The first thing one would probably ask me when they found out I read all those Salvos books is why? Why do I like it? What’s even good about it?
It’s easy to find parts that deserve criticism. For instance, the characters are written in annoying anime/manga ways; hysterical behaviour, immature stuff that’s supposed to be cute and it’s actually incredibly cringeworthy, author’s tendency to write only female lead characters while male characters look like fumbling fools who couldn’t tie their shoelaces without a female and so on. There’s lots of stuff not to like, and I actually don’t like it either. Also, not all of Melas’ writing is equally good. Some is outright terrible, especially when he tries too hard to be comical. “Amelia”, for instance, is a clusterfuck. It’s almost on top of my list of shittiest writing and dumbest characters in all of literature, and considering how many books I’ve read, that’s truly something. It’s almost as if he was kidnapped and waterboarded by inane, infantile worshippers of manga tropes and forced to write what they thought was hilariously funny good stuff without all that serious shit they don’t care for. Also, it’s almost as if he’s trying very hard to include all kinds of woke bullshit tropes in order not to offend American college audience. Basically, invert male and female typical roles, make most powerful characters gay, make everything that resembles Christianity look like the worst hypocritical bad guys and make Demons good. Sure, I get it, he’s being so progressive and radical in his thinking, it’s almost as if he’s thinking the same things as every stupid kid these days. Yawn.
The authors create characters that feel like themselves; I get it. Greg Bear and Stanislaw Lem write characters that all feel like IQ 150 physicists. Atheists can’t write good religious characters to save their life, because they don’t understand enough to do so. Gentry Lee writes every character as an intelligent person that was profoundly fucked up in some way and then tries to work their life around the fucked up place as a given, and manage symptoms with alcohol or something; it’s as if he was describing the JPL people in some bar in Pasadena. 🙂 Melas writes childish, immature characters who act in ways so hysterical and often stereotypical, it sometimes feels like drowning in a pool of cringe. It’s a lot to get used to, especially if you’re accustomed to reading sophisticated SciFi like Clarke, Lem, Asimov or Heinlein, or sophisticated fantasy like Tolkien or Zelazny. It’s as if there’s a whole subculture of worshipers of inane, hysterical, immature drivel, and Melas took care not to offend any of them by including all of it. So, now we have characters who drop to their knees in despair and pull their hair in anguish when issued a fine by the authorities. How mature.
But if that were all, I wouldn’t be reading it, would I?
“Salvos” is extremely appealing since the main characters are convincing and feel like real people with real problems they are trying to deal with in a reasonable way. Salvos herself wakes up without memories, without any idea about the world she’s in and the beings she encounters, and initially spends her points on trying to identify rocks, because she can’t believe they are all the same and hopes to find a special one. Then she meets others, and soon finds out that everybody is trying to kill each other in order to level, and encounters psychopaths, hapless victims, overpowering threats, and feels an urge to become more of herself, to rise up, to survive and, very soon thereafter, to surround herself with companions she can experience life with. She likes to be great, but in a very specific way – she wants to be great while surrounded by others she can share it all with. This is a particular distinction, because the books are full of people who are example of the opposite; they want to be great by being above everyone, by making everyone else a slave. Also, she develops an ethical worldview very quickly. She never attacks innocents, and never attacks first; she’s reactive in her violence. She tries to befriend someone first. In her worldview, there are wild demons and other wild things that just want to kill everything, and then there are “horned demons”, beings that pretend to be reasonable but are just as wild; the machiavellian psychopaths of the world, but she of course doesn’t have the term for it. When she accidentally falls through a portal into the Mortal Realm, her accidental encounter with Daniel is very inauspicious. She asks him to show her the way back to Netherworld and he tries to kill her because she’s a demon and must be guilty of everything he ever heard demons do wrong. She easily defeats him and knocks him out, and when he wakes up, disarmed, she berates him for attacking her with no reason instead of killing him. He then starts to figure out she’s not anywhere near what he thought, and starts helping her.
The world is not a trivial manga-fantasy trope. It kind of starts that way, but soon you figure out all kinds of complexity there, and it grows more complex as the main character moves in the world, learns more things and figures things out. It’s a gradual process; like seeing a child learn to walk, then run, then go get bread in the bakery independently, then go to school, and so on.
