Ripheus23 Posted January 8, 2025 Posted January 8, 2025 (edited) In Tolkien's background stories, Sauron didn't always try to raise huge armies for his purposes. Neither did Melkor, exactly, IIRC. In the Covenant novels, it's explicitly stated that the Despiser's strategy in the first arc was heavily based on the idea of using an outside army, then an inside army in the second arc, and finally no real personally directed army at all but an elaborate manipulation of circumstances, like a pattern of inverted divine providence, in the last arc. On the other hand, the Dark One was waging war right through to the Last Battle's last ending. The reason/way this possibly applies to the Archive's back half would be: what if Retribution won't be the tangible antagonist almost/at all? As if to say: It'll be Mishram primarily, there'll be duels with Fused and Unmade and all that, but not the direct meddling from the evil Shard like we've dealt with throughout the front half and especially as of the third book. Ishar will be more volatile than we'd have hoped (think Esmer from the last Covenant arc, if you're familiar with those novels). There will be ecological and technological dangers. Secondly: it's possible to write an absurdly epic conclusion to a fantasy saga that does not depend on a final-battle scene. A zig-zag, to some extent, of the whole template is at the end of His Dark Materials (which seems like an absurdly good option when it comes to, "If any other books inspired the idea of the spren and bonds therewith..."), where Spoiler God, who is indeed corrupt, is yet helpless and in some ethereal sense now innocent, and now vanishes from life by an act of grace on the part of the human saviors; then the closest functional equivalent to Sauron, Metatron, is vanquished by the sacrifice of two other human beings; but the actual salvation of not just one world, but all life throughout the multiverse, is accomplished by the love of the two humans saviors for each other, and not metaphorically by this means but entirely literally so. I am reminded also of the Genesis of Shannara novels, arguably the finest entries in that whole convoluted, even repetitive, meta-series. The endgame is such that Spoiler yes, there is a "final boss battle" scene, but then the truly salvific moment is not that scene. And this is like unto how in the second published Shannara book, there is a "final boss battle" but also afterwards then the regeneration of a sacred tree, which regeneration is the actual crux of the storyline. It's tragic, too, incidentally. So now why should Sanderson, who has already "written the book on" battle sequences involving transcendent evil beings (the end of The Wheel of Time, that is), go and duplicate that narrative rhythm in the Archive's back half? Actually, I shouldn't say that it would be impossible for him to justify doing so. He could well conceive of a battle sequence culminating in an assault on Retribution's power that is as epochal as the apocalypse of the Dark One in The Wheel of Time. He'd figure it out. But, so, does he have to? This is what I'm mainly wondering. Suppose, for example, that Retribution is truly meant to be the broader-scope villain also, i.e. will in fact go on to menace the entire cosmere not just by desire but by deed? Wouldn't it kind of be a let-down to have Kaladin and Co. square off with him somehow, especially in some dramatic multiple-magic-systems-engaging manner, and he was not defeated by this? Now, if I want to push the Covenant analogy some more, I'd claim, "Well, he could write it like that, too: Retribution is sealed away at the end of the back half, but there's a known 'timer' on the sealing, so the later interstellar conflict will involve him when he returns; this is what Donaldson did with the Despiser two times over, after all (implicitly more, if you count the implied prehistory)." Still, I would also then want to emphasize that the second arc's ending was split in half, and one half of that was a healing-themed scenario more, with surprising undercurrents of what was at the time pathbreaking queer theory/representation in fantasy fiction. This representation evolved into one-third of the ending of the third arc, no less, which though it involved a separate corrupted deity than the main enemy in the series was not about defeating this dire goddess in combat. Meanwhile, another one-third of the third ending was an elaborate Battle Within the Mind kind of scenario, focused on metaphysical puzzle-solving more than combat or emotional outbursts either way. And even the other half of the second ending, though it had more "battle-like" characteristics, was really instead one of the greatest subversions of the final-battle trope in fantasy that I've ever read. So, for all that, again: and no doubt, Retribution will play a deep role in the text no matter what, but will his role now be more like, say, the Keeper of the Underworld's role was in Goodkind's peculiar series? (I mean the earlier books, there: IIRC, the mythos of the Keeper was eventually transformed into some multiversal situation involving a diabolical prophecy-machine or something) Or just: will a final personal confrontation with Retribution be the apex of the last endgame (in the Archive), or will the ultimate focus be on a different scenario involving enormous magic power? So finally, I also want to bring up Sazed's triumph, then: even already Sanderson has equipped a fantasy climax with both a divine battle scene and a divine regeneration scene. Does he actually need the former for the end of the back half, or would it work even if he had only a world-healing scene at the end? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ADDENDUM: FFX So, that's Sanderson's favorite FF game, yeah? Maybe even his favorite video game, period??? (I'm not sure how to read the article's meaning correctly.) There HAS to be a clue to the Archive/cosmere-saga in that. I mean, there's another thread here correlating FFX and Yumi/the Night Painter story (which I haven't read yet, though). But so, as far as goes this question of, "Will there be a final battle, or at least rather will there be a final battle and then a non-combat final dramatic scene?" then what could we question about the theme in terms of how FFX goes at the end? Because, like, there's a complex battle sequence for sure, where you're fighting the visual embodiment of the thing you've known as Sin itself the whole time. You're going into it, no less. Then you're in this mystical realm where you eventually fight another major enemy figure who's showed up before over and over again. (A guy not all too unlike Ishar, after all...) Eventually, Kaladin, err, Tidus confronts an awful truth in that Spoiler besides the fact that he's part-hologram (to put it the only way I know how), his dad on his real side is the avatar of Sin's heart. So, there's a final battle that you can lose. But then, for some mysterious narrative reason: Quote You have to "defeat," i.e. zero out the health number for, these angelic beings who've been helping you throughout your battles on your epic quest, all in a row. But so while you play the scene using the combat system, the scene isn't an actual combat scene, because you can never die/lose in it (AFAIK). Instead, once you get to the actual core essence of Sin, even the "battle" with this entity is by Sin, err Yu Yevon, unwinnable: so you will win, and so you will have really, in a lot of ways, already won the game as of beating Tidus' dad in the previous scene. Another thing: Sanderson's said something about gloves being off or what, recently(ish)? From what I'm seeing, it was something to do with crossovers from different parts of the meta-series. But that's also, technically, a pacing question, w.r.t. the whole meta-series, yeah? Like how much the tempo of RAFO adjustment on the wider scale is intensified. Something I'm wondering is if we should assume that all the back-half Archive books will be ~1400 pages each. Is it possible that we see shorter main entries and maybe longer intermediate entries instead? Maybe he picks up the pace in some way proportionate to how he paced W&T, even (not that the whole back half covers mostly just ten days, but still something metaphorically like that, sort of). I mean, FF6 Spoiler halfway ends with the world getting mutilated by the ascension of the crazy evil wizard who seemed kind of like a main enemy up until that point, but not the main enemy. But the pace doesn't pick up, IIRC it takes you as long, IRL-timewise, to get through the back half of FF6 as the front half. I think you go through a bunch of mirror situations compared to the front half, too, but I'm not too sure about that. But now in FFX, once you get to the twist/everything-changes-now moment, it's closer to the end. But "all gloves are off" because whereas before you were kind of stuck going from point A to point B down the road, now you can go to all sorts of locations in preparing for the final battle. So in the Archive's back half, could we see Kaladin and Co. doing a lot of things a lot more quickly than we're used to them doing things in the front half? Edited January 8, 2025 by Ripheus23 1
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