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Brandon and the Undead


Adella

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Okay, I'm excited to bounce this off more Sanderson fans.

My brother in law and I have this ongoing discussion about Brandon having an obsession with the undead. It started when we were trying to figure out what Voidbringers were, he chimed in and said "I bet they're zombies" and I was so thrown. Why would they be zombies? Well, he explained to me that everything we had read from him had some form of the undead in it.

Spoilers ahead, both minor and major if you haven't read any of the following works.

Wheel of Time- he made a whole village that murders everyone at night and then comes back to life in the morning

Warbreaker- The Gods

Elantris- We figure that the Elantrians count as sort of undead until the end, they don't age or change in any way, and wounds can't heal. Very zombie like.

Mistborn- Inquisitors or Koloss... or both.

Stormlight Archives (WoR spoilers)- At first we assume it was the Parshmen, but now it's the Shardblades

These are just to name a few that we have discussed. I'm just curious if anyone else has noticed that he kind of has a pattern of using the undead in his stories, or if there are any specific theories behind why.

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How familiar are you with what Brandon has said at signings and such? Because there's a common thread to most 'undead' types in the cosmere works but he hasn't come out and said it in the books themselves.

For a real-world explanation, in the annotations for Warbreaker he mentions that he likes finding new spins to put on the undead when he uses them. He specifically mentions that the Lifeless came from a desire to create 'technological' undead in a fantasy setting. Then that same work had the Returned who are sort of like vampires except that they don't prey on anyone but need someone to willingly give them their Breath and outside of Hallandren they don't have an infrastructure built to support them (or people with a desire to donate Breaths) so they tend to only 'live' for a week. The same kind of thinking can be extended to his other examples.

For Mistborn, I'm not sure either of those is really quasi-undead. The Kandra might be closer, if only because the process of initially creating them involved a kind of mind-death which was later reversed but left them no longer human, and while they can't kill people they can eat their bodies and use their bones for transformations.

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I honestly haven't read many of his quotes from signings, but if this is something people have asked him I'm really interested in what he has to say on the subject.

 

That's really weird, cause I recently reread Warbreaker (I'm searching out all of Hoid's appearances on my own, so I can read them in context) with the annotations and don't remember him talking about that. I'm very forgetful though, so that doesn't surprise me one bit.

And I guess my thoughts, specifically on the inquisitors, is that you have to kill people to make them, and they pound giant spikes through their brain... to me that makes them kept alive by magic alone, thus undead. That may be a less popular way of viewing it.

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http://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-Elantris-Chapter-10/

http://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-warbreaker-chapter-four-part-2/

http://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-warbreaker-chapter-fourteen/

Here's a couple annotations where he discusses the topic to a degree. When it comes to signings, it's not that he's been asked about his use of undead tropes as an author (if he has been, I haven't seen it) but more the results of people asking him questions about specific mechanics that touch on the matter. I'm not sure if you've read everything so, going crazy with the spoiler tag just in case. Mistborn: Secret History, Warbreaker, Stormlight Archive, Shadows for Silence

Most undead-esque entities we've seen so far are Cognitive Shadows, or at least are theorized to be ones in-universe. In essense, it's when your soul becomes permeated with Investiture of some form and is thus able to persist in the Cognitive Realm after death without being drawn Beyond. The Shades on Threnody are Cognitive Shadows and Brandon confirmed that Kelsier became one as well during the events of M:SH. He recently explained that Returned are also Cognitive Shadows, with the Divine Breath acting to essentially staple their soul back into their body. And he's said that the Heralds (who probably meet the 'undead' classification given that they've died many times, been tortured post-death and then get returned to do it all over again) would be thought of as Cognitive Shadows as well. The only entities that seem undead-ish that don't fit are Lifeless (though Brandon has said there's stuff we need to learn about them in the planned sequel, so they may kind of count) and Elantrians, which he's explicitly said operate differently.

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