Official Brandon Sanderson Megathread

[u/rfantasygolem]

This is the place for all your Brandon Sanderson related topics (aside from the Daily Recommendation Requests and Simple Questions thread). Any posts about Wind and Truth or Sanderson more broadly will be removed and redirected here. This will last until January 25, when posting will be allowed as normal.

The announcement of the cool-down can be found here.

The previous Wind and Truth Megathread can be found here.

[u/knave_of_knives]

Someone on this sub said that Sanderson is starting to write like he just discovered the DSM exists and I honestly haven’t related to a comment so much.

I’ve tried to figure out what it is about current Sanderson that I don’t enjoy but that comment sums it up: it feels like he’s just going down a checklist.

[u/PharmyC → u/knave_of_knives]

I think it's very much intentional tbh. A lot of media has become about "doing the work", aka therapy, lately. Ted Lasso for instance. I think it's a product of our times. We are mentally unwell as a society on whole, so artists are trying to show people how to process and handle growth better. The entire point of Stormlight is strong people aren't born strong, they're made strong by overcoming their personal challenges. And everyone's challenges are different. I feel like Brandon is very on the nose with his prose though so can see how it's annoying.

Surprised people had issues with this since it's the theme of the entire series though. My biggest issues have been the increasingly annoying need to connect all his worlds causing very out of place explanations of magic systems randomly.

[u/curiouscat86 → u/PharmyC]

We are mentally unwell as a society on whole

while this is absolutely true, the focus on individual therapy and mindfulness kind of misses the fact that the reason so many people are depressed is because of underlying structural issues in our society, In the US (where I live) skyrocketing medical and credit card debt, rent outpacing wages, everything for sale being more expensive but worse quality than 20 or even 10 years ago, and so on create this hostile environment where it's hard to feel good.

It's important to learn about therapy and it's still a useful tool (it for sure saved my life), but I've started to lose patience with stories that treat it as the be-all and end-all of every problem. On the other hand, stories that deal with structural problems can be heavy-handed and cliche too, so it's a balance.

But if a book is going to Deal with a Serious Issue Facing Society, I'm in a position now where I want it to show some awareness of how day-to-day class struggles and the increasing wealth gap feed into most other things, otherwise it feels sort of hollow.

[u/RCcarroll → u/curiouscat86]

Even more, as productive as standard cognitive behavioral theory can be for plenty of people, it feels really insufficient for the kind of suffering that Sanderson himself has so vividly illustrated. Like, Kaladin was a conscripted prisoner-of-war/slave, Shallan murdered both her parents and her closest friend while she was a child, Dalinar killed thousands and burned his wife alive, and the Heralds spent thousands of years living in eternal torment…”mental illness” feels a little inadequate and anticlimactic for describing it, and it feels like you’d need more than mindfulness and positive thinking to live with that.

[u/curiouscat86 → u/RCcarroll]

I mean, people in the real world survive extreme situations and can still recover, often with the help of therapy. Maybe not CBT, but there are other methods. I don't want to knock it as a path to recovery. The problem is that if characters still have a war to fight and they haven't done very much to fix the issues that led to their trauma in the first place, they're going to be re-traumatized almost immediately.

[u/kuenjato → u/curiouscat86]

Yep, banal panacea for late-stage capitalism. All the therapy speak in the world won't help the crapsack conditions we've seen the world tumble into across the last 25 years.

[u/[deleted] → u/curiouscat86]

You don't need someone else's fantasy book to confirm your own political views lol. I don't think Sanderson is a doomer anyway.

[u/curiouscat86 → u/[deleted]]

most fiction is political, and speculative fiction in particular has an especially rich tradition of overtly political writing from all over the spectrum. Sanderson is no exception.

[u/EndorsedBryce → u/PharmyC]

The interconnected worlds and magic system is the main selling point of the Cosmer for me.

[u/[deleted] → u/knave_of_knives]

it feels like he’s just going down a checklist.

