Who do you ship and why?

[Razrback16]

39 minutes ago, Joy said:

I had no idea that so many people shipped Kaladin and Jasnah. Personally, I interpret her disinterest in men as a sign that she's either gay or asexual.

And you know, you could be 100% right. There are just so many little details we just don't know as Sanderson has kept Jasnah's POV so limited up to this point. But ya, I actually thought I was one of very few who shipped Kaladin and Jasnah, but between this place and reddit, I've seen a bunch of others who are also shippers of the same which for me, was a pleasant surprise.

[NoiseSpren]

19 hours ago, Dalakaar said:

We read very different stories if you think Sazed had little development.

Very different stories.

 

Hmm, new ship I just thought of now though, that I am fully behind.

 

Sazed and Cultivation!

Oh, he has some developement. Even important one...

All right. All characters I mentioned HAVE real progress. But the point is that Adolin has it too. No discussion. No excuses. Think what you want...

 

Back to shipping: Sazed is too precious. Some Slammer isn't good enough.

I WANT MORE OF HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What about Nightblood and Hoids chest?

Or Kaladin and Marasi?

Szeth without shipping, thank you...

Lopen and Jasnah...

Galladon and Vedel.

Lift and czech kitchen.

Kaladin and Plate!!! :-D

[Quantus]

Lopen would drive Jasnah to murder in under five minutes...

[NoiseSpren]

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

Lopen would drive Jasnah to murder in under five minutes...

Exactly

[Toaster Retribution]

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

Lopen would drive Jasnah to murder in under five minutes...

Its not hard to drive Jasnah to murder. Just take her for a walk at night in Kharbranth.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, NoiseSpren said:

But the point is that Adolin has it too. No discussion.

I don't know. That is kinda the point of a forum.

Edited January 3, 2019 by SLNC

[NoiseSpren]

4 minutes ago, SLNC said:

I don't know. That is kinda the point of a forum.

Exactly

[Guest]

Then why are you desperately trying to shut down discussion about a certain topic? 

That, by the way, also counts for others here in this thread.

Edited January 3, 2019 by SLNC

[AbsentKeeper]

1 hour ago, SLNC said:

Then why are you desperately trying to shut down discussion about a certain topic? 

That, by the way, also counts for others here in this thread.

They are just part of the Assuredness Movement.

[Argent]

5 hours ago, NoiseSpren said:

But the point is that Adolin has it too. No discussion. No excuses. Think what you want...

Hey, that seems a little... harsh. Forums are about discussion, as @SLNC correctly pointed out. This being said, not all of this thread seems super serious, so it's probably best for everyone's peace of mind to focus more on the posts we like and agree with and kind of shrug off the ones we think are too silly, too serious, or too wrong. The thing about the Internet that's both terrible and wonderful is that there are plenty of ways to ignore things you don't want in your life

All this being said, you know who I want to see more of? Those old ardents who were doing measurements on spren. They were a cute elderly couple. 

[thegatorgirl00]

5 hours ago, NoiseSpren said:

Or Kaladin and Marasi?

I misread this as Kaladin and Marsh and I was like yessssss

My favorite ship in the Cosmere is Skar and Lyn. I love their scene together and can totally imagine than as a battle couple. 

[Vissy]

Can I just point out that whoever Slammer is, they sound aamazing. 

[The Feruchemist]

I like Shallan best when she’s with Kaladin. So Shalladin, please. Reading through Oathbringer though she’s setting herself up to becoming my least favorite character. Not happy with the Shalldolin nonsense. I feel like the only reason for them to be together is heirs.  Just my opinion though. 

As far as Syl and Kaladin go my whole problem with it is the whole Peter Pan and Tinkerbell feel it has. I always thought that was super weird. 

I don’t ship anyone with Jasnah. Nobody I can tell can make her any better than she is. Someone would have to have the same effect on her as her father did. Tough luck on that one.

Last and very much least, Adolin, I don’t ship anyone with him, cause well, I just want him to die.

...

So there.

 

Hmm... come to think of it the Sandersonian romance that I enjoy the most are the side character ships not the mainstream. Sazed/Tindwyl and Breeze/Allriane are my favorites. Adolin/Shallan, Dalinar/Navani, and Vin/Elend I could’ve done without. I don’t quite understand the point of Adolin/Shallan or Dalinar/Navani, but I admit, I understood the reason for Vin/Elend just had such a raging problem with Elend that I couldn’t bring myself to like them as a couple. Raoden/Sarene is the only exception here. I thought their romance was very interesting as well as their interactions. Few seem to share that opinion though. 

