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guime's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cannibalism, Slavery, Violence, Torture, Blood, Gore, Death, and Genocide
Minor: Adult/minor relationship and Animal death
pnwbibliophile's review against another edition
dark
slow-paced
1.0
Spoilers ahead! This is going to be a long, detailed review as I have visceral negative feelings about this book and author. If you love this book or don’t want spoilers, click away. You’ve been warned.
Overall, I found the writing to be sloppy. It suffers from having far too many characters, gratuitous violence, lack of constraints grounding the world, unbelievable plot twists, lack of a cohesive plot, homophobia, misogyny, and an author’s disregard for his readers. Pierce Brown managed to take a formula that worked for him in the first trilogy and bastardized it to the point that it feels like a cheapened, hollow imitation of its former self.
Getting into the specifics:
1. Overly Swollen Character List
Each new character has a gaggle of other unimportant side characters to digest. Take a gander at the Dramatis Personae page, then realize the low-level side characters aren’t even listed there. Woof. Why so many characters? Oh, just so Brown can butcher them. Trying to understand who new characters were and their dynamics became a chore. If you devoted any significant mental energy to keeping everyone straight, you’re rewarded by realizing so many of them are dead by the end and thus all that energy to keep everyone straight was ultimately pointless.
2. Gratuitous Gore and Violence
There was gore, rape, torture, genocide, cannibalism, nailing a newborn baby to a tree, a lot of butchered horses, and not one but two separate cases of pedophilia. Look, I was girded for this book to be brutal. I’m not a sensitive person to this stuff, but this level of depraved gratuitous violence just for violence’s sake was just lazy. I’ve read books like The Poppy War series and Manacled with similar war violence and they were some of my favorite books. Not because of the violence but because the violence was contextualized. If an author takes the time to reflect and make you realize why these violence scenes are necessary for plot, theme, or a wider moral message, it can be quite poignant. This, however, felt like the violence was there only for shock value as due reflection was often glanced over if undertaken at all. The graphic violence is also unceasing to the point that it was all so absurd and overdone by the end.
3. Unmooring Known Constraints in the Book’s World
When long-dead characters come back from the grave for cheap plot twists, it begs the question of what is actually at stake in this world? Think about it. In this world, healing is extremely easy and dead characters are now coming back to life. They can engineer fantastical creatures and impossible to kill monsters. They can terraform planets, control weather, and travel impossibly far in space. Characters will accomplish unbelievable levels of education, cunning, and war training off the page. Darrow is such an overpowered hero that anything’s possible to him while simultaneously any mishap feels almost unbelievable because he’s so perfect. There’s a balance between creating an interesting sci-fi fantasy world and anchoring it with limits such as physics, biology, strength, time, death, politics, resources, the limits of the human mind and body, etc. This lost that balance. Anything seems possible, so any character growth or accomplishment feels cheap, unearned, and hollow. Brown has figuratively unmoored the series from the laws of gravity such that it feels adrift out in space.
4. Believability
The big plot twist was a lazy, reused idea. He resurrected the Jackal as a 10-year-old clone, who then successfully takes over the Republic government with a coup. Sigh. Here’s a running list of characters in the series who actually died or were written to seem dead to other characters and/or the reader: Darrow, Virginia, Sevro, Cassius, and the Jackal. Learn a new trick, boyo. The Jackal plot twist was all so unbelievably absurd. Laughably absurd. It was such a gross betrayal of his readers that it felt to me like the last season of Game of Thrones.
The Jackal coup wasn’t the only unbelievably absurd plot twist, but let’s start our examination there. Tell me how a 10-year-old clone boy can make an underground crime network, dupe a senator, then stage a coup inside the Senate chamber? This same boy was outsmarted and out gunned previously as an adult and is described as being less cunning as a boy repeatedly by Virginia during their interactions. Yet he somehow orchestrated this unbelievable coup? The way the coup played out as well was just done for shock value alone and was lazy as it wasn’t grounded in how historical coups have transpired. Imagine the whole of the US Congress and President are overthrown by a ten-year-old boy’s plotting. Even with the historically incompetent US political system we now have, that wouldn’t be conceivable even in the most low-budget Hollywood film.
Sefi is also overthrown in a coup that felt comically absurd. He built up the Obsidians as the most brutal of all the classes then Sefi just sits there as two men babble on and on and tell her they’re about to overthrow her. Instead of just shooting either of them, she sits there like a dumb log. Again, this happened only for shock value, not believability. It also threw out the whole moral arc of the Obsidian class in such a lazy and unsatisfying way, which challenges the central premise of the series. If the Obsidians can learn peace and cooperation only to descend back to war and committing genocide, then why is Darrow even trying to free all the races from the Golds? Doesn’t that just play into everything the Gold’s preach? Sigh. It was just done for shock value without consideration to how it tied in with the overarching plot and theme of the series.
Cassius comes back from the dead after being absent the entire book and miraculously rescues Darrow at the end. Again, unbelievable and all too convenient a twist. Then let’s unpack how unbelievable Lysander’s story was. First, he somehow survives a storm killing everyone else and a desert known to kill virtually all who get stranded. Then he somehow gets rescued in disguise by Darrow’s side, gets into the city where Darrow’s side is virtually under siege, gets discovered but escapes to run/fly across the city in plain sight without getting killed as all of Darrow’s forces pursue him, works with someone else to use Darrow’s own EMP to wipe out their tech (so their transport and weapons), then rallies the city against Darrow’s side to attack him. One man did this all by himself. Yup. And you’re telling me that the people who are getting called slaves are going to rally to the slavers? Again, unbelievable.
