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The point for Way of Kings prologue is that it really was over explained. Using Szeths point of view in it at all was a mistake, it should have been from Sadeas if anyone.
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Aug 5, 2016 14:25
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The more concretely defined the magic system is, the more it can be used to drive plot without it being a big old deus ex machina.
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Aug 5, 2016 16:46
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Leng posted:Only found this thread a few days ago and read the whole thing - and I gotta say, the sheer number of criticisms levelled at Sanderson for the Szeth prologue in TWOK is insane. It made me go back and re-read it a few times to try and see if it was really all that bad...and guys, seriously? quote:He hit the ground in the midst of the soldiers. Completely surrounded, but holding a Shardblade.
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Aug 5, 2016 16:54
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Tunicate posted:It's more than just that. It's clumsy and keeps breaking up the pace. Yeah, my problem is the description of the mechanics comes in the middle of an awesome fight scene. And Szeth is really the only POV character that knows the mechanics so explaining them to the reader that early in the book/series isn't really necessary. It's like if they took the opening scene to the Matrix, and paused it every ten seconds to have Trinity doing a voice-over "Being in the Matrix allows me to do this", "Agents are dangerous because such-and-such". It's using a bunch of 'telling' to bog down what 'showing' it's doing.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:40
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The Words of Radiance reread on Tor.com came to an end this week, and it had this interesting paragraph at it's end, containing a lot of information I did not know before: http://www.tor.com/2016/08/04/words-of-radiance-reread-epilogue-and-what-comes-next/ quote:What comes next? I don’t want to lose momentum, but there’s just no more Stormlight to be had until Arcanum Unbounded comes out in November. You will definitely want to join in on the discussion of the Lift novella Edgedancer when it’s released, though, because we need to talk about it! (Brandon thought it was going to be a 17,000-word novelette, but it ended up right around 40,000 words, because he used it to let us observe some things that needed to happen before the events of the next book take place. Trust me, we need to talk about it.) After that, though, we just have to wait for the release of Oathbringer, and that’s going to be a while. There’s some indication that the beta will begin early this fall, and the beta-readers are currently doing a group reread discussion of WoR in preparation, but… we’ll have to wait and see. Team Sanderson is working on ways to streamline the process without compromising the quality of the work, so it might not be as long a wait as we would currently expect. Dunno. Never heard of Arcanum Unbounded before, it's a Cosmere collection including Emperor's Soul and Mistborn: Secret History. The one new work will be the Lift novella Edgedancer. Which is of course a prime example of Sanderson.txt, growing from 17k words to 40k words.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:16
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It's been posted a few times I think or I could he mixing this thread with my reading Sanderson's website updates or the 17th Shard forum. Tor posted an excerpt of Lift with the first few scenes. It's pretty good and we get an idea of what she asked the Nightmother for.
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Aug 5, 2016 20:11
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AU has emperor's soul in it as well. All the stories get an introduction from Khriss (the lady who writes the magic system blurbs at teh end of the book) detailing information about the planet as well.
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Aug 5, 2016 20:19
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Leng posted:Only found this thread a few days ago and read the whole thing - and I gotta say, the sheer number of criticisms levelled at Sanderson for the Szeth prologue in TWOK is insane. It made me go back and re-read it a few times to try and see if it was really all that bad...and guys, seriously? No, it's worse. I absolutely love Brandon Sanderson. I own paper and/or kindle editions of pretty much everything the guy has published. I also spend an abnormal amount of time trying to guess out future reveals in his books, and I disagree with you 100%. That chapter is terrible. poo poo, I always think it's silly when people complain about Sanderson's magic systems being overly structured. That's part of the charm! "Magic" in Cosmere worlds is just another set of unique scientific rules governing their reality. The way that characters and societies are clueless to or completely misunderstand fundamental magical laws of their world adds a neat element of discovery too. But even getting that out of the way, holy poo poo is that chapter terrible. And it's bizarrely unnecessary too. All these magic powers will be slowly revealed to us later in the narrative, there's no need to drown the audience in robotic descriptions of vector addition equations from the get go. If the point was just to preview to the audience some of possibilities of your magic system then just vaguely describe the mysterious guy doing some crazy poo poo involving gravity and mopping the floor with some mooks to show how badass he is.
