{LONG POST} I really feel like I have to say this: Shadiversity's book is not good.
{SPOLIERS for Shadow of the Conqueror below!}
Shadiversity's book, Shadow of the Conqueror, deserves serious criticism, and not for the reasons Shad himself would prefer to believe. He clearly has genuine talent for some parts of worldbuilding and weapon design, and should have stayed in that lane. Writing a compelling story in book form is simply not his strength, and the book's failures run very deep.
The book's central moral argument is deeply disturbing. It essentially argues that you should not hold deeply evil actions against someone if those actions produced some good outcomes. The protagonist is a child rapist. Some of his victims went on to have children from those rapes and, by the story's end, are depicted defending him. They do this because they now have families due to rape babies, and that is framed as beautiful. The victims who have no children, and who still hate him, are implicitly portrayed as simply failing to see the bigger picture or being blinded by personal hubris or hate. This is not moral complexity or grey characters. It is consequentialism taken to its most disturbing logical conclusion, and the narrative treats it as settled wisdom rather than something to interrogate in detail or explore its impact on the human psyche.
The book also undermines itself in subtler ways. Characters occasionally intervene when men are sexually abusing women, executing the abusers on the spot, then immediately leaving. This is framed as righteous or even redemptive. But the world has already made clear that women in these social classes depend entirely on their male partners economically. Executing an abusive husband and flying away might save these women from direct abuse, but it also sentences them to poverty and suffering. The author seems unaware of what this actually reveals about these characters: that their idea of justice is performative, surface-level and not consequential. This could have been explored as intentional characterization. It is not.
Shad has publicly argued that criticism of his book is politically motivated bad faith. This is worth examining, because while the criticisms above are entirely apolitical, his worldbuilding is saturated with his personal politics. The story treats those politics as objective moral truth rather than as one perspective among many or something worthwhile to explore in depth.
The primary antagonist faction is functionally an extreme caricature of modern day progressive politics. They claim to oppose wealth inequality and fight for the lower classes, yet their methods include dropping a floating rock onto a densely populated city. This would kill vastly more poor people than rich ones. No one in the narrative appears to notice this contradiction in a meaningful manner, and the story does not engage with it. Meanwhile, the archknights, a judge-jury-executioner police force with sweeping magical powers and legal authority, are presented as an unambiguous good. There is no meaningful opposition to them from ordinary people, no civil liberties movement, no anarchists, no complex moral relativists (a bit ironic), no popular front or well written separatist uprising. No one who questions whether this level of concentrated institutional power might be dangerous. Nobody who tried to completely unseat them from power, even as a political move, maybe to replace them and expand their own influence. In a world with a long history, that absence is conspicuous.
Finally, the book falls into the standard traps of the reincarnation power fantasy genre without seeming aware of them. The protagonist repeatedly defeats opponents with vastly more experience and training than him. The most egregious example is a fight where he binds (light) magic to itself. An act framed as something no one in this world's history has done before or ever conceived of! This is done to defeat enemies who have studied magic their entire lives. The hyperspace ram problem from The Last Jedi applies here directly: if this is possible, why has no one in this world's long history ever attempted it? Why does it not transform combat or conflict? The narrative offers no answer, because it has not asked the question.