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  Mystery

  12 февраля 2019

  Words of Mediocrity

  Give me an audience who have come to be entertained, but who expect nothing special

  - Brandon Sanderson, through his character Wit.

  This quote gives an impression that Sanderson is fully aware of his flaws as a writer and is perfectly content with his work regardless, having no intent to grow as an artist and preferring a low-effort method of creating, because "nothing special" is a very accurate description of this book.
  All the troubles I had with the previous book ( «The Way of Kings» Brandon Sanderson ) still remain in this one, if not intensify.
  First, I mentioned poor worldbuilding. We get some more of that and it still doesn't make much sense.
  The second complaint mentioned not living up to the standards of an "epic scale". Expect no breakthroughs here: the main storyline is still stuck in the same region. This could be fixed (starting with the first book) if the author included POVs from across the world - not as brief intermissions leading nowhere and serving as an illusion of a greater scale picture - but as separate storylines given no less spotlight than the main ones. Alas, there is no such thing.
  The next gripe was about characters and plot. Well... Not only the characters are still mostly one-dimentional and devoid of evolving, but if one thought it couldn't get any worse than shallow, cringey dialog, ham-fisted moral lessons and the overall lack of subtlety...
  Without getting into specifics let's just say that Sanderson apparently has trouble with "good" characters staying injured or dead. This way death loses its meaning and its impact on the reader. Any controversial characters, on the other hand, don't stay alive long enough, being killed quickly (often after a few chapters since their introduction). One could guess that such decisions are caused by Sanderson's inability to portray complicated, not black-and-white characters. That being said, all controversial and potentially interesting characters quickly become "evil" and then die.
  Still, the biggest drawback of the whole book is not even the writer's fixation on a black-and-white picture of the world, it's Kaladin's story ark. While all other main characters' stories progress, at least somewhat, Kaladin's comes in circles, repeating itself.
  Not to mention how ridiculously talented and flawless he is: he constantly saves others' lives never to be saved himself (the closest we have to someone saving him is still a tie), he is a great leader, he learns at impossible rate (a plenty of different skills, mind you!), and in the end he covers a distance of a few days travel in a few hours at most. He is a genius even among the most special people and this is plain boring. It's hard - impossible even - to root for a creature so godlike flawless with his skills (who on top of that acts immature and spoiled).
  It's hard to maintain over-the-top ridiculousness such as this work possess and remain at least semi-realistic (in portraying people, etc). Usually you have to choose between those.
  It would be a lot better if Sanderson wrote a fairy tale (of moderate length, as I suggested earlier, because his pace still suffers) instead of an "epic fantasy", because far fewer aspects would be questioned. Until then his works remain as they are - painfully mediocre.

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