no one fucking touch me critical brainrot levels have commenced. if i start thinking about The Characters in a pacific rim or soul eater au that's how i know i'm cooked. anyways re9 leon dual wielding grace & emily. his daughterssss. i almost want to say escrima bastons (guns are obvious choice) but again. i'm cooked!! battered and fried on both sides for four minutes people. don't look at me don't touch me
i fear i am 900 pages in to oathbringer and could not possibly actually girlblog about it BUT. i will make a big post about my thoughts later (tomorrow) (maybe) anyways this is spoilers under the cut
BUDDY COP COMEDY ROUTINE WITH SZETH AND NIGHTBLOOD FINALLY
nightblood thinks szeth is trustworthy 😭😭 ily nightblood you’re the best sword ever. szeth, not that i would ever say this to a real man, but you should listen to your sword
Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson | 4.5 out of 5 stars
I’d read a lot of opinions about Oathbringer & talked to friends who’d either read it or were reading it before I’d even really started, so my view of the book is a little biased. Most of those opinions said that this book was long, and hard, and that I should probably take a break to read Mistborn Era 1 before continuing. Now, I’m not a quitter. I’ve never been a quitter in my goddamn life. But three out of three things are correct: Oathbringer was long, it was hard, and I’ll probably read at least Mistborn: The Final Empire before carrying on with The Stormlight Archive since my library only has one copy of Rhythm of War as an ebook specifically & I have to wait seven more weeks to get it because I put it on hold through Libby. Let’s dig in!
Things I Liked:
This is an easy category for me, simply because there are a lot of things to Stormlight that I particularly enjoy, and Oathbringer is particularly huge. It's not an overstatement to say that anything that isn't in the 'Things I Disliked' section & isn't mentioned here was also something I enjoyed to some extent!
We really did get to see a lot more character relationships evolve and grow, and we also got plenty of new dynamics to explore! Stormlight Trio aka Shakadolin aka My Wretched Polycule had multiple chapters dedicated to developing their dynamics together (Kaladin and Adolin’s easy camaraderie, Adolin and Shallan’s blossoming romance feat. Adolin being the most patient man in the world, and… well, the last pair is better handled in the second section). Shadesmar Roadtrip, you will always be in my heart.
We got Dalinar and Lift, daddy-daughter Radiant duo! We got Dalinar and Navani, serving political power couple (and they’re married now, which is awesome)! We got more of Bridge Four operating without their Captain’s leadership, something that I’d actually been wanting for a while to help flesh out those characters out! Obviously, my favorite out of all of them: SZETH-SON-SON-VALLANO & NIGHTBLOOD BUDDY-COP COMEDY DUO. Yes. Give that horribly depressed man a sentient sword with whimsy in its heart. I don’t know, I just like sentient weapons, okay? There were plenty others I could’ve mentioned, but like I said, there were a lot of new bonds forged during Dalinar’s attempts to ‘Unite Them’.
Speaking of Dalinar, this was the Dalinar book (rounding off our original focus characters), and I won’t be the first to say it: I loved the flashback chapters. Seeing him at the start of his story versus how we’ve known him for the past two books truly was like seeing two separate characters. I also now have context for why Sadeas thought Dalinar had gone insane—I’ve been poking around The Way of Kings again as a comfort re-read, and.. YEAH, BUD. I get it now. His brother-in-arms organized a razing of Rathalas, accidentally killing his wife in the process, and then turned around to say 'Erm, actually, the end doesn't always justify the means!' after becoming fantasy-Catholic in an almost-overnight process. I'd be confused too.
It’d be in poor taste if I didn’t at least mention the second honor moment of all time ala “You cannot have my pain!”/Honor’s Perpendicularity. It helped that Shallan, Kaladin, and Adolin all jumped out like superheroes to save the day, of course, but like I said: I’m biased towards them. Dalinar’s great. No one is doing bad fatherhood like him. #myblorbos
The Sanderlanche in Oathbringer bumped this rating up from a 3.5 to a 4.5, by the way. A whole point up from just the last 200–300 pages. This is a feat that I believe only he could pull off, but that’s more or less just because he’s well known for the tactic of “big book with big pay off at the end”. I’m also not as well read as I’d like to be, so maybe that opinion will change later down the line!
