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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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Sanderson is very good at what he does. What he does is crank out easily digestible lowbrow epic fantasy. Sanderson novels are the MCU films of contemporary fantasy literature. He's a self-admitted mediocre prose artist, but he has a reasonably effective plot formula and has a genuine knack for writing fantasy action scenes, which make his books fun to read if you're into that sort of thing. The gimmick-based world building and magic systems appeal to the nerdism of fantasy fandom and gives a sense of novelty to what are otherwise fairly forgettable stories.

Sanderson is YA, but aimed primarily at men in their early twenties rather than women in their early twenties. The fact that his writing is not on the level of GRRM is the point - almost every higher caliber SFF writer I can think of is also significantly heavier, which is not necessarily a plus.

The most egregious is on the sentence/paragraph level, where Sanderson literally repeats himself.

I have an ungenerous theory: this is a plus for two reasons. The first is that epic fantasy is a genre that implicitly equates bulk with quality (you compare it to LotR, but LotR is quite modest in length compared to later epic fantasies), so a padded writing style helps there. A lot of readers want the pointless fluff. The second is that it makes it easier to read without paying close attention. It's okay if you miss details because Sanderson will just tell you again.

He's a self-admitted mediocre prose artist,

Ironically, I believe this was actually one of the things his editor reined him in on. Something like "You can't write easily digestible prose most of the time and then turn into Hemingway for three paragraphs."

Is the implication that Hemingway is not easily digestible?

Sanderson is YA, but aimed primarily at men in their early twenties rather than women in their early twenties.

Isn't YA aimed at people in their early tens? It's just called YA to flatter their egos.

Some of the more successful fantasies of the past decade or so have been YA series Throne of Glass and Shadow and Bone (by Sarah Maas and Leigh Bardugo, respectively) and approximately 11 zillion copycats. The books are nominally aimed at people in their late teens, but it turns out people in their twenties have more money.

I think he is referencing the perception that the "YA" audience now skews older than the people it was originally supposed to appeal to. The idea being that "YA" is now targeted at the demographic of "YA fans" (made up predominantly of adult women who are looking for YA genre tropes) and no longer appeals as much to actual teens. I haven't dug into how true this is.

As a once-young adult, young adult genre has always been trash, it's the label that your Christian mom will let you buy and read than anything else.

The genre deliberately caters more to the parents buying the books than to the kids.

Wiki says 12-18.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_adult_literature

Most women reading (read?) the magazine called Seventeen are in their early tens, too.

I'm not sure why it was called YA, but a central example of a YA novel is a coming-of-age novel. Aimed at someone who is one the brink of or currently transitioning to adulthood (or rather, adulthood as it was before the extremely extended adolescence we have nowadays). (Note the earlier Harry Potter books were NOT YA, they was "middle grade").

Publishers have come up with a new category called "New Adult", but the central example is still a coming-of-age novel -- only for college-age people. Reflecting the extended adolescence we have today.

What do you think people in their mid-later tens read?

If my niece is anything to go by, manga and webtoons...

TikTok closed captions? If you want me to be 100% serious, then fine, I'll extend YA to midtens, but I totally expect late tens to switch to regular midwit literature without YA labels.

I suppose late tens was when I switched to webliterature.

He's a self-admitted mediocre prose artist, but he has a reasonably effective plot formula and has a genuine knack for writing fantasy action scenes, which make his books fun to read if you're into that sort of thing.

Also, there are plenty of people (hello!) who couldn't care less about his prose. I don't read to enjoy the quality of the words themselves (no shade on those who do, it's just not my thing), I read to enjoy the content those words convey. People love to dunk on Sanderson saying his prose is mediocre, but rarely seem to consider that not everyone values that the way they do.

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