[OB] Truthwatchers bind Voidspren (But are not evil)

[Zalocx]

So at the end of WoR almost everyone in the fandom started noting Renarin was acting "kinda shady", and then chapters 8 and 9 of Oathbringer removed the "kinda" and turned the "shady" dial to 11 and snapped it off. The conclusion that a lot of people seem to have reached is that Glys isn't what she says she is or that Renarin is going to turn evil/is already evil. An equal amount of much the same people would also tell you that such a plot twist would be very predictable and kinda lame. So here I am to offer some thoughts I had when thinking about this while procrastinating at work 

First let me set up where I'm coming from:

- We know the bondspren are at least a mixture of Honor and Cultivation's Investiture. With some (Honorspren) leaning almost fully one way while other (Cultivationspren) lean the other. But I don't think we have a definitive WoB about if any of Odium's power is also mixed in there. 

-Seeing the future is said to be "of the Voidbringers". We know from previous books that facets of myth and legend on various shardworlds are in-fact hints or obtuse references to the natures or powers of the Shards that inhabit or shaped that world. So I am pretty confident in predicting seeing what is to come is associated with the Voidbringers in the cultures of Roshar because its something Voidspren or Odium himself are very good at. And hey look! It's also what the Truthwatchers pretty much do all the time!

-For all their being personifications of concepts, spren do show a bit of an ability to make choices as long as those choices don't contradict their concepts. Like the dichotomy of truth and lies between the Honorspren and the Cryptics are part of their nature, but the fact that this has grown into a big racial conflict in Shadesmar between them as implied by Jasnah is probably not. The two people most likely chose to express their rivalry this way instead of it being something hard-coded in them as Honor/Lie-spren.

So from that base I would like to posit that Truthwatchers bind a type of spren (Prophesyspren?) that are actually mostly (or even entirely) of Odium, explaining why they are associated with Future Sight. But who in ages past turned against their master and joined the forces of humanity in the conflict between the 3 Shards. Maybe they foresaw something that rankled them if Odium won, maybe their nature as beings who conceptualize "seeing what is to come" meant that they are afraid of losing their entire purpose if Odium wins (a Cosmere where he has shattered the other 15 and rules unopposed would probably be very dull and predictable to a race of Seers). For whatever reason they turned against Odium and joined team Roshar, then when the rest of the bondspren started to imitate the Honorblades and give birth to Surgebinders they followed suit. That explains Renarin acting super weird around mentions of Odium's Champion and the general distance and obscurity attributed to the Truthwatchers in history: its not just that they are aloof and cagey because they get to know deep terrible secrets by their very nature, it *is* partially that, but also that as technically Voidspren they have an innate knowledge of Odium and his designs. The aloofness also probably comes from the fact that the other orders and other spren still probably didn't trust them, and who knows what the general populace would have done if they had known. It also kinda explains why Renarin DOESN'T TALK TO ANYONE ABOUT ANYTHING. His father has pledged to destroy Odium and is bonded to Honor's own Sliver, what is someone who was already a wallflower before this all started supposed to do? Go up to Dalinar and say "Hey dad, just wanted to tell you all this super secret stuff I know from my bond with a fragment of the Lord of Hate, but its cool she says she's on our side!"?

 

So yeah, Renarin, Glys, the rest of her kind and the order of the Truthwatchers. I believe they are ultimately good guys, they just have an INCREDIBLY complicated backstory that explains why they are so, well *shady*, about it all.

[Hafrigado]

Or maybe the "truth Spren" were of Honor/ Cultivation but they decided that they could only truly know the truth if they knew the future. So they made a deal with Odium where they get futuresight but Odium gets to twist it or only show them the worst possible outcome.

[ProfessorMLyon]

Interesting idea, but it doesn't quite feel right to me. I don't think that because you can see into the future necessarily means you've got Odium on your contact list. In Way of Kings, Honor says that Cultivation is better at seeing the future than he is.  I think that future sight comes from her. This ability has just received a bum rap because it has been associated with the Voidbringers. How do we know that is true and not some propaganda spread around by the Vorinism? 

[Hafrigado]

2 minutes ago, ProfessorMLyon said:

Interesting idea, but it doesn't quite feel right to me. I don't think that because you can see into the future necessarily means you've got Odium on your contact list. In Way of Kings, Honor says that Cultivation is better at seeing the future than he is.  I think that future sight comes from her. This ability has just received a bum rap because it has been associated with the Voidbringers. How do we know that is true and not some propaganda spread around by the Vorinism? 

You have to admit, Renarin's visions are rather......dark.

Also, all Shards can kinda see the future, so just because Cultivation is "better" at it then Honor doesn't mean she's "good" at it.

[Zalocx]

11 minutes ago, ProfessorMLyon said:

Interesting idea, but it doesn't quite feel right to me. I don't think that because you can see into the future necessarily means you've got Odium on your contact list. In Way of Kings, Honor says that Cultivation is better at seeing the future than he is.  I think that future sight comes from her. This ability has just received a bum rap because it has been associated with the Voidbringers. How do we know that is true and not some propaganda spread around by the Vorinism? 

My feelings are that if it is Cultivation, then why is Renarin acting so strange? Especially when Dalinar mentioned Odium's champion. Also I think that thing with Cultivation and Honor gets blown out of proportion. All Honor says is that she's better at it than him. We don't know how Odium (or any of the other Shards for that matter) compare to either of them. And I'm pretty sure that its not just Vorin Propaganda since it seems to permeate non-Vorin cultures too and I think even Tennavast said something to the effect in one of the visions in WoD.

