Fixing the Stormlight archive

[Frustration]

I was running a thought experiment some time ago about what could be improved upon in the SA, so I thought I'd let you see my thoughts here as I do have mild Sunlit man spoilers.

 

WoK:

This one is honestly really good. I'd probably just move the Shallan sections around as right not they are in really annoying locations. I'd also see about giving her more to do as Shallan spends most of the book not making any progress towards her goals.

 

WoR:

Jasnah's fake death isn't very impactful to the story, and weakens the ending with three fake out deaths one right after the other. We should get some confirmation that she's alive, and probably have her and Shallan speak once she's been transported to Shadesmar. Some of Shallan's dialogue could also be cleaned up a little but that's less of an issue.

 

OB:

Shallan's breakdown doesn't hit like it should, and her whole character is off for most of the book. Elhokar's death is also done so poorly I didn't believe he was really dead until almost two years later. The fused are also jokes, they need to be shown to actually be capable of serious damage. Dalinar kind of sucked up all of the emotional beats in the story, which made his arc really good, but left almost everyone else feeling flat. Unless Brandon wants Jasnah to be evil she also should probably have talked to Renarin before trying  to kill him.

 

RoW:

The previous entries could all have used a little work, but it's here that big changes start being necessary. Despite the book being about Willshapers and having her flashbacks Venli is a surprisingly passive character. I'd honestly restructure the book, taking several of Kaladin's PoVs as well as most of Adolin's and give them to Venli. She also needs to be more active. I think her finding Kaladin and trying to help him, while also not getting caught would be a far more compelling story than what we got. It would also explain why the Radiants were so willing to let them go at the end of the book. And finally there are some mild inconsistencies between the WoR interludes, and what we saw in the flashbacks that need reconciled. 

Kaladin's depression is really mild in its depiction this book. WoK did a much better job with it. I know part of it was intentional, but it still needs work.

Shallan's entire story for RoW is just a poorly done recreation of Dalinar's in OB at best, and an exercise in futility at worst. She spends the whole time saying that no one will love the real her, and I still remember thinking that there was no way the reveal would live up to it. I was right. She spends the whole book worrying about Formless, which was poorly revealed to just be Shallan the whole time. She worries about Ghostblood spies, which never existed. And the Testament reveal was rather weak.

Navani spends the entire book being an idiot. Raboniel was one of the most obvious liars I've ever read in fiction, and Navani still fell for it. I know that more than anything Brandon just wanted to make anti-light but he could have done that without making Navani a gullible pushover in the process.

Dalinar does almost nothing this book, which is really unfortunate.

Once again the Fused are complete pushovers. There were almost zero negative long term consequences as a result of their actions, despite the Fused holding the Tower for most of the book. They had victory in their hands and still managed to lose. None of the heroes died, no one was injured, nothing was lost. Huge letdown. If Odium was smart he would have slaughtered everyone in the tower, or at least have evacuated them to Kholinar as prisoners. Keeping the Radiants alive makes a little sense to keep the spren from bonding someone else, but the humans had no reason to continue to be there.

Additionally just on a worldbuilding side I would have made all of the Fused much more powerful in direct combat. Most of their powers suck, and need overhauled. I've detailed my thoughts on what they should be in other posts, but I'm still disappointed with what we got.

 

WaT:

Do I even have to say it? There's a lot wrong with this one.

The dialogue and prose needs quite dramatic alterations, as do Brandon's poor attempts at humor.

Kaladin needs a better end goal than just "Help Szeth." Even with Dalinar's instructions I feel like Kaladin would at least try and be more helpful to the Radiants efforts. Brandon even had it set up perfectly for Kaladin to try curing Ishar so Ishar could help Dalinar. He could have even had Wit message Kaladin and say they need Ishar to make a Perpendicularity because Dalinar is stuck in the SR. Either would have given much more urgency or at least more weight to what Kaladin was doing.

Cut some of the needless bloat. Adolin's chapters could be trimmed down a little, as could some of Jasnah's, and almost all of Rlain and Renarin. I know Brandon was setting up for book 6 there, but there's still a lot that isn't necessary.

Brandon needs to stop holding back with the Fused and Unmade. Yelig-nar shows up for the third time in the series and we skip over that like it's nothing. The Azimir sections did a good job of showing how outmatched the heroes are. Narak needed the same treatment, but instead felt rather hollow when they had to retreat.

Some plot holes need filling. There should have been some mention that they couldn't lock the Azimir Oathgate. And Sigzil needed to swear the fourth ideal to get his armor as we saw in TSM. Brandon could have easily done that by altering the point where Sigzil breaks his oath to be him considering that and the deciding to try and swear the fourth ideal instead. Not only would that have been a cooler scene, and it would also have given him the power needed to overcome the fabrial, but it would have let Brandon pull the heartstrings as Moash killed Sigzil's spren anyway.

Gavilnor. Above everything else I hated this the most. Gavilnor was a terrible choice of a champion, and almost anything else would have been better.

 

But enough of my thoughts, how about the rest of you?

Edited Friday at 06:07 PM by Frustration

[Ascended Grubberfly He/Him]

I have opinions, but I don’t know how influenced they are by the community, but I’ll share anyways.

WoK:

I liked this book, and looking back I think these are the best Shallan chapters. I kinda liked that Shallan only stole the Soulcaster after the lesson in philosophy. I loved that lesson.

WoR:

Shallan’s chapters felt empty, and Jasnah’s death limits Shallan’s soulcasting and doesn’t do anything for the story.

OB:

Dalinar’s flashbacks are my favorite chapters in the whole series, maybe even the whole Cosmere. Terrifying man.
In retrospect, I wish Elhokar got a redemption arc. Maybe if Jasnah didn’t fake her death and Elhokar was a fake out, it would be better. Why do you think Elhokar’s death was bad?

I wish Renarin did stuff. He doesn’t exist till book 5, and I have issues with that I’ll mention in a sec.

RoW:

This was a Venli book? She was super passive, then kinda helped in minor ways and had her own thing happening, but not a big mover of the story.
I liked the chapter where anti-light is discovered because I felt an energy. Doesn’t make sense why Navani would make it while captured by the enemy, but I enjoyed it.

Shallan’s chapters are unenjoyable, she was constantly saying everyone would hate her if they knew her “even deeper and darker secret” and she doesn’t ever choose to make progress herself. Every other time she is forced to out of necessity rather than personal choice. Except maybe in book two, but the earlier books were better for Shallan anyways.

Dalinar did have a whole book to himself, I didn’t miss him here.

The Fused are rarely dangerous. They never harm the characters in meaningful ways and don’t work as villains. The Pursuer gets Final Killed by El, WHO NEVER DOES ANYTHING OF NOTE IN BOOK 5!

WaT:

Don’t know much about prose and writing quality, but I still have opinions.

El does nothing. Ever. We know nothing about him, and he just kinda exists.

Adolin’s chapters were enjoyable, because I like Adolin, but could have been shortened for the sake of keeping the size down.

Shattered plains felt like Azir but without Adolin. I remember thinking “ugh, where are the good chapters?” anytime Kaladin or Adolin were off screen.

Szeth was so much fun. I liked his flashbacks, his development, and his big moment at the end. Same with Nightblood, I love Nightblood.

Kaladin is Kaladin, and did let me see more of Szeth, so I liked his chapters. It did annoy me with the whole “who is Szeth’s Tien because I need to connect to him in that way and OMG SZETH IS TIEN!” was annoying because it felt repetitive iirc.

Moash gets eyes after losing his eyes? Bruh, let a punishment stay.

Sigzil. I don’t like his final chapters. He rejects his Oaths out of nowhere, when his spren could have just flown out of range of Moash. It felt like Brandon needed to set up for Sunlit Man, but didn’t write it well. 

