Cosmere University Paper Topics/Ideas

[blakismaximus22]

Greetings!

This is my first post, so please bear with me if anything is not formatted correctly 

In an English course I am taking at University, we have an oppurtunity to write an analysis about a text we enjoy and are interested in.  I've been devouring Sanderson's books lately, so naturally I want to do the assignment on one of his works.  I was wondering what people think would be the best/ most interesting to analyze.  

The analysis will feature a brief summary of the text, and should focus on a theme or two that run throughout the piece (Keep in mind the paper can't be too long, ca. 1500 words).  

Thanks in advance to everyone who replies!

[Jofwu he/him]

If it were me...

Stormlight books are too big for a brief summary.

I'd do Alloy of Law and talk about the different perceptions of "right and wrong" (civil law versus moral law and how the characters take those into their own hands). Something like that.

[kenod]

Maybe Mistborn, and an analysis of the results of class oppression, or The Well of Ascension and the results of revolutions.

[Argent he/him]

Heh, that's the problem with Brandon - you can't fit much in 1,500 words. 

My gut feeling is to go with the original Mistborn trilogy and look at one of the following motifs:

• Trust, love, and betrayal - whether it is better to implicitly trust new people, or be suspicious of everyone; whether it is better to love and risk betrayal/disappointment/rejection, or avoid love (and the potential drawbacks) altogether. Vin's views on trust change dramatically over the course of the trilogy, but most so in the first book.
• Belief - what are the roles of the believer and the deity in the different religions Sazed examines. Do you pray and wait for a miracle? Do you not pray and do everything on your own? How is the former different from being a lazybum, and how is the latter different from being an atheist? I feel like there is much to be said about belief and expectations, mostly considering Sazed's PoV.

[DarkJester]

Well if your limited on your word count then you need one of his shorter works. Steelheart is a lot of fun, along with a lot to digest. It wouldn't take much to come up with something better than a brick made of porridge. Then there's The Rythmatists. Poor guy. (Can't think of his name right now.) Hes got the Pokémon theme song playing in his head. "I'm gonna be, the very best! Like no one ever was!" Alas. No mater how good he gets... He's worthless... Of course, if you want something a little deeper, you could look to Legion. It's a very interesting concept and there's a lot of personality in them. All of which are short and could be summarized in 1500 words or so.

[kenod]

15 minutes ago, DarkJester said:

there's a lot of personality in them

Pun intended?

[DarkJester]

Of course! 

[thegatorgirl00 she/her]

If you wanted something shorter, you could do The Emperor's Soul. There's a lot in there about the nature of art and beauty. 

[+Extesian he/him]

Warbreaker is short and gets into (via Nightblood) the dangers of technology and giving rise to sentient machines without the proper planning of how to encode them with commands that have the desired effect.

[Pagerunner he/him]

Brandon likes to do deconstructions of common tropes, so you could pull his treatment of one of those. Kelsier is a Christlike figure in many ways, but he's not a typical hero either. He's a psychopath who enjoys killing people. I could go on about the contradictions in Kelsier, but I wouldn't want to write your paper for you. Suffice to say, in the Mistborn annotations (available on Brandon's website), you can learn a lot of what goes into the books that isn't inherently obvious while you're reading them.

Once you've written the paper, whatever it winds up being about, feel free to post it. I'm pretty sure I've made posts over 1500 words, so you'll fit right in!

[skaa he/him]

I'll just link to what I wrote in your introduction thread: