The Dragon War Trilogy ::OLD::
3/6/2024: This is an old review. Other projects have occupied my time BUT I plan on doing a mega review series going over the entire series (similar to my Warrior Cat ones but way more negative). The books are boring as hell but I’m making some progress. Once the first part of that is out, I’m deleting this one. It’s not bad, just old and unfinished.
Author: Daniel Arenson Genre: Fantasy Year of Publication: 2013 Pages: 713 (ebook)
Writing: 1/10 Plot: 1/10 Characters: 1/10 Creativity: 1/10
Overall: 1/10
Dreadful. Don’t read it.
I guess it’s fitting that the first book review I post is about this series. Hoo boy… So, The Dragon War Trilogy by Daniel Arenson is hands-down the worst series of books I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading. In fact, the entire Requiem Series is downright dreadful. The story follows a race of people called Vir Requis aka Weredragons. They have many misadventures and they’re all boring and hard to read. For simplicity, I’m just going to talk about The Dragon War Trilogy. There’s so much wrong…
The plot. Cliched lost heir, civil war story. Rune, the lost heir, must take down the evil king Cadigus and bring peace to the land of Requiem by joining up with a group of rebels blah blah blah. It’s typical. What’s upsetting is that I don’t mind this trope. My favorite book series ever WereWorld, has the exact same plot, but it’s done so badly here! I don’t care about Rune because he’s a blank slate with drastic mood shifts. I don’t care about his best friend Tilla, who is drafted into Cadigus’ army, because she is not interesting. Valien, the rebel leader, is boring. His sidekick, Kaelyn, is just as wishy-washy as Rune. Prince Leresy is literally useless and takes up so much time with worthless crap. It’s agonizing to read. The villains are comedically evil which I wouldn’t mind if this series was written for children. This is written for adults; it’s too sexual and violent for children, but it’s so juvenile in every aspect that only an edgy teen could get a kick out of this. The plot is stretched out to oblivion. You can honestly condense this 700 or so paged trilogy down into one 300 paged book. There are so many chapters that have meaningless garbage strewn about. It’s there just to take up space because Arenson couldn’t think of organic ways to flesh out his barebones story and world. It’s quite sad really.
The Writing. When it comes to technicals, it’s fine. Arenson can paint a pretty decent scene, he knows how to put words into sentences- the bare minimum. But everything else is terrible! His prose, his dialogue (oh man, HIS DIALOGUE), his worldbuilding, the fight scenes, everything! Everything is bad! Starting with the prose, it’s repetitive and boring. If you remove all of the repetitive information this series would be one book. I cannot stress enough how much this man repeats stuff. Characters would literally think one thing and then the prose would repeat that exact same thing a few sentences later. He repeats the character’s motivations, their actions, and their thoughts OVER AND OVER! He uses the same words, phrases, and sentence structures ad naseum. I swear, I never thought I would hate the word “leaped” so much. I am dead serious when I say that he doesn’t use a synonym for the word “leaped" throughout the whole trilogy. He doesn’t use “jumped” “hopped” “pounced” or even “lept.” Just “leaped” whenever a character launches into the air. Every. Time.
Ugh… let me give some examples.
Describing Kaelyn: “Her eyes were hazel, her features feline, she reminded him of a lioness. Her body too was catlike, slim and lithe, a body made for leaping and running and climbing.”
Introducing the Resistance: “The Resistance lived out in the forest they said. They hid in trees and holes and secret tunnels, and they fought the Cadigus family, and they hated order and law and life. They stole from good folk to fill their coffers and they weren’t afraid to slaughter the innocent. Rune had heard all about their deeds.”
Read these out loud and feel how awkward they are.
Starting with the first one “….her features feline, she reminded him of a lioness. Her body too was catlike, slim and lithe, a body made for leaping and running and climbing.” We get it! She’s a cat! Feline, lioness, catlike… can you spell “redundant”, Arenson? You don’t have to say “a body made for leaping and climbing etc etc” because we get that image from you describing her as “feline”. It’s also a clunky and awkward sentence. Slim and lithe mean the EXACT same thing, same connotation, and denotation. She’s slender and slender. You don’t need to be a super genius to know how to use a thesaurus! All he had to say was
"She reminded him of a lioness: golden, proud, and lithe.”
That’s it. That’s all you have to write. It gets the image across perfectly fine. Now for the second.
“The Resistance lived out in the forest they said. They hid in trees and holes and secret tunnels, and they fought the Cadigus family, and they hated order and law and life. They stole from good folk to fill their coffers and they weren’t afraid to slaughter the innocent. Rune had heard all about their deeds.”
I learned how to not do this in second grade. There’s this thing called commas. USE THEM! Splitting up a list with “and and and” over and over is juvenile! That’s some kindergarten crap! It’s not stylistic, it’s gross to read! I hate this sentence so much. Let me show you how to write this.
“Rune knew all about the Resistance and their deeds. They were a meance that hid away in holes and tunnels, waiting to strike innocent people in their delusional fight against the Cadigus family.”
Editing. It’s a wonderful skill. Edit your work. Read your work out loud and eliminate these clunky, gross sentences.
