Mistborn
by Brandon Sanderson
First posted June 2019
I mourn for the innocent version of myself, who earnestly wrote, “I’m really impressed with how the new Star Wars movies yanked itself away from another ‘magic bloodline dynasty’ story.”
I don’t feel very compelled to read the rest of this series, but if I still have a taste for escapist fantasy after I see how Mr. Sanderson wraps out The Wheel of Time, maybe I’ll get there.
Reading High Fantasy unearths memories of posting song lyrics as AOL Instant Messenger away messages. It is not because those eras in my life overlapped, but because of the outsized influence they both exerted during formative periods in my life.
AIM: As a college freshman at the dawn of the w̶i̶l̶l̶e̶n̶n̶i̶u̶m̶ millennium, constant broadband was ubiquitous while cellphones were not. Instant Messenger was running as frequently as Snood and Napster—which is to say, always—and was far more useful for finding out when your friends were at the dining hall. It is a cultural touchstone with the lifespan of drosophila, but if you were there, you had your favorite away messages: the cut & paste conversations that made you laugh; the first time you realized %n would get the viewer’s name to pop up; or some special “eighteen and just got real dumped for the first time” lyrics. Fiona Apple’s “First Taste” recently popped back up in my life, and it brought a slew of Fiona-Apple-based away messages with it: “Full is not heavy as empty, not nearly my love, not nearly my love, not nearly.” I was a dramatic late teen. And Fiona Apple was there to tell me, “Yes, everything you feel is important and unique but also I have lived through it and turned it into art.” Heavy sigh.
High Fantasy fiction: The equivalent to college romance lyrics for a pudgy eleven-year-old was escaping into the hero’s journey. I drank in the stories about an unready male child called to high purpose, discovering secret powers, defeating powerful foes, travelling with a hapless and agency-free princess, and I never stopped. American male pubescence allowed me to center the world upon my wants: fantasy fiction gave these internal cravings outside validation. Much like heartfelt lyrics found an expressive—if passive and cryptic—outlet in away messages, fantasy books hit at just the right time in my life for me to imbue them with more pathos than they deserved.
Genre fantasy has certainly warped my mind; I am grateful that I spread out a bit from the heavy hitters of the eighties and nineties, where Skywalker and Baggins analogues muttered, “Women be shopping” in exasperation if non-males were present at all. Maybe the fact women were characters and not props in some of the Mercedes Lackey and C.S Friedman books I loved led me to love Fiona Apple? Or she's just great. Regardless, it seems that the mainstream has taken a market wide open for exploitation—alienated outsiders pitted against a system they cannot comprehend or assimilate into while cursed with special powers that highlight their differences but are actually their greatest strength in a preordained bid to overcome all challenges—and pitched it to the demographic least likely to be able to see through its explicit promises of escape and empowerment: High Fantasy has seen its shtick co-opted by the Young Adult market. The Rands al’Thor and Garions of the world are now your Harrys Potter and Katnisses Everdeen, and the series that stands as testament to this new world branding is Mistborn—once pure High Fantasy enough to land the author a deal to finish the illustrious Wheel of Time series—now a decade past publication rebranded as YA.
While I am absolutely one to slag off on YA—I think it is a waste of time for stronger readers (regardless of their age) to read simple fiction solely for plot and not for sentence structure and word choice as well as plot—don’t take me for ungrateful that kids can more easily find better fantasy books than I could. I certainly could have used less race-based conflict in the fantasy worlds I obsessed over: remember when Murgos were bad, Gnomes were bad, just always bad because they were? That’s not great. Terrisman in Mistborn aren’t great; eugenics and selective human breeding aren’t...great...topics for any fantasy novel. The concept of “high” blood giving someone magic powers is a classic classist trope that should stop; I’m really impressed with how the new Star Wars movies yanked itself away from another “magic bloodline dynasty” story. Mistborn does not. Secret heritage will never go away, apparently, because the world loves that moment when someone busts in and starts yelling, “You’re a wizard, ‘arry!” You know, like being born an aristocrat.
What is the difference between secret special heritage and chosen-one mythos on the one hand, and the true love soul mate magic-feelings lyrics of a maudlin pop song on the other? They’re both there to tell you’re special, you’re unique, everyone one of you that reads the book or hears the song are the one for whom it is really mean. You really get it. Reading Mistborn scratches the same grandiose-adventure itch as listening to a sad song does when you find out your college girlfriend cheats on you with her high school ex-boyfriend. Not to mention the powerful cultural structure of the Aslan altruistic sacrifice that coincidentally happens right when a bunch of dust gets in my eye every time it is trotted out. Can’t pull from a more foundational text than the bible, after all.
The hole fantasy fiction dug into my brain is where reasonable expectations of life and my place in it should be never closed. Somehow, twenty years later, I still believe a powerful and mysterious weirdo might show up and drag me into unexpected, world-changing adventures, even on the most mundane of mornings. That childhood nostalgia of purposeless estrangement mixed with world-changing bravado is only a fantasy book away, and Mistborn takes me back to twelve years old faster than you can say, “Full is not heavy as empty, my love.”