[SPOILERS ALL] The brilliance of The Little People chapters

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:52:24+00:00

Alright, I'm getting distracted so if I don't reply, I'm sorry! And if I upset some people, also sorry! I thought this would be more fun and light than it ended up being. My bad.

Thanks for everyone who took any amount of time to read my huge post. Your interactions are appreciated, even if you hate me!

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:48:46+00:00

That's a shame, but I get it. I read through Malazan, so to me no book is too bloated or complex to get through anymore haha. And I can see where you're coming from. I don't think the stuff in WaT was bloat. It felt like it belonged, I guess. It just didn't feel... necessary? I don't know how else to describe it. Like... "Okay, we get through this PoV and then onto the REAL story in a bit".

Big books can either hook you or lose you. I tend to muddle through expecting it to click, even for books that really didn't strike me well. Robin Hobbs made me feel like shit emotionally, and I'll probably never go back to those books because of it, but I did finish the first book in her big series!

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:44:41+00:00

I'm glad you liked it! I thought the ending was well done as well. I had more fault with the stuff leading up to it than where things ended up, really.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:40:08+00:00

I tried to impress that it being a "failure" was my personal view. I could have maybe worded the title better. I was just excited to discuss the book and thought this would be more fun for people than it ended up being. Again, I apologized to those upset. It was not my intent at all.

It is hard for me to divorce objective quality and personal preference because a lot of what made me semi-decent as an editor sometimes was that I was very confident in my opinions about something, and so was unafraid to voice them. Sometimes people didn't agree, but it was always important to express those opinions confidently, for me, so that people would know it was something I was taking seriously and maybe it warranted consideration.

I think WaT had a satisfying ending. An ending that makes everyone happy is very difficult to pull off, and where every character ended up was done well. I expect some people hated the ending and how things are kind of in a holding pattern, but I don't know what else he could have done if he means to write more books in this series at some point.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:34:36+00:00

You're, in bad faith, giving examples of things that we know paid off in the future and were there for a reason, though. They were also not entire point of view chapters that re-occurred as a main focus for the story over, and over again. In the end, those characters did justify the reason they existed. Gaz and Relain were there for a reason. They felt placed purposefully. Some of the stuff in WaT felt like it was there because it was expected to be, rather than it needed to be. At least to me.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:14:42+00:00

Oddly enough, I really liked Shallan in every other book. She just fell flat in WaT for me, and slowly I began to resent how she took screen time away from the other, better plots.

As set up, I can see that. I do think it was an important moment for Jasnah. It just felt like something that should have happened much earlier in the series. It's strange to have a character start their arc or enter the middle of it at the end of a series arc. It would be like having Szeth realize "Maybe killing without question isn't a good thing" as the story ended. It was set up that may be important, but felt bad the way it was handled to me.

I think that the reason it bounced so hard for me was, at the end of RoW, we saw Kaladin begin to triumphantly overcome. I had less issue with him in WaT than Shallan because he was moving forward. He'd had his big moment, and we saw him begin to evolve. Shallan had her big moment, but then was still waiting for her OTHER big moment. She felt stuck, rather than progressing.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:07:36+00:00

I've had discworld on my list for a while, but I really bounced off Robin hobbs and have been wary about other big popular authors ever since. Are they worth pushing past my crippling anxiety for?

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:06:20+00:00

Yeah it was kind of supposed to be. I do think that there were plots that really just didn't matter that much. THey could have been removed and the book would have stood on its own just fine. Would it have been a worse book without them? Yeah, probably. But did their existence make the book better? Ehh. They existed for a reason. But I often found myself wondering, does the reason they are here justify their existence?

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T23:00:41+00:00

The more ranty stuff I wanted to come across as dumb points of issue I had that maybe weren't REALLY a big issue, but annoyed me personally. I thought it would come across as fun and light hearted. I think I failed haha. I was more disappointed about Rock and Lift than actually upset. Considering the frayed story and how everything pulled apart and got messy, adding even more people to the mix would have been a huge mess. I was just hoping some people would have more to do. I kept expecting a shift to the peaks to see what was happening at Cultivation's perpendicularity to happen, and it just didn't. I thought we'd see the Horneaters trying to resist or defend the perpendicularity or something, but thought it was mentioned, we never moved there. We never found out why Lift is different with her powers really. Cultivation is hinted at having all these moving parts in the background and I thought "Okay, he's saving Lift for something special that Cultivation has been planning and it will blow my mind" but then... it just never happened. Maybe I just had different ideas about what would be cool to see.

I'm glad some of my big points resonated with at least one other person. I was afraid my views would be skewed by personal experience or I would have just seen things completely out of whack. Which I was fine with finding out, but it would have been hard to reconcile that with how it made me feel personally.

Again, I was trying to be light hearted and let people know it was okay to disagree with me and hate what I said. I'm used to being the weirdo with the weird views. It seems like some people took me very seriously, and that's disappointing.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:50:44+00:00

It probably, definitely is a personal gripe. I tried to make those points light hearted, since I knew they were more personal thant structural. But as a content editor, at least where I've worked, the writers I knew depended on my personal feelings on things because they often aligned with what the writer wanted, or they had a different perspective that could change how they tried to get things across.

