Good Media Which Doesn’t Justify Its Length: Sanderson’s Wind and Truth

This is a blog, so I guess I can write about my life. I got a really bad resperatory infection in early January. I was stuck at home for a little over a week with very little ability to do anything but consume media. For those that care, I seemed to get better after a week, but I had a bit of a cough for a couple more weeks until I suddenly started coughing a lot more and had horrible chest pain. A visit to a doctor told me that I had at least one broken rib and another round of antibiotics I needed to take. Anyway, I’m doing much better now, so here’s a blogpost.

One of the things I did while sick was read Brandon Sanderson’s latest installment in his Stormlight Archive series. It is called Wind and Truth, it is over 1300 pages long, and I’ve decided that I didn’t like it that much. It was entertaining enough, and one of the storylines was fine, but it wasn’t worth the wordcount. Ironically, I will now write a bunch of words talking about why I think the book was too long and about other works of media which I think are too long. This post probably will have spoilers for the whole series.

I have to talk about why I’m even reading the Stormlight Archive. They have been good fantasy! The worldbuilding is impeccable, the action is exciting, and the characters go through sweeping arcs that celebrate some of the best things humans see in themselves. However fun the books are, most of them don’t have anything particularly interesting to say to me. The characters don’t feel like people. They are obstinate in a way which matches their character design but not in a way that feels realistic to me. Then they go and pull through with solutions which save the day. They develop superpowers which drive their character development and the plot, although I have to hand it to Sanderson for making a magic system where this feels satisfying in context rather than coming off as deus ex machina as that trope so often does. It’s a little bit like reading a DND campaign. DND is meant to be fun to play and provide a setting in which characters can interact with each other, but that doesn’t mean it creates great literature. And yet I kept reading them out of perhaps a combination of some pride in not quitting and having something to talk about with the nerds I surround myself with. I will say that the fourth book Rhythm of War stands out in the series for me. The action was good, but it spoke to me in particular for two reasons. One is that there is a beautiful story of a scientist trying to prove her self-worth by figuring out some esoteric way to use the magic system while collaborating with the enemy who has imprisoned her. I’m a sucker for dramatized science. The other is that half of the book is from the point of view of the enemy soldiers, and the book is such a delightful mix of “yay, the protagonists are being cool” and “oops, the antagonists are pretty justified in what they’re doing actually.” The leaders of the “monsters” the protagonists are fighting are incredibly broken and tired of the cycle of violence they’re participating in (but admittedly seem to be winning now). One of the things novels are good for is practicing empathy, and good stories should have antagonists which act for a reason. This isn’t a new idea in literature by any means, but the execution is solid.

I wanted to talk about a book in the series which was particularly good, because I don’t want to make it sound like there’s nothing to recommend the series when I say Wind and Truth was a slog. The action was slower, and I didn’t feel like I got anything in return for that. The book does break the mold a little bit, because the characters basically lose in the end. To be fair, they’re situation has been increasingly dire for the past three books, but this time they don’t regroup. They don’t swing in with an emotional breakthrough that coincides with a superpower breakthrough that hands them a pyrrhic victory again. They arguably lose on their own terms, but the big bad ends up ruling the world even if he seems stymied in hitting some of his wider goals. (Wider than ruling the world? I’ll get back to this point in a second.) Maybe Sanderson was going for an Empire Strikes Back style “oh no, they lost, but that just gives us a desperate situation to recover from!” The problem was that it was too boring, and then the book ends with an unrestrained binding of the series into the extended universe of Sanderson known as the Cosmere. I get a similar feeling to how I felt halfway through Adventure Time. The scope of concern for the story has inflated too much. The series has jumped the shark. This story was about the characters and world right here, and now Sanderson has solidly torn out the insulation from everything else he’s written (not that there weren’t always easter eggs for the dedicated Sanderson reader). And did I mention how long the thing was? Maybe having most of the cast go on a vision quest while a few others go on a murder quest was a good segue into widening the scope of a conflict, but why did he need to spend 1300 pages on that? We didn’t get anywhere satisfying. My hot take is that this shole book should have been compressed into maybe two hundred pages of vignettes and stuck at the front of the next novel Sanderson wants to write in the series, which probably needs to be cut in half as well based off of previous trends. We didn’t need to see Dalinar hunt through a series of ten visions. The relevent bits were in maybe a few dozen pages. We didn’t need to see Shallan fail to kill her mentor five times, because one (with maybe like a set of paragraph-long flashbacks to a few others if you really wanted) got the point across. We didn’t need to see every day in between when Adolin started an impossible anti-siege and ended it. I’m not saying that nobody should be able to write a long book, but if you want me to read your long book, then I prefer it to be soul-crushingly beautiful or incredibly insightful. This writing was fine. If I had nothing better to do, sure give me 1300 pages of it. I usually do have something better to do though, or at least books which have surprising insights into humanity and satisfying realistic characters in like 400 pages instead of 1300. People have been writing novels for a long time, so there’s lots of really good ones I could be reading. If you’re going to double the page count of The Brothers Karamazov, please do me the courtesy of being at least nearly as good as The Brothers Karamazov.

