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Unpopular Brandon Sanderson Opinions


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3 hours ago, KaladinWorldsinger said:

Can you expand on this? 

I did:

On 12/3/2022 at 4:07 PM, Ookla the Frustrated. said:

He's so simple, most characters these days feel like they have miles worth of problems and twenty-three different motivations for everything. It was kind of refreshing to have someone without all the angst.

Just to show what I'm talking about: Spoilers for WoK Prime

  Reveal hidden contents

When Merin goes to save Elhokar, he learns that two assassins are being sent and goes with his friend to defend his king.

When Kaladin goes to save Elhokar he spends several chapters agonizing over whether he should save him or not.

It's not to say Kaladin is bad, I really like him, but I found Merin's simplicity relaxing, ordinary as it was.

Does that make any sense?

 

Another one: Brandon writes really unrealistic fight scenes and its starting to bother me. A lot of his "most powerful" combat powers are in reality mostly useless.

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There are little to none armor on the soldiers in the books, most of them are running around a battlefield with only uniforms on them, some pov characters even got an armor and never used it. And when armor does appear it doesn't do what it should have - protect. The only exception is Shardplate. There is so many different swords in his books, but only like 3 armors, which is much more important on the battlefield.

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1 hour ago, alder24 said:

There are little to none armor on the soldiers in the books, most of them are running around a battlefield with only uniforms on them, some pov characters even got an armor and never used it. And when armor does appear it doesn't do what it should have - protect. The only exception is Shardplate. There is so many different swords in his books, but only like 3 armors, which is much more important on the battlefield.

No armor? What do you mean? Soldiers wear armor in SA at least.

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23 minutes ago, UnfortunatelyNamed said:

No armor? What do you mean? Soldiers wear armor in SA at least.

Some yes, most, including main team, no. There were some instances of armor, like full plate armor appears few times, or some officers wearing breastplate, one was not protected from being cut and disemboweled. But uniforms are constantly described: in the camps, on the battlefield etc. Armor  not so much.

In my opinion there should be much more armor description than there is. No uniforms on the battlefield, just armor.

Edited by alder24
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9 hours ago, Frustration said:

Eh, from the scenes with Kaladin the normal soldiers have leather caps and skirts, but no mail or gambison.

Those soldiers weren't the richest, so it makes sense they wouldn't have mail, but they probably should have had gambesons.

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I'm not very fond of action scenes in books or movies.

Albiet, there are exceptions because I actually quite liked some of the duels in stormlight (such as the shardbearer one in WoR with Kaladin or a couple with Szeth). I don't know if this counts too, but I liked the scenes with the fights against the chasmfiends. You practically always know the protagonist will win in books and movies anyway.

 

P.S. - Yup, even when sanderlanches mainly consist of them.

P.S. x2- I haven't yet read the full mistborn trilogies.

Edited by solarcat93
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90% of Brandon's live streams and fan interaction is a useless exchange of pleasantries.

The questions are mostly B tier jokes, or "what are your thoughts on____" and the worst part is that it's even started to affect the spoiler streams.

I think it would be far more fulfilling and certainly more exciting if all livestreams allowed spoiler questions, with the spoiler streams disallowing non-spoiler questions.

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15 hours ago, solarcat93 said:

I'm not very fond of action scenes in books or movies.

Albiet, there are exceptions because I actually quite liked some of the duels in stormlight (such as the shardbearer one in WoR with Kaladin or a couple with Szeth). I don't know if this counts too, but I liked the scenes with the fights against the chasmfiends. You practically always know the protagonist will win in books and movies anyway.

 

P.S. - Yup, even when sanderlanches mainly consist of them.

P.S. x2- I haven't yet read the full mistborn trilogies.

I like them to a point. In RoW I really got sick of the Kaladin fight scenes.

Spoiler

The fight over the 3rd node in particular. We've already established there are 4 nodes nothing will be resolved until they find the 4th one. This fight doesn't need to be 20 pages or whatever. 

On 12/15/2022 at 9:07 AM, trav said:

The really good thing about the cosmere series is the magic system and world building. The characters are not relatable for the most part.