Our only two characters of the 5th ideal either reject their Oaths or become a Herald? It makes sense for them both to do their stuff, but I want to know if that ideal does anything.

Adolin thing: he loses his leg, gets a super good replacement, doesn’t get to watch his child grow up, then grins the ability to call his wife? He loses basically nothing, and I heard this on SHARDCAST I think but I agree with it: it would be interesting to see him be an absent father when he swore to not be like his dad. It would be a cool struggle for him to go through to develop his character, but that is almost entirely removed by the seon.

Renarin and Rlain:

Spoiler

I did not like this relationship. I am not super hyped for relationships in general, but I had other issues with this one.

First, I do not fully agree with lgbtq+. This does not mean I hate the people, in fact there are plenty of people who fall into these categories and you are all great people, but I do not agree with it. So I am already a little against this relationship.

Second, there is no setup for this. Renarin and Rlain have very little time on screen, and most of the time it is about how alien they are to the rest of society. It makes sense that they would be friends and find companionship in that, but not courtship.

Third, it has no impact on the story imo. This feels like Brandon added a gay character for adding the sake of a gay character, and used BAM as a plot device to justify it. I think that BAM could have been convinced without them needing to be a couple.

 

[The White Drake]

2 hours ago, Frustration said:

And Sigzil needed to swear the fourth ideal to get his armor as we saw in TSM.

The platespren we see there aren't windspren, so that's his Skybreaker armor, which he'll presumably obtain later with Aux.

1 hour ago, Ascended Grubberfly said:

Our only two characters of the 5th ideal either reject their Oaths or become a Herald? It makes sense for them both to do their stuff, but I want to know if that ideal does anything.

Shallan reached Fifth Ideal I thought. Sanderson is saving seeing what it does for later, but later will be a decade from now.

[Ascended Grubberfly He/Him]

3 minutes ago, The White Drake said:

Shallan reached Fifth Ideal I thought. Sanderson is saving seeing what it does for later, but later will be a decade from now.

Shallan is also part Herald and has a double bond. Plus it’s Shallan so mechanically who knows what she’s doing.

In all honesty, we’ll probably see some 5th ideal stuff a lot more in the future.

[Frustration]

12 minutes ago, The White Drake said:

The platespren we see there aren't windspren, so that's his Skybreaker armor, which he'll presumably obtain later with Aux.

He said that he had armor spren from both his first and second set of ideals

12 minutes ago, The White Drake said:

Shallan reached Fifth Ideal I thought. Sanderson is saving seeing what it does for later, but later will be a decade from now.

Unless I missed something big she did not, only her fourth

[The White Drake]

17 hours ago, Frustration said:

He said that he had armor spren from both his first and second set of ideals

I see.

  17 hours ago,  Frustration said:

Unless I missed something big she did not, only her fourth

I thought that was what was happening when she admitted she caused the Desolation

Edited Saturday at 02:20 PM by The White Drake

[Returned he/him]

Overall, I think that the first two books are great and don't need adjustment (though positive adjustments are possible, I think that the books work very well as they are). The most significant shallow problem is that the exciting and intriguing novelties (the core details of Roshar as a setting, Surgebinding and its various applications, etc.) are mostly used up in books 1 and 2, and the later books can feel less innovative or fresh The most substantial problem books three through five have is that they are unfocused, and the tensions between how many plot lines there are and how/when they advance or resolve makes it difficult to put together cleanly or well.

It gets geometrically harder to work with everything with each thing you add and so while I don't fault Sanderson for dropping some of the balls he was juggling here I do think that the dropping happened, starting with OB. We had to accept that some things just are the way they are, which was suspiciously convenient for a lot of plot advancements, while what was presented was often kind of underdeveloped.

This post came out really long, so I put my book-specific thoughts into collapsible boxes. Feel free to ignore them. The upshot is that, from OB on, I think the SA books lack focus. Readers expect to see major characters involved in events, even if they aren't important to the events that drive a book or don't develop much during that portion of the story. This leads to side-events that don't really matter being conjured up, with all of the pages required to set them up and situate them in the broader story, and the  characters moving through them but not changing nor accomplishing much on the way (whether they accomplish their tasks or not). The list of significant characters keeps expanding at the same time that they get too spread out among unrelated and unimportant tasks. This is a marked change from the stories Kaladin and Shallan experienced in WoR, for example, which were both important to the main plot of the book and occasionally overlapped. Even when characters do develop it's more often in a situation that is not important, which leads to a feeling of bloat, while also perversely making the development feel more disjointed and less thorough.

WoK: Excellent, no adjustments needed.

Spoiler

Excellent book, and is a reasonable one to use as a base around which the later books move. I don't mind the Shallan chapters nor their arrangement in the book, especially as they help pace out some sections of the book which take more in-universe time but which are glossed over narratively (like Kaladin's early time in the bridge crews). I viewed most of the Shallan chapters here as setup and worldbuilding, since WoK isn't "her" book, but they're too thin to be their own thing.

They're a little more like interludes or flashback chapters, which is a bit problematic because these books all already include flashbacks and interludes-- there is a lot that already is an aside to the main plot, so the slack available before something becomes cast as bloat or a distraction is already mostly used up. It's a hard balance to make work, but WoK is strong enough to handle it in my opinion. When I re-read this one I tend to skip the flashbacks, may or may not skip some interludes, but don't skip Shallan's chapters (except the ones including Kabsal-- that particular romance subplot is one degree of separation too many for me, and Shallan's ideas about what to do besides the Soulcaster-theft plot aren't expressed in a way that makes them a real focus). Many of the people I've seen say they don't like the Shallan chapters also don't like Shallan, and so I'm not sure that's solvable without totally changing the entire series to omit her.

Great settings, characters, events, exciting and new powers, plausible and well-developed interplay among all of them-- this is what I want a fantasy book to be.

 

WoR: Also excellent, I wouldn't change much.

Spoiler

Also excellent. The dead character fakeout is a device that Sanderson uses too often, but I think that Jasnah's is one that is fine. The minimum narrative reason is that she needs to be removed, since she has enough Radiant magical ability to matter in various ways, enough knowledge to influence events meaningfully, and answers to some of the mysteries which drive characters' decisions. Even knowledge that she survived, never mind active communication with anyone near the main characters, unravels too much for the story to support. My only major issue with the book is that Shallan's storyline is a mystery/thriller setup, but isn't quite a fair one, so it has to rely on the novelty and cleverness of her use of her powers. That was done well enough for me, but I can appreciate if others don't like it.

I didn't love that most of her practical con artist skills were learned via thin montage with Tyn in such a short period, it's too much of how she operates afterwards to be so lightly sourced and she's too good at it for such a brief education to be satisfying. It felt almost like a reboot of the character. We don't have enough context to solve the central mysteries along with her, which means that her adventures have to be exciting enough on their own before we're told what they mean later. But because they're mysteries those adventures mainly gather incomplete information we can't evaluate or understand until the concolusion, which can make them less satisfying on their own. We also don't really have any way to gauge her "fake it until you make it" strategy for so many high-impact scenes. When she's worked out the limits of what she can do with her magic, and then concocts a risky scheme based around the unique opportunities that magic affords her, that's interesting to me. When she fumbles through her date with Adolin, I liked it-- it's one of the things that makes her different from the other court ladies, which intrigues Adolin, so that's OK. Gambling on Sebarial... uh, OK, I guess (at least it only matters the once). When she fools others (especially Mraize) on the fly while just speaking, it strains credulity a bit, which is worse when that's one of her major undertakings. This book pushed that pretty close to the limit for me, but not over the line.

