KONSHUU | Volume 55, Issue 9
JOURNEY BEFOR THE STORMLIGHT ARC BLAKE MORRISON
Writer
2nd Year, English and Japanese
What is the most important word a man can write? It’s the next one. Always the next word.
A little over a year ago, I started reading The Stormlight Archive, the ongoing epic fantasy novel series by Brandon Sanderson. This was unprecedented for me. I hadn’t read anything by Sanderson before. I hadn’t even read many fantasy novels other than the short and simple ones I read as a kid, and those hardly count given how little I remember of them. Before Stormlight, my understanding of fantasy as a genre essentially started and stopped with The Lord of the Rings. Sure, I’ve also read some fantasy manga and watched some fantasy anime, but other than a few notable exceptions like Berserk, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Made in Abyss, most fantasy anime and manga that actually have fantasy settings and not just fantasy elements are highly derivative isekai series or dragged out shonen series that often make me feel like I’m wasting my time. It’s not simply the length of these shonen fantasy series I’m adverse to. Rather, I dislike how much of their runtime is spent on battles with obvious outcomes and on showcasing the special abilities of every newly introduced character and on cookiecutter evil organizations and blah blah blah. It doesn’t help that most fantasy anime have soft magic systems, which means that the rules of the system aren’t rigidly defined, which means that the character with the stronger will and the better friendship speech is probably going to win any given fight. Like they say: where there’s a will there’s a power of friendship speech. But enough about anime. Until a year ago, I thought fantasy stories were mostly The Lord of the Rings clones or trash isekai anime, and in hindsight, it’s obvious that was because the only fantasy stories I had consumed for the past five years were The Lord of the Rings and fantasy anime and manga. The Stormlight Archive illuminated just how ignorant I was. If the average seasonal isekai series is the nadir of modern fantasy, then Stormlight is the shining pinnacle. Interestingly, Brandon Sanderson himself claims that Stormlight is his one novel series that he doesn’t have a concise pitch for. This makes some amount of sense, as starting right with the series’ first entry The Way of Kings, every main book is structured as three novels in one, with three main perspective characters dealing with their own trials and tribulations. It might not be concise, but I think that one can still pitch The Way of Kings as they can any great book, albeit with a separate section for each main character... And one more section for the unique setting because it’s fascinating enough to merit it. The Stormlight Archive takes place on the continent/world of Roshar, a fantasy setting unlike
anything you’ve ever seen in fiction. With the exception of the lands far to the west, there are no wide open plains of grass or even the soil to grow them in. Roshar mostly consists of rocky terrain, and what hardy plants there are growing between the cracks have evolved to recede away from any movement towards them. Instead of soft-skinned and furred mammals, crustacean-like creatures of chitin and carapace crawl through the lands. There may seem to be little believability to this setting at first, but that all changes once you learn that every few days, what’s known as a highstorm sweeps across Roshar from east to west. The highstorm is at its strongest when it first hits Roshar on its eastern edge, tearing through the land in a stormwall several hundreds of feet high that can toss the occasional boulder with the force of its winds and rains alone. Flora that retreat into the cracks of rocks at a touch. Fauna covered in protective shells. All of Roshar’s ecology uniquely evolved under the influence of the highstorms. And that’s just the tip of the stormwall of what makes Roshar unique.
In Roshar, each and every natural phenomenon and human emotion attracts what’s known as a spren. Think of spren as incorporeal beings. They’re essentially spirits that embody the phenomenon or emotion they accompany. Just to name a few: rain attracts rain spren, appearing as long blue cylinders with black eyes that grow out of puddles, anger attracts anger spren, appearing as pools of bubbling black tar, and wind attracts windspren, appearing to whoever they choose as flying ribbons of light and can mimic voices and the appearance of small objects blown about in the wind. Spren are generally considered to not possess a will of their own, but some exhibit strikingly personified behavior. For instance, wind spren often appear where they are not wanted and seem to play pranks on humans by sticking certain objects to surfaces when someone tries to pick them up. It is in Roshar, this world of storms, crab monsters, and spren, that we find our main characters of The Way of Kings. Kaladin is
