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Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
I'll admit that I don't really have any basis to call Sanderson's dialog "anime". Other people were making the connection and I ran with it.

I guess three main things especially bother me about Sanderson's dialog.

The first is his unique sense of humor that is apparently shared by all of the characters in Roshar. I could not for the life of me distinguish between Shallan's "good" jokes and her "bad" ones, though I think her bad ones relied on puns more as opposed to just being outright insults. And that's weird because puns to me are more creative than saying, "Women run away from your face!" Haha, good one! This is also one of the reasons I don't like Wit as a character. His taking people down a peg just feels super juvenile. A good comparison is the actual "witty" dialog in "The Baroque Cycle". It may not be funny by our standards of comedy, but you can see how it was actually well thought out.

The second is his overuse of ellipses, hesitations, and pauses in speech. I guess I prefer to read, "His mouth hung open," or, "He was left speechless," to, "Uh...," or, "Um." Sanderson does the latter two a lot.

Last, I really do not like phonetic approximations of accents, especially when they parallel a real world accent. For as much as Sanderson does a great job of creating unique cultures and ethnicities that are not directly lifted from the real world, he is awful at speech patterns. Rock sounds like the worst most stereotypical Russian. More than a few characters talked with absurd cockney accents. It could just be me reading too much into the accents, but they immediately take me out of the story. I guess I like the way GRRM does it better with a smattering of colloquialisms to indicate someone has an accent. "It is known." "Just so." It's weird because Zahel does just that with his references to colors and it works perfectly, though his consternation does get overplayed.

The other thing that bothers me to a lesser degree is that everyone shares the same sense of propriety and shies away from overt references to sexuality. I don't mind that Sanderson keeps his books a clean PG-13, but it doesn't jibe with the characters constantly bickering and hurling insults at one another. It makes everything feel really plastic and also gets an eye roll because once again it's totally acceptable to have over the top violence but heaven forbid someone make a joke about male anatomy. It's baffling that the only character who came right out and said "breasts" was Lift, but it was also refreshing that at least someone acknowledged that sex was real and happened regularly. He tries to get around this by having curses unique to Roshar, but no one seems to react to them at all. Of course the opposite end of this spectrum is GRRM and I think we all agree he takes way too far the other way.

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Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

subx posted:

To be fair here, how often does someone actually "react" to someone using a curse in the real world? Unless it's your kid or something (A Christmas Story springs to mind), you don't really pay attention to them.

I think it depends heavily on context. People do react in the book, but only to really tame innuendo. No one cares at all if someone is dropping the equivalent of an f-bomb. It could be that everyone is so used to being around soldiers all the time that no one cares anymore.

api call girl posted:

One thing you might notice with the ellipses and some other pauses in Shallan's POVs is that they are actually special in her case. She'll blank out and ignore anybody who tries to talk to her about the poo poo she went through in her home in Jah Keved, then continue on as if nothing happened. Imagine if you were talking to her and she just shuts down for an undetermined amount of time. It's fairly creepy.

I also kind of was annoyed by Rock's speech pattern, but it was all worth it for Shallan's trick Tyn made her pull on Kaladin.

I'll give you Shallan, but Kaladin is as guilty of it as anyone. It happened with enough frequency across POVs to annoy me.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
My own prediction is that Adolin and Shallan may get married briefly, but Adolin is not going to survive Szeth's book and then Shallan and Kaladin are going to have a PTSD relationship.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:

Can't find the WoT thread and I'm phone posting, but Sony has announced that the TV show has been greenlit over there. Red Eagle still producing though, and I thought those guys are out of the picture now? But Harriet is lead consultant so I guess that's Team Jordan officially involved.

My guess is that someone decided the property was worth whatever the license holders demanded and decided just to pay them and get the drat show made already.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
Don't worry, you'll feel that way about him soon enough and all through book 2 as well.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
Some of the flashback stuff was interesting. When it came to like the 20th ladder run though I was completely out of patience and then in book 2 he's Mr. Mopey-pants and no thank you.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
I would say that some Stephenson books have good endings and some have bad and that it's hardly a rule. The Baroque Cycle for instance has a great ending, but Seveneves has a good one followed by a terrible several hundred page epilogue, which itself ends in a fine place for the minor tale it's telling, but is so unnecessary it doesn't feel like that.

Anathem has a decisive ending, probably his most satisfying. Snowcrash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon do not.

