Feels Like Fan Fiction?

[VirtuousTraveller]

I want to say I liked TLM, because there were moments that I truly did enjoy.  I think I’m seeing lots of similar feelings though to my overall reaction to some of the “overstuffed/overplayed” nature of the story…

Spoiler

Namely the nonstop references to other cosmere magic and people (seriously, The Emperor’s Soul even got into this thing somehow).

Also, the dialogue with Wayne, which was likable and unique in book 1 and 2, became a lot in The Bands of Mourning, and almost unbearable at times in TLM.  This is a trend I’ve noticed with not just Wayne, but also some other characters like Lift and Design.  It veers into less comedy and more G rated silly cartoon speak, which becomes distracting from the actual plot/character development.

The middle section of TLM in particular felt almost like a fan fiction, as did the “big bad” reveal early in the story.  Then again, we’ve got a bunch of really committed fans who pour over the books and interviews and Word of Brandon that by the time a book comes out, statistically it’s likely that the fan community will guess at least some of what’s coming next.

Consider the difference between:

Spoiler

How Odium was portrayed in the Stormlight books, and how Autonomy was portrayed in TLM.  Odium is a character that felt heavy, well defined, and imposing.

Autonomy’s descriptions felt like copy-paste Words of Brandon from the Arcanum or The Coppermind websites.

I love Brandon’s writings, and I’ve loved all the cosmere books so far.  That said, TLM fell a bit flat.  No author will hit it out of the park 100% of the time, and Brandon has certainly spoiled us with nonstop high quality material so far.  The argument that he enjoys doing multiple projects all at the same time because it’s his process, when the messy quality of TLM is what we get after waiting six years, makes me question the process a bit now.  I’m glad he’s taking more time to get Stormlight 5 right.

Edited December 4, 2022 by VirtuousTraveller

[Gak]

To be fair, people from other worlds being everywhere makes perfect sense given the context, even if it feels a little heavy handed compared to in say, The Stormlight Archive, but that's to be expected; the Ghostbloods are based in Scadrial, and a core reason for their formation was to defend Scadrial.

[CognitiveShadow]

On 12/3/2022 at 11:14 PM, VirtuousTraveller said:

Namely the nonstop references to other cosmere magic and people (seriously, The Emperor’s Soul even got into this thing somehow).

Also, the dialogue with Wayne, which was likable and unique in book 1 and 2, became a lot in The Bands of Mourning, and almost unbearable at times in TLM.  This is a trend I’ve noticed with not just Wayne, but also some other characters like Lift and Design.  It veers into less comedy and more G rated silly cartoon speak, which becomes distracting from the actual plot/character development.

Not sure that I fully understand the complaint here. Isn’t the point of the Cosmere and the connections between all of the stories supposed to work together towards a specific purpose? Part of that will naturally include the bringing together of characters from different books to show how they are all relevant to the overarching story.

And not liking a characters sense of humor doesn’t make it a bad story or bad character. It means you didn’t like them… with each character some people will like the way they are and others will not like them. Brandon doesn’t try to make every character likable to every person, just lets them be who they are in the framework of the story. Though he does tend to explore some eccentric personalities, but I think that makes it more fun haha

[VirtuousTraveller]

11 hours ago, Ookla the Shadow said:

Not sure that I fully understand the complaint here. Isn’t the point of the Cosmere and the connections between all of the stories supposed to work together towards a specific purpose? Part of that will naturally include the bringing together of characters from different books to show how they are all relevant to the overarching story.

Don't get me wrong - yes, I would love to see the eventual crossover epic Marvel Endgame-like cosmere extravaganza.  One of Brandon's best writing qualities is his ability to build up a story (or collection of stories) into a grand climax with incredible payoffs (think about how the flashbacks in any of the Stormlight Archive books feed into the building momentum of how each book finally concludes).  Knowing that this is what I think makes Brandon so incredible is what made TLM feel off to me.  Instead of building up to anything, the cosmere references felt included for...I don't know, fan service maybe? 

