 There are a lot of books out there that just sound really, really weird and funny on the surface, like especially self-published ones. Like you can look through the self-published section on the Amazon store or you can just, you know, dig through the bargain bin at used bookstores and stuff. But like whether you're talking self-published, professional published, there's a lot of books out there that just sound really weird and funny on the surface, you know. There are literal fanfictions that people publish. There's Drex that no publisher would touch, self-inserved power fantasies, lazy attempts at cash grabs. There's a surprising amount of books that are basically just people trying to write, anime, you know, etc. There's a lot of these. And there are so many that no one will ever discover. You know, they'll never have like any sort of following or anything. YouTubers will never talk about them and make fun of them. And a big reason for that is just that outside of the setup and a few bits scattered throughout maybe, they're just really boring. You know, they sound crazy and fun and over the top, but they're just not. You know, things like Evermore, which I reviewed a few months ago, you should check it out, or Empress Theresa or the Fifth Sorceress, like those are really great to read and review and talk about because there is just constant insanity in all of those. Like they sound crazy because they are crazy. But then there's a lot of others that are unknown because there's just nothing to say about them or there's very little to say about them. You know, they sound crazy and there's a few details throughout which are crazy, but outside of that they're just really dull. You know, a lot of times the author will take themselves too seriously to do anything silly on purpose, but they don't have enough imagination to really do anything crazy and weird and funny on accident either. And you probably guessed by now Leviathan is one of those. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Also, yes, I'll get to the stuff in the title later. I swear it's not clickbait. This guy really does write propaganda for the Russian government. And that is a shame because this book sounds really cool on the surface. You know, it sounds like it might be a cool, fun story, or at the very least it would be something so stupid you can laugh at it. Like I mentioned it on a live stream that I was on a little while ago and the other people there agreed with me. They said, yeah, that sounds kind of cool on the surface, but then I explained a little more and like it's just, it's mostly just boring. You know, it's based on Christian mythology. You know, it's about Noah as in the guy from the story of the great flood. He built the ark because God talked to him and said, hey, I'm going to kill everybody except you and your family. And this is long before that though. Like this is hundreds of years before when he's a young man that just follows his young life living amongst, you know, angels and Nephilim and dinosaurs. We'll get to the dinosaurs later. Don't worry. On his journey to be the chosen one by God, you know, it starts off with him before he does all that and like how does he become that person that we know from the story in the Bible? Which sounds kind of cool. Also, people have gotten salty with me before because I refer to Christian mythology as Christian mythology. That's, that's what a religion is when you don't believe in it. You know, Christianity is just as real as Greek myth and Egyptian myth and Aztec myth and all those others. Like they're just as real. Like just because people take it more seriously in the modern world that doesn't make it more real or any less mythological. This setup for a story though sounds really neat. You know, it is fertile ground for something different. There can be fun adventures. There can be a new look at popular myth. And it's it's just not that like not even close. Like I know it's still early in the year, but Leviathan is probably going to be a very good contender for the worst book I read in 2023. Not maybe not for the reasons you're thinking, but it's it's horrible. Don't get me wrong. And before anybody gets butt hurt, this book is not bad because it's Christian. I'm not bashing it for that reason, nor am I bashing the author for that reason. It's bad because it's bad. You know, Percy Jackson is about Greek mythology. I don't believe in Greek mythology. The Percy Jackson books are still really good. Likewise, Prince of Egypt is based on the book of Exodus from the Bible. Again, that's not a true story, but it's a good movie. You know, it takes the original Bible story expands on it gives the characters some personality. We see the relationship between Ramses and Moses, which is fantastic. The animation and the soundtrack are great. Like it's it's not a real story. It's still a very, very good movie. Now I'm preempting the inevitable hate because conservative Christians will tell you that dog shit tastes like candy if the dog claims to love Jesus first. And if you don't believe me on that, like just look up reviews of some crappy Christian movies online if you want proof of that. Like for real, just just look through some of those. You realize like, okay, these people don't actually care about the quality of the movie. They're just there to have their beliefs validated somehow. Just like with a lot of crappy Christian movies that have come out lately, like, you know, the God's not dead movies. This leviathan is really not aimed at convincing anyone of their viewpoint nor is it even about representing the values of Christianity. It's just there for people to jerk themselves off about how they're better than everybody else, which is kind of a shame because some of these stories do have a lot of potential. You know, like Christian stories could be good, but so many of them can't just be a good story that has Christian themes in it or that is based on Christian stories, like again, Prince of Egypt. But they just have to sacrifice everything at the altar of showing off that everyone who disagrees with them is stupid, ugly, evil, and hated by God. You know, it can't just be, hey, here's my beliefs and values represented in this greater story about something else. It has to be, hey, here's something that's specifically about how I am better than you. Like if you ever watch, again, the God's not dead movie, the first one, all the atheists are evil and that's done completely at the expense of giving them any real motivation or characters. Like they can't even be good villains nor are they realistic people. They are just evil. Why? Because those people disagree with the creators, therefore they are evil. Except leviathan, despite being a Christian book, doesn't even have that. Like, at least then I would be able to hate read it and point out all the crap in there that sucks about it. But I can't even do that. This book is empty. Like, oh my God, it is empty. It's not bad because bad would be something. And it's not even boring. It is empty. Like as far as the plot goes, there's like six events that actually occur in this book and it's like, oh, this copy's over 400 pages long. So that there's not a lot going on here, even though it's somewhat long. The characters here, I don't even know if I could call them two-dimensional. Like they are there to, once in a blue moon, spout religious dogma. Like, again, they don't even do that very much. But like once in a blue moon it does happen. The characters are there to praise Noah for just being the best and if they're villains, they're there to talk about how I am evil. And they usually don't have any real reason for being evil. They just, they just are. And mostly, though, it's not even that much. They just exist. Like there are so many characters that are there and they do nothing in the story. They have no identity, no personality, no nothing. They're, they just exist and they're there. And there are dozens of them. This book was not written for entertainment. It doesn't seem like it was written to be wish fulfillment for the author. It doesn't even really seem like it's trying to push an ideology. And if it is trying to push an ideology, it's so weak that it's almost unnoticeable. And it's not even fun to like read and point and laugh at. Like, there's maybe three things in this book that are dumb enough to really amuse me. And there's exactly one moment in the entire book that made me laugh. And it was on the last page too. So I had to go through a lot of crap to get there. And it wasn't like good spirited laughing along with the book. It wasn't like it finally made a good joke or anything. Like, I mean, it was harsh and judgmental laughter. If the author was there when I read it, I would point in his face and laugh directly at him. This book is literally just telling the story of Noah's early life, but there's no new details, no new insights, no nothing. You know, how does he become the guy that God decides, okay, he's pure and free of sin, so he needs to build the ark? I'm going to talk to him specifically. Like, how does he become that guy? I don't know. Like, why is he so pure and free of sin? What made everyone else around him turn away from God? What sort of society came out of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden? How is faith in God affected by only being a few generations removed from Adam, you know, the first person who spoke or the first man who spoke to God? All of these could have been interesting questions to ask, but we don't do that. Noah is just pure and amazing and good from the beginning, just because. Not a single thing here has changed or even really expanded upon in any meaningful way from the Bible. It's just longer. And that's a shame. Like, why is that? You know, the source material is rich, you could do a lot with it. It does form a basis for some decent fantasy. You know, the Bible has angels and monsters and demons and stuff. Like, you could have fun with that, but that's the thing again. It's fantasy, and the author doesn't think that this is fantasy. He believes every word of it is literally true. Yeah, this is one of those books that's more of a look into the author's deranged mind than anything else, because, oh my god, this guy's a piece of work. So allow me to introduce RM Huffman, that's short for Richard Mark Huffman. This guy is a doctor, an anesthesiologist, who lives in Texas, and he's also a nutcase. He is a young earth creationist, meaning he thinks the world is only a few thousand years old. For those of you unaware, I hate to burst your bubble. That's not true. That's what the Bible says, but it's not true. That was written by people who didn't understand the world around them and were trying to make sense of it. We know better now. Usually, creationists will claim that scientists are all in on some massive conspiracy to do something, you know, like they made up the theory of evolution and everything around it, and everything, well basically all science, is made up because, I don't know, reasons, but like they just claim that. I don't know if that's what Huffman believes, but many others do. I do know, however, that Huffman believes humans and dinosaurs lived side by side. Specifically, he thinks that they lived side by side. They used to be called dragons. They were hunted to extinction sometime in the Middle Ages, and then when they dug up their bones in the 19th century, they were renamed to dinosaurs in order to make people not believe in the Bible. This is a real thing. Like, I know some of you are probably having your minds blown and just going, wow, this is one crazy guy. It's not one crazy guy. There are plenty of other people who unfortunately believe this. According to the acknowledgments at the beginning of the book, Huffman literally believes we are all descended from Noah, like literally. He just thinks that. I'm not sure how he thinks that one family of white people created all of humanity. You know, like again, there's one family of white people, and now we have black people and Asian people and Indian people and, you know, everybody else. I'm not sure how that happened. And also, hey, Huffman, if you believe all of this literally happened, how is this fantasy? Like, you yourself have called this fantasy. Wouldn't it be historical fiction if that were the case? Because I'm sure at some, if I were to ask you to your face, you would say some of this is dramatized and not meant to be taken 100% literally. But you do believe that humans and angels and Nephilim lived side by side and dinosaurs. That's somehow the dumbest part. But you do literally believe that. So how is it fantasy and not historical fiction? Because your own publisher even labels it as fantasy. They say fiction, fantasy, action and adventure, fiction, fantasy, dragons and mythical creatures. Your own publishers making fun of you, dude. And let me be clear, being Christian or being religious, I should say, does not make you dumb. Like, it means you're wrong, but it doesn't mean you're an idiot. You know, you can have one or two dumb beliefs while still being overall intelligent or an overall decent person. You know, like as long as you're not a dick about it, I really don't care what your religious beliefs are. We can still be friends. However, being a creationist does make you dumb. Because in order to reach that point, you have to ignore, well basically, the world around you because you're just dismissing so many different fields of science with so much different evidence that shows the world is older than it is. You know, you have to ignore geology, biology, astronomy, archaeology, history, zoology, paleontology, and more. And this isn't like stuff you have to take on faith. You know, you can observe the things they talk about yourself and realize, oh, okay, yeah, the world's not 6,000 years old. Now, people are allowed to believe all this if they want. Like, again, it's really stupid, but they're allowed to think it. They're allowed to tell other people about it and try and convince them of it. But just like they are allowed to voice their beliefs, you know, I'm not going to try and stop them. Like, who am I to do that? But just like they're allowed to voice those beliefs, I'm allowed to make fun of them for it. You know, it goes both ways. You have a constitutional right to be a dumbass. Huffman is also an anti-vaxxer because if you're going to be a dipshit, you may as well go ahead and get dipshit bingo. Like, I'm really not joking when I say you're for the safety of this man's patients. Like, again, not joking, not trying to be snarky in any way. Rejecting vaccines and evolution, I mean, at that point, you're just ignoring almost all the laws of biology. So I don't know how he could possibly do his job as a doctor well. Like, did he get his degree from Tijuana or some shit? Like, I, I don't know. But all I'm saying is if you're ever getting surgery in Frisco, Texas, and your anesthesiologist is named Richard Mark Huffman, maybe request a different one. On top of that, there is his very extreme, very public and very violent, in some cases, hate for the LGBT community, Muslims, Jews, people who are the