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basket-of-radiants · 27 days ago

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Why were you so disappointed by Rhythm of War?

This has been sitting in my askbox for years. I've taken several cracks at answering, only to get frustrated with the subject matter and burn myself out every time. I didn't like Rhythm of War. More than that, I didn't like it in a way that tainted my enjoyment of the entire series. And despite what it may seem, I don't actually enjoy discussing things which I don't like. I always want to talk from a place of good faith. Which is why now that my feelings towards the series are a little more positive, I think I can finally answer this.

I'm going to try to stay away from specific plotpoints and story beats for this post, because my goal isn't to nitpick (if for no other reason than it would take a week to write this post), I'm just looking to talk about my overall impressions. I think that might mean the only spoilers here will be structural? idk, if you haven't read Rhythm of War yourself then you should probably do that before looking for other people's opinions anyway.

I liked Way of Kings when I first read it. I didn't love it at the time, but I liked it. Certainly enough to keep reading once I'd finished. One thing that made me a bit uncomfy, however, was the war against the Parshendi. They were this unknowable enemy which the book was not interested in knowing. An inhuman army. Their main purpose was to kill Kaladin's friends, or else be killed by Dalinar's armies. And yet the Parshendi, and the parshmen in the form of Shen, did show hints of personhood. And so it bothered me how Dalinar spoke so casually about how the Alethi had decimated their numbers, how the others used the war as a means to amass wealth and power. (It didn't bother me in a "this is a bad book" way but in a "these characters are bad people" way.)

One of my foibles as a reader is that when a book is very clearly treating one side of a conflict with more humanity, I tend to be a bit predisposed towards the other to account for that. And with the Alethi clearly being the invading party and superior military force, there was also some underdog favoritism. I didn't really like how the book treated the Parshendi. This is to say that going forward, the singers would be more important to me than any other through line.

So imagine my delight at reading Words of Radiance and meeting Eshonai, one of the Parshendi, who even gets her own point of view sections! They were no longer being treated as a faceless mass, we were getting to see things from their perspective as well. And it became plain to see the damage the Alethi had done to them. I couldn't really bring myself to root for Dalinar or really any of the humans against the listeners. I couldn't even bring myself to like most of these characters. I still enjoyed the book but once it became clear there wouldn't be a peaceful conclusion, let's just say that I wouldn't have wept for Dalinar and Adolin if Szeth had managed to off them. Like everyone in the book, I assumed that going forward all the parshmen would be turned into evil voidbringers in the everstorm and that the listeners were mostly dead. Except for Rlain, and Eshonai because I'd read or been told that book 4 would be Eshonai's book and thus had assumed she was fine. (Oathbringer spoilers, she was not fine.) So ultimately it was still a bit of a downer way to end the book.

So imagine my delight at reading Oathbringer, where for the first time singers were being treated as people, full and real people, and where the human characters could no longer ignore or dismiss them. We met Khen and the others, common singers who were sympathetic and just wanted freedom from bondage. We see Venli grapple with the loss of her home. We see Leshwi and Moash connecting with and understanding one another. We learn of a history where singers were the original inhabitants of the planet. Parallel to this, Dalinar is having a truly excellent character arc about confronting one's past actions and acknowledging them to move forward and do better. I loved Oathbringer, for some years it was my favorite book, and I was excited as hell to see what came next. At the time, it seemed to me that there is a clear direction the story is going. Two books about needless war, and then a third where the main cast is forced to acknowledge the personhood of their enemies. This was so cool, all of my feelings from the previous installments were being validated, the characters were going to have to face what they've done in the past and outgrow their militaristic mindsets, I was so sure of that.

Imagine my disappointment when that does not even remotely resemble the direction the story went in Rhythm of War. RoW presented a clear, straightforward “us vs. them" narrative, where every character was totally fine with killing singers. Characters aligned with the singers were either flattened into wholly evil versions of themselves (Moash) or were expected to turn on their side in favor of the humans (Venli.) Because clearly there was no reason good people would be on the side that's all former slaves trying to stay free. Maybe there's some sort of accord or understanding between Navani and Raboniel that I might have found meaningful if the seeds of mutual understanding weren't already there in Oathbringer and then apparently ignored for a year by all the characters.

I have a lot of issues with how the listeners are handled in these books. (Here's some elaboration.) Following OB, I had thought that all my concerns were going to be addressed. Following RoW, I knew they never would be.

Which is my main complaint, because that's the thread that matters most to me in this series.

I have a lot of other Things as well. Gonna just talk about a few big ones.

One outsized source of disappointment that may seem a little petty, and which probably is, is that I felt mislead by the premise of the book. It had been announced that this book would center Venli and Eshonai, and I was unbelievably hyped for that. That did not really turn out to be the case. The purpose for their backstory chapters felt less about exploring them as people and contextualizing their arcs, and more about filling in gaps of world history. In the main plot, Venli was a POV character and she certainly played a role, but honestly not a very important one overall. To me she felt like a side character in her own book. I don't think it's controversial to say that the main character of RoW was Navani. A lot of people really like Navani and are happy about that. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people, and I found it all the more difficult to enjoy her when it felt like it was coming at the expense of some of my favorite characters.

This particular gripe somewhat comes down to preference, obviously everyone prefers to read about characters they like more than those they don't, and it can go both ways. (For instance, on a craft/technical level RoW is probably the superior book to W&T, but I liked the latter a lot more because of my stupidly outsized attachment to Szeth and Nale.) But I do think there's something of a real criticism in how the book would rather focus on the feelings of a queen rather than those of a genocide survivor, and how the former's are given significantly more weight and import. It ties in with my main criticism, I think.

And then there's how human/human racism had also been wholly cast aside as a plot point. Jasnah fixed slavery so that's resolved, and the only person who still cares about structural racism is the evil bad bad evil villain Moash/Vyre, who is now wholly irredeemable and who you're allowed to totally write off because he's sold his soul to Odium. I've already talked a lot about this. Other people have already talked about this, probably better than me. The writing was actually on the wall for me in OB, but again, RoW was when I fully accepted that this was never going to be addressed.

There's something else that probably deserves its own discussion rather than being quickly tacked on at the end here, but here we are. This book changed how the series approaches war.

In WoK, war was very clearly portrayed as a bad and inglorious thing. It was brutal, it was painful, those at the bottom died cruelly and unceremoniously and pointlessly while those at the top turned a profit. Every day was a new horror. The enemy were never evil, they were always just more people forced to go through the same thing. Through the next couple books, it felt to me that even if the characters had accepted war as necessary, there was still a tragedy to it. Conversely, in RoW (and W&T) war is basically a series of boss battles, in between which our protagonists can kill dozens of footsoldiers with barely a thought in the same way WoK had criticized.

Final note on all this, it sucks how we have no perspectives from the former-slaves-singers demographic. Those guys are really thrown under the bus, and seemingly get no self-determination now or ever. It was a glaring problem to me in RoW. Conscripted and enslaved humans and singers probably have just as much ground to form mutual understanding as a fused and a queen. (In fact they already had. In Oathbringer.)

In essence, RoW disappointed me because it left me with the distinct impression that none of the series's most important through lines (well, most important to me) were going to be resolved well. I liked W&T, but I haven't revised my opinion very much about the overall handling of these topics across the series. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to enjoy W&T so much more was because I no longer had such high expectations.

#sorry i sorta need to get this stuff off my chest to unpack my feelings about the series.#i hope posting this out of the blue doesn't come across as too mean spirited. my sensitivity reader DID sign off on it.#(that is a joke. although i do let my sister look over any 1000+ word posts ahead of time. and i would respect any disapproval from her.#but normally she just tells me i'm allowed to be more forceful in my opinions without qualifying them or apologizing all the time. pfff.#the reason i've been hesitant to write any especially spoilery w&t meta is mostly because she hasn't read it yet.)#discourse #asks #hey anon if you're still here after all these years. thank you.#at the time i was kinda fishing for an ask like this bc i wanted to vent but it felt mean to do so unprompted #of course this was still really hard to write. mostly because every time i tried i completely spiraled.#the version of this post that was sitting in my drafts was honestly a lot better than this one. in basically every way. except.#except it was nearly the same length and all i'd gotten to was the oathbringer paragraph #below which was a stupidly thorough outline of my itemized complaints #you KNOW i don't care about brevity but my god that would have taken forever to write and finish #and i did not want to spend that sort of time with a book i didn't like. which i would have had to do to get all my planned citations #sorry past self. you were clearly writing from a place of much more passion and that made your work better than mine. and yet.#so as i said. i'm only writing this bc i now like the series enough to talk about it again. sincerely not trying to be a hater.#side note: if any of you have thoughts/opinions about the shift in the way war is used in these books. i would love to hear them. lets chat

