There's not enough bitching

[Anastasia]

I hate those days when you wake up and you immediately can tell what's primed to start hurting.

[Dracos]

day 2 after trip - jetlag still kicking ass.  Work tomorrow.  Bleeeeh.

[Anastasia]

I have to wait 4 or so months for the next game in the game series I'm playing. Ugh.

[Dracos]

Lazy weekend about to end.  Work returning.  Worse, hybrid work.  After years of remote.  Go away physical sites.  Seriously.

[Anastasia]

Finally back to the office, huh? Good luck.

[thepanda]

How is this book so bad? The first book wasn't like this.

[Anastasia]

The curse of sequels?

It does suck when a sequel doesn't live up to the previous book(s) in the series. It always lets you down and makes you wonder what could've been.

[thepanda]

Man, this don't even feel like the same author. Or character.

[Anastasia]

Brutal. Did a different author pick it up or something?

[thepanda]

Nope, same author.

He killed off almost every character he'd developed and the setting everything happened in at the end of the first book.

The second book takes place three years later. The new setting is underdeveloped. The new characters have little to no personally. He starts with triplet catgirl adventures as new companions. Then he gives them names so similar you'll have difficulty distinguishing between them. Or you would, if you had any reason to try. How he managed to give them zero personally between the three of them is beyond me. The author doesn't even bother calling them by name most of the time. They are just the triplets. And slapping a couple annoying tropes(Oh ho, they have a fan club that gets jealous that the protag is working with them! ... and who are ignored by them and the protag without issue) on them doesn't help.

The protag is so overpowered for the setting that the narrative doesn't even pretend to challenge him in any way, shape, or form. Which wouldn't be so bad if the people around him weren't written to be idiots.
No one can fight him. Grown ass people who are supposed to be professionals  in whatever they're doing continuously are shocked and amazed by the simplest things he does. He can bake sweets? Literally every woman in the story starts acting like they have two brain cells. I was waiting for him to start breaking the the massages.

If the enemies he fights were called one dimensional that would be giving them an entire dimension they don't have. Like, who was this written for? It can't be kids. You have a whole plotline about bandits that murdered all the menfolk in a village and were raping the women before planning to sell them into slavery. So why does every antagonist sound like a Saturday morning cartoon villain?

And this is just the major stuff. I haven't even touched the numbers thing or the endless parade of tropes that serve no purpose and seem to be thrown in for no reason at all.

The first book wasn't perfect but it wasn't this. I wanted to find out what came next after reading that one. This one is like "Well I already spent the money, may as well finish it."

[Anastasia]

Nothing like Saturday night pizza being bad to make Sunday an adventure in stomach fun.

[Dracos]

Week be startin'.  It be like that.  My sleep schedule is very early again.

[Anastasia]

That's rough, I'm in an up late pattern right now and having trouble dropping off. That part's rare for me, for some reason sleep's been elusive.

That up early pattern at least usually makes it easy to drop off (for me at least), though it's rare and against the grain. When I get up early, I tend to be tired no matter how much sleep I got. I hope it's not the same for you.

[Dracos]

Yeah, basically the evening becomes just tired time.

[Anastasia]

Yeah, and that really sucks since that's the free time.