Things I Disliked:
God, this book felt simply bloated with detail—one of the downsides to having a huge book to read. One of my friends who’s reading the series because of me told me that it felt ‘ambitious’, which I thought was a kind way of describing it. The biggest issue, to me, is if you’re going to be as ambitious as Sanderson was, you need to commit to following through. The following items, in my opinion, were dropped in such a manner that felt unsatisfactory to me:
Adolin’s murder of Torol Sadeas. He actively benefits from this decision in the end (not ascending the throne) and bears little to no consequence over it. For someone who spent the first part of the book agonizing over this decision, Adolin sure doesn’t think about that for the rest of it!
Shallan’s… Lightweaver-thing with the Unmade in Urithiru. I’m not sure how else to put it. Coppermind let me know that the Unmade was named the Midnight Mother, but my point is that the thing she does is so vague and hand-wavey that it stuck out as wrong. After all, Sanderson is the hard-magic system guy! My best guess is that it was there as a way to explain her gambit in Kholinar, but whatever, I guess.
Queen Aesudan’s transformation after attempting to consume Yelig-nar. We can pretty handily guess that she’s, y’know, fucking dead, but… That’s the Queen. That’s the whole-ass queen of the goddamn nation. There has to have been fallout in the kingdom after her death! And we’ll never get to know, because she’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things. (That also bothers me. She shouldn’t be inconsequential, but she is.)
…and more, probably! God. There were so many things that got dropped for the sake of moving the plot along. The stone thing that Dalinar did (his entire power set, actually), Drehy’s queerness being a few throwaway lines, etc. Candy for fanfic writers, though—they’re the ones that profit off of dropped plots to pick right back up in their own ways.
And then there were some things that just flat out bothered me. Like many others, I felt that Syl’s characterization—especially near the beginning of the book—was in direct conflict with her characterization in the first book. She wouldn’t say that it was alright to kill the Parshendi, just because they were different? Who the fuck is that, Sanderson? This doesn’t really come up again as far as I can remember, so I can’t tell if it was just a one-off (based off of improper information/bias coming through the Nahel bond) or if Syl is doing baby’s first racism. I hope it’s the former.
Here’s the big one, though: Shallan was bad in this book! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I do actively like Shallan and try to empathize with her, but her struggle in this book fell flat with me. I get that she has fantasy OSSD-1b/DID/something similar to the two—Veil and Radiant both have different preferences and make their opinions well known throughout the book as different people. But they’re still ultimately fragments of herself, and Shallan is a deeply flawed, broken character that simply cannot shine as well as she did when she was given the center stage (see my Words of Radiance review for more on that.) Her being mean to Kaladin felt trite, the will-they-won’t-they romance between them was only fueled by Veil being Horny™, and she was sort of a hot mess the entire time.
To be fair to her, it was kind of the point for her to be a hot mess, but regardless: I want to see more from Shallan in the next book, and luckily, I think I can look forward to that thanks to reports from my friend. All in all, I think he tried to do too much with too little time, which is an objectively hilarious thing to say about a 1,200+ page novel—but he was ambitious, like my friend so kindly said. I'm going to cross my fingers and hope against hope that he reins in that ambition a little for the next one.
Things I Got, Perhaps, A Little Fucking Autistic About:
Guys, it’s still Kaladin. It’s still Kaladin Stormblessed. We got a scene with him reminiscing on his old love, Tarah, and I made an embarrassing squeaking noise in real life. I’d actually been curious about her since TWoK, given that she comes up a couple times in the novel and never got introduced. Also, in my defense, the following passage came directly from Sanderson’s heart, presumably inspired by his wife:
“...Slightly plump, with a round face and firm build, Tarah’s beauty was a subtle thing. Like an uncut gemstone. The more you saw of it—the more you discovered its natural facets—the more you loved it. Until one day it struck you that you’d never known anything as wonderful.”