wrong type of Christians, like they basically people who disagree with him in any way. Like, I straight up would not trust this guy to provide care to anyone. Like, if he found out a patient was gay or something, like he literally believes gay people are possessed by demons. So I don't think that I could trust him to do, to give them proper care, you know. There's a common saying that you have to respect other people's beliefs, and no you don't. You respect the right to have those beliefs, but you reserve the right to point and laugh at them when their beliefs are demonstrably stupid. You do need to acknowledge their beliefs, though. You know, religious conservatives tend to be just completely unable to conceive of other people believing things differently than they believe. Like, they think that everyone agrees with them, but some of us pretend not to for some reason. You know, trying to gain some advantage or something. Like, that's why the atheist professor in God's Not Dead actually does believe in God. He just hates him because, I don't know, his mom died or whatever. That's a terrible movie. Like, people like Huffman and other extreme religious conservatives just lack any sort of imagination and they lack any sort of empathy. Like, they straight up do not understand other people. And to add on top of the pile of why he's a shitty person, he also writes for Russia today. Oh, sorry, RT. Yeah, totally different thing. They changed their name a couple of years ago, and I think RT doesn't even really stand for anything anymore. But yeah, it was formally Russia today. It's literal Russian government propaganda. Like, anything that shows up there is there because Vladimir Putin approves of it. And Huffman has multiple articles on there, like multiple opinion pieces he's written. And some people will try and declare that just because it's run by the Russian government doesn't mean it's not, oh, it doesn't mean it's propaganda, it's just run by the Russian government, or they'll try to say, oh, well, what about this other thing and change the subject or something? It doesn't matter. RM Huffman has created propaganda for a brutal dictator. And if he wanted to get his thoughts out there, again, he's allowed to do that, but there are hundreds of other publications that he could have gone to and said, hey, can I write an opinion piece for you? And a lot of them would have taken him. Like, the fact that he decided to work with these guys, I mean, that just, that just says a lot. Also, I don't know if this is relevant, but this guy, my God, he is on Twitter all the time, like he tweets multiple times a day. However, around the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February, he stopped for about three weeks, which as far as I can see, he hasn't done that very much before. And then he just started up again, like nothing happened. And I, again, I don't know if that's relevant, but I felt the need to bring it up. And it's just, I don't know, if like for most people, creating propaganda for a dictator would be like top of the list for why they're a scumbag. With this guy, I don't even know if it breaks the top 10. I mean that, like I have not read a book by somebody who's this much of a scum fuck since Steven Seagal, it like even on the bottomless pit of undiagnosed mental illness known as Twitter, this guy stands out. Like recently he had chat GPT write a book and then published it under a different name and declared himself a genius for doing so. Like he did that. Like he's taking credit for chat GPT writing something because he came up with the prompt. It's, I don't know, like in fact, he's constantly promoting his own work by referring to them as genius and original. Like he has a couple of children's books that he's written as well, which he compares to Dr. Seuss. Like he seems to think he's on level with Dr. Seuss. Like, dude, they're selling yourself and then there is Revelling in Your Arrogance. And this is Revelling in Your Arrogance. Here, real quick, let me check how many ratings Leviathan has on Goodreads. Ooh, 25, including mine. Hey man, that's almost 26. I'm glad to see you've made a best seller. I mean I may be the first critic or publication of any note to talk about this book, but I mean hey, somebody's grandma bought it for them for Christmas and they said, oh thanks grandma and now it's gonna sit unread on the shelf for three years and then given to Goodwill or thrown away. I mean that's kind of successful. Like I said earlier, he thinks that LGBT people are literally possessed by demons, which demons aren't real just to be clear. They're not. I hate that I have to specify that, but they're not. He also continuously calls them all pedophiles. In fact, he calls basically everybody he disagrees with pedophiles, which he also thinks that the Bible is the literal Word of God and is not to be changed or interpreted any differently than he has interpreted, but I mean, Huffman, if that's the case, why does God condone pedophilia? Because it doesn't take Galaxy Brain to know that the Bible has some, let's say problematic elements in it and there are passages like Numbers 31, 15 through 18, Judges 21, 20 through 23, and Exodus 21, 7 through 10, which all condone pedophilia. For no particular reason, here's a picture of a film projector. Now obviously I'm not saying that Christians are pedophiles. Like that's not at all what I'm saying here. What I am saying is that if I met somebody who believes that literally everything in the Bible is good and true, including the parts about pedophilia, and they're constantly thinking about the abuse of children and they're constantly talking about the abuse of children and they're constantly accusing everyone they don't like of abusing children, I'm going to be giving that person some serious side-eye. Huffman also straight-up threatens to burn down churches that disagree with him. Like, yeah, I'm not even making that up. That's a thing he has done. Or sorry, he says they deserve to be burned down. Totally different. Like he has constant posts about how he wants to create an independent city-state where everybody dresses traditionally in dirndles, which real dirndles looked nothing like that. They didn't have cleavage showing that historically they were much much more modest than that. So clearly he just wants to post tits on Twitter. Like, I mean there's nothing wrong with that but I like that's what he does. And like another part of this is that he just wants to live in traditional buildings because nobody builds traditional buildings anymore. Huh. That's weird. As soon as I said that my neighbor's dog started barking. This man literally, again I'm not making any of this up, he literally asked Elon Musk to build cathedrals and included this picture in there. If that looks familiar that's because it's Irithyll of the Boreal Valley from Dark Souls 3. This guy asked, this guy went in public and asked Elon Musk to make Dark Souls real. Oh god. Although probably my favorite part about this whole thing is that this guy has his own website which, you know, that's fine. Like you're a small indie author having your website to promote yourself, let your fans hear about news from you and everything. That does make sense. But his website is unfinished. Okay, so I'm recording this ahead of time because I'm just afraid he might change his website but I swear to god all of this is real. So like this is his website, right? TheHuffmanLetters.com. And a small author having their own website perfectly normal. It is a little weird that they have a login thing like you can apparently create accounts on there but whatever. And then it's pretty normal stuff like home and about section, a section where you can buy books and stuff. And then when you go to the reviews and press page, right? Like you'd think that's where they would put all the rave reviews of their books and everything. But if you look it's just sample text. It says I'm a review. Click to edit me and add text that says something nice about you and your work. Share a bit of critical acclaim and spur some excitement for your latest projects and then coming soon. And then just more. It's the exact same thing over and over again. Like apparently he bought a template for this website which I mean that's fine. Not everyone can be an expert in web design but he bought this template and then he didn't fill it out. Presumably because there aren't any reviews left or there aren't any reviews yet but like just remove this page until you get some reviews man. What the fuck? And that's really weird that he wouldn't put any quotes on his website because there are quotes on the book here. Like on the back and inside a little bit. There are quotes from a couple of people talking about how awesome it is. Like granted they're not from anybody notable. Like the closest thing to a notable author on here is Tim LaHaye who is one of the authors of the left behind series. And other than that it's like a bunch of unknown Christian authors but you know still you you still could have used those. Like I don't know I just this man is a joke. Okay like he's an awful human being but we should all remember that even though he's an awful human being we we just need to point and laugh at what a loser he is. It's nice that I can just come right out and call him out for being a twat though. Like I don't have to be polite or respectful in any way and I I haven't been able to do that with an author since Steven Seagal. But let's circle back to the book and let's talk about how the author believes that the world this takes place in is literally true and the story from the Bible of Noah and everybody is literally true. You know it's not allegory or metaphor. It wasn't changed or mistranslated at any point in history. It's like it's literally true. This is like from the very start this is the kiss of death for a fantasy series. Like just the absolute kiss of death. There is just no coming back from that. I don't think there's any salvaging it because imagine for a moment if J. R. R. Tolkien believed that Lord of the Rings was literally true while he was writing it. Like like he was literally saying no no Middle Earth is a real place and Frodo and Gandalf were like real people. This is all true guys. It all really happened like if that was the case he wouldn't be writing a world that he thought was interesting or characters that he thought were fun to follow or a story that was meant to evoke certain emotions in readers because you know that's what stories are for. They're meant to evoke you know excitement sorrow fear surprise etc. But that's not what Tolkien would be doing if he thought it was real. He would be writing fanfic about somebody that he worships who again he thinks is a real person where that person he worships does awesome stuff except the stuff that he does really isn't that awesome unless it's filtered through the lens of already believing he's awesome. Like it's circular nonsense and that's basically what Noah is in this book. Like all of Noah's accomplishments here are only really impressive if you already believe that Noah is an impressive individual. It does nothing to convince you of him being all that cool or impressive. Like the author believes that Noah is the ultimate Paragon of Virtue which means that he has to be the ultimate Mary Sue. Like Noah cannot have flaws because his only real identity from the Bible is that being the Paragon of Humanity. You know like him and his small family were like the only people that God decided not to kill for being sinners and because Huffman believes this is literally true he can't change or refute that. You know if he was like not a Christian or at least not a hardcore Christian and he just took the story of Noah as inspiration then he could change stuff about that and make it more interesting but he can't do that. He can't refute or anything. Like he has religious reverence for the figure of Noah and so he can never portray him as anything less than perfect. Hell, he can't even conceive of him being less than perfect and that's just the kiss of death for your story. Like it would be so much more interesting to see Noah as a flawed young man and then we can watch him turn into the flawless patriarch who would build the ark on the orders of God. Like that could be a good story and it wouldn't even really refute what's in the Bible but that would involve asking questions and religion is not to be questioned. You know I think that's why Greek myth and even Norse myth and Egyptian myth to a lesser extent has more stories based on it in the modern world and even stuff that is based on Christian myth tends to just take some basic facts about it and put it in a modern setting. You know like Angel Fire which I just read that based on Christian myth but it's not like just retelling stories of the Bible or anything like but the reason that Greek myth is used so much and that that's moved to a modern setting is that Greek gods and heroes were flawed and that makes them interesting and if you have original characters who are just interacting with like you know the Archangel Gabriel or whoever then those original characters can be flawed and that makes them interesting. As for the actual events of this story I mean there's there's barely any here like there's a couple excuses to show Noah be amazing except he doesn't really do anything amazing he everyone just acts like he's doing amazing stuff like it's I don't know it's hard to explain but I think you'll see what I mean as we go on. What is the conflict? At first Noah wants to save his hometown his family who lives there later on it's like I'm kind of unsure what's even going on like I've read the thing and I'm unsure and then suddenly there's a big battle at the end you know like it's not well put together at all like I I really wish I could say this book is the worst thing ever but it's too empty to even do that and I don't know if that's a very long intro let's just get started spoilers ahead so we'll start with the prologue which says it takes place 930 years after the creation of the world so this is long after Adam and Eve have been kicked out of the Garden of Eden and by now humans have spread all over the world and we open on a man named Lamek who is the father of Noah if you're unfamiliar and he is riding a dinosaur. Lamek raced down the gritty road his scarf pulled over his face to keep out the dust his crusted dragon's clawed feet tore up the ground in long protruding strides millennia from now the beast would be called a hadrosaurid the rider called him grip and he was fastest in the herd again if you doubted me when I said that Huffman literally believes that humans rode dinosaurs he just came right out and said it right there remember in crappy books like this the heroes and the narrator are only ever allowed to agree with what the author believes and only the villains are ever allowed to criticize or question those beliefs crappy writers are crappy writers partially because they really don't understand or empathize with other people's point of view you know like look at my videos or anyone else's videos really on like the way of the shadow wolves or