So I'm back posting again. (Got ghosted by the seller I found last time), so I'm asking around against if anyone has a Medium of the shirt pictured here (the store only has the Large and upper versions available). I'm willing to pay full price and shipping, or even trade a Large for your Medium. Please DM me if you guys are interested!
So, up to the point of the release, we had a number of artistic designs, official designs even, for shardplates, the Orders, what their plates looked like...then the Handbook dropped and I find it odd? Some of these designs feel a lot like sci fi power armor which conflicts a lot with what we had up to this point?
I find Petar Penev's designs to have been really well done in comparison for establishing visual language among different Orders. And the weird thing is...Penev isn't some random artist who is a fan. He's associated and made a lot of the official art in the book. And some of the designs and art styles in the handbook seem to bounce wildly in style causing an almost jarring reading. In isolation they look alright, but flipping from the book's pages you'll see artwork like this
Immediately followed by this?
Visually this is a strange contrast in artstyle, and the Windrunner design feels like there's a lot of conflicting pieces? Heavily pauldrons and shoulders, branching out hip joints, bulkier chest pieces...The armor has these smooth, broad metallic planes and chunky geometry that make it look oddly technological? Not literally sci-fi, but almost like a Destiny/Warframe/Power Rangers cousin of Shardplate. There’s relatively little of the organic or wind-swept quality I’d associate with honorspren.
EDIT: To get this point across. This is the literal cover art of the book. Notice the design, theme, and genre difference in appearance. This is the design used throughout the book...EXCEPT on the pages for the Orders' skill trees, where they shift into this sci fi-esque design.
EDIT 2: So a lot of people just seem to be resorting to claiming 'past vs present Radiant armors' so I'm just going to put this here as a general edited response. There is no reason why the rest of the book, even showing current Radiants, uses the traditional Shardplate design aesthetic we've seen throughout the books, official arts, and canon...and that these few pages depict sci fi esque designs. The much more coherrent explanation instead of trying to justify why some Radiants are forming sci fi armor during the present day and some are depicted with regular armor is most likely...the artist who drew these few particular pages just simply did not coordinate with the design philosophy of the rest of the book. That's it. That's the coherrent reason. Trying to claim they're showing a Radiant from Emberdark randomly, or that people on this world would, for some reason, desire to or even imagine sci fi armor at their level of technology isn't a coherrent defense. It's defending a conclusion without updating the position based on information.
Edit 3: I'm just gonna leave this here for the overwhelming amount of people who keep trying to defend the 'old plate vs new plate' thing. This is also artwork. Still High Fantasy design, not sci fi. I can only assume that some people are emotionally seeing 'this particular artwork doesn't seem to follow the rest of the designs' with 'this person is making fun of the thing I like and thinks I'm stupid!'.
And for the record? Personally I believe that not questioning anything or saying 'try not to worry about it' and not being capable of saying something is incoherrent is not wisdom. It's avoidance of taking a position that requires discrimination and thought. If you can draw no line over where coherrent design begins and ends, then you are not developing an opinion. Accepting anything and everything you are fed is simply being too afraid to have a personality.
I find it funny with this argument in a subreddit for a ROLEPLAYING GAME based on a series where the central magical institution is built around people articulating ideals and then being bound by them.
Stormlight is practically screaming:
Who are you? What do you believe? What lines will you hold? What choices follow from those beliefs when holding them becomes uncomfortable?
A Radiant doesn't advance by going:
“Eh, whatever. Anything works. I don't really see why we'd distinguish between these things.”
They speak Ideals. Their character is demonstrated by commitments that exclude other possibilities. Kaladin's entire fucking arc would cease to exist if every moral contradiction could be answered with “well technically you can interpret it however.”
So there is something exquisitely ridiculous about reaching the final defense:
“Why do you need a coherent visual language? Plate can look like anything. Why draw a line?”
...in a community dedicated to a game about constructing characters by drawing lines.
So yeah, I really love their merch, but unfortunately they don't have this specific tee in Medium. Anyone have one they'd be willing to sell? Or hell, I'll even buy a Large and trade you that. I'm just not really a Large lol.