As with WoK, I thought this book had good characters and made great use of its settings and plot setups. The pieces fit together well to describe major events in an exciting way as different characters moved around and through them, again in ways that felt plausible (maybe a little less so than WoK, but still well) and expressed things about those characters even as the plot moved.

 

OB: Good stuff in it, but you need some motivation to get through the chaff to reach it. Major revisions would help but would indeed be major. The balance between the first half of the book and the second is poor, with much of the non-Dalinar plot in the second half suffering greatly due to low relevance and underdevelopment. Themes for characters start to really diverge in OB, which makes it very difficult to develop or express those themes with events common among them. Improvements would involve coming up with different conflicts (especially cleansing Urithiru, retaking Kholinar, and journeying through Shadesmar) which are more relevant to OB's core story and in which the main cast could more naturally participate. This would make it much easier for character developments to occur and land well while also keeping the narrative tighter.

Spoiler

I agree that Dalinar stole the show in this one, though it is his book. I agree that Elhokar's death was awkwardly done, though I did appreciate that while he was building up to be a major character his story was cut short by other major character arcs. SA main characters have too much plot armor, and even when they don't their stories wrapping up tidily has some similar effect. I also agree that Shallan's character is off for most of the book and that it's not presented very well, although I ultimately liked the contrasts of her against Re Shaphir the setup was weak and the payoff for driving her away was barely important. I think that the bigger issue is that depressed/despondent characters tend to have a lot of similarities in how they are expressed and in how they largely don't interact with things in the plot, and SA already has a lot of that  (and done better). It's kind of unsatisfying to read after the much better Kaladin representations in books 1 and 2, with Kaladin also there experiencing something similar alongside Shallan in book 3. But it's a hard issue when that's how the characters are feeling. I disagree with your comment on Jasnah talking to Renarin first (detailed in another thread, as I recall), but I personally don't think that this is severe enough to be a weakness which impacts the whole book's quality.

My major issue with OB is that it's unfocused and doesn't handle that especially well, especially in its transition from the first half to the second. It has more major characters doing things on-screen than the previous books, and they are more spread out in location, task, and importance of their objectives, as well as how meaningful the events they experienced and the opposition they faced. The battle outside of Theylenah suffered for trying to cover so many characters in similar detail at once. Adolin might have had an interesting story in investigating a murder that he, alone, knew he'd committed, but instead it mostly was subsumed by Shallan's story and he was cut out of it. He wasn't too important to anything afterwards, and the parallels between him and Gallant were expressed but then dropped. Amaram, instead of being a highly respected noble official, turns out to have been widely despised all along (at least by the major characters) and a long-time follower of Odium along with all the other secret societies he interacted wtih, kind of a weak heel turn. And his story isn't even developed, he's just removed. The Vorin Church was understandable when personalized as Kadash (especially with the flashbacks), but the Vorin Church as a political and social force is much more poorly defined and so it was hard for me to appreciate why it would matter that the Church was unhappy with Dalinar or excommunicated him.

This is also the first book in which many major characters fail at their goals in really major ways, which can make them feel especially stagnant without offsetting personal storylines. Retaking Kholinar was symbolically important to some of the characters but otherwise not very meaningful (especially given that it failed), but a lot of time and energy was spent only on that (the characters did not develop very much along the way, for example). The flight through Shadesmar was similarly light on significance (in terms of stakes and import) and long on page count, even though there was some interesting worldbuilding there. A whole group of major characters, including two of the most important, spent most of the book on barely-relevant side quests and returned much as they left. I get that we needed more on-screen time with Elhokar to make his death a meaningful event, but it was too fragmented with Kaladin separately going to the wall guard and Shallan separately doing her Swiftspren shenanigans. But they all failed in their aims and developed so little along the way, all those pages could have been lifted out of the book and would hardly change anything.

The changes I would make to the book would be to commit more to some characters or to scale way back on them, and cut down on much of the on-screen journeying. If characters can't play a role in the major events of the story, then don't write about them as much as if they did. When you do write about them, keep their activities tied to something with a meaningful connection to the major plots and/or give them personal development that will stay with them into the future. Doing neither feels stagnant in an already very long book. I was hard on OB when it was published, and while I like it a great deal more now it's not ideal to have to work through so much to get there.

 

RoW: Interesting but flawed. Too unfocused for many developments to work well, and unwilling to allow central conflicts to change which makes many events feel unimportant. Every problem in OB is present here as well but worse, though at least the book is willing to largely ignore major characters who don't matter to the story as much. Most characters spend most of the book not mattering to anything, and accomplish nothing. Too little early focus on Navani for her story to develop well (especially as it is supposed to follow the pattern of Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar in the previous books) and when she does draw focus it's during a structure that makes that development more difficult. Too much is reserved for the "big reveal" for a lot of the intervening material to be worthy of much attention, which makes it easier to be sloppy with the intervening parts and puts enormous pressure on the reveals themselves. The book has sharp edges between the ideas that it needs to connect to other books but also stand on its own, which makes too much of it feel disposable.

Spoiler

It has the same focus issues as OB, but more of them, as well as even less subtlety. It's literally a stated objective that Dalinar and Jasnah must be removed from Urithiru to anywhere else, for example, so they are narratively and diagetically removed from all important events. They are correctly de-emphasized from the story, but the method wasn't smooth. The main characters are all generally too passively swept up in events, and just sort of wait around until they are forced to act again.

Shallan really suffered by having her entire story revolve around big reveals (both about herself and about her ostensible plot about finding traitors) while also not giving us fair information for following those mysteries along the way (though it was slightly better done than in OB); the entire "fake it until you make it" failing in OB was sort of swept away with more of Veil's "here's a great trick that will catch a spy" being relied upon. If the reveal is great that might be forgiven, but it wasn't great, it was just OK. The "Mraize has a spy" story line just wasn't enough, especially when so little engaged with it. Most of her story was just a couple of reveals being dangled but constantly held in abeyance, a promise of something interesting later without delivering anything like that now. I think that a second journey through Shadesmar at all was a mistake, it should have been OB or RoW (not both), at least for the journeying itself. I did like Adolin's development, but it was a light undercurrent which had been running since OB. It was still underplayed in RoW, but it's a theme and perspective that the books needed.

The reintroduction of magical limits on Kaladin were welcome, as we hadn't seen a lot of clever application of Surges to solve difficult problems since WoR. The sequential, mission-of-the-day structure of his plot in the tower was a weakness as this, again, is a major character passively swept up in events. It was also kind of clumsily managed, with limited communications with Navani and the Sibling's reticence (both arbitrarily overcome when the plot needed to move) that prevented Kaladin from being more active while also interacting oddly with his increasing discomfort with violence. The Sibling's lack of trust as an explanation for this was OK, plausible and sufficiently explanatory, but not satisfying for me because even that never changed; the Sibling just became desperate enough to ignore that time after time and doesn't even really accept Navani at the climax. And it's not like that was developed much more in the next book.

I liked the interplay between Navani and Raboniel, in that it was a battle of wits with each trying to glean knowledge against the other's will. Raboniel's evident dishonesty was balanced against Navani's desperation and need to act somehow and the former's millennia of personal experience manipulating others, plus the theme that if not at war the two would have made excellent colleagues and friends. It could have been done better, especially in terms of Navani letting her guard down too much for what Raboniel presented, but I liked this aspect of the book more than Kaladin's low-commitment Die Hard storyline. Navani as a major character would have benefitted a lot from having more tasks and objectives outside of lab work and more interactions with others. But that personal plot was much more condensed and shallower than what we got for Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar (among others). It was too contained in a single volume which had a structure that wouldn't allow us as deep a view of her issues as we got for the others. Her insecurities and personal struggles were mostly shown through flashbacks to Gavilar saying dirtbag things to her which undermined her sense of capability and self-worth. I think that the idea is that her personal insecurities and struggles were realized in her efforts against Raboniel failing. Navani was very capable and just outmaneuvered by someone cleverer and more vicious, but the books really don't seem to present her issues as being anywhere near those that Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar faced.

