My wife genuinely suggested to me, half an hour ago, as I was telling her that I had to write this and that I was not looking forward to it, that I just make the entire post a single word:

“Don’t.”

And … well, no. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this series is how close to being remarkable it is. Most of the reviewers certainly seem to think it’s amazing; the lowest-ranked of the main Archives books is at 4.51 on Goodreads, which is hardly a failure.

And in many ways it really is remarkable. I stand by my repeated assertion that The Way of Kings is an amazing fucking book. But unfortunately the series follows what has become a sadly typical trajectory of the fantasy megaseries, that being that each book is worse than the book before it. And much like the best example of this phenomenon, A Song of Ice and Fire, the first book is so good that there’s plenty of room for the books to get worse before they even begin to approach being bad.

So let’s start off with some good stuff. The books are clearly carefully planned out. George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss are never releasing the next books in their series because they have written themselves into corners. I believe completely that Sanderson is going to deliver on books six through ten if he lives long enough, and I may even buy them if only to have them on the shelf. He’s going somewhere with this and he knows what he’s doing. And while I have some serious issues with his worldbuilding– more on that later– there is no doubt that it is both deliberate and meticulous. It’s not easy to write a five-book series in the first place! I certainly couldn’t do it! It’s even harder when each book is over a thousand pages long and all five of them come out in a fifteen-year period of time where you also write and release seven hundred other books.

By all rights, these books should be much, much crappier than they are. It’s amazing that they’re even readable, to be honest.

But about halfway through Oathbringer, a book that I abandoned early the first time I tried to read it, the books took a turn that I wasn’t expecting.

Unfortunately, that turn was directly up Brandon Sanderson’s ass.

The Cosmere has its fans, I am aware of this. I am very very much not one of them. For those of you unaware of the meaning of that term, all (perhaps most? Let’s go with most) of Brandon Sanderson’s books exist in the same universe. During the time where I was reading his work regularly, he hadn’t really revealed this little detail of his work, and any connections between different series either went unnoticed or were dismissed as Easter eggs of no particular real significance.

You can imagine my dismay when the fucking annoying talking sword from Warbreaker, by far my least favorite of Sanderson’s books, showed up in Oathbringer, and you will have to take my word for it that said dismay increased significantly when it became clear that not only was the sword not going away but it was far from the last intrusion his other books were going to make into Stormlight. It was never really explained why the sword was there. It just was. Other characters from his books showed up too, one with a pretty prominent role, others in cameos. Other planets were frequently discussed, and travel between them became a sub-theme. And after a while, every time I encountered a character I didn’t immediately recognize, I had to play this stupid game where I was wondering if it was just a minor character that after thousands and thousands of pages of narrative I simply didn’t remember, or if it was someone from another book and I was supposed to realize something about it.

Again, you may like the Cosmere. More power to you. Enjoy the wikis. It damn near destroyed the books for me.

I nearly started talking about his characters when discussing the positives of the series, and stopped; most of his characters are assassinated over the course of the series. Kaladin is amazing in The Way of Kings; he has the following exchange in Wind and Truth, which is treated like a mic drop:

“How?” Ishar repeated. “What are you?” He gestured toward Szeth.
“Are you… are you his spren? His god?”

“No,” Kaladin said. “I’m his therapist.”

…

Shut up, Brandon Sanderson. Mental illness is a theme of at least three if not four of the books, but it’s handled so, so poorly that I don’t even want to talk about it. Everybody’s fucked up somehow, and it becomes annoying after a while. The final book, one thousand three hundred and twenty-nine pages long, is 70% flashbacks, and the other 30% is mostly self-affirmations.

Which. Yeah. Bloat. I’m not joking about Wind and Truth being 70% flashbacks. Nearly all of the book is presented in a series of visions. What happens in Book Four? At the beginning of the book the bad guys take over a place, and at the end of the book they are driven out of that place again. The actual changes to the status quo over Rhythm of War’s 1200 pages or so could be done and dusted in 250 pages. Whole subplots just never gelled with me at all. Shallan spent two books chasing around something called the … Dustbloods? Ghostbloods! It’s Ghostbloods. They’re from Mistborn, apparently? They’re completely irrelevant to anything, as far as I was able to tell, and the entire subplot could have been cut with no damage. And it takes her away from characters who her interactions with are actually interesting. I don’t think she has a single scene with Jasnah after the third book. It’s fucking ridiculous.

The books are so thoroughly up Brandon Sanderson’s ass that it may be better to stop comparing the series to A Song of Ice and Fire and compare them instead to another megaseries written by an author so famous that he could shit on a napkin and sell a million copies: The Dark Tower.

What I’m saying is that were I to discover that Brandon Sanderson self-inserts into Book Seven, I would not be the least bit surprised.

Gah. I could keep going; I don’t want to. Like I said, I’ll probably buy the rest of the books if only because having half of the series on my shelf will annoy the shit out of me. Will I read them? Okay, I’ll probably read Book Six, because it’ll be interesting to see where he goes with what he’s calling the “second major arc” of the series. I make no promises after that, and I am absolutely not dragging myself through another reread of this monstrosity.

They aren’t terrible. They really genuinely aren’t. But there is six and a half thousand pages of this, and “not terrible” is not good enough motivation to read six and a half thousand pages, and it certainly isn’t enough to get me to recommend them. I won’t stop you, but … God, go read twenty books by other people instead.

Blech.