🧛🏻‍♀️Review: The third time was absolutely NOT the charm

It hurts me to write this. It really does, but I've given this book and Jay Kristoff AT LEAST three chances. The story is derrivative of other franchises that I love: Last of Us, The Witcher, Elric of Melnibone, Bloodborne, Castlevania, and so many more. Putting all these stories that I really enjoy in a blender like this can sometimes pay off, but here, it's so thinly veiled and doesn't have a good payoff in my opinion. Not only is it unoriginal to the extreme, it's painfully hard to read, rife with intense gut churning misogyny and homophobia. Enough was enough and I decided to just call it when I only have about a hundred pages left. I looked up the summary of what happens next and then the plot of the second book. No thanks. I'm good. I'm out. I'm just done.

Gabriel makes some of the consistently stupidest choices possible I think just in order for the plot to be able to happen. He's also extremely unlikeable and smug, giving off that cocky arrogant hubris of every internet atheist I've ever met since the early 2000s. He's got the personality of a wet moldy gym sock and it's so hard to go through a story with him as our vehicle into it because all the other characters around him are ten thousand times more likable than he is. He's abrasive and dickish to the people that are trying to help him. While I don't usually mind an unlikeable protagonist, I start cold sweating every time I think about the fact that the Empire of the Vampire trilogy is probably about 2400 pages long and I probably will have to bear Gabriel through its entirety.

Gabriel/the author intentionally prevents us from knowing all there is to know at all times, jumping back and forth between two time lines: one when Gabriel is about 16, the other when he's about 32 or so. Frustratingly, he always makes the jump between the timelines just as something dire is happening and you have to wait roughly 200 pages or so to get your answers if you ever do. I'm still waiting on answers for things from the beginning of this book and I am currently at the halfway mark 400 pages in. I do realize this is a trilogy and that means that I won't have my answers about some things probably until book two or even three, it's just frustrating.

There's no reason for this book to be so long. I'm not sure what I would cut, but there has to be something that could've been trimmed. There just has to because there's not a ton of plot going on in either timeline, and very little of it seems relevant to each other.

The world this is set in is just utterly horrific and our "heroes" are some of the most bigoted male pigs I've had to read since A Song of Ice and Fire. The difference in George's work was that characters like Ramsay Bolton or Joffrey aren't meant to be loved, but in Empire of the Vampire we're supposed to be pulling for an order of vampire slayers that abuses children, crucifies homosexuals, and beats women senseless. No. Just. no. I'm rooting for the vampires, the humans in this setting are just trash. Even Gabriel our protagonist can't call a woman anything other than a "btch" or a "cnt" constantly. Including his love interest. LGBT representation where the only gay characters are beaten to hell isn't representation, it's homophobia. Having a strong sassy female character doesn't mean anything if every other character constantly puts her down and calls her misogynistic slurs. I've seen people make jokes about not wanting to read fantasy by male authors anymore and Jay Kristoff embodies all the problems they're talking about. It's misery porn for everybody but the straight male Gabriel.

If that wasn't bad enough, there's a ton of logical inconsistences that took me out of it pretty much constantly. The half-vampires smoke vampire blood to quench their bloodlust, but that's not how biology works. They tattoo themselves with silver because vampires are allergic/burned by silver, but...aren't they vampires? Shouldn't they be burned? What's the point of tattooing themselves so elaborately if just simple stripes would work just as well? What's the vampires's plan for when all the world's population dies out? Why are scars so inconsistent in this setting, one minute someone gets run through and they're fine, but another guy loses an eye and it doesn't regenerate, make it make sense. I don't think Kristoff thought any of this through at all, it's just plot beats from other and better stories. Castlevania and Last of Us are the worst victims of the rip off machine, but Fromsoftware's Bloodborne got a lot taken from it too. I don't think Empire of the Vampire could exist by trying to be original since it takes so much from so many other franchises.

I'm just sour from this; it's such a mixed bag too because at TIMES this is actually a good book, but at others, Gabriel just says "fck my face 60 times a chapter and that's the best we can do for dialogue.

I was planning on reading the whole trilogy but I realise I'd just be forcing myself through it and I deserve to treat myself better than that and read something I'm actually enjoying. I'm tired I'm just so tired. I think the worst part is that I actually do want to know how this saga ends but I don't know that I have the strength of will to get through about 1600 more pages to find out. I'm sure it's a depressing ending anyway.

🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Fun Factor 1/5 (I was in pain) 🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Writing Style 2/5 (Extremely inconsistent, sometimes beautiful sometimes stupid) 🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Characters 1/5 (Jean-Francois is the only one who deserves joy) 🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Plot 3/5 (Last of Us but vampires) 🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Setting 3/5 (Spooky gothic setting) 🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Feels 1/5 (Gut churning rage, does that count?) 🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Romance -10/5 (It's there but it's so perverse and gross) 🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Spiciness 4/5 🧛🏻‍♀️☆ Gore 6/5 (Over the charts, intensely gory)

🧛🏻‍♀️If this were a movie it'd be rated: R for gore, violence, bigotry, some really messed up disturbing scenes

🧛🏻‍♀️☆FOR FANS OF: Edgelord reddit atheism

🧛🏻‍♀️Ultimate verdict: ⭐⭐/5

🧛🏻‍♀️☆☆☆Best Character Award goes to:☆☆☆ All the vampires are right and correct, but especially Jean-Francois