I kind of gave myself away yesterday with my least favorite villain, so I’ll just put it above the cut: the Hunger.

Yes, yes, I know. It’s the ultimate villain in the Balance series of The Adventure Zone, and its defeat (spoiler alert?) at the hands of the IPRE/BoB folks brings about a peace the main characters had not known for over 100 years. I get it. “The Stolen Century” did give us John, the physical representation of the Hunger, which was a great move by Griffin, but it wasn’t enough for me to really latch onto this giant, looming threat.

I mean, it was there at the Midsummer Festival, just the literal blink of a thousand eyes, and it was ominous, for sure. But like I said yesterday, it was almost too big, too monstrous for me to fathom. I couldn’t really see it like I could with other things Taako, Magnus, and Merle battled. Even when characters from “The Stolen Century” whose worlds had been overtaken by the Hunger returned to fight the main three boys, it didn’t have the same impact as when Marvy, Magic Brian, and Jenkins were revived into robots in “Crystal Kingdom.”

This is not to say that I wasn’t on the edge of my seat during the finale, wondering how they would manage to defeat the Hunger, because dear gawd, I was. I was just certain Magnus would die during the final battle, heroically saving the lives of those he held dear, or that Lucretia would be consumed by the Hunger, her greatest fear coming to life: fighting her friends. And I’m not certain if this could have been done differently, but that doesn’t mean that I have to be a rabid fan of it.

Art Credit: Maximum Fun