[Dalakaar]

I have a hard time remembering these books aren't YA sometimes. Think about spren and how invested in human emotion they are. Now think about how much of humanity's emotions are invested in sex. There must be sexspren. Probably many types. Lustspren, intimacyspren, cuddlespren, bondagespren! I don't need my Stormlight to turn into pr0nlight but I also kind of get tired of reading teenage-level crap too.

On 1/5/2019 at 0:45 AM, The Feruchemist said:

Hmm... come to think of it the Sandersonian romance that I enjoy the most are the side character ships not the mainstream. Sazed/Tindwyl and Breeze/Allriane are my favorites. Adolin/Shallan, Dalinar/Navani, and Vin/Elend I could’ve done without. I don’t quite understand the point of Adolin/Shallan or Dalinar/Navani, but I admit, I understood the reason for Vin/Elend just had such a raging problem with Elend that I couldn’t bring myself to like them as a couple. Raoden/Sarene is the only exception here. I thought their romance was very interesting as well as their interactions. Few seem to share that opinion though. 

I liked both Sazed/Tindwyl and Breeze/Allriane as well. Breeze and Allriane struck me as a really neat pair in particular. On the Dalinar/Navani count I actually sort of enjoy it but Dalinar is my favourite so I'm biased.

---

Here's an interesting snippet from an interview in Spain with Brandon on the subject(s) of some the ships going on.

Quote

In Stormlight I decided that my love story would be between the middle-aged people, not the kids. Kaladin does not have a romance, Shallan does but there is a twist involved, Dalinar and Navani are the ones having a romance. People who are in their forties and fifties fall in love all the time, kids pretend that it’s all about them! But I can’t say more, because I’m playing with some tropes that would give spoilers.

Source

[Eris]

I’ve seen this post so much and every time I see it I think. Who do I ship?

I have been pondering on it for days and have come to the conclusion that I ship Jasnah with herself. Jasnah is in her 30s (don’t quote me on that) and seems too focused on her work. That isn’t a bad thing but I feel like that if she was interested in love, she would have shown affection towards someone else. She is too focused on her studies and research to bother with love, probably doesn’t see what the big deal is. Exactly the same with her heretic status which I have noticed she fails to realise one of the reasons that religion exists is to teach love.  

However she obviously does love her family but was willing to kill family members.  

Spoiler

Her sister in law and renarin

Showing she is willing to throw away love if it furthers her work or supports her conclusions.

She hates taking on wards because she is so driven and feels like they won’t reach her strandards which are insanely high. 

I just can’t see her having a love interest at all. And really she is a strong person who doesn’t need someone else to fill her life. She is her own person.

Therefore I ship Jasnah with Jasnah.  

[Winds Alight]

I believe with Jasnah we also have to bear in mind that in WoK, it's somewhat implied she may have been raped at some point in her life. (Remember her when she dealt with the robbers in Kharbranth and the way she talked about it to Shallan.)

So while I don't necessarily read her as aro/ace, I do believe it is possible that she's not interested in anything remotely sexual.

Another part of me thinks that a potential Jasnah x Kaladin relationship could be very interesting.

[Alderant]

Quote

In Stormlight I decided that my love story would be between the middle-aged people, not the kids. Kaladin does not have a romance, Shallan does but there is a twist involved, Dalinar and Navani are the ones having a romance. People who are in their forties and fifties fall in love all the time, kids pretend that it’s all about them! But I can’t say more, because I’m playing with some tropes that would give spoilers.

This is the danger with quotes from Brandon...Stormlight is a living work. This interview is from over 2 years ago, well prior to Brandon outlining Oathbringer (which shook up a lot of his existing ideas), and later quotes from Brandon indicate opposing ideas, so take this with a grain of salt that like all WoBs, new information takes priority.

That said, nice find @Dalakaar! That was a fun read.

[Greywatch]

My ship from WoK on is and has always been Kadolin. They have such a great dynamic, they started out not liking each other or trusting each other at all, and they've really grown to like and trust each other in such a gradual, natural way. I couldn't imagine the kind of ways they'd be thinking about each other in OB, and it was such a pleasant surprise for me to see the depth of that. Their relationship has become something really grand, and I can't wait to see what happens in the future books now that they're actually, finally friends.

 

 

4 hours ago, Alderant said:

This interview is from over 2 years ago, well prior to Brandon outlining Oathbringer (which shook up a lot of his existing ideas)

New information notwithstanding, 2-3 years ago is when Brandon was writing Oathbringer, actually after outlining it. He started writing OB in earnest November 2015, according to his 2016 State of the Sanderson.

