rhythm_of_blues_brothers

Hey, I'll second that I'd much rather see good adaptions than crappy or even ok-enough ones. And I wouldn't be too surprised if the Cosmere books never ultimately get adapted.

Also, in case anyone is wondering, I'd like to note: No I didn't underline this entire post on purpose. I don't know exactly why it has that format now and I can't figure out how to edit it out, and I'm too lazy to contact the "17th Shard Tech Support"-or-equivalent about it.

Now that I have a nice dramatic thread title, here goes... I watched the "State of the Sanderson 2025", and suspect Sanderson is wrong about his reluctance to adapt his books with animation. There's the comments around ~13 minutes into the video. Then there's this quote from ScreenRant (https://screenrant.com/stormlight-archive-wind-truth-animated-adaptation-convincing-op-ed/#:~:text=Brandon Sanderson's State of Sanderson,fantasy series is much smaller.) : "Do Way of Kings as animated!" While I'm not opposed to the idea (I think a good animated version could be done), if we made an animated version of Stormlight Archive, it would play only to our fans, and to animation fans, perhaps. It would not gain a larger audience. The unfortunate truth is that animation for adults does not gain audience, right now. So we could do a cool one just for the fans, I'm not saying no to that." With all that in mind, I'm suspecting that Sanderson is being misled by some Hollywood conventional-wisdom about "animation is for kids" and possibly some other reasons Hollywood might look down on animation (totally guessing here, but again, I suspect this is the case). Anyway, digging into the "State of the Sanderson 2025" and the quote from Screenrant: Why is a big budget necessary for animation? Would it really cost so much to hire a bunch of no-name voice actors and do a 2D animation with a decent art style? Maybe this reflects what I don't know about budgets? If this is about income, isn't Sanderson rich enough already? I think Sanderson is wrong about anticipating that animation won't get a large audience beyond the existing fans. I also suspect he's searching for latent fans in the wrong places (i.e people who watch 'serious' hollywood movies and live-action prestige TV). I think he needs to stop trying to imagine cosmere works being some kind of "Game of Thrones 2.0" that attracts a bunch of normies to watch a fantasy show, and instead start envisioning an animation audience as a combination of the existing animation audiences plus some newcomers: i.e the existing cosmere fan-base, weebs who didn't read Sanderson but will probably watch a cosmere TV show, the Avatar-world fan-base, normie parents who see Cosmere stuff that their kids are watching and start watching it themselves...and maybe some other folks I haven't thought of? Addressing the canard of animation&comics not being seen as "serious", I suspect the 2020s/30s might be a decade where a lot of people might be willing to let go of that myth. Sanderson mentioned "Arcane". Is he aware of the existence of: Ghibli films, Persepolis, Flee, Apollo 10 1/2, Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Triplets of Belleville? Who has Sanderson approached about animated adaption? Has he talked to any Anime people? Finally, here's my personal opinions on how all of the cosmere (that I know of so far) should be adapted: Stormlight: needs to be animated. Spren, Shadesmar, Spiritual Realm, plants outside of Shinovar, Parshendi/Singers/Fused. It should be animated. PERIOD. I'm partial to an 'anime-inspired-western-animation', but that's just a personal preference. Mistborn: more plausible as live-action than Stormlight, but I think it would still be better as animation. Tress: needs to be animation, and apparently that's what Sanderson is going for. Good. Yumi: animation, or maybe "space-jam-style" with the 'nightmares' and spirits animated but the people and setting live-action. Warbreaker: relatively-plausible as live-action. Almost all of it takes place in one city, I'm guessing that the magic effects would be relatively doable in live-action. Sunlit Man: animation. Elantris: I think animation would be better, but might be doable as live-action. Mostly-takes-place-in-one-setting, but I suspect the magic effects (including the appearance of pre-restoration Elantrians) would be more difficult to do well as live-action vs Warbreaker. Finally: does anyone know if there are other sources for relatively-recent remarks Sanderson has made about how he wants to do adaptions?

POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW Yeah I've been fine with it so far. If I did have any writing-style gripe about Sanderson, it's that his combat scenes sometimes take way too long. And I enjoyed how the 4th book tied learning about the magic system with the Navani story. In terms of being more systematic about the music, I'm fine with having it or not, don't really care. My main interest is if a movie/TV adaption ever happens, about how I think a lot of the music (& especially the Listener/Singer music) should sound - i.e, if Sanderson doesn't explicitly develop a music system before doing a movie/TV adaption, I'd hope that whichever team takes that on doesn't end up doing one of: All Roshar music = western European music. AND/OR Orientalism-music i.e every listener rhythm is sung in double-harmonic-major (i.e Hijaz Kar maqam) Also, to clarify about the number of notes per scale: the examples from Klezmer that I mentioned are modes/scales that extend beyond the octave. And if you're on a not that's different in different parts of the scale, I think you can still figure out "where you are" in the scale based on the phrasing/progression-of-the-melody. Also, I'm mentioning Klezmer because it's system is the one I know a bit about, not because I think it's the best possible inspiration. In fact, I think it's not the best source, because it doesn't have nearly enough scales and time-signatures to choose from (essentially only 4 scales, and largely devoid of asymmetric time-signatures). I'm pretty sure there's other musical styles that have more of both (e.g Balkan regions with time signatures such as 11/8, 13/8, 15/8, 7/8, 5/8, Maqam systems with tons of different modes). And if the "10 notes" thing really is that important, I'm pretty sure there's at least some systems with modes (e.g Persian "Dastgah-e Mahur", which to me appears to be the same as the Klezmer "Adonai Malakh" scale) that extend beyond the octave.

TEXT BELOW HAS SPOILERS Not knowing much music theory but knowing some klezmer music, I will say that I believe that it (or maybe just the component of it inspired by Nusach?) has "scales" with more than 8 notes (Freygish->10; Mishebeyrekh->9, Adonai Molokh -> maybe 10, I suspect it's actually 11). My sort-of/maybe-understanding of how this works in klezmer is that it's about "progression", e.g the highest note in the major-ish "Adonai Molokh" is used in a piece called "Der Shtiller Bulgar" at a point where the phrase is generally going "on the way up" the scale. I'm a bit sorry to necromance this thread, but wanted to respond here because for a while I've had the following general thoughts about what should happen with the music if Stormlight were ever adapted to TV/movies: The inspiration sources for a lot of the human music should be one or multiple of the Middle-East/North-Africa/Central-Asia/India "modal" music traditions (e.g Arabic and/or Turkish and/or Persian), and the main sources for 'music' of much of Roshar should absolutely NOT be western-European classical music. It's neat that I now have a Sanderson quote to back that up, at least for Alethi music. Since there's so many different Listener/Singer rhythms, I'm guessing the Singer/Listener music system should include lots of different modes AND asymmetric rhythms. It's probably completely subjective (at least I don't have a Sanderson quote to back it up), but when I think of Listener/Singer music I imagine: "Rhythm of..." = a specific time-signature or emphasis pattern (e.g some syncopated beat within a symmetric rhythm, or an asymmetric pattern such as the Bulgarian "Lesnoto" 3+2+2) in a specific mode ("Longing" could for example be ANY slow-ish melody in 7/8 3+2+2 and in some designated mode/scale). The "songs of..." examples on the other hand would be actual specific melodies...BUT they should still be sung in a melismatic style with improvised ornamentation. It might be subjective on my part, but there is a specific scene that I imagine having vertical harmony "chord progressions": the "flute orchestra" that the wind creates for Kaladin when he deprograms Nale. In this specific scene, it would be ok to use some piece of (or something resembling) western classical music [though there are other sources that could also inspire this scene].

I'll admit some of my trepidation is because I thought two of the major fantasy series that I got into that experienced some kind of 'mega-escalation' both got worse because of it ['Supernatural' TV show & Dresden Files books. Less so with Dresden Files, since I actually got through Battle Ground, w/ Supernatural I quit part-way through the show]. Maybe Sanderson can pull it off successfully. I do think he's a better writer than Jim Butcher.

Some more Stuff I liked: Jasnah: I liked the way WoT wrote her losing to Odium. I hope books 6-10 will show results of the treaty with the Listeners, and her dismantling the Alethi caste system. Adolin: Still maybe my favorite character in the whole series. Aside from a general writing style criticism that applies to a lot of Stormlight in general*, the Adolin story was great. Kaladin/Szeth: mentioned that one already, but to elaborate...yes I loved the therapist-Kaladin scenes. Yes, it starts of as a shonen tournament arc that takes place mostly separate from the rest of the stories, and that is also just fine. *I think Stormlight in general has excessive blow-by-blow fight scene narration. (Note: this does not apply to Kaladin's talk-no-Jutsu. The flute/story scene with Nale is one of my favorite parts of the book).

My Reaction: I definitely liked it, probably somewhere around 8/10. At the same time, where the story went makes me somewhat less enthusiastic about reading books 6-10. The "Good": -The storylines of pretty much everyone, especially Kaladin/Szeth, Renarin/Rlain The "Meh": My general sense that the ending means that books 6-10 will by-definition have to be Cosmere books instead of Roshar books. In the past, it's been fully possible to appreciate the Stormlight books without "Cosmere Awareness", which is good because I'm not cosmere-aware. I didn't like Mistborn era-2 enough to finish it. I might read other cosmere books, but don't want to feel obligated to in order to enjoy the 2nd Stormlight era. The previous books got me really into the question of how the Singers/Listeners/Humans might eventually work out a peace on Roshar, and that's one of the reasons I loved the Venli story in book 4. I'm afraid that books 6-10 will be so much about Shards and shard-power-mechanics that the author will take away a lot of agency from the actual Singers/Listeners/Humans.

Shinovar & Blackthorn: I agree completely. I also think that about the swap with "fake Gav". If you want to leave him in the SR, just leave him there and accept that many people will see the Contest of Champions part at the end coming. Which apparently a lot of folks saw anyways (I didn't, TBH).