(no subject)

I've been reading Rhythm of War (fourth book in the Stormlight Archive) and mostly so far my reaction is wow I wish I had re-read the previous three books at some point. I have totally forgotten about half the characters, the ones I remember I still couldn't tell you how their relationships with each other ended, and there's a dozen plot points I couldn't tell you how they were resolved. Some of it is coming back to me as I read but I think at some point once I'm done I should do a whole-series re-read to out, like, everything in context. Sanderson generally is an author who rewards playing close attention to detail and noticing things that don't make sense as clues to larger mysteries and I can't really do that if I'm forgetting half the hints to what should and should not make sense.

Probably part of the problem is that I don't really participate in the Cosmere fandom, which would serve for the purpose of regularly refreshing that stuff in my mind and talking about things other people have noticed that I might not have (well, I've been in an rpg campaign set in the Cosmere for a while, but not beyond that). And some of *that* is that I don't really know how to... do that? The only two fandoms I "participate in" in the relevant sense are Worm (where it mostly works out as "read a lot of fanfic and have many tumblr mutuals who are into it because that's how the social circles worked out") and ASoIaF (where I mostly just read analysis blogs).

Purposeful human interaction continues to be hard, I guess.

(no subject)

A thing I am grappling with re: Worm's worldbuilding is that I am not sure what are the mechanics that make it so that most supervillains (that don't draw too much ire) have careers for extended periods.

It's implied that gangs try to break out their people out of prison whenever they are captured, and we see this happen with e.g. Lung. Obviously Lung/Oni Lee are not easy to capture in the first place, so their continued existence as threats makes sense. Similarly the Empire has the numbers to try to mount a rescue for anyone, and they're implied to have a high turnover anyway. But what about lesser villains?

Lisa more or less says outright that minor villains are let out of jail, or at least their escape attempts are unimpeded. I don't think you can take the "cops and robbers" framework as given, there's multiple steps of motivated reasoning in that conversation, but I wouldn't think she makes that out of whole cloth.

The practical question is, how often should you expect a villain who is not a major threat (say, doesn't have a murder to their name) to actually escape from the heroes, vs be captured and 'let go' one way or another, vs actually stay in prison for a while or get recruited for the Protectorate or otherwise end their villainous career?

(the practicality of the question is, of course, that I'm writing fanfic and I don't know what a realistic getaway rate is for Uber and Leet, because them consistently escaping from the heroes seems unlikely, but so does them getting broken out of jail, and yet they continue to exist)