Pleaaase stop being contrarians for contrarianism sake. The prologue ends with his entire squad getting massacred and his entire journey is coming to terms with being a good person in horrible conditions. The books are also not meant to be deep or life changing, they are just fun. A dragon ball Z fight in the middle of an apocalyptic storm is dope as fuck.
yes, the lack of sex in the books is hilariously overwrought.
tbh I'd take that over the sci-fi authors who absolutely insist on incorporating their weird kinks into their writing
As a Dune enjoyer, yes I will say Frank and especially his son were coomerbrained and had some serious unexamined misogyny.
The books are also not meant to be deep or life changing, they are just fun.
I mean, there's definitely a critique of society, morality, and spirituality happening in these books. You can't just ignore the number of parallels between the books and modern social movements.
A bunch of the Twist Endings in the series
spoiler
involve subversion of tropes in American conservative/reactionary movements. Just off the top of my head, you've got an archeologist that's lionized the past, only to be confronted with irrefutable evidence that her people's predecessors were deeply primitive and backwards.
You've got a deeply religious man stumbling on a Spiritualist pre-recorded message that drills into his brain "God Is Dead and You Assholes Killed Him" on a damned loop.
You've got people grappling with colonialism, with wars over natural resources, with religious schisms, with bigotries, with philosophical struggles over the nature of power...
This goes a bit above some pulpy Flash Gordon tier action/adventure.
People are saying his writing has too many adjectives, but I'm saying it's far too sparse. Where are these guys standing? What's the texture of the grass? What can they smell and hear? What's the history of this particular region? Who are the local lords and to whom are they allied? What marching songs did the army sing on the way to get here?
Yeah, I'm a Tolkien fan.
I still stand by the belief that if he had actually finished the series all of the food descriptions would have been paid off incredibly well by the descriptions of stale rations and empty plates during winter.
brought to you by Turning Point Euron Islands
The Greyjoys making a fortune by opening the first chain of fish and chips shops
If they could invent canning technology they would rule Westaros with canned sardines
Holy shit that would be so big brain. But alas it will never come to be
Dont you love the late heinlein books were he goes on and on descriving his breakfast?
I personally hated Brandon's works because his prose feels dead; it feels purely functional. I tried other stories of his but the prose is always the tripping point (oh, also the video game mechanics). Good prose should feel like your mind comes alive in vivid colors with the beautiful use of literary devices and such. Brandon's works on the other hand are just simply functional and little else.
It's a stylistic choice rather than being a bad writer. Read Tress of the Emerald Sea, his latest book and see that. But pirate it because he is Mormon and tithes to homophobic church, despite being decent with queer rep in books
The fact he able to be an adult about it when it was pointed out his representation was lacking was cool.
It makes him better than 90% of creators :agony:
In this particular type of literature descriving the regions history and political situation is very important otherwies it feels hollow.
i like the stormlight archives, they're a fun read :shrug-outta-hecks:
You're doing the internet argument version of mashing every button on the controller rn
I just finished the first three Earthsea books and they might not be groundbreaking, but they are deeper in theme than I expected out of a fantasy book. Very well written too. I second your recommendation wholeheartedly.
Most days, he wakes up at 1 pm, exercises, and writes for four hours. Break for the wife and kids. Then he writes for four more. After that he plays video games or whatever until 5 am. A powerful sleeping pill is all that works, finally, to get him, and the voices in his head, to shut up.
If I worked from home and could set my own hours, and I didn't help the kids get ready for school in the morning, my wife would pour bleach down my throat while I was asleep.
Many things, from buildings to beasts, are “enormous.”
:biggus-dickus: :biggus-dickus: :biggus-dickus:
They probably think I don’t know my Kaladin from my Adolin.
McSweeney's Quiz idea: "Characters created by Brandon Sanderson, or sleeping pills Brandon Sanderson has taken?"
[T]he company is now 50-some-people/Mormons strong
Nice
The r/bookscirclejerk reaction to it was priceless though.
Idk I liked it lol. You can palpably feel the driven insanity of the Mormon mode of being flowjng off the page.
I just read part of that article (I'll finish it tomorrow or something) and from what I've so far read.....they're not wrong. Brandon's prose feels genuinely dead, it lacks for good use of literary devices. The stories aren't themselves bad (except of course for the video game mechanics) but the lacking prose makes reading the book feel like a slog.
