New Stormlight Archive Sub-forum

[Aether he/him]

I am interested in launching a larger discussion on the epigraphs of the Way of Kings. There are several of them that I find have rather interesting and (I think) undiscovered implications (the exception, of course, being "the Letter", which has a radically different form than the others).

 

What I want to do is to make a collective attempt at milking them for what information they are worth - attempting to find previously undiscovered connections and titbits of information - instead of using them individually in scattered hypotheses.

 

The problem is that a normal thread would make it difficult to generally discuss interpretations and significances of them as they cover largely different subjects and themes. Some of them can be grouped together, sure, but any single thread generally discussing the epigraphs would quickly become cluttered and confounding.

 

I think a separate sub-forum would be just what is needed for making a general epigraph discussion possible. Each separate thread could either discuss a single Death Chant or a single excerpt from Jasnah's Notebook; or discuss a group of them which seem to be linked together. This could be done in the normal Stormlight Archive forum, but I think it would be better to group epigraph threads together in a separate forum to avoid completely overtaking the forum-box and thus pushing down all other discussions.

Edited November 27, 2013 by Ookla the Omniscient

[Windrunner he/him]

This seems like a lot of work for questionable benefit to me. A lot of the epigraphs are either fairly straightforward or so obscure and confusing that it's difficult to have a meaningful discussion. It really doesn't seem to warrant a subforum in my opinion and certainly not ~60 individual topics. If any one else on the staff or another member wants to jump here and express and alternate opinion, I'd love to hear it, but right now, I think that a single topic would be sufficient to discuss the epigraphs without too much confusion. It's worked before, after all.

[Shardlet he/him]

While I am not terribly interested in a thorough examination of the epigraphs, in my infinite ignorance, establishing a sub-forum doesn't seem like it would be particularly challenging.  The only danger I would see is, would such a thing evoke more requests for subforums to the point where now each forum has 3 or 4 subforums.  Is that undesirable?  IDK.  As to the topics within the forum, I don't see the need to establish 60+ specific threads or any threads really.  It seems like it would make more sense to build the sub-forum and then let the community add threads as they desire.

[Aether he/him]

Thanks. And be reassured, I am not interested in creating 60 separate threads. The point is to have an area where there is the possibility to create several smaller threads without cluttering up the other sub-fora. As Windrunner pointed out, far from every (maybe even most) of the epigraphs are of any interest, but enough of them are.

 

While this is of particular interest for me, as I think it could be rather fun and enlightening, it is however not of high importance. It could be an interesting experiment, but if you feel like it would set a bad precedence, then I'll survive.

[Chaos he/him]

I'm not really a fan of additional subforums unless absolutely necessary. I find forums with large amounts of subforums hard to navigate. It is not at all challenging for me to make such a subforum, but I do not want to do that until I feel there is an overwhelming need to do so. Because I mean, there are a lot of things that could theoretically have subforums. Heck, every book could have its own subforum. However that would be rather silly. At some point too much categorization makes it harder for people to decide where to put topics and it makes it harder to navigate the board. Even now there is some confusion on whether people should put a topic about Roshar, but is cosmere heavy into either Stormlight or Cosmere Theories. I personally don't care, and I don't want moderation to involve moving topics into arbitrary subforums just because. It could be a whole can of worms and unless it is necessary, I don't wish to do that.

The subforums we have currently are a necessity only because they contain spoilers for things that people would not like spoiled, but those are not permanent subforums. The WoR discussion and the Steelhunt discussion boards will eventually go away, just as the Alloy of Law board did a bit after its release.

So hopefully you understand when I say "I do not want unnecessary subforums."

Personally, I think the Stormlight forum is sufficient for these purposes. Then again, I'm not sure it would warrant sixty topics. But either way, there are other factors to consider. If we have an epigraph board, will each of the ten books get an epigraph board? Or will it just be the epigraphs for all of Stormlight Archive? And why should the epigraphs get a board? Would that lead to additional sub-boards regarding particular areas of interest in Stormlight Archive, like fabrials, Surgebinding, etc.? I worry about that.

I realize forums are not the most dynamic of environments to group things, but in the meantime, if you want to group a bunch of topics together, I would create a tag for all those topics. So Epigraph discussion can just be "epigraphs", and for those other topics similarly.

You are more than welcome to try and persuade me on a subforum, but I have a lot of bias against making subforums, so you'd may need to work at it a bit and address these concerns.

[Aether he/him]

Well, I respect your reasons for not wanting to set this precedence, so unless I am able to come up with a very good counter-argument, I shall let it be - at least for now. I am not sure I want to launch a epigraph discussion without its own sub-forum though, but I'll look into other ways of organizing it.

 

But thank you all for giving it serious thought and giving me a good and respectable answer.