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I've found that Sanderson's books tend to be three-quarters of people just hanging around a castle/library/pavilion learning about elements of the setting and one-quarters actual action and plot advancement. Unfortunately most of that latter quarter comes at the end of his books. It would help a lot if he could write a compelling villain to save his life, but for the most part his books feature abstracted antagonists, so there aren't many chapters featuring badguys to break up all the protagonists waiting around for the badguys to attack them. This is true of every Sanderson book I can think of, from the first three Mistborn novels where the Lord Ruler shows up only once in person and the big bad mostly mucks things up in the background, to Warbreaker which is a book where I can't even remember who the main villain was or even if it had one, to WoK and Words of Radiance where the main bad guy is a regretful assassin who is forced to kill because he's bound to his oaths.
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May 23, 2014 03:44
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Dravs posted:Haven't heard of these. Is the Night Angel trilogy any good as well? I enjoyed the Night Angel trilogy when I read it, but I would probably not recommend it unless you've got absolutely nothing else to read instead. For what it's worth, I have only a vague recollection of what happened in the first book and only slight flashes of things that happened in the second and third. I read the first Black Prism book too and bought the second a few years later and had forgotten almost everything about the plot, to the point where even Wikipedia couldn't catch me up. Perhaps that says more about me than about Weeks or his writing, though.
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Sep 1, 2014 09:32
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Well of Ascension has a pretty cool ending at least, but yeah I also thought the first Mistborn book was the best. The pacing on #2 is really off and is a prime example of the "Sanderson Avalanche" where not much happens until the end.
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Nov 27, 2014 00:58
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socialsecurity posted:The main thing about Shallan is that she isn't supposed to be witty her dialogue is supposed to sound painful most people are just humoring her because of her position, all of the characters do grow on you it take a long while, I will say the second book handles that all way better as POV characters interact much more making characterization possible but he does a great job of rounding everyone out eventually This is not the impression I got from reading. My impression was that we are supposed to think Shallan is super-clever.
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Feb 8, 2015 21:10
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Smiling Knight posted:Would you please point out the spoiler? I miss a lot of these things. Also: The weapons master that Kaladin works with has a lot of color-themed idioms.
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Feb 13, 2015 20:24
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It's one of the reasons I am not more of a fan. If you didn't follow all the Q&A stuff Sanderson does you would never know that these worlds are interconnected at all. I hope that's something he corrects in the third Stormlight book.
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Mar 16, 2015 01:15
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Thyrork posted:I passionately hate this idea. It doesn't matter how the real world uses dialogue, if any phrasing is just tossed in for shits and giggles I'd call it out because its bad writing. Of course it matters how the real world uses dialogue. If I'm reading a book about the Three Musketeers and one of them says their enemy just got a wicked sick cut on them, I'm going to be taken out of the story even if briefly. There were a few times where some of Shallan's lines, for example, reminded me more of a 21st century teenager than a noblewoman in a fantasy setting. I can move past it but it still makes the dialogue seem jarring and fake; it reminds me that it's not a person speaking these lines but a person writing them for me to read. As for cologne, obviously people did read the word and make the association to the real-life product and place. It stands out for the same reason it would stand out to me if Adolin went to the nearest butcher shop and ordered a hoagie. Of course we all know what Sanderson means by using that word, but it happens to be a word with clear ties to our own world and not Roshar's world.
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Mar 23, 2015 23:55
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thespaceinvader posted:People who criticise the opening of Stormlight for being too videogamey definitely shouldn't read Warbreaker. All of Sanderson's books are video gamey.
