Yumi and the Nightmare Painter Full Reactions (No Cosmere)

[Chaos]

Put your full book reactions to Yumi and the Nightmare Painter (which is Secret Project 3) here. Note in this forum, talk about stuff in Yumi only, not greater cosmere connections.

[Pagerunner]

As I expected, this is pretty easily my least favorite of the Secret Projects so far, and it might be my least favorite Cosmere book, period. Something about Freaky Friday plots just is not enjoyable for me to read, so the first half of this book was a real chore.

The second half gets better, once it moves away from the body swap and into the deep lore, save the planet, overthrow Skynet. I did expect that the planet both characters were seeing was something else, not each other's homes. (Which, granted, was based on a cryptic WoB about yellow hion, so I thought it was just gonna be a third planet entirely that the shroud was trying to spread to.) Revealing that Yumi was a nightmare was a nice twist, and I found it to be engaging from that part on.

I also picked up on how it was gonna be a fakeout sad ending with a bonus extra scene as soon as each of those clues dropped. (Literally. When Yumi watches the TV and they talked about how sad endings happen sometimes, I said out loud "Brandon you don't have the guts to do that." And then when Izzy said there's a secret followup episode, I said "There it is.") I think I'm ready for a sad ending to one of these stories, or at least something a little more open-ended, especially since the last two Secret Projects were both "happily ever after." But whatever, they're stories he wrote for his wife, so no surprise they're not gonna lean towards tragedies. (That's what Stormlight Five is for...)

[Argenti]

This book took my theories and threw them out the window. I was expecting a book where they learned from each other by spending time in the other's shoes and grew as people, Yadadada. Sappy stuff. What I was not expecting was that Yumi had been dead for 1700 years, Painter was a master all along, and a vampire god machine was secretly shaping the town, Yumi, and the Nightmares. I wish we had more on virtuosity, but maybe that's for when we explore the 4 armed people? 
Unpublished

Spoiler

Yes, I know they're sho-del, I'm just doing it for other's benfit. 

 

[+Child of Hodor]

These people take a lot of baths, huh?

It was pretty good. *shrug* I was a little thrown by Hoid narrating this similar to Tress. I don’t need Hoid’s smug asides to the audience all through a book. I did appreciate Design being there and a part of the story. 

I felt like most of the twists were not well disguised. I immediately thought the idea that they were from separate planets was wrong no matter how much they kept saying it. 
Painter confronts a nightmare and next thing he knows nightmare is gone and Yumi is there. I assumed she was Nightmare and they are just misunderstood. 

“I, the one they call Painter, am actually good at painting!! I was pretending to be less good” didn’t add much to the story or the character imo. Sometimes maybe there doesn’t need to be another secret. 

Edited July 1, 2023 by Child of Hodor

[ChocolateRob]

edit - moved to its own thread. Yumi and the Final Fantasy X connections.

Edited July 2, 2023 by ChocolateRob
gone to a better home

[ChocolateRob]

edit - Moved to its own thread. Simply put my reaction to this book was to think on its connections to FFX, a game that I know very well. Brandon was clear that it was a major inspiration and I was struck with an urge to discuss it.

Edited July 2, 2023 by ChocolateRob
Moved to its own thread

[Pandora's shard]

Just finished the book. Not my favourite of the secret projects. Thats still Tress. 

It actually gets better in the second half, after the condescending tones of the Yumi is gone a bit, and she starts to understand that there is something more to the Painter. As for him, well, one word that came to my mind was, "Potential". A character with such specialisation of the arts... Who is lost in his inertness because of his indecision and failures.. I just wish he was in a different story, and there was more care given to him. 

well, this book is 3.5/5 for me.  

[RedBlue]

Finished the book last night, took time to digest.

Things I liked:

• Both settings were very inventive and fun to read about. I love it when Brandon gets extra creative like this.
• The writing style. I enjoy Hoid’s voice a lot, with the fun asides, talking directly to the audience, and still being able to deliver the serious emotional moments. It feels dialled back a bit from Tress, which suits the tone of the book, being closer to regular cosmere style and less fairy tale style. I wouldn’t mind at all if future books were written in this voice.
• Painter is great. I like how we get to know him and see that he’s struggling with something before peeling back the layers to find out what exactly happened to him. His backstory doesn’t feel at all surprising when we get there, and that’s really cool — we got to know him through the life he’s living now, to the point where he doesn’t need to be ‘explained’.
• Yumi is great. I loved seeing her slowly slide away from the rigid control of her life as a yoki-hijo, then break away as she comes to understand the extent of the abuse, then take control of the situation for herself when she uncovers the abuse behind the abuse.
• Liyun is great. She seems like a complete monster when she’s introduced, but as you find out more, her behaviour makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t change the fact that she’s done horrible things, but it adds complexity and nuance when you realise that she’s just another flawed human being in a difficult situation, perpetuating the abuse because that’s what she knows how to do.
• The mystery, and the reveals at the end. I like how you can relatively easily piece some of it together (I guessed fairly early that the two ‘worlds’ were actually physically right next to each other and only separated by the shroud), but the details of how this all works and what it means for the characters comes as a shock.

