Aliroz-The-Confused
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Everything posted by Aliroz-The-Confused
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Mmmmm, Lieutenant Xabbenlumbo, an interesting detail, but I can't possibly see how this question could ever be answered given the lack of evidence. I guess the case will, sadly, go unsolved.
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I have never listened to any of Brandon Sanderson's books, nor have I ever used the wiki. I read the books in publication order (other than the first Mistborn trilogy before Elantris).
Everyone who is worried about new fans coming in with the screen adaptations because it's not the same experience can SHUT THE HECK UP AND BE NICE AND POLITE TO THE NEWBIES when they come because This is the third or fourth time the readership got swamped with newbies, and i'm pretty sure nobody on this forum was actually reading Elantris back in '05 so we are all one in the great cycle of being insufferable newbies. A reader's time as fan rises and falls like the sun. One day, memers, the sun will set on my literacy, and it will rise with yours. Every page the ink touches is your kingdom.
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A hearing-first go-through, I think, tends to leave the hearer with a clearer memory of dialogue and a fuzzier memory of detail, description, and worldbuilding. I also think those who go through the books hearing-first tend to have an easier time keeping the large casts of characters in order but have a harder time keeping places and other stuff in order.
In my opinion, the wiki more or less exists as a service to hearing-go-through-noun-person-GOSH-DANG-IT-I-HATE-THAT-IT-WOULD-BE-RUDE-TO-JUST-SAY-OUTRIGHT-THAT-I-RESENT-THE-USE-OF-THE-WORD-READING-TO-REFER-TO-nevermind, because a physical paper book allows you to flip back (and in many situations where you can have a paper book and the opportunity to read, one can also additionally have a notebook and pencil to make notes (though you have to make them before you can read them); the wiki is essentially a shared notebook that can be read without writing. This is a much easier and arguably more passive experience, much like hearing, but has the advantage of peer review and verified accuracy). The speed and ease at which one can accurately navigate previous pages in a paper book is absolutely incredible.
Also, one can make markings in a book, page numbers are easier to remember than timestamps, and the ability to navigate a page with tiny slight eye movements is BONKERS COOL because it's so many tiny adjustments and movements but it's automatic and not exhausting (except when it is, and that's sad). The downside of this is that it's far too easy to end up skipping sentences or paragraphs (the ability to go back may or may not compensate for this).
Page-reading also allows one to run around in a book like a playground, jumping from chapter to chapter, looking for goodies and Easter eggs.One can much more easily go "I'mma read all of [insert-character-here]'s point of view chapters in a row" or "I want to read my favorite part three times, and then this other favorite part, and then take a shortcut to visit this one bit with the vibes that match my current mood" with paper. And you know what that feels like? IT FEELS LIKE NAVIGATING A WIKI! (I mean a good wiki, the kind they don't make anymore, the kind we had back in 2011 when the internet was still wild and most websites didn't have advertisements). Therefore, anyone who doesn't have the time to read the books in page-form (not your fault, society's full of nonsense like hour-long commutes to and from work five days a week just so the real estate people don't have to worry about the possibility of declining value of certain propertiesblahblahblahblahblah) and uses the wiki to keep stuff straight is NOT AN IDIOT and NOT ILLITERATE and NOT LAZY, no matter what paper-purists like me might want to say. It's simply an accommodation for those who don't have the opportunity or ability to enjoy the books as a paper playground.
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I mean, I'm not really sure that the post-2009 books are intended for me and people like me, to be honest. I think they are, but there's a good chance that they're not. I mean, if they people with whom I disagree relate to and connect to the words on the page, then either my relating and connecting to them was accidental and wrong, or the relating and connecting to them by those who disagree with me is accidental and wrong.
Possibly the difference is that many listen to the books rather than read them, and this experience prioritizes dialogue over narration (since characters are given different voices, but no such coloring is used for non-character things). It also makes them more or less incapable of parsing the chapter epigraphs (since the hearing experience is entirely linear and the reading experience is not), which are, word for word, among the most essential bits to the work.
A hearing-first experiencer of the books cannot parse that one bit (you know the one if you'd read it) on the first go-through of Oathbreaker. A page-first reader experiences it as the twenty-one most memorable sentences in the book. -
Sometimes I think about writing a letter to Brandon Sanderson expressing how much his books mean and have meant to me.
