She is the embodiment of one of Sanderson's biggest shortcomings — he isn't great at humor/wit. Her humor is founded on pretending at being obtuse and then elaborating on deliberate misunderstanding with too literal an interpretation of metaphor or a saying.

For example, one character, a sailor, tells her "It must be your beautiful face that brought us this favorable wind!" Her "witty" response, and Sanderson makes the point on the same page of the story to talk about how entertaining she was with her wit, is to say the following: "You say that my beauty coaxed the winds to deliver us to Kharbranth with haste, but wouldn't that imply that on other trips, my lack of beauty was to blame for us arriving late?" "So in reality" ... "you're telling me I'm beautiful precisley one-sixth of the time."

This interchange, terrible as it is, actually gets worse, somehow. The sailor protests and compares her beauty to "a morning sunrise," to which she says, "Like a sunrise?" By that you mean entirely too crimson" — she pulled at her long red hair — "and prone to making men grouchy when they see me?"

The exchange goes on with her deliberately missing the point or focusing on a collateral aspect of a metaphor and then making too literal of deductions from the metaphor. Indeed, she is like this throughout the whole series. It is like Sanderson took his most pretentious and un-selfaware Dungeons and Dragons loser buddy and fashioned a female character out of him. Like that Simpson's comic book seller, except the Simpson's writers are parodying how awful that guy is and Sanderson is taking Shallan's awful "wit" seriously.

Sanderson is brilliant in many regards. The situations he puts his characters in and the thoughtful way he develops them through those experiences is almost incomparably amazing. Think of Kal being betrayed and his experience in Bridge 4. How he has characters work through problems is fantastic. His thoughtful and organized magic system changed the genre. His ability to tease out the consequences of an element of a story, like his storms, into every facet of the world is really impressive. However, I end up rolling my eyes every time Shallan attempts to be funny. Ugh.