#Don't even get me started on how wild magic vs witch magic works | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

numericalbridge · 2 months

Text

TOH rewatch semi-liveblog. Season 1 part 1b

episodes 4-5

Episode 4

- So, how do they make the forcefield against the Boiling Rain once Eda loses her powers?

- Yeah, i love that sometimes Luz and King and Eda are allowed to be mean or insensitive. What i don't like is Eda starting to say that she will 'break every bone' in King's body because he stole the elixir, and that it is not shown as something unusual and instead the story just moves on. With the knowledge that King is meant to be equal to an elementary school kid that kinda crosses the line. He is 8! (as in - i see it is a writing choice that doesn't really fit what season 2 does with Eda and King, not like anything that i hold against Eda as a person)

- But curious whether the King's plotline was changed between seasons because of the way the storyline here connects him with the plight of the demons.

- He also says that the demons are underappreciated, yet all the one-off villains in season 1 are demons or creatures☹️

- AU potential for King and Eber interactions is also golden.

- Transition between episodes from the dream-like sequence of Eda wondering who cursed her to Lilith's introduction in episode 5 is really good.

Episode 5

- Interesting how excited Willow in particular seemed to be about the Covens. Would've been interesting if the development from this point onwards got more focus, and if she had some kind of connection and confrontation with Terra. Or, alternatively if the dynamic between Eda and Willow&Gus that exists in season 1 was continued in season 2 with Eda working on becoming a mentor figure for various kids, leading to her opening the school in the epilogue.

- Tbh i think some of the one-off villains in season 1 could've been replaced by the Coven Heads.

- Mason's cameo. He seems very stoic and rather chill about getting thrown around. Interestingly he is the only Coven Head present at the convention. So maybe the newest Coven Head duties, or maybe he actually cares about his Coven.

- Not an actual criticism - it's just genre conventions, and too much exposition would've dragged the whole thing down, but i confess it always amuses me when very important bits of information about the world - for example how the goverment works - are not explained to the main character until much later even when the absense of that info is dangerous (same happened with WHA too)

- What track is fire spell magic or is it a general thing?

- Luz seems quite reasonable when she explains why she wants to check the EC to form her own thoughts (especially with the info that is available to her and the viewers at this point), and i find it interesting the way she says 'individualism' specifically (and not 'individuality' or 'independence') when describing Eda's aproach and how that connects to Eda's overall journey towards opening her institute of wild magic. I initially had conflicting thoughts about that development because i liked that Eda was allowed to be angry at the school system and never want to do anything with it ever again, but on this rewatch i definitely see how the arc is forming, so i warmed up to it. It's a pity that because of the shortening it feels like a part of her journey is still missing. And also it would've been nice to see why she doesn't seem to connect much with other wild witches - are they just scattered around and in hiding? Or is Eda shunned because of her curse?

- Why doesn't Eda ever use illusion magic?

- No, but all Eda and Lilith interactions are golden! And then season 2 happened.

- They should have, imo, shown Willow's reaction to Luz vs Amity fight, even if brief.

- Luz and King's developing relationship is also very good.

- Ahhh, but Lilith is also shown to hold some bad beliefs - looking down on humans more aggresively than other witches, throwing words like 'degenerate' around. It is clear that she wasn't just some poor nerd whose only problem was that she had to supress her real nerdy interests in the Covens, and it would've been nice to see her progression and bettering herself in s2 instead of just focusing on her relationship with her family and her geeking out. Like, Oh, Titan episode is right there to show the progress! Never understood why it prioritized Steve over Lilith, when Steve didn't even need to be deprioritized, just have all 3 travel together, show Lilith reacting to common people and helping out in the montage, then learn her lesson regarding King by the end in an actually serious manner instead of making it a joke. It is so frustrating, because I never doubted she would be redeemed, and after season 1 i was excited for her development and to see more of her, and then season 2 just went in the direction of my least favourite writing choices with her😞

----

Conclusion:

Overall episodes 1-5 mostly hold very well on the rewatch, and i found episodes 1-2 much easier to follow this time. But some problems are already obvious like Gus having less attention compared to others, and problems with certain character designs.

