“The opening page of Best Served Cold was enough to stop me in my tracks.”

Is it conscious? I’d love to see an interview from Sanderson where he specifically talked about that. Otherwise it seems like it’s just part of his general trend of pushing fantasy toward a sort of superheroic vibe.

I mean, I just no idea what you mean by “mainstream” if you’re saying Sanderson isn’t it. He sells huge numbers of copies of his works to an audience who are not, by and large, readers of other fantasy novels.

Personally I disagree re: it being just “I don’t like this author/I do” and I think it’s incredibly evident in the posts here, and much worse elsewhere. Just on this article we’ve got people calling the journalist every name under the sun, wishing for him to be fired, and so on. And that’s with people holding back…

They’ll scream at you, sure, but they aren’t quite as psycho as Sanderson/SU fans. It’s difference between a rude, aggressive but not-actually-throwing-hands sports fan, who will spew vitriol all over you for not liking his team or whatever, and a bunny-boiler.

You’re really encapsulating the profound shittiness of some fans in your post here. Not only are mad-as-hell with the journalist, you think he should be fired, and you don’t see any problem with saying that.

The exact terminology you use is going to vary based on your background and the way your mind works. You’ve certainly been pretty insulting and demeaning at times. “Fucking idiot”, for example, is not equally insulting to or from everyone who says it. In the case you’re referring to (which is a different thread) I was…

I don’t know if it’s most, but a significant proportion certainly do.

“I personally wouldn’t call him better as an overall storyteller”

To be fair, you just described most of the posters on this site including yourself lol. I’m just willing to actually argue the toss, partly because I can spam posts out like Sanderson can spam books out!

Thank you for the examples - I haven’t read any of those books (despite having read like 10+ Sanderson books) but I might get to Wax & Wayne eventually.

LOL. Dude. No-one in The Black Company is remotely plausible. They’re all just basically acting like 20th-century people in this entirely dark and medieval environment. Like, there’s plenty to critique in Martin’s work, but trying a “The Black Company was better!” angel is just hilarious and very old-man-ish.

Not yet - but I was thinking about it.

I mean, I’ll be honest, I feel like if he wrote fewer pages and thought about each page a bit more, Sanderson could easily become one of the best fantasy writers, like, ever. I think his approach, which is to just spam it out, works, but just a bit more thought about his characters and stories could really elevate it…

There’s definitely a similarity to shonen manga, but I would say a lot of his work sadly resembles the worse kind of shonen, the older, filled-jammed, emotionally-confused, not-much-to-say kind of shonen. Occasionally he breaks out of that for a bit and does something genuinely good, but then he gets trapped in it…

I actually agree: Name of the Wind.

I don’t think he does game them out, because they’re too predictable but he certainly structures them in a way that is very reminiscent of videogame fights, or bad manga/anime.

“that are all connected”

“That’s a fucking good thing!”

Right? A lot of the same exact factors have gone into the success of their work, and that’s one of them.