Apocalypse cause is lame and the relationship is underbaked

Witchery June 20, 2025 12:55 am

I don’t know if this is just me, but I find the revelation of how the apocalypse happened to be kind of… lame? I’m not a big fan of the “power of feelings” trope when it’s used in a clumsy and nonsensical way. Atel was captured, held prisoner, and completely trapped for years, completely helpless from the sealing chains, but the second he finds out MC is dead, he magically breaks out like nothing, only to lose control and destroy the continent.
His character just doesn’t match. He’s gone through rejection trauma, forced to go to war, assassination attempts, etc… since he was young and shrugged it off with no ill effects or outbursts other than being mildly sad about it sometimes.
Idk, there was like zero setup to show that 1. He would even have intense emotional outbursts, or 2. lose control from those intense emotions, in the spectacular manner he did. I get that the death of a loved one is different, but it just felt random since the setup wasn’t there.
And the rampage isn’t even explained well. So he has shallow thoughts about destroying the world that “failed Beaty”, but that reaction makes no sense with the rest of his character because he’s destroying villages, killing civilians, etc. Is he possessed by his power, reverting to an animalistic state? Atel is shown consistently to be a just leader who cares about the country and people, so if the descent into complete abandonment of his previous character/morals doesn’t make sense in terms of his thought process, there needs to be another explanation offered.
Just feels like a shallow way to demonstrate an excessive dedication to MC to later push a romance that really doesn’t have much psychological buildup. Other than being friendly to each other and “feelings go thump” there really isn’t any romantic buildup between them, so this feels like a shallow plot forcer trying to cram the relationship down the readers’ throats without actually writing a believable/fleshed out romance, which is actually extremely common in these stories.
The entire sequence of events and character shifts is completely incoherent.

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