#it's part 1a and 1b because i watched in 4-5 episode batches but the first part was getting too long #toh rewatch numericalbridge #toh rewatch liveblog #long post #the owl house

2 notes · View notes

i-love-hobbies · 3 years

Text

Eda may have more trauma than what we've seen on screen - theory

Her seeing a lot of death I think is a fact.

She has been a criminal for three decades and she ate a dude while being so chill about it. For someone to be this chill they have to have seen a lot of death and recovered from it.

She is extremely reckless like on another level when she doesn't (or refuses to) recognize the danger. We've seen her permanent record. She also got caught by Warden Wrath. She almost had Amity stabbed with a lot of spikes. She fell for a scam (for thirty years she has been a scammer) for an elixir, cause of cards.

She got herself scammed kinda on purpose just so she can prove to be better than Lilith. She actually got caught by the fun police.

She fell for Luz's apple blood signs (how bad is that problem?). She punched a guard. She almost had Amity get blasted. She told King to echolocate the lake (I know they didn't get caught and that she was expecting that as she has experience with the coven but why risk it?). She had to hit the fool's blood.

Now obviously the roots of this problem come from her parents. Her mom was probably very ignorant of her behaviour and her dad fired fireworks in the house (In my opinion this was her second transformation ever. So my problem is "in the house".)

Ok so her growing up with this problem makes sense but she has shown to respect others' opinion. She respects a fourteen year old from another dimension without natural magic and a kid which till now didn't have magic and she has no idea which species he is from.

Yes telling her "just follow the rules" like Lilith and teachers did would not work but Raine seems like the person who would recognise why rules are there in the first place and straight up say:

- You want Bump to allow you to study every track. Well don't have him completely dependent on the Emporer's coven money by breaking everything.

Now this obviously didn't work immediately, but it should have planted a seed, right?

How has she not grown out of her biggest flaw? It's been near five decades. For five decades she refuses to change?

What was stopping her? The guards she can mop the floor with? Yes she was in isolation, because of her choices, curse and wild magic but again didn't do anything till now about it.

1. Isolation 2. Bigger problem with the curse and talking to people 3. Bigger isolation

Again she didn't break the cycle for three decades. Why?

She has been shown to be very adaptive. She probably had to change at least a bit to find herself with someone with stage fright, to rebel against her mom's cures and find an elixir, to be able to so drastically change her point view of the coven system, that she accidentally inspires someone to rebel. And is overall a very mature person when it comes to her giving advice.

Then she completely pauses and refuses to change in any way. Refuses to learn from her mistakes. Refuses to learn how to manage her curse better. Just stops.

Then Luz shows up and she is adaptive again.

What happened in between? She never needed to learn to be adaptive or to put herself in other people's shoes cause she already knew how, someone just needed to show her affection.

Now here is my theory. She was apart of a rebellion or better yet she led one at some point in the past and before it and while being in it, she had overcame her reckless problem thanks to Raine.

We have seen the difference between what she was going through while she was a scammer and while she was actually proactive in a pretty small rebellion. It was a big difference. She probably thinks Raine is death. At first it felt kinda safe and then BAM.

Also her punching the guard for some stranger, her line "Only truths!" which as pizzaboat pointed out is just her saying "I'll tell you only if you catch me just like always!" her leadership when it came to Raine's rebellion that fell cause Raine fell for a trap.

Also I should probably point out Raine's rebellion as it feels relevent. I think they had a family or close friends that died in this thirty years (maybe in Eda's rebellion, maybe cause of stuff that was curable back in the savage ages when a lot of plants weren't extinct).

And then they finally decided to act while before they were just trying to join the ranks as they're plan was to destroy the system from the inside so minimum people would die, but they finally really started recruiting people, recently.

On the other hand I think Eda, after finding out how her sister was treated and probably distanced herself even more from her, cause of the fear of the curse hurting her even more and going to the forbidden part of the library, found the author of the unauthorized history book, who was probably in the rebellion that formed immediately as Belos became emporer (there is no way such a rebellion didn't exist).

From them she learned exactly what she was getting herself into and what was actually effective and started learning how to form a rebellion, before even becoming officially a criminal.

Also I think she probably used a fake identity so her family doesn't get attacked ones she became a wild witch. I'm imagining dark green clothes with red eye contacts and no hair.

While being in the rebellion she probably learned a lot of skills and went through a lot of trauma, as death was kinda normal, with the help of her mentor and her new found apple blood problem.

I think the rebellion also succesided in something but mostly it failed miserably and the rebellion was destroyed with her probably the only survivor (at the very least her mentor dies).

Also I'm still begging for an Eda vs Belos fight which is definitely not happening outside of a flashback.

Also if hundreds really did die Infront of her in the matter of a week, maybe even in a second if Belos came personally. She probably needed someone who fulfilled the role of a therapist and probably for a long time no one had heard of her or her other identity as she was hiding in the forest cause of the flashbacks she had.

Not sure what happened to the therapist but I wouldn't be surprised if they're dead.

This combined with her nightmares I think is something she is still recovering from by refusing to recognize danger, by trying to escape reality. By being so reckless so she can feel better and have fun always.

Anyway if I'm right imagen how hard s1ep18/19 and s2ep7 hit her.

#toh #the owl house #toh eda #eda clawthorne #edalyn clawthorne #the owl lady #eda the owl lady #toh raine #raine whispers #raeda #toh raeda #toh theory #the owl house theory #toh emperor belos

84 notes · View notes

firelxdykatara · 3 years

Note

not gonna lie I would love to hear more about the drama and infighting that went on in The Vampire Diaries fandom if you have the time (and also want to use that time to give your experience with the fandom, which from the snippets you've told sounds Not Fun so I get it if you don't want to lol)

oh god, there was like, SO MUCH, i just

i really feel like tvd is one of those fandoms that is so hard to describe without a lot of ‘you’d have to have been there’, but it really felt like this huge and all-consuming beast for about five years until the show finally imploded and the fandom basically turned on it en masse. (you ever see that post going around that’s like ‘if you ever want to know what true regret feels like, ask someone who once called tvd their favorite show’? still a mood, all these years later. basically the entire fandom thought the show should have just bowed out with whatever shreds of dignity it had left at the end of season 6, and became more of a hatedom than a fandom for the last two seasons. when you have an entire fandom cheering news of your show’s cancellation, i think that’s a sign you done fucked up, julie.)

first and most infamous, of course, are the ship wars. which are pretty much inevitable in any teen-centered drama, and i really think the CW fucking thrives on them, but it was particularly egregious in TVD’s case because not only was the base premise of the show a love triangle, but the two main romantic leads were brothers that the show constantly pit against one another--in pursuit of elena’s affections, but also because it kept up this insistence on the ‘good brother/bad brother’ dichotomy which stopped making sense after about season 2 (by which time we have found out that the good brother was never as good as he appeared, and the bad brother has been growing and isn’t nearly as bad as he pretends to be)--and the question of which brother ‘deserved’ elena (and no, what elena wanted very rarely factored into these discussions, especially in the team stefan camp because they turned on her when what she wanted was no longer The Good Brother, but i’ll get to that in a bit) was hotly contested.

i’m not kidding when i say the shipping wars were vicious. i started watching tvd shortly after it began to air, which was late 2009, and kept up with it fairly sporadically over the years. i didn’t come onto tumblr until 2011/2012, and by then, the fandom was already pretty much a garbagefire. there were anti ship and anti character blogs, any time something bad happened for one ship the rival ship would invade the tags to gloat about it (seasons 3 and 4 were especially rough, and i’m not gonna pretend delena fans weren’t just as bad about tag invasion and shit, but as that was my side of the road i saw a lot more of the stelena shippers being assholes, which soured my opinion on the ship a long time before i started rewatching and realized the red flags were there from the start), confessions blogs were popular also toxic as fuck (so much fighting happened in the notes of those posts, good gods), and this was right around when twitter’s popularity was on the rise and the line between Celebrity and Fan was thinning, so the fandom was absolutely atrocious to much of the tvd cast and crew.