I know there's a connection to all these stories, but TLM in that middle section of the book managed to include references to Mistborn Era 1, Mistborn: Secret History, Elantris, The Emperor's Soul, Warbreaker, White Sand, The Stormlight Archive, the Aethers, Odium, Autonomy, splintering, slivers, Investiture, perpendicularities, Sho Del, and probably some I'm missing.

Weaving storylines together is what Brandon does well.  I thought Mistborn: Secret History was a fantastic example of Brandon weaving together crossover moments in a way that added to the story.  Consider another example (reference to Stormlight Archive coming):

Spoiler

When Azure appeared in Oathbringer, that to me was a good example of weaving in allusions to other work without coming off as fan service.  While we could figure this crossover out with some minor digging, it didn't suddenly distract from the story, and only functioned to build a greater mystery as to how and why this moment was occurring in the story.

What this middle section of TLM felt like was, "Oh look - the people in this mysterious group have code names, he-he no subtext at all this person is the girl from Elantris and wink wink this other person is that character from The Emperor's Soul but now they've vanished I wonder what's going to happen now?"

My hope is that the eventual crossover will be more like Avengers Endgame (wow look at that it all paid off), and less like Marvel Phase 4 (leaning almost entirely on crossover and "look it all fits together it's a shared universe" at the expense of everything else).  I said it.  That's my opinion and it is what it is  

11 hours ago, Ookla the Shadow said:

And not liking a characters sense of humor doesn’t make it a bad story or bad character. It means you didn’t like them… with each character some people will like the way they are and others will not like them. Brandon doesn’t try to make every character likable to every person, just lets them be who they are in the framework of the story. Though he does tend to explore some eccentric personalities, but I think that makes it more fun haha

I totally hear you on this point, and I'm trying to be fair that what didn't work for me might work well for other people.  What my "fan fiction" characterization is considering is that rather than Wayne being portrayed as a humorous character, he came across as a caricature of himself (i.e. "he-he fart joke" and "silly Wayne throwing his money away on ridiculous investments like electricity and the sports/entertainment industry!")  Wayne had some really, really solid moments in this book, but I felt like where the plot/story wasn't as full as I felt it should be, it was full/stuffed with "oh look at that Wayne character, remember he's the funny one everyone!" content.

[CognitiveShadow]

39 minutes ago, VirtuousTraveller said:

Instead of building up to anything, the cosmere references felt included for...I don't know, fan service maybe? 

Aaaah ok yeah I see what you mean. There were definitely a lot of seemingly random Easter eggs and stuff like chouta showing up and all that. I get what you’re saying, that’s fair. I guess the hope is that ultimately those little crossovers make a little more of a difference and/or foreshadow/point towards things happening in future books. Haha all the little references have definitely left us theorizing a LOT. I think I agree with you on hopes for the final outcome. Very valid points:

39 minutes ago, VirtuousTraveller said:

My hope is that the eventual crossover will be more like Avengers Endgame (wow look at that it all paid off), and less like Marvel Phase 4 (leaning almost entirely on crossover and "look it all fits together it's a shared universe" at the expense of everything else).  I said it.  That's my opinion and it is what it is  

 

39 minutes ago, VirtuousTraveller said:

What my "fan fiction" characterization is considering is that rather than Wayne being portrayed as a humorous character, he came across as a caricature of himself (i.e. "he-he fart joke" and "silly Wayne throwing his money away on ridiculous investments like electricity and the sports/entertainment industry!")  Wayne had some really, really solid moments in this book, but I felt like where the plot/story wasn't as full as I felt it should be, it was full/stuffed with "oh look at that Wayne character, remember he's the funny one everyone!" content.

