To be honest, I really did like the ending. Sazed becoming what effectively amounted to a god actually made sense, considering how he ended up grappling with all his faith issues, and didn't seem "random" at all, especially considering that he really did possess all the qualities one would expect would be necessary for a person to serve as an effective all-powerful entity. I don't see how the deaths at the end were "random" or "unnecessary" - Vin's death in particular made sense, considering the equivalent nature of Preservation and Ruin, and how the only way to destroy one would be to destroy oneself in the process. Elend's death seemed to be the only on that would, strictly, be considered "unnecessary" but then, I don't consider deaths to be "random" unless its truly some random factor that kills them, Ruin choosing to kill Elend almost entirely out of spite wasn't "random" it was actually pretty much in character for him.
Even then, I don't see character deaths as ever "unnecessary" because that heads into meta-plot elements that I try to avoid when it comes to judging a story. As it was, Elend's death made logical sense considering the context, even if that context is "angry spiteful doom god killing him while he lay helpless to stick to his rival." Thus, I don't see how those character deaths were really negative, and I found the ending pretty staisfying.
You have many good points, and there's not really anything in particular I can disagree with. However, personally I prefer more of a... logical progression, I suppose. In other words, a planned path by the character, whether they succeed or fail. Vin becoming Preservation made sense, as she had previously seized the power and was using the mist and whatnot. Sazed, on the other hand, wasn't planning on becoming a god. He just sorta seized it when he was in the right place at the right time.
Except Sazed did have a logical progression to the point of becoming Harmony. It was shown rather clearly when he assembled the power of both Preservation and Ruin that everything up to that point in the final book that he was ideally suited toward that power. While he was in the right place at the right time, I don't see that as a bad thing.
Preservation planned for Sazed to become a god. Elend let himself die because the duralumin-atium combo let him see that if he died, Vin would kill Ruin. Vin died to kill Ruin. None of it was random or unfulfilling; it was just unexpected.
The ending was actually what I liked best, seeing Sazed\'s religious knowledge pay off, and the sentiment that, while each individual religion may have its flaws and none of them may be technically correct, they are all to some extent true (which I feel would make Real Life a much better place if more people shared it). That, and how it\'s arguably one of the best-executed Chekovian Guns in recent memory.
I agree that the series as a whole was a tad underwhelming, I in particular found the author\'s voice to be rather bland and generic, and felt he worked too hard at pulling the reader in through being deliberately mysterious (points I elaborate on in my own review). But on the whole, I\'m glad I read it, and I\'ll probably buy the books at some point (a friend loaned them to me) to read them again.
Leave a Comment:
Meh
Warning, contains spoilers.
The series was interesting, but in short, extremely underwhelming. There was so much set up for epic end of the world scenarios, but they didn't go anywhere. With a name like THE DEEPNESS, glass windows depicting a eldritch horror with writing black tentacles, and a diary that goes on at length talking about how armies are useless and it's destroying the world, it turns out to be... a little bit of mist. The Deepness comes back, in that it gets a little misty during the day. There was a lot of setup, and it went nowhere. It turns out that the mist is actually caused by the good deity too.
Normally I don't mind a good amount of introspection, but there's so many times the characters have lengthy internal monologues during action scenes or when they're jumping off walls. It really stops up the action unnecessarily. It got worse towards the last book.
And the most disappointing part was the ending. The trilogy was perfectly set up to have a good ending, but it basically seems like so many important characters made it to the last chapter just to die, while a minor recurring servant character randomly ascends to godhood to save the world. The deaths of Vin and Elend, the former ascending to godhood then dying, and the latter, who burns a stockpile of Atium and nearly fights off an army, then dying, didn't seem to fit. Don't get me wrong, I've read all the ASOIAF series and I'm plenty used to characters dying, it just seemed so random and unnecessary. As far as plot goes, this is the most unfulfilling ending I have ever read.