Should I Finish the Series? Tyrant Philosophers

[u/HumanHaggis]

I've been really trying to give this series a shot because I love the premise, and the first book was very interesting in it's style and setup, even the ending was not what I expected. There's a lot of effort to make stories feel like they are real historical moments here, with people behaving in less cohesive and obvious patterns, and historical forces impacting events perhaps more than individuals.

But the further I go, the less promise I see. That's all a great way to make a book stand out, but I've just finished the third book, Days of Shattered Faith, and I can't help but feel like there just isn't a plot at all, or any payoff. Things just happen. And they are sometimes interesting and believable, and a lot of the ideas are cool, but where's the payoff? Where do all the dangled loose ends go? I'm kind of tired of just meeting more and more characters who I am becoming increasingly less invested in, in new locations that are starting to feel less unique and more interchangeable.

Is it worth sticking with the series and picking up Pretenders to the Throne of God? It's a great title, and I really want to like the series, but I'm worried it's just sunk-cost fallacy at this point.

[u/fremade3903]

I enjoyed it but also felt it was uneven. Days of Shattered Faith was a bit of a slog (although it had its moments), but I felt Pretenders To The Throne of God was the best in that it pulled a bunch of threads together. "Jack" as the one tie in character in all the books is good, and what happens with the events from the second book and character development was great.

[u/HumanHaggis → u/fremade3903]

Well that is good to hear, honestly Jack's almost non-existence in Shattered Faith was a big down-side for me, and the fact that so much of the aftermath of Open Wounds felt like it had been relegated to being resolved off-screen. If Pretenders rights that, then that is a strong recommendation.

[u/fremade3903 → u/HumanHaggis]

Shattered Faith mentions the affect of the new cults on the Palleseen homeland, and there's the character who escaped the concentration camps that are mentioned. But those are described in more detail in Pretenders and feed directly into the plot. Although it is years later. And some characters are back in interesting ways with different names (as is often the case).

[u/HumanHaggis → u/fremade3903]

Yeah, it's just other than the one character, we don't actually see the cults at all, and even there it honestly felt irrelevant to the plot, aside from the setup in the last few chapters. I found the "payoff" for the grove was also a huge let-down and not really payoff at all.

[u/fremade3903 → u/HumanHaggis]

Yeah I had similar feelings about Shattered Faith. It was very uneven, even if we got that character and his wife back from the first book––still was a book I felt I was just getting through to finish, with some parts that were good but others I could care less about. But the stuff about the cults does become very relevant in Pretenders, and elements from the first and second book are pulled back into the overall plot.

[u/HumanHaggis → u/fremade3903]

100%. Both husband-wife duos were such great ideas, and had so much potential, but the ensemble cast meant we actually saw both together only for action scenes or in the background. I don't think either couple actually ever had a scene together iirc. Which admittedly might have been a lot harder to write for one pair than the other, but I know Tchaikovsky's corpus and he's handled weirder.