Shadow of the Conqueror (Part 5)

STATS

Title: Shadow of the Conqueror

Series: The Chronicles of Everfall (Book 1)

Author(s): Shad M. Brooks

Genre: Fantasy (Epic)

First Printing: July 2019

Publisher: Independently published via Shadiversity Pty Ltd and Honorguard Productions LLC

Rating: 6/10

SPOILER WARNING

Spoilers will be necessary to properly explore aspects of this story. I will mark “Mild Spoilers” and “Heavy Spoilers” at the start of each section as necessary, but the first paragraph will always be as spoiler-free as possible.

THEMES (Heavy Spoilers)

Discussion of the themes – the unifying ideas and deeper meaning of a story – can be complicated.  While an author can expound upon an idea within their work, the reader experience can produce a variety of different interpretations of that idea.  Sometimes authors can subconsciously incorporate a theme, or a theme can manifest through an unintended pattern.

While Shadow of the Conqueror does lean heavily on certain ideas, I didn’t want to go off just my interpretation.  I requested feedback from others who’d read the book.  The responses I got came from people with widely different feelings about the book’s quality, yet many of our ideas overlapped.  The themes we’ll cover in the next section will be based upon that consensus.

Redemption

Shadow of the Conqueror is, at its core, a story about a villain seeking redemption, albeit in the manner he deems best.  This redemption takes many forms, though for the purposes of this story, it can be boiled down into atonement for past wrongs, obtaining the forgiveness of others, and undergoing a personal transformation into a better person.

As with many other things in this story, the intent was good, but the execution was mixed, at best.

Atonement

On the surface, this idea is successfully conveyed.  The entire reason Daylen goes on his adventure is to atone for his past wrongdoing.  On a closer look, though, Daylen never actually atones for anything.  Atonement is only ever promised for the future or used an excuse for him doing things his own way.

We’ve already covered that this really aggravates people.  I’ve heard multiple people complain that they couldn’t take Daylen’s repentance seriously because he didn’t surrender himself to justice immediately.  While I was am willing to stand my ground on this not being objectively bad for character writing, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a problem from a thematic perspective.

It’s possible that this was deliberate.  Perhaps Shad wanted to show Daylen going about atonement the wrong way, only to flip things around and have Daylen learn some lesson.  The scene where Daylen finally surrenders to the authorities includes an admission by Daylen that he was wrong to avoid justice in the first place.  I suspect that this happened as a consequence of Daylen’s fight with Ahrek and Ahrek’s decision to forgive him.

The problem with this interpretation is that we didn’t get an arc.  It’s not like Daylen spent the story learning that atonement isn’t something he can dictate for himself.  He just flipped after one significant altercation.  Again, it’s justifiable from a character perspective; it’s terrible for a theme.

Forgiveness

The idea of seeking forgiveness is introduced late in the story.  Ahrek and Lyrah both have opportunities to forgive Daylen for the trauma he caused them as Dayless.  Their reactions are not quite polar opposites, yet I think they do an effective job of showing how different people react to those that have hurt them.

As mentioned back into the plot breakdown, Ahrek defeats Daylen in their final fight.  He then has opportunity to kill Daylen.  Before he can, Daylen points out that Ahrek is about to become like him; after all, Daylen’s transformation into Dayless the Conqueror began with the extermination of the nobles who ordered his family’s deaths, an act of revenge that failed to ease his pain.  Ahrek considers this and, ultimately, makes the choice to free himself by forgiving Daylen.  He heals Daylen and embraces him.

This forgiveness is incredibly rushed.  The only reason it isn’t nonsensical is that Ahrek is firmly established as a moral paragon.  However, within the moment, the emotions feel genuine, and the power of forgiveness to save those burdened by grief is demonstrated.  I feel that it is a win thematically.

Lyrah never forgives Daylen.  She is rendered catatonic by an anxiety attack when she realizes who he is; when she recovers, she and Ahrek hunt Daylen down, only for Lyrah to be called away to deal with the Dawnist attack.  (This is when the final fight between Daylen and Ahrek occurs.)  By the time the group is reunited, there are more pressing matters than dealing with Daylen, and then Daylen surrenders to the authorities.  She doesn’t get a chance to face him until the trial.  There, she makes it clear that she still hates him.  She also acknowledges his good deeds throughout the story.  She concludes by saying that she doesn’t care what happens to him, so long as she no longer has to be exposed to him.

This also works very well.  Aside for the fact that she’s channeling a significant portion of the audience with her conclusion, her inability to forgive Daylen is a human reaction.  I think it was very important for Shad to include this so that Ahrek’s decision to forgive Daylen would have more meaning.

During the trial, Daylen is also confronted by “only seventy” of the women he raped.  (I’m not going to depress you with the total.)  Most of them also choose not to forgive him.  Four of them do, though from the example we’re given and the fact that the narrative refers to it as a “moderate” response, it’s clear that this is more about these women having made peace with what he did to them personally rather than them thinking he should be let off the hook.  This is then followed by an example of one of his victims shouting how she wants him dead so that he can never do any to harm her or their son.  Again, this demonstrates the spectrum of human reactions when it comes to the choice of forgiveness.

