So I just finished Mistborn. The ideas are fresh and if I wait until I sleep on it, half of this will be gone by morning. I'm learning that lesson the hard way lately... strike while the iron is hot, as I told myself and then failed to do on the last post. Here we are. Again. Quick disclaimer for the Sanderson faithful before we go any further: yes, I'm the sister of the brother who reads everything this man publishes and then tells me about it in great detail on his lunch breaks. Yes, I've been skeptical. Yes, I wrote a whole post wondering what happens to his outlines when he kicks the bucket. And yes, I was the one who picked up Way of the Kings and felt like I was preflighting an airliner when I just wanted to go for a Sunday drive. That one was a legit struggle. It took me months. A couple of chapters a day, casually, jumping between the physical book and the audiobook on walks, and eventually Way of the Kings became strictly audiobook because I just did not want to read another single word of it. I finished it out of spite and stubbornness, which are two perfectly good motivators but not the ones a novel should be relying on. So coming into Mistborn, I had baggage. Big, industrial Samsonite baggage... I should also mention I'm currently playing the Cosmere RPG, which is doing more for my Sanderson tolerance than the books did. It's not half bad. A bit rules-light for my taste, and anyone who has watched me GM knows I like crunch, I like options, I like a character sheet I can drown in, and I do not love how few skills my character has. Coming off decades of AD&D and its descendants where your sheet is a novella of proficiencies, the Cosmere system feels like somebody handed me a business card and told me that's my whole guy. But it plays fast, the world is fun, and it warmed me up to actually sitting down with Mistborn. So credit where it's due. Even if my idea to be a chull-riding spren wrangler wasn't feasible... and my next was a scholar with a shardbow... again not feasible. I'm making my way through with my scholarly ways of DESTRUCTION! Yeah... I went the Shigaraki route, and my god is breaking things apart at the molecular level powerful, destructive, and satisfying. 3D6. Boom, 18 points of damage to your soul! *clears throat* ahem... anyway. Let's start with the gut punches, because that's where my brain is living right now. Marsh. Sweet, grim, brother-in-arms Marsh. They telegraphed that rug pull so hard I thought I saw it coming, and then the book yanked it anyway. You think he's gone, you grieve him, and then nope, surprise, he's still kicking. I don't know if I should feel cheated or annoyed. Probably both. Kelsier though? The K-Man himself? Gone. And I was actually not really expecting that one, so hat tip to Sanderson for that. You build a novel around a charismatic con-man mentor figure and then you put him down in the dirt, that's a bold call. Gandalf in Moria bold. Ned Stark bold. As I said, I tip my hat. And can we talk for a moment about The Lord Ruler? The Lord Ruler with that backhand. I'm sorry, where was this dude in Way of the Kings? Because that is the kind of moment that makes a fantasy novel sing. One casual, contemptuous swat that reframes every encounter you've had with a character up to that point. It wasn't even him trying. That's the terrifying part. That's how you write a big bad. Not a thousand pages of logistics and glyph scholarship, just... swat. Fifty paces. Gone. Take notes, Stormlight. Speaking of the Lord Ruler, and the setting in general, the whole thing reads like Ravenloft with better branding. The ash-choked sky, the perpetual dread, the skaa grinding out existence under a god-king who has personally outlived entire bloodlines, the Mists as an actual supernatural presence with rules you learn the hard way... that is a Domain of Dread with a Sanderson coat of paint. And the Lord Ruler himself lands as a Domain Lord. More Soth than Strahd, though, and I mean that as a compliment. Strahd is romance-tragedy in a cape, an immortal sulking about a woman for eternity while everyone politely pretends he's terrifying. Soth is regret ossified into cruelty. A man who failed the big moment, knew he failed it, and is spending eternity making everyone else pay for it. The Lord Ruler has that same calcified-failure energy under the god-king swagger. He got handed the world and he made it ash. I'll take a Soth over a Strahd every day of the week, and I especially appreciate a villain whose backstory hits like a tragedy instead of a perfume ad. On the figuring-things-out front: I clocked Elend of House Venture as the love interest basically the moment he showed up loitering in the wings reading instead of noble-ing. Sanderson doesn't exactly play these cards close to the chest. I also called the Lord Ruler being both a Feruchemist and an Allomancer... a storage bucket tank and a burner in the same body. I couldn't tell you exactly which clue locked it in, that's the aphasia tax at work, my brain processes in words not pictures so I can't replay the scene that tipped me off, but somewhere in the back half I just knew. I recalled a conversation where my brother mentioned everyone plays the Lord Ruler as this big super powerful badass, and I knew Sanderson is pretty meticulous about his magic so it had to be something we weren't necessarily seeing. And when we learn our tasty valet can store up things, the natural question is, can you taste what he's cooking? And the truth of the matter was... yes. Yes you could taste what he's cooking, but you weren't able to access it. But if someone could cook and taste? Look... this Rock metaphor only goes so far. Either way, the whole system demands a keystone villain who embodies both halves, and Sanderson loves a clean system. Either way, the reveal hit like a confirmation, not a surprise. Which is its own kind of satisfying. The magic system, by the way. I've talked before about how I can't stand magic that doesn't make sense, how I spent a decade on Altered Realities untangling cause-and-effect because I refuse to hand-wave at my own readers. So imagine my relief reading a book where the rules are rules, the metals do what the metals do, and when someone pulls a new trick it's because they found a new application of the existing laws, not because the author got bored. Sanderson and I would probably argue about a lot of things, but we agree on this. Magic has to have a bill, and somebody has to pay it. Vin pays hers constantly. Respect. My curiosity as to what element the 11th metal is might not be answered for a bit. But I knew as soon as Vin burned it what it did. If gold showed her past selves, and atium showed the lines of attack, well a mixture of gold and atium could show a possibility of others' futures, at least that's the logic I'm sticking with. Sailing the internet seas looking for stuff on Sanderson is high spoiler territory. Look, just because my bro reads everything and talks to me about it doesn't mean I recall everything. I don't have a band that I can pour my memories into like some sorta Feruchemist. I have to make do on a pretty decent long-term store of information. I used to recall for years what I had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I no longer do that, I devote that to other equally useless stuff. Like 90s comic book lore. Now for the grading on a curve portion. I said Way of the Kings felt like a preflight check, and I stand by that. Mistborn is lighter on its feet. Less geology, more heist. Less interlude-as-homework, more plot-as-plot. The cast is tighter, the stakes scale cleanly, and when the big setpieces hit, you've actually been given the tools to care. On a scale of one to Way of the Kings, this is the stronger entry. By a lot. I'd say something like 9 out of 10 Blackthorns I'm buying the second book... but the truth of the matter is, I already did. I bought it even though as of writing this I'm halfway through the Isles of Emberdark, think I have about 7 hours left on that. I won't be reading it for a bit, I have a story about a merchant crab I got to read. Don't judge me, I see crab and I buy it. I know evolutionarily speaking, crabs are peak life. I will say that having read most of Emberdark, I recognized from Way of Kings the dark pool is the Shademeyer that Jasnah and Shallan ended up in, Shallan being the whiney teen girl with the soulcaster and the shardblade she did some terrible things to get her hands on, what those were? I may never know because book 2 Words of Radiance is her story. I wanted to say Honorblade instead of shardblade, but that's the Cosmere RPG talking. Don't worry Taln, we'll get your sword back, or die trying. Anyway. Good book. Surprised myself. If you told past-me that I'd be recommending a Sanderson novel in a blog post, past-me would have asked if you were feeling okay. Clarity of Thought Before Rashness of Action, as Shockwave said. Turns out when you give a book actual clarity of thought, you reward the reader's patience. Who knew. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So we finished My Hero Academia. Good show, had its ups and downs, definitely dragged in some places, but at least I knew who was on screen at any given moment. Then we dove into the backlog, and that meant Solo Leveling. We watched the first season, finished it, and moved on to better things like Delicious in Dungeon, Frieren, and Invincible. You know, shows with actual characters in them. It’s not a secret that I consume media and internalize it and criticize it. That’s kind of my whole deal. And I’m telling you right now, Solo Leveling is pretty meh. At best. We still have to watch the Ant King fight, probably tonight, and I’m already bracing myself because I genuinely do not recognize half these characters in their street clothes. Their names are too similar. Their designs are too similar. It’s like someone hit copy-paste on the character creator and just tweaked the hair color slider. So it’s hard to know who is who, and more importantly, it’s hard to care who is who. And then you have Sung Jin-Woo. Blank Slate MC Boring Dude Bad Ass Power Fantasy himself. And it’s like… yawn. Who the heck cares? He levels up. He gets stronger. He levels up more. He broods attractively. Rinse, repeat, insert cool shadow army here. Now compare him to Saitama from One Punch Man. And maybe this is the key difference. Maybe it’s because One Punch Man isn’t taking itself seriously. Saitama is the guy who is supposed to be sort of jokey. He’s going to win. You know he’s going to win. He knows he’s going to win. The show knows he’s going to win. And yet somehow, impossibly, it still works. I rewatch the Genos vs. Saitama sparring match pretty often. The Deep Sea King fight. Boros. They’re all memorable. Not because of the outcome, which is always the same, One Punch, but because the characters around the punch are worth watching. That’s the One Punch Problem, and Solo Leveling has it bad. See, when you make your protagonist an unstoppable force, you have exactly two options. Option one: make everyone around them interesting enough that the audience is watching for the ensemble, not the main character. One Punch Man does this. Mob Psycho 100 does this. I’ll be blunt, I wasn’t watching Mob for Mob. I was watching for Reigen, Mob’s so-called “Master,” the greatest con man in anime history who accidentally stumbles into being a decent human being. Option two: make the journey to that power so compelling that the audience doesn’t mind the destination. Neither of these is what Solo Leveling chose. Solo Leveling chose option three: make everything look really, really cool and hope nobody notices the protagonist has the personality of a loading screen. Season 2 of One Punch Man was alright, not as memorable as the first, I’ll grant you that. But you know what fights I watch over and over again? The Ranma 1/2 Breaking Point arc. The dodgeball fight in Hunter x Hunter. The Hisoka vs. Gon fight. The Knuckle and Shoot vs. Gon sequences. A few of the old DBZ fights, the ones where you actually worried, even a little, that Goku might not pull it off this time. And yeah, Goku always pulls it off. He’s Goku. But here’s the thing, he’s not just some blank template that makes it hard to care about him. Goku is a lovable idiot who wants to fight strong people and eat a lot. That’s a personality. It’s not a complicated one, but it exists. I tried to watch Mashle. And while the dude is funny, he’s just… so meh. It’s the same problem wearing a slightly different hat. The overpowered protagonist as comedy works exactly once, and One Punch Man already did it better. And it’s not like anime doesn’t know how to do fight scenes with stakes. Have you watched the Shibuya Incident arc in Jujutsu Kaisen? That spirit fight where Todo and Itadori are popping back and forth with Boogie Woogie? That fight rocks because you care about both fighters, because the technique is clever, because there’s genuine tension even when things are going well. Or the Mugen Train arc in Demon Slayer, where we see Rengoku going hand to hand with Upper Moon Three. Technical skill, emotional weight, consequences. That fight matters