It feels presumptuous, though, to give such unprompted feedback directly. It would feel even more presumptuous to express my concerns/disapproval/negative opinions regarding aspects of the books (I mean, if so many thousands and millions of people like them, who am I to insist that all must be as I wish). Considering that I'm not capable of writing something so popular or of such high quality, I shouldn't be telling the author what to do.
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You could probably set up an ambush for me by putting up a fake sign that says "free spaghetti for Sazed fans".
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As always, spoilers for everything Cosmere except the three non-Tress secret projects. Spoilers for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure as well.
All of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere books are amazing and good. Appreciation is not a zero-sum game.
That said, The Alloy of Law deserves a lot more love than it gets, and so do Warbreaker and Elantris.
So, I must explain via a proper comparison between The Cosmere and the comic book / animé JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which may indeed be inaccurate, given my partial and piecemeal knowledge through limited exposure and cultural osmosis to the latter.
Spoiler
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!)
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Sometimes a hypocrite is a man in the process of doing something heinous and making a token apologetic gesture so he can consider himself redeemed and then do the exact same baloney next book while never truly changing. Sometimes a hypocrite is a man in the process of becoming a not-hypocrite and really changing, but in that case he darn well better finish that process if he wants to actually be a not-hypocrite.
Spoilers for everything, including The Hobbit.
SpoilerThe 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).
Spoiler<1> For the fifty percent of you who would have felt less awkward if it had been "more clever": "Cleverer" is a real word, and not even in the sense that "octopi" is a "real" word because descriptivist jerks added it to the dictionary. It's more like "octopuses" in that it looks like something a good prescriptivist would get after you for but is actually something that a level 20 Pedant would recognize as correct. "Cleverer" is an exception to a larger rule, and entry-level grammar teaching is meant to teach rules rather than exceptions. However, "more clever" is accepted by upper-level pedants as being of equal correctness/proper-ness to "clever", making it one of the very, very few words to work that way. It's about sixes on usage and in which one "feels" right to people (in speech, it's hard to say). Don't let level 6 Pedants get after you for using "more clever" OR for using "cleverer".<2>
<2> For the record, "stupider" is a legitimate word, one used by Jane Austen, centuries of very fussy dictionaries, and accepted by higher-level prescriptivist pedants. This one's fallen a little out of usage in the British isles but has stayed in American use. Remember, the funny rhyme you learned in elementary school goes "Girls/Boys go to college to get more knowledge, Boys/Girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider". "More stupid" is fine. "Stupider" is fine. "More stupider" is the wrong that makes the funny.<3><3>There isn't a simple rule for when you use "more" versus when you use "er". Usually one-syllable words go for "er" (harder, wetter, faster, stronger) and usually words of three or more syllables go for "more" (more excellent, more terrific, more abhorrent) though there are exceptions. ("more wrong" raises no eyebrows but "wronger" does; "slipperiest" raises no eyebrows and neither does "most slippery")
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As always, spoilers for everything Cosmere except the tree non-Tress secret projects. But also this one's got spoilers for the works of George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, and our boy C.S. Lewis.
Also spoilered for spicy hot takes nobody asked for.
SpoilerBack 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!
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Note, do NOT read the above if ya ain't read The Princess And The Goblin by George MacDonald AND The Princess And Curdie by George MacDonald.
Seriously, what the HECK are you even DOING with your life if you're reading crazy bonkers hot takes on the internet instead of the foundational text of the fantasy genre. For pete's sake, it's in the public freaking domain, it's written for half-asleep seven year olds to engage with, both books are shorter than books usually are now, if you got time for Stormlight ya got time for this.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are >:| at you for actin' like they invented Fantasy when both of them would cite MacDonald as the O.G. and their stuff as the mixtape.
Spenser would get credit for inventing the genre, but he got disqualified for being evil in real life, so the Faerie Queene counts as sub-foundational, or bedrock, or proto-Fantasy.
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Again, spoilers for everything I've read, which is all Cosmere except the three non-Tress secret projects:
SpoilerStormlight 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.
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I'm not sure plot armor is a real thing; I think it might be a tautology where any character who dies at the beginning or middle gets retroactively classified as "not a major character" and any character who doesn't die gets retroactively classified as invincible for not dying.
Besides, the Fused were never the villains, Frus. The Radiants always were.
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I've mourned too many favorites to ever complain about plot armor (also, deaths near the end of the book still count).