Odium's consistent failures finally came to a head but even his failure failed to matter. Too much Odium and too much Hoid (not that I dislike them, but their direct, constant involvement should overshadow pretty much anything the mortal characters do and at least one of them should succeed. Instead, they both failed at everything). The sudden introduction (and removal) of Lezian as an antagonist was structurally sound but a bad sign and really cemented the "villain of the week" vibe I felt since OB. His gimmick was OK as lore (which all of the Fused are supposed to have but we don't really see) but was too mechanically convenient. I did like the thematic connection of Lezian's highly personalized commitment to violence and Kaladin's books-long development from impersonal violence to all violence being personal and therefore difficult for him to reconcile.

Overall RoW suffers most from wanting a lot to happen but for the operational situation of the story to not change. It was a lot of pages for most of the books' conflicts to still be at the status quo as it was at the opening of OB, and many of the characters have again not changed much along the way. Improvements would have involved more to set up Navani's problems in the book before the other major characters split off on their quests, slimming Kaladin's sections down a bit while also giving him more agency than following a string of quests from a hesitant quest-giver, and a better conflict for Shallan than the bottle-episode "someone is a traitor" as a wrapper over the "your personality-splitting thing makes 'you' unreliable" item would have been good. If we have to get storylines and themes arbitrarily extended out across multiple books, we could also have the setups and characters span books as well so that the development feels smoother. Even if we can't have that, the books can focus on the characters and stories that are happening within them, not forcing content so that there is "enough" happening for some fans' favorites.

 

WaT: Not the worst thing ever, but too weak to pay off everything the earlier books left for it to clean up. Less focused than ever, with the attempted fix being to make each individual thread shallower and more mechanical while all still moving in lockstep for no particular in-world reason. Far too little effort was put into which quests would involve which characters and what they might do while pursuing them. The "big reveals" were again loaded beyond what they could bear, and the plot conditions were not permitted to change for too much of the story before those reveals.

Spoiler

WaT was forced to do a bunch of stuff the earlier books couldn't be bothered to do, while also setting up a bunch of stuff that will be important and interesting in subsequent books (but maybe not so much right now). So much of it felt like it was just killing time, and the forced parallelism-in-time of the different conflicts felt very artificial to me. Again we have the main cast arbitrarily split up to different places with different dangers and goals with no further relationship, and serious unevenness in how much focus each receives. More villains-of-the-week, personifications of the enemy so replaceable that they lose all effect as such. Microscopic development of some characters, like Adolin, contrast with exposition dump non-development of others (I really felt that Szeth's flashbacks mattered radically less as context for his character than his time as Truthless than did Kaladin't and Shallan's, and was much shallower than Dalinar's). The current-events-and-flashback structure of the other books was abused beyond reason in WaT, with Szeth flashbacks and spiritual realm recountings occurring alongside largely stagnant current events.

The characters were mostly mired in events that they couldn't change (Azir, the Shattered Plains, the spiritual realm) so focus on them felt unpromising and stuck even as they delivered some minor details that were good. The Shinovar plot was very on-rails and narrow, with Kaladin and Szeth having very few choices to make and a very contrived set of goals (a sequential fighting tournament? Is this a shonen anime?). The lack of other characters for them to interact with put a lot of pressure on dialogue and activity in each scene outside of Szeth's fights, and I don't think that they could bear that weight. They were mostly just walking or eating, and if the fights with mini-bosses and the time with Kaladin had any relationship to each other it didn't make enough of an impact on me to remember it (though that doesn't mean it doesn't exist). Kaladin doesn't seem to learn or change much on his way to joining the Heralds, though it seems like there should be a connection between that end and the events which preceded it. I didn't like the surprise introduction of Wind as a last hope, the Listener refugees and sophont Chasmfiends reveal was not worth the setup and delay, El was a massive disappointment, and Taravangian's goals are unclear enough that it's hard to know what to make of his victories.

The contest of champions, which I always felt was radically oversold, disappointed as expected. The majestic sweep of Honor's efforts and failures culminating in Dalinar's "loss" and Honor's actual death (much mentioned previously in the series) felt too suddenly revealed at the last minute and disconnected from the specifics of the current events to land well. This was especially problematic because that was supposed to relate to Dalinar's decision in the contest, his reaction to Gavinor as his opponent, and the rebirth of a better, more internally consistent and self-possessed Honor. But the thematic connections weren't strongly laid out, very little time was available to set them up, and a rooftop battle is a hard place to do something so involved.

The biggest change I would make would be to mix up the timeline. Instead of having all of the conflicts happen on the same schedule at the same time, I would have at least one of them fail or succeed decisively for the main characters earlier on. Tying up Dalinar and Navani in the spiritual realm for those conflicts was a mistake in service of convenience, especially as it also sidelined Hoid for weak reasons. Shinovar didn't need to be so desolate and empty, though that had some thematic implications which were nice I would have ditched those in favor of doing a better Szeth and Kaladin story. There were a lot of events that happened, but very, very few of them advanced the plot or even affected it. So much of the book was just stalling until the end, and if we accept that as OK it's very difficult to enforce any of the other things which might have improved the book. Once they're freed from floating along in Dalinar's wake for ten days, it becomes necessary for Shallan, Rlain, and Renarin to do something that moves them towards or away from their goals. Instead they're just noted as still being there, which isn't worth a whole lot.

Relatedly, it's not really OK for stuff to be held back for later books if there isn't enough for the current book to make use of, which is an indulgence that tolerating such a stretched-out book allows and promotes. We also don't need stuff jammed in just to relate to another book if it doesn't otherwise matter. Sigzil's chapters are pretty bare, and if the fighting at the Shattered Plains is so unimportant that what we got should be acceptable then we really didn't need any of that story besides the very end, when Sigzil does everything that matters to that fight and his setup for Sunlit Man.

 

[Schizoposting]

I don't think that anyone here is actually qualified to give advice on how to improve the books, beyond the abstract; the most one can do without being an actual professional author is to point out the problems in the way the books were written.

Within this constraint however, I think that there's a real problem holding back some the latter entries of the series, which is the tension between the grounded realism of the earlier books, and the abstract metaphysical conflict between Honor and Odium. The issue is connecting the two, so that the latter would be expressed in the former. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, the concrete conflicts of TWoK and WoR (like the caste system), were more or less forgotten about, so that the narrative could focus on fighting Odium instead. 

But it's not all bad; the way the battle between Honor and Odium was expressed as the struggle between the Singers and Humans, was very well done—especially since it's explicit that the latter are the real villains of the conflict, and that Honor is just as bad as Odium.

Overall, a general mishandling of the issue, is why the first two books are the best in the series, while RoW and OB are the weakest.  

[Treamayne]

General Note on the above comments - I think many people fail to understand what the Order/Book/Flashback chapter's goals are - it's not that Oathbringer was a book about Bondsmiths or RoW was a book about Willshapers - the book/flashback tie is meant to indicate "this is the book where we start to explore the surges for this Radiant Order" - and we did that. We see Spiritual Adhesion and how Bondsmith's Surges differ from Windrunner/Stonewards due to the CR/SR aspects those surges take. We see how Cohesion works for Willshapers in RoW. Goal met.

54 minutes ago, Schizoposting said:

I don't think that anyone here is actually qualified to give advice on how to improve the books, beyond the abstract; the most one can do without being an actual professional author is to point out the problems in the way the books were written.