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Aug 6, 2016 04:31
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I'll echo whoever said that part was alright, subjective of course but I prefer when things like that just get explained outright. Compared to some of the subtler stuff he does in the novellas where things are just mentioned or alluded to and I'd actually want to know more about things that just get mentioned or alluded to. But then I'm also someone who'll sometime stop reading and look up a wiki article when a new unfamiliar term comes up so it's definitely down to individual preference.
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Aug 6, 2016 08:47
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Me personally I like the way the prologue is kinda detached from the story. With explanations and such. When you know exactly how the magic works and have another character learn it by instinct later in the book it gives you a different sense of progress. Because you know where they are headed. And want them to have the correct assumptions about it. In Shallan's case we have no idea of what is happening and discover everything together with her. As usual in the genre. If both approaches were the same it would get boring imho.
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Aug 6, 2016 13:33
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NeruVolpi posted:Me personally I like the way the prologue is kinda detached from the story. With explanations and such. And Szeth's knowledge isn't complete by any stretch, either. There are things Kaladin does later that he had no idea were possible, all the prologue did was give us the bare bones of how it's useful in combat.
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Aug 6, 2016 19:06
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Really disappointed that surgebinding turned out to give all users magic healing powers. I had thought that windrunners were gravity/healing(regrowth) and that's why Kaladin could heal, but no, it turns out that windrunners are adhesion/gravation. I already disliked that stormlight worked like every other limited mana pool in fiction, and lashings well... have you noticed that authors always ignore the bio mechanics of how aiming to hit something is actually really hard and wind up giving characters pinpoint accuracy? So I can't say that a gun would be a better power than surgebinding, it's only because guns actually have to be aimed.
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Aug 7, 2016 01:21
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IIRC lashing are either 'touch' or 'aoe' range
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Aug 7, 2016 02:08
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I admit, I don't think remember the negative lashing ever being used at range. But I still say that it seems every fantasy system that tries to build a concrete and logical system for fighting seems to default to giving the characters revolvers loaded with magic bullets.
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Aug 7, 2016 03:28
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Monocled Falcon posted:Really disappointed that surgebinding turned out to give all users magic healing powers. I had thought that windrunners were gravity/healing(regrowth) and that's why Kaladin could heal, but no, it turns out that windrunners are adhesion/gravation. Considering stormlight is basically raw cosmic energy that it can be used to force a body to regenerate isn't a stretch. Besides, there's a huge difference between "stormlight regen" and the kind of healing power someone with Regrowth has access to. Stormlight healing is "recover 1d4 hp per round" while regrowth is "cast the Heal spell on target."
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Aug 7, 2016 04:20
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The big difference is that stormlight will only heal you while regrowth can be used to heal others.
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Aug 7, 2016 07:19
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I'm hesitant to continue this line of discussion because I sense the possiblity of derailing the thread into a massive argument about minor technical details but it just seems like quick but energy intensive healing is a crutch every author writing about 'battlemage' type of magic. Always makes me feel like I'm reading a transcript of an RPG session. Was also reading the final fight scene with the impression that Windrunners had gravation/regrowth and that Szeth had the skybreaker honorblade with gravation/something else. But since lashing requires adhesion/gravitation, shouldn't Szeth have instantly realized that Taravangian was lying to him when Kaladin used lashings? And I know that at the time of the final Szeth was completely crazy but only in a way that serves the plot. But I'm still excited to find out what happens next in the story, so I do like the Stormlight Archives.
