Review: Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy

So I kind of hated this series that I read recently and I was asked on twitter to explain why. It takes more than 140 characters, so here is a bit of a rant.

Note: You might have liked this trilogy. That's okay! Maybe you didn't notice the things I hated, or didn't hate them. Or liked some other things much more than I did that made the whole thing worthwhile for you. That's fine, we can still be friends. Just don't recommend me any other Brandon Sanderson novels, basically.

Contains Spoilers for all 3 novels:

First I will start with some of the things I did like:

The magic system was certainly interesting. Basically people get their magical powers by eating bits of metal and "burning" them in their stomachs. They can telekenetially affect metal or affect people's emotions or whatever. It was certainly unlike most magic systems I have read about and I thought that was kind of neat!


So I actually liked the first novel in the series quite a lot. I was fairly annoyed by some of the following things but it was only when they kept happening and kept getting worse that the scales were tipped. Like, I actually recommended the first book to a few people but then had to go and take it back after I read the other two. And, to be fair, I did read the second two books in less than a day. So they were fairly readable and all that.

So anyway, I didn't think it was super well written and I didn't really care about any of the characters. Sanderson seemed to attempt to do this thing where every half-book or so there would be a big "EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW IS WRONG" moment which I didn't hate in theory but it felt really really clumsy. Also I got the impression he was going for lots of BIG REVEAL moments but reallyreally messing them up. Basically by making things really obvious (and in at least one case unambiguously spelling it out in text) and then making the characters take hundreds of pages to work it out. And that just kept happening. And I read the second two books in less than 24 hours total so I didn't have a lot of time to ponder things, I'm not super smart to work it out before the big reveal moment it's just that when I read in text that someone is writing something in metal because words that aren't etched into metal can't be trusted and then it takes hundreds of pages for the characters to finally work out that... words that aren't etched into metal are being mysteriously changed by the big baddie!! It's hard to really be impressed. 

Also did we need that many monster races? Really?

So anyway, all of that would have just made it a series of books I didn't really enjoy. here are the things that made me want to throw the books at the wall:

Magical boob powers.
So this didn't actually affect the plot at all. It was just a throwaway line that was thrown away several times and ugh.
So some of the magic people can manipulate people's emotions by either suppressing some or all emotions, or intensifying them. Some people are, understandably, uncomfortable with the idea that someone can come and tinker with what they are feeling but because the people doing the tinkering are supposed to be the heroes, the author explains why this doesn't make them evil terrible people with an example.

Sanderson claims that tinkering with people's emotions is no more evil or underhand than what ladies do with their boobs (ie MANIPULATE THE FEELINGS OF MENS). Gross. 

Well done, foreigner, you've learnt to talk like a normal person!
So there is a character, Lestbournes aka "Spook" who comes from a different area of the world and speaks in an "Eastern Dialect" which nobody else can understand. This is treated by the text like some kind of speech impediment and a lot of Spook's character development consists of him, basically, learning to talk "properly".
He's congratulated several times, in text, for learning to speak normally. Not congratulated for learning the dominant dialect in the area he now lives in because hifive bro now you can communicate your wants and needs to the people you're surrounded by. He can now talk "normally" and not in his nonsense street-speak.
Also people mock his dialect by speaking actual nonsense to each other. Gross.

Democracy is a nice idea in theory, but ACTUALLY what people REALLY NEED is a dictator.
One of the characters, Elend, is one of the nobles and at first he's really passionate about democracy and giving everyone a fair go and maybe the Skaa (peasants basically) aren't that different from real people! What a nice guy! Then he ends up in charge and gets a chance to put it all into practice...

And it all falls apart and they kick him out and nothing gets done right because really, deep down, those peasants just need someone to tell them what to do.

Because it turns out the Skaa REALLY ARE DIFFERENT to the nobles. The nobles are physiologically taller, better looking and smarter than the Skaa. They can interbreed but the Skaa were designed to be the workers and the Nobles are designed to rule over them because they are just, you know, more betterer or something.

Girl needs a real MAN who is MANLY enough for her
Female lead falls in love with sweet bookish noble dude. She beats people up and he reads books and it is AWESOME AND I LOVE IT apart from the bit where of course then he needs to get magical powers too and his have to be STRONGER than hers. Ugh!

A Real Man has a PENIS
So there's a dude in the books who is a eunuch so like every eunuch in a novel I have read he has to have a sad about not being a "real" man. Which is fine, obviously. Dudes (or ladies) with missing and/or excess parts is, I understand, often suicidally painful. But the text supports his assertion that he lacks the proper equipment to be called a man, or even use male pronouns. Okay so the book uses he/him/his for him. But it's basically the big reveal of the series that an in-text prophecy doesn't use the expected male pronouns for the "hero of the ages" so there's a red herring about it being the female lead. But then it turns out it's the eunuch and that's why they used those weird non-male pronouns. Because he's not really male! AAUUGHH