 So, what we have right here is an empty bottle of Zoloft pills. And what Zoloft does is you take it and it forces your brain to make more serotonin. You know, it's used to treat depression, you know, so I take these every night before bedtime and basically it just makes me want to kill myself less. Reading Throne of Glass was kind of like taking an anti-Zoloft. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Before I get really started into this, I just want to say that one yes the shirt is available in my merch store and if you can be the first one to guess where the quote is from then you win a cookie. And also I should note that Throne of Glass is a seven book long series and this video is going to be part one because I only read the first three books in the series because like they're already pretty long. It would take me a long, long ass time to read all seven and honestly I just don't think I could fit all of it into one video because I realized part way through the second book I already have plenty of material to work with so I will be reading the rest at some point in the future. I don't know exactly when. And I will say that this isn't the absolute worst thing I've ever read. I mean I'll get into obviously all the reasons why and you know spoiler warning so if you don't want that then you should check out now. But mostly a lot of the story ideas are fine and a lot of the character ideas are also fine but the plot is just horribly structured okay. It feels like it was assembled by a small child playing with Legos and a blowtorch. It's just the pieces do not fit together properly. Anyways, I'm ready to get started but before that a word from this video's sponsor Campfire. Writing stories can be hard. Just ask Sarah J. Moss. But it doesn't have to be. 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Okay, so Throne of Glass, for those who don't know, is all about this teenage girl named Selena Sardothian. And at the beginning of the series she's already this crazy badass assassin lady who's been going around doing, well, doing assassin stuff, killing people, but she was captured a while ago and she spent the last year in this prison called Endovir and what that is is they just capture like political prisoners and such and put them in minds and worked them to death and she's been there for a year. But at the beginning these two guys come in and they tell her, hey, we're the prince of the kingdom, Adolin, that's where we live, and this other guy's the captain of the royal guards and they tell her, hey, we're going to drag you out of here and you're going to participate in a tournament to become the king's champion and if you do that for a couple of years then you win your freedom. At this point we're about 25 to 30 pages in, there's already a lot of problems here. Okay, so first off, Selena being a badass assassin at the beginning of the story. Now she's only 18 years old but I can accept her already being this crazy badass, okay? That's not that weird, it's not that far outside the realm of possibility and it just works for the type of story that we want to be telling so, you know, that's fine. The character would be badass and already know how to fight and everything at the beginning of the story can work just fine, especially if it's a story where like the conflict isn't about like, can they be strong enough to defeat these guys? The conflict can be more about like an emotional side of things like, oh, am I doing the right thing or can I protect my friends even though I'm this big badass, I can't do it, you know, that sort of thing. There's a lot of places you can go with this so I'm not too upset with that. The problem is that it mentions multiple times at the beginning that she has already almost escaped from the prison already. She like came within a hair's breadth of escaping and then they caught her and dragged her back and she's killed a bunch of guards and stuff multiple times. And that's a problem because repeatedly throughout not just the first book but also the second and third, they hearken back to her time at Endovior and talk about how it's like, oh this is the worst thing ever, it's horrible, I was gonna spend the rest of my life there, but at the beginning it's more concerned with making her seem cool and making her seem like a capable fighter and making her seem like a badass than it is with making the prison seem scary and seem intimidating so it doesn't make the prison seem scary or intimidating, it really just doesn't seem that bad. The other thing is that, like I said, there's going to be this big tournament to determine who will become the King's Champion and all the people being put forward are members of the court. Like I mentioned one is the prince, his name is Dorian by the way, and he's putting forward Selena and then there's other like nobles and such who are putting forward their own champions and so reading that you would think like, oh okay this is like some sort of Hunger Games thing, there's gonna go through all these trials and Selena will eventually come out on top and it'll be a super big deal. Not really, like I'll get into more of that later, but why would the King allow people who are his political opponents or political rivals might be a better word for it? Why would he allow them to put forward their own candidates? Like that really doesn't make sense and why have this tournament at all? Like you already have Selena, like you already know she's this badass crazy cool assassin lady, why not just go to her in prison and say, hey work for me for five years and I'll give you your freedom or work for me forever and I'll give you your freedom, something like that. Like she's really not in much of a position to negotiate, but the point is you could just pull her out like you don't need to have this competition and actually throughout the competition you wind up killing people who could have been decent servants on their own. We are 30 pages in and obviously because this is young and old fantasy they're gonna try and go into the romance right away which just doesn't work and so Selena immediately upon seeing Dorian and the captain of the royal guards, his name is Chaol by the way, she just immediately starts thinking wow those two guys are so cute, but what's even worse is the narrator's description of Selena. At a passing glance one might think her eyes blue or gray, perhaps even green depending on the color of her clothing. Up close though those warring hues were offset by the brilliant ring of gold around her pupils, but it was her golden hair that caught the attention of most hair that still maintained a glimmer of its glory. In short Selena Sardothian was blessed with a handful of attractive features that compensated for the majority of average ones and by adolescence she discovered that with the help of cosmetics those average features could easily match the extraordinary assets. I also just want to point out that the original cover of the book had Selena looking like some sort of drow elf and in fact most of the covers of the books look like that. I don't know why because she's a human in the story and she whatever, but