How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying

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Django Wexler: How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying (2024, Orbit)

English language

Published 2024 by Orbit.

ISBN:
978-0-316-39230-3
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3 stars (2 reviews)

2 editions

Quite enjoyed this, especially at the end

5 stars

The premise is that Davi wakes up naked in a small pond in a magical world, where she is proclaimed to be the messiah of prophecy. Only after doing this 237 times and the hordes of the Dark Lord overrun the Kingdom every time, she gives up. She decides she's going to become the Dark Lord instead. There's a bit of Groundhog Day in this, but thankfully Wexler only takes us through those motions for the first chapters.

Davi is the kind of character I usually find annoying. Way too quick with quips and never serious, like every damn character in a Scalzi book. Thankfully there's an actual character arc where Davi comes to realize other characters aren't just NPCs in her personal video game, and she becomes less self-obsessed over the course of the book.

This is one of the few books lately where I became more interested in …

Wanna be DnD Deadpool

2 stars

I really wanted to like this, and enjoyed the premise (time loop / can't die in a DnD inspired setting).

As the book went on it felt more like reading someone's self-insert fanfiction. The main character has a serious case of woman-written-by-a-man. Other characters felt very one dimensional and single purpose.

The plot was okay, but didn't do enough with the time loop trope, and fizzled out a bit to set up the next book. Footnotes were a cool idea but were really only used as parethentical asides to add a snarky joke.