Schizoposting

What do you mean by "powerful"? Besides, unless if you're referring to some different battle, Rand only destroyed the army because he was directly being powered by the Eye of the World, which hardly counts.

Yes, Rand is highly overrated; at the beginning of AMoL he has the strength of a strong Forsaken, which certainly makes him powerful, but as we all know, far from invincible. There are plenty characters in the Cosmere who can defeat him in that state. Things get trickier later on, because he seemingly gets the ability to directly influence the Pattern, but we never learn the limits of this ability, so trying to extrapolate anything from it is pointless.

I read Cytonic before Skyward Flight; overall, I think that this reading order worked, because the former ended on a cliffhanger that made the latter more interesting—conversely, intermixing the two, or reading the latter before the former, would have likely resulted in a worse reading experience IMO.

To Hegel, God (more precisely, the absolute idea) is nothing more than the process of thinking itself; as Feuerbach pointed out, this is just a fetishism of the human capacity for reason, projected as an external object. Of course, the latter was unable to overcome Spinozism, because he conceptualized humanity as a purely passive, and static subject. The point is, saying that you need God to understand philosophy is reversing the causality; Christianity, for instance, is quite famously a bastardized version of Neo-Platonism. So, the framework does not actually add anything.

I don't care much for religious debate, but I must say that I find the claim that "humanity is inherently evil" to be genuinely hilarious; it's one of those things that's no longer politically correct to say anymore, but which perfectly incapsulates the essence of religion—namely that it's a mechanism for human debasement. (Although to be clear, as I said before, this is only the subjective reflection of the objective debasement of humanity that already exists in society.) Why bother with religion at this point? You don't need belief in God to justify Spinozism, Nietzscheism, or whatever it is that you believe.

God is already dead. I understand the existentialist desire to create your own values, but this can only be done on an objective basis, not on a subjective one. In other words, the only to change the individual is to change society. The great irony of postmodernism is that the "freedom" granted by it is just another form of enslavement: you can do whatever you want, so long as it's just another form of consumerism. The only thing that's prohibited is actually challenging the system. I would caution against fetishizing the family as something eternal and immutable; even today, the way family works in places like Somalia or Afghanistan is extremely different from the nuclear family in the developed countries—any serious historical analysis shows that it's something that only evolved during modernity. Furthermore, treating familial repression as the fundamental driver of society falls into the trap of the "Sexual Liberation" movement of the 60s—maybe back then, fornication was radical, but in this day and age no one cares (except for some boomers) if you engage in, open marriages, one-night stands, polycules, etc. And those who do, are just as miserable as the rest of us.

@ParaTulip, religion is just another form of ideology, no different than any other; this is most clearly seen with atheist, progressive, liberals, who replace faith in God with faith in science, progress, or humanity itself (Comte was particularly honest about this). Like all forms of ideology, it's the result of people fetishizing their own narrow interests as being objective and universal; for instance, ancient Greek slaveowners claimed that slaves lacked the capacity to rule themselves, while feudal lords claimed that feudalism was ordained by God. And they genuinely believed this. Thus, religion is not particularly significant in itself, except in places where it holds real institutional power. To be sure, there's a dissatisfaction with modern life that can give religion (whether spiritual or secular) a real appeal to people; however, said dissatisfaction does not come about because of secularism, but because of the objective alienation caused by the commodity form. As such, religion does not, and cannot, lead to real happiness.

I don't think it has so much to do with "theism" as with the rejection of post-modern nihilism (which is why Grimdark is the ultimate form of post-modern fantasy). Even in the real world there are a great many heroic deaths that really do mean something.

This is fine: the problem is when it's overused. And further, in art, one must deviate from reality in order to express a deeper truth; even "realist" fiction is not actually realistic. Thus, even if it's not "authentic" for someone to have a grand climactic death, it does not make it inherently bad thing.

But that's just not true: in WaT and TLM, Dalinar and Wayne died. Maybe you felt that there was a lack of stakes, but people did suffer consequences.

Aside from the case of Kelsier, it's always made clear by the end of the book. But if you think that this is a major problem, what characters are you uncertain about being dead or alive, whose deaths we saw "on screen"?

I don't see any reason why killing off characters is in itself a good thing—as others have already mentioned, randomly having your characters die can, and often does, make said deaths less impactful to the story. I would rather have death be used for something more than cheap shock value, in the Cosmere. And "fake out" deaths are not inherently a bad thing: when used correctly, they can add thematically and narratively to the story. Out of your list of fake outs, I would argue that at least half of them are justified.

This is false: Also, Kaladin became a herald after Retribution's accession, which means that Honor's and Odium's investiture can be clearly split off from one another.

The issue with Iran was that the US lacked the political will to open the Strait of Hormuz, i.e., the will to launch a million-man invasion of Iran; if they had done this, they would have "won". I have talked about this before, but the will to fight is an essential resource in war, no different from manufacturing capacity. The actual way to conquer Roshar is through economic hegemony, and not military force.

I don't think that anyone here is actually qualified to give advice on how to improve the books, beyond the abstract; the most one can do without being an actual professional author is to point out the problems in the way the books were written. Within this constraint however, I think that there's a real problem holding back some the latter entries of the series, which is the tension between the grounded realism of the earlier books, and the abstract metaphysical conflict between Honor and Odium. The issue is connecting the two, so that the latter would be expressed in the former. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, the concrete conflicts of TWoK and WoR (like the caste system), were more or less forgotten about, so that the narrative could focus on fighting Odium instead. But it's not all bad; the way the battle between Honor and Odium was expressed as the struggle between the Singers and Humans, was very well done—especially since it's explicit that the latter are the real villains of the conflict, and that Honor is just as bad as Odium. Overall, a general mishandling of the issue, is why the first two books are the best in the series, while RoW and OB are the weakest.