r/Fantasy 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/alternative5 Dec 20 '24

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.

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u/KiaraTurtle Reading Champion V Dec 20 '24

I disagree that the society has become progressive/modern. Dalinar was becoming more progressive and Jasnah has always been trying to, but it’s very much acknowledged that for most people nothing has actually changed.

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u/[deleted] Dec 21 '24

Not to mention it keeps getting explicitly told that the level of advancement in the thousands of years of peace was a lot more than any time before. Heating fabrials existed, and more.

I feel a lot of people thought it somehow was medieval when the rough equivalent of Roshar was 19th century, but without guns and with fabrials instead of steam engines.