And, besides, my investment in Cosmere isn't usually "will this main character survive", it's more often "will this minor character I love survive?", "what will happen to the setting?", "will these nameless innocents all over the place be okay?", "will this main character have to endure seeing this thing happen that should not happen?", or "will the book run out of pages without giving me the joy of seeing Navani Kholin get shoved into a woodchipper?".
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Spoilers for all Cosmere books I've read (everything except the three non-Tress Secret Projects)
I reserve the right to deny sympathy to:
SpoilerBavadin/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)
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Spoilers for The Stormlight Archive (everything up to Wind And Truth) in the spoiler box.
SpoilerInasmuch 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.
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Instead of complaining about protagonists I disapprove of today, I've decided to hype up protagonists I approve of. Copy-pasted from mah crazy Notepad.exe ramblings
(Spoilers for what I've read, which is everything except the three non-Tress Secret Projects, beneath the "Read More"):
QuoteSarene's micro and macro are S-tier, her resource game's on point, her build orders are immaculate and so are her strats. More than that, she walked in on her missing fiancé's multiplayer game which had been idle for two minutes, sat down, and in real time figured out his keybinds, build order, and strat, then proceeded to combine that with her own mad skillz to perform an adapted version of what he was doing and make up for the afk time to deny the other player(s) the econ chokehold thus denying wincon to the opponent(s). Yeah, Sarene is G.O.A.T.-ed for real, for real.
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Instead of complaining about movies I don't want Brandon Sanderson to write, I'm going to come up with stories I DO want him to write.
Cosmere Short Stories That Don't Exist But Should (Spoilers for what I've read, which is everything except the three non-Tress Secret Projects, beneath the "Read More"):
Duke Roial Shows Up And Reveals His Apparent Death Was A Prank On Count Ahan Who Goes >:D And Resumes Their Prank War
High Priest Nanrovah Accidentally Invents The Folding Chair, Gets Rich, Then Goes On Vacation With His Family And Only Good Things Happen
Sekeir The Cranky Honorspren Gets A Monster Truck And Has Fun
Mennis And The Rest Of The Skaa Freed From The Tresting Plantation Realize That The Ash Is Gone And Everything's Going To Be Okay For Them
Bavadin Gets Hit In The Face With A Folding Chair Unexpectedly, Gets Run Over By A Monster Truck Repeatedly, Discovers That All Her Planets Have Declared Independence To Join A Selish Prank War, And Realizes That Nothing Is Going To Be Okay For Her
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(I've read every Cosmere book except IOTE, YATNP, and TSM, do not spoil these and do not spoil books that aren't published yet. My ramblings tend to contain unmarked spoilers for the Cosmere books I've read)
Evil Me and Good Me are the same person (me) just at different grumpiness levels. If nobody else is going to agree with me, might as well agree with myself.
Evil Me: The 496 pages of Elantris have more worldbuilding, and better worldbuilding, than all five-plus-Dawnshard books of The Stormlight Archive, contributing more to the Cosmere.
Good Me: True, but that's an unfair comparison, The Stormlight Archive is only half-finished, you can't compare a full story to a half-story. If you took the paydirt and condensed it, it'd be approximately 240 pages of condensed paydirt on Roshar so far. And that more or less matches the first half of Elantris.
Evil Me: 240? That's absurdly generous, out of the somewhere-between-five-thousand-and-six-thousand pages from blahblahperson and blahblahperson-aligned points of view there ain't any more than thirty pages condensed of paydirt, and that's IF you count a couple of pages as a lead-up to I Am A Stick.
Good Me: Oh, certainly, all that coulda been smashed into 30 pages of Osmium-density writing (probably shouldn't, but should and could are two different things), but that's not the whole thing. There's the Listener point-of-view stuff, the Singer point-of-view stuff, that one chapter from Sylphrena's point of view, and those interlude chapters from one-off characters' points-of-view.
Evil Me: Ohmigosh I love the Listeners! And also all those other things.
Good Me: Exactly. That's how ya get the other roughly-210 condensed pages of stuff.
Evil Me: That makes sense. But you're still being generous by counting worldbuilding and paydirt that got undone. If you write a spiffy forest and then pave it, I don't want to give points for spiffiness. So, unpaved spiffiness only.
Good Me: Methinks spiffiness isn't destroyed, just stolen or converted into an inaccessible form. Also being generous is part of the whole "good" thing.
Evil Me: The author better unpave what he paved, or provide awesomesauce without take it away.
Good Me: Again, The Stormlight Archive is only half-finished. I'm sure he'll make it happen.
Evil Me: Still, Wind and Truth is over 1,340 pages and it felt like only twenty or so were about the Listeners. A couple dozen or so out of over 1,340 is a totally bonkers ratio for pages-of-characters-I-want-to-read-about-doing-things-I-want-to-read-about-in-places-I-want-to-read-about to total page-count. Especially because Elantris has that ratio as 496 out of 496.
Good Me: It's not my fault The Stormlight Archive doesn't have knitting clubs and zombies.
Evil Me: Not yet, at least. Half-finished, after all.
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When I measure the Cosmere by endings (by endings, I am referring to the full conclusions of novel-or-longer stories, the points at which all has been resolved and every loose end taken care of; as opposed to non-bold-font endings), I find only five among the Cosmere content I've read (I've read everything but Emberdark, Yumi, and The Sunlit Man, this status update assumes they don't exist).
So, the seven novel-length-or-longer Cosmere stories are:
1: Elantris completed in 20052: Mistborn (the first book by itself) completed in 2006
3: Mistborn (as a trilogy) completed in 2008
4: Warbreaker completed in 2009
5: The Stormlight Archive- INCOMPLETE
6: Mistborn (as a full thing)- INCOMPLETE
7: Tress of the Emerald Sea - Completed in 2023
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This leads to the following questionable opinion: "weighting completed stories as 1, incomplete stories as numbers between zero and one, and assuming for no actual reason (other than that for the set "all x and y such that 0<x<1 and 0<y<1" the average for x+y is equal to 1) that the two incomplete stories together are equivalent in weight to one, measuring like an opinionated weirdo gives the '05-'09 run a weight of four and everything since a weight of one. Thus, an opinionated weirdo's assessment of the Cosmere ought to be at least 80% based on the '05-'09 run."
(I am aware that this is not how weighted analysis works. I majored in stats. I am aware that you can't just remove everything from the dataset until it gives the result you want, this is intentionally silly anti-reason.)
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With this in mind, I have begun constructing an unfair framing in which Elantris, the first Mistborn trilogy, and Warbreaker are the essential Cosmere and everything else is "extra stuff set in the same universe".
This actually works pretty well from a "what to recommend" standpoint. Someone can be satisfied reading Elantris and nothing else, same for The Final Empire, same for Warbreaker, same for The Final Empire+The Well of Ascension+The Hero Of Ages. Any combination of these can work as a complete "You can read these and be satisfied because the setups are paid off, loose ends are tied off, itches are scratched, and the ending is a happy one so you're left with a feeling of resolution rather than tension" body of work.
Everything else (of the Cosmere books I've read) is journey without destination (or, rather, journey without currently-existing-in-printed-form destination), except Tress of the Emerald Sea.
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Hoid Storybook collectionsm vibe check
Aliroz-The-Confused replied to gryn.heartsmyth's topic in Cosmere Discussion
With regards to Tom Bombadil, I like what Tolkien did there. Some characters serve the work by contributing to the narrative. Some characters serve the work by contributing to the tone. Some do both, or neither, or other things. As an adult, I appreciate how Tolkien uses Tom Bombadil to regulate the pacing and keep the story from being too frightening for children. The atmosphere, worldbuilding, and the poetry going on there is wonderful. It doesn't mean I don't feel the eight-year-old in me throwing a fit when I get to chapter seven of The Fellowship Of The Ring, though. My inner child does NOT want to settle down and take a nap (it was just getting good! There's adventure! This is boring!), is NOT relieved each time the hobbits get to safety (okay, maybe a little bit), and is NOT scared of the ringwraiths, thank you very much. EDIT: I don't have fatigue for the character of Hoid. I guess he's my anti-catharsis/anti-comfort character. No real reason why. I adored Tress of the Emerald Sea, so perhaps I'm the target audience for stories where "Hoid is an insane cursed fool on a pirate ship"-type stuff happens, just as you guys are the target audience for The Stormlight Archive. Something for everyone, I guess. -
So, at long last, the answer to "how long can I possibly argue before running out of opinions and stubbornness" is revealed!
Turns out the limit is a conversation of 411 replies, at which point my willingness to continue runs out.Four hundred and twelve would just be silly.
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Within the books themselves, it's impossible to win an argument against a windrunner; you either get convinced or get proven wrong. Nothing they do can be condemned as wrong. This, evidently, extends to this forum. Whatever I say, except for agreeing with you, results in "You're wrong, Aliroz, and here's why". Responding to that ends up in more "You're wrong, Aliroz, and here's why". This absolute dominance of The Stormlight Archive's protagonists' paradigm is exactly why I don't want the humans on Roshar to go to other worlds and start interacting with others. It's exactly why I don't want The Stormlight Archive to connect to the rest of the Cosmere. I'm not going to try to provide support for any of my assertions anymore, it doesn't change the "You're wrong, Aliroz, and here's why" outcome. I'm not going to try to defend my positions anymore, responding to disputation doesn't change the "You're wrong, Aliroz, and here's why" outcome. MY PESSIMISTIC PREDICTION (spoilered for organization) MY OPTIMISTIC PREDICTION (spoilered for organization) MY UNSETTLING PREDICTION (spoilered for organization) And with that, I've said all I'm going to say in this thread. Thank you for putting up with my rambling. -Does a kickflip off of the concept of fairness while flipping double birds at the concept of maturity.-
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I've been trying to figure out how to put the point I want to make about this into words for a while, and here's what I've got after a month and a half of working on it. It's not all that good, and at a bunch of points I employ intentional absurdity or silly phrasing when I come up against something I lack the words to express (so it's tonally a mess and very very cringeworthy), but it's free and you get what you pay for. Part One: Disclaimers (spoilered for organization, there are no actual spoilers). Part Two: The Point I'm Trying To Make (spoilered for organization, there are no actual spoilers). Part Three: Frameworks (spoilered for organization, there are no actual spoilers). Part Four: Policy (spoilered for organization, there are no actual spoilers). Part Five: Historical Comparisons (spoilered for organization, there are no actual spoilers). Part Six: Cosmere Comparisons (spoilered for organization, there are no actual spoilers). Part Seven: Putting Two And Two Together (spoilered for organization, there are no actual spoilers). Part 8: Six Years of Starvation (spoilered for organization, there are no actual spoilers). Quoted from The Way Of Kings, page 269, chapter 15 Dalinar left the fallen chasmfiend behind. He understood each step in the process of what had happened during those six years. He'd even hastened some of them. Only now did he worry. They were making headway in cutting down the Parshendi numbers, but the original goal of vengeance for Gavilar's murder had been forgotten. The Alethi lounged, they played, and they idled. Even though they'd killed plenty of Parshendi--as many as a quarter of their originally estimated forces were dead--this was just taking so long. The siege had lasted six years and could easily last another six. That troubled him. Obviously the Parshendi had expected to be besieged here. They'd prepared supply dumps and had been ready to move their entire population to the Shattered Plains, where they could use these Heralds-forsaken chasms and plateaus like hundreds of moats and fortifications.
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I guess, what I'm trying to say in this and the last two status updates is, "I'm planning on leaving these forums and not coming back for at least a couple of years, thank you for putting up with me as long as you have". I've done multi-year leavings before (my account is quite old for one with so few posts, at least a third of which are in a single thread I started a few months ago).
I am not good at being a member of internet forum communities. I argue harshly, employ excessive prolixity, make strong claims and then get frustrated when people ask for sources or examples, fixate on topics to the exhaustion of everyone's patience, try too hard to be funny, and have an unfortunate mix of sensitivity and imperceptiveness that gives me a tendency to both offend others without meaning to and get offended by others who weren't meaning to.
I tend to, within my first forty posts on any forum, get banned, get angry enough at everyone that I decide never to visit the site again, cheese someone off so bad that leaving is honestly the best solution, find someone I cheesed off somewhere else years ago (people who remember your younger days as an internet idiot are the scariest possible thing you can find as a new member of a forum), or otherwise fail to vibe.
This is a serene, mellow forum, peaceful and welcoming. It is also intensely wearisome in how relentlessly high the barriers are for anyone trying to disagree with the userbase. Any flaw in whatever you say will be noted and called out, any insufficiently-supported assertion will be questioned from every angle until it either falls or you get exhausted from the effort of defending your words, and whatever questions you fail to provide a reply to will be repeated.
It produces a high level of discourse, but at some point it's just not worth it to contradict what others say unless you're willing to run the gauntlet.