Concur. Done is done - we can say what we dislike and why, but there is no "fixing" what is published. 
That said, I can see why WoK!Prime was not published and am very glad we got this version of Roshar over that one. 

 

On 6/26/2026 at 4:45 PM, Frustration said:

On 6/26/2026 at 4:32 PM, The White Drake said:

The platespren we see there aren't windspren, so that's his Skybreaker armor, which he'll presumably obtain later with Aux.

He said that he had armor spren from both his first and second set of ideals

Sigzil never had Windrunner Armor, he has windspren in his Skybreaker armor. It was very well established that the windspren that become a Windrunner's Plate start following them after the third ideal. We see Kaladin's Windspren deflect the highstorm winds to protect the captured Alethi in OB Ch 31 and his Platespren manifest in Shadesmar as they follow him on Notum's ship in OB CH 108. Likewise, we see that Sigzil's Third-Oath bound Windspren are still following him in WaT Ch 147:

Spoiler

Yes, a highspren, who split the air and was filled with stars. An outline of a person. “You are a Windrunner, yes?” he said.

“No,” Sigzil whispered.

“No need to lie,” the spren said. “I’ve seen you, with the others. With Kaladin.”

Sigzil perked up. “You … know Kaladin?”

“Briefly, I knew him. I can tell you of his time in Shinovar, though I do not know the end of his quest there. I was rejected by my Radiant first.”

Sigzil considered, rocking in place, numb. “Spren can’t leave Roshar. Why are you here on this caravan?”

“Ah, well, you see,” the highspren said—having far more familiar a tone than Sigzil had expected—“I can leave now! Any of us can. There are some in the caravan, even some windspren and other smaller ones. Cultivation fled, and it was her bond with Honor, and their agreement with Odium, that locked us here.” 

WoK: No comments

WoR: Shallan ignoring Soulcasting because of Stick and Jasnah's admonition to not pursue it alone felt more like a gimmick than an extension of Shallan's story. .It felt like Brandon was saving Shadesmar for later. . . and he was. Which is fine, but the Watsonian reasoning falls flat for me. I also wish we had seen more Kaladin/Lighteyes interactions in his role as Captain - but overall the book is solid.

OB: Easily the worst of the five for me - almost entirely because of Shallan (with a side of Lirin who makes my top-3 hated characters in SA). Kaladin has depression and SAD and we feel that he struggles with these conditions while they do not define him. Everything about Veil and Radiant in this book feels fake - like a person that had read about DID once is trying to fake having DID. I've stated in other places the long descriptions and do not feel inclinced to repeat it here since it is tangential to this topic. I wish Doors of Stone (which still does not exist, and likely never will) had not prompted Brandon to change from the plan for book 3 to be Stones Unhallowed - saving Dalinar's flashbacks for Book 5.

RoW: I liked RoW, even if it was Die Hard on Roshar. I loved the lore and worldbuilding and artefabrian reveals. I wish we had gotten some Windrunner vs Skybreaker content from the Azimir front. Shallan's sections continued to be the weakest component of the story to me, made more tolerabel by being in Shadesmar and some good Spren information; though I wish Felt, Stump, and Godeke had gotten a bit more rounded in these parts - again it flet like intentional blinders because Edgedances and Truthwatchers are reserved for the second arc. 

WaT: I still need to do my first re-read of WaT, so it is the book I have internalized the least. I understand why Brandon wanted to include linguisitic drift in the story - I just wish it had happened either in RoW (we had a 1 yr time skip) or in Book 6. The fact that people speak differently from WaT ch 1 than they did in RoW Ch 117, when it is "the next day" is what I find jarring (not the lingustic drift itself). I also found Jasnah's debate with TOdium to be unconvincing. Jasnah has been built up from first intro as an intelligent and eloquent speaker with much practical experience in debate, but that she somehow fails to call out ad hominum, and other glaringly obvious logical fallacies undermines the entire scene as Diabolus ex Machina - designed to get the result the story wanted, even if the path there was false. I'll reserve other thoughts for after a re-read... 

Spoiler

 

Edited yesterday at 02:42 AM by Treamayne
SPAG

[NameIess]

Maybe I’ll post more thoughts here later, but here’s my biggest problem with anything in the series: the whole premise of the conflict in WaT, that capturing capitals means capturing an entire nation, is never established and feels stupid. At least set that up as an Alethi custom or law first, rather than bring it up from nowhere to justify the (admittedly very cool) entire plot of most of the book.

[Frustration]

On 6/26/2026 at 1:29 PM, Ascended Grubberfly said:

I have opinions, but I don’t know how influenced they are by the community, but I’ll share anyways.

WoK:

I liked this book, and looking back I think these are the best Shallan chapters. I kinda liked that Shallan only stole the Soulcaster after the lesson in philosophy. I loved that lesson.

WoR:

Shallan’s chapters felt empty, and Jasnah’s death limits Shallan’s soulcasting and doesn’t do anything for the story.

OB:

Dalinar’s flashbacks are my favorite chapters in the whole series, maybe even the whole Cosmere. Terrifying man.
In retrospect, I wish Elhokar got a redemption arc. Maybe if Jasnah didn’t fake her death and Elhokar was a fake out, it would be better. Why do you think Elhokar’s death was bad?

I wish Renarin did stuff. He doesn’t exist till book 5, and I have issues with that I’ll mention in a sec.

RoW:

This was a Venli book? She was super passive, then kinda helped in minor ways and had her own thing happening, but not a big mover of the story.
I liked the chapter where anti-light is discovered because I felt an energy. Doesn’t make sense why Navani would make it while captured by the enemy, but I enjoyed it.

Shallan’s chapters are unenjoyable, she was constantly saying everyone would hate her if they knew her “even deeper and darker secret” and she doesn’t ever choose to make progress herself. Every other time she is forced to out of necessity rather than personal choice. Except maybe in book two, but the earlier books were better for Shallan anyways.

Dalinar did have a whole book to himself, I didn’t miss him here.

The Fused are rarely dangerous. They never harm the characters in meaningful ways and don’t work as villains. The Pursuer gets Final Killed by El, WHO NEVER DOES ANYTHING OF NOTE IN BOOK 5!

WaT:

Don’t know much about prose and writing quality, but I still have opinions.

El does nothing. Ever. We know nothing about him, and he just kinda exists.

Adolin’s chapters were enjoyable, because I like Adolin, but could have been shortened for the sake of keeping the size down.

Shattered plains felt like Azir but without Adolin. I remember thinking “ugh, where are the good chapters?” anytime Kaladin or Adolin were off screen.

Szeth was so much fun. I liked his flashbacks, his development, and his big moment at the end. Same with Nightblood, I love Nightblood.

Kaladin is Kaladin, and did let me see more of Szeth, so I liked his chapters. It did annoy me with the whole “who is Szeth’s Tien because I need to connect to him in that way and OMG SZETH IS TIEN!” was annoying because it felt repetitive iirc.

Moash gets eyes after losing his eyes? Bruh, let a punishment stay.

Sigzil. I don’t like his final chapters. He rejects his Oaths out of nowhere, when his spren could have just flown out of range of Moash. It felt like Brandon needed to set up for Sunlit Man, but didn’t write it well. 

Our only two characters of the 5th ideal either reject their Oaths or become a Herald? It makes sense for them both to do their stuff, but I want to know if that ideal does anything.

Adolin thing: he loses his leg, gets a super good replacement, doesn’t get to watch his child grow up, then grins the ability to call his wife? He loses basically nothing, and I heard this on SHARDCAST I think but I agree with it: it would be interesting to see him be an absent father when he swore to not be like his dad. It would be a cool struggle for him to go through to develop his character, but that is almost entirely removed by the seon.