Repeatedly, sides which were on their last leg or dead suddenly come back and miraculously out maneuver characters with established political and physical prowess. Again unbelievable. Brown gets so caught up in catching the reader off guard with unforeseen plot twists that they end up feeling tired, cheap, and laughable by a certain point. I love a good plot twist, but you have to have it moored in reality.
5. Plot
Some previous points tie in here. The plot was all over the place. It’s a swollen 800ish pages, half of which felt unnecessary. You could cut out Lyria’s perspective entirely and wouldn’t lose anything but the shock value of what she witnessed which honestly wasn’t needed to advance any other character arcs (we already know Victra is primed for vengeance). Harmony was already known to be vile and we didn’t need to see her Red Hand faction being more heinous. Lysander’s perspective was also unnecessary. Being inside his head was also insufferable. Ephraim gets butchered after all that time spent redeeming himself. The fight scenes were generally well written, but often lasted too long and were too numerous. These action scenes were also juxtaposed against chapters that dragged such that you’d get whiplashed by: Action! Drag. Action! Drag (ad nauseum). And what is the plot? The only things of substance that happened were: Virginia and the Republic are overthrown, Sefi is overthrown, Darrow is booted off Mercury. All the other plot points introduced didn’t complement the main plot, but rather further cheapened it and made it drag.
6. Homophobia
Brown has let his own biases color the writing. It’s become its own trope for male sci-fi/fantasy authors to slip in misogyny and homophobia. Brown has repeatedly let me down here. I gave him a pass in the first book because he was a new author, it was published 10 years ago, and he likely had less editorial support. The issue is, I can’t keep blindly giving this man a pass. The language he uses and the treatment of the female and queer characters is not just unfortunate, it’s harmful. We'll come back to the mysogyny in the next section.
I've touched on the homophobic language he uses in previous reviews. The list of terms used in the series include "pricklicker," "buttboy," and "cock suckers" to name the most egregious. The term "pixie" Brown invented is also used as a pejorative for characters who are either materialistic or acting vain, hedonistic, or effeminate. Oscar Wilde was often derided as a "dandy" in his day and was famously jailed for being a gay author who liked the finer things in life. It's difficult not to see the term "pixie" in the same light as the term "dandy," which was used against Oscar Wilde in the media's portrayal of him during and after his trial. With the term pixie, you can substitute any gay slur (faerie, sissy, pansy, the f-slur) and the context of the sentence would remain unchanged. In Dark Age, there was also a scene where the word catamite is used repeatedly as a pejorative-another example of Brown introducing homophobic language. And it’s not just the villains who use this language, it’s even the characters such as Sevro and Darrow who are written to be respected and loved. The language you use in a series about fighting tyranny and oppression shouldn't marginalize your minority readers.
This book ruined Sevro for me because of his homophobic language. Let’s deconstruct that scene. Mustang catches the crime boss responsible for abducting her son and Sevro’s daughter and captures the man’s memories. She believes Dancer was involved because of the contents of the memory. Sevro and Mustang confront Dancer by showing him the memory, which shows Dancer having adult relations with this crime boss. We didn’t know Dancer was queer so he’s forcibly outed. What plays out is a tense scene where Sevro makes fun of Dancer’s sexuality with the pejorative language you’d expect from a cringy straight guy. Dancer thinks they’re trying to blackmail him for his sexuality. Mustang and Sevro then find out Dancer had no idea the man was a crime boss and that Dancer wasn’t connected to the abduction. Sevro apologizes but it’s while they’re trying to convince Dancer to rally his Senate faction to vote for something Sevro and Virginia want so the apology feels opportunistic and fake. Dancer tells them how hiding his sexuality was deeply emotional for him, but they’re all ultimately good with each other after talking and Dancer agrees to help them in the vote. They then go to the Senate. As Dancer is about to commit his support for Mustang’s cause, he’s brutally killed and a coup transpires. Really? REALLY? You torture this man by making fun of his sexuality, forcibly out him, make him think his sexuality is being used against him, make him think everything is okay, then not only brutally kill him but symbolically take away his voice the way you killed him.
Then Brown does it again with Ephraim, the only other significant queer male character. Ephraim is forced to watch Sefi be butchered then has his heart brutally ripped out. The man already had his heart figuratively ripped out when his husband died (also killed by this author). This book lost me before this part but that was the final nail in the coffin.
For those who would argue it’s a war series and characters die, let’s also examine this author’s history with his queer male characters. Every queer male is portrayed as creepily hitting on Darrow (Tactus), a villain (Tactus, Duke of Hands), deceitful (Duke of Hands, Ephraim, Roque), sexually promiscuous (Quicksilver, Matteo), overly materialistic (Quicksilver, Matteo), a drug addict (Ephraim), or killed off (ALL but Quicksilver and Matteo).
I will be generous and say that writing characters in such a large world and trying to give representation to groups you’re not a part of is always a hard undertaking. It can be a damned if you do, damned if you don’t thing. But you don’t want to reinforce stereotypes, use language which has historically been weaponized against these groups, or repeatedly subject almost all in the group to death or torture. You also put yourself under the microscope even more when your series is about fighting oppression. Brown did more harm with his queer representation than good, unfortunately. It's also hard to see this pattern and not wonder if it was done not in ignorance, but with malevolent intent.
7. Misogyny
As for misogyny, this series is rife with it. You only have to look at the bro banter between the men or what the women are subjected to. I was delighted to see Virginia get her own chapters and generally enjoyed them. Then Brown brutalized her. I liked Sefi and he brutalized her in the dirtiest way. Lyria had an interesting arc then is brutalized by…seeing other women brutalized. She helps Victra give birth in a cringey scene that felt very much like a man describing birth. Then Vicra and Volga are taken, tortured, and Victra’s day-old baby is nailed to a tree. Lyria discovers in the town that a Handmaid’s Tale-esque program is forcing women to be raped and used as broodmares. Except Brown makes it little girls because he always has to do the most. I can give him a pass for having some brutal things happen to a few of the female characters. It’s war. But do all of them need to be so brutalized? And the brutality didn’t even have a purpose most of the time. Treating your female characters again and again this way establishes a pattern that cannot be overlooked.
8. Disregard for the Reader
Part of writing a good book is being able to elicit the breadth of human emotions in your reader. Sometimes bad things have to happen to do this. But there is a balance such that you don’t come across as an author who has a total disregard for the reader. Brown really just flipped us the bird with this one and said, “I know you’ll keep buying my books anyways.” This book was overall tainted with the fact that everything in it was unsatisfying and left us with no sense of hope. Doing this as an author shows a disregard for the reader that breaks their trust in you to pen the story. Authors often must emotionally manipulate readers to give us a good story. Great authors make you love the manipulation. Good authors make you tolerate it. Bad authors make you realize they weren’t a safe person to trust with your emotions. Pierce Brown is the latter. I don’t trust him to execute the theme of the series-fighting tyranny and oppression-properly. I don’t trust him as a queer man to represent me in this series or this world. So why would I want to continue on? There are plenty more qualified authors who tell the stories with the same theme better.
Overall, I found the writing to be sloppy. It suffers from having far too many characters, gratuitous violence, lack of constraints grounding the world, unbelievable plot twists, lack of a cohesive plot, homophobia, misogyny, and an author’s disregard for his readers. Pierce Brown managed to take a formula that worked for him in the first trilogy and bastardized it to the point that it feels like a cheapened, hollow imitation of its former self.
Getting into the specifics:
1. Overly Swollen Character List
Each new character has a gaggle of other unimportant side characters to digest. Take a gander at the Dramatis Personae page, then realize the low-level side characters aren’t even listed there. Woof. Why so many characters? Oh, just so Brown can butcher them. Trying to understand who new characters were and their dynamics became a chore. If you devoted any significant mental energy to keeping everyone straight, you’re rewarded by realizing so many of them are dead by the end and thus all that energy to keep everyone straight was ultimately pointless.
2. Gratuitous Gore and Violence
There was gore, rape, torture, genocide, cannibalism, nailing a newborn baby to a tree, a lot of butchered horses, and not one but two separate cases of pedophilia. Look, I was girded for this book to be brutal. I’m not a sensitive person to this stuff, but this level of depraved gratuitous violence just for violence’s sake was just lazy. I’ve read books like The Poppy War series and Manacled with similar war violence and they were some of my favorite books. Not because of the violence but because the violence was contextualized. If an author takes the time to reflect and make you realize why these violence scenes are necessary for plot, theme, or a wider moral message, it can be quite poignant. This, however, felt like the violence was there only for shock value as due reflection was often glanced over if undertaken at all. The graphic violence is also unceasing to the point that it was all so absurd and overdone by the end.
3. Unmooring Known Constraints in the Book’s World
When long-dead characters come back from the grave for cheap plot twists, it begs the question of what is actually at stake in this world? Think about it. In this world, healing is extremely easy and dead characters are now coming back to life. They can engineer fantastical creatures and impossible to kill monsters. They can terraform planets, control weather, and travel impossibly far in space. Characters will accomplish unbelievable levels of education, cunning, and war training off the page. Darrow is such an overpowered hero that anything’s possible to him while simultaneously any mishap feels almost unbelievable because he’s so perfect. There’s a balance between creating an interesting sci-fi fantasy world and anchoring it with limits such as physics, biology, strength, time, death, politics, resources, the limits of the human mind and body, etc. This lost that balance. Anything seems possible, so any character growth or accomplishment feels cheap, unearned, and hollow. Brown has figuratively unmoored the series from the laws of gravity such that it feels adrift out in space.
4. Believability
The big plot twist was a lazy, reused idea. He resurrected the Jackal as a 10-year-old clone, who then successfully takes over the Republic government with a coup. Sigh. Here’s a running list of characters in the series who actually died or were written to seem dead to other characters and/or the reader: Darrow, Virginia, Sevro, Cassius, and the Jackal. Learn a new trick, boyo. The Jackal plot twist was all so unbelievably absurd. Laughably absurd. It was such a gross betrayal of his readers that it felt to me like the last season of Game of Thrones.
The Jackal coup wasn’t the only unbelievably absurd plot twist, but let’s start our examination there. Tell me how a 10-year-old clone boy can make an underground crime network, dupe a senator, then stage a coup inside the Senate chamber? This same boy was outsmarted and out gunned previously as an adult and is described as being less cunning as a boy repeatedly by Virginia during their interactions. Yet he somehow orchestrated this unbelievable coup? The way the coup played out as well was just done for shock value alone and was lazy as it wasn’t grounded in how historical coups have transpired. Imagine the whole of the US Congress and President are overthrown by a ten-year-old boy’s plotting. Even with the historically incompetent US political system we now have, that wouldn’t be conceivable even in the most low-budget Hollywood film.
