Thank you. That gives me some hope. I honestly don't hate Erin, although I think she's kind of a terrible character to pin the beginning of a story on. But I can deal with her simply because of the interesting characters that interact with her.Ryoka is a fucking terrible character early on. She’s an insufferable cunt that wants to fight everyone for no reason and fucks everything up. Her character becomes much better, she eventually drops the insufferable cunt down to 1 or 2 from 11, but she’s still kind of a fuckup.
Erin is a little different, she honestly doesn’t change much personality wise but definitely does change in the circumstances she’s in. That’s one of the more common complaints, that her character doesn’t really seem to grow, learn from mistakes, or actually implement any newfound convictions she has.
I will say that the first couple of books are much worse than the next 4 or 5. The first book especially is much rougher. The woke stuff almost completely goes away tbh (until Oneiva, but so far at least “she” doesn’t have many pages). The woke parts in there are actually kinda funny, trying to remember but at some point I think drakes start chanting to build a wall.
Ryoka gets much less page time going forward from where you are until much later in the series, at which point even if her character isn’t the best she at least is in storylines that are. The story has expanded well beyond those two characters to the point where you could go a half dozen chapters without seeing either of them and not even realize it.
All that said, TWI is still my favorite overall series factoring in longevity, update frequency/length, and overall story quality even if I didn’t like the most recent book as much.
Sad thing is, plenty of interesting characters have interacted with Ryoka already, but I don't want to see them anymore if they are going to drag her back into the story. I'd rather they just show up at Erin's inn (which I think they might anyway) and we all pretend Ryoka ceased to exist.
I almost registered an account just to tell her how fucking horrible those two chapters in a row were, but I realized it wouldn't make any difference since she's well beyond that point by now. And if she's anything at all like her characters, she'd just assume I'm a misogynistic nazi that doesn't understand her wokeness anyway.
I'll keep going thanks to your words, because there are plenty of other interesting characters, and if a bunch more of them become important to the story, I'll likely enjoy it. So thank you again.
I'm serious though, I honestly don't know if there has ever been a character that I wanted to murder more than Ryoka. Even explicitly "villain" characters have more redeeming qualities than she does. I'd rather hang out with fucking Freddy Kreuger than her, even knowing he's going to murder me in some horrible fashion. At least I can respect his motivations. She's just a miserable, unlikable, probably somewhere on the spectrum, cunt.