Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Here's the differences between Mistborn and Lies of Locke Lamora.

Lies of Locke Lamora is a loving brilliant masterpiece and easily the best book in the genre in the last decade or more. It's got great characterization, great dialogue, great prose. The plotting is excellent and tight and the worldbuilding is fantastic and interesting.

Mistborn has an interesting magic system.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


I think Sanderson did a relatively lovely job of wrapping up the WoT, actually. There was too much Sanderson-style One Power abuse that made the last book especially all lovely. Gateways are a great example of this. Gateways as aerial surveillance! Gateway/cannonfire/close! Gateway out a lava flood! Block an incoming weave with a gateway and redirect it into the originator!

The entire reason they won the Last Battle basically seems to be the fact that Demandred, the best and brightest general of the Age of Legends, never saw or used any of the obvious gateway exploits, which just feels really loving cheap.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


HidaO-Win posted:

Third Ideal of the Windrunners is "I will protect those I hate, so long as it is right", the Ideals seem to become more restrictive as you go along, greater access to power from cleaving closer to the Sprens ethos.

I never got that impression that he swore the Third Ideal. I think that that still counts as the Second Ideal, "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves." Kaladin lost contact with Syl when he broke that oath by deciding to help/let them kill the king. When he realized that protecting the King was the right thing to do and went back to do it without his powers, I think he had a chance to reswear the Second Ideal and renew his broken oath and that "I will protect even those I hate, so long as it is right" is just a rewording of it.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Szeth:

I liked getting Szeth back. I would have been disappointed if he'd died before I got to see his reckoning with the Elders that made him Truthless.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


I still can't see "I will protect even those I hate, so long as it is right" as the Third Ideal. "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves" as the Second, and another "I will protect" as the Third Ideal? Bleh. Unless we've got Word of Author that it's the Third Ideal, I remain convinced that it's a restating of the Second Ideal and, essentially, just a retaking of the oath he broke when he agreed to let them kill the King.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Tunicate posted:

Who's the best rapper in the cosmere?

Everyone always asks about powerlevels and fights. But who will win a rap battle?

I'm pretty sure that Wit takes that one.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Lobsterpillar posted:

I just read Elantris, got the last copy the library had which was falling apart in the spine. Then the annual library book sale was the other day, and I found TWO copies in much better condition being sold, which were ex-library copies. For some reason the library had decided to keep the falling apart one and sell the good ones. WTF, library?

If I had to guess, it would be that the book isn't checked out enough anymore to justify three copies worth of shelf space, but they didn't try and sell the lovely ones because people are much less willing to purchase a lovely falling apart book.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Xemloth posted:

I'm sure I saw somewhere that the second mistborn trilogy was going to start with a misting SWAT team against a mistborn serial killer

I need that in my life.

This sounds so potentially awesome, but I am pretty skeptical of Sanderson's ability to actually write a serial killer.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Tunicate posted:

Okay, seems that Shallan actually isn't considered to be really that funny by Sanderson. At least she'll improve in later books, it seems.

The problem is that, from what you are saying, Sanderson was trying to write an intentionally unfunny character, but nobody could tell it apart from his actual attempts at humor.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Damo posted:

I did it. I made it through Mistborn: Well of Ascension.

gently caress, that wasn't exactly the greatest book ever. Really hope Book 3 makes this all have been worth it. As it is, I'm almost of the opinion that I would have been fine without ever having read this series.

It doesn't, you would have been. That series went downhill after the first book and fast.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Honestly, I think the Mistborn books are the worst thing that he's written. Book II is a slog, Book III is something of a slog. There's no distinct antagonist. Granted, that's not an ironclad necessity, but there's no characterization or anything else to drive the story without the presence of one. You could cut those three books down into one Way of Kings sized book and it would be a much stronger story for it, imo.

And I facepalmed at that bit towards the start of Book II or so where Sazed finds this ancient metal plaque carved with knowledge and it outright says "Dudes, your enemy-thing can and will gently caress with everything that's written down, unless that poo poo is written down in metal. Don't trust anything that's not written down in metal" and Sazed goes "Oh ho! That is interesting! Time to make a paper copy of this! That can't turn out badly!"