I also wouldn't compare him to Sanderson at all. Every detail that Sanderson introduces ends up being important, even in the boring slogs that make up the middle parts of several of his books. Stephenson introduces ideas and concepts and tangents that are often at best additional characterization or world building but are usually no more than extraneous flavor or simply interesting ideas that Stephenson wanted to delve into briefly. I also don't think Sanderson explores ideas very deeply or develops characters all that well, two staples of Stephenson. Plus, while Stephenson is often grounded in reality, his stories remain mechanically undefined. This would be impossible in a Sanderson book, but would ruin something like Anathem or The Baroque Cycle, the latter of which is all about the struggle for acceptance between two competing mechanical systems and the possible magic undermining both.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

bewilderment posted:

Yeah, Baroque Cycle has an actual ending which is why I recommended it over the other stuff. Basically I see it as a 'fantasy epic' and apparently Stephenson's own intent was to make it a 'sci fi epic', just that in this case the science is 17th-century science rather than far-future science.
I don't think there's much magical that really derails Baroque Cycle other than the very first book making it clear in the first fifty pages or so "Enoch Root is basically a wizard, just accept that and move on".

It's Baroque Cycle specifically I recommend, basically, for Sanderson readers, not the rest (unless, of course you like Baroque and want more). It wouldn't make any sense to say 'if you like Sanderson, try Anathem or Snow Crash' because those don't really have much in common while at least to me, Baroque Cycle had some commonalities.

I guess if you want to bridge readers from Sanderson to Stephenson then that would be the book to recommend, but other than being long I don't see any parallels.

As for magic, the gold Newton is after is literally infused with the essence of God.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

bewilderment posted:

Multiple intersecting plots and kinda-fun character interaction and worldbuilding?

This is vague enough that I could apply it to just about anything. "Why yes, Guy Richie and Brandon Sanderson have a lot in common and therefore if you like one you'll like the other."

That isn't to say that you can't compare Sanderson and Stephenson. They both have world building and the worlds are integral parts of the plot, but how and why they intersect plot points is totally different. Besides, I don't think Sanderson is particularly good at writing or developing characters and the interactions between them is always in direct service of the plot, and comparing that aspect to Stephenson feels really off the mark to me.

But again, I can compare Sanderson to anyone and say there are multiple plot threads and sometimes fun characters in both works, but it really isn't saying much.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
Pretty great news in my opinion and having a weird looking Dutch kid as Rand will make him standout as "clearly not from around here". Randland has always been fairly diverse though. It's been awhile since I did a reread but I remember the characters being more distracted by the Seanchan's shaved heads and accents than their skin tones, and even then I don't think the Seanchan were universally black.

They better get those loving accents right though. Assuming this isn't a disaster and we get season 2

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Sab669 posted:

I would be perfectly OK if they do not be speaking like an illainer, honestly.

Also book 14 ch 37 is TWO HUNDRED FORTY PAGES long what the gently caress

I specfically meant the Seanchan having a southern drawl. We need more of that in fantasy.

eke out posted:

personally i'm very excited to see nerds online angry because nynaeve, perrin, and egwene are all poc

I've already started receiving private messages from my own family outraged at this.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
Temuera Morrison for Lan please.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
Yeah, my family member was just ranting about BLM and how Robert Jordan had a VISION for what a character looked like and we should respect that. Also my kid isn't white and I told him to gently caress off, my kid can be any character fictional or otherwise that he feels like.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

RC Cola posted:

Agreed on that. Padan Fain sucked

I gotta wonder if this was cut down because Jordan died and Sanderson didn't know what to do or if even Jordan had lost sight of the character. I always envisioned him as WoT's Gollum and figured he'd have one last part to play before the end. I guess it was just stabbing Rand in the chest and nothing else. Same thing basically happened to Demandred.

Also the Talmanes bits in the prologue of Book 14 are possibly my favorite prologue.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
Or conversely the only way to beat spanking is to be bored of it.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
I'm looking forward to every reference to the Taint being met with a raised eyebrow and a smirk. "Yeah, Rand touched the Taint. Heh."

Also, Mat is going to cuddle the brains out of a bunch of barmaids and stablehands.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
He's 5-10 years younger than I pictured Lan, but that's a solid loving choice.

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Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

eke out posted:

have you considered that he could easily be 50 by the time a show could get to the last battle

Great point and I think he's supposed to benefit from the Bond anyway.

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