true allegiance or the fifth sorceress or trigger warning or hell the entire Onision trilogy you know good fantasy includes heroic likeable characters that the author may or may not agree with you know uh yasna from the stormline archive is a very good example because she is an atheist and brandon sanderson the author is a Mormon but in spite of that yasna is still intelligent and sympathetic and heroic and uh in the first book the way of kings like there is a whole sequence where she explains to somebody why she's an atheist and it's done very respectfully very intelligently and yeah she makes a good point and that's how you know that brandon sanderson actually took the time to understand other people's point of view and decided to write them respectfully because i don't think he hates atheists at least he doesn't hate them for being atheists uh or hell in an old project that i worked on like an old book i wrote a couple years ago uh the protagonist of it was a committed monarchist like there there was a whole revolution where they overthrew him and replaced him with a democratic government uh but the main character was fighting to put the king back on the throne essentially like the reason i did that was because i wanted to make a main character who i would disagree with ideologically and who i would probably hate if i personally met him but i wanted to make him sympathetic whether or not i did a good job of that i mean that's up for other people to decide like it's not a published book or anything so you're not gonna be able to read it but you know the point is that's i that's what i was trying to do and unfortunately bad writers just don't get this and so throughout the entire book the entirety of leviathan only villains are allowed to say anything that huffman finds objectionable at all anyways back to la mech on the dinosaur now i think dinosaurs in fantasy is a cool idea and i don't think that that idea has been explored nearly enough like last year i read uh the dinosaur lords which was a really cool fun series you know it was about dinosaurs which are cool and it was about knights which are cool and it just combined the two and it achieved new heights of awesomeness like but the thing is uh there's a lot of detail about the dinosaurs not just about them themselves like how they behave and their biology and everything but a lot of detail about how they're integrated into human society you know how do we use them in agriculture how do they use them in warfare uh some people use them as pets you know for companionship uh some of them are wild and they make travel difficult you know like there are giant leoplerodons and such out in the ocean which can attack ships or uh there are stretches of forest with allosaurus allosaurus as allosaurus are allosaurus i don't remember but allosaurus and t rexes that can attack people like it's how are dinosaurs integrated into society how do people live with them how do people try to deal with them when they can't live with them you know and there is nothing like that in here there's a few times that characters ride dinosaurs and there's a battle at the end where one or two of them come back but that's really it and there there is a bestiary at the end which gives like the names of the dinosaurs and uh describes them a little bit like because they have different names in this than they did in real life but yeah there there's nothing in the actual story itself that goes into any sort of detail about how they fit into this world so there's zero effort in that aspect of the world building and that continues to everything else you know the culture of this world the politics history flora and fauna nothing has any more detail beyond the absolute most surface level imaginable like so the whole book just winds up feeling really lazy but it also feels like it's trying too hard so anyways la mech is a descendant of adam and i mean i guess everyone is just descendant of adam in this world but whatever la mech is a only a few generations removed from adam and he's going to witness his death because adam is over 900 years old now and he's finally succumbing to old age but and if that sounds weird that is actually accurate to the bible like before the great flood people did live a lot longer so that's you know that that's a thing and there is a really long paragraph about the landscape he's riding through and how all the grapes there are used to make the best wine ever and there's actually a lot of weird focus on wine in this book like i i don't know why it doesn't seem like it's a metaphor or anything there's just a lot of talk about wine a dignified future awaited those grapes destined to be pressed into the best wine in the region indeed the wine superiority was no longer considered to be a matter of taste but a matter of fact by the many who had enjoyed it the wording of it is also weird like it's trying to sound smarter than it really is and that is the entire book really like every sentence of it is trying to sound smarter than it really is so anyways lomik makes it to adam and then adam apologizes for his sin which got humanity thrown out of the garden of eden which remember he and eve both ate from fruit from the tree of knowledge and then they were cast out because of it and then he dies and there's like a big funeral and everyone is sad etc now the thing is this is a fantasy book it has a prologue that's pretty standard so you would expect some of this to come back later right like some of these details to be important at some point in the story and nope not not at all nothing nothing about that bit with adam comes back in any way like the the only semi almost important thing from the prologue comes after the bit with adam and i've just like cut out the bit with adam then you know like if it's not important leave it out kill your darlings so then it cuts to a woman named nama and this is still the prologue remember a woman named nama who is a descendant of kane who lives in a city called inok with other descendants of kane inok was a person not a city and later they mentioned the city was named after him but that's kind of confusing so i'm not sure why they would do it i don't know anyways some newcomers walk nearby and nama is really impressed the tallest man the one nama had first noticed through the mists gazed directly at her she met his eyes their crystal unearthly beauty caused butterflies to flutter in her chest but the intensity almost intimacy in the way he looked at her made them race down to her legs had she been standing on dry land land her trembling knees might have failed her did that guy looking at her just make her come you know i know it's a meme for men to be bad at writing women you know like there's that whole oh she breasted boobily across the room but like that that bit is impressively dumb like i i'm kind of at a loss for words for describing just how stupid that was now i'm not saying that the only men who could have written a passage like that are men who have never pleasureed a woman sexually but i am going to say that if a man had never pleasureed a woman sexually and he tried to write about one being pleasureed sexually he would write something very similar to that so anyways nama talks to him and his name is samiyaza and he's a gregory which is a watcher angel and that that's it that's the end of the prologue there was so much important info and foreshadowing contained here i'm glad it exists and i mean like literally that's just nama and samiyaza's first meeting and then at some other point they get married and later on uh she dies and samiyaza is sad but i don't think we needed to see their first meeting in order to understand why he would be sad that his wife is that dead like i feel like you can just have him go oh my wife is dead and we we generally understand and be at least a little sympathetic towards him i really hate to say this like it i feel like this is gonna burn my throat when i say it out loud but the fifth sorceress did it better yeah like the the prologue in the fifth sorceress was bad but it did at least introduce important characters and it did show how the world got into the state it's in during the main story and this can't even do that which is oh my goodness so then we go to chapter one which is 206 years later and this is after the birth of noah so he's around now and our first introduction to noah is that he is hunting a velociraptor which these people call drakes but according to the bestiary at the end it is confirmed that drakes are indeed velociraptors and we get this line water brought life but for some creatures water brought death this book is just trying so hard to sound epic and poetic but it just it sounds like a middle schooler who just read lord of the rings i swear to god and i guess maybe that's meant to be foreshadowing for the great flood but that doesn't even happen in this book so what is the point so anyways noa kills the raptor with his dad lamek and his grandfather matthew zilla and he goes home to his girlfriend slash cousin who is named em zahra but everyone just calls her zahra for short it's honestly kind of wild how noah like the biblical patriarch fighting a velociraptor can be so boring but somehow it this book manages to do that and when we're introduced to zahra her description is very odd a young woman approached noah walking with a light bounce to her step her bright eyes and pretty smile complemented the lovely figure of a woman exiting gracefully from the last stages of girlhood she was no i thought the most beautiful creature he had seen um exactly how old is zahra because exiting from girlhood could mean a lot of things and in fact has meant a lot of different things in different cultures over the years like she she could be like 13 or 19 like for for my own sanity i'm going to assume she's around 17 to 19 but e gad so anyways they all have a feast for whatever reason i don't think they're celebrating anything they just they used to have a feast and it's great and the thing is we learned that they're in eden right now but noah also says this must have been what life was like in the garden of eden but the whole point of that story is that humanity was cast out of the garden of eden and can never come back like is is the garden just part of eden like is is there a fenced off area two miles down the road that they can't go into i i genuinely don't understand but you should specify because it makes this throughout this book it sounds like these people still live in the garden of eden some people in noah's family talk about how he is the subject of a prophecy we don't actually get a lot of detail about what that prophecy is they just say he is the subject of it because we need to be informed of how special the protagonist is that way we know we're supposed to be impressed by him every every time he does anything like i said we don't know what the prophecy says they never show it in this book vague prophecies that say whatever the plot demands that is such an excellent writing tool and not at all amateurish i am so glad that it's here so somebody steals a bowl from matthewsel has heard and noah goes looking for he goes to the home of a man named elibru who is a nearby i don't know aristocrat is the best word i can think of for it like like he's just a dude who lives in a manor and has a bunch of farmland around which he owns and he has a whole bunch of servants who toil the fields and everything for him i'm not sure where all these servants came from i'm not sure why they work for him i like do the edenites use money and if if he's if they do if he's paying them for this then where does his money come from i i don't understand so elibru is a big meanie head he says to noah that he doesn't know where the bull is but he won't help him even if he did know where it was why is he like this why why is he so rude to noah i don't know but we need to be told that he's a big mean poopy head that way we don't like him and then on his way home noah is crossing a river and he is nearly killed by a leviathan that shows up like yeah it turns out this thing appeared recently it ate the guy who stole the bull uh so that's why they weren't able to find him noah just finds his body and it is a sarcosuckus sarcosuckus something along those lines but i'm totally sure i pronounce it uh it looks like this though it basically a gigantic crocodile they they did exist in the real world they were huge like 30 feet long and they were kind of like dragons and especially this one because this one in the book does breathe fire and at this point i almost got excited because hey something is happening so noah tells everybody that hey there's a leviathan in the river we should stay away from that and then elibru takes a bunch of men at arms which apparently he just has a bunch of soldiers at his command that he can take to go hunt this thing but okay whatever uh and he takes them and tries to kill the leviathan and they fail and most of them die horribly which this sequence was kind of neat you know like it's nice to see how powerful this thing is like it has impenetrable scales that are immune to their spears and arrows and everything it breathes fire it's really fast it's crazy like you can see why this thing is such a threat and that's it though like it's it's kind of neat it doesn't really go above that and this is i think this is meant to be elibru's comeuppance but it's a pretty weak one because he lives and then he runs back to noah and the rest of his family and tells them what happened and while they're all discussing what's going on and what they should do elibru suggests that maybe they should just leave sacrifices for the leviathan and while doing so he refers to it as the new god of the river and lomic assaults him for that because there's only one god and apparently it is completely reasonable to physically attack somebody for disagreeing with you on the subject of religion i wonder if that reflects any of the author's real views now what was it that made elibru turn away from god it doesn't matter i guess he's just bad because he's just bad you know same with everyone who turns away from god or everyone who isn't the exact same brand of christian as the author and the main characters like every they're all just bad because this was an opportunity to have some interesting villains you know like villains who turned away from god either for selfish reasons or just because they lost their faith or whatever and you could do something with that it would give them at least a little personality and maybe some of them could be redeemed but i guess that's not really the point of this story you know the point isn't to be a good story with interesting characters the point is to let the audience know that the heroes are morally pure and you can't let them know that they're morally pure by having them do anything good no silly you just have to contrast them with the villains who are bad they need access to the river though you know to water their animals and they're also afraid the leviathan will eventually like leave that area and start wandering and hunting their herds and hunting people so they send noa to kenan to ask for