#njasnyah.txt

[njasnyah-kholin]

(less serious follow up post) ok but look at the second(?) edition cover of TFE! this is a little ninja child! no gender only murder! if you asked william shakespeare if obsidian knives were a masculine or feminine weapon he would simply stare at you in confusion

[njasnyah-kholin]

Alright some people have already given nice summaries so I feel no responsibility to be serious, therefore, memes.

Welcome to Roshar, a lush and vivid world where everything is crabs. The dogs are crabs, the bugs are crabs, some of the people are crabs, I don’t think the birds are crabs but the birds are all chickens. For some reason the horses are also not crabs HOWEVER the culture of horse-owning is such that having a horse on Roshar automatically means you’re a magical horse girl.

Welcome to Alethkar, a land where everyone makes fun of white people’s lack of epicanthic folds and thinks they all look like children. White People Country is so small and off the map that there is one (1) token white person and everyone else is POC. (Except the Horneaters, maybe?) In all seriousness the world is overall really well thought out and he hired some experts to help with language, geography, culture etc. which makes the worldbuilding one of the major selling points of SA. There are a lot of lil deviances between neighboring cultures that actually make sense based on their geography and history, and the way they all interact and challenge each other’s beliefs is so interesting.

Once you’ve wrapped your head around the excellent cultural yeetage and interplay, meet the listeners! The series starts out with the Alethi at war with the listeners, whom they consider unintelligent and enslave, etc. Long story short, surprise surprise, they find out that the listeners are actually intelligent (how shocking) and have a rich culture of their own. I won’t give away too much because this is a major point of the overarching series but they have a lot of great discussions about respecting others’ language and culture and stuff.

Did I mention the magic system? Brando Sando is known for his magic systems and SA does not disappoint. It’s really really science-y while still being simple enough to understand because the characters are making discoveries about the magic pretty much at the same rate we are, so we get new information in small packages and get to see how that new technology revolutionizes whatever before moving onto the next one. Some of the best powers are:

Sticking people to walls

Materializing a giant fork that can cut through anything

Turning that frown upside down, quite literally, by reversing gravity

Repressing your past- I mean, cool illusion powers!

Turning people into various non-people substances

Talking to sticks

As a magic-user on Roshar, you will also get a free therapist along with your powers! These tiny life coaches slash miniature gods will help you through your issues and whenever you reach a mental health milestone, you get to level up. 10/10

Finally, time to meet one of the most dynamic and varied cast of characters you will ever encounter:

Depressed surgeon-turned-soldier who just wants to look at cool rocks (ace? gay? aro? unclear but he is certainly Not Straight)

Struggling art student with magical DID and a sordid history (bisexual by word of brandon and arguably canon)

Himbo horse girl master duelist fashionista (bisexual by word of brandon, and also, like, look at him)

Old man war criminal with amnesia and a nice butt

Old lady queen who would rather do science than... really anything else, except perhaps old man war criminal

Heretic scholar who knows way more than everyone else but refuses to share out of spite (asexual by canon)

Canon autist with fashion frames, he took all the brain cells from his brother himbo and yet still has very few brain cells (mlm by word of brandon)

One guy who is literally the galaxy brain meme

13 year old girl who just wants some pancakes

Token white person with resting facepalm face

EDIT: forgot the most important one! literal clown who is one of the oldest beings in the universe, just here for the instant noodles

Hopefully this was entertaining. Read SA, it’s an amazing experience and you won’t regret it!

Alright, where my B-Sandy Cosmere stans at?Tell me why I ought to Stormlight. I'm needing y'all to convince me, cuz my whole dang writing group insists it's absolutely my style and I'm going to love it, but reading time is at a premium with baby about, so it had better be worth it. Especially with as heckin long as these books are. Also, since they all took his lecture series and 50% of them applied to his workshop sessions, they're kinda biased.

So convince me. Why should I spend my 45 minutes of book time per day on The Stormlight Archives?

(But also this is tumblr so I have high expectations for y'all's summaries, convince me in the most entertaining way possible pls)

[njasnyah-kholin]

vin venture fucks with gender in a way that can appeal to like. every single gender group.

at her most basic, she is a woman who learns to fully embrace her womanhood while simultaneously learning not to let it define her.

as a young transmasculine kid, i loved that she could perform gender and enjoy it while never losing the street-hardened awesomeness at her core - simply evolving it.

i know that some transfeminine readers connected to her growing acceptance of her own femininity.

i connected to the weakness and vulnerability she feels around those who are more visibly capable, especially men, and was inspired by how she found her own strength to be greater - and so was my dad, a middle-aged cis(?) man who is similar to me in a lot of ways (physically, personality, interests etc.).

she is, in many ways, a standard hero of the (male-dominated) fantasy genre, with zero concessions based on her gender of what she can and can't do.

