The Hero of Ages

This review is full of spoilers for the entire trilogy; you could say it will… ruin most twists and turns.

The Hero of Ages marks the conclusion of the first Mistborn trilogy. It’s an uneven novel that struggles under the weight of its many plotlines and themes, with redundant character development and some disappointing pay-offs.

The story begins a few years after the events of The Well of Ascension, when Vin accidentally freed an entity called Ruin, who is now loose in the world and – living up to his name – wanting to wreak destruction everywhere. With the help of her husband, Emperor Elend, Vin’s plan is to seek out the location of some storage caches hidden by the Lord Ruler and find out if the former villain had any information on how to defeat Ruin, who is himself seeking out a special metal deposit. While they make preparations to take the city of Fadrex and gain access to the last cache, their friends Spook, Sazed, and Breeze try to stop a rebellion in the city of Urteau. Meanwhile, the shapeshifter kandra TenSoon is trying to convince his people that the end is near, but the fact that he’s being accused of treason makes his mission a bit more difficult.

The plot involving Fadrex contains one of the best characters in the whole trilogy: the obligator Yomen. Far from being a one-dimensional villain, like those of the first two books, Yomen is fascinating due to the way he tries to reconcile two conflicting things: critical thinking and religious fundamentalism. He follows every teaching of his faith without thinking twice, without making concessions, being harsh and pious, but only because he has already studied them, analyzed them thoroughly, and deemed them good. He’s not blindly following what the Lord Ruler used to preach, because with Yomen it’s less about belief and more about ideology: he has academic rigor and reason behind his actions.

And if Yomen’s religion forms the pillars of his government – it’s a clear theocracy based of the late Lord Ruler –, the man still remains capable of being open to dialogue and respecting his adversaries’ point of view. Like Sazed, he’s a rational man who takes a practical stance when it comes to religion: he knows, for example, that the laws written by the Lord Ruler can lead to social injustice, but considers it a necessary evil to maintain political stability and guarantee security to the people. In other words, Yomen believes that it’s necessary to oppress his people if he wants to protect them. Intelligent and able to manipulate his opponents with ease, the character is certainly the most complex in the book.

The narrative retroactively makes the Lord Ruler a much more interesting figure as well, framing his actions as the “lesser evil”: in his mind, his tyrannical rule was necessary to save the world from Ruin. The Lord Ruler may have been an asshole, but he had the best of intentions – and after he was killed, it didn’t take long for Vin to indeed free the destructive deity he was guarding and put the whole world in jeopardy. Yomen, therefore, appears almost as a second Lord Ruler, making the same mistakes for the same reasons. In fact, it’s curious to see how the Lord Ruler assumes here a similar function to Kelsier in The Well of Ascension, being a spectral presence that guides the actions of several characters while becoming a model to be either followed or rejected by them.

After all, another character who bears similarities to the former villain is Elend, whose political stance has been drastically changed from the previous book. He’s Emperor Elend now, a ruler who believes that democratic concessions, brutal displays of force, coercion, and manipulation are useful political tools. Much like Yomen and the Lord Ruler, he has no objections to using violence if he believes it will bring peace. The difference between the antagonists and Elend lies only in the fact that the Emperor still advocates for a more egalitarian world, since his means of achieving this dream now don’t differ anymore from those employed by his enemies. It’s no wonder that the climax of his character arc involves the use of an army of monstrous koloss: Elend contemplates committing the same abominable act that made him judge and execute his own friend in The Well of Ascension. Elend finally deciding not to go through with the attack, therefore, is the key point that turns him back into his previous self: the Elend that saw violence as a trap instead of a solution.

There are four types of rulers in The Hero of Ages: there’s the one who sees political stability as the ultimate goal and finds their legitimacy in religion (the Lord Ruler and his proxy, Yomen); there’s the one who doesn’t hesitate to coerce and kill if this will lead to a less socially unjust world, and who finds their legitimacy in their noble blood (the Elend from The Hero of Ages), and there’s the one who believes that this peaceful and less unjust world will never be built with acts of war and injustice, but still have their power legitimized by their higher social class (the Elend from The Well of Ascension).

What about the fourth ruler? This one comes from the common people and, well, it’s where the novel starts to stumble. The man who controls the town of Urteau is a mysterious figure known simply as the Citizen, whose plotline offers a scenario predicted and avoided by Elend in The Final Empire: a revolution that begins and ends with the common people. Emperor Elend has always preached that such a government would never sustain itself for long, believing that since it’s based on class struggle, it would inevitably collapse under the weight of the hatred toward the upper classes. Don’t eat the rich, rich Elend argued, for an alliance with the nobility, such as with a man like himself, is essential to build a bridge toward a more democratic world.

