Ruin Explorer
Legend
Right jesus christ the rockbuds, I'd managed to push them out of my mind lol.Brandon, I've got it with the rockbuds. Really.
Yeah "I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one" is basically Stormlight all over* - full of repetition of basically everything (something Jordan went in for as well), wallowing (in really shallow and unconvincing emotions too - Sanderson can't write emotional pain convincingly so he just goes for wallowing instead), Cosmere bollocks, incredibly lengthy (and again often covering much of the same ground) lore lectures and so on. With more care and time from Sanderson a good editor every one of the Stormlight books could half the length or less and wildly more impactful (probably closer to 1/3rd the length even). The actual idea/story density of the books is very low, contrast them with say Gene Wolfe's New Sun books, where the idea/story density is incredibly high (of course the prose is incredible too in those).Something something brevity something wit.
But I feel like whilst I'm critiquing them I'm also listing why they're successful - because they're not really stories in the normal sense as much as lore bible for people to learn - albeit with some random decent fight scenes thrown in! The biggest fans of them don't want a dense, thoughtful, meaningful work that's a reflection on the human condition or the nature of existence, and they couldn't give two figs about prose, they want lore lore lore lore (and by lore I include the actual stories of the books), with characters like, loosely underpinning the lore/plot stuff (including all the Cosmere refs).
* = Also my posts so I can't talk lol