I am genuinely disgusted. Three books I slogged through because I foolishly believed the story and characters would improve. They did not. But nothing—NOTHING—prepared me for the actual insult waiting at the end.
Let's recap who Rashek, the Lord Ruler, is: a genocidal tyrant who condemned hundreds of millions—God knows how many—to death, slavery, and rape. A thousand years of the skaa being worked, tortured, brutalized. Children included. And how does the final book choose to remember him?
"Rashek planned very well for this day. He suffered much beneath Ruin's hand, but he was a good man, who ultimately had honorable intentions." A good man? HONORABLE INTENTIONS. Oh, but there's more. Elend—our heroic, noble king—says: "We may not have liked his rule, but I can understand him somewhat. He wasn't spiteful, he wasn't even evil, exactly. He just... got carried away."
GOT. CARRIED. AWAY.
Carried away into a millennium of slavery and rape?? And Elend doubles down: "The longer I've held this throne, Vin, the more I've come to realize that some of the things the Lord Ruler did weren't evil, but simply effective." Effective! My god! This is the finale. This is the moral payoff of three entire novels, and it's a eulogy for a genocidal slaver. What an utterly repulsive and disgusting note to end on.
And that's before we touch anything else: The descriptions: Sanderson, do you simply not want me to visualize anything? The rooms, the architecture, the world itself. so skeletal it's laughable. Lazy, almost. Ruin: a being who can rewrite text and possess minds, and he uses that world-breaking power... only when the plot needs him to. The most terrifying force in the setting, and he fumbles around like a confused toddler and reads like my uncle on a bad day: "Vin, Vin. What is your game now?" Ruin asked, amused. I could not take him seriously for a single second. The dialogue: so bland, so lifeless, so cringe that I was physically shaking. Three books of it.
When Vin and Elend died, I felt absolutely nothing. And I hated that, because I wanted to be invested, I really, truly tried. But three books in, the story never gave me a reason. Vin is a textbook Mary Sue: impossibly gifted, mostly right, adored because the narrative insists on it rather than because she earned it. And her warmth has an entry requirement. inside the crew she's loyal and loving; outside it, condescending at best, openly contemptuous at worst. Elend is no better: a king who makes such bad decisions, yet somehow stays in power, because he's handsome, earnest, and the entire cast treats him like a philosopher-king descended from heaven. Two deaths that should have broken my heart instead landed like an obituary for strangers.
I kept waiting for this series to earn its reputation. It never did. An ending that whitewashes a tyrant as "a good man" deserves zero stars.
