Hi

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

Hi, I'm posting this topic to let you all know I exist as instructed.

I've been a fan of Brandon's for a while but I think I only truly became obsessed after reading Oathbringer. I've been looking at stuff on the forum and listening to shardcast for a while, and then I just thought that I really should just make an account. So, here I am! 

[classicalkhlennium]

Welcome! I'm relatively new to posting on this site as well, seems like a pretty fun site so far - discussing theories and the like!

[Honorless he/him]

Welcome to the Shard, @Callsign Radiant! Who's your favourite character so far?

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

2 hours ago, classicalkhlennium said:

Welcome! I'm relatively new to posting on this site as well, seems like a pretty fun site so far - discussing theories and the like!

Nice to meet you! Yeah I'm not sure that I'm any good at thinking of theories myself and I listen to the audiobooks so it's harder to find quotes for evidence, but it's definitely fun to read what other people think.

 

Dreamer, sorry, I tried quoting to reply to you too but I got an error message saying I'm not allowed to use links because I'm new or something like that? Hopefully this will work though.

Anyway, thanks! Hmm... I'm not usually that great at picking favourites. I do really like Shallan. I was actually quite surprised when I found out so many people seem to strongly dislike her. Jasnah is also great. It's too bad that we don't get much from her pov right now but it makes sense. Who's yours?

[Honorless he/him]

You should be able to @(username) people after you've gotten your post count up. It's a measure against spam.

Shallan is a fair bit complicated. My favourite Stormlight character would be Kaladin.

Who's your least favourite character, @Callsign Radiant?

[Wander89 he/him]

Welcome to the forums! 

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

 

1 hour ago, Wander89 said:

Welcome to the forums!

Thanks. 

 

Dreamer:

Yeah that makes sense. Any idea what my post count has to be for me to do it? Or is there somewhere I can find out?

That's fair enough. Kaladin is definitely a cool character. I think it'll be interesting seeing him struggle with and finally swear the fourth ideal in the next book.

So I think I'd have to do a full cosmere reread to be able to decide who my least favourite character is. I really don't know honestly. Who would you say is your least favourite character? 

[Honorless he/him]

33 minutes ago, Callsign Radiant said:

Dreamer:

Yeah that makes sense. Any idea what my post count has to be for me to do it? Or is there somewhere I can find out?

That's fair enough. Kaladin is definitely a cool character. I think it'll be interesting seeing him struggle with and finally swear the fourth ideal in the next book.

So I think I'd have to do a full cosmere reread to be able to decide who my least favourite character is. I really don't know honestly. Who would you say is your least favourite character? 

Hmm, definitely by 10 posts, but I'm not sure. I didn't try @-ing anyone before my post count hit 10 back when I joined

 

My least favourite characters are Hashal and her husband Matal, the Bridgecrews managers, Roshone, Amaram, Elhokar

 

What was the first Sanderson book that you read?

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

Ah ok thanks. It's not that important but still it's nice to be able to avoid error messages if possible. 

Yeah those make sense. Well Elhokar would maybe be more controvercial but I get where you're coming from. Do you think you would still dislike him if he hadn't been killed and we actually saw him progress as a lightweaver and accept his flaws and become a better person? We have quite a lot of evidence that he wasn't a good king and made bad decisions, but then we also saw that he wanted to be better and was trying to be. I suppose it just depends on whether you think that's enough. Although you could just find him irritating either way I guess.

 

So I can't remember now if I listened to the Wheel of Time first and found Brandon through that or if I listened to Mistborn first and found WOT through Brandon. I could probably find out by looking through my audible account. I think some time after that I must have listened to WOK because I remember being excited when WOR came out. I only read Elantris and Warbreaker in the last year or so though.

[classicalkhlennium]

20 hours ago, Callsign Radiant said:

Dreamer, sorry, I tried quoting to reply to you too but I got an error message saying I'm not allowed to use links because I'm new or something like that? Hopefully this will work though.

Ah. That happened to me the first time I ever commented - I was trying to contact an artist to get permission to use his work on the Coppermind(generic comment we use has a link to the Coppermind in it). Had to get Chaos to change my permissions.

[Honorless he/him]

@Callsign Radiant, who is/are your favourite author(s)?

Edited March 2, 2020 by Dreamer

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

1 hour ago, classicalkhlennium said:

Ah. That happened to me the first time I ever commented - I was trying to contact an artist to get permission to use his work on the Coppermind(generic comment we use has a link to the Coppermind in it). Had to get Chaos to change my permissions.

Ah ok. I don't have much experience on forums in general so I was confused when it happened but it seems like a reasonable way to deter spammers.

Edited March 2, 2020 by Callsign Radiant

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

Dreamer:

I would say that Terry Pratchett is tied with Brandon for my favourite author. I also really like Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials), Douglas Adams (Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy)... I'm going blank. But as you can see I have a range from big epic stuff to more surreal and funny stuff. Though Discworld does also include a lot of deep philosophical discussion and good characters. There are a lot of books which I own and plan to read but haven't yet because I find that it can distract quite a bit from my work for university, so I'm sure in the summer I'm sure I'll be able to add more names to the list. Though even now there are a lot more authors I like who I just can't think of at the moment.

