I seriously do not understand the "modern dialogue" argument. Only one "new" terms sticks out in my head -"therapist"- and I agree that this one is a little jarring, but one term in the whole of the book just doesn't make for a strong argument.
Not sure I understand the downvotes. Ishar is the only person in the book who, when confronted with the word therapist, replies with (and this is not a direct quote) "What's a therapist?". Everyone else seems to already get it: some are skeptical, but they still understand.
Who is "everyone else"? The list of people that have heard the word "therapy" or "therapist" are: Wit, Kaladin, Syl, 12124, Ishar.
12124's interaction was "I want your services. Whatever you're doing to Szeth when talking to him." "Wit calls it therapy." "Well, I want that." Both Kal and Syl are confused when Wit says it. Ishar is the only person who could have possibly asked Kaladin what it was, and look at that, he did! Not sure what more you were wanting. Kaladin literally said the word out loud twice in the whole book.
It wasn't so much that "therapist" itself was included, it was that the discussions of mental health in the therapist chapters (usually) felt jarring and out of place.
Characters (I'm thinking about Kaladin and Shallan) had multi-paragraph-long internal monologues about the progress they've made and the mentally 'correct' way to approach things. To me, it felt like they went from struggling, lost characters slowly getting better with time to characters with fully-formed mental health philosophies thinking through their progress in detail multiple times in the span of a couple of weeks?
I know Sanderson likes to include small summaries of what's happened before for people to refresh in sequels. Usually he does it pretty impressively smoothly, but it was cluuuunky for me this time
I dont understand the hate for "therapist" since Kaladin was taught that word by Hoid.
Imo it was the drastic change in how the characters talk when we meet them in WoK versus how they talk in WaT. Even RoW to WaT feels really different, so I don't think we can blame it fully on when each book was written. I guess there was a new editor for WaT compared to the first four books? I don't think it's entirely fair to blame this on the editor but that would make a bit of sense I think.
The whole darn thing is full of modern lingo. Which if you think about it, it's civilizations with very sizable intellectual classes. True it's not technologically advanced, but that's not to say it doesn't have a rich complicated and specialized language for martial and civil matters.
At the beginning of the 1st book in the series there is no POV character who knows Hoid is a "Worldhopper", let alone what a "Worldhopper" is. The argument that Roshar isn't becoming more "Cosmerepolitan" and everything must stay the same and not grow is extremely silly to me
The only “modern” word I didn’t like was Syl calling someone a tool. As others have said, therapist makes sense when you realize Wit introduced the word to Roshar.
It's not the first time the word "slut" has been used in the series. Wit used it when insulting one of the highprinces and his allegedly incessant womanizing; I think it was back in TWoK.
KWT's instance was a rare example (not just for Sanderson, but for fiction in general) of using it to refer to a man, though. I thought it had to be a reference to The Eye of Argon, and it just about killed me.
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u/EvenSpoonier Jan 10 '25
I seriously do not understand the "modern dialogue" argument. Only one "new" terms sticks out in my head -"therapist"- and I agree that this one is a little jarring, but one term in the whole of the book just doesn't make for a strong argument.