TLDR: Look, this book wasn’t for me. But give it a try! Especially if you can return the credit.
It might just be the YA, shallow, power fantasy flick you need.
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I was intrigued by the book’s initial review and premise. Magic? Supers? Tech? Magic Super Tech?!?
What’s not to love, right?
Well whatever points it gains from being in a genre I absolutely love, is quickly lost by the absolutely awful “Beat me into submission with world facts instead of showing me” that exists in this book. Nearly everything is a trope. And “magic” and “tech” are used to “magic” away so many explanations of the world; it’s ridiculous.
This book was written on Royal Road by an author with a juvenile sense of humor and writing style. The author has consumed too much of the litrpg slop saturating this genre, and boy, does it show.
*spoilers*
Expect big, juicy eye-rollers like the ones below every 3 minutes of the book.
– Uncaring, slow, DMV employees a la zootopia.
– School/Work/Loot Bullies every time it’s convenient. Who are absolutely the stupid, crybaby versions seen in typical anime tropes.
– A military that acts like 1830’s “ready aim fire” of redcoat Great Britain and runs away… from a wall protecting one of the last bastions of humanity? When they are reloading? Sorry, what?
– Guns protecting one of the last bastions of humanity designed by scientists, shutting down from military people swearing, and they have to say “I’m sorry” to make the gun work again? What?
– A post-apocalyptic alternate reality where billions die in the 1970s, and most of the world is shit, yet today they still joke about fruit ninja and Minecraft.
– Smart people have a “tinker” power for tech things and use that tinker power as a be-all and end-all Mary Sue power. I’m sorry, but the MC can use tiny nanobots to level a section of land for a lair in seconds? Design a whole Motel? Paint a Fresco? Make millions on the stock market to buy land as an 18-year-old in one of the last bastions of humanity? How immersion-breaking. I can turn a blind eye to an acceptable amount of sci-fi fudging, but the MC magicking(tinkering) away 95% of their problems in a world where thousands of other tinkers exist is… ridiculous.
Look, this book was obviously not catered to me. It was a Royalroad fiction meant to entertain casual readers who like reading modern slang and projecting themselves into a magic, tech, fantasy world that doesn’t make sense.
I’m looking for something a bit more real. I WANT a character to be limited in ways that make sense for both their age and the reality(post-apocalyptic, much of humanity is dead or superhumans) they are placed in.
I want to read about a world where people act like people and not just hastily written foils to Mary Sue along the MC to greatness.
OR, just accept you are a YA satire and go all in. Stop trying too hard.
TLDR: Look, this book wasn’t for me. But give it a try! Especially if you can return the credit.
It might just be the YA, shallow, power fantasy flick you need.