Aliroz-The-Confused

Elantris / Phantom Blood: (Iconic first work where the author is constantly hyping up the protagonists' virtue and competence, but, in these days of morally ambiguous protagonists flawing up the place, it almost comes off as daring and original.  Kills off characters who deserve their own spin-off.  Makes you cry at the end.  People say not to start with it because the creator's skills increase later, but the low points are higher than any other part's low points, everything is tightly paced and each event/character/place is straight-up iconic in a way that later, longer works would sandwich between fluff and filler)

Mistborn trilogy / Stardust Crusaders: (The incredibly memorable one with the best fight scenes ever, probably the most iconic and meme-giving part, everybody pretends that certain segments of it don't even exist, people still geek out about the ending decades later, way longer and more ambitious than the iconic first work and the colorful adjacent work, people who haven't experienced the various parts think of this one when they think of the thing.) 

Warbreaker / Battle Tendency:  (Vibes, entertaining villains, and two or three standout moments make people remember this as the "fun colorful rollercoaster one" and forget how much the big gutpunches hurt.)

Wax and Wayne / Diamond Is Unbreakable: (Immaculate vibes, good times.  Zany hijinks, nobody would have minded if it was longer even though it's long and has quite a bit of filler.  Nobody has a problem with it.  Manages a level of scariness none of the others do.)

The Stormlight Archive / Golden Wind:  (Has its own fandom separate from everything else.  People who like this one the best typically either started with it or didn't go in publication order.  The ratio of fan art to quality of the original work is... yeah, the teenagers really like this one.  Occasionally remembers to be awesome (When it does, everyone who talks smack on it goes silent and no higher praise exists than that).  Marketed super heavily.  I sez:  Moar fights, less angst!)

The children of Ashyn promised to stay in Shin.  They broke that promise.  I cannot regard them as oathbound, honorable, or in any way respectable in the grand moral arc of the Cosmere, so long as their ideals are negotiable, their duty optional, and their commitment to absolutism based on a giant flipping cheat-compromise-lie and broken promise.

The only thing that gives them any hope of redemption in my eyes is their zealotry.  People like Szeth give me hope that at some point, the children of Ashyn will accept living only in Shin (and maybe Ashyn).  That kind of unreasonable, no-benefit, do-it-even-though-it-hurts I-made-a-promise-and-nothing-more-needs-be-said is what gave us "Storm it, we have to go back".

So, if Brandon Sanderson got kidnapped by aliens and the terms of his release was that he could never write anything in The Stormlight Archive ever again, so all of our guesses and suppositions were as good as any other because the true answer would never come out, thus meaning nobody could say "You're wrong, Aliroz, and here's why", "I don't think that's likely" or "I think future books will prove you wrong"...

If it was like that and my ideas were as good as anybody else's, so there was no need to defend them nor any measure to which they had to be evaluated...

(Or, in other words, if Brandon Sanderson died and had all of his unpublished notes, works, and existing WOBs deleted.)

I would make what TvTropes (Ah, TvTropes, my first internet home, before some of you posters here were even born, probably) calls a WMG, wherein the moral arc of the children of Ashyn ends with them living only in Shin (and maybe Ashyn), abandoning all else, because it is right.  I'd have them do so with the words "We have to go back.  Storm it, we have to go back."

But, of course, that's not what's going to happen, because none of us have any idea what the series will be like.  Nobody in 2010 could have predicted that The Stormlight Archive would go where it did.

What happens will be weirder, cleverer<1>, more morally coherent, and more wonderful than anything I could have guessed.  At least, that's how it's been with every ending of every Sanderson story that ever grankled my bajankles in the middle.

And, if not, well... if it turns out that nuance was the whole point, that the author's favorites get whatever they want, and that the central message of The Stormlight Archive is a more palatable delivery of what is at its core the Melian dialogue, then...

Well, C.S. Lewis wrote a lot on Spenser's The Faerie Queene in 1936.  I read it over the last few weeks, and it resonated deeply with me.  I'm pretty sure it is public domain because this is 2026.  This is the relevant chapter.  If it turns out as the previous paragraph suggests, then I shall have to regard The Stormlight Archive as being to the Cosmere in the same way Lewis regards Book V as being to The Faerie Queene. 

