The Will of the Many (Part 3 - Characters)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our ongoing review of The Will of the Many (Many).
This part of the review will cover the discussion of Characters. If you’re looking for the overview of this 10/10 book, see Part 1; for Worldbuilding and Themes, see Part 2. For those of you who are all caught up (or only really care about the character writing), let’s dive right in.
STATS
Title: The Will of the Many
Series: Hierarchy (Book 1)
Author(s): James Islington
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: January 2025
Publisher: Saga Press (imprint of Simon & Schuster)
Rating: 10 / 10
SPOILER WARNING
Minor, unmarked spoilers for The Will of the Many will be provided throughout this review. I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labeled sections.
No spoilers will be provided for the sequel, The Strength of the Few. That book is not yet released as of the time of this review series, and this review was written prior to me reading any sample chapters.
VIS - PROTAGONIST / POV
This is the most important character to get right - and, boy, does Isnlington get him right.
Extremely OP
Vis is a character who could have very easily turned into a Mary Sue (or “Gary Stu” or “Marty Stu”, for those who prefer the gendered version of the term). From very early on in the story, all of the following is established for him.
He is insanely OP, possessing immense intelligence, a silver tongue, and combat skills that allow him to overpower people who are quite literally an order of magnitude stronger than him.
The explanation for him being insanely OP is the family he comes from, and the nature of said family makes him even more insanely OP via influence and alliances.
He is recognized for his specialness, plucked from a situation of poverty, and placed onto a path of privilege and opportunity.
He is a brooding youth raging against the unjust system.
He’s basically the D&D character one gets when your buddy with Main Character Syndrome asks to roll dice for stats and rolls nothing but 16s, 17s, and 18s. If this was all there was to him, I’d honestly say that he’s worse than Violet Sorrengail. At least Violet has the EDS and POTS. Sure, Yarros toggles them on and off on a whim, but they do technically exist.
If this was all there was to Vis.
Those same chapters that establish Vis as an overpowered D&D character also establish:
Yes, he’s OP, but he’s arrogant. He repeatedly underestimates challenges and gets humbled, and he makes mistakes even when he thinks he’s thought things through and covered his tracks. I think the only one of his skills that doesn’t end up falling short because of his arrogance is his ability to play the in-world equivalent to chess, and that only helps him in one scene after buildup of both how good he is and that his opponent is far more arrogant than him in regards to this one skill.
His family’s power and status were ground to rubble by the Hierarchy. There’s no chance of him going home to reclaim what we taken from him. A few people are willing to rally around him, but he knows that doing so will just get all of them killed.
Being recognized for his specialness just means he goes from barley surviving on the margins of society to being actively threatened with either death or life in a Sapper, fates he can only avoid by pushing himself to his absolute limits.
That rage against the system is just rage. He’s actually given up on toppling the Hierarchy. As a result, the rage just amounts to “an anger problem” (as a character we’re all supposed to like calls it, to his face, about two-thirds of the way through the book) that pushes him into making mistakes just as severe as those spawned by his arrogance.
These aren’t flaws that exist in the background. They are consistently hindering Vis. As a result, all of his positive attributes don’t so much build him up as they provide a lifeline for him to struggle through challenges.
Diago
While Vis’s true identity is kept vague in the Premise, the book doesn’t treat it as a big mystery, revealing it fairly early on.
Vis’s true identity is Diago, Prince of the island of nation of Suus, which was conquered by the Hierarchy three years before the start of the book. While Vis’s parents and one of his sisters were hung by the Hierarchy in a public execution, Vis tried to escape the island with his other sister, whom we’re told drowned. Vis has since eked out an existence as an orphan within the Hierarchy, doing what he can to avoid having to cede Will as he gathers the resources needed to flee to the fringes of the known world.
This is a backstory that handily explains all of Vis’s skills.
He’s intelligent and strategic because he had a royal education in a setting where education is a privilege of the wealthy.
He was trained in combat to fulfill his duties as a prince.
His skills in reading and manipulating people are because he needed to develop these skills to survive after the fall of Suus. (We’re later explicitly told that diplomacy was a skill he was trained in yet failed to grasp, so when he has to make friends and win people’s loyalty later in the book, it’s a challenge for him.)