then there's other versions of the cover that look like this and for no particular reason I'm gonna put a picture of the author up here. Feel free to draw your own conclusions from that. So Selena agrees to be Dorian's champion and so he takes her off to the capital and they have to hide her identity when she's in the tournament. They call her Lillian something, I forget what her last name is, it's not important but they call her Lillian and the reason they give for hiding her identity is that people might underestimate her. They really don't throughout the trials underestimate her they think she's whatever it's it's really not that important but once you get to the main setting of the story the castle of glass in Rifthold that's actually one of the cooler ideas in the story because it takes place in this gigantic castle which is you know made of glass like it was originally a stone castle but then all the glass is built around it and it's like absolutely enormous it's like the size of modern skyscrapers and stuff and again it's made of glass and it's full of like all these hidden coves and hidden tunnels and stuff and that's cool okay when I read fantasy I want to read about locations like that because those are really neat so I don't have an issue with the castle of glass all I think the castle of glass is actually really cool and it does kind of highlight how this author had some ideas in there but they just weren't put together all that well and I'm not gonna say they were executed poorly either because that's that's a little bit of a different thing they just weren't put together well so once they're in the glass castle Selena meets the king and she meets all the other competitors and the king is this I don't know how to put this he's like the dark overlord of this story like he's the king of Adolin and he has already conquered pretty much their entire content okay he's conquered a terracing which is the kingdom where Selena is originally from and he's conquered a bunch of other neighboring kingdoms and he's just supposed to be this crazy powerful intimidating villain I'll get more on that later in the video and she meets all the other competitors and none of them really stand out cool it's it's whatever it it exists it's it's a thing and then she starts training because during her year in prison she got you know she was halfway starved and she just not in proper shape so she starts training with chaol and I I kind of liked that bit like you know I liked how she wasn't just immediately back in the game as soon as she got out of prison like it does kind of contradict how she was still killing guards and shit while she was in prison but whatever whatever it's not a huge deal I just I'm just glad she has to actually work at becoming this master assassin again the only issue is that well I'm not sure how to put this so at one point the book mentions that as she's getting back into shape and as she's getting proper nutrition into her body again she starts getting her period again and that makes sense biologically like you know if you're starved and women stop having that but still did you need to bring that up was that necessary now while all of this is going on she's just talking with Dorian and chaol and it's pretty clear from this point that they're trying to set up a love triangle and mostly just because it's like that's the kind of book it is and the issue with that is that she just kind of thinks both of them are pretty like she thinks they're both good-looking there's no real like there's no one moment in there that ever seems to suggest that they actually like each other or that she likes either of them for any reason other than they're good-looking and honestly it focuses way more on Dorian which again with this type of story it's usually pretty obvious from the beginning who's gonna be the winner of the love triangle winner of the love triangle but in this case her relationship relationship with chaol is like so weak that by the end of the book I was thinking like were they even trying to do a love triangle or was I just imagining that because this is young adult fantasy I and I genuinely couldn't tell you the answer but don't worry we'll talk more about that later I just want you to keep that in mind as we're going through this because this is the first like 80-something pages of the book none of the trials have happened yet or anything like this is all that's going on so Selena goes through a couple of the trials which are like you know there's an archery contest there's people climbing around the outside of the glass castle trying to capture a flag and to be the first one down you know that sort of thing and while this is going on in between the competitions so what you know competitors like get thrown out after each competition it's like a season of survivor or something but in between all the trials they're being violently killed like they're finding their corpses which are like ripped apart in places in the castle and they don't know what's going on so Selena starts kind of investigating and while this is going on she runs into the other three characters that are kind of important to in this book now the first one is Kane he's just one of the other competitors and he's kind of the favored one to win he's just this kind of big brutish mercenary dude who's good at fighting that's that's kind of it like it's not really a whole lot else to him but you know he's just big brutish dude good at fighting another competitor then there is Nehemia and Nehemia is a princess of a kingdom called a away I think that's how you pronounce it at least it's this however you say that and that was most recently the most recent conquest by Adderland and so she's there trying to sort of protect her people while also not being straight up okay so there's rebellions going on in a way but Nehemia is totally not involved in that in any way and her and Selena just sort of become friends initially like they just start you know they start talking and I mean I'm not gonna say that they have an amazing friendship or anything but I at least bought that they were friends like you know later on when the narrator says like oh they were friends I don't find myself don't really they were oh okay like no they are friends but there's not a whole lot to her other than that like she's this patriotic young lady who wants to protect her people and really hates Adderland and I guess she's secretive but I don't know if that's really a personality trait and the last character that is really important here is this young noble woman named Coltane or Caltane I don't know how to say that and she is someone who is from lower nobility but she really wants to marry into higher nobility so she wants to marry Prince Dorian and she's seeing how he is super into Selena and she just she just starts thinking man fuck that bitch I want to do anything I can to ruin her and so she starts plotting against her and well it's kind of it she's just kind of a jealous bitch and so that's the majority of this book really because while there are a couple of trials that it goes into more detail on some of them it just straight up