Welcome to the first installment of a new series: In My Humble Opinion. These are less reviews and more of a place to talk about things I either like or dislike, usually from books but potentially movies and other things.
There is a YouTube channel by the name of Terrible Writing Advice. In the same vein as CinemaSins, Angry Video Game Nerd, How It Should Have Ended, and Honest Trailers, the channel is a satirical presentation of actually fairly useful writing advice. The graphics aren’t amazing, nor is the content exactly groundbreaking in originality, but it’s still a humorous channel I would indeed recommend to people.
But, as the channel is based on writing advice, it also just so happens the channel creator wrote his own book. Aeon Legion, Labyrinth. Given he seemed tuned in to how to write proficiently, I thought I would give it a read.
I was a tad disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a terrible read. Parts of it really capture the imagination, and time travel always opens possibilities for unique and varied settings, plotlines, and characters. But despite the author’s ability to see cliches and poor story structure, it just completely missed the mark on several areas.
The main character, Terra, wasn’t very interesting, nor was she very insightful. She would ask questions that seemed obvious, and didn’t seem to question other things properly, throwing her into situations that she should have been more prepared for. This is more a problem at the start, but it still bothered me quite a lot how much of what happens is simply the hidden machinations of everyone else except for the main character, who comes off as rudderless and conflicted much of the time.
But that’s not the part that bothered me the most. No, the one thing that most annoyed me was the Aeon Legion. They are a Latin-Roman-ish themed standing army equipped with time travel technology, traveling through time lines to thwart attempts to change history, Doctor Who style but with more structure and personnel involved. The idea is not exactly new, basically having a “time police”, but is passable for a story. The problem I have is with their tactics.
The training they put their recruits through is ridiculously brutal. This is common with military training, at least my layman understanding of it, but they go the extra mile. Some of what I’m about to say gets into spoiler territory, so this is your final warning to bail if you don’t want anything spoiled.
SPOILERS AHEAD! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
The Legion not only allows predatory behavior between recruits, they encourage it. This is hand-waved as weeding out the weak and by saying that the bullies never last to the end anyways, but this creates a culture that simply gets flipped later on. I don’t buy that for a second. This isn’t high school where the bullies need to fly under the radar to a certain degree, but rather the bullies can actually take points away from other recruits to be used to buy better equipment. This incentivizes bullying, so the people who succeed under this model will be the strong and unscrupulous. The absolutely insane thing is that it is insinuated the training regime used to allow recruits to just kill each other, but that was scrapped for failing to produce remotely good results. The fact that they think this new system that encourages loose morals from the very start makes me think they simply opted for a less bad system, which just baffles me given they are supposed to be a society that has existed with stability for countless centuries due to unlocking the secret of immortality.
The second to worst infraction is when they allow recruits to enter the wilderness to fend for themselves, and either with or against each other as they see fit. Again, you see the predatory aspect between recruits come into play, but that’s not the focus. A military group of dubious origin appears and starts attacking people, abducting them and depositing them into a prison camp. The recruits are tortured for a lengthy period of time, both physically and mentally during intense interrogations as attempts were made to make the characters flip their alliance, until they finally stage an escape attempt. When they do manage to begin an escape, they are quickly chased down as they run, and just when the main character looks doomed, it’s revealed the whole thing was a massive illusion by the Aeon Legion. That’s right. The instructors tortured their students for weeks, then expelled any that flipped allegiance under the pressure.
I don’t know if any real military actual does something similar to this to recruits, but I see serious issues if they did it exactly as portrayed here. Betraying the trust of your recruits to this extreme extent would cause many to seek revenge down the road, not to mention starving your recruits intentionally can undo months of strength training, possibly causing long term health issues. There will always be that nagging fear down the road to graduation that some unusual situation is some kind of bizarre test by one’s instructor, instead of a real life and death situation.
That reminds me, there are a LOT of mind games in this story that I find irritating. One character(I honestly don’t remember his name beyond his character type, so let’s just call him “Swag Knight”) specifically goes out of his way to do as little work as possible. Despite this, he makes his way through all the tests, always taking an easy way out when it wasn’t the point of the test, but never doing so when it would disqualify him. At the start, there are three tests specifically listed as optional. But, unbeknown to the recruits, if you don’t at least try you are immediately expelled. So, he must have taken those tests, despite them being listed as completely optional. However, at one point he is tasked with properly cleaning a weapon, and when he is tattled on for simply switching the dirty weapon for a clean one, the instructor states that he did nothing wrong. The insane idea that Swag Knight needs to be willing to wade into disgusting muck as part of an optional test, but doesn’t need to know how to properly maintain his weapon screams misplaced priorities, and the only way he can navigate these opaque requirements to eventually graduate is by having a level of insight that simply isn't possible, and certainly isn't explained. Swag Knight is supposed to be this easy going con-man character that breezes through life, but he comes off as an impossible character that has knowledge and skill that there is no real explanation for. He borders on a Gary Stu.
But getting back on topic, the single biggest issue with the training regime is how many recruits die in the final exam. I really don’t need to spend much time on this; if your lengthy training ends with the deaths of many of your recruits, then every recruit that dies represents not just a massive loss of resources, but also a devastating tragedy. The Aeon Legion can travel through time itself, and yet they can’t at least prevent their recruits from dying in the final test should they fail. That’s ludicrous.
The small group of main characters irked me as well. There was an… Asian? Japanese, I think, I don’t really remember… who was disrespectful towards everyone, despite the culture she came from having that as one of the most highly instilled virtues. Then, Swag Knight, who acts as a complete antithesis to the stereotypical chivalrous knight as he conned people and always looked out for himself. Finally, there was an Islamic man that functioned as the mediating force between many other characters, but most notably had incredibly liberal views on women and general social norms. All of these I find incredibly surface level from a characterization perspective, as they are all just stereotypes flipped in the opposite direction. Most of them didn’t feel like real, fleshed out characters because of this. There was a truckload of development near the end where each character besides Terra gave more of their backstory, but that was too little too late, in addition to really feeling forced. It wasn’t terrible, but the severe lack of anyone that feels close to a real human really hurt what was basically a fish out of water story; a normal girl is thrown into time traveler boot camp.
I don’t know if the author plans on writing more. Judging by his less than stellar reviews on the first book, combined with his YouTube channel actually doing quite well, I won’t hold my breath. But I will be reading any new installments should they arise, as I’m curious to see where he takes the story. He does try to set up some larger arcs, but to an extent I feel like they detract from this current book. They draw attention away from the story happening in the moment, almost making the whole thing feel incomplete at the end due to unanswered questions that now might never be definitively answered, though you could certainly guess at some reasonable theories.
For now, I would not recommend reading this book, and just check out his YouTube channel instead. I might change this recommendation if he writes additional installments that expand the world and its characters better, but for now I just think this is not a great story. But that’s just my humble opinion.