Slaughter and Despair

[Havoc]

Thanks for setting up this forum Chaos!

 

One thing that's always confused me about this book is what exactly Slaughter and Despair are. Are they Shards? If so, how are they sons of what seems to be another Shard?

[Pagerunner]

It looked to me like the Former was an early analogue to Preservation ("One who Forms," not "The First"). His power was split into two parts, however, in Chaos and Order, both essential parts of any creation. Each had their own separate Shardpool, and each had separate Aethers come from them.

 

It seems like Agaris and Makkal were Slivers, who had held some of the Former's power, but didn't hold the Shards themselves. One used Chaos, the other Order, but they went by different names. If they were literally the Former's sons, then they might be from Yolen, and their lives were preserved by their nature as Slivers. While they were imprisoned within the wells, they could behave SH Spoilers:

like Kelsier did when he was in the Well, riding pulses out to touch the minds of men.

But then, at the end of the book, they were returned as mortals, as men in physical bodies - makes me think they haven't Ascended to be full Shards, just Slivers like the Lord Ruler or Vin.

Edited April 14, 2016 by Pagerunner

[KaIadin]

Remember guys, this was I think before Sanderson had laid out the groundwork of the Cosmere.

[skaa]

Remember guys, this was I think before Sanderson had laid out the groundwork of the Cosmere.

Party pooper.

Assuming that certain ideas about how Shards work were already in Brandon's mind when he wrote Aether of Night, I believe Slaughter and Despair are Splinters of Former, not Slivers. They're basically two really powerful "spren" of Former. Makkal/Slaughter and Agaris/Despair were split from Former's two aspects: Chaos and Despair, respectively.

It looked to me like the Former was an early analogue to Preservation ("One who Forms," not "The First").

Preservation cannot create/form things on his own. He can only keep things from changing. Former's Intent, I believe, is Creation. When Brandon decided to write Mistborn, I think he took the concepts of Chaos (which is an aspect of Former) and Decay, combining them into Ruin. Then he took what's left (Order) and renamed it Preservation.

Edited April 15, 2016 by skaa

[Pagerunner]

Remember guys, this was I think before Sanderson had laid out the groundwork of the Cosmere.

Actually, it was written after Elantris, White Sand Prime, and Dragonsteel Prime, so I think he had the mechanics of the Cosmere down fairly well at that point.

[Auger]

I too found it strange how the Former seemed like a good guy, and then at the end seemed to be happy that "The Fell Twins" have returned.

[Emerald101]

And then how does decay fit in all of this? In the prologue he says that Agaris "came to him" and that was the only way Agaris was able to "defeat" Makkal. As he's in his prison, Agarsi appears to be all-powerful. "Once, that scream would've shaken the Universe, shattering planets with it's intensity" and such. Despite that power, Decay has (according to Agaris) somehow imprisoned him and Makkal using "Order itself, the very substance of the Universe".

 

What is Decay, and how does (he? she? it?) fit into all of this?

 

Edit: clarity

Edited April 17, 2016 by Emerald101

[Stormgate]

Since this part of Aether in particular was taken and modified so much, I'd say that Decay is proto-Ruin.

[Emerald101]

So Decay and the Former are both shards, then?

[Stormgate]

That seems the most likely option.

[Soujiro]

As I read it I saw the Former as more of a Adonalsium, or another Shard (like Honor) and Decay as Odium. Slaughter and Despair sound much like Ruin and Preservation to me. The way I see it Brandon may not have figured out the full Cosmere by then, and wanted it to put Odium in the same level as Adonalsium. My reasoning is mainly because Mekkal behaves a lot like Preservation when he's about to lose his mind, he doesn't remember who he is and what happened. He feels like a force that has no mind, as if it was Shattered. And Agaris is a lot like Ruin captive. He can contact the people of the world by pulsing and influencing his followers. Lowering Mekkal and Agaris into Slivers or Splinters seems quite low, since they feel a lot like shards. Leaving Decay and the Former in a higher position.

[Weltall]

Word of Peter that Decay was the basis for Ruin. I think it's fair to say that Brandon hadn't quite wrapped his head around the power levels of Shards and various other entities, but since the work as it currently exists isn't canon the distinction is academic.

[Pagerunner]

On 8/13/2017 at 10:55 AM, Soujiro said:

As I read it I saw the Former as more of a Adonalsium, or another Shard (like Honor) and Decay as Odium. Slaughter and Despair sound much like Ruin and Preservation to me. The way I see it Brandon may not have figured out the full Cosmere by then, and wanted it to put Odium in the same level as Adonalsium. My reasoning is mainly because Mekkal behaves a lot like Preservation when he's about to lose his mind, he doesn't remember who he is and what happened. He feels like a force that has no mind, as if it was Shattered. And Agaris is a lot like Ruin captive. He can contact the people of the world by pulsing and influencing his followers. Lowering Mekkal and Agaris into Slivers or Splinters seems quite low, since they feel a lot like shards. Leaving Decay and the Former in a higher position.