I’m filing the whole 5 book starting arc of the Stormlight Archive under “pretty good; too long.” The existence of that category as a commonly used thing in my brain might give insight into why I generally don’t watch television. I will admit that there seems to be some excellent TV series out there, but the medium is such that a typical commitment for consuming them is ten hours watching something that had four hours of filler episodes and could have had 80% of the insight if it were cut to a two hour movie. At least reading books or comics I’m only speed-limited by my own mental capacity to comprehend the thing, which means that I am literally absorbing whatever it has to say as fast as I can. But written media can still just be so long that it wasn’t worth the time commitment to skim it. “Pretty good;too long” is a tag I first remember putting on Andrew Hussie’s multimedia web project Homestuck. The thing has a wordcount that is maybe a book short of the entire Harry Potter series, thousands of illustrated pages with no prose, and several pages which are ten minute videos or LITERAL VIDEO GAMES YOU PLAY IN YOUR BROWSER. It takes weeks to read if you have nothing better to do, and, honestly, I think it’s incredibly good. The characters and dialogue are compelling, the worldbuilding is fun, the plot is so twisted that you can get lost in the joy of unravelling it, and I’m a huge sucker self-referential works which annihilate the fourth wall, and Hussie’s brilliance is in using the tattered wreckage of the fourth wall as fuel for the engine moving the plot along. Even so, that doesn’t make up for how long the thing is. I think it peaks in Act 5 Act 2 (don’t ask), and then there’s an less interesting build up (which either is longer or feels longer than the entire preceding work) to the rather excellent Game Over (Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 3 in case you’re wondering), after which there’s a truly spectacular instance of either a character coming into their own or deus ex machina, and it all ends with a sad fizzle in terms of plot which admittedly contains good dialogue. It’s followed by the dubiously canonical Epilogues, which are simple prose, excellent, and possibly worth their wordcount which clocks in at just over the length of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, but they don’t make any sense without slogging through Homestuck Act 6. It’s really good if you care to waste a month or three of your life getting through it, but, at this point in my life, I don’t.

Here’s a quick rundown of more some media which I have relevant opinions about. Les Misérables is incredibly good, but maybe a bit too long at over 1400 pages. Maybe! It’s an incredible novel! I’m not sure the Napoleanic war asides added much for me, but overall it’s beautiful and intricate and sweeping and a bit inspiring and a love letter to Paris. If you dare to break 1000 pages, try to be at least that good. I recently watched the movie I Saw the TV Glow, and it’s a devastating look at how media shapes your identity and society crushes it, but, although it only has a 100 minute runtime, I probably could have gotten that out of twenty or thirty minutes less movie. The Adventure Time episode Donny is a masterpiece in 10 minutes. It has a simple thesis about ideals that are good in one context being harmful in another context, but it gut-punches you in the feels in the last minute amid the characteristic compelling chaos of the land of Ooo. I was briefly apalled that it was intended for children the first time I saw it, but the episode now holds a special place in my heart. I’ve read a lot of ambitious novels which are about 500 pages long and absolutely worth it. Dan Simmons’ Hyperion was a beautiful tapestry of stories about civilization, mortality, and storytelling. Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth makes you wander around her world having no idea what’s going on for hundreds of pages, and you love every minute of it. It felt like the freshest novel I’d read in years. The protagonist mixed charisma, cluelessness, and competence in a way I wasn’t accustomed to in a viewpoint character. The entire magic system and plot had to be inferred by the reader because the protagonist had no idea what was going on. The plot turned out to be a delightful mixture of action, mystery, and quest once you got oriented. Fonda Lee’s Jade City is a moving tale of responsibility to your family and its legacy, a compelling hypothetical rejecting colonialism for local tradition as a pathway to modernity for small nations, and a compelling romanticization of living under gang rule. Moving away from 500 page novels, the animated series Revolutionary Girl Utena is a surrealist psychological masterpiece, but it didn’t need 39 episodes. A dozen of the episodes have the same walking up the tower animation repeated frame for frame eating up two minutes of runtime, and there’s only so many moving stories you can squeeze out of repeating the plot of “jealous aristocrat fights protagonist for love interest and loses, but it’s in a weird high school.” They literally made a 90 minute movie that adapted the series (with subjectively half the impact for me, but it makes me imagine an 8 episode series with 200 minutes to work with). I mentioned Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which is 700 pages long, and, while I’m not sure my philosophical leanings let me appreciate it to the extent it deserves, I don’t think the wordcount is an issue.