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apradonite · 22 days ago

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God the soriel scene. Why can people acknowledge that it was BOTH an irresponsible decision and kris and susie have a right to be upset about it, AND that toriel has the right to move on with sans AND that that she is like a.. hundred times better parent than asgore despite her failings.

Toriel can have failings as a parent without being completely shitty.

(Asgore on the other hand... fucking yikes. I'd respect him a million times more if he was going after rudy, a married man, rather than repeatedly going after his ex like GET AWAY FROM HERRRRR, the only benefit of sans and toriel getting drunk at her house rather than at sans's is that it means that asgore might visit and sans might open the door for him. Hopefully, that will be enough to get it through asgore's skull. I used to sympathise with financial situation, but now i wonder if it's actually brought on by his obsession to get back to "normal," leading him to neglect moving on and taking care of himself)

Sorry for the asgore paragraph. Anyway, I need to see an awkward breakfast scene between her, sans and kris as she tries to smoothe things over and try to properly introduce sans while kris is trying to get out of the door as fast as possible.

Also, we gotta admit the soriel scene is cute. Someone compared it to the lalondes' drinking scenes in the homestuck and think that's important. It's cute and joyful, which makes it hurt a little more (im not wording this right, but hopefully it makes sense? Like, i wanna be happy for her but also ouch. Its the right mix of clashing emotions)

Anyway sans. I support toriel liking him but it has made him too confident. He needs to be bullied by teenagers.

And on a final note, toriel being much taller than sans is wonderful and needed. I keep seeing art that makes lanino much taller than elnina and it gives me the ick. I'm so glad Toriel is so much taller than sans, we need that.

DUDE EXACTLY like yea i 100% agree that not watching how much you drink and getting super drunk when you got kids coming back later that night absolutely wasn't a responsible thing to do (i don't exactly blame her for not calling kris considering this is what. the third time they've gone out to hang with friends via suddenly disappearing and being out of reach. but it still should've been a safe bet that they're coming back at the end of the day) and whether or not that's a consistent pattern of behavior SHOULD be discussed. or even how kris's disappointment might be rooted in how just how fast their whole life is shifting around (especially with a guy that just moved into town) considering the theming of chapters 3 and 4. but some people's criticism of her in that scene is absolutely rooted in the idea that asgore is still entitled to her just because he wants her back and really any mention of "asgore is better/she should've stayed with him" is what gets me the most. she literally could not make it more clear that she's not interested! kris is allowed to be upset and uncomfortable with how quickly and messily their family's dynamics are changing just as much as toriel is allowed to want to move on! let that 6'8 woman hang out with her short ass boyfriend

#i do sortttt of agree about asgore's living situation because speaking from experience it's very much Divorced Dad Living Space #but we've also gotten tidbits on how he doesn't sell any of the plants he grows he just gives them away and im sure the supplies to care-#-for them all is shriveling his wallet like a raisin. it seems like a mix of him struggling to get his life in order post divorce and his-#-over-altruism getting in the way of making a stable income off of his day job #ill also admit that i haven't read homestuck so i cant fully back the comparison but you're definitely right that this-#-was supposed to be a scene that gives you mixed feelings. sans and toriel are happy and giggling and dancing and making jokes while-#-susie and kris are uncomfortable enough to where it wasn't worth for susie to stay over. it's a mixed bag but like i said before people in #-fandom have problems with seeing situations in black and white and not looking at it from the gray perspective it needs to properly-#unpack it #apradonite.txt #deltarune #deltarune spoilers #deltarune chapter 4

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