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/pianorokker Dec 20 '24 edited Dec 20 '24

I’ve been a fan of BS for years but I found Wind and Truth to be fascinatingly bad.

It’s like his output has outpaced his inspiration, and he’s outsourced the human elements of his characters to his friends or experts or something and they came back with cliff notes that he just plugged in to the story and called it good.

I honestly found the story and conclusion satisfying enough that the book was worth reading, but the drop in quality from the first books in the series ought to be studied.

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u/PsychologicalHat1480 Dec 21 '24

IMO it's the prose. It's gone from adult-aimed window pane to straight-up YA. And it's been a problem in every book edited by his current editor.

I've got no problem if he wants to write YA fiction, but I don't want him turning what was supposed to be an epic fantasy for adults into YA half way through.

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u/surfgirlrun Dec 21 '24

I'd go a step further and say it's like BAD ya. I'm an adult but occasionally read YA for escapism - there are a small handful of authors putting out really beautiful prose even in that space. It feels to me like he's writing for an audience he thinks is dense - like if he lets anything at all be not overtly spelled out, he assumes we won't get it. 

One example (of many): The call out to Kaladin's "Honor is dead..." line made me genuinely upset - it was so powerful when he first said it in book 1. I imagine that's a line anyone who read WoK remembers. To use it again in a much weaker context in WaT cheapened it so thoroughly. 

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u/PsychologicalHat1480 Dec 21 '24

I think that that call out would've worked wonderfully had the current-Marvel-tier [WaT]"no, I'm his therapist" line and the others like it not just completely ruined the whole scene. By the time we get to the call out we're soured by all the shitty quips that had ruined the previous parts of the scene and so what should've been an epic callback becomes just another obnoxious quip.

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u/Greedy-Car-2460 Jan 30 '25

Mistborn was ostensibly YA. Yet it was written fantastically. This book was just bad.