Shadows Rising was magnificently okay

Community General Discussion
1

Finished Shadows Rising and

IT

WAS

FINE

Just okay. Spectacularly competent. Amazingly adequate.

The good:

  • Talanji and Bwonsamdi got a ton of spotlight and characterization.
  • Actual LGBTQIA+ rep. Not much but it’s a start for a company that fought against representation super hard in the past. Here’s hoping for more.
  • Characters feeling the heavy weight of ruling over a nation. Talanji, Anduin, and Thrall all are written in a way that makes them feel justifiably tired.
  • Trolls! Oftentimes you get books and comics painting trolls as unimportant or dumb. Here we have Talanji, Zekhan, Rokhan, Apari, and… Bwonsamdi? Does he count?
  • Dunking on Nathanos Blightcaller is always a plus in my book.

The bad:

  • Conventional travel (land/sea/air) being a bottleneck when worldwide teleportation networks exist. EDIT - Nah this is fine.
  • Alleria seems… off. The game presents her as this adept wielder of the Void, and here it’s more like she’s a degree or two away from going full Azula from Avatar.
  • The book didn’t come with a code for a mount or pet.
  • Cat durid is 4 fite.

Overall, I give Shadows Rising an arbitrary number grade that means “just okay.”

EDIT - Some clarifications:

  • It is not badly written.
  • It is not a waste of time to read.
  • I like big butts and I cannot lie.
17 Likes
2

7? That seems to be the ‘mediocrity’ grade.

3

When one of your four criteria is:

I don’t know if reason is part of the picture.

4

This is confusing… “magnificently” implies it was awesome, “okay” means that it was just a meh. Was it fantastic or meh?

5

Apparently it was fantastically meh.

9 Likes
6

Yeah probably, though grades out of 10 are so fuzzy and jank. I prefer letter grades. Let’s go with a B.

What do you mean?

It was aggressively readable.

“Meh” implies bad. It was not bad. It was okay.

7

Back in the day, you could get letter grades for work you did in school.
A “C” was average but amped when adding the “+” so “C+” might be amazingly average? idk if that’s what the OP was going for but seems on point to me

lol thanks OP for the clarity so I wasn’t wrong (just on the letter part)! woohoo

1 Like
8

I don’t remember letter grading criteria too well, but from how OP said it I imagine that if C was 72-80, the book would be exactly 76.

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9

Disagree. “Meh” is neither good nor bad, it’s a neutral word.

10

I dunno Optimus I never really used it in any other context. BUT that’s okay! Dare I say, “meh” even!

11

Isn’t 5 more mediocre than 7?

12

You’d think so, but review scoring is weird. Anything under 6 is an immediate writeoff as garbage.

13

Sticks.exe has stopped working

1 Like
14

Just finished it, I found it ultimately “meh”. 6.5/10 if I had to grade it.

If you love Talanji, you’ll love this book. The story is pretty much about Talanji and her becoming a part of the Horde. So I’d say, this book is less about leading into Shadowlands and more about closing the loop in BFA with how Talanji felt at the end of BFA. Sylvanas and her motives are barely in the book, pretty much not at all being honest. No new or interesting lore about Shadowlands or how it works or the jailer or anything like that. So if you’re expecting that, I’d say it’s a pass.

Ultimately it’s pretty much just further character development for Talanji, some snippets here and there for Alleria and Turalyon. Perhaps our first big gay canon relationship between Flynn and Shaw? Oh yeah, if you want this book to learn more about night elves fate, I’d pass. They are also barely in this book, probably a solid 5 pages at most lol. It felt pretty boring overall imho.

1 Like
15

So Immortan Joe would give it 0 jaws up?

16

Man there is now QIA too? No one even knows what this is

5 Likes
17

It was a good read but the fact that it didnt reveal anything substantial about the plot moving forward was pretty annoying.

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18

Astonishingly hmpf

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19

Queer, Intersex, Asexual.

Now you can be a little less of a troglodyte. :slight_smile:

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20

Nothing to do being a troglodyte tbh. Just things even being less common if not even rare to see. I never would force someone to know what QIA even means.

But nice to see ppl like you being entilted I always enjoy this part when reading things about lgbt

4 Likes