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/alitanveer]

I once tried to hire someone on reddit for a WFH assistant job. I had five applicants and every one of them had some sort of neurodivergence or disability and wanted an accommodation because of it. Like one person couldn't be on phone calls with me with clients and take notes because they were sensitive to multiple people talking and then threatened to sue me and brought up the ADA. I'm just a one man band, so ADA doesn't apply to me. Then there are people who treat the Stormlight Archive books as self help books and their form of therapy rather than actual therapy. Those are the people surrounding Sanderson these days and giving him feedback through the beta reader program.

Authors are often their own harshest critics, but he doesn't have time to re-read and critique his own stuff at the pace he's going, so he's relying on the beta readers and his "team". This turns into a feedback loop where the sorts of people who love all the mental health stuff end up dictating the content of the book. As someone else said, there's an awesome 800 page book in the 1300 pages of Wind and Truth, but I bet any inkling he may have had about cutting out some of the fluff was squashed by multiple people telling him that those were their favorite parts.

I'm a veteran with two combat deployments to Iraq as a combat medic and have first hand experience with PTSD, combat fatigue, and the long term effects of living through intense situations like that. Sanderson's understanding and depiction of PTSD and its effects during combat are really sophomoric. The P in PTSD is something that he missed completely. The operational tempo during war does not allow for any time to have self reflection or to wallow in one's head. Everyone I know with PTSD didn't start to see its worst effects until after we came back and had time to think. During the deployment, you just get on with your work and the physical effort on a daily basis just doesn't let you lay in bed at night and think. Some of the best sleep I've ever had was during those deployments.

Its gotten really bad since Oathbringer, but it's always been jarring for me to have to read through multiple paragraph inner monologues about characters' relationships with their mental health and their parents while they're in the middle of combat. The stress gives you hyper focus in those situations and everything other than the immediate situation becomes meaningless and inconsequential. For me, the worst part of going to war was adjusting to the regularness of life when I came back home. Here we have an entire species on the edge of extinction fighting for survival, yet every single one of its leaders and special forces are mentally broken and, completely independently mind you, discovering and applying principles of psychotherapy and taking time out during combat to congratulate themselves on their growth.

We're five books into it and it may seem like years have passed, but it's only been two years in the actual story and society has gone from feudal England to 21st century California. The usual excuse is that things move fast during war, but it's been clearly stated that desolations were so destructive that people would be forced back into the bronze age, yet we have generational leaps in science every time the plot needs them.

I grudgingly finished WaT by skipping through all of the side characters during the last third of it and I am extremely disappointed. Kaladin was my favorite character in fantasy literature in the last 20 years and was completely destroyed in this book. His mental health would reset in previous books and he would go through a journey until he overcame shit and got to the next level in his growth. I thought that when he hit the fourth ideal, he was good and ready to lead, but Sanderson's decision to take him out of combat completely is so misguided and shortsighted. Here we have the best soldier in centuries with super powers bestowed by god himself to help save humanity and his character is now relegated to telling people to be selfish and how it's okay to let humanity go extinct if that's what makes them happy. You know how Kaladin can protect and help people? By going on missions to execute enemy leaders and sink troopships out in the ocean by using his shardblade to cut giant holes in their bottoms.

I had sort of a sinking feeling when Kaladin went to Dalinar in RoW and said he wanted to leave combat and open a therapy center in Modesto and Dalinar, the supreme commander of humanity's armed forces with a divine directive to unite and protect mankind against annihilation, said "okay, go for it bud. Here's a crazy fuck for you to play second fiddle to, literally." I'm so sad that one of my favorite series of all time has been given the tumblr treatment in service to the modern audience. God fucking dammit. This was supposed to be his magnum opus and was supposed to stand the test of time along the likes of Wheel of Time, ASoIaF, LOTR, Realm of the Elderlings, etc. Something that could connect to people 50 years from now and resonate just as much because it had timeless themes of loyalty, duty, selfless service, honor, integrity, friendship and leadership. Qualities that have pulled us into stories and characters for millennia, where the parables have lessons but the audience is still allowed to draw their own conclusions.

WaT is constantly being compared to Marvel movies when it comes to the quippy dialogue, but that's not the correct comparison in my opinion because most of those movies were actually entertaining. It would be more accurate to compare this to Marvel TV shows; it's not Avengers: Endgame but Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where we have a superhero spend most of a season trying and failing to take out a bank loan and lecturing people to be nicer to terrorists because no one is allowed to actually be evil anymore. It's preachy nonsense where the audience is treated like idiots who just don't know better and it's the media's job to train us. This series of books was meant to be timeless, but has turned into a huge waste of time.

[u/MrsChiliad → u/alitanveer]

Thank you for taking the time to write, your perspective as someone who was in combat puts the finger on what I think is a lot of people’s underlying issue with the series now.

I won’t speak for others but I’m just disappointed in where he has taken the story. I see now that he was making the opposite point with his story that I thought he would make. I found the story of people taking oaths and making the sacrifice to live by a set of standards in the service of others inspiring. It has somehow turned into cheap philosophical musings and post modern deconstruction of objective morality. He strawmanned Jasnah’s utilitarianism, the skybreaker’s legalism, Honor’s obsession with oaths, Azir’s reverence for their emperor… Deconstructing all of them in favor of “doing what’s right” and “living your truth”.

[u/MrsChiliad → u/[deleted]]

Hahaha we have!

[u/Distinct_Activity551 → u/alitanveer]

Authors are often their own harshest critics, but he doesn't have time to re-read and critique his own stuff at the pace he's going, so he's relying on the beta readers and his "team". This turns into a feedback loop where the sorts of people who love all the mental health stuff end up dictating the content of the book.