I don't have a heck of a lot of context for this but he's gonna wish he had piss-soaked rags if the enemy has mustard gas.
When I picture Mormons I imagine people who are as emotionally stunted as Canadians but who are forbidden from partaking in any of the classic Canadian coping mechanisms (weird sex stuff, gratuitous profanity, alcohol, caffeine.)
Yeah that's pretty accurate. They replace it with self-loathing and self-righteousness in equal parts.
Brandon Sanderson is cool. Most :reddit-logo: things are bad but he's literally just some dude who writes cool big-ass books. He just attracts a bunch of MCU people because shared universes are popular rn. The books also skew further left as he gets older
yeah donating absurd amounts of money to hate groups on a consistent basis is cool. he writes the fantasy book equivalent of a particularly mediocre marvel movie so he can do no wrong :so-true:
I don't understand why you picked me to reply to. I just said I like the guy and his books. I'm sorry if I gave the impression that he could "do no wrong".
But damn, it's nice to have a major fantasy author who doesn't write a bunch of really gross shit about women or queer people.
I get that it sucks that he gives so much money to the mormon church, and that's totally a fair thing to be upset about, but saying that he "donates money to hate groups" is kinda baitey.
As far as leading fantasy authors go, unfortunately this is about as good as it gets in terms of fair representation and avoiding liberal/monarchist :brainworms:
I get that you might not like him, but there's not a need to be inflammatory just because some stranger on the internet likes something you don't.
I don’t understand why you picked me to reply to
because it is your comment which i found distasteful and to which i was directly replying? what?
i dont understand why you picked me to reply to. just because i wrote the comment you're replying to? seems a lil sus :thonk:
you said he's "cool" and "literally just some dude who writes cool books." i take issue with that framing.
Yeah, I like his books and I started pirating after finding he pays tithe to bigot church.
I read the last books of the wheel of time and the quality went to shit once sanderson took over.
And thats considering that nothing really happens in the miidle books by jordan.
But it was clear sanderson sturgled with charachterizations and plot settings. In the last battle the series was building towards the bast he can do is " the make a line and sit there". When in the last jordan book we get much more interesting battles.
And dont even get me started on mat's character.
Also not to sound like a nerd but while jordans prose was clunky it had a certain charm. Sandersons was plain.
So i was never interested in him or his books. I have the impresion that he is bland. Anfd that he cant deal with even mildly interesting charachters or stettings. And it always annoys me when the stormfronters recomend him.
I'm a huge WoT fan (well, the first 7 books really) but I think you'd be surprised by how much of the last 3 books were actually written by RJ and not BS. Jordan was basically bedbound and still trying to write, and I think it shows; and Harriet didn't have the heart to edit him as hard as she should have. For example all the prologues, that were roundly panned as a "change in tone" and "clearly writen by Sanderson" were all RJ, turns out.
Which is to say I don't think we can put it all on Sando, even though I do agree that a lot of the bits we know we're him (everything with Androl lol) were not up to the prose of the rest of the series. And I totally feel you on the Mat parts though, BS wrote a lot of those, and really did him dirty.
Weirdly the cut material with Demanded in Shara (River of Souls or whatever) was actually probably the best piece that BS wrote for the whole series and Harriet cut it lmao
Man. Hearing about that is just really sad. Poor jordan. That is dedication.
That being said im still not very interested is bs.
Oh yeah that wasn't a defence of BS really, I'm not keen on his work.
But yeah Jordan was a Great cheesy prose writer
I tried reading this book because a few people recommended it, I only got about a third through it (so like 400 pages) before giving up. Too much of it read like the novelization of a Dynasty Warriors game.
honestly trash series lol but apparently hot take given the comments
Nothing I like better than sci fi with less believable names than a japanese baseball game on nes
I initially read that as Reginald Dickshamer and was about to have questions
We don't piss-shame in these parts, pardner. :brace-dark-cowboy:
he did do a world where their magic is based on diseases, so wizards go around trying to catch them and then continuously suffer...
Better than the magic is evil and hurts your soul or whatever that is too common
Lethally pissing my pants in combat (they interfered with the magic of my large round silver metal riveted coat-of-arms-emblazoned handheld shield)
