Who sits upon the throne of bad fantasy cover design? Behold A City of Ashes, where the art direction clearly took a smoke break and never returned. This isn’t just dark fantasy — it’s a glow-filtered mess propped up by a very tired throne and a tragic misunderstanding of lighting physics.
Let’s address the iron-clad elephant in the room: the central figure. At first glance, he exudes the ominous grandeur of a warlord-turned-villain. But squint just a little, and you’ll see it — the unmistakable shimmer of a copy-paste knight. That throne might as well have wheels, because this whole figure looks like it was dragged into the scene via lasso tool and promptly abandoned.
And the armor spikes on the knees? Sweet mercy. They’re off-center, like even his armor couldn’t commit to this scene. Symmetry is optional, apparently, especially when your design budget says, “We’re doing this in one take, Steve.”
Then we have the lighting. The actual scene is backlit with blazing inferno energy — smoke, fire, end-of-days ambiance. So why, dear reader, does our menacing monarch glow like he’s flanked by two ring lights and a diva fan? Is there a hair commercial being filmed off to the side? We’ve got side-lighting, top-lighting, inner peace lighting — all happening simultaneously, and none of it matching the scene.
Let’s not ignore the filter overdose either. If Photoshop had a panic attack, this is what it would look like. Glow here, haze there, vignette everywhere. The textures have been so aggressively blended that the cover looks like it’s trying to fade into itself. By the time your eyes get to the bottom right corner — where a rogue light orb glows like a badly placed moon — you’ve officially entered the no-logic zone.
And where, exactly, are his feet? Are they part of the throne? Melting into it? Hovering above the cobblestones of a badly composited hellscape? It’s the floating warlord conundrum — feared by many, grounded by none.
This isn’t a throne room; it’s a Photoshop purgatory with a budget dragon in the background and a mood board that just said “make it epic” with no further instruction.
If A City of Ashes tells us anything, it’s this: when your armored antihero looks like he wandered in from another JPEG entirely, you’ve officially won the crown for fantasy cover confusion. Long may he not reign.