skips over like there's one where so there's one point where Selena is worried about well she's worried about losing I guess and then it skips ahead and she's like the last trial was fine it was a night throwing competition so I won easily and then the and it just goes on like that and like that's the interesting bit of this story like it's in the summary and everything like that's what you're using to draw in your audience you don't think that'd be important to focus on at all Jesus Christ that that's what I mean by this book being poorly structured and the plot being poorly struck are really the whole series just being poorly structured in terms of plot like there's a lot of stuff that should be in there that's just missing it's like if you were building a tower of Legos and you just pulled some out of the middle like it might still be able to stand afterwards but it's gonna be a lot shakier anyways while Selena is investigating the violent murders of the other competitors she like goes to the library and she starts investigating some of the hidden tunnels that she finds in like her room and stuff and while she's in the library she finds out a couple of important things one she finds a copy of the walking dead and apparently what what happened is that that there are multiple like dimensions in this setting and the walking dead somehow came from our world into theirs that's kind of stupid but I can work with it like I feel like they could have found something else that they could bring from a different world or even if they wanted to go with our world they could have something that's a little more interesting and a little less dumb but whatever I can work with that for now that's just another thing that keep in mind we'll talk about it later and she also finds some more information about what happened to magic because in this world magic just stopped working 10 years earlier or rather on their continent it stopped working 10 years earlier on other continents it still works fine and they don't know exactly why or what happened but that's also around the time that the King of Adderland outlawed magic and if anyone's found practicing it they get executed while Selena's investigating she finds some hints that maybe the king of Adderland somehow suppressed all this magic and somehow he's the reason it's not working anymore and there's no confirmation of that but that's what she thinks and that's what other people are whispering about but obviously you can't be saying it out loud otherwise you might get executed that's also okay that's an okay idea I kind of like how that works but while she is investigating some of the tunnels she finds this tomb with the ghost of Queen Elena in it now Queen Elena was this other well she was a queen of either Terrison or Adderland I forget and I can't be bothered to check but she was a queen of one of those places like many hundreds thousands of years ago when there was a portal to a demon world that opened and demons poured in and almost killed everybody and she was one of the people that fought them back and Elena and Selena once she gets over like oh hey I'm talking to a fucking ghost they just start talking and Elena's like hey beware of the king of Adderland blah blah blah she's not actually very helpful but she does tell Selena about what to do a couple of points there's honestly there's not that much to say a little bit later on while she's going through the tunnels and investigating she finds Kane doing some sort of bizarre magic ritual in a hidden chamber and while she's watching he sees her and he summons a demon and the demon attacks her but she manages to run down to Elena's tomb and grab a sword and she kills it and she almost dies but she doesn't she lives and she gets away but Kane has also escaped by this point and she doesn't say anything to anyone about him summoning it partially because they probably wouldn't believe her anyways but now she knows like okay he's the one that's behind killing all these dudes so then it gets to the final trial which is four people there's Kane Selena and two others and that one is just a duel to not the death but you get your opponent into a position where they can no longer fight and you're actually not supposed to kill your opponent and so Selena defeats the first guy easy Kane defeats his first guy easy and then they're about to fight each other now while this happens Selena gets poisoned and she fights him using and just a wooden staff with an iron rod at the end that Nehemia gives to her remember the princess that I mentioned earlier their friends and she gives it to her and she's like hey this is like the spirit of the people of alway blah blah blah and hearing that you might think it's magic or something it's not it's just a regular staff and considering that Selena is mostly used to fighting with swords and daggers and that she's fighting this guy who won is much bigger than her and also has a lot of combat experience and has killed plenty of people before you think she'd want to use something she's more familiar with but instead she's like yeah you're right I'll take this rod and right before she drinks some look she gets poisoned by Caltein the jealous noble woman who wants to fuck Dorian and while she's fighting she you know she's not able to fight very well and she starts seeing demons and stuff that nobody else can see and Kane is using magic on her blah blah blah and she almost dies but she manages to win in the end cool and Lady Caltein loses her shit while she's watching with everybody else and she starts yelling and she literally turns to this other nobleman there and she starts yelling about how you told me that when we were poisoning her when we were breaking the rules when we did our evil plan like she literally just tells everybody her evil plan and then the other guys like what are you talking about I had nothing to do with that and so she gets arrested and dragged away cool and then well that's that's basically the end of the story like Selena is now the king's champion and she's gonna be his assassin oh and the king specifically mentions like that he knows she's friends with Nehemia and Chao and Dorian now and so he mentions like hey I'm holding them hostage if you decide to not do what I say I'm gonna execute some of them and so that actually makes sense like like you know it that's how he keeps it from just running off and leaving so the problem with this first book is that it's just a prologue like the entire story is just setting up what's to come later like and later it's you know Selena being the king's assassin and deciding I don't want to do this and realizing okay he's evil overlord all that stuff and it's just it's just a prologue is the problem like most of the exposition and stuff could be folded into the next two or three books without losing really that much and again I already mentioned the competition is kind of stupid and the author seems to almost think it's stupid too because she skips over so much of it and it just gets pushed almost to the back burner and I'm not even bringing up like the smaller dumb issues like how Chao is apparently captain of the