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I loved Way of Kings. I want to be really excited about Words of Radiance... but I just can't force myself to be. Shallan, ughh. WoK had a good mix of perspectives, I really don't understand what the need for mixing up the proportions is, especially when that mix up involves focusing on the least interesting character. I think a lot of "epic" fantasy writers fall into the trap of having too many different perspectives and having these perspectives too often. This is particularly problematic when one character is clearly THE protagonist with all the exciting moments, despite the number of chapters allotted to them. Wheel of Time has this same problem. Every time you turn a page to a new chapter, you can't help but feel "oh great, another non-Rand/Kaladin chapter". Lots of different perspectives works great when there isn't really a central character per se, but when a series has a character so prominently more awesome than anyone else, too many chapters (i.e. a majority given the Shallan focus) from other POVs soon becomes a chore.
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Jun 14, 2013 11:18
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quote:Kaladin isn't the main character I don't buy this. Kaladin's abilities and Sanderson being Sanderson mean that Kaladin is and always will be the main character, even if the books take turns focusing on different characters. It's not necessarily even about who is the protagonist anyway. It's also about who is the most fun. Kaladin, being the Spartacus cliche inspiring everyone around him, surprising people with his magic that was thought forgotten etc is always going to be more enjoyable. Even if it is pretty standard fantasy bildungsroman stuff. quote:Also, I think Shallan's really interesting, especially now that she might get a little more connected to the rest of the characters. I guess my main issue with Shallan is that Sanderson is seemingly incapable of creating more than two different female characters. There's Vin, and then there's Other (Vivenna, Siri, Sarene, Shallan). I don't feel the need for a Shallan book, because I feel like Shallan is a copy/paste of Vivenna, Siri and Sarene. Their personality traits and characters are almost identical. A Shallan book isn't necessary, because he's already written two of them (one of which had two such identical characters in the same book). Arcanen fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Jun 14, 2013 |
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Jun 14, 2013 11:46
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Re: Steelheart and speculation. Calamity is clearly an epic (perhaps an alien epic), and it is obviously one hell of a gifter. It's likely that all epics can gift, most just don't before becoming evil, at which point they'd never want to gift their powers. One cannot gift to people of the same "gift tier". I.e. Earth epics can't gift to other Earth epics, but can gift to "normal people. I suspect a gifted David could gift one of Profs powers to another human, but not to a human who is also being gifted with another of Profs powers. The reason all of this must be true, is that Sanderson is often a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of writer. He wants to be able to establish David as a super awesome "normal" who can defeat epics without any powers. But he's also going to want a final showdown of some sort, clearly with Calamity. So I'd bet every nickel to my name that the final showdown is Calamity vs. David who has been gifted by tons of epics. Because doing this sort of stacking on a normal human is clearly the (only possible) way to create the most powerful being i.e. someone with a chance of defeating Calamity. Calamity either won't take back the powers it gifted to standard epics because of some story reason (e.g. wanting to test humanity etc etc) or because of some handwaved power reason (his gifting is different, can't recall gifting after a certain amount of time etc)
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Oct 25, 2013 19:43
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Just finished the Rithmatist. There were definitely a few issues I had with it, primarily related to the existence of this huge world but being stuck inside a school. I know many people related it to Harry Potter for this reason. Speaking of Harry Potter, one issue I had throughout most of the book was that Nalazar just screamed SNAAAAAAAAAPE the entire book. Fortunately I suspect Sanderson did this knowingly to make it surprise when it turned out that Nalazar WAS, in fact, the bad guy. I enjoyed that Joel and Melody weren't cut and paste copies of previous characters he's written (or the same of such characters in similar books), and that each had some notable character flaws. I think it's tempting for a lot of authors, particularly in YA, to do the Mary Sue protagonist super amazing at everything thing, and I'm glad it was avoided here. I'm also glad that Joel remained a non-Rithmatist. Unfortunately, Sanderson is a have your cake and eat it too kind of author sometimes, so the mysterious 3d chalkling makes it pretty clear he'll become a Rithmatist at some point. I just hope he avoids (JIM BUTCHER'S CODEX ALERA SPOILERS!!) the problem with Codex Alera, which had a similar plotline with Tavi, who became considerably less awesome when he could just kamehameha his problems away instead of outsmarting everyone. Btw, does anyone have a decent summary of Way of Kings? I read it when it first came out, and I really don't remember that much of it. I don't have the time for a re-read though, and so would appreciate it if anyone had any links to a decent summary.
