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Title: The Hero of Ages
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Epic fantasy (#3 in trilogy)
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: Same problem as the last one--synopsis of book 3 spoils books 1 and 2. Having been tricked into unleashing an ancient evil bent on destroying the world, Vin and her companions must find a way to set things right. But how does one fight something that hears everything you say, can change every word you write, and talks inside your head?
Thoughts: Sanderson wraps this whole thing up in a very satisfactory manner. I have some issues with his character development and with his tendency to leave a few too many threads hanging in a world he doesn't seem to be interested in revisiting, but the man is a master world-builder and plot mechanic. He did in fact answer several of my questions, as well as provided explanations of events I only thought to question in retrospect. This is an excellent, innovative, and very well planned trilogy.
Still going to complain about a couple things, though. I nitpick because I love? (Or rather, more ambitious projects get more of my attention and thus are held to a higher standard.)
Spoilers ahoy.
I have mixed feelings about Elend becoming a Mistborn. While I wasn't crazy about their whole will-they-won't-they dithering in book 2, I did like the dichotomy of Vin as a person of action and Elend as a person of thought. But not only is he now a Mistborn, he's now the Most Powerful Mistborn of the AgeTM. It's a running problem, in fantasy--you set up a character with a Super Special power that makes them the Specialest Person Ever, and then you have to top it in the next book. And the next thing you know, everyone's got the original Super Special power, and the power levels just become more and more absurd. First Vin is a Super Special Mistborn who learns insanely fast and can pierce copper clouds, then Elend is Even More Powerful. Well, of course Vin has to become a god, it's the only thing left.
It's not like Elend's beign extra powerful is all that necessary, even. His skill level in relationship to Vin's is very uneven--sometimes he seems to be way more powerful than she is, sometimes not. (And don't tell me she has more practice--the third book is set late enough that he's had plenty of time to catch up. She doesn't have that much of a lead on him, especially if her powers are watered down from a thousand years of mixed breeding.) He doesn't seem to be so very much more powerful than his fellow atium-burners in the last battle, even. Look, is the guy the most powerful Mistborn in a thousand years, or not? He doesn't seem to be all that much better than Zane. (Also, I feel like making Spook a Mistborn at the end both contributes to the whole overpowered thing as well as kind of cheating him of his well-earned character development.)
Also a bit underused is the kandra. The Lord Ruler's big secret weapon is that his most secret servants...commit suicide? I guess I feel like this element really got played up as a huge important thing and then when the time came, didn't present much of an obstacle. And TenSoon is a really compelling character who just gets lumped in with the other kandra at the end. Like poor Allriane, who still didn't get to do anything cool.
I still have a couple things that bother me. I will be surprised if Sanderson comes back to this world--its big story is told. After fighting off an evil god, anything else is either going to seem insignificant or become even more ridiculous (see above, regarding increasing power levels). I mean, we had two major characters ascend to godhood, and freaking changed the orbit of the planet. How do you top that? And yet he still left stuff unresolved. (He did this in Elantris, too.)
What happened to the koloss and the kandra, for example? Are they automatically destroyed, did Sazed put them down out of mercy, did he find some way to fix them? If you stick a Blessing back into a kandra-turned-mistwraith, do they become themselves again or do they start new?
Did Sanderson deliberately leave two metals "undiscovered" so he could come back to this world or just to taunt us or because he left clues or because he hadn't figured out what the last one does? (If atium is the body of Ruin, surely the fifteenth metal must be the body of Preservation, that makes people into Mistborn. So does the sixteenth permanently cancel someone's ability to burn metals? It would make a certain amount of sense, but that would make the last pair the only one with a permanent effect, and thus much more powerful than any of the others. Which wouldn't work well with the whole "Preservation and Ruin balance each other" thing.)
If Sazed can talk to the dead (as it's implied in his last letter, where he's apparently spoken to Vin, Elend, and Kelsier), then I feel a bit cheated of the revelation of the afterlife. Remember, Sazed almost gave up his faith because he couldn't solve the problem of whether Tindwyl was really gone forever or not. This is the most important thing in the world to him. And she doesn't even rate a mention at the end? For that matter, if Sazed can talk to the dead, why can't Ruin and Vin? Surely having Kelsier speak to Vin at a critical moment in that last battle would be a better way to bring that relationship to a full close. Discovering that yes, there is an afterlife, is incredibly huge in this universe--it's been a big driving question. So using it as a cutesy aside ("Oh, Kelsier wanted you to be a Mistborn, and also reminds you that he left the stove on, could you go turn it off for him?") seems to miss a big opportunity.