Islington had the potential to take this backstory in a very power-fantasy direction (and, in all fairness, he might end up doing so in future books). A prince of a fallen nation is still a prince. He could be a rallying for for Suusian dissidents. Indeed, Vis does meet three characters who recognize him throughout this book, one of whom offers to commit an assassination on his behalf.
Instead, Vis’s backstory serves as a heavy weight upon him. It’s a memory that reminds him of just how much he lost, things he’s helpless to reclaim because the Hierarchy is just too powerful. He’s just a survivor at this point.
This is something that makes Vis feel a lot more human. Sure, it would be a lot more cathartic for him to rise up against the Hierarchy and reclaim his home, yet there’s a melancholic realism and relatability to his situation. He’s just making the best of a bad situation. Even when he’s uplifted and given a chance to enter the Academy, promised renown and political power if he succeeds in his mission, all he cares about is finding a place of safety and security where he can live another day without having to compromise on his values any further (i.e. not having to cede or receive Will).
Which brings us to …
The Chosen One
Because of Vis’s arrogance, he accidentally exposes his OP skills to Ulciscor Telimus, a powerful senator who crosses his path. Ulciscor, realizing that this young prodigy is the ideal candidate for his own plans to put an infiltrator in the Academy, makes Vis an offer. He will legally adopt Vis into the Telimus family and allow him to reap all the rewards of an Academy education in exchange for Vis finding evidence about what the Principalis (headmaster) of the Academy is doing in the ruins near the Academy.
If Vis fails - or refuses, since by this point, Ulciscor figures Vis knows too much - then Ulciscor will either kill him or condemn him to life in a Sapper.
Right off the bat, this caveat is so much more effective than, say, the threat of death in the Riders Quadrant (or of Violet being sent back to the Riders Quadrant if she tries to go to the Scribes). We’ve seen the Sappers by this point, and we’ve seen Ulciscor condemn a man to continual suffering in the Sappers in the name of his mission. Also, as pointed in this video on the Yu-Gi-Oh! English dub’s invention of the Shadow Realm, the Sappers present a fate that is a lot more believable as a threat than death. Killing a protagonist (or any major character) effectively ends that character’s story, which is a massive gamble that few writers are willing to commit to; however, a Sapper is a torment that someone can come back from, so the story can continue in some form even if Vis fails. It also helps that, early on, we see just how casually Ulciscor disregards birthright and brutally kills people, and Vis doesn’t have any plot armor to protect him if Ulciscor really wanted to do the same to him.
Bringing this back to the path of privilege and opportunity: Vis at first assumes that his existing skills will making climbing through the Academy’s ranks will be an easy task. Ulciscor and his associate, Lanistia Scipio, quickly dissolve that notion. Even before getting to the Academy, Vis quickly learns that his previous education aren’t enough, being repeatedly put in his place by Lanistia’s tutoring and needing to grow and adapt as a result. Things don’t get any easier once he actually reaches the Academy. Lanistia’s tutoring gives him a slight edge over his peers in the lower-ranked classes - after all, Ulciscore wanted him to be ready to rapidly climb to Class three - but Vis has to keep stepping up his game.
Balance
Arrogance is only one of Vis’s flaws, and his humiliations don’t stop with his pre-Academy tutoring. While he doesn’t face any outright humiliations once he gets into the Academy, he does find himself overestimating his abilities and only escaping failure because a friend stepped in to show him the error of his ways.
This isn’t his only flaw, either. Vis’s anger constantly causes problems. There are a few points where he throws away an easy victory or crashes headlong into an avoidable fight because he gives in to obvious goading. The one time his rage actually helps him, it’s in a public display that makes him look like a maniac, which makes people more wary of him and forces him to then have to work extra hard to get back into people’s good graces.
On top of this, sometimes Vis just makes outright mistakes. The reason he even comes to Ulciscor’s attention is that he’s not at good at hiding his reactions as he thinks. There’s also a point where he nearly compromises his identity as the outcast prince of Suus because he shows obvious knowledge of things that someone with his supposed background shouldn’t know.
Despite being flawed, Vis is also brave, hardworking, and willing to help out underdogs. He speaks multiple languages (a fact that almost reveals his true identity to Ulciscor at one point), knows how to play chess really well, and is a devoted student able to pick up whatever academic subjects he doesn’t already know. While he’s not very charismatic or diplomatic, surviving for three years on the run has made him good at reading and manipulating people, allowing him to at least maneuver out of danger whenever his identity (or some other secret) is close to being compromised.
