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Khizan posted:Sanderson's always had videogamey magic systems, but this is egregiously bad even for him. I keep seeing people here describe Sanderson's magic systems as "videogamey," but I think a better way to describe them would be "alternate science" --- they usually follow strict rules (even if those rules are only partially understood by the characters) and behave in consistent, quantifiable ways. Things like Surgebinding or Allomancy are clearly written to feel like additional laws of physics, and generally interact in sensible ways with real physics concepts (e.g., mass, momentum, etc). I wasn't as bothered by the Szeth prologue as a lot of people seem to have been. I think the purpose of starting the series that way was to make it clear right from the start that this series considers magic to be a science with hard limits. That setup immediately puts the reader in a very different frame of mind than in books like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter where you know magic exists, but there's no clear sense of what kind of things it can/can't do. Personally I'm not sure if it would have been as effective to just describe a flying, glowing wizard with a sword in the prologue and then try to come back later in the book and wrap that behavior in the science of surgebinding.
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Jul 20, 2018 16:51
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I just recently finished RoW, but I had a couple impressions at the end that I haven't seen anyone else mention: (Final Pre-epilogue chapter spoilers) On the surface this chapter shows Eshonai dying, getting a quick tour around Roshar from the Stormfather, and then moving on. But my impression was that like this chapter makes it pretty likely that she isn't truly dead/gone from the series anymore? The "obvious" outcome to me was that her soul didn't move on, but rather jumped into a chasmfiend's gemheart, which is later seen protecting her mother and the other listener refugees. I think we've already seen that Fused can possess giant beasts, and given how it's stated that Eshonai saw everything on her storm tour and suddenly understood how the world fit together, it seems like she may understand how to do this too. And of course the cosmere has some other notable examples of death not really sticking for heavily invested characters... (Herald and Unmade spoilers) Given Ishar's very abrupt transition from madness to sanity and back to madness (even mid-sentence), it seems pretty likely that at least he isn't actually suffering from traditional old-age madness, but is rather under the influence of some external power. There's still a lot of ambiguity about the real nature of Ba-Ado-Mishram or where her gemstone is, so a long-lived herald seems like the most likely person to be in possession of the gemstone if it still hasn't been found at this point. My suspicion is that this is a "One Ring" situation and even though she's technically imprisoned, she can still exert some influence on whoever holds the gemstone; Ishar's madness is actually a result of Ba-Ado-Mishram wearing him down and whispering in his ear for so long. That would also explain the strange experiments with bringing spren into the physical realm --- if Ba-Ado-Mishram can eventually be freed from her prison, she might consider migration to the physical realm as a way to hide and/or avoid being re-captured in the same manner.
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Mar 3, 2021 08:01
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