Except, without Sanderson being guilty of real-life evils.  My point is that the salt flats and the enthusiasm mountains meet at the appreciation hills because certain types of salt come only from unironic enthusiastic joyful engagement confronted with Freaking Baloney. 

I feel a lot better knowing that one can be an emotionally compromised kind-of-embarrassing let-me-tell-you-about-my-favorite-thing-at-great-length giddy fanboy or fangirl and also a sharp  at Freaking Baloney without either of those invalidating the other.  (Not that I'm comparing myself to the great C.S. Lewis, of course, whose writing is always nuanced, reasonable, and gives you a permanent +1 to wisdom, but having an author I respect wax indulgently prolix about his youthful fictional hyper-fixation makes me realize that (1) We are all one in the great circle of literate dorks and (2) I could have been way more polite and considerate of other people in internet disagreements without conceding certitude; so maybe I can be just as stubborn and unreasonable without being an acerbic grouch (though of course this does not imply adding any grey to my black-and-white thinking.  It simply means accepting that I cannot convince people of things so I might as well stop trying and just vibe)).  Apologies to everyone who disagreed with me, I didn't need to be so pessimistic and hostile.

I will (at least try to) maintain childish glee for the Cosmere and childish indignation whenever the bad guys get away with Evil Stuff.  (Lol, I'm probably one of the older posters here, old enough to still spell it e-mail with a hyphen!  I also use double-spacing between sentences.  I'm even old enough to remember when newspaper comics were actually funny.  I'm not kidding, they really were; you just weren't born yet.)

Adults, being far more morally sophisticated, cannot handle the dissonance and so they resolve it with nuance (my dumb lizard brain dislikes nuance in fantasy and bacon in sandwiches).  Children, being much less morally sophisticated, throw tantrums knowing that they have zero control over things that matter enormously to them (like bedtime, or moving from one town to another).

Being an adult means being emotionally mature about real-life things. It does not require being emotionally mature about stories involving fairies and magic swords.

If my final reaction to The Stormlight Archive is a childish "No, nuh-uh, that's wrong.  I don't care what it says, it's stupid and unfair, because they made a promise and you can't break promises!", well, I'll take the L (kids are notoriously not as good at debate as adults are) and accept that the author disagrees with me.

I mean, that's how I've always felt about the end of The Hobbit (Dwarf treasure is for DWARVES, not elves!  The Elvenking can just get the heck out of there and jump in a lake, and take his stupid crown of red leaves and berries with him.  Forget the Elvenking, all my homies hate the Elvenking).
 

Back in 2005, the fantasy genre was vigorous, hearty, and thriving.  Now it's all but dead.  In 2005, the rigorous logic and artifice (I use this word in its original sense, meaning skill, rather than deception, or, perhaps, to suggest a sense of craft and diligence rather than something wild and natural) of Elantris was like a blood thinner on a form that was clot-thick with generic mass-market no-originality fantasy (the most egregious of which being, of course, The Wheel of Time (which, to its credit, did contribute one thing to the fantasy aesthetic:  the quarterstaff as a weapon that fictional grown-ups take seriously)).  But a blood thinner is no help to one who has anemia or hemophilia, and after that Song of Fire And Ice nonsense, that Court of Thorns and Roses baloney, and a whole host of "realistic" edgy deconstructions of fantasy parasitically sucking the lifeblood out of the genre, the genre needs a Sonic CD or a Belgariad more than it needs a Sonic 2 or Cosmere, though Cosmere and Sonic 2 be admittedly the better work.

Basically, Fantasy got all samey, Sanderson tried something cool and different; but now there's so much different that the original feels like an endangered species.  Not even his fault, nobody could have guessed two decades of cultural change beforehand.

At this point, Fantasy might not survive if Stormlight turns out to be the deconstruction it appears to be rather than the reconstruction it might be.  I mean, it'll be remembered and loved, but not as a living form with significant new contributions.  Ya can't just subsume the numinous into the rational and pave fairyland without killing something beautiful, ya know.  Ya gotta either prevent that transition (Lord Of The Rings, Elantris, Warbreaker... before you point out the scouring of the shire, remember that it is the scouring of industrialism and modernity FROM the Shire) or timeskip that transition, then have the return of wonder and the numinous and the unmaking of evil's cold work (Mistborn; The Lion, The Witch, or the Wardrobe).  Both of those are inimical to the materialist conception of progress which the Kholins and their ilk serve (Navani Kholin is a fantasy villain every bit as awful as the Lady of the Green Kirtle, the White Witch, or Spenser's Blatant Beast... no, the real protagonists of Stormlight, by the rules of Fantasy are the defiant last holdouts against invasion, the natives, originals, strange creatures from the oldest days, the few-and-fading-but-not-yet-dead... in other words, the 1700 Listeners).