 

Some things I wasn’t so keen on:

• The romance aspects were just kind of okay. They weren’t actively bad or anything, but I didn’t feel like they added anything to the story. If Painter and Yumi had just been really close friends it might actually have worked better IMO.
• I’m … not sure how to feel about the rock stacking machine. Given what’s been going on in the real world lately, it can’t not feel like it’s about the dangers of AI. And I wouldn’t necessarily mind that, except that Awakened objects are functionally very different from the kinds of AI we have in the real world, which makes the stacking machine stuff ring a bit hollow for me. 
   

Overall, really enjoyed it. It’s nice to have another good standalone cosmere book that has connections to other cosmere stuff but doesn’t require lore knowledge to be understood. I think I liked Tress a little more, but this one is not far behind. 

[The Unknown Ajah]

Copied from the bookclub PM:

So, I loved Painter. Definitely a top three Brandon character next to Kaladin and Dalinar. Parts of his character really resonated with me. Not exactly the lone wolf style, but the concealed loneliness and certain aspects of his character that you'll discover about midway through the book.

Yumi, less so. Brandon's female characters have a very distinct connection with Robert Jordan's, which means I will always find them pretty irritating. I know everyone always talks about how accurate they ar. I agree, I just don’t like the women they're accurate to either.

Design was a delight throughout. Tearing through social conventions like a hot knife through butter. Hoid was pretty fun even outside of his narration.

Let's do ratings:

Emotional Impact: 9

Characters: 8.55

Plot: 5.8

Dialogue/Prose: 7.45

Worldbuilding/Magic System: 8.25

Overall: 7.81

A very respectable score, if it weren't for Yumi the score would be a bit higher. This wasn't a plot heavy book either, and the only parts that were plot heavy were pretty confusing, so it got a pretty low score on that front. All of the side characters were delightful. 

I think I will have to agree with Brandon that this is my favorite SP so far, but I think there's a good chance it will be usurped by SP4.

Brandon said his goal when writing these was to get Hoid’s tone down for Dragonsteel, and this tone feels pretty good. I would be pretty happy with this for Dragonsteel. 

[ftl]

Fun read! I enjoyed it.

The part I liked least was the way the info about the planet's past was presented; unlike many reveals in Brandon's books, this one didn't feel organic to me. I liked the bodyswap plot and I liked Painter as the stormup who's trying to do better.

[Siri]

I actually thought i was going to like this one better than tress. I liked the body swap.  Yumi's confusion was delightful and i actually laughed out loud about the concubine confusion.

I felt like Hoid was mostly in character,  annoyingly reminding you that this was his story every now and again. 

 

I actually really liked yumi. She was a product of her upbringing,  but softened with experience.  She had a passion for her job even while she was changing and realizing the depth of her abuse. I didn't find painter nearly as interesting,  maybe because  john in The frugal wizard was almost identical.  A guy trying to act more confident than he is all the while being crippled by insecurity.  The only difference was in this one he could remember it.  But it still worked ok. 

The plot twist was pretty good.  I figured that the hion lines would turn out to be related to the trapped spirits,  but i didn't see yumi as a nightmare coming. 

It started to fall apart for me when hoid started explaining the backstory.  It pulled me out of the story, and instead of returning to the same level of intensity afterward,  it felt more like coming back to the story to find it neatly wrapping up,  in almost as succinct a summary.   I felt like it would have been better to not tell us at all, maybe let the scholars explain the 1700 year part.

I also really wanted yumi to seek out the other yoki-hijo and gang up on the machine together.  Why have a connection to them if nothing was to come of it except feeling them fade after freed from the machine?  I think that would have been cool. 

Also,  it didn't really make sense to me that painter was able to pull yumi back. Cool that it proves he's a master painter with strong intent,  but.... really?  I thought it would really have helped painter grow as a person to have to deal with her loss and try to reconnect with his other friends.  