All we know for certain on Future Sight is:

-Preservation is better than Ruin

-Cultivation is better than Honor

My hypothesis is that Odium is better than both of them,  perhaps one of the best out of ALL of them. It would explain why he has been so effective at killing other shards, since we have a WoB that they were initially all perfectly equal in power. So even if Odium waited until the others had invested themselves in planets before striking, or used some other methods we are not yet aware of he would still be displaying an absurd amount of cunning and planning that can be explained if he really is better than everyone else at planning 3 steps ahead. We will have to see, I just think its strange that all Shards have Future Sight yet Odium (through the Voidbringers) is the only one known for it in mortal mythologies.

[FeatherWriter]

A quick note, Glys's pronouns are he/him. 

[ProfessorMLyon]

31 minutes ago, Hafrigado said:

You have to admit, Renarin's visions are rather......dark.

Yes, yes they are. But the truth is, the future is dark. We are talking about the Last Desolation here. It isn't going to be pretty. 

 

17 minutes ago, Zalocx said:

My feelings are that if it is Cultivation, then why is Renarin acting so strange?

We don't know much about Truthwatchers. We know they see...something. Renarin just may not know how to say what he knows. Remember, he has other issues. And again, future sight has been labeled as bad, heresy, and evil in Alethi culture. That's a lot to overcome.

 

31 minutes ago, Zalocx said:

My hypothesis is that Odium is better than both of them,  perhaps one of the best out of ALL of them.

I agree. Rayse has an edge and this may be it.

As I said, we just know so little about Truthwatchers to really say one way or the other. Thanks for the discussion!

[Hafrigado]

6 minutes ago, ProfessorMLyon said:

Yes, yes they are. But the truth is, the future is dark. We are talking about the Last Desolation here. It isn't going to be pretty. 

I meant that they are unnecessarily dark. Like when he kept saying they were all going to die but they didn't. Of course, they could all die eventually.

[ChazBolt]

Unless I'm forgetting something here, are we positive that the Truthswatchers power is Future Sight?

From what I remember from WoR (the book as documented in the epigraphs) it's not necessarily seeing the future. Id theories that it's more about being able to see a grander perspective on any given situation, be that a situations past or several perspectives on the same situation. 

Edited September 14, 2017 by ChazBolt

[Yata]

The Truthwatchers' Spren could hardly be Voidspren.

First of all we saw at least One of them (Ym's one) and the look doesn't fit with the Odium's theme in Roshar.

Then we saw how Syl overreact to the Stormspren while She didn't feel nothing wrong with Renarin always around.

Nale itself hunted and killed a proto-Truthwatcher and he didn't considerate for a moment that this could be weird (if Truthwatchers are Voidspren bound, the returning of Voidspren would be a great alarm to It).

About the strange behavour, probably the Spren are Simply attracted by Humans with a reclusive nature like the inkspren are attracted by the Logic not hotblood people.

[Catladyman]

33 minutes ago, Yata said:

About the strange behavour, probably the Spren are Simply attracted by Humans with a reclusive nature like the inkspren are attracted by the Logic not hotblood people.

I LOVE this idea for what attracts Truthwatcher spren! I had been thinking along the lines of selflessness or compassion, based mostly on Stump and Ym. However, the idea of a lonleyspren or something is really unique and fun! I also really like picturing these people so isolated in their own worlds suddenly visited by a spren that looks like light through a prism. Lovely.

[Frostlander]

Do we know how traumatic entering the physical realm is for nahel spren? They talk about the difficulty, and many of them seem to have fuzzy memories that improve as the bond progresses. What happens if the spren's transition is particularly bad? The other Truthwatchers don't seem particularly "off," and they can effectively use their powers. And Ym's spren seemed normal enough. Is it possible that something went wrong with Glys's transition, and that is causing the problems we're noticing?

[Yata]

12 minutes ago, Frostlander said:

Do we know how traumatic entering the physical realm is for nahel spren? They talk about the difficulty, and many of them seem to have fuzzy memories that improve as the bond progresses. What happens if the spren's transition is particularly bad? The other Truthwatchers don't seem particularly "off," and they can effectively use their powers. And Ym's spren seemed normal enough. Is it possible that something went wrong with Glys's transition, and that is causing the problems we're noticing?

I don't think It's the case.

But rather Renarin's condition that give him and hard time to adapt to the new status quo.

As far as we know the only transition out of the standard was Wyndle's one (and in Better) thanks to the pre-working he did and the fact that Lift is a more compatible host than a regular human

[treblkickd]

9 hours ago, ChazBolt said:

Unless I'm forgetting something here, are we positive that the Truthswatchers power is Future Sight?

From what I remember from WoR (the book as documented in the epigraphs) it's not necessarily seeing the future. Id theories that it's more about being able to see a grander perspective on any given situation, be that a situations past or several perspectives on the same situation. 

Great point.

I would expand this even to point out that it's not clear that to the extent that we can know/guess at what Renarin sees, there hasn't been much in the way of visions of the future. Rather, he saw or knew about, at some level, an ominous thing coming, but he didn't necessarily have a clear idea of what was coming (the Everstorm). Renarin was generating a countdown, but in terms of "visions" or "seeing", that strikes me as more along the lines of being able to see a clock that no one else can, with the time ticking away. Seeing the countdown in real time does not mean that he knows what's at the end of the countdown. Even at the end of WoR you have Renarin pronouncing that everyone is "dead", but that's happening essentially as the Everstorm is being summoned, so it's not clear that he's seeing some vision of the future, but rather "seeing" (understanding?) on some intuitive level what the summoning of the Everstorm means for everyone (spoilers: it's bad).

Also, regarding the OB "creepy" Renarin scenes, there's really zero evidence there to suggest that he knows anything about the future. Rather, the implication is that he's more aware, in some way, of current facts. Perhaps he can see that Adolin is lying, or concealing something. Maybe he can even sense that there is some duplicity going on with the second murder (i.e., it's being made to look like a serial event when it's actually not).