TLM and TotES remind me of what I don't like about Star Wars

[Eran of Arcadia]

Okay, don't get me wrong, I like the new books. I like Star Wars too.

What I don't think I like is that in a universe that has been established to be enormous, all the same few characters do everything. Okay, so Hoid is a given, has been since the second book was written. That I don't mind. But all these cameos from characters in other books feel too much like fanservice to me. Of course we're going to see certain characters here that we've seen before. Just like how everyone ends up on Tatooine.

I had hoped to be able to recommend TotES to people like my wife who don't care for traditional fantasy, but it feels too intertwined with the rest of the Cosmere to work as a standalone.

I understand that the Cosmere as a whole is meant to be linked, but I worry that as it goes on it will do so in a way that feels kind of superficial. Any thoughts?

[Frustration he/him]

I'm alright with occasional reappearances, like Shai showing up and things, but when just about everyone has already been seen I felt it stretched believability. Namely Klaise, it felt unnecessary for two of our three ghostbloods in TLM to be prestablished. The Sorceress being from SH didn't help either.

[+Oltux72 he/him]

The Cosmere, due to the Shards, Invested Arts and biology, contains individuals with extreme personal powers. They also convey immortality in many cases. Under those circumstances personal, as opposed to political or financial power, as far as they do not match, will matter to a far larger degree than in a universe that does not feature them.

Elantrians are demigods basically. They are so personally powerful and versatile in that power that they negate the existance of an economy even. If you are a relative of the lord of the demigods, you will go places, if I may put it that crudely. In a universe of immortal demigods they will supply a vastly disproportionate share of the most important actors.
That is not to say that your observation is false. It is spot on. However, it is to say that it is kind of unavoidable. And, in my opinion, done far better in the Cosmere thn in Star Wars.

On a tangent, this makes the Cosmere's politics more primitive politically speaking. Politics is much more dominated by the personal agendas of the actors at a far more advanced stage than we would otherwise assume.
If I am to put it in a mean manner, which I absolutely will, because I dislike the character it is aimed at, you can see a lot of the Cosmere's history as one man's self-directed therapy and penance for the ultimate sin against his god.

[king of nowhere]

this one looks like a justified case, actually. in that tress story was selected specifically because it had hoid in it.

 

I mean, it's clear that lumar has a lot of different people who interacted with the dragon or with the sorceress. those stories usually ended up poorly,

hoid went to lumar to get elantrian magic from riina. he spent years on the planet. then he crossed tress, who wanted to reach the sorceress, and helped her achieve her goal. while the story is nbarrated mostly from tress perspective, it's really only noteworthy in the grand scheme of things because it has hoid in it. otherwise tress would have at most figured out in an appendix as yet another victim of the sorceress.

As for ulaam, i think he was looking for hoid specifically, and stuck to him.

 

So no, this is not a classic star wars case of "guy lands on a new planet, which apparently has a single city on it, and there he stumbles upon this other main character. also, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale".

no, this is a case of "hoid came to lumar for a specific reason, got cursed, then he wandered the planet for years, was eventually found by an old friend who was looking for him and stayed with him, and eventually stumbled on a girl whose quest aligned with hoid, and hoid helped her to succeed"

 

in general, worldhoppers are not too common, and they are looking up for important stuff. marasi did not stumble on shai; shai was on scadrial doing ghostblood business, and she was specifically looking out for marasi. felt did not attach himself to dalinar's retinue by chance; felt has a mission on roshar, and whatever that mission is it involves being close to important events, and dalinar is the most important person on the planet.

You do not stumble upon a worldhopper. the worldhopper was there waiting for someone like you to come along.

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

The way I look at it, the actual number of people in-world who are fully aware of the big picture of the cosmere and it’s main ongoing conflicts is actually fairly small, especially if you recognize that there’s actually an even smaller number of organized efforts involved, which are led by people who have found a way to avoid death by natural causes. That limits the number of people who are available for the stories.

On top of that, we are getting a carefully crafted story of this major conflict in the cosmere, and each book helps push that overarching story forward a little bit, or helps us better understand the situation at hand. This includes lots of foreshadowing, and it makes sense that the people the story has focused on previously that seemed to just be random people in the cosmere turn out to actually be important players…. (Sixth of the Dust for example) The whole reason we get to see these peoples stories is so that we will better understand them and value them when we see them on the bigger stage with everyone else. So it makes sense that we have reached a point where more and more overlap will start happening with these people that we already know about, we been introduced to them and now we get to see the real reason why. There will still be new casts like in MB eras 3 and 4, SA back half, etc, but the important / immortal and involved people will still be interacting with them and making major decisions. That’s why we got their stories- they tie in with the bigger one.

[Aldric he/him]

When they're quite minor characters from existing stories, I don't really care. I usually have to look them up anyway to have remembered them. I certainly didn't remember a specific Ire from SH, I didn't remember one of the kids from Elantris in TLM, without looking her up. Based on some of the things she mentioned, I vaguely thought it might be her, but yeah.