guards and he's only 22 which is kind of weird but again I can work with that on its own but he's also again captain of the guards and he's the one that goes to Selena's room and wakes her up every morning that you think he'd have one of his underlings do that and also how Selena is like I don't want to wake up and she's like bitching about not having enough pretty dresses and then when she does have pretty dresses she's like drooling over them and how she just loves dancing at balls and how she loves to read and all that like she really doesn't feel like this badass assassin she feels like a whiny bitch honestly well you know what that's not very charitable she feels whiny I don't know if I call her a bitch but I don't know that's the whole first book and it doesn't get much better from here so now we go to the second book which is called crown of midnight now it starts off with Selena being the king's assassin now like she's going off and killing folks and she's already it's only like a month or two later and she's already killed several targets for him now the first major issue with this is that remember I mentioned the love triangle between her Dorian and Chale and how it was very clearly leaning towards Dorian and it's like yeah okay Selena and Dorian are gonna be a thing and Chale is just gonna be off to the side and her thing her relationship with Chale was so weak that I wasn't even sure they were actually trying to do that and I might have been imagining it but within the first couple pages of this book her and Chale are apparently dating or dating and it's just completely forgotten about Dorian so and like they don't even really bring up that she was attracted to Dorian before and so even just setting aside their lack of romantic chemistry I find it really funny because it seems to me like Sarah J Maas was at first thinking yeah okay I really want her to end up with Dorian but after the first book she decided she didn't like that or she decided it didn't really make sense and so she just changed her mind and shifted it over to Chale but she didn't actually do that in the story she just decided uh yeah retcon it's just really stupid and funny so pretty early on we discover that Selena is not actually killing the targets that the king sends her after she's going up to them saying hey you need to disappear all fake your death for you just run away and then they're doing that and she's bringing like fake corpses to the king and he's believing her sure that's fine she's also living in immense luxury which like I said doesn't make her seem like much of an assassin but whatever that's not not the worst thing and whatever and then she keeps going down to the tombs to talk to the Queen Elena and while she's there she meets this magical talking doorknob named Mort and that's not too stupid I don't think I I wouldn't even really say it's stupid at all in a fantasy setting like you know there's magic and she's asking like but wait magic is broken he's like well my spell was cast before the magic got broken so it's fine and you know just that sort of thing and Mort is not great but he's a little bit funny now and again so you know not a huge issue and but he's mostly just there for exposition so whatever so her next target is this guy named Archer who is the king of Adolin thinks that she's working with or thinks that Archer is working with the rebels so he sends Selena after him and she actually knows him from before so she's like hey dude I'm gonna fake your death but so just run away I'm gonna give you a little bit of time but before then just get your shits together and then leave and he tells her but wait if you don't kill me I can give you information about you know the rebels about what's going on that sort of thing and apparently the heir to Terrison which again is where Selena's from apparently the rebels think that the heir to the throne there is still alive and they're looking for her or gathering around her or something but he doesn't really know that much about it and so she's like okay just feed me info and I'll leave you alone for a while now this is fine this isn't this is actually okay but again wait it gets worse so while Selena is investigating she almost gets killed by somebody but she manages to kill him first and then she drags her ass back to the castle and Chao finds her gets her to a healer and so they argue about the assassinations Chao's like I can't believe you're doing all this for the king even though he's also loyal to the king and he's protecting the king and he's helping the king and throughout this whole series so far a pretty big part of his character has been his reluctance to do anything against the king but whatever we'll set that aside but yeah he argues about that and then eventually Selena just tells him about how she's faking the deaths and how she hasn't killed anybody and he seems relieved and then they bang and well that's it they bang they have sex that's not even really treated as a big deal in the story I don't think so while all of this is going on Prince Dorian has a few little interludes where the story follows him and apparently he has magic now like he he loses control of his temper a few times he's like oh shit things are like freezing around me and this isn't good because father finds out I will be killed I need to look into this so he goes to this carnival or traveling fair that's nearby and there's a fortune telling witch there and so he talks to her asked her about it and she says yeah you have magic and also there's still magic around the king couldn't get rid of all of it and she seems to kind of confirm that like yeah the king of Adderland was the one who broke magic I guess that's the best way of putting it suppressed magic maybe might be a better word for it and while this is going on we also find out about this thing called the witch kingdom that used to exist now this is another one of those like ideas for like the setting for the world building that I think is really cool and it's just not explored properly at least not yet because what it is is apparently witches are a separate species from human in this they live a really long-ass time they can use magic they have iron teeth and their nails are also iron and they're just really strong really fast at you know all that kind of crazy stuff and they apparently used to have their own kingdom somewhere on the continent and it was destroyed about 500 years before the story takes place and so it's mostly a wasteland now but there are witches that want to bring it back that's really cool I like the idea of okay this powerful kingdom that used to be ruled by magic users and now it's gone and they're trying to bring back I think that's a cool idea it's just they haven't really done all that much with it yet at least not the first three books they might do more later and I'm actually holding out hope that they will because as strange as it may sound I actually want these kind of books to be tolerable Archer and some of his rebel friends take chaol hostage and they leave a note and Selena finds it and she loses her shit and goes after him now they have him chained up in this