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Aug 7, 2016 17:03
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You can use more than one honorblade, so kaladin could have had two of them with 3 or 4 different total surges. Szeth's specific brand of brain problems is entirely based around following his society's laws. The oathstone is literally just a rock. Dude is not going to re-offend with his blasphemous 'surgebinders are back' talk when there's another explanation.
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Aug 7, 2016 17:43
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Monocled Falcon posted:Really disappointed that surgebinding turned out to give all users magic healing powers. I had thought that windrunners were gravity/healing(regrowth) and that's why Kaladin could heal, but no, it turns out that windrunners are adhesion/gravation. Yeah, I'm not very happy with the implications of the almost infinite healing capabilities of stormlight either. Unless you crush someone's skull, no damage will be permanent. Fall hundreds of feet, chop off limbs, sever spines, stab them through the heart, it doesn't matter unless you take care to deplete their mana pool first!
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Aug 7, 2016 22:56
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Subvisual Haze posted:And it's bizarrely unnecessary too. All these magic powers will be slowly revealed to us later in the narrative, there's no need to drown the audience in robotic descriptions of vector addition equations from the get go. If the point was just to preview to the audience some of possibilities of your magic system then just vaguely describe the mysterious guy doing some crazy poo poo involving gravity and mopping the floor with some mooks to show how badass he is. In TWOK, there are actually two "prologues" as such - you have the prelude from the POV of Kalak and then you have the prologue from the POV of Szeth. The prelude gives you a promise of an immense scope of the story, millenia of history, the world ending and betrayal. The prologue is not just to preview the possibilities of the magic system (though certainly that is one of the aims) - it sets up three different cultures, does a bunch of foreshadowing and establishes the character of Szeth. broken clock opsec posted:The point for Way of Kings prologue is that it really was over explained. Using Szeths point of view in it at all was a mistake, it should have been from Sadeas if anyone. If you're an experienced reader, then yes, I agree that some sections can feel "over-explained". However - as someone else has already pointed out - individual preference does come in to this quite a bit. As a reader, you learn over time how to analyse text for hidden meanings and so you can keep up with more subtle and nuanced writing - e.g. vague named references to places/people/events in history that hasn't been shown on the page yet. But if you don't normally read a lot of epic fantasy, then this can be quite confusing. In the prologue of a ten book epic, I'd argue it's probably a fair choice to "over-explain" a bit to give new readers some training wheels so that they can get onboard for the ride. Getting the prologue from Sadeas' POV would have lost quite a bit because you wouldn't get to see the excesses of Alethi culture or the apparent contradictions in Parshendi culture/thinking from the perspective of an outsider. You wouldn't get to see the tail end of the feast with a bunch of mysterious characters (Heralds) in juxtaposition with their legends. Sadeas retired from the feast with Gavilar and he's seen running away from Szeth as a decoy - I don't know how much you really would have "seen" from his perspective. Add in some other foreshadowing about how the honor blades work differently to Radiant/shard blades and the black sphere and there's no way you can achieve all of that without using Szeth's perspective. There are other considerations as well. - Szeth is confirmed a viewpoint character in the first five book arc of Stormlight Archive - the reader needs to find his internal conflict intriguing enough so that he's not just immediately dismissed as the bad guy. - Many of the other characters know too much to be POV characters (e.g. Parshendi in attendance, Gavilar, Heralds) and other characters don't know enough (Sadeas, other Alethi elite, a random bystander, etc). At this point, Szeth knows something is up but he doesn't know too much, so his POV is a good choice. - Brandon has confirmed we will eventually see Gavilar's assassination from 5 different perspectives. We've already had 2 (WOR opened with Jasnah). By the time we see the other 3 perspectives, more of the plot will have been revealed so Brandon has more freedom to choose a character who knows more. To sum it up - I just think the amount of bashing Sanderson has copped in this thread is out of proportion to the actual writing. I'm pretty sure he's thought about the pros and cons, and he has good reasons for the choices he made with the prologue. Some of these reasons we won't know about until the whole series is finished. Just like the end of Mistborn was foreshadowed from the first epigraph in the prologue, the end of the whole Stormlight Archive series has been confirmed to be contained somewhere in TWOK and WOR.