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Dec 10, 2013 00:11
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ConfusedUs posted:I really disliked his Night Angel series because of its juvenile approach to, well, everything. It was a fourteen year old boy's power fantasy. That's sort of countered by the protagonist being incredibly unlikable (to both the reader and the other characters in the book) and generally very flawed. But having an unlikable protagonist has its own set of problems. I think it's true that Sanderson generally doesn't "make his protagonists meaningfully flawed in a way that may evoke dislike or disgust from the reader", but that's clearly by choice rather than an inability to do so effectively. When it comes down to it, Sanderson wants us to be genuinely cheering for our protagonists. So they are never flawed in a genuinely dark way. But they can be effectively flawed; for example, I thought Joel from the Rithmatist was flawed in a realistic way, being incredibly arrogant about his intelligence in a very realistic teenage way. The scene where he makes a comment about Melody being stupid and the subsequent berating he gets was well done, I think. Sanderson can do meaningfully flawed if he chooses to, he just never crosses that line of making a protagonist flawed to the degree they are unlikable. Personally, I'm ok with that.
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Dec 31, 2013 06:27
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So has Words of Radiance ended up longer than Way of Kings? I seem to recall Sanderson saying it was shorter, but I just pre-ordered the audiobook and the Words of Radiance recording is slightly longer (46 hours vs 45 hours of WoK). Of course this is within the margin of error based on reading speed, but it implies at the very least they are of quite similar lenghts.
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Jan 29, 2014 17:09
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Speaking of the WoR cover art, it's funny in a way that it's a Kaladin cover given this is supposedly the/a Shallan book (haven't read the preview chapters). Sort of implies that the publishers realise that it's in their best interests to trick people into thinking it's a Kaladin focused book. I can't say I blaim them, Shallan is a terribly dull character, certainly in comparison to Kaladin and Dalinar, and it's a shame we're getting a book focused on her so soon... or at all really. I trust that it's happening for world building purposes and will all work out. But yeah, if it's necessary, it's a necessary evil. I really hope that Sanderson doesn't write himself into a Rand-esque corner where where we only get a handful of chapters from the perspective of everyone's favorite character and/or the protagonist per book. World building is great and all, but world building using uninteresting characters, especially when it takes up a large part of a book, is one of the most frustrating things about epic fantasy.
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Jan 29, 2014 21:21
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Sanderson can certainly make side characters interesting, no doubt. But you may notice something very telling about all your examples... they are all male. One of Sandersons major issues is that he's not particularly good at differentiating his female characters. He's gotten better since he wrote Way of Kings, and he's always had some exceptions (Vin for example), but most of his female characters are identical. The issue in this instance is that Shallan from Stormlight Archives, Sarene from Elantris, Vivenna and Siri from Warbreaker are all the same character (Warbreaker was particularly egregious in this regard, having two of them in the same book). They all have near identical personalities, mannerisms, narrative voices etc. Even if Sanderson can take the story for Shallan in an interesting direction, the issue is that he has already established Shallan as a character... to be downright identical to characters from his other books. I'm not really interested in a Shallan book in terms of Shallan's character, because I've already read a bunch of books about her (or characters near identical to her, anyway).
Arcanen fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jan 29, 2014 |
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Jan 29, 2014 21:56
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Please use spoiler tags for discussing the preview chapters!
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Jan 31, 2014 04:59
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Locker Room Zubaz posted:The one thing GRRM does well is keeping the reader somewhat on their toes with regards to people dying, in Mistborn and Stormlight I never thought Vin, Kaladin, Shallan, etc would ever die despite being in danger almost all the time. I think sometimes it is necessary to kill characters and I think that Sanderson is unwilling to do it until the climax of books. I really feel like loss can make a story stronger especially when someone the reader really relates to kicks the bucket and it isn't just a noble sacrifice that ends up beating the big bad. I agree. I thought it was pretty weak that both Szeth and Jasnah were revived, particularly the former. Kaladin shouldn't have been able to succesfully kill him if he was going to be revived 10 pages later. I also though it was super lame that everyone and their dog are suddenly radiants. Now, the bridgemen becoming radiants is cool. But Dalinar and Renarin? Ughh
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Mar 12, 2014 13:24
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Xenix posted:I had hoped that Jasnah dying on the ship was sort of Sanderson's nod to the Joe Abercrombies and Mark Lawrences of the world, basically saying that he can get his hands dirty too. I was disappointed, but not surprised, when she reappeared at the end, mostly due to the dust jacket description of the book on Sanderson's website. While others in the book may have fit the description of The Explorer (I was thinking Shen for a bit there, despite what we get told about the Listeners and spren), none of them were women. I'm not saying it wasn't obvious that it was coming at some point, but rather that it happened in a pretty poor way. We go from "OMG Kaladin, you're the one I've been looking for" to "Dalinar the Radiant" in 5 seconds flat. I think Stormfather should have said no to Dalinar, at least for now. I think it would have made for better development if he had formed the bond in some moment of need rather than just say the words, become radiant wham bam thankyou ma'am. I'm also not sure I really like Dalinar being the one to bond Stormfather, or that anyone bonded him at all. In Way of Kings, it was Kaladin who had the connection to Stormfather through his dreams. It was a weird change that now it's suddenly Dalinar who has the strong connection to him to allow bonding (yes, we hear that it was Stormfather who sent Dalinar the dreams via Honor, but that felt like backsplanation to me), and Kaladin's implied connection was basically discarded. Maybe part of it is me being silly, thinking Kaladin should have the "most powerful" spren bond on account of being the true protagonist (yes, we get books from different PoVs, but Kaladin having the first book cements him with the status of actual protagonist). So this makes me think at some point Kaladin is going to get an even more crazy powerup to be more powerful than Dalinar/Stormfather. Speak of power creep, I feel like WoR was easily Sandersons most anime book to date. But most of these moments were so awesome I didn't care. When Kaladin first learns to fly, and later on when he goes super saiyan against Moash and Graves... so much fist pumping.