Renarin and Rlain:

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I did not like this relationship. I am not super hyped for relationships in general, but I had other issues with this one.

First, I do not fully agree with lgbtq+. This does not mean I hate the people, in fact there are plenty of people who fall into these categories and you are all great people, but I do not agree with it. So I am already a little against this relationship.

Second, there is no setup for this. Renarin and Rlain have very little time on screen, and most of the time it is about how alien they are to the rest of society. It makes sense that they would be friends and find companionship in that, but not courtship.

Third, it has no impact on the story imo. This feels like Brandon added a gay character for adding the sake of a gay character, and used BAM as a plot device to justify it. I think that BAM could have been convinced without them needing to be a couple.

 

3 hours ago, Returned said:

Overall, I think that the first two books are great and don't need adjustment (though positive adjustments are possible, I think that the books work very well as they are). The most significant shallow problem is that the exciting and intriguing novelties (the core details of Roshar as a setting, Surgebinding and its various applications, etc.) are mostly used up in books 1 and 2, and the later books can feel less innovative or fresh The most substantial problem books three through five have is that they are unfocused, and the tensions between how many plot lines there are and how/when they advance or resolve makes it difficult to put together cleanly or well.

It gets geometrically harder to work with everything with each thing you add and so while I don't fault Sanderson for dropping some of the balls he was juggling here I do think that the dropping happened, starting with OB. We had to accept that some things just are the way they are, which was suspiciously convenient for a lot of plot advancements, while what was presented was often kind of underdeveloped.

This post came out really long, so I put my book-specific thoughts into collapsible boxes. Feel free to ignore them. The upshot is that, from OB on, I think the SA books lack focus. Readers expect to see major characters involved in events, even if they aren't important to the events that drive a book or don't develop much during that portion of the story. This leads to side-events that don't really matter being conjured up, with all of the pages required to set them up and situate them in the broader story, and the  characters moving through them but not changing nor accomplishing much on the way (whether they accomplish their tasks or not). The list of significant characters keeps expanding at the same time that they get too spread out among unrelated and unimportant tasks. This is a marked change from the stories Kaladin and Shallan experienced in WoR, for example, which were both important to the main plot of the book and occasionally overlapped. Even when characters do develop it's more often in a situation that is not important, which leads to a feeling of bloat, while also perversely making the development feel more disjointed and less thorough.

WoK: Excellent, no adjustments needed.

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Excellent book, and is a reasonable one to use as a base around which the later books move. I don't mind the Shallan chapters nor their arrangement in the book, especially as they help pace out some sections of the book which take more in-universe time but which are glossed over narratively (like Kaladin's early time in the bridge crews). I viewed most of the Shallan chapters here as setup and worldbuilding, since WoK isn't "her" book, but they're too thin to be their own thing.

They're a little more like interludes or flashback chapters, which is a bit problematic because these books all already include flashbacks and interludes-- there is a lot that already is an aside to the main plot, so the slack available before something becomes cast as bloat or a distraction is already mostly used up. It's a hard balance to make work, but WoK is strong enough to handle it in my opinion. When I re-read this one I tend to skip the flashbacks, may or may not skip some interludes, but don't skip Shallan's chapters (except the ones including Kabsal-- that particular romance subplot is one degree of separation too many for me, and Shallan's ideas about what to do besides the Soulcaster-theft plot aren't expressed in a way that makes them a real focus). Many of the people I've seen say they don't like the Shallan chapters also don't like Shallan, and so I'm not sure that's solvable without totally changing the entire series to omit her.

Great settings, characters, events, exciting and new powers, plausible and well-developed interplay among all of them-- this is what I want a fantasy book to be.

 

WoR: Also excellent, I wouldn't change much.

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Also excellent. The dead character fakeout is a device that Sanderson uses too often, but I think that Jasnah's is one that is fine. The minimum narrative reason is that she needs to be removed, since she has enough Radiant magical ability to matter in various ways, enough knowledge to influence events meaningfully, and answers to some of the mysteries which drive characters' decisions. Even knowledge that she survived, never mind active communication with anyone near the main characters, unravels too much for the story to support. My only major issue with the book is that Shallan's storyline is a mystery/thriller setup, but isn't quite a fair one, so it has to rely on the novelty and cleverness of her use of her powers. That was done well enough for me, but I can appreciate if others don't like it.

I didn't love that most of her practical con artist skills were learned via thin montage with Tyn in such a short period, it's too much of how she operates afterwards to be so lightly sourced and she's too good at it for such a brief education to be satisfying. It felt almost like a reboot of the character. We don't have enough context to solve the central mysteries along with her, which means that her adventures have to be exciting enough on their own before we're told what they mean later. But because they're mysteries those adventures mainly gather incomplete information we can't evaluate or understand until the concolusion, which can make them less satisfying on their own. We also don't really have any way to gauge her "fake it until you make it" strategy for so many high-impact scenes. When she's worked out the limits of what she can do with her magic, and then concocts a risky scheme based around the unique opportunities that magic affords her, that's interesting to me. When she fumbles through her date with Adolin, I liked it-- it's one of the things that makes her different from the other court ladies, which intrigues Adolin, so that's OK. Gambling on Sebarial... uh, OK, I guess (at least it only matters the once). When she fools others (especially Mraize) on the fly while just speaking, it strains credulity a bit, which is worse when that's one of her major undertakings. This book pushed that pretty close to the limit for me, but not over the line.

As with WoK, I thought this book had good characters and made great use of its settings and plot setups. The pieces fit together well to describe major events in an exciting way as different characters moved around and through them, again in ways that felt plausible (maybe a little less so than WoK, but still well) and expressed things about those characters even as the plot moved.

 

OB: Good stuff in it, but you need some motivation to get through the chaff to reach it. Major revisions would help but would indeed be major. The balance between the first half of the book and the second is poor, with much of the non-Dalinar plot in the second half suffering greatly due to low relevance and underdevelopment. Themes for characters start to really diverge in OB, which makes it very difficult to develop or express those themes with events common among them. Improvements would involve coming up with different conflicts (especially cleansing Urithiru, retaking Kholinar, and journeying through Shadesmar) which are more relevant to OB's core story and in which the main cast could more naturally participate. This would make it much easier for character developments to occur and land well while also keeping the narrative tighter.

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I agree that Dalinar stole the show in this one, though it is his book. I agree that Elhokar's death was awkwardly done, though I did appreciate that while he was building up to be a major character his story was cut short by other major character arcs. SA main characters have too much plot armor, and even when they don't their stories wrapping up tidily has some similar effect. I also agree that Shallan's character is off for most of the book and that it's not presented very well, although I ultimately liked the contrasts of her against Re Shaphir the setup was weak and the payoff for driving her away was barely important. I think that the bigger issue is that depressed/despondent characters tend to have a lot of similarities in how they are expressed and in how they largely don't interact with things in the plot, and SA already has a lot of that  (and done better). It's kind of unsatisfying to read after the much better Kaladin representations in books 1 and 2, with Kaladin also there experiencing something similar alongside Shallan in book 3. But it's a hard issue when that's how the characters are feeling. I disagree with your comment on Jasnah talking to Renarin first (detailed in another thread, as I recall), but I personally don't think that this is severe enough to be a weakness which impacts the whole book's quality.

