The Well of Ascension

The review will leave you as spoiled as a rich, white, aristocratic kid.

The second book in the Mistborn trilogy, The Well of Ascension, is much more flawed than its predecessor. Still repetitive and occasionally inconsistent, the novel is now also rife with problematic characterization and badly used genre tropes, with even the titular MacGuffin not being used… well, feeling much more like an afterthought than a goal that actively drives the characters.

The story begins months after the Final Empire’s climax: the Skaa are now free workers, Elend Venture is king, and Kelsier’s troupe has become his advisors. It’s all well and good, except for the fact that the city of Luthadel is being besieged by enemy armies, and the main one is led by no one other than Elend’s own father, Straff Venture. Meanwhile, Vin, who is dating the king, needs to investigate the rumors about strange figures lurking in the mists while worrying about a mysterious creep who, like most mysterious creeps, loves to watch her from a distance.

But in The Well of Ascension, Vin remains mostly in the background until the climax. Elend Venture is the one who takes on the mantle of protagonist here, having to make difficult choices after realizing that his unrestrained honesty is not exactly a political strength. His narrative arc is a simple one: the tests to which the young king is submitted serve to tempt him to review his ideals, pushing him to believe that sometimes treacherous, violent, or even authoritarian attitudes can produce better results than dialogue and understanding.

Therefore, Elend tries to remain steadfast in his convictions, accepting the negative consequences of his choices by believing that the nature of one’s actions matters more than the results they produce. However, this also may suggest that he values his moral standing more than the well-being of his people.

Elend has a democratic spirit: he’s not content with liberating the Skaa but insists that handing them political power is also crucial. One of his first accomplishments as a king, then, is the creation of a parliament, putting the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the people on a theoretical equal footing. Two elements, however, complicate his government. First, there’s the fact that the interests of powerful businessmen and the upper class generally coincide, making the dispute often unequal for the common people. Second, much like in real life, the people in charge don’t always know what they’re doing: whether motivated by greed or fear, the members of the Elend’s Assembly show the irresponsible habit of caring solely for what’s happening at that precise moment, failing to visualize the long-term consequences of their choices, or – in the case of the nobility and the merchants – not caring much about the consequences because they know that only the less favored –like you, yes, you – will be getting the short end of the stick.

The king’s internal struggle, therefore, becomes clear: does he need to respect the decision of the parliament when they’re being unjust, shortsighted, or even suicidal? Is it just and right to enforce his will in these cases, to protect the people, or does he need to respect democracy even when it’s clearly not working to everyone’s benefit? Elend is of the opinion that upholding the parliament’s decision, whatever it may be, is the key to a democratic government. He believes that if he fails to do that, he’ll put not only his moral integrity at risk but also the entire political system he helped build. Being in a democracy, in other words, is just like being in a relationship: we must accept the good and the bad; sometimes things won’t work, but such is life – the important bit is the good outweighing the bad.

If Elend is often described as a “good man,”  it’s because of his incorruptibility and the fact that his ideals are based on a democratic principle: Elend is “good” precisely because he tries to diminish inequality by handing power over to those who suffer directly from it while rejecting any movement that ignores or denies that power.

However, even though this is a fascinating political discussion, it’s one that Sanderson never develops beyond surface level. The narrative here is marked by repetition, which is reflected in Elend’s arc: the king faces a situation where the easiest way out is the authoritarian one, but refuses to go that route, which generates bad consequences for himself and his city. His next problem, then, is the same as the previous one in essence, and Elend makes the same virtuous choice… and faces similar results. Rinse and repeat through more than 600 pages. There is nothing wrong with a character never changing, especially when this is part of the theme, but the sheer number of these scenes in The Well of Ascension just turns the narrative more tiresome than this review.

But to make matters far worse, at the end of the book, Elend indeed changes, but in a way that is not only sudden but also goes against everything the character stands for. It happens with a single line of dialogue, but it’s enough to throw all the development made until then out of the window: Elend suddenly acts like he doesn’t understand that making an ideological concession – even a small one – marks the beginning of the collapse of his democratic system. His insistence on upholding his moral values has always been an act of resistance and protection, and not mere stubbornness. So, when Elend concedes and falls to the temptation of acting like a tyrant, it means that he has ultimately failed. The problem, however, is that the tragedy of this ending is immediately undercut by the fact that the book ends soon after: the narrative barely has time to acknowledge the meaning of what has just happened… let alone develop the theme.

