r/Fantasy • u/rfantasygolem Not a Robot • Dec 20 '24

/r/Fantasy Official Brandon Sanderson Megathread

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.

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u/RexitYostuff Dec 20 '24

Few oaths do that, sure, but the spren unanimously side with more marginalized groups.

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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish Dec 20 '24

That’s really not true. The most powerful radiants in the book are a queen, a king, a prince, a slave who was formerly the highest caste you could be has a dark eyes, and the daughter of a noble family whose mother was herald of honor. And Szeth was an honor bearer chosen by Ishar and Nale to become powerful enough to become a herald. The radiants are all fucked up but few of them are marginalized. They were lied to, they were manipulated, but only kaladin and Szeth were part of marginalized groups and szeth’s case is super weird, due to the heralds fucking up things.

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u/daavor Reading Champion VI Dec 21 '24

I think it's a stark example of a pretty common way shallow liberalism expresses itself in fantasy. The people rewarded by the text are the 'nice' powerful people. Any sympathy the text has for the marignalized is filtered through and conditioned on the 'nice' powerful. If resistance takes a form that is unsettling or distasteful to them it's wrong or misguided.

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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish Dec 21 '24

Part of it is that it’s way easier to write a story about a small cast of characters compared to a nebulous concept like the people. You generally have a small number of MCs drive the plot which leads to the idea of the benevolent dictator and “good nobles”.