When Vin is killed as a god, her physical body reappears. Ruin and Preservation also apparently have physical bodies, which Sanderson takes great care to describe. If Ruin and Preservation created the world and then created people, where the hell did their original bodies come from? I feel like he's trying to imply something important that I'm totally missing here. Are they embodiments of the great forces of the universe that have been here for all time, or are they people who absorbed the powers themselves? Chicken and egg problem here.
The atium-burning thing bothers me, too. The kandra specifically say that whenever it's burned, it starts forming in the geodes again. Elend doesn't know that, naturally. So when they burn off the atium in the last battle, they didn't destroy it, they just moved it. Elend's wrong when he tells Marsh that Ruin will never find his body. So is the point just keeping Ruin from finding it long enough for Vin to fight Ruin?
Oh, and what happened to Marsh? He kills Elend and then...what? Did I miss it? Does Sazed kill him? Fix him? Did he die when Ruin died?
Really, a lot of the problem here is that Sanderson's created so rich a world that even he can't manage to tie up all the loose strings. He just put out too many strings to begin with. The way he ties up the ones he does is quite impressive. He really did have a lot of this really well planned in the first place. (I love the explanation of why the sun's red and the ash falls. You think it's just a Mount Doom kind of "so much concentrated evil makes nature mean" thing for two books, and then you discover that there's actually a good, even scientific reason why Rashek did this in the first place.) The hints of the long game the Lord Ruler and Ruin played with each other, and how little anyone else understood what was going on, go right back to the very beginning. There's so much you think is just fantasy cliche, especially "mistakes" the Lord Ruler made from the Evil Overlord list, that turns out to have actual reasons behind it. It's an ambitious trilogy. Perhaps a little too ambitious for its own good, but even with some flaws, Sanderson deserves kudos for pulling it (mostly) off.
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Epic fantasy (#3 in trilogy)
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: Same problem as the last one--synopsis of book 3 spoils books 1 and 2. Having been tricked into unleashing an ancient evil bent on destroying the world, Vin and her companions must find a way to set things right. But how does one fight something that hears everything you say, can change every word you write, and talks inside your head?
Thoughts: Sanderson wraps this whole thing up in a very satisfactory manner. I have some issues with his character development and with his tendency to leave a few too many threads hanging in a world he doesn't seem to be interested in revisiting, but the man is a master world-builder and plot mechanic. He did in fact answer several of my questions, as well as provided explanations of events I only thought to question in retrospect. This is an excellent, innovative, and very well planned trilogy.
Still going to complain about a couple things, though. I nitpick because I love? (Or rather, more ambitious projects get more of my attention and thus are held to a higher standard.)
Spoilers ahoy.
I have mixed feelings about Elend becoming a Mistborn. While I wasn't crazy about their whole will-they-won't-they dithering in book 2, I did like the dichotomy of Vin as a person of action and Elend as a person of thought. But not only is he now a Mistborn, he's now the Most Powerful Mistborn of the AgeTM. It's a running problem, in fantasy--you set up a character with a Super Special power that makes them the Specialest Person Ever, and then you have to top it in the next book. And the next thing you know, everyone's got the original Super Special power, and the power levels just become more and more absurd. First Vin is a Super Special Mistborn who learns insanely fast and can pierce copper clouds, then Elend is Even More Powerful. Well, of course Vin has to become a god, it's the only thing left.
It's not like Elend's beign extra powerful is all that necessary, even. His skill level in relationship to Vin's is very uneven--sometimes he seems to be way more powerful than she is, sometimes not. (And don't tell me she has more practice--the third book is set late enough that he's had plenty of time to catch up. She doesn't have that much of a lead on him, especially if her powers are watered down from a thousand years of mixed breeding.) He doesn't seem to be so very much more powerful than his fellow atium-burners in the last battle, even. Look, is the guy the most powerful Mistborn in a thousand years, or not? He doesn't seem to be all that much better than Zane. (Also, I feel like making Spook a Mistborn at the end both contributes to the whole overpowered thing as well as kind of cheating him of his well-earned character development.)
