It's the sort of low-calorie fantasy you can easily watch and enjoy if you turn off most of the critical faculties in your brain for an hour. The fights and magic and action really ramp up the show's energy. One shape-changing demon is particularly scary. The demons are sufficiently creepy and there's some good fight scenes. There's some good special effects at work here, too, though nothing mind-blowing. But the younger stars, from Austin Butler to Poppy Drayton, all do a decent job as well, especially given some of the lines they're asked to deliver with a straight face. The acting is decent, especially from Lord of the Rings veteran John Rhys-Davies and Arrow and Hobbit alumni Manu Bennett as the elven king Eventine and druid Allanon respectively. I enjoyed it enough to have fun watching, even if sometimes that fun was derived from laughing at it a little. I'm not going to tell you whether he's right or not, but he has an argument.The Dagda Mor Unleashes An Evil Demon Into The Four Lands (Credit: MTV)ĭown below, I'm going to really tear into the Shannara Chronicles, but before I do that, I think it's important to note one very important tidbit: I'm actually glad I had the chance to watch the first four episodes of the show. What does autonomy mean? We attach a lot to it, but what is the actual, if you get rid of the charged terms, what does it mean? And this is where you end up with things like Odium claiming 'I am all emotion.' Rather than- But then there's a charged term for it that is associated with this Shard. So I find Honor very interesting, but I find Autonomy a very interesting one for the exact same reason. And not all of them are gonna have a 100% balance between those two things, I would say, because there's only so many fundamental laws of the universe that I can ascribe personalities to in that way. So a lot of them do kind of have this both- cultural component, I would say, that is trying to represent something that is also natural. And there's this sense that that is noble, that's the honor aspect to it, but there's also something not honorable about Honor if taken from the other direction. Like, Honor is the sense of being bound by rules, even when those rules, you wouldn't have to be bound by. And those are the personality aspects, and the way they are viewed by people and by the entity that was Adonalsium.

And Preservation is a charged term for stasis, for staying the same. Ruin is a charged term for something that actually is the way that life exists. And then humans do have a part, there's a personality. Like, you've got these two contrasts, between things changing and things not changing. They are the primal forces of entropy and whatever you call the opposite, staying-the-same-ism-y. And when I wrote Mistborn we had Ruin and Preservation. And so I view every one of them this way. So the Shattering of Adonalsium was primal forces attached to certain aspects of personality. So when I split Adonalsium I said, 'I'm going to take aspects of Adonalsium's nature.' And this involves personality to me. Like the concept of Honor can only be done when it's carried out, essentially, by a sentient creature. Why do we have Shards that can only exist in the mind of a sentient creature?. Trying to keep this spoiler free, so: Ruin, Preservation, this kind of thing. We started with fairly obvious ones, magic wise. But I don't want them to overshadow the stories of the books themselves. (Yes, there is more.) Those are there for the readers who want to dig, and who want to see the greater story. I don't want anyone to HAVE to know any of the behind the scenes, regarding Hoid, Adonalsium, and the rest. Mostly, I want the stories to be enjoyable and self-contained. The subtle hints will continue until then. (If they are released that way, they'll most likely be free for download and reading.) So perhaps these will all just be on my website only. Perhaps I'll write them out in novel form and release them in bookstores, but I have a feeling that most of my readers would be completely confused by them. Some of these stories are novel length, and I can't say what I'll do with them.

There will be short stories dealing with Hoid, most likely posted to my website. I will confirm that I do have stories planned that delve into what is going on behind the scenes. Or will you stick to placing subtle hints in your different books/series about the overall system? Is that something you would even be interested in doing? Since you established that all the worlds you created in your books are linked, any chance to see in the (very) distant future a book/series that delves into this overarching story/universe/rules more directly? Possibly with a crossover of characters from your different stories, specifically characters that became 'immortal' or at least achieve a 'different' state: Sazed, Kelsier, Raoden.

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