A summary of RED RISING 1-5 | Can LIGHT BRINGER make it work again?
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- čas přidán 24. 08. 2024
- FOLLOW-UP VIDEO: My review of LIGHT BRINGER • LIGHT BRINGER: What's ...
An incredible series had an abysmal fifth entry, and hasn't seen a new book in four years. It sounds like--hopefully--Pierce Brown has written a banger of a sixth, and I really want that to be true.
LIGHT BRINGER comes out July 25th, 2023. I'll have a review as soon as I can.
BEFORE YOU COMMENT:
1) If you enjoyed these later books, that's great, I'm happy for you. My non-enjoyment of books 4-6 is not a value assessment against you personally.
2) Acting like a tough guy on the Internet is pointless, and you absolutely would not insult me to my face, so save us both the time and don't bother with it here.
3) I read all kinds of stuff, across multiple genres and for multiple audiences. "Go read kid books" is not a valid counter to any of the points I raised here.
4) Your non-comprehension of anything I said in this video is 100% *your* problem and not mine.
Thanks for the video! I needed a refresher before jumping into Light Bringer. I couldn’t agree with your analysis more. I have LOVED the Red Rising series from the very beginning. The first book had me totally hooked. Iron Gold was a little different from the recipe I had grown to love but I still really enjoyed it. Then Dark Age was released. It was like a love note to failure, death, destruction, violence, and utter tragedy. I couldn’t wrap my head around why he made the story so ridiculous dark. I’m really, really, REALLY hoping Light Bringer can turn this whole thing around.
It seems rare to find a fellow reader with this assessment, and I thank you for the comment.
I am roughly halfway through Light Bringer right now, and while it's still a dour grind, with the feeling of a cheat code working against the protagonists, there appears to be at least some form of a way forward for the story.
I can't say more without coloring your experience when you read it, but if you want to, check back in a few days when I post another video. We'll see where he leaves us at the end.
See you soon.
In that case, it makes Battle for the Abyss and Damnation of Pythos look like completely meaningful books to the overall plot of the Horus Heresy (/sarc, they aren't, outside of a few character interactions, they're skippable)
I really appreciated your comparison with the Game of Thrones and JK Rawling’s depression. Reminds me to take into account the emotional state of the author, rather than their simple ability to compose a story.
👍 Yeah, that kind of stuff has to have an impact on your craft.
Thanks for watching!
I agreed with most of your analysis. I have a very fond memory of Books 1-4 and I can hardly seem to remember book 5 despite it being the one I read most recently. There was certainly something missing from it.
As soon as the author became established (comfortable and respected), he was no longer a rebel, and stopped identifying with his previous works. He proceeded to sympathize less with the working class, and more with the existing power structure. His turn towards nihilism and deconstruction are typical of mainstream entertainment, a mainstream of which he is now a part.
Thank you for posting this after abandoning the series I decided to give it a shot after your catch up video. What did you end up thinking of 6?
Better than 5, but still extremely frustrating--it was 700 pages that didn't move the story forward hardly at all, Darrow & co. are basically in the same situation by the end that they were in the beginning, they've just visited some people along the way. I did a video on it last summer.
czcams.com/video/wfZBk8QaF1Y/video.htmlsi=OC3lPjWpPfAfgBFX
Fifth entry best book boyo. Godspeed to you.
Adamant disagreement. I'm reading book six next week and hoping it repairs the damage.
Beg to disagree.
Yea it's definitely the big fan favorite. It'll be interesting to see how people rank the books in about a year or so. I can see Light Bringer being a contender for the number 1 spot with DA.
Cannot disagree more with this recaps view that books 4 & 5 were not good. I’ve recommended the 5 books to three friends who all loved it 100%. But this is art so opinions will vary 😁🙏
For sure.
Thanks for providing a summary!
I'm not sure if it's because I'm more of a character-driven reader and so ignore the plot in a lot of ways, but I feel like Pierce Brown's strength lies in his character work and that felt lost in Dark Age. He tried to go big while characters died with little to no emotional setup/payoff, which up until book 5, felt like his signature. I'm personally too invested in Darrow's story to ever consider giving up on the series but I don't fault people who do.
I do think, however, Dark Age is a book that can grow on the reader. It has for me at least. I was more or less neutral on it when it first came out--I felt it was an inevitable movement as far as story, but Pierce could have made the same points he was making with far less gore and shock factor (thus preventing my friends from bailing the series entirely and leaving me a lone Howler). But with each reread I appreciate the book on an orchestrated artistic level more and more. There's a lot of good in it and it has great story movements, but it's a shame it gets hidden beneath the bad and violence for the sake of violence. I love DA now but it definitely crosses some lines and begs the question of whether books should be entertaining for the reader or purely self-indulgent for the author. Which, I'm pretty sure DA is the latter and rarely the former.
As for Light Bringer, I'm happy about the tonal shift. It's not so light that it completely forgets Dark Age and in that way I felt like it honored the suffering readers were put through in DA lol. The plot felt clunky, but I was just so thrilled to get back to the characters and focus on their arcs. It's not the most polished installment (sort of surprising given the 4-year gap) but I appreciated Darrow's having to face consequences and the time taken to set up for Red God. I prefer that to rushing into the end. Ultimately, I think Red God is going to determine if Iron Gold works, Dark Age was worth it, and if Light Bringer was needed.
The book was called Dark Age... and the main character is called The Reaper.. you guys complaining about it being "too dark" are naive.
The issue was the abrupt and pointless deconstruction of the four books to precede Dark Age, simply for the sake of being gratuitous and excessive. Brown showed readers he could present that edge and give it meaning, but then Dark Age came along and it was nothing but the edge for its own sake. There's no naivete in observation.
Thank you for your time and effort making the video. I personally expected an objective recap followed by your analysis given your title. Not many if any recaps of the first 5 books exist. Also why are you concerned with spoilers in a recap video? Im here to quickly remember what I read so long ago, vague summaries to avoid spoilers do not help. I can definitely understand the change in writing with second trilogy being offputting in comparison to the first. But I applaud the darker turn to express the difficulty and complex nature of revolution after the smoke clears. I hope Lightbringer brings it home.
Thanks for listening in, yeah this ended up being a recap + editorial, sorry if you were looking for just a general recap. As to the spoiler warnings, that's a habit from my podcast, I don't generally do these big series recaps. A few of my listeners had asked for one since it had been 4 years, so I recorded the audio and put it here too.
Most of my videos don't get this kind of traffic so it's been a double-edged sword. Lots of views, but not what most readers were looking for.
Anyway, thanks again for tuning in, have a good day.
@@GrahamBradley Hey man, thanks again for putting yourself and the video out there. It's a very hard thing to do, I just wanted to give what I hope was constructive feedback because I very much appreciated the content.
Best wishes to you and the channel.
fyi for anyone reading, this comment has spoilers!
appreciated the recap for Dark Age and i understand the criticisms but i enjoyed how many characters and spinning parts it had. personally didn't feel like it was that gore-y but maybe that's just me having read too many manga that i've become desensitized.
and as much as i root for our heroes, i love seeing darrow beaten down and bruised. he's never lost this bad before and i really wanted to see how he digs himself out. he seemed too stable and capable before (i know this is a weird complaintttt sorryz lol). i thought that all the bad breaks in DA were to make up for the perfect happy ending that was MS.
it's funny you mentioned seraphina au raa because it was her death in the first quarter of the book that got me totally engrossed with the story. i was so blown away (pun dubiously intended) by how raw that scene was lol. agreed on the other point though, i am sad we didn't get more of tongueless, but someone's gotta die so i'd rather it be him.
We must have read different books….
Okay.
In my opinion, light bringer is the best out of all 6 books
Now that's a tall order, ha ha. Morning Star is my favorite.
Great recap- jumping into book 6 now. Fingers crossed it turns around!
Thanks for watching. My review goes live later this week, let me know what you think when you're done. 👍
About to read book six and needed a summary, thank you for that.
I agree, book 4-5 made me a slightly less happy and optimistic person. That’s not why I read fantasy/SciFi…I am hoping book six is the antidote.
Without spoiling anything, I will say 6 was better than 5, but that's a low bar. I have a spoilery review of it if you want to check it out when you're done.
Thank you for watching.
Stranger Things Season 3 sucked? Huh. I thought it was really good. I guess to each their own.
Holy. Crap. Your experience is my exact experience. I tried re-reading Dark Age 3 times and I even owned it and couldn't finish it either.
Oh and of course, thank you for this. Seems I've forgotten more than I thought. Extremely helpful to be able to listen to a recap of this magnitude.
I knew I was gonna get some blowback on that but I figured I couldn't be the only one who felt that way. You're not alone, man.
@@GrahamBradley no doubt! I will say thought that I actually really enjoyed Iron Gold, along with the new perspectives, which is what makes Dark Age even more disappointing for me. I guess I'm going to give Light Bringer a shot -- but it'll be a library rental, not an Audible purchase this time.
@hellojustin1988 I've got a video review of Light Bringer, won't say anything about it though so you can have your own experience. I will say it's better than Dark Age in most ways.
Best books I've ever read love this series so much. I cryed when Ragnar died.
That was a hard loss for sure.
I was in the last hour of a 6 hour drive at 2am trying to stay awake. The Ragnar death had me shook so bad I not only stayed awake for the rest of the drive but laid in bed when I got home for like another hour thinking about it. But there with bridge 4 saving Dalinar in the way of kings for all time memorable moments in books for me.
Review of LIGHT BRINGER: czcams.com/video/wfZBk8QaF1Y/video.html
I finished LIGHT BRINGER on Monday and typed up my thoughts on Substack. A tamer video will hit the channel in a few days. Spoiler warning.
crackerstack.substack.com/p/light-bringer-a-tale-of-excesses
I've just read your LB review... slight spoilers for LB below.
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" The entire time, he reads a book on philosophy that basically teaches him everything he’s done for the last sixteen years is wrong and stupid" - from your review.
This is something that's irritating me to hell and back. Darrow (at the time of the second Trilogy) is an unprecedentedly successful individual in the realm of war: he is exactly what both he and The Republic needs him to be. He's conquered The Society by 24. He has no contemporary or historical rival (as Lysander notes in Iron Gold, when comparing his feats to Alexander the Great). They have the last two threats on the ropes: Mercury and Venus, and he conquers Mercury at the start of IG. They're at the finish line.
And yet we've had 3 fucking books of him 1) being undermined at every turn, and 2) languishing in self doubt and regret.
Why is he doubting himself, and why does he need to completely reinvent himself?
If Pierce wanted his Hyphasis Mutiny, and the subsequent rebuilding of Darrow, then it needed to be justified, if not to the reader, then at least to Darrow himself.
I suspect that the entire arc of rebuilding Darrow (yet again), was something Pierce came up with post-DA. I'd point to what appears to be the retconning of Darrow's physical prowess (and the Willow Way's utility) as evidence of this.
Man, you freaking nailed it here. I was listening to the audiobook while working (I have a fast-paced job) so I wasn't able to stop and take notes on specific things, but I remember the undercurrent of frustration with this. Like the last three books have been a plodding, deliberate deconstruction of his success in the first three.
And the hell of it is, I think there's room for things like Cassius' revelation on the Willow Way, the fact that people would eventually wisen up to it, and figure out a counter. You see that in sports all the time, where certain styles of offense and defense go in and out of fashion because the league catches up to it.
I felt like it was thrown in Light Bringer as a band-aid after the slog of Dark Age. Brown said he was working through the manuscript and at one point deleted like 200 pages to take the story in a different direction, because it wasn't working. I want to say it was close to half of what he'd done at that point?
I respect the hell out of that decision, it had to have been hard (I mean good hell, four years between books? He must have stressed about that).
In the three days since I've finished Light Bringer, I've already gone back and forth a dozen times over whether I'll even bother to read Red God. I want to believe he can fix it all, but I wanted to believe that before reading Light Bringer, and I just walked away from it angry. I don't know.
Anyway, /rant, and thanks for your observation.
Thanks for the great effort on Dark Age diatribe. I concur. I am a chapter into Lightbringer and am hopeful.