advice and kenan is an ancestor who lives in eden but he lives pretty far away off in his own corner and noa brings him some wine as a gift but while noa and kenan are talking kenan monologues about his life for a couple of pages you know he married his sister uh because apparently that's just a thing that happened in like in this world everyone is extremely inbred like not it's not just noa being involved with his cousin who he is now betrothed to marry it's just everyone's marrying their siblings or their uncles or stuff anyways he married his sister they travel he traveled very far and wide he protected people from bandits he fought demon sorcerers like he like he did a lot of cool stuff and now he's just retired and is enjoying the last years of his life in eden near his family honestly kenan's backstory sounds like it would be a way better book than what we got here so he tells noa to go to enok the city of enok not the person remember there's two different things kind of confusing but they're two different things uh and to seek the help of the gregory who remember that the watcher angels this could have happened a lot quicker but whatever it that's what he tells him what to do so then the next chapter we cut to sam yaza and nama for a chapter and she dies in childbirth and he is sad and that is it that is that is the entire chapter that's all it is for and then noa walks to enok from eden and that's it for several chapters yeah there's not a whole lot that really happens on the journey like he talks to some people at one point he gets all his stuff stolen by a nephilim and you would think like okay that will cause him real problems down the line or he'll have to do a detour to go and get his stuff back or something but no he just gets tricked and then this guy steals all his stuff and then noa goes what an asshole and then he keeps walking and it doesn't cause him any problems like there's no conflict at all in this part of the story which is so stupid like the point of a journey whether that's like a literal physical journey to a place or an internal journey or whatever is for the characters to have a goal and for them to face obstacles on the way to achieving that goal like the point of a journey is for them to face hardships and we're over a hundred pages in and noa has faced no hardships so he arrives at the city of enok and he's very impressed you know there are nephilim which in this art they're they're half human half angels and in the lore of the bible that just makes them basically giant humans so in this they're like eight nine ten feet tall and other than that they're basically just people and then there's like foreigners people from a bunch of different cultures there are huge walls surrounding the city canals markets you know just stuff that he's seen before or stuff that he's never seen before and he's very impressed by but he has to mention okay i'm not i'm not actually impressed because the hero cannot display relatable traits like awe or feeling like he's in over his head just nope just total calm stoicism all the time never feeling anything except for his apparent love for zara because it's not manly to feel things i guess now keep in mind it only took him a few days to walk from eden to enok like this is all only a few days walk from his home yet travel between the two places is so rare that people from eden and enok know basically nothing about one another which makes zero sense like people wander people go around and trade with each other and stuff and especially in this book it's mentioned humanity has covered the entire earth in only a little over a thousand years so clearly the people in this story do explore and trade with others and wander around and how have they not run into each other before this or however they rarely ran into each other before this i i don't understand but most importantly how the fuck can a city this big exists in this world like it's mentioned twice in the book that half a million people live in enok and that is just ludicrous the idea that there's enough people to do that is ludicrous because to have just one city even if it was just one city that big but then they also have a bunch of like foreign lands with their own kingdoms and everything you would need a gigantic human population because before modern technology only a tiny percentage of people could be urban dwellers you know it just we needed a lot more people producing food it was hard to transport and refrigerate it you know it's just only a few or only small percentage of people could do that and so i thought about this probably more than i should have and i did some research and the first city in the real world to reach half a million people was alexandria egypt around 200 bce right and at that time the world's population was 150 million people so in this world where remember everybody's descended from adamany there were only two humans apparently uh and it's only been around 1100 years since they left the garden and started having children and according to the exponential growth function that is technically possible to go from two people to 150 million at a growth of 1.66 percent per year which almost makes sense if you don't actually understand math like while doing research i saw people mentioning that oh yeah no we can all be descended from adamany because exponential growth function and like they like used math to try and uh justify it but the thing is in order for this to work every woman would need to have a kid every year forever like starting from the year for birth by the way which is also impossible infants can't have children uh but you again you need to have one every year for centuries because people lived a lot longer and no one could ever die like there's so many assumptions here that it's useless as a model like in order to believe that this part of the bible is true you would have to believe that the part where everybody lived for hundreds of years before the flood but they didn't do it now like like it was a really cool trick but we can't show you now like you would need to believe that part in order to believe this other part so it's basically saying this part of the bible is true because this other part of the bible says so like it's it's circular circular large circular logic and even in the book the idea that no one could ever die is just ridiculous because people die we see a bunch of them die it literally started with adam dying like not only from old age but people die in wars and stuff like i just it's it's stupid it really is stupid like maybe you could justify this because you know it's a weird fantasy world but no attempt is made there's a genealogy at the end of the book which only shows 10 generations of people like since adamany there's only 10 generations and each of those generations only has a few kids so clearly they're not all going out and having hundreds of spawn you know unless adamany popped out 300 more off screen that we didn't mention like how does that even work and obviously the sheer amount of inbreeding here would cause serious problems but we're pretending that's not a big deal like again according to the bible marrying your siblings was perfectly fine up until moses came along which was the hundreds of years after this so you know that that's a thing and even if they could create that many people how would all the different hair colors and skin tones and heights and eye colors and etc how would all of that come about you know you know because people if they're all from the same family they'd be and are severely inbred they would all look pretty similar to one another you know they would make the mcpoils look like arian uber mention the mcpoil bloodline's been pure and clean for a thousand years means we haven't bred outside the bloodline for a thousand years yeah that makes a lot of sense if you cite mutations and say oh well okay so some of them mutated so that's why there's like you know occasional blonde hair or red hair or something and if you acknowledge that entire populations can become different if they're descended by from people who have mutations then congratulations you have accepted the theory of evolution into your heart and i know i'm going on about this for a while but like if this was fantasy like if the idea that two people could create this many people in such a short amount of time so that we could have this gigantic city and other kingdoms spread throughout the world if this was a fantasy world i'd probably move past it it's not fantasy though the guy who wrote it thinks it's real it's the ramblings of a deranged dipshit so noa arrives in the city he asks the people who run the city for help including gregory humans nephilim and they talk around it for a while and then they invite him to stay the night and he spends time with jet and gillion characters who do nothing at this stage or okay gillion does one or two things later on the story so you know he contributes a little bit uh but they neither of them say anything except praises for how awesome gloriaan is and gloriaan is their father he's he's a nephilim like i said there are dozens of named characters in here there's even like a several page long guide at the start and none of them have any personality like at all like uh there are one or two villains that are kind of cartoonishly evil but that's about it and even the ones that do have personality are not really memorable like most of the characters here could have either been cut out entirely or just been rolled into another one so we have less names to try and keep track of but yeah there's a lot of characters here so if i like just bring up a name out of nowhere and you think did he mention them earlier i probably didn't and the book probably didn't either but you don't really need to know much about them just like a person came in did something or was involved in some way and then left that's all you need to know so gloriaan like i said is a nephilim specifically he is the son of samiaz and as a nephilim he's a giant human he doesn't have any powers or anything beyond that anyways they eat dinner and of course they drink wine with their dinner now while they're talking gloriaan mentions that people follow a lot of different religions and i just wonder how and why you know like if we're all descended from the same two people and those two people like personally met god and they all carry the stories with them through the generations like hey granddad met god great granddad met god and like there's no other gods or anything that are coming in and telling people different stories then where did all these other mythologies come from you know like this isn't like the real world where we have a whole bunch of different mythologies competing and trying to tell you hey look we're real and you just choose one this is you only have one and if your grandpa met god it's probably a lot easier to believe in him i guess huffman thinks that people forget things if they're not constantly beaten over the head with them so it turns out that no one has ever killed a leviathan before like ever like gloriaan is familiar with leviathans he's seen them before but he says hey uh no one's ever killed one so good luck but in spite of that's where you'd think okay they're going to refuse to help him and noa's gonna have to convince them somehow that that doesn't happen they just some nephilim including gloriaan and gilean and several others they agree to go help noa kill the leviathan and save eden why do they go with him it like does he offer them anything in return does he appeal to their better nature or something like no they just they just go with him they feel like it that's all so we are over one quarter of the way through this book and no conflict has happened other than noa wanting the leviathan gone like that is it think about the sequence of events in this book so far are we watch adam die noa talks about how awesome life is the leviathan appears they try to kill it they can't kill it noa walks to the city again without running into any sort of trouble and then he convinces the nephilim to help again without trouble there there is no conflict here a story is not just things happening it's characters trying to reach a goal and struggling on the way to that goal without that there is no point the king died and then the queen died is not a story the king died and then the queen died of grief is a story because that implies there's conflict hey here's another problem if everyone in inoc is a descendant of kane or at least most of them are where did kane's wife come from according to the genealogy here he married someone named awan who was his sister who was also a child of adam and eve and that is the often accepted folklore but the bible does not say where awan came from she doesn't say who she is or that she's a sister or anything like that it just says that she's his wife where did she come from that like this isn't canon the idea that he married awan is not canon so noa and the others grabbed some equipment and they walk back to eden and while they're walking back everyone makes sure to suck noa's dick some more interesting said hoduin my impression of noa was much different i would say that never a more spiritual man have i met he seems in tune somehow with the vibrations of the cosmos in fact i hope to coax him to return to inoc and study with me i feel as if the flood gates of the heavens might open to us to reveal their secrets dude you barely know noa he's he has done nothing to warrant this like what what personality does he even have like he's loyal to his hometown i guess he's brave like i guess the story treats him as brave for going to inoc by himself but i mean he just walked for a few days and didn't face any danger so how brave is that really so they arrive in eden again they don't run into any trouble at all along the way and noa is happy to see zara again and gloriaan introduces himself i gathered gloriaan said bowing and smiling broadly i recognize in you both the passion i share with my own wife i am very pleased to meet you this dialogue is not robotic but it's not human either it it is unsettling like if i was walking down the street by myself at night and i ran into someone and they started talking to me the way that the characters in this book talk i would run away like usain bolt it's like it's like a lizard person trying to emulate human speech it's not correct do you understand the english language so they drink some more wine and they prepare to kill the leviathan so noa has them just dig a big pit and put sharp stakes in it so that they can lure the creature in and then it will fall in impale itself and it'll die that's not a bad plan but it also everyone treats him like a genius for coming up with it like how how difficult could that plan really be to come up with it seems pretty basic to me finally they lure in the leviathan and they start fighting it and i'll be honest this sequence is kind of cool like there is some vivid imagery characters keep dying so it does feel kind of tense like we finally get to see the heroes be competent at something you know they're fighting this thing noa doesn't really fight