Over all it felt like brandon was rushing through the end,  instead of giving it the complexity it deserved.   So, even though it started great, i have to put this one behind tress.

[king of nowhere]

I wasn't excited at the beginning, but I ended up liking it a lot.

I liked a lot Yumi and her take on the "powered by a forsaken child" trope. I mean, every time i've seen that trope used, it's to show that something is incredibly evil, because they are exploiting some innocent. or to show how grimdark the setting is, that it requires constant sacrifices to keep going.

here a different angle is explored: yes, this world requires that some people live a life of sacrifice. what do you do about it? if it's the only way to ensuyre the survival of everyone else, you can ask this sacrifice. and a lot of people, if they were the only ones who could provide it, would sacrifice freely.

and then the reform movement (by the way, was that real or was it invented by the machine to try and play along?). sacrifice is needed, yes, but no more than necessary. and i realized at this point being a yoki-hijo is not really all that different from any other job. yes, we all get torn away from our families and hobbies for 8 hours per day and forced to engage in unpleasant activities so that society keeps functioning. most of us do it spontaneously and considers it a small price to pay to not have to live on trees.

painter is a very archetypical sanderson character, but from the beginning where his job was equated to nurses or teachers, it created some deep resonance with me. I can testify that 90% of what is said about nikaro's job also applies to teaching. fantasy stories are still about humans, and sanderson is great at representing people

[Nathrangking]

I'll be totally honest that initially I was not all that impressed. I found the pre-released chapters uninspiring. Being unfamiliar with his inspirations and not being a fan of manga made it hard for me to care about. It was only reading it as a whole did I find it somewhat enjoyable. I can somewhat relate to the ways that Nikaro and Yumi sometimes feel. Design was a gem and really a standout character. All of that said the romance felt forced to a large degree. All in all I enjoyed it. It is not my favorite, but it was pretty good.

Edited July 13, 2023 by Nathrangking

[king of nowhere]

Can't help wondering though: why it's yumi and the nightmare painter instead of nikaro and the girl of commanding primal spirits?

[Nitpicking]

I propose that this book could be called Jessie and the Math Teacher.

I am in no way trying to intrude, but Jessie and Eric were pretty open about how they met virtually while living in different worlds (North America and Australia), and communicated a lot over electronic media (Connection) while being physically unable to be together due to the Shroud (global pandemic), but have had a happy (courtship storyline) ending. I have to think that, consciously or unconsciously, Brandon was inspired by their long-distance relationship when writing Yumi. IIRC he did attend their wedding celebration. (I'm really not prying, Eric talked about it on the podcast.)

I am in no way saying that Jessie is anything like Yumi, or Eric like Painter, but the situation has similarities, yes?

[Elegy]

Loved it, his best since Oathbringer easily in my opinion, and one of the best Cosmere books in general. It's so full of ideas and inventive, he really went all out this time, a book that is packed with stuff that could have easily filled three books by most other authors. Also, easily the best prose of all of his bibliography. The flying scene in particular stood out as Brandon's best writing ever imo. Just extremely happy with it.

On a side-note, gah, I hate the epilogue and I could rant about it for a thousand words (but I won't). Genuinely felt like he abandoned the artistically resonant ending for the safe and forgettable one - in a book about artistic resonance. I think it's a very bad decision and it drags the book down a bit. Which goes to show how much I loved the rest of this, because it's still a masterpiece. Komashi is up there with Scadrial as a runner-up for second place for my favorite Cosmere worlds right now (Roshar #1 of course). Great collection of moods and ideas in general.

[Treamayne]

2 hours ago, Elegy said:

I hate the epilogue and I could rant about it for a thousand words

Just to clarify do you mean:

1. Epilogue 1 and Yumi's Plot Armor?
2. Epilogue 2 and Hoid's "wake up?"
3. All of the above?

[Elegy]

46 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Just to clarify do you mean:

1. Epilogue 1 and Yumi's Plot Armor?
2. Epilogue 2 and Hoid's "wake up?"
3. All of the above?

Epilogue 1, although my problem is not necessarily the plot armor, but the fact that the book tries to make the reader feel the sad ending without commiting to it. Which feels like a major fake-out.

This thing would be frustrating in any work of any artist, but on top of that, Brandon has pretty much written a library worth of books with fake-out deaths, several of which feel deliberately dishonest, almost mean to me in the way they try to pull emotions out of the reader by having them believe the character is dead just to reveal that these emotions were basically for nothing because surprise, they live. Plus the fact that readers already complain about this all the time (one of the major criticism that comes up in the beef Shardcasts, for example), yet he just does not learn that this kind of thing feels bad to many of his readers.