(some of them deserved a lot of the later backlash, but in the early years a lot of it was ‘how dare you write the story in a way i dont like, you terrible fucking person’, and gods don’t get me started on the dobsley vs nian Thing)

i think what really encapsulates my feelings on the tvd fandom as a whole, though, is the way they (to this DAY) treated elena gilbert, which can be summed up in one meme that gained a lot of traction around season 3 if i remember right: that gif of pam from true blood, with the text altered to read “i’m so OVER elena and her precious doppelganger vagina!”

i swear at one time i had over half the active tvd fan accounts on tumblr blocked, because i got to a point where i would no longer tolerate elena hate, and she was (and still is, in what remains of the fandom; you’ll see a lot of ‘elena was one of the worst things about the show’ takes from ex-fans, too) one of the most widely despised characters in the entire fandom. because she -checks smudged writing on hand- was a traumatized teenage girl who -reads off a crumpled notecard- couldn’t always perfectly sort out her own feelings and -squints at the ceiling- sometimes made mistakes or bad decisions. (except a lot of the fandom also insisted that she was a mary sue who had no character traits or flaws or faults and it was like....make up your fucking minds???? is she a calculating conniving bitch whose somehow manipulating these centuries old vampires to tie them around her little finger or is she a boring flat character with no depth and no flaws??? jfc)

there was this massive double standard, too--like, stefan and damon could fuck whoever they wanted and that was fine, but elena was constantly raked over the coals for the crime of developing romantic feelings for the two men who had become constants in her life and whom she cared for deeply, and oh my GOD the slut shaming that happened when elena slept with damon was fucking wild. (and also happened in canon lmfao. like the show had one of elena’s best friends basically call her diseased on screen for falling in love with someone other than stefan. it was gross and ridiculous and the friend in question was also being a giant hypocrite at the time since she was happily flirting with someone who was directly responsible for the deaths of like four of elena’s loved ones and her own boyfriend’s mother but that’s beside the point) but like elena was called a slut and a bitch and a whore for ‘cheating’ on stefan (she hadn’t, and she had in fact broken up with him on screen the episode earlier) and ‘immediately’ jumping into bed with damon, even though none of them said fucking boo when stefan had one night stands or damon had fuckbuddies or whatever.

shit, caroline didn’t get any of this treatment when she started falling for tyler while dating matt! which isn’t to say i think she should have, just that i think it’s fucking ridiculous that elena was absolutely demonized by the fandom for daring to have feelings for two guys at once and eventually acting on them--despite the fact that the entire premise of the show was a love triangle. it’s not a love triangle if both sides don’t eventually get explored, and the crew had been pretty explicit about the fact that delena was going to happen at some point--but when it did, a huge chunk of the fandom absolutely threw a fit.

and a lot of these elena haters were alleged stelena stans, and i say alleged because they hated her so much for not wanting stefan’s dick anymore that it was clear they were really stefan stans and only wanted stelena to be endgame because they wanted stefan to ‘win’ at the end of the day, because ‘he’s the good brother’ so he deserved elena more.

it was all very gross and very misogynistic and very sex shaming (apparently delena was a ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’ relationship because they had sex after two years of unrequited feelings slowly becoming requited and then pining for ages on both sides, and because they had a lot of on screen chemistry that the show capitalized on for years so of course they did a lot of making out and shit but it’s not like stelena didn’t have its fair share of making out and sex scenes, stefan was just too much of a coward to let elena top i’d apologize for that joke but i’m really not sorry because it’s true), and when i say it was egged on by the crew, that’s because they refused to let the love triangle die back in season 4 when it should have.

they insisted on stringing stelena fans along, dropping little bread crumbs to keep them invested, like dreams of a future where they were married and revealing that stefan was also a doppelganger and he and elena were descended from a pair of star-crossed lovers (a plot that ultimately went nowhere, to no one’s great surprise), and then fucking like. julie plec turned around and threw nina under the bus after she chose not to extend her contract and pretended that stelena might have happened again if she hadn’t left the show, which....i mean frankly i wouldn’t put it past her, but it would have been shitty writing. then again, she thought having a vampire pregnancy where a uterus was magically transplanted from a witch into a vampire that could somehow......carry the babies to term.... made sense and was a good way to accomodate candice’s RL pregnancy rather than like literally ANYTHING else, soooooo. but anyway julie saying that around like, end of s6 sparked off a new wave of nina hate and elena hate and ship wars bc they SEers took it as ‘confirmation’ that stelena was REALLY meant to be endgame and it was all just a hot fucking mess

another thing is that, while tvd was in its prime before the anti/purity culture shit started picking up any real steam, there was still this pervasive attitude throughout the fandom that if you liked Damon, you were A Bad Person. liking damon was apparently grounds for insults and harassment, and apparently he was The Worst Person on the Show even though literally nothing he does on screen is any worse than shit we know stefan has done (and frankly every other vampire too, but i mention stefan specifically because he was always held up--in the show but especially in the fandom--as the Good Brother while damon was the Bad One, and if you liked damon more then that had to mean your morals were dodgy and you clearly couldn’t appreciate what a heroic and saintly figure dear stefan was and....oops, i’m sorry, my salt keeps leaking -cough-).

meanwhile klaus quickly became a fandom darling despite not even really having much of a redemption arc (on tvd anyway, he just became more ‘affably evil’ as the show went on and more inclined to work with the main characters rather than try to kill them; i have no idea what went on over on his show, though), and like i can 100% appreciate liking villains and not caring that they do dodgy villainous shit, even just liking them bc they’re hot and wanting them to kiss a main character bc they have insanely good chemistry (yes i ship klaroline, no i won’t apologize for it, they could have been Really Great), it’s just really the double standard that gets me.

and all of this, incidentally, required ignoring some truly gross shit stefan was responsible for wrt his relationship with elena, that frankly it has always bothered me never really got addressed in the show. i get why elena herself would never be able to actually call him on it, but the fact is that he stalked her for months after he first saw her and thought she was katherine (meanwhile it only took damon .5 seconds to realize she was someone else entirely, but that’s another topic entirely), and then he deliberately inserted himself into her life because, in his words, ‘i have to know her’. he never gave a thought to how his presence in her life might affect her (or rather, he did, and tormented himself about it in his internal monologue, but never let this actually dissuade him from disrupting her life), and elena would wind up blaming herself for every tragedy that befell her friends and loved ones as a result of getting mixed up in vampire bullshit even though none of it was her fault--she literally blamed herself for existing but most of the fandom didn’t give a fuck about that lmfao--and stefan did shit like find out that she was adopted and then withhold this information from her until she got pissed about another secret he was keeping (her resemblence to katherine) and drop it on her to try and distract her from her very reasonable anger, and like... i should stop before this becomes a whole rant about how much i hate stefan fucking salvatore, but the point is, he did a lot of really sketchy shit he never answered for and elena never really took him to task for, and the fandom just kept eating up his insistence that he was the Good Brother and therefore he deserved to have elena, and if she didn’t want him anymore it was because she was a heinous bitch who didn’t deserve him.

uh.....i think i got off track there. and there’s probably a lot of shit i missed, like i think i was incandescent with rage for most of seasons 5 and 6 so i missed a lot of the interfandom shit cause i was too busy being increasingly pissed off at the show itself, but if nothing else this should give you an idea of how much of a goddamn cesspit the fandom was while the show as in its prime. there’s a reason both the show and the fandom have such a lousy reputation lmfao.

#the vampire diaries #tvd #tvd fandom salt #anti stefan #anti stelena #salt for ts #asked #Anonymous

75 notes · View notes

signofwolf · 3 years

Text

Kingdom of Ash by Sarah J. Maas – book review

Series: Throne of Glass #7 Genre: YA, Fantasy Theme: Fae, magic users, war Warnings: mentions of torture, imprisonment Star rating: 0,5/10

Why did I pick this up?: I wanted to end this horrible series once and for all.

