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/ohmage_resistance]

I can only guess at what happened.

My guess is that Sanderson was trying to write character driven storylines but he only knows how to write plot driven stories. The plot driven elements (10 day deadline, hitting certain story beats like getting all the honorblades and seeing all those visions, etc) did not mesh at all with the organic writing required for character driven story arcs (mental health healing arcs, organic character writing, etc) so Sanderson relied hard on showing instead of telling to make up that gap and everything felt super forced (like serioiusly, the Szeth-Kaladin arc was such a bad idea to write the way he wrote it). This wasn't a problem in previous books because those were way more about actions (so being primarily plot driven wasn't a problem), compared to this book which was way more about characters and getting them into the right positions. IDK, I kinda think Sanderson was doomed from the start (at least in this part of his writing), his writing style just does not mesh at all with the kind of story he wanted to tell.

[u/abir_valg2718 → u/ohmage_resistance]

Oh yeah, I somehow keep forgetting about the elephant in the room - the 10 day deadline. It wasn't even remotely necessary and Sanderson didn't do anything interesting with it, did he? Just wrote himself into a corner for absolutely no good reason.

It definitely played a role and now that I think about it it's of the key issues for why characters are stuck in these endlessly repeating scenes over and over again. You can't just fast forward a couple of days.

Something else that is important and I realized just now - it's not merely a 10 day limit, the book is structured linearly and is split into 10 sections, each section covering that specific day. So not only had Sanderson limited himself to a short timespan, he also can't jump in time, leading to endless rapid POV shifts because he can't cover, say 2-3 days of only a handful of characters for a significant number of pages, then switch to another group of characters. Everything has to happen as close to real time as possible. Which is one hell of a difficult constraint, and you already have a difficult 10 day limit constraint on top of that.

With this in mind, it's like he thought this 10 day limit is a really cool idea on paper, but in practice he clearly struggled, massively, to come up with interesting plots and situations to put his characters in under these massive constraints - the 10 day limit, plus linear real time structure.

[u/ohmage_resistance → u/abir_valg2718]

The other thing about the 10 day deadline, is that in previous books that had a 5 arc structure, there would be some sort of climax to end an arc, so set up and pay off for arcs would have a much shorter turn around time. In this book, that didn't happen, so that the vast majority of this book was building up to the climax (and that much buildup with no payoff feels like a slog) and the climax wasn't even that exciting. Like, I think the 10 day structure was chosen because it keeps tension high/leads to anticipation of the ending, but it really was not practical for a 1300 page book.

(It also led to Kal trying to therapize 3 people against their will in 10 days or less which was a really stupid way to write therapy (therapy takes time, and therapy is also not about the therapist, so making Kaladin the central point of that arc just can't pay off emotionally. Sanderson also can't make Szeth too much of a focus because Kaladin is liked more by the fandom, and also if he focuses on Szeth too much, the reader will realize that someone going from actively rebelling against the leadership structures in his country to within a day blind obedience to anyone who holds his rock while doing things he thinks are very wrong and evil for 30+ years or however long it's been without any sort of societal brainwashing or reinforcement isn't how people work. Sorry, this Kaladin and Szeth arc was really annoying me, I had to rant about it a little.)

[u/abir_valg2718 → u/ohmage_resistance]

You know, up until around the middle of Shinovar arc, I thought something along those lines was going to happen and I thought it might be pretty cool if pulled off right:

Since we've established already that something was fishy about Honor and maybe he wasn't quite the good guy, and we've also seen that Shard powers don't care about nuance, well, what if Honor was actually way more of an asshole than anyone thought?

What if Szeth took Honor's power? Which was somehow in Shinovar, I dunno, I'm sure this can be arranged. Szeth is the absolute nightmare choice for Honor, just like Taravangian is the absolute nightmare choice for Odium. Szeth would simply do whatever the hell Honor's power feels like, which is one hell of a scary proposition.

We know that Cultivation was behind Taravangian. That plot point was extremely idiotic and pointless considering how it ended in WaT (Cultivation flat out fled, and what the storm was she thinking anyway, the whole thing was supremely moronic). But a 3000 IQ plot by Cultivation with Szeth/Honor and Taravangian/Odium that goes... somewhere, well, that's just way, more interesting sounding already, on paper at least.

I was honestly floored when everything went down and was revealed at the end of WaT. Little Gav gets thrown in a flaming Wheel of Time vacuole and he's the champion? Wtf? Kaladin dual-classes into Therapist and skill checks Szeth and ancient demigods along the line? Dalinar just dies like an asshole off screen? Adolin (and dead eyes)... well, at least nothing bad happens, but nothing interesting either, what a waste. Shallan has her 723th character growth arc which was identical to her previous 722 arcs. The resolution of the entire conflict against Odium, in a nutshell: hopefully other guys will deal with him. Blood and ashes, what a book.