Garfield

Right now, the desolation is upon the continent, and so far they have produced one measly Radiant in fighting shape to help humanity. When in the past they had the 10 heralds and probably hundreds of fighting knights. When Syl said something along the lines that a dead spren is only as dead as the oath it's bound to. That means for me that they are not truly dead as in gone forever but rather suspended in some sort of VERY unpleasant undead limbo state. Couldn't be a way around the shortage of knighs be humans who are willing to speak and uphold the oaths bonding the blades to revive them? It was never anywhere stated that only the specific knight that betrayed the spren can bring the undead spren back to life. I could imagine Adolin making a fine Windrunner.

When I was reading WoR there was one decision of Dalinar that I found seriously ODD. He appointed Amaram as the head of the Knights Radiant, despite having zero Radiant abilities. I mean, Dalinar even had these visions where he had seen first hand what KR means and what abilities you have to have in order to be one. I mean, this is a joke! He knew, Amaram was only a normal person and how is a normal person be the head of the order of the KR. This decision seems so completely nonsensical. And has Dalinar, when it became clear to him that he has to refound the order, never looked out for people, who repeatedly succeed at stuff when normally the odds should be against them? Did he really never investigate into how bridge four held that bridge and Kaladin was able to rescue him? When Kaladin admitted, he had killed a shardbearer? When some irrational gut feeling tells him to trust Kaladin, despite knowing nothing about his past? He never considered it possible and investigated, instead even appointed a non radiant?

There are several thought that popped up in my mind about the spren Firstly, helping the humans to keep desolations at bay. What exactly is their stake in the game? Spren are in and by themselves quite happy in their own cognitive realm/Shadesmar it seems. Now, why were they even interested in humans in the first place? They emulated Honor, bonding to humans to give them surgebinding to fight off Odium and the desolations. But why? Are they in any way, as a species or individually, negatively affected if Odium takes over Roshar, so do they gain some advantage if they prevent Odium from taking over Roshar? Next, apparently all spren that are non-conscious in our realm, but seem to have some kind of conscious representation in the cognitive realm. Aren't they furious that humans trap some of them to harness their power in fabrials?

As I understand it, there aren't many spren around that would be willing to bond with a human. They don't have a death wish.

I guess