warehouse area and or this I guess it is just a warehouse and so Selena being angry she literally jumps from a roof across the street into the warehouse through a window and then she kills like 20 people and then Archer tells her wait wait you can just have chill now you can go now there's a couple of problems with that for starters she's an assassin you know wouldn't it be neat if just once there was a story that focused on an assassin and they weren't super bad ass fighters like they were good at sneaking around and poisoning people like and just being unseen like you know the stuff that assassins should do but they weren't like these mega ultra badass warriors like and while all that was happening while Selena was just cutting through these guys which is a very boring action scene by the way like all most of the action scenes in this are just like yeah she killed 20 guys like a whirlwind and then everyone was like what and then she won like that's how most of them are written but while all this was going on I realized that Selena is basically just an edgy rogue character being played by a first time D&D player because think about it she has the backstory her parents were killed she was taken in by this master assassin and trained as an assassin and then she spent time in prison now she's being forced to kill against her will and like all that it's like it has the elements of an edgy backstory but the player doesn't really know how to play that edgy character very well so she still winds up being pretty nice overall except when her friends get hurt and she also doesn't really know how to play as a rogue because she just charges in and attacks everybody rather than sneaking around and but you know she's first-time player so the DM just goes easy on her and actually lets her win that's what this entire series feels like to me so anyways while she's away rescuing Chale Nahemia back at the castle winds up being killed and I should mention that her and Nahemia were also arguing about her being the king's assassin and Nahemia was upset with her but she never told her that she was faking the deaths anyways Nahemia is killed Selena kind of gets really sad loses her shit almost kills Chale and then she gets arrested thrown in the dungeons for a while she runs off gets revenge on the guy that killed Nahemia he was working on someone else's orders though and then she bear actually he was kind of sort of working on archers orders but that's a little too complicated I'm probably not even gonna go into it here whatever but yeah she gets revenge and then at Selena not Selena at Nahemia's grave Selena sings this song for her and Chale is like wait I don't recognize the language that's in I think that's the language of the they because oh yeah they exist in this world they just don't really show up or or even mentioned very much until this point so anyways she goes down into the catacombs where Elena's ghost hangs out and she finds this poem and then she goes to the fair and speaks to the same witch that Dorian spoke to and the witch is like shocked by this poem that she brings up and when she presses her on the issue a little bit more she the witch brings up how you know a long time ago demons came through from another world and that's what Queen Elena was fighting and they managed to seal the opening to the other world using these three things called weird keys or word keys weird keys whatever and apparently the three word keys are like full of just crazy immense power unlike anything else in the world and if you were to gather all three of them then you could open the portal and bring in hordes of demons into the world but if you only had one or two you could still open it little and bring in a couple of demons and the witch specifically mentions that she thinks the king of Adderlon has one of the weird keys and he used that to suppress magic now again that's pretty neat idea I like that and it seems to be trying to set up the king as this again as this powerful imposing figure but he's in this story so little that it just doesn't work but anyways the witch tries to kill Selena it doesn't work Selena kills her and cool she goes back to the castle starts investigating more magic stuff and this is where I have to bring up the walking dead again because while she's in the castle library she just finds the book again and she looks through it and apparently there are spells in there that she can use and that still work despite the king's suppression of magic like she found a copy of the walking dead graphic novel you know the story about people on the east coast of the US fighting zombies and it had it came from our world into theirs and they start casting magic spells from it and when I read that it felt like someone was playing a prank on me like like Sarah J Maas wrote like she didn't write that in most of her books like like most copies of the book don't have anything about the walking dead in it but just specifically the ones that I got had that little bit thrown in there just to fuck with me like I'm gonna bring this up and other people are gonna be like I've read those books I don't remember anything about the walk it feels like that's what's happening so anyways while she's casting spells from the walking dead Dorian also shows up and they're walking around in the hidden tunnels and anyways a demon shows up and her and Dorian managed to kill it using both Selena's badassness and Dorian's new magic and she's like whoa Dorian has magic that's crazy and it was after they kill it they find Archer who's also down in the catacombs whatever you want to call them just the hidden areas and he has a book and he's like casting this weird spell and they find him he's going through this ritual and apparently he I just he killed Nehemia it doesn't really make sense why but he did and then he opens a portal and another demon comes out and they start fighting it while Archer runs away and at some point Selena goes inside the portal with some of her friends so like they go to the other world and while she's there she turns into like this fey form you know which I am at I assume that that's what this drow elf looking thing on the cover of most of the I assume that's what that's supposed to be I assume that's supposed to be her fey form but whatever I don't actually know and while she's there she like shoots out fire and you know does magic and stuff she kills the demon and then when they leave everyone's like yo Selena what was that and she admits okay I'm part fey like she what it is is apparently her great-grandmother was a fey which means she's only one eighth fey so Selena is just as much fey as I am Japanese which is to say not very much but anyways yeah she does that she runs after Archer he begs for his life she's like oh Nehemia would have let you go but I'm not a good person whatever she tries to be badass it doesn't really sound that bad as she kills him and then not long after that the king sends her on a mission to another country called Wendlin which is like across the ocean from them on another continent and he says he sends her there to assassinate the royal family so that the country