it but you know the other heroes do fight it and like you can tell that huffman had fun writing this part and if it hadn't taken 160 freaking pages to get here it would have been a great ending to the first act of the story there is still plenty of dumb stuff here though like i said they know it doesn't really do anything and then they get the leviathan to the pit and it falls in but it only gets minor injuries so they just decide okay let's bury it alive and they start dumping dirt on top of it but it escapes and it kills some more people and then noa thinks back to a conversation he had where he asked one of the nephilim about how the leviathan makes fire and brief aside i know that the singular form of nephilim is naffle or nephal and this book does use naffle but it feels weird to me and so i'm just going to say nephilim and i don't care if it's grammatically incorrect because nephilim aren't fucking real but anyways noa asked him how the leviathan makes fire and it turns out it has these chambers in its head which have separate chemicals in them and individually they're fine but when they mix they create fire and noa realizes that if he can make it mix while it's still inside the leviathan then it'll burn from the inside so what's his brilliant plan to make this happen he tells gloriaan to smash its head with an axe so his brilliant plan to kill the leviathan is smash its head open and we're supposed to be impressed by this like this is yeah noa nobody else could have thought of that look if you want to have him do something that's kind of impressive or at least observance have him notice a loose scale on its belly and just say hey there's its weak point go for that or have him trick it into eating something poisoned or hell even luring it into the pit and stabbing it with a bunch of stakes was a better plan than this so anyways gloriaan breaks its head open and it dies like it the chemicals mix it burns from the inside but again he broke its head open even if it hadn't burned from the inside that probably would have killed it noa again did next to nothing here but he's treated like he did the lion's share of the work and everybody is constantly patting him on the back and saying noa you're so great like it i don't get it like if the main character is supposed to be the coolest best most pure guy ever wouldn't you want to show him being good at something once in a while you know wouldn't wouldn't you want to have him like pick up gloriaan's axe because gloriaan is injured and then he delivers the final blow himself at least like at least that would be kind of impressive like that it's weird for noa to be such a gigantic mary sue when he doesn't even really do anything that impressive normally when a character is a mary sue they get to do a bunch of cool stuff and everyone is super impressed and uh in awe of them but noa doesn't even get that but other than that ending and a few odd lines scattered throughout this sequence really doesn't do anything phenomenally bad so you know it it's better than the rest of the book at least so while they are resting and celebrating the fact that they killed the leviathan uh this this whole celebration goes on for more than 20 pages by the way uh gloriaan requests that someone come to enok as emissaries you know because they can be emissaries between the two places and you know form a connection between eden and enok like again these places are right next to each other like there should be a lot more contact already i'm also not sure how there can be emissaries or ambassadors that eden doesn't have any sort of government you know they don't they don't have a king or ruling council or anything they just have a bunch of families who live around there and each family seems to be a loose collective i mean granted they're they're all one family really so maybe they all just listen to the oldest one who cares enough to give orders and if they don't have an army or anything i'm not sure why enok didn't just conquer them earlier but okay sure so noa and matthuzala and some others all agree to go to enok uh with no prompting so this is the start of the main story like the leviathan and all that was just the inciting incident and it comes more than 200 pages in so we're we're nearly halfway through the book and the story has started awesome so we get a chapter with sam yaza remember the leader of the evil gregory uh lileth and azaziel and again there's so many characters here that just have very little definition and barely appear but we're just expected to remember them and to care about them in some way like do i even need to explain who these people are if they do nothing and have no definable identity like i don't think so anyways azaziel is a gregory and he kills a bird so that's how we know that he's evil and noa and company arrive they get a tour of the city and they hear about how the council apparently has very little to do like the ruling council running a city requires a lot of work but sure okay now matthuzala at one point brags about how we need and everyone is judged by his actions instead of his ancestry like yeah no fucking shit dude you all have the same ancestry remember your inbred you have you have a constitutional right to be a dumbass so the gregory come along and demand that the edenites be removed but the council refuses and sam yaza sees zahra remember noa's uh betrothed his fiance and decides he wants to marry her and then there is this really weird scene between azaziel and lileth the gregory's eyes snapped open in one breath he was out of the water standing in front of her lileth shuttered still in awe of his perfect form after all these years she tilted her head to meet his eyes first i cannot find gloria on she said and then you disappear what he kissed her violently leaving a spot of blood on her lip she licked it off shuttered again uh okay so sam yaza mopes around for a bit in the room he dedicated to nama which remember that was his ex-wife who died in childbirth like it's very easy to forget because so many characters here just have nothing to define them but that that was her and his room is filled with tons of sculptures and paintings of her that he had made like it's just there's dozens of paintings and busts and stuff which that's a strange detail and it is kind of funny like it did amuse me a little bit but it's not focused on that much so i don't really have anything else to say about it the villains all have a cryptic discussion about how their evil plan is coming to fruition and like why is this a thing in bad books you know just the villains talking about their evil plans in very vague terms like they know the audience is listening in and they don't want to give away the surprise yet like either do it or don't you know give us give specifics or don't have them talk about it at all and i swear i'm not skipping anything important here this whole book is just like brief flashes of characters we're supposed to care about and then moving to different flash of characters we're supposed to care about it's like a slideshow so back to noah and his family in their new home uh his brother asks noah where their mom and dad are noah says they retired for the night which is implying that they're having sex and his brother goes ew i didn't want to know about that and i i think this part was meant as a joke but it's it's really forced like no one talks like that you know they would they would just say where's mom and dad oh they went to bed like even if he knew that they were having sex why would he bring that up like even if he didn't think it was gross to talk about or anything there's no need to mention it so why wouldn't that be kind of private i just i don't know the characters in this book are all so weird but they're not weird in a way that gives any of them personality because they're not consistently weird so we just wind up with odd moments and odd lines like that which aren't even fun to laugh at so gloriaan asks noah why he believes in his god and not the others and great that's awesome is this going to be an intelligent discussion on faith and how it works and how it affects people's lives why should i believe your tales he had asked noah one evening as they had made camp in the wilds of nod what raises its truth above all other accounts one might hear in any source or his college why not the light of the laroo or the infinite turtle do not their adherence cling just as strongly to their beliefs noah had taken the question seriously i suppose he had said it comes down to trust we believe the account of the heavens and earth because it was written down by the one who was by the very one who was there okay so that's another part where he's just saying the bible is real because the bible says that the bible is real like it's just it's just so circular man it's frustrating because you could have had noah have a crisis of faith or something before finding god again you know he could go out into the world and see all these people with different religions and realize that they hold to their beliefs just as strongly as he holds to his and then he starts questioning things and then later on he would find faith in god again you know like signs did something kind of like that and that's a great movie but we can't have that of course because that might make dear mary sue look like he has a flaw like this passage is just saying everyone thinks their religion is true but i'm actually correct and everyone else is wrong like yeah dude everyone thinks their religion is true that's why you keep murdering each other like this is what i mean when i say bad writers just don't understand anyone else's believe beliefs they believe what they believe without any real reason so they think everyone else believes what they believe without any real reason you know writing before anything else before you start talking about pros characters whatever writing requires understanding what you're talking about or what you're writing about i should say so some assassins pop up and attack and noa escapes a couple of them escape but everyone else is killed or captured including gloria gloria is killed which i mean he wasn't great but i didn't actively hate him so i suppose there's something resembling sympathy that almost arises in my chest when i hear that and this sequence lasts a while i'm really not leaving anything interesting out like the bad guys just want them dead and apparently they have a bunch of assassins to kill them with like they just came up out of nowhere the assassins are referred to as the nameless which is an oxymoron because that is a name you idiots you simpletons you absolute fucking donkeys and you might be wondering how does noa escape well he escapes through a secret passage because of course it's it's a fantasy novel the the hero needs to i either get in or get out of a fortress slash castle slash palace so of course there's a secret passage you know like we don't even need to explain why it's there or justify why it's there just there is a secret passage and we all are supposed to go along with it so he goes to this giant hidden underground library there are some friendly people there who are just called the scribes and their names aren't important because they barely exist you know they they show up here to help him once and they give a little bit of exposition and then they leave the story or sorry they they don't completely leave the story just beyond that they also suck noa's dick for a little while as a group we scribes hide in our burrows but as individuals we have resources what we lack is a leader someone who can take the mantle of the prophet enok and free the city our people from the grip of the angels that leader must be you noa you people don't know this man he just popped up the other day what has he done that's impressed you look do not make your main characters marry sues but if you're going to at least have them do something worth being impressed by so that you can justify everyone being impressed by them now noa did escape but the gregory want everyone to believe he's killed so they bring his father and grandfather to a corpse that azazel made up to azazel made up to look like noa like he doesn't use magic or anything he just puts some makeup on a dead body and it fools noa's family like his own father and grandfather think it's him and they're very upset which that's stretching disbelief a little bit here's a better idea if they wanted to make them all believe that noa was dead and they used a fake body or something they could just use magic to do it or if they didn't have access to that then they could just kill someone who kind of looked like noa and then smash up his face a little bit to cover up any differences and then put him in noa's clothes and then it would be more believable why his own family would not recognize that that wasn't him just just an idea you know so the bad guys celebrate some more and they drink wine while they're celebrating uh sam yaza tries to woo zara since now she thinks her fiance is dead and he acts pretty nice to her you know she like she is talking to him and says hey why did adam hate you so much what did you do and he basically says that well adam and i both tried to please god but we tried to do it in different ways and he actually compares it to the story of kane and abel and he basically says like well sometimes when one is pious their piety turns to anger or when one is envious their piety turns to anger you know and okay i kind of like the scene it makes sam yaza look kind of smart and manipulative and then zara kisses him and i guess they're just they're just a thing now so gloriaan's son gillian remember i mentioned him earlier he was at the fight with the leviathan you don't remember well too bad uh he finds a member of the city guard who knows about the evil conspiracy that killed his father and faked noa's death and the guard is drinking wine obviously while they're talking to him and he tells them all of this because they mixed in a truth-telling serum in his wine and truth-telling serum was not mentioned at all before this it does not come back up after this it's just a thing that apparently exists in the story and we are supposed to accept that okay so gillian tells the council about this and then the council summons azaziel and sam yaza and they're like we're very mad at you like they can't do anything but they're mad they they'll they're not happy they don't like you and they they realize noa is alive and zara hears that he's alive and there is this weird line the den of the manor was a male's territory trophies from the hunt adorned the walls as well as a dozen or so tastefully done paintings of nudes paintings of nudes was that was that just a weird word choice or a typo or both you could have said paintings of nudes figures that that that would have worked you know you you're just completely completely have no idea of the english language now noa and his brother are still hiding in the library and his brother asks him like hey we need to make up our minds are we gonna go back to inoc or are we gonna go back home to eden and noa just says he'll put his trust in god and like that's not