Comment by mnarayan01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnarayan01 | Hacker News Reader

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If you're cringing at it, I think you must be getting more from it than I am. The only thing I get out of it is the surface level pun, so I feel the same way as with pretty much all of his other puns: slightly baffled as to why they're included. With this one (though not most others), it feels like there might be a second level that English/Literature majors might get around etymology, but if so, I miss it entirely.

Sanderson also clearly gets many orders of magnitude more out of "word shape" than I do, so he might just really like puns. I've also never translated that quote to any of the various forms of sigals Sanderson defines in the series; if you do so, it might well be breathtakingly beautiful.

> But just like the Marvel movies probably won't be regarded as the masterpieces of our times, despite their popularity, Sanderson's books are not, to me, worthy of such praise either.

Forty years later Star Wars hasn't exactly fallen out of favor. Ignore the stilted dialog...it has a "robot" which is really obviously just a trashcan. Mark Twain's books contain a lot of colloquial dialog which is very much not "soaring prose", and they remain popular a century later. Which is not to say that I think Sanderson will be a hot read in eighty years, but I doubt Jordan or Martin will either. While the average library system presumably has a copy of The Dispossessed at one of its branches, the average branch has zero copies IME.

All of which is totally tangential, I just couldn't let it go (and I tried).

I also tried to let go, but couldn't ;)

Being occupied with word shapes and word plays is fine! You and several other replies to that post focused on the word-play part of it, as if that was what I was reacting to, and I understand that, since I didn't really give you a lot more to work with. What I tried to bring attention to, however, was the way in which sentences like that break immersion. To me, a sentence like this takes me away from the fantasy world that I have so far been presented, and into some kind of (sorry I keep using this example, but it's really how I feel about it) Marvel movie where our heroes are engaged in friendly banter, or to some tumblr fanfic. That could of course be a problem with what I am expecting going into his universe, but I believe it is more of a problem of Sanderson not taking the time to properly refine his ideas before committing them to paper. Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing. That doesn't excuse it for me, though.

I am not looking for soaring prose - Mark Twain is great partly because of his ability to maintain the illusion of a rustic backwater society and the people within it. Star Wars is similar: When they stay within the expectations set up by their own universe, it's great! Trashcan robots are part of this! But as we have seen, whenever the dialogue takes you out of the universe and reminds you this is an illusion, fans do react ("I don't like sand...").

I also recognize that this has evolved way beyond where it started and this interaction on HN has influenced my thoughts about this. So I won't pretend what I'm saying now is 'what I had in mind from the beginning'.

You mean "breaking the fourth wall" a la Deadpool? He at least skirts that line in some places (e.g. Wit/Hoid/etc.). I'd probably class those parts similarly to Shallan's puns: Moderately annoying but tolerable due to rarity.

Or maybe some super-set incorporating both the flat word play and "breaking the fourth wall" all with other willful discarding of immersion? I can't think of anyone else who goes as deep and long into fantasy as he does, and then occasionally casually discards immersion simply to wink at the reader or make a (weak) joke or whatever.

I'm not a fan of this either, though it doesn't happen often so I find it tolerable. That very rarity, though, particularly in combination with the breaks in immersion always seeming gratuitous, does make it feel like an unforced error on his part. If someone's not sold on the 1000 other pages, adding less than five pages of immersion discarding humor seems unlikely to sufficiently sweeten the deal.

> Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing.

I assume his prolificacy hurts the quality of his prose (though that's very much a pass/fail sort of thing for me; he passes, so his prolificacy is a pure win for me), but what I'm talking about (and maybe you are as well) seems more like what I'll describe as "Get an [expletive] editor." In some ways he seems particularly egregious, as I don't know if even one percent of his content feels like it needs to be excised, and what does feels like it could go for free.

Edit: Reading your sibling comment, I'm probably off-base with the above.

> I think that Shallan, as presented, is written lazily and with a way of thinking and talking that has been forcibly transplanted from our (as in, the World, 2018) current culture and into a fantasy universe, which is jarring to me.

The dialog generally "feels" reasonable to me, but that's obviously something where tastes strongly vary. One note. Looking at:

> No, drat. It would have to be Misjasnahistic, and that doesn't work nearly as well, does it?

I, at least, don't know anyone who talks like that. Which is not to say it's good, just that describing it as "hip" does seem quite curmudgeonly :)

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