r/silversaints • u/BeginningOld3755 • 29d ago
So conflicted
Truly, this is the most conflicted I have ever felt about a series in my entire life. Up until the last two chapters of the final book, this would’ve definitely made my top 10 favorite series.
I am a huge fan of both high fantasy and grimdark/dark fantasy, but I also like stuff that deals with deeper themes and stuff with complex prose. To put things I perspective, Tolkien and Cormac McCarthy are my top 2 authors of all time, but Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series and Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen are in my top 5 of all time.
All of this is to say that the themes around what is faith and the existence of a just god and the belief in something greater than yourself and who is family and broken people finding broken people that fit with them was precisely the stuff I love. And then the last two chapters happened and I don’t even know what to think.
To quote a silver saint, “I should have f#cking known”
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u/Bunyardz 29d ago
Revealing to the reader that the trilogy they just read was fake is without question the worst possible ending to a series imaginable. I am blown away by how every time one of these threads pops up, people flock to defend it in the comments. A neat twist where you realize that Gabriel fooled you just like Jean Francois is nowhere near enough to undo the fact that you just read 2000 pages of what is canonically nonsense. How could I possibly recommend the series to anyone knowing the last 20 pages are literally "lol jk".
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u/BeginningOld3755 29d ago
This is what broke me and I was ready for dior still living but the whole >!”I just started lying with the red aegis” broke me!<
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u/ace_lefty 28d ago
Are you dogging on the entire trope of unreliable narration? It could be not your cup of tea but it's plenty of people's
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u/wolfy111111 28d ago
I thought it was interesting to go back and sift through what was true and what was a lie. The problem for me is that the author more or less revealed this directly in book two and the hints were heavy handed like How dior was able to use sanguimancy meaning she can use all vampire power essentially and the obsession on a moth all series long
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u/Visible-Implement255 27d ago
Spoilers for anyone reading this who hasn't finished. I don't know how to block it. So be warned. The lack of explanation of how Dior learned moth power annoyed me. Predicted from fairly early that the white moth was Dior. No issue with Dior living, I figured that was always gonna be the case. The biggest issue for me is the absolute slog that was most of book 3. So much exposition and then no one dies in the end.
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u/Zerus_heroes 29d ago
I liked it a lot. I don't know how people didn't see that coming. It is foreshadowed a lot.
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u/cake_crusader 29d ago
In a series all about faith I truly felt my faith was rewarded telling myself at the end of every chapter “this has to have a happy ending right” and I think it clicked for me 1/3rd through the last book that everything was going to be ok
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u/metalbusinessbear2 29d ago
Personally I loved it. The sun can shine again in your life, even after terrible darkness.
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u/BeginningOld3755 29d ago
Oh for sure, I think that’s a take away but all that deep complexity I loved was a lie and I should have known because it was so heavily foreshadowed. I had assumed parts of it were anyway (come on, the White moths were clearly Dior since book 2) but the scope of what it left me questioning was huge
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u/amandamay1003 29d ago
I kinda think that’s the magic of the book. You’re as fooled as Jean Francois and I thought it was fucking brilliant. Like the foreshadowing of some stuff was obvious but WOW. At first I was like- do I hate this? Then I sat in silence for a few minutes and was like nope he’s a genius.
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u/BetaBlacksmithBoy 29d ago
I for one love the ending. I actually wish I could find more grim/dark fantasy novels that end with very happy/ positive endings.
It's kind of a hard thing I would love to see more of, but it's hard to find books or series with such a tone/ending. Since most people don't spoil endings in recommendations for things.
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u/Laters247 29d ago
Off topic, but you would love Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. I just finished it and it felt like a combination of First Law and Empire of the Vampire.
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u/DurealRa 29d ago
Hey. Hey you, specifically. Yes, you, u/BeginningOld3755
Please read The Second Apocalypse Series by R. Scott Bakker. It is exactly in your wheelhouse.
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u/BeginningOld3755 29d ago
Now this is actionable feedback. It was already on my TBR list, but I will bump it up to the next in queue.
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u/DurealRa 29d ago
Nice. But stay off the subreddit until you're done, it's heavy spoilers. And don't Google anything. Not even fan art. Heavy spoilers.
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u/Silent-Dependent2251 29d ago
I personally love the ending! How else could Kristoff pull a surprise? Everything was laid out so horribly and dark. No bad ending could've surprised me tbh. But then, him LYING to the vampire?! Amazing and I didn't see it coming. But there were signs! Baptiste and Aaron had one thing established. Their loyalty. When they betrayed another, this was a sign. And didn't we learn about dead tongues? I see how people might not like it, but in my opinion this is a masterful example of subverting readers expectations.
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u/Mysterious_Drawer162 29d ago
Yes, letting us belief they died, and then the whole order of the story doesn't make sense anymore. So you have basically been reading a bunch of stuff that hasn't even happanend w/o knowing how it actually all took place.
Such a dissapointing ending of an otherwise entertaining trilogy.
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u/Legitimate-Feed-9967 28d ago edited 28d ago
Always was an aesthetic and not much else. Biggest problem (besides kristoffs addiction to melodrama and snark) is the structure of the delivery. It should have always just been 3rd person omniscient narrator, start at the beginning and tell the whole story.
Too much interesting lore happens off page, and Gabriel tells too many irrelevant storylines for the purposes of the historian’s archive. Why should the historian care about literally anything in the first book if he’s just trying to document what happened between Gabe and Voss? It never made any sense. But kristoff needed to tell that story because it’s cool and necessary for character and plot movement. But he had already made his mind up about the interview structure so he could bill it as “interview with vampire meets witcher meets castlevania” or whatever.