[Heavy spoilers ahead]

To make myself clear, before this book I quite liked this series. It wouldn’t place in my top 100 books, not even close, but it was a pleasant pageturner to listen to in audiobooks when working.

Language

Let’s start slow. I lack the words to express how much I hate the words ‘male’, ‘female’ and ‘mate’ after this series. Not even gonna try to express my trauma. But these 3 gems aside, Sarah J. Maas needs a dictionary. Or compress her work to a manageable size. Everything sang, Everyone melted, Every man roared, Every woman trembled, Everyone was unleashing themselves at least once a chapter (number of chapters: 122) ). And now I know definitely too much about Yrene’s ‘womb’. I know so much…

Dynamism

I thought that was a book about a war with heavy action content. Oh boy, I was wrong. This 984-pages monstrosity has maybe 5 pages of action. If you squint.

Every sequence, where by design action should take place was followed by one of two scripts:

Few sentences of action and then a few pages long internal monologue. Often repeated with the same character after the next few sentences of action, or with the next character and then the next (sometimes the first character made a second appearance and then everything would go all over again). And the word ‘character’ used in these sentences is not because I’m rambling. This book is written that way!

Few sentences of action and then action stops, and we are graced by a few pages long conversation. In the middle of a battle. Or spying. Or in Erawan’s chambers, when his castle is going down, and he is running up the stairs...

Time

Leaving alone the fact that apparently all series took less than a year (till this book I estimated the plot for about 3 years, Wiki told me it was 2, but Maas knows best), because that is a can of worms in itself. Time in this one? I honestly have no idea. There were many ‘few weeks of travel’ parts with two main groups of POVs. Personally my only time indicator was ‘Orynth won’t fall till Aelin gets here’. But nothing just fit. And I saw Lost Song when in the last episode we as the audience realized that our two POVs parallel storylines are in reality millennia apart. Lost Song made sense.

Emotional loading

… there wasn’t any. Really, it was like reading a milk label. Every time the scene was potentially emotionally impactful, Maas went ahead to overexplaining EVERY. GOD. DAMMED. THING. And it was abso-fucking-lutely everything. ‘Emotional dilemma? Let’s current POV explain it! 2 pages should be enough… Damn maybe it wasn’t enough. I know! I’ll switch POVs and explain it through the other character!’ <= My impression of Maas’ thought process. I’m fairly sure that the record was 7 POVs explaining the same thing in the row, but I was blacking out a little, so I cannot be sure.

And if that wasn’t enough, this book had a second way to defuse tension: random-plastic-repetitive-badly_written-smut. Really badly written and really repetitive. How could you not feel the spicy bits, when Manon (cruel, self assured 100+years old witch-queen) reacts the same in bed as Elide (20years old, virgin, ex-slave). And the rest of them were the same, there weren’t ANY distinctions.Just copy-paste.

The next point in current case: Someone died, it was impactful, I really liked the character, so I got sad. But then 2 of our characters came out of the room with a body, and after a paragraph of grieving they started making out, and then I was regaled with 2-pages-long description of melting cores. That was the place then this book stopped being badly written, and started being distasteful.

Characters

Remember when I was writing about switching POVs (which is 15(!!!) In the whole book. Oh and an omniscient narrator in places when our current POV was grieving too much to overthink something, but Maas still wanted to inform us about something)? They were all savagely murdered in the worst way: character mutilation. Somewhere between books our maybe-not-that-original but colorful and interesting characters became carbon copies of each other. I have no idea how many times I didn’t realise there was a POV switch. The only indicator was a change of pronoun, or when Maas was telling us the name of a current narrator. These were the only ways. And if you can't distinguish if you are in Dorian’s head or in Manon’s, that is the sign of a really BAD writing.

