Book Overview #20: Broken Empire

Prince of Thorns

So I was given to read Prince of Thorns and right away you see what kind of story it is. So damn morbid with corpses being looted and guts spilled all over the place. And then there is rape and bestiality, before they burn the victims alive. I know what many of you will claim; it’s not really edgy because the whole world is like that all the time and thus there is no contrast to count as edgy.

All I can say is that it’s done for the sake of kneejerk reactions from the reader instead of an excuse for why things are so shitty all the time. There is an empire that has declined and everybody is killing everybody else, but why do they hate each other so much? Is it for gets to take over the land? Why are they so morbid about it? The in-story excuse is very weak, which is why it feels like things are edgy for the sake of being edgy.

Surprisingly, the least offender is the protagonist, who is excused to be a sadistic murderer after witnessing a blood bath as a child. The plot is a basic revenge story, where a prince wants to avenge the death of his mother and brother, no matter how many he has to kill or torture in order to achieve it. It’s a petty reason but a reason nonetheless.

We don’t get that from anyone else. They are mean and evil, loving to kill, torture, and rape, despite having religions that preach love and compassion, without demonizing the other factions. There is no paradise if you die for your lord, nor obeying him because god said so. Besides trying to have only one as an emperor, what’s the reasoning for why the population doesn’t revolt against these homicidal maniacs who want to kill everybody?

As much as I want to talk about the characters, there’s really nothing much worth mentioning about them. They are archetypes who do not contribute to the plot in any significant way because the protagonist is the only one getting fleshed out and moving the plot forward.

As much as I want to talk about the setting, all we are told is that it’s a second dark age, eleven centuries into the future after a holocaust, and nothing else gets elaborated. It goes to waste, since its state is never the reason for why everyone is acting or living the way they do. It could have been so easy to just say there are not enough resources, so only the chosen few can survive, or that an emperor is prophesized to bring a utopia. And yet we get nothing, it remains a bland canvas with a cool background idea for the protagonist to abuse, since he somehow knows about ancient technology by being educated, while everyone else who is educated doesn’t. It’s essentially a plot device, so he can use weapons of mass destruction to kill his enemies with very cheap ways. As always, without giving a shit about the cost.

It’s a single man’s book with an edgy cover and an edgy title. And when it’s not being edgy because the protagonist is not constantly raping or killing, it’s boring since nothing of interest is going on. A huge battle with undead can be taking place and you will be left completely unengaged since none of the participants get any focus to make you care about any of them. You are just waiting for the next morbid thing the protagonist will do.

Anyways, whatever plot can be found in this book can be summed up as the protagonist trying to win the favor of his father by causing a genocide, only to be called a traitor by his very father who had sent him on a suicide mission so he can get rid of the last survivor of his former wife’s lineage. Of course the author doesn’t let the protagonist die and instead has him escaping captivity pretty easily, confronting the killer of his family soon afterwards, and through an asspull, he gets magical powers and captures him, thus taking over his land and becoming king. What a lazy final showdown!

And that’s why the first book of the trilogy is not a dark subversion of epic fantasy, as many think in the other reviews, but just more edgy garbage.

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King of Thorns

The second book is surprisingly much better in overall. Many passages are poetic, the morbid scenes are much fewer and we get more insight to the characters. The plot is non-linear and there is a second point of view to show us how someone thinks about Jorg and all the terrible events he caused.

Although there are still a lot of disgusting events in it, they feel more dramatic than shocking. The post apocalyptic world is now a place of sorrow instead of a cheap excuse for having the protagonist and his team slaughtering and raping for the amusement of the reader.

Even the few scenes where the edge is over the top, are used to portray the ruthlessness of the nobles and how they are taught from a young age to be brutal if they want to defeat the other kingdoms and become the emperor to rule them all.

Even the conflicts are more engaging this time, since they have a direct relation with the protagonist. When in the first book his team was attacked by undead, I didn’t care one bit; it felt like a random monster encounter. Over here, amongst the undead you find the former companions of Jorg. It’s as if he’s facing the demons of his past, since all these men died because of his actions.

Unfortunately, the author is still resolving everything with lazy asspulls, which makes every victory hollow because it wasn’t earned. The undead are defeated by somehow summoning an army of ghosts through the hidden powers of the protagonist. Why was he even running away for so long, when he could simply do that from the very beginning?

And if it’s not something magic can solve, it’s going to be technology, which once again is something only Jorg conveniently finds and uses to his advantage. When he faces the Prince of Arrow, a man with ten times the size of his army, he uses a gismo to devastate the soldiers and then a gun to shoot the prince. This is not smart, it’s not tactical, and comes off as cheap and unimaginative when nobody knows of or can defend against these contraptions.

I still didn’t like how everything revolved around the protagonist with everything else being blank sheets of paper. There is a huge world out there and we see or know nothing about. How did the prince of Arrow take over the other kingdoms? How were the isles overrun by undead? Who is a relative to whom? Although the second book is better, it is still suffering from the exact same problems and the third one didn’t fix that.

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Emperor of Thorns

Oh, God, the third one, what a pile of crap that was. There is this Dead King marching through the land, killing and turning everybody into undead. Nobody does the tiniest thing to stop him despite knowing the threat he poses.

In the meantime, Jorg spends the whole book not fighting the undead threat. He’s just traveling around the world and kills the ones in power so he can become an emperor. Just like before, there is no strategy or build up to anything. We literally get character introductions of powerful nobles and popes, who die after ten pages because Jorg kills them as soon as he encounters them. No battle takes place, nobody takes percussions, they just meet the protagonist out the blue and he kills them on the spot.

After four times of repeating the exact same thing, and several hundreds of pages where nobody does a thing to stop the Dead King, Jorg demands from the rest of the nobles to accept him as an emperor. As soon as they do it out of fear and not because they consider him worthy, the Dead King appears out of nowhere and renders the whole emperor election plot that took up 90% of the book completely pointless. Not only that, he reveals to be Jorg’s dead brother from the first book. How did he survive, and managed to become the lord of the dead? We are never told.

And it doesn’t even matter because Jorg just stabs him to death with a simple weapon, which somehow kills the most powerful creature in existence. After that, he is too stabbed to death by some bitch. And then somehow the siblings become ghosts who stop the end of the world by shutting off a machine. Where did this machine come from? How did they become ghosts that can stop machines? What is going on here? We are never told. And then the book ends.

There were zero explanations, every new character was getting killed ten pages after his introduction, and the ending made no sense. This is one of the worst conclusions I have read in my life.