Sefi is also overthrown in a coup that felt comically absurd. He built up the Obsidians as the most brutal of all the classes then Sefi just sits there as two men babble on and on and tell her they’re about to overthrow her. Instead of just shooting either of them, she sits there like a dumb log. Again, this happened only for shock value, not believability. It also threw out the whole moral arc of the Obsidian class in such a lazy and unsatisfying way, which challenges the central premise of the series. If the Obsidians can learn peace and cooperation only to descend back to war and committing genocide, then why is Darrow even trying to free all the races from the Golds? Doesn’t that just play into everything the Gold’s preach? Sigh. It was just done for shock value without consideration to how it tied in with the overarching plot and theme of the series.
Cassius comes back from the dead after being absent the entire book and miraculously rescues Darrow at the end. Again, unbelievable and all too convenient a twist. Then let’s unpack how unbelievable Lysander’s story was. First, he somehow survives a storm killing everyone else and a desert known to kill virtually all who get stranded. Then he somehow gets rescued in disguise by Darrow’s side, gets into the city where Darrow’s side is virtually under siege, gets discovered but escapes to run/fly across the city in plain sight without getting killed as all of Darrow’s forces pursue him, works with someone else to use Darrow’s own EMP to wipe out their tech (so their transport and weapons), then rallies the city against Darrow’s side to attack him. One man did this all by himself. Yup. And you’re telling me that the people who are getting called slaves are going to rally to the slavers? Again, unbelievable.
Repeatedly, sides which were on their last leg or dead suddenly come back and miraculously out maneuver characters with established political and physical prowess. Again unbelievable. Brown gets so caught up in catching the reader off guard with unforeseen plot twists that they end up feeling tired, cheap, and laughable by a certain point. I love a good plot twist, but you have to have it moored in reality.
5. Plot
Some previous points tie in here. The plot was all over the place. It’s a swollen 800ish pages, half of which felt unnecessary. You could cut out Lyria’s perspective entirely and wouldn’t lose anything but the shock value of what she witnessed which honestly wasn’t needed to advance any other character arcs (we already know Victra is primed for vengeance). Harmony was already known to be vile and we didn’t need to see her Red Hand faction being more heinous. Lysander’s perspective was also unnecessary. Being inside his head was also insufferable. Ephraim gets butchered after all that time spent redeeming himself. The fight scenes were generally well written, but often lasted too long and were too numerous. These action scenes were also juxtaposed against chapters that dragged such that you’d get whiplashed by: Action! Drag. Action! Drag (ad nauseum). And what is the plot? The only things of substance that happened were: Virginia and the Republic are overthrown, Sefi is overthrown, Darrow is booted off Mercury. All the other plot points introduced didn’t complement the main plot, but rather further cheapened it and made it drag.
6. Homophobia
Brown has let his own biases color the writing. It’s become its own trope for male sci-fi/fantasy authors to slip in misogyny and homophobia. Brown has repeatedly let me down here. I gave him a pass in the first book because he was a new author, it was published 10 years ago, and he likely had less editorial support. The issue is, I can’t keep blindly giving this man a pass. The language he uses and the treatment of the female and queer characters is not just unfortunate, it’s harmful. We'll come back to the mysogyny in the next section.
I've touched on the homophobic language he uses in previous reviews. The list of terms used in the series include "pricklicker," "buttboy," and "cock suckers" to name the most egregious. The term "pixie" Brown invented is also used as a pejorative for characters who are either materialistic or acting vain, hedonistic, or effeminate. Oscar Wilde was often derided as a "dandy" in his day and was famously jailed for being a gay author who liked the finer things in life. It's difficult not to see the term "pixie" in the same light as the term "dandy," which was used against Oscar Wilde in the media's portrayal of him during and after his trial. With the term pixie, you can substitute any gay slur (faerie, sissy, pansy, the f-slur) and the context of the sentence would remain unchanged. In Dark Age, there was also a scene where the word catamite is used repeatedly as a pejorative-another example of Brown introducing homophobic language. And it’s not just the villains who use this language, it’s even the characters such as Sevro and Darrow who are written to be respected and loved. The language you use in a series about fighting tyranny and oppression shouldn't marginalize your minority readers.
This book ruined Sevro for me because of his homophobic language. Let’s deconstruct that scene. Mustang catches the crime boss responsible for abducting her son and Sevro’s daughter and captures the man’s memories. She believes Dancer was involved because of the contents of the memory. Sevro and Mustang confront Dancer by showing him the memory, which shows Dancer having adult relations with this crime boss. We didn’t know Dancer was queer so he’s forcibly outed. What plays out is a tense scene where Sevro makes fun of Dancer’s sexuality with the pejorative language you’d expect from a cringy straight guy. Dancer thinks they’re trying to blackmail him for his sexuality. Mustang and Sevro then find out Dancer had no idea the man was a crime boss and that Dancer wasn’t connected to the abduction. Sevro apologizes but it’s while they’re trying to convince Dancer to rally his Senate faction to vote for something Sevro and Virginia want so the apology feels opportunistic and fake. Dancer tells them how hiding his sexuality was deeply emotional for him, but they’re all ultimately good with each other after talking and Dancer agrees to help them in the vote. They then go to the Senate. As Dancer is about to commit his support for Mustang’s cause, he’s brutally killed and a coup transpires. Really? REALLY? You torture this man by making fun of his sexuality, forcibly out him, make him think his sexuality is being used against him, make him think everything is okay, then not only brutally kill him but symbolically take away his voice the way you killed him.