This makes sense to me now, I can definitely see that Wayne became more Wayne-y, and the same could be said for other characters as well. I guess I didn’t expect too much from era 2 since it’s kind of been a last minute addition and has to be tweaked to work with the bigger picture. So I kind of figured it would be more of a series with fun connections and interesting stories to draw information from to help understand and potentially predict the more important stuff happening in later books. But if I step back and look objectively at the book itself, I have to admit I liked it more for the cosmere connections and theorizing ammunition it gave than for the plot and jokes. Looking at it critically from that perspective I can see the arguments. Still good, like you said, but maybe not Brandon’s most refined and intriguing story

[StormingTexan]

I do agree that all of the Cosmere stuff in this book was not as eloquently done as it has been in the past.  It kind of felt like a mash up at times. I absolutely loved all the GB stuff though. I think in a perfect world this would have been it's own book though and not a subplot in TLM. I think though we are just at the point where Brandon feels like in order to advance the Cosmere plot along it needs to be way more in the foreground. We saw this in RoW as well. I think he has realized he just does not have the time left to slow play the Cosmere overarching plot like he did initially. He has a lot of things he needs to introduce so they are properly foreshadowed. 

 

[IndigoAjah]

Some bits, like some of the humour and the voice of some of the characters earlier on I understand. They annoyed me a little at the beginning but once the plot picked up I forgot and stopped paying attention to them.

 

The OTT cartoon (sub)villain was a bit of a drop back after recent Cosmere villains too. But Autonomy was the real villain  (or maybe Saze and Kel set up for the future) and that worked well.

 

As for Cosmere stuff, the plot is explicitly about Cosmeric worlds colliding. There's absolutely no way to write this book in a Cosmere -naive way 

[Returned]

I'm on board with this view, too. I do think that a major reason for the heavy-handed feeling is that Lost Metal is the last book in the sequence, so there wasn't any time or space for more setups, while it also would have been hard to work in appropriate setups in the earlier era 2 books. So for broader Cosmere stuff to be added in it really just had to be dumped in. There wasn't time for subtlety in the way that other Cosmere books have used. Other, non-era 2 books in the future will have more structural ability to incorporate these sorts of elements in ways that are less abrupt and more meaningful to the immediate plot.

That said, I disagree with IndigoAjah about the goal being Cosmere-naive writing. I'm excited about the series interacting with each other, and with crossover magics and characters. But the plotting and writing comes first for me. Azure (and, better still, Vasher-as-Zahel) are my touchstone examples of this done well: they are meaningful parts of the stories in which they appear and their introduction, development, and actions are about those stories in which they're embedded. They also happen to be worldhoppers, with lots of implications and details that come along. There were subtle indications early on (Zahel's lifesense, sleeping in a dangerous spot during Highstorms, and others), and later on really obvious indications (Awakening sheets during a fight with Kaladin, Azure cutting sailcloth into roughly human shapes to make Awakening them easier).

That's not how things played out in Lost Metal. TwinSoul and Shai (both of whom I like!) were just dropped in, had little to no connection to the setting or events of the book, and didn't do much beyond showing off their non-Scadrian powers. There wasn't any setup about why they were on Scadrial or why they'd joined the Ghostbloods-- they mainly showed up suddenly, inserted themselves into events, and used their powers to immediately solve problems that arbitrarily arose. To me, they came off as vehicles for Investiture-ex-machina more than anything else. I want the crossover stuff, but I want it to be interesting and important to the stories where that stuff happens and not just be there (obviously or subtly). Lost Metal gave me some real concern that we're going to get crossovers that are more artless than what Sanderson has given us so far just in service of the crossovers being present.

Sanderson is a master at his craft, and given that I felt that Lost Metal had rougher edges than I expect from him.

Edited December 6, 2022 by Returned

[AquaRegia]

12 minutes ago, Returned said:

Sanderson is a master at his craft, and given that I felt that Lost Metal had rougher edges than I expect from him.

Hard agree, sadly.  We've all read MB Era 1... we've SEEN what he's capable of in terms of seamless integration of plot development, character arcs, new magic wrinkles, big endings, etc... and TLM doesn't measure up.  My hope is that it's a result of him writing four other novels in the same time span.

[Tglassy]

I did get a little of this.  I think the Cosmere stuff was a little heavy handed, and the reveal of Autonomy really did feel like reading a WOB.  In fact, I'm pretty sure the exact wording was the same.  

I think it was just a bit much. There was SO MUCH to process.  If you weren't Cosmere Aware, then I'm not sure if this book would make much sense.  The jump from "There could be other worlds out there, and maybe even another god", to "Here's everything, everywhere, all at once" was rather abrupt.  

