Sadeas Alive?

[byscuits]

Did a bit of a search for this, but didn't find anything. Do we have WoB on whether Sadeas is dead dead?

Edited January 20, 2017 by byscuits

[Gizmosowner]

Well..... He did get a knife to the brain through the eye and he didn't get up so I think it's safe to say that he is as dead as dead can be

[byscuits]

Well, this _is_ Brandon Sanderson we're talking about here. With such an excellent, hatable character like Sadeas, it seems worth keeping him around.

Where did Adolin's side knife come from? Was it a gift? Could it have been a well-placed Hemalurgic spike? Seems potentially within the realm of easy possibility.

[StormingTexan]

Not sure either but I have wondered the same thing 100 times. I know its been mentioned Brandon does bring back the assumed dead sparingly of course he has already done it once with a major character in WoR. I'd like to think he is dead dead though of course it is plenty of plot goodness either way. 

[byscuits]

Mostly asking if their are Words of Brandon on this one. Going to see him in Boston and want to have my question settled.

Edited January 20, 2017 by byscuits

[Gizmosowner]

Cool so ask him if the knife will be a hemalurgic spike of some kind tho I don't remember ifadolin removed it after he popped his eye

[byscuits]

Just re-read the rest of the section. Adolin was distracted by the appearance of the shard blade and disposed of it. No mention at all of his side knife.

[Kered]

I remember seeing an interview on Youtube with Brandon saying Sadeas is dead dead. I'll try to find it on there or on Theoryland. But I'm 99.9% sure that there is a WoB for it. The only possibility I see with Sadeas being "alive" is him sticking around in the Cognitive Realm, but that's a stretch. As said above, a knife to brain is pretty dead. And Brandon has been suuuuper careful with crossing over magics, as see in Shallans flashback with Hoid. I don't think he would be like "Bam, just kidding Sadeas isn't dead, Adolin randomly got a hemalurgic spike". 

[Jondesu]

5 hours ago, byscuits said:

Did a bit of a search for this, but didn't find anything. Do we have WoB on whether Sadeas is dead dead?

His Shardblade couldn't have unbonded and appeared next to him unless he died, and I find it very unlikely that Nale was there to resurrect him.  I guess we don't technically have official confirmation, but I can't see any reason to resurrect him.  There's plenty more bad guys.

[Kered]

5 minutes ago, Jondesu said:

His Shardblade couldn't have unbonded and appeared next to him unless he died, and I find it very unlikely that Nale was there to resurrect him.  I guess we don't technically have official confirmation, but I can't see any reason to resurrect him.  There's plenty more bad guys.

I didn't even think about the Shardblade, I think that pretty much sums it up. 

[maxal]

4 hours ago, byscuits said:

Just re-read the rest of the section. Adolin was distracted by the appearance of the shard blade and disposed of it. No mention at all of his side knife.

Adolin's side knife has been part of several discussions with respect to how he might be found guilty. It is never mentioned within the text what he might have done with it, so we truly have no idea. In his daze, he might have left it there or he might have picked it up.

[Toaster Retribution]

13 hours ago, Jondesu said:

very unlikely that Nale was there to resurrect him.  

Why would Nale want to resurrect Sadeas of all people? 

 

I do think and hope Sadeas is dead. I think he fulfilled his part in the story as an early main antagonist, before the Voidbringers/Radiants/Societies appeared. And Brandon already resurrected two people in WoR (yeah, I know Jasnah wasn´t technically dead, but it counts). If he starts bringing every major dead character back, that will make his stories way less effective. I actually hope that he keeps of the resurections for a while now since we also have gotten some in Mistborn. And there really is no reason to bring Sadeas back. He wasn´t even that present in person in WoR, and now there is so much going on that he will be distracting.

We will probably get more Sadeas in Dalinars flashbacks though. But that is a different matter.

 

[maxal]

3 hours ago, Chull #445 said:

Why would Nale want to resurrect Sadeas of all people? 

 

I do think and hope Sadeas is dead. I think he fulfilled his part in the story as an early main antagonist, before the Voidbringers/Radiants/Societies appeared. And Brandon already resurrected two people in WoR (yeah, I know Jasnah wasn´t technically dead, but it counts). If he starts bringing every major dead character back, that will make his stories way less effective. I actually hope that he keeps of the resurections for a while now since we also have gotten some in Mistborn. And there really is no reason to bring Sadeas back. He wasn´t even that present in person in WoR, and now there is so much going on that he will be distracting.

We will probably get more Sadeas in Dalinars flashbacks though. But that is a different matter.