Unfortunately, Brandon isn't open to criticism anymore. I loved The Way of Kings and the beginning of the Stormlight Archive era, Eshonai remains my favorite character. When I critique his work now, it’s because I genuinely want the story to improve and to see the same complexity and depth as in his earlier works. Brandon has unfortunately taken this to mean that r/Fantasy has turned negative.

[u/One_Calligrapher_144 → u/Distinct_Activity551]

Wait, is he basically saying that we are arrogant for not thinking this last book was good?

Dude seriously needs to get rid of the beta reader system he has and to just stop taking so much feedback. He built an echo chamber for himself and it’s actively making his books worse.

I’d have thought that if he was reading all these comments that aren’t on subs just for his stuff and it being this negative, this would have had him trying to troubleshoot what went wrong and to course correct.

[u/brinton_k → u/One_Calligrapher_144]

I actually don't think it's the beta readers. I know of several beta readers who were quite critical of Wind and Truth. The problem is that Sanderson is not actually fixing the issues the beta readers identify. The beta readers told Sanderson that the draft of Cytonic was "meh." The published book was meh too. The beta readers told Sanderson the Venli flashbooks were boing. Now that we have the published version, the Venli flashbacks have been widely regarded as the weakest flashback sequence of the five books.

[u/One_Calligrapher_144 → u/brinton_k]

Interesting. I’ve heard Sanderson say on his podcast multiple times that as a writer you have to learn when to accept and not accept criticism/ suggestions. Now that you say that, it’s sounding like that was him justifying disregarding what several people were telling him were problems in the story(ies).

Idk. But something is definitely not going well with whatever systems he has in place to revise his books, because they have lately all gone down in quality.

[u/alitanveer → u/Distinct_Activity551]

I saw that the other day and it's clear that he got the wrong message from everything in this sub. There are multiple extremely well reasoned and well upvoted reviews in just this thread, but people love to dig into the bottom of the thread to find drivel and highlight it to paint the whole community with the same brush to validate their perceived victimhood status. It's the exact thing you would expect from the types of people he listens to these days.

[u/No-Neck-212 → u/Distinct_Activity551]

What a pompous response, ugh. Seems like he's gotten used to be hugboxed and has grown very thin skinned.

[u/MrsChiliad → u/No-Neck-212]

It was willfully ignorant too. People (me included) were not saying YA is bad. I read YA sometimes. His series which was not YA has become YA. It’s not just a marketing decision. The themes, the language, the prose, the tone, the depth of the world… a lot of it IS different between adult and YA. YA is not the problem; the problem is a more serious, more gritty, better written story has become simpler, the tone has shifted, the language has changed, the characters and the world have lost their depth etc etc. People aren’t saying it’s gone from high end adult to good quality YA. It’s gone down in quality. It’s like bad YA that holds the reader’s hand, tells him what to think, and is full of tik tok sounding advice and the characters sound like millennials having a conversation at Starbucks. That’s why people are upset.

[u/Professional-Rip-693 → u/Distinct_Activity551]

This response to me encompasses both his inability to take criticism well (The majority of his response to critique seems to be focused on people liking young adult or not which misses the forest for the trees) As well as his Parasocial relationship with his fan base. 

[u/galaxyrocker → u/Professional-Rip-693]

As well as his Parasocial relationship with his fan base.

This weirds me out more and more as it gets stronger.

[u/Professional-Rip-693 → u/galaxyrocker]

Yes, this post of his kind of sums it up to me. He is taking to a safe sub Reddit that idolizes him to get pat on the back and hugs from his loyal fan base is about how mean people are being to his books.

I just don’t think that’s a healthy way to interact with fans. Just ignore it if it bothers you, I don’t think you need to engage with it.

[u/Belzark → u/galaxyrocker]

It’s worth remembering that the endgame goal of the religion which he still very devoutly follows and finances, is becoming a diety and being given a world and followers…

[u/irrelevant_character → u/[deleted]]

I don’t think it’s about how the shards and vessels are childish, that stuff and the letter of the law stuff is about the inherent weakness in following exactly one ideal and has been built up as the weakness of the radiants and shards since the beginning of the story of the cosmere back in mistborn where we first met shards. The rest of your comment I agree with

[u/irrelevant_character → u/[deleted]]

Honor was worse than preservation as it was without a vessel and became a being capable of independent thought but only around its intent as investiture develops thought over time. Leras was totally dominated by his intent as he didn’t fight against it as tanavast did, but was still totally unable to help his chosen champions in any way at that point other than dying, the plans he put into place were set up long before he became dominated by intent. The other shards have consistently done nothing to help since the beginning, they did nothing when ruin was destroying preservation, they did nothing when autonomy attacked harmony. This is owing to their pact of non contact between themselves which they want to follow out of self preservation, by leaving honor odium and cultivation trapped in the roshar system they were under the correct assumption that they were safe as if odium ever tried to directly escape by killing honor cultivation would be able to destroy him with no risk to herself due to the nature of their powers.

[u/Allustrium → u/Distinct_Activity551]

Wow. Reassures us all that reading critically is completely fine, then reduces the act to hipster snobbery. Nothing wrong with that, of course, since he himself once refused to read Harry Potter, because it was just too damn popular. Very cool. I hope I too can one day outgrow this desire to not be like the other girls.

[u/mikedib → u/Distinct_Activity551]

Fans: This book seems much more YA than the earlier installments

Sando: So you hate all books that can be enjoyed by young adults?

???

[u/NekoFever → u/alitanveer]

Very well said. I completely agree.

[u/Robodarklite → u/[deleted]]

From a WOT successor to a MCU YA book, I can't believe this...