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Aug 8, 2016 00:10
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"An objective thesis on why a chapter from a pulp fantasy novel is actually good and shouldn't be criticized as much as it is"
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Aug 8, 2016 00:43
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Reading back, does anyone else find Ruin's personality a bit off? He keeps giving speeches to protagonists about how the concept of destruction isn't inherently evil, just a natural part of life, but then drives people around the world to be crazy murderers and rants and raves when things don't go his way. He isn't really a dispassionate force of entropy as much as a crazy person. He clearly couldn't have been that way when he helped create the world. The books seem to suggest Ati lost himself to the shard's nature over time, but he doesn't really seem to match that nature either though. I wonder if Ruin only went crazy because of what Preservation proactively did?
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Aug 8, 2016 01:32
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Oh god, I wasn't as orginal as I thought bashing Sanderson's magic system. I do like the basic nature, though.
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Aug 8, 2016 01:58
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Leng posted:If you're an experienced reader, then yes, I agree that some sections can feel "over-explained". However - as someone else has already pointed out - individual preference does come in to this quite a bit. As a reader, you learn over time how to analyse text for hidden meanings and so you can keep up with more subtle and nuanced writing - e.g. vague named references to places/people/events in history that hasn't been shown on the page yet. But if you don't normally read a lot of epic fantasy, then this can be quite confusing. In the prologue of a ten book epic, I'd argue it's probably a fair choice to "over-explain" a bit to give new readers some training wheels so that they can get onboard for the ride. Dude multiple people I've talked to picked up the book as their first sanderson, read that chapter and put it down because it was - in one person's words - like a video game tutorial level. It's bad exposition dumping, and it's unneeded - Kaladin figures this poo poo out later in the book in a more gradual, organic way that provides all the 'training wheels' you need, since he's figuring it out along the reader.
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Aug 8, 2016 02:03
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Tunicate posted:Dude multiple people I've talked to picked up the book as their first sanderson, read that chapter and put it down because it was - in one person's words - like a video game tutorial level. The prologue is somewhat awkward, yes. But there is something to be said about knowing more than Kaladin does about how Stormlight works. It makes those passages interesting in a different way.
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Aug 8, 2016 03:50
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The first chapter there is really not the greatest I've ever read, but I'll take it if it means there's no "A wizard did it" whenever he runs into a problem with his plot. Maybe it would better if he set his magic system in stone in his own notes and then worked from there, gradually exposing the readers to it. I am not sure why he did it so heavy handed with that first chapter, didn't he comment on it in some interview as well?
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Aug 8, 2016 06:30
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TheMadMilkman posted:The prologue is somewhat awkward, yes. But there is something to be said about knowing more than Kaladin does about how Stormlight works. It makes those passages interesting in a different way. It's not somewhat awkward. It is tremendously awkward. It's writing straight out of a video game tutorial level. You're running down the hall at the guards and then suddenly the game pauses and a window pops up to let you know that you can use LT+<direction> to adjust which way gravity pulls you and that you should try it now. And after that it points out that you can use RT+<direction> to adjust which way gravity pulls your target. And then after you use a gravity shift to piledriver the guards into the celing it pauses again and points out that your mana bar has gone down and that you can restore mana by draining the glowing crystals that you find on the walls and dropped by enemies. It is easily the single worst bit of writing he has ever done, and that's saying a lot.
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Aug 8, 2016 07:02
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I was in this thread a few days ago complaining about having to learn how all the powers worked in the first Mistborn book, but after that first fight scene, it started to feel more natural and the rest of the book was a breeze. Hopefully the rest of the series holds up. I'm currently reading his annotations for The Final Empire on his website. I just got done reading ASOIAF, so it's really funny to hear him fret over the amount of violence in this book. I wish he'd learn a synonym for "maladroit," though.
