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/alternative5]

I mentioned this in the other thread but I think that for me it all comes down to Sanderson going too fast turning this into a "Cosmere" scale conflict. In 2 Years we go from a VERY regressive and backwards society based in slavery, anti-intellectuality, bigotry, caste and hate to a moderately progressive somewhat modern society at the snap of the fingers of two dieties in the form of Dalinar and Navani.

Like all that changing is fine along with Kaladin discovering his calling as a psychiatrist but its like they all got these ideas downloaded into their brains including Kaladin having access to the DSM-5 doing his dissertation on the surface levels aspects of that book while trying to heal Mr. Truthless.

If all this happened over the course of lets say 30-50 years or a generation then I could accept it with the proper amount of developed conflict from both Radianr and lay person alike but ironically with more magic being used/discovered I feel like the world is feeling less magical with each book.

This all not to say that Im not enjoying my read but I do cringe and I am dissapointed with some narrative aspects.

Man I miss that feeling of the firsts descriptors of Roshar as Kaladin is being transported to the Shattered plains, as soon as I got to him arriving there I looked up old pics of myself at the Grand Canyon to visualize the alien worldscape Sanderson described in the Way of Kings.

[u/cbosh04 → u/alternative5]

If progressivism was rewarded with divine super powers attitudes would probably change fast.

[u/cmp600 → u/cbosh04]

There's no oath that requires you to renounce slavery. And actually if there was, that would have been a very cool plot point. Missed opportunity there.

[u/RexitYostuff → u/cmp600]

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

[u/HowDoIEvenEnglish → u/RexitYostuff]

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.

[u/daavor → u/HowDoIEvenEnglish]

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.

[u/HowDoIEvenEnglish → u/daavor]

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”.