Then Brown does it again with Ephraim, the only other significant queer male character. Ephraim is forced to watch Sefi be butchered then has his heart brutally ripped out. The man already had his heart figuratively ripped out when his husband died (also killed by this author). This book lost me before this part but that was the final nail in the coffin.
For those who would argue it’s a war series and characters die, let’s also examine this author’s history with his queer male characters. Every queer male is portrayed as creepily hitting on Darrow (Tactus), a villain (Tactus, Duke of Hands), deceitful (Duke of Hands, Ephraim, Roque), sexually promiscuous (Quicksilver, Matteo), overly materialistic (Quicksilver, Matteo), a drug addict (Ephraim), or killed off (ALL but Quicksilver and Matteo).
I will be generous and say that writing characters in such a large world and trying to give representation to groups you’re not a part of is always a hard undertaking. It can be a damned if you do, damned if you don’t thing. But you don’t want to reinforce stereotypes, use language which has historically been weaponized against these groups, or repeatedly subject almost all in the group to death or torture. You also put yourself under the microscope even more when your series is about fighting oppression. Brown did more harm with his queer representation than good, unfortunately. It's also hard to see this pattern and not wonder if it was done not in ignorance, but with malevolent intent.
7. Misogyny
As for misogyny, this series is rife with it. You only have to look at the bro banter between the men or what the women are subjected to. I was delighted to see Virginia get her own chapters and generally enjoyed them. Then Brown brutalized her. I liked Sefi and he brutalized her in the dirtiest way. Lyria had an interesting arc then is brutalized by…seeing other women brutalized. She helps Victra give birth in a cringey scene that felt very much like a man describing birth. Then Vicra and Volga are taken, tortured, and Victra’s day-old baby is nailed to a tree. Lyria discovers in the town that a Handmaid’s Tale-esque program is forcing women to be raped and used as broodmares. Except Brown makes it little girls because he always has to do the most. I can give him a pass for having some brutal things happen to a few of the female characters. It’s war. But do all of them need to be so brutalized? And the brutality didn’t even have a purpose most of the time. Treating your female characters again and again this way establishes a pattern that cannot be overlooked.
8. Disregard for the Reader
Part of writing a good book is being able to elicit the breadth of human emotions in your reader. Sometimes bad things have to happen to do this. But there is a balance such that you don’t come across as an author who has a total disregard for the reader. Brown really just flipped us the bird with this one and said, “I know you’ll keep buying my books anyways.” This book was overall tainted with the fact that everything in it was unsatisfying and left us with no sense of hope. Doing this as an author shows a disregard for the reader that breaks their trust in you to pen the story. Authors often must emotionally manipulate readers to give us a good story. Great authors make you love the manipulation. Good authors make you tolerate it. Bad authors make you realize they weren’t a safe person to trust with your emotions. Pierce Brown is the latter. I don’t trust him to execute the theme of the series-fighting tyranny and oppression-properly. I don’t trust him as a queer man to represent me in this series or this world. So why would I want to continue on? There are plenty more qualified authors who tell the stories with the same theme better.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Torture, Genocide, Gore, Child abuse, Eating disorder, War, Cannibalism, and Violence
Moderate: Animal death, Confinement, Drug use, Homophobia, Sexual assault, Trafficking, Vomit, Xenophobia, Misogyny, Rape, Sexism, Sexual violence, Adult/minor relationship, Outing, Animal cruelty, Classism, and Physical abuse
arkiwi88's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Torture, Violence, War, Death, Genocide, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Blood, Body horror, Classism, Confinement, Slavery, and Rape
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Death of parent, Cursing, and Animal death
_thunderhead_'s review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Sexual violence, Animal death, Animal cruelty, Blood, Suicide, Violence, War, Child death, Classism, Gore, Death, and Incest
kaseyzeller's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcohol, Body horror, Cannibalism, Child death, Death, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual violence, Slavery, Abandonment, Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Animal death, Drug use, Gore, Confinement, Murder, Toxic relationship, Physical abuse, Excrement, Fire/Fire injury, Grief, Mental illness, Pregnancy, Child abuse, Suicidal thoughts, Torture, Genocide, Gun violence, Incest, Kidnapping, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Sexual content, Xenophobia, Blood, Cancer, Medical trauma, Religious bigotry, Bullying, Classism, Colonisation, Cursing, Hate crime, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Violence, Vomit, and War
islandbookwyrm's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Gore, War, Injury/Injury detail, Fire/Fire injury, Death, Torture, and Murder
Moderate: Vomit, Abortion, Child death, Sexual assault, Slavery, Grief, Violence, Genocide, and Torture
Minor: Addiction, Animal death, Suicidal thoughts, and Incest
habitualrereader's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
5.0
I swear each book is better than the last, though Dark Age broke my heart over and over.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Violence, Child death, and War
Moderate: Torture
Minor: Death, Slavery, and Sexual violence
leahsbooks's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
While I flew through the other books in this series in a day or two, it took me quite a while to get through this one. The book was a little slower moving at first than the previous ones, and the points of view were handled a little differently. Rather than bouncing back and forth between all of the characters, it was broken up between the sections, so that we only see a little bit of the picture at a time. It left me feeling as though I was always missing out on what was happening to other characters.
There was a LOT of stuff going on, all at the same time. All of the main characters have their own story line, and it didn’t really become clear how they interconnected until late in the book. The story is brutal, gory, and tense all throughout the book. There is no shortage of battles, and the pervading feeling I carried throughout my reading was “oh man, this is bad, how much worse can it get?” But of course, whenever I thought that, it got worse, every bloodydamn time. Not a single character escaped unscathed.