[Ripheus23]

Hmm...

Raoden + Susebron = Raobron, Suseden

Raoden + Elend = Raond, Eloden

Raoden + Adolin = Radolin, Adoden

Adolin + Elend = Eleolin, Adoend

Adolin + Susebron = Susolin, Adobron

Kaladin + Susebron = Kalabron, Susedin

Kaladin + Elend = Kalalend, Elaladin

Kaladin, Adolin, Susebron, Elend, Raoden = Kaladosuseleraoden = Adonalsium

[I wonder if Sanderson ever makes up new character names by shuffling parts of preexistent characters' names around :P]

[Sedside]

As soon as my Shalladin ship is stuck in a dead sea without supplies, I am going to gather a rescue mission on board Jasnadin fregate perhaps with a little help of Veiladin trawler and/or Taradin coggle.

Sailing before landing, comrades.

[Vissy]

So what follows is just my pure opinion.

Brandon has kind of accidentally done a half-good job of writing natural-seeming (semi)romantic character interaction between Kaladin and Adolin, whereas he has failed with it when he's actually tried to do romantic character interaction (for an example, Dalinar and Navani is a really awkward relationship for two people who shouldn't really have any problem with showing public affection and/or having more romantic conversations beyond "hold my hand"), and Shallan & Adolin felt forced and more like a soppy teenage story, a part of which I grant is probably intended.

Sanderson isn't a great character writer (he acknowledges this himself) and it's something he could improve a lot on. Personally, Skyward was super promising on that front - I really liked his character writing there compared to his Stormlight stuff, and I hope it's a sign of improvement on his part. I hope we'll see the fruits of that improvement in his revisions of the SA outline in SA4 and 5.

EDIT - So I wanted to expand on what I mean by "he's not a good character writer". So OB is a great example of his failings on this front. All of the major characters involved (Dalinar, Shallan, Kaladin, Adolin) have character arcs that are fully internal - in other word, their arcs happen within their own heads with little external influence, or indeed with little external impact as well. Dalinar's backstory of being a hopeless drunk has remarkably little impact on his children, for example.

Whereas naturally character development is not a self-contained thing, it occurs through interaction with other characters and external events, in Stormlight character development most often occurs inside the character's own heads - Kaladin's depression, Shallan's escapades, Dalinar's guilt - and it all happens in interaction with nobody in particular. It's all very flat and static, something that is often the case when Sanderson's outlining doesn't quite hit the mark. This is why the Wit scenes with both Kaladin and Shallan are so well-liked, in my opinion: at least there's some character interaction to facilitate growth there, even if it's a bit obvious to see what the scene was outlined to do. So in Skyward we had the main character grow and interact in much more dynamic ways in my opinion, in a way that is a marked improvement over Sanderson's previous work (especially Oathbringer). I hope to see a lot more of this dynamic character interaction and character development in SA4. And hopefully that improvement is heavily involved in the romances to come 

Edited January 7, 2019 by Vissy

[Winds Alight]

12 minutes ago, Vissy said:

Sanderson isn't a great character writer (he acknowledges this himself)

W H A T

That's the first time I ever heard about that and frankly, I don't see that. Like. At all.
Do you know where he said that and in what context? I'm a little lost here. That's like the opposite of what I got from his books all these years.

Edited January 7, 2019 by Winds Alight

[Vissy]

8 minutes ago, Winds Alight said:

W H A T.

That's the first time I ever heard about that and frankly, I don't see that. Like. At all.

Ah, for me I didn't initially think a lot about his characters honestly.  I just enjoyed the stories. But the more I thought about it and the more I read, it became more and more apparent to me that this was the case. It's not an indictment on him - he's not a bad character writer by any means, writing characters convincingly is actually really hard. But it is something of a weakness in his style, being an outliner and all that.

So in terms of explaining why I think so, there are a couple of WoBs I could pull to support this. He almost always mentions having difficulties with character writing when he's asked about that topic or an adjacent one - this is something that I find great about him, because I can see that he has a great drive to improve and who doesn't like an author who's only likely to get better with age.

