Wizwell

You know your a Sanderfan when your friend comes over and asked why books 1-11 are missing from your Wheel of Time set

So somebody asked a question... here To which somebody answered it... here At which point I got carried away and wrote a essay somewhere around... here To preface, I must add that this is not an attempt to try to become a surgebinder, but more a pseudo-philosophical look into what it means to be a windrunner with a bond to honor By ending my post by saying what Sanderson is trying to do is get his audience to understand "The end does not justify the means" I think I am not giving credit to him or his audience in my oversimplification. As I said before, the Windrunner's Nahel bond is based off of what society thinks is right and wrong and works off of a system of checks and balances. It is also important to note that what is being judged is the pure action of the Windrunner, as well as the choice that led him to that action. You can save a child from being sacrificed in some devil worshipping occult even if the kid's death would bring 100 years of good harvest and 40 virgins to boot, and that would be viewed as the definite right thing. And on the other side you can't kill a kid for 100 years of good harvest and 40 virgins, that would be WRONG. A bother isn't it? My point is that the action taken is judged in it's immediate capacity, not on what it's outcome will be. Because, fundamentally, Sanderson believes that humanity has a base set of values which they deem as right and wrong. They believe the killing of a child to be WRONG, even if that murder will bring wealth and safety to many others. There's no getting past their view of this as wrong. On the 99th year of the occullts bountiful harvest, someone is still going to look back on that day were they offed a six-year-old as WRONG, even if they have reaped a bunch of reward from it. The tie-in to following the path of the Windrunner comes in when you start to make decisions based was not on what is best for the people, but what is right to the people. In my previous example made with devil worshipping and occults, the argument could be seen as a simple choice. The gain that of selfishness, and the party that of evil. I'll come back to that. In Sanderson's book The Way of Kings (of course minor spoilers ahead) Kaladin is offered a shardblade, which he earned after killing a shardbearer who murdered many of his friends and allies. Kaladin earns this shardblade from a pure act of selflessness. He protects those which he deems worthy of protection, and it seems like Kaladin's heroism and against-the-odds win is about to have the payoff of our main protagonist being awarded the weapon which has since been the center-point of the book; a weapon which can slay men with ease and is worth kingdoms. But Kaladin goes against the expectation. He chooses to deny his reward. Kaladin sees what the audience does not see until much later in the Stormlight Archive (Oathbringer omage); he sees the ease of destruction that the blade brings, and how any man can use it for evil. NO, the taking of the blade isn't WRONG, but what it represents is. When given this scenario, the decision is a lot harder to stand behind, but it carries the same ideology. Do humans think that abused power is wrong? Do humans find something that is used to oppress others as wrong? Then the shardblade becomes impotent as a source of honor, and must be discarded. Sure, the murder of Parshendi is easy when society calls them Voidbringers, and they mean the end of worlds for you and your kind, but it becomes hard to stand behind it when the truth is that they're no different from any other human you've met, and therefore must be addressed the same way any human would. I wish I could say more, but I really don't want to make this an Oathbringer only thread.

Whether or not you are maintaining an oath is a system of checks and balances based off of a two (maybe even three) party system. The first party is you, the windrunner, fallible and susceptible to change. The second party to judge whether the thing is right is your spren, who is not-so-fallible and not-so-changeable. But the thing I really think ties it all together is that Honor spren are cognitive essences of societies views of the "right thing". So, for example, an Honor spren could never be able to view [insert debated and highly controversial topic here] as right unless society upheld standards that supported that thing as right. But it's important not to conflate society upholding certain standards as right with society viewing an individual action as right. That's what so many people get wrong - Moash, King Taravangian, Guantanamo Bay torturers. Yes, while you can view a certain action you take as the right thing to do, if society views any of those steps in that action as morally inept, then it is negated. A long and much broader sum-up of "The ends most certainly do not justify the means!". This is why Syl is so distraught by a man carrying an honor blade that lacks a spren, there are no checks for power.

I always figured Lerasuim's power was the ability to give people the ability of a mistborn. I had a hard time wrapping my head around this to as it would mean... well it would mean a Lerasium misting was a mistborn. But that would be odd because mistborn do not need to ingest Lerasium in order to gain all 16 (or maybe 15) allomantic abilities. Did we ever end up finding out if allomantic abilities were split evenly into 16th's (or 15th's ) for mistings?