A second Elantris gets talked about a lot in the threads. It gets randomly brought up all the time. The general consensus is that it would just drag down the story and not be good for it. Although I think that stories about people in other parts of the world dealing with other things would be cool, but a sequel would not do well for the story.
I disagree with that. I am fully convinced Brandon could write a compelling sequel to Elantris. If you read the Elantris annotations, you quickly realize that his map of Opelon is incredibly zoomed in onto Arelon, without showing much of the larger continent, which just screams epic conflict, in my opinion. There's plenty of mystery in the magic system to continue to explore as well, and not just how the Seons are created. The ending of Elantris opens a wide door for new and surprising methods of channeling the Dor. There's a whole host of content to delve into, so I don't see how that could be such a drag.
The only trick would be to make the sequel relatively self-contained. I mean, of course, it would build on the world introduced in Elantris, but I mean, it shouldn't be a sequel that has two parts. What comes to mind is Pirates of the Carribbean, which had a fantastic first movie, but the conflicts introduced in the first movie were not carried over into the second and third one--instead, they merely rehashed the characters and gave completely new conflicts. To me, that made the trilogy very disjointed and not cohesive.
An Elantris sequel would, in my mind, only be effective if it was a story in itself, much like how Elantris was in the first place.
In any case, the point is relatively moot. If Brandon decided to write it, he probably wouldn't work on it until quite a few years. He's busy with A Memory of Light, which could (and probably should) take a long time to make it as flawless as possible. Next comes Way of Kings and a few more Alcatraz books, not to mention Warbreaker being published in the first place. After that--and Ookla, please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just saying this from information I picked up on the board, which in no way means I am an official source here--he
might have time for an Elantris sequel. Heck, if Brandon set the sequel ten years in the future, I'd imagine that'd be just right, because ten years from now in real life, he may actually have an opportunity to do it!
But, in review, my opinion of an Elantris sequel simple: Brandon, if you have enough cool material and ideas to make it work well (and it's a self-contained story), then by all means, make it! I will certainly read it, for sure! However, if you don't feel there is enough material to warrant a sequel, you shouldn't feel pressured into it. No one will hold it against you if Elantris is an individual novel without sequels--which, really, is sort of why a lot of people liked Elantris in the first place.
