primeideal

(This part will be more applicable when I crosspost to Reddit:) I know there have been a lot of takes of the form “here are the parts of Wind and Truth that didn’t click for me,” and I suspect this is going to overlap with many of them, so sorry. With a book/series of this scope it’s hard to really do a coherent/organized review, so this is mostly going to be bullet points of things that worked and didn’t work for me. My overall enjoyment of the series isn’t necessarily a function of how many bullet points are on either side.

Once upon a time there were three people who set out in search of dangerous magic, and the hour of the world’s need was so great that a god came in person herself to deal with them. One of these visitors was a young and very hungry girl whose mother had died, leaving her impoverished and alone. Another was a mighty prince who, though wealthy, was in thrall to addiction and bloodlust and his own shame. The third was an elderly king who had lived a great many years and led his people with tolerance. But he came nonetheless, because he knew that humanity was in terrible danger.

To the first, the god gave a gift of power, so that the child might do magic even when all around her had their abilities curtailed. To the second, she gave an opportunity for rebirth, so that the prince might receive visions and form bonds and become a worthy champion. To the third, she gave intellect and emotion—but never both at once. The king might seek the greatest good for the greatest number, but he would not wield magic himself; he could only move those who did.

Some things I liked:

• The worldbuilding of how all the Heralds’ names have evolved and changed over time in different places. Turning palindromic when that’s seen as divine. Yezier and Azir, etc. I think my first time through the series this was more annoying/frustrating (or just the focus on the Heralds in general when I couldn’t really tell what was going on), but this time around the worldbuilding was a nice touch.

• “Book-quartermasters” :D

• The parallels to how things work elsewhere in the Cosmere (Shallan seeing alternate versions of what someone could be/gold and the eleventh metal, Moash’s spikes/Marsh and the Hemalurgists)

• The different POVs during the “Not Sleeping” chapter, with Fen and Yanagawn’s characterizations revealing a lot about their cultures. Fen and her husband in their sixties, scandalizing the guards! Peacetime uses for Shards (I think they mentioned somewhere before “maybe there are other, more productuve things, we could do with these instead of killing each other”?). Everything about Yanagawn and Noura’s relationship throughout the book.

• Colot: “No one’s going to weep for me, the poor highborn boy who didn’t get what he wanted. I don’t imagine that they should.” I think this is especially important in light of the things I reacted to most strongly from book three, about “if humans are just the evil invaders then why are we reading about all these guys anyway.”

• “I’m concerned about what Iyatil is plotting.” “Mmm...do you think she has a graph, or…” Took me a minute! :D

• “Understanding the ways of God is the primary purpose of science.” Aww. I know not everyone, even in-universe, will see it this way! But for religion and science in this specific setting I think it’s a great characterization of Navani.

• Ash and Taln’s last stand!!

• “Lopen had regrown his arm immediately, after years going without. But some people received full Regrowth within a month, but had internalized the wound enough that the body wouldn’t comply. He didn’t know how to combat that. He needed to not accept the wound? Storms, he hated the idea that if he couldn’t get healed properly, it was his fault somehow. Wasn’t the loss of a limb bad enough?” Okay I don’t “like” this per se but it’s a fascinating POV on the limits of this system/potential victim blaming.
• Sigzil's renunciation as a foreshadowing of the end.

• “The weapon is supposedly a kind of...test of a person’s character. You have passed.” “I’ve done little with the sword.” “That is part of passing the test.” Lol.

• Sebarial and Palona get married for real!

• Nightblood, of all “people,” being the one to learn from Kaladin’s rules!

The flashbacks were...kind of odd, in the sense that there were a lot of them, but proportional to their page count I feel like they didn’t tell us a great deal that we didn’t already know?

• Things I liked from Szeth’s backstory: his home culture with the motifs of “adding” and “subtracting.” Szeth being curious about whether art can really be adding if it doesn’t contribute productively. The splashes of colors, as contrasted with the white that we’ll see later.

• We don’t really get anything about the “voices” plural Szeth deals with in the canon timeframe, that’s just “he’s mentally unwell and is ashamed of the people he’s killed.” But from very early on he’s hearing Ishar’s voice in his head, and sometimes putting words in his mouth (“this is why I only stabbed the carcass once”). It’s tough to get invested (as it were) in someone whose characterization is having something else put words in their mouth!

• Suddenly having “the Wind” be introduced as a character, and people needing to “listen to the Wind,” and “the Heralds look much younger than they are because of Surges,” can’t help but seem like a Wheel of Time ripoff. To some extent, the flashbacks to Szeth being just a simple shepherd are similar. Now, granted, the Wheel of Time definitely didn’t invent the Good Shepherd trope, but...it’s there.

• The Shin border being the “Misted Mountains” is funny in the context of “Shinovar is ye olde generic fantasy land and that’s where humans can thrive, everywhere else is inhuman and weird.”

• “Szeth wasn’t Kaladin. Szeth was Tien.” This would hit harder if we hadn’t already had “the king was Dalinar’s Tien.”

• Ashyn really invented nuclear weapons before they invented the wheel or writing, lol.

• We go back to some of the tragedies from Dalinar’s past...but we’ve already seen that. We go back to some of the tragedies from Shallan’s past...but we’ve already seen that...except we get even more tragedy infodumping.

• On the other hand, this does make “the world had ended, and Shallan was to blame” hit differently.

• “All but your husband’s bastard bear a terrible burden, including predispositions inherited from you.” What? Is this implying that one of the brothers isn’t really Chana’s? (Helaran was an apprentice skybreaker and the twins are...twins, so it would probably have to be Balat?) Or does Shallan have another half-sibling running around Jah Keved somewhere that we don’t know about?? I need more about this!

• “Elhokar would have married that nobody scribe, if not for me.” So we could have averted Aesudan’s evil and Gavinor’s turn, if it wasn’t for Gavilar being the worst.

• Cultivation is a literal dragon and that just. Hasn’t come up. (Okay it kind of has, Hoid talked about the “tricky lizard” and last book, “there’s one on this planet but she prefers to hide her true form.”) Still, of all the actually new things to get info about in the flashbacks…?

• The Stormfather was sort of an echo of Tanavast, but not really, because Odium killed him. Okay, but...we knew that. Something went wrong with Ba-Ado-Mishram and that’s why the Recreance was so bad for the spren, but...we sort of knew that? (Do we know why the singers who rebelled became listeners and the others became parshmen/slaves, were they magically separated in some way before that? Mishram’s Connections? Or is that just kind of handwaved?)

• I don’t think we actually needed any more motivation for the Recreance than “the humans were arguably the bad guys all along,” but again, maybe that’s just something I’m particularly sensitive to. For a while I was scared that the interspecies romance had caused the Recreance, and like...please no, not everything needs to be about romance all the time. So I’m glad that wasn’t really a thing.

• I wanted a lot more about the fourth moon that shattered the Shattered Plains? With Odium’s Perpendicularity underneath? I wanted more about the new listeners in general, beyond “unspoken plan guarantee that boils down to signing a treaty offscreen.” Although it’s an important treaty, given how much of the early plot revolves around that war.

Miscellaneous:

• Please don’t let Rysn and Vstim be separated! Let them be friends! (What is Rysn’s secret plan? Is she going to retrofit the Wandersail as a spaceship or something?)

• “She is good at making people who were once alive and unthreatening, unalive and unthreatening.” I’ve spent too long on the internet because “unalive” just sounds like Youth Jargon. Could it at least have been “living” and “unliving” maybe?

• Is there any relationship between music and magic horses or was Sanderson just like “yeah this is neat”?

• I think Taln the Herald and Talyn the gunship from Farscape should hang out. Fighting unwinnable battles. Suffering stoically together. Being a little bit insane but still more sane than some of the people around them.

• I appreciate hearing Nightblood clarify “yeah I don’t destroy people’s souls forever, I just send them...wherever people go when they die.” Last book I was kind of confused about the role of Spiritual Realm, as opposed to just “going Beyond,” so I was glad to see more of what that was and wasn’t. I still think the mind-soul contrast, allowing a better Oathpact, is kind of a distinction without a difference. But if this means that Jezrien and Raboniel aren’t “worse than dead,” they’re just...really dead like normal mortals, then yay.

• Szeth’s happy ending is really settling down in a heteronormative relationship with someone we’ve never met and just got epigraph quotes from, lololol. Princess Irulan but it’s true love!

• Timeskipping Gavinor offscreen to be the opponent felt kind of cheap. We have a few compelling antagonists (Moash, Venli, Leshwi)...but most of them just wind up defecting to the “good guys.”

Neurodiversity and/or identity politics:

• “People talked about being bad with names; he’d heard it a dozen times over. He’d been bad at them once. But in his experience, being bad with names was like being bad with swords. Most people could learn if they tried hard enough.” Adolin, have you asked Renarin if he can get good with names and faces by just trying hard enough? I feel like this kind of undercuts the neurodiversity/mental health themes.

• On average, girls are less strong than grown men, that’s very unfair but that’s how it is. Maybe one in ten volunteers will qualify for the front lines, most of whom are men but some of whom are muscular women. BUT if a woman fills out the right paperwork, then the narrative will just reference her as a man! I know the Azish love their paperwork but I don’t think this is going to age well.

• “A lonely stick had been ripped free in the wind and ended up here—where, over time, crem had coated it. Such shapes tended to be hollow—she could step on it and crack it straight through, because the original wood had rotted away, leaving this shell. Thoughts could turn to stone the same way.” I like this imagery of thoughts turning to stone, powerful but not tendentious.

• Pattern’s talk to Shallan: anxiety generalizes from small sample sizes, a more objective look would take into account all of the mentors and loved ones you have not killed. Again, this felt like actually usable advice.

• The total amount of characterization/POV/focus we’ve gotten on (Jezrien, Ishar, Nale, Kalak, Taln), versus the total amount on (Ash, Chana, Vedel, Battah, Pailiah), is certainly...something. (We could make this up in the back half by having it be all about Battah’s genius plan to play both sides and make a gazillion dollars in compound interest, just saying.)

• “It is not our strength, Glys whispered. We focus on what will be. ‘I have to do a lot of things that I’m not very good at,’ Renarin said. ‘That’s basically my whole life, Glys.’” I can definitely relate to this point about “sometimes you have to learn to deliberately do things other people take for granted and just...struggle through it.”

The things that I’m guessing everyone else has complained about:

• I don’t mind Wit using jargon like “therapists” that Roshar wouldn’t have words for. That’s fine with me.

• This is a very long book! Over 1300 pages! For most of it, the characters sound reasonably like themselves and their setting. If I grate at some of the dialogue choices on page 1000+, that doesn’t mean the book was terrible. But the in-universe ten day timespan is not a long time to evolve into phrasing that’s more reminiscent of our world.

• So when Kaladin says stuff like “I’m sorry, Szeth. What can I do to help?” That is somewhat grating.

• “I’m his therapist” would have been really annoying, if it hadn’t immediately been undercut with “What is that?” “I honestly have no idea.”

• When it comes to Shallan and the mystery of “why is Formless back,” I don’t really think the revelation of “I knew I was doing better, so she had to be Iyatil” is earned. We see several times in the previous books that healing is not a linear process, people perseverate.

• Likewise, her discussion about “well I’m not going to get rid of Veil and Radiant, I’m just going to use them constructively” felt like walking a very thin line between “this isn’t actually healthy” and “well we can’t judge anyone’s coping mechanisms.”