Romance

…there wasn't any. In all this book there wasn't any naturally progressing romantic scene. There were Maas’ endgame pairings which were sexing or pinning. As the author Maas loves to write about soulmates. And it’s not a bad thing itself. When I want some fluffy story I often tag ‘soulmates’ in AO3 and voila, +10 to good mood. But God above, it is not cute when every pair you write about are ‘true mates’ just BECAUSE. It is the only way Maas sees a relationship, as a fated pairing, written in the wake of the universe by the God himself. There is no choice, nor the work to put in it. They are the author's OTP and that means that they are perfect and they should have children right now. Point in case:

Guy was treating a girl like a shit on his sole, including throwing her naked out of tent, on a snow, with their friends present, all the while abusing her verbally in a worst way. But it’s okay, because when she almost died he realised his mistakes and apologised. Two scenes later, he was forgiven, because... fated mates?

The pathos

I know that many people don't like this type of scenes, but it's not my case. I’m reading by picturing images and not repeating words. I like sequences that I can imagine to be grand and glorious, even if they are a little corny. That said, the pathos scenes were the most disappointing ones for me. Maas likes to write parts that are more picturesquely exalted than logically possible [point in case: meeting of 5 armies/forces in the random patch of sand in Empire of Storms, and it being painted as ‘an Aelin’s great plan’. I laughed myself silly at that. But not taking logic and all the plot holes into consideration that was a nicely looking scene. In Kingdom of Ash that wasn’t the case. I would say that the author wanted to paint us a renaissance painting every 20 pages or so. In my opinion, every time she failed miserably. Each and every of those scenes was or to farfetched to be even remotely realistic, and evidently written only for a sake of the picture, or just plainly stupid.

Example, and it’s so priceless a scene, that I just need to share it: Battle of Orynth, 25th day or so (time in this book doesn’t exist), the 13. sacrificed themselves (like thousands before them but hush). And then, time stops: grieving Manon is going through the city, they open the gates for her (yes, the siege is still on), she goes to the place where they died, after her come out all of our main heroes, and half the city itself with ‘flowers, rocks and precious possessions’ and they lay it there in a tribute to these brave (evil till 2 months ago) witches. I honestly can’t remember when was the last time I saw such an abstract scene. It’s a material for an essay in itself. No, I could not take it seriously.

Additionally, it's hard to make an impact as every damn sentence is grand and lofty. In the end it became truly pathetic, Aelin vs Maeve was unreadable.

Character deaths:

Let's make a quick count: main characters in a series at the start of KoA: 12 secondary characters in a series at the start of KoA: 20ish minor and total background: a lot more

Death count: main: 0 secondary: 3 minor: 2 (11 if we try very hard)

Resurrections: 1 (possibly 3, but not gonna analyze it)

Did you feel emotions of this impossible war against this all-encompassing, all-powerful, invincible, immortal, cunning Evil with armies from 3 continents and 2 worlds? No? Me neither.

Oh well, but there were a lot of deaths of ordinary soldiers. I’m quite certain that all of Terrasen’s army was at least twice brought back to life for them to die in these numbers.

Logic or lack thereof

Oh, and let’s not forget about the Deus ex machina army of unbeatable, magical elves on wolves, from legends, living for the past thousands of years in the unreachable lands of the north, because they managed to run from the surprise attack 10 years earlier. Did I mention that they came from portals, which the whole book was telling us were impossible to make in this scenario? After the previous saviour army was already fighting there for a day? And that Aelin didn’t know they would come for sure (how did she contact them again?)? Even though they were waiting in the full armours for these portals? Ah, and also: that army didn’t do anything. They just came and fought for maybe 4 minutes. And there were just so many things like that!

And if we’re on the topic of armies I present you: ‘My favourite absurd-list in the series: allied armies’.

(As a comparison, in A Song of Ice and Fire by J.R.R Martin, in 7 kingdoms of Westeros, at the peak of war there were 7 forces present, but not all were even engaged in a war.)

First the ones that made sense:

Armies of Terrasen’s Lords (counted as one, not gonna nitpick)

The Khaganate army (also counted as one)

Galan Ashryver’s armada

Whitethorn fraction

Rebel Ironteeth witches

…should Dorian be counted as an ‘army’?

