The Audacity of Shad

So, I have recently finished Shad Brook’s book, Shadow of the Conqueror, and I have too many thoughts on it. I wanna see if I can explain my feelings to you succinctly while entertaining you as best I can.

I have always made it clear I want to support and cultivate right-wing creatives, given that there are so few of them around, let alone in any positions of influence. I want to encourage less of a lopsided political leaning, as we can enjoy a wider variety of books. Will this bite me in the behind later in life?

I hope not. One benefit to being a writer is that you ideally want to put yourself into people who you might not otherwise be. Fiction is a powerful tool for empathy and intellectual enrichment. I think with more conservative authors, we can cultivate empathy for each other. What I am going to say is all in the process of wanting to improve Shad’s writing and making him aware of some of the moral blind spots and failures in the text. This is not to shit on him. I will be tough but hopefully fair. Shall we get started?

What I enjoyed

Shad knows how to craft character voices, he understands how to convey personality both through actions and with speech.

Tuesic, for example, is highly expressive in his movements and the way he speaks. Shad does a wonderful job of showing how confused Tuesic is about the world and acts in ways that don’t match up culturally with Lyra.

He is brash and uncouth to where it seems malicious. Lyra is headfast and determined, all masking the shame and trauma that weighs on her like a bag of bricks. She is barely keeping it together and I am completely sympathetic towards her. Dylan and the Lightbringer are also very interesting if (for the former) occasionally frustrating. Dylan is often very emotionally unstable, flipping between making fun of rape victims and also getting visceral reactions from the same victims.

The Lightbringer is desperate to see the good in everyone, struggling with his trauma load, right until the monster is revealed. Shad has skill with writing human scenes with emotional cores. Shad’s prose is rough but not unsalvageable with a couple of edits and rewrites.

He can keep things flowing nicely and the dialogue is mostly okay, more on that later. I think he is not untalented. He is on the level of Christopher Paolini during Eragon. Nothing that can’t be improved upon and polished. I do admire his ambition. Most Youtubers tend to write something either very shallow and safe or get a ghostwriter.

Shad not only went the self-publishing route but wrote a sci-fi fantasy novel about trying to redeem a tyrant so vile it would make Hitler and Genghis Khan blush. I can applaud someone who would try to make something that tackles such a difficult subject, even if it doesn’t work.

Writing much like every other creative medium is littered with the failures of the past, piles and piles of failed, abandoned, or forgotten ideas litter the battlefield of the creative. The problem is that most of us get those out of our system early where people cannot see. Shadow of the Conqueror is Shad’s first work. As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything else previously.

This isn’t a bad thing per se, but it is much like Eragon. It will read like a first novel or first project. Everyone has to start somewhere, and I am glad he has created something in the first place, as opposed to just thinking about making something.If he has written short stories before, I think the problem might be more serious than I would give Shad credit for. Cause, there are a lot of problems here.

What I didn’t enjoy

Shad is very inconsistent on the environmental detail, an early example would be in the opening chapter. Shad provides a weirdly and ultimately unneeded amount of detail for Dylan’s hovel, yet is extremely vague when it comes to the big city. The former is only visited once, and the latter is visited often, but all I have for the city is that it’s in the sky and has neoclassical architecture.

Shad, aside from not providing enough environmental detail to immerse the reader when required, also makes a mistake when it comes to describing buildings. When one uses items or ideas from our world and puts them into theirs without much thought it can drive away immersion. While as bad as say, Bright, describing architecture as just neo-classical or gothic, etc doesn’t do a good job of evoking emotion. It relies on the reader to know what that looks like. When describing places, you want to evoke an emotion, particularly in what era you want. Just saying gothic or neo-classical doesn’t emote anything. To use an example, I would like to offer this quote from a rather famous story:

“Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Here Shirley Jackson sets the mood in Hill House in such a way that you don’t feel safe. Something is lurking within those doors, it feels like an abandoned prison. You want to evoke the emotion related to the place you are depicting. This is a problem that reveals Shad’s rookie nature. He is worried about over-explaining visuals and as a result, doesn’t offer much when it is needed. Shad also fails to tackle difficult subject matter well.

This manifests in two ways when it comes to rape and trauma from said rape. While Lyra’s trauma is depicted with humanity and realism, he constantly has her in situations where her trauma is triggered for comedic effect, Tuesic is a sex crazed manic that never seems to care about Lyra’s reactions to his endless sexual advances, all played for laughs.

This might have worked if it was funny, but it isn’t. Rape jokes are extremely difficult to get right and most people don’t bother. Shad shouldn’t have bothered as it only cheapens the book and makes Tuesic look like a terrible person. Another problem with rape depictions comes up when Dylan talks to the trafficked women and one of the victims throws herself on him.

While this could have been a powerful scene showing how fucked up people can get under sexual slavery, it becomes a joke later when one of the side characters marries her. I am not saying Shad doesn’t take rape or sex slavery seriously but his sense of humor is misguided, to say the least, it gives the appearance of doing that. Shad’s juvenile humor seeps through the rest of the book, including a strangely outdated gay joke.

Here Dylan teases the light bringer for liking men because the latter had a dream of Dylan where he happened to be naked. It feels like something teens during the early 2000s would say and I was cringing in a bad way. The language is often jarringly modern in a science fantasy, such as “retarded” or “It’s a little gay for me.” Both seem jarringly out of place and crude, taking me out of the story due to the strong whiplash.

