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pyphais 's review for:
The Burning God
by R.F. Kuang
The ending did in fact wreck me, I'm still crying.
There were honestly a lot of things about the ending that annoyed me; things that didn't make sense about how they 'won' or that entire chapter with the dragon that felt so rushed and out of place, the fact that this book kinda had no impact on the country since they're just going back to hesparian rule again anyways but now with even more dead bodies and less food, the fact that Nezha never again seemingly tried to create a democracy once he was in charge despite championing it before, the fact that the hesparians seemed to have forgotten about their dirigibles that could've taken out so much of Rin's army, the uselessness of said army throughout the whole book, NOT USING THE GUY WHO CAN MAKE GIANT SINKHOLES TO DRAIN THE PLACE THAT RUNS ON CANALS AND HAS A WATER DRAGON LAIR IN SUPER SHALLOW WATER, and the feeling that Rin kinda didn't end up making a difference in the grand scheme of things across the entire series.
Similarly, the massive presence of the trifecta in this book, and deciding to work with Daji after she's the reason for the whole last book because she wanted to keep her throne, felt kinda wasted when it just happened to be a convenient way to get rid of an unreasonable number of dirigibles that made no sense to send all after her in the first place.
I never expected a happy ending for any of the characters, especially Rin, but I did expect at least SOME kind of resolution to the conflict and not just 'everything she did was for nothing and the country has now been colonized anyways', and it feels kinda crappy to have been so invested in how they could possibly make it out of this mess the whole time (nikan not the characters) just to have it end without doing so.
I've got several other complaints too. HOWEVER, I still couldn't put this book down, loved the way it was written and the characters, and was invested in it to the point of bawling at the end even though I knew that was the likely ending. There were tons of plot points I loved, andRin and Nezha will forever be in my heart and I loved how they were written in regards to each other. Same with Kitay. I will love those characters for the rest of my life. It made me feel emotions like it was a 5 star book, but had too many problems and was my least favourite in the series because of that. I loved the series as a whole and get that it was probably hard to think of an ending to it. I also would still recommend it to people and didn't hate the ending, I just was really unsatisfied with nothing being resolved. I'll also think about the series for a long time I'm sure, so it's above a 4/4.25. So I've settled on 4.5.
There were honestly a lot of things about the ending that annoyed me;
Similarly, the massive presence of the trifecta in this book, and deciding to work with Daji after she's the reason for the whole last book because she wanted to keep her throne, felt kinda wasted when it just happened to be a convenient way to get rid of an unreasonable number of dirigibles that made no sense to send all after her in the first place.
I never expected a happy ending for any of the characters, especially Rin, but I did expect at least SOME kind of resolution to the conflict and not just 'everything she did was for nothing and the country has now been colonized anyways', and it feels kinda crappy to have been so invested in how they could possibly make it out of this mess the whole time (nikan not the characters) just to have it end without doing so.
I've got several other complaints too. HOWEVER, I still couldn't put this book down, loved the way it was written and the characters, and was invested in it to the point of bawling at the end even though I knew that was the likely ending. There were tons of plot points I loved, and