Brandon Sanderson needs to step away from his writing desk and explain what happened to common sense in modern fantasy.
I’m not saying he’s a bad storyteller, but when you have a billionaire book deal and still fill 500 pages with a character tying their shoes in magical slow motion, maybe we’ve lost the plot. My neighbor spent an hour last week arguing that Sanderson’s magic systems are “hard” science. Hard? It’s common sense: if you need a 200-page appendix to explain why a rock glows, maybe it’s not a rock, it’s a tax write-off. We used to just read books without needing a degree in theoretical physics to understand a sword fight. Call me old-fashioned, but “he put the sword in the bad guy” should not require three chapters of math. This is what happens when we let authors get too big for their britches—they forget that stories are for everyone, not just the basement-dwelling calculator crowd. Common sense says if I can’t follow the plot without a spreadsheet, you’ve failed as a writer.