 

I agree with this post. I have seen a strong negative reaction across the fandom with respect to the multiple resurrections. A non-negligible percentage of the fans were annoyed by it and do think it the lack mortality within the story is impacting those fans in a negative way. Not in the sense they necessarily want someone to die, but they feel cheated when characters did die only to be brought back through the use of means that weren't properly introduced before. Others also call for "Deus Ex Machina" for having Nale be ready to catch Szeth as he fell with a healing fabrial in his hands: the timing is too suspicious and it trials the suspense of disbelief of several. 

Obviously, everyone understands why Szeth and Jasnah didn't really die and if most are willing to accept Jasnah, Szeth is a hard sell. My perspective is Szeth died in order to give Kaladin a glorious moment, but since his character was still needed, he had to be "revived". My thoughts are the last scene would have probably flown better had Kaladin just maimed Szeth and let him escape, out of pity, only to have Szeth, still very alive but gravely hurt, being found by Nale and healed. Same story, but no revival, same use of the fabrial. Of course, there are other reasons to have revived Szeth, Brandon wanted to show us it was possible, but the scene was received in a mostly negative way.

This being said, I am convinced Brandon is very well aware of how his fans have received the multiple "revivals". I am thus convinced he will take care, in future books, not to over-use the trope. He has however announced at least one character would be dead when his flashback book happens and he has said "being dead didn't mean someone would not be playing a role into the main narrative". This opens the door wide for someone dying and being active through the aftermath, being able to influence the physical realm: someone like Kelsier in Mistborn. My money is currently being placed on Renarin. So huh if this happens in a future book, well, Brandon warned us in advance it would happen.

I have however absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Sadeas is truly dead, dead. Not to forget his character serves a higher purpose by being dead as opposed to being alive. His death is actually enhancing the story: having Adolin knifed him certainly propelled his character towards an ever increasing popularity. This one scene has been one of the most discussed subject since the release of WoR and the "what will happen to Adolin now" is one of the most anticipated story arcs. I thus say Sadeas dying was exactly the right move to play within the story.

[Jondesu]

3 hours ago, maxal said:

My perspective is Szeth died in order to give Kaladin a glorious moment, but since his character was still needed, he had to be "revived".

Actually, I felt that it was more of a way of setting the stakes and challenges.  If you know your enemies can survive or be brought back from even something like that, then it makes everything more desperate for the heroes.  Jasnah's was about setting up how hard it would be to kill a Radiant, as well as sending Shallan out on her own, but Szeth's was about making killing their enemies seem even harder to achieve (while also offering Szeth a potential redemption arc, though I'm not a big fan of that idea).

[maxal]

34 minutes ago, Jondesu said:

Actually, I felt that it was more of a way of setting the stakes and challenges.  If you know your enemies can survive or be brought back from even something like that, then it makes everything more desperate for the heroes.  Jasnah's was about setting up how hard it would be to kill a Radiant, as well as sending Shallan out on her own, but Szeth's was about making killing their enemies seem even harder to achieve (while also offering Szeth a potential redemption arc, though I'm not a big fan of that idea).

Except Szeth isn't an antagonist: he is one of the main protagonists. A redemption will obviously happen and has already started happening in Edgedancer. Having characters die only to be brought back is a dangerous thing to do. I personally was not overly traumatized by it, but I have read enough negative comments on it to figure out many feel negatively towards it. 

As for Jasnah, well, I am not sure how I personally feel about knowing the Radiants are practically invincible. I think the stakes would have been higher if we knew they can be killed. It has been one of my personal critics: how Kaladin has gone from a character I was widely interested in to one I now see as generic due to the lack of stakes when it comes to him and the predictability of any fights he partakes in. I thus think knowing Radiants can die would have brought in an aura of danger we don't currently have. 

[Jondesu]

@maxal, my impression is that he's upping the stakes when we find an enemy that will be able to defeat Radiants, perhaps even easily. There's a reason they didn't just easily win the Desolations, and instead saw large portions of the population destroyed. Since they're very tough to kill, imagine an enemy that can sweep through lines of Knights Radiant.

[maxal]

1 hour ago, Jondesu said:

@maxal, my impression is that he's upping the stakes when we find an enemy that will be able to defeat Radiants, perhaps even easily. There's a reason they didn't just easily win the Desolations, and instead saw large portions of the population destroyed. Since they're very tough to kill, imagine an enemy that can sweep through lines of Knights Radiant.

My thoughts are there never were enough Radiants to take care of the evil in an effective way. They might be invincible, but it seems there were much more foes than allies. Normal humans, it seems, were nothing more than meat for the grinder: only the lucky survived.

[nervousnerd]

Yeah. I really doubt Radiants will be invincible. The point may be to make it seem that way in order to show them being overconfident and then being shown the strength of their enemies. I also felt that until the final Szeth fight, none of them really were invincible yet. Even in that fight, the storm might have killed Kaladin easily even if Szeth could not.

I don't really worry about resurrections too much. Reading the FAQ and stuff made me realize how concious Brandon generally is about using common fantasy tropes. If he does use a trope, it is generally because he believes it is the direction the story naturally had to go or it was specifically always planned that way in order to tell a certain story. I don't think it really happens just because he realizes that he didn't want to kill the character after the fact or for the shock value.

As mentioned above, Jasnah was important in order for Shallan to really progress and I believe to give us a source about the spren (even if her part of that story isn't going to be told in canon). I also think we are going to need dead or at least non-physical characters in order to understand all of the Realms.

Edited January 22, 2017 by nervousnerd

[galendo]

I didn't much like the Jasnah/Szeth "deaths" less because I found them cheap (though I did a bit, for both) but because of the lost potential.  See, Roshar already had a well-established method of bringing characters back from the dead (the Oathpact), and I was hoping that the rest of the series would play death as final so that sometime way later, probably around the climax of book 7 or 8 but possibly as early as 5, a character (probably Kaladin, since in my hypothetical story Dalinar's already dead by then, and no one else really fits) could make a heroic sacrifice only to find that he's inadvertently bound himself to the Oathpact.

This would give all the gravitas of a heroic sacrifice, since no one would have the "on Roshar, death is cheap" mantra running through their heads and it wouldn't be clear right away that the character "survived."  It would also give a way to show what Damnation is like for the Heralds through the eyes of one of the viewpoint characters, maybe give some insight into Odium's workings, stuff like that.  Then, when the character finally made it back to Roshar, you'd get a bunch of cool homecoming/reunion scenes.  Not to mention that, if said character were Kaladin, you'd get to see all the lighteyes' consternation as they realized that a darkeyed bridgeboy was now a Herald of the Almighty.

That's mostly why I dislike the oh-no-they-died, oh-no-they-didn't patterns in SA so far: lost opportunity.  A part of me still hopes that Brandon will do something like that, because it would be cool, but even if he plays death entirely straight henceforth, I don't think he can ever quite get rid of the precedent that these "deaths" have established.  That's why we've got threads like this one, wondering if Sadeas is really dead, when from every sort of narrative and logical sense, he ought to be dead, dead, dead.

He is dead, by the way.  I'm like 99% sure of it.  My prediction is that Brandon does try to play death straight in the Stormlight Archive from here on, or at least for the next few books.  The main reason is just good storytelling: if characters can just be resurrected willy-nilly, the impact of character death is lessened, which lessens the stakes, which lessens the tension and worry for the characters' well-being, etc.  The story just becomes less in every way.  I don't think he can ever completely regain the ground lost to the "death is cheap" precedents so far, but I'm willing to bet that Brandon will work hard at regaining that ground in the future.

So Sadeas has to be dead.  There's no reason to suppose otherwise, and quite a few reasons to suppose so.

[byscuits]

On 1/21/2017 at 5:46 AM, Chull #445 said:

I do think and hope Sadeas is dead. I think he fulfilled his part in the story as an early main antagonist, before the Voidbringers/Radiants/Societies appeared. And Brandon already resurrected two people in WoR (yeah, I know Jasnah wasn´t technically dead, but it counts).

This seems excellent reasoning. Now that the story has progressed to bigger antagonists, Sadeas seems quite anemic. Very solid logic.

Now I need to have a new question ready for Mr. Sanderson.

[stonedshaman]

Shai'tan will resurrect Sadeas and use him as a new dreadlord  bahahaha

[Flynn]

On 1/21/2017 at 3:05 AM, StormingTexan said:

Not sure either but I have wondered the same thing 100 times. I know its been mentioned Brandon does bring back the assumed dead sparingly of course he has already done it once with a major character in WoR. I'd like to think he is dead dead though of course it is plenty of plot goodness either way. 

 

He did it with two major characters in WoR

[Spoolofwhool]

6 hours ago, Flynn said:

He did it with two major characters in WoR

I'll be honest, I don't consider what happened to Szeth to be a revival.  Jasnah, yeah, but she isn't major; she's tertiary. 

[Flynn]

33 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

I'll be honest, I don't consider what happened to Szeth to be a revival.  Jasnah, yeah, but she isn't major; she's tertiary. 

That's fair

[Vissy]

On 21.1.2017 at 11:23 PM, maxal said:

My thoughts are there never were enough Radiants to take care of the evil in an effective way. They might be invincible, but it seems there were much more foes than allies. Normal humans, it seems, were nothing more than meat for the grinder: only the lucky survived.

There's that, and then the technology levels during the Desolations were never nearly as high as during the current timeline on Roshar. Heralds had to teach people to cast bronze, etc.

I have a feeling that a Desolation happening at the current time is only going to be devastating because it transforms the parshmen - a cornerstone of many a society - into Voidbringers.

Edited January 28, 2017 by Rob Lucci