Dylan is a Mary Sue, chiefly of the villain and black hole strains of the Sue. I know there is some pushback against the accusation, more often than not because Dylan doesn’t fit in what might be considered a traditional Mary Sue and the term is often abused. I would like to offer something of an explanation for my claim. Shad (through the justification of the in-universe god of The Light) is extremely biased towards Dylan.

Dylan never loses a fight cause there is always a reason for him not to. He can also become needlessly powerful for no real reason, such as the climactic scene where Dylan is somehow able to slice an island in half because he just could do that all of a sudden. Any fight he is in is always a cakewalk in some capacity. He is always more powerful than his opponent. There is no reason for Dylan to be forgiven in universe. He is a serial rapist of women and children, not to mention the murder of millions and the ruination of countless lives.

There is no reason for anyone to forgive him no matter how sorry Dylan claims he is. There comes a point where any good deed doesn’t atone for that amount of atrocities. Shad tries too hard to challenge the reader but is too cowardly to let events unfold naturally. As a result, the universe and logic bend and contort to arrive at the preordained destination.

Shad’s bias towards Dylan and his intense, narrow-minded desire to keep the protagonist sympathetic hurts the narrative and makes for an uncompelling experience. There is no reason to care for Dylan’s drive to be redeemed cause he can’t.

Shad’s desire to have characters who should in all rights kill Dylan on sight to forgiving Dylan only results in a jarring experience and robs them of agency. The Light Bringer and Lyra suffer from this terribly. The Light Bringer himself goes from rightfully wanting to kill Dylan for all the crimes he has committed to forgiving him due to Dylan’s nonsensical claim that The Lightbringer would be no better than Dylan.

Lyra should have been allowed to kill Dylan, almost does but Shad cheats and denies the woman any proper resolution to her trauma.

I would also like to briefly return to the prose problem. Shad made the strange choice to include video game terminology in his magic system. Dylan and friends can shift their mass and muscles in a manner akin to stats in a video game. Same for the use of power levels for different tiers of magic, not to mention the invisible barrier problem.

All of this feels very jarring and reads like someone who has played a lot of video games but has not read many books. While this can be fine in a LitRPG or something that involves video games in some description. Shadow of the Conqueror, however, isn’t a LitRPG, It’s just sort of there. Shad’s strange use of video game-esque terminology only makes his prose more stiff and awkward.

I could go on, I could talk about how the women who got pregnant from Dylan’s rapes are somehow grateful to him while those who never got with child hate him. Or how he somehow becomes young again after trying to commit suicide. Somehow Dylan’s suicidal tendencies just vanished after he became hot. I could also talk about the weird culture of black people who go around almost, if not completely naked, and are completely horny for white women.

There is a whole paragraph on how tone-deaf that is right there. But honestly, this section is already extremely long and I don’t want to be too mean. Shad has bitten off more than he could chew with this book, for a first book it is admirable but honestly fails what it set out to do.

Dylan is only redeemed because of Shad’s will, Shad treats the subject matter with all the care of a chief with no arm bones. The book feels like it was written by a teenager who has gotten their fill of culture from animated cartoons and edgy webcomics.

Shad has potential

From what I have said in the previous sections, there is some good stuff within Shadow of the Conqueror. Lyra’s scenes are emotionally driven. Each character has their own strong, consistent voice. They have personalities that are clear and distinct. The moral conundrum is solid and not often explored in fiction, let alone Fantasy or Science Fiction.

Shad has skill when expressing and delivering emotional scenes to the reader, he has ambition, unlike many YouTubers who decide to get into books, and wants to challenge himself and the reader by exploring the horrors of tyranny and the aftermath of it. I can respect a creative that doesn’t want to do the safe and sanitize and challenges the reader. That should be applauded, and that needs to be encouraged among creatives. Shad needs someone who can go through his work and point out the truth of the story wherever it will be.

I fear he has surrounded himself with yes men and sycophants that will lap up anything and everything he says. Shadow went through seven editors., I have to wonder what the hell went on in the writing room. Did nobody tell Shad that Dylan is a Mary Sue, how dirty Lyra was done by Shad in repeatedly mocking her and her suffering?

Nobody stopped to think how hollow and dare I say childish the humor could be. I guess not, and that is the problem. Shad needs people who are not afraid to point out his flaws, Shad needs to have his ego popped, otherwise he can never improve himself. It will hurt, but everyone needs to be humble and creative even more so otherwise we will make substandard products.

Conclusion

Shad can be a good writer. I have seen glimpses of this throughout the story. The problem is that he needed more practice and feedback from people who could say no to him.

He needed to realize that the idea of forgiving a character as terrible as Dylan was a doomed endeavor. He needed to fix the dissonance the reader experiences between how Lyra experiences her trauma and how the story frames everything around said trauma.

He needed to scale back the content for his first book to be something less intense. Shadow is dealing with a lot of heavy themes that require skill Shad simply doesn’t have at the moment. He bit off more than he could chew and, as a result, he offers up a story that doesn’t do justice to the question presented. I doubt Shad is going to read this cause I am a nobody and he is successful. However, Shad- I would urge you to instead of writing a sequel to this book or starting another book.

You should write short stories first. Learn the ropes about storytelling with a reduced scope before you step back into the area again. From one self-published writer to another, we are our best friend and worst enemy. We are all responsible for ourselves. We have to surround ourselves with people to tell us what is up so we can be the best artist we can be. We are responsible for delivering the best product we can to our readers. Do not surround yourself with yes men and sycophants.