And when Spook, Sazed, and Breeze arrive in Urteau, it seems that Elend’s arguments were indeed sound: the city is in total chaos, with the Citizen making his own French Revolution in Urteau, carrying out regular public executions, ruling by fear and acting not unlike the Lord Ruler himself when it comes to persecuting his opponents.

But here is where the novel – much like my own mind – starts to sabotage itself. First, the chapters in Urteau never advance the political landscape: the Citizen is tyrannical at the beginning, tyrannical in the middle, and tyrannical before he is deposed at the climax. His point of view is never included – a serious crime – and the events serve only to affirm that Elend has always been right, without raising any sort of counterpoint. So, if Elend advocates for a pluralistic worldview, the way politics is portrayed in Urteau is, contradictorily, one-dimensional.

However, the main mistake here is the final twist that the Citizen was actually acting under the influence of Ruin. This spoils the whole thing because it means that the leader of the people’s revolution was not acting according to his own ideals. Urteau is no longer a laboratory for proving Elend’s point of view because the necessary elements are no longer present: it was a random destructive deity and not the ruler’s political vision, along with his social condition, that was generating those horrible results. In other words, the whole discussion is suddenly thrown out of the window. It’s not the case that Ruin metaphorically symbolizes the mentality of a popular revolution – as questionable as that would be – since it’s suggested that the Citizen would have acted differently had he not been influenced by Ruin, and there’s a noble (Penrod) suffering from the same malady while ruling Luthadel. The twist, then, makes the whole plotline thematically hollow: it doesn’t mean anything anymore and feels like padding.

The protagonist of this section is Spook, who finally gains the limelight here. And what is revealed about him here? Nothing that hadn’t already been hinted at in previous books. The two main points developed are his inferiority complex, showing that his almost insignificant role in Kelsier’s group made him sad – who could have imagined – and his romantic side, which had already been much more effectively shown with the handing of a handkerchief to Vin in The Final Empire. In other words, it’s ironic that the character realizing his dream to step out of the background doesn’t add much to him: Spook remains the same Spook, with no added depth.

To add insult to injury, the impact of the Urteau plotline on the war against Ruin lies only in a single message of questionable value. This message is intercepted and read by Marsh – Kelsier’s brother –, which pushes him to come up with the idea of ripping out Vin’s earrings, freeing her of Ruin’s influence. The problem is that the information the letter contained – that people can be manipulated by Ruin when pierced by metal – could very well have been deduced by Marsh alone: after all, he was precisely one of the individuals who went around the world piercing people with metal so that Ruin could have a hold on them.

Then there’s how he managed to pull out Vin’s earrings. Marsh, being impaled by metal as he is, can’t do something as insignificant as turning left without Ruin, on the other side of the world and focused on other things, sensing the act and coming back to make him turn right just out of spite. However, during a climactic scene, Marsh is able to pull those earrings out of Vin even though Ruin is right there, already in the act of controlling his body. And this is possible only because the entity was too… distracted by the prospect of killing Vin, and Marsh had feigned a lack of resistance to surprise him at the opportune moment. Okay, then.

Vin herself also lacks a character arc to call her own. She loves Elend and her friends and wants to kill anyone who poses a danger to them… and that’s it. And to make matters worse, the novel undoes the whole symbolism established around her in The Final Empire. There, Vin disliked her earrings because they made her look feminine, drawing unwanted attention to her: she saw them as a sign of weakness that made her look like easy prey for male predators. But, after meeting Kelsier and becoming more self-assured, she started to wear the earrings without fear: the feminine, then, stopped being a symbol of weakness and became one of self-affirmation.

Here, however, it’s revealed that the earrings are objects by which Ruin can influence her thoughts: on a symbolic level, then, the feminine has once again been linked to a weakness, to a point of vulnerability. The power to corrupt and its association with a dark destructive deity deemed the devil have always been cruel symbols associated with the feminine, which means that The Hero of Ages endorsing them is not only bad from a structural point of view, as it contradicts the first volume, but also from a social one.

Talking about structure, some of the book’s main revelations have basically no impact on the overall story. Take the discovery that the monstrous koloss are generated from human bodies, for example: it’s just lore that disgusts the characters who find out and nothing more. Another problematic revelation is that Ruin was the voice of Vin’s brother in her head: one of the chapters ends with this twist, which functions as a thrilling cliffhanger… until it’s later discarded, since Ruin could not have been her brother’s voice for most of the time, as it was often reacting to her thoughts and Ruin doesn’t have access to them.

