Why does everyone hate Oathbringer?

[Thaidakar the Ghostblood]

so everyone has been seeming to hate Oathbringer. In my opinion it was really great, Dalinar's arc was amazing, the battle at the end was awesome. the story did not drag that much . and well it was great, it had great momentum. why doesn't anyone agree? now it aint my favorite book but it is still great.

[Frustration]

I don't think anyone hates Oathbringer, it's just the one good book in a series of Great books.

Though I would say it's better than WoK at least.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Frustration

[HSuperLee]

My view on this is extremely skewed because I read Oathbringer in one day, but my friends who have also read it (and at much more reasonable paces) say that its kind of hard to get through, because it doesn't feel like a lot is happening during the Kholinar section, and that apparently made it difficult for them to enjoy it as much as the first two books (they've not gotten to RoW yet).

[StanLemon]

Oathbringer is my personal favorite of the books so far, heck it is what turned Dalinar from a character I liked to being my favorite Brandon Sanderson character. Honestly Rhythm of War is the one I consider having the lowest quality overall even if it had some amazing aspects to it

[+Oltux72]

I suppose because it is the book of the series that is closest to an old style SF story in the sense that it is driven by plot in general. You have nothing like the story of Kaladin going from a branded slave to a savior figure in it and where you have something similar, it is ... sliced off. Oathbringer is a story about a war with the main protagonists in it. The other books are stories about the protagonists during, not even for the most part in, a war.

I would not be surprised by a strong correlation of liking Oathbringer and disliking The Way of Kings and vice versa.

[AquaRegia]

5 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

I would not be surprised by a strong correlation of liking Oathbringer and disliking The Way of Kings and vice versa.

Well, I like them both just fine.  I do tend to be more interested in character than in plot, although of course both are needed to make a truly great story.  I loved Dalinar's flashbacks and getting to see the journey that has made him who he is.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but my least favorite part of the Stormlight Archive is the time spent in Shadesmar.  After teasing the Surge of Transportation for two books, and building up expectations of the Cognitive Realm, the payoff, to me, was both disappointing and vaguely silly.  A Realm of pure thought where objects from the Physical Realm are represented by spheres...so what reason is there to expect AIR there, let alone air with the exact same composition our human friends are used to?  How is there both air and water vapor, but no clouds or weather?  What is the deal with the tiny cold sun that never moves?  Way too much about it strikes me as random and nonsensical, Alice-in-Wonderland-style, which is something I've never felt about any of Brandon's other work.  Too many spren seem to be just a little too cute or funny.  It feels like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", when they finally go to Toontown and everything is zany and hilarious; the vibe just doesn't match the rest of the novels.  This applies to RoW as well as Oathbringer.

[teknopathetic]

If anything, I feel I have personally heard the most dislike for Rythm of War (pacing, balance, video-game fight scenes over and over)

Edited January 9, 2022 by teknopathetic

[Morningtide]

Oathbringer is probably my favorite Stormlight book. I thought that the pacing was really good and the final battle was well written.

[apepi]

Ive always thought that Oathbringer was the most liked book in the series. RoW kind of the worst. Though ive heard a lot of people like warbreaker.

[Frustration]

7 hours ago, apepi said:

Ive always thought that Oathbringer was the most liked book in the series. RoW kind of the worst. Though ive heard a lot of people like warbreaker.

Warbreaker is a different series.

Edited January 11, 2022 by Frustration

[danex]

i don't think i have any one favorite SA book

there's just so much CONTENT that it all blurs together in my mind, i often forget which scenes are in which books.

[agrabes]

I didn't like Oathbringer very well either.  I think @Oltux72 is onto something.  OB is where Sanderson started shifting from telling a story about characters to a story about "advance the plot at all costs."  OB was my least favorite by a significant margin until RoW.  Now that RoW is out, I like it less than OB by an even wider margin and I actually probably like OB better now by comparison.  I really do think it has a lot to do with the fact that OB starts shifting towards being primarily plot driven, but RoW goes all the way there. 

