Just finished #LightBringer by Pierce Brown (#RedRising Saga) and. Fuck. Red Rising is so, so good.
I obviously have criticisms of its typically liberal, sort of centrist politics, where the most radical revolution that it can imagine is basically just capitalist republicanism, where the socialists that point out that nothing has really significantly changed for a lot of the actual lower classes under the Republic's rule are depicted as easily manipulated idealists for the most part, and where the people that are rightfully angry at the fact that they have just ended up dominated by yet another hierarchy with an aristocracy on top — it's just that they get to choose which aristocrats lord it over them every so often — are depicted not as people who are rightfully angry lashing out in the only way that they can figure out how to actually make the system listen, but as an angry, slavering, unthinking mob.
But the character development is wonderful and complex and slow and oh so realistic and mature. The dialogue is amazing. The drama brings out emotions that are so rich and evocative. The in-world politics and plotting are so complex and interesting well thought out. The narrative so brutal and willing to take good things away from you and twist the knife that you can't help but eye every positive turn of events with traumatized eyes. The action scenes so well choreographed and executed (some of the best I've ever experienced in any medium). It just has such a sensibility for grand drama and true epicness that it is truly awe-inspiring. Despite its flaws philosophically and ideologically speaking, despite how often it edges up to a good point or idea philosophically and then backpedals or dismisses a strawman of it through narrative happenstance in favor of comfortable support for the status quo in our world, despite how truly centrist and unradical a lot of its underpinning thinking is, unwilling to really inspect or think about the roots of ideas or assumptions, I still love it as a work of fiction.
Going back to Malazan (last two books now!) is super rough after this though, bc it's very hard to adjust back from first person present tense to third person past lol