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Aug 8, 2016 08:36
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Lester Shy posted:I wish he'd learn a synonym for "maladroit," though. Every author has a word or phrase that they love to use. Maladroit is less egrigious than most. berenzen fucked around with this message at 11:10 on Aug 8, 2016 |
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Aug 8, 2016 10:43
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Khizan posted:It is easily the single worst bit of writing he has ever done, and that's saying a lot. Hyperbole aside, I agree this chapter is definitely not one of his better chapters by a long shot. Subvisual Haze posted:"An objective thesis on why a chapter from a pulp fantasy novel is actually good and shouldn't be criticized as much as it is" The fact that this (and a few other things) is what we're debating speaks a lot to the quality of the writing itself. There are a lot of other books where you could make a fair argument for a laundry list of criticisms instead of just a couple. I know other people have accused him of lacking depth in his characterisations, his prose and the way he writes internal monologue (e.g. Vin/Elend/Sazed in Well of Ascension). But until you've read some truly awful writing, like say Elspeth in "The Red Queen" (final instalment in Isobelle Carmody's 7 book Obernewtyn series), I think we're operating with very different baseline benchmarks for terrible info dumping and a tremendously awkward cringeworthy whinge-fest of an excuse for internal monologue. Tahirovic posted:Maybe it would better if he set his magic system in stone in his own notes and then worked from there, gradually exposing the readers to it. I am not sure why he did it so heavy handed with that first chapter, didn't he comment on it in some interview as well? I seem to recall this as well, but couldn't find the source. At any rate, he does already do this - the best example is how the Metallic Arts have evolved over the course of the 7 published Mistborn books, and where he's headed for future books:
But yeah, Sanderson made a choice to approach writing magic as a science rather than some vague "Will and the Word" art form - so hard sci-fi is probably a better comparison in that sense than other fantasy. One of the cons that comes with doing this is he has to define the science of the entire magic system over the series to say, the depth of knowledge that you'd expect a high school graduate to generally know about physics. Then, he has to bring the reader up to speed on that amount of material over the course of the series. Like if you don't already understand Newton's laws of motion (e.g. Mistborn 1 Era), you're probably not going to be able to understand the conservation laws (Mistborn 2 Wax & Wayne Era) and the basic principles of relativity (somewhere in Mistborn 4 Era). There's not a lot of ways to do this and none of them are perfect, so you end up with trade-offs. I could go on and on because I find thinking about this from a writer's perspective fascinating but I get the feeling that this topic is played out. So.... Subvisual Haze posted:Reading back, does anyone else find Ruin's personality a bit off? He keeps giving speeches to protagonists about how the concept of destruction isn't inherently evil, just a natural part of life, but then drives people around the world to be crazy murderers and rants and raves when things don't go his way. He isn't really a dispassionate force of entropy as much as a crazy person. He clearly couldn't have been that way when he helped create the world. The books seem to suggest Ati lost himself to the shard's nature over time, but he doesn't really seem to match that nature either though. I wonder if Ruin only went crazy because of what Preservation proactively did? It could be that Ruin was just making whatever easy arguments there were to make in the moment to try and win them over, rather than seeing those things as truth. He's just following the Intent to bring the entire world to ruin, by whatever means possible. However, I think I'm inclined to agree with you that Ati was not in his right mind by the end. There's a piece of Realmatic Theory floating around that talks about whether a Vessel (person who holds the power of a Shard) is well matched with the Intent of the Shard they hold. Like you've said, over time the Vessels take on the Intent of their Shard and can't act against it. So if you have a basically "good man" like Ati getting stuck with a Shard like Ruin where the Intent runs counter to his beliefs, you end up with massive internal conflict. Hence when Vin (and Secret History: Kelsier) interact with the cognitive aspect of Ruin, they basically get to see Ati who has been all twisted up to suit the Intent of his Shard. I'm not actually sure whether Ati was already like that when Scadrial was created. The creation myth that we get through the first trilogy is that Preservation and Ruin were in conflict until they made their pact - I don't think it specifically says how long. But given what we've seen through Vin and Sazed POVs when they hold the power, this could have been a long time - long enough that the man once known as Ati was completely overtaken by the Intent of Ruin and it was this cognitive aspect that made the bargain with Preservation. (and somehow I've now written  again...it wasn't my intention to write a mini-thesis in each post, but I just find this stuff so drat interesting to discuss that it's hard to shut up about it and I'm just going to shut up now before this gets any longer)
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Aug 8, 2016 13:56
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I agree with the idea of shard personality conflict potentially causing problems. It's my theory that this is how Odium does his mysterious splintering of other shards. He somehow injects part of his shards odious nature into the planet that the other shard is invested into. The existing shard is now tainted by odium and at cross purposes with itself, causing it to kill its current user and shatter into smaller pieces like an autoimmune disorder in human pathology. I think this will partially tie into the mysterious "rust" metal. It's some sort of ruin/other shard hybrid.
