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The Brandonothology


Chaos

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It's time to give this a permanent link on General Theories. This wonderful Brandonothology is pretty much the best resource for cosmere research ever. All credit goes to zas678.

Link: https://sites.google.com/site/brandonothology/home

Here's Zas's introduction to this:

This is the Brandonothology. It is a collection of interviews and answers that have been gathered, and in the ultimate source in Brandon Sanderson unique information. After looking at the mess that was the old Brandonothology, I decided it was time for some changes. Now the pages are seperated by series. If you just want to read about the cosmere, you’re welcome to do so. If you really need to read about why he wrote the Way of Kings, you can find it without looking through the entire thing.

I am zas678, and am most often found at 17thshard.com, the Official Brandon Sanderson Fansite, and the perfect place to disucss the cosmere with fellow fans of Brandon Sanderson’s works. If you find any discrepancies, tell me there.

If you don’t want to miss a single detail, read it here on the Brandonothology.

The Annotation files that I have are linked to the individual book pages. Annotations for Elantris, all Mistborn novels, and Warbreaker are posted.

The Brandonothology is now in chronological order, starting with the oldest and going to the most recent. I also decided to include the publication dates of the books. That way, if you’ve only read the Mistborn Triology and Elantris, there are still books you can read. I still however, suggest you don’t read the Cosmere page until you’ve read everything.

Edited by Chaos
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  • 3 weeks later...

It's done. Version 3.0 of the Brandonothology is up and running.

The new link is https://sites.google.com/site/brandonothology/ , quite a bit better than that mess of a URL that was Google Docs. I updated it with the Reddit 2.0 interview (Terez's version, though I may change that), and I also compiled the digital versions of the annotations that Chaos and an Heather (a user from TWG) made.

So what do you guys think?

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It's done. Version 3.0 of the Brandonothology is up and running.

The new link is https://sites.google.com/site/brandonothology/ , quite a bit better than that mess of a URL that was Google Docs. I updated it with the Reddit 2.0 interview (Terez's version, though I may change that), and I also compiled the digital versions of the annotations that Chaos and an Heather (a user from TWG) made.

So what do you guys think?

that is significantly more awesome than the google docs :D you're my new favourite ....uhhh ...thing :D

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Let me preface this reply with two things. First, I think this is a fantastic idea - I've been following the document for many months now. And second, I like to offer (constructive) criticism to everything I can, so don't take the following points badly :)

  • Chronological order. While I think this is the most efficient way of organizing the site/document, I believe that going from newest (on top) to oldest (on the bottom) can be more beneficial. For new users the current order (old > new) may be a little less confusing, but I believe the Brandonothology will get more traffic from returning users, and to them/us it will be more important to see the newest entries on the top. This way I can read the entire thing once (perhaps backwards) and then every time I come back, I will only need to look at the top to find out if there is anything new.
  • Formatting. This is, perhaps, the only thing about the site I have some (minor) negative feedback about. While none of the pages are particularly hard to read, it's rubbing off my e-OCD that the formatting is not consistent. For example, Part 2 has all of the questions bolded, leaves a lot of empty lines between questions/answers/paragraphs, and many of the questions preserve their original format even if it's not particularly good/consistent. I suppose this last point is a design "problem", but I think it would read better if all of them were written according to the same grammar rules (e.g. Which of Your Characters is Your Favorite? > Which of your characters is your favorite?). I have some ideas about how the formatting could be improved, but I won't fill this post with ideas, for now at least. If you are willing to make some changes, I will be more than willing to spend a lot of time with you to work on this - whenever I can find the time, that is. But I will make an effort to do so.
  • Page descriptions. I think I would like to see a little more (structured) information about each interview/QA/page. A little blurb in the beginning that explains when and where this section took place originally, as well as what it focused on. Things like that. Again, it's mostly a thing of consistency - I like it when all of the entities of a website follow a similar structure or format.

I think that's all for now. I haven't read the entire thing after it was ported to the new website, but a quick skimming over several pages gave me this to work with. If you want to work with me on this, I should have some contact information somewhere around my profile. Credit means little to me here - I would be totally willing to help you out as much as I can and let you keep all the credit, it's your project after all. But on the other hand, I wouldn't ask you to start such a massive revision without offering to do at least some of the hard/annoying work of reformatting.

Up to you.

Edited by Argent
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I'm up for revising. The reason that they're in so many different formats is because so many different people collected them at different times. I'll come up with a policy in a bit of how I want to do it.

As for the updating part, I plan on current users knowing when content comes out, as well as seeing the new posting dates (instead of being Brandonothology 9/11, it would change to whenever the next one comes out, probably 11/11.)

The page descriptions should be an easy thing too.

I'll probably keep the Q&A chronologically because Brandon is so spoiler conscious, and because it's a lot easier to keep old customers than keeping new customers.

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  • 3 years later...

The Brandonothology was replaced with the much more comprehensive Interview Database. It's kept really recent, especially thanks to Weiry, who does an awesome job at inputting interviews and Q&As. Usually anything a month old or older is in there.

 

The search is a little finicky- it only matches exact words, so if you search for shard, you won't catch shards. But you can also search by tags, which are generally helpful. 

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