I have loved all the other books in this series a lot. Funny charming and skirting the line between being brutal enough to protect his people and not being a straight up evil bastard. In this book he just goes totally over the edge into evil to me. Spoiler, the MC straight up murders someone for basically no good reason at all and then comes up with a bunch of completely irrational nonsense justification for why he had to do it. He in fact does this twice, the first one being worse but both being straight up unnecessary executions of people without trail for no good reason. Just decided to kill some people for no justified reason. And then the even worse part for me is that he keeps justifying in under the guise of keeping himself and his people safe but the reasons he gives are laughably dumb. So dumb and nonsensically unnecessary in fact that I have serious trouble believing that even the MC believes them. It make same feel like he just wanted to murder some people because he didn’t like that they didn’t bend the knee and submit to him and the thoughts he has is just him practicing the nonsense excuse he will tell other people for the murders he simply enjoyed committing. Dont get me wrong I am all for justifiable murder to protect your people, I am the one always shouting at the screen just kill him or them, they will get others killed if you don’t that is fine with me but this was not that, this was murder for no justifiable reason no matter what your morality. It was just murder for fun. Ironically i also agree the MC is whiny and dumb. To me this is more lazy writing, dumb allows lazy story telling where mc doesn’t see super obvious things coming and so falls into more traps etc which the author wants to put in. Whiny is to me more of a lazy tool to make the MC seem more moral then he really is but to me it often jsut makes him come across as small minded. None the less those things are all forgivable to me, murdering people within minutes of meeting them bc they might disagree with you or not submit and fall to their knees for you the second they see you is not. It basically the definition of pure evil, every brutal act before that I am fine with, that one makes the MC contemptible even more so bc he self justifies and pretends it was not what it was