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Aug 8, 2016 15:38
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Tunicate posted:Dude multiple people I've talked to picked up the book as their first sanderson, read that chapter and put it down because it was - in one person's words - like a video game tutorial level. My experience is quite the other way around. My friends loved the way he explains a bunch of cultures and a whole magic system in the prologue. But could not stand the drag of Kaladin and Shallan heading to their destinies. Their complaint is that the promise of action and wonder takes too long to pay. NeruVolpi fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Aug 8, 2016 |
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Aug 8, 2016 16:50
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Leng posted:Getting the prologue from Sadeas' POV would have lost quite a bit because you wouldn't get to see the excesses of Alethi culture or the apparent contradictions in Parshendi culture/thinking from the perspective of an outsider. You wouldn't get to see the tail end of the feast with a bunch of mysterious characters (Heralds) in juxtaposition with their legends. Sadeas retired from the feast with Gavilar and he's seen running away from Szeth as a decoy - I don't know how much you really would have "seen" from his perspective. Add in some other foreshadowing about how the honor blades work differently to Radiant/shard blades and the black sphere and there's no way you can achieve all of that without using Szeth's perspective. I agree that the non-surgebinding parts of the prologue with Szeth are very good, especially in hindsight. I began to like it even more after reading Jasnah's perspective and realizing that we will get 5 viewpoints in total. The black sphere still hasn't been explained, and we don't know where it is now (Szeth hid it somewhere, but Chekhov's Gun will come up again for sure). Gavilar's words about Thaikandar or Restares being "too late" in assassinating him are also still a mystery. Too late for what? It's all very intriguing, marred by too much of the RPG rulesbook stuff. Sanderson could have explained how surgebinding works in detail in one of the Szeth interludes, and it would have worked much better, without scaring off potential readers of his (imho) best series. It absolutely was a mistake to do it this way.