because the character matters. Has Solo Leveling given me a single fight I want to rewatch? The animation is gorgeous, I’ll give it that. The production values are through the roof. But does gorgeous animation without emotional stakes rock as hard as Todo screaming about his best friend while swapping positions mid-combo? No. No it does not. My friends and I talk anime frequently, and my gaming buddies are all about how great Neon Genesis Evangelion is. And look, I get it. I understand why people love NGE. But I was sitting there going… eh. But did you see Getter Robo G? Did you see Gaiking: Legend of Daiku-Maryu? Did you sing along with the Star Blazers theme song? Did you root for Utena to become the prince and save Anthy? Those characters had personalities. Utena had a drive and a purpose and a tragedy baked into her DNA that made every episode compelling. Shinji… Shinji had a lot of people telling him to get in the robot. And maybe that’s the generational divide talking. Maybe I’m just old enough to remember when the overpowered protagonist wasn’t the default setting. When you had to earn your power-ups through training arcs that actually meant something. When characters had flaws that weren’t just “sometimes he’s too cool and brooding.” Ranma was arrogant AND had a legitimate weakness that was played for both comedy and drama. Gon was determined AND dangerously reckless in ways that had real consequences. Even Goku, sweet, simple Goku, had the flaw of prioritizing fighting over literally everything else, including his own family. What does Sung Jin-Woo have? A level-up notification? Now, I can already hear some of you. “But what about Levi?” And yeah. You got me. I need to address this because I’m nothing if not honest about the holes in my own arguments. Levi Ackerman from Attack on Titan is, on paper, exactly what I’m complaining about. He’s an overpowered badass with the emotional range of a wet napkin. The man has virtually no personality. He’s short, he cleans things, and he kills titans like he’s getting paid per head. That’s… kind of it. I hate the ending of Attack on Titan. I think the show disappeared up its own existential rear end and forgot to come back out. But Levi? Levi works. And it bugs me that he works because he shouldn’t. I think the difference is context. Levi exists in a world where everyone around him is dying horribly and constantly. His blankness isn’t a power fantasy, it’s a trauma response, and the show earns that reading even if it never spells it out. When Levi carves through titans, it doesn’t feel like a victory lap. It feels like a man who has watched everyone he cares about get eaten alive and has decided that efficiency is the only emotion he can afford. That scene where he gives Erwin the choice… that’s not a blank slate moment. That’s a character moment buried under all that stoicism. The blankness IS the characterization. He’s not empty, he’s full of things he refuses to express, and Attack on Titan gives you just enough glimpses to know the difference. Sung Jin-Woo isn’t hiding depth under a cool exterior. There’s just… nothing under there. Levi is a locked safe. Jin-Woo is an empty one. And then there’s Alucard from Hellsing Ultimate, and oh boy. Talk about a badass blank slate who has absolutely no business being as compelling as he is. Alucard is, for most of that series, basically an invincible murder machine in a cool hat. He walks into fights you know he’s going to win. He toys with his opponents. He monologues. He grins that stupid, wonderful, terrifying grin. And it works. It works SO well. Partly because Hellsing Ultimate knows it’s a spectacle and leans into the theatrical madness of it all. Partly because the supporting cast, Integra, Seras, the Major with his absolutely unhinged war speech, are doing the heavy emotional lifting. But mostly? Mostly it’s because when Alucard finally drops the act and unleashes the full Dracula bit at the end, when he becomes this emotionless void of pure power… you feel the loss. You’ve spent the whole series watching this monster who was at least entertaining, who had swagger, who had that voice. And Crispin Freeman, god bless that man, could read a phone book as Alucard and make it sound like the most menacing thing you’ve ever heard. So when the character becomes truly blank, truly emotionless, truly just power without personality, it hits different because you remember what he was before. That’s earned blankness. That’s a narrative choice. Solo Leveling starts blank and stays blank. There’s nowhere to fall from because the character never climbed anywhere to begin with. So yeah. Levi and Alucard prove that you can make a seemingly blank badass work. But they also prove my point, because the reason they work is precisely the thing Solo Leveling is missing. Levi has trauma under the surface. Alucard has centuries of monstrous history and a voice performance that drips with personality even when the character shouldn’t have any. They’re not actually blank. They just look blank until you pay attention. Jin-Woo looks blank because he IS blank. And that’s the difference. Here’s the thing about power fantasies. I love them. I’m not above them. When I play Elden Ring, I start off as a weak, scrawny bastard. The plucky Tarnished with 1 HP and a dream. And I grind away. I die to the tutorial boss. I die to the Tree Sentinel because I’m too stubborn to go around. I die to Margit. I die to Godrick. I die to every single thing in Caelid because Caelid hates me and I hate it back. And I beat them. One by one, I beat the bosses. And then something shifts. Somewhere around the midgame, I stop being the underdog. I stop being the plucky hero. I become the boss. And suddenly I’m not struggling through dungeons anymore. I’m walking into boss arenas to check if these so-called demigods are WORTHY of sharing a kingdom with me. And that power creep? That gets me. Every single time. But it gets me because I earned it. I remember being weak. I remember every death screen. The power feels incredible BECAUSE of the suffering that preceded it. Solo Leveling wants to give you the Elden Ring endgame without making you play through Limgrave first. Jin-Woo’s early weakness is a speedbump, not a journey. He goes from E-Rank to god-tier so fast that the weakness never has time to mean anything. Compare that to the moment in Hunter x Hunter when Gon sits across from Pitou and you realize, with dawning horror, that Gon isn’t the hero of this scene. He’s the monster. THAT is how you do an overpowered protagonist. You make the power itself the source of tension. You make the audience afraid of what the character is becoming, not impressed by how many shadow soldiers he can summon. And you know what else works? Getting back up. In One Piece, Garp is shown to be a badass. He just… comes out of nowhere and drops a damn meteor on an island, and you’re sitting there screaming “My man! Get ’em!” at your TV. That moment works because Garp has been this legendary figure lurking in the background for hundreds of episodes, and when he finally cuts loose, it’s cathartic. It’s earned through patience, not a level-up notification. Or Guts. God, Guts. He fights. He struggles. He loses. He gets the absolute hell beaten out of him by things that should kill him ten times over. And the man gets up. The mofo gets up. Every single time. And it’s not willpower. It’s not some shonen “I believe in my friends” power boost. It’s inevitability. Getting back up is just what Guts does because the alternative is lying down, and Guts doesn’t know how to lie down. That’s a character trait that tells you everything you need to know about the man without a single line of exposition. Even Stark. Lovable Stark from Frieren, who is legitimately afraid to fight a dragon. He doesn’t want to be there. He’s terrified. And he keeps getting up anyway, not because he’s brave but because someone has to, and he’s the one who’s there. There’s a reason the best moment in any fight story isn’t the final blow. It’s the moment the hero stands back up when they shouldn’t be able to. There’s an old Thing vs. Champion fight, and Champion says something that’s stuck with me: “I could crush you a hundred times, but I cannot break your spirit.” That’s it. That’s the whole argument. That’s what makes a fight matter. Not the power level. Not the animation budget. The spirit. Solo Leveling has no spirit. The One Punch Problem isn’t about power levels. It never was. It’s about whether the story gives you a reason to care beyond the spectacle. One Punch Man gives you Saitama’s existential crisis, his boredom, the comedy of a world that can’t recognize its strongest hero. Mob Psycho gives you Reigen and the Body Improvement Club and Mob’s desperate desire to be normal. Hunter x Hunter gives you consequences so brutal they redefine the protagonist entirely. Elden Ring gives you the memory of every death that made your victory possible. Berserk gives you a man too stubborn to die. One Piece gives you a grandfather who drops meteors because family matters more than rank. Solo Leveling gives you a cool jacket and some shadow summons. We’ll watch the Ant King fight tonight. Maybe it’ll change my mind. But I doubt it. Because the problem was never the fights. The fights are fine. The problem is that I couldn’t pick Sung Jin-Woo out of a lineup of his own supporting cast, and when he gets knocked down, I don’t feel anything when he gets back up. And that’s a failure that no amount of animation budget can fix. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So here’s a fun thought experiment. Take the King James Bible, a text that has been around for over four hundred years, and run it through an AI detector. ZeroGPT will tell you that Genesis is 88.2% AI-generated. The Book of Genesis. Written centuries before electricity, let alone large language models. Apparently, God was using ChatGPT. Who knew? And it’s not just the Bible. A screenshot recently went viral showing that a passage from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was flagged as 100% AI-generated. Mary Shelley. The woman who wrote the foundational work of science fiction in 1818 while she was barely out of her teens. The woman who essentially invented the genre I’ve spent my entire life loving. According to the algorithm, she’s a robot. I’m sure she’d appreciate the irony, given what the book is actually about. The US Constitution has been flagged. Harry Potter has been flagged. Edgar Allan Poe has been flagged. At some point you have to stop and ask yourself... if your lie detector is telling you that literally everyone is lying, maybe the problem isn’t the people. Which brings me to the polygraph. Because that’s exactly what AI detection has become. The modern literary polygraph. For those who don’t know, the polygraph is classified by the scientific community as pseudoscience. The National Academy of Sciences did a comprehensive review in 2003 and concluded there was little basis for expecting a polygraph to have high accuracy. Studies outside the polygraph industry have found false positive rates as high as 50%. That means out of 100 people telling the truth, up to 48 of them get branded as liars. That’s basically a coin flip. The American Psychological Association agrees that there’s little evidence polygraphs can accurately detect lies. And yet law enforcement agencies and government offices still use them. They’re still part of the culture. Because people want to believe there’s a machine that can sort truth from fiction, even when the machine is demonstrably terrible at it. Sound familiar? AI detection tools work by measuring how predictable your writing is. They look at something called perplexity and burstiness. Low perplexity means the text is predictable, word by word. Low burstiness means the sentence lengths are uniform. And if your writing scores low on both of those metrics, congratulations, you’re apparently a robot. The problem is that well-structured, polished, edited writing is inherently more predictable. It follows conventions. It uses proper grammar. It flows logically from point to point. And that’s exactly what these tools flag. So the better you write, the more likely you are to be accused of not writing at all. Let that sink in for a second. I ran my own experiment with this. Same AI detector, two of my own works. I took I Am Not A Kobold, my five-year novel project. Fantasy. Book one alone is somewhere between 162,000 and 182,000 words depending on whether you count the side stories. Fantasy prose tends toward the longer, the more flowing, the more meandering. You’re building worlds and layering descriptions and letting the language breathe. Kobold came back largely clean. Then I took Digital Ghosts and Other Anomalies, my sci-fi and cyberpunk short story collection. Nineteen stories, about 107,000 words total. Cyberpunk is a different beast entirely. It’s snappier. Shorter sentences. More action. Grittier. The prose punches instead of flowing. Higher AI detection score. Same author. Same detector. The difference wasn’t quality. It was genre. Cyberpunk’s clipped, punchy style, the short declarative sentences, the