[INSERT LONGING SIGH/GIGGLING/TWIRLING OF HAIR/KICKING OF FEET HERE.] Let’s have a moment of silence, shall we?
…
I did this bit in the last one. Whoops! Anyways, we're moving on now.
I’m not over Elhokar! I don’t think I’ll be over Elhokar for a while. He went from ‘annoying little greaseball of a king’ to ‘pathetic, sopping wet beast of a man’ to ‘wait he’s actually kind of okay now?’ across the past three books. I was actually starting to fucking like him, and then MOASH (that bitch, I like him so much) KILLS HIS ASS? When he was this close to saying the Words? I understand the narrative decision there, I do, but GOD! Gentle readers, I had to physically shut the book and put it down for a while! Whatever. Lightweaver Elhokar, you’re probably out there in some fix-it fic, and if not, I’ll do it myself.
Conclusions & Predictions:
No predictions from me about the next one, given my general knowledge of the Cosmere! I know we’ll get to do fabrial physics in Rhythm of War, which I’m personally super excited about as a science nerd, and I hear that we get a fight scene (or multiple) between Kaladin and Leshwi that is considered ‘erotic’, whatever that means for Sanderson. I’m personally hoping that we get to see a scene about Jasnah being crowned the monarch of Alethkar & Hoid applying to continue to be the King’s Wit. That’d tickle me for sure.
Despite all the flaws I found, I really did enjoy myself reading this monster of a book. And as always, I’m excited for what the next one has in store for me! Gentle reader, if you’ve made it this far: thank you very much for reading through this. I’m not quite sure I’ve had anything of import to say, but it was humbling to see a handful of comments on my last review. You guys are very sweet to me—cheers, and I'll see you in the next one!
i’m going to crash the fuck out sorry gamers. i have been stressed out for like the entire first half of this year i have stupid ass adult acne on my face that i’ve been slowly getting rid of with good skincare but i feel like i look like SHIT my fuckass loser manchild boyfriend has lapsed on his promises he made to me during our relationship renegotiations THIS LAST SUNDAY so ALREADY he is fucking it up i have one thousand thing going on FOREVER no one is hiring me despite being competent and attractive as a candidate AND i haven’t probably been eating or sleeping right. so. you know.
anyways. all that to say that i’m TIRED of this BULLSHIT CIRCUS i call my life!!! AAAAAAAAAAAA where is my prince or princess charming to SAVE ME /hj (i do not actually need someone to save me i’m just mad.)
sorry i haven't been mistborning btw. mostly i'm just sad about vin. that's a baby. that's a baaaaaby!! she's 16!! she's out here snatching extra food, making sure to have one set aside for when she thinks she'll inevitably thrown to the street and i'm llke. girl!!
you have 7 dads now!! kelsier is dad prime, obviously /j please please please trust in your crime family this one (1) time. they're including you for a reason you HAVE to be slightly less paranoid (i do not blame her but it just makes me sad okay :( that's my daughter)
for clarity's sake i do not think we've founded the family yet nor do i think kelsier would be an actual good father figure for vin. but. i DO strongly believe in weird uncle kelsier agenda. anyways i'm getting back to it
handshake counter w/ kelsier: 2 (good job on removing vin from her stupid stupid surroundings)
sadness cancelled. we got vin’s debut at a ball! she has adopted the imposter syndrome submindset of ‘grifter’ (i’m sure you all know what i’m talking about but for context:)
and then. meetcute on the balcony with the one and only elend ‘reads at parties’ venture!! kicking my feet giggling!! i too yearn for the ball to return. vin good job!! you did it!! i'm tousling her hair affectionately
kelsier handshake counter: (bing!) 5
kelsier thumbs-down counter: still at 2
