heridfel

I will pull a Hoid. No Shards for me, thanks. I'd like to retain a bit more of my free will.

Hoid was lying when he said that the only woman on Roshar his age was Cultivation. Shallan has lost all of her memories from the old days, but still vaguely remembers that she killed Adonalsium. It was her all along!

That reminded me of a question I had - do we have a WoB as to whether Aimians could form a Nahel bond? I’m not asking whether they ever had, since Venli may be the first Radiant who is also Parshendi, but whether it is even possible?

My thought was that at least one of Dalinar’s oaths was not of the Bondsmith order: “If I must fall, I will rise each time a better man.”, but that it was still Accepted. That would explain the Stormfather’s confusion, along with the claim that this has never happened before and Dalinar himself saying that they are something new. Though if he ends up getting extra Surges as a result of that oath, I’ll be the first to complain about his hacking the system.

Well, I have to acknowledge that evidence hurts my theory. It is possible that Frost was speaking poetically, but that is about all it could be unless Frost is wrong about the nature of Rayse’s Shard (which I still think is possible - old and Cosmere-aware doesn’t mean omniscient - but unlikely). I still think that something is going on which makes Odium different - I know we have not seen many original Shardholders who haven’t been near-death and capable of interacting with “normal” humans, but the way Odium feeds on passion/hatred/self-hatred does not seem to fit.

For a Shardholder that we believed to have the Shard of Hate, which was taken on by a nasty person to begin with, Odium comes off as surprisingly calm. He sees himself as being the Shard of Passion, and others note that he seems to feed on passion. However, I think that for as long as he has been around and influenced by the Shard, he still seems too in control of himself for either hatred or passion to be his main focus. Instead, I think that he is the Shard of Betrayals. This would explain a lot of things. We find out that Odium is a human god, but he is leading the Listeners/Singers against the humans. The Stormlight Archive starts with nine of the ten Heralds betraying the last one so that they can avoid further torture. All of the humans which Odium or his Fused recruit (or attempt to recruit, in the case of Dalinar) are betraying humanity: Moash, Amaram, and Taravangian all join with Odium not because they believe his side to be the right one, but because they believe his side is the stronger one or because of personal benefits. This sets them apart from Nin and the Skybreakers, who join for reasons of morality, even if that morality has been twisted. If Odium is the Shardholder of Betrayal, he would still be able to make long-term plans, act calmly rather than passionately all the time, and it would explain how he could continue to destroy other Shards since Betrayal is nearly as destructive as Ruin. The only trouble I have with the theory is explaining how he could be held by the Oathpact, but maybe it is as simple as “you cannot betray someone unless they trust you”, and so he has to be able to act in a way to make others trust him in order to fulfill his Shard’s Intent. Thoughts?

Another possibility is that Renarin chooses to remove the gauntlet because he believes that he needs skin-to-skin contact. I'd have to re-read Dalinar's memory of Regrowth-based healing to see if the Radiant in the memory explicitly took off Shardplate in order to heal. If that was the case, then that'd be much stronger evidence.

Thank you for consolidating those prefaces. My hope is that whoever the in-universe author is, it's someone who isn't used to writing. The sentence structure is so simplistic that it hurts me to read it all at once. That makes sense when the out-of-universe goal is "let's come up with something that I can break up and put in the front of chapters of my book", but the main effect in-universe (intended or not) is that the author is a drill and the reader and her listeners are the materials being drilled. It suggests a personality like Dalinar's, but the text itself doesn't support his being the author very well.

Ah, it’s rough to have each character getting a chapter. While trading off like that isn’t bad when you have the whole book, I want some more meat with Kaladin. Even so, I think we are getting a hint of what his next oath will be: protecting the former Parshmen is the right thing to do, even if it brings a lot of complications with it. It’s hard to say whether Adolin is relieved or more worried now that Shallan says she’s going to give him a little chance for mystery. I think part of him wants to confess, but he’s afraid of disappointing his father. Nothing new to say about the Dalinar bit, since I had seen it before. Still fun to see the brute he used to be.

There's one bit of dialogue which points towards a stumbling block that Adolin would face if he meant to re-awaken his Blade: "I’ve always kind of known. Not that it was alive. That’s silly. Swords aren’t alive." Maybe he is flexible enough, mentally, to change that way of thinking. But it's pretty clear to me that as long as he does not think of his sword as alive, it won't be. By the way, the modern term for multiple personality disorder is dissociative identity disorder. Shallan's version may or may not be possession-form (where a personality can "take over") - it's harder to tell if other people can notice the change in behavior when she can literally change her appearance to match the personality.

On the other hand, we've got a few examples of parshmen-cum-Voidbringers acting in unusual ways (stealing boats, etc.) which don't line up with the behavior of Listeners, and we know that there are some Listener forms which exist but haven't been shown on screen. Mediationform and smokeform both could assist with gaining illicit access to a spanreed and faking correspondences. Also, we have seen a cabal of humans who were trying to bring back the Voidbringers as part of a convoluted way to return the Heralds. It's not a big step from there to a cabal which wants to work with them for reasons, even petty ones. I don't view this as the most likely of the scenarios - if anything, "Gawx was doing something else" would get my vote because he would be involved with any negotiations with Voidbringers, and that would be a more immediate priority - but I don't think we have evidence to contradict it from what we've seen so far.

I don't know: would you consider the possibility that the Voidbringers (or a group allied with them) have infiltrated the spanreed as a subset of A, or its own thing? I agree that Gawx probably would not have responded in that fashion unless he was totally captured by the system, but it isn't as though there is something in place to authenticate who is using a spanreed beyond handwriting analysis. Even that wouldn't really help because scribes are getting replaced all the time - the whole "men don't need to know how to read and write" thing really bites them in the butt there.

I greatly enjoyed these chapters. An end (or at least a pause) to "Renarin is faking being a Truthwatcher", and the same for Syl/Kaladin relationships. I don't know how that would work, don't want to know, but at least neither of them seem to show interest in it - more family than romance. Oh, and some more indication that Elhokar might end up a Lightweaver. Admitting truths to himself, seeing more Spren when he's around other Radiants... though I'd be just as happy if he ended up a squire to Kaladin.

If Shardblades were reasonably generic in appearance, then stealing one from the guy you just killed isn't a completely terrible idea, presuming you can somehow smuggle it away. Of course, they are rare enough that it'd be pretty reasonable for anyone you know to ask, "Hey, where did that Shardblade come from?" That is an awkward question - the sort that leads to a whole bunch of darkeyes getting killed. But when each blade is distinct enough that someone looking at it says "Hey, why do you have the Shardblade of the guy who was murdered a little while ago?"... yeah, good luck convincing people that you found it tossed out a window.

I think that you are overestimating the stability of the Alethi political structure. The requirement for becoming a Highprince is essentially having enough power to get people to call you a Highprince. I think that "Sadeas' camp", left without an heir, would quickly devolve into the lesser Brightlords who were under him trying to take on his role. For the challenges of trying to maintain a dynasty in Alethkar, look no further than House Kholin. Elkohar is the son of the first king in modern history, and is showing all of the problems associated with the ruler changing from a great man and powerful warlord to his son, who is not nearly so impressive. There are plenty of people who have a living memory of his father, which would normally help to find support for the heir, but it's taking Dalinar to keep the whole thing from fracturing. It doesn't help that he's responsible for some of those fractures, but that's who Dalinar is.