To the contrary, I think Brandon had figured out the cosmere by that point, since he called Aether the first on-screen appearance of a Shard.

The only part of the cosmere that predates the cosmere is Elantris, which is why Brandon mentions in the annotations that he wasn't quite sure what Shardpools were when he wrote one in. But during Dragonsteel, he developed Realmatic Theory, and the broader story of Dragonsteel (the series, not the book, I think) tells the story of the Shattering and sets the stage for the Shards and all that. Elantris underwent some revisions before publication (like the loss of the Mad Prince plotline), but White Sand was written before Aether, and it fits into the canon without any revisions (since they're adapting it to the graphic novel, with the only big change being Ais's gender).

There are some other pieces of information that point towards just how long the cosmere has been around. Per the original SSFH preface (not the one that appears in Arcanum Unbounded, but the standalone ebook version), Threnody was developed as a cosmere world around 1999 or 2000. (The time period Brandon was writing Elantris, Dragonsteel, and White Sand. Aether was written with the 'bad batch' of Mythwalker, Mistborn Prime, and Final Empire Prime in 2001-2002.) And Way of Kings Prime, written in 2003, only two books after Aether, had worldhoppers and Shards and all that good stuff built into the draft.

So, I think Slaughter and Despair can fit into true cosmere Realmatics. I recently realized that they might be like Nightwatcher and Stormfather on Roshar. (I started overanalyzing Fleet's story, and it almost sounds like someone Ascending to the storm, which may be the origin of the Stormfather.)

From a storytelling point of view, I'll agree that they definitely fill some of the roles of Ruin/Preservation, when it comes to being trapped in Shardpools and battling it out and all that. But it looks to me like that was just a combination of roles, not anything to do with the Realmatics of the Shards of that planet.

[MountainKing]

My personal theory is that when Adonselium was shattered he had avatars in the Cosmere, and when he was shattered the avatars lose a significant chunk a power but they still were there, and that the Former is one of those avatars.

[Weltall]

Neat idea, though that Brandon has said that all Investiture became associated with a Shard regardless of location so even if it started out that way, it would have become a Splinter of some specific Shard after the Shattering. He's also called the Pool of the Forgotten a shardpool (this was before he canonized Perpendicularity as the 'proper' term) so the Twins too would be associated with whatever Shard the Former is associated with. And since the Former and Decay were on the same level of power and we know that the latter was intended to be a Shard, I suspect the Former is still going to be one rather than a Splinter of one.

That reasoning aside, we also have six Shards left to reveal and not all that many known Cosmere projects in which we could see any of them other than Aether and the Silverlight novella. Seems like it would be a great opportunity to give us one more.

[dbulick]

I could see The Former being the shard, with the Twins being his "children".  Perhaps they are humans bestowed inentionally with a splinter.  It would take some changing to make it fit without our current knowledge of how these things work.

[Weltall]

That's sort of where my own thinking is going right now. We know that Vessels can have children so I'm thinking that what we'll get is a Shard (whatever Intent Brandon wants to assign to the Entity-Formerly-Known-As-The-Former) which had two children and at some point decided to give up their power, which Vessels can willingly do. My guess is that rather than creating the Aethers directly, each of the Twins got assigned some of the original Shard's power much like all Investiture in the Cosmere got assigned to one of the sixteen Shards after the Shattering of Adonalsium.

This theory does require two assumptions, that it's possible for a Shard to willingly split off such a significant fraction of its power to essentially create two super-Splinters and that these be capable of bonding with humans (or Dragons/Sho Del, depending on the original Vessel) which doesn't quite fit our current understanding of Splinters and how they can be interacted with. Brandon did leave the door open for something like this to happen in the WoB about giving up a Shard, saying that what happens next depends on a lot of factors including 'whether sapient beings are involved'. There's also a brand-new WoB that if a pregnant woman Ascended, there would be an effect on their children so for all we know, that could be a workaround to how we currently understand Splinters to work

Failing any of that, the easy cheat would be for the Twins to be sapient Investiture rather than humans having taken up a large chunk of Shardic power, since we know that can happen if it's left to itself and we could imagine a scenario where a Shard's power split into a couple large chunks instead of a single whole.

[dbulick]

20 hours ago, Weltall said:

Failing any of that, the easy cheat would be for the Twins to be sapient Investiture rather than humans having taken up a large chunk of Shardic power, since we know that can happen if it's left to itself and we could imagine a scenario where a Shard's power split into a couple large chunks instead of a single whole.

I would agree with that except, at the end of the book the twins are shown in human form back in they physical realm.  That seemed to me like they were humans initially as well.  Who knows!  We are speculating on things that Brandon has never considered.  

[handleCUP]

I think that because of Brandon's prolific work with insane foresight and planning we assume that he has everything all figured out. This is certainly not the case! He probably makes huge changes and pivots all the time, for example I was just reading about how he is not happy about Wax's savantism and wishes he could go back and change it. That is for a recent publication imagine how he feels about Elantris. We love it but I'm sure he would rip it apart and re-write it were he given the chance and time.