rapid-fire action beats, that’s what the detector flagged. Because short, direct, uniform sentence structures score low on burstiness. The detector can’t tell the difference between a machine generating text and a human writing in a genre that demands tight, efficient prose. Fantasy’s natural variation, the long descriptive passages mixed with dialogue mixed with internal monologue, that reads as more “human” to the algorithm. Not because it’s more human. Because it’s less predictable. And keep in mind, these detectors are generally only checking short bursts of text. They’re not analyzing the full 182,000 words of Kobold. They’re sampling. Which means the results are even less reliable than they appear, because you’re making sweeping judgments about an entire work based on whatever chunk happened to get fed through the machine. It’s the literary equivalent of taking someone’s blood pressure once, at one random moment, and declaring them healthy or sick based on that single reading. But here’s the thing that really bothers me, and I don’t think anyone in the AI detection space is talking about this. You want to know how to spot a human writer? Look at their body of work over time. Take my first novel. True Blue Alien. Published in 2015. Please don’t read it. It’s absolute trash. I love it, it’s my firstborn literary child, but it’s trash. Now hold TBA up against A Goddess’s Gifts. Different genres, sure, Sci-Fi/YA versus urban fantasy, but you can see the difference an editor makes. The prose is tighter. The pacing works. Someone other than me looked at the words and said “this part doesn’t work” and I listened. Now take TBA and hold it up against Altered Realities, my third novel. Sci-Fi/YA versus urban fantasy smut round one. Different genres, different tones, but you can already see the author growing, making different choices, learning what works and what doesn’t. Now take TBA and hold it against Kobold. Against Digital Ghosts. They look like two vastly different authors wrote them. And in a way, they did. The difference is ten years. Ten years of me dicking around trying to figure out what works. Ten years of writing, scrapping, rewriting, reading other people’s work, getting feedback, ignoring feedback, getting more feedback, and slowly, painfully, developing a voice that doesn’t make me cringe when I read it back. A writer’s first novel is almost always raw. That’s not a failing, that’s the process. I challenge anyone to pull up their favorite author’s first published work and compare it to their most recent. See if they didn’t change. See if the prose didn’t evolve. See if the storytelling didn’t sharpen. Go read whatever King’s first manuscript looked like and tell me it reads like The Institute. Hell, Chuck Tingle publishes like a mad person, dozens of books, and I haven’t read them, but I’m willing to bet there are still differences between their first and their latest. Because that’s what humans do. We change. We grow. We get better, or at least different. And that’s a better indication of humanity than any algorithm checking sentence burstiness. AI doesn’t have a first novel that it’s embarrassed about. AI doesn’t have a ten-year learning curve. AI doesn’t have that awkward phase where it’s trying to write like its favorite authors before it finds its own voice. If you want to know whether a writer is human, don’t run their latest book through a detector. Compare it to everything they’ve written before. If the style hasn’t changed at all over years and years of output? That’s your red flag. Not the quality of any single work in isolation. Which brings us to the Shy Girl situation, and oh boy, is this one a mess. Mia Ballard wrote a horror novel called Shy Girl. Self-published it in early 2025. It did well on BookTok. Hachette picked it up for a proper release. And then the internet decided it was AI slop. A nearly three-hour YouTube video racked up 1.2 million views breaking down why the book was allegedly AI-generated. Reddit threads piled on. Pangram, an AI detection company, ran the full text and came back with 78% AI-generated. Hachette pulled the book within 24 hours of the New York Times reaching out to them about it. Ballard says she didn’t use AI. She says an editor she hired for the self-published version used it without her knowledge. She says she’s pursuing legal action and that the controversy has destroyed her mental health and her reputation. And here’s the thing that nobody seems to want to talk about... maybe she’s telling the truth. Maybe she’s not. But the tools being used to make that determination are the same tools that think Mary Shelley is a chatbot and that Genesis was written by OpenAI. Here’s what I know from twenty years in healthcare IT. When you build an interface, you test it. You validate it. You don’t deploy something that has a known failure rate of 20% and then use it to make career-ending decisions about people. A 1-in-5 false positive rate, which is what some studies have found for AI detectors, would get a medical system shut down by regulators. But we’re perfectly happy using these tools to destroy someone’s publishing career. And here’s the part that really gets me. The Stanford research showing that AI detectors misclassify over 61% of essays written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated. Sixty-one percent. Because these students were taught formal English, the kind with proper transitions and structured argumentation, and that’s exactly what the detectors flag. The students who worked the hardest to learn English get punished the most. Neurodivergent writers get flagged at higher rates too. If you have ADHD or autism and your writing has certain patterns of repetition or structure, you’re more likely to be accused of cheating. As someone who has written extensively about my own aphasia and the weird ways my brain processes language, this hits different. But let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Formulaic writing. Because this is where it gets really muddy. Genre fiction, by its very nature, follows formulas. Romance has a structure. Horror has a structure. Mystery has a structure. Thrillers have a structure. That’s not a failing; that’s the genre. Readers pick up a romance novel expecting certain beats to hit. When AI detection tools flag formulaic writing as AI-generated, they’re essentially flagging the conventions of genre fiction itself. They’re telling every romance author and every horror writer and every thriller writer that their adherence to genre conventions makes them suspect. And this is where the Shy Girl case gets even murkier. Even the reviewers admitted that the prose was generic, full of common metaphors and predictable phrasing. But here’s a question nobody seems to ask... is it possible that a debut self-published author just isn’t that great of a writer yet? Is it possible that generic prose is just... generic prose? Because I’ve read plenty of self-published books and traditionally published books that read like they were assembled from a kit of interchangeable parts, and those were all written well before AI was a factor. Some writers are formulaic. That’s been true since the invention of the printing press. One Reddit commenter summed up the problem beautifully: if it isn’t AI, she’s a terrible writer, because her writing is indistinguishable from an LLM. And there it is. The assumption that bad writing must be artificial writing. As if mediocre prose hasn’t existed for as long as people have been putting words to paper. As if every human who ever picked up a pen produced deathless art. I’ll be honest. Shy Girl might be AI-generated. The evidence is certainly suggestive. But “suggestive” is not “proven.” And the tools we’re using to make that determination have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they cannot reliably distinguish between a machine and a human. When your detector flags the Bible, it’s not evidence. It’s noise dressed up as precision. Now here’s where I’m going to lose some people, and that’s fine. As a futurist, I welcome AI as a tool that can help people tell their stories. There. I said it. Come at me. An editor starts at fifty dollars an hour and goes up from there. Way up. For a new writer, someone who’s never published, someone who maybe doesn’t come from money, that’s a massive gateway. That’s the difference between your story existing in the world and your story dying in a Google Doc. And even if you scrape together the money for an editor, good luck getting an agent. Good luck getting a publisher to take a risk on you. The publishing industry is just as afraid of risks as Hollywood. They want the tried and true. They want the sequel to the thing that already sold. They want the name they already know. Indie writers have been screaming about this for years. Back when I was getting into self-publishing, the conversations in indie circles were all about how the traditional gatekeepers didn’t want to take chances on new voices. They wanted bankable. They wanted safe. And some of us decided to go around them entirely because the gates weren’t opening. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the same thing that happened with comics. The big two, Marvel and DC, had a stranglehold on the industry. The creators were work-for-hire. The publishers owned everything. And then a group of artists and writers said enough, and Image Comics was born. Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, and the rest of them walked away from the sure thing to own their own work. And what came out of Image? Invincible. The Walking Dead. Saga. Some of the biggest hits in comics over the past thirty years came from the company that the traditional industry said was a bad idea. AI as an editing tool, as a brainstorming partner, as something that helps a first-time author who can’t afford a fifty-dollar-an-hour editor get their manuscript into readable shape? That’s not the death of literature. That’s democratization. That’s the self-publishing revolution getting another tool in its kit. The problem isn’t that AI exists as a tool. The problem is that we can’t tell the difference between someone using AI as a tool and someone having AI do all the work for them. And instead of developing better methods to figure that out, we’re relying on detectors that think the Bible is a chatbot. The polygraph persists because people desperately want a machine that sorts truth from lies. AI detectors persist because people desperately want a machine that sorts human from artificial. In both cases, the desire for certainty is outrunning the actual capability of the technology. And in both cases, real people are getting hurt by the false positives. As someone who has spent twenty years building systems that process information, and as someone who has spent years pouring her guts into fiction that nobody may ever read, I’m watching this whole situation with a mixture of professional skepticism and personal dread. Because if the trend continues, if polished writing gets flagged and formulaic writing gets flagged and non-native English gets flagged, then eventually every writer is going to be looking over their shoulder. Not at the blank page, but at the algorithm that decides whether they’re real. And the truly dark irony? The AI companies themselves can’t even solve this. OpenAI shut down its own AI detection tool back in 2023 because it wasn’t reliable enough. The people who built the language models can’t reliably detect the language models. But sure, let’s use some third-party tool with a confidence score and a percentage to end someone’s career. That seems reasonable. Clarity of thought before rashness of action. That’s what Shockwave says, and he’s right. We need to stop treating AI detectors like oracles and start treating them like what they are: imperfect tools with known, significant failure rates that should never be the sole basis for any consequential decision about a person’s work or integrity. Otherwise we’re just strapping writers to a polygraph and asking them to prove they’re human. And history has shown us exactly how well that works out. I want to close with a quote that’s stuck with me for decades. In the Armitage the III OVA, Elizabeth Berkley voices a character, a robot designed to bear children to help Mars’s flagging birth rates, who asks a question so simple it hurts: “If humans didn’t want me, why did they build me?” Sure, it’s a different context. Naomi is a robot grappling with her own existence and humanity’s rejection of her despite literally being created to serve them. But I think about that line a lot. We built these AI tools. We trained them on our words, our stories, our collective literary output. We poured billions of dollars into making them smarter and faster and more capable. And now we’re panicking because they’re too good. Now we’re building other tools to detect the first tools. And those detection tools are so unreliable that they flag the Bible and Frankenstein and the Constitution. If we didn’t want it, why did we build it? That’s not a rhetorical question. That’s the question this entire industry needs to sit with before it destroys another career with a percentage score from a digital polygraph. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

