"Know thy self, know thy enemy"
- Sun Tzu
Marcus Graham has been handed a raw deal. As a student of military history, he wants nothing more than to help the world learn from human conflict. But his increasingly hostile college is blocking his lectures and threatening to cancel him for speaking his mind. War is just too triggering for the young minds of this generation.
But there's another world out there. A world wracked by constant strife. A world of fantasy races locked in combat, and where the tides of war are always in full swing. It is a world on the brink of almost total annihilation, where the common people have almost given up hope.
But Marcus, with his extensive knowledge of battlefield strategy, might just be the man to save them all.
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Fantasy General features:
Small-large scale battles ranging from shady underground caverns to open-field skirmishes.
A story focused on military strategy with detailed battle maps.
Political intrigue between fantasy races each (Elves, trolls, orcs/goblins, lizardmen, ratlings) each with their own kingdoms and motivations.
Characters with realistic thoughts and actions.
A protagonist who's IQ is above room temperature
It is unfortunate that I can only give this story 2 stars.
While the premise might look somewhat promising, please keep in mind that the description is highly irrelevant and plain false. The key issue lies with the fact that the protagonist is forced to support the most disgusting, wretched, vile evil creatures. The ratkin are dirty, uncivilized, sub 60 IQ, cannibalistic, human sacrificing "creatures", that we are somehow supposed to sympathize with. Their enemies don't really differ on any one of these "qualities", so as a reader you end up hoping that both sides get 100% genocided and the protagonist leaves, or actively contributes towards that outcome. Instead what you get is an at best -forced by the circumstances- at worst -forced by his naivety- protagonist helping these mistakes of existence achieve their evil goals. The protagonist even starts to admire these vermin due to their "warrior's tenacity" that's ultimately produced by their existential nihilism.
The writing is amazingly self sabotaged. For one the author spares no detail describing the disgusting vermin and their somehow even more disgusting actions, making the reader skim through paragraphs to skip these descriptions. Another thing the author does is make the sub 60 IQ critters talk in a matter that befits their IQ rating, confusing the reader into thinking they're reading a webnovel right out of a Google translation, where concepts such as "articles" and "proper usage of tenses" are considered miraculous. Then as if all that wasn't enough, the readers have to contend with the fact that things that already have a name in English (or whatever the equivalent for these things are for these "creatures") have different names in the new world and are deliberately made so they sound totally stupid and/or disgusting. An example of that in a simplified sentence would be: "They took the pflongs to complete a skibidi." The reader then has to remember these dumb names to understand what's going on, especially in the battles, but because of all the skipping done previously due to their disgust, they can't even enjoy the best part of the story.
This culminates into a story that can be aptly described with two words: "lost potential". Had the protagonist transfered in the human realm and helped the humans eradicate these evils out of existence, the story would actually be readable, the introduction of factions and fantasy races would be smooth and my rating would be higher.
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