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Mar 12, 2014 16:50
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I wouldn't necessarily call the dialog anime, but the action definitely is. We have glowing auras surrounding the characters who have super powers, we have actual power up scenes. We even had a scene with Kaladin and Szeth flying around having a sword fight. It doesn't get more anime than that. But it's not said as an insult, the action scenes are generally awesome and I always enjoy "character has secret superpowers and reveals them to an audience" scenes. But it's definitely true than Sanderson's sense of humour just... isn't very good. It's a key reason why I've never liked Shallan and still don't even after WoR (the other key reason being that Sanderson has trouble writing women with distinct narrative voices; Shallan is too similar to Vivenna, Siri, Sarene etc). You can't define a key character trait as "Shallan is really witty" and then have her "humour" be incredibly grating. It's why the inevitable Hoid/Wit book/s will be awful. Sanderson just.. isn't funny. The sooner he accepts that, the better we, he and his works will be. Regarding phonetically written dialog, it's much less of an issue when listening to the audiobooks of Sandersons works (the only books of Sandersons I've ever actually "read" are the WoT books). He usually gets pretty good narrators, whose performance adds to the experience and eliminates a lot of the annoying writing quirks you're talking about.
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Mar 19, 2014 18:17
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Jorenko posted:According to the rules we've been told, yes. That 9.8m/s/s is the acceleration due to gravity -- that is, if you're falling with no resistance, your downward speed increases by 9.8 m/s every second. A windrunner changes the direction of this acceleration, and can even stack the force multiple times in the same or different directions. One thing that was wrong about stormlight "flying" though was Kaladin experiencing wrenching everytime he lashed a different direction. He's changing gravity that effects all his mass in the same way (he's obviously not capable of creating gravity at such a level that it would cause spaghettification) and so he shouldn't feel a thing. One thing his speed is limited by is terminal velocity. I wonder if his (eventual) shardplate will be able to transform to give him a better aerodynamic profile. Then again, if he truly does command "the winds", perhaps he'll be able to create vacuums infront of himself and survive the vacuum via stormlight. If he can somehow survive vacuum, I earnestly look forward to him going intersolar and world-hopping in a very low-tech way to Odium's planet. And yeah, I think it's pretty clear that each order gets access to two surges plus a special ability (or two if they get an ability for each surge). Kaladin has his fighting, Shallan has her memory/drawing. They are too closely related to the use of their abilities for it to be coincidence. Btw, was anyone else disappointed that Kaladin was indeed a windrunner? It seems like skybreakers have a better second surge. Adhesion is kind of lame and basically redundant; you can stick someone to the roof or floor by changing their gravity to a significant enough extent.
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Mar 20, 2014 15:20
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Stormangel posted:While it's true that with his eyes closed Kaladin probably wouldn't be able to notice a difference when his lashings changed direction, the disconnect between his visual and spacial cues would definitely make him "feel" something. Ask any Oculus Rift user who has experienced that disconnect. Hmm... Now I wish I had a Rift and could program. It's specifically stated that he feels a physical pull (that shouldn't exist) by the changing direction, and that it's the stormlight that allows his body to deal with the strain.
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Mar 20, 2014 16:20
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Tunicate posted:You're assuming the lashing effects the entire body simultaneously. If there's a short intermediate period where half his body is gravitied up, and half is gravitied down, that'd be noticable. I am, and that's true, but since lashing changes someone's "spiritual connection to the planet" or something, it wouldn't really make sense for the lashing to effect parts of the body gradually.