Other things I didn't like about OB were Shallan's character arc and the resolution of the Kaladin/Shallan/Adolin romance plot.  Those are controversial and everyone's opinion on that will vary though.  I don't want to discuss those things in this thread, but because I didn't like them it lowered my overall opinion of the book.  Less controversially, the way Amaram's character was handled also didn't sit well with me. He went from being a nuanced, interesting morally gray character to one dimensional.  

[apepi]

7 hours ago, Frustration said:

Warbreaker is a different series.

Yes, but this is in the Cosmere Discussion and not Stormlight.

[+Oltux72]

16 minutes ago, agrabes said:

I didn't like Oathbringer very well either.  I think @Oltux72 is onto something.  OB is where Sanderson started shifting from telling a story about characters to a story about "advance the plot at all costs."

To be brutally honest, the first two books of SA are a kind of prelude. Who really still cares about who cut Elhokar's saddle or Shallan's shipwreck or the Diagramm or House Sadeas? These story lines were strictly speaking not part of the core plot. Stormlight Archive is a war book. The real war starts, if you will, when the Alethi march on Narak. If Brandon had written a third book of that kind, we would start to ask when something fundamental happens.

If you, to bring another example, set a book at the beginning of the 1940ies in the USA, Pearl Harbor will have to come eventually and it will alter the story.

16 minutes ago, agrabes said:

  OB was my least favorite by a significant margin until RoW.  Now that RoW is out, I like it less than OB by an even wider margin and I actually probably like OB better now by comparison.  I really do think it has a lot to do with the fact that OB starts shifting towards being primarily plot driven, but RoW goes all the way there. 

The observation is correct, though I do not share the conclusion. For the record Oathbringer is my favorite book in the series so far. I'd say that RoW repurposed the flashbacks from a device that explains a character, which, in my mind indisputably so, found its summit in Dalinar's flashbacks, to a background plot line introducing Odium's strategy and mysterious outside forces.
And that, yes, is a weak point of the latest book.

16 minutes ago, agrabes said:

Less controversially, the way Amaram's character was handled also didn't sit well with me. He went from being a nuanced, interesting morally gray character to one dimensional.  

Absolutely.

[Stormlit-man]

I don't hate oathbringer and I think that it makes a good contribution to the stormlight archive.

[Frustration]

1 hour ago, agrabes said:

Less controversially, the way Amaram's character was handled also didn't sit well with me. He went from being a nuanced, interesting morally gray character to one dimensional.  

When was he ever nuanced?

[Boomerang Guy]

Some people hate OB!?!?!? I freaking love the storming heck out of that book! Who could hate such a book!?

[Experience]

Honestly I think OB is my favorite after my recent stormlight reread.

[agrabes]

21 hours ago, Frustration said:

When was he ever nuanced?

He was a nuanced character throughout all of tWoK and WoR.  He was shown as someone who genuinely wanted to, and often did, help people.  He had sincere beliefs about what he should do to make the world a better place.  In the pivotal scene in Kaladin's flashbacks he is shown as struggling significantly with the moral weight of the decision he makes, being convinced by others who were probably under Odium's influence to do what they tell him is noble and he initially thinks would be just giving in to his base instincts.  He even chooses to spare Kaladin's life, knowing that it could get him into trouble.  In tWoK he was very clearly a nuanced character.

Throughout WoR, you also see him struggling with the idea of how highly Dalinar thinks of him.  He doesn't really think he's worthy.  All the way up through the end of WoR, he's portrayed as a character who has goals that are noble, but is willing to cross some (but not all) moral lines to achieve them.  He still has honor, in his own way.  He again commits some immoral acts, but only for what he sees as a higher moral purpose.

