Vin burned pewter, hocking a loogie.
It may have been a blog entry, but for someone who makes a living with his writing, I’d have expected better than a non-apology tacked on to an already offensive and unnecessary bit of soapboxing. His work is marketed to adolescents: it’s likely a few of them are/were already struggling with issues of identity and acceptance before he aired his grievances. I’m not saying he’s a major celebrity, but he could have an influence on his readership.
I fully concede that it’s mostly my own problem. If there’s one rule of life I try to adhere to, it’s “Don’t be an ass.” As with similar offenders (e.g. Orson Scott Card) I have trouble separating the artist from his work. Result: I can’t enjoy the work.
I don’t know about this. I’m having trouble coming up with the appropriate analogy here, but if ASoIaF is an 8 on the 1-10 “darkness and brutality” scale, and Malazan is maybe a 9.5, Joe Abercrombie is somewhere around a 17.
Well I have to say I see a strong distinction between Sanderson and Card. Sanderson seems to be almost apologetic for his agreement with the church. (I say “almost.” I mean, he endorses it, but you can kind of see he’s a little embarrassed by it, not really all that wholehearted about it, and it seems to almost be a matter of duty for him to agree with it.) Card on the other hand, is a raging asshole.
We boil at different degrees.
IOW: You make a fair point, but I can’t stomach this kind of poison. To each his own.
You have to wait for book six ( actually nine if you count the intervening Liveship Traders series ) to get any kind of closure on that one ;). There were three interlocking trilogies, the first and third of which are about the same protagonist. Personally I rate them as solid, but I don’t have a lot of interest in re-reading them.
Ah, but the last time it happened, with the Lord Ruler, the world was very nearly destroyed. Even with his last minute patches, the world is slowly ending. And the ‘ancient knowledge’ has been suppressed since then, so anyone who suddenly “turned into a god” would very likely muck things up completely.
I liked the way that the story made it obvious that if either of the two main heroes became a god, there would be too many things that they didn’t know to allow them to help the world. For them, attaining godhood would be, ultimately, a failure.
For what it’s worth, I guessed the ending of the first book - and I guessed wrong.
About two thirds of the way through I thought the ending would be[spoiler]Kelsior would turn out to be the Lord Ruler.
I figured there was a mystery surrounding the Lord Ruler and a mystery surrounding how Kelsier had survived the pit. Plus we saw from the Lord Ruler’s diary that he had once been a normal moral person. And Kelsier was leading the rebellion but he was obsessed with killing the Lord Ruler and claimed to have secret knowledge that nobody else had about how to do it.
I was figuring the end of the book would be the reveal that the Lord Ruler’s mind was breaking down and he wanted to die. But he couldn’t just kill himself outright. The original Kelsier had been killed in the pit and the Lord Ruler had adopted his persona in order to set up his own death. I thought Vin would end up doing the actual killing after she realized who Kelsier was and what he wanted her to do.[/spoiler]That last part was the only thing I even came close on.