Albertosaurus
Since: Jan, 2001
12/17/2016 00:00:00
I think you hit the nail on the head with this review. I recently worked my way through the entire Elric saga and everything seemed incredibly rushed and barely described. Nothing that happens has any emotional weight because nothing feels actually real. And that's not even getting into later additions to the saga like Revenge of the Rose, which is just pure chaos - and not in a good way.
MikMan
Since: Jan, 2001
01/14/2017 00:00:00
Overrated = I didn\'t like it and you\'re wrong for liking it.
Not a milkman!
RavenOfCthulhu
Since: May, 2020
08/24/2020 00:00:00
I love reading this review, but it gets overshadowed by the poor spelling, grammar and punctuation.
The vilest deeds like poison weeds/ Bloom well in prison air/ It is only what is good in man/ That wastes and withers there.Leave a Comment:
Whining+gloom and doom+evil swords=overrated series
I admit, i find this series a little overrated and i'm not surprised the movie based on these books has been in development hell for years.
To me, the Elric saga is like a concoction of Lord of the Rings, Conan the cimmerian(but with none of Tolkien's poetic and larger than life narration or Howard's machismo and spirit of adventure) and the anime of Yoshiyuki Tomino(because the main character is overly angsty and his friends and family members dies like flies). Elric is basically the wet dream of a cynical and angsty teenager: He's an albino prince of a kingdom of evil, hedonistic elf like humanoids who whorsip chaos lords from hell, always dressed in black, doesn't care about hurting innocent people, has an evil sentient sword, does alot of whining and self-loathing like Shinji from Evangelion, and icing on the cake,BIG SPOILERS, he destroys the world at the end of Stormbringer. I'm suprised it didn't get a comic book adaptaion back in the nineties during the dark age of comics, it would have sold copies like peanuts.
The main problems i have with the Elric saga are the following:Moorcock's writing is quite clunky, the characters and the setting are barely described(don't give me that is up to the reader's imagination stuff) and too many pages are dedicated to describe Elric's sadness and self loathing, making the main character quite obnoxious.
I think theres also a lack of an epic feel in these books, the final duel with Yyrkoon,Elric's evil(er) cousin, and the deaths of Elric's companions and love interests are not memorable or striking as they are supposed to be.
On the plus side, there are some things i liked about this series, the concept of the Eternal Champion who is supposed to create a new world free from the influnce of the gods, the conflict between the lords of Law and Chaos, the evil soul sucking sword Stormbringer and some of the action sequences are pretty entertaining. But all these elements are overshadowed by all the flaws i've mentioned earlier, but at least this series is not as painful to read or pretentious like other fantasy books COUGH COUGH,Sword of Truth,COUGH COUGH.
Michael Moorcock once said i'm a bad writher with big ideas. I agree, you could have done alot better than this.