Malazan Empire: Dadding - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Holy shit. This is Mistborn? This is the series that is so frequently recommended to newcomers to this genre? No wonder some people don't take Fantasy seriously. This was so bad. I almost stopped reading so many times, but I told myself that this was Mistborn, everyone loves this, it's a modern-day classic, I need to read at least the first book before I make up my mind. And I was pretty annoyed at not liking it, because I was ready to power through this series after the disappointment that was the First Law.

The worst part was the dialogue. It's stilted, unnatural, too many dialogue tags / actions (laughed, chuckled), everybody seems to say so many uncessary things like "true" "indeed" and they're always nodding. Everyone has a stupid shortened nickname like you see in bad fan fiction: Kel, Ham, Dox, Saze. I thought there were a few people immune to this like Elend, but then in the last few hours he just had to be called El. Gah!


The two or three planning scenes were almost entirely dialogue, which made them incredibly painful to get through. And maybe it's the audiobook format (I'm taking a minute here to complain about Dox and Breeze's voices/accents, they're really bad especially when coupled with the cringey dialogue - most of the other voices are good though), or maybe I'm not used to conversations between so many people, but there were too many X said, Y said, Z said, that really took me out of it. What was the use of the planning scenes? I'm still not sure, it felt like Sanderson was using the scenes to plot out the book for himself, but ultimately I think they could have been axed or shortened and not really changed much. My least favourite scenes overall, very difficult to get through without rolling my eyes or grinding my teeth.

What can I say about the magic system? Well, it's a system that's for sure. Is it clever? Probably. There's not much mystery to it, it's info-dumped on us pretty early and explained in wikipedia entry style, it makes most fight scenes a bore, it's constantly re-explained to us in case we might forget it, and it leads to a lot of boring repetition of language.

The rest of the writing wasn't great either. Let's take a look at just one scene I rolled my eyes at near the end of the book. Vin gets locked up during her assault on The Lord Ruler when the 11th metal doesn't really do anything. As a reader I'm thinking: "it made people appear, that's kind of like gold." Then Sanderson decides that Vin needs to go on this big long winded explanation, re-explaining every single metal group and trying to figure out where this new metal fits, hammering it into our heads that "hey, there's a similarity between gold and this one." A few minutes later she runs into one of the Nails-in-their-eyes guys (ok, cool idea, but a book needs something a little more than cool-factor to be good, and then the whole mystery of the Steel inquisitor was ruined anyway with the POV chapter near the end of the book) and she sees he has scars from arrowheads. Left at that, pretty cool, the reader gets to puzzle out the implications for themselves. But nope, Vin has to go on this other internal monologue "oh my god it's the same guy I shot with my arrows a few minutes back, and oh shit they're healed, he must have super powers". Its the same thing she does when she encounters anyone more powerful than her. Instead of letting the action speak for itself, she has to say "damn this guy has so much power". These are just the examples that jumped immediately into my head. Everything's spelled out, it's like Fantasy for the lowest common denominator Dan Brown-style stuff.

What about the characters? Kelsier is this witty happy-go-lucky guy, how do we know this? Because Vin constantly tells us how witty he is. When his wit is really just cringey dialogue followed by "he quipped" or some bullshit to let us know that was supposed to be humour. Vin as a character pretty much boils down to: hard upbringing, trust issues. Kelsier boils down to: badass. Don't get me started about Elend and Vin. I'm not usually a fan of overt romance in Fantasy, it's almost always too heavy-handed. Vin falls for Elend pretty quickly (ok, hormones, teenagers, I get it) because he's not like the others and he's mysterious and reads all the time and ignores her because that's sexy. And Elend likes Vin pretty quickly because, get this, she's pretty and not like all the others. It was all just too clichéd for me.

Character development in this book? Vin telling us how much Kelsier changed after his failures (despite not really changing that much at all), or telling us how much she's changed since meeting the crew (with some clichéd internal monologue about how trusting people and having friends is good, gee thanks for that pearl of wisdom), or Elend telling us how much he's changed since he was a kid. The characters felt static, but they had to keep telling us they changed.

How about plot? The army in the caves attacking prematurely? End of the world, everyone's sad, ready to give up, despite the fact that the garrison is out of the city anyway. It's not until super-smart-badass-with-a-cool-cloak-author-stand-in Kelsier comes along and is like "hey, you know this is exactly what we were aiming for" that they all get their heads out of their asses and hop to it. And then Kelsier single handedly takes over the pits of Hathcin - the same pits they were raising an army to conquer (but not really because plans within plans, as long as those plans are explained like a Scooby Doo villain at the end). You know, the pits that are the key to economical success of the entire empire? literally the Lord Ruler's most important resource? That I guess are pretty much unguarded? Despite the rampant rumours that a survivor of Hathcin (who knows exactly where the pits are) is hanging around the city. I don't know, all the action took place off screen so we don't really know, but if one mistborn is able to take over the most important part of the empire, it seems like a pretty shitty empire.

Vin is just naturally really good at allomancy, cool that's fun and unique. Her "special" lessons from individual mistings who have "such a good grasp" on their powers compared to Kelsier are a few paragraphs of "well this power is actually more powerful than you thought" that somehow Kelsier wasn't able to teach her. Her training with Kelsier seems to be pushing things back and forth, but when she gets into an actual fight she wins by 1) turning off her powers for a second to trick a fully trained mistborn (because somehow they aren't trained to recognize this amateur hour duplicity) and 2) by rigging up some admittedly cool arrowhead-metal contraptions and metal smokescreens (why doesn't everyone use these if they're so powerful? why haven't these immortal-esque all-powerful inquisitors seen this before? why aren't these little tricks the focus of her training when all this pushing and pulling stuff seems so easy to counter?).

Then Obi Wan, sorry I mean Kelsier, gets struck down by Darth Va- whoops, the Lord Ruler, while Luke Skywalker, wait nope it's Vin, watches. And then the rebel alliance/ska rebellion attacks the death star/city.

Best part of the book? The bits before the chapters with the Lord Ruler's journal. Adds some moral ambiguity, a slow drip of interesting concepts with some mystery that isn't explicitly beaten over our heads, ties into the main novel itself in a very Robin Hobb kind of way, and no shitty dialogue! While the ending switcheroo was clever, making the Lord Ruler actually just a corrupt classically-evil dude kind of bummed me out.

I could go on for a while. I think I didn't like some small things at first and it just kept getting worse and worse to the point where I wasn't able to enjoy anything at all. Despite everything, there's still a little part of me that's curious about The Deepness. Am I reading the next one? Hell no. I think I'm done with Sanderson for a while. For the sake of everyone else, I hope his newer books are better.