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Mar 20, 2014 16:42
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senae posted:Yeah, reversing your direction midair would be like pulling 2 G for an instant. More if you lash yourself multiple times at once. Not true. There is a difference in how you experience acceleration because of how that force is propagated is propagated through your body. Imagine you're in a car that accelerates at 9.8m/s^2. You'd feel that right? You'd be pushed into the car seat with the same force that you're currently pushing into your chair. Imagine the car accelerates even faster, you're going to get pushed into the car seat quite painfully. But then compare this to what you would experience if you jumped off a building. You'd be accelerating (towards the earth) at 9.8m/s^2, but you wouldn't feel the sensation of being pushed against something while you're in midair that you feel while accelerating in the car. For the same reason (that gravity is acting on all your mass simultaneously; in contrast the acceleration caused by the car does not act on all your mass simultaneously), you wouldn't feel anything when changing lashings, since you're just falling with down now being a new direction.
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Mar 20, 2014 17:08
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treeboy posted:You'd still experience disorientation as the inner ear adjusted to the new direction of gravity. I didn't get the sense that his "lurching" was like someone pulled on his belt, but rather that his was suddenly falling in a completely different direction and it was disorienting When he first learns to fly it's specifically mentioned that it's a physical strain on his body that he can handle because of stormlight. So Sanderson goofed, in all likelihood. As someone mentioned above, a possible explanation is that the lashings affect parts of his body before affecting him as a whole(e.g. if Kaladin is standing and lashes towards the sky, his head feels the pull towards the sky while the rest of his body is experiencing the lashing toward the ground), but that's kind of bizarre given how the explanation of lashing is given (as a spiritual connection to the planet below etc, which would imply that once the lashing is in effect, it should affect the whole body at once). Arcanen fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 21:46
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Fair to Midland posted:About 40% through WOR, liking it but is Brandon actively trolling with his 'tempest' use now? One page even had tempest 3 times on it. Noticing when authors overuse a particular word is awful, because you'll never not notice it from then on. I went on a LE Modesitt Jr (the imager series in particular) binge a few months back and noticed he used the word "sardonically" practically every page. It's possible they use a word so much that it really distracts the reader and brings them out of the book. I always wonder why their editors don't point out to them how they are overusing something. It's particularly bad when the word isn't really used in everyday language (tempest is a fairly common word, but I'd never heard someone use the term sardonic before Modesitt).
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Mar 21, 2014 21:51
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Lift is going to be awful as a main character, because Sanderson will try to write her as funny and/or witty, which is a terrible thing because Sanderson is not funny and/or witty. Like, someone really needs to be explain to him that he just isn't funny. He just doesn't seem to get it, since he keeps trying in every book. It's like he's under the impression that he's funny and continues trying to be so in his writing, but it's always so detrimental to its quality. The quality of his work would improve drastically if an editor would just explain to him and make sure he understands that his "dad humor" just isn't funny. Not "not funny in an ironic way", just straight up not remotely funny in any remotely interesting way and that he should stop trying to be something that he isn't. Has he ever been asked in an interview if he understands that no-one finds his humourous characters humourous, or thinks his witty characters are witty?
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Mar 28, 2014 00:20
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treeboy posted:It's a love it or hate it style to some extent. I love that he just gets it over with in the prologue and them you never have to worry about what a lashing is since he got all the exposition done in the first three chapters, it can make it a little dry at times though. I think the thing that makes it so awkward is that we get all this lashing explanation that really isn't at all necessary for WoK, since Kaladin doesn't even really use lashing until a book and a half later. While I'm someone who absolutely loves Sanderson's "hard magic", it really wasn't necessary to give us such a precise tutorial of exactly how lashing works, at the cost of narrative flow and turning away a lot of readers, when Kaladin isn't going to do any serious lashing for 1500 freaking pages.