Elantris is better written, Warbreaker is better written, everything he's written is better written than Mistborn.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Damo posted:

I mean, the whole war was averted like in the last couple of pages almost as an afterthought. So the whole book was in service of a plot that in the end felt like it really fell flat.

This is how I feel about basically all of Sanderson's stuff. In Warbreaker. the entire big war was seemingly averted at the last minute cause the guy went "Oh, here's my ancient invincible army, you can have it". In Elantris, the big end war was basically averted because at the last minute they all went "Oh, we have our powers back now and already know how to use them". Hero of Ages had "Oh, it's actually an entire army of atium mistings!" The Way of Kings sets up the betrayal of Dalinar and then Kaladin goes full anime and saves them. And then Kaladin does it again in Words of Radiance.

All of his endings seem to end up in a deus-ex-machina and so they all pretty much fall flat at the ending.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


My wording was unclear. I meant that one in a more generic "Kaladin went full anime and saved the day" kind of way.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


After doing that he pulled an entire flight of arrows into his shield to save the bridge before exploding with light and vaulting the chasm to fight them off alone so that the bridge could be pushed across safely, and then saving Dalinar by besting an enemy Shardbearer with a crappy wooden spear That's pretty much going full anime.

And saving Dalinar from the Assassin counts as saving the day, since he's the de facto leader of the Alethi.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


It's not that Sanderson always has somebody saving the day, it's that they always seem to do it by pulling a day saving rabbit out of their hat at the very end of the book. It's like somebody at the end of the book goes "Oh, that's not right" and pulls a switch to fix the problem.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


The worst part is that he managed to ruin a "supernatural assassin kills a king" scene by filling it with loving Player's Handbook magic-system-rules bullshit and that bullshit isn't even important to the story.

It would be awful even if those details were important to the story, but it doesn't even have that excuse. It's completely loving unnecessary and it does nothing but make the prologue a particularly awful piece of prose even by the standards of an author who's notably bad at that to begin with. It is probably the single worst Sanderson's ever written, which is saying something.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


api call girl posted:

I don't think he got that deep into the details there. At worst we're talking like, LARPer's Guide to Sorcery.

"This was a Basic Lashing, first of his three kinds of Lashings. It gave him the ability to manipulate whatever force, spren, or god it was that held men to the ground. With this Lashing, he could bind people or objects to different surfaces or in different directions."

Yeah, it doesn't give loving weight or volume limits or Stormlight Points like you'd see in a PHB, true. Those things aside, though, this is basically interrupting the action to give us the PHB description of how that spell he just did works, and he does this poo poo every time something new happens in that prologue. It's basically like "The guards threw spears at the assassin and he cast Reverse Lashing on the door. It is a spell with the following stats. Target: One person or object. Range: Touch. Duration: Until Released or contact broken. Effect: Increases gravitational pull of target. Objects thrown at the wizard will instead strike the target of this spell. The spears veered in the air and hit the door."

It's awful and clumsy even by Sanderson's standards, and those are pretty loving low to begin with.

Khizan fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Jul 11, 2014

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Eric the Mauve posted:

The way Sanderson set up Way of Kings, the prologue was necessary so the reader could figure out before Kaladin did that Kaladin is Surgebinding, and what that means.

There are really only a few things that you need to be told for this.

  • Szeth is a Surgebinder
  • What Surgebinding means with regards to the Radiants and so forth
  • What Szeth can do with his surgebindings.

Numbers 1 and 3 can be easily handled in the Prologue without the horrible "Reverse Lashing is a touch range spell with a low yet constant mana drain" type of infodumping that he uses and he has hundreds and hundreds of pages to handle #2 before it becomes relevant to the Kaladin situation.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Lightsong and Hrathen die, but those are heroic sacrifices at the climax. When you get right down to it, Kelsier was a heroic sacrifice at the climax, for that matter.

I don't think that Sanderson has ever just flat out Ned Starked somebody in the middle of a book.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Benson Cunningham posted:

Disclaimer: I have read all his books, and the Wrestlemania scene in Words of Radiance is one of the best things ever.

I really didn't care for that scene until I read the post here that compared it to WWF, at which point it did a complete 180 in my mind and became incredibly awesome.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Karnegal posted:

I don't remember Drehy. Does he do anything significant or is he a super minor character who we never really see developed?