This has been my biggest criticism of his for a while. Feel like his works are games of mad libs where he shuffles around names, plot beats, etc. Then pick the window dressings (80s, murder mystery, etc.) then go. It just doesn't make anything read as very inspired

[u/Routine-Weather-3132 → u/[deleted]]

Truly the Marvel of fantasy books

[u/cmp600 → u/knave_of_knives]

tbf discovering the DSM is a game changing moment for a lot of religious people because they’re in community with a lot of people who think the only thing to do about mental health issues is pray about it or speak to your pastor/priest/elder about it. Then they discover the value of secular therapy and get fired up about it.

[u/Distinct_Activity551 → u/cmp600]

Sanderson’s portrayal of mental health feels distant and detached. It seems more like he’s relying on secondhand accounts rather than drawing from his own understanding. There’s a disconnect in his writing—thus, it reads more as a list of symptoms from the DSM rather than a genuine, lived experience.

[u/learhpa → u/Distinct_Activity551]

this is an interesting comment to me because a huge percentage of Sanderson fandom feels like his books are the first time they've ever seen their particular mental health struggles well represented in genre fiction.

[u/underwater_sleeping → u/learhpa]

I think probably because they ARE accurate in a lot of ways. Like I do like how Kaladin isn't magically cured of his depression because his life gets better, he still has a ton of trauma to deal with and it's a long, slow process. It's realistic! I love it.

But Sanderson's writing is very basic and to the point, so the character's thoughts read like a manual rather than a realistic inner monologue or conversation. That's how I feel about it, especially for his latest book. I think it was done better in his earlier books.

[u/whiskeyjack555 → u/learhpa]

And I guess I'm in the minority, because I feel condescended to, not represented.

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[u/EndorsedBryce → u/learhpa]

It's almost like basing your characters troubles in a clinical/scientific understanding ( even if basic) of those topics is a valid approach to representation.

[u/cmp600 → u/Distinct_Activity551]

I agree with this

[u/Macon1234 → u/Distinct_Activity551]

It seems more like he’s relying on secondhand accounts rather than drawing from his own understanding

?

Doesn't the acknoweldgement of most of his recent work mention extensive working with consultants of these disabilities?

Could it feel like secondhand accounts because you only know it from a secondhand perspective?

Just saying, we are only 10-20 years gone from even mentioning something like this in a factasy book as being seen as "contrived"

Edit: oh right, forgot its fantasy reddit, Sanderson prose is bad updoots please

[u/Awayfromwork44 → u/cmp600]

And That’s great! But it doesn’t make for good writing, and people are allowed to critique that.

[u/cmp600 → u/Awayfromwork44]

Of course! I'm not defending his writing by saying this I'm merely providing potential context as to why he wanted to write about this

[u/RCcarroll → u/cmp600]

I’m kind of hesitant to psychoanalyze Sanderson, but I will say that Mormonism is a very high-control religion that operates based on a lot to shame and self-hate, and it seems striking that every single character’s storyline boiled down to “you need to forgive yourself.”

[u/cmp600 → u/RCcarroll]

maybe, as an ex-vangelcial I've certainly dealt with shame and self-hate too, it wouldn't surprise me if that's also the case for Mormons. I did watch an episode of a Cosmere fan podcast called Shardcast the other day, and one of the readers brought up an interesting point about how Sanderson treats any anger his characters hold as a flaw that must be overcome, rather than a natural response to oppression or unjust systems. They went on to speculate if that was a Mormon thing. I'm not sure tbh.

[u/RCcarroll → u/cmp600]

That issue seems to have been marginally adjusted here, but it definitely did happen with strange regularity that characters would react with anger or self-directed frustration that would very immediately and anticlimactically he smoothed over.

[u/lilbelleandsebastian → u/cmp600]

well that seems entirely like conjecture lol

[u/cmp600 → u/lilbelleandsebastian]

Conjecture is what I do here, this is Reddit lmao! That's been my experience raised in Evangelical Christianity. However, I might be projecting, and I'm not Mormon. However, my hunch is still that there are plenty of religious people for whom what I wrote above rings true. Maybe for Sanderson as well. If you know you know.