d4gregg

Dear Brandon Sanderson, I write to you as respectfully as I can to share my experience with Oathbringer. My wife is a fan or your series, and I have begun reading the books with her. Overall the experience has been very positive. I’ve found your work to be a robust mixture of art and entertainment. I love select sections of the Stormlight Archives series, but I find it to be suffering from both overly elaborate magic schemes and shock points. The last straw for me was the chapter The One You Can Save. I fully acknowledge that you have the liberty to write your story however you choose. It’s clear you have very elaborate plans that span years and years for your characters, and you have a very large and faithful fan base. However, I believe there is a fairly narrow line between when an author is writing tragedy and when an author is writing abuse. I have never felt more personally aggrieved reading a story than I did when reading The One You Can Save. I identify some artful connections of fate and the inescapable ripples of a person’s past. I even found the character to be fairly expendable, and perhaps an important turning point for your story line as a whole. What changed that scene from tragedy to abuse of one’s readership (in my perspective) was the excessive nature you stacked layers of misery on top of each other. It was enough to have Kaladin overwhelmed with grief from watching his comrades and friends kill each other and to lose Kohlinar. It was simply too much at once. It took me out of the story and exhausted the use of shock. It’s caused me to do what I call the Martin shift where I simply seek to disconnect emotionally from whatever abusive choices you may make for your characters in the future. It's drained me of enthusiasm and interest in your story. Of course, we can argue that The One You Can Save is merely a reflection of the atrocities of reality: good people are unfairly taken from the world at the cusp of transcending great personal difficulties every day. I can tolerate certain doses of the horrors of reality, though I’m already exposed to enough of it in my work as a psychologist. I enjoy well-written tragedy, but I think you need to pick a lane for your series, so your readers know what they’re investing their time in. I think you need to slow down, focus more on cohesion rather than quantity, and assure yourself that don’t need to rely on shock points to keep your readers interested. You're better than Martin, IMO! I want to keep enjoying Stormlight Archive. I’m not a natural reader of this magnitude, so your writing has had great impact on me for me to be reading as much as I already have. I just ask you to really consider the impact of your writing on others. You experiment with heavy themes of mental illness and fill your story with abundant amounts of self-depreciation and loathing among your main characters. Please keep the well-being of your readers in mind while you continue to write a compelling and entertaining work. Thank you.