This forum is very inclusive, warm-hearted, newbie-friendly, possibly the easiest entry into a forum's culture I've seen, and at the same time it is a culture that makes theorizing aggressively unfun.
To theorize is to get shot down and proven wrong by a WOB. At this point, if you put all the WOBs together it would be a full book, a "book" the userbase here has read and the newbies haven't, and seeing new posters full of enthusiasm show their carefully constructed theories only to get hit with information from the "book" that isn't out in print and then never seeing that newbie post ever again makes me feel like this place is missing out on so many insightful but not-possessed-of-immense-knowledge-known-only-to-this-forum's-giganerds voices that could be sharing enthusiasm and building something instead of being met with "nope, wrong" until they leave.
It's hyper-intellectual, scholarly, impressive, and intimidating in a way that discourages rather than encourages intermediate and entry-level analysis and engagement. The gap between books+outside-of-books-lore oldtimer and books-and-only-the-books new arrival means that the latter, no matter how thoroughly he/she/they have studied the books, is fundamentally behind and comes off as ignorant.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that getting dogpiled by everyone for all those pages of the "So, there's no hope" thread was exhausting enough that I'm not going to make another such thread any time soon. It is not fun at all to express my thoughts on the Cosmere here.
So, rather than mess up other people's threads with my unreasonable thoughts and turn them all into arguments I don't have the desire to prosecute, and rather than keep troubling the serenity of these forums and taxing the patience and goodwill of you all, I'm going to leave before this mutual exasperated affection becomes irritated toleration, and come back in maybe a couple years so you all can go "Ohmigosh, Aliroz! It's been so long! How've you been" and I can be "Ohmigosh my friends! Yay happiness".
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As one of said giganerds, this is something I worry about.
While I love the theory culture of the shard, and have in many ways aided in it reaching the form it is in currently, I recognize that it is not very friendly to newcomers.
I for one would be very sad if you left, and should you decide to do so: I await your return friend
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Once the read is done and the reaction(s) posted, the "Aliroz Reads Isles Of The Emberdark" (not started yet, title not set in stone) thread will have served its purpose. After that, I don't think I'll post too much on these forums, or if I do it'll be in forum games and/or as something like one simple post in a thread, not as long blocks of texts or conversations.
I said that the "So, There's No Hope" thread would quarantine my unreasonable words and I stand by that. You members of the 17th Shard have been astoundingly patient with me, and have been incredibly generous in letting me be unreasonable on a forum based in being reasonable. Messing up other threads with my views and turning them into "Aliroz indefinitely and unreasonably argues with people in defense of positions nobody else has" is the exact thing that the "So, There's No Hope" thread was supposed to prevent.
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When my cousin gets a copy of Isles Of The Emberdark, the read will begin. I will make a "Aliroz Reads Isles Of The Emberdark" (title not necessarily set in stone) thread for it (to post my reactions) in the spoiler zone, at which point the "So, There's No Hope" thread no longer serves a purpose, since the understanding I made it to express will no longer exist. The point of view I have now will not exist. I will know things that I don't now know, and thus my thoughts will come from a different context.
I hope the mods don't delete it or lock it or anything (I know many sites delete old threads); I put a lot of effort into it.
I imagine it will take a while to get through the book, so it'll probably be multiple "reactions for chapters blah blah blah through whatever" posts rather than one big one, and if it turns out that way please don't take that as an invitation to spoil chapters I haven't gotten to yet.
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discuss Cosmere Bene Gesserit?
Aliroz-The-Confused replied to Schizoposting's topic in Cosmere Discussion
This thread is genuinely reprehensible. I will not engage with it further, and I post this that anyone else who feels uncomfortable with creating plans for this sort of thing knows that they are not alone in that. -
Game: Cosmere Theory Generator
Aliroz-The-Confused replied to Singer's topic in Forum Games & Random Stuff
Tensoon and Kaladin will become friends after realizing that they both got in trouble with the older generations for doing hero stuff, that neither of them ever stopped having feelings about their dead friend, and that neither wants to be revered as a holy figure. Kaladin will teach Tensoon to play the flute (Tensoon will become rich because people will pay good money to see a wolfhound play a flute), Tensoon will teach Kaladin the secret techniques for killing and replacing one's counterpart/brother/"coworker" so that Kaladin can kill Moash and steal his identity to troll Retribution's forces. Skazes and the Iriali. (Also, congratulations on achieving a five-year necropost! I've always wanted to do something like that.)