I would be interested to read any of your original works. Thanks again.
My pleasure. I will say that Light Bringer was a step up from Dark Age in a lot of ways, I'll save further commentary for when you're done.
As to my own original works, I have some that vary in length. My most recent release a short one about a small-town sheriff fighting vampires (Sheriff Porter a.co/d/aDCjeuT) and my biggest work is an alternate history/fantasy trilogy about the American Revolution. It's my first published work from about ten years back, but I've got a sequel coming next year, so it's a good starting point for my larger catalog. Rebel Heart: (Engines of Liberty, #1) a.co/d/hd6N9lp
Thanks for your interest!
I will check it out. Thanks Again!!!
Why would you record in your car brother?
Cause I'm a busy man
I have to say I loved the second trilogy. It's a story about war. I like to see the ugly side. It's beautiful
czcams.com/video/wfZBk8QaF1Y/video.htmlsi=qE3vc6sFDkuEd_p0
I thoroughly enjoyed Dark Age. I could see the story heading toward that dark, grim pit of death and sorrow from the end of the first trilogy. However, it did get SO BAD that it's hard to imagine Brown bringing it all back to light in one single entry. I started re-reading the saga from the first book (this will be my 4th read through) a couple weeks before my pre-order of Light Bringer came in the mail. I'm extremely pumped to crack that fresh ass tome open after a complete first-hand refresh.
I won't spoil LB for you, I will say that it does make SOME progress toward bringing it back from that edge. Doesn't do it all in one volume (and somehow I found that frustrating. Alas.)
I'm posting my review of LB later this week, curious what your take is when you're done.
Great review. I don’t think the problems that come up because of the rebellion in the first 3 trilogies make the work of the first 3 books void. I think the message is that its not so simple as overthrowing the government. All the problems aren’t solved and there is more work to do to fix the society.
Also, I think you’re seeing more political influence in the book than is actually intended. Pierce is more libertarian and right leaning so I don’t think he’s trying to push left-leaning social issues.
🤷♂️ Completely possible that my own biases are coming through, happens all the time.
I just finished Light Bringer and I'm frustrated by the lack of real substantive movement in the story, beyond the aspect of "it's hard to fix society." (Which I completely understand, I've been reading AmRev nonfic for 20 years).
I'll have a video on it in the next few days, with some elaboration.
@@GrahamBradley haha no worries! I do the same! I can't watch marvel, star wars, Disney, etc anymore basically 😭haha
Dang that's disappointing! I'm just about to start. That's how I found your video actually. I was looking for a series recap. Thanks for doing that!
I'm kinda not surprised it's stagnant since it's second to last book. I was thinking it will probably be a lot of buildup before Red God comes out. I hope it's not so grimdark. I totally agree with you I don't enjoy the increased violence, language, and sexuality.
Can't wait for the video! I'm gonna subscribe!
Iron Gold was so good, loved The Rim. That walk in freezing wind was epic. Somehow I managed to zone out all the gay stuff and didn't remember any of those relationships.
I'm watching this to try and get a recap before starting next book. Light Bringer
Dark Age was indeed the worst. Everybody dying and my mind couldn't stay hooked.
The Raa and the other Rim Lords have for sure been the more interesting element of the sequels.
But yeah, the excessively dehumanizing (and over descriptive) death scenes were so grotesque and over the top that it felt like watching a disturbed person pleasure himself to gore videos on a dark site. Like it was just happening for the sake of it happening.
I'm a few chapters into Light Bringer. I'll post updates as community posts.
Naw book 5 was great. One of the best of the series. Whack take lol
It accomplished nothing
Gay characters are overrepresented in this series.
There seemed to be a high amount, there's also a higher population in this timeline (18 billion?) But it didn't become a stumbling block to the actual story until the 4th book on, when 28th century characters started spouting off 21st century platitudes about it.
This was a very bad summary of these books (especially the first trilogy) and pretty much just you complaining that the newer sequels are too sad and too gay for you.
That‘s not a great literary evaluation 🤷🏼♂️
This is a very bad understanding of what I said, but you're free to be as low-cortical as you like.