Then we come to the big twist that the metal deposit Ruin was searching for all this time is hidden in the city of the shapeshifter kandras. Although the twist makes sense, as the creatures’ behavior and origin serve as appropriate clues, it also makes the main villain of the novel look, well, pretty stupid. After all, it makes sense, and there were plenty of clues (and Ruin is supposed to be very smart). But then the novel has Ruin ignoring, in his plan for world destruction, an entire race of bloody shapeshifters that he could mentally control. The excuse is that Ruin thought the kandra were “weak,” whatever that means. So, come on: Ruin not only fails to consider the possibility that the kandras were part of the plan to defeat him, despite them being created by his most powerful enemy (the Lord Ruler), but he also doesn’t even consider making use of them in his plan. Just by being shapeshifters, the kandras would have already been an invaluable tool, saving him the trouble of surgically piercing Penrod with metal, for example: all he had to do was kill the guy and replace him with a kandra. Yes, the creatures had a safety measure if he tried to control them – suicide – but he didn’t know that at first, and some of them didn’t even kill themselves when Ruin finally remembered they existed. Not to mention that things dying is kind of his goal, so even if Ruin knew about the collective suicide plan, there would be no reason for him not to try to control them. If they all died, great for him; if some managed to stay in his control, great for him too. But no. He considered them beneath his notice because they were weak, reclusive, etc. Okay, then.

The only big twist that really works is that the hero of ages – the chosen one – is not Vin, but subverting our expectations, her friend Sazed. And this works mainly because he’s a much more fascinating character than Vin: still traumatized by the death of his beloved in the war for Luthadel, Sazed, who used to understand the comforting side of religions, starts to question their very structure, analyzing their contradictions and inconsistencies. He’s even responsible for asking the question of the century: if people kill and oppress in the name of religion, which structures their hatred and turns it sacred, what then is their real social function?

But the greatest thing about Sazed being the hero of ages is that this allows his character arc to reach a satisfactory conclusion: by becoming what’ basically a God, he gets the chance to use everything he learned to help rebuild the world. He became what he was starting to criticize and has got the opportunity to do everything differently. Sazed, after all, understands that religions may fail to offer comfort and answers, and even to push humanity to goodness, but they still serve as cultural repositories, serving as a mirror that reflects what humanity really is.

During the climax, however, some characters just disappear, and in one particular case – Marsh – this means that his arc is left unfinished. It’s an unnecessary omission, since Sazed could have reconstituted his body, solving what ailed him quickly. Or, if for some arbitrary okay, then reason Sazed could not make Marsh normal again, the Inquisitor could have carried out the suicide he was contemplating. In any case, even a bad or bizarre ending (Marsh deciding to become a plumber and going on to massacre a whole lot of sentient mushrooms) may have been better than the absolute lack of resolution found here, with the character simply not being mentioned anymore. Yomen could also have had more closure, as his reaction to the miracles performed by Sazed would either lead to a strengthening of his faith in the Lord Ruler, attributing the miracles to him – which would mean that the problem the villain represents would still persist – or would cause him to live a crisis of faith. In any case, just like Marsh, he should have been mentioned.

The plot of the kandra TenSoon also has its ups and downs. On the one hand, it develops his race, planting clues to the twist about the location of the metal deposit, and moves Sazed to where he should be to become the hero, both physically and psychologically. On the other hand, it just amounts to TenSoon running around places quite lost for much of the book, and, in some situations, this even occurs artificially: there’s one scene where soldiers in Luthadel don’t know where their own army has gone, when there is no reason for that to be a state secret. Okay, then.

As for the villain, Ruin, it’s a good thing there is Yomen in The Hero of Ages, because he falls into that very niche category of villains who are one-dimensional monsters –basically destructive forces of nature – and also total idiots – basically slow forces of plotting. But the main problem with Ruin is not even that he’s just another shallow bad guy out to destroy everything, but that he is a shallow bad guy out to destroy everything who still has several lines of dialogue. After all, what can such a character say that is interesting? Apparently, nothing, because his lines vary from arrogance to mockery and end in childish meanness: he even gives an evil laugh when he eventually murders Elend, for example, saying to Vin, “I killed him! I ruined everything you love” –  and he’s probably just like me at the beginning of this review, thinking himself very smart for the pun.

The prose remains quite repetitive and condescending here, too. Characters, for example, still repeat the same thoughts over and over again: Spook repeatedly laments having abandoned his uncle, Marsh repeatedly laments not being able to commit suicide, Elend repeatedly laments that the war has turned him into something he despises, and so on. Meanwhile, the story is frequently interrupted by very didactic explanations on how some of the elements of its fantastical universe work, which is something unacceptable in the final book of a trilogy: the function of pewter is explained three times; the first with Ham, the second with Vin, and the third with Spook, who, not satisfied, takes the opportunity to recall the alomantic function of all the metals. And this can get laughably intrusive at some points: near the end, for example, it’s said once again that Luthadel was built on top of the Well of Ascension and that it eventually became a pretty important city. No shit.

In the end, The Hero of Ages perfectly encapsulates the entire Mistborn trilogy: it may raise some relevant questions and present a few interesting characters, scenes, and set-pieces, but it’s dragged down by a repetitive and oftentimes contradictory narrative.

July 02, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on January 01, 2018.