YMMV tropes for the entire Stormlight Archive are here.
- Ascended Fanon: The glowing creatures found walking in the storms were dubbed Stormstriders by fans. Come this book, that name becomes official. It's also revealed that they are a type of spren.
- Alternate Character Interpretation: Cultivation is either a Memetic Loser whose plan fails catastrophically or playing such a subtle long game on Taravangian, which actually went All According to Plan, that even large portions of the audience are fooled. She's escaped Roshar and has an 80 year headstart on Taravangian to prepare for war; she's already left contingencies like Lift behind for a stormlight-free Roshar; her "moment of inattention" when Taravangian protected the souls of Kharbranth also happened to create a weakness for the god and a rift between him and his shards; and as Dalinar and Hoid realized, the events as they played out were likely the only way to resolve the contest without destroying Roshar or giving Odium a millennia to prepare for war - and if the contents of the Diagram can be assumed to come directly for her, she's been directing Taravangian to try to become king of Everything (with a capital e) for decades.
- Crack Ship: Due to their shared status as Heralds, some people jokingly ship Kaladin and Chanarach for no other reason then finding Shallan's hypothetical reaction hilarious.
- I Knew It!:
- Many fans guessed that Honor and Odium would merge into a combined shard. Though most were wrong about who would hold the shard as most guessed Dalinar or Kaladin when it was actually Taravangian.
- Considering Dalinar winning the Contest of Champions is narratively uninteresting since that would nullify Odium for most of timeline Word of God stated for the series, they expected him to lose and die. Him escaping the fate of becoming a Fused was unexpected though.
- Likewise related to above, Odium escaping Roshar was also speculated.
- Many fans long speculated as far back as the second book that the Champion for Odium would be either Gavinor or Oroden, thanks to a death rattle of someone agonizing over the decision of being forced to slit a baby's throat for peace, since they are the youngest of the significant characters in the cast that would provide such a Gut Punch.
- Shallan's mother's identity had been figured out by the fans so long ago that it borders on Captain Obvious Reveal. Even the chapter seems to realize it, ending not on the reveal itself but rather the fact she was present at Shallan's wedding.
- Memetic Loser: Cultivation, even with the popularity of certain theories to the opposite: Regardless of whether it turns out to be part of a longer term plan or not, she spends most of the book seeming completely incompetent, with Taravangian doing the opposite of everything she says, the plot to hold Kharbranth hostage backfiring, Dalinar succeeding in ascending to Honor only to renounce all Honor's oaths, freeing Taravangian and giving him a second shard, and how she ultimately flees Roshar without a final word - it all serves to cause fans to send a lot of ridicule her way at first.
- Moral Event Horizon: While he teetered on the edge for quite some time, Taravangian finally fully crosses the line, to a place not even Cultivation will interact with him, when he annihilates Kharbranth with a tidal wave, sacrificing the very nation he betrayed humanity over in the name of his own power, including his friends and family. Even he seems to realize this, but sees it as a means of reinforcing that he cannot stop now. Then, the trope is subverted at the end of the book when it's revealed that Taravangian secretly transferred everyone in Kharbranth to a copy of the city in the Spiritual Realm; Taravangian wanted everyone to believe that he would sacrifice everything when, in reality, there were lines even he wouldn't cross.
- Narm:
- While Kaladin's story focusing on mental health is nothing new, some felt like the ways it was handled in this book - especially referring to himself as a therapist, a word which does not match the language or even general diction on Roshar, was explicitly given to him by Wit, and generally feels very out of place - was more than a little hard to take seriously.
- Wind and Truth's more general modernization of the series' tone can evoke this too. An increase in jarring quips, terminology such as the above, and analogues to contemporary identity politics serve less to furnish the epic fantasy world of Roshar and more to "bait cheers in a Marvel movie theater," according to some reviewers. Depending on whom you ask, this is either overstating the case, a Franchise Original Sin, or a classic example of a titan of industry grown deaf to his editors; but regardless, "Let's kick some Fused ass."
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A common compliant is that while the book was said to be a partial conclusion to the story thus far, with room for more, only some plotlines got a sense of closure for now, while others were clearly intended to be resolved in the back half without much impact on this book, despite set-ups here.
- The most severe is Moash/Vyre, where after the significant build-up he received in the previous books, with it successfully making him one of the most hated villains in the entire Cosmere, his role in Wind and Truth amounts to very little, acting as a mostly offscreen Co-Dragon with El during the Battle for the Shattered Plains. In particular after Rhythm of War did give him climatic moment for his character arc with admitting not regretting killing Teft, and losing his eyesight, he seems to have lost his direction as a character, as the book has his eyesight being restored very quickly with Hemalurgic spikes, which is not explored all that much, then has him showing up merely to retread ground of doing the Moash special by killing a yet another member of Bridge Four and also being the impetus for Sigzil breaking his Nahel bond to Vienta as was shown to have happened by The Sunlit Man, which could have been fulfilled by anybody else. After that he just plain disappears with no indication of where his character's going, or any sort of coda for what he's been up to now. Some now even wish he just died outright in Rhythm of War.
- To a lesser degree, El. Rhythm Of War set him up as a new and incredibly dangerous threat, with El's interlude early in this one seeing Taravangian give him ultimate authority in the Fused, while giving him an interesting Affably Evil personality. Yet despite this he barely appears, or do much. However, unlike Moash, the book all but spells out he's still being built up for a major role in the later books, including actually getting a final conversation that provides some decent closure for his role in this book, while also establishing his direction going forward. It also doesn't help that Abidi the Monarch, a brute of inferior stock to Lezian the Pursuer, gets more to do than either El or Moash.
- Tying into the above, and crossing into They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, Leshwi gets little to do despite her break from Odium. She and Moash, who killed her in a previous body and whom she recruited into Odium's forces, might have gained from a reunion during the battle for the Shattered Plains.
- Not as notable as the previous examples, but with Taravangian stepping up as an active antagonist, and Adolin assigned a fairly weak one in Abidi, it's been argued that Danlan Morakotha, a surviving conspirator of Taravangian's Diagram, might have been a more compelling ex for Adolin to deal with than May Aladar.
- Trapped by Mountain Lions:
- Jasnah's subplot is commonly citied to come off as peripheral to the main plot, boiling down to a debate with Taravangian (with complaints being amplified by the quality of that scene being contested), which causes Thaylenah to join Odium, and Jasnah to have a breakdown that completely unravels her sense of self, neither of which end up impacting the climax, and are left for the back half of the series to explore. This is worsened as the book cuts away from Kaladin's dramatic fight with Nale to show this.
- Most of Venli and Leshwi's subplot consists of a Shattered Plains travelogue, whose lore implications, though significant, only hint at future intrigues. Besides that, they find themselves confined to a supporting cast duller than the one their Heel–Face Turn traded it for. Things pick up when their paths cross with El, but even then their Fake Defection back to Odium leads to the execution of a gambit that probably didn't warrant the equivocation it received in the text.