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Mar 29, 2014 06:04
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-Fish- posted:Jesus aaaaaagh I just finished WoR and I'm majorly fangirling out over Seth getting motherfucking NIGHTBLOOD at the end?! Holy poo poo! Sanderson already said that Nightblood is to Shardblades what a Shardblade is to a practice sword. Holy poo poo that's a hell of a powerup. I really can't remember much from Warbreaker (specifically about Nightblood). What do we have to indicate (in terms of abilities) that it is so much better than a shardblade? I guess its major disadvantage (constant use of Breath) is essentially eliminated on Roshar because stormlight can be used as investiture, which would up it's relative "power". I'm also interested to see how far shardblade shapeshifting abilities can go. If a shardblade can be normal sized, or small, and they are always lightweight to the wielder... is there any reason Kaladin couldn't, say, use his shardblade as a sort of spear harpoon gun (i.e. making it rapidly extend 100 feet into an enemy, contracting, then repeat), or a comically ridiculously 10 story high sword Would be cool if their only real limitation was imagination, since then the shapeshifting ability of the shardblade would make it a green lantern power ring
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Mar 31, 2014 03:32
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Zypher posted:Just finished Words of Radiance, but I haven't read Way of Kings yet. I feel like I got the main gist of Kaladin's story from WoR -- am I making a huge mistake by not going back and reading WoK? This is a troll, right?
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Mar 31, 2014 18:05
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Zypher posted:Not trolling. Obviously the best experience is to go back and read it, but I'm wondering if I can get by just on what's been implied / reiterated over the course of WoR. I just.. don't understand why you would read the second book of an epic fantasy series (about the furthest from episodic you could possibly ever get) before the first. You made the "huge mistake" already, by not reading the first book first.
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Mar 31, 2014 18:29
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The Puppy Bowl posted:It gets much better. It does, but I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as WoK for the same reason I suspect you won't; I just don't like Shallan as a character and suspect I never will, though I do like Pattern much more than Syl. It's just hard to like a character based upon Sanderson humour. It doesn't matter that there might or might not be plot reasons or lampshades about why Shallan isn't funny or that people pretend to find her funny or whatever because the end result is the same, that she's horribly unfunny and half her dialogue is cringeworthy "jokes". This is such a widely held view (I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of readers actively disliked Shallan after reading WoK) I'm actually shocked that he took the chance on making a Shallan focused book so soon. Even though this book explains a lot about Shallan, I don't think it really changes much about whether or not people actually like her. In fact, practically every review I read said something like "how you view Shallan will change, but you still won't like her". At least the Shallan book is out of the way I guess.
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Apr 1, 2014 23:57
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It's also entirely possible that Sanderson was just logically inconsistent when coming up with Kaladin's new oath. He is human after all...
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Apr 6, 2014 16:18
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The issue is that it just comes too close with howSzeth dies and is revived; this one is the big offender I think, the Jasnah survival was foreshadowed, but Szeth's resurrection was just bullshit deus ex machina. If he was to be revived so soon after he died, he shouldn't have been killed off in the first place. It really just made it feel like all the important characters in this series have plot armor, which is a big mistake and really unsatisfying. I'm absolutely convinced that the reason Sadeas died in this book as opposed to a Dalinar book was because Sanderson felt he had to have a death that stuck after pulling switcheroos with both Jasnah and Szeth
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Apr 9, 2014 02:05
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Xachariah posted:I don't get why so many people complain about Wit's humour, his jokes are supposed to be lovely and belaboured. It's only supposed to be Elhokar who finds him entertaining, and mostly because he pisses other people off. This is just an excuse Sanderson (or more likely, some Sanderson fans) hides behind. If you find his characters funny, great. If you don't, they totally aren't supposed to be funny you guys! Isn't it nice and convenient that all of Sanderson's "funny" characters have plot reasons that people can use to justify why they aren't actually funny. It's bullshit, Sanderson tries his best to make them funny and people use those excuses to justify the jokes falling flat (i.e. most of the time). But the reason Shallan/Wit/etc aren't funny isn't because they aren't funny in world, it's because Sanderson sucks at writing humour. He's just not a funny dude and should accept that it weakens his writing. Saying that the characters "aren't supposed to be funny" is just excusing Sanderson's terrible humour.
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Apr 12, 2014 04:59
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Guys, Sanderson thread. Let's not discuss spoilers for other books.
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Apr 17, 2014 19:39
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Yarrbossa posted:I don't know about everyone else, but I love Sanderson's "Have your cake and eat it too" writing. I already have plenty of other fantasy series that kill of characters I like to be edgy/realistic/whatever. Fact is, it's loving fantasy and I like to read happy fantasy sometimes. Sanderson fits that writing role for me. No one's saying everyone has to die. What everyone is saying is that everyone who "dies" suddenly coming back to life is rubbish. You're right, we don't have to have characters dying left right and center, but Sanderson has pretend killed Jasnah, Eshonai and Szeth and it just sucks the dramatic tension out of anyone dying in the future. Szeth's case is clearly the worst, with him dying them coming back to life a chapter later. He shouldn't have even died in the first place if that was going to happen and he would get revived with deus ex machina. It's something Sanderson himself agrees with.
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Apr 26, 2014 19:30
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