How about you? Maybe your list will trigger my memory. 

[Honorless he/him]

@Callsign Radiant, yeah I like reading way too much to be able to point towards a single book or author and say that's my favourite! Or even a bunch of them!

I liked His Dark Materials too, haven't picked up Book of Dust yet though. I liked Cloud Atlas, Sleeping Gods, Perdido Station, Don't Let Him Know, Anything Could Happen are some books that are still fresh in my mind. Generally I like fantasy and historical fiction, occasionally go into sci-fi

A more interesting question, who's a popular author/a popular book that you don't like?

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

Well it seems like the second book of the book of dust was fairly polarising. I understand why and from what I remember there were one or two things I wasn't too sure about, but I really liked it. The first book is basically about getting baby Lyra to Jordan college. It was good but mostly about more minor characters from the main series or ones that weren't in the main series at all. The second one is quite different though. I remember it being very emotional, with some in-world philosophy stuff and something which I don't think we thought was possible in the original series. I think some people complained that there was too much politics in it, or I should say that they thought it had too much of Pullman's politics in it I suppose but really it's not like HDM didn't involve some strong views.

That's an interesting question. Well I have very mixed feelings about Harry Potter and Rowling but I feel like that applies to basically everyone now. I haven't read ASOIAF so this doesn't really count, but it doesn't really appeal to me and whenever people hype it up or try to convince me to read it I just feel even less convinced. That's probably some kind of psychological thing though I guess. Oh, well I did listen to The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown recently and it was just so frustrating! I don't remember everything but basically there were two supposedly very intelligent people who were meant to be a scientist and a philosopher, but they seemed more interested in pseudoscience and religion/spirituality. The book even involved an experiment to prove that there was a soul by weighing bodies after death. But I'm sure it was proved some time ago that dead bodies do become slightly lighter but due to natural physical causes and not because of anything spiritual. Also if the soul is meant to be nonphysical then why would it weigh anything in the first place? Sorry for the rant. People obviously have the right to believe whatever they want. There are still dualist philosophers I think even if it's not as generally accepted, and there might even be dualist scientists, and that's fine, but if it's all going to rely on old experiments and pseudoscience then that's just too much. I mean I think there were other annoying things like this throughout the book that got on my nerves so it's not just this, but this is the bit I remember.

Anyway that was probably a bit over the top. I just want to reiterate that I have no problem with any religious or spiritual beliefs, it was just how it was all handled in the book.  

[Aon Tia she/her]

Welcome to the shard @Callsign Radiant 

which radiant are you ? 

[Honorless he/him]

@Callsign Radiant, absolutely agreed with all of that!

Right now my biggest peeve is the fact that almost all gay literature by gay authors are coming-of-age stories, wish more fantasy and sci-fi with gay leads were written

Do you have any favourite authors that you think are grossly underrated?

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

The Traveller:

Thanks. None of them unfortunately. Where are you travelling too?

But seriously, I'm not sure what order I wd/want to be. Especially at this stage where we don't really know the ideals for lm of the orders. I like the idea of the lightweavers because I think the idea of really looking at yourself and going beyond the lies you tell yourself about who you are and just being honest to yourself as much as possible is a really important and powerful thing. I also have a habit of ignoring problems and distracting myself to avoid thinking about them rather than just dealing with them when they come up so I understand the temptation to convince yourself and everyone else that everything's fine. Obviously I'm definitely not as bad as Shallan though in any way. I'm interested in finding out what the elsecaller ideals are though because I do consider myself to be quite a logical person and have been accused of being too logical sometimes. But really I just like the concept of the radiants in general. The idea of in a way progressing as a person as well as in power and just the whole thing with the ideals and spren.

 

Dreamer:

Yeah I don't think I know any fantasy books with gay main characters now I think about it. I think in some YA fantasy there are some gay characters who aren't like 'the main character' but are at least fairly prominent because they're friends with the main character. I'm sure there's more than that out there, it's just not something I've really considered.

Well Jonathan Stroud is a pretty good author I don't hear about much. The Bartimaeus series was one of my favourite series when I was younger and I still like it now. I don't think IVe ever heard anyone mention Tom Holt before and I think all his books are really good. Michelle Paver wrote The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness which is a cool series too. Also Jonathan Renshaw wrote a fantasy book which I thought was amazing, probably a few years ago now, I can't remember what it was called and I don't think the sequel is out yet but it's a great book. I don't know if Peter V Brett is underrated really but I don't think I've noticed people talking about him too much. That's probably enough now. 

[Honorless he/him]

I don't know any of them aside from Brett. It was cool talking to you! Hope to see you around on the forums!

[Callsign Radiant she/her]

1 hour ago, Dreamer said:

I don't know any of them aside from Brett. It was cool talking to you! Hope to see you around on the forums!

Well I must have done a good job of picking underrated authors then. There's nothing more underrated than just not being known in the first place. Yeah it's been cool talking to you too!