Personally, I think I'd have nixed what's his name, Twin Soul?  Maybe kept Shai.  As cool as the Aethers are, I think it was just one more thing on top of all the other things he was introducing.  From the perspective of someone who IS cosmere aware, the inclusion of the Aethers is great, becuase it's something new.  But to those who haven't read all the other works, and just like Mistborn, this book has a lot to digest.  

Not really sure how he could do Autonomy's reveal better, since people have been hounding him and asking him about her for literally years.  

In the end, it was a great book, and I think it does what it was meant to: It's a transition series.  It's meant to bridge the gap between Mistborn Era 1 and what was supposed to be Era 2.  The world is slowly becoming more Cosmere aware.  We get to see that happening.  What he wanted to do with what is now Era 3 must need the reader to have been introduced to all this.  I just think, if that is the case, that he should have seeded it a little earlier in the Wax and Wayne books.  Autonomy's reveal should have been in Bands of Mourning.  Maybe even the introduction of the Ghostbloods.  You don't have to connect them to Kelsior at that point, because that particular reveal was wonderful.  But they could have had a presence.  

Anway, it was still a good book, and I cried fairly constantly from the big explosion to the end of the book.  Any book that can get me to feel something is a good one, in my opinion.  

[rabidhexley]

Quote

That said, I disagree with IndigoAjah about the goal being Cosmere-naive writing. I'm excited about the series interacting with each other, and with crossover magics and characters. But the plotting and writing comes first for me. Azure (and, better still, Vasher-as-Zahel) are my touchstone examples of this done well: they are meaningful parts of the stories in which they appear and their introduction, development, and actions are about those stories in which they're embedded. They also happen to be worldhoppers, with lots of implications and details that come along. There were subtle indications early on (Zahel's lifesense, sleeping in a dangerous spot during Highstorms, and others), and later on really obvious indications (Awakening sheets during a fight with Kaladin, Azure cutting sailcloth into roughly human shapes to make Awakening them easier).

I agree. After a certain point (getting close to 10 books into an epic fantasy series), it becomes safer for Sanderson to assume that readers will be fans who appreciate the additional depth Cosmere-aware writing adds to the stories (even if they still function independently).

 

I think TLM mostly ended up how it did due to the limited word-count associated with the Wax & Wayne books, and that this wasn't really decided on until Shadows of Self was written, TLM is the longest book and it's still notably shorter than The Final Empire. So we ended up with two books to wrap of the adventure of Wax & Wayne, but also serve as a delivery method for all this information Sanderson wanted readers to have before he started in on Era 3, while also getting in enough stuff in about worlds we're not going to be getting back to for a while.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Era 3's outline has barely been changed by the existence of Era 2, except now Sanderson doesn't have to work in nearly as much exposition regarding what happened in the post-Catacendre world. We already know about Harmony/Harmonium, Kelsier and the Ghostbloods, the Malwish and there tech, etc. Kinda like how Sanderson can keep the pre-Catacendre explanations light in Era 2 for possible new readers, but doesn't need to go in depth for returning readers who will want to know wtf is going on in the world.

Edited December 20, 2022 by rabidhexley

[Frustration]

On 12/6/2022 at 8:41 AM, IndigoAjah said:

As for Cosmere stuff, the plot is explicitly about Cosmeric worlds colliding. There's absolutely no way to write this book in a Cosmere -naive way 

It wasn't meant to be Cosmere-naive. In fact at the signing he specifically said he's no longer going to try and hide the cosmere, from now on it's all in the open.

[Koloss17]

5 hours ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

It wasn't meant to be Cosmere-naive. In fact at the signing he specifically said he's no longer going to try and hide the cosmere, from now on it's all in the open.

That’s cool! Can ya give me the WoB? I’d love to get some extra context.

[Frustration]

5 minutes ago, Koloss17 said:

That’s cool! Can ya give me the WoB? I’d love to get some extra context.

Here

Spoiler

Travis Gafford

This decision [do be more Cosmere-aware] for this book [The Lost Metal] in particular, was this more out of desire or necessity to start doing this?