My major issue with OB is that it's unfocused and doesn't handle that especially well, especially in its transition from the first half to the second. It has more major characters doing things on-screen than the previous books, and they are more spread out in location, task, and importance of their objectives, as well as how meaningful the events they experienced and the opposition they faced. The battle outside of Theylenah suffered for trying to cover so many characters in similar detail at once. Adolin might have had an interesting story in investigating a murder that he, alone, knew he'd committed, but instead it mostly was subsumed by Shallan's story and he was cut out of it. He wasn't too important to anything afterwards, and the parallels between him and Gallant were expressed but then dropped. Amaram, instead of being a highly respected noble official, turns out to have been widely despised all along (at least by the major characters) and a long-time follower of Odium along with all the other secret societies he interacted wtih, kind of a weak heel turn. And his story isn't even developed, he's just removed. The Vorin Church was understandable when personalized as Kadash (especially with the flashbacks), but the Vorin Church as a political and social force is much more poorly defined and so it was hard for me to appreciate why it would matter that the Church was unhappy with Dalinar or excommunicated him.

This is also the first book in which many major characters fail at their goals in really major ways, which can make them feel especially stagnant without offsetting personal storylines. Retaking Kholinar was symbolically important to some of the characters but otherwise not very meaningful (especially given that it failed), but a lot of time and energy was spent only on that (the characters did not develop very much along the way, for example). The flight through Shadesmar was similarly light on significance (in terms of stakes and import) and long on page count, even though there was some interesting worldbuilding there. A whole group of major characters, including two of the most important, spent most of the book on barely-relevant side quests and returned much as they left. I get that we needed more on-screen time with Elhokar to make his death a meaningful event, but it was too fragmented with Kaladin separately going to the wall guard and Shallan separately doing her Swiftspren shenanigans. But they all failed in their aims and developed so little along the way, all those pages could have been lifted out of the book and would hardly change anything.

The changes I would make to the book would be to commit more to some characters or to scale way back on them, and cut down on much of the on-screen journeying. If characters can't play a role in the major events of the story, then don't write about them as much as if they did. When you do write about them, keep their activities tied to something with a meaningful connection to the major plots and/or give them personal development that will stay with them into the future. Doing neither feels stagnant in an already very long book. I was hard on OB when it was published, and while I like it a great deal more now it's not ideal to have to work through so much to get there.

 

RoW: Interesting but flawed. Too unfocused for many developments to work well, and unwilling to allow central conflicts to change which makes many events feel unimportant. Every problem in OB is present here as well but worse, though at least the book is willing to largely ignore major characters who don't matter to the story as much. Most characters spend most of the book not mattering to anything, and accomplish nothing. Too little early focus on Navani for her story to develop well (especially as it is supposed to follow the pattern of Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar in the previous books) and when she does draw focus it's during a structure that makes that development more difficult. Too much is reserved for the "big reveal" for a lot of the intervening material to be worthy of much attention, which makes it easier to be sloppy with the intervening parts and puts enormous pressure on the reveals themselves. The book has sharp edges between the ideas that it needs to connect to other books but also stand on its own, which makes too much of it feel disposable.

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It has the same focus issues as OB, but more of them, as well as even less subtlety. It's literally a stated objective that Dalinar and Jasnah must be removed from Urithiru to anywhere else, for example, so they are narratively and diagetically removed from all important events. They are correctly de-emphasized from the story, but the method wasn't smooth. The main characters are all generally too passively swept up in events, and just sort of wait around until they are forced to act again.

Shallan really suffered by having her entire story revolve around big reveals (both about herself and about her ostensible plot about finding traitors) while also not giving us fair information for following those mysteries along the way (though it was slightly better done than in OB); the entire "fake it until you make it" failing in OB was sort of swept away with more of Veil's "here's a great trick that will catch a spy" being relied upon. If the reveal is great that might be forgiven, but it wasn't great, it was just OK. The "Mraize has a spy" story line just wasn't enough, especially when so little engaged with it. Most of her story was just a couple of reveals being dangled but constantly held in abeyance, a promise of something interesting later without delivering anything like that now. I think that a second journey through Shadesmar at all was a mistake, it should have been OB or RoW (not both), at least for the journeying itself. I did like Adolin's development, but it was a light undercurrent which had been running since OB. It was still underplayed in RoW, but it's a theme and perspective that the books needed.

The reintroduction of magical limits on Kaladin were welcome, as we hadn't seen a lot of clever application of Surges to solve difficult problems since WoR. The sequential, mission-of-the-day structure of his plot in the tower was a weakness as this, again, is a major character passively swept up in events. It was also kind of clumsily managed, with limited communications with Navani and the Sibling's reticence (both arbitrarily overcome when the plot needed to move) that prevented Kaladin from being more active while also interacting oddly with his increasing discomfort with violence. The Sibling's lack of trust as an explanation for this was OK, plausible and sufficiently explanatory, but not satisfying for me because even that never changed; the Sibling just became desperate enough to ignore that time after time and doesn't even really accept Navani at the climax. And it's not like that was developed much more in the next book.

I liked the interplay between Navani and Raboniel, in that it was a battle of wits with each trying to glean knowledge against the other's will. Raboniel's evident dishonesty was balanced against Navani's desperation and need to act somehow and the former's millennia of personal experience manipulating others, plus the theme that if not at war the two would have made excellent colleagues and friends. It could have been done better, especially in terms of Navani letting her guard down too much for what Raboniel presented, but I liked this aspect of the book more than Kaladin's low-commitment Die Hard storyline. Navani as a major character would have benefitted a lot from having more tasks and objectives outside of lab work and more interactions with others. But that personal plot was much more condensed and shallower than what we got for Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar (among others). It was too contained in a single volume which had a structure that wouldn't allow us as deep a view of her issues as we got for the others. Her insecurities and personal struggles were mostly shown through flashbacks to Gavilar saying dirtbag things to her which undermined her sense of capability and self-worth. I think that the idea is that her personal insecurities and struggles were realized in her efforts against Raboniel failing. Navani was very capable and just outmaneuvered by someone cleverer and more vicious, but the books really don't seem to present her issues as being anywhere near those that Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar faced.

Odium's consistent failures finally came to a head but even his failure failed to matter. Too much Odium and too much Hoid (not that I dislike them, but their direct, constant involvement should overshadow pretty much anything the mortal characters do and at least one of them should succeed. Instead, they both failed at everything). The sudden introduction (and removal) of Lezian as an antagonist was structurally sound but a bad sign and really cemented the "villain of the week" vibe I felt since OB. His gimmick was OK as lore (which all of the Fused are supposed to have but we don't really see) but was too mechanically convenient. I did like the thematic connection of Lezian's highly personalized commitment to violence and Kaladin's books-long development from impersonal violence to all violence being personal and therefore difficult for him to reconcile.

Overall RoW suffers most from wanting a lot to happen but for the operational situation of the story to not change. It was a lot of pages for most of the books' conflicts to still be at the status quo as it was at the opening of OB, and many of the characters have again not changed much along the way. Improvements would have involved more to set up Navani's problems in the book before the other major characters split off on their quests, slimming Kaladin's sections down a bit while also giving him more agency than following a string of quests from a hesitant quest-giver, and a better conflict for Shallan than the bottle-episode "someone is a traitor" as a wrapper over the "your personality-splitting thing makes 'you' unreliable" item would have been good. If we have to get storylines and themes arbitrarily extended out across multiple books, we could also have the setups and characters span books as well so that the development feels smoother. Even if we can't have that, the books can focus on the characters and stories that are happening within them, not forcing content so that there is "enough" happening for some fans' favorites.

 

WaT: Not the worst thing ever, but too weak to pay off everything the earlier books left for it to clean up. Less focused than ever, with the attempted fix being to make each individual thread shallower and more mechanical while all still moving in lockstep for no particular in-world reason. Far too little effort was put into which quests would involve which characters and what they might do while pursuing them. The "big reveals" were again loaded beyond what they could bear, and the plot conditions were not permitted to change for too much of the story before those reveals.