she's a brilliant character with so much nuance and i don't think bsandy intended any of this at the time :P

[njasnyah-kholin]

oh yeah forgot to post this one. life update i'm a kaleshwi truther now

[njasnyah-kholin]

i think… i have become a kaleshwi stan

[njasnyah-kholin]

me trying to think of original content for my blog on tumblr dot com so people will give me notes: i want.. . to eat... the concept of shallan davar. . . i think it would nourish me for days

[njasnyah-kholin]

good job to the stormlight archive for having not one but TWO male/female relationships that i'm crazy insane about

[njasnyah-kholin]

shallan is such a vibrant character and I'm convinced it's partially because she embodies so many roles at once. she is the heart, the brains, the damsel, the rogue, the artist, the scholar, the spy, the diplomat, and even the firepower at times. she moves fluidly between all these roles, finding her capability in each of them, and in the process grows and changes non-linearly. she's continuously questing to find herself, and that quest gives her the freedom to explore all the different sides of herself within a relatively self-contained narrative.

[njasnyah-kholin]

Putting in my two cents: I read SA 1-3 only having read Mistborn Era 1, and it was totally great. If you're planning to read all the books anyway, pretty much any order should be fine. I don't feel like I missed the cameos in SA; it's more like SA was intriguing foreshadowing, and the cameos happened when I read those characters or magic systems' main books later.

And don't worry about not enjoying SA as much because you don't understand broader cosmere theory stuff. I mean, my dad read the series skipping every single interlude because he didn't get the cosmere stuff, and he still thoroughly enjoyed the books.

I have No Idea what’s going on with the Cosmere or how anything is linked

But I loved Mistborn and just bought Way of Kings, so hopefully it eventually makes sense?

[njasnyah-kholin]

the way harrow really went "i never received love so i will reserve my heart for things i can trust" whereas gideon went "i never received love so i will wrestle it out of everything i can" and the way both of those things ended up being each other

[njasnyah-kholin]

they say there are two kinds of cosmere fans: those here for the theories and those here for the memes. they are wrong. there is a third kind of cosmere fan. i am here for shallan davar and shallan davar only

[njasnyah-kholin]

reading nona: a comedy in three parts

(for context i called gideon pov almost immediately last book and got hubristic)

part 1 (the rising action)

part 2 (the false triumph)

part 3 (the falling action)

[njasnyah-kholin]

I'm tired of the "noble loner" trope in sanderson books. give me mentor characters who've gotten to where they are by making a whole lot of friends. give me heroes who love too much and fall too deep. give me strong leaders whose aloofness detracts from their dignity instead of being a silver lining. give me father figures with living wives

[njasnyah-kholin]

Stormlight books and Ideals

Seems like each of the ten Stormlight books and flashback characters corresponds to one of the three Ideals.

TWoK - Kaladin - Life Before Death WoR - Shallan - Strength Before Weakness Oathbringer - Dalinar - Journey Before Destination RoW - Venli & Eshonai - Strength Before Weakness* KoWT - Szeth - Life Before Death

*Wasn't sure about this one, but to be frank I didn't really connect with V&E's story so the theme could be there.

Makes sense that Szeth's book is life before death, because he's, y'know, a former assassin. Super excited for that!

Then for the back half:

Book 6 - Lift - Life Before Death Sort of makes sense with her backstory and the contents of Edgedancer! And her general determination to not harm/kill others, with Wyndle, etc.

Book 7 - Renarin - Strength Before Weakness Definitely makes sense!

Book 8 - Shalash - Journey Before Destination Highkey really excited for this. I think her story might have to do with forgiving herself and the other Heralds for abandoning their post and Taln for so long.

Book 9 - Talenel - Strength Before Weakness Also makes sense considering, y'know.

Book 10 - Jasnah - Life Before Death Ok I am OBSESSED with what this might mean for Jasnah and her character. IIRC, Sanderson had Jasnah as Book 8 for a while before moving her to the end and pushing Ash and Taln forward. This book is scheduled for uhhh 2033?? so it'll be a while before we get answers? but I'm very excited to watch all these stories play out!

[njasnyah-kholin]

The characterization of Dalinar is pretty smart. I was thinking about why I don’t like reading his chapters in the first two books and I think it’s because he’s hard to forgive. Kaladin and Shallan are young and vulnerable, so it’s easy to take their side when they make mistakes. In contrast, Dalinar is an older man with a lot of power who is very confident in his authority. His flaw is bullheadedness. And it’s really hard to forgive that, because we as readers figure that he should have either been right or been less confident.

Don’t know yet if that makes me like him more.

[njasnyah-kholin]

i relate to both sides of all fictional sibling pairs because i am the golden child eldest son but i am also the neurodivergent high needs younger sibling