Brandon Sanderson

It was a mix of both. I would say it's more desire. There's some things I wanted to get in. This book introduces a character from a world we haven't visited yet who has a completely new magic system that is just kind of part of the story, and I was really hesitant about putting this character in, because you could feel lost. (Even though there's no book for this character's backstory yet.) But I thought, "This is the character I want in the story. This is the story I wanna write. I'm just gonna put him in. I'm just gonna do it." And it worked wonderfully. I love how it worked in the story. And at that point, I'm like, "This has gotta be the moment." The "gloves off," as I said. Before, I've been kind of pulling my punches a little bit.

Miscellaneous 2022 (Nov. 28, 2022)

 

[Tglassy]

 

1 hour ago, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

 

  Hide contents

Travis Gafford

This decision [do be more Cosmere-aware] for this book [The Lost Metal] in particular, was this more out of desire or necessity to start doing this?

Brandon Sanderson

It was a mix of both. I would say it's more desire. There's some things I wanted to get in. This book introduces a character from a world we haven't visited yet who has a completely new magic system that is just kind of part of the story, and I was really hesitant about putting this character in, because you could feel lost. (Even though there's no book for this character's backstory yet.) But I thought, "This is the character I want in the story. This is the story I wanna write. I'm just gonna put him in. I'm just gonna do it." And it worked wonderfully. I love how it worked in the story. And at that point, I'm like, "This has gotta be the moment." The "gloves off," as I said. Before, I've been kind of pulling my punches a little bit.

Miscellaneous 2022 (Nov. 28, 2022)

 

Personally, I found Twinsoul or whatever his name was to be a bit much.  It was one Cosmere thing too far, for me. 

But you know what?  If that was Brandon's thought process, and that was his reaction, then I am 100% for it.  It is so important for the Author to feel satisfied with their work, and to write the stories they want to write, regardless of what the readers may desire, that this changes my mind.  Too many times I've seen authors struggling so hard to write what the readers want that they just lose the love of their own stories, and I never want that to happen with Brandon, so gloves off.  

[trav]

Skipped a few of Waynes exchanges. Does not feel real or interesting to me. It is as you say. It became rather annoying because its either too forced or too frequent. Sometimes less is more.

Brandon does a lot of interaction with fans. Which is great. Yet there is the big issue that he can end up doing too much fan service. I will not go into detail as its a sensitive topic for some. Stormlight Archives is also heavily affected by this and is one of my biggest gripes with it.

About the cosmere connections. Well, other books were less blatant about it. Not that this is a huge issue. Its normal once a series progresses. This happened in Stormlight aswell. You see the story through the characters eyes and by that time the relevant characters have already conversed with gods and demi-gods. Showing the rest that goes on behind what normal people notice is just the next logical step and was to be expected.

In the end, and I do not like admitting it, I only finished the book because I did not want to miss out on relevant cosmere information. The book itself will be one of the few that I will most likely not read another time. I read Mistborn about 5 times each already. Era 2 is definitely my least favourite series now. By a large margin.

[StormingTexan]

5 hours ago, trav said:

Brandon does a lot of interaction with fans. Which is great. Yet there is the big issue that he can end up doing too much fan service. I will not go into detail as its a sensitive topic for some. Stormlight Archives is also heavily affected by this and is one of my biggest gripes with it.

So this is something I struggle with. Not so much the fan service but the interaction. There are so many times where I have to figure out if I know something because it is in the books or I know it because it is in a WoB. On one hand I wouldn't want to change a thing with his interactions because he does it better than any other author I read. On the other hand I feel like it has almost become a crutch (specifically the WoBs) where we are getting the "connected dots" outside of the books. 

This WoB is a perfect example of what I am talking about. I think most of us expected to learn how more about medallions in TLM specifically how they are made and instead we get this WoB which implies we will get this info but not in a book... Spoiler for length. 

 

Spoiler

 

muh_vehicles

A while back you said that if you didn't reveal how medallions are made after The Lost Metal, we could bug you for the step-by-step process. Can you tell us now?