I like things coming in threes, so I'll give three examples:

WoB 1:

Spoiler

Questioner

Something I found really interesting and refreshing--it's sad it is that way, but it is--about your books are female characters, and I recently read that for a while you were kind of mortified because, talking about feedback, someone told you that you were writing really plain female characters. Now, seeing Vin or Megan, I barely can believe that, and I think as fans sometimes maybe get a bit too caught up in how amazing your worldbuilding is, and your magic systems, and we sort of disregard something that really works as well, and that's characters. I really like that your characters have, even if they are kind of secondary, they have purpose, they have motive, they have a backstory, they are not just there as background, really. So, could you describe how is character building for you and how has it changed since then?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, this is an interesting thing to think about, as a fan of science fiction and fantasy, because the thing that draws us all to sci-fi/fantasy, the reason we're here, is because of the setting. And yet, the setting is in some ways the least important part, because, if you have a bad setting, but great characters, you usually can still have a good book, but if you have terrible characters and and interesting setting, usually that book is still going to be boring.

This was a problem early in my writing, as you have brought up, particularly my female characters. I can still remember sharing one of my first books with someone, and being very excited for their feedback, and hearing how much they loved the magic system, and then getting to the criticism and saying, "It's unfortunate that the female lead is so wooden," and this was something that I needed to work on. No writer starts out good at everything. I was fortunate in finding early on some of these things that I needed to work on.

For me, one of the big breakthroughs came when I started to look at each character as the protagonist of their own story. In some of these early books, characters were fit into a definition by my brain. This is the love interest, this is the sidekick, this is the mentor. But that's not how we are in our lives. Every one of us is a romantic interest at times, a mentor at times, a sidekick at times, but throughout the course of all of it, the only perspective we have of it is our own, and we are always the protagonist in that story. So when I started asking myself for each character, no matter how insignificant to the plot, who are they, what are they passionate about, what would they be doing today if the world weren't ending, and how are they the hero of their story.

source

 

WoB 2:

Spoiler

Questioner

How is it that you’re able to write such real and strong women characters that are feminist in their own way but in very different ways from book to book? Is your wife your inspiration? Can you do a workshop for other male writers?

Brandon Sanderson

This is a huge compliment, thank you. It is something that I’ve worked on a long time. I would blame the authors I read getting into fantasy, Barbara Hambly, Melanie Rawn, Anne McCaffrey. They were the first three authors I read. I internalized some of the things they were talking about. I also do have some good models. My mother graduated first in her class in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in the accounting department. She’s currently the accountant for the city of Idaho Falls. So getting it wrong was a big deal to me, and I did get it wrong on my first few books. The unpublished ones, fortunately. What I realized was, it was a bigger problem than just doing the female characters wrong, though that was the biggest sign that I was doing something wrong. What was happening was I was writing people to roles in the story, rather than writing them as people having a role in the story. That sounds really simple, right? But once I realized people don’t see themselves as the plucky sidekick, usually, and people don’t see themselves as the romantic interest. People see themselves as a person who plays a part in someone else’s life, but plays a different part over here, and a different part over here. Those of us who are extraverts might be introverts in some situations where we don’t know very much. Those of us who are introverts might be extraverts when you put us in front of a room and tell us to do a reading, we’re like “Yeah! I can handle that!”. We all fulfill lots of different roles in different settings, in different people’s lives. Everybody has motivations and passions, and gender identity, racial factors, your upbringing, your culture, these are all parts of who you are, but when you let one of those things define you too much, you become a flat character, in fiction. [Talks for a minute about Lost, where the character who loses his son becomes a flat character because it comes to completely define the character. He’s talked about this before in his lectures so I’m not going to type it out]. When you’re writing people to just a role like that, you end up with these flat characters, you end up with people who don’t really live. And I think the first big revelation for me was that I was doing that. And this was particularly true of the female characters. When you start writing, it’s very normal to just write a protagonist who’s much like yourself and then writing people who aren’t like yourself like, this is this role, this is this role, and then boom. But there was something else I had to learn. There’s still lots of things for me to learn, but there was something else big that I had to learn. This was the problem that I’ve only recently begun reading essays about it, which is the natural inclination of someone is to first off write everyone as kind of a stereotype, and then you learn and you get better. But then the next inclination is to write the person who is different from ourselves as super super awesome. Just so that we’re not accidentally being sexist. And you’ll see this a lot too, this happens a lot with African Americans, in video games in particular. I was playing a video game once, and it’s a bunch of burly white guys who are awesome with guns and they’re killing stuff. And they talk about their friend, the black guy. You don’t know he’s black at the time. And then they get into trouble and they can’t save themselves. And the black guy bursts through the ceiling with guns blazing, mows down the enemies, says “Alright guys, go for it!”, and then runs off into the sunset. He’s like the coolest guy ever. He only stops short of doing a rap song for the end song, right? They don’t want to be racist, so he’s awesome, but he also doesn’t get a character arc. Everybody else has deep character arc and is messed up. They didn’t want to, and I understand this instinct, they didn’t want to make the black guy messed up because he’s the minority and they are so worried about screwing it up that instead they put him on a pedestal. You see guys do this with women, and you see women do this with the men characters. If you read a book, often the guy, by a female writer, the guy has very few faults, he’s just this guy, and the woman is this messed up, neurotic, interesting character. Same in reverse with the guys. The woman in the book ends up being the one who is very responsible, the one who’s like “We need to go do this”, the kick-chull “strong female character” [he literally says “quote-unquote” about strong female character] who just awesome, but doesn’t have a character arc and isn’t messed up in the ways that make people interesting. That’s another level, when you’re like, we have to make all the characters interesting, and all the characters messed up and individual, rather than even doing that level. And that one’s been even harder to internalize and figure out how to do.

