That makes sense 🤔. You’re probably right

*Truthless of Cleveland

​@@westvirginiaglutenfreepepp7006😭🤣🤣

And objectively , as someone who is new to stormlight and the cosmere , Brandon Sanderson is a great writer . I only got into him because of the fantastic job he did in finishing The Wheel Of Time .

😂😂 relatable

Were not boring

I think I skipped about a third of them lol

(Sigh).....can't argue with you there

I Love this series but tbf, there are definitely some boring parts.

They grew on me during a reread.

😂😂

Great way of putting it, dont entirely agree - but wow is the book special

That's kind of a genre thing though, no? POV characters in fantasy novels don't usually die, and when they do you can often see it coming a mile off.

yes but that is why the stakes are not if they will live or die...

*elokar and teft did not enter the chat

Every single book I read, I thought Dalinar was going to die at some point lol

Subbed

Thank you 🤠

Welcome 🙏😁

Hell yea! I (austin) think it is in some way referring to both (the people and the realms) - and that hit even harder for me thinking that was the case

We havent yet - Rich DNF’ed it because of the first chapter but we may have to give it another go

lol you’re proving their point tho, that’s an easy statement to make where there’s sm other topics to explore that aren’t that basic

Part of it is his refusal to go into what people call Purple Prose, which is when the writing gets all, for lack of a better term, extra.

Richard would approve of this comment lol

I really liked it.

Shallan is in my opnion the best character. Dalinar is very close but words of radiance creates an incredible complexity to Shallan. You will understand if you read it

​@@donkey3235 Since that original comment, I actually have finished Words of Radiance and have started on the Lift novella (the name is slipping my mind at the moment) and to some extent I can agree, she definitely gets better and I absolutely understand why so many people have fallen in love with this character. That said, she still doesn't quite work for me until the last few hours of WoR, which actually slightly worsened a complaint I had from the first couple chapters of the book. From the beginning of The Way of Kings, I was actually on her side, she seemed charming enough even while being an endlessly awkward fish-out-of-water girl, and for a while I was actually interested in her story. But...most of that took a bad turn four-hundred pages (roughly, give or take) in. For what it's worth, a decent amount of what doesn't work for me with Shallan has to due with her story. And, for better or worse, Brandon ties his characters into their own individual stories very tightly, and Shallan's never managed to grab me. The one part of Shallan's story that always kept my interest actually had little to do with her, because I really enjoy Jasnah, maybe a little too much, she's an absurdly confident ends-justify-the-means woman with a hidden soft side to her. Then, she died (I'm aware that she comes back, but for WoR she effectively died), and the only character from Shallan's story that I found truly interesting was gone. This led to an extremely lackluster middle section for Shallan's story in WoR. But enough negativity (kind of). Shallan actually did become very interesting for me towards the end of WoR, and part of this comes with a bit of a return to Jasnah's death. I don't know what it was exactly, maybe the point where she begins breaking at the very thought of being forced to remember her past, maybe it was learning that she had locked away the part of herself that was willing to kill in cold blood, maybe when she first kisses Adolin (which sounds odd, but to me it felt like a real moment of growth for her, no hesitation, no awkwardness, it felt like she had truly grown as a person and was just doing something because she wanted to, without a second thought), maybe it was her during the race against time to find Urithiru. Whatever it was specifically, she began to exhibit character traits I hadn't been allowed to see for most of the The Stormlight Archive (up to that point). In those last few hours (maybe it was closer to several, I can't quite remember), Shallan worked for me so well because she began to feel like Jasnah. Which I know was the point of her character arc, and to some extent I can see that as being a large reason why people fell in love with a character like that, it's definitely a fascinating direction to take a character in. But again, for me it came a bit too late in the story after far too much lackluster material during the build-up in my opinion. It's also probably not a good sign for my appreciation of this character when I only began to love her when she no longer seemed like the character she had been for nearly two books, and instead began to feel like a character that was killed early in book two. All that said, though, I've resumed my reading of The Stormlight Archive, and am actually interested in Shallan's character for now, at least until Jasnah comes back and by extension triggers Shallan's PTSD such that it forces her back into a place of darkness (I assume Jasnah's return will shock Shallan, and that is the only reaction I can imagine her having, hopefully I'm wrong). Also, despite my complaints, it really does make me happy that so many people love this character, I can totally see why they do, and I would never want my experience with her to be the experience everyone else has, that would just be unfortunate and a bit silly of a thing to hope for. Also, apologies for the "Why I Shallan Didn't Work For Me" essay, I get carried away sometimes.