Brandon Sanderson

So I tried to find my little write-up on this and I can't find it. So I have to re-write it up. You can bug me but I'm not going to get it yet. It needs to be canonized for certain things that are coming up very soon, so I need to write it all out again. Double-check that I run it through continuity, that it is right. The more we do these things the more complicated it gets, and the more like computer programming in a world using physics that don't exist it gets. Which is fun! That's the feature, not the bug, that it gets really finicky how these things work. But it means I have to do that whole writeup again. It was several pages. So I am going to do that again, I have to have it in hand before I can do Era Three. Bug me again when I'm writing Era Three. Sorry.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 5 (Dec. 2, 2022)

 

 

[rabidhexley]

Quote

This WoB is a perfect example of what I am talking about. I think most of us expected to learn how more about medallions in TLM specifically how they are made and instead we get this WoB which implies we will get this info but not in a book... Spoiler for length. 

"A while back you said that if you didn't reveal how medallions are made after The Lost Metal, we could bug you for the step-by-step process. Can you tell us now?"

After doing some more thinking on it I do feel like it was an error on Brandon's part to not follow up on some of the BoM stuff a bit more. TLM is definitely the first time he's "finished" a story with this many hanging plot threads. This is mainly only an issue though because a bunch of these threads were introduced in the previous book. TLM resolves the Set plotline, the main plotline of the series, but BoM introduces what feels like major subplots; The Malwish, Nicrosil tech, the Bands of Mourning, and the Sovereign. These details are acknowledged, but otherwise almost entirely ignored in TLM, which definitely feels off given the way BoM ends.

 

Like, we know the Sovereign is Kelsier, and we know Wax knows, and Marasi certainly knows if not just from Wax telling her then from having seen the statue of the Sovereign before meeting Kelsier. We then get multiple scenes with Kell that never talk about the Malwish or the Bands, and it's not really discussed in Kelsier's own scene where he's specifically talking about his work to increase the power-level of Scadrians. And we have Nicrosil tech, which is one of the biggest reveals of the entire Mistborn series so far only get nods in the plot. The meat was always going to be left until Era 3, but it really feels like we should have got something to actually nibble on.

 

I still love Era 2 and TLM personally for the rest of it, but I'd consider this a sour point for sure. At least I can be confident we'll get our satisfaction in the next books, so that tempers my personal critique a bit, it's just a really weird pacing decision to leave readers hanging to this degree from Sanderson. Who tends to aim for maximum satisfaction by the end of an arc.

Edited December 21, 2022 by rabidhexley

[Trusk'our]

On 12/4/2022 at 0:14 AM, VirtuousTraveller said:

I want to say I liked TLM, because there were moments that I truly did enjoy.  I think I’m seeing lots of similar feelings though to my overall reaction to some of the “overstuffed/overplayed” nature of the story…

  Hide contents

Namely the nonstop references to other cosmere magic and people (seriously, The Emperor’s Soul even got into this thing somehow).

Also, the dialogue with Wayne, which was likable and unique in book 1 and 2, became a lot in The Bands of Mourning, and almost unbearable at times in TLM.  This is a trend I’ve noticed with not just Wayne, but also some other characters like Lift and Design.  It veers into less comedy and more G rated silly cartoon speak, which becomes distracting from the actual plot/character development.

The middle section of TLM in particular felt almost like a fan fiction, as did the “big bad” reveal early in the story.  Then again, we’ve got a bunch of really committed fans who pour over the books and interviews and Word of Brandon that by the time a book comes out, statistically it’s likely that the fan community will guess at least some of what’s coming next.

Consider the difference between:

  Hide contents

How Odium was portrayed in the Stormlight books, and how Autonomy was portrayed in TLM.  Odium is a character that felt heavy, well defined, and imposing.

Autonomy’s descriptions felt like copy-paste Words of Brandon from the Arcanum or The Coppermind websites.

I love Brandon’s writings, and I’ve loved all the cosmere books so far.  That said, TLM fell a bit flat.  No author will hit it out of the park 100% of the time, and Brandon has certainly spoiled us with nonstop high quality material so far.  The argument that he enjoys doing multiple projects all at the same time because it’s his process, when the messy quality of TLM is what we get after waiting six years, makes me question the process a bit now.  I’m glad he’s taking more time to get Stormlight 5 right.

