/lit/ - Literature

>>21246818
I read this recently, it's fine

A few weeks ago there was someone here who was looking for a fantasy series with romance and battle couple. I didn't want to recommend this book / series until I'd finished it, especially since there were problems with every relationship at that point in my reading. I just finished it and the series has some nice conclusions to two cute romance stories so go ahead and read it if that's your thing.

Aside from that, I feel the series has a problem finding purpose in each scene / book. The POV character chosen is often the wrong character, and there's big swathes of material between checking in with many of the POVs (and there's only 6 so it's not even a huge amount of characters to check into) that leaves it feeling really fragmented. There's also some serious deus / diabolus ex machina problems where new problems and new solutions seem to come out of nowhere. My favorite POV through the first few books (Tharok) feels disjointed from every character at the start, and completely irrelevant by the end of the series.

There's some tropes I hate (such as the evil religion / theocracy) that aren't quite resolved satisfactoriy (the pope turns out to be ok guy but his story thread isn't fully resolved by the end of the series).

Also for some reason everyone has ridiculous fantasy names except for the Fujiwara clan, one of the main protagonists in the series. None of them actually have Japanese personal names or seems descended from any kind of Japanese expy (although Alethian society has poetry battles and some key Japanese nods in architecture, clothing, etc.) it just feels weird.

>>20829790
For me it's Asho!

>>20829744
For me it's Asho!

A little over halfway through this book. The good so far:
>Tharok's chapters
The bad so far:
>Tharok's chapters and everything else.
Tharok is a badass orc warrior guy, last of his clan, getting revenge on people who killed his family, promising to become the new orc warlord who will unite the clans and fuck the world. Unfortunately every other POV is in a completely different place and every time the story shifts to Tharok it feels like a different book. For that matter, you have one POV chapter then another in the same scene/location with the other characters and I honestly see no reason why.