Brandon Sanderson/Cosmere Thread!

Do you like cool magic systems?

Do you like worldbuilding?

Do you like fantasy settings that don't look like Generic Fake Medieval Europe?

Do you like plots that surprise you and then you reread it and go "OH GOD DAMMIT" a lot at all the foreshadowing you missed?

Then join me in Cosmere Hell, where we talk about Brandon Sanderson's awesome interconnected fantasy multiverse centered on worlds where magic is derived from fragments of a broken god.

Topics of conversation include:

Spoiler: Overview/sales pitch/*sperg*

• Mistborn, a setting where the evil overlord won and ash constantly rains from the sky.
  • Has three complex overlapping magic systems involving metal, body-horror monsters, and a feral alley cat of a protagonist desperately in need of a hug, a warm blanket, and a cup of hot chocolate.
  • An escalating series of "it can't POSSIBLY get worse than this, right?" moments, with bonus snark, politics, awesome metal magic shenanigans, and a guy who keeps trying to sell people on reconstructed religions a thousand years old.
• More Mistborn, set 300 years later.
  • It's Industrial Revolution tech with a bit of a Western flavor, and turns out metal magic is even more exciting with trains and guns.
  • Protags are Flying Wild West Sheriff Who Doesn't Know How To Politics And Has PTSD, Hypercompetent Nobby Nobbs Who Also Has PTSD, and a lady with allegedly-useless powers which she keeps saving the day with who wants to be a cop instead of a lawyer.
  • Also contains Steris, who seems boring as hell in the first book but turns out she's the best and also canonically autistic.
• The most important feature of the Mistborn magic system is that wearing an aluminum foil hat blocks mind control, and I refuse to believe the author's insistence that he did this on accident.
• Elantris, a setting where the entire society collapsed overnight when the magic failed, and now all the previously shiny magic people are not-quite-zombies locked in their previously shiny magic city.
  • Main characters are a prince who woke up one morning as a not-quite-zombie and got thrown in, the princess who got sent to marry him and was very irate to get there and be told she was now legally a widow and threw herself into Doing Politics with a vengeance, and a warrior-priest of a violently expansionist religion who's been ordered to convert the entire country in three months or his people will invade and kill everyone.
  • Also there are magic symbols and I have a necklace with one.
• Warbreaker, a.k.a. "let's subvert as many tropes and expectations as possible in one story."
  • You know how in generic fantasy they talk about how there are distant tropical trade cities with exotic spices and dyes but god forbid we leave Fake Medieval Europe and see them? This book is actually set there.
  • There's an obedient princess betrothed to marry the scary evil God-King and her rebellious younger sister who runs around looking for adventure, except at the last minute their dad decides to send the younger sister to marry the God-King instead and the obedient princess hares off to rescue her from this fate.
  • You will want to strangle the older princess and I love her character arc with all my soul.
  • There is also a god who doesn't believe in his own religion and snarks constantly and magnificently, a sexy scantily-clad love goddess who's one of the smartest and most driven members of the pantheon and is only the goddess of love because she petitioned for the title because she felt it was a more powerful position than "goddess of honesty," and an incredibly powerful cursed magic sword with the personality of an excitable puppy who loves murder.
  • If you collect bits of souls and put them in a shirt and tell it what to do it'll strangle people for you.
  • Available for free legally on the internet!
• White Sand, a graphic novel which only the first part of is out, but it's set on a tidally-locked planet with a light side and a dark side and people have sand-manipulation powers that dehydrate you as you use them.
  
• The Stormlight Archive, my personal favorite. Two books of a planned 10 are out.
  • Set on a planet where gigantic mega-hurricanes sweep through every week or so and the entire ecosystem looks like stuff from the bottom of the ocean because it's all adapted around surviving them.
  • The standard beast of burden is a giant crab, gardens look like coral reefs, most food crops grow in hard-shelled polyps or buds that only open just after a storm, and people are weirded out visiting a place with soil and grass that doesn't retreat into a hole when you get near.
  • Giant magic lightsaber-inspired swords, which he came up with by going, "Okay, you know all those giant, ornate, hideously impractical swords you see in fantasy art? I'm going to think up a way to make them actually make sense."
  • Also magic power armor to go with the magic swords.
  • There's a guy whose entire job is to insult people. This is the best job.
    
  • Main characters are many and include:
    • Kaladin (was supposed to be a doctor but got sold into slavery instead, has a mental illness triple combo, glows sometimes, and wants to ~protect everyone~)
    • Sylphrena (the wind spirit who follows Kaladin around)
    • Shallan Davar (girl with social anxiety + science nerd + snark at inappropriate times = #relatable, with bonus dissociation and recently-authorially-confirmed bisexuality; steals boots)
    • Dalinar Kholin (warlord retired to a life of ~HONOR~ and dadness having to deal with a lot of schemey political people he wants to punch, who might be seeing prophetic visions from God)
    • Adolin Kholin (Dalinar's son who wishes his dad would let him punch the schemey people)
    • Szeth son-son-Vallano (the saddest assassin ever to murder an outrageous number of people just because he was told to, who needs to retire to a nice quiet house in the countryside with a puppy)
    • Jasnah Kholin (badass magic Renaissance-woman atheist heretic historian scholar-princess, and the source of a certain amount of wife goals/life goals confusion in Shallan)
    • Navani Kholin (Jasnah's mom, magitech engineer dowager queen and Hot Grandma (TM))
      
    • Eshonai (I'm not sure how to summarize her without spoilers but Eshonaaai)
    • Lift (who is technically not a main character at this point but her interlude is such a work of goddamn art that I have to include her).
  • 
• Assorted short stories and novellas, including one where birds tell you you're going to die, one where the lady who runs the inn in the middle of nowhere is a stone-cold badass, one where an art forger is ordered to make a new soul for a dead emperor, and one where a Mistborn character who died in the first book punches God in the face.

