Oops, he did it again

[+Oltux72]

Just to mention it, but here we have yet another planet whose history includes the line: And then almost everybody died.

This time it is genocide by industrial accident. The majority of the planets in the Cosmere we have seen so far has gone through horrible civilization and population collapses or outright genocide. Brandon seems to be a genuinely nice and caring man. Yet he routinely wipes out planetary populations. Am I the only one to feel that this is odd?

[TheOtherDave]

Don’t worry, none of this is real… he hasn’t actually killed billions of people.

 

 

I wouldn’t read too much into it. For reasons that are far to philosophical for me to get into with only one cup of coffee, interesting stories rarely happen in idyllic environments. 

[+Oltux72]

Yes, I am aware of stories needing conflict. And I have no problems with it. It just feels inconsistent to have Brandon state that he does not want his books to get too dark, yet he routinely kills billions. JUst as if it counted only if described in detail.

[RedBlue]

One main character death (excluding bad guys) makes the tone a lot darker. A million deaths of nameless, faceless characters has little impact on tone. That’s just kind of how it works. 

[ftl]

The tone of the books doesn't have too much to do with the death toll of the backstory, TBH.

Brandon's books are always about how good people, when they try, can make a difference. They can grow and change if they were bad before, they can overcome their challenges, and they can solve whatever problems the world has no matter how impossible they seem. That's what makes the books hopeful and positive.

And, interestingly, the worse the situation is at the start, the more hopeful the story can be. The worse things are for the heroes, the more AWESOME it is when they fix everything.

[Dalinar_Kholin]

I often find that worlds with an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic feel to them tend to be the most interesting. Having a large disaster in the past creates a sense of mystery and gives a feeling that the world has a history.

[king of nowhere]

it's hard to find a fantasy world that didn't have some apocalipse in the past. as others have explained, they are convenient for the plot

[Nyrrix]

Going beyond the meta-value apocalypses have in story telling: Earth has seen some rather devastating apocalyptic events. They completely changed the way humans interact with each other and the world. To name a few: World War II and I (global relations were flipped almost completely), the black death, the Bronze Age Collapse, and the Great Flood (I mean the end of the last ice age, which separated Russia and Alaska, flooded a lot of coastal regions, and seemed to inspire a universal flood myth in a lot of ancient cultures).

I think there's a tendency to take our own apocalypses somewhat for granted, but notice a fictional property having enormous, far-reaching events and say, "That's not realistic!" Sure, some of the apocalypses Brandon has cooked up are on a ridiculous scale, but many are not unreasonable if you set aside the magical context.

I don't think these world-changing events would not be so enthralling if we didn't have quite a few shaking up our own world in the past.

[king of nowhere]

7 hours ago, Nyrrix said:

Going beyond the meta-value apocalypses have in story telling: Earth has seen some rather devastating apocalyptic events. They completely changed the way humans interact with each other and the world. To name a few: World War II and I (global relations were flipped almost completely), the black death, the Bronze Age Collapse, and the Great Flood (I mean the end of the last ice age, which separated Russia and Alaska, flooded a lot of coastal regions, and seemed to inspire a universal flood myth in a lot of ancient cultures).

although none of them is nowhere near on the scale of fantasy apocalipses. the balck death was the most lethal and it killed one third of the global population. on scadrial and komashi, we're talking 1% survival rate

[RedBlue]

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

the balck death was the most lethal and it killed one third of the global population. on scadrial and komashi, we're talking 1% survival rate

IIRC, the Black Death killed one third of the European population. So definitely a sizeable dent in the global population, but not one third.

The relative lack of variation in the human genome compared to other species suggests that there was a serious population bottleneck at some point in prehistory. That’s probably the closest thing we have to a traditional fantasy apocalypse in the real world.

