Should we read Brandon critically or exegetically?

[ecohansen]

Couldn't decide if this belonged here or in General Brandon, but decided on here....

 

So you're reading one of Brandon's books, and you come across something odd.  Something intriguing.  Time to start coming up with a Fan Theory!  Woohoo!

 

But how do you do it?  In general, there are two broad options, with a spectrum in between them.  Where do you think a reader should fall on the spectrum?

 

First, you could can read exegetically (this is the approach I usually prefer).  You assume that Sanderson is much, much smarter than you (probably a safe assumption), and therefore anything that appears anomalous or contradictory only SEEMS that way, and it is your job to find the truth resolving the problem.  Because you trust the author absolutely, you don't really care what he intended: he gave you a universe with rules, and he gave you events that occurred in that universe, and it's your job to determine how the rules explain the events.

 

The second approach is to read critically.  You realize that, as awesome a worldbuilder as Brandon is, he's said he prefers to "err on the side of not enough worldbuilding" (http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1ced7z/iamstilla_novelist_named_brandon_sanderson_ama/).%C2'> You realize that it's impossible for any human to write a fully-detailed and self-consistent world into existence, and you respect the work too much to insert your own half-baked ideas into the universe when there's no evidence that that is what the author actually intended. 

 

I've always gotten a kick out of the fact that while the exegetical approach descends from monks reading holy texts, it tends to produce incredibly rigorous and scientific explanations of fictional universes--meanwhile, while critical reading derives from a  more hard-scientific approach to a text, it tends to result in the explanation "it had to happen that way because of the plot."

 

But what's y'all's opinion on the way we should read the Cosmere?

[Argent]

As with almost binary question, the answers lies in the middle. Perhaps not the exact middle, but somewhere between the two extremes. In my - rather extensive - experience, assuming that Brandon has made a mistake in his worldbuilding is almost always going to result in an incorrect assumption. I've done it before. Usually my first read of a book is exegetical - I take almost everything for face value. My belief is so suspended, it might as well be frozen. During my first reread, however, I am more critical, I know where things are leading, I can recognize foreshadowing, the big reveals are known to me. It is here that I start doubting some things - not many, because I've found that the logic Brandon applies to his worldbuilding is very similar to how I myself think, so the connections he makes are logical in my mind. But some things don't necessarily click, there are effects whose causes I find either contradictory or entirely missing. And this is where I've been burned on the metaphorical fire - almost every single one of those contradiction candidates had been shown to actually have very logical causes, just not necessarily ones known to me at the time. Questions during events, annotations, future books, and even unreliable narrators have all proven me wrong in the past. So these days I still note those irregularities, but assume it is I who is wrong, not Brandon, at least until further information makes itself present.

[yurisses]

I don't have many specific examples off the top of my head, but there are things which are errors, and things which are purposely misleading. I've seen people call certain things retcons when, to people in on interview spoilers, they are closer to brilliant cases of characters studying the magic and being wrong about it. The self-critical scholarly approach to Brandon's magics is one my favourite things about Mistborn and SA.

The difference between holy texts and BS books is that you can verify whether inconsistencies are errors or foreshadowing, whether through future sequels or WoB. I'd say a lot of small things the common reader might assume to be errors, we here know to be better than that.

But things are not black and white, and amid the clever foreshadowing probably hides a few mistakes. For example I always wondered about the instances where we see emotional allomancy performed on Smokers or Mistborn. Obviously this feat is possible--the Lord Ruler does it, the annotations mention Zane using emotional allomancy on Vin, and Vin successfully dazes Yeden's Tineye and Smoker with duralumin and brass--but even though it is used by the protagonist herself, it is never discussed how to achieve it. ("Piercing a coppercloud" is explained in the sense of Seeking allomancy inside a coppercloud, but not in the sense of Soothing/Rioting a Smoker.) So in my opinion, either Brandon sometimes forgot about Smokers' immunity to emotional allomancy (what with Zane soothing Vin, unless her coppercloud was down), or it's a possible feat that he used but forgot to show the characters exploring the modalities.

Edited June 16, 2015 by yurisses

[ecohansen]

I wasn't so much thinking of errors as I was really abstruse stuff like most of my threads, or some of Skaa's.  I recognize that Brandon probably didn't consider the plate-tectonic implications of juxtaposing temperate and tropical zones near Hallandren.  But, he did describe a world with such a juxtaposition.  Is it therefore worthwhile to speculate about ways in which that world's magic could suppress earthquakes?  Or, since I recognize that that was not an originally-intended part of the story, should I refrain?

 

In other words, lots of Trekkies spend a lot of time explaining things in that universe even after the show's writers explicitly state that they put their efforts elsewhere--often, a trekkie will use scientific findings that didn't even exist at the time the show was written.  If a trekkie uses a 2015 finding from Cern to explain warp drive behavior in an episode of the original series, is he still being true to the nature of the series, or is he betraying the series by inserting things the original writers couldn't possibly have intended?

Edited June 16, 2015 by ecohansen

[Chaos]

I'm moving this to General Brandon.

EDIT:

I don't have many specific examples off the top of my head, but there are things which are errors, and things which are purposely misleading. I've seen people call certain things retcons when, to people in on interview spoilers, they are closer to brilliant cases of characters studying the magic and being wrong about it. The self-critical scholarly approach to Brandon's magics is one my favourite things about Mistborn and SA.

It's so incredibly hilarious to me to see how discussion on Brandon books goes on non-17S places. I just want to pat them on shoulder and say, "Oh, you."

Edited June 16, 2015 by Chaos

[Argent]

It's so incredibly hilarious to me to see how discussion on Brandon books goes on non-17S places. I just want to pat them on shoulder and say, "Oh, you."

 

Skaa... Though you must admit, we've been pestering Brandon for so long, and he has given us so much information, there is no way for people who don't visit this forum to match this level of discussion. There is just too much information out there, if "out there" means "in here".