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WaT was forced to do a bunch of stuff the earlier books couldn't be bothered to do, while also setting up a bunch of stuff that will be important and interesting in subsequent books (but maybe not so much right now). So much of it felt like it was just killing time, and the forced parallelism-in-time of the different conflicts felt very artificial to me. Again we have the main cast arbitrarily split up to different places with different dangers and goals with no further relationship, and serious unevenness in how much focus each receives. More villains-of-the-week, personifications of the enemy so replaceable that they lose all effect as such. Microscopic development of some characters, like Adolin, contrast with exposition dump non-development of others (I really felt that Szeth's flashbacks mattered radically less as context for his character than his time as Truthless than did Kaladin't and Shallan's, and was much shallower than Dalinar's). The current-events-and-flashback structure of the other books was abused beyond reason in WaT, with Szeth flashbacks and spiritual realm recountings occurring alongside largely stagnant current events.

The characters were mostly mired in events that they couldn't change (Azir, the Shattered Plains, the spiritual realm) so focus on them felt unpromising and stuck even as they delivered some minor details that were good. The Shinovar plot was very on-rails and narrow, with Kaladin and Szeth having very few choices to make and a very contrived set of goals (a sequential fighting tournament? Is this a shonen anime?). The lack of other characters for them to interact with put a lot of pressure on dialogue and activity in each scene outside of Szeth's fights, and I don't think that they could bear that weight. They were mostly just walking or eating, and if the fights with mini-bosses and the time with Kaladin had any relationship to each other it didn't make enough of an impact on me to remember it (though that doesn't mean it doesn't exist). Kaladin doesn't seem to learn or change much on his way to joining the Heralds, though it seems like there should be a connection between that end and the events which preceded it. I didn't like the surprise introduction of Wind as a last hope, the Listener refugees and sophont Chasmfiends reveal was not worth the setup and delay, El was a massive disappointment, and Taravangian's goals are unclear enough that it's hard to know what to make of his victories.

The contest of champions, which I always felt was radically oversold, disappointed as expected. The majestic sweep of Honor's efforts and failures culminating in Dalinar's "loss" and Honor's actual death (much mentioned previously in the series) felt too suddenly revealed at the last minute and disconnected from the specifics of the current events to land well. This was especially problematic because that was supposed to relate to Dalinar's decision in the contest, his reaction to Gavinor as his opponent, and the rebirth of a better, more internally consistent and self-possessed Honor. But the thematic connections weren't strongly laid out, very little time was available to set them up, and a rooftop battle is a hard place to do something so involved.

The biggest change I would make would be to mix up the timeline. Instead of having all of the conflicts happen on the same schedule at the same time, I would have at least one of them fail or succeed decisively for the main characters earlier on. Tying up Dalinar and Navani in the spiritual realm for those conflicts was a mistake in service of convenience, especially as it also sidelined Hoid for weak reasons. Shinovar didn't need to be so desolate and empty, though that had some thematic implications which were nice I would have ditched those in favor of doing a better Szeth and Kaladin story. There were a lot of events that happened, but very, very few of them advanced the plot or even affected it. So much of the book was just stalling until the end, and if we accept that as OK it's very difficult to enforce any of the other things which might have improved the book. Once they're freed from floating along in Dalinar's wake for ten days, it becomes necessary for Shallan, Rlain, and Renarin to do something that moves them towards or away from their goals. Instead they're just noted as still being there, which isn't worth a whole lot.

Relatedly, it's not really OK for stuff to be held back for later books if there isn't enough for the current book to make use of, which is an indulgence that tolerating such a stretched-out book allows and promotes. We also don't need stuff jammed in just to relate to another book if it doesn't otherwise matter. Sigzil's chapters are pretty bare, and if the fighting at the Shattered Plains is so unimportant that what we got should be acceptable then we really didn't need any of that story besides the very end, when Sigzil does everything that matters to that fight and his setup for Sunlit Man.

 

Agreed with both of you here, solid points all around.

On 6/26/2026 at 1:29 PM, Ascended Grubberfly said:

Why do you think Elhokar’s death was bad?

It was just rushed with no impact on the rest of the story. It was just, "Oh he's dead, moving on." Which read to me as "there's more here."

26 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Concur. Done is done - we can say what we dislike and why, but there is no "fixing" what is published. 

I don't know about that, Tolkien went back and changed The Hobbit, 25 years after initial publication.

28 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Sigzil never had Windrunner Armor, he has windspren in his Skybreaker armor. It was very well established that the windspren that become a Windrunner's Plate start following them after the third ideal. We see Kaladin's Windspren deflect the highstorm winds to protect the captured Alethi in OB Ch 31 and his Platespren manifest in Shadesmar as they follow him on Notum's ship in OB CH 108. Likewise, we see that Sigzil's Third-Oath bound Windspren are still following him in WaT Ch 147:

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Yes, a highspren, who split the air and was filled with stars. An outline of a person. “You are a Windrunner, yes?” he said.

“No,” Sigzil whispered.

“No need to lie,” the spren said. “I’ve seen you, with the others. With Kaladin.”

Sigzil perked up. “You … know Kaladin?”

“Briefly, I knew him. I can tell you of his time in Shinovar, though I do not know the end of his quest there. I was rejected by my Radiant first.”

Sigzil considered, rocking in place, numb. “Spren can’t leave Roshar. Why are you here on this caravan?”

“Ah, well, you see,” the highspren said—having far more familiar a tone than Sigzil had expected—“I can leave now! Any of us can. There are some in the caravan, even some windspren and other smaller ones. Cultivation fled, and it was her bond with Honor, and their agreement with Odium, that locked us here.” 

 

That's interesting. I still don't like it as I feel the spren Kaladin summoned were different every time, just the windspren that were nearby responding to him. And even if not I feel Sigzil breaking his oaths should have severed them as completely as Vienta was, at least until the fourth idea. However that does make me feel better about it.

34 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

(with a side of Lirin who makes my top-3 hated characters in SA)

Who are the other two?

23 minutes ago, NameIess said:

Maybe I’ll post more thoughts here later, but here’s my biggest problem with anything in the series: the whole premise of the conflict in WaT, that capturing capitals means capturing an entire nation, is never established and feels stupid. At least set that up as an Alethi custom or law first, rather than bring it up from nowhere to justify the (admittedly very cool) entire plot of most of the book.

I hadn't noticed that, probably because I kept thinking of the loophole being something with the contest of champions while I was also almost two years away from thinking about the loophole at all.

Props to you my friend.

[Treamayne]

8 minutes ago, Frustration said:

46 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

(with a side of Lirin who makes my top-3 hated characters in SA)

Who are the other two?

Jasnah and Amaram - each for different reasons and their relative ranking fluctuates by book and mood.
Some of my Lirin thoughts are here and later in the same thread (though he is briefly mentioned in the note at the bottom of the previously linked post).

[Returned he/him]

1 hour ago, Treamayne said:

Concur. Done is done - we can say what we dislike and why, but there is no "fixing" what is published. 

I was thinking more along the lines of "if I were an editor reviewing these books and had the cachet to persuade Sanderson to revise, what revisions would I suggest to improve the books?" and not "what can be done at this point to fix them", which I agree it is likely too late for.

I'm curious, for you and anyone else who cares to comment, do you think that the character development and events related to it are similarly satisfying across the books? And, separately, do you think that the plot and major development are also similarly well done across the books? I ask because I do feel that the books accomplished some of the specific goals Sanderson set for them, but that isn't a big factor in how I evaluate them. And while I like the lore and bits of information that we consistently get across all of the books I can't help but feel that we could have gotten that information just as well even with radical changes to the story, so I don't give any individual book much credit just for including it.

I persistently feel that there is a real distinction between the first two books and the latter three, and a lesser distinction between the first three and the last two and I'm interested in views that align or differ from that.