{"id":53502,"date":"2025-12-10T08:36:42","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T16:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/?p=53502"},"modified":"2025-12-10T08:38:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T16:38:23","slug":"these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/2025\/12\/10\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\/","title":{"rendered":"These are the things you&#8217;ll learn if you read How to Become the Dark Lord"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Django Wexler&#8217;s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying didn&#8217;t teach me how to become the Dark Lord. But it did teach me other things, such as how fantasy worlds are uniquely demanding, how comedy is hard to do, how not to write a female character, how action scenes are usually a waste of word count, how some writers need vigorous editors, and how some people play too many videogames. Although many of the lessons I&#8217;d already learned elsewhere, so I guess it would be more accurate to say How to Become the Dark Lord <em>reminded<\/em> me rather than taught me.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Since I&#8217;m reviewing this at the behest of someone who enjoyed it and said he hoped I&#8217;d enjoy it, I feel bad confessing that no such thing happened. To elaborate feels pointless and even a little cruel. But I&#8217;ve been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/exciting-roll-143778403\">charged<\/a> with a task &#8212; a quest, even! &#8212; and I intend to fulfill it. So I suppose maybe this book did teach me a little dark lordliness, in its own way.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let the pointless cruelty commence!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because I was unable to find a copy of this amateurish dreck at the library, I had assumed it was self-published. Oh ho, was I wrong, because of course amateurish dreck finds publishers! For instance, a big-ass French company called Legardere has a publishing division called Orbit Books, to which they consign the genre ghetto known as &#8220;fantasy\/sci-fi&#8221;. This imprint includes accomplished writers like NK Jemisin and Iain Banks, both of whom are on my shelves, where I can see the little Orbit Books logo peeking out on the bottom of the spine. And now I also have a copy of How to Become the Dark Lord, written by someone named Django Wexler, sporting the same logo as Jimisin and Banks.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wexler&#8217;s novel starts out promisingly enough, which is going to be the only positive thing I say in this review, so don&#8217;t get used to it. The first several pages would have you think you&#8217;re about to read a saucy, sassy time loop comedy about the eventual chaotic evil playthrough of a fantasy game you&#8217;ve played several times. But then Wexler seems to forget everything about the premise except for the word &#8220;fantasy&#8221;, and even that he struggles feebly to realize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is the story of a woman living through time loops in which she wakes up as a princess who will be guided by a wizard to lead a kingdom against dark forces. After several hundred failed attempts in which the kingdom falls and she dies horribly, followed each time by waking up at the beginning to do it all over again, she gets fed up. She decides to join the dark forces to see if she can do any better by being evil. So she murders the wizard and tries to insinuate herself among the orcs. &#8220;It behooves me to get to know these people as something other than a red mess on the other end of a battle axe,&#8221; she says, trying to try again as she Groundhog Days her way into the orcs&#8217; good graces.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But since she&#8217;s always restarting from a fixed point at the beginning &#8212; this playthrough doesn&#8217;t seem to have save points &#8212; the stakes get higher as time passes. &#8220;The further we get from the start, the more I lose my mojo,&#8221; the princess explains with more insight than her author intends. Because Wexler abandons the time loop concept and proceeds into a tedious slog of smugly written, painfully unimaginative, and supposedly comedic fantasy slop for another 350 pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wexler seems mostly uninterested or incapable of worldbuilding. &#8220;The thing about a fantasy world,&#8221; he reveals, &#8220;is that &#8216;A wizard did it&#8217; is a perfectly valid explanation.&#8221; As far as D&amp;D campaigns go, this one is pretty bog-standard. Aside from the usual species, there are mouse people, snake people, deer people, and so on. The fox people have Asian names and use chopsticks. The rock people are dumb and slow. The dwarfs are short and bearded. The orcs are orcs. Wexler doesn&#8217;t introduce anything distinct or memorable. Instead, he simply spends 400 pages lampshading his own rote fantasy. It&#8217;s worldbuilding the same way doing a Lego set is sculpting.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even the concept of a chaotic evil playthrough goes by the wayside pretty quickly. After murdering the exposition wizard, the protagonist mostly does a normal good playthrough, but with orc followers. She spares prisoners, rights wrongs, brings justice to the oppressed, rescues a toddler, feels bad about casualties in battles, and generally does the same things any protagonist in a young adult fantasy novel would do. &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to be the kind of Dark Lord who turns over prisoners for execution to save my own skin,&#8221; she says, which strikes me as a baseline requirement for Dark Lordship. When she gets horny, she opts not to fuck captives. &#8220;This isn&#8217;t HBO,&#8221; she reminds us. &#8220;I&#8217;m the kinder, gentler model of villain,&#8221; she says to the love interest orc during an earnestly soggy romance scene.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The lead character in this first-person story is a &#8220;woman&#8221; who has played videogames, read George RR Martin, recognizes the theme song to A-Team, and knows the names of the planets in the Star Wars prequels. She can therefore make explicit all the mostly young male references that literally litter the text. For instance, when mentioning that the orcs are chopping down trees to build scaffolding, Wexler footnotes that it feels like playing Warcraft. &#8220;Zug zug,&#8221; he elaborates. The female protagonist also knows the Metal Gear Solid games, the Total War series, and Pornhub. Yet she claims she&#8217;s been in time loops for so long she can&#8217;t remember the trappings of her real life, such as her nationality, which state she&#8217;s from, or even which state is Florida (although Wexler refuses to pass up the opportunity for an obligatory &#8220;Florida is America&#8217;s dick&#8221; joke).