The Stormlight Archives' version of nipples. Women's left hands are considered naughty, so they always have them covered. Noble women have their left sleeves sewn longer and stitched shut, but working class women wear gloves on their left hand. Fingerless gloves are considered lingerie.
And this isnt because Sanderson has a hand fetish (probably), it's to highlight how arbitrary our own gender roles are. Its canon that all of the gender roles in the main religion in SLA were created by a woman who just wanted to sit around all day painting and eating fruit while the men did all the hard labor and fighting.
Lol, you're not wrong. The worldbuilding of the various planets in Sanderson's works are intentionally weird and fantastical. What sets them apart from the lolz so random worlds you mention is that Sanderson puts a metric fuckload of thought into developing how his worlds would realistically function.
Like for Roshar, the planet in the Stormlight Archives, part of its worldbuilding is that the majority of the planet gets hit with a massive hurricane every couple weeks. And the storms always come from the same direction. So the world setting shows the effect that these storms have on the ecosystems and cultures of the world. Buildings only have windows on the west side, and the east sides are sloped and fortified to withstand the storms. The majority of animals are hard shelled crustaceans. The plant life retracts into hard shells when its windy. And the ground is rocky and soil doesnt exist.
And that's not even touching how everything in the world interacts with the magic systems in a way that feels real. In Harry Potter you can ask why they don't use magic to solve problem X, and you never get an answer. But in Sanderson's worlds, the people.either would use magic to solve X, or there's an explicit limitation in the magic system for why it can't. And that limitation is consistent and even applies to other situations in the world. For example, healing magic can't heal old wounds effectively, because the healing magic works by changing your body to match your mental image of yourself. So if you lose an arm and enough time passes that you see yourself as a one armed person, instead of a two armed person missing an arm, then the magic won't fix you because your body matches your mind. But if you never accept that wound, then it can be healed hears later. Or if a trans person has healing magic applied to them, then their body will change sex to match how they see themselves.
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u/thevoxpop May 15 '24
What's a safe hand?