Madmen of the Late Tang

After writing for so long, depicting the immense suffering of the people at the end of the Tang Dynasty, who finally managed to escape to the mountains, the latest chapter shows the organization of a capture-the-living army! What is the author trying to achieve? And then there's the burning, killing, and looting earlier! Is this how you write a book?

No, this is too frustrating to read. Frustrating reading a novel is like death. What we want to see is victory, promotion, wealth, beautiful women, and expanding our army.

This book isn't bad, but it's frustrating to read. He didn't rise to power when he should have, and instead spent over 200 pages analyzing and judging, only to seize power through a coup in his own hometown. He was even threatened by his own soldiers. Didn't you even bother to look at the foundation you wrote before? It was all pointless and unnecessary.

It's true what they say: "Sharing a cup of wine, yet showing no mercy in a life of bloodshed." Emperors who rose from humble beginnings often treated their underlings like dogs discarded after a rabbit is caught. Liu Yu, at least, used them and then discarded them; Zhu Yuanzhang, after conquering the empire, then dealt with his meritorious officials. But Zhu Wen was different.

One problem with this author's book is that the ending is too rushed, and the antagonists are too easily portrayed, making it uninteresting to read. It's just mindless, indiscriminate killing. The battle scenes are brief and abruptly concluded. Just when you expect a powerful finale, the author kills off the enemy without any real challenge. The protagonist isn't given any difficulty whatsoever, and the author even fills in the gaps in his own story.

This book has many advantages and disadvantages. Let's start with the advantages: it realistically depicts the chaotic world at the end of the Tang Dynasty, where military men held power, social order collapsed, and ordinary people struggled to survive. The uprisings of Wang Xianzhi and Zhu Wen were the result of natural disasters and man-made calamities.

Don't portray the protagonist as so hypocritical. A usurper should act like one. Constantly telling the protagonist to tolerate the emperor, "Don't force me, I'll treat you well," only for the emperor to relentlessly pressure him in subsequent chapters, while the protagonist keeps yielding, effectively trapping him like a turtle in a jar.

Why didn't you say anything about starting a new book? Do you look down on your fellow readers? 😡

The late Tang Dynasty was an era where a mere captain could become a military governor, and a bandit could become a prefect. The protagonist, from a family of soldiers for generations, had already risen to the rank of general, his situation roughly the same as Wang Jian, a prisoner who joined the army in his thirties and served for no more than five or six years.

The Shatuo cavalry, what kind of great bow could shoot 200 paces from horseback? It started off well, but then it became the same as the previous book?