answering the question you know god's not gonna just come down and say hey here's what you should do like he might send you a sign but he's not just gonna tell you like somebody even calls noa out and he's he tells him that trusting god sounds like it's just an excuse for not doing anything which that's a good point but it never comes back up you know like it could be a flaw that noa has that he would have to work to get over you know like he could just be walking around and saying that's okay god will take care of it and never take any initiative and never try and do anything himself and then later on realize oh okay god just provides me with the opportunities i need to succeed but i still have to do it myself but again we can't have noa have any flaws even if he develops out of them so a bunch of people who hate the gregoris show up and ask them for help like they want to start a rebellion and they decide that noa should lead them in this rebellion against the angels and he agrees and keep in mind this rebellion includes like both humans and nephilim who just don't like the gregory being in charge so like literally an army just materialized completely out of nowhere and then just fell in his lap like there's nothing satisfying about this like he didn't have to do any work to gain it so the this moment is unearned and thus it rings extremely hollow you know like if noa had had to travel around find allies and like agitate for change like you know go to villages and say like hey you don't like the gregory being in charge me neither fight with me and we'll get rid of them and like convince people then that would be neat it would also make for a much better second act to the story because this this book doesn't really have a first act or have a second act you know we have the first act which is everything up until the leviathan fight and that's almost half the book uh and then there's noa going to inoc immediately afterwards and everything immediately falls apart and then we just jump right to the climax this is why story structure is important guys like without it everything just brings hollow and feels meaningless and for that matter why would they ask noa of all people like we see very quickly that there are warriors who joined the rebellion like gillion for instance and these are people who have experience fighting they seem like they would be a better choice to lead an armed rebellion you know noa has hunting experience which i mean that's not nothing you could show him being a skilled hunter earlier and then show how uh he can use that knowledge and experience to be a good battlefield commander or something you could do something with that but they don't hear he is not a warrior or commander and he's not a scholar or a philosopher he's not a hero he's not a champion of god he is just the main character which means he is none of those things but according to the story he is all of those things also by this point it's been almost a hundred pages since noa's fake death like there there's so much in this book that is either needlessly long descriptions villains going wahaha i'm evil or good guys just kind of existing like i cannot call this boring even because boring would imply that things are happening and they're just not interesting this is empty because nothing is happening so the villains are preparing for zara and sam yaza to get married despite her not really wanting to so like she is now officially the sexy lamp that sam yaza and noa are gonna fight over you know like you could replace her with a sexy lamp and everything in the story would say exactly the same and make exactly as much sense not everyone is happy about the two of them getting married though aila aimed her venom at an easier absent pray well if father wishes to sow his seed once more i suppose some country-born cockat is suitable field to plow he shall do so without my blessing though again this book just tries so hard to sound epic and poetic but it just comes across as like a little kid trying to sound cool so a lot of time passes it's a little vague it could be weeks months not really important so a lot of time passes and inoc has some gigantic feasts to celebrate the upcoming wedding i assume there's wine it's not specified but you can safely say that there's wine noa shows up at one of them and zara is really happy about it she's like oh my gosh noa you're here and then he gives this dramatic speech about how the gregory took the earth from the humans and how their time is over and you know the drill the hero giving a dramatic speech to the villains it it's fine you understand and then sam yada sam yaza orders him killed and some guards look like they're about to do it but then a bunch of them defect like either they were part of the rebellion to begin with or noa just convinced them with his speech not really important they defend noa and then they all just leave like that they're just allowed to leave they don't even have to fight their way out and run away or anything they just they head off and then outside an army appears outside the city and it's under siege now so this is where the climax begins so entirely off screen noa gathered an army who are mostly from eden apparently he built some siege engines off screen he gathered weapons off screen he organized all of this and came up with a plan off screen and now it just shows up and we're supposed to think oh that's cool instead of thinking oh that's really unsatisfying because we didn't see him put in any of the work to actually do that you know this is this is the problem with having obnoxious marysu characters like all of this is to make all this is happening off screen to make the main character look cool and smart and look like a good leader without putting in any of the actual work to actually make them cool or smart or a good leader like i have not been this unsatisfied at a supposed awesome moment from a protagonist since i read throne of glass see in throne of glass for those who haven't read it or seen my videos on it uh the main character alyn there's a part where she breaks into a bank vault and replaces a villain's will with a forged one and then they killed a villain and when his will is read off they like get all his stuff right and so she got the forgery off screen so the audience doesn't know about it and then she broken and replaced it off screen so the audience doesn't know about it solely so that it'll be surprising when the reveal happens so like that's the problem with the book it's more concerned with shock than it is with making sense and that's exactly what happened here in leviathan like if your protagonist can accurately be compared to alyn from throne of glass in terms of marysunus something has gone horribly wrong on top of that how does noah know how to build all of this like they have again siege engines and stuff so how does he know how to build all this how does he know the tactics of siege warfare how does he know how to organize everybody into formations that will allow them to fight effectively that's irrelevant i suppose like i i can stretch my disbelief a little bit like i can accept he's a quick study i can accept that he read about some of it in the library i can accept that he would come up with some ideas on his own but i can't accept that he invented an entire branch of warfare that as far as we know it hasn't been around in the world before and even if it has been around noah has no contact with it so it may as well not exist in the world before this and it's like siege warfare took thousands of years to develop irl and it was constantly changing over time one man can't invent it completely on his own without even any experience but if you can ignore all of that this final battle is like the leviathan fight it's kind of cool at least at first you know they hit the walls they attack the city they send in triceratops to break up defensive formations like oh yeah you forgot there were dinosaurs here didn't you well the author didn't they they use triceratops and send them into attack enemy formations like it's very very brief but you know that's something they light a bunch of fires around the city so it looks like there are more people in the army than there really are they attack the defenders like you know it's it's kind of cool it's not great by any means but it's kind of cool but after a while there are just there there are too many things that don't add up and so the battle just collapses under the weight of these many many problems like all the stuff i said earlier about how it doesn't make sense that no one would know how to lead an army like this and build all these siege engines and come up with these tactics and everything it just doesn't make sense uh at one point it specifically says that the edenites are not warriors and they would probably do poorly against the defenders but then they do great anyways they like they just win really easy without too much trouble somehow they built a giant battering ram slash tank thing shaped like a leviathan's head like it's like a big wooden and metal structure on wheels which they can hide under and they push it forward to like the doors of the city and then they uh use like a battering ram to break through which is a neat idea but like how were they able to build it with such primitive technology i'm i'm not totally sure and then noa brings up the rear of course which like it makes sense for the leader to be at the rear like you don't want him right at the front where he might get stabbed and killed easily but like that's fine but at the same time everyone treats him like he was at the front and he cut through the battle himself like you can't have it both ways you gotta have one or the other and in fact i don't think noa ever gives orders in this battle not i'm not that i'm noticing it like there's no point where things go awry and the plan doesn't quite work out the way it's supposed to and he has to improvise like everything just goes perfectly like presumably he told them about this plan before the battle started and then they just do it and it works great like nobody disobeys orders the enemy doesn't react in any uh unpredicted ways like they just everything goes great because noa came up with the perfect plan from the beginning like any tension and excitement that was in this battle at the beginning is just lost it's it's like poking a hole in the bottom of a cup and all the water falls out of it you know it just at first it's fine you can drink a little bit of it but eventually it just it's just all gone so noa and gileon and some others go to fight sam yaza but they have to spend many pages shit talking each other and hyping themselves up and just stopping in the middle to talk like just a lot of talk no jutsu going on here and then azaziel shows up after a while too two steps to the side and noa interposed himself between azaziel and gileon brandishing his staff with both hands held in front of him a staff azaziel sneered you wish to be cut in half dust man very well that's a weird line and a weird insult uh also like you shouldn't be that specific because you're specifying two steps to the side like you shouldn't be that exact most of the time it's just it's just bad but this fight once it gets going is you know fine you know sam yaza and azaziel are just way too fast and they dodge all the attacks they counter everything that enemies throw at them like even the huge battle experience nephilim just can't touch this guy like the gregory are way too high above both humans and nephilim there there's nothing you can do to fight them normally so have it how do they defeat these guys they do not like just all of a sudden and i do want to underscore all of a sudden this happens completely out of nowhere the skies open up and they see god hanging out in heaven and a bunch of angels descend and they don't say anything but sam yaza and some of the other major gregory flea and all the remaining gregory are stripped of their physical bodies and then their spirits just disappear so yeah just a a literal deus ex machina literally god just came out and saved everybody like the heroes can't save the day so god does it like the only positive i can think of in this part is that the description is kind of cool you know the angels are described as being biblically accurate so you know they're like a bunch of flaming wheels and thousands of eyes and just you know stuff like that it's it's kind of cool why do so many christian books or even books that are just based on christian myth do this like why why do they just have god come up and save everybody at the last minute like isn't isn't a pretty big part of that religion that god's not going to directly come in and save the world like that like he'll bring floods and stuff to help slash hinder you but he's not going to directly show himself like that i mean even hell even people like moses when moses was talking to god he talked to him in the form of a burning bush you know he didn't just open up the heavens and you could see him at least god used to do cool stuff like appearing as a burning bush nowadays his power seems to be relegated to just making his face appear on toast sometimes at least i don't know this idea that god doesn't directly interfere is like the excuse that most people use for why he doesn't at least not anymore but i don't know like even even if huffman was going for like some sort of theme here it's still a very unsatisfying way for the villains to be beaten because it means that if god had shown up a little bit earlier everything would have gone quicker like the characters wouldn't have had to die or struggle at all like if he had done this like i don't know halfway through the book then the gregory would just be gone and the day would just be saved like it cheapens the effort and the sacrifice that the characters made and there are a lot of other books based in christian myth that do this like fallen is the first one to come to mind you know at the end of that series god literally just came down and stopped lucifer from destroying the world and saved everybody and uh the last long book review i did was angel fire and that one avoided that trap it specifically did not just have god come in and save everybody and as a result it was much better this is part of the problem with creating a mythology ruled by an omnipotent being like you're always going to be wondering well if he wants things done why doesn't he just do it himself like you know the best way to handle this sort of thing uh is to say that the deity wants to maintain free will so he's not going to interfere because that's basically just living the human's lives for them like uh if you ever read mistborn era two which you should mistborn era one and era two are both pretty good uh there's a sequence where harmony is talking to wax and he explained this explains this to him he says look if i handle every problem for you then you're just going to be like pets you know i have to let you live your own life otherwise your own life won't mean anything and i mean that one was also written by brandon sanderson and i think that was like his genuine uh religious beliefs poking through