I'm new to the Romantasy genre and I'm looking to find my footing. I've read a handful of the highly recommended books and have yet to find anything that speaks to me. I just finished {Reign & Ruin}, and while it's the best of the genre I have read so far, it still has some issues that have put me off to the series. So what I'm hoping to do is find someone that shares some of my opinions and who kept reading who can let me know if it gets better.
First, the good...
- Capable and respectable FMC.
- Very good spice; well written and better visualized than most.
- Solid writing structure and technique. Good pacing, cause and effect, foreshadowing, etc...
The problems...
- The conflict is uninteresting. >!It's just a basic line of succession story of a woman in a patriarchy.!<
- The heroes are all (nearly) perfect and the villains are all mustache twirling evil.
- The one instance of either the FMC or MMC having any character growth at all is an immediate about-face near the end that isn't earned.
- The magic system is about as cliche as it gets.
My hope is that now that the basics of the world are laid out that as the author explores other couples they will also dig into more nuanced stories and characters. At the same time, the world building will get more interesting now that the scaffolding is up. But I could also see the opposite happening. And I can't really trust reviews of the latter books because those will be heavily colored by confirmation bias.
So, I figured I'd ask here. Does the Mages of the Wheel series get interesting or does it continue to remain almost fairy tale like in the simplicity of its characters, conflicts, and morality?