Also a bit underused is the kandra. The Lord Ruler's big secret weapon is that his most secret servants...commit suicide? I guess I feel like this element really got played up as a huge important thing and then when the time came, didn't present much of an obstacle. And TenSoon is a really compelling character who just gets lumped in with the other kandra at the end. Like poor Allriane, who still didn't get to do anything cool.
I still have a couple things that bother me. I will be surprised if Sanderson comes back to this world--its big story is told. After fighting off an evil god, anything else is either going to seem insignificant or become even more ridiculous (see above, regarding increasing power levels). I mean, we had two major characters ascend to godhood, and freaking changed the orbit of the planet. How do you top that? And yet he still left stuff unresolved. (He did this in Elantris, too.)
What happened to the koloss and the kandra, for example? Are they automatically destroyed, did Sazed put them down out of mercy, did he find some way to fix them? If you stick a Blessing back into a kandra-turned-mistwraith, do they become themselves again or do they start new?
Did Sanderson deliberately leave two metals "undiscovered" so he could come back to this world or just to taunt us or because he left clues or because he hadn't figured out what the last one does? (If atium is the body of Ruin, surely the fifteenth metal must be the body of Preservation, that makes people into Mistborn. So does the sixteenth permanently cancel someone's ability to burn metals? It would make a certain amount of sense, but that would make the last pair the only one with a permanent effect, and thus much more powerful than any of the others. Which wouldn't work well with the whole "Preservation and Ruin balance each other" thing.)
If Sazed can talk to the dead (as it's implied in his last letter, where he's apparently spoken to Vin, Elend, and Kelsier), then I feel a bit cheated of the revelation of the afterlife. Remember, Sazed almost gave up his faith because he couldn't solve the problem of whether Tindwyl was really gone forever or not. This is the most important thing in the world to him. And she doesn't even rate a mention at the end? For that matter, if Sazed can talk to the dead, why can't Ruin and Vin? Surely having Kelsier speak to Vin at a critical moment in that last battle would be a better way to bring that relationship to a full close. Discovering that yes, there is an afterlife, is incredibly huge in this universe--it's been a big driving question. So using it as a cutesy aside ("Oh, Kelsier wanted you to be a Mistborn, and also reminds you that he left the stove on, could you go turn it off for him?") seems to miss a big opportunity.
When Vin is killed as a god, her physical body reappears. Ruin and Preservation also apparently have physical bodies, which Sanderson takes great care to describe. If Ruin and Preservation created the world and then created people, where the hell did their original bodies come from? I feel like he's trying to imply something important that I'm totally missing here. Are they embodiments of the great forces of the universe that have been here for all time, or are they people who absorbed the powers themselves? Chicken and egg problem here.
The atium-burning thing bothers me, too. The kandra specifically say that whenever it's burned, it starts forming in the geodes again. Elend doesn't know that, naturally. So when they burn off the atium in the last battle, they didn't destroy it, they just moved it. Elend's wrong when he tells Marsh that Ruin will never find his body. So is the point just keeping Ruin from finding it long enough for Vin to fight Ruin?
Oh, and what happened to Marsh? He kills Elend and then...what? Did I miss it? Does Sazed kill him? Fix him? Did he die when Ruin died?
Really, a lot of the problem here is that Sanderson's created so rich a world that even he can't manage to tie up all the loose strings. He just put out too many strings to begin with. The way he ties up the ones he does is quite impressive. He really did have a lot of this really well planned in the first place. (I love the explanation of why the sun's red and the ash falls. You think it's just a Mount Doom kind of "so much concentrated evil makes nature mean" thing for two books, and then you discover that there's actually a good, even scientific reason why Rashek did this in the first place.) The hints of the long game the Lord Ruler and Ruin played with each other, and how little anyone else understood what was going on, go right back to the very beginning. There's so much you think is just fantasy cliche, especially "mistakes" the Lord Ruler made from the Evil Overlord list, that turns out to have actual reasons behind it. It's an ambitious trilogy. Perhaps a little too ambitious for its own good, but even with some flaws, Sanderson deserves kudos for pulling it (mostly) off.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-24 11:46 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-03-25 12:14 am (UTC)From:This could have been avoided by making Elend a normal Mistborn. Just say that the powers didn't degrade over time. Then when Vin absorbs the mists, it just continues to be "Vin was special all along", instead of bouncing back and forth as to who was more powerful.
Got any theories on the last pair of metals?