This one was the worst of all, because it made me feel the deeply emotionally resonant ending that the book could have had. That ending would have been such a stand-out in his work, people would talk about it all the time. But he dropped it for the "everyone's happy, also they take over the noodle shop", which feels like fan fiction, or a meme ending, to the point that I think it's possbible that Hoid just made it up on the fly because everyone in the audience was crying and the tragic ending might be what actually happened, because it felt like such an odd decision.

And I get that you want to make your audience satisfied with a neat little happy ending that is cute and all that, and Brandon can do that, but why in a book about art that resonates and does something to people on a deep emotional level? You watch too many Disney movies Brandon ahaha.

... And this is why I initially didn't write more about it  Sorry haha. The disappointment is still too fresh. Might have been one of my all-time favorite books if he had been brave enough to push through with it. The way it is, "only" masterpiece status. (I'm just so impressed with basically everything else.)

The Hoid epilogue was great, I really liked it. I somehow assumed that it was obvious which one I meant (since I've seen other people disappointed/confused about that part, for example Merphy Napier), but yeah, I wasn't clear ^^

(EDIT: To clarify, the ending would have been better if he hadn't made it seem like he wanted to commit to the sad ending in the first place. Having a happy ending for this story is fine. It's the fact that he wanted the reader to believe that the sad ending had already happened just to undo it that makes me mad. If he hadn't done that, I would have happily gone along with the happy ending, even though it wouldn't have been nearly as emotionally resonant to me as the one he almost did. At the very least, it wouldn't have felt dishonest.)

Edited July 26, 2023 by Elegy

[Treamayne]

49 minutes ago, Elegy said:

Epilogue 1,

(EDIT: To clarify, the ending would have been better if he hadn't made it seem like he wanted to commit to the sad ending in the first place. Having a happy ending for this story is fine. It's the fact that he wanted the reader to believe that the sad ending had already happened just to undo it that makes me mad. If he hadn't done that, I would have happily gone along with the happy ending, even though it wouldn't have been nearly as emotionally resonant to me as the one he almost did. At the very least, it wouldn't have felt dishonest.)

Thank you for putting into words what I failed to explain in my reaction post. I thought you meant the first epilogue, but so many people liked it that I thought it was better to clarify.

I'm sure the fact that it was a gift for his wife influenced how the final ending happened. 

[king of nowhere]

5 hours ago, Elegy said:

Epilogue 1, although my problem is not necessarily the plot armor, but the fact that the book tries to make the reader feel the sad ending without commiting to it. Which feels like a major fake-out.

 

I never bought into the fake death, because at some point near the beginning hoid says that yumi and nikaro narrated the story together (can't find the exact point). meaning they are together when hoid is "defrosted". so i never felt that kind of emotional whiplash from that. i always knew yumi was not gone for good.

! Cosmere spoilers !

Spoiler

Quote

This thing would be frustrating in any work of any artist, but on top of that, Brandon has pretty much written a library worth of books with fake-out deaths

vin and elend die for real. wayne dies for real. elhokar dies for real. a lot of people in brandon's books die for real. kelsier dies for real, and just because he returns centuries later, no, he still died for real.

 

 

[Elegy]

@king of nowhere (This is not the Cosmere spoilers forum, so better hide that second part of the reply.)

I wasn't saying that no characters die. The fact that people die in Brandon's books is no argument against his liberal use of fake deaths, which, like I said, isn't a topic often brought up in connection with him for no reasons. From the top of my head, in the matter of seconds, I can name seven significant fake deaths of major characters in his work. This is not a problem that a list of actual deaths will nullify. Like, the man has written like 40 books, of course characters can die.

Edit: Also, regarding your very last point, no, that's a fake-out death by every definition of the word.

Edited July 26, 2023 by Elegy

[Argent]

@king of nowhere, I've edited your message to hide the - pretty significant - Cosmere spoilers. Please be more careful in the future. 

[king of nowhere]

7 hours ago, Elegy said:

@king of nowhere (This is not the Cosmere spoilers forum, so better hide that second part of the reply.)

 From the top of my head, in the matter of seconds, I can name seven significant fake deaths of major characters in his work. This is not a problem that a list of actual deaths will nullify. Like, the man has written like 40 books, of course characters can die.