 

I would say with this one that there are certain things that are kind of cannon - like we see an aether elsewhere in the cosmere - but still completely different. Like the rules of how aethers work and what there abilities are could be completely different by the time anything is released. Another possibility is that he might cannibalize different elements of the story for different stories. If you check out Way of Kings Prime or Dragonsteel you'll see a lot of this kind of reusing of stories but usually with many changes.

 

Some of it is cannon I'm sure, but with the amount of changes - small or large - taking anything as cannon and working it into your theories could be more harm than good.

[Weltall]

1 hour ago, handleCUP said:

I think that because of Brandon's prolific work with insane foresight and planning we assume that he has everything all figured out. This is certainly not the case! He probably makes huge changes and pivots all the time, for example I was just reading about how he is not happy about Wax's savantism and wishes he could go back and change it. That is for a recent publication imagine how he feels about Elantris.

Nah, we actually know for a fact that he hasn't planned everything out. Elantris is a great example because he's told us that it wasn't until he wrote Mistborn Era 1 that he sat down and decided 'Now I'm writing the Cosmere for real, let's start canonizing everything'. For example he's mentioned that the pool above Elantris was created first as a plot device to get Raoden in a position to have his epihpany, without having a particular role in the underlying Cosmere mechanics. He went back to it when he was writing Mistborn and came up with the Perpendicularity concept.

In between writing Elantris and deciding to really hammer out the Cosmere, he also wrote Dragonsteel, White Sand and Aether of Night, along with Prime versions of what became Mistborn: The Final Empire, Wabreaker (well, part of it) and The Way of Kings. So yeah, even though Dragonsteel is a huge work in overall story terms, we know he hadn't nailed everyhing down when he wrote it. Same's true of Aether, though as it was a later book it probably represents something closer to his ultimate thoughts on things Cosmere than the earlier books.

Then you get things like Mistborn Era 2 which wasn't planned originally but has been huge in terms of what it's done for Scadrial's worldbuilding and the picture it's starting to give us of other Shards getting involved. So yeah, it's pretty obvious that as awesome as Brandon is in planning things out, there are definitely a lot of things he's still working out as he goes along or that he hasn't canonized yet. xD

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I would say with this one that there are certain things that are kind of cannon - like we see an aether elsewhere in the cosmere - but still completely different.

Brandon has said that the magic system is still canon so while there are probably going to be some changes to how they operate, the fundamentals are unlikely to change too much. Also, he recently gave us an interesting tidbit about his plans for Warbreaker's sequel, that it will involve Darro in some way. So at the very least we've got the magic system and one confirmed character and since Brandon mentioned him specifically he's probably going to be recognizably Darro, otherwise he could just make a brand new character from Aether's world for his worldhopper to serve whatever story function is intended.

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Another possibility is that he might cannibalize different elements of the story for different stories. If you check out Way of Kings Prime or Dragonsteel you'll see a lot of this kind of reusing of stories but usually with many changes.

He's already done this, with large chunks of the 'apocalypse/gods' plot being cannibalized for Mistborn Era 1, so we know that's going to change. And he originally tried cannibalizing Aethers for Liar of Partinel before deciding to rework the former so that they no longer needed to be included in the latter. Since he and Peter have both made it clear that there's something about Aethers that Brandon wants in the Cosmere with or without an actual book called Aether of Night, we can assume that whatever has been cannibalized or changed, the underpinnings of the Aethers isn't part of it.

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Some of it is cannon I'm sure, but with the amount of changes - small or large - taking anything as cannon and working it into your theories could be more harm than good.

Given that we have nothing to go on about Brandon's plans for the rewrite other than the magic system is still canon, Darro still exists and maybe that the world has been renamed to Vax, we pretty much have to base our theories on what we know about the book as it currently exists if we're to remain grounded at all.

Plus, it's fun to speculate and we know that all we're doing is making educated guesses at this point.

[handleCUP]

I think that we are agreeing lol I just wasn't as comfortable making such specific statements as I didn't have the quote's ready. You showed another good example of what I meant with the changes - perpendicularity - and definitely were able to say some things for certain that I did not know but I think in spirit we are saying the same thing.

I kind of figured the cannibalization to the mistborn gods but I didn't want to confuse anyone as I wasn't sure. Very interesting the thing about Darro though, and good to know about the magic system, I think that it had a lot of use beyond what we saw and the greater Cosmere implications are endless.

As far as speculation goes I wasn't saying not to speculate, I was just saying that with things like the gods being used elsewhere show that there is not much in this book to use towards theory crafting - other than Darro and the magic system - I never meant not to do it. My post was just to make clear that while Brandon has incredible foresight and when the books come out everything seems so perfect and planned out, he is making it up at he goes. While there is an outline it is subject to change, and often does, we just have to roll with the punches as they come, much like Brandon himself does.

Thanks for the info though I did not know all that.