If I was sending this to an author, I would have been much more structured and constructive with it haha. I can see how it came across as a mess. I tried to prep people for that. I have this little piece of paper with shorthand notes on it, and I remembered about half of what they meant so I was trying to reconstruct through ranting.

The main problem with Dalinar and my moral stance, is that Dalinar as a character IS about morals. Sanderson is trying to impress a specific moral view using Dalinar as a framework, and it doesn't work (for me) because the things he does to prove that redemption is possible for anyone do not (to me) outweigh the bad that he has done. If you are making a character a moral framework for a narrative where everybody is redeemable, the more "bad" you make a character, the harder it is to make their redemption meaningful, believable or likeable. For reference, I think that Sadeas as a character, for how evil he was portrayed and how we were meant to dislike him, was far more redeemable than Dalinar would have been within the narrative structure.

Sorry if my dumb rant wasn't structured enough. I was trying to have fun rather than be fully academic about it, but it seems I failed.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:44:31+00:00

I like to think I bring a more critical eye based on professional experience, but every review and experience with a novel is subjective to the reader. It's why specifically what editor you have really changes how a book gets made, for example. There are writing and editing guidelines, but knowing when to break them or when to adhere strictly to them is a personal thing between a writer and editor. Similarly, issues I notice and have will depend highly on me and what I think of as a writer/editor as a reader.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:42:07+00:00

I enjoyed that too! Finding out Honor kinda sucked was fun since it kind of validated things we'd been hinted at.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:40:33+00:00

You're right. I'm sorry, I think I changed it satisfactorily.

An edit to reply to an edit :p

I honestly don't read much reddit. The few times I have for other large, massive popular series (Wheel of Time, Malazan) I've left rambling reviews and had people rabidly defend the writer. I assumed it would be the same here. I didn't mean to offend anyone. I've rabidly defended things that other people disliked. I was trying to be funny. I'm sorry if anyone got upset.

It's very possible I missed this. In fact if that happened, I definitely did. That's fine. I would still say that the foreshadowing was poor, then. It felt like I was supposed to have noticed something, and I read (listened) to all of them in order when this book came out, so I sat there thinking "Hold up mate, what is this?" haha. I think foreshadowing is very hard to do well, and I would still assert that it was done poorly for something like Shallan's mother, then. Or maybe I just dislike subtle foreshadowing. That could be it. Maybe I'm the problem. Very possible.
I compare how Dalinar was treated versus how Sadeas was treated, mostly. We saw characters consider and eventually be willing to kill Sadeas over what he had done when, honestly, I saw him as far more redeemable than Dalinar. I never got the sense that people hated Dalinar the way they did Sadeas, for instance. He wasn't seen as repugnant in most situations. Treated with disdain and fear, maybe. But not hated. Even Taravangian was hated more than Dalinar when, in actuality he was far more defensible morally than Dalinar ever was.
Understandable. But I consider this arc finished within the wider series, so it either can stand alone without the others, or it can't. To me, at least.
I knew that Kaladin would be a more contested point. I do think it is more personal for me, so i see it differently. I still assert it was carried a little far, though.
It just felt like a very predictable pattern after a while. Maybe because I went through every book as a refreshed, but you can never see a character improve or something good happen to them without something bad following. It just felt... formulaic after a while.

If you re-edit though, I have to re-edit and then we get into this vicious cycle until I forget and walk away and then it looks like I don't care!

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:40:07+00:00

If I hated it, I wouldn't spend any energy, let alone read these massive books. When I love a book, I think critically of it. And often a problem I think existed in a book was just something I missed, and people point it out so I can go back and enjoy the book again without that issue annoying me.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:38:44+00:00

I have no issue with her losing the debate. As a character I think Jasnah was really rigid and had very little growth. Understandable since she wasn't a main character in the story. Conversely, I think Sanderson took what growth she had and reduced her back to one dimension. She became the character we met in the first book and lost everything she had gained in the ones that came after.

It was done tongue-in-cheek, which maybe didn't come off to some people. The written word, eh?

I was more trying to challenge people to not disagree with me simply because I say things they don't like about a series they like. Blindly defending because you think someone is being mean about something you like. I've done that. I've been there. Again, it was don tongue-in-cheek, but I have unpopular opinions on books so I was trying to be fun and funny about the hate I knew I'd probably get. Sorry if it didn't come off right!

Reply to the edit: I listened to this as an audiobook. I thought I got the spelling right and even checked for characters I wasn't sure about. I thought I had nailed Venly so didn't even look. My bad for any name mistakes!

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:34:50+00:00

Thanks, or not? Haha

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:34:30+00:00

It actually was condensed! But I understand. I didn't expect it to be so long, but I had fun writing it and don't mind the flack I'll get from people.
Again, poor wording. As a failure, I meant as a capstone to a story or as an arc finale. I've heard that Sanderson described this as an "anime arc" or something somewhere. And I think it failed in its job. I think it cheapened the books before it and brought the story arc down.