Agree. The magic systems are what he is better than other authors at. I love his worldbuidling especially in Stormlight. I enjoy a lot of his character work overall, but he has some real clunkers.  He's bad at writing romance and his attempts at humor come off as trying too hard. Especially the "funny" characters like Wayne. I can't imagine him writing a character as genuinely funny as Tyrion from A Song of Ice and Fire for example. 

He uses the same joke format a lot and I've grown tired of it.  Usually pays off with "I meant a real ___" Stormlight & Mistborn examples:

Spoiler

 

Dalinar: Do you have a weapon?

Lift: Nope. Can't read.

Dalinar: Ca- I meant a real weapon! 

(That one was good)

 

Spoiler

 

Marasi: Have you ever been in love?

Wayne: Sure I have. Why I had this beautiful hat once.

Marasi: I meant with another person Wayne.

This is from memory may not have been Marasi who this was with, but Wayne has multiple of these a book

 

He has his moments usually with odd couple pairings like Wit - Design, Kaladin - Syl. 

I've probably read too much of his stuff in too short a timeframe. I reread Stormlight twice in the year before RoW came out. After I read RoW I was like "Is this not as good as the other 3 or am I burned out?" perhaps both. 

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  • 1 month later...
On 3/22/2019 at 10:42 PM, not an Evil Librarian said:

Please post your unpopular opinions of Brandon Sanderson's books here. Please try not to get into debates.

 

Mistborn era 2 is better than era 1.

Jasnah is overpowered and unintirestingly perfect. she is to good at everything, and has no flaws at all. This makes her boring.

I agree on Mistborn Era 2 > Mistborn Era 1.

I think for one that Brandon has improved as a writer.  I also like the characters more.

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6 hours ago, Frustration said:

Kaladin needs to die in KoW.

Preferably about 3/5 of the way through, as Odium's champion attempts to kill Dalinar before the contest starts.

Kaladin manages to stop them but gets completely curbstomped in the attempt.

I’m intrigued. This would definitely be a great way to go but I don’t know if it has to. If it did though, I definitely wouldn’t be mad, I’d probably been quite impressed actually.

Mistborn era 1 and secret history spoilers

Spoiler

 I think Brandon has been a little bit more conservative with not killing off protagonist than he could be. Even with Kelsier we got this whole cognitive shadow stuff — which was awesome, don’t get me wrong, I loved that — but if he was very bold with it, I feel like he could pull it off very well.

 

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15 hours ago, Frustration said:

Kaladin needs to die in KoW.

Preferably about 3/5 of the way through, as Odium's champion attempts to kill Dalinar before the contest starts.

Kaladin manages to stop them but gets completely curbstomped in the attempt.

I don't think that will happen, simply because it's far too obvious a twist and Brandon's a better writer than that.

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7 minutes ago, Frustration said:

Why would it be for a twist?

Because Kaladin's entire story has been one of progression and recovery.  Bad things happened to him in his past, but he's slowly getting better, little by little.  Having him die soon after reaching the fifth oath would be just a variant on the old "retirony" cliché.

Also, beating up the most powerful character around to "establish stakes" and show just how seriously we should take this new threat is also a bad cliché.  It's known as "Worfing," due to how commonly the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation did it to Lieutenant Worf.  (Reportedly, one of Michael Dorn's conditions for coming back to play Worf on Deep Space Nine was that they stop doing this to his character.)  And again, I think Brandon's a good enough writer to know better than to Worf Kaladin.

Edited by Mason Wheeler
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On 12/12/2022 at 7:11 AM, Captain Coffee said:

 I'm relatively new here. Liking Oathbringer is unpopular? As far as prose goes, I think it is his best written book.

Maybe Oathbringer is more diskliked among those who think it was their least favorite in the series because I've seen a poll that asked what a persons least favorite SA book was, and RoW was the least liked among that group of fans (around 300; I don't remember). Personally, RoW was my favorite book out of the series, albeit I can see why it is some fans' least favorite since it deviates more into the magic system and whatnot. 

Edited by solarcat93
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