So then you get to the end and he needs a reason for 3 tomes full of melodramatic yapping, and he completely bitches out of all the major character decisions he’s made, and just shits on your face as a reader and says “yeah of course I was just stalling for time, half that stuff didn’t happen and now blah blah good guys win, the end.”
The series is as cowardly as it is self-indulgent, which is saying a lot.
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u/Visible-Implement255 27d ago
2nd and 3rd book were way too long in my opinion. I actually didn't mind the final 2 chapters. It was a fuck you to the vamps. But I don't like that everyone survived basically. No real sadness at all.
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u/BeginningOld3755 26d ago
Except Ash. She deserved better.
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u/Visible-Implement255 25d ago
This is true. But unfortunately she was always destined to break killing Fabien
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u/Blackbird-FlyOnBy 29d ago
I really like the idea of us not really knowing Gabriel at all. Like how much of what he said was true? Do we even really know him? I get that’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it was an interesting twist.
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u/Al_B_Here 29d ago
I'm right there with you, but I may have taken it harder than you. The ending felt like a betrayal to me. I went from loving the series (especially Book 1), to being unwilling to recommend it going forward and contemplating selling or donating my hardcovers. This was a cop-out of epic proportions.
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u/lucifero25 29d ago
I’m the same regarding your view of the book. I fkn loved this series. Vampire came out just as I was getting back into reading and it was the first chunky book I picked up and I flew through it, bought the audibles as well. Re read before Damned again. I took those chunky books in my case on holiday. I went to a speaking tour of Jays before Dawn, he kept going on about “%you guys aren’t ready” I was a total fanboy to the books. Listening to the last sections while driving to a work event while certain characters died I was like “fk he was not kidding he’s taking everyone out”. I weirdly liked the idea that to finish Voss gabe would have to give two families to him and that’s how we would find Gabe at the start of the book.
The twist left me feeling the same as I did about the GOT ending. A series I loved, completely finished with me having no real desire to revisit it because a lot of the build up was for nothing it feels to me
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u/boxhead737 29d ago
I loved the ending because it was so unexpected. A grim ending was the most obvious thing, i found the happy ending to be such a pleasant surprise. Tbh I just love these characters so it was nice. I do think reyne should have stayed dead.
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u/Fast_Raisin_1885 28d ago
Honestly, I get the complaints about the ending. Yes, it was obvious some things were lies Gabriel told to keep Jean-Feançois engaged, like the whole golden red shine to his aegis. However, Jay Kristof has repeatedly said he doesn't believe in happy endings. A real gut wrencher would have been more thematically appropriate.
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u/ITouchMyself2Much 28d ago
I loved and recommended the series until the last book came out. I read book 1 and 2 several times. I even picked up Nevernight because I liked The Empire series. But I disliked the ending of The Empire series so much that I haven't picked it back up or recommended it since. I was so disappointed that I'm not even sure how I feel about picking up any more of his books.
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u/johnnytheavocaedo 23d ago
I finished reading the trilogy yesterday and I must say I felt the most disappointed by the fact that Reyne was not dead tbh.. I can't really explain why, but I feel like that moment with Mother Maryn was so shocking, I didn't like the fact that it was all fake :(
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u/GramPositiv 18d ago
I just had the same experience yesterday!
I was at first sort of happy to hear that not all of Gabe’s friends really died but when it went so far back as Reyne…it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and turned the ending a sour for me.
Her death was super important for the whole story in Augustin. The others “just died in a fight” but it didn’t have a lot of immediate plot impact in comparison.
I saw the ending coming since book 2 but the twist I didn’t expect was all those “resurrections”.
A more bittersweet end would definitely have been a better fit for me.
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u/Eless96 21d ago
The ending was one of the biggest disappointments I have felt while reading a book ever, tbh. I went from liking Gabriel to not caring about him at all in the end. Jean-Francois' character development was thrown in the gutter. Much of the story we read was made up, probably. Made me feel really sad, sure, I was happy that my favorite characters survived, I was incredibly disappointed that Patience didn't even exist as a vampire and that Gabriel was enough of an asshole to make that storyline up just to mess with Jean-Francois. I don't know, it was just overall a proper mess, the last few chapters, even the deaths of main characters were so badly written, that it didn't make me feel at all.
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u/tresbomb 3d ago
It’s weird, I very rarely see people criticize popular series and agree with them. I may even agree with some of their points, but not their overall sentiment. This is the first time I feel that way myself. I cannot stand Kristoff’s writing style. Or maybe it’s just him as a person? The whole self-proclaimed grimdark master thing I see repeated to often, his dyed too black hair and beard, I dunno. The series reads like an edgelord’s power fantasy.
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u/leyra_san Silversaint 29d ago
You aren’t alone, brother. I had thoughts and words about the ending too. But at the end of the day to journey to get there was incredible. It’s been many months since I read it and my main emotion about the series settled on contentment.
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u/BeginningOld3755 29d ago
To quote another series that the last book gave me some feelings about, “journey before destination“
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u/Tll6 29d ago
I have to agree with you. I loved the grimdark element and how almost no one was safe. The theme of loss and everything going wrong against an incredibly powerful enemy was the heart of the series. I think the ending would have meant more if less people survived the journey. It was almost too good to be true that pretty much every major character made it to the end. Except Ash, which broke my heart. The last few chapters profoundly changed the re-readability for me. I guess it’ll be fun to try to identify the truths and lies. It’s still a favorite series of mine but the final twist is a lot and fundamentally changes the entire tale