Vin doesn’t fare better. In most of the book, her drama involves a poorly developed love triangle that leads her to believe that her choice between two men will define who she is. In her mind she has only two choices: she can either stay with the man who watches her from the shadows, called Zane – because entertaining the mysterious creep is always a smart choice, what could go wrong, right – and so become the warrior she thinks she needs to be, or stay with Elend, who she loves, but be drowned in political intrigue for the rest of her life. That is, regardless of who she eventually chooses to be with, these two options have her identity linked to her potential husband.

It’s telling that Vin continuously tries to mold herself to better serve Elend: when she tries to smother her personality because she believes that Elend deserves a “normal” woman or at least one “better” than her, and when she tries to change the way she looks, keeping her hair long simply because he likes it that way, even though that makes her uncomfortable – as it means a disadvantage in battle and Vin is a warrior at heart –, Vin is submitting herself to a man. The opposite, however, never happens: when Elend changes his posture in the book, he’s thinking primarily about his people’s opinion and not Vin’s.

She even believes that a “better” woman for Elend is precisely a more submissive one: she rejects the very characteristics that make her a strong character, associating them with the masculine. For Vin, the man is the one who protects, not the woman, and Elend deserves someone who conforms to this sexist gender ideology: “But, doesn’t he deserve a woman that he feels he can protect? A woman who’s more like . . . a woman?” she ponders in clear terms one time. Elend, of course, also begins to refer to Vin with terms that basically objectify her: she is called a “resource,” a “tool,” a “weapon,” and especially a “knife.” In other words, not exactly the attitude of a “good man”, but the narrative barely acknowledges that… let alone develops the theme.

And it doesn’t help that Vin’s other suitor, Zane, is insane and hears voices that tell him to go do bad things – oh no, the mysterious creep is dangerous, who could have guessed: certainly not Vin. Zane functions only as a tool to create the ridiculous love triangle – which is basically Vin’s only internal struggle for much of the book –, influencing few other characters throughout the story. His personality may be eccentric, but is – true to form – never developed: although the voices he hears have some importance, they only function as dark humor for most of the time. Meanwhile, elements such as self-harm and a feeling of social exclusion are thrown into the pot just to shock us, being discarded soon after.

Zane’s dialogues also make him sound like a broken record: he approaches Vin, claims that Elend is only using her, and that if she decides to stay with him instead, she won’t have to give up her freedom. And maybe even keep her hair short. And then he repeats everything when he finds her again, and then says it again in their next scene together, and then again in their next scene, and then again and again and… when we gain access to his point of view, he starts not only to say these things out lound but also to think about them – again, and again, and again, ad aeternum. And then one more time. Zane is an excessive, tiresome character, whose only redeeming quality is the fact that he seems to be the only one in that world capable of manipulating people and forming a plan.

After all, for most characters in the novel – from villains to heroes – the solution to all problems always seems to be a bland show of strength. Elend’s father, Straff Venture, is the biggest culprit, as he could have been compared to Tywin Lannister of A Song of Ice and Fire if Tywin Lannister were a total idiot. Straff acts as if problems can only be solved through intimidation or a big display of power – and he even sounds desperate while trying to accomplish these things: in one scene, Straff drinks a tea that he knows to be poisoned just to impress Zane, which leads him to quickly run to an antidote when that very mysterious creep – such a good, healthy match for Vin – leaves his presence. The problem is that such action shows exactly the opposite of what Straff intends: if someone needs to drink poisoned tea to appear fearless, they have already lost the battle. The narrative, however, continues to treat his actions as if they were great ones, as if Straff really were someone like Tywin Lannister: he is seen with respect and fear by Kelsier’s troupe and is still considered an effective commander by those around him.

