Charlotte Kersten

The Stormlight Archives has probably been the number one thing that people have consistently recommended for me to read for this Trauma in SFF project, but I’ve hesitated for a while because epic fantasy is not my typically preferred subgenre and the books are just! So! Long! I’ve nevertheless been fascinated by the passionate Sanderson discussions that appear periodically, and the polarizing release of Wind and Truth at the end of 2024 is what finally made me curious enough to start the first book, both for the sake of exploring one of the hottest series that fits my reading project and also because I really, really want to finally have my own opinion about Sanderson as one of the most popular fantasy authors of our time. Having now finished The Way of Kings, I can confidently state that in my opinion it is……….just fine!

I would say that almost every element of my reading experience was enjoyable and engaging in the moment, but nothing particularly astounded me. If I had expected any particular element to be extraordinary, it definitely was the world-building, which is what I see Sanderson most consistently praised for. In my various times lurking in Stormlight discourse threads, I’ve also seen his world-building described as wide but not deep, and I’m apt to agree with that now. We learn about the environment and animal life; there is certainly the sense of a big world, different cultures, and ancient history that we’re starting to piece together, all of which are interesting enough to keep me reading but not truly ground-breaking or thought-provoking to me in any way.

The example that illustrates this best for me is the construction of gender in Vorin culture, particularly the fact that their gender roles characterize womanhood as scholarly in the “feminine arts” and women as the only gender that is allowed to be literate. I was really interested by this at first, because a binary with women in charge of reading and writing could go a lot of fascinating directions to me, but it mostly just seemed to create the scholarly jobs of characters like Jasnah and Shallan and then got mentioned occasionally when male characters needed something read or written. The huge impact that this binary could have on conceptualizations of “womanhood” vs “manhood” and on distributions of power and knowledge don’t really seem to be explored (at least in this book!). Most prominently to me, there is a scene where Shallan asks a man at a bookstore for philosophical texts and he patronisingly tries to sell her frivolous romance novels instead because they are more suited to her. This gives us a moment where Shallan uses her wordplay to mock him and prove that he shouldn’t make assumptions about what she wants to read, but does it really make sense for a man to belittle a noble young woman and assume that she should only be reading silly romances in a world where women are accepted as scholars of various subjects and men aren’t even literate at all?

When I was reasoning this out in my head I thought, well, I guess it does make some sense because the world is mostly a patriarchy with roles and expectations that match the real world, and in response to that I thought, well, I don’t really think that should be the case when one of the differences that Sanderson established is as major as woman being the only literate gender! I think more things would be different as a result of that and it’s disappointing that they’re not!

As a whole, genteel ladies like Shallan are to be treated with delicacy and protected; noble women are to be courted by noble men; war camp “whores” are regularly abused (in order to facilitate scenes of male character development of course!!); rape potions are available for men to purchase from seedy healers; and “careless women” who get assaulted in dark alleys ought to have been more careful. This is all fairly expected and uninteresting to me. I read somewhere that men are mostly still in positions of power in Vorin societies because men are exclusively allowed to be the money-holders and warriors, the latter of which is valued most prominently because of its necessity in reclaiming the Tranquiline Halls. Which is fine as it goes, but it all feeds back to my general opinion that these somewhat interesting pieces of world-building don’t actually have the deep impact on the world that would make them truly interesting, so they end up feeling somewhat arbitrary as a result. As a whole, the world then does not feel nearly as interesting or lived-in to me as “smaller” worlds where the world-building is explored more thoroughly.

One of the book’s biggest themes is related to power and oppression, particularly the oppression of the darkeyes by the lighteyes. It’s clearly well-intentioned on Sanderson’s part but nevertheless feels somewhat clumsy and shallow as a whole, and I don’t know that he has the specific insight or finesse to pull off an oppression metaphor like this. This feels especially true to me when another major part of the story involves the mass slaughter of “black-skinned” subhuman savages who used to be mythical monsters but, after being discovered by a king who explored their primitive society, have now been tamed and enslaved. I can tell that all of the elements of violence, oppression and bias in this society are depicted as being Actually Bad and that the parts that are accepted/unexamined by many characters right now will be examined and denounced later, but I don’t think that makes it a particularly effective or sensitive examination of these topics.

The other thing that really stood out to me is the prose, which has been another long-debated piece of Sanderson’s skill. Famously, his writing is often described as “windowpane prose” – this comes from an essay by George Orwell that states that “good prose is like a windowpane.” In writing communities this has come to be understood as writing that allows the reader to get a clear understanding of what is happening and does not get in the way or obscure the reading experience. I absolutely think there’s room for all kinds of prose and different stories are served better by different types of writing, but in this specific case, I actually found the fairly unimaginative and basic prose to be very distracting, and that is what tended to take me out of the story more than anything else. I honestly believe that if The Way of Kings had been written in something other than the most boring, expository style possible, it would have been a much more engaging and emotional reading experience for me. What’s particularly interesting to me is that I do think Sanderson knows this to some degree because his prose does change and attempt to become more stylized and emotional sometimes, especially in the Kaladin moments that are meant to be big emotional/plot beats, such as when he’s chained up to the building in the storm, when he’s zooming around the world seeing all the cities, when he’s picking up a spear in the canyon for the first time, and when he’s doing his giant jump into battle at the book’s climax.

On the topic of Kaladin, I now understand that his storyline is one of the main things that had so many people recommending this series to me for my reading project. And as with almost everything else…it’s fine, and he’s fine as a character? I think that what comes across as kind of meh to me could be a lot more impactful for readers likelier to identify with Kaladin as a character, especially young men who are struggling to articulate depression or trauma or suicidality for the first time, and I think that’s a great thing. It’s clear that his story is at the heart of Stormlight’s story as a whole and I did find parts of it genuinely moving…but I just can’t help but think about characters of a similar type (the young man with an epic fantasy destiny who gets tortured by the plot) who have felt a lot more dimensional to me, such as Robin Hobb’s Fitz. I’ve also heard mixed things about his character develops, especially in terms of his mental health struggles (including the fact that he becomes a literal therapist in Wind and Truth?????? what lol???) so I do think I’d have to read on to keep forming my opinion of that.

The other thing that people constantly debate about Sanderson is whether or not his books are funny and, if they’re unfunny, whether they’re unfunny as a means of deliberate characterization. I’m Team Unfunny, and I get that it could be intentional, but I find that intentionality somewhat questionable as almost all of the characters who are known as (possibly) funny/witty characters make the same kind of jokes that are oddly reliant on wordplay/puns and are exclusively referred to as funny/witty in multiple other characters’ perspectives and/or reactions. Even in the conversation that Shallan has with Jasnah about her constant verbal jabbing, the point that Jasnah criticizes is that she’s jumping immediately to being sassy and witty when other approaches might be more diplomatic; the only character who seems to take real issue with Wit is the character who can’t stand being insulted him. Idk, I just think that if basically every character makes the same kinds of jokes and basically all the other characters respond to them in the same play and the author is often criticized for being somewhat basic and clumsy in his writing in other ways…well…there you go.

It would seem that the books only get longer and more regularly criticized for their repetitiveness and clunkiness from here on out, so I will have a hard time deciding whether it’s worth continuing along with something I didn’t find super amazing in the first place. I am genuinely curious about some of the character development and authorial choices I’ve heard snippets about and I found the first book to be a very smooth reading experience overall, but I’m just not sure how true that will continue to be and whether the rest I’m curious about will be worth it.