for a second because that is a real way that a lot of real religious people approach the subject they're like well if we don't have free will then there's no point to it like you know we're supposed to use free will to be good people but if there's no struggle to be good people then it's meaningless you know like that that's a real thing that real people believe or maybe you could leave it ambiguous as to whether or not god is real because you know in the real world having faith in god is not about like just seeing him in the sky one day uh but if you want to leave it ambiguous then you could have a message of god helps those who help themselves like uh i'm thinking of the priest from The Walking Dead at least the show who for a long time was just walking around refusing to ever fight or anything other than run away from the zombies and then he just said that's okay god will protect me and after a while he realized he has to he had to take action himself like he straight up said god helps those who help themselves like he gives you opportunities he gives you the tools you need to protect yourself and to come out on top of these difficult situations but you still have to take action otherwise it's not going to work out for you and like i was saying earlier it seems that no one was using trust in god as an excuse not to do anything and this sort of message could be a refutation to that sort of thing but this clearly shows that no one was right to not freaking do anything because you can apparently just sit around and wait for god to handle everything like i said noa cannot develop or change at all over the course of the story because that would imply that he wasn't perfect to begin with and that's that's the problem like yes obviously the biblical noa is as i was saying a paragon of virtue but that's just not that interesting to read about and this is supposed to be like his origin story where he's a young man we can see him turn into a paragon of virtue instead of just being one you know this is what i was saying earlier this book is not bad because it's christian it's bad because it's bad so with the battle over noa goes off to rescue zahra and lileth is there and lileth kills her like did i even mention i genuinely don't remember if i even mentioned lileth being in this book like it i don't know it doesn't matter there's so many characters who contribute nothing outside of a single scene and like this is lileth's one scene where she actually does anything she she kills zahra so noa does fail to save his beloved at the end and admittedly that did surprise me a little bit you know it saves this from being a completely generic happy ending at least like it's it's not great but it's something i guess uh so then they go through the city and massacre everyone who stood against them and this is portrayed as a good thing because they're psychopaths i guess uh when they're done they drink some more of methuselah's wine and now the humans and the nephilim are in control of the city and the gregori are gone so noa stays behind to rebuild while his family goes back to eden and as they're walking away going home they decide to just stroke him off one last time mark my words my son methuselah said to lamek as they began their long journey home the world will be changed because of that man of that i have no doubt my father he left of that i have no doubt okay if i long journey home they mean like four days but okay sure but yeah again it's just everyone in the story constantly telling us how amazing noa is and how he's going to change the world and that one at least kind of makes sense because at this point he was involved in taking over the city and getting rid of the gregori and it is his father and grandfather who are really proud of him and as far as they're concerned he's the one he's the one that like led this and is the mastermind behind all this so it does make some sense that they're saying this at least it just doesn't make sense from an objective standpoint so the gregori who fled including samoyaza they all officially joined forces with lucifer because you know again they're they're evil uh and there is a very short epilogue that takes place 18 years later noa is building a tower with some others and apparently he was the architect of this tower because of course he was at i'm half expecting to find out he's a fucking pilot at this stage but yeah so much of inoc was destroyed in the fighting that it's taken them you know all this time to rebuild it's been 18 years and at the very end the final leader of the council decides that he's going to rename the city atlantis and that is the last line of the book it's like i said man that that was the one line in this book that actually made me laugh and it was not friendly good-natured laughter it was mean spirited harsh like again if help me was here i would point in his face and fucking laugh at him because that's the dumbest shit i've ever read or one of the dumbest things okay the bar is pretty high but it it nearly clears that bar because you know a story is out of ideas when it brings in random conspiracies and legends just completely out of nowhere you know like a story just completely out of nowhere brings up the illuminati or the lizard people that's how you know they're out of ideas or hell remember and save the pearls when halfway through it revealed that aztec gods are a thing and that some of the main characters were just aztec gods which that had never been hinted at before it's clear that the book was just out of ideas at that stage plus atlantis was not in the bible atlantis was a myth that originated in the writings of playdough like trying to integrate legends like atlantis into your religion is some weirdo happy science cult shit and no i'm not talking about the church of happy science we do not have time just look it up trust me but yeah that's the note it ends on like this city is atlantis and it's trying to leave us in suspense for next time but it's such a ridiculous thing to say that it kills any and all suspense that might have been there and like that that's the end it's a it's a very muted end considering that there was that huge battle at the climax but like it's just yeah it just ends with such a whimper it's it's weird and you may have noticed that the summary for this book was kind of short in relation to how long this video is and yeah it is this book it's not particularly long but it's not really short either like you can see it's it's a mass market paperback and it's only a little over 400 pages and that includes like the genealogy and the acknowledgement section and the bestiary like there's just not that much going on here like now you know what i meant when i said it was empty there's a lot of stuff here that could have been unironically great and there's a lot of stuff here that could have been hilariously stupid but none of it ever reaches its potential because r.m. huffman refused to ever make a choice you know think think about it he created a world where dinosaurs are a thing and other than the leviathan he just barely did anything with it you know if you're gonna have dinosaurs there go crazy with it have no will be a dino rider who fights bad guys from the back of a triceratops you know have the villains tame a leviathan and use it to attack the good guys so they have so they have to kill it at the end we have the gregory in this story and they are evil angels who rule this city what are their powers you know they are really fast that that's about it you know they don't have any crazy magic or anything so they're not that's intriguing or cool as villains you know the edenites they live right next to the birthplace of humanity or in the birthplace of humanity again it's kind of confusing uh and they remember the old ways and they remember god when others have forgotten what sort of definable culture do these people have you know how does this them remembering the old ways while everyone else has forgotten how does that affect their relationships with the outside world it's irrelevant because they have no relationships with the outside world like all of this stuff that could be neat is just sort of thrown out there and then left alone you know you can't expect everyone else who reads your book to already love the characters in the setting and to already to want to know what happens next like you have to do something to make them care like the author just sat back and expected neat things to happen without doing it himself i wonder if that affects any of the themes of his writing look good stories at the end of the day come from making decisions and committing to them you know making bold choices hilariously bad stories also come from committing to weird choices like save the pearls those books are shit but that series committed to its bold and ridiculous world building about how the main character wants to turn everyone into furries and how white people are legally required to wear blackface when they're in public or tommy waso's acting is very famous and it's hilarious because he's clearly trying i mean what's more entertaining this you are tearing me apart lisa or this those are both equally bad acting but one of them makes a very bold choice and frankly if tommy waso didn't have such an odd accent and odd cadence when he speaks that like very big operatic reaction might have worked but because he doesn't it was funny you know it didn't work but it's still entertaining leviathan just has nothing like that and so it has nothing here that makes it worth reading like at all you know it's not good it's not funny bad it's it's not even really worth hate reading so that you can get mad at like ultra christian beliefs being pushed because it doesn't even do very much of that like puffman gave us an empty glass and told us to drink up and when he him and people who agree with him ideologically hear anybody say that hey this glass is empty or and we don't like that this glass is empty they're going to claim that oh they're only saying that because they hate christians or because we're woke or brainwashed lives or whatever secretly they actually love it because it's objectively great like they're just going to ignore and dismiss any and all criticisms because let's be honest here r.m. huffman is definitely going to watch this video sooner or later he might turn it off after five minutes in a rage but he's gonna watch at least part of it this guy has a huge ego at least when it comes to his writing and people with big fragile egos have a whole litany of psychological tools they use to avoid realizing that they have the capacity to do a bad job at literally anything like they they have a lot of ways to avoid criticizing themselves and honestly if there's anything about this book that can be called objectively bad it's that it has nothing to appeal to anyone you know fantasy fans don't get a good fantasy story christians do not get anything interesting in regards to their faith like there's who's this for i i don't know like there are a lot of moments in this book that make me think of other books or movies that did something similar but they did a lot better and i think that's what this was really like the author saw stuff that he thought was cool but he didn't understand how or why it worked and then he just threw it in there without doing the necessary legwork to make it work and then he tried to combine it with biblical lore and that's it and so because of that a few things are kind of cool but that is the highest level this book ever reaches it is kind of cool sometimes now the problem here is not that the author disagrees with me in terms of religion and politics when somebody who disagrees with me writes fantasy we get stuff like the lord of the rings or the chronicles of narnia or a song of ice and fire the powder mage trilogy lightbringer the first couple of lightbringer books let's say and the cosmere you know like those are all great fantasy and they were all written by people who are much more religious or politically different than i am you know lord of the rings and chronicles of narnia were written by jr or tolkien and c s lewis both of whom were fairly conservative and religious even by the standards of the time they lived in like if i met them personally would i get along with them super well probably not but i still really love and appreciate their work that's when somebody who disagrees with me writes fantasy though when somebody who is possessed by ideology to the point where they're incapable of seeing the real world tries to write fantasy we get crap like leviathan and the fifth sorceress and the sort of truth and shadow of the conqueror actually you know what sort of truth it's not fair to put sort of truth there because that's a bad series or okay i've only read the first book but the first book was pretty bad and from what i understand the rest of the series does not improve but it's not very good but and it's obsessed with showing off how cool terry goodkind thought libertarianism was but he at least understood the basics of how to structure a story and give the characters personality you know like terry goodkind was a jerk but he did sincerely believe in all this and it was just a reflection of how we saw the world and that's what art often is it's a reflection of how you see the world and how you see humanity and if that's what you make then by me consuming that art it allows me to look at things from a new angle from your perspective and understand you better and understand the world a little better even if i disagree with it or even if i disagree with your views i should say like everybody likes rage against the machine's music and they're a bunch of anarcho communists like i think a substantial chunk of their audience would probably disagree with them politically at least in part but it still works and people still love them because their music is a reflection of the world as they see it they're angry at the state of things but that anger is rooted in a deep love for humanity and a sympathy for the suffering of others but again that's just somebody who you may disagree with creating art if you are actually blinded by the world again blinded by ideology then you can't show anyone things from a different angle because you're not actually seeing the world from any angle all you can do is point and yell but no one else can see what you're pointing at and that is poison both to yourself and to your art i've said for a while that the fifth sorceress is the worst epic fantasy i've ever read and i do stand by that like that one is worse because it evoked many more emotions in me than this including anger annoyance and disgust but still i would rather read the fifth sorceress again than read this crap again because the fifth sorceress had things to say they were stupid things they were gross things but they were things you know and that's just it's so bizarre that noah the guy from the bible who made the arc noah fighting dinosaurs and evil angels it's so odd that that would be so dull you know like there are sequels to this book it's part of a series it's called the the anti deluvian legacy which is not a made up fantasy