And all she would have had to do is call them her younger sisters. I'm not sure if it would close all of the plot holes that their existence opens up, but it would surely help.

And it could literally be fixed by just tweaking maybe two lines in the entire trilogy. Five minute edit at most, and bam.

Okay, honest question. Are there booby traps set up all over and around the village? Because this is Looney Toons levels of wacky clumsiness and slapstick shenanigans. I could buy the old man tripping and breaking the lantern. That's fine. But why do Raum and Shra trip, too, other than it makes it a convenient way to catch them?

When a character gets caught in this trilogy, it's ALWAYS because of convenient tripping. It happens with Faraday, too. In fact, in a chapter or so we'll see Raum suddenly fall over for no reason again, and this time he breaks something. You'd think someone who's lived in the forest his whole life would know how to run among trees without falling on his ass, but nope.

Douglass, you're not changing my mind about Axis being the Worst Leader Ever. In fact, you're just reinforcing my belief.

The more the narrative tediously blathers on about how Axis is a "great commander", the more absurd it becomes.

She clearly doesn't trust her readers to be able to pick up on subtle clues.

There's SO much hand-holding in this thing, and it gets significantly worse in book two. Once their initial roles are rendered irrelevant, all Ogden and Veremund do is hang around explaining what everything "means", no matter how blatantly obvious it is.

Even people who aren't used to having captives should know that this is not how you make sure they don't escape.

There should be at least two guards at every entrance and patrols outside at the very least. Further highlighting how utterly incompetent Axis and Belial are.

And just wait and see how utterly useless Belial proves to be in the very immediate future. He bungles his job so badly it should have warranted an immediate demotion.

I was about to say, that is the height of hypocrisy from Axis, there. But I guess it's perfectly fine when he does it. It's just that no one else is allowed to.

One of the few character traits Axis consistently has is his raving hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, I'm exclaiming with despair. Where did these two idiots even come from? It's like characters completely disappear until they're necessary to the plot, and then they just pop up out of nowhere.

It hasn't even gotten half as blatant as it's going to become.

Unless their race is able to survive without water for longer than a human, they should be dead. The limit for going without water is three days, and I suspect that's in ideal conditions where you don't lose any moisture from your body or sustain any trauma.

Yup. That is if they didn't just die outright from the beatings they've sustained. Also why are they naked? The author has a really weird hang-up about random nudity.

Oh, don't worry. Us readers have been hating him plenty, so he hasn't been able to prance around these chapters doing whatever he wants with complete immunity. But please, do join us! Hating him can be quite cathartic, especially when you yell at him.

I have far less restraint; in my own spork of this trilogy I went off on multiple expletive-laden rants and called him just about everything in the book. "Axis McDouchebag" was the mildest.

All I can think is that Belial is afraid to get too close to Axis. Which doesn't speak well for Axis, since Belial is not only an ally, but is supposed to be Axis's best friend.

Axis is of course going to continue treating Belial like shit, and that's going to escalate too. A lot.

*sighs heavily* I'm not even surprised by this. I'm just tired. And disgusted. We don't need even more proof that Axis is a Gary Stu, Douglass. Stop wanking over his awesomeness.

I suppose it would be redundant of me to say that this is only going to get a million times worse too. The bullshit "Axis is the greatest" carry-on in this book is mild by comparison.