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Finished reading Wind and Truth, fifth Stormlight Archive book. It was really not good. Books 3 and 4 had gone downhill so I wasn't expecting too much. Just figured I'd read it since it's the last book of the planned 1st arc. It was rough though. I'm not even sure where to begin criticizing it, every part has issues. It's got some culture war issues, but mostly because Sanderson up to this point has been a prude Mormon author so it feels inconsistent with his previous books. The character arcs go in uninteresting directions that feel like they have low or no stakes and often end pointlessly. Sanderson has never been a great prose writer, but in this book it's bad enough to constantly distract from the story.
It’s a shame, really, because it was refreshing to encounter a fantasy author who delivered straightforward fantasy without forced modern DEI themes. Books 1 and 2 were honestly quite good—classic, heroic epic fantasy done well. However, none of the setups in those books ever pay off. The built up character conflicts just get dropped. The love triangle just fizzles out, and a character's controversial decision is barely addressed. It’s like the characters stop interacting after Book 2. They all seem to have gone on heavy psychiatric medication and started cognitive behavioral therapy, blunting all their emotions and the actions those emotions might inspire. Instead of living and acting through their feelings and getting the self-discovery potential those actions could lead to, they just become distant and introspective, endlessly dissecting their issues in a repetitive, stagnant, psych 101 for dummies style. It's all tell and no show.
I kinda wonder if Sanderson just wants to get to his long term over arching cosmere stuff more than he wants to write good books. So everything is getting the short stick and forced into unnatural feeling storylines to keep things on track. No time to write these character interactions, gotta introduce random new cosmere lore! Which is ironic for a series whose moral was supposed to be, "journey before destination."
I thought the book was decent, but a noticeable step down from the previous 4 (which I thought were all excellent). My main gripes were twofold. First, while the series has always had an element of being very heavy handed about mental illness, this one really took it to another level. It felt like everyone's foremost character trait was their mental baggage (to be fair that was always the case for Kaladin but now it's everyone), and as you said it just gets handled in a way that feels very... Reddit, for lack of a better way to put it. Lots of emphasis on therapy and thinking about mental illness in a way that the other books really didn't have. I don't really care for the way he took an interesting aspect of the setting (you need to have some cracks in your soul to get powers) and Flanderized it the way he did in this book.
My second beef was the culture war angle I suspect you allude to,Renarin and Rlain's nascent relationship . It just feels so forced. The series has had gay people in it and that was fine (if a bit anachronistic for the tone of the setting, but so are a lot of things I suppose), but this was just over the top for me. For one thing it feels like it was a DEI box-checking exercise first and foremost - "hey let's not only have a gay romance, but a gay INTERSPECIES romance with an autistic dude!" . So this feels very forced in a way that other, similar situations just didn't. But that isn't even close to the biggest problem with it. No, the biggest problem is Shallan playing cheerleader the whole time, culminating in letting out excited squee noises like she's some fucking Tumblr fangirl . It is absolutely insufferable and I very much doubt if I will ever read those chapters again because of it. I feel like Sanderson is spending too much time listening to the Reddit/etc section of his fan base (who I have no doubt eat this stuff up), to the point that I got the sense that Shallan was meant to be an audience stand-in when she got all excited . But I can't stand it. I'm willing to give him a break on this one just because like I said, his other books have been excellent. But if he keeps this shit up I'm probably going to stop reading. It was that annoying to read.
Those two things aside I thought the book was fine. I didn't hate it. But it was a definite step down for me, the first real blemish on his record since Elantris (which was his first book so i don't expect it to be as good as the rest). I can imagine that I would be much more upset if, like you, I hadn't really thought the last two books were that good either. But for me this is just an outlier in quality, one I hope remains an outlier and that he goes back to his usual standard. We'll see.
Yeah that was not subtle. I couldn't stop rolling my eyes at this book in general, and the modern immersion breaking references, but there were a lot ofRenarin things that were especially bad. They visit his childhood room and his hobbies were reading and model kit building (omg he's just like redditors!) or at one point he is nervous and if I'm remembering correctly he is basically described as both fidgeting, while spinning a sphere in his hands to distract himself. Fidgeting and spinning...
I think what bugged me the most was something that bugged me about a lot of the other plotlines too, namely the timingIt's 10 days before what could be the apocalypse and confronting an evil god and everyone is more worried if their uwu crush notices them, or for Kaladin if they're self-actualizing. Is being a soldier really the right job for Kaladin? Or Sigzil? Maybe they'd be better off as therapists or carpenters. It just felt so first-world problems. You need to meet all those lower needs like not being dead on Maslow's hierarchy first.
Also the entire recreance just turned out to beHumans being bigots and if they had just learned to mate with and love the crab people instead of being slavers everything bad could've been averted Just a really lazy and typical modern plotline that's been done to death. Avatar etc. I like Sanderson's worldbuilidng but the rest I've come to dislike. Too many safe and easy plotlines, (Even evil god turns out to have faked destroying his city, and of course Dalinar doesn't actually have to take a stance on the trolley problem, it's just dodged to be fixed at some later date) so feels written by HR for approval by the overly online crowd. I kinda wish he'd keep worldbuilding but let other authors write some of the stories, since he seems to be getting overwhelmed with all the cosmere stuff with the expanding scope. Need to at least pick up a much more critical editor and get rid of the overly online fandom sourced beta readers.
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