Also, a rather important limitation within this world: Vis does not have access to Will, outside of Will-imbued items that he’s given on a case-by-case basis. This means that literally any character with Will is a superhuman threat that he can’t tackle head-on. Any encounter with such characters therefore has an inherent sense of tension, as we know right of the bat that Vis can’t rely of a direct approach and will need to use his wits to survive.
All this is the say that Vis strikes the right balance between incredible skills and incredible flaws. It’s easy to get invested in his journey and root for him. He faces genuine obstacles, rather than just the illusion of obstacles, and succeeds through genuine competence rather than author fiat.
SECONDARY CHARACTERS
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Vis because the bulk of the narrative heavy-lifting falls upon him. That isn’t to say that Islington skimped on the secondary characters. This isn’t a story of demonized antagonists or accessories. All of the people surrounding Vis are fully formed.
To avoid rambling on at length, I’m going to focus on just the most relevant of these characters and group them by their role in the narrative.
Ulciscor Telimus & Lanistia Scipio - The Mentors
Ulciscor recognizes Vis’s potential and strikes a deal, adopting Vis as his son in exchange for Vis infiltrating the Academy to investigate the Principalis, Veridius. He undergoes some rather interesting development. While it’s obvious from the start of the story what the dynamic between him and Vis truly is, he’s originally very sympathetic. Yes, he’s threatening to send Vis to the Sappers if Vis does not accept or fails in this potentially deadly mission, but he comes across like a man who’s only willing to do such things because he feels he has no other options in the face of a sinister threat. As the story progresses, however, Ulciscor’s obsession boils to the surface. For all his claims that the Principalis is a threat to the Hierarchy, what he cares about most is proof that the Principalis murdered his brother, Caeror. No matter how much evidence Vis gives him, he still orders Vis to take even greater risks, under the threat of a Sapper, to prove a conclusion he’s already decided upon.
Lanistia is Ulciscor’s confidant and Caeror’s former lover. She was present when Caeror died, through she has no memory of the event, which also cost her both eyes and forces her to constantly wield Will in order to see anything. While she is originally colder than Ulciscor, and even threatens Vis on Ulciscor’s behalf, she eventually becomes a moderating voice, attempting to defend Vis when Ulciscor effectively orders Vis to go to his death.
I really like the handling of these characters. Islington balances them on a razor’s edge between antagonists Vis needs to satisfy and allies who are willing to help him if he helps them. There’s a real sense of growth when Ulciscor and Lanistia begin to diverge on how far they’re willing to push Vis.
Callidus Ericius, Eidhin Breac, and Aequa Claudius - The Friends
These three are closest thing Vis has to Violet’s circle of accessories, with the important distinction being that each has a fully fleshed-out identity and their own motivations and journey that exists outside of Vis.
Callidus is the first friend Vis makes at the Academy. He’s a social outcast who was demoted from Class Three to Class Seven, which we eventually learn was a political move to protect his father’s career. Callidus is an archetypal quiet nerd, helped Vis with his studies while also providing Vis someone laid-back to bounce off of. (He’s the one who directly calls Vis out about the anger issues.) He has a subplot involving being blackmailed that Vis helps him with.
Eidhin is another social outcast within the Academy. Much like Vis, he was a member of a “barbarian” people that was conquered by the Hierarchy, only sent to the Academy because his father was a collaborator. He struggles with the Catenan language. However, one of the languages Vis speaks in the language of Eidhin’s tribes. This connection allows their dynamic to shift from surly antagonism to a gruff friendship. Through Vis, Eidhin even makes friends with Callidus, someone he was bullying when the two were first introduced.
Aequa is actually the first the three whom Vis meets, with the pair crossing paths in Act One. She fades into the background once Vis arrives at the Academy, since she’s in Class Four and thus far outranks him. Once Vis rises to her rank, however, there’s a brief conflict where she accuses him of cheating (by using Will within the Academy). Near the finale, however, Vis gives her a second chance, and she gets to show her true colors when she has to decide whether to help him in a bleak moment.