What in the Akira Toriyama is this crap? We went through eight seasons. Four movies. A decade of watching these kids get beat up, powered up, emotionally wrecked, and built back together. And after all of that buildup, all that investment, the grand finale of My Hero Academia lands with all the impact of a wet paper towel thrown at a brick wall. I sat through that final war arc and when the dust settled, I just stared at my screen and thought... really? That's how we're doing this? Let me back up. I've talked about MHA before. I did a whole post on the fourth movie and how All For One, this supposed criminal mastermind who's been running the underworld for over a century, somehow never thought to acquire Overhaul's quirk or Eri's rewind ability. I talked about how if you're going to write a Big Bad Evil Guy, you better make sure he's actually living up to the billing. And the series had every opportunity to course correct from those problems. It did not. So here's where I land on the whole thing, now that the anime wrapped in December 2025 and we're apparently getting one more epilogue episode in May. My Hero Academia started with a genuinely interesting premise. A kid with no powers in a world where everyone has them. That's compelling. That's a story I want to read. And for a while, it delivered. The sports festival arc was great. The Overhaul arc was phenomenal. Lemillion's fight where he lost his quirk protecting Eri? That was peak shonen. That was the show at its absolute best, where sacrifice meant something and the consequences were real. And then... it just kept escalating without the writing keeping pace. I grew up in the '90s watching Dragon Ball Z. I know what bad power scaling looks like. Toriyama forgot things constantly. He forgot Launch existed entirely. The power levels went from "over 9000" to numbers so absurd they stopped meaning anything. And we all made fun of it back then. It was practically a sport to dunk on DBZ's inconsistencies. I found Hunter x Hunter late in life, but I watched Yu Yu Hakusho when it aired, and Togashi understood something that a lot of shonen writers don't: your power system has to have rules, and those rules have to matter in the final confrontation. Toguro didn't get beaten by the power of friendship. He got beaten because Yusuke pushed past his limits in a way the series had been building toward from episode one. MHA didn't do that. MHA went the Dragon Ball route and then pretended it was being deeper about it. Let's talk about the finale itself. All For One takes over Shigaraki's body, because of course he does. The guy we've been told is the root of all evil, the mastermind, the puppet master pulling every string. And how does he ultimately go down? Deku transfers the remaining One For All quirks into Shigaraki to crack his mental defenses, appeals to the tortured child still trapped inside him, and then lands one last punch with the dying embers of his power. Shigaraki's body disintegrates. All For One is defeated not by tactical brilliance, not by exploiting his weaknesses, but by... feelings. Reaching the sad boy inside the monster. Nothing more than feelings. And love. Blargh. Look, I get it. Thematically, My Hero Academia was always about the idea that heroes save people, not just beat villains. Deku's whole thing was extending a hand even to people who didn't deserve it. Fine. I understand the narrative intent. But understanding what a writer was going for and thinking they pulled it off are two very different things. You can't spend eight seasons building up the most dangerous villain in history and then have him get undone because the protagonist was really, really nice at him. That's not satisfying. That's a participation trophy for the audience. And let's talk about the regeneration issue, because it's been bugging me since the final fight. All For One's whole excuse for why his body is failing is something along the lines of "this broken body can't handle it anymore." His regeneration is supposedly not strong enough to keep up. I'm sorry... what? Wolverine has come back from a bullet to the brain. Deadpool has come back from a bullet to the heart. In some storylines, those two have regenerated from explosions that left nothing but a skeleton. And you're telling me the guy who has been stockpiling quirks for over a hundred years, who specifically seeks out powerful abilities, never bothered to grab a top-tier regeneration quirk? Or stack multiple healing quirks on top of each other? This is the same guy who gave Shigaraki a body that could tank attacks from the strongest heroes alive, but he couldn't figure out how to fix himself? The writing doesn't hold up under the slightest scrutiny. And here's the other thing that makes me want to throw my remote at the screen. Let's say you're All For One. You've just taken over Shigaraki's body. You now have One For All's remnant quirks being forcefully transferred into you, your body is rejecting them, and the heroes are closing in. What do you do? If you're a tactical genius, which the show has told us you are for eight seasons, you withdraw. You retreat. You live to fight another day. You take your new body, whatever quirks you've absorbed, and you disappear into the shadows like you've been doing for a century. You heal up. You rebuild. You start your crusade again when you're at full strength and the heroes are exhausted and scattered. But no. AFO stays and fights to the death. Because... arrogance? Pride? Sure, he's arrogant, but he's supposed to be a genius. A genius who has survived for over a hundred years by being patient and calculated. A genius doesn't throw away a century of planning because his ego got bruised in one fight. That's not a mastermind. That's a temper tantrum. And this brings me to what really grinds my gears about how this series handles its villain. Don't give me a reason to pity All For One. Don't try to make me feel sympathy for the guy in the last arc after eight seasons of building him as pure evil. You want me to feel something for Shigaraki? Fine. The abused kid angle works. But All For One himself? No. He should have been terrifying to the end. You want to know what a good villain looks like? Grand Admiral Thrawn. I've talked about Thrawn before and I'll keep talking about Thrawn until every writer in the industry takes notes. Thrawn doesn't need a tragic backstory to make you understand him. Thrawn doesn't need you to feel sorry for him. He's compelling because he's competent. He studies his enemies. He respects their culture and their art and then uses that knowledge to systematically dismantle them. When Thrawn loses, it's because of factors genuinely outside his control, not because the hero believed in friendship hard enough. You don't pity Thrawn. You respect him. And that's infinitely more interesting. Or take Lord Soth from Dragonlance. Now there's a villain with a backstory that actually works. Soth was a Knight of Solamnia, a hero, who fell because of his own pride and arrogance and hatred. His distrust, his inability to let go of his rage, his refusal to do the one thing that could have saved everyone... that's a fall from grace that earns its tragedy. You got his backstory and it made him more terrifying, not less. Because you understood that this was a man who had every chance to be good and chose not to be. His pride was his downfall, but more than that, it was his hatred and distrust of everything around him. That's how you write a villain whose history enriches them instead of deflating them. The best villains make you understand, on some level, that they think they're doing the right thing. Or at the very least, that their path makes a brutal kind of sense. You can get behind their logic even while knowing they're wrong. All For One never had that. He was just... evil because evil. Power because power. And then at the very end they tried to bolt on some emotional complexity with the Shigaraki possession and it was too little, too late. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either he's a calculating monster or he's a sympathetic figure. Pick one and commit. Hell it showed he was apparently the mastermind of creating Shigaraki. So clearly he had no compunctions about ruining entire family lives. He even said when he was fighting Lord Explosion Murder Dynamite God damnit what a long as superhero name that he ended entire blood lines. This is a villain who has no redeeming quality, and shouldn't have no redeeming quality. And the wasted potential. Oh, the wasted potential. Let's start with Midnight. Her quirk, Somnambulist, could put entire groups of enemies to sleep just by breathing near them. In a war arc where you're fighting armies of villains and a giant called Gigantomachia who could level cities? That's your ace in the hole. That's your battlefield-ender. So what did the series do with her? Killed her off-screen. Not in some heroic last stand. Not in a blaze of glory. She got hit by debris, fell, got ambushed by some nobody villains, and died alone in the forest. Her students found her body later. That's it. That's how one of the most tactically useful heroes in the entire roster got taken out of the story. And don't even get me started on the fact that some random gas mask wearing goon took credit for it later, like that was supposed to give us closure. It didn't. It was the writing equivalent of a shrug emoji. Then there's Lemillion. Mirio Togata. The guy with Permeation, one of the most broken quirks in the series. He can phase through anything. Anything. In the Overhaul arc, he dominated that fight even after losing his quirk, fighting with nothing but prediction and sheer willpower for five straight minutes. He gets his power back thanks to Eri, shows up in the war, and then... gets used as a stall tactic. He's assigned to delay Shigaraki. That's it. But he was wrecking Overhaul for a bit, and in the coffin fight he's like "Oh noes! I'm worthless and only a distraction!" The hell you say? You clearly aren't doing a good enough job with your quirk Togata. And here's what drives me absolutely insane. You have a character who can phase through solid matter. In the world of comic books, which this series is heavily inspired by, phasing characters are some of the most terrifying offensive threats in existence. Kitty Pryde from the X-Men, Shadowcat, she's phased her hand into people and threatened to solidify. The Vision does the same thing in Marvel. Martian Manhunter in DC can phase into someone and rip them apart from the inside. You're telling me nobody, not one single person in the writer's room, thought about having Mirio phase into All For One's body and solidify inside his heart? Or phase him into the ground and leave him trapped? That's literally what his power does. That's the logical combat application of that ability against a regenerating opponent. But no. We can't do that because it's a shonen and we have to hit him with feelings. I shit you not. We didn't talk about passing quirk personalities forcibly to people. It only seems to be a thing that happens in All for One and One for All. And apparently you can just... pass it along and have it pierce a poor little kids iron heart of hate and sadness and all that stuff. Same problem with the telepaths and mental quirk users. Shinso can brainwash people who respond to him. Why wasn't he a central figure in the plan to take down a villain whose entire weakness was that there was a fractured mind inside him? The series eventually uses Shinso to control Gigantomachia, which was cool, but that should have been the template for the entire final strategy, not a side note. This is the DBZ problem all over again. You establish that characters have specific, useful abilities, and then you bench them because the main character has to be the one to win. Krillin has the Destructo Disc, an attack that can cut through literally anything, and he never uses it when it would actually matter. Piccolo has regeneration and the Special Beam Cannon and he spends most of Z getting his ass kicked to establish how strong the new bad guy is. MHA does the same thing. It introduces incredible quirks and complex characters and then funnels everything down to Deku punching really hard while crying. The epilogue was... fine, I guess? Deku loses One For All because he burned through it saving Shigaraki. He becomes a teacher at UA, mirroring All Might's path. His classmates go on to become pro heroes. Lemillion ends up as the Number One Hero, which at least makes sense given how busted his quirk is when it's actually allowed to be used properly. Bakugo becomes a top hero but apparently isn't popular because of his personality, which is the most realistic thing in the entire show. And Todoroki is Number Two, which tracks. But Deku becoming a teacher felt deflating to a lot of people, and I get why. The manga ending got roasted for it. The anime apparently softened it a bit by showing his friends built him a power suit so he could still do hero work. Which is nice but also feels like a band-aid on a narrative wound. The boy who wanted to be the greatest hero ends up being the greatest teacher? There's a version of that ending that works beautifully. This wasn't quite it. I'll give credit where it's due. The Todoroki family drama was genuinely well done throughout the series. Endeavor's abuse, Dabi's reveal, the way the family fractures and tries to heal, that was some of the best character writing in modern shonen. And Bakugo's growth from an irredeemable bully to someone who genuinely cares about Deku and feels guilt for how he treated him? That scene where All Might calls both of them the greatest heroes and Bakugo is in tears? That hit. I'll admit it. That landed. But those character moments can't carry a finale that fundamentally fumbles its main conflict. When your villain has been absorbing quirks for a century, has regeneration, has raw power that dwarfs everyone else, and the answer is "be really emotionally sincere at him until he crumbles," you haven't written a satisfying conclusion. You've written a Hallmark card with superpowers. I said in my movie review that if you're going to give us a mastermind, you better damn well make sure he's living up to his capabilities. The same applies in reverse. If you're going to defeat that mastermind, the method has to be as smart and capable as the threat demanded. All For One deserved a defeat that matched his buildup. What he got was the shonen equivalent of "we talked it out." And you know what makes the disappointment sting even more? The fact that in the same general window of time, we got Delicious in Dungeon and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. Two anime that are absolute master classes in their respective genres. Delicious in Dungeon takes a premise that sounds like a joke, cooking monsters in a dungeon, and turns it into one of the most thoughtful explorations of party dynamics, grief, and worldbuilding I've seen in years. Frieren takes the "what happens after the adventure" concept and crafts something so quietly devastating that it makes you rethink every fantasy story you've ever consumed. Both of those shows understand that you can tell a compelling story without power scaling yourself into a corner. MHA had that potential. It just... didn't get there. And here's the thing. I'm not anti-absurd. I'm used to absurd in anime. I expect it. I welcome it. You want absurd? Let's talk about Baki. Baki is technically a battle shonen. It's a fighting anime. And the absurdity in that series doesn't just work, it's the entire point. You've got a frozen prehistoric caveman who gets thawed out and starts fighting modern martial artists. You've got a reborn samurai dueling people in the modern era. Yujiro Hanma, the strongest creature on earth, literally used his own son as nunchucks. As. Nunchucks. And it works! It works because Baki never pretends to be anything other than what it is. The series commits to its insanity with absolute conviction, and the result is something that's genuinely thrilling to watch precisely because there are no brakes on this train and nobody is pretending there should be. Each Baki character has as much blood, if not more, than a Mortal Kombat character. MHA's problem isn't that it's absurd. It's that it's absurd while pretending to be grounded and thematic. Pick a lane. And while we're on the subject of battle shonen that understand their villains, let me circle back to Dragon Ball for a second. Dragon Ball had two major villains who switched sides. Picciolo we saw Goku kill his daddy, and then he raised Gohan and that was enough to make Piccilo a daddy figure, arguably one of the betters ones in the series. And then we have Vegeta who struggled to become one of the best anti-heroes in anime, he fought through the Saiyan saga, through Namek and then he saw Goku surpass him and he leaned into it, let that consume him. But when he had a critical moment of choice he chose the family he had and became a redeemed character. He was never going to be a goody goody, his heart was pure. Pure unadulterated badass. But Frieza? He was the gold standard of an unrepentant psychopath villain done right. Can you imagine if Goku had landed on Namek, punched Frieza really hard, and then there was a three episode arc where Frieza suddenly realized he shouldn't be evil? Where he had a change of heart because Goku believed in him? That would have been one of the greatest stumbles in anime history. And thank God that's not what happened. Frieza is still an evil bastard. He was an evil bastard on Namek, he was an evil bastard when he came back as Golden Frieza, and now with Black Frieza he's finally getting on the train to being the strongest in the universe. He's getting into the spirit of the series. Frieza works because he never stops being Frieza. His motivation is simple, brutal, and consistent: he wants to be the strongest, and he'll destroy anything in his path to get there. No redemption arc. No sad backstory reveal. Just pure, unrelenting villainy with style. Can you imagine Goku converting Frieza to a good guy? Or Cell? There are fan fics about that, and there's a reason they stay fan fics. Because that's not how those characters work. That's not what makes them compelling. Frieza doesn't need to be saved. He needs to be defeated. And that's what All For One should have been. A villain so committed to his own evil that the only answer was to outthink him, outfight him, and put him down. Not hug the sadness out of his host body. At the end of the day, I don't necessarily regret watching My Hero Academia. The early and middle arcs are genuinely excellent. The character work, when Horikoshi was focused, was top tier. But the final war... it broke under the weight of its own roster. Too many characters, too many quirks that could have solved problems but were conveniently ignored, and a resolution that prioritized theme over logic. And when you stack it up against what else anime has been producing lately, the gap between good and great becomes painfully obvious. If you're going to watch it, watch it. Enjoy the ride. But when you get to the end and you're staring at your screen thinking "is that really it?" just know you're not alone. I've said my piece. My Hero Academia is done, and so am I. Now if you excuse me, I have my own superman to wrangle in the Kobold Isekai I'm writing. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So I've been thinking about something that's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Good. If you're comfortable with this topic, something is wrong with you. We live in a world where we like to pretend that the monsters are hiding in the bushes outside the playground. That they're the creepy stranger in the van. And sure, some of them are. But historically? The monsters wore crowns, sat on thrones, held titles, and were celebrated by the very societies they preyed upon. And the pattern hasn't changed nearly as much as we'd like to believe. Let me take you on a little tour through history. Not the sanitized version you got in school, but the version where we actually look at what powerful people did when nobody could stop them. The Ancient World: "It's Culture, Not Crime" The Greeks had this lovely institution called pederasty. An older man, the erastes, would take on a younger boy, the eromenos, in what was dressed up as mentorship. It was considered a civic duty. A rite of passage. Educational. And it was baked into the culture of one of the civilizations we credit with giving us democracy and philosophy. Let that sit with you for a second. The same people who gave us Socrates and the concept of ethical reasoning also institutionalized the sexual grooming of adolescents and called it enlightenment. Go look up the Sacred Band of Thebes. A selection of soliders. Couples. Grouped by Age. The Romans weren't much better. Emperor Tiberius, the second Emperor of Rome, retreated to Capri and, according to the historian Suetonius, engaged in horrific abuse of children. I referenced this in my last blog post about internet safety, and I wasn't joking. The dude had literal pools where children were made to... you know what, go read Suetonius yourself. I'm not your history teacher, and frankly I need to keep my lunch down. But here's the thing that matters: nobody stopped him. He was the Emperor. Who was going to tell him no? And guess what, there wasn't much leeway in the other's either. Plutarch accused the Persians of the same thing. The Byzantines had it. Feudal Japan had it. This wasn't one civilization's sin, it was a feature of power across the ancient world. Now this is not to say I frown upon the love of a man for a man or a woman for a woman. I am merely frowning upon the continued pederasty that seems to have arisen from our ancient roots as primates... anyway, what about we get a little more... Medieval? The Medieval Period: God's Representatives on Earth Let's talk about the Catholic Church, shall we? And before anyone starts clutching their rosary, I'm not attacking faith. I'm attacking an institution that has systematically protected predators for over a thousand years. In 1049, a monk named Peter Damian wrote to Pope Leo IX about the widespread sexual abuse of boys and adolescents by priests and bishops. 1049. That's not a typo. Nearly a thousand years ago, someone was already screaming about this problem. And Pope Leo's response? He was willing to punish the worst offenders but minimized everything else. Sound familiar? It should, because it's the same playbook the Church has been running ever since. Pope John XII, who reigned in the 960s, was accused by his contemporaries of turning the Papal palace into a brothel, ordaining children for favors, and committing incest. His papacy is considered one of the darkest periods in Church history. Pope Benedict IX, who took the throne around 1032 through bribery, was so spectacularly corrupt that the Romans literally drove him out of the city. He eventually sold the papacy to his own godfather because he wanted to get married. These were supposed to be God's representatives on Earth. Then there's Gilles de Rais. A French nobleman, Marshal of France, companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc. A legitimate war hero. He was convicted and executed in 1440 for the rape and murder of over a hundred children, mostly boys between 7 and 15. For eight years, he operated with near impunity because he was wealthy and powerful, and the families of his victims were too poor and too afraid to challenge a nobleman. His servants were seen disposing of children's bodies at one of his castles in 1437, and it still took three more years before anyone with authority did anything about it. That's what power buys you. Time. It buys you time to keep doing what you're doing while everyone around you looks the other way. Hollywood and the Entertainment Industry: The Open Secret Fast forward to the modern era, and the pattern is identical. Just swap castles for studio lots. Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to the sexual assault of a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977, then fled the country to avoid sentencing. He's been living comfortably in Europe ever since. And Hollywood? They gave him a standing ovation at the Oscars. In 2003. Let me repeat that. A man who admitted to assaulting a child received a standing ovation from an industry that claims to care about victims. Victor Salva was convicted in 1988 for sexually abusing a child actor, videotaping the abuse, and possessing child pornography. He served his time, got out, and Disney released his movie Powder. Disney. The company whose entire brand is built on children's entertainment hired a convicted child predator to make a film. Because talent, apparently, trumps the safety of children. Jimmy Savile in the UK is perhaps the most stomach-churning example of institutional protection. A beloved children's TV presenter and DJ who abused hundreds of victims over decades. The BBC, hospitals, charities... everyone around him either looked the other way or actively covered for him. It wasn't until after his death in 2011 that the full scope came out. The man was knighted. He had access to children's hospitals. He was untouchable because of his celebrity and his connections, and every institution he touched chose their reputation over the safety of children. And then there’s Nickelodeon. You know, the channel we all grew up watching. All That, Drake & Josh, iCarly, The Amanda Show. If you watched the Investigation Discovery documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, you got a front row seat to what was happening behind the scenes of your childhood. Brian Peck, a dialogue coach on The Amanda Show, pleaded no contest to sexually abusing a child actor. That actor turned out to be Drake Bell, who came forward publicly in the documentary. Jason Michael Handy, a production assistant, was charged with lewd acts on a child under 14. Animator Ezel Channel was sentenced to over seven years for committing lewd acts on a 14-year-old boy. These weren’t random strangers who snuck onto the lot. These were employees. People