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Well why not, my secret: I did not finish Final Empire first time around becuase I looked at the last page. I learned, that you know who will die, and just stoped reading. Long time later, after reading some other books of Brandon's I came back to it, and by the time I finished reading The Hero of Ages it became one of my favorite Fantasy trilogies.

There are so many ways to react to a book as there are people, so of course there is a lot of variety in responses to Brandon's work. I seen a lot of negative reposes hanging out on Reddit book related subreddit's. Some people dislike the prose, some prefer more messy chaotic style of plot which they consider to be more organic, and so for them neatness and symmetry of Brandon's books is a demerit. Some just like stuff like grimdark and dislike that Bradon's protagonist's aren't more gray /morally ambiguous. And those are just some of the the criticisms I do not share but understand that someone with different taste could think that way. There are also some really irritating ones like "everything he writes is YA" crowd or "Sanderson is bad at worldbuilding and all his worlds all feel fake" crowd. Then once in a while you see some which are just plain weird, like one guy that said he hate's Well of Ascension because of the main reveal of that book, as he felt that it constituted Author lying to him.

I think it will be extremely interesting and challenging. I mean lets think about it, if we presume Brandon wishes to preserve the form of the series it would be first person book with very strong narrator voice, with a tendency for addressing the reader, from a female perspective centered around her telling a story of her 13 years old self. I always thought Brandon was good with female characters but if he does this, it will be on the completely new level.

I think Brandon does stuff like that more in YA where I guess its more expected? In his adult novels he seems to be moving away from this trope. As for Bastille, well now she will have a lot more chance to develop in various ways, with her book and all .

It felt as a natural assumption to me as well after reading. But I like to read reviews of books I like after I finish reading them, and number of people on goodreads who missed it entirely was.... substantial, some of them reviewer's I respect which are very smart folks. As such while I would still argue that the story had all the elements necessary to reach the right conclusions on our own, it became pretty evident that it was not an automatic thing everybody got from the text.

Well your completely right about Kai of course he had no reason to figure it out, but I was under the impression we were talking about reader perspective not character perspective. For the record maybe I am not paranoid enough, but even after all this time I actually usually miss 3/5 of Brandon's twists, I usually figure out some of them, but never all. The latest Mistborn novel got me pretty good with its biggest reveal. ETA: I would not even say it was obvious or glaring, that would be going a bit to far, I would rather say that there were ways put it together present in the text, that made it possible to figure it out by the end of the story.

Well they point quite strongly to the fact that Kai was directly interacting with Melphi through remotely controlled body double not just with a robot. Some of them also point to the fact that real Melphi is a lot like Sophie , including things which did not seem to be part of the deception like matching motivations (as Melphie), and speech patterns As for the gender, from the moment of the flashback we actually know that there is no factual reason to assume Melphi is male as all Kai ever saw was a robot without specified gender. As such the assumption she is the same gender as the only incarnation of her we actually interacted with seems reasonable. Add to that Vode outright telling Kai that Melphie is a she at the end, and honestly my own feelings on the matter are more along the lines of "why shouldn't we think Melphie is female". I read the second annotation, but all I can say is that during my first reading, while I did not get all the clues, (that took a reread) I just automatically, started to suspect that Melphie- Sophie, as we knew so little about the actual nemesis that her being Sophie seemed like an obvious narrative pastern. ( I read enough of Brandon's work to expect a twist in a story until proven otherwise.) Then last words of the robot being about "rebelling against and not being a puppet" which was at a core of Sophies character, seemed as a good confirmation. Although, admittedly, I did not expect the suicide at the end . Then when Vode called Melphie a She it seemed like a final confirmation necessary. I knew I could be wrong ,my other more morbid theory was that we might view the events through the prism of Kai and Sophie's discussion about the nature of AI, and that in a ironic twist since Sophie/ Melphie does not consider Machinborn to be people, the "Sophie" we see is a Machineborn copy of herself made to kill herself to prove a point. But the first interpretation just felt like something Brandon would do, after reading many of his stories, knowing the way in which he treats his female characters, destroying a character like Sophie that way, when there was clear present alternative interpretation seemed unlikely. Especially considering how much the story gains when we think of Sophie as a person and how much it loses when don't.

Hello I have been lurking around for some time now and this topic finally made me write something. There were actually a quite a few clues that Melhi is Sophie in the text of the novella: 1 In Sophie’s backstory she was a rebel anarchist who snuck to a high science state to get weapons, - Melphie uses giant robots. 2 The way she addressed Kai was Emperor man and kiddo, Melphie in the flashback called him “Fantasy man”, and later refers to him as a child. 3 Sophie’s main motivation was rebellion against Vode and their manipulation, what enraged Melphie in their first meeting was being called puppet of the vode. Last words we hear from Melphie are: “. . . part of me that rebels against . . . will go forward . . . not . . . their puppet . . .” This fits perfectly with Sophie’s personality as we knew it. 4 Then there is their first meeting in the flashback where Melphie talked through his robot emissary he says in that scene that : “I am Liveborn like you,” Melhi said, looking me up and down. “This is merely one of the forms I use.” And in the last chapter Kai’s aide said: That woman was just like the emissary we met in the Border State—a fabrication controlled from afar, only this time created to be indistinguishable from a human being.” After this Vode calling Melphie a she was just a final confirmation.