I’ve seen in reviews of Mistborn that a criticsm that pops up from time to time is that you tend to repeat the basic principles of the magic system. I’ve seen that some feel hit over the head with it. Personally, I liked that fact since the magic system was new and it helped me to remember and understand.
I’m also seeing criticsm now with Warbreaker that the magic system isn’t explained enough to thoroughly understand it. I’ve pointed out in discussions that not even Vasher understands it all.
But here’s my question: Did criticsm of the magic system’s explanations in Mistborn have anything to do with Warbreaker having considerably less explanation in its magic system?”
Wow, that’s a very detailed and interesting question. The answer is no.
…Okay, there’s more to that answer. I accepted the criticisms of the Mistborn books with the knowledge that there was really no other way around it—the way I was writing those books and the complexity of the magic system made me feel like I needed to give those hints. It’s not like I’m trying to write down to the lowest denominator, but at the same time I want to make sure that the complicated magic system is a force driving the book—and is something interesting rather than something confusing. Across a three-book epic like that I wanted to make sure that I was not leaving people behind. That’s always a balance in a book series. And I don’t know where to set that balance. In fact, I think the balance is going to be different for every person. Any given book that you read, some people are going to find it overexplained and some people are going to find it underexplained. I’m always trying to strike the right balance, particularly for the tone of a given book, to make that work for the novel.
With Warbreaker , as you’ve pointed out, the magic system is much less understood by the poeple taking part in it. In the Mistborn books the magic system is very well understood. Even though there are little pieces of it that people don’t know yet, those peices are easy to grasp and understand and use once people figure out what they are. In the Mistborn books the world is in a state where people have spend 1000 years using this magic system and perfecting it and understanding it. In Warbreaker , they haven’t. They still don’t know much about what’s going on. It’s very mysticized. People haven’t sat down and spent enough time pursuing scholarly research about it, figuring it out. Beyond that there’s no immortal Lord Ruler figure explaining it all to them—or if there is, it’s Vasher and he’s not telling anyone. And so the magic in Warbreaker has a very different feel to it. I wanted it to be a little confusing, because it is confusing for the main characters.
I wouldn’t say that the criticism of the Mistborn books is what drove me; the needs of the various plots is what drove me.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.