The latter.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


DarkHorse posted:

That said, cologne can be jarring. What if a writer used "Parisian" as an adjective, or talked about Parmesan cheese? Some things are closely tied to the cities that created them, so referring to them necessarily reminds readers of those earth cities and can ruin the suspension of disbelief.

I'd be willing to say that not one person in twenty will read "cologne" and associate it with the German city. I'd be comfortable raising that to one in fifty, honestly.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Everything Sanderson writes is pretty YA, imo.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Rumda posted:

It's that mindset that leads to people complaining about actually flawed characters in stormlight

The complaints are not so much about the characters having flaws so much as they are about Sanderson's implementation of those flaws. Sanderson's just not that good at characterization or dialogue in general, so the flaws aren't handled with any degree of subtlety whatsoever and you end up with a thousand pages of Kaladin being an aggressively mopey idiot followed by his having an epiphany and getting a Level Up animation right before the boss fight.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


syphon posted:

It always amazes me how polarizing that scene is. That scene instantly hooked me and made me very interested in finishing the book. I wouldn't call it the best scene in the book, but I thought it was a very strong start!

It was an awesome scene that unfortunately read like he was including information from the game manual in the book. "Szeth used a Basic Lashing on the guard. This took 5% of his Stormlight Gauge and bound the guard to the ceiling for 12 seconds. If used with the SURGE button..."

It left a sour taste in my mouth before I even got into the actual story simply because of how blatant a rules-system infodump it was and it could have been handled much better.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


ruby idiot railed posted:

I think more thought on it would have led to maybe putting it in 2 POVs, one from a random guard, the other from Sadeas. Point being, not from Szeth. Just emphasize the utter impossibility of what he was doing.

Szeth's fine for this, he just should have told me that Szeth lashed them to the ceiling and they fell upwards without adding in the "a Basic Lashing is an instant with a mana cost of 1U that reads..." stuff.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


mallamp posted:

You seem pretty devoted so I'd say it's time for Elantris. It's not as good as stuff you've read but it's still a fun Sanderson doorstopper and it'll get sequel. Then Emperors Soul and that's pretty much it for major Cosmere works. Well there's plenty of short stuff and YA after that if you're going to go all in. Perfect State was pretty good and Reckoners has its moments.

I liked Elantris more than Warbreaker and the Mistborn books, easily. Hrathen was a more interesting character than anybody in those books and the ending was not that bad compared to Warbreaker's "Oh, the invasion of your homeland that you've been worrying about? Here, you can have my invincible golem army! It'll resolve the crisis in two sentences!"

Khizan fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jun 5, 2015

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


He does that in all of his books, it just stands out more in Steelheart and the like because it's more of a contemporary setting.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Hrathen shows better characterization than most of the characters in his later books, for that matter. I sort of suspect this is because it's an early book and he spends less time sperging out about the precise mechanics of the magic system and so has more room for things like that.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Torrannor posted:

Hrathen makes me forgive Sanderson all the things he did wrong with the female character, whose name I can't even remember.

Hrathen is pretty much the only Sanderson character that I actually like. I think he's easily the best written character he's ever done.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


mewse posted:

I really liked mistborn, even the first novel, but this is the second time I've heard someone having significant trouble enjoying it. It might just be that I can abide cliches without gagging? I really wonder why it's polarizing

Mistborn is your stereotypical Sanderson book and it showcases every one of his problems in painstaking detail. Wooden characters, clunky dialogue, a magic system described with all the wonder and mystery of a D&D handbook, and plotting that goes "Oh crap, I've only got two chapters left, time to wrap up everything all at once." Every one of Sanderson's problem areas shows up in this book and it's so early in his writing career that the rough edges are really rough.

It also suffers from the thing where the first book in a series by an essentially unknown author has to handle matters in a way that would let it fly as a standalone if it failed to gain traction. This means that he has to set the Lord Ruler up and then knock him back down in the same book, and it just ends up feeling very rushed. It's made even worse by the fact that he has to kill Kelsier off before anybody else becomes interesting, and that leaves a HUGE empty space that nobody really fills. I think that if Mistborn were written at a later stage of his career Kelsier and the Lord Ruler might have made it into book 2 and the whole thing would feel a lot smoother.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Ithaqua posted:

I think that's more a religious thing than anything else. He's not censoring the language because he's targeting a younger audience, he's censoring the language because it's uncomfortable for him to write strong profanity and it would upset his church friends.

I'd prefer if he just didn't bother with fake profanity because it sounds goofy, but I don't think it's a YA vs A thing.

I think it's less the fake profanity and more that he's just not very good at cursing in general. RJ had Mat swearing with things like "Blood and bloody ashes" and "Sheep swallop and bloody buttered onions" and that worked for me, but Sanderson's "Storming thing!" comes off as Ned Flanders going 'Goshdarnit all to heck!".

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


broken clock opsec posted:

The Sanderson Avalanche is a feature, not a bug.

In his Writing Excuses podcast, he actually talks about it being a problem:

quote:

[Mary] But the caution with that is that if you wrapped too many of them up with... At the same moment, it can feel neat and tidy and very, very artificial.
[Brandon] Or, there's actually something worse. This was a big problem with me early in my career. Dan read a lot of these books...
[Dan] The Brandon avalanche?
[Brandon] They called it the Brandon avalanche. I still have this, but I've learned to deal with it more. What happened... The problem with the Brandon avalanche, and the avalanche was where I would overlap multiple very powerful moments of resolution in the story, usually involving some sort of twist. I really like twist endings. So you're like, "Wow. This reveals so much about the character. Wow. This reveals so much about the character. Wow, this reveals so much about the character. I'm tired of this." What happens is each one was weakened by the other ones. When I could... When you can overlap a great plot moment and a great character moment, that's great. That's powerful. That's what we're looking for. But if you kind of overlap three character moments for the same character, with the plot and with this, what would happen is people would lose track of everything that's happening. This was very detrimental to my stories working.
[Dan] Often those twists and surprising new character information would also, at the same time as an invasion of another nation because...
[Brandon] Hey, I only did that once.
[Dan] We need to be running while we're having deep character moments.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] But I did do that once. I was bad at introducing third act new conflicts.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Silver2195 posted:

Reading some of the annotations on his website, I actually got the impression that Sanderson is not a very deep thinker, and it's kind of surprising that his books are as good as the are.

I don't think it's surprising at all, because the books aren't that good. The characterization is flat. The dialogue is forced. The prose is workmanlike at its best, and that's being generous. His 'avalanche' leads to a boring middle section, because none of the threads resolve until the very end. It also leads to a rushed feeling on the ending, because there isn't enough time to witness the aftermath of any of the resolved threads.

The only thing he happens to be good at is the technical details of the worldbuilding and magic systems. It just so happens that there's a large audience for that. It's sort of like LE Modesitt in a way; I don't know what it is but if he wrote a book that was "500 pages of some dude building furniture" I'd probably read it.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


thespaceinvader posted:

K J Parker. Very good writer, horrible protagonists.

They're good protagonists, they're just horrible people.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Rygar201 posted:

:frogout:

W&W Era (books and setting) is better than the first trilogy, fight me (fellow) nerds.

That is sort of like saying that getting punched in the stomach is better than getting punched in the nuts. It's true, but neither of them are very good outcomes.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Rygar201 posted:

Do not like Sanderson at all, or just prefer his other work? Cause km having a hard time getting into Stormlight Archives. It's just soo sloooooow

My problem with Sanderson is that he only has two things going for him. The first is strong worldbuilding, and the second is just sheer writing speed. Everything else he does is workmanlike at its best, if not outright mediocre.

Honestly, it is not that I dislike him so much as that there's no real reason to actively like him and so I am continually surprised by how many people are such diehard fans of his wooden characters, clumsy dialogue, and bad pacing.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


coyo7e posted:

Also doesn't he have some prepubescent sailor-moon-esque character that pops up in every one of his novels, even when it's obscure?

IIRC, there's a recurring character but it's an adult male.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


The second book of Mistborn is a steaming pile of garbage, largely because the first book only had one decently interesting character and Sanderson killed him as part of that book's finale.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


MildShow posted:

I feel that Mistborn has enough good there that most people will be able to enjoy it despite its flaws, and it's probably the best example of what you can expect reading Sanderson.

Mistborn would be among the last books I'd suggest to get somebody interested in Sanderson, because it's not very good and the second book is just so bad.

I'd honestly start with Elantris. It was first and has a lot of rough spots, but it also has his strongest character(Hrathen), and the fact that it's a standalone saves it from having a second-book slump.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply