By: Tony

I have been having some trouble writing about the Stormlight Archive.

(BTW spoilers ahead if you subscribe to that cult)

I originally was going to write an extensive article about how blatantly racist his whole world was, but it felt too preachy. The Parshendi are the natives of the plane, displaced by humans and then forced into slavery for 4000 years. The books are written from the perspective of those oppressors, affirming their righteousness. Each country is based on an actual ethnicity, but only through major racial stereotypes. For instance, the Herdazians are based on hispanic culture, but this means that the only Herdazian character of note has a large family with lots of cousins, he calls people by “Herdazian nicknames,” (Gancho means Hook in spanish, by the way) and is kind of lazy and womanizing. Furthermore, if someone says a person’s “skin is so dark, they could be Turkish,” that’s racist. If you say the same thing and replace Turkish with Makabaki, it’s still racist. Sanderson has said Alethi are supposedly based on Korean culture, but I’m skeptical. They feel a lot more like the purse-clutching upper-middle class Christian white America that inhabits places like, I don’t know, Utah? (Brandon Sanderson lives in Utah)

This is just brushing the surface, and trust me, there’s more.

If you’re curious, someone put together a race guide to the series, which would be really racist if it was about real people in the real world.

While discussing this, it was pointed out to me that fantasy as a genre is inherently racist. Elves, dwarves, goblins; these are all based around racial stereotypes that are perpetuated by the writers and readers of the genre. Any time someone refers to goblins/orcs/ogres as greenskins or monsters, they are essentially using hatespeech. So I can’t rightfully call out one author for his blatant racism without just blasting an entire genre. It would be unfairly singling one person out. So what I will say is that you should question the racial profiling that happens in the books you read. Why are certain races always portrayed as warlike savages, or whimsical tricksters? Could this be a casual dismissal of a marginalized population? Get woke, stay woke: Goblins are people, too.

So my second idea was to write how this was just Magic: The Gathering fanfic. I could jab at how stormlight is mana, and they trade mana rocks (Read: moxes) as currency. I could talk about the actual planeswalkers. I could talk about how the ten orders of Knights Radiant are a little too similar to the Guilds of Ravnica. I could mention how the Shards of Adonalsium are suspiciously like the Shards of Alara. Honor would be Esper with the melding of technology and living creatures. Cultivation would clearly be Naya, and Odium would probably be the primal nature of Jund.

But as it turns out, Sanderson writes for Magic: The Gathering.

He actually has been writing stories for planeswalkers, which were recently tied into the main story arc. So I can’t really make a joke out of something that is just plain true.

So I find myself returning to a simple statement: The series is trash, but I’m going to keep reading it.

The story is progressed through a comedy of errors, as each character has one piece of the puzzle and refuses to share. There are scenes where the characters literally have to say about 3 words and would shorten the book by about 600 pages. Honesty is not considered a positive trait in the world though, so everybody hides behind layers of deception. This heavily pads the page count, and sometimes it pays off in the “perfect moment,” but it can be torture to read. I call it edging in book form. Look it up, it’s a pretty funny joke (…and possibly nsfw, but here you are reading this at work, so just go for it).

So this strange dancing around that happens for hundreds of pages can really drag on. Readers will notice that the pacing doesn’t slowly build up, but instead follows a pattern similar to a Sine wave (oddly enough, this pacing would work well in a TV series…). You think a character is finally going to say “Hey, look at me, I am a knight radiant and can summon a shardblade.” Then the chapter ends, and we are dragged kicking and screaming through a flashback that nobody asked for.

For the record, I skipped all of Shallan’s flashbacks. I think she sucks, and her story sucks, and I didn’t miss anything. I thought her comeuppance where she realized that she wasn’t as clever as she thought was small, late, and far too short-lived. Reading her compartmentalize her emotions by using some poor man’s version of split personalities was insulting.

Kaladin Needs To Start The Fucking Revolution

I love how Kaladin hates the ruling class and everything that they stand for. I love that he has inherent distrust for all rulers. I love how dedicated he is to common people, and how he struggles with moral dilemmas. How can you vow to protect the weak, but then slaughter opposing forces like a farmer harvesting wheat? He struggles with this, and I enjoy it. It feels like the questions are presented by a Philosophy 101 student, but at least the questions are brought up.

Characters talk habitually about how grumpy and sullen Kaladin is. I ignore this. In my head cannon, this guy can fly, he is finally free, and he just wants to help people. He’s only grumpy because he has to deal with people like Shallan on a constant basis, and I think that is very relatable. I pronounce his name “Khal-a-deen” instead of Aladdin with a “K” up front, because I think it sounds way more badass.

He tries to bring as many people into his order of knights, the Windrunners, as possible because he knows how easily it will bring them out of oppression. The Knights Radiant are set outside the political and social structures, and I enjoy that immensely. People don’t know how to address them or react to them, and that throws a wrench in the neatly tailored caste system.

A problem with fantasy as a genre is that it romanticizes the monarchy. Any character that stands out against it is alright in my book.

Sanderson Is Incapable Of Writing A Woman’s Perspective

I don’t like how simply the women are written. They are warm matrons, troubled youths, or actual robots. The latter is one of my favorite characters, which is kind of sad. Someone pointed out that women flush a lot in his works. Like multiple times in a page. I don’t have the strongest grasp on reality, but that doesn’t realistically depict any woman I have known.

Man: “you said something dumb”

Woman: *flushes* “oh, I uh… didn’t mean it”

*fumbles with words and then changes subject*

I’m not a scientist, but that seems like sexism. And more than just the rampant sexism already prevalent in the world. Like feminine mystique tuned up to 11. Men don’t read because that’s not manly. I can’t respect a writer that uses this for three whole-ass 1300 page behemoth novels and nobody has yet to bring up a legitimate criticism in-world.

So Shallan sucks, but Jasnah is pretty alright.

She is strong to a fault, and possibly autistic. I remember reading the first book and thinking, “Wow, what a life. She just reads and researches all day, every day.” Then I realized the only reason she can do this is because she is the king’s sister. The amount of privilege in the main characters is pretty distressing, but Jasnah uses it to her advantage in interesting ways. She is cold and standoffish because she doesn’t want to waste time dealing with people. She has easily the best combination of Surges of all the Knights Radiant, and uses them the best out of all of the new knights. She is fearless and ruthless, and she gets shit done.

Also I ship her and Kaladin.

Now, hear me out. Shallan likes sword jocks because *tee-hee* they are cute and tough or whatever. Jasnah, though. She shares very little time with Kaladin, and they almost immediately argue. My money is on Jasnah as the Tsundere to Kaladin’s small-town-surgeon’s-son bit.

I Am Hopeful For The Series

Not in the unrealistic way. I don’t hope that Sanderson miraculously learns how to write concisely, feminine characters, or with a decent tone, or with pacing that is less agonizing. I hope that the systematic racism, sexism, and love for the monarchy in the first three books are setting the stage for the eventual upheaval and overturning of the cultural norms. I hope he is writing the first part as a long-con for an eventual criticism. This would be better than maintaining the comically cartoonish social customs of the current paradigm.

I know the series is trash. I’m going to keep reading it out of morbid curiosity, and to keep updating the reasons I give people when I warn them away from the Brandon Sanderson Kool-Aid.