Well I managed to finish Off to be a Wizard and it was a fun to read. To recap the book is about a boy named Martin who's in his 20's. He stumbles upon a file online that allows him to manipulate the everything in the universe. 2 days later he mucks it up and goes to medieval times to escape where he find that other people had the same idea. So he's taught by a guy named Phillip who teaches him to be a Wizard. Which is just what everyone who finds the file and escapes to that time disguise themselves as. Most of the book is really just Martin getting used to the time and to other wizards, primarily Phillip who he grows close to. They started off rough with Martin trying to prove Phillip as a fraud in the beginning, but this grew into strong friendship as Phillip mentored him in how being a wizard works. He taught him about how to use the file and outlines what wizards have been able to do with it.
But what I'll be writing about is Jimmy or Merlin as he's known as in the time period Martin and the others are in. Now Jimmy used the file to make the legend of King Arthur reality and essentially change around history to better suit himself.He made a sword by using the file and imbued it with magical properties to fit the description of Excalibur. He's essentially your run of the mill sack of garbage villain who has a craving for fame and power. When Martin and Phillip went to Camelot to get martin instated into the wizard guild, everything was made out of gold. The castle was painted gold,the statues of himself were gold, and even the guards' armors were gold. He was just a person who loved to be flashy. But what really made him a true villain was he wanted to make the world into a true fantasy world. He went off to try to make people orcs, elves, hobbits, and dwarfs, and ended up killing an entire village since, when you edit a person's physical traits in the file, you can end up doing serious damage. By making the people in the village shorter Jimmy essentially made it so their organs didn't fit in their bodies anymore and killed them. The file can change a person's height at the caveat that the organs may not grow with them. Since organs and such seem to be a separate part of the code. But Jimmy didn't care, he just saw it as an accident and felt it didn't matter.
This dream of wanting a real fantasy world spawned from the realization that nothing they do int he past doesn't apply to the future. No what they did in the past it didn't seem to affect the future. The reason for this is summed up to parallel universe and the file auto correcting itself when it came to small changes. So from this Jimmy tells Martin that he's making these changes because in the end they're all a program in a computer which means they don't really exist. That everyone is just a bit of data he can edit and play with. And just before this he preached about how he's making things better by undoing the mistakes that have occurred. He wanted to kill Hitler's parents and have him adopted to a Jewish family to see how that worked out, wanted to see how things would be if Native Americans had guns. He felt he was fixing the future and making things better, and stated how a bit of fun can't hurt since no one really is a person in this computer program they all live in. All of this when he killed an entire village and broke one of the three rules that the wizard guild that pertain to changing physical traits. He's the chairman of this whole wizard guild thing and he breaks his own rules. Why make these rules if you're not going to damn well follow them. He truly just goes mad with power and proves how much of a sack of garbage he is. Which is why I found myself just hating him. He had little reason to do what he did besides greed. He was a show off with no humility. And above all a monster near the end, willing to sacrifice people to fulfill his own twisted fantasy. He made people into orcs and those people were in constant pain, and followed his orders because he programed them to get angry at anything when he was unhappy. Everything just made him the bad guy and through out the book the Author makes it painfully obvious that this guy is going to a big conflict. As soon as Jimmy is mentioned all you hear is how much Phillip hates him and how much of a scumbag he is.This made it fairly predictable but the ending was still interesting, since I didn't really expect Jimmy's plan to be make the world into a cliche fantasy world, by changing people into various different races. So it still kept a surprise at the end which is nice. So that ends my entry and I'll probably move onto the next book in the series which is Spell or High Water Which I guess pertains to the female wizards since they all went to Atlantis according to the book.