Then OB comes along.  He's immediately accused of at minimum repetitive sexual harassment (with worse implied) and the tone of the writing says we as readers are expected to believe the claims are accurate.  Nothing in the way he had behaved up to that point suggested he had done anything like that.  And after that, his character changes completely from morally gray semi-protagonist to mustache twirling evil antagonist.  He does get a small line or two at the end of OB about why he changed.  And I get it - there's just not room in the book for a good and realistic character arc for Amaram to make his character changes feel earned.  At least there is some attempt to explain why and even if it was not satisfying for me personally, it does help.

[Frustration]

2 minutes ago, agrabes said:

He was a nuanced character throughout all of tWoK and WoR.  He was shown as someone who genuinely wanted to, and often did, help people.  He had sincere beliefs about what he should do to make the world a better place.  In the pivotal scene in Kaladin's flashbacks he is shown as struggling significantly with the moral weight of the decision he makes, being convinced by others who were probably under Odium's influence to do what they tell him is noble and he initially thinks would be just giving in to his base instincts.  He even chooses to spare Kaladin's life, knowing that it could get him into trouble.  In tWoK he was very clearly a nuanced character.

Throughout WoR, you also see him struggling with the idea of how highly Dalinar thinks of him.  He doesn't really think he's worthy.  All the way up through the end of WoR, he's portrayed as a character who has goals that are noble, but is willing to cross some (but not all) moral lines to achieve them.  He still has honor, in his own way.  He again commits some immoral acts, but only for what he sees as a higher moral purpose.

Then OB comes along.  He's immediately accused of at minimum repetitive sexual harassment (with worse implied) and the tone of the writing says we as readers are expected to believe the claims are accurate.  Nothing in the way he had behaved up to that point suggested he had done anything like that.  And after that, his character changes completely from morally gray semi-protagonist to mustache twirling evil antagonist.  He does get a small line or two at the end of OB about why he changed.  And I get it - there's just not room in the book for a good and realistic character arc for Amaram to make his character changes feel earned.  At least there is some attempt to explain why and even if it was not satisfying for me personally, it does help.

I see no difference between the two.

He wanted the shards so he took them, he felt bad about it, but he did it, then he went to Odium because he didn't want to feel guilty about it.

[agrabes]

1 minute ago, Frustration said:

I see no difference between the two.

He wanted the shards so he took them, he felt bad about it, but he did it, then he went to Odium because he didn't want to feel guilty about it.

The difference is that early in the story he sometimes did bad things but felt bad about it, but most of the time he didn't do bad things because he genuinely didn't want to do bad things.  He was portrayed that way in tWoK and WoR and it made him interesting - that there were rational arguments to be made that he did the right thing in the big picture.  It was an interesting commentary about the challenges of leadership and how someone can trick themself into going astray.  It sounds like you don't see it way and that's fine.  

Starting in OB, his character was retconned to have always been doing bad things and always having bad motivations.  That made him boring and lame and a massive letdown as a character. 

At the end of OB, we do get the part where he says he lost control of himself after realizing he had been wrong all along about his plan to cause the desolation to bring back the Heralds and went to Odium.  And you can say then that his uncharacteristic behavior in OB makes sense in that context.  That much is fine, though a little disappointing.  If he had just changed how he behaved starting in OB after he gets a full dose of Odium, I don't think you'd see a significant number of people feeling like his character got the shaft in OB.  It's the part where the rest of his character is retconned to having always been rotten and evil in all aspects of his life that is lame.  

[Pathfinder]

3 minutes ago, agrabes said:

The difference is that early in the story he sometimes did bad things but felt bad about it, but most of the time he didn't do bad things because he genuinely didn't want to do bad things.  He was portrayed that way in tWoK and WoR and it made him interesting - that there were rational arguments to be made that he did the right thing in the big picture.  It was an interesting commentary about the challenges of leadership and how someone can trick themself into going astray.  It sounds like you don't see it way and that's fine.  

Starting in OB, his character was retconned to have always been doing bad things and always having bad motivations.  That made him boring and lame and a massive letdown as a character. 

