A few scattered thoughts on Rhythm of War (Stormlight Archive #4)

[primeideal]

Okay so. I have been (re)reading the Stormlight Archive series, building up to "Wind and Truth." I had previously read the first three books (and "Edgedancer," the novella), but did not read RoW when it came out. I was more than halfway through when bingo started so it won't be a bingo book, but #5 will be. ;) There is no way shape or form to concisely and coherently review a Stormlight Archive book, so instead I'll just do some "relatively" truncated ramble/bullet points by character.

Spoilers through this book; also for Mistborn Era 1, Mistborn: Secret History, and, uh, "Spinning Silver" by Naomi Novik. If you hate Brandon Sanderson and think I'm a total hack for enjoying it, that's fine too, you're more than welcome to unfollow and disdain me in peace!

First off, what stuck with me from Oathbringer, and part of the reason I wasn't super motivated to reread/continue, was "okay so the humans are the actual evil invaders, meanwhile Taravangian is out here playing 4D chess, he has this whole thing planned out and is stuck using his extremely varying intellect to try and save the world. Why isn't he the main character? Why are we focusing on the Radiants if it's just 'humans suck, lol'?" (Other things I remembered: Dalinar getting his memory back, starting with Evi's name, and the ensuing manpain, "was it a boon or a curse," turns out it was both. Also, we learned Maya's name! And there seemed to be a weird amount of focus on the ancient heralds?) I went back to find my reaction from 2018 and past-me wrote, in full: "Seems like it flowed a little better than the first couple (at least there was a good reason for the flashbacks to work as they did for once!) Although it’s still hard to keep track of everything going on." Okay, yeah. So it definitely helps to read back-to-back, as much as possible (still not very fast) to track some of the minor charactesr between appearances, like Nin and Rysn.

I have also osmosed that WaT was disappointing to some people and...I suspect some of their complaints will be relevant for me and some will not.

Anyway, Rhythm of War:

