Full series review/critique.

The following are my main thoughts on the series having dropped it around 10.44 (spoilers beyond this are fine), this is mostly a critique of aspects of the series I have found frustrating.

 I am also trying to improve my writing generally and using this mostly as a writing exercise so feel free to ignore or offer criticism of my writing. Feel free to share your thoughts as I still love discussing the series and don’t resent the time I spent in the world. Everything I say ultimately comes from a place of love.

Sometime over the last few years, the Wandering Inn (TWI) started to worm its way into my favourite series within the fantasy genre. At its best, I think TWI is an exceptional character driven narrative, that made me fall in love with dozens of its cast members. In its current iteration however, I think it suffers from meaningless stakes, bloat and an overall lack of focus.

To begin, I’d like to go over some of the things I love about the series. As I mentioned, the characters are fantastic, from the first 6 or so volumes I’m struggling to think of a POV character I actively dislike, I thought the villains were interesting and multi-faceted, and the problems our characters faced were believable and filled with tension.

Likewise, my favourite part of the entire story is character meetups, from the initial wait for the Horns to get to Liscor, to Niers finally making it to the inn and Erin to Baleros (what could have been), character meetups and interactions have largely carried the series for me. There’s nothing better than after a major occurrence, all our favourite characters sitting around and discussing the events.

Some other standout moments include basically everything goblin related up to the siege at Liscor, most things concerned with the witch arc and finally Erin’s general machinations at the inn.

To preface, I read a lot of those back-to-back so don’t have strong permanence for where every event in the story takes place. Overall, I felt the first 6 volumes were largely perfect and I have very little notes on them. Volume 7 is where the cracks started to appear, I actively disliked volume 8 for reasons I will get into, 9 was a surprising comeback with 10 finally being what has put me off the series.

To explain my critiques, I think they can fit into several distinct categories, lack of meaningful stakes/stake creep? Poor action scenes overall and a lack of direction/progression.

Firstly, to discuss stakes – what I consider to be the biggest issue with the story – I will talk about what I see to be a ‘stake creep’ that has led to overall narrative fatigue. The beginning of TWI dealt with small scale villains for the most part with a few lingering threats in the background that provided a sort of endgame goal for the narrative. I found Az/Bel to be far more interesting upon their introduction than the place they have eventually reached. The emotional weight of things like Calruz’s death, basically everything related to the goblins and the individual pain most of the cast went through was monumental, and what contributed to making this a fantastic series.

As the narrative has progressed however, the stakes have been raised to such a ridiculous level they have become meaningless to me.  I find this is a problem plaguing much of modern fantasy, the belief that introducing more powerful/dangerous conflicts heightens the emotional weight, whereas I would argue our attachment to the character/narrative is what adds that depth. This leads into as I see it a lack of meaningful consequences for a lot of the built-up tension. This was already beginning in volume 7 and hit a peak at the end of volume 9/POF arc. It is now too obvious that characters can walk into any situation and come out largely unscathed. Most egregious examples of this for me were Flos’s battle, with the pirate ship’s arrival, the raid on the village of the dead and the end of volume 9/later revivals. Despite disliking the actual narrative itself at the end of volume 9, I thought pruning a few of the stroylines was fantastic and might indicate a new more focused direction for the story, however V10 has obviously largely discounted a lot of this. I am also not someone who thinks a writer needs to be killing characters left and right to create tension or provoke emotion, I just dislike the constant fake outs and thousands of words spanning fights with no emotional weight.

Jumping on from this point is the actual action scenes themselves, for me, this is the weakest part of the authors writing. Virtually every fight scene in later volumes becomes a game of ‘and then this new super powerful thing happened’, this might just be because I don’t overly enjoy the genre outside of this story but the constant skill spam, new upgraded villains who carry less emotional weight than the original and general power creep make every fight scene exhausting. For me the examples would be – the battle at sea, the dead village, everything Floss has ever done and the final solstice fight, although I think you could pick basically any fight scene from V7 onwards and this would apply.

The physically exhausting nature of reading these chapters alongside the lack of emotional weight behind them is probably my single biggest critique, and the largely fantastic aftermaths are no longer enough to carry the series. There also seems to be some strange fascination with having literally every man and his dog turn up to action scenes causing them to become these huge, bloated affairs where the original cast the battle is supposed to be affecting lose focus within the narrative, making me lose all emotional connection to the scene.

My next critique is with regards to overall narrative pacing, positioning and the structure within the chapters themselves. The series has become too large, there are too many characters I simply don’t care about – virtually every Gnoll, almost everything on other continents not connected to original cast members – it feels like side stories have been given side stories at this point.

 Furthermore, the narrative doesn’t feel as self-contained within the chapter anymore. An example of an excellent chapter is the Bird one from V9. The entire narrative was started and completed within the chapter, and it’s probably the last truly fantastic chapter I can think of. Another great example of this was Trey’s trip to A’ctelios Salash, perhaps my favourite chapter in the series. Both these chapters felt like contained stories that were still building towards a larger narrative. Obviously, it is impossible for every chapter to hit like this, but I feel like the pendulum has swung far to far in the other direction.

 Currently, it feels as though every chapter is building towards an arc, and these arcs are disconnected and could easily formulate a separate series. This means if you don’t enjoy an arc, you can be waiting chapters upon chapters to get back to something you actively enjoy reading, and as I mentioned previously the good no longer outweighs the bad for me.

Prime example of this is I consider Rags to be one of the best written characters in the series, after the completion of the Goblin lord storyline I can barely recall a scene she is in until briefly appearing to help Erin then promptly disappearing again. Now seemingly having some of her narrative space taken up by a cloned version of herself. Looking forward to her and Erin reuniting was one of my biggest anticipations, and while it still hit hard when they did, the wait was just far too long in my opinion, there are countless more examples of similar situations.

Finally, I started to dislike the POV usage within chapters, I may be wrong on this, but it always felt like one chapter would centrally focus on one POV. I think sometime around V8 multiple POV’s became common within a single scene, contributing further to the narrative drag and overall reading fatigue.

Sorry for turning this into a long-winded rant at points, I often have difficulty expressing my thoughts clearly so hopefully these writing exercises will help with that. I also have many more things I could say so feel free to debate in the comments I’d love to hear what other people consider their favourite and least favourite parts of the series. Overall, most of these criticisms come from a place of love and I know a lot of people enjoy some of the things I’ve mentioned.