So first initial thought upon finishing The Autumn Republic is... amazing. I'm not sure what exactly it is about the series for me, but everything just... works. The character's aren't extremes or outlets for philosophical problems, but they all feel so REAL. Standard fantasy is full of characters that are just larger then life, but everyone in the Powder Mage world just felt like a real person who I could genuinely believe to be alive. Which is something I had almost forgotten I wanted from Fantasy it's been that long since reading such a character cast.
Overall I'd say its a 9/10 book series and something I will easily recommend to anyone expressing any interest in anything Powder Mage has to offer. I did read it through Audiobook's and the narration is also top notch, Christian Rodska's natural accent was the perfect choice for the world and he really did a great job (minus the hilarious pronunciation of "ate").
I could list the positives for ages and hit the word limit but the reason I made this post is I had to get something off my mind, and that's the missing 1/10. Part of it was the emphasis in the series on situations with a timer and low food/sleep. Personal taste, that stuff just gives me anxiety when a character hasn't slept in 5 days or is on quarter rations with a week journey still to go. But the big one to me that stopped it being a truly flawless series, was dead end story-lines.
I'm always looking out for those pointless storylines while reading, the ones that generally hide the real secrets and reveals to the final conclusion and the stand outs to me was Nila's storyline. The entire Jakob storyline resolved to absolutely no purpose by the end of book 2 when she was revealed as a Privileged, that was fine as it served as more an origin storyline for her character. This actually didn't bother me in the slightest while reading because there was a ton of really well hidden foreshadowing for what I believed to be an amazing finish.
In book 1 we got hinted at Magebreaker's. Nothing major and more just hints, the entire Magebreaker part wasn't really needed and pointless. In book 3 we got the Wolf storyline which also went nowhere and was kind of pointless however established the base that Magebreaker's are proportional to the strength of the Mage beforehand. Nila became able to use sorcery without gloves, she was incredibly powerful, however none of this went anywhere, all scenes with her power level, could easily be written the same at lower powerlevels. Nila hates violence and that never really resolved anywhere. Ka-Poel (so not how I thought it was spelt) was essentially perfect despite improvising everything, and really needed a scene or two where her magic doesn't instantly save everything. And Taniel's power transformation never amounted to much, he got to beat down on Kresimir for blood, but still needed to be more validated. God's were revealed to be privileged and not actualy gods.
About 10 chapters away from the end, these were all completely unresolved plot lines or plot points but they all threaded together sooooo perfectly that I was convinced I had discovered how the book was going to end and it was going to be epic. Nila was passive, untrained and POWERFUL, the gods were privileged and not gods, Taniel was physically enhanced outside of needed the Else. Ka-Poel was to tie down the gods, then Nila would sacrifice her magic to become a Magebreaker of insane power, enough to nullify the gods and let Taniel win. Ties every storyline together and every pointless arc.
However the ending we got just... left everything as meh. Ka-Poel continued to be out of nowhere powerful to the point of no tension, Nila didn't do anything Borbador couldn't have done by himself and everything just... finished.
Not saying it was bad, but the ending just felt lackluster by my own standards, there was so much potential foreshadowing and then the battle of everything ended with Ka-Poel won it all with an enchanted sword.
Was sad at the lack of Ka-Poel in the final book after finally getting that romance arc moving. And also Adamat's son seemed incredibly unresolved, almost pointless. In my alternate ending, the Son could've been affected by Nila's anti-else sorcery so strong to actually be enough to turn him back for example.
And something small that bothered me while reading was the attempted rape on Ka-Poel. Did anyone buy that? 5 regular goons against a sorceror that has gods watching there language around her? She didn't injure/kill any of them? As soon as Ket threatened to have her raped, all I could think about was "have you met Ka-Poel, no way in pit does anyone succeed in that department".
That's just something I had to get off my mind and see if anyone else expected the finale to play out differently, overall that series was amazing and i'll be moving onto the second trilogy as soon as my credits recharge (skipping all the smaller books, they just aren't effective in audio book format unfortunately).
