Red Rising Series

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Darrow is too perfect. The guy can seriously do no wrong.

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He makes several huge mistakes in the first two books.

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He's smarter, a faster leaner, better fighter, and overall just better at everything than everybody.

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He was specifically "carved" to be physically and mentally equal or superior to the upper echelon Golds and it's definitely earned.

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Two books in and it's a Darrow and a few friends that do absolutely nothing but worship him.

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I mean, he gets gutted and left in the mud to die by his "friend" Cassius, completely fricked over by his "friend" Roque, fricked over by his "friend" Tactus...

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Other than Darrow, who are you supposed to like at this point?

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Who says you're supposed to like Darrow? Every character in these books is deeply flawed. Including Darrow. You have to keep in mind that only having Darrow's POV comes with a certain amount of unreliability. Darrow isn't better at everything than everybody. He's still, even by the end of book 2, incredibly naive in a lot of ways. He was trained and created to be a leader, but he's still learning how. (hence the whole "that person will remember that pat on the back the rest of their life.")

As you get into later books, there are more POVs added. You'll notice when you get those that everyone's inner thoughts and opinions are unreliable to a certain extent. They're biased by they're own experiences and sense of self worth. The consistency in that across multiple characters is one of the more impressive parts of Brown's writing.

I will say, if you didn't enjoy the first two books, you should probably just stop reading the series. Those first 2 books are a fair representative of the entire series and are better than some of the later books.

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He makes several huge mistakes in the first two books.

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I obviously say "perfect" but know he hasn't done every single thing right. I wouldn't say he made any "huge" mistakes in book one. He wins fight with complete ease barely picking up a scratch and gains followers just out the kids being so impressed with him. He has major plot armor, that can't even be argued. In a game where people are just openinly killing each other, he walks into an enemies camp with no weapons, hands in the air, and everybody just decides that's when you stop fighting the enemy. The big showdown with the Jackal, who was supposed to be superior to Darrow in every way, just ends up being them sitting at a table and Darrow stabbing his hand and the Jackal not caring, only to be captured off screen and dropped off naked. I mean what kind of show down was that?

Losing the battle towards the beginning of book two and costing 800 people their lives was big, but it didn't effect him at all in the long run. He's just 2 ish years removed from the Hunger Games and he's already being annointed as Augustus' heir despite having a son and daughter. Come on

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He was specifically "carved" to be physically and mentally equal or superior to the upper echelon Golds and it's definitely earned.

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How did he earn it? Other than coming out on top int he hunger games? Honest question.

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I mean, he gets gutted and left in the mud to die by his "friend" Cassius

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Only to briefly train and then essentially be able to embarrass Cassius in a razor fight. Train Darrow at something for a week or two and he's going to be able to beat anyone at anything, regardless of how good they are at it.

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completely fricked over by his "friend" Roque, fricked over by his "friend" Tactus.

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Noticing a common trope here? Hence me saying that virtually no plot point is surprising because all people do is turn on each other.

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Who says you're supposed to like Darrow?

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Are you not supposed to like anybody? I mean a main motivation for wanting the main character to succeed is because of having sympathy for him losing his wife. So a guy is the only POV for numerous books, clearly isn't being written as a bad guy, and I'm not supposed to like him?

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Every character in these books is deeply flawed. Including Darrow

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Maybe by the end of the series, I don't know. But two books in and every single character other than Darrow is an extremely shallow/weakly written character. Cassius was on his way to being a character having some depth but he was largely left out of book two. It's a pretty cliche thing to say that they are deeply flawed when you barely know anything about most of the characters outside of Darrow.

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He's still, even by the end of book 2, incredibly naive in a lot of ways. He was trained and created to be a leader, but he's still learning how. (hence the whole "that person will remember that pat on the back the rest of their life.")

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I can see that. And the whole other people will remember this forever thing, which has happened numerous times now, isn't really a knock on Darrow, it's more of a gripe with the author. And I'm trying not to hold stuff like that against him too much because RR was his first novel, veery few authors look their best in their first book. His writing style improved a good bit just from book one to two.

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As you get into later books, there are more POVs added. You'll notice when you get those that everyone's inner thoughts and opinions are unreliable to a certain extent. They're biased by they're own experiences and sense of self worth. The consistency in that across multiple characters is one of the more impressive parts of Brown's writing.

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Sounds like that's more up my alley/what I was hoping for.

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I will say, if you didn't enjoy the first two books, you should probably just stop reading the series. Those first 2 books are a fair representative of the entire series and are better than some of the later books.

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Ouch. Ok, yea it just might not be for me. It's not like they are 1,000 pages so it's not too hard to tackle so I'll probably keep going but I might just read a fiction novel or something before Morning Star just to break it up. I also told a buddy that if he read a series I recommended I'd read RR and he's already finished the series I recommended, so I kind of need to do it for that reason as well

Did you happen to listen to these on audiobooks instead of read them?