Straff, however, is not the only character like that in the novel. Two kings who appear in the story also seem to believe that the straightforward use of force is the only possible strategy to win a war – one of them tries a single political maneuver to seize power but that’s it – and the heroes themselves act the same way, often believing that the situation is lost because their military power is smaller than that of their opponents. And maybe they’re even right, as the eventual solution for a good part of their problems doesn’t come from intricate plans and a lot of preparation, but from one of the main characters discovering that they’re a weapon of mass destruction (I bet you though this character is Vin and guess what, you’re right!). So, for a book focused on political conflict, there is extraordinarily little intelligence and manipulation involved in the proceedings: the climax, for example, consists not of unexpected moves and countermoves, but only of more displays of raw power from both sides.

Another problem with The Well of Ascension is the glacial pacing, with most scenes in the book serving more to postpone the climax than to move the story to it. And it doesn’t help that some events could be cut without much changing: what’s the point of discovering how a certain king controls his army of monsters if the information is not used by anyone? Similarly, why do we have to accompany the ins and outs of a political maneuver of another king when he enters Luthadel if, in the end, he’ll leave the city and his army will return to almost the same position as they were before?

Sanderson’s prose just aggravates the issue, being as repetitive as it was in the Final Empire: in the novel’s second paragraph, for example, Vin thinks that the killers she sighted were probably sent to kill Elend and not her, and then, a few paragraphs later, she thinks that the killers she sighted were… probably sent to kill Elend and not her (“If she had just arrived with an army to conquer Luthadel, the first thing she’d have done was send in a group of Allomancers to kill Elend,”  x “Nobody sent assassins to kill bodyguards. Assassins killed important men. Men like Elend Venture.” Some points of view are also redundant: why insert Straff’s perspective at the beginning, revealing that his Allomancers are his children, if later on the same information will be conveyed by Zane to Vin? Likewise, why should we learn Straff’s plan in Part IV if, soon after that, Breeze will repeat the exact same information to us?

There are only two plotlines in The Well of Ascension that are good. The first is Vin’s relationship with a Kandra (basically the shapeshifter race of that universe): initially rejecting the creature for its monstrous nature, Vin starts to perceive her hypocrisy and tries to modify her way of acting towards them, which leads to unexpected results. The other plotline is the development of Sazed, who begins to be questioned on several levels: his political activism is condemned by his compatriots, the usefulness of his teachings is misunderstood by the people, and the function of explaining all the world’s religion beliefs to others is seen as moot – and by the end, due to some personal tragedies, Sazed himself begins to question all these things.

In relation to the Kandra shapeshifters, The Well of Ascension also has a The Thing kind of plotline, with the heroes realizing that there is a monster in their midst that can assume the form of any person. The problem is that Sanderson uses the conventions of the detective/mystery genre, making any reader accustomed to this type of story realize who the culprit is right away: the strategy is always to discard who the investigator obviously suspects and instead pay attention to who they’re ignoring. And to make matters worse, this plotline is basically a distraction to Vin, who has to constantly remind herself that there is a traitor in her group and that she needs to do something about it: “She couldn’t ignore it any longer,” the narrator states in one scene… for the second time in the book.

Similarly, regarding the Well of Ascension itself, it’s a place that Vin believes to be important, but she doesn’t actively try to discover its location right until near the climax. She indeed has other, more urgent priorities, but this makes the well feel like another distraction, that kind of inconvenient responsibility we often postpone until it’s too late. The twists and turns involving the place also fail to have an impact because, despite subverting certain elements, they produce relevant consequences only for the last volume of the trilogy, having almost nothing to do with the whole political plot of this book. In other words, the narrative barely has time to acknowledge them… let alone develop the theme. Despite being in the title, the Well of Ascension, then, feels just like a hook for the next novel.

Finally, Sanderson also embraces several genre tropes, suggesting that a certain main character is the “chosen one” for the most part of the novel (I bet you though this character is Vin and guess what, you’re right again!), inserting an absurd love triangle, and even making one of the villains tell their whole plan in a terrible monologue that’s very much in the style of  “I can’t believe that I did this very evil thing in secret I that would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your damn kandra dog.”

The Well of Ascension is not a good follow-up to The Final Empire, which was already a book with a fair share of problems. With an incredibly repetitive narrative and a bunch of problematic characters, the novel, although ambitious, fails at almost every front.

May 13, 2025

Review originally published in Portuguese on December 08, 2017.