Will we get more of Lift?
You will get a lot more with Lift. She was written into the outline from the very begining as one of the people who gets a book of her own. With Lift part of the inspiration was– Boy, what was the inspiration for Lift? When I was building the Stormlight Archive I said “I want the Knights Radiant to run the gamut of different character styles, ages, and types of story.” And when you say “knight”– When I say knight you imagine one thing, what you don’t imagine is a thirteen-year-old hispanic girl, right? And I said “I want to have the people who are in the Knights Radiant to not be the standard what you think of.” They are the entire world’s cultures having different people. And so I said “What are somebody who does not fit that mold?” That you would say is not a knight. Lift was partially developed out of me wanting to build a character who was awesome but was so different from what everyone would think of. ‘Cause you say knight and they think of white dude in armor and I wanted something very different from that. And that’s where she came from. It also came partially from my wife reading a lot of fantasy and complaining and she’s like “You know the asians show up in fantasy, asian culture inspires a lot. European culture of course does. You see a lot of these things but where are the hispanics?” Yeah there’s one. So she challenged me to put a hispanic culture in my books because I had never done it before and so Lift is an outgrowth of that, so are the Herdazians. They are meant to be sort of in the same way that the Alethi are inspired by Korean culture, mashed up with this sort of concept of medieval knights. Shallan is based a little off of Western American/Europe culture. The Herdazians are launching off some of the original hispanic concepts. So the thing is, you want every culture to be new and original but you are working from somewhere. And the problem is we all work from the same stories for so long that is part of the reason why fantasy is starting to feel so stale.
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