The thing folks usually yell about Sanderson that's interesting is his Hard Magic Systems. Less loudly, they'll talk about his plots, the way they multiple threads rush to a climax in a "Sanderson Avalanche." Rarely, I'll hear folks talk about his surprisingly solid and compelling character work across a breadth of characters. All of these things are there to greater or lesser degrees.
Here's the thing. To me, they're all wrong. It's all about the slutty gloves.
To provide basic context: In the Stormlight Archives, one of the cultures, the Alethi, have a specific relationship with clothing that permeates gender, sexuality, and class. The core, material idea is that exposure of the left hand of women is considered 'indecent', in the way exposing ankles might be considered the same in Victorian England.
This is borne, ostensibly, out of the idea that work that can be done 'one-handed'- reading, writing, mathematics, etc.- is considered 'women's work', but the way it's presented in the work is not so much strictly causal- it's unclear, really, what came first, the taboo, or the ideology, or if they both evolved separately and converged. They both feel like the result of a million different cultural effects converging into a singular thing.
This idea is then complicated by the fact that it's carried forwards by people living in the world. By class- women who aren't nobility, after all, do not have the luxury of working with one hand. So you end up with a class-signifier where women who do have to work with their hands wearing instead a glove, rather than the long-sleeves that button closed of the nobility. Class of specifically women is made immediately visible, in a way that is entrenched in their body, in physical accessibility. Sex workers show their profession, in part, by not wearing a 'safeglove' as it's called.
The thing that makes this for me, though, is that this is not a fact of the world, but a piece of specifically Alethi culture. It's an arbitrary fact that is a product of their society, produced and propagated by the people of the world and their relationship with their bodies and others, their bodies and sex and sexuality. Multiple non-Alethi people go 'lol what the fuck that's stupid' and like. It is! It's dumb and arbitrary but they have their own (admittedly less developed, to my frustration) arbitrary relationships with bodies, with sex, with gender.
And it would be easy to like, have that be the end of it? Have the book go 'lol silly Alethi' but it manages to avoid that! These ideas, this culturally defined arbitrary relationship, has a active effect on individuals in the world! They feel actual shame, embarrassment, arousal, desire, revulsion- real emotions, because of it! It is a cultural production with real impact on the world but it is very visibly produced. People have differing relationships with it, from intentionally eschewing it to participating in it to avoid the hassle of bucking it to uncritically accepting it as fact to exploiting it to their advantage.
And like, it's a low bar for me but the thing I like about Sanderson's stuff is, at its best, it's about people. It's about the ways we make and produce things, our ideas, and how they affect both us and others. It's a swing and miss sometimes, and it often doesn't go far enough for me, but it's enough for me to be compelled to keep coming back. It's a recognition that there's not like, some idealogically-neutral fact that produces culture as is, forever and ever, but instead it's a thing that is made by both historical forces and people now, and that it is both arbitrary and also something with real impact on people, something that drives their actions and emotions.
It's cool! To be clear this is not 'BRANDO SANDO THE GOAT NO ONE EVER DOES THIS' but rather like... a recognition of cultural mores and taboos being a thing that are produced by history and people as like, a thing of the time and history, is not super common in a lot of fantasy and it's nice to see in a genre that does things like 'yeah we've been basically culturally and technologically the same for 50k years.' It's one of the things I really latched onto, first time I read Stormlight Archives.