who were hired, vetted, and given access to children as part of their job. And the environment they operated in? Show creator Dan Schneider, once called “the Norman Lear of children’s television” by The New York Times, built an empire on kids’ TV. He’s since apologized for some of his behavior, including asking staff for massages and being volatile on set. Former iCarly star Jennette McCurdy wrote an entire memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, describing her experiences with an abusive figure widely reported to be Schneider. The documentary showed clips from his shows that, viewed through adult eyes, are deeply uncomfortable. Young Ariana Grande in sexually suggestive bits. Jamie Lynn Spears getting hit in the face with goo. Content that was written, approved, filmed, and broadcast by adults who knew exactly what they were putting child actors through. Schneider is currently suing the documentary’s producers for defamation, claiming it implied he was a sexual abuser. He denies that. But here’s what he hasn’t denied: multiple convicted predators worked on his shows, and Nickelodeon’s own investigation only addressed verbal abuse. The network’s statement? They “can’t corroborate or negate allegations from productions decades ago.” Can’t. Not won’t. Can’t. That’s a hell of a thing to say about the safety of children on your sets. Gary Glitter. R. Kelly. Jerry Sandusky. The names pile up. And in every single case, there were people who knew. There were warnings. There were red flags the size of billboards. And in every single case, the response was to protect the institution, protect the brand, protect the money. The children were an acceptable loss. The Catholic Church: A Thousand-Year Cover-Up I need to circle back to the Church because the scale of it defies comprehension. In France alone, an independent commission found that approximately 216,000 children were abused by an estimated 3,000 clergy members since 1950. That's one country. In Australia, seven percent of Catholic priests were accused of abuse. Seven percent. The John Jay report in the US found that more than 4,000 priests were accused of abusing children between 1950 and 2002. And the institutional response, for decades, was to reassign predator priests to new parishes. Fresh hunting grounds. A priest would get caught, and instead of turning him over to the police, the Church would move him to a new community where nobody knew what he'd done. They treated child abuse like a sin to be forgiven rather than a crime to be prosecuted. Pope John Paul II's initial response to the American abuse scandal was to talk about the "power of Christian conversion" for the perpetrators. Not the protection of victims. The conversion of the people who raped children. Pope Benedict XVI, before he was Pope, was found by an independent investigation to have failed to act against abusive priests when he was archbishop of Munich. His response was to express "pain and shame" while his lawyers argued he wasn't directly to blame. The playbook never changes. The Boy Scouts: Badges, Campfires, and Perversion Files And because the Catholic Church can’t have all the fun, let’s talk about the Boy Scouts of America. Over 82,000 sexual abuse claims. More than 7,800 former leaders identified as having been involved in sexually abusing children over a 72-year span. Twelve thousand alleged victims documented in the BSA’s own records. And the kicker? The Boy Scouts kept internal files on known and suspected predators going back to the mid-20th century. They called them the “Perversion Files.” Not a joke. That was the actual name. They tracked these people, documented what they did, and instead of handing the files to police, they used them as an internal blacklist. Except the blacklist didn’t even work, because predators who were removed from one troop would show up in another. The story of Richard Turley is a masterclass in institutional failure. A Canadian who abused children in California, Turley was caught, and the Boy Scouts of America’s response was to tell him to go back to Canada. They didn’t warn Scouts Canada. They didn’t call the police. They just... sent the predator home. In 1996, Turley was convicted of assaulting four more boys in Victoria, British Columbia, three of whom were Scouts. In Canada, the pattern continued. In Ottawa, a former Scouts Canada leader was sentenced in 1997 for abuse that spanned from 1979 to 1985. In Kitchener, Ontario, another former leader pleaded guilty to 27 counts in 2001. In Ireland, a 2020 report found that the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland and the Scout Association of Ireland protected at least 275 known or suspected predators over decades. In 2020, the BSA filed for bankruptcy. Not because they were ashamed. Because they couldn’t afford the lawsuits anymore. A $2.46 billion settlement was reached. The largest sexual abuse settlement in American history. And as of late 2025, just over $164 million had actually been paid out to survivors. An organization that was supposed to teach kids about honor, duty, and service was keeping secret files on child rapists for a hundred years. If that doesn’t crystallize the thesis of this entire post, nothing will. The Pattern Here's what connects Emperor Tiberius in his villa on Capri to a priest being quietly transferred to a new parish in 2002 to a Hollywood producer whose behavior was an "open secret" for decades: Power insulates predators. Every. Single. Time. The more power someone has, whether it's political, religious, financial, or cultural, the longer they can operate. The more people will look the other way. The more institutions will choose self-preservation over the safety of the most vulnerable. It doesn't matter if it's a Roman emperor, a medieval pope, a French nobleman, a British TV personality, or an American film director. The mechanism is identical. And we, as a society, keep acting surprised when it happens again. We keep treating each case as an isolated incident instead of recognizing it for what it is: a feature of how power operates when it's unchecked. So What Do We Do? I don't have a neat answer, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But I know what doesn't work: trusting institutions to police themselves. The Catholic Church had a thousand years to get it right and didn't. Hollywood had decades and didn't. The BBC had decades and didn't. Penn State had years and didn't. What I do know is that the single most important thing any of us can do is refuse to look the other way. Refuse to let celebrity or authority or wealth or talent be a shield. When someone tells you that a powerful person is hurting children, believe them. Because history has shown us, over and over and over again, that the accusations are almost always the tip of the iceberg. I wrote in my Tenets of Incorrigibility that you should speak the truth even if it hurts. This is one of those truths. Power protects predators. It always has. And it will continue to do so until enough of us decide that no amount of talent, no amount of prestige, no amount of money, and no amount of spiritual authority is worth the safety of a single child. And for the love of all that is holy, stop giving standing ovations to people who hurt kids. It's really not that high a bar. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So, I’m old enough to remember the pre AOL days. The days before that horrible screech of dial-up modem. I remember trying to find stuff on the then blossoming interwebs. I also remember working at Electronics Boutique and selling Net Nanny and other products to adults to “protect their children from the horrors of the internet.” Never mind that those children already knew more about the computer than their parents did. I grew up with a Nintendo Entertainment System, and I swear a 386… certainly a 486. Because my father worked in Military Intelligence. He could tell me more, but my security clearance hadn’t cleared yet. That joke was never not hilarious, to him. But the point is, I grew up between Sneakernet and now. And I recall all the security that pr0n sites had. The need for credit cards and the like and the pinky promise you were 18 years old. And now the world has gotten less dangerous. Wait, let me check my notes. Oh, no it’s actually not. With Roblox hosting child predators, a certain drugged out soon to be trillionaire’s constant abuse of their chat bot making borderline child pr0n and now the age gate keeping for the children. Won’t you think of the children? Please? Just think about them… while we write half assed laws that don’t actually do anything but piss off the customer base. This blog is brought to you by Discord. For all the years I’ve been on the internet I’ve known the only person who could keep my data safe is myself. That’s why outside of government websites and things that linked to the government I had purposefully seeded misinformation into the digital profiles. No two profiles for my name are the same. This is intentional. I have next to no images of my physical self online. I’ve hated how I’ve looked since I was about… 10. It’s one of the reasons I have the fursona of a Fennic Fox Mimic Hybrid wearing a cowboy hat. I mean… if you saw what I wore through high school it wasn’t because I was ashamed of my fashion choices. Flannel, doc martens, and cargo pants were a lifestyle choice. One I’m pretty sure my elder sister would kill me for if she had ever taken me to school. She was kind enough to buy me preppy kid clothing from Abercrombie and Aéropostale and the like. But here’s the thing. Discord is basically saying “Trust us bro” with our data. Even though they just lost 70,000 government issued IDs. And they’re telling us that they’re basically training AI to recognize faces, oh and they’re feeding everything we do on Discord into the AI to determine if we are of a consenting age. Now, I get it. I fully and 100% endorse the protection of the wee ones from folks like a certain sex trafficker in a position of power that shan’t be named… I am of course talking about our Lord and Savior… Emperor Tiberius. What? Go read about the dude’s retreats. Those Romans I tell you what man. But the thing is, the internet cannot be safe AND anonymous. And I say this as someone who just ironically was saying how I purposefully seed bad information so that if data breaches happen it’s less impactful for me. The safety of being a fly on the wall means that it’s hard to prosecute and apprehend bad actors. Roblox is going through some serious heat right now over all that. Now keep in mind, there is no easy fix to this. Like with the UK’s CCTVs on virtually every corner there are going to be people who be cry “my freedoms! Don’t step on snek!” and then flood the message boards to complain. But as we saw with 9/11 in the US we were quick to start giving up our freedoms for what we perceived as safety. Now I’ve not done the research on this, but I’m pretty sure no one felt any more safe with TSA in our airports than without. But given a sufficient enough trigger point we’re happy to trade freedom for security. It’s like a Pavlovian thing. The bottom tiers need to be met for the top stuff. So, I know you’re wondering if I’ve thought about how to make this system “safe” for us. And you won’t like it. It’s every site, regardless of its age, regardless of its origin, regardless of its purpose, needs an ID, a Bank Account and a secondary authentication each and every time. I’m thinking you biometrically authenticate. A gallon of blood per site, that should do it. Now you’re fooling yourself if you think that they don’t already have the information and can’t pull it up when they want. There’s entire sites dedicated to scraping Facebook, Twitter and other sites and selling it. Your entire search history is cataloged and sold to the highest bidder. Your phone is listening and reporting to the corporations. Your driving data is recorded, in newer cars, by the GPS trackers in the car, and sold to insurance agencies. Or… maybe we should take the chance and stop letting the village of idiots raise another idiot. See I recall when that “It takes a village to raise a child” came out. And that thinking needs to stop. Yes it’s nice to have help raising your child, but so far we’ve divested so much of the responsibility of raising our spawn to others that we cannot for the life of us figure out how to get them back. Cause the thing is, when an idiot raises an idiot you get Idiocracy. And we’re on a fast track to that nightmare right now. Look, I’m not saying the internet isn’t dangerous. It is. It’s always been dangerous, just like the real world has always been dangerous. But no amount of age gates, AI face scanners, or “trust us bro” corporate promises are going to replace a parent who actually sits down and teaches their kid how to navigate this stuff. We didn’t need Net Nanny in 1996 and we don’t need Discord’s AI babysitter in 2026. We need parents who give a damn. And until that happens, the village is just going to keep churning out idiots. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So, a potentially charged topic here in America since there was a man who allegedly shot a malicious and disgusting serial murderer. I mean a healthcare CEO. Allegedly. And they still held the meeting without said CEO and put in a call to get his position filled like halfway through the meeting. If you want to know what a corporation thinks of you as a human being, that's your answer right there. You're not even cold yet and they're updating the org chart. If you read my last post, you know I'm currently navigating the delightful experience of finding a new endocrinologist while my insurance cosplays as actual coverage. But my personal frustrations are a symptom, not the disease. So let's talk about the disease. This system wasn't actually in place back in World War II. See, when we were having our second go at destroying the European continent, companies were told, "No, you can't change the values on wages and salaries. In case you didn't notice, you unpatriotic cur, we're in a war." It totally was like that. FDR was channeling Teddy Roosevelt energy. So in order to attract workers, companies started throwing in benefits. Covering health insurance as part of the salary. Vacation days. Sweetening the pot by saying not only will we pay you five pittances a day, we'll cover your insurance too. Fast forward eighty years and the system is so ingrained with the American workforce that no one can go without it. Your healthcare is chained to your employment, which means your employer has leverage over you that goes well beyond your paycheck. Quit your job? Lose your insurance. Get laid off? Good luck with COBRA, which costs roughly the same as a modest car, monthly, for the privilege of keeping coverage you were already paying into. Though I guess considering a “modest” car is sitting at 40K it’s actually cheaper again. But it certainly wasn’t for the year I was unemployed back in 2008, thanks housing bubble. I recall some film guy named Michael Moore making a movie about this. Sicko came out in 2007. That was nineteen years ago. And the situation has gotten worse. Not stagnant. Worse. We now have companies using AI to automatically deny patients. We have so many hoops and leaps to get through to see a doctor that the process of getting healthcare has become its own part-time job. And I recall even as early as 2008 people were taking trips to Mexico or Canada to get their prescriptions filled. Normally the folks on Medicare. The retired ones. The people who spent their whole lives paying into a system that now tells them their pills cost more than their mortgage. And speaking of pills, finding out that my heart medication is forty-five dollars at the Wally for a thirty day supply would make me go crazy... you know, if I wasn't already probably borderline. No one ever said writers maintain a firm grip on sanity. Have you seen our history of substance abuse? We're only one good book deal away from getting a dealer on speed dial. Now, am I advocating for the chaos of the tax-based system that our European neighbors have? Not necessarily. Like many things in life, I see a problem and I want to paint it b... sorry, I see a problem and think we can start fixing it. One of the biggest gripes people have is that prescription drugs are expensive. In most other countries the government can argue on behalf of the people. Last I checked there are 330 million people in America. If we could allow the government to start arguing for that buying power, we'd start getting some relief. But the principle applies to more than just prescriptions. Insurance as a whole is "safe" because largely the numbers work out that the more people in the pool, the less danger there is of catastrophic payouts, and so the prices can stay mostly low. It's sort of the inverse of the Walmart Law. See, there are roughly 5,000 Walmart locations in the US alone, and police get called there three to four times as often as other retailers. Why? Because there are tons of them. The number skews because of the sheer volume of locations. They're not any more unsafe than your local Jack In The Box. So the more people in the insurance pool, the less you pay and the "safer" it is on the whole. Only, as we're seeing in California and Florida, home insurance is pulling up stakes faster than a peregrine falcon diving. The housing market is getting brutalized by weather events and insurers are having to pay out. Le Gasp! What grew out of the market trying to attract workers has become a keep-all-the-money-for-themselves operation. Which has led to automated denials, hoops aplenty, and eventually the murder of a CEO. Allegedly. There's a new trend emerging in our medical system, which is darkly humorous because it already happens in countries outside of America. Direct Provider Care Membership, or DPC. If you're not familiar, it's a subscription-based system where you pay your provider a monthly fee for access to them, usually within a day or two. But here's the thing: this is exactly the sort of thing Mexico does for the retired Americans living in the resorts. Roughly ten percent of the AAFP surveyed in 2023 admitted to being on DPC. And you can find these services in Belize, Mexico, Ecuador, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Canada. Our healthcare system has become so terrible that our providers have given up on taking insurance and are moving to a subscription-based service. And I don't know if that's the ultimate expression of the capitalist way or if that's just the natural evolution of a broken system. Thanks Private Equity. You came for Toys R’ Us and now our healthcare! Most of our insurance companies, and a lot of corporations in general, have moved to maximize profits and minimize costs. And one thing many have tried is subscriptions. Why have a single transaction once or twice a year when you can have twelve sixty-dollar payments? Twelve ninety-dollar payments? Hell, even gym memberships have moved to a "lower cost" model by going from monthly to biweekly billing. It's not actually lower cost. See, you stop being billed sixty dollars a month, which works out to 720 dollars a year. Instead you get billed twenty-seven dollars every other week. So technically in a four-week period you're saving three bucks. Not huge. But when you do the math, you're actually being charged 1,404 dollars a year for that same gym membership. Twenty-seven dollars times fifty-two weeks divided by two... times two. See what they're doing? The healthcare system, the insurance industry, and the subscription economy are all running the same play. Make the number look small. Make the billing frequent. Bury the real cost in complexity. And if someone gets sick, deny the claim and let the algorithm sort it out. I don't have a clean answer for this. I wish I did. But I know the current system isn't it, and I know that nineteen years after someone made a whole movie about how broken it is, we're still here. Only now the CEOs are getting shot and the AI is doing the denying. But you’re mad if you thought they’d let you go. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So last month, Janurary 2026, I was told that my endocrinologist was leaving the practice I've been going to for ten years. Ten years. That's a relationship longer than most marriages in Hollywood, and it ended with a form letter. Thanks for the memories. Good luck out there, soldier. Now picture Ron Swanson slinging his backpack onto his back and fleeing his work. That’s the vibe I got. Now, for those who don't know, I've worked on the back end of healthcare for about twenty years. Most of my adult working life has been squandered creating interfaces to move results, orders, and patient demographics through electronic systems. Tracking down anomalies in billing on the inside of insurance companies. Setting up laboratories throughout the continental United States. I know how this system works. I've seen the guts of it. And I still can't make it work for me. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about American healthcare, I don't know what will. Let me back up and explain why I even need an endocrinologist in the first place. Technically, I'm diabetic. I say technically because once the system has flagged you, you're ALWAYS a filthy disgusting diabetic. It's not a best of three situation. You don't get to appeal. You have one really bad day where you're like, "Stand aside Cookie Monster, that bakery and me have business." Which isn't exactly what happened, but it might as well have been. I drank a lot of the Zero Sugar Crystal Light stuff the day before I went to get my blood test done. And it spiked into the high range. One test. One bad day. But here's the thing. For my entire adult life, when I was jet setting around the US, drinking entire bottles of Johnny Walker Blue at parties, eating pamcakes, and having sweets, I was always prediabetic. Always right on that borderline. And ever since that one diagnosis, repeated tests have put me right back at borderline prediabetic. Where I've been my whole life. But the flag doesn't care about context. The flag is permanent. And that flag does a number on you. If I lose my insurance for whatever reason, and the Affordable Care Act drops the stipulation that insurers have to take people with preexisting conditions, I'm locked out. One bad blood test on one bad day, and the system has branded me for life. Welcome to American healthcare, where the points are made up but the consequences are very real. But fear not, average US citizen tied to your job! You have healthcare! Or do you? Well, as I discovered today, my insurance is woefully inadequate for the task of getting me what I need. I started calling practices from the list of in network providers for my insurance. Most of the ones listed as accepting "open patients" had never heard of those providers. So that was a fun few hours of my life I'll never get back. Nothing in network, at least not within spitting distance. Which is an accurate south western term for measurement, like crow flies. Technically my primary care isn't even in network, so I'm paying specialist rates for the privilege of having a doctor who knows my name. And the cherry on this particular sundae? I found out that medication I need for everyday life is about a third of the cost on GoodRX. A third. Which kinda makes you question why you're paying ninety bucks a paycheck for insurance, plus the High Deductible Savings Account, right? And hey, if you didn’t know this. Most insurances have 2 moops. In Network and Out of Network. Better hope you know which ambulance/hospital you’re going to so you can file the paperwork correctly and get that deducted from the right moop pool. Last year I had to get my heart looked at. And I was told, "Congratulations, you've reached your MOOP!" That's Maximum Out of Pocket for those of you lucky enough to not know that acronym. Great, I thought. At least I'm done bleeding money for the year. Then a week later they told me, oh no, you didn't actually reach it, it's actually this other number. Then another week later, congratulations, you reached it again! Only for the new year to roll around and they hit me with a "LULZ JK, you totally didn't, and you owe the hospital a surprise grand. CYA LATERZ." I work in this industry. I build the systems. And I cannot tell you with any confidence what my actual out-of-pocket maximum is at any given time, because the insurance company apparently can't either. To see my new PCP after my last one retired? That was a year wait. A neurologist for migraines I've had for thirty years, because it's a family problem? Six month wait. And these aren't exotic specialists. These are bread-and-butter medical needs. But sure, the system is working. It's fine. Everything is fine. I need to find a new endocrinologist to handle meds that I don't technically need because I got flagged once on a diagnosis that was, frankly, bullshit. Because I'm an idiot who drank too much Crystal Light. And anyone who knows me knows I'm an absolute menace in the kitchen. I once mixed oatmeal with eggs because I thought that might be quick and easy for breakfast. Spoiler: it wasn't. So yeah, the idea that I was out there destroying bakeries is laughable. But the system doesn't care about context. It doesn't care about repeated tests. It doesn't care that you work inside it and know exactly how broken it is. The flag is the flag, and the flag is forever. I've got more to say about this. The systemic stuff. The history of how we got shackled to our employers for something as basic as not dying. But that's a longer rant, and this post is already long enough. Consider this the personal side. Next time, I'll zoom out. Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint

So I finally did it. I finished The Way of Kings. All forty-five-ish hours of it between the Kindle and the audiobook during cardiac rehab drives and walks around my neighborhood. And you know what? The ending was actually pretty good. For about two hours. Two. Hours. Out of forty-five. That's roughly 4% of the book that felt like it was actually going somewhere. The other 96%? Setup. Endless, grinding, "trust me bro, it'll pay off" setup. Which eh… wasn’t really a trust me bro. That’s like everyone being oh by season three it gets really good. Listen, if it’s not decent by episode 3, you have a problem. You know why video games are always so stellar at the beginning? Because people peter out at like the 50 to 60% mark. But I get it. It can’t ALL be a non holds barred action packed thrill ride for 95 of a 120 minute movie. The Tower: When Things Finally Happened Look, I'm not going to lie. When Sadeas betrays Dalinar at the Tower, abandoning him and his army to die on that plateau, I sat up straighter. Finally. FINALLY. Someone did something interesting. A villain emerged from the political muck and actually made a move. Sadeas, you magnificent bastard, where have you been this whole book? And his reasoning? He’d agreed to protect the kingdom. He’s not a bad guy, his idea of protecting the kingdom is just different than our soon to be Philosopher King Dalinar. And Dalinar's response? Chef's kiss. The Blackthorn showing up and reminding everyone why he earned that name was genuinely satisfying. All those chapters of him being a brooding honor-bound philosopher finally cashed out into something visceral. Watching him carve through Parshendi while his army rallied behind him? That's the content I signed up for. Sure we saw him save Sadeas a bit ago, but this one. This was the charge of the light brigade. This was a for Sparta moment. But here's the thing... we could have gotten here sooner. We didn't need forty hours of bridge crews and library scenes and "I wonder what these visions mean" to earn this payoff. Some of us have cardiac rehab schedules to keep. Kaladin Becomes He-Man And then there's Kaladin. Our brooding bridge boy who I've been frustrated with for turning down perfectly good power armor finally does something cool. He goes full Air Jordan across that chasm, practically hanging in the air, and becomes a Radiant. All that was missing was him grabbing the Sword of Grayskull and shouting "I HAVE THE POWER!" while lightning crackled behind him and Syl turned into a magical steed or something. It was so tropey, so perfectly Saturday morning cartoon, that I couldn't help but enjoy it despite myself. I actually expected Kaladin when he ran up to check that Sadeas and his company was leaving to be like “I killed a mofo in shardplate once. And I didn’t have magic.” Crack his neck and be like “Time to reap the whirlwind.” But apparently I’m just a blood thirsty warmonger who would have launched myself at the guy without a second thought and driven his own dagger into his faceplace and Necromongered that. Keep what you kill right? Did it make narrative sense after all his "I won't become like the lighteyes" angst? Eh. Kinda. The whole "protect instead of conquer" thing gives him an out, I suppose. But let's be honest, it's the fantasy equivalent of refusing a promotion for thirty chapters and then accepting it anyway when the plot demands you stop being stubborn. The Soulcaster Twist So Shallan and Jasnah can both Soulcast as their Radiant power. No magical artifact needed. They just... do it. With their minds. Or souls. Or whatever. And Shallan seeing the sprin of… art? They still haven’t told us what the squiggled head folks are. And I don’t know if I care. Finding out Sly was Honor Sprin is meh. Finding out that the ones who follow Shallan around are soulcaster sprin or whatever is probably going to be silly obvious in hindsight when they tell us what they are. But you know what? That's actually kinda cool that they’re able to magic like that. I'll give Sanderson credit here. The whole "the soulcaster was fake/broken and Jasnah was doing it herself the whole time" thing retroactively makes some of the library scenes slightly less tedious. Slightly. Don't get too excited, Brandon. It also means Shallan's entire heist plot was doomed from the start, which is either brilliant irony or a waste of my time depending on how generous I'm feeling. Today I'm feeling... moderately generous. Let's call it clever. But here’s a bit of stupidity. Shallan put the dots together when she realized that Jasnah soulcast the jam into something, destroying the antidote, and then the bread. We should have seen some stormlight leaking. And her needing the gems from Shallan’s soulcaster to keep changing blood, which isn’t organic so it’s cool and easy bro, constantly is a bit of a narrative oversight that I guess I can over look. The Parshendi Are What Now? Oh, and the Parshendi are the Voidbringers. Or connected to them. Or will become them. Whatever the twist is supposed to be. Holy Hoping Crabmen Sanderson! Here's my confession: by the time this reveal dropped, I had stopped caring. I'd spent so many hours wondering about the mysterious crab people and their singing and their weird carapace armor that when the answer finally came, it landed with all the impact of a wet napkin. "They're the ancient evil." Cool. Sure. Add it to the pile of things I'm supposed to remember for book seven. You know what would have made me care? If we'd spent more time with actual Parshendi characters instead of just fighting them and wondering about them from a distance. Give me a Parshendi POV. Let me understand their culture before you tell me they're secretly apocalyptic. But no, we get more Shallan drawing pictures and Kaladin brooding in the rain. You gave us a chapter of a fisherman walking across a lake. You couldn’t put in 2 minutes on Shin? He’s literally with Kaladin so it’s like it’s adjcent to the story. He could have been like “Stars of my people! You’re wearing the dead! The evil evil dead of the voidbringers! My papas!” or you know… something. God's Dead, By the Way Oh right. The Allfather, or high father or whatever is dead. We don’t even get his name, not really. It’s sort of implied that he’s Honor. Cause that’s what the Way of Kings is and the Knight Radiant and all that. It’s about Honor. The god that's been sending Dalinar visions is a corpse, and his power is fractured, guess he’s never heard of the Jedi Holicorn Crystal, and there's this other god called Odium who's apparently the real threat, and... You know what this reminds me of? When you're playing a JRPG and you beat the final boss only to discover there's ANOTHER final boss behind them. And then another. And you're forty hours in thinking "I just want to finish this game" and the game is like "LOL no, here's more mythology to absorb." Mizayki be praised! Look I get it. I have spent a lot of time watching Dark Souls and Elden Ring lore videos, but that was because it interested me. I don’t know if I can be bothered to find out about the other gods in the cosmere. I'm sure this matters. I'm sure it'll be crucial in books two through ten or however many Sanderson is planning. But right now? Right now I'm just tired. Dalinar's Big Brain Moves So after all that, Dalinar gives up his shardblade. To Sadeas. The guy who just tried to kill him. Bold move, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off. Actually, I kind of respect it? In a "this is either 4D chess or complete insanity" kind of way. Trading your legendary weapon to the man who betrayed you in exchange for all the bridge crews, including Kaladin's boys? That's either the most honorable thing anyone's ever done or the dumbest. Possibly both. Probably both. But ultimately… ultimately. It’s stupid. You’re not making Sadeas stop throwing away bodies on these bridge runs with that wager. And he even asks Kaladin the price of the blade and the price of a life. Both are supposedly priceless. But wait, there's more! Dalinar then proceeds to kick his nephew Elhokar's shit in, dude goes into his chamber and beats him within an inch of his life. And I fully expected him to just straight up snap his neck and sit on the throne and be like “Here lies your king, anyone else wish to object?” Instead after teaching him a lesson on what a warrior can do he makes himself Highprince of War. Takes over the whole military operation. And THEN gives his Shardplate to his son Renarin. So now Dalinar's walking around with no blade, no plate, just vibes and the sheer intimidation factor of being the Blackthorn. Oh and the massive fucking balls it takes to be Dalinar in a camp of people who are about to get their murder on. You know what? I actually love this. Dalinar's out here playing the game without any of the cheat codes and still winning through pure "I will end you with my bare hands" energy. It's the fantasy equivalent of a retired gunslinger hanging up his revolvers and still being the most dangerous person in the room. Like when they came after Afro Samurai and he’d been “retired” but his reflexes and skills were so top notch that after who knows how many years he basically blinked and the guy was dead. That’s the energy that Dalinar is spitting out right now. The Storm on the Horizon And now Szeth, our favorite gravity-flipping assassin, has been sent to kill Dalinar. You remember Szeth, right? The guy who murdered the king in the prologue by hookshoting his way through an entire palace guard? The dude who's killed three shardbearers as a casual aside? Plus others on the command of the healer king. Who apparently has world domination plans, or at least likes the world all messed up and not united. Yeah. That guy. Coming for Dalinar. Who just gave away his shardblade and his shardplate. Part of me hopes book two opens with Szeth doing his whole "stormlight flip, pull gravity, lash lash lash, I have a shardblade" routine and Dalinar just standing there like, "Bitch, I'll take you without a blade. Come at me." Because honestly? I'd believe it. The Blackthorn earned that energy. The Hermit Crabs Update Still not enough giant hermit crabs though. I demand more chulls in the sequel. The chasmfiends were cool during the fight scenes, I'll admit. Giant lobster kaiju battling dudes in power armor is exactly the kind of ridiculous I can get behind. But the everyday giant crabs pulling wagons? Those are my boys. Those are the real heroes of Roshar. Speaking of which, my brother wants to run the Cosmere tabletop RPG. And you know what? I'm in. But I'm not playing some noble shardbearer or brooding soldier. No, I'm going to be a spren wrangler who rides a chull. Just some absolute nobody living their best life herding magical emotion sprites while mounted on a giant hermit crab. That's the Roshar content I've been craving. Forget the Knights Radiant, give me the Chull Herders of the Shattered Plains. That's the real story. Have an exhaustion spren hanging around all erory like giving off a “well, it could be worse,” vibe. Because in this world it could. You could end up a slave running a bridge for an asshole. Now, about those RPG books... my brother dropped roughly $200 on the Cosmere RPG set. Had them for about two months. The gold lettering on the covers is already rubbing off. Two months. Two hundred dollars. Gold flaking away like it's some ancient tome that's been sitting in a crypt for centuries instead of on a bookshelf in an air-conditioned house. Look, I get it. Fancy collector's editions are meant to be displayed, not manhandled. But these are game books. They're supposed to be used. Flipped through during sessions. Referenced when your spren wrangler needs to know if her chull can trample a Parshendi. If the gold lettering can't survive two months of existing, how's it going to survive actual play? Maybe Sanderson's publisher should take some notes from the Dungeons & Dragons folks, because my 3rd edition books from twenty-plus years ago still look better than these allegedly premium products. Which by the way. Full collection, still in good condition in my library. Still read occasionally. But hey, at least we'll have pretty... slightly less pretty... okay, increasingly shabby books to reference while I live my best chull-herding life. Final Verdict Here's where I land on The Way of Kings: it's not a bad book. It might even be a good book for people who aren't me. But it's absolutely, definitively, not a book for someone who reads in small chunks, prefers sci-fi pacing, and wants their villains to show up before the 90% mark. Sanderson can clearly write. The action sequences, when they finally happen, are genuinely exciting. The magic system, once you stop thinking about the physics, has some cool applications. And the worldbuilding is dense enough that I'm sure superfans have wikis dedicated to cataloging every spren type and Highprince genealogy. But forty-five hours is a lot to ask for a setup book. And let's be honest, that's what this is. Setup. The real story, whatever it is, hasn't started yet. We're still in the prologue of a ten-book series, and I just spent a month of reading time getting through it. Will I read Words of Radiance? Maybe. Eventually. When I've recovered from this one and my brother has sufficiently guilted me into it. Or maybe I'll just absorb the lore through osmosis during our tabletop sessions while my chull-riding spren wrangler avoids all the main plot nonsense entirely. For now, I'm going back to sci-fi where the spaceships go fast and the villains have the decency to show up in act one. Rating: It Gets Good Eventually/10 Incorrigibly yours, J.E. Flint