There was something so fundamentally off about reading Darrow’s chapters without Sevro by his side. It shows how much he really leans on him, and values the support he provides.
“A life of war is catching up with me. She doesn’t know the weight I carry. How much I relied on Sevro to help carry it.”
We get to see a lot more from Virginia’s POV than usual, and I really love her character. She’s brilliant, level-headed, and logical, but this book showcases more of her emotional side. Her loyalty, her passion, and her fears are on display for the first time, and it makes her so much more relatable.
“What good is being smarter than everyone if no one listens? Is this how my father felt? My brother? Is evil born of pure frustration?”
Over the course of the series, we’ve seen Lysander grow up. He didn’t have an easy go of things in the last 2 books, but I just struggled so much with him in this book. He learned a lot about life in this book, and was exposed to new experiences when he went to war for the first time. But I grew to like him a lot less over the course of this book.
“From a distance, death seems the end of a story. But when you are near, when you can smell the burning skin, see the entrails, you see death for what it is. A traumatic cauterization of a life thread. No purpose. No conclusion. Just snip.”
Sevro isn’t a huge part of the story in this book, and I was so disappointed not to see him as much as usual, since he’s one of my favorite characters in the entire series. He’s always been a little off, but he serves an important purpose in the Republic. Even if people don’t always agree with his methods, everyone knows that they’re effective:
“I’ll never get used to seeing the fear Sevro wakes in people. Deep down they know Darrow is operating on a framework of logic. No one, not even me, believes that Sevro is completely sane.”
As has become my custom when reading this series, I always consider changing my “gasp factor” to something else, because I don’t just gasp, I actually start exclaiming “HOLY SHIT!” Yeah, it’s serious. Once I got past the slow moving part, it just felt like the action start coming faster and faster and never stopped. The ending didn’t feel like an ending as much as a cliffhanger/to be continued, and I honestly wish that the next book had a release date so I’m not just left pining for a book without even having a clue when it is going to be available. The struggle is so real y’all. But I’m 10000% sure it’s going to break my heart into tiny little pieces, because this one already did. But I have no regrets because it’s amazing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Gore, Death, Torture, Cursing, Addiction, Drug use, Child death, Animal death, Cannibalism, Incest, and Genocide
Moderate: Homophobia
Minor: Rape and Slavery
dosymedia's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
While Dark Age, published by an American author in 2018, cannot actively comment on the events of 2020 and 2021, reading this book during the final six months of Trump's presidency was a fucking head trip whose horrific verisimilitude culminated in an act of domestic terrorism on the nation's Capitol. Our dystopia is here and we don't get to have the neon-soaked inventions of our narratives, rather, it's the terror and confusion so well exemplified in the latest entrant in the Red Rising saga.
Dark Age is the fifth installment in a series that has evolved in depth. The first trilogy, starting with Red Rising, is a fast, action-packed science fiction series following Darrow, a slave who infiltrates society's elite to realize his wife's dream of equality. Reflecting his age, Darrow is an idealist who struggles to nurture love and compassion in an inhospitable society in the first trilogy. Darrow is hardened by the second trilogy, his idealism still a delicate flame that drives him to incredible feats, but the questions he asks himself are those that come with maturation: what is his role in prepping the next generation of sons, can the democracy that he helped to established decades ago survive him, and can a democracy created from bloody revolution be sustained?
And honey, the glow-up is tremendous. While sustaining the incredible pacing and intricate plotting of the first trilogy, the second trilogy has improved on all fronts, primarily drawing on the strength of its characters by expertly intertwining plot with character in such a way as to make every new development perfectly damaging to my poor heart.
Red Rising has always been a series that preferred rule of cool in its worldbuilding over realism, and in Dark Age that inclination is fully embraced, introducing huge worldbuilding elements that push it towards science fantasy; the series wears its technology as costume whilst the thrust of its what-ifs are in its society and politics, which it happily unpacks by exploring the depraved depths of its significant players. Dark Age is most interested in people and why they do what they do, like why the "good" commits evil, the various ways in which we express cruelty towards others, and the ways in which we reframe our actions to fit within personal narratives. It does this by showing the wild thrashing of a powerful, entitled class realizing its end and doing everything within their power to return to a status quo that caters to them. Unlike the real world, its heroes and villains are easy to pick out -- being in support or in opposition of slavery is a pretty easy moral barometer -- but its nuance is in the method by which heroes achieve their ends.
It's that character exploration that truly hooked me. And I was surprised that even those that I've had a relatively short time with wormed their way into my heart. Brown is aware of the readers' emotional vulnerability and he doesn't flinch at exposing it, cutting characters down in a myriad of difficult ways that by some miracle managed tears from this otherwise apathetic reader. While it became clearer to me Brown's pattern for early elimination, I felt that because each character arc is opened and closed so well, therefore signaling the character's imminent danger, that each cruelty enacted within the second trilogy was well earned, and the heartaches induced each respected and treated meaningfully, with the characters and text calling back to earlier losses and sacrifices to remember the friends that contributed to their lives. It's a mark of skill that I was able to mourn earnestly alongside the characters and that each and every death could be carried with me as if they were family. I appreciate this idea that our sacrifices aren't nothing, that their impact on the ones left behind mean something, even if our actions hadn't accomplished what we desired.