&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wexler&#8217;s female protagonist reads as if the writer&#8217;s idea of women is that they&#8217;re merely the equivalent of horny teenaged boys. So our pansexual heroine constantly drops sexual asides, fucks her followers, and ponders graphically the prospect of fucking various characters of various species. The reader is treated to details like her record time from meeting a woman to eating her out, how to navigate tusks during cunnilingus, and that a fox-person wags his tail when he ejaculates. During a speech to inspire followers, she shares with us readers, &#8220;Fuck yeah, I want to stick a hand down my pants on the spot.&#8221; Wexler&#8217;s concept of a woman&#8217;s sexuality tumbles out onto the page like a carelessly hidden porn stash spilling out of a shoebox; it&#8217;s embarrassing for everyone involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The art of writing is also necessarily the art of deleting. Or, if you can&#8217;t bring yourself to strikethrough your precious prose, the art of knowing what not to write. In lieu of editing or restraint, Wexler resorts to footnotes to make sure you never miss out on a single one of his supposedly funny tangents, discursions, or bon mots. If it sprang into his mind, he makes sure to share it with the rest of us somewhere on the page. So the bottom of most of these pages are littered with superscripted smug asides. Nabokov wept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The real problem throughout is that Wexler isn&#8217;t funny. He&#8217;s instead taken with his own nudge-nudge-wink-wink pop culture references, clearly showing the extent and limits of his cultural diet. In lieu of something funny, he simply associates it with something he knows and expects his reader will know. A shared cultural vocabulary, divorced from wit, ingenuity, or irony, isn&#8217;t comedy. It&#8217;s simply commonness. I suppose it&#8217;s to his credit that Wexler makes it 250 pages before resorting to a Leroy Jenkins reference. This book was published in 2024, by the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;I have always been a believer in wearing my influences on my sleeve,&#8221; Wexler confesses in the acknowledgements, after 391 pages of explicitly calling out his influences. &#8220;The inspiration for this book started with the <em>isekai<\/em> trend in anime &#8212; the &#8216;ordinary person transported to \/ reincarnated in a fantasy world&#8217; stories that became popular a few years ago and as of this writing still pour forth in an unending tide.&#8221;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I wonder if this might be why Wexler insists on so many drawn-out action sequences, which is a common type of padding in bad fiction. But whereas anime leverages artwork to show movement, action, drama, and the sorts of things anime attempts during its action scenes, written action scenes tend to read like a blow-by-blow account of someone&#8217;s latest D&amp;D battle, writ lurid. &#8220;So I rolled a 14 and did 7 points of damage. Then he rolls a 12 and misses. My next roll of 12 would normally be a miss, but because my sword is +2, it&#8217;s a hit. But I only do 1 point of damage! Then he rolls a 17 and does 4 points of damage, and oh no, now I&#8217;m down to 11 hit points left!&#8221; Just do that but with adverbs instead of numbers.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The ultimate joke is that How to Become the Dark Lord is a book one. The final line is &#8220;What the fuck do I do now?&#8221;, followed by a bold-face &#8220;To be continued&#8230;&#8221;, affixed with a footnote reading &#8220;Dun dun DUN!&#8221; Assuming Orbit Books doesn&#8217;t implode sometime soon, there are more of these on the way. In fact, for all I know, they may already be out there. You have been warned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:178px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Why am I reviewing a bad fantasy novel? Because it won the Patreon review request <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/exciting-roll-143778403\">drawing for November<\/a>! If you support me for $10 or more, you can participate in the monthly drawings and inflict your own delights or horrors on me. I promise to be an uncompromising asshole, if need be!]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Django Wexler&#8217;s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying didn&#8217;t teach me how to become the Dark Lord. But it did teach me other things, such as how fantasy worlds are uniquely demanding, how comedy is hard to do, how not to write a female character, how action scenes are usually a waste [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>These are the things you&#039;ll learn if you read How to Become the Dark Lord - Quarter to Three<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/2025\/12\/10\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"These are the things you&#039;ll learn if you read How to Become the Dark Lord - Quarter to Three\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Django Wexler&#8217;s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying didn&#8217;t teach me how to become the Dark Lord. But it did teach me other things, such as how fantasy worlds are uniquely demanding, how comedy is hard to do, how not to write a female character, how action scenes are usually a waste [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/2025\/12\/10\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Quarter to Three\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-12-10T16:36:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-12-10T16:38:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Dark-Lord-review-1.jpeg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1021\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"549\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Tom Chick\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Tom Chick\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/2025\\\/12\\\/10\\\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/2025\\\/12\\\/10\\\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Tom Chick\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3fe63ea802f1c18eb09e0b1b8df5199b\"},\"headline\":\"These are the things you&#8217;ll learn if you read How to Become the Dark Lord\",\"datePublished\":\"2025-12-10T16:36:42+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-12-10T16:38:23+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/2025\\\/12\\\/10\\\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1689,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/2025\\\/12\\\/10\\\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2025\\\/12\\\/Dark-Lord-review-1.jpeg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Book reviews\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/2025\\\/12\\\/10\\\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/2025\\\/12\\\/10\\\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.quartertothree.com\\\/fp\\\/2025\\\/12\\\/10\\\/these-are-the-things-youll-learn-if-you-read-how-to-become-the-dark-lord\\\/\",\"name\":\"These are the things you'll learn if you read How to Become the Dark Lord - 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