word word by the way anti deluvian just means relating to the world before the biblical flood uh but like there are sequels the second book is already out but i'm not gonna read them like it's kind of common for bad book series to have a really boring first book and then the later ones get really nuts but this one already had noah fighting dinosaurs and evil angels and it was boring as shit like adding atlantis into the mix isn't going to make it entertaining not even ironically i don't think you can get a whole lot crazier than this and it like i have to be good fun or bad fun like it's just going to be throwing out some crazy and then doing nothing with it i wish i had more to say about this book itself but i i just i just really don't it's empty there's very little here like i can talk about some of the stuff surrounding it still like the publisher for instance the publisher is called brown books publishing group and it's kind of weird like according to their website and some articles that people wrote about them what they do is rather than what most publishers do where you have to finish up a manuscript and then submit it to them and if they like it they'll take it and help you edit it and then send print it and send it out and sell it but brown books publishing group takes unfinished manuscripts like instead of taking completed ones and polishing them they take incomplete ones and then the authors will pay them to help them finish like the the authors pay them for editing pay sometimes they'll pay them for ghost writing and they'll pay them for printing but in exchange they retain the rights to the book like if they want to sell movie rights or anything and they retain most of the profits which is completely backwards from traditional publishers where they take care of all of that but in exchange they take the lion's share of the profits and honestly that explains a lot about this book because like this isn't a specifically christian press they publish all kinds of stuff but like if this is something where you already pay them and they've already made their money then they're just going to want to take care of business ASAP and throw it out to market like they don't make much money whether it sells well or not so they don't really care if it sells well like so they're not going to put in that much time or effort into editing it and making it good which is the direct opposite of traditional publishers who actually want it to succeed like if you're going to a traditional publisher like i'm not saying that traditional publishing doesn't have issues because it has a lot but like at the very least your interests and their interests are aligned most of the time brown books publishing is also guilty of scamming authors like they've done that in the past so stay away from them and everyone and look just general advice for like publishing or anything else if somebody wants you to pay them for the privilege of entering to business into business together it is a scam and like like i said they do offer ghost writing services i don't think that leviathan was ghost written like i guess it's possible but i don't think it was like i i feel like the author deserves both good and bad credit for it and i mean again he's not above taking credit for chat gpt even while admitting that he used chat gpt to write his book but i i mean i don't think this was ghost written i don't know this whole thing with brown books publishing is just self-publishing with extra steps so if you're gonna go down that route you may as well just do self-publishing like i mentioned earlier huffman has a gigantic ego when it comes to his writing like the only way i found out about this book and then like stumbled down the rabbit hole of his derangement uh is because i just stumbled across a tweet of his where he refers to this this series as great original fantasy and he has a few other statements where he says it's like way better than any other fantasy coming out nowadays and he also says similar things about the crappy children's books he's written about farts you know we compared himself to dr again he he's written multiple children's books about farts like at that point i think you just have a kink for it or something like this man's head is big enough to have its own gravity well and this is not the first time i've read a book by somebody like him you know somebody with reactionary political views who thinks that they deserve more success in the artistic world than what they've gotten you remember a couple of years ago when i reviewed true allegiance by ben Shapiro like it's it's not a great video it it had low production value was kind of clumsy like i was still figuring out how to do things in this format i mean hell i guess i i'm still changing and improving so i guess i'm still figuring out how to do things in this format but whatever you understand what i'm saying and uh the thing is ben Shapiro is known as a political commentator but before that he wanted to be a hollywood screenwriter and he failed like his parents have hollywood connections they worked in hollywood but he still couldn't get his screenplays out there and i haven't read any of them but i think it's safe to say based on both his book and the fact that even with connections he couldn't find anybody to actually buy them and make them into movies they're probably pretty shit now he was pretty young when he wrote those i know and most of us start off as shitty writers there's no shame in that like i did a video a while ago about the crappy book i wrote when i was 15 you can check that out if you want it is terrible it just is we all start off bad at our art whether it's you know writing music singing sculpting what painting whatever like we all start off bad at it but you get better through practice and more more over you have to be able to examine your own stuff you have to find out what works what doesn't work throw out stuff you previously thought was good because you know i'm sure a lot of writers out there can tell you there's stuff that you think is amazing when you first write it and then you go back to it like a year later and you say oh god this is terrible and you have to be able to accept criticism from others like you have to be able to do all of that and it's a lot of work to not only write something out but then to go back and realize okay large parts of this are just going to be have to be gone and without that you're not going to get any better at what you're trying to do and Shapiro and Huffman and others like them they can't do that like they think that their work is already perfect and it's society's fault for not uncritically embracing their work oh they didn't buy my screenplays it wasn't because they were terrible it's because hollywood is run by liberals or wokeness has brainwashed people not to like good art or you know something like that just anything to avoid acknowledging that you are imperfect because introspection is death to narcissism on top of that Shapiro came from a very well off family and never had to work that hard for anything like it was all handed to him and I don't know about Huffman but I know a lot of other people in similar situations had the same thing they came from wealth but they still screwed up they still couldn't make it because you have to work a lot to get better at things like you have to work a lot to get better at your art but people like Shapiro just don't want to so him and Huffman both leaned into reactionary politics you know they made a name for themselves as people who tell their audience what they want to hear and then they just use that as a springboard to get their crappy art out there and they're not the only ones that have done this a lot of others have like uh if you heard of other political commentators like Steven Crowder he was a failed comedian and a failed husband who turned into a political commentator and sometimes he still pretends to be a comedian because he tells very unfunny jokes that don't have a punchline a couple of months ago some people probably became more familiar with Michael Knowles because he made a speech at CPAC where he straight up called for a genocide of transgender people and he was a failed actor he followed the same path like he tried to make it as an actor he couldn't make it as an actor he didn't want to work hard and get better at it so he just decided to blame everybody else and there's also an entire genre of shit rappers that have followed the exact same path you know tried to make it as rappers sucked at it then just decided okay i'll cultivate an audience by blaming the jews or blaming wokeness or whatever for everybody's problems and then i'll just throw my music out there and then some of them will listen to it you know people like zuby and tom mcdonnell now not a single one of these people has achieved their dream like none of them have have succeeded at it like despite coming from wealthy backgrounds and being given every opportunity opportunity to succeed they failed to reach their dreams like they have an audience of people who will pretends to like whatever they make because it's like owning the libs or whatever but there is almost no one out there who genuinely liked true allegiance or who genuinely likes zuby's music or anything like that and if you don't believe me you can just look at the views on their music videos or the number of ratings that their books get on amazon and goodreads like their audience just isn't interested in the stuff they have to produce their audience interested in being told that their beliefs are true and hearing about political stuff like they just do not care outside of that but in their bubble people like huffman and shepiro get to pretend that they succeeded and they make money too like there is a lot of money in being a reactionary grifter but you don't make much money from selling your books or music or being an actor or anything else because out in the real world outside of their bubble their stuff wasn't very good like they couldn't find mainstream success and they couldn't find success in a niche audience either but they could get people to fawn over them because of political tribalism you know like just me criticizing them in this way is going to have people coming out of the woodwork saying actually it's good you only hate it because they disagree with you even though i've specifically said multiple times no that's not the problem and gone over all the real problems and for every one of these people you hear about there are a hundred more out there that you will never see people who get a few thousand followers on instagram or twitter or something because they're crying about how the woke mario movie is destroying their childhood or sorry they're crying about how great the mario movie is and how it's sticking it to the libs or something which one is that again i don't know they they kept going back and forth on that one they should they should get their messaging a little better but they managed to get a few thousand followers by complaining about stupid shit like that they convince people hey i'm on your side and you have to defend me otherwise the other people will win and then they like self-published books on amazon or some shit like that and then they sell almost nothing their own audience doesn't like what they make like i said leviathan has 25 ratings on goodreads and one of those is mine so even in its niche it hasn't gotten much traction like christian fiction is a big market there are plenty of people who would clamor for this sort of story if it was worth reading and it's just it's just not and one day all of these people huffman zubi Shapiro all of them one day they will all die and they will be just as far away from attaining their dreams as they were when they started and if they have any self-awareness they're going to look back and wonder where it went wrong the moral of this story is that you have to kill your ego or your ego will kill your dreams your ego gets in the way of self-improvement and it gets in the way of your success there's not a conspiracy to keep conservatives out of the entertainment industry most of them are just fragile and unimaginative it really is that simple like the the ones that aren't fragile and unimaginative are doing okay for themselves you know i i mentioned before that uh the star fire series is great military sci-fi even though uh both the writers political beliefs and the messages being pushed by the books are things i vehemently disagree with you know clinton eastwood and kelsey rammer and some others are like working in hollywood they have pretty good careers and they're also like very right-wing guys but people don't care because they're actually good at what they do richard mark huffman is not unique by any means even though on the surface he sounds like kind of an interesting person again he's he's a russian propagandist he's an author he writes both adults and children's books he's a doctor like he he sounds like an interesting person but he's just following the same pattern a thousand other people already have and he's not doing it very well which is why i don't want to read the sequels even though i normally would in this situation like the leviathan is an empty derivative book and it is written by an empty derivative man i already know everything about them that i need to know from the first one so now for some news by which i mean let's talk about my next super long review which will be out in a couple of months because i did two really close together i did angel fire and then this really close together and that's very tiring so i need to take a bit of a break before i do that and also this and angel fire we're both based on christian myths so i need take a bit of a break from anything based on that so i asked in a short just a couple of days before filming this what you people wanted me to review next and you answered so stay tuned for breathe by sarah croissant it is it's about a world where there's no more oxygen and so everybody lives under domes and they have to pay for air which that's just an edgy version of belorex movie it's it's ridiculous but you know i'll see you when that comes out probably some time this summer goodbye wow you you're still watching i i mean i guess i appreciate it but i'm not sure why i mean at this point all that we have left is all these names here these are my patrons and including my ten dollar and up patrons aposavalanan olivia reyan brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay dan ancelia vich dark king don dio echo flax carcat kitsune lexie delorm lyza rudakova lord tiebreaker microphone mist boy peep the toad roby reviews sad martigan sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla shark vei victus and westley these are all great people you know let me let me just let me tell you if you want to get your name on here then consider donating to me once a month become a patron or if you don't feel like doing that or you just can't because you know you're like poor or whatever no shame in that uh then just you know rate the video comment on it subscribe share it around spam it to all your friends and uh yeah goodbye