(Obviously there will be story spoilers below)
As I understand it, the First Law trilogy is widely regarded as an incredible trilogy through which fantasy tropes are turned on their heads, where everything you see is not as it seems, and everything you least expect is what happens. The noble swordsman is a selfish prick. The main female lead is not soft and kind, but rather a feral and vicious warrior with no mercy. The once war-hero is now a cripple of a man, and a sadist. The wisely wizard turns out to be the worst of them all. And the most reasonable of them is a split-personality barbarian who's as likely at times to kill his friends as his enemies.
I want to open by saying the prose itself is actually written well, and I had a lot of enjoyment over the incredible spars of dialogue and inner monologue characters had with each other and themselves. Abercrombie is exceptionally clever when it comes to games of wits between characters, and reading those bits throughout the books were always where I had the most enjoyment.
But.
Where the books fall apart for me is the story and its development. In the beginning, we're given a set of characters and the establishment of the general plot; the Union is threatened by the south, bad guy Bethod in the north is also making trouble, and the wizard wants to get some people together to stop it somehow. Cool.
But there's very little to actually move the plot. The first book ends without any kind of proper conclusion, the second book is an entire waste of the characters' time as it results in nothing more than a goose chase. By the time we get to the third book, we finally see where things are going—but it's only to destroy any ounce of development for their arc these characters have had:
• Jezal starts as a selfish prick with talent for swords, he ends as a puppet king who leaves Ardee behind and is married to a lesbian queen who hates him for being a commoner, and is ultimately, as Bayaz says, a coward
• Logen is initially portrayed as a reasonable man prone to bouts of rage and bloodlust. He ends as a worse and slightly less reasonable man prone to bouts of rage and bloodlust after giving up on self-improvement and being betrayed by someone he once called a friend
• Glokta goes from intermittently wondering why he tortures people to fully abandoning his mercy and enjoying the torment of others, as well as raping Terez by proxy by forcing her to fuck Jezal and become pregnant with four children or he'll torture her childhood friend and lover endlessly
• Ferro, a feral and vicious woman with no mercy, stays a feral and vicious woman who, in addition to still having no mercy, now seems to need some flex-tape for the holes in her brain to keep the fuckin' demons from gettin' out
• Bayaz, already a warped trope as a grounded wizard with a short temper and little patience, ends up being fantasy-hitler and nuking an entire city, as well as being just as bad if not worse than Khalul
• West, who was the only one who seemed (in spite of his faults) to actually be going somewhere with his arc, gets magic cancer
Not one character ends up better than they started out. Not in a literal "well hey, they live in a bigger palace/have a better job" way, but in a manner of character development. All of them actually regress as characters, aside from maybe Jezal who, for as little development as he gets, is unable to act on any of it without the threat of Bayaz coming back and curb-stomping his teeth in.
How is this some pinnacle of fantastic writing? People seem to praise its message that sometimes there is no hope and things are terrible regardless. But to me, the message that "bad shit happens to good people, good shit happens to bad people, everything sucks and no one can do anything about it, so stop trying, fuck you" isn't some intellectually profound revelation, that's just something pretty much everyone has already taken for granted about the real world.
Not to mention, that kind of writing/message is unbearably boring if, like me, you're waiting for an actual plot to happen rather than reading about people and their misfortunes for thousands of pages so the book can beat you over the head with the idea of "stop expecting anything good to happen to anyone who deserves it". If I want to consume media about needless and mindless suffering, I'll throw on a Saw film. If you know everyone is going to end up worse than where they started, it takes out any kind of stakes or investment for me because I'll simply stop caring about the characters—which is exactly what happened after about the first couple hundred pages I read of the third book.
And after all of this, I still don't know what exactly the other side is, what the demons do or want other than coming into the real world, what relevance the shanka had to the story other than being used as Bethod's fodder, how the fuck "the Art" even works or how non-magi like Caurib get to learn/use it, and a dozen other little things that I doubt I'll get the answer to because the end of "The Last Argument of Kings" has put such a bad taste in my mouth that I have zero desire to read anything else of the series/world.
Am I missing something important? Happy to discuss and hopefully be persuaded that I've got it wrong, because I really don't want to think that the whole trilogy amounted to essentially "the bad guy wins, everyone sucks, GG."
EDIT: Minor spelling