will be thrown into chaos and Adolin can invade and take over and she's like yeah okay I can do that and in the back of her head she's thinking like okay I can actually do other stuff while I'm there and while it's happening Chaol starts he realizes hey she's part fey and then he's like that that's a little weird and he starts looking through genealogical records of terraces nobility terraces royal family and he remembers that Selena said that her parents were killed on the edge of a riverbank and she only escaped by jumping in and he looks at it and he looks at the apparently the daughter of the royal family of Terrison was killed when she fell into a riverbank and she was also one eighth fey and he just realizes oh Selena is the princess of Terrison the lost princess and he is just like oh shit I'm sending her to Wendland she has family there she's gonna not do what the king says even though by this point I kind of think the king is evil this is bad and they're just that's how it ends and okay I'm not saying that reveal can't be done well but it just feels weird coming at the end of the second book because the this first two books are kind of structured almost like it's gonna be a trilogy but then it just goes on much longer so had this second book been the second entry in a trilogy that might have been okay but as it stands it just feels weird because like I said the whole first book feels like a prologue and this one feels like well the actual story is starting to get going but it still has a lot of bits that feel like it's just there to expose it you know and so had you sort of combined them and cut out some of the unnecessary bits then that might have worked as a good reveal at the end but as it stands it just it just feels like it's in an odd place and that comes back to again the same problem over and over again the plot is just poorly structured and a lot of the events should happen in different orders I think so now we move on to the third book which is the final one we'll cover today and that one is called air of fire now there's three main storylines in that that don't really intersect so I'm just gonna go and Salinas takes up the bulk of the time so I'm gonna get to her last but they don't really intersect at all and so I'm just gonna go over them one at a time now the first one follows a new character whose name is Manon and she's a witch now first time you see her we realize she's just fucking crazy she just likes killing people she likes causing pain she's just a sadistic crazy person cool um and her storyline is well it's interesting in that it gives a little bit more insight into witches and witch culture and some other aspects of the setting like you know me I'm a sucker for good worldbuilding and I like that we're getting to see some of the stuff from a different angle um but it does feel a little odd at this point because for most of the books up until this point it's felt like magic does not play a huge role in this world and that there aren't that many magical creatures running around because when demons come up it's like oh shit demons that's a big deal uh but apparently witches are just like you know they're rare but they're also like yeah they're there they're just sort of normal maybe normal is not the right word but you know they're not that it's not that big a deal if you find one so and that happens a little bit later on too like Salina runs into some skin walkers and it just feels weird like oh I guess skin walkers just sort of walk around in this world like had it been that had it been brought forward earlier that characters could run into magical creatures like if they saw like just some pixies flying around or something or like there's a dragon flying in the background or something like that then it probably could have worked because just be like oh skin walkers okay that's just a different type of magical creature that's okay that's a thing but as it stands both that and the witches feel just a little bit off like like it's a good piece of the story but it doesn't fit in to the right place quite right so the majority of man in storyline is just her basically trying to prove herself as the heir to becoming like the leader of the witches because uh she the witches are working for the king of Adderlin and apparently they're just training and again that's this whole book really is just they're training to go to Adderlin to kill all the rebels with the king and then they're going to go back to the wastes and try and restore the witch kingdom and man in is going to be uh the heir to that and okay that doesn't sound great on its own and it really isn't because again the whole story is mostly just training but um basically a quick run through is that they're training with weverns because they ride weverns into battle and uh the various witches are kind of fighting over which wevern is the best one because they all want to get the best pick and at first man in wants to get this really big aggressive one named Titus uh but they put Titus into a pit with a bait weaver and while man in is watching them fight she sees the bait weaver and even though it's a lot smaller is like a much better more ferocious fighter and she's like okay that one's a warrior it wants to survive so she kills Titus and helps and takes that one she names it Abraxos and at first that kind of made sense like it made sense why she would want it because like okay it's a fighter it's you know it's uh even if it's not the biggest it's going to be the best one but as it goes on you realize that Abraxos is like crippled and they have to they have to put some of his teeth they have to give him fake teeth and they have to give him fake spikes on his tail and they have to go through this whole thing getting spider silk so that she can repair his wings because his wings are crippled and it just it feels I don't know at first it made sense but as it goes on you realize like it would have been just a lot smarter for her to pick the first one but okay whatever and then at the end um she just proves herself becomes leader in a not particularly interesting climax it's just her flying on weavers and then she saves somebody's life and whatever and I guess on its own the storyline isn't awful but it feels really really disconnected from the rest of the book and keep in mind these are all pretty long okay this last one airifier this copy here is five hundred sixty five pages that's that's like good length for an epic fantasy for young adult fantasy that's really really long and when you're that long you don't need to every little bit of the story in there there's a lot that you can cut out it's just it's really obnoxious the second storyline follows dorian chaol and this new character named sorsha all back at the glass castle now okay a lot of this is sort of like I don't want to say political entry because it's really not it's basically just like hey there's some stuff we have to keep secret from the king but it's again it's not awful it's just that like man in story it feels a little disconnected or rather parts that feel disconnected and could have been cut out and for a book this long you really