@@sparksdog8111 While I don't dislike Shallan I actively groan every time it's switched to her perspective, Dalinar and Kaladin have such interesting character arcs and the struggles they face even more imo. And then they switch to Shallan who is like how do I get this blonde hair man to like me ooga booga, while for book 1 and most of book 2 ignoring her past, which is the only interesting thing for me lol

@@deadfromhell1235 I think I would actually re-characterize my criticisms of her character to closer resemble what you are referring to, because I feel exactly the same. She just, feels like an afterthought that suffers from the length of each book, because she's supposed to be a main character but often has the amount of content customary for a supporting character.

@@sparksdog8111 thank god she is bipolar so she can switch away from shallan in later books 😂

It has a really slow start, IMO just take your time but don't give up :)

I am confused on what you don't understand, the plot is rather simple :D

I enjoyed the 2nd era just as much. The connection and relationship between the characters is much better.

Read them. Doooo it!

Every single review of every single piece of media is subjective based on the the taste of the reader/viewer. There's no such thing as an objective review of a piece of art, unless the review says things like "The book has characters, and those characters experience events." With that in mind, shouldn't you curate the reviews you pay attention to down to the ones who share your perspective and tastes on other books? Because just raw dogging a bunch of aggregated book reviews won't tell you anything about how YOU will feel about the book going in.

I also found that WoK drags on the first time you read it. But for me, this was mainly due to the fact that some things were difficult to understand when they were first mentioned. At first, I had no idea what to imagine by Spren. But when I read it a second time and also read the following books, it went much better, because you understand a lot of things and the characters much better. There was a passage where Elhokar talks about figures he sees in the mirror and I forgot about it the first time I read it because it didn't seem important to me, but the second time I had to stop at that point because I realized that this was not Elhokar's paranoia, but a very important piece of information about him.

😂 we suck

@@2ToRamble 🙃

Not mention he spelled “Mary” as “ Marry” 😂

slams any modern fantasy

This is not hot, it's just plain wrong

This person obviously didn't understand what a shardbearer is. When Sanderson writes it's an opponent, it can be anything from Sadea's spy who can't fight to best swordsman. But Shardbearer tells you exactly who you're dealing with. That would be like saying, "He keeps using the word king for Elhokar, he might as well just write nobleman or brightlord."

Big mistake. In my opinion Oathbringer is the best of the storm light archive books. But also, epic fantasy is not for everyone.

lol this is the most insane cope I've heard It isn't even true, either. If you think adults have better attention spans than children by default when reading *books* then you clearly never worked with children.

He does get better though, that's he's whole thing he struggles with depression and no he'll probably never be completely free but that how depression is, it doesn't always go away completely but that doesn't mean you can't live a normal happy fulfilling life. Also as someone who also struggles with depression and relates to Kaladin so much you saying that it's obvious that he cant get better, hurts, like it really shouldn't but it does😂😂😂😂

@@pingpong2978 but his whole life is about how depressed he is . I’m glad you relate to Kallidin but I can’t relate to him. I think I have a better understanding of depression but the book needs to move on. 1000’s of pages on how depressed he is depressing (pun intended) and a slog to read.

I think Kaladin is already doing much better. He'll never heal completely, but it's in the last book that he's at his worst. But in the end, he heals. One of the main reasons that Kaladin suffers from depression is because he blames himself when someone dies. That's why his glyph didn't disappear. But in the end, he accepts that he can't save everyone and the glyph disappears. This shows that Kaladin is getting rid of a great burden and is on the road to recovery.

@@teresa6525 so the trope of the eureka moment heals depression could have happened at the end of book one.

⁠@@chicagodino But then he wouldn’t be an interesting character, having depression over the deaths of the people he swore to protect is way more interesting than just accepting it later on, and if you give context to Kaladin being unable to move on, it’s that he was raised as a surgeon, with the ideals of his father, that there are two kinds of people, one who takes lives and one who saves lives. However, Kaladin would retort to that, thinking that there are also people who take lives to save lives, now when he goes to war and Tien dies, he trains to keep depression at bay, he trains so that the next time he wants to protect someone, he’ll be able to save them but it’s like everyone he wants to protect keeps dying and he’s one of the only ones left alive. Let’s not forget that when Kaladin became a slave he was beaten and treated less than human. However, later on he grows, he gains power, he rises to a higher rank, he’s well respected by bridge four and now the captain of Dalinar’s Honor guard, and you would assume that “Oh, everythings fine now.”. Only for Moash to kill Teft, one of Kaladin’s closest. It’s redundant, tiring, I know, yet that’s what depression is, you can’t escape it, especially if you go through that much trauma as Kaladin. I mean you can literally see it in his ideals, they’ve changed, so does his character. If you can’t relate to him then find another character to focus your attention on, there’s so much more characters in the books. We can’t control what Brandon Sanderson writes, so just look for a different author.