source

WoB 3:

Spoiler

Questioner

I wondered if there's a bit of you in all the characters... and it's characters where they don't have bits of you that you get stuck with writing them, and how you overcome that?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, getting stuck. So characters are the hard one for me to talk about because I plan my worlds in great detail before I start writing, in most cases, and I plan my plots in moderate detail. I plot backward, I start with what I want to have happen for a plot cycle; not necessarily the last scene, but, you know, something like this character learns to use the magic, and I've got the scene where it shows that this is working, and then I list a bunch of bullet points underneath. That's my-- And so if you look at my outline, it's like goal, bullet points, goal, bullet points, goal, bullet points-- that's my whole outline.

My characters, I figure out who they are when the book starts, but I do not outline them in great detail. The reason for this is we find that writers tend to fall into two general camps. We have what we call outline writers, and discover writers. Now, discovery writers, George RR Martin calls them gardeners, they like to discover their story as they go. Stephen King says you never start with an ending in mind because otherwise it ruins the book, he just goes and see what happens. They tend to write character really well. In fact if you're reading a good and you go "Wow these characters all feel really vivid and alive", that's probably a discovery writer. If you're-- On the other hand outliners, or architects as George RR Martin calls them, tend to plan everything out ahead of time and because of this they tend to have spectacular plots. If you've got somebody who's got a great plot, it's a page-turner, the great twist at the ending-- that's most likely going to be an architect, but the flaw of this is they tend to have weaker characters; and the flaw over here is they tend to have weaker plots. Terrible endings are a horrible kind of habit of the discovery writer. 

Over time I've really tried to kind of mitigate this by letting myself discovery-write my characters to kind of get some more of that living character status, which means I have to have a flowing outline where, once I've started writing my way into the character I will then have to rebuild the outline periodically to match the person they're becoming, which sometimes rips apart that outline quite a bit. The other thing that it requires me to do is I often have to kind of cast characters in a role. Vin is a great example of this, where I actually tried Vin three different times--I posted one of these on my website--with a different personality each time until I got one that would fit the story that I'm telling, and who she was, and I went from there.

And so it's really hard for me to pick out what I do with characters, but if my book is not working it's almost always that a character is not working for me. And this happened with Sazed in book 3 of Mistborn. I wrote this in the annotations, you can go and read it off that. Dalinar, in the original draft of The Way of Kings. When a character is not clicking 100% it is the biggest problem I run into with books, that takes a lot of drafting to figure out what to do. With Dalinar, if you're not familiar with what happened there, is I split him into two people. It always had his son Adolin, but Adolin had not been a viewpoint character, and the problem I was having with Dalinar was that I wanted to present a strong figure for the leader because people though he was going mad, but I also had to have him talk about this madness, and be really worried about it, and so he came on very weak, because everyone thought he was going mad, and he spent all of his time brooding about going mad. When I took the brooding out to his son, and had Dalinar be like "I'm not mad, something's going on, everyone thinks that I'm crazy, but I can deal with this", and had his son go "my dad, who I love, is going crazy", those two characters actually both became more alive, and worked better, than they had with the conflict of "I'm going crazy" being Dalinar's. So, it takes a lot of work to figure these things out sometimes.

source

 

Edited January 7, 2019 by Vissy

[Winds Alight]

Thanks, that's really fascinating!

Though I'd think many authors struggle with this ^^
Sanderson is one of those writers where I usually have multiple favourites in each book and I almost always understand everyone's motifs (to an extend).

[Vissy]

It's not so much of a problem to "discovery writers" (to use Brandon's terminology), or people who just start writing and follow their inspiration, but there are other reasons as well. Sanderson's dialogue writing could be a lot better, for example (Mistborn is a big offender on this front), so there is an element of skill there as well that some other authors are more capable at compared to Sanderson. Scott Lynch comes to mind as an example of a more character oriented writer.