that that was kind of cool i wound up getting dragged away it would honestly be better if we got like two or three chapters in the present and then we got a flashback chapter and then we got two or three more in the presence and then flashback chapter but even then that wouldn't fix everything it would just be an improvement and even if we set all the flashback annoyances aside there's no structure to this book at all like neither of the storylines have any structure the plot has no inciting incident at all there's no falling action at the end it just again it stops like seemingly in the middle of the climax and the flashback storyline doesn't have a climax at all we just hear about isla apparently killing a bunch of innocent people in the present in very vague terms like most events in this book do not matter in the slightest like the only important subplot is isla learning about her powers because that's what allows her to open the vault but that turns out to be what the villain wanted all along now i believe lightlark is intended to be a trilogy like i obviously that could change and i don't think that's ever been confirmed anywhere but i'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a chill trilogy and if it is it has the worst middle book syndrome i have ever seen in my life like briefly if you're not familiar with middle book syndrome it's when the author knows how to begin the story and they know how to end the story but they're not really sure how to connect them you know like you've probably read a couple of trilogies over the years where book one is the introduction you know this is where we are introduced to this world and these characters and we find out about the main conflict and then book three is some sort of big final battle and that leaves book two with a bit of an identity crisis you know like what is book two and a lot of authors have trouble figuring out what book two is and so oftentimes the middle book will wind up having nothing happen or it'll have a bunch of stuff happen but none of it seems to contribute at all and night bane somehow manages to do both which is kind of impressive alex aster had more than a year to get this book out and i figured at first that the extra couple of months she was taking was time she needed to rewrite stuff but i guess not you know and the thing is i considered splitting this video into multiple sections kind of like my fourth wing review but i honestly didn't see the point like do i need to explain to you that every character in this book is completely empty or that the many fight scenes feature isla doing weird and impossible stunts or that she has zero chemistry with grim and oro or that isla's dresses are given more description than any character appearance or that there's no recognizable themes anywhere to be found like i don't think i need to tell you that i think you can figure that out on your own just based on well everything else i'm telling you there's very little in night bane that surprised me you know the only thing worth noting is the depths to which the stupidity delves because again it is occasionally very funny and i think that's why the first book was huge not for good reasons a lot of people were just mad at it because it was not properly advertised and it didn't pander to them enough but the first book was huge and night bane doesn't seem to be huge so far you know it seems like it's just kind of come and already gone with very little fanfare like that is i don't know that that's a tragedy in a way like despite its success lightlark has very few actual fans it connected with almost no one like there is a fan wiki for the series but there's nothing on it like no one has added to it it's completely dead and i before filming this looked up to see on youtube to see what other people are saying about night bane and i've seen very few videos on it and those videos have very little viewership like it seems that lightlark has not connected with anyone it doesn't have much of a fan base now i'll say right now lightlark is better than fourth wing like the first and second books that it's better than fourth wing but fourth wing does have a huge fan base because it takes all of the boring story world building character development it just shoves all that to the side in favor of making the self-insert protagonist effortlessly amazing so that she can go around and fuck hot dudes lightlark also has the effortlessly amazing protagonist who goes around and has sex with a whole bunch of hot dudes but the books try to have an actual story and world building and stuff outside of that they just really half ass it whereas fourth wing zero asses it so that there's absolutely nothing to get in the way of the wish fulfillment that is why fourth wing is beloved by the same people who should like lightlark but they don't because again it's just not pandering to them the way that fourth wing does the only reason to read lightlark is to laugh at the ineptitude which is what i am doing like the first two books are amusing i've enjoyed laughing at them and this may seem like a bit of a tangent but bear with me for a few minutes i think that's why we haven't seen very many successful screen adaptations of these really popular young adult fantasy books like in the past few months i've covered three of them i've done red queen i've done fourth wing and now i'm doing night bane which is the second in the lightlark series like there are these are all books that sold really