should have cut it out but anyways uh so sorsha is a healer at the castle and she's also in love with dorian and I know they could come up with a reason for why she's in love with dorian but the author decided not to because the narrator literally just says she was in love with him from the moment she saw him but she's a commoner and she would get in trouble if she tried anything so cool anyways she finds out about dorian's magic and she helps him get it under control so it doesn't go crazy at an inopportune moment and he gets in trouble okay that's fine but the biggest part of this storyline is chaol meeting this new guy named adion who is uh well he's selena's cousin for starters and he is basically he is the general that works up in terrason and he's suppressing all the rebels so like even though he's from terrason he is quote a loyal subject to the king and he does what he asks and all that but apparently he is also working with the rebels and he's feeding them info and chaol tells him about selena being the princess and her real name is alin by the way but that that just that sounds weird and by now she has three names that she's known by so i'm sticking with selena but anyways so yeah he gives them that info they start working together and well that's pretty much the whole plotline like they're just finding out little tiny bits of information and sending them off and trying to avoid being caught and in the end they find out how the king uh took away magic and what he did was he built these three towers all around the continents which form a sort of triangle and somehow those are suppressing magic and they think if they destroy any one of them then that will fix things and like okay that that's kind of cool that's a neat idea and it definitely sets itself up for some fun adventures later on so i got i got no issue with that uh but uh the king finds out about their activities so he takes all of them hostage in his throne room and he kills sorcia uh which apparently she was feeding the rebels info while all this was going on um all right whatever also dorian falls in love with her too at some point so he loses this shit and uh he starts fighting the king but the king using his word key is able to defeat him and the others run away now i will say that all these three storylines have their own climax and of the three that's the only climax actually kind of lights because i know i was describing it in very unflattering terms a second ago but uh when they're first taken prisoner and the king is like threatening to execute sorcia on the spot if they don't tell him anything it really does it really is a pretty tense scene and it really does feel like oh if they fuck up this girl's gonna get killed and while she's not an amazing character while i don't particularly like her i would still feel bad for her and i would still feel bad for dorian because he's not super interesting but he's at least a decent person so while all of this is going on it does actually feel pretty tense and when sorcia is killed and when dorian is captured it is actually kind of sad but the others managed to get away and you're like okay they'll fight another day so this climax works okay it's not amazing but it works so the third storyline which like i mentioned takes up the majority of the book follows selena in wendland the other country where she was sent to kill the royal family and while she's there she uh at first like just looks out and sees the prince of the country who's like her distant cousin or something and she just kind of hates him because his people love him okay cool uh she obviously doesn't try to kill him she runs off and tries to meet her great great aunt mave who is like the queen of the fey and so while she's there she meets this other fey whose name is roan and he takes her over to where queen mave is and her mave her aunt refuses to tell her about the word keys because selena is like hey i want to know about the word keys i want to know where i can find the other two that the king doesn't have and what sort of powers they do have and what how i can destroy them maybe or if i can't destroy them how i can at least hide them but mave refuses to tell her until she gets her magic under control because you know like uh like i said when she went through the portal into that other world and fought the demon she could breathe or not breathe fire but she could shoot out fire and stuff but she can't really figure out how to do it in the real world because she is just constantly in her human form she can't shift into her fey form she's she's can't control it so uh mave has roan train her and this is kind of an issue because well not only is the majority of this storyline just her training and her learning to use her magic like that's kind of boring on its own and it's not done particularly well but what makes it even worse is that up until this point selena has been this crazy badass assassin like she's already known how to fight she's already known how to do a lot of stuff so she hasn't really had to learn it's been more about okay investigating stuff and using her skills in important ways and meeting new friends blah blah blah but now she's going from being this crazy badass to just being this trainee and it feels like a bit of a whip lash in terms of her character growth like it feels like character regression almost even though it really isn't to go back to dmd it's multi-classing into a magic class but it just feels off you know like it doesn't feel like something that character would do also while all of this is going on she has a crazy lady boner for roan so i i guess we're just trying to go back to love triangle or something whatever and so while all this is going on he's trying to get her to shift into her fey form and she just cannot do it uh he finds that the only way to get her to do it is to just get her angry and then she'll she'll turn okay that's fine but uh the first time he does it he like bites her and she gets angry and turns to her fey form and is able to shoot out fire and stuff and i mean that's fine but i feel like in a story like this you should have it happen once maybe twice and then after that like okay she can control it at least somewhat whereas in this it happens once with her being bitten uh twice the second time is with uh like i mentioned before skin walkers they get attacked by some skin walkers and almost died but she manages to shift at the last second because she hates them so much and then kills them and then the third time when roan takes this innocent kid hostage and puts him in a position where she has to save him and she can't save him unless she gets goes all fey uh and after that she finally can sort of control it mostly but that takes up several hundred pages of the book oh my god like if i can describe it in that much detail and give you the whole gist of that like that is bad okay that is very very bad like i'm getting wheel of time flashbacks here because as much as i like wheel of time it's a very horribly structured series because there are entire books where basically nothing happens nothing advances and this feels a lot like that so once