Baaaaaaaaaaasically, Navani Kholin is a nerdy scientist lady in the literary form where nerdy scientist ladies are allowed only as bad guys.  Our boy Brandon's coloring outside the lines and I'M NOT HAVING IT.  Puddleglum didn't step in no flame just for us to not learn to recognize Creepy Rationalism Metaphor Gals when we see 'em.  S.T. Hedgehog and M.T. Prower didn't run all over S---- Island, W--- S--- Island, and A---- Island (okay, M.T. Prower didn't participate in the S---- Island thing, but still) just for us to NOT grow up knowing that you don't put cute little thingy-thingies in your weebly-woo devices!  And the silver moon mistress's pigeon didn't almost die for us NOT to learn the difference between not meaning to do evil and meaning to do good.

Come on, ya radiant doofuses!  Get'cha Curdie on and knock off ya bullcrap so y'all can make e'rything right.  Sincere lack of intentional malice ain't mean squat when ya done a badness-do.  I talk a lotta smack but I beliebs in ya!

Stormlight and the true Cosmere are two different moral universes, incompatible, and hardly even mutually intelligible.  The true Cosmere is harsh on characters and loves places, Stormlight is harsh on places and loves characters.

Kelsier's drive to protect Scadrial is every bit as righteous as Kaladin's drive to protect his loved ones.  Stormlight-first readers can never, and will never, understand this.  There are many things that Stormlight-First readers cannot understand, but this is one of the most important.

In the true Cosmere, a world is not such a nothing as to be mentioned only in one paragraph, as Obrodai was.

Sanderson did not become a success on his characters, but on his worlds and magic systems.  All his excuses and insistence otherwise, all his disavowals of anything but Character Character Character, do not fool any of us who know that his first novel was named for a place, his second novel was named for a place, and his third novel was named for a place.

I hope that Stormlight resolves to reveal that it is actually a true Cosmere story, just cut off in the middle.  I would hate to see the soulless pragmatism of the Alethi devour all other vibes in the Cosmere, but the author's favoritism is endlessly obvious.

Bavadin/Autonomy

Avatars of Bavadin/Autonomy

Worshippers of Bavadin/Autonomy whether witting or unwitting

Things that are probably Bavadin/Autonomy

Things that remind me of Bavadin/Autonomy

Hoid

Taravangian

Rayse

Khriss

The Ire

Any character who acts as though Dawnshards are real (they're not, they're a red herring that will never be plot-important and exist only to distract fans from thinking about things that are actually going to be important later, like the town of Faradana (shout out to Faradana!  Mentioned once, ever, and never forgotten!), Obrodai (mentioned once), and the existence of giraffes on Scadrial)

Your mom

Your dad

Your dog

That #%@$ barrel in Carnival Night Zone Act 2

That boot-stealing scumbag Taraco (how dare he take up the one mention of Faradana and make it about himself!)

Granite Joe (not as cool as Taraco despite having an equally cool name)

Whoever the heck shot Dunny by mistake when Moash was RIGHT THERE AND VERY SHOOTABLE back in the day

Bluefingers

Bluefingers' friend Stevefingers

Bluefingers' friend Magentafingers

Bluefingers' friend MisterSaltFingers

Bluefingers' friend MrsPepperfingers

Bluefingers' friend Mailboxfingers

Bluefingers' friend Paprikafingers

Bluefingers' friend Shovelfingers

Bluefingers' friend Pailfingers

Bluefingers' friend Sidetabledrawerfingers

Bluefingers' friend Slipperyfingers

Fluefingers' friend Ticketyfingers

Whoever told Brandon Sanderson that he should make Mistborn movies

Your other dog (the one that can read)

Inasmuch as the children of Ashyn continue to use fabrials I will continue to regard them as slavers.  And, thus, I reserve to myself a prerogative not to sympathize with them.