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.

The only arrogant assumption here, is thinking that you understand Plato based off a few half-remembered tertiary sources and doubling down when confronted about it. Some values are superior to others—I already said this. And no, artistic preference is not equivalent to phone preference. I'm sorry, but not every philosophical or scientific concept can be fully explained in just one sentence. For the past few posts, I have literally (not in the figurative sense) already answered all of your objections in previous comments—it has become very tiring to constantly repeat myself for your benefit. Next time, before you respond, I recommend reading what I have already said.

If you actually understood Plato, then you'd know that he believed in the objective from of the beautiful. And Plato was never opposed to poetry—that's a blatant misreading. I say this with confidence, because I have read every single one of his dialogues, including the boring and nigh incomprehensible ones. What does camera preference have to do with art? No, because there's a difference between the particular and the universal; it's a basic concept in philosophy. That would be vulgar empiricism—subjects do not have immediate access to "noumena"—the very act of perception gives us a warped view of the object being perceived. I already made this distinction in a previous comment.

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/08/10/the-importance-of-the-homeric-poems-in-ancient-greek-culture/ This is just one example. The fact that people believed in the objectivity of art in the past, is indisputable. Advertising. Not all wants and desires are equally valid. The condition under which humans exist. I already answered that question: it's the only way to objectively determine the quality of art. I don't dismiss people's opinions because they disagree with me—I am just as willing to dismiss the opinions of people who like WaT, if said opinions are superficial; I already said this in my reply to @Returned.

For the vast majority if human history, it was common sense that Homer, Shakespeare, or whoever, was the pinnacle of art—it was only with the rise of postmodernism that it was accepted that bad fan fiction was just as good as the great works of yesteryear. It's certainly true that people may have various values, but not all values are equal; despite pretensions to the contrary, everyone implicitly accepts this—"tolerant" liberal multiculturalism is famously rather intolerant of "intolerant" values that don't align with its own. So, good art is art that represents values that are good and is opposed to those that are bad. But what determines whether or not a value is correct or not? Quite simply: a value is valid to the extent that it's a truthful reflection of the human condition—otherwise, it would be false, and misleading. The trick is, all art already reflects the (human) conditions under which it was made. The difference between good and bad art, is that the latter only superficially represents these conditions, whilst the former reflects the human condition as it really is. So, one way of determining the human condition would be through literary analysis. (To be clear, some aspects of the human condition are universal, whilst others are particular to a certain time period and certain social conditions.) I'm not sure what you want me to respond to.

In Yumi, like in other Romantasy, I think that there's a tension between the romance and the fantasy: it's not obvious to me, what the romance has to do with the themes about art, and the struggle against the Father Machine. In regular fantasy, romance is usually just a sub plot to show character growth, or something of that sort—but when both are equally prominent, the story can feel disjointed. But it has been a while since I last read Yumi, so if anyone has different opinion on this matter, I'd be curious to hear it.

The great irony of postmodernism is that saying truth is relative is in itself an objective truth—your assertion that art is subjective is just as exclusionary of other perspectives, as saying that it's not. I don't think that people understand their feelings in general, beyond the superficial. It has nothing to do with their opinion on WaT. Because it's the only criterion that can objectively determine the quality of art—conversely, if we judge a given work by how aesthetically pleasing it is, then it degenerates into subjectivism, since different people may find different things to be aesthetically pleasing. Quality can only be determined by literary analysis, because said analysis is defined as understanding how a given work relates to the human condition. Based on the criterion described above. What critiques, exactly, have I dismissed out of hand? I have repeatedly stated that there are valid critiques of WaT; however, said critiques are nowhere near enough to explain why there is such vitriol towards this book compared to others, especially when the aforementioned critiques apply just as much, if not more so, to earlier entries in the series. I would say the exact same thing to those people. Nor do I think that subversion is good for its own sake: it's only good insofar as the ideal being subverted is false. This is a very dishonest framing—I never said that people were "addicted", "stupid", "belligerent", or anything of that sort; perhaps you think that people are stupid for lacking self-knowledge, but I don't. Saying that refusing to accept people's self-perception to be unconditionally true, makes you contemptuous and denigrating, is a bizarre claim to make. By that reasoning, every great philosopher and thinker of the last 200 years "radiated contempt and denigration", by doing the former.