Of the three, the only one of these characters who is arguably badly written is Aequa, to the point that she was another reason I considered dropping this book from a 10 / 10 to a 9.5 / 10. Her redemption just happens so rapidly. One moment, Vis decides to give her a second chance, and then Callidus is talking about all this history she supposedly has with the group. Upon reflection, though, this doesn’t actually compromise the narrative. There’s a time skip in which Aequa was training with Vis and Callidus, so the remark does at least make sense in-world. As for the narrative issue of character growth, Aequa’s actual development is demonstrated in the moment when she chooses whether to help Vis or herself in that bleak moment. Whether this happened immediately after he offered her a second chance or after weeks of bonding doesn’t actually affect the emotional payoff, so my issue ultimately comes down to one line from Callidus that feels a bit saccharine.
Emissa Corenius - The Love Interest
Emissa is a Class Three student who quickly takes an interest in Vis and makes excuses to spend time with him. The two quickly develop a friendship that develops into attraction, which in turn blossoms into a romance after Vis saves her life.
I want to hold off discussing Emissa for now. We’ll get into her a bit more in a moment when we discuss the Romance in this story, and the rest needs to come in the Plot analysis.
Veridius Julii - The Villain (?)
The Academy’s Principalis, Veridius is the chief suspect in Caeror’s death. He’s also, if not necessarily a suspicious person, someone in a very suspicious position. He’s a young prodigy whose requested assignment after the Academy was to work at the Academy, with him being promoted to Principalis almost immediately because the previous Principalis conveniently died. He also petitioned to have the island where the Academy is located (which was only meant to be a temporary facility while the main campus was shut down by a crisis) into the permanent location, dramatically increasing security while also launching expeditions into the ruins.
Veridius is an interesting antagonist. He is fully aware that Vis is here to investigate him, since Ulciscor has been very vocal with accusations about Caeror’s death, yet outside of an attempt to get Vis expelled on the first day, he leaves Vis alone. At a few points, he even tries to win Vis over, insisting that he is innocent and not wanting Vis to throw away a bright future to chase Ulciscor’s obsession. It’s not entirely clear (at least prior to the climax) whether he’s genuinely innocent or just a really good liar. Combine this with the fact that Ulciscor really is dangerously obsessed, and there’s a layer of ambiguity to his interactions with Vis that makes things a lot more interesting.
Melior & Sedotia - The Extremists
Functionally, these two characters fill a single role. They provide a face to the Anguis, blackmailing and otherwise threatening Vis into supporting their efforts to topple the Hierarchy. They make it clear that they want to exploit the opportunities that Ulciscor has opened up for Vis, leveraging Vis as an operative in the upper echelons of the Hierarchy’s government.
Melion and Sedotia feel fully justified in engaging in the most heinous acts of violence to serve their cause, as we covered back in Worldbuilding and Themes. However, much like with the other antagonists of this book, Islington manages to give them depth and nuance. They read like people who are at the end of their ropes and only engaging in such violence because they feel they have no other options.
Also, I’ll note here that there’s a minor twist about Sedotia midway through the book. It’s the sort of twist where you’ll see if coming if you’ve read a lot of Fantasy. While predictable, I think this twist is fine. Islington didn’t build it up (either before or after the fact) to be anything bigger than what it is.
TERTIARY CHARACTERS
The cast of named background characters in this book is MASSIVE. A good chunk of the student body of the Academy (at least, from the upper three classes) gets names. Outside of the Academy, there are also various political figures and old associates whom Vis needs to interact with, some of whom only get a few scenes before vanishing from the narrative.
I have harped on this problem, at length, in other books. What’s changed here is that Islington does things right. This isn’t a Red Shirt mob. This is a multitude of distinct individuals, where the worst-case scenario is that the names are a mouthful of syllables or that two names are way too similar (such as how Class Three includes two characters named Indol and Iro, whom I’m still having trouble remembering which is which without looking at the Major Characters section).
The first reason this works is that Islington makes these characters into actual characters. These aren’t interchangeable faces, spouting dialogue that could be assigned to anyone, whom Vis doesn’t interact with in any special manner until the author wants us to care about their deaths. Everyone who is important to the narrative has some combination of backstory and traits to make them memorable. Even in the case of Indol and Iro, I only mix them up because their names are so close and because they share scenes together. I know that one of them is the son of the man who now governs Vis’s homeland, where the worst quality he possesses is a sense of smug superiority, while the other actively hates Vis and serves as a minor antagonist.
