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waltzoidMe, that's who.
Four months after I said I'd sworn off Savior King, I picked it up again to see just how much stupider it could get from Chapter 31's "Dimitri goes berserk and kills a bunch of villagers from Remire" plot point.
"Very", okay? The answer is "very".
I originally wanted to do a full-on chapter-by-chapter review of this fanfic for das_sporking, but I changed my mind, citing to myself time constraints (I only get a few free hours after work to read, leaving little time to write a detailed critique), so I've taken to Discord to roast this thing with a few friends. Any further SK updates on this blog will only be for chapters that gave me especially big headaches.
Like Chapter 38, for example.
In the final third of Chapter 37, after Dimitri overhears a conversation between Lysithea and the author's OC (which, coupled with the author's note at the end, is little more than the author using her OC as a mouthpiece to bash Edelgard), the Monastery comes under attack from a pack of a dozen Demonic Beasts. After the beasts are dealt with, the scene cuts to Byleth crying and howling her head off over Jeralt's corpse.
"It's just like in Three Houses! That's supposed to be all sad and junk!" Except it's not like that at all.
See, Savior King has stuck to a "rotating protagonist POV" method of storytelling, with each chapter dedicated to the perspectives of Dimitri, Claude, and Byleth, in that order. The reader only finds out that Jeralt is dead because Claude hears Byleth crying, and the only description of the fatal attack comes from Atra (the aforementioned OC), who also gets laid out and has to nurse her own injury while telling the others that Jeralt died protecting Byleth from an attack by Thales, the presumed main villain of the story.
I get what the author was trying to do here: give Jeralt a chance to die a more "heroic" death than the "quick stab to the back" the game gave him. But unless I can see him tanking a blow meant for his daughter, the scene loses much of its punch, no matter how many of the students huddle around Byleth to cry with her.
The attack leading up to Jeralt's death raises a few more questions.
Why does the author desperately want me to like this character again? Or this story?
(sigh) 38 chapters down, 68 more to go.
...
Four months after I said I'd sworn off Savior King, I picked it up again to see just how much stupider it could get from Chapter 31's "Dimitri goes berserk and kills a bunch of villagers from Remire" plot point.
"Very", okay? The answer is "very".
I originally wanted to do a full-on chapter-by-chapter review of this fanfic for das_sporking, but I changed my mind, citing to myself time constraints (I only get a few free hours after work to read, leaving little time to write a detailed critique), so I've taken to Discord to roast this thing with a few friends. Any further SK updates on this blog will only be for chapters that gave me especially big headaches.
Like Chapter 38, for example.
In the final third of Chapter 37, after Dimitri overhears a conversation between Lysithea and the author's OC (which, coupled with the author's note at the end, is little more than the author using her OC as a mouthpiece to bash Edelgard), the Monastery comes under attack from a pack of a dozen Demonic Beasts. After the beasts are dealt with, the scene cuts to Byleth crying and howling her head off over Jeralt's corpse.
"It's just like in Three Houses! That's supposed to be all sad and junk!" Except it's not like that at all.
See, Savior King has stuck to a "rotating protagonist POV" method of storytelling, with each chapter dedicated to the perspectives of Dimitri, Claude, and Byleth, in that order. The reader only finds out that Jeralt is dead because Claude hears Byleth crying, and the only description of the fatal attack comes from Atra (the aforementioned OC), who also gets laid out and has to nurse her own injury while telling the others that Jeralt died protecting Byleth from an attack by Thales, the presumed main villain of the story.
I get what the author was trying to do here: give Jeralt a chance to die a more "heroic" death than the "quick stab to the back" the game gave him. But unless I can see him tanking a blow meant for his daughter, the scene loses much of its punch, no matter how many of the students huddle around Byleth to cry with her.
The attack leading up to Jeralt's death raises a few more questions.
- If the Demonic Beasts were Academy students, then why did they attack from *outside* the monastery?
- How did no one notice more than a dozen students disappearing?
- Why did Thales expend so many resources just to get to Byleth?
Why does the author desperately want me to like this character again? Or this story?
(sigh) 38 chapters down, 68 more to go.
...