Anybody read them? Anybody want to read them? Please talk to me about it

 

Aw yiss, this is my jam!

Also HOLY SHIT HOW DID I MISS THAT SHALLAN IS BI OMG #HIGHLYRELATABLE

 

YELLS A LOT

 

He only recently confirmed it, when someone asked if she was because of how much she talks about how pretty Jasnah is. He said something to the effect that he wasn't thinking of that when he was writing it, but it was probably in the back of his mind.

Shallan is so relatable. And provides me with an endless well of snarky comments re: certain points of anti discourse.

Spoiler: Big ol' spoilers

By reductio ad absurdem of "if you like a character who did [bad thing] you might as well have done those bad things," I murdered both my parents! :::DDD

 

!!!That sounds awesome consider me sold.

Do you have reading order recs? I want to read about Shallan

 

Shallan is in the Stormlight Archives books! As far as I'm concerned, you don't need to read the other books first, but I could be wrong!

 

I'd generally recommendation the Mistborn Original Trilogy -> Elantris -> Warbreaker -> Stormlight, but you can grab any of Mistborn/Elantris/Warbreaker/The Way of Kings and have a good story. The biggest issue is that there are a lot of cameos of characters from other series in the Stormlight books, including a couple of really big Warbreaker cameos in the second one. But The Way of Kings -> Warbreaker -> Words of Radiance will get you the context for that in time and still get you to Shallan immediately.

 

i havent been able to concentrate on books lately but i really want to start another one of his books, ive read the original mistborn and a few of the 300 years later! i tried warbreaker online but i need pages for books like these tbh

 

(Incidentally, you can read that Lift interlude I linked with minimal spoilers, since it's set in a country on the other side of the continent from where most of the protags are. There's some stuff in it that will probably be a bit incomprehensible, but Lift is fantastic enough that I think it can carry it.)

 

I've read all the novels, Emperor's Soul and Mistborn: Secret History. Arcanum Unbounded comes out next month, I think that should cover all the shorter stories I haven't yet read.

Shallan is incredibly relatable, but Kaladin is probably the character I'd die defending.

Also, Steris. I adore her.

 

Yeah. And I get annoyed by people complaining about how "his character development was reversed in Words of Radiance!" or "he's OOC in WoR!" because no, it wasn't and he's not, it's just that his depression didn't magically go away just because his life is no longer an unending hellscape.

 

Exactly! I really appreciate that he continues to struggle with depression after the first book. It's... I don't know, representation feelings, probably. Yes, you can do incredibly badass things while still having the brain weasels.

 

It also helps that the shrieking brain weasels are 100% in character with what they sound like in real life. I don't know if Sanderson has had depression or just done a lot of research, but he nailed it in Kaladin's internal monologue. In particular, I've almost never seen anyone else quite show that feeling where you spent all this time trying to crawl out of the depression pit but you know you're back on the edge again now and could fall back in at any time and you'll have to do it over again. Like. I've been there. (Brandon confirmed Kaladin has SAD, too, which I suspected. Like, jeez, no wonder he had that spectacular meltdown in WoR- on top of everything that happened he got locked in a windowless stone room for weeks.)

 

I would also like to state, for the record, that Shallan's family is exactly my favorite flavor of awful. Especially when you get to the end of WoR and realize

Spoiler

just how much of her father's behavior was informed by both a genuine desire to protect her and the fact that he was terrified of her. Rightfully.

 

Oh my gosh yes.

 

Spoiler

Even if he never opened the safe, at some point after the initial event he had to have realized "it's a Shardblade, if it's staying it's only because she's letting it." Making it all the more ironic that in the end, that wasn't even what she used, and he never saw it coming.

 

If I remember correctly, he doesn't have depression himself, but his wife has had it. I think it was mentioned in a Writing Excuses episode a few years ago.

 

ALSO, in "characters who are important to me" news: Vivenna, Unlikeable Female Character of my heart. I have so much love for this angry, self-righteous, bigoted jackass who can't see past her own privilege and pain. What a good character arc. :::')))

 

I've only read the Mistborn books (and ofc the Wax and Wayne ones after them) but they're soooo good

Spoiler: Wax and Wayne things

also OMG I'VE BEEN WANTING TO ASK IF STERIS READ AS NEURODIVERGENT OR AUTISTIC OR WHATEVER TO ANYONE ELSE SINCE I'M NEUROTYPICAL AND A TERRIBLE JUDGE OF THIS SHIT. and it's canon? BLESS.

I love love love that Brandon turned our (or at least my) expectations from Steris's introduction as 'ugh she's an anti-fun harpy who will just make our adventurous hero miserable so obv he's gonna end up with the much Spunkier Lady Marasi (who I aint shitting on, by the way, she's a great character in her own right)' to 'no actually she's amazing and helpful despite not having fancy metal powers like the rest of the cast and she and Wax end up together enthusiastically and it doesn't feel forced one bit.' -heart eyes- and this is coming from someone who is typically v. not into romance. also Wayne is also the best and I love him at all times especially when he does his method acting stuff.

 

How did I literally not notice the wax/wain thing. I am in shock, it was right in front of me the whole time.