Typo or new role for Adolin?

[CaptainRyan]

I was reading through the excel spreadsheet of Reddit WoB's that was compiled by Pagerunner here and came across this one (#437):

Q: Do you plan to write the stormlight archive books with the same POV characters throughout the series (like WoT) or do you think that you give other characters POV (aSoIaF) as the series continues?   A: Most of the main POV characters have been introduced. Each book will take one major character (Kaladin, Dalinar, Adolin, Jasnah, Shallan, Navani, Szeth, Taln) and give them 'flashback' sequences in the same way Kaladin got flashbacks in the first book. There are some open spots for which I'm toying with other characters being used. Other characters will get viewpoints now and then, but I feel that one of the ways that big series get off track is by changing the focus to side characters. (Note that I will continue doing the Interludes to give some other voices and perspectives screen time. Few of these will be main characters.)   ADOLIN is mentioned as a PoV character who will get his own book. This quote is from August 2015. Is this a typo and should read "Renarin" or has some change occurred and none of us have followed up with Brandon about it? @maxal, you would probably be interested in this. Also, notice this : It seems the chosen 10 are not as set in stone as we might think, eh?

[Caevita]

It is widely fan theorized that Adolin will become a Dustbringer someday.  There's a WoB out there saying that "some orders" would be very okay with Adolin's actions at the end of WoR.

I don't have a lot more beyond that.  On the other subject though, good point.  I'd always assumed Eshonai to have one of the spots, when I was tallying them up in my head, but we'll see.

[Steeldancer]

Um adolin was distinctly not going to be a viewpoint character. That was part od the argument over his character. He's not really set to be a major part of this series.

Edited May 23, 2017 by The Flash

[Pagerunner]

Before he wrote Words of Radiance, the flashback characters we knew were: Kaladin, Dalinar, Shallan, Szeth, and Navani; and Jasnah, Taln, Adolin, Taravingian, and another Herald. 

But Brandon has said that was never set in stone, and after WoR, it appears Lift, Eshonai, and Renarin replaced Adolin, Navani, and Taravingian. He's also been careful to say that it's not guaranteed we'll get all ten Orders represented in the flashback characters.

On the Arcanum Unbounded tour, I actually asked Brandon if he had revised the list any further while writing Oathbringer. He said he hasn't, and it was becoming increasingly unlikely he would, but there's still a chance.

[maxal]

Thanks for pinging me, but honestly you will have a hard time finding something I haven't read yet unless it is very recent  I did read this WoB and no I do not think Brandon meant "Renarin", but said "Adolin". This isn't the kind of misspelling Brandon typically makes: he is usually very careful whenever he is answering, taking him time if needed to make sure he doesn't give away something he means not to. He is also very self-conscious about canonizing information he hasn't settled himself on. For instance, he wrote the entire Szeth's flashback sequence for Oathbringer, even if they aren't planned before quite a few years, just to avoid continuity errors.

Thus, when Brandon says we have met most of the main POV characters and he lists Adolin (and also Navani) in the lot, then I do take him for his word. Mind, this doesn't mean Adolin is getting a focus book, as far as I know, this isn't within the plan and even if he once toyed with the idea, he seems to have currently decided against it. The flashback structure and the focus characters aren't however set in steal: Brandon has been quite explicit about that. Yes, he has a plan, but yes this plan might change. It may be one character he planned to write will simply not work out as expected just as Adolin is currently working out much better than intended. He referred to Adolin as a pleasant surprise, because he didn't plan him and certainly never thought the character would write itself as he did. Nothing prevents Brandon from having unpleasant surprises where one planned character simply does the opposite of Adolin. It could be the main narrative story arc of one or a few of those flashback characters will be greatly reduced from what we have seen so far. We simply do not know.

There is also the fact what we refer to as main characters and what Brandon refers to as main characters may not be the same. On one hand, he considers the flashbacks characters to be the main ones, but on the other hand he constantly lists Navani as one of the major ones even if she isn't getting neither a focus book nor even a strong character arc.The line in between main characters, flashback characters and which characters the readers will perceive as "major" is quite muddle. Ask around and many will tell you Adolin is one of the main characters because well, quite frankly, he is an integral part of the main narrative, he has many viewpoints and a character arc. Others will disagree because he isn't a Radiant and fills in no definite function preferring to adopt the flashback structure and ranking Eshonai above him even though Adolin has a much stronger presence within the story than she. Some would even argue minor characters such as Sigzil and Gaz are more important than Adolin even if they aren't getting be it viewpoints nor a stand-alone character arc. Really, it truly depends on where you are standing. Character readers, such as myself, will argue Adolin is very important to the main narrative because he brings balance, he brings unpredictability, an interesting character arc, but world-builders could argue he isn't important because he isn't use to present either magic nor world. My hopes are Brandon will manage to keep a good balance in between both world-building and character building, allowing characters to grow for other purposes than show-casting on elements of magic while finding creative ways for readers to explore his world within all its splendor.

Also, I am unsure how important Renarin's character arc will end up being. It isn't set until very far down the road which makes it hard to have true speculations. It may be he didn't mention him merely because he doesn't plan on writing a lot of him until much later. I personally wonder about keeping Renarin's story for so far down the road if it is to be this meaningful: it seems an odd choice but not knowing what Renarin will or will not do makes it hard to figure it out. One thing I do know is Adolin currently is the one we are following, Renarin being a supporting character: all the characters Brandon mentioned within this WoB also are current viewpoint characters. Omitting Renarin merely means he isn't getting viewpoints within the near future.

Edited May 23, 2017 by maxal

[Pagerunner]

First, I'd like to make a correction: the date is an error in my WoB collection. If you follow the link, you'll see that the comment in question is actually from 2011. Apologies for the confusion, but this is some out-of-date, pre-WoR information.

But, some further clarification: Way of Kings Prime had six main characters:

• A young peasant soldier (Merin)
• A middle-aged sister to the king (I believe her name was still Jasnah)
• A battle-hardened nobleman general (Dalenar)
• An honor-bound assassin serving an evil master (Jek)
• A young lady-in-waiting (who wasn't actually Shallan)
• An immortal protector of mankind who is slowly breaking beneath the pressure of his station (Taln)

Shallan replaced the fifth character. (I have a memory of Brandon saying that, unlike Merin and Jek, he does not consider this the same character under a different name. I wish I could find her name... I'm pretty sure I've seen it before.) Then, as Brandon rewrote Way of Kings and set the structure of the series at 10 books, each with a flashback character, he needed to find four other characters to take those viewpoint roles. Those are the ones that have changed over the years as Brandon refines his plans. Here are the instances where Brandon mentioned a character other than the Dalinar, Kaladin, Shallan, Szeth, Jasnah, and Taln:

• September 2010, we have met all the "major viewpoint characters" for the series (which would seem to exclude Lift)
• October 2010, maybe a second Kaladin, maybe an Adolin
• July 2011, Adolin, Navani, Taravingian, and a second male Herald who appears in Way of Kings
• August 2011, (the quote in question), Adolin and Navani
• April 2012, either Navani or a character he can't tell us yet.
• March 2014, Eshonai (reaffirmed several other times on the WoR tour)
• March 2014, Lift (also reaffirmed several other times on the WoR tour)
• March 2014, Renarin
• April 2014, Lift (claiming she was in the series outline from the beginning)
• February 2015, Lift, Ash, Renarin
• September 2015, Renarin, Lift, Ash
• September 2016, Eshonai, Lift, Renarin, Ash

Adolin and Navani were pretty frequent mentions in the year after WoK was released. You can see the gap during the second half of 2012 and all of 2013 where Brandon was writing WoR, and he didn't talk much about it. Then, after WoR was released, he was extremely consistent in mentioning Eshonai as the remaining member for the first five, and Lift/Renarin/Ash as the remaining five in the back.

Brandon has plans for more than just ten characters. Renarin was important in WoK Prime, Lift had been a planned Radiant from the beginning (even if she apparently hadn't originally been devised as a flashback character), Taravingian and the Diagram still look to be a big part of the series. It just depends who Brandon feels will tell the best story in a flashback situation. I, personally, think that he took Adolin off because his backstory doesn't have anything especially tragic or mysterious in it. He's not as old as Dalinar, hasn't had as rough a time as Kaladin, doesn't have secrets like Renarin or Shallan. He can be important in the present day, but maybe his backstory isn't well suited to hold up an entire book by itself in a flashback sequence. He also may have lost his book to even the gender ratio, which is currently 5-5 but was originally 7-to-3 in favor of men.

The other concern that I raise is that, while we have a pretty strong pattern that we'll be getting one of each Radiant, that does not need to hold true. I think it still will (which would mean a really interesting story for Ash, who is the Herald aligned with Shallan's Order), but Brandon has to leave the option open. Same way he keeps insisting that a character can die before their flashback book; it doesn't mean he is killing someone before their book, just that he needs to allow dramatic tension of Jasnah or Renarin dying. So, if he has planned out one book per Radiant Order, then that would mean Kalak was the male Herald (the Willshapers are the only unrepresented Order with a male Herald), and Adolin/Navani/Taravingian would have split the Edgedancer/Dustbringers/Truthwatchers. (Unless, of course, one of the male Heralds would join another Radiant Order. Which is what I suspect may happen for Ash.)  And since Adolin's blade is an Edgedancer's...

All that to say, no, the flashback characters are not set in stone. Brandon has changed them, and he may do so again. But he didn't change them while writing Oathbringer, and the more he writes the more he'll be locked in to his choices. It looks like he's settled in to his final decisions.

[maxal]

Excellent post @Pagerunner  Here are a few additional comments.

8 hours ago, Pagerunner said:

Shallan replaced the fifth character. (I have a memory of Brandon saying that, unlike Merin and Jek, he does not consider this the same character under a different name. I wish I could find her name... I'm pretty sure I've seen it before.) Then, as Brandon rewrote Way of Kings and set the structure of the series at 10 books, each with a flashback character, he needed to find four other characters to take those viewpoint roles. Those are the ones that have changed over the years as Brandon refines his plans.

 A lot of things has changed since WoK Prime. When talking about it, Brandon has often mentioned how this first draft absolutely didn't work out. It isn't so much he felt the individual character arcs were bad, but grouped together they lent for a slow paced story as nobody truly had enough page time to progress much beyond the mere basics. One of the changes he made when writing the final version of WoK was to remove Renarin, Taln and Jasnah from the viewpoint characters, postponing their stories until a much later time. Recently, he mentioned how Taln has been planned as the story of a "man waking up and thinking he is someone, but is he this person or not?", which seems to be the essence of Taln's character arc, but then again, he also mentioned how this didn't work out anymore as he couldn't realistically withhold the secret around the character for such a long time period. Hence, his character arc is likely to be greatly modified from the intended plan, it may be it will be spread out through many more books thus making the "Taln" book not necessarily "Taln" heavy. 

Honestly, I do not know, but I am using the example to further explain how the initial plan may not end up being the story we will read. It is the one reason often raised to justify why Adolin shouldn't grow within the story nor get a decent character arc: he wasn't planned, hence nothing surrounding his character will ever be important nor detailed. This isn't true, Brandon's plans aren't fixed in time, they change, the adapt themselves, they morph and studying this first outlay of WoK truly highlights just how different the book we ended up reading is.

I also think, given the timeline, when he said he might do an Adolin flashback book probably coincide to when he changed the outlay of Stormlight in order to give him a bigger role. He did say how he had to do this as the character worked so well in WoK. So it might be, at the time, he hadn't truly settle on how he was going to develop Adolin. Now he has a better idea.

8 hours ago, Pagerunner said:

Adolin and Navani were pretty frequent mentions in the year after WoK was released. You can see the gap during the second half of 2012 and all of 2013 where Brandon was writing WoR, and he didn't talk much about it. Then, after WoR was released, he was extremely consistent in mentioning Eshonai as the remaining member for the first five, and Lift/Renarin/Ash as the remaining five in the back.

At one point in time, Brandon toyed with the idea of giving both Adolin and Navani a book, just as he toyed with the idea of giving Kaladin another flashback book. This changed.

In Navani's case, Brandon explained how he felt giving her a flashback book would be redundant with Dalinar's, feeling his would cover her backstory adequately. However, having read the Thrill, I don't think it does so huh maybe we'll get a surprise down the road.

In Kaladin's case, my thoughts are Brandon dropped the idea when he decided he could write flashback sequences for characters other than the focus one in any given books. Hence, we are getting four additional Kaladin flashback chapters within Oathbringer and supposedly one for Adolin (I am still keeping my finger crossed I have no hallucinated this one). Thus, it might be the decision to stop restricting the flashback sequence to one sole character has helped some decisions being made.

8 hours ago, Pagerunner said:

Brandon has plans for more than just ten characters. Renarin was important in WoK Prime, Lift had been a planned Radiant from the beginning (even if she apparently hadn't originally been devised as a flashback character), Taravingian and the Diagram still look to be a big part of the series. It just depends who Brandon feels will tell the best story in a flashback situation. I, personally, think that he took Adolin off because his backstory doesn't have anything especially tragic or mysterious in it. He's not as old as Dalinar, hasn't had as rough a time as Kaladin, doesn't have secrets like Renarin or Shallan. He can be important in the present day, but maybe his backstory isn't well suited to hold up an entire book by itself in a flashback sequence. He also may have lost his book to even the gender ratio, which is currently 5-5 but was originally 7-to-3 in favor of men.

The main reason, I believe, Adolin is not getting a flashback book merely is his backstory doesn't follow the pattern Brandon seems to wish to reproduce for all books. In shorts, he wishes for those sequences to revolve around uprooting a secret: they aren't per-say the complete backstory of a given character, they are the story surrounding a secret this character has had. It is why we never got to read how Shallan bonded Pattern, it is why many feel her backstory wasn't complete: it wasn't because the purpose of the sequence isn't to give a character's full backstory, it is to reveal a secret. Adolin has no such secrets to reveal which isn't to say nothing of import for his character has happened within the past, it merely means it doesn't allow for the pattern to be reproduced. 

My thoughts also are the back order is highly likely to change because, by the time we get there, it may be some character's secrets will have come out through other means, thus rendering a flashback sequence obsolete. I am mostly thinking of Lift and Renarin here. In Lift's case, I personally felt Edgedancer gave us enough information about her past: I currently do not see the need to write it down within 13 additional chapters, but it may be Brandon planned to write something else, something which will happen in between both books. I cannot say. In Renarin's case, I cannot believe whatever is ailing him won't get explored before the second half, so once again, reading his childhood within 13 chapters may not turn out being relevant nor required. It may also be Brandon will decide Renarin isn't the best character to narrate this backstory, who knows?

Arguably, someone like Taravangian's flashback sequence sounds reasonably more interesting to read than Lift, well, to me it would be.

This being said, simply because someone is getting a flashback sequence doesn't mean this someone will have a strong presence within the main narrative just as not getting one doesn't mean another someone won't be important nor have a character arc. The gender ratio might have come into play, but I doubt it since Brandon never truly had firm plans to write an Adolin focus book.

11 hours ago, Pagerunner said:

The other concern that I raise is that, while we have a pretty strong pattern that we'll be getting one of each Radiant, that does not need to hold true. I think it still will (which would mean a really interesting story for Ash, who is the Herald aligned with Shallan's Order), but Brandon has to leave the option open. Same way he keeps insisting that a character can die before their flashback book; it doesn't mean he is killing someone before their book, just that he needs to allow dramatic tension of Jasnah or Renarin dying. So, if he has planned out one book per Radiant Order, then that would mean Kalak was the male Herald (the Willshapers are the only unrepresented Order with a male Herald), and Adolin/Navani/Taravingian would have split the Edgedancer/Dustbringers/Truthwatchers. (Unless, of course, one of the male Heralds would join another Radiant Order. Which is what I suspect may happen for Ash.)  And since Adolin's blade is an Edgedancer's...

All that to say, no, the flashback characters are not set in stone. Brandon has changed them, and he may do so again. But he didn't change them while writing Oathbringer, and the more he writes the more he'll be locked in to his choices. It looks like he's settled in to his final decisions.

Brandon explicitly stated how the pattern of WoK and WoR wouldn't repeat itself for all books and while it is repeating itself for Oathbringer, while it is his plans to repeat it for book 4 and 5, it may not happen. He did state how, well, his plans for book 4 and 5 might change as he starts writing them. So I definitely think we shouldn't take for granted each flashback character will be a Radiant nor that we are even getting one main character per order. It may also be some books flashback characters will not be a member of the featured order: viewpoints and a main narrative story arc isn't the only way to present characters nor magic nor Radiant orders. 

One of the reasons Adolin as a Dustbringer got so much traction back in the day was linked to the one empty spot within the flashback characters combined with the fact none of the chosen ones fit for the order. 

On the last point, Brandon recently did say the back order wasn't fixed yet: he might still change it. That's the thing about plans, they need to have the flexibility to adapt themselves to a story not yet written.