• Lirin POV! I like that we get to see more about the costs and tradeoffs of being an Actual Pacifist (and geez, this would not have been as topical in 2020 :/)
• The setup with the focus on the Mink and how we're going to smuggle him to safety...IDK, felt kind of strange to have this new character just drop out of nowhere. Was he mentioned before? Maybe he'll turn out to be secretly evil?
• During the timeskip there was a trip to Aimia and we missed it? Those ancient weird nonhuman people and the drowned ruins? Are we going to get to learn more about this??
• Rock leaves, possibly forever, I'm not okay with this, I need more Horneater dialogue in my narrative!
• Shallan and Mraize have a conversation that's at first confusing because of the multiple meanings of the word "power." In book 4 of Steerswoman, Rowan and Willam have a very similar conversation. Two nickels!
• Syl being horrified by the list of potential migraine precursors. "Stuff doesn't go out of you and it's bad. Stuff goes out of you too much and it's bad. How do you humans handle it?" Tell me about it.
• Kaladin trying to ask "how do we treate mental illness? Are there best practices? Have we tested experimental and control groups?" I know that this will also be a thing in book 5 and some people think it's too much of a thing. I guess it's worth contrasting with how much scientific knowledge Roshar does or doesn't have about other things. Like, Navani clearly has a very modern-sounding idea of "what is science, how do you test hypotheses, how do you experiment and tinker with a thousand ideas that don't work before you find one that does." Whereas some of the physical-health medical knowledge, like, you should wash your hands, seems to have been passed down directly from the Heralds, so Roshar kind of got a jump start with that. But then there are other things like "we can teach you methods of crafting metals, like steel, it's stronger than ordinary bronze," where it's like...actually human technology has progressed a lot farther since you were last around. So. Reserving judgment on the science of mental health, for now.
• On that subject: the phrasings I found most jarring in terms of "these people sound like 21st century Earth humans" were abbreviating "maximum" to "max" as in "Five thousand men, max." And "crash course," which we get twice! On the other hand, when Kelek says stuff such as "Tanavast is dead. Like, completely dead." That use of "Like" was jarring...but upon further consideration, it makes sense that his dialect and vocabulary should be in a very different register from the contemporary characters!
• I can't really relate to Lift's motivations. Like, I can certainly understand "period cramps are not fun, I wish I didn't get them!" but the premise of "puberty as a radical change that restructures your body entirely?" I just...didn't experience anything like that. If anything, it was a lot more like "culture describes puberty as if your mind changes, you'll stop caring about certain things and start caring about a lot of other things instead, that could be scary" (except that really didn't happen for me, which I'm mostly happy about but means it's difficult to relate to people where it did?) Anyway, I know she is sort of a...divisive character in the fandom, I can't say I'm particularly a fan. Maybe some change on her part would be appreciated by the readers.
• The flashbacks! Apparently, while past-me thought the conceit in book 3 worked better for flashbacks than the first two, that's...still a pretty low bar. Even when I first read "Way of Kings" in 2012, it was like, deliberately withholding information from us is kind of contrived, and the levels of Tragic Backstory for Shallan and Dalinar didn't really dissuade me from this. So I was glad to see 1. we made it all the way to the 48% mark before the flashbacks hit, 2. it's about Eshonai, who's dead already, and Venli, who we know is responsible for some dark stuff, and so it wasn't so much a big tragic angsty backstory but more...filling in the listener worldbuilding.
• You can definitely see the, uh, "family resemblance" between the Sibling and the Stormfather, in terms of them both being very stubborn and "neener neener, I'm not like humans, I don't change." What must the Nightwatcher be like?
• Not every culture's music theory is the same, the Thaylens are so weird they have twelve-tone scales. Hahaha. I had a professor in college who would have loved to nerd out with Navani.
• I like Navani's depiction of impostor syndrome, and it feels realistic that her relationship to Jasnah would be relevant here--"she's the smart one in the family, I'm not." (I've seen descriptions of different ways impostor syndrome works in women, and it's like, "were you pigeonholed as The Smart One or The Other One, both can screw you up?!")
• Not a big fan of Shallan's plotline in the later books. (I understand her scheme in book one was extremely dumb on a number of different levels. That's fine, that's the point! She's a teenager with little real-world experience who isn't really thinking things through! No complaints there.) The reveal of "what happened to Ialai" was very underwhelming, the "oh no there are even more repressed memories we must work through with flashbacks," do not want. Like...I've never had battle trauma like Kaladin or Dalinar, but I suspect many people can relate to their experiences of depression or guilt. With the specific symptoms being portrayed, there's sort of an evolutionary cycle of individual case studies -> diagnostic criteria in medical literature -> portrayals of fictional characters. With someone like Shallan, her backstory is also extremely traumatic and disturbing, it's not a surprise it would screw someone up, especially a kid. I don't want to trivialize or dismiss real people's illnesses. But the concept of "multiple identities" has kind of breached diagnostic containment and become a social contagion. Kind of short-circuiting the cycle. I worry that Sanderson is at risk of being a victim of his own success; when you're this popular author, you want to work really hard to prove you're doing it right and listening to people who know more about these conditions than you--but there's a risk of enabling stereotype loops.
• On the other hand, Adolin is great. In book 2 when Kaladin went to jail for calling out Amaram, a few chapters later we get Adolin "texting" with Shallan via the ardents, and then only later do we realize he's been in self-imposed confinement this whole time, if Kaladin can't be free he won't be free either. He's limited by how much he can accomplish in his position, but also, he genuinely means well and wants to put his own skin in the game! The ancient Radiants were kind of in an impossible position, like, "you killed eight orders of spren, you're responsible for eight genocides, what's wrong with you?!" "yeah, well, they only had this crisis of conscience because they realized their ancestors were the original invaders, what else were they supposed to do?!" I guess it's no surprise that this is the plot point I latched onto. You could say I...got invested in it. Connected to it. Ahem. I am glad that Shallan didn't impersonate Kelek at the trial, it would suck to have Adolin only go free through a lie.
• Okay so. We have several instances of "how do we get characters who keep returning from the dead to die permanently." Jezrien last book, Kelek is afraid of it now, and then Navani invents the new anti-Voidlight that Raboniel uses. On the one hand, it fits well with the themes of power creep, escalation, and Radiant-nerfing tech. On the other, in worlds that have afterlives, I really really hate the premise of "uhh death is cheap I guess so now we're going to have a way to kill characters super dead, like extra dead, so dead they can't be with everyone else." (Ask me about some other terrible examples!) Kelek says that with the Oathpact broken, Jezrien had "no valid Connection to the Physical or Spiritual Realms" and "eventually fades away into the Beyond." Is this a typo/mistake for "Physical or Cognitive"? Shouldn't normal mortal beings who are 100% dead just exist purely in the Spiritual Realm (as is implied for Evi and Tien??) with no way to return in the Physical or Cognitive Realms? IDK, I'm just assuming/hoping Sanderson wouldn't do us dirty like that. D:
• On that note though, the parallels between Raboniel and her daughter, and Venli and her mother, are great.
• Jasnah/Hoid. Thanks, I hate it! On paper I'm sort of intrigued by the idea of "there was a seventeenth person present at the shattering, who didn't take a shard, and now walks the worlds thinking they got the better end of the deal." But also, the way Hoid is deployed as a not-deus ex machina and sense of humor across books just doesn't do it for me overall.
• TARAVANGIAN! Okay with the whole "there is free will sometimes" and "Nightblood isn't from this system so it represents a serious wild card," it's like...he still means well. He's trying, in his screwed-up way. And then he uses it to kill Rayse and take on Odium's power! Cultivation is like "yeah, this was the best chance!" Lift and Dalinar turned out to be great heroes, so why not him too? And now it's like...he's going to do the whole thing all over again but on the scale of the solar system, or the Cosmere. IDK. If Sazed can ascend to blend two opposing shards into one, Taravangian should be able to also. He saw the problems on the horizon, he was willing to risk any curse to try and stop it! Irina in Spinning Silver got the "look, all of these people are technically my subjects now, you can't mess with us" gambit to work, it wasn't a bad plan! If he just turns into the villain on a larger scale, it's like, "utilitarianism is never a good idea because something something hope and free will are important too." And "intelligence is useless without emotion to balance it." Again, not too surprised in retrospect that this is what stuck with me/annoyed me about book 3. (I'm not the most hardcore utilitarian in the world but sometimes I bristle when confronted with people's magic empathy-fu.) Anyway, please, I would say "justice for Taravangian" but Taravangian would be first to agree "justice for me means having my head cut off, I have it coming." THAT SAID. The terms of the challenge mean that if Dalinar's champion wins, Odium spends a thousand years in Damnation? There is nobody better suited to hang out in Damnation for a thousand years being like "yeah, this is what I deserve, I'll make something good out of it in the long term" than Taravangian. It'll be like a party with sulfur and wormwood! His chapter title is even "Bearer of Agonies," just like Taln! Please let him not be irredeemable and I'll enjoy all the suffering we heap on him.
• The last chapter where Eshonai temporarily sticks around, highly Invested, just like Kelsier in "Secret History." Only fourteen months ago? I was like "oh no not another major character death fakeout, come on, Sanderson, sometimes the protagonists stay dead." And then...she stayed dead, but. D'awww. That was nice. Ditto Venli's ending--she's finally restoring freedom to the captives, awwww.

I will start on book 5 soon-ish? I think there may be another spinoff novella in between?