In the Mortal Realm, Salvos does something no demon ever seems to – she joins the human society and becomes a productive member. This is in part due to her own ethics, because she hates killing sentient beings but likes to level, and so she always finds some den of monsters that need to be eradicated, rather than do the easy thing and just kill random people. Her companions always start with “Demon! Let’s kill it!”, then she roughs them up a bit and they get to the “oh wait…” point, then they become hostile but tolerant, then friendly, and at some point when they really know her it becomes a bond of love and trust so strong, they would jump into fire for each other. For instance, Salvos never has to sleep, so she’s always on guard duty. Initially, her companions are very reluctant about it; oh great, let’s have the Demon on guard duty while we all sleep, what could go wrong. But eventually, Salvos on guard duty makes a zombie-infested swamp the safest place in the world, because they know they are the most precious thing in her life and she will literally go to the ends of the world to save them. They gradually understand that she just looks silly and childish, and that she’s in fact very methodical, calculated and strategic about her goals; it’s just that she was a literal baby when they originally met, and she had plenty of room to grow. And that she did. There are some things that never change about Salvos. She always wants to grow and become more. She wants to become powerful. She hates wild things. She forms deep interpersonal bonds. She’s incredibly loyal. She’s kind of terrible at explaining things to people in a gradual way that will get them to the same page. But she learns. She often starts as sucking terribly at something, then gets better, and then gets quite good at it, for instance navigation. Her manners suck, because she doesn’t understand why she shouldn’t just spit something out if she doesn’t like it, or make a scene if she feels like it. It’s normal to her to assume she should just do whatever she likes. It’s a hard habit for her to change, but she does change. The way that happens is realistic; it’s not just some sudden choice, but a very realistic thing, where something happens gradually as you figure it out piece by piece.
She officially joins human society at level 40, as a Gold ranked adventurer. The ranks are Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Elite. She rises through the ranks by killing monsters, cultists, demons and the undead. As she does, she becomes slightly famous at first, then very famous as the Liberator of the Plaguelands, and one of the most famous people in the world by the time she’s the Secely’s Sentinel. She joins Mavos Academy, the best magical school in human lands, and initially she struggles at everything. She gradually manages to read up to the point where she catches up with the lessons, then becomes a top student and even tutors others. It doesn’t just happen. We see the struggles, the hard work it takes.
She starts as an outcast, and gradually becomes a famous, incredibly highly esteemed adventurer within the human society, and one of its highest-ranked members. In the end, she’s one of humanity’s top generals in the fight against the Demon invasion. It’s all earned with hard work and lots of blood and sacrifice. She’s no Mary Sue; things don’t just work great for her because she’s Salvos. She gets her butt kicked more often than not. She gets cocky, and then something wrecks her so badly she barely escapes with her life. Sometimes, an enemy is so overpowering she loses and barely escapes multiple times as she levels, but it turns out not to be enough, and she has to change strategy, think things through and go through the entire heroic arc until she finally wins, and then it’s often nowhere near what she imagined at first.
She’s endearing because you can identify with her. She’s virtuous, but ignorant and she messes things up more often than not, then has to learn from the mistakes, pick herself up, understand what went wrong, and grow. She thinks growth means one thing, and then along the way it turns out to be five different things all at once, that she couldn’t even comprehend at the starting point. That stuff is very realistic. For instance, she thinks she has to learn space magic in order to travel back to the Netherworld back to Haec, and works hard to achieve it. However, along the way all kinds of things happen that complicate her understanding of what she’s even doing. For instance, as she grows to love her human companions, she can’t just leave them unprotected amidst an ongoing Demon invasion of the Mortal Realm in order to go back to her childhood friend. Her responsibilities get complicated. And she does learn responsibility. She is often chided by Edithe and Willy, the Grand Spirit of Diligence, and learns that she can’t just take off and leave whenever she doesn’t feel like doing something, because lives of other beings depend on her and she needs to learn true responsibility; and so she does. It’s a gradual change, but it’s also very realistic, with incremental steps of understanding and regression.
Salvos feels like a realistic, complex person, and not like some literary trope. Her world, the Nexeus, feels like a complex place with history, politics, ancient stuff that gets discovered and changes the way you see what’s going there. You have characters that look crazy, and you think they are one thing, and then you learn more and you understand that their crazy ramblings weren’t crazy at all; you just didn’t understand what’s going on. It’s complexity and nuance and sophistication wrapped inside superficial tropes. You think you’re reading a standard fantasy novel about a mage, a rogue and a warrior on their separate paths, joining forces to travel to a distant land, slay a dragon and achieve fame and fortune, and then stuff starts getting really sophisticated and you’re like “whoah, what is it that I’m actually reading here?”
So yeah, that’s why I like it.