The other issue comes back to the matter of death. These characters don’t merely exist to fill space and then die so that Islington doesn’t have to kill his darlings. Characterization isn’t delivered in throwaway lines or rammed into place moments before death. Islington has no qualms about killing important secondary characters. When he does kill a tertiary character, it successfully elevates the stakes and tension because he’s actually established that stakes and tension truly exist in this story. He doesn’t need to tell the audience that we should feel some emotional investment in some character in Class Four whom Vis has no meaningful relationship with. The deaths have weight simply because it is credible that whatever killed the character could kill Vis or one of his friends.
ROMANCE
Next week, we’re going to be doing the Spotlight on the Romance within Onyx Storm. Without getting into spoilers, the contrast between the supposed Romantasy by an established Romance author and the romance subplot in the unapologetic Epic Fantasy with political thriller elements is astonishing.
Many presents us with a genuine, natural, and believable bond forming between two people, founded on something deeper than sex, with meaningful obstacles to their relationship and meaningful character decisions about how they progress. It is everything a Romantasy SHOULD be … and yet it manages this within a subplot. Not even an important subplot. This is done with minimal page count.
Vis meets Emissa partway through Act One, when he and Ulciscor make a pitstop at the Academy on the way to Ulciscor’s estate. She is one of three students in Class Three who take an interest in Vis. Ulciscor’s initial assumption is that they were trying to get information out of Vis on behalf of Veridius. The possiblity is also raised that she is acting to gather politically useful information about Ulciscor on her family’s behalf.
Once Vis formally joins the school, Emissa is the only one of those three students to continue taking an interest in Vis, helping him with disciplinary chores and with training. Ulciscor’s warnings are heavy on Vis’s mind throughout these interactions. He is also painfully aware that any relationship with her couldn't last even if her interest is genuine, since (A) he’s lying about his identity, and (B) he’s planning to retreat to the fringes of the Hierarchy as soon as he graduates. His father’s warnings about a prince needing to put duty over love hang over him as well.
Nonetheless, Vis finds himself drawn to Emissa and enjoying her company. After saving her life, he finally lets his guard down. The pair kiss, and from that moment forward, they operate as a couple.
It’s a simple Romance … but that’s why it works so well. There are no contrived obstacles, no misrepresented drama, no wasting time pretending that this is an Enemies to Lovers scenario. These two characters feel a mutual attraction, Vis holds back for reasons that are true to the plot and his character, and then a moment of crisis tips things over the edge. There’s also real chemistry between the two (versus suffocating sexual tension). I can’t say for certain what exactly Emissa sees in Vis, but in his case, it’s clear that he’s found someone he can relax around and share happy moments with.
Now, that’s not to say that there’s no drama in this dynamic. It’s just not contrived. To explain what happens, though, we’ll have to wait until we discuss the Plot in two weeks’ time.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON CHARACTERS
I’m not going to pretend like I’ve gone years without reading stories with real characters in them. What I will say, though, is that it’s wonderful to see a practical reminder that main characters can be powerful without breaking the narrative, that casts can be huge without dissolving into sludge, and that Romance doesn’t have to be a euphemism for badly written pornography. Islington out time and effort into making his characters strong enough to carry this massive narrative, rather than meandering along on a self-insert adventure that occasionally needed puppets to praise him. That effort shows. I would honestly recommend reading this book for the character work alone.
PLANS WITHIN PLOTS
… I would recommend reading just for the characters, but the plot is also great.
On November 14th, we’ll wrap up this series with a discussion of the Plot. This will include not only an overview of the main plot threads and a discussion of key twists but also an analysis of the handling of the Magic School. We’ll then touch on how The Will of the Many functions as a first entry within a series.
Thank you all for coming with me this far. I hope to see you for your conclusion.
TRUE LOVE?
Unfortunately, before then, we need to cover Chapters 48 through 49 of Onyx Storm.
These chapters cover one long scene of foreplay and sex. It is presented as the payoff to the Romance (such that it is) within the book, and it is extremely lackluster as a payoff. Since the Romance drama effectively ends here (for this book, anyway), now is the time to finally do the Spotlight on the Romance that I promised seven months ago. We’ll break down the chapters on November 7th, then do the Spotlight on November 8th.
Whatever you’re here for, thank you. Please remember to subscribe to the newsletter if you’d like weekly e-mails with the latest posts. Please also share this review with others if you enjoyed it. Take care, everyone, and have a good weekend.
