The first sixty chapters, in fact, are pretty good! The story presented itself as an "anti-HFY" of some sort, where instead of being badass deathworlders who punt everyone to death, humans are compassionate beings who win over the heart of the galaxy through their kindness to an alien named Tarva, the leader of the Venlil. The story juggled with tropes all around: The Always Chaotic Evil aliens aren't actually so, The Federation is actually the bad guys. The highlight was definitely the Battle of Earth, which I saw like a Wham Episode a la Red Wedding from Game of Thrones: a brutal episode where consequences happen to the good guys. Kalsim was an amazing antagonist, and it shows how well the author can write them.
Alas, all what I described was not to be.
Despite still being a good chapter, 67 proved to be a harbinger of things to come. Characters firmly grasping the Idiot Ball? Check. The villains being, as a whole, terribly written and stupendously dumb? Check. A potentially extremely dangerous escape being resolved literally offscreen? Check.
This trio of problems (events happening because the plot said so, the Federation being poorly written, and pacing) soon metastasized everywhere. The potentially interesting plot of Humanity First got relegated to a side story, giving no consequence to the Battle of Earth. Meier dies underdeveloped and Zhao threatens to be more than a 2D Big Good before reverting back to it. Then the Silis arc happened and Marcel and Slanek started their slow walk towards becoming The Scrappy through their annoying holier-than-thou attitudes which they never get called out for. Then the villains decide to up the ante through a shadow fleet that's barely ever a threat. Every times, many things happen offscreen, but the format prevents us from seeing much of it.
And then comes the worst arc: the Slanek assassination. In it, Slanek, who I really hate by now, somehow manages to travel through half the galaxy to kill the leader of the Federation. Slanek, who has practically no combat experience and is a moral and physical wreck successfully kills the Big Bad before being captured and lobotomized. Entire difficult chunks of the many-step plans are outright resolved offscreen. If the Battle of Earth was the Red Wedding, then this is Arya killing the Night King.
Worse? There is practically no payoff to that whatsoever. The Federation just gets a new Big Bad who's so bland and boring that I've already forgotten what I'm talking about, and then the plot continues practically unchanged. After that, the whole thing mostly devolves in a boring string of battles. Overall, the last 40 chapters of this work are... embarassing, no other way to put it. We go from Contrived Coincidence to Idiot Ball and from Idiot Ball to Contrived Coincidence.
Overall, I rate this work 4/10. The whole thing isn't worth reading, if you really want to stop at 67.
Literature Good premise, poor story.
I really wanted to like The Nature of Predators.
The first sixty chapters, in fact, are pretty good! The story presented itself as an "anti-HFY" of some sort, where instead of being badass deathworlders who punt everyone to death, humans are compassionate beings who win over the heart of the galaxy through their kindness to an alien named Tarva, the leader of the Venlil. The story juggled with tropes all around: The Always Chaotic Evil aliens aren't actually so, The Federation is actually the bad guys. The highlight was definitely the Battle of Earth, which I saw like a Wham Episode a la Red Wedding from Game of Thrones: a brutal episode where consequences happen to the good guys. Kalsim was an amazing antagonist, and it shows how well the author can write them.
Alas, all what I described was not to be.
Despite still being a good chapter, 67 proved to be a harbinger of things to come. Characters firmly grasping the Idiot Ball? Check. The villains being, as a whole, terribly written and stupendously dumb? Check. A potentially extremely dangerous escape being resolved literally offscreen? Check.
This trio of problems (events happening because the plot said so, the Federation being poorly written, and pacing) soon metastasized everywhere. The potentially interesting plot of Humanity First got relegated to a side story, giving no consequence to the Battle of Earth. Meier dies underdeveloped and Zhao threatens to be more than a 2D Big Good before reverting back to it. Then the Silis arc happened and Marcel and Slanek started their slow walk towards becoming The Scrappy through their annoying holier-than-thou attitudes which they never get called out for. Then the villains decide to up the ante through a shadow fleet that's barely ever a threat. Every times, many things happen offscreen, but the format prevents us from seeing much of it.
And then comes the worst arc: the Slanek assassination. In it, Slanek, who I really hate by now, somehow manages to travel through half the galaxy to kill the leader of the Federation. Slanek, who has practically no combat experience and is a moral and physical wreck successfully kills the Big Bad before being captured and lobotomized. Entire difficult chunks of the many-step plans are outright resolved offscreen. If the Battle of Earth was the Red Wedding, then this is Arya killing the Night King.
Worse? There is practically no payoff to that whatsoever. The Federation just gets a new Big Bad who's so bland and boring that I've already forgotten what I'm talking about, and then the plot continues practically unchanged. After that, the whole thing mostly devolves in a boring string of battles. Overall, the last 40 chapters of this work are... embarassing, no other way to put it. We go from Contrived Coincidence to Idiot Ball and from Idiot Ball to Contrived Coincidence.
Overall, I rate this work 4/10. The whole thing isn't worth reading, if you really want to stop at 67.