Source of the Intents of the Shards

[Honor's Radiance]

Not sure if this has been put forth already, so apologies if so, but...

We know from WoBs that Adonalsium was Shattered deliberately, not directly by its own hand, in the presence of the 16 Vessels and Hoid, and into sixteen pieces because of the specific details of the Shattering which happened, not because of the nature of Adonalsium. (It has been stated it is possible the Shattering could have produced other Shards.)

My impression is that the usual assumption is simply that the Shards are attributes of Adonalsium, and the source of their intents is within Adonalsium. However, what if the intents result from the intents of the Shattering, not the intents of Adonalsium?

I'm trying to remember whether we have confirmation that the original Vessels were for sure the cause of the Shattering, but if they were, it would make sense that the intents of those 16 people would affect how the Shattering manifested if indeed (as has been said) Adonalsium Shattered as it did for specific reasons. Now, we know that Ati's personality was different than that of his Shard, so presumably it isn't directly personality-based so much as related to the sixteen's particular relationships to Adonalsium or opinions on why the Shattering was necessary.

I've only read SA and Warbreaker, so this is hard to flesh out with all the unknowns, but if someone buys the idea and knows more, feel free to offer the data from the rest of the Cosmere.

[Ishar]

Personally, I kinda like this idea. Just to get it straight you are saying that because for example Ati helped shatter Adonalsium because he wanted to ruin him, whereas Leris maybe wanted to shatter Ado to preserve something. I think it could make sense, but I kinda doubt it is correct, simply because, it is too simple.

[Calderis]

The intents were something specifically that was taken from Adonalsium. Not something imparted by the Vessels. 

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Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

Shards. We started with fairly obvious ones, magic wise. Trying to keep this spoiler free, so: Ruin, Preservation, this kind of thing. Then we get the weird ones. Why do we have Shards that can only exist in the mind of a sentient creature? Like the concept of Honor can only be done when it's carried out, essentially, by a sentient creature.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

So when I split Adonalsium I said, "I'm going to take aspects of Adonalsium's nature." And this involves personality to me. So the Shattering of Adonalsium was primal forces attached to certain aspects of personality. And so I view every one of them this way. And when I wrote Mistborn we had Ruin and Preservation. They are the primal forces of entropy and whatever you call the opposite, staying-the-same-ism-y. Like, you've got these two contrasts, between things changing and things not changing. And then humans do have a part, there's a personality. Ruin is a charged term for something that actually is the way that life exists. And Preservation is a charged term for stasis, for staying the same. And those are the personality aspects, and the way they are viewed by people and by the entity that was Adonalsium.

So I view this for all of them. Like, Honor is the sense of being bound by rules, even when those rules, you wouldn't have to be bound by. And there's this sense that that is noble, that's the honor aspect to it, but there's also something not honorable about Honor if taken from the other direction. So a lot of them do kind of have this both... cultural component, I would say, that trying to represent something that is also natural. And not all of them are gonna have a 100% balance between those two things, I would say, because there's only so many fundamental laws of the universe that I can ascribe personalities to in that way. 

So I find Honor very interesting, but I find Autonomy a very interesting one for the exact same reason. What does autonomy mean? We attach a lot to it, but what is the actual, if you get rid of the charged terms, what does it mean? And this is where you end up with things like Odium claiming "I am all emotion." But then there's a charged term for it that is associated with this Shard. I'm not going to tell you whether he's right or not, but he has an argument. 

source

 

[Leyrann]

I had a theory along those lines (contains OB spoilers), though my goal wasn't to explain why the intents existed but rather to try and predict the missing intents.

Edited May 29, 2018 by Leyrann

[Honor's Radiance]

On 5/27/2018 at 11:47 PM, Ishar said:

Personally, I kinda like this idea. Just to get it straight you are saying that because for example Ati helped shatter Adonalsium because he wanted to ruin him, whereas Leris maybe wanted to shatter Ado to preserve something. I think it could make sense, but I kinda doubt it is correct, simply because, it is too simple.

Yep, that's my intent here, to go for the obvious pun. You're probably right that it's too simple for Brandon xD.

On 5/28/2018 at 4:02 AM, Calderis said:

The intents were something specifically that was taken from Adonalsium. Not something imparted by the Vessels.

I've read that WoB a few times now, and I'm still not certain I'm convinced it contradicts my theory. Perhaps a better way of wording what I'm thinking is that the aspects of Adonalsium's personality which manifested in the sixteen Shards were determined, at least in part, by the intents of the shatterers. Obviously, if the Shards are pieces of Adonalsium, there's some level at which they're determined by aspects of his personality or nature. I'm just arguing that of the possible options (these being elements of Adonalsium's personality), those chosen were those most closely corresponding to the intents of some or all of the shatterers.