[GoldMisting]

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

although none of them is nowhere near on the scale of fantasy apocalipses. the balck death was the most lethal and it killed one third of the global population. on scadrial and komashi, we're talking 1% survival rate

There are quite a few mass mortality events at least localized to a city or continent or a species prior to us.   They probably felt apocalyptic to those involved and some notably had 100% mortality.  They just don't leave us written records usually.  You need archeology 

Mass die offs are part of the fossil record.  It might be dinosaurs or it could be strange sea life where an ocean receded or a scene of mass death upon an ice age starting or ending.  Some of those were global but obviously predated our species

Volcanic eruptions like what happened to Pompeii happened.  Only those far enough away lived to tell the tale, kind of like folks on the outskirts of the kingdom 1763 years ago. That's why we have only one eyewitness account of that one

Native Americans had a pathogen cocktail tossed at them by European contact by accident or design at multiple points.  Smallpox had something akin to a 90% mortality rate in populations that had not been previously exposed.  Between that and more intentional acts of genocide they weren't the party that got to write about what happened.  Diseases to which there was no prior exposure spread through their trade networks crisscrossing the Americas causing mass death years before any European or their descendants ever physically got to some of these places and found ruins because everyone died or fled

We don't think about apocalyptic events on grand scale or in near totality because they don't leave many survivors to talk about it or we don't relate well to other species or sometimes other groups of people.  You think of the plague that left ample survivors clever enough to avoid it and write not just accounts spanning more than one continent (Africa and Asia had it too though history we learn in school is Eurocentric) but famous works of literature referencing it.  Even areas where written records omit the plague, cities and towns end up being abandoned around the time the plague was known to be around

[Argenti]

On 7/4/2023 at 5:25 PM, TheOtherDave said:

Don’t worry, none of this is real… he hasn’t actually killed billions of people.

 

Yet.
He does have a supervillain lair and according to a certain article, he's our god.

[Brgst13]

On 7/7/2023 at 6:00 AM, king of nowhere said:

although none of them is nowhere near on the scale of fantasy apocalipses. the balck death was the most lethal and it killed one third of the global population. on scadrial and komashi, we're talking 1% survival rate

Look up the Lake Toba event.  Humanity was reduced to 70,000 individuals.  Is that apocalyptic enough for you?

[GoldMisting]

1 hour ago, Brgst13 said:

Look up the Lake Toba event.  Humanity was reduced to 70,000 individuals.  Is that apocalyptic enough for you?

Thank you!  Not to mention probable near misses before that point.  We've had some serious dips in the "breeding population" prior to Lake Toba but other than an ice age we don't really know what happened

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, Brgst13 said:

Look up the Lake Toba event.  Humanity was reduced to 70,000 individuals.  Is that apocalyptic enough for you?

it's a disputed theory, apparently not very consistent with the most recent climate models.

furthermore, back at the time humans only lived in east africa as hunter gatherers. not something that would give high population density; I would be surprised if there had been one million humans total at the time

[TheOtherDave]

On 7/8/2023 at 9:33 AM, Argenti said:

Yet.
He does have a supervillain lair and according to a certain article, he's our god.

lol, fair point

[JohnnyKaizen]

I would like to point out that the disaster of turning on the father machine wasn't a genocide, it was a tortuous, parasitic hostage situation. The population was trapped in the Shroud. Their Identity was intact, in that the machine could churn them back out at will. Even with their memories deleted daily, some part of them knew something was deeply wrong..for 1700 years on a planet with 11 day weeks. If they happened to have 52 weeks in a year, they were in that situation for 2,664.1 earth years. That, to me, is a lot darker than genocide. Thousands of people made sort of immortal, being daily tortured by a machine for basically no reason...that certainly surpasses my definition of dark.

Another thing that made me sad, is that if every person in the Shroud had been able to meet someone like painter, then they could have all been brought 1700 years into their future to finish their lives that were halted. I mean, going to Cosmere heaven is fine and all (since I have no idea what that entails but it seems peaceful and whatnot) and maybe after 266 earth centuries of that horror, I might want to go to the Beyond as well.

I really enjoyed the book. I really connected with it, but @Oltux72 is certainly correct that this book is dark. I think a lot of authors write really dark, horrific stories/histories/etc as the main and/or supportive story element. The difference between Brandon and most other authors is that he is able to write 4-10 full novels a year, so there is so much more content. I don't think it's odd, more formulaic than odd. 