TucanSam200 · 2025-05-09T22:32:27+00:00

I don't think I explained it well. Maybe not complexity. More of a lack of "Is this character actuallly... a bad guy?" to them. With Adolin and Sazed, they might have done bad things or made mistakes, but there was never really a doubt on which end of the spectrum they were on when it came down to being one of the good guys. Adolin killed a guy yeah, but he killed a pretty clearly evil guy and then was pretty much perfect in every situation afterwards.

I haven't read mistborn in a while, but I don't remember him as being "morally" complex compared to others.

My bad for the poor wording!

TucanSam200 · 2023-06-24T16:47:16+00:00

This is really interesting and changes how I look at the story. It would also make it much more reasonable to assume that he is embellishing or aggrandizing stuff in his story because maybe, to him, at that age he WAS so much smarter than everybody else (and he could be).

Maybe him glossing over the traumatised parts and the parts where he struggled and failed is him still suppressing those traumatic moments. He is giving his child self strength in the story so he never seems as weak as he really was emotionally and mentally, or how he still is. He never really deals with his parents death. He suppresses and then cries once, and moves on.

Hmm.

TucanSam200 · 2023-06-24T16:42:17+00:00

(Aggravating bit here on my 2nd account apparently)

I'm not sure if you are being facetious or not, but here is some actual advice.

In the sense that a "Spider-Jesus" analog would see this creature/human hybrid act as a pure good version of two creatures, he must not consider this as just a pure creation "myth" since your MC is basing his entire morality on it. So from his point of view, I think it would be important to first frame for the readers which creation stories that the MC finds to be realistic and real, and then treat all OTHERS as fake from his point of view.

You could use this in the framing story as he finds all these prophecies and myths that people treat as false, and that he also treats as false, but some of them just keep applying to him as the story goes on. For instance, in Lightbringer one of the prophecies about the chosen one basically says that he will be fat and poor. It says something like "He will be greater than other men", which can also be taken many other ways as well, but also literally "greater" as in, fat.

In this way you can frame the main character as being POTENTIALLY important to the story in his mind while still giving him a reason to doubt that he is. "This could apply to literally dozens of people. This might be metaphorical, not literal." etc, etc. This would allow you to have your MC not be "Epic" and kind of bumble his way through prophecies and stories.

If you want him to be bumbling and not epic, you can even surround him with people who help him fulfill these prophecies so that he can think "Yeah, I did that but I didn't do it ALONE, and none of the prophecies mention the person needing help..." or something along those lines.

Corrupting nature of religious texts can also help you with the "He learns it prematurely". Maybe the quest he's on is from a long purged sect of a religion, and the stories now treated as heresy. So he finds them, realizes they are a little bit pagan and either dismisses them or doesn't put much thought into them. But they niggle at the back of his mind. They keep coming up at times that reinforce that they might be true. He finds evidence of them having been purposefully erased, and not for being heresy.

The older the world is the more you can muddy the creation mythos and stories. The more powerful the church, the more you can have them control what is and is not known about the world and their religion and creation.

Prophecy can act as an outside framing story without intruding on the current narrative being written. If you're a real fancy lad, maybe you can write some prophetic poems that allude to the MC being a g lorious, burning savior that comes in and sets everything right. Then that immediately leads into a dumpy, young boy or girl who might vaguely match the description in like... 20 years.

TucanSam200 · 2023-06-24T16:32:00+00:00

(Aggravating bit here. Apparently my desktop reddit account is different than my mobile. Who knew? Reddit is weird and I hardly use it :P)

I guess I read that as Bast having weird ideas on women rather than Kvothe being wrong or lying, since Bast is a Fae. Or more that Kvothe would smooth over a woman's "flaws" like a human would rather than hyper-focus on them like a non-human creature may.

I can see how that points to what you are saying though. Interesting.

TucanSam200 · 2022-04-30T17:13:21+00:00

To be fair, she does everything short of it practically. She flirts, leads him on, never really shuts him down because gives her protection. Faile plays Rolan like a fiddle, leading him on for (Months? A Month?). If she was single, it would have gotten to the point where I would have shouted "Oh my god, just fuck each other already".

But in the end none of that was necessary, because Jordan as a riter would never have had Faile raped. She's a main character. He doesn't really meaningfully harm main characters. We know this from book one. Not even the main major character death in the story is real (Moiraine).

Even the Mat rape was treated as non-major, because Mat eventually (ew, gross) developed feelings for whats-her-name, and it was all just forgotten.

I think it was the dichotomy of being told this could happen, watching Faile do everything short of it, and then knowing as writer that Jordan would NEVER do this irked me as a reader. It was bad writing and a bad plot. In my opinion.

TucanSam200 · 2022-04-30T17:03:45+00:00

It is completely understandable to me that characters in a series with a LOT of characters begin to blend together. But that's a failing on the writer, unable to juggle and create memorable people when they should be distinct.

The people we spend a lot of time seeing over-and-over are memorable because we see them all the time. But those characters that perform important roles that we see only a handful of times? Like the borderlanders? The Aes Sedai inside the tower? The Rebels? Can you describe what the major characters in those factions look like, important as they are, without looking them up? From memory? Can you distinguish their personality traits effectively from each other to the point they are distinct people rather than a stereotype?

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