This has also worked for me. But I'm not sure if it would have worked without the alarm clock I have. It has the feature that it starts to shine 30 minutes before the alarm, getting brighter before starting to ring.

If the alarm clock is shining, I know it's time to get up. If it's not shining, I know there's enough time to sleep more. I don't need to worry I'll fall asleep 2 minutes before the alarm ringing.

It is true that the characters are very distinct from each other, I have to give him that.

Maybe part of it is that I'm just not that into grimdark as a genre, because at some point I get "grimness exhaustion" where I feel that if everything is miserable and pointless for the characters, it starts to feel pointless as a reader to continue reading.

But there are cases where I do like tragic things. I actually did like the point where Logen was told that his bloodlust had effectively forced King Bethod to rebellion by killing people Bethod tried to negotiate with etc. It did bring the earlier mentions of successful duels etc. to a different light, while fitting his character.

With Logen I was mainly annoyed at the ending cliffhanger (or cliffjumper maybe?), it just felt a bit too "on the nose" as a bookend for the start of the trilogy, and not the type of conclusion that I like. I think it partly soured me on him retroactively.

Glad to find that I'm not the only one who didn't enjoy every character :D Although most of them did have quite good elements, for some I'm more annoyed about the ending rather than the journey.

All good points, and I agree. Maybe I was just feeling overly annoyed when I wrote the post, because I keep agreeing with majority of things that people say.

I haven't read Elmore Leonard, but thanks for the recommendation. Looks like one of his stories was adapted to Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, so it sounds interesting.

You're right, I copy pasted it from a Wiki list of PoV characters and got the wrong one.

Those are good points. The characters often do have plenty of shades of grey, and there are a lot of trope subversions, such as the great wise wizard not being very nice in the end.

I think I may have gotten too focused on some characters feeling like they didn't change enough during the story (e.g. Ferro) or just having somewhat pointless feeling fates (e.g. Collem West). Maybe it's just part of grimdark genre where pointless bad things happening to (somewhat) good people is just normal. As people have listed, there are a lot of good things.

Many people have said the later books continue improving, so maybe I should continue.

That's true. Maybe I'm not giving enough credit for that. Or maybe I kind of thought of the trope subversion etc. as a part of the plot or worldbuilding, but it is a significant part of the characters too.

Yeah I generally try to not care too much if others like/dislike something differently than I do. In this case it just sometimes feels like I'm missing some sort of punchline that others are seeing and got curious.

It's true that they have personality, feel very distinct, etc. But while I enjoyed many of them, I did occasionally feel like "oh no a Ferro chapter." Also I feel that I'm probably not as character focused reader as many Abercrombie fans. I felt like some characters such as Ferro should have changed more during the story.

Several people have said that the later books get better, so maybe I should continue after all. I am interested in finding out which direction the world is going.

He for sure is unpredictable, like ending the second book in the trilogy with most of the book being a waste of time (some of it was useful in the third book though).

I just don't understand what's the deal with everyone hyping the characters: What are the factors that make the characters awesome?

Thanks for the recommendations!

Overall I agree that it's cool that Abercrombie is subverting hero's journey etc. It's just that from my point of view it seems that people keep telling me that I need to ignore everything else and just love his characters. I just don't see why his character work would be _that_ amazing.

Makes sense... Maybe this kind of "no glimmer of hope" stuff just isn't for me.

Yeah I agree, there's a lot of difficult choices, badassery, black humor, etc. That's what kept me reading the trilogy.

I guess I just didn't understand Abercrombie's black humor about Logen just failing in the end, it just seemed too "Aristocrats!" to me :P