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Jun 6, 2015 16:27
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Thyrork posted:Different folks, different strokes and all that but i still wonder why too. As cheesy and "young adult novel"* as it is, I find the first Mistborn to have a pleasant cast of characters and extremely good at invoking a scene. Would love to see it hit the cinema or a high quality tv show. Young adult novels are simpler and ignore the complexities of adult actions and interactions in order to tell a specific story. There's all sorts of simple shortcut storytelling in Mistborn. We're told through Vin and Kelsier how evil the nobles are compared to the peasant class, but then Vin is disguised as a noble and goes to noble parties and the first noble she meets is a pure good guy who wants to help the peasants, and actually most of the other nobles are good guys too. You don't have to channel GRRM to see that these villains aren't really that villainous. We're told how dark and cruel this world is but we don't really see much of it, which makes this very dirty world seem sanitized. Any book in which characters either go out of their way not to swear, or when they do swear it sounds like Made Up Bad Word, is going to look like it's meant for younger audiences. Adults can handle adult language; Sanderson censoring this language makes it clear his novels are aimed at younger audiences. Finally and one of my biggest complaints about Mistborn and Sanderson in general is that there are no clear antagonists, and the few named antagonists either have very little screen time or it turns out they weren't villains at all. The Lord Ruler shows up very briefly in person in Mistborn 1 and after that the antagonist is a vague cosmic entity that is the literal embodiment of Ruin. In Warbreaker I don't think there was an actual named villain, just a group of people who wanted to gently caress things up for the emperor and his court. Stormlight 1 didn't have a named antagonist and the closest there was to a named villain with any real presence was Sadeas. I can't even remember the name of the villain in Stormlight 2 even though she got four or five chapters of how she was being corrupted. I like Sanderson for the most part and I enjoy his books as something to read, but in terms of characterization and conflict they are all pretty simple. I enjoyed the first Mistborn book for what it was, but frankly found the other two books to be a big waste of time, and I definitely would sooner recommend people start with Stormlight than Mistborn if they haven't read anything by Sanderson.
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Nov 15, 2015 22:07
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computer parts posted:I would think not having clear antagonists is a sign of a more mature work. Not when they're replaced by characters suffering from internal angst over the same unresolved problem for chapter after chapter. Evil Fluffy posted:The main villain for Stormlight is alluded even before their name is explicitly given in the first book and people like Sadeas are never painted as some kind of Big Bad. There's no shortage of greedy power hungry assholes who think what they're doing is right, but I'd be pretty shocked if the main enemy in Stormlight were to change considering Dalinar is explicitly shown past (and future) visions of what Odium will do and that includes destroying Roshar in addition to other worlds. The person you're thinking of from book 2 was never painted as a villain though. If anything she's a victim taken advantage of by her sister and others because she's desperate to save her people but instead fucks everything up by agreeing to the Stormform test. If he's the main villain maybe he could make an appearance in the book. The Dark Lord was kind enough to show up a few times in the first two Wheel of Time books.
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Nov 16, 2015 08:01
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Chernabog posted:Which fantasy series/books would you guys recommend I move on to next? If you're doing audiobooks the First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie has a fantastic narrator. Start with The Blade Itself.
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May 23, 2018 15:51
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Let me clarify A lot of it is slice of life stuff. Character wakes up, trains a bit, contemplates the Big Event coming up, has a meal, thinks about their role in society, worries about some tidbit of lore, goes to bed That's about 80% of any Sanderson book.
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Nov 7, 2018 01:01
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Am I batman or robin The immediate narrative is usually some character putzing around a castle waiting for the bad guys to show up, so yeah all this detail is pretty necessary just to give you something to read about.
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Feb 5, 2019 19:29
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Mel Mudkiper posted:To get back to the original point RAFO
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Feb 8, 2019 19:00
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What other answer are you even expecting? You're not going to read the book and you already dismissed one response of someone replying to you by pulling two sentences out of five paragraphs.
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Feb 8, 2019 19:16
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Mel Mudkiper posted:There was a big interesting discussion in the bonfire yesterday about a topic that got run out of this thread. Except you did get answered, you got six paragraphs that you replied to with two words and a smug declaration that your time was too valuable to spend reading such dreck.
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Feb 8, 2019 19:28
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Mel Mudkiper posted:how When you approach conversations this way it makes serious discussion impossible. For what it's worth I don't even agree that Wheel of Time "subverted tropes" and in my opinion what makes it notable is the sheer scale of the project, with hundreds of named characters drifting in and out of a sprawling narrative. But what's the point in explaining that to someone who has already clearly judged me simply for having read the book we are talking about? Despite my earlier response to you I don't think you need to have read a book to participate in critical discussions of it. But you can't have it both ways where you're here to helldump people for liking the books they read but then complain when those same people are unwilling to engage in good faith with you.
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Feb 8, 2019 20:09
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If you think answering is pointless dont answer. Because like you I'm interested in seeing critical discussion of these books, but unlike you I understand why nobody wants to reply to someone who struggles with every post to conceal their contempt for the conversation they ostensibly wish to have.
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Feb 8, 2019 20:26
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chernobyl kinsman posted:"critical discussion" as long as no one says anything critical Plenty of people offered up criticisms of Wheel of Time in the last two or three pages, including that ConfusedUs six paragraph post. Even Sanderson's biggest fans in this thread still complain about the awful pacing of his doorstopper books, and that's to say nothing of criticisms people have leveled at his characters, how he handles humor, and even the "worldbuilding" that is considered one of his strengths as a fantasy author. Perhaps this thread isn't critical *enough* for you, but after all this is a thread populated by people who enjoyed his books enough to read more than one. Mel Mudkiper posted:Ok I already answered this.
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Feb 8, 2019 20:38
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I am attempting to reboot the conversation Okay I'll give you a serious attempt at an answer. The one big trope Wheel of Time subverted, if anything, is just that the women are the dominant force in this fantasy world, the men are the betrayers in the world's origin story who cannot be trusted, and because of this the main character being a man with power is a huge liability and threat in this society. In 1990 this was a pretty big departure in the genre from Lord of the Rings which had maybe three women characters of note and only one with any real agency. For that matter most epic fantasy was very male-focused with maybe Le Guin's Earthsea as the major exception. Most of the major powerful characters and power players in Wheel of Time were women and the society and world had several instances of women-dominated power structures and societies. In terms of gender representation Wheel of Time was a big change of pace from its contemporaries, and the interplay between the two genders was a major element of the story and undeniably one of its biggest appeals. It's also one of the story elements that has aged poorly; the men view the women as bossy nags who are always getting in their way, and the women view the men as unkempt louts who can't help but get into trouble. Jordan does his best to paint characters of both genders as at times unreasonable in this dynamic, but it is undercut by the framing of the story around a male protagonist destined to save the world despite the doubts and concerns of the women around him, who the readers are inclined to believe are wrong. I don't think the Wheel of Time really subverted much else. The opening chapters are very reminiscent of the Lord of the Rings and while the story rapidly diverges by the second book it is still ultimately a story about good attempting to triumph against a corrupting, impersonal evil.
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Feb 8, 2019 21:52
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We live in a society whose norms are heavily shaped around the Bible and Eve's original sin. The Wheel of Time is an inversion if this where instead it is Adam who committed original sin and the society it portrays conveys this from.the ground up. So it's a twist that goes beyond simply rearranging the pieces on a fantasy board. Men are still men and women are still women in the series, but the power dynamics between them are radically different.
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Feb 8, 2019 22:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:But the trope is a fallen world caused by the deception of a naive progenitor. Making it a man rather than a woman still operates under that narrative framework. The trope being flipped is that women are not the weaker sex, nor are they untrustworthy deceivers. Instead they are the movers and shakers of the world who cannot be dismissed or ignored. As someone else put it a few pages earlier the Wheel of Time portrays an inversion of our society's patriarchy. Setting aside the larger narrative I am struggling to think of another work of fiction that has done something similar. Without an assumption of gender essentialism this inversion is less meaningful. Jordan was certainly writing from the perspective that men are like this and women are like this. So the work does not really hold up as progressive in 2019 where people are beginning to reject the dichotomy of masculine vs feminine traits. The Ninth Layer fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Feb 8, 2019 |
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Feb 8, 2019 22:19
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Well, I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree on how we define tropes. To me, to subvert a trope is to analyze how and why we return time and time again to certain narrative patterns and to create discomfort in the reader by taking that scenario into a different outcome. I would argue that what you describe in the first paragraph is what the Wheel of Time does. The ruling class of wizards are all women and very early on they attempt to gain control of the make protagonist for reasons tied directly to the character's gender. Essentially they believe that the main character (or any man) will go mad if allowed to wield power, and there are women dedicated to put men down when they show signs of exercising this power. Of course an element to this discomfort is that women can be overbearing nags and there's basically nothing the men can do about it, but then we're barely two years removed from an election where one of the two major candidates was dismissed by a good portion of the electorate as an arrogant bitch, so it does work at times as an effective reflection of our own society. When the women are annoying it is because they are annoying from the perspective of the male protagonist whose agency is impeded, in much the same way that many fans of Breaking Bad thought Skyler was annoying for getting in Walt's way even though she was totally justified in almost everything she did. What Jordan is speaking to is that women can wield power, can have agency, and can be effective if given the opportunity. To the degree that he succeeds in conveying this is questionable but it is obviously one of his intentions. He is playing with the reader's existing preconceptions of gender roles in the way he portrays his society and character interactions. This doesn't make Jordan high literature and I will freely admit to the story's many shortcomings, but it's also not a lazy or poorly executed story element but rather a core focus of the story's themes
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Feb 8, 2019 22:57
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Xotl posted:Serious question: about how many pages into a book or series do you, specifically, go before you have an accurate feel for it and are comfortable tossing it aside? And if the author then adds another X books to the pile connected to that book, do you then feel that you have to re-evaluate your decision because maybe it's better down the road / your understanding of the whole as a percentage has markedly dropped? Apply this same line of thinking to movies and ask yourself how seriously you would take any opinion of someone who walked out of a film after the first twenty minutes beyond that they found the movie distasteful and did not like it. Like yeah, nobody has to force themselves to read something they are not enjoying, especially if they feel they could use their time more productively elsewhere. But, like, why should I or anyone else take seriously the thoughts and critique of someone that made it five chapters into a forty chapter book? My mom watched three episodes of The Wire before she decided it was boring and a waste of time. A friend of mine quit Breaking Bad after four episodes, he thought it was dumb Walt didn't just call the police in the second episode instead of killing Krazy 8. They're not authorities on whether these shows are actually good or not. I watched the first three episodes of Burn Notice and stopped watching because I thought the characters were boring and had no interest in what would happen to them. That doesn't mean I have the authority to tell someone who watched the whole thing that actually it's bad. I watched Dexter seven seasons in, largely enjoyed the first four and then hated the last three to the point that I did not watch the final season. I thought the show was awful by the end and from what I heard the eighth season did not get any better, but if someone told me otherwise and had a persuasive argument with it I would be forced to consider their dissenting opinion and I might even be compelled to discover if they were right, if for no better reason than to have reason to disagree with them. I'm not saying the Wheel of Time is a work of art as profound or full of quality as The Wire or Breaking Bad, two TV shows that I think are among the best television series of all time. In fact I would struggle to recommend it to anyone who did not already have a specific interest in the fantasy genre. But I do think people should probably judge it on more information than the equivalent of the first three episodes of Burn Notice, in the same way I think someone who left a meal because the appetizer was fried brussels sprouts probably should not be reviewing the main course. The Ninth Layer fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 01:37
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I don't think it's possible for someone to be "an authority on whether it's good or not" regardless of how much they read or watched Okay then replace this with "whether it's bad or not," since you obviously felt qualified to claim the book sucked.
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Feb 9, 2019 01:50
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Mel Mudkiper posted:why not Maybe you're just talking 100 pages here and not the whole book which is fair enough but this certainly looks like you dismissing a whole book because it's bad. Mel Mudkiper posted:I dont think I ever said the book sucked to be honest. No worries. I'm enjoying the conversation and would rather get you at your best anyway.
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Feb 9, 2019 01:52
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Also re: looking up the plot summaries of things on wikia instead of reading them, I did this for the second two hunger games books because even though I enjoyed the first for what it was I didn't care enough about the characters to want to spend a few more hours with them. I also looked up the plot of star wars episode 8 instead of seeing it in theaters and have no regrets on that one.
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Feb 9, 2019 01:58
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Sure, we all have our own likes and dislikes and I wouldn't want anyone to sit through any bit of entertainment media they did not find enjoying or personally fulfilling. I think it's a shame my mom will never watch The Wire, but at least I tried. I'm not even recommending you return to the Wheel of Time, even if my personal experience was that the Two Rivers intro was pretty uninteresting but that the story became a lot more intriguing once the characters left. In the end it's a long, sprawling and often meandering fantasy story in a world that doesn't exist, and as other posters have pointed out you could read several other books in a fraction of the pagecount of just the first Wheel of Time book. It's hard for me to relate to your experience because I generally make an attempt to read through every book I buy and finish every movie I start. Sometimes it takes me a while (it took me three tries to get into Ulysses) but once I start a book it's pretty rare that I intentionally quit a book. The only exception I can think of is the second twilight book which was too boring to enjoy ironically. Mel Mudkiper posted:Not to open a new can of worms but you should see episode 8 it's probably the best star wars since empire I did see it when it came out on Netflix and thought it was alright. I enjoyed the Luke and Rey and Kylo stuff (Adam Driver carries the movie for me) but found Poe a lot less likable than in 7 and was disappointed with what they did to Finn who was probably my favorite character from 7. I dunno if I'd say it was the best since Empire but mostly because I like ep 3 a lot for Palpatine.
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Feb 9, 2019 02:23
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Sham bam bamina! posted:What about someone who catches the movie on TV, doesn't like it after 20 minutes, and changes the channel? Commercials would make The Godfather unwatchable.
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Feb 9, 2019 05:30
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I think we need to make a distinction between themes and tropes. This is one of those things that I personally want to murder every TVtropes user about. A trope is a narrative pattern that is familiar to the reader. A trope is, for example, the Hero's Journey, or Saving the Cat. It is not the message that matters in defining a trope, it is the pattern by which the message is conveyed. From what I read, and understand, the text doesn't actually subvert these tropes. Instead, the text uses these tropes to explore ideas that are not normally explored in fantasy i.e. gender roles and the nature of power and social control. These are the themes. Yeah like I said originally I don't really buy into the idea that WoT "subverted tropes" because for the most part it is a fairly generic fantasy story that was clearly heavily influenced by Lord of the Rings, and to the degree that it is notable it is in how the series was from the beginning conceived as a multiple books long epic story in which a whole world would be visited and explored. I don't have a critical background in literature or anything beyond just being someone who enjoys reading, so I appreciate getting this distinction between tropes and themes from you. As a final note on women in Wheel of Time, others in this thread have highlighted how it's laughable that a fantasy story having women characters in it was a big achievement, but just take a look at how many women there are in the books. Someone earlier brought up The Worm Ouroboros as an early fantasy book with women in it, but of the twelve characters that were listed on wikipedia only two are women. Jordan beats that ratio just within the five teenaged protagonists introduced at the start of the first book. WoT easily passes the Bedchel test and there are plenty of scenes and chapters with no men at all. That doesn't excuse Jordan's many faults in how men and women are portrayed; just google "wheel of time gender politics" and you will find plenty of articles pointing out various sexist elements of the books. But it does set Jordan above most of his contemporaries in terms of gender representation and the series undoubtedly brought a lot of new readers into the genre because of it. Also it wasn't me who mentioned the Piers Anthony review, I'm just gonna distance myself from that one haha.
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Feb 10, 2019 03:22
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Sure, there were other epic fantasy stories out there. I remember reading somewhere that Jordan originally planned on having his series extend to ten books but I can't find a source on google so maybe I'm wrong about that.
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Feb 10, 2019 04:09
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I felt like nothing happens in Warbreaker, just a lot of people standing around waiting for offscreen bad guys to do something.
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Dec 16, 2019 17:22
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