Personally, I loved TLM. I loved that Cosmere connections finally came more out into the open, I loved the characters and how they had developed (mostly; I'll explain more in a minute), and especially the new insights with Hemalurgy.

But yeah, I feel like the story was a bit disconjoined with the rest of the era 2 books. It's hard to really pin down what it was (except that the jokes were cruder, I think), but it felt a bit wonky. I think that Wayne's humor, and the humor or much of the story, was a bit...off... a bit different than the rest of the era 2 books, though maybe that was just because Brandon took a while to get to TLM from BOM (I actually feel that OB and ROW had a somewhat similar issue, where they were a bit different, and not necessarily in a good way).

But overall, I'm satisfied with the book.

[Honorless]

Quote

Namely the nonstop references to other cosmere magic and people (seriously, The Emperor’s Soul even got into this thing somehow).

Yes, it did feel rather self-referential compared to how elegantly the crossover elements were handled in Tress 

 

Also, yes! Autonomy should've felt like a bigger threat. That's a Shard, people! So where's that sheer presence of Ruin? Of Odium? Of Cultivation?

 

Regarding the Wayne dialogue, I read that as Wayne overgrowing his old skin, so to speak. And I generally didn't like Wayne's interactions in first read-throughs in the prequel books either but did find them funny upon reread, so I'm reserving judgement until later, if/when I get around to rereading it.

[VirtuousTraveller]

20 minutes ago, Honorless said:

Yes, it did feel rather self-referential compared to how elegantly the crossover elements were handled in Tress 

Absolutely 100% agree - elegance is a fantastic way to contrast how I feel Brandon has done this kind of cosmere connection work when it goes well, and in TLM it did not feel elegant.

[Frustration]

I thought the Cosmere crossovers were really well handled, if a tad more conservative than I would have hoped.

[KaladinWorldsinger]

4 hours ago, Frustration said:

I thought the Cosmere crossovers were really well handled, if a tad more conservative than I would have hoped.

Any more cosmere connections and it would have been criminal to market this as an era 2 book

[Frustration]

20 minutes ago, KaladinWorldsinger said:

Any more cosmere connections and it would have been criminal to market this as an era 2 book

Please, we only mentioned four shards, barely hinted at Silverlight, completely ignored the IRE, didn't even mention that Hemalurgy can steal powers from other worlds. Didn't mention how Connection can impact the ability to use Investiture, barely explained Avatars, only briefly saw the Cognitive Realm.

We didn't even get into how medallion technology is basically synthesizing souls, we didn't get to see off world weapons, Adonalsium isn't even mention.

There's nothing on the theorized Dawnshard on Scadrial, or even the fact that Investiture resists Investiture.

 

I can keep going.

Edited February 8, 2023 by Frustration

[cometaryorbit]

I generally liked TLM but I agree it felt more uneven than most Cosmere books, and didn't answer some of the questions raised in BoM.

I do agree the time gap between writing SoS/BoM (which were basically written as one unit) and TLM probably contributed.

It's really Marasi's plot line (the secret Set underground colony / Autonomy's army attempting to invade through the artificial perpendicularity) that bothers me. It's super cool, but it feels rushed. If we'd had another 10k-20k words of this, maybe a couple brief POVs from the people there..

Wax and Wayne's plots work great for me all through the book. The ending is great, and so is the beginning of the book before the plot line split. It's just the middle and especially Marasi's plot in the middle that feels rushed.

TLM also has a more complex, more split plot than the other Era 2 books but is shorter than the Era 1 books. I think it kind of falls in an awkward middle where it doesn't have the narrower focus of AoL through BoM* but doesn't have the room to add depth that Era 1 has.

*each of those is much more pulp styled: AoL as a Western, SoS more noir/mystery ish, BoM full on adventure. TLM tries to be a spy thriller but it's just not as focused.

Overall I like it, especially the beginning and end, and I do like the more foreground Cosmere connections, but the seams do show in TLM in a way they didn't in SoS or BoM (or Tress).

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by cometaryorbit