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Aug 8, 2016 19:29
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Subvisual Haze posted:It's my theory that this is how Odium does his mysterious splintering of other shards. He somehow injects part of his shards odious nature into the planet that the other shard is invested into. The existing shard is now tainted by odium and at cross purposes with itself, causing it to kill its current user and shatter into smaller pieces like an autoimmune disorder in human pathology. WOR epigraph letter/Cosmere discussion: Isn't Odium confined to the Rosharan system, as either a direct result or consequence of Honor's actions (which I'm currently assuming to be the Oathpact)?  If so, then according to the chronology there would be a pretty tight timeframe for Rayse to go from killing Aona and Skai and splintering Devotion and Dominion, then hop on over to Scadrial to do whatever - BEFORE Ruin and Preservation made their pact? - and then moving to Roshar and being confined to Braize by the Oathpact and then millenia passing before the first five books in Stormlight Archive...Cosmere/White Sand/Shadows of Self spoilers: I'm personally inclined to think that Trellium is not of Odium - although it is possible with the timeline - but rather Autonomy, particularly when you take in the nature of Bleeder/Paalm's ranting and raving about "freeing" people from Harmony's influence and cutting strings, etc. Though the question then becomes why Bavadin would leave Taldain. I haven't read the unpublished White Sands yet, only Vol 1 of the graphic novel. Hopefully the graphic novel series gets finished faster than Stormlight 3 or The Lost Metal so we can have canon to continue our theorycrafting before things get confirmed... Torrannor posted:Sanderson could have explained how surgebinding works in detail in one of the Szeth interludes, and it would have worked much better, without scaring off potential readers of his (imho) best series. It absolutely was a mistake to do it this way. NeruVolpi posted:My experience is quite the other way around. Can't please 'em all!  I think the other thing that was about as polarising is probably the Lift chapters. The first time I read it I just eye rolled at all the awesome because my immersion, but I know there are people who absolutely adore Lift and thought it was completely appropriate. Now that I know it's there, it doesn't bother me as much as it did at first and there's not actually as many uses of awesome as I initially thought.
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Aug 9, 2016 01:07
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Leng posted:WOR epigraph letter/Cosmere discussion: Oh, I agree, I was just using Odium as an example there of how one shard could theoretically turn another against itself. As for Rust/Trell it's Autonomy, almost without a doubt. Sazed's description in their religion as a people in darkness fearing the sun and mapping the stars is a dead match for the advanced civilizations on the dark side of Taldain (where Khriss originates from). Oddly enough the original Trell religion seemed like an anti-Autonomy one, maybe a religion brought to Scadriel in the distant past by refugees from Taldain. Big Original White Sand Spoiler: (not even sure if this will be accurate anymore with the new version) There's a relatively minor character named Eric who has extreme commitment phobia. In fact he has Gollum-like conversations with himself when alone where "Eric" repeatedly tells him that everyone is out to use him and he shouldn't let himself be used as a tool by others. So basically Autonomy is whispering "everyone wants to use you, run away, be an individual" thoughts into his mind, like Ruin used to whisper "kill everyone" thoughts on Scadriel. It's pretty easy to see how Paalm using an Autonomy spike could result in her having gone nuts like she did.
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Aug 9, 2016 02:05
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ConfusedUs posted:I feel like Mount Char was really good for about 80% of the book, and then just fell apart, hard, at the end.
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Aug 9, 2016 05:11
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Leng posted:Can't please 'em all! I think most people are annoyed because that part reads like a facebook post by a 10 year old at first. I kinda like it because it's a nice change of tone, especially among all those rather whiny Kaladin chapters. I know he's depressed but I just finished work and I am on my commute home, I don't want to end up depressed too, so lets have some more awesome.
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Aug 9, 2016 06:37
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I really wanted to like Stormlight Archives after reading all of Sandersons other stuff, but the realization that I'd be enduring over 4 million words with his standard-Sanderson characters made me drop the series entirely. His stories are interesting because of the care he puts into the magic and the worldbuilding, but those can only sustain a narrative for so long before the characters need to start pulling their weight. I can't think of a single Stormlight character - or any other Sanderson character, for that matter - that has enough complexity for me to want to slog through ten books the size of Way of Kings. For those of you who can, you're better readers than I. I'll just stick to his one-offs and novellas.
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Aug 9, 2016 16:33
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I agree sanderson's characters are not his forte. One of the reasons I drag through Wax Wayne are the main characters. But the ones from stormlight are actually his better ones. Especially in WoR. Jasnah is particularly well built. Kaladin being clinically depressed is an outlier im his works. Even Adolin has more depth than it looks. Try giving it a shot. Even the quality of character descriptions is better in stormlight.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:02
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I did give it a shot, I got through all of book one and partway through book two. It just didn't work for me.
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Aug 9, 2016 19:31
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