The long way to encourage selfishness.

After 20+ hours, I finally felt I had a good impression of Twinborn Chronicles: Awakening Collection and decided to stop listening.

The setup seemed to last forever, but as a veteran of fantasy epics I chose to stick it out. However, I began to realize that what I thought were very slowly developing characters were actually fully developed from the beginning. I think I was thrown off since they kept getting shallower the more I knew of them.

The whole book seems to be a treatise on the virtues of self-interest. When a character’s father is murdered, the author spends a few sentences on why this character doesn’t care before moving on to enthusing about the new promotion and cool magic sword given to them by said murderer. This theme continues as virtue for virtue’s sake is disdained in favor of vain pleasures and self gratification.

The plot is mildly complex, but unfolds incredibly slowly while the author takes time to delve into various forms of escapism. The characters are binary constructs with either for or against the MC’s happiness being the only relationship dynamic. I can see Twinborn Chronicles: Awakening Collection appealing to middle-school students who discovered D&D for the first time, but is tough for someone with more life experience to sit through.