Jump to content

happyman

Members
  • Posts

    1436
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    7

happyman last won the day on January 8 2013

happyman had the most liked content!

1 Follower

About happyman

  • Birthday 05/24/1979

Profile Information

  • Member Title
    High Priest of the Stick
  • Gender
    Male

happyman's Achievements

585

Reputation

  1. (Gibbers in terror in the corner. "The quiping just never stopped!")
  2. She was signing up to "live for more than two more minutes." A decrease in lifespan would be an acceptable outcome to her, I'd say. That said, I seriously doubt the DawnShard will actively kill her; probably quite the opposite. After all, holding Ruin itself didn't kill Ati directly. He was functionally immortal, although he sprenified pretty bad.
  3. Apparently time isn't a thing in the spiritual realm. I don't know how literally this can be true given that people continually make decisions that change the future, but the past is the past and thus fixed. However, I suspect that this does mean that spiritual bonds transcend time and space, and since Kaladin had an existing, and quite potent, connection to Tien, the fact that he had been dead for years wasn't a barrier in the spiritual realm.
  4. To play devil's advocate, Adolin could get away with stuff like that because of his rank and because he's a Shardbearer. There's other people who'd be willing to help out, but don't want to mess with Sadeas' men. And they may well be right not to; they might end up making the situation worse. That said, though, I feel it's still an indicator. His rank could just as easily have made him arrogant and dismissive of the prostitute, but it didn't. He stood up for her partly because he could, but also because he obviously felt it was right as well.
  5. As were the Sho Del.
  6. That's one thing about breath immortality that's really nice, especially compared to atium immortality: It's actually stopping your body from aging. If you lived until the age of, say, 25 before you got any breaths, and then got catapulted straight to the fifth heightening, lived for 2000 years, and then had it all stripped away from you somehow, you'd suddenly begin aging as though you were 25 again. Your spiritual connections and what-not would presumably still "know" how old you actually were, but they would also "know" that you got that old through having an absurd amount of breath for 2000 years, and that you "should" be aging as though you had been in perfect health for 2000 years. It's great.
  7. In a re-read of Oathbringer, I discovered the following little quote, from Moash' POV: What this strongly suggests, to me, is that Moash at least knows how to see Damnation and the Tranquiline Halls in the sky. The two phrases aren't generic, like our human description of the Heavens; they are specific places which are distinct from each other and can be seen. We're pretty much certain Braize is Damnation, and also another planet in the Greater Roshar system. This means that somebody who knows what they are doing could spot it on a clear night (when the geometry is right), just as easily as one of us could spot Mars or Venus. Presumably the same could be said about Ashyn. This strikes me as an indication of a couple of things: 1) At least some of the Rosharan humans were originally from Ashyn. This is not a surprise, nor is it something I would seriously contest, but this is another point in favor of it. The Tranquiline halls were (are) Ashyn. 2) At least some people on Roshar know this, to some extent. It's not at all clear how much of the astronomy they've managed to put together, but it sounds like they have at least a couple of strong hints. I'm not completely sure about this, because I vaguely remember some comments about the Tranquiline Halls becoming Damnation, but it's easy to see the elements mixing in various ways. I don't think it rules out at least some people remembering that they were separate places, and even where they would appear in the sky.
  8. Kaellok, Your points make very good logical sense. The thing about this kind of crisis of faith, though, is that it is mostly emotional. There are people who logic their way out of their previous beliefs, but the Radiants are, by their very actions, True Believers. Nothing speaks belief like the kind of action they have to take to keep the oaths. Having their faith broken would lead to all kinds of things, at least one of which is depression. In the depths of depression, people do things exactly as stupid as you are describing. More stupid, even. But I wouldn't be opposed to there being more about it than we have learned. I do think, though, that some folks are pushing the logical side more than the Radiants in the book, of any age, did. Certainly the actions of Kaladin and the bridgemen felt real to me at a gut level, even as I knew that it made no sense.
  9. We have gone far too long in this thread without quoting the most important commentary on The Recreance Reveal in the entire book: Kaladin and Syl's understanding of it. I'm going to emphasize the bits which I think are most relevant for this discussion. Notice that this quote does a pretty good job of squashing the folks who claim that the reaction from the Radiants was too small. In reality, the reason it didn't have much impact on the book is because it came out towards the end. Between when Dalinar first learned The Secret, and this scene was, best I can tell, within the same day, the day of the battle of Thaylen City. It was a pretty busy (200+ page) day, but still the same day. Dalinar had essentially the same scene earlier the same day, and he stopped thinking about mostly because the battle was quite literally right there, right then, spear-headed by Odium himself. Pretty much as soon as they had a chance to absorb what they had learned, Dalinar, Bridge Four, and Kaladin almost instantly had the same gut reaction: What are we doing, and why are we doing it? We don't see Shallan's reaction, but then the records do claim that the Windrunner's were among the first affected, and the ones most strongly affected. Kaladin also describes the basic problem with trying to keep the Oaths with this kind of sucker-punch. It's important to remember that original the Knight's Radiant were, in many ways, religious orders. They literally drew their power from their god, and they did so by keeping some of their god's commandments (situational commandments, sure, but they fit the individuals pretty well). Discovering that the commandments themselves may be literally impossible to keep...it's one of the world's most extreme examples of a crisis of faith I've ever heard of. And like most crises of faith, the reaction probably differed from person to person. Some made a big public demonstration of it, like many Windrunners. Some probably just---disappeared. In all cases, though, they probably didn't do it because they wanted to. They did it because---because they didn't believe any more. It wasn't that they wanted to hurt their spren, it was because their was literally no way forward that they could see---perceive---in which they kept their oaths. I do kind of like hoiditthroughthegrapevine's idea, though, that the last straw was how the remaining Radiants treated the listeners during the False Desolation. His reconstruction of events makes sense. Combine the effect the end of the False Desolation had on the parsh (e.g. turned sapient creatures into mindless slaves) with the fact that said sapient creatures were in fact the original inhabitants of the planet, and that humans had brought their own evil with them...yeah, that sounds like just the one-two punch that would send the bulk of the orders into a destructive spiral which eventually ended up killing all their spren.
  10. It gets better. As per the events of HoA, a part of Preservation's power, under Leras, actively made normal people mistings as part of his deliberate effort to preserve the planet and its people. Pretty sure it is within Preservation's power to create Mistborn directly. Probably not easy, but definitely possible.
  11. I wonder if you wouldn't see him as one of the Vessels? In Secret History, Leras implies that Hoid turned against them for some reason. If he hadn't, that seems like one plausible outcome.
  12. I like this thread. My main concern is that it's missing Dalinar's vision of the Recreance. I feel like that should really be included. In doesn't tell us as much about the bigger situation, like the annotations do, but for completeness, it seems like we should at least include a few snippets.
  13. happyman

    Aonic names

    Now I'm thinking of the Oreos from Wreck-it Ralph (Oh-ree-oh. Oh-Reeee-oh. Oh-ree-oh. Oh-Reeee-oh. ). That gag really worked in that movie...
  14. You've pretty much summed up why people who like the story, well, like it. I was reading it earlier today in my copy of Arcanum Unbounded. It really is a three-way character study (Shai, Gaotona, and the emperor) and I think it works beautifully. Incidentally, if you want to learn more about what Brandon thinks about all of this (plot vs. character) you should totally check out the writing excuses podcast. They talk about different authors approaches to creating stories and what works and doesn't work for different people.
×
×
  • Create New...