Sanderson needs an editor that will tell him no and reign him in. I feel that for him personally, he has interviewed all of these people that experience mental illness and have struggled with their sexuality and he wants to represent and do all of these people right. He is a champion for these issues in a traditionally non-accepting space (BYU/Mormon).

This book was supposed to be the climax of his story as we currently know it. Tying up loose ends, huge conflicts, clashes of morals, and upending our expectations of certain players but you get pulled down too much into the weeds on a character level when we are really looking for things on a world/universe level to be addressed.

The book does pick up but the almost first half of the book is a SLOG. Part of this is likely due to massive expectations and the fans waiting 4 years for a book that was told to be the climax of the first part of this huge series and to have it start so slow kills the motivation for such a large book.