Through a postcolonialist lens this is pretty clever. Use of civilized as a term to excuse the racist and expansionist actions of one’s own country, expansion which happens to have coincided with railways being central to industrial power. Now the colonized are civilized, are we the barbarians?

Unironically thinking like that is the real ape-brained behavior.

This reads different if the woman is an economist.

Hey, thank you so much for the wall of text!

Yes, most of what you mentioned is what I was vaguely including with the term “YA.” I’ve read a lot of it so I’m very inured to the silly tropes and unlikely and dramatic deus ex machinas. It’s great to hear your negatives because I’m seeing my own blind spots!

I think your criticism is valid. I don’t think it’d be correct to call any impression-based criticism invalid. Doesn’t mean one can’t also learn from it. Additionally, the negatives might make sense in context of it being YA, but that doesn’t make them weightless imo.

I liked the second book the least by far, but maybe it’ll be different for you. I’m sorry the BBEG wasn’t up to snuff, I was absolutely convinced. Maybe books 3/4 will do it but it’s mostly in the same vein. I’m glad you still enjoyed it!

I’m not familiar with Hollow Knight, but if you say there’s similarity maybe I should be…

No worries, I don’t expect anyone to remember random internet stranger number seven thousand one hundred and eight. But, just in case =D

Oh yes I’m a sucker for sprawling, disjointed worldbuilding. It’s what ended up pulling me into fan fiction. Maybe I should try dark tower again. I’ll put it back in the “maybe” pile.

Please get back to me with your impressions, especially on the “befriending bad guys” side. I’d love to know (even if you end up disliking it)!

I thought dark tower was okay, but it was a bit too surreal for me towards the end.

Might I recommend the Mortal Engines quartet? They’re kinda YA, especially the first one, but the setting is as far as I know completely unique, and beyond amazing. I really don’t want to spoil the first few moments of realization, so I’m just going to put the first two passages below.

Also, many of the BBEGs are cool af and (spoiler for the later books) as least one matches your request exactly, while others match it pretty well.

Honestly I love the characters, they work so well. Especially Tom, he’s the most normal everyday lead I’ve ever read in a fantasy/sci-fi book, and yet all his actions are totally believable.

My only complaint is that book 2 is kind of frustrating in places.

First two passages:

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

In happier times, London would never have bothered with such feeble prey. The great Traction City had once spent its days hunting far bigger towns than this, ranging north as far as the edges of the Ice Waste and south to the shores of the Mediterranean. But lately prey of any kind had started to grow scarce, and some of the larger cities had begun to look hungrily at London. For ten years now it had been hiding from them, skulking in a damp mountainous, western district which the Guild of Historians said had once been the island of Britain. For ten years it had eaten nothing but tiny farming towns and static settlements in those wet hills. Now, at last, the Lord Mayor had decided that the time was right to take his city back over the land-bridge into the Great Hunting Ground.

Online dating in 2001? What was that like?