• The first book is explicitly meant to be "What if Fellowship of the Ring, but Gandalf a woman??" It even follows the plot suspiciously closely, with four five rural friends being chased from home by dark riders with unnatural powers, barely escape across a ferry, meet up in a small town they mistake as a big city to team up with a wizard and mysterious fighter, then head off to the actual big magical city before heading out into the big unknown wild on their actual adventure. After this is when it starts becoming its own thing.
  
• Jordan is looser with magic rules than Sanderson, though he's more on the structured end of the scale. Still, characters pull stuff out of their asses and sometimes things get contradictory, especially with early books
  
• The majority of the series is about political intrigues and epic battles, the fates of cities and nations and Houses and heroes and villains vying for control and reacting to surprises. Jordan however is more subtle and vague than Sanderson. He uses third person limited perspective for his characters , and they are often not only wrong about what they know but wrong about understanding themselves. One character contradicts themselves in a single sentence and often in the course of a conversation, complaining about violent men before thinking about beating them up for it, another is insane talking out loud to a voice in their head, but if you aren't paying close attention you might not realize it. Things the characters see but don't understand are only given passing mention - if they mention a short person wearing a red coat, it's 50/50 whether they're just background or it's another character doing something else. Characters meet in disguise and don't know each other, but you can sometimes figure out who was there by what they know or how they say things.
  
• Relatedly, subtext is a big part of the series. The relationship between Siuan and Moiraine for example is canon, but referred to obliquely as "pillow friends" and ambiguous if it's sexual or just an exceedingly close friendship. Many other things might seem to come out of left field, but usually there are signs you pick up on a reread, or if you know the characters. For example, two powerful and canny characters meet early in the story, but because we're in the head of an ignorant shepherd a lot of their conversation goes over his head and he just observes they don't like each other. This makes the books extremely rich reading, but it takes more effort and not for everyone.
  
• Also relatedly, battles are way different. Jordan was a Vietnam vet with PTSD and it shows with his depictions: everything is chaotic and the focus is on immediate survival, and though you get information about it the whole time the broader battle only makes sense once the fighting stops. You get a broad feeling for how the battle is going but spend most of it just trying to not die.
  
• Fighting moves are explained with evocative but meaningless names, like the sword attack "Boar Rushes Down the Mountain." What that means is never explained, but it gives you the idea of a reckless brute force downward striking attack. Sanderson in my experience is more explicit about how individuals are positioned and fights are more focused on the actions of individual combatants' movement
  
• While progressive for its time it was still written in the 90s and some things haven't aged well. Jordan has an inclusive and diverse cast and the themes of cooperation being good, miscommunication common, and racism/prejudice being bad are all quite relevant, but two-gender essentialism is built into the story. The only arguably trans character is a bad person, and put in the wrong body as punishment/humiliation. There are a few same sex relationships but they aren't prominent or obvious, and there are several instances of multiple-partner relationships but clumsily implemented and usually polygamous instead of polyandrous. That said, this is probably just because Jordan died before a lot of progress was made and his wife believes he would be a good ally today.
  
• Speaking of his wife, she was his editor and while undoubtedly whip smart she may have let Jordan get away with too much wordiness and meandering plotlines. And inclusion of his spanking kink. And lots of arms being crossed under ample bosoms.

• Alcatraz 6 is coming out at last. From memory, he didn't have to do a whole lot to get it to publication ready status, because it's from Bastion's POV so it is a co-written project where somebody else was going over the character's voice to give it a different feel to Alcatraz
  
• Defiant 1.0 draft is two thirds complete - apparently it's not the end of the world if he doesn't finish by the end of the year? I'm guessing that's because he did a bunch of work on the Stormlight 5 outline when he was outlining Stormlight 4, so perhaps he doesn't need to move on to Stormlight 5 on 1 Jan
  
• Sanderson is finally thinking about going on Patreon - the currently contemplated backer reward is video annotations of his work
  
• Lost Metal is up for preorder! Preorder links here: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/the-lost-metal-by-brandon-sanderson/
  

Leng fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Dec 17, 2021