selena manages to get her magic under control demons attack and i should mention real quick that the way magic works in this is not super interesting or unique but it's at least a little bit different because what it is is people who only have a little bit of magic inside them they can only do a little bit at a time but it refills quickly whereas people like selena and roan who have a whole lot of magic they can do crazy stuff but once their reservoir is empty it takes much longer to fill up so they have to rest for days afterwards that's actually kind of cool i do like that idea but anyways you know demons attack and they're under the control of the king of atterland and so selena just fights them using her fire and she manages to kill them eventually but uh before they kill her or before she kills them they they like feed off of her pain i guess so they like drag her into this dark sphere and so they can't see her or anything and they just start feeding on her bad memories and she's like no this is awful and honestly the climax would be okay but there is just a really obnoxious flashback in the middle which shows selena as a child uh she was in terrason with the royal family and the king of atterland actually came for a visit and apparently her powers went out of control but uh it wasn't her fault it was actually the king of atterland that did it whatever and then atterland attacked killed her parents and she manages to escape and apparently the big twist here is that her parents sacrificed themselves to get her to safety that's that's not much of a twist really that that feels pretty standard especially for a story like this but whatever uh and so like i said the climax could be good but there's just it's just that obnoxious flashback in the middle really wrecks the pacing of it so it it's it's bad of the three i would say this is the worst and also when it happens there's still 90 pages left in the book so when i got to the end of it i was like well what the fuck is gonna happen now so after that selena finally goes back to mave and now that she has her magic under control mave tells her about the weird keys and she doesn't tell her that much about him she tells her that uh the king of atterland probably already has two and one of them is this like black ring that he wears and uh while she's listening selena realizes that this amulet her parents gave her is the third one and uh she realized oh okay i lost that years ago and now my old assassin master has it so she knows okay i have to go back to the other continent and i'll get it there and so we know that's where the second the next book is going to be and also while this is happening uh she manages to convince mave to let Rowan out of his like blood oath to her so and then Rowan makes a blood oath to selena so now he's her forever observant and anyways the book ends with her getting on a ship back to the other continent and she's thinking i'm gonna be queen even though she's never wanted to be queen before this like throughout the whole assassin bit at the beginning of crown of midnight at the beginning of the second book she's only thinking about how i just got to keep this up for a few more years and then i'm free i'm on my own and it's just why like this character could be good but she just goes in so many different directions at once that nothing feels as though it's natural progression so even though she's far from like being the bitchiest character ever or the stupidest character ever or the most whiny character ever just nothing feels consistent with her and so well it's it's just dumb so like i said um this isn't like the worst series i've ever read at least not so far but it is very long and the story is very poorly structured which makes it feel even longer than it really is like if the story was just uh if it was just rearranged a bit like the first book being basically a prologue and having a whole lot of unnecessary training in the third book you could probably have made these a lot better if you just cut a lot of that out and rearrange some of what was left but as it stands it's just man it's obnoxious and not to mention that a lot of the exposition in here is supposed to be like a shocking twist but they always always have to use it as a shocking cliffhanger like it can't just be like oh that's a twist let's examine it a little further like Selena being the princess of terrorism and there's really that's kind of a feels like a twist just for the sake of having a twist because there's not much hinting at it beforehand like as far as we knew Selena was just some orphan who became an assassin but whatever and you know the world building is kind of the same way like it's a lot of good ideas it's a lot of good individual pieces but they're just kind of thrown together and they don't fit together all that well like i mentioned the glass castle is really cool it's a really cool setting it's kind of obnoxious that all three of the books so far have had a lot of time spent there but it's still really cool i like to imagine that and the witch kingdom that's a cool idea i like that and i guess a lot of the stuff with the fey is kind of interesting because you know they are immortal and very powerful and they don't really they feel kind of alien i guess would be a good word for it more than anything with this book or with these books i'm frustrated and kind of disappointed so far like i don't think it's the worst thing ever yet there's still four books it could go really bad but it man it could be so much better and i know i haven't really talked about the characters so far but most of them are just kind of bland because in the end they're all defined by the romantic relationships like chaol is pretty much completely defined by his romantic relationship with selena dorian is completely defined by his romantic relationship with selena at first and then later on his relationship with sorcia and rowan the the fey trainer from the third one is just defined by this sad backstory he has about how his girlfriend was killed and just that's really all there is to most of these guys and the only one that really isn't is the king of atterland but the thing is he um well they're like i said they try to paint him as this intimidating crazy powerful villain that we're supposed to be afraid of but there's just he's not in the story enough for that to work and when he does show up it's mostly like okay i'm just sitting here and i'm threatening you that's all he does like we see a little bit of his power uh at the end when he fights dorian but that's it and so yeah i don't have a whole lot else to say it's just disappointing and frustrating so far we'll see where it goes from here thanks again to campfire for sponsoring this video and huge thanks to all my patrons especially my ten dollar and up patrons oppo salvalainen christopher hawkins joseph pendograph and a new one tobacco crow as well as all the other names here if your name's on there you're awesome and if you watch this far you're also awesome please you know like the video comment subscribe try to spread it around so more people do that and part two is coming eventually bye