 

I'm basically saying I personally don't think the original poster has to worry about Cosmere tie-ins in this book putting off new readers. But that's totally just an opinion, obviously. I don't think many of these things "matter" for the story at hand. If you're not SUPER into doing Cosmere studies, you usually have to look up things online to be sure of XYZ anyway.

 

Though I suppose if people feel they are "missing" something by missing various Easter Eggs, then for their personality, they'd need to have read the entire Cosmere.

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

2 minutes ago, Aldric said:

When they're quite minor characters from existing stories, I don't really care. I usually have to look them up anyway to have remembered them. I certainly didn't remember a specific Ire from SH, I didn't remember one of the kids from Elantris in TLM, without looking her up. Based on some of the things she mentioned, I vaguely thought it might be her, but yeah.

 

I'm basically saying I personally don't think the original poster has to worry about Cosmere tie-ins in this book putting off new readers. But that's totally just an opinion, obviously. I don't think many of these things "matter" for the story at hand. If you're not SUPER into doing Cosmere studies, you usually have to look up things online to be sure of XYZ anyway.

 

Though I suppose if people feel they are "missing" something by missing various Easter Eggs, then for their personality, they'd need to have read the entire Cosmere.

Yeah I think you make some great points. I guess for me at this point I highly doubt there will be any books coming out in the future that are truly good standalone / entry into the cosmere books. Best entry points have already been written I think. From here on out Brandon is racing to get to the end of the cosmere story before the sun dies

[Aldric he/him]

3 minutes ago, CognitiveShadow said:

Yeah I think you make some great points. I guess for me at this point I highly doubt there will be any books coming out in the future that are truly good standalone / entry into the cosmere books. Best entry points have already been written I think. From here on out Brandon is racing to get to the end of the cosmere story before the sun dies

Oh I agree with you in general. I mean he's specifically said the comment about the gloves being off from now on with Cosmere tie-ins.

I just personally felt that this story is a reasonable starting point because of it's relative brevity, fairytale feel, and while there are plenty of Easter-eggs, I didn't feel the reader noticing them was very necessary for the story. The fact that the "Evil Sorceress" was an ancient Ire Elantrian wasn't that necessary to the story, I didn't think. I could fully see somebody disagreeing with that though, seeing as how one of the meta-points of the story was Hoid getting his Elantrian Groove On. But a first time Cosmere reader wouldn't really notice or care that much about that final point, at least theoretically.

Similarly I don't really see knowing that the tablet that translates spoken words was an advanced Awakening application is really necessary for the story. Stuff like that.

[AquaRegia he/him]

1 hour ago, Aldric said:

I could fully see somebody disagreeing with that though, seeing as how one of the meta-points of the story was Hoid getting his Elantrian Groove On. But a first time Cosmere reader wouldn't really notice or care that much about that final point, at least theoretically.

I don't disagree that TotES would be a reasonable My First Cosmere Novel™.  But it's a fair point that a reader who is not familiar with Elantrians or AonDor might very well finish reading the final showdown and have no clue what just happened.

I'll also agree in principle with the OP:  seeing the same characters (or clans thereof) over and over does strain credibility.  But I don't think the Cosmere is nearly as bad as Star Wars ended up getting... in terms of callbacks it's more like Star Trek.  ;-)

[Eran of Arcadia]

14 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

this one looks like a justified case, actually. in that tress story was selected specifically because it had hoid in it.

I mean, BrandoSando could have written a story about Tress that was not, ultimately, about Hoid becoming an Elantrian. But he didn't.

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

1 hour ago, Eran of Arcadia said:

I mean, BrandoSando could have written a story about Tress that was not, ultimately, about Hoid becoming an Elantrian. But he didn't.

The main reason for us to have the story is because it ends with Hoid becoming an Elantrian, which will no doubt have a major impact on the future of the larger story of the Cosmere. If that (or something of a similar level of impact / tie-in) didn’t happen, this book would be cute and fun, but ultimately disappointing, I think. At this stage in the Cosmere, every new book should be either pushing the overarching plot-line forward, or giving us answers existing and important questions. That’s why Brandon is ‘taking off the gloves’ as others have mentioned on this thread.
 

Ultimately, I loved secret project 1 for the fun and unique story it was, but loved it even more for the tie-ins to the larger Cosmere (especially Hoid’s new progress). I don’t understand the ask for new starting points in the Cosmere given how far along it is now, or why people are surprised that the same characters are popping up. Like I said earlier, I personally think the pool of people that are actively involved in the major storyline is relatively small. Plenty of random (and awesome) stories could be told about the millions of people in the Cosmere and their lives/adventures, but Brandon is focusing in on the threads of a larger story. To me that means the important characters will continue to pop up, especially given that various forms of immortality is a thing in-world.

[Knight Oblivion]

I don't think it's a problem for TotES. Sure, Hoid is extra blatant compared to RoW, but everything else is barely fanservice or something I'd imagine someone starting off in the Cosmere would struggle with. Ignoring Hoid, we have two characters that were only named drop once in previous stories and some techno-magic-babble for a predictive tablet algorithm.

 

Ultimately, I'd imagine things will go like how my friends/acquaintances who start with Stormlight think. That there's some weird stuff and people going on in the background, but glossing over it for the main characters/plot.