• The overall premise of Stormlight Archive is that these people’s brokenness is what makes them potential Radiants. So in many ways, I’m lucky if and when I can’t really relate to the main characters, or that the messages of “you’re valid and deserve happiness just as you are” aren’t “for me.” There’s a whole world out there much bigger than the Radiants—I can relate to Navani doing science experiments, or Adolin playing board games, or the ardents discovering the Heisprenberg Uncertainty Principle, even if I don’t have any trauma like Shallan or Szeth or Kaladin! But…

Taravangian, my problematic fave:

• The first few books kind of hinted in the background that “seeing the future is inherently evil.” Hence the stigma about Renarin and his powers. In retrospect, I understand that those powers have a negative reputation in-universe. Of course, it seems like beings like Honor, Cultivation, and the Sibling, have similar visions too. And part of the importance of the Renarin and Jasnah conflict at the end of book 3 was that the visions aren’t set in stone, they can be wrong.

• However, the way the Diagram came across in books 1-3 made it seem like “this guy is out here playing 4D chess and seeing the whole future.” Which, if he is, why wasn’t he the main character? It made everyone else's efforts seem kind of futile. Between that and “oh humans were the real invaders all along,” I was pretty unmotivated after book 3 to canon review before book 4 came out.

• So I feel as if the earlier books could have done more to explain “this is why everyone else’s actions aren’t meaningless after all.” Instead, Taravangian comes across there as more of a Hoid-type character; he’s so overpowered that he has to be nerfed (in this case by his varying intellect) to not break the narrative, which feels like a copout.

• Given that, I really appreciated Taravangian’s Ascension in “Rhythm of War!” He means well, he’s trying to prevent a cataclysm, and faced with an incomprehensibly greater power, he does what he can and fights for the greater good of Kharbranth. And so getting more of his POV here was great.

• Instead of humans arguing about the problem of evil, we get it from the gods’ POV!

• Me taking notes on an early Jasnah chapter (I think this is the line “It’s about what brings the greatest good to the most people—and sometimes that requires making difficult decisions”). “Jasnah has utilitarian sympathies, she and Taravangian should hang out.” That aged well!

• Taravangian’s deal for Kharbranth still binding him and coming back to bite.

• All the Chekhov guns coming back. The assassination contract from the book 2 prologue! The body horror of Soulcaster devices!

• Jasnah sparring with Taravangian is fun because he’s more than a match for her. I hated Jasnah/Hoid, in large part because I was tired of Hoid’s non-deus ex machina shtick across the Cosmere, but without the annoying humor, Jasnah vs. Taravangian is great.

• And the Sazed parallels! Totally here for it.

So the thing with Taravangian is, I think, intended to point out the limits of utilitarianism. However, I don’t think it’s as simple as a single philosophy, there are also cases when Kantian-style reasoning comes in for a bad look.

• “Cannot every murderer say, ‘Mine is the instance where the rule should be broken’? Every person has wanted to break the law—but if it is right for one to uphold it, then it is likewise right for all.” (Nale)

• “What kind of world would it be if every time such a decision came up, we forced ourselves to sacrifice? Not giving up our lives or time, but our integrity, our happiness, our very identities?” (Kaladin)

Szeth has to learn, sometimes painfully, that different parts of his homeland have different tastes, not just in aesthetics, but even in very important things like what is sacred. We shouldn’t assume everyone is the same.

But—and this is probably more about my neuroses than the book as it is—I don’t think it follows that the right thing to do is subjective. Szeth gets lucky, in this case, that Kaladin is willing to take up the burden and fight so that other people, like Szeth, don’t have to. But I don’t think, in general, we can just assume “some people will choose to be watchers at the rim because they want to.” If the message for people who have been dealt a bad hand in life, like Szeth and Shallan, is “the bad things who happened to you aren’t your fault, you deserve to be happy, you get to have nice things,” ...well, there are still problems in the world. And maybe it falls to the people who have the good fortune to be born wealthy kings and lighteyes to make those sacrifices.

Bingo: Perfect fit for Knights and Paladins (the hard mode is “the character has an oath or a promise to keep,” lolololol), A Book In Parts (hard mode, four or more parts), Gods and Pantheons.