Edit: Also, regarding your very last point, no, that's a fake-out death by every definition of the word.

weird. off the top of my head, I can't name a single one in a cosmere book - ok, my last point if you consider it as such.

after checking book by book, I can list a handful, but still rather rare considering the sheer amount of books he's written. like, I can list it once every 3-4 books.

also, there's a strong dependence on the amount of foreshadowing involved; I mean, in most fake deaths you have enough details that will let you know it was fake. As I said, I never expected yumi could possibly die for real in this book. If you catch the hints, does it count as a fake death? and if you don't, but after the fact it makes sense? I'll bring a couple of examples from the reckoners trilogy because I'm rereading it right now and it's fresher in my memory:

reckoners big spoilers

Spoiler

 

in the first book, we have two fake deaths: megan, and prof.

but prof has never fooled me. Ever since I saw him use the "tensors", I immediately realized he was an epic. when he got his head crushed, I knew he was getting up.

megan did fool me. I didn't catch the hints regarding her - although the one about prof gifter powers not working on her was pretty blatant in retrospect. So, even though it did foor me at the beginning, I didn't complain about that either.

 

so the question is, do those count as fake deaths, or not?

for me, they don't. if for you they do, I can see why you'd be annoyed.

6 hours ago, Argent said:

@king of nowhere, I've edited your message to hide the - pretty significant - Cosmere spoilers. Please be more careful in the future. 

sorry about that

[Elegy]

On 27.7.2023 at 2:06 AM, king of nowhere said:

weird. off the top of my head, I can't name a single one in a cosmere book - ok, my last point if you consider it as such.

after checking book by book, I can list a handful, but still rather rare considering the sheer amount of books he's written. like, I can list it once every 3-4 books.

also, there's a strong dependence on the amount of foreshadowing involved; I mean, in most fake deaths you have enough details that will let you know it was fake. As I said, I never expected yumi could possibly die for real in this book. If you catch the hints, does it count as a fake death? and if you don't, but after the fact it makes sense? I'll bring a couple of examples from the reckoners trilogy because I'm rereading it right now and it's fresher in my memory:

reckoners big spoilers

  Reveal hidden contents

 

in the first book, we have two fake deaths: megan, and prof.

but prof has never fooled me. Ever since I saw him use the "tensors", I immediately realized he was an epic. when he got his head crushed, I knew he was getting up.

megan did fool me. I didn't catch the hints regarding her - although the one about prof gifter powers not working on her was pretty blatant in retrospect. So, even though it did foor me at the beginning, I didn't complain about that either.

 

so the question is, do those count as fake deaths, or not?

for me, they don't. if for you they do, I can see why you'd be annoyed.

But once every 3-4 books is actually an outrageous amount if you consider that doing it constantly can make the stories lose stakes for a lot of people. There have been several instances of characters actually dying and people needing Brandon's confirmation via WOB that they were actually died because they didn't believe they actually died (and a shoe was once eaten because of it ). Cases like these show that this is not something that an author should do liberally. Of course, I understand your experience. But I've heard it repeatedly that people are annoyed at this.

And this particular case was one of the worst in my opinion. Like, it literally says that she "evaporated into nothingness" (what's a more definitive way of saying that a character died) at the end of the chapter, so it's hard for me to imagine that Brandon didn't want the reader to believe she died and feel the feeling as if she had died. And, like I said, to me that feels dishonest. (Now that I think about it, I wouldn't have been nearly as mad about it if he had just let her come back at the end of the chapter instead of closing that door in one chapter, then opening it again in the epilogue as a separate chapter and doing it the other way. It just wasn't well-done imo.)

Anyway, there's more discussion about fake deaths in this section of the Cosmere Beef 2 Shardcast episode (obviously full of spoilers, even beyond the Cosmere, and released waaay before Yumi, so I have no idea how the casters think about this particular case).

I think I said what I wanted to say about this topic, especially considering that I didn't want to talk about it initially  The ways we perceived the ending are both valid and we can agree to disagree. It is, however, a fact that to some people, Brandon's tendency to bring characters back feels a bit overdone and easy.

I promise I will write something more positive about the book in the next few days, because like I said, I loved it and there's so much to talk about, and it feels bad to just rant on about the one single thing that I disliked about it. (EDIT: Took me a bit longer than I wanted, but there it is!)

Also, the physical copy just arrived and it is such a piece of art, I'm going crazy over it.

Edited August 19, 2023 by Elegy

[king of nowhere]

By the way, i'm wondering how the nightmare painters started. As the survivors of the shroud started rebuilding civilization, nightmares started to manifest.

And somebody first had the idea to paint them. 

Imagine the scene. There is this eldritch horror. Weapons pass through it. And somebody painted it.

It must have taken a very unusual person.