Which way should it be viewed then? I never said that "anyone who dislikes WaT is incapable of articulating their own feelings and opinions"; nor do I find the question of why this or that person liked or disliked something to be particularly interesting—I am considering individuals in the aggregate. The problem is that the immediate, unmediated, experience of consciousness is an illusion: what we think, and how we feel, is determined by unconscious forces beyond our direct control. That's why an individual's account why they feel, think, or act, in a certain way, is not to be trusted. That's not to say that understanding people's reactions to a certain piece of media is impossible, but it takes a deeper investigation than simply taking their word at face value. The objective quality of a given work of art is determined by how well it reflects the human condition. The only way to determine this, is through literary analysis. Regarding the debate, the reason why Jasnah "seems stupid", is because she's not quite the genius that she thinks she is—people were offended by that scene, because they bought into her delusions of invincibility. Being popular does not give a certain perspective any epistemological privilege over others—far from it. Besides, WaT is hardly despised by the vast majority of readers: just look at the poll results. Obviously, no book is perfect, and one can certainly have valid criticisms of how WaT was executed. The problem is that the backlash in the fandom is completely disproportional to how well the book was actually received by the average reader, not to mention its actual quality. So why is this? Why does a substantial minority of the fandom passionately despise this book? Simply saying that people disliked it because they thought it was bad is tautological. I don't think that it's at all "arrogant" to treat people's perspectives as the object of critique—if anything, it's the highest form of respect to take these views seriously, instead of dismissing them by saying that all perspectives are equally valid. Nor do I think that people are "stupid" for disliking WaT—people like or dislike things for myriads of reasons, which may or may have anything to do with its actual quality. If you read for pleasure and think that Shakespeare is boring, while enjoying Red Rising, that's perfectly fine. But it does not change the fact that the former is far superior to the latter. (Obviously, the Stormlight Archive is nowhere near as good as Shakespeare, but the point still stands.)

Quite frankly, the popularity (or lack of thereof) of a given work has very little to do with its artistic merit—the only way to determine whether a book is good or bad is through literary critique. The problem with the main complaints about WaT, is that they one-sidedly criticize the form (e.g. the prose), while disregarding the content; any serious critique has to consider the interrelation between the two, with the latter being the more important aspect. (Incidentally, that's why a lot of literary fiction is bad—a fetishism of form over content.) The reason why I like WaT, is because of the way it challenges the assumptions and biases of the earlier books: at the beginning the series starts with a rather naive conception of a struggle between a benevolent Honor and an evil Odium; of course, this is complicated by the fact that the Almighty is dead, the Alethi are terrible, Humans are the real aggressors, and so forth (which is why the earlier books are good)—but broadly, the point still stands. But in WaT, this notion is completely overturned: Honor is just as bad as Odium, Dalinar is a tyrant, and the coalition abandons him as soon as they get a better deal; the entire contest turns out to be a farce, etc. Naturally, this is going to upset the people, who feel attached to ideals being deconstructed, which happens to be a substantial part of the fandom. But since these people are not truly capable of the literary analysis to articulate why WaT discomforts them, they randomly latch on to superficial details that they did not like and fetishize them as being the reason why they feel this way. Combine this with the dynamics of fandom, and internet "hyperreality", and you get the sort of backlash that WaT got.

I think that it's indisputable that far more happens in WaT, per page, than in the other entries of the series. But if you don't think so, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. To be clear, I am not opposed to the change in formula—actually, it's one of the best parts of the book. However, I am well aware that defending WaT is a rather unpopular opinion, to say the least. So, there has to be some reason why so many people disliked it. While there were many different (sometimes contradictory) complaints about the book, most people are very bad at understanding why like certain things over others beyond the purely superficial: if people find the plot boring, or are disappointed by the ending, the real question is why they feel these things. That's why any serious critique has go deeper than simply complaining about the "modern language". And to be honest, I can't really take credit for this specific critique, since I more or less got it from Brandon himself: It's certainly possible that he's wrong, but we should still give his opinion some weight, given that he's the author and likely understands the series more than pretty much anybody. But even if we embrace the death of the author, and completely disregard his opinion, I still think that this explanation works far better than any other at explaining why so many people took issue with WaT. (The effect of fandom on "the Discourse" is an entirely different matter.)

The page space is used a lot more efficiently compared to the other Stomlight books: in WaT there are ten different plotlines going on simultaneously, while in something like RoW or OB literally nothing happens for the first half of the book. Some of these criticisms are fair, but most of them are not particularly unique to WaT—the Stormlight archive has always been bloated, and dialogue has never been Brandon's strong suite. While some of the backlash has undoubtedly been amplified by the dynamics of fandom, for many people there's something fundamental that didn't work in WaT. And the reason, I think, is quite simply that Brandon abandoned the classic Stormlight formula used in the first three books of the series. Which is why he (correctly) anticipated that the book would be very controversial.