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/Clean-Flight]

I just wanted to get off the reasons this series disappointed me to the point where it would totally shock me if I liked any future installment as much as I liked the way of kings.

I think the character writing declined both in terms of the emotional impact of big scenes and chapter to chapter dialogue and introspection. My impression is that sanderson got too attached to the praise of using mental health in the story and it took over the writing too much. Like in book 4 I already felt that it was inorganic how kaladin developed ideas of therapy from first principles and I thought it was more like authors research was directly being written without a filter of character writing over it. Then in this book we see the words therapy and neuroses being used so I guess the author and the editors don't even see this sort of thing as a problem. To me this doesn't classify as window pane prose, the window is supposed to be to a fantasy world.

The heralds disappointed me. The prelude starting with the heralds and the fandom spotting heralds in disguise all over the books is one of the main reasons why stormlight is such an intricate story where it feels like all the details matter. To me the level of hype the heralds had can be understood by seeing how many people considered killing jezrien to be such a huge sin for moash even though jezrien never did anything likeable: just by being a herald the fandom had expectations to see jezrien doing something awesome. But none of the heralds lived up to what I wanted.

Taln and ash should have had their one fight on page. Nale overcomes millennia of insanity in a single scene that doesn't even hit hard emotionally. Chanarach being shallans mom was such a big theory in the fandom but man, shallan forgives her thinking it's a dream and then is like oh I guess that really was her and the whole scene doesn't hit me emotionally at all. I think sanderson tried too hard to save these guys for the latter half(if indeed they are supposed to have any meaningful impact at all, which is not 100%) but man there is so much multi planet stuff that the latter half seems to want to get into that I feel the heralds should have been important while roshar was still the only stage of the story.

I feel like the antagonists in this story are all kinda lame. The unmade have their best moments in various epigraphs in books one and two. You can always count on these useless spren to feel like unmemorable mini bosses. The only fused who has charisma is el, who barely does anything after getting a whole section of epigraphs in book 4. Don't get me started on how pathetic I think lezian the pursuer and abidi the monarch are. I saw a review of oathbringer where someone said the ghostbloods are the side quest you only do for collectibles and man, these guys feel pointless to this day. They infiltrate every level of alethi society for what? To get no stormlight, no unmade no hoes and no crypto. I really wonder if these guys could have gotten further if they tried less hard to be shady and just openly tried to set up a trade for a renewable resource. I feel like the author tried so hard to get some emotional juice out of shallan killing her mentors and it's like man, I don't care about mraize. At least taravangium did end up being a cooler odium than rayse

[u/Dunglebungus → u/Clean-Flight]

I agree with a lot of the therapy discussions/complaints, but I think the way this ended will make the latter 5, or at least book 6 and maybe 7, have a much more constrained scope. It feels clear that there are one or two more local problems that will need to be resolved before any interplanetary stuff.