[Thaidakar the Ghostblood]

On 7/8/2023 at 9:33 AM, Argenti said:

Yet.
He does have a supervillain lair and according to a certain article, he's our god.

HMMMMMMMM

Kind man who kills a lot of people routinely...

Hmmm...

does that sound familiar?

*Looks at our friend Ati/Ruin*

[Duxredux]

On 7/4/2023 at 2:50 PM, Oltux72 said:

Just to mention it, but here we have yet another planet whose history includes the line: And then almost everybody died.

This time it is genocide by industrial accident. The majority of the planets in the Cosmere we have seen so far has gone through horrible civilization and population collapses or outright genocide. Brandon seems to be a genuinely nice and caring man. Yet he routinely wipes out planetary populations. Am I the only one to feel that this is odd?

My take is that this is an expected potential outcome of what happens when you put the powers of deity into the hands of ordinary people who do not have the knowledge or vision of a deity, which is a fundamental idea of the Cosmere. There's going to be a higher incidence of people trying to get something to work and because they hadn't anticipated a quirk in the process, there's side effects - larger than you would find on an unInvested world. Vin breaks in her Mistborn powers by nearly impaling herself by burning Iron without knowing how exactly it works. Dealing with power that becomes sentient if left alone probably makes it even more complicated. Add in Shards both alive and dead leaving around massive sources of power relatively unsupervised and some other Shards coaxing the inhabitants into doing dangerous experiments and I don't think it's too surprising that so many worlds in the Cosmere almost got themselves annihilated. Nightblood, rampaging Koloss armies, Scadrial's too-close orbit during TFE, Elantris short circuiting at the Reod, the destruction of Ashyn... most potentially have Shardic machinations in the background and humans messing with a lot of Investiture. And that's just the mostly well-intentioned people, leaving out people actively trying to nuke a city like the Set.

Quote

Starman of Admora

After reading Mistborn, Elantris, and Warbreaker, I couldn't help but notice some recurring themes. What is it that entices you so much about the concept of living gods?

Brandon Sanderson

The idea of the Cosmere, the fundamental idea of the Cosmere, was: power of deity put in the hands of ordinary people. That is the Shattering of Adonalsium; that is the origin of the Shards. So when I built the Cosmere, that became one of the key themes of the Cosmere. And so, to tie all of these different books together (that are happening on different planets with different themes and characters and plots), I wanted some few things to link together. And that big linking connective tissue is: what do people do when they have the power of a god? Or even just a little fraction of it. What do they do with it? What happens? How do we explore that? And that theme is a connective tissue binding the Cosmere together, which is why you see me coming back to it time and time again.

r/books AMA 2022 (July 7, 2022)

Edit:I found one of the fundamental reasons for why Brandon consistently has planetary scale calamities. It's in the Elantris 10th Anniversary edition in the forward written by Dan Wells. Apparently Brandon used to not write major conflicts as we used might consider them (Ruin destroying Scadrial), more on the scale of "some people want to shut down Kenton's sand magic school" and that's about it. His writing group would ask him when the real villains and conflict were going to show up... and Brandon wasn't planning on any bigger villains. Wasn't going to happen. It's his first writing agent, Joshua Bilmes's fault that Cosmere worlds are in peril and that Brandon started selling in the first place as he said something that became a mantra to Brandon's writing group when giving feedback - "The fabric of the universe needs to be in peril". Brandon really just wanted to write about people who flew on sand and ate giant insect tofu and fired air-powered wrist darts, but no the fabric of the universe wasn't really in peril enough. Brandon hadn't sold yet and then got published, so apparently at some level it worked and stuck. Dan's forward is beautiful and well worth reading, but there's the answer. His agent, his writing group, and probably his publisher and editor thought that there needed to be more conflict than just watching a guy keep his school open.

Edited August 8, 2023 by Duxredux
added thought

[Saxsoon]

I think he is fascinated with post apocalypses so far in the future that humanity has recovered.

[trav]

Civilization is cyclical.

You live on a planet where it collapsed multiple times in the past

Seems rather natural and normal to me. I like that he uses different reasons why it happened.

Edited September 3, 2023 by trav