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I'm not sure it's specifically Tolkien so much as general high fantasy, upon which Tolkien is by far the greatest influence. The information we got on the Hero reminded me more of Rand al'Thor than Frodo, for instance.
That, I think, was just a subtle Take That! at Rand. Sanderson read WOT even before he started writing it, or so I heard.
Besides, Vin's comments on how someone so whiny could have become the Lord Ruler are GOLD!
But the fact that the hero was prophesied is more general, and not very Frodo. High Fantasy has plenty of prophesies that some farmboy is going to take down the neighborhood not!Sauron, but Frodo didn't carry the ring because there was some ancient scroll saying "The hairy-footed one shall bear the Dark Lord's power to destruction," but because his uncle found it in a cave and passed it on to him.
It's like how in Steelheart, the eponymous super's crew isn't the Justice League. Steelheart himself looks a lot like Supes, but he also looks a lot like, say, Metroman, and there's nobody with him who looks very much like Batman or Wonder Woman. The reason the Lord Ruler has a Sauron vibe isn't so much that he's based on Sauron, but that he's based on a whole class of guys, at least the earliest of whom were directly based on Sauron.
I doubt it's a Take That! at Rand. Brandon is a HUGE WOT fan. Lucky him.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.Regarding Sanderson's writing of women - I think he does fairly well (certainly better than Robert Jordan), but where he seems to fall down is quantity. I can only think of 6 or so female characters, major and minor, in the whole of the Mistborn trilogy. Shallan and Jasnah are great, but the other three storylines of Way of Kings are pretty full of dudes.
Be not afraid...Sorry for the delay in responding.
Sanderson seems to have this unusual take on Real Women Don't Wear Dresses in which his female characters feel like that is being preached to them, but would all (at least the good ones) rather be "traditional" women.
See Marsai in Alloy of Law. And similarly, you see with Vin that she basically has a choice between being a crazy Action Girl (linked with Zane) who doesn't pursue feminine styling and being a sane Action Girlfriend to Elend and embracing femininity. I do think it is kind of clever though how Zane is sort of a parody of a Troubled, but Cute villain who can be redeemed by love.
And it seems like with Vivenia and Siri that although Vivenia is set up as a Proper Lady and Siri as a Rebellious Princess, Siri pretty clearly indicates the kind of female character of which Sanderson approves, and Vivenia the opposite.
edited 12th Feb '14 10:17:00 AM by Hodor
Edit, edit, edit, edit the wikiI think I see what you mean. While Siri went the queenly route and Vivenna became an Action Girl, I got the feeling (both from the text itself and from the annotations) that Siri was, overall, the better person, and better liked by Brandon. I do think the propensity for anti-Real Women Never Wear Dresses only extends to main characters, at least.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.Also, although the twist in Warbreaker is quite clever, it does put me off how the annotations make clear that we are to get the idea that Vivenia's screw up was really her fault and she therefore "deserved" to be punished (particularly that while Sanderson has her stopped short of becoming a prostitute, it is just short of that- incidentally, as he notes, her fall borrows rather heavily from Les Miserables).
I'm kind of reminded of A Song of Ice and Fire and Sansa's mistakes that make her hated by a lot of fans- AFAIK Martin was surprised by the hatred and didn't intend for her to be seen as that culpable- which makes it strange how Sanderson is the opposite with Vivenia (granted, Sansa was a lot younger).
Edit, edit, edit, edit the wikiAlso that. Overall, I feel Vivenna's character was treated somewhat... unfairly by Brandon, if that makes sense. I mean, excuse me if I sympathize more with the sister who spent her life preparing to sacrifice for her country and gets nothing but shit for it than the one who sits in a palace falling in love and having her every whim waited on.
edited 12th Feb '14 2:40:10 PM by Ninety
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.Of Sanderson's works I've thus far only read Mistborn, and I'm not quite finished with that, but my own reading of Vin's decision wasn't a choosing of "traditionally feminine" over "action girl", but rather the realisation that she could have both: she could be the powerful Mistborn killing rooms full of enemies by night, and also walk into a ballroom, wearing dress and makeup, Elend by her side. That spending some time being traditionally feminine (wearing dresses, enjoying balls, etc.) doesn't preclude being otherwise at other times.
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Well, I don't mean to oversimplify it, and Vin definitely has her issues, but the link between sanity and embracing femininity is striking. Also, while of course there's nothing wrong with female characters/women in real life liking being feminine, you're not going to find many sympathetic female characters in Sanderson who don't like being traditionally feminine.
edited 12th Feb '14 3:11:05 PM by Hodor
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In Vin's case, at least, I don't think that it's embracing femininity itself that leads to sanity, but that she embrace all parts of who she is; I think that Elend had a similar arc about embracing both scholar and ruler in himself. If Vin's closer to falling off the deep end as a result of her not embracing those elements I think that it's more to do with her being generally somewhat more intense than Elend than that one of those elements is "femininity".
That said, I'll grant that the pattern that you describe does seem like a potential issue. In Vin's specific case, however, I don't think that femininity being a part of her character arc is problematic
edited 12th Feb '14 3:34:32 PM by ArsThaumaturgis
My Games and Asset PacksCome to think about it, do any female characters other than Vin explicitly struggle with traditional femininity? With Sarene and Siri, it's more of a thing of living up to their peoples' and families' expectations of them as princesses. They are both plenty feminine in their own right.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.Well, I was thinking also about Marsai in The Alloy of Law. Siri's kind of an odd case because she's initially presented as not that "traditionally feminine"/uninterested in being a Proper Lady, but she later embraces that.
Edit, edit, edit, edit the wikiThinking of Alloy of Law—if I may make a minor tangent—I currently intend that to be my next Sanderson book; is it any good? (I've been rather impressed by Mistborn thus far.)
My Games and Asset PacksIt's AWESOME. It's like the lovechild of Spiderman and a cowboy movie directed by John Woo and Michael Bay... but in a GOOD way. And okay, maybe not Bay, there's only one major explosion of note.
On a side note, anyone have the released Glimpss of Radiance? I signed up for it, but aren't getting the glimpses emails, even though status emails are coming in every time i reset my password to sign up.
edited 12th Feb '14 4:06:47 PM by SCMof2814
But like I said, in Siri's case it's more of a side effect of maturing and fulfilling her duties. Not explicitly a matter of femininity.
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Very much so. It's not epic like the main Mistborn books, but that's not a bad thing. It's got good characters, kickass action sequences, and if you're a minmaxing fan like me, the Twinborn power combinations are the best thing ever.
You mean the preview chapters? They're up at Tor. Look for the links in the Stormlight Archive thread.
The "Glimpses of Radiance" are separate from the preview chapters. After all the chapters were released, Tor had a thing where you could sign up to have little snippets from Words of Radiance e-mailed to you each day.
It started yesterday, and while I didn't sign up out of laziness, through the 17th Shard forums I was able to find what the first two are:
edited 12th Feb '14 4:18:41 PM by beorc
Welcome to th:|

I think her Character Development, while good, leads her to an odd place at the end. I get that she was distancing herself from her previous life, but the thing where she up and left with Vasher, not bothering to even let her family know she was alive ("They'll get over it", what the hell?) struck me as either inconsistent with her previous characterization, or showing that her development led her in the wrong direction. I do hope Brandon writes a sequel and that is explored. Though maybe it's because I'm too much of a family man myself, I couldn't fathom doing that sort of thing.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.I'm curious, though. What bothers you about Brandon's way of writing women?