I only ask because you seem to have missed some context on some of these things.

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I read them. Listened to a few chapters of RR on audiobook but couldn't get into the narrator.

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I only ask because you seem to have missed or left out a few things.

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He wins fight with complete ease barely picking up a scratch

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Again, he was gutted and left for dead.

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gains followers just out the kids being so impressed with him

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One of the purposes of the institute is to identify the leaders and the followers in Gold society. The Jackal had followers too.

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The big showdown with the Jackal, who was supposed to be superior to Darrow in every way, just ends up being them sitting at a table and Darrow stabbing his hand and the Jackal not caring, only to be captured off screen and dropped off naked. I mean what kind of show down was that?

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The Jackal definitely cared. He cut off his own hand and killed Pax just to get away.

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He's just 2 ish years removed from the Hunger Games and he's already being annointed as Augustus' heir despite having a son and daughter.

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The manipulation and the situation Augustus found himself in to make this decision was excruciatingly laid out in detail over several chapters.

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How did he earn it?

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Did you skip the chapters that covered his carving, physical training, mental training, and training on the politics and etiquette of the society?

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Only to briefly train and then essentially be able to embarrass Cassius in a razor fight. Train Darrow at something for a week or two and he's going to be able to beat anyone at anything, regardless of how good they are at it.

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He trained for hours, daily, with the society's greatest living razor master for a year.

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Are you not supposed to like anybody? I mean a main motivation for wanting the main character to succeed is because of having sympathy for him losing his wife.

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The motivation for wanting him to succeed should be because you agree with him that the Society, as it exists then, should be ended. His wife is his initial motivation. It doesn't have to be yours. You can agree with what he's trying to accomplish and not agree with how he's trying to do it.

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It's a pretty cliche thing to say that they are deeply flawed when you barely know anything about most of the characters outside of Darrow.

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So you barely know anything about Virginia? The Jackal? Sevro? Roque? Fitchner? Nero?

No offense. It just seems like you either completely missed or are intentionally down-playing some pretty important stuff that directly addresses your complaints.

This is odd cus I normally agree with most of your takes in the fantasy thread . I didn’t like RR at all until maybe halfway through then it started to click and loved to. The big turn at end of book two had me hooked through the end. Darrow is for sure a Mary sue in a lot of ways (I’m a helldiver of lykos so my hand eye coordination is the best ever etc) but he has many set backs that he learns from. As someone else said starting book 4 you get new POV. I loved the series as a whole, still under stormlight but right up there with first law. Just my opinion. .

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This is odd cus I normally agree with most of your takes in the fantasy thread

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Yea I figured this wasn't going to be a popular take

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Darrow is for sure a Mary sue in a lot of ways (I’m a helldiver of lykos so my hand eye coordination is the best ever etc)

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O man if I heard that one more time.

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As someone else said starting book 4 you get new POV.

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I went ahead and started book three yesterday and knocked out 10 chapters or so and I feel like I can already tell a little change in his writing style. This seems to move away more from a young adult novel feel that RR had. Might be wrong on that though. I think that was part of why I was disappointed in RR because it had been pumped up to be not a grim story but gritty, and it just came off as an unoriginal YA novel. Too many of y'all that I typically always agree with like it too much to not keep going. The books aren't all that hard to tackle anyway.

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I loved the series as a whole, still under stormlight but right up there with first law. Just my opinion.

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Stormlight is probably what I'm going to start next. Been holding off reading Sanderson too long now. Was talking to my wife about me being not the biggest fan of this so far and how it's definitely the minority opinion and I think my tastes have just swung quite a bit lately. In the past I would have said I liked Sci-Fi as much or close to as much as Fantasy but I think these days I prefer Fantasy quite a bit more.

Sry

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**Semi spoilers for the first two books**

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I would argue the opposite, especially in book 2 and 3. For someone who is as smart as he is, I felt like he was constantly being outwitted and outmaneuvered by foes that were less than him.

One of my chief complaints is that they dumb him and his circle down at some points to create drama/tension.

Finishing RR and jumping to Sanderson now would be good timing with Stormlight 5 dropping in December. Sure you’ve seen in fantasy board what all you need to read to not miss anything in the cosmere.

Darrow is nowhere near perfect. I don’t get this criticism at all. Plenty of mistakes, some of which don’t come back to haunt him until books later. (That’s one of the things I love about this series).

I also think the series does a great job of having other characters make their own plans which can interfere or even be in direct conflict with darrows. Game of thrones did this incredibly well. Red rising does it very well. It’s harder to understand some of the characters in the first book or two because you are getting purely darrows view but if you view how they act and ans what they have plotted - off page - that then gets revealed on page you get a strong view of them. Later books with more points of view broaden this.

But my big thing is this - there are trade offs to decisions and consequences, big and small through the entire series. You don’t get to screw over someone even if seemingly helping them without it still being present in reality. Too many series plod forward without those consequences coming back.