Anyone else feel like Brando Sando lost the plot on this one?
I really enjoyed the first two books in this series, but I'm reading Wind and Truth and at 200 pages... it just feels like a slog.
So many named characters with absolutely no personality. An incredibly convoluted plot. An impossible number of Radiant and Fused orders to remember. And, it seems like nobody has a character arc anymore. Adolin committed murder and he's too busy thinking about clothes, because that's his one personality trait. Dalinar no longer seems like a complicated person. Jasnah and Navani don't seem dangerous like they used to. I thought Shallan fixed her personality issues, but she's still got three personalities. (Does anyone think it's interesting when she LARPs as a cowgirl or a knight?)
Honestly, I think tying the series so much into the greater Cosmere was a bad idea. The whole series feels small and irrelevant once it zooms out from Roshar to the greater universe; a greater universe whose existence doesn't seem to phase anyone. Nor does anyone seem really interested.
And the great, continent-wide war... feels like it doesn't happen, because everyone just hangs out at Urithiru talking all the time. We hear about the war, but it doesn't feel like it really happens. We don't get to really see the impact on the ground level. Nobody ever seems to die.
I'm really tired of reading about these boring people sitting around Urithiru just talking constantly.
For that matter, it feels like Sanderson has forgotten about all the interesting lore and flavor that made the series so interesting to begin with. The first couple books felt like a really interesting, alien world with some cool characters. This book feels like the world is just window dressing for a bunch of characters to share stiff, boring, unrealistic dialogue. (Which, for the most part, sounds like it was spoken by a constantly-online millennial.)
Am I being too harsh? Does this book get good at a certain point?