The last, crucial element that makes me feel this theme works is Daylen himself.  He does not believe he deserves forgiveness.  He accepts that his good deeds throughout the story didn’t earn him anything.  Setting aside the fact that refusing to forgive oneself is also realistic, this hammers in the idea that forgiveness can’t truly be earned through some form of emotional transaction.  It’s a decision that others need to make on their own.

Personal Transformation

We’ve already covered how Daylen himself doesn’t really atone or change throughout the story.  However, the power of people to redeem themselves and change their ways is integrated into the magic system.

One of the gifts that both Lightbinders and Lightbringers possess is to sense the goodness within others.  Ahrek sees within Daylen the potential to become good.  He also coaches Daylen to use this gift on others.  Daylen, who was falling easily back into his habits as Dayless, learned to see that potential in others and to spare them accordingly.  This is ultimately what leads to Sain being spared and joining the group.

This element of the story has gotten some flak.  I will touch on it more when we talk about the theme of objective morality.  Looking at just its presentation in terms of redemption, though, it works well enough.

Accountability / Responsibility

Daylen spends this story avoiding accountability for his actions, all while demanding draconian levels of accountability from others.  He also avoids submitting himself to the Archknights to learn how to wield his powers responsibly.  Throughout the plot, though, he learns a measure of restraint, and his ultimate punishment at the end is a lifetime of paying off his debts through using his powers under the authority of the Archknights.  He shrugs off his hypocrisy while accepting the existence of a more moderate stance.

I think this idea comes off slightly better than the exploration of redemption through atonement.  It’s not great, yet at least we get some exploration of the idea, and it is meshed with character growth.

Coping with Trauma

This is something that has been touched on multiple times in this review.  The one new point I’ll add here is a complaint, which ties back to the power fantasy section.  This theme’s execution, much like the external stakes, feels lopsided.

Trauma is linked to everyone’s internal struggles.  However, while it is always in the background, I think it only really takes center stage when Ahrek and Lyrah try to kill Daylen.  This is an idea that was most effectively executed through external struggles, and the external struggles in this story was in very short supply.

I think any ease fix for this would have been for Daylen to have a personal stake in hunting pirates.  His should have had trauma tied up in dealing with them, rather than a desire to tie up a lose end that he couldn’t as Dayless.  Linking those battles to some unresolved trauma might have made them more engaging while giving this theme the weight it’s missing.

Coping with Guilt

Throughout this critique, I’ve tried to identify aspects of the story that worked objectively despite producing a negative subjective experience for some readers.  I can’t do that here.  The interpretation of themes is a very subjective experience.  The author can have intentions, but it falls on the reader to pull that idea back out of the text and digest it.  Our respective biases and our emotional experience while reading the book will impact this process.

So, while I’m about to say some nice things about how Shad presents Daylen’s journey through guilt, this theme ultimately doesn’t work.  The audience needs to feel empathy for Daylen to buy into the idea that he feels guilt.  His resume of misdeeds, coupled with the anti-social personality, make that very difficult.  Daylen needed to either be more likeable or have fewer sins.

With that established …

I think that Shad does a good job of demonstrating Daylen’s guilt from a mechanical perspective.  Daylen is driven first to suicide, then to self-assigned acts of atonement.  He also experiences revulsion and shame when exposed to reminders of his misdeeds.  His trial, where all of his recorded crimes are presented to him, is emotionally draining for him.  The bipolar tendences discussed in Part 4 are triggered by his guilt.  All of these are very human reactions.  Daylen’s guilt is a heavy load, and his mind can’t continue to carry it.

Objective Morality

Fantasy allows writers to craft settings where objective morality is manifested through the physical laws of the universe (usually, the magic system).  The specifics of right and wrong may not always fall into easily delineated categories of action, but even in these cases, there are often certain truths that underlie the system.  Correct usage of this manifested morality allows writers to express intangible ideas more effectively to the audience – though things can get very wonky if readers approach the story from a drastically different perspective than the original creator.  (See Part 0 of my Obi-Wan Kenobi series for a taste of how this phenomenon has affected interpretations of the Force and the Jedi.)

Shad is very vocal about believing in objective morality.  It’s not surprising that he incorporated this into Shadow of the Conqueror.  The Light serves as the arbiter of right and wrong within the universe, and it marks the capacity of people to find redemption for their sins through the strength of their inner light.  Lightbinders and Lightbringers can then use this to read the threat that other people pose to society.  The objective morality established by the Light also dictates the behavior of Lightbringers, as they must remain virtuous to retain their powers.

That isn’t to say that people don’t disagree about what is moral within this setting.  There are theological disputes over the nature of the Light’s wishes.  The only act that we know is unconditionally condemned by the Light is lying, as Lightbringers will lose their powers if they lie.  Everything else is up in the air as to how much is strictly enforced by the Light and how much is left up to human interpretation and error.

One specific complaint that I have heard related to objective morality within the story is that the Light condones rape and genocide, since it chose to spare Daylen, rejuvenate him, and grant him his powers.  This conclusion isn’t supported by the text.  The Light only offered Daylen a chance at redemption.  We can also see the fingerprints of the Light within the laws of the land – after all, if people exist who can read the goodness of others, it makes sense that laws would have been shaped by this.  We can therefore we reasonably certain that anything that Daylen was charged with in court (including rape ad genocide) is condemned by the Light as well.  There’s also the small matter of the Light sending instructions to Ahrek via dreams and visions.  Daylen’s chance at redemption was not without caveats.

There’s more than Shad could have (and, probably, should have) done to explore objective morality in this setting.  What we got is still adequate.  The story at least lays the groundwork for further exploration of the idea in future stories.

OVERALL THOUGHTS (Heavy Spoilers)

Here we are at last. Finally, after more than 15,000 words (apologies to those whom I promised that I’d stay under that limit), we have reached the end of the review.

I’m sure that some of you may have noticed a problem.  While I have not been scoring each section individually, nor have I provided any rubric for weighting the value of each section, what I’ve just laid out does not sound like the 6/10.  At most, an assessment of the individual parts of Shadow of the Conqueror point towards a book that is no more than a 4/10.

Why, then, did I rate it as high as I did?

Well, despite the book’s many flaws … It works.

Reading this book to the end was a satisfying journey.  I felt a sense of catharsis that I can only really contextualize in terms of the palpable apathy I felt after the Season 4 finale of The Legend of Korra.  There, I was presented was a story that build up my expectations and then delivered a hollow shell that made me feel my time had been wasted.  Here, I found myself struggling and frustrated at parts, only to feel like both my first and second readings (and the time spent to write this behemoth review) were time well spent.

I think this all comes down to the trial scene.

We spend an entire book getting to know who Daylen is and what he’s done.  It is unsatisfying as the action story that we were promised, but it works as a character study.  We learn how deep Daylen’s flaws run. We witness firsthand how much trauma he left in his wake as Dayless.  We see how he is, fundamentally, the same man, and how that holds him back any meaningful growth and leaves him open to repeating his mistakes.

Then the trial comes.  While Daylen’s flip from prioritizing his own agency to surrendering to justice is too quick, his behavior during the trial is faithful to his character.  He has always admitted to having done evil; it was only that insistence on staying in control that held him back.  With that barrier cleared, he publicly accepts fault.  He doesn’t even try to argue in the few cases where an accusation against him was false or exaggerated.  The closest thing he ever offered to a defense was his closing remarks.

Even then, all he said was, “I’m sorry.”

Maybe this is me allowing my subjective experience to create a bias, yet I feel that this was brilliant.

Shad made us genuinely hate this character.  We were walked deep into his psyche and shown how anyone could have become like him.  We were made to feel – not just know, but feel – how much trauma he caused, all while avoiding directly showing us the events in question.  And then, after we had hit our limit, this character turned around, accepted responsibility, and apologized for all the bad things.  The story even acknowledges that forgiving this character may be impossible and that the punishment given to him won’t satisfy everyone.  A mob tries to kill Daylen when he receives a verdict differently than death.

Shadow of the Conqueror offered us catharsis for pent-up emotions that it had generated. This is emotionally manipulative writing, in the best sense.  The story primes us to find gratification in an outcome that would otherwise feel flat.  There’s no denying that the execution was botched.  Many people hated Daylen so much that they stopped reading before the end, or they misread the outcome as a validation or condoning of his crimes.  The problem isn’t in the premise or plot, though, only in the miscalculation of making Daylen too unlikeable.

Hence, a 6/10.  I think this book is worth reading (if only once) for the exploration of this villain and the final payoff.  It’s a positive element that shouldn’t be ignored or overshadowed by the flaws.

CONCLUSION

And so, at least, we have reached the end of the long road.

Shadow of the Conqueror is a complicated read, to be sure.  There’s no shortage of examples of what not to do when writing a book.  There are also a few brilliant gems.  Back at the start, I said that flaws should not overshadow merits, just as merits shouldn’t overshadow flaws.  Hopefully, I’ve adequately demonstrated this over the past few weeks.

Shad, if you someday read this, please note that I think you have a lot of potential.  This was decent as a debut novel (as a few others on the Shadiversity server have put it).  Your self-assessment of being able to tell a “good” story (from your All Stars announcement video) holds water.  What’s keeping you back from telling a “great” story is not your concepts; it’s your execution.  If you can find the time to hone your craft and correct the errors identified in this review, you could produce something magnificent.

I thank you all for joining me on this journey.  The next few entries in Recent Reads will be markedly shorter.  I’m planning on doing a lightning round review for a few book trilogies that I finished over the course of 2022.  Hopefully that will be ready by the New Year, though I plan to prioritize the Once Upon a Time series for If They Planned It All Ahead first.

Merry Christmas to all.  I hope to see you again soon.