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by edgyquant 1576 days ago
He’s the Stephen King of Tolkien-rip off fantasy. He churns them out, sure, but I don’t consider the quality all that high.
2 comments

> Tolkien-rip off fantasy

You're free to dislike the books, but this is an extremely unfair characterization. Sanderson's books bear very little resemblance to Tolkien's beyond the genre and the elaborate nature of the worldbuilding.

It’s not unfair. The genre he writes is a genre of Tolkien ripoffs of which he is the most prolific.
There are Tolkien rip offs, but Tolkien didn’t invent fantasy, and unlike a lot of fantasy authors Sanderson doesn’t include elements like dwarfs, or elves or really anything that Tolkien came up with as far as I can tell. Are you maybe confusing him with someone else?
If you're including Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time, then I guess Sanderson broadly falls into that same category. I'd hardly label any of them "rip-offs", though, especially given that there are books out there blatantly ripping off Tolkien right down to elves, dwarves and halflings.
I’ve only read the Mistborn series, but I didn’t find it all similar to Tolkien–not in style or themes.
By "Tolkien ripoff", do you mean anything beyond "fantasy novel"?
Except King can actually write dialog that isn't 100% cringe.

Sanderson's refusal to have characters ever actually curse is just infuriating.

Your need for swearing in dialog for it to sound real says a lot more about you than it does about the author.
He uses "storming" as a proxy. :)
Yes, and it reads like something a prudish 60 year old would write for 5 year olds.
I actually have always appreciated it because I have taken it as a level of world building beyond what is obvious.

Most all profanity in our language can in some way be traced back to a religious context. It would the make sense that on other worlds with totally different religious backgrounds they would use different cursing.

In fact his usage of this concept is so subtle that you can detect what characters are from the world and which ones aren't by whether they use damnation as a noun or an adjective.

Goramit! You've reminded me Firefly was killed too ruttin quickly.
This is exactly why Mat was so badly butchered at the end of the Wheel of Time: Sanderson doesn't have any experience of carousing to draw on, and prudish is spot on.
Swearing is cringe.
Agreed. I read the Mistborn books a few years ago and just found them very... sanitised, especially compared to other prominent fantasy novels by the likes of Scott Lynch or the brilliantly sweary Joe Abercrombie.
I wasn’t saying King and his are the same quality, just that the speed of writing is similar. With that said King writes his fair share of cringe dialogue.
I have only ever read the Wheel of Time by Sanderson, but the dialogue was enough to convince me I never needed to bother with him again. Meanwhile, I find King to be probably the best American English writer that I've encountered. By that I'm really only talking about his use of the language, and what a pleasure it is to read. And of course, dialogue is a part of that. This is all subjective of course - that's just how I feel about it.
Sanderson didn't write much of the Wheel of Time, only the very end after the (main) author died.
I really hate to be a guy that's like "I know", but come on, I obviously know that. The dialogue was good from Jordan, bad from Sanderson. In my opinion. Thus my statements above.
Even if you know that, what you wrote is misleading to anyone else reading who doesn't know the details.
I mean, his name is only on 2,700 pages of it.
Which sounds like a lot, but the full series is over 10,000.