I'm sorry but its been a couple of days since I put down Cleaver's Edge and I cannot stop thinking about how often this was recommended to me.
I got the complete trilogy omnibus because 1) economical 2) the last omnibus I got like that I stuck out the weak first book and ended up with a trilogy I can't stop thinking about in the best of ways
But that was so long ago now that I can't get a refund on it.
I was willing to get this series because I wanted something low stakes, a lot of the books I'd been reading were high octane in some shape or form, so it was a good come down from The Wandering Inn, He Who Fights With Monsters, and Dungeon Crawler Carl among others.
Cleaver's Edge is ostensibly about an orc who just wants to be a chef and looks out for his friends who are adventurers. Nice low stakes, there's a promise of interpersonal relationships taking the main focus, and just over all being really straight forward.
What I got instead was some of the most baffling instance of Fantasy Racism I've seen in a good long while.
To break it down. Orcs in this setting are:
Incapable of language, the first several hours of the first book is just people going "OH MY GOD A TALKING ORC????". Yet, somehow, orcs do trade with humans aside from the main character.
Incapable of forming and maintaining a culture (yet somehow have clans and war chiefs)
Incapable of cooking (yet somehow)
Incapable of casting magic, as a result of there being no mana in their bodies at all. Literally none. Zero. Not a hint or scratch.
Classified as "Mid to High Intelligence Monsters", but do not have any semblance of personhood as we would recognize it in a human.
I was seven chapters out from finishing this book. Actus makes it painfully clear that the above isn't sterotypes or misunderstandings due to propoganda or even just Fantasy Racism. Orcs are biologically like this. They're biologically not people. They're animals. Smart ones! But animals. Like corvids or dolphins.
Eric, the orc main character, whose perspective we see the entire story through, makes it expressly clear that the above are not instances of misunderstandings or prejudice. They're fundamental facts of the setting. That he is an outlier because a mage happened to capture him, experiment on him, and forced him to become "civilized".
This book wants to have all of this, and expects us (the reader) to take it seriously. That Eric was made better for having Some Guy capture him and make him "civilized". I can understand why no one on Royal Road of all god damn places sat there and was like "Hey, Actus? This is fucked up actually" BUT I ACTUALLY HAD BETTER EXPECTATIONS OF AETHON PUBLISHING