The Worldbuilding. There is none. Requiem is incredibly small with no major landmarks, only three named settlements, no variations amongst the people, a barebones government that doesn’t make sense, no culture, nothing. Nothing at all. For a world about weredragons, it sure is dull! You can remove the whole weredragon aspect and nothing about the story would change. These people being dragons is so inconsequential to the story. All it does is create frustration and plot holes. So, the people are oppressed by Frey Cadigus, the dictator that slaughtered the old king and took over. They’re broke, starving, abused etc etc. There’s also a law preventing these people from shifting into their dragon form. Only the royals and the soldiers can do that. How does Cadigus control people’s shifting abilities that they can access at will? By doing nothing. These people just let themselves be oppressed! They have every means necessary to rise up as dragons and overthrow the monarchy, but they don’t. I don’t know why! Everyone hates the royals! The civilians outnumber the army so why don’t they just kill them? They’re DRAGONS! They’re not average humans. There’s nothing, except for themselves, stopping them from rising up. A law written on paper says “no shifting” so they don’t do it because reasons. Arenson never gives a good enough reason as to why the civilians don’t fight back. He handwaves it with, “we don’t want to get killed” but they outnumber the army! The Cadigus army is undertrained and severely abused anyway, so it’s not like they’re fighting against well-organized troops. This is a plot hole that could have easily been fixed with a simple "magic-inhibiting device.” It’s not like Arenson hasn’t thought of this before! In Flame of Requiem, a series where the weredragons are enslaved, they have collars that stop them from shifting. Why not have that here? That’s not even the worst bit of worldbuilding.
So Frey likes to abuse his troops. Tilla is drafted into his army and we see the trainees get beaten, starved, and even killed. They are deprived of basic hygiene, they are deprived of decent sleep, they are forced to do grueling tasks that they weren’t properly trained for, and the female recruits are threatened with sexual assault constantly (I’ll dig into this a bit more later). Frey believes in “weeding out the weak” so he physically abuses everyone he comes across because beating people is how you make them strong (???). What’s stupid is that the text pushes this idea that the abuse does make Tilla and her fellow recruits strong when that flies in the face of all logic. The recruiters call their torture “breaking.” They need to “break” their recruits in order to make them strong and loyal. No. If you want a loyal army, you don’t beat the crap out of them for missing a step. That’s a quick way to start an uprising. Frey apparently doesn’t believe in propaganda. His soldiers are not fed rhetoric about his greatness. The citizens aren’t either. Like, there’s supposed to be propaganda against the Resistance, because everyone thinks the Resistance is terrible. But like… all the things Frey says the Resistance is doing is stuff that is happening to the citizens and soldiers every day by his hand. They never see the Resistance, but they sure do see Frey’s lackeys murder all of their friends so why would they blindly believe Frey’s word?? How do you mess up a story this simple?
Let’s get into the dragons themselves.
I have to preface this by saying, I love dragons. Dragons are one of my favorite mythical beasts! I also love werewolves! One of the reasons why I bought Skyrim was so I could play as a lycanthropic Khajiit that beats up dragons! It’s awesome! Combining the two should be a perfect match for me, but no… I left disappointed. Arenson’s dragons are not interesting. These people turn into dragons, fly around, breathe fire, and that’s it. There’s nothing… well, draconic about them! The world is not built upon this idea. There’s no creativity, ironically enough. In their human form, they look like normal white people (and yes, they’re all white. Other races don’t exist in this world. Wooo >:( ) They don’t have horns or claws. They don’t have weird eye colors. They don’t call upon aspects of their inner beast to enhance their everyday lifestyles. What do I mean by that? In WereWorld, another book series about werepeople, the Werelords call upon small aspects of their monster to help them with tasks. For example, Drew the werewolf would let out the Wolf a little bit to enhance his sense of smell so he can track, he would elongate his canines for intimidation, or let out his claws for defense. All in his human form. It’s really cool and I like this. All the Werelords carry innate traits of their inner beast. Drew is scruffy like a wolf and has a good sense of smell. Sha the werehawk (it is way cooler than it sounds) has incredible eyesight. Gretchen the werefox has dark red hair and a good nose (she also elongates her canines to snap at people. I love Gretchen). Bergan the bear is a hulking dude. Lucas and Leopold the werelions are huge, blonde guys. I wish this was in Arenson’s story. Have the dragon-people breathe fire in their human forms. Have them grow wings out of their backs so they could fly without going full-dragon. Have them grow horns from their foreheads to skewer people or have their tails thwack people’s legs to topple them or break them! Anything creative at all!
But no. Whenever the weredragons need to do anything draconic they shift fully and it’s… lame to me. The Requiem Series has really great cover art of these wonderfully creative and unique dragons. Too bad none of them show up in the books. They all have the same description: Two horns, scales, and a spiked tail. That’s it. Their scales are weird though. I don’t think Arenson understands how scales work. He would constantly say “scales clattering as so-and-so moves.” For example:
“As a human girl, she was sneaky and silent and could hide in shadows. Dragons were burly, their scales clattered, and their maws leaked fire that could be seen for leagues. Humans survived in the wild; dragons were hunted and died.”
Scales don’t clatter. When a snake moves, its scales don’t shiver around. He also describes the scales falling from dragons like feathers, which is a gross image. I know dragons aren’t real, but like… scales are basically hardened skin. Skin doesn’t clatter onto the floor.
One more thing: The fight scenes. Not only are the fight scenes repetitive and boring, but they’re also uncreative! You have dragons fighting dragons, but it’s just them flying around blasting fire. They have cannons but they don’t use them in creative ways. From what I can remember, they just blow cannon fodder at them- no nets, no stink bombs (whatever. I don’t know.). When they fight as humans, the soldiers are both sides wear steel armor which is plain dumb. Why would you wear steel when you’re fighting opponents that can BREATHE FIRE? I guess they want to be roasted alive. There’s one paragraph (only one) that shows Cadigus’ army training as dragons and learning how to fight and it’s pointless. They learn formations that don’t get utilized. All that the armies do is slam into each other, strategy be damned. It’s lame and I hate it.
I’m done. This part is getting really long. I can honestly rant about this trilogy for days. The next part will deep dive into the characters and will discuss topics I found stupid and offensive. Look out for that.
Yeeeah, no. I’m not doing part two. I can’t force myself to write more about this horrendous trilogy. Don’t read it. It’s truly awful.
