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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9851126" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, it's been a few years, and these are giant ass books written in a rather forgettable style, it's not like Gene Wolfe who is basically writing in flame direct into the memory, but I would say whilst the first book had relatively little of this, only an excessive amount of repetitious scenes ("and then basically the same thing happened again but slightly differently so I described it for another four pages") or scenes which went on 3x too long (several "nobles arguing"-type scenes were like this), all of which should be fixable by other writers being involved and the TV format making repetitious stuff obviously expensive and stupid, so I'm not too worried about that. But the next two books had increasing amounts of just pointless fight scenes which weren't even exciting, wildly overly long scenes which were technically delivering information but were like, inappropriately long, sudden lengthy cuts to other characters where then not much happened apart from lore teasing of the "Oh yes let's talk obliquely about the thing that happened instead of being direct because mystery is inherently cool"-type (something I used to respect Sanderson for NOT doing, by the way!), and so on. But there are two kinda-memorable offenders, both I think from book 3. One was like, this city being taken over by cultists, but it was just so extended and done in such a crap way that it was deeply uncompelling, and also featured a Type-A Mysterious Wanker at absolute nuclear maximum mysterious wank mode (I'm told he's maybe from another, totally unrelated series of books set in the cosmere), just for bonus-time wasting. The other, which I think featured some of the same characters was a lengthy mysterious/magic journey, which once more involved external characters, this time so obviously from an unrelated book series that I looked it up whilst reading, and I will say, unfortunately, the female character was actually way cooler-seeming than anyone in Stormlight, and I thought "Wow am I wasting my time reading Stormlight, I should go read the cross-marketed book she's from, that sounds a lot more interesting", but she didn't get to do anything, and nothing much happened, and this was an awful lot of pages, and we learned absolutely nothing that seemed to mean anything.Now, maybe, in some future book, this will matter, but like this kind of extended lore-wank, lore-teasing for esoteric lore doesn't work for TV shows - you have to keep it shorter and more direct, preferably less obvious in what it is, and most importantly, more human and relevant-feeling. It only kinda-works in the novels because Sanderson has an existing fanbase, some of whom aren't even reading the novels primarily for the characters or story, rather primarily to figure out cosmere lore mysteries, which is like, very serious nerd alert behaviour, and I say that as a nerd, who the nerd alert detector would definitely go off on with a high reading, but the kind of reading you'd get off someone primarily trying to work out cosmere lore stuff would like, break the meter. And that's not the kind of thing you can do in a TV show. In a TV show, you want like R + L = J level stuff, emotional stuff about relationships and people, not esoteric stuff about how the universe works.</blockquote>

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