At the end of OB, we do get the part where he says he lost control of himself after realizing he had been wrong all along about his plan to cause the desolation to bring back the Heralds and went to Odium.  And you can say then that his uncharacteristic behavior in OB makes sense in that context.  That much is fine, though a little disappointing.  If he had just changed how he behaved starting in OB after he gets a full dose of Odium, I don't think you'd see a significant number of people feeling like his character got the shaft in OB.  It's the part where the rest of his character is retconned to having always been rotten and evil in all aspects of his life that is lame.  

So I totally respect you liked Amaram and felt he was done dirty. To each their own. I am only here to chime in on the party that he genuine was good and tried in the beginning. I have about two or three WoB that clearly state that the "do gooder" was the face Amaram put on for the world. That was not who he really was. If you would like to see the WoB, I will be happy to provide. Now I believe the book also showed this, but I imagine you would disagree on that, and I respect your opinion.

Edited January 12, 2022 by Pathfinder

[Frustration]

2 minutes ago, agrabes said:

The difference is that early in the story he sometimes did bad things but felt bad about it, but most of the time he didn't do bad things because he genuinely didn't want to do bad things.  He was portrayed that way in tWoK and WoR and it made him interesting - that there were rational arguments to be made that he did the right thing in the big picture.  It was an interesting commentary about the challenges of leadership and how someone can trick themself into going astray.  It sounds like you don't see it way and that's fine.  

Starting in OB, his character was retconned to have always been doing bad things and always having bad motivations.  That made him boring and lame and a massive letdown as a character. 

At the end of OB, we do get the part where he says he lost control of himself after realizing he had been wrong all along about his plan to cause the desolation to bring back the Heralds and went to Odium.  And you can say then that his uncharacteristic behavior in OB makes sense in that context.  That much is fine, though a little disappointing.  If he had just changed how he behaved starting in OB after he gets a full dose of Odium, I don't think you'd see a significant number of people feeling like his character got the shaft in OB.  It's the part where the rest of his character is retconned to having always been rotten and evil in all aspects of his life that is lame.  

I felt he was always evil, his rationalizations were thinly veiled power grabs.

He killed dozens of people so he could have some shards, as if his marginally better skill would be the thing that saved the world.

[agrabes]

Just now, Pathfinder said:

So I totally respect you liked Amaram and felt he was done dirty. To each their own. I am only here to chime in on the party that he genuine was good and tried in the beginning. I have about two or three WoB that support that the "do gooder" was the face Amaram put on for the world. That was not who he really was. If you would like to see the WoB, I will be happy to provide. Now I believe the book also showed this, but I imagine you would disagree on that, and I respect your opinion.

I think I'd heard that before and I don't dispute it.  Sanderson has said he considers Amaram to have always been evil to the core and only putting on a nice face.  So really the question to me is:

Did he originally intend that from the beginning and just write Amaram too sympathetically in tWoK and WoR that gave some of us the wrong impression or did he change his mind at some point during the writing?  Because Sanderson does introduce those bad behaviors in the RoW prologue, so I think it's clear Sanderson's current intent at least since writing OB is that Amaram was always bad. 

[Pathfinder]

1 minute ago, agrabes said:

I think I'd heard that before and I don't dispute it.  Sanderson has said he considers Amaram to have always been evil to the core and only putting on a nice face.  So really the question to me is:

Did he originally intend that from the beginning and just write Amaram too sympathetically in tWoK and WoR that gave some of us the wrong impression or did he change his mind at some point during the writing?  Because Sanderson does introduce those bad behaviors in the RoW prologue, so I think it's clear Sanderson's current intent at least since writing OB is that Amaram was always bad. 

So the answer to that does actually come up in the WoB I was referring to, so I will post them below and offer a little commentary for why I still posted them in line with your question. But TLDR, Amaram was always meant to be that way since Way of Kings. We just didn't get to see it on screen as much, and since the reaction to Oathbringer, he has walked back his responses a bit for Amaram to still be bad inside, with the outside still being a façade, but it to be a slightly more downward progression over time. 