And there were some that did not:

Ansel of Briarcliff’s army

The Silent Assassins

Mycenians

Wild Men of the Fangs

Army of magical elves on wolves

And the ‘I don’t even know’ category:

Crochan witches

Overpowering and overreaching

Section title tells it all. The stakes were too high. I was honestly waiting for Aelin to become Super Saiyan and start to throw planets at Maeve and Erawan. I won’t spoil if this happened.

In my opinion it could be a really great series, if our list of villains ended with Arobynn and King of Adarlan, and the list of Aelin titles with an assassin and a princess. We could have had two main fight plots: one emotional with Arobynn, when Aelin would have to face a damage he had done to her, and overcome it. And the second one, with freeing Terrasen from Adarlan’s rule. That’s it. There was an asshole, power hungry king, who feared magic and wanted to rule the East part of a continent. A lot of plot, but not so much that we stopped to care, or didn’t have time to cover everything. We could really get to know what Terrasen and his people were like and not JUST GET TOLD that it was ‘the greatest place in the world’ every damn 20 pages.

Plus…should Dorian be counted as an ‘army’? It's a REALLY valid question.

Climaxes

IIf I have to write a list of things that disappointed me in this book, this review would be thrice its current size, but one of the worst grievances I have is the complete lack of acknowledging the plotlines that had been started. This book series has overall 4 372 pages (not counting novellas) and 12 main characters (still not gonna address this). All of them had their storylines and arcs but if they weren't tied up in the previous instalments they wouldn’t be in this one. I get it, Maeve and Erawan got beaten (in an extremely unsatisfactory way) but they were only a background in this series' plots.

Aelin Well, Aelin was one of 3 people (+2 paragraf-long insertion from Nesryn and Chaol) who got their own POV’s after the battle (second was technically Rowan, who was ‘Aelin’s POV outside of Aelin’.The third Dorian, who got almost a full two pages). And from this we got that: she got crowned, Aedion got his bond and that Maas have no idea how the city looks after weeks of siege. In her case what angered me the most was ‘Terrasen is my home’ subplot. Only in this tome we read at least 3 times that Aelin will be okay with dying, if only she gets to see Terrasen one last time, or if she get to die on Terrassen soil. But you know what? Maas forgot to write the scene where Aelin actually ‘comes in��.

Mannon Didn't get her own POV after the battle, but here’s what we’ve got: She is going to the Wastes with Croachans and Ironteeth. Whait. What? Yes, that was the ending of this 500+ years of feud. They fought together and they decided to unite their two species, completely forgetting more than half a millenia of slaughter. I can only hope that there were at least some talks behind the scenes… NO! F*** NO! This isn’t how it works!

Rowan, Dorian, Chaol, Yrene, Lysandra, Aedion, Lorcan, Elide, Nesryn, Sartaq Lived happily ever after

Secondary minor and total background characters Survived (I acknowledge that they would be ignored in most books’ epilogues, but this abomination is almost 1000 pages of nothing!!).

Good Scenes

That saying, this book actually had 4 good scenes:

Crochan witches go to war - gathering-forces-to-fight trope, which is my *love-always trope* so I’m not even sure if it was relatively good, or if I’m just a slut for this trope. It was still only a paragraph long though.

[recurring] The children’s tale Aelin repeated to herself to remember who she is.

‘Lorcan Lochan’ - the only marginally funny scene in the whole book

I actually found Darrel making Evangeline his heir charming. Even if circumstances were far-fetched at least.

But the words crime of this book? It was agonisingly, mind-numbingly boring. If the overexplaining and repetitions were to be taken out I highly doubt that there would be 300 pages left.

For these 33 hours of audiobook I suffered through I give it half a star. Because Abraxos exist.

Please see my garishly accurate cover on my instagram! You can also like it there :D

instagram | goodreads

#book #book review #bookworm #review #signofwolf-book_review #opinion #throne of glass #throne of glass series #throne of glass spoilers #sarah j maas #kingdom of ash #aelin galythinius #mary sunderland #tog #fantasy #fandom

4 notes · View notes