That emotional resonance made Dark Age a five star book; I haven't felt such uncompromised adoration within the series since Golden Son, but because I spent a significant portion of my read also analyzing the handling of queer representation and gender, I found some fumbled social issues worth critiquing.
Gold society likes to pat itself on the back for being progressive in comparison to their predecessors, primarily in the areas of sexuality and gender, but there's little in the narrative and worldbuilding that actually supports evidence of that. Worse, the narrative appears to condone the ableist notions of its textual world.
While queer characters are present, they've yet to be allowed to exist on page in the same way that straight characters have. Straight characters have been able to voice their sexual and romantic desires (with the penultimate chapter even including a brief male-female sex scene), but queer characters haven't been seen in the same loving relationships, nor has a queer protagonist truly spoken on their sexuality in the same way that Darrow has. With even that kind of representation missing, it seems like too much to ask for more, like say an aromantic character that isn't depicted as a psychopath. And it seems an even more unrealistic expectation to see queerness reflected in the society itself; there's very little queering within Gold society. Bisexuality is accepted and same-sex marriages exist, but that's basically it.
Queer rights doesn't begin and end at the inclusion in heterosexual rituals. There should be an overall questioning of traditional structures, such as alternative family arrangements, that show a society that has made room for difference. What comes closest to touching upon this idea is cloning as an alternative for natural childbirth. Kavax tells his son, Daxos, that he would love for his son to give him grandchildren, regardless of their partner's gender since, "cloning is always an option," albeit a subpar one, according to Kavax. While this shows on its face a sexually liberal society, it's still one governed by western sexuality and its interest in maintaining blood lineage through natural procreation. The ways in which their society approaches this issue is the way we do today, with natural birth positioned as the best option while alternatives are decidedly second-rate, even unnatural or creepy.
Where the series has so far excelled as far as queer representation is its inclusion of Ephraim, who is a gay man depicted with the same amount of pathos as Darrow; he's interesting, complex, and his narrative has nothing to do with his sexuality, despite Ephraim being the widower of a tertiary character first introduced in the original trilogy. In fact, Ephraim's narrative intertwines with Darrow's on the themes of fatherhood and both despair as they come to new understandings about the meaning of and importance of home and family. And its their conclusions regarding these themes that drive these characters' action, for better or for worst. While there is still legitimate criticism of Ephraim as he relates to his queerness within the narrative, I was floored by how much I came to love his character.
Gold society is obsessed with domination and thus much of their language and ideology is mired in this idea. This has led to an inherently ableist society, but the book then reinforces their ableism through Liam, a Red boy who was born blind and who has his blindness magicked away as an act of kindness. To do this without giving Liam a voice is frankly gross. As Elsa Sjunneson pointed out on an episode of Worldbuilding for Masochists, a character such as Liam would have their life fundamentally changed if their blindness was suddenly taken from them; their blindness is natural to them, they have always known it, and to suddenly make them see would be incredibly disorienting, forcing them to process information that they never grew up to understand. It's ableist to assume that he would want to be changed to be more like the able-bodied rather than considering that what he may prefer tools to make his life within a world that wasn't made for people like him easier.
Permanent disfigurement is also used as a means to separate the good from the bad, with the book's most villainous bearing noticeable facial scarring or body disfigurement whilst the valorous always have their beauty fully restored.
From interviews, I suspect that these missteps are the results of a straight white man that hasn't really wrestled with these questions before, but I feel it's really, truly telling that Brown has included a major queer character in his series after seeing how his first trilogy resonated with queer readers. If he improves on this front in the future or if his handling of these topics reveal a stagnant pattern, time will only tell, but at present I remain optimistic.
If you're the sort of person who turns to narrative to better understand the world and who flocks towards difficult subjects as they become particularly relevant in your own life, the Red Rising saga is a series for right now -- it takes its dystopia seriously and unpacks its repercussions, centering the humanity within each and every character exactly so we can understand how our worst impulses surface.
TLDR: Darrow is daddi & the Red Rising saga is brooding action daddi fic, perfect for those that enjoy the action and worldbuilding of series like John Wick, but would like a dash of Shakespearean melodrama added to their Machiavellian politics. Also, space swords.
Dark Age is the fifth installment in a series that has evolved in depth. The first trilogy, starting with Red Rising, is a fast, action-packed science fiction series following Darrow, a slave who infiltrates society's elite to realize his wife's dream of equality. Reflecting his age, Darrow is an idealist who struggles to nurture love and compassion in an inhospitable society in the first trilogy. Darrow is hardened by the second trilogy, his idealism still a delicate flame that drives him to incredible feats, but the questions he asks himself are those that come with maturation: what is his role in prepping the next generation of sons, can the democracy that he helped to established decades ago survive him, and can a democracy created from bloody revolution be sustained?
And honey, the glow-up is tremendous. While sustaining the incredible pacing and intricate plotting of the first trilogy, the second trilogy has improved on all fronts, primarily drawing on the strength of its characters by expertly intertwining plot with character in such a way as to make every new development perfectly damaging to my poor heart.
Red Rising has always been a series that preferred rule of cool in its worldbuilding over realism, and in Dark Age that inclination is fully embraced, introducing huge worldbuilding elements that push it towards science fantasy; the series wears its technology as costume whilst the thrust of its what-ifs are in its society and politics, which it happily unpacks by exploring the depraved depths of its significant players. Dark Age is most interested in people and why they do what they do, like why the "good" commits evil, the various ways in which we express cruelty towards others, and the ways in which we reframe our actions to fit within personal narratives. It does this by showing the wild thrashing of a powerful, entitled class realizing its end and doing everything within their power to return to a status quo that caters to them. Unlike the real world, its heroes and villains are easy to pick out -- being in support or in opposition of slavery is a pretty easy moral barometer -- but its nuance is in the method by which heroes achieve their ends.
It's that character exploration that truly hooked me. And I was surprised that even those that I've had a relatively short time with wormed their way into my heart. Brown is aware of the readers' emotional vulnerability and he doesn't flinch at exposing it, cutting characters down in a myriad of difficult ways that by some miracle managed tears from this otherwise apathetic reader. While it became clearer to me Brown's pattern for early elimination, I felt that because each character arc is opened and closed so well, therefore signaling the character's imminent danger, that each cruelty enacted within the second trilogy was well earned, and the heartaches induced each respected and treated meaningfully, with the characters and text calling back to earlier losses and sacrifices to remember the friends that contributed to their lives. It's a mark of skill that I was able to mourn earnestly alongside the characters and that each and every death could be carried with me as if they were family. I appreciate this idea that our sacrifices aren't nothing, that their impact on the ones left behind mean something, even if our actions hadn't accomplished what we desired.
That emotional resonance made Dark Age a five star book; I haven't felt such uncompromised adoration within the series since Golden Son, but because I spent a significant portion of my read also analyzing the handling of queer representation and gender, I found some fumbled social issues worth critiquing.
Gold society likes to pat itself on the back for being progressive in comparison to their predecessors, primarily in the areas of sexuality and gender, but there's little in the narrative and worldbuilding that actually supports evidence of that. Worse, the narrative appears to condone the ableist notions of its textual world.
While queer characters are present, they've yet to be allowed to exist on page in the same way that straight characters have. Straight characters have been able to voice their sexual and romantic desires (with the penultimate chapter even including a brief male-female sex scene), but queer characters haven't been seen in the same loving relationships, nor has a queer protagonist truly spoken on their sexuality in the same way that Darrow has. With even that kind of representation missing, it seems like too much to ask for more, like say an aromantic character that isn't depicted as a psychopath. And it seems an even more unrealistic expectation to see queerness reflected in the society itself; there's very little queering within Gold society. Bisexuality is accepted and same-sex marriages exist, but that's basically it.
Queer rights doesn't begin and end at the inclusion in heterosexual rituals. There should be an overall questioning of traditional structures, such as alternative family arrangements, that show a society that has made room for difference. What comes closest to touching upon this idea is cloning as an alternative for natural childbirth. Kavax tells his son, Daxos, that he would love for his son to give him grandchildren, regardless of their partner's gender since, "cloning is always an option," albeit a subpar one, according to Kavax. While this shows on its face a sexually liberal society, it's still one governed by western sexuality and its interest in maintaining blood lineage through natural procreation. The ways in which their society approaches this issue is the way we do today, with natural birth positioned as the best option while alternatives are decidedly second-rate, even unnatural or creepy.
Where the series has so far excelled as far as queer representation is its inclusion of Ephraim, who is a gay man depicted with the same amount of pathos as Darrow; he's interesting, complex, and his narrative has nothing to do with his sexuality, despite Ephraim being the widower of a tertiary character first introduced in the original trilogy. In fact, Ephraim's narrative intertwines with Darrow's on the themes of fatherhood and both despair as they come to new understandings about the meaning of and importance of home and family. And its their conclusions regarding these themes that drive these characters' action, for better or for worst. While there is still legitimate criticism of Ephraim as he relates to his queerness within the narrative, I was floored by how much I came to love his character.
Gold society is obsessed with domination and thus much of their language and ideology is mired in this idea. This has led to an inherently ableist society, but the book then reinforces their ableism through Liam, a Red boy who was born blind and who has his blindness magicked away as an act of kindness. To do this without giving Liam a voice is frankly gross. As Elsa Sjunneson pointed out on an episode of Worldbuilding for Masochists, a character such as Liam would have their life fundamentally changed if their blindness was suddenly taken from them; their blindness is natural to them, they have always known it, and to suddenly make them see would be incredibly disorienting, forcing them to process information that they never grew up to understand. It's ableist to assume that he would want to be changed to be more like the able-bodied rather than considering that what he may prefer tools to make his life within a world that wasn't made for people like him easier.
Permanent disfigurement is also used as a means to separate the good from the bad, with the book's most villainous bearing noticeable facial scarring or body disfigurement whilst the valorous always have their beauty fully restored.
From interviews, I suspect that these missteps are the results of a straight white man that hasn't really wrestled with these questions before, but I feel it's really, truly telling that Brown has included a major queer character in his series after seeing how his first trilogy resonated with queer readers. If he improves on this front in the future or if his handling of these topics reveal a stagnant pattern, time will only tell, but at present I remain optimistic.
If you're the sort of person who turns to narrative to better understand the world and who flocks towards difficult subjects as they become particularly relevant in your own life, the Red Rising saga is a series for right now -- it takes its dystopia seriously and unpacks its repercussions, centering the humanity within each and every character exactly so we can understand how our worst impulses surface.
TLDR: Darrow is daddi & the Red Rising saga is brooding action daddi fic, perfect for those that enjoy the action and worldbuilding of series like John Wick, but would like a dash of Shakespearean melodrama added to their Machiavellian politics. Also, space swords.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Child death, Medical content, and Torture
Moderate: Ableism, Child abuse, Pedophilia, and Drug abuse
Minor: Homophobia, Animal death, Sexual violence, Body horror, and Cannibalism
More...