What Your Favorite Stormlight Archive Character Says About You

Stormlight readers have very strong opinions about which character is their favorite. Stronger than is probably reasonable for fictional people. And those opinions are, it turns out, extremely revealing.

This is not a neutral character ranking. This is a character ranking that is also, quietly, a personality test.

If Your Favorite is Kaladin

You take on too much. You are probably the person in your friend group who people call when things go wrong, and you answer every time, and you have not told anyone that this is exhausting because you have decided it’s your job and also because admitting you need help feels like failing at the one thing you’re supposed to be good at.

You have a complicated relationship with authority — specifically, you are fine with authority when the authority figure has earned it, and you are allergic to authority that hasn’t. You have strong opinions about what “earning it” means. Those opinions have caused you professional friction.

Your depression is not a phase. You know this. You are working on it, or you have been working on it, or you will work on it as soon as the current crisis passes (there is always a current crisis). Kaladin’s Fourth Ideal hit different for you. You know exactly which part.

You are also fiercely, genuinely kind — the kind that costs something. That’s rarer than people think.

If Your Favorite is Dalinar

You think a lot about legacy. Not in a vain way — in a what is this all for way. You have done things you’re not proud of. Not necessarily dramatic things — probably smaller, personal things. But you think about them. You believe, genuinely and not as a slogan, that people can change. This belief has occasionally made you a target for people who haven’t changed.

You are drawn to the idea of building something larger than yourself. You are also drawn to the specific problem of whether you deserve to build it, given everything. You are aware that this question can become paralyzing if you let it.

You prefer directness. You find political games exhausting. You are not above playing them — you are actually quite good at them — but you always feel slightly dirty afterward.

Also: you respect the codes. Whatever your codes are. You don’t necessarily follow them perfectly. But you respect them, and you respect people who do.

If Your Favorite is Shallan

You are funny in a way that disarms people before they realize you’ve also just deflected an entire emotional confrontation. You have been doing this for so long that you sometimes do it accidentally, and then afterward you’re not sure if you actually feel fine or if you just performed feeling fine and forgot to check.

You contain more than one version of yourself, and you’re not always sure which one is real. The answer is all of them. That is actually true. You know this intellectually. The emotional uptake is slower.

You’re drawn to art, pattern, and the aesthetic dimension of things. You notice how rooms are arranged. You remember what people are wearing. You sketch people — mentally, sometimes literally — and the sketches are always more honest than what you say out loud.

You are probably harder on yourself than you are on literally anyone else. This is not a virtue, even though you have framed it as one.

If Your Favorite is Adolin

You are the most functional person in your social circle and you know it, and you find this more exhausting than it looks from the outside. Everyone else is having profound identity crises and you’re just… trying to have a nice dinner. You have a nice wardrobe. You take care of your friends in practical, concrete ways rather than dramatic, emotional ones, and you have noticed that the dramatic emotional style gets more credit.

You are genuinely, non-performatively kind. Not in a complicated, morally weighted Kaladin way. Just… kind. You like people. You want them to be okay. This is not taken seriously as a character trait in fiction, which is one of the reasons Adolin fans are, quietly, the most vindicated readers by the later books.

You are also significantly more capable than the people around you have fully registered, and part of you is fine with that, and part of you is not.

If Your Favorite is Szeth

You have done things you didn’t choose, in service of systems you didn’t design, and you are still working out how much responsibility that transfers to you. This is not an abstract philosophical question. It is a present, active one.

You believe in rules with an almost religious intensity, because you have seen what happens in their absence and you prefer the rules, even bad ones, to that. This sometimes means you follow rules you disagree with. You are aware of how that sentence sounds. You have read it many times, from the outside, and you still can’t always find the exit.

You’re also carrying something very heavy that you have not put down. I’m not going to tell you what to do about that. But Szeth’s arc in Wind and Truth is probably worth reading.

If Your Favorite is Jasnah

You are correct more often than is socially comfortable. You have trimmed your social life accordingly, or it has been trimmed for you. You are at peace with this, or you’ve decided to be, which is close enough.

You have thought more carefully about most topics than most people you meet, and this shows, and it has made some people resent you, and you find that genuinely confusing because you can’t imagine preferring comfortable wrongness to uncomfortable accuracy.

You are also warmer than you let on. You have let yourself let people in, carefully, after a long time. You are protective of those people in ways that would surprise everyone who only knows the public version.

The heresy is not the hard part for you. The hard part is watching everyone else catch up.

If Your Favorite is Lift

You move fast and you don’t overthink things and this is mostly a feature and occasionally a catastrophic bug. You care deeply about specific people rather than abstract principles. You are suspicious of institutions. You have found a way to be in the world that is entirely your own and you defend it fiercely, which is right, even when it makes other people mildly insane.

You notice injustice quickly and respond to it immediately, without waiting for permission. This has gotten you into trouble. It has also occasionally made you the only person in a situation who actually helped anyone.

You have strong opinions about food. The opinions are correct.

The Stormlight Archive works because these aren’t character types — they’re the same person at different points in their lives, or different people who chose different responses to the same kind of pain. Find yours. Then read the next book.

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