well and outside of that there's a bunch of other young adult fantasy stuff that has also sold really really well but we haven't seen any really big successful adaptations of them which usually you get with really popular books you know like red queen came out eight years ago it was a huge success in terms of publishing but it had no adaptation same with throne of glass it's even older and it's still nothing has come of it yet shadow and bone came out around the same time as these and that was also a massive success and it did get an adaptation on netflix but that was canceled prematurely after only two seasons before that we had the mortal instruments and vampire academy both of which got big screen adaptations which flopped and so we only got the first book adapted and then both of them came back later and had television shows that tried to adapt the story but those also flopped and were prematurely canceled like you could probably write an essay on why all of these books are connecting with audiences in written form but they're failing to do so in visual form however my brief take on that is that a lot of them and light lark and fourth wing are way way worse about this than pretty much anything else i've read lately but a lot of them are just self-insert wish fulfillment and there is literally nothing else to them like there's no other story or anything there like there's nothing to say about isla crown beyond her romantic entanglements and the powers she gets just for existing like she's completely empty as a character that's why i'm not really going into detail about her there's nothing to go into detail about she is empty she barely exists and the world of light lark is complete nonsense it has a little bit of effort put into it like more than you would expect from something like this but it's complete nonsense there's nothing there like these young adult fantasy novels are just isekai light novels but they're aimed at girls instead of being aimed at boys and just like isekai they aren't just all the same like they they are all the same but that's not just the reason to hate them there's also just nothing there at all like again if you are at all familiar with isekai anime manga light novels like there is nothing to them there's no character no themes and there's no story beyond the protagonist being awesome and being the center of attention and stuff like light lark is exactly the same and if that's all you ever have then you're only ever going to appeal to a small niche audience even if that audience is very loud but you can get away with it in the realm of books and light novels because books and light novels are really cheap and really easy to make television shows movies and anime are not they need much bigger budgets and therefore much bigger paying audiences to justify their own existence and that's why so many of these adaptations fail to get off the ground like they can get a bit of an audience but just not enough to pay for everything that's also why these sorts of things get so much hate from people outside their target audience like people gave me shit for criticizing fourth wing as harshly as i did and they were going oh obviously you only hate it because it focuses on romance which first of all those people are fucking stupid and they clearly didn't pay attention to the hour of complaints and criticisms i had about fourth wing secondly those people and other fans of these types of things whether again it's shitty young adult novels or shitty isekai light novels or whatever like if you're a fan of that sort of thing you need to understand that this is pure wish fulfillment that's all it is like there's nothing wrong with that at least in moderation but you need to be cognizant of the facts and you need to stop pretending it's anything other than what it is because that's what's annoying and that's what gets you hate from other people now lightlark is bad night bane is also bad but the author did something that none of her genre contemporaries seem to be doing and that's that she tried she failed horribly but she tried and that's why i just can't bring myself to hate lightlark as bad as it is it is earnest but that's also why it's funny bad instead of boring bad you know because there's energy and passion put into it and that's why i'm going to keep reading you know if there's a third book i'll read that if there's fourth fifth i hope not but if there's fourth fifth sixth i'll probably read those two just because i am just happy that someone is actually trying okay anyways that's all i have to say please like the video comment and subscribe goodbye hello huge thanks to all of my patrons you see these names here yeah these are my patrons uh their names are very cool you should sit here and read all of them especially a thanks to all of my ten dollar and up patrons who are aposavalanan olivia reyan brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay chibzahoy dan anseljevich dark king dio echo flax jalal dalool james m lexie delorm lyza rudakova lord tiebreaker microphone mist boy mitzimona peep the toad roby reviews sad martigan psych xs selene sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla shark vaivictus vimek zole and wezzley all of you you're you're all amazing i swear all of you you're you're great and if you watch until this point well you're even more amazing or so yeah uh see you later goodbye like the video comment on it subscribe consider donating patreon what why am i still talking