 

So first, WoB on Brandon's original intent for Amaram being a representation of being all show regarding honorable, rather than actually being:

 

Coachdorax

Did you write Amaram as an opposite of Dalinar or was he simply a bad guy meant to spur Kaladin?

Brandon Sanderson

I meant Amaram to be the representation of the corrupt side of the Alethi. Meaning they are all talk and very little heart. Very little of what they say, to the worst of the Alethi, gets to who they really are. They would rather be known as someone honorable than be actually honorable. And this I consider a major problem with their society, and I needed somebody to represent this. Part of it is, to represent a contrast to Kaladin’s ideals. This belief that lighteyes were these paragons of virtue. But I also needed somebody, you may say an opposite to Dalinar. In a way, he is an opposite to Dalinar, but more he just represents Alethi society. And I did want it to be that he wasn’t just all the way corrupt. When he makes his decision in Book One in the flashbacks, he is making a decision. There is a moment where he is considering. By the time you are seeing him in later books, that decision has taken him down a path that leaves him very far from any sort of redemption. But it was a choice. And he wasn’t just corrupt from the get go. But yeah, he represents what I feel would be bad about Alethi society. A kind of honor society that is more about looking honorable than being.

YouTube Livestream 2 (Jan. 20, 2020)

 

This WoB discusses how Brandon felt there was a gradual descent that really started at the moment with Kaladin, but it wasn't shown due to page constraints. That what he did with Kaladin was the worse thing Amaram ever did, so that Amaram was going down the bad road since at least Way of Kings. Just we didn't get to see it

 

Steeldancer

In Oathbringer, my one big issue with Oathbringer was Amaram's turn. I'm curious why you chose to not hint more at his turn. It felt a little bit out of nowhere. What were your thoughts on Amaram?

Brandon Sanderson

Which turn are you talking about?

Steeldancer

When he turns to Odium's side and he's like, "Okay, now I'm going to consume an Unmade."

Brandon Sanderson

I feel like Amaram was a slow and steady descent. But you didn't get to see viewpoints from him as he was doing it. And what he did to Kaladin was worse than anything he did in Oathbringer, in my mind.

Steeldancer

Why did you choose not to give him viewpoints.

Brandon Sanderson

Too many characters. To many people to give viewpoints to. It was kicked around. I kicked it around for a while. There just wasn't enough.

Legion Release Party (Sept. 19, 2018)

 

Finally, another WoB that show Amaram was initially supposed to be portrayed even worse, but that since publishing Oathbringer, he has started walking back on that. So initially Amaram was intended to be pure monster inside that can finally show his true colors. Since Oathbringer, Brandon has tweaked that a little bit.

 

Oversleep

Two characters who I believe Brandon absolutely butchered in terms of what their setup was and what happened to them.

[...]

Amaram. Suddenly, completely out of left field, Amaram has been talking to Odium, betrayed all he worked and believed in, sides with Odium... And becomes inhuman monster nobody will lose any sleep over getting rid of. Seriously, what the hell? 

Rayse. Similar complaint of setting someone up for one thing then just conveniently cutting out: Rayse. He's been set up, multiple times, in multiple books, by multiple characters, as the Big Bad (or at least close to it).

[...]

And after all that build up of Rayse and what he turned out to be... How am I supposed to believe Taravangian, the newest of the Vessels, is going to be any threat at all?

Brandon Sanderson

While I kind of agree on Amaram, I don't on Rayse--but it's useful for me to read this sort of thing.

The goal with Amaram was to finally let him be the monster on the outside he was on the inside--and so the sequence felt thematically right to me in outlining and writing. Since the publication, though, I've walked back this opinion somewhat. While the sequence works as intended, it's not quite right, and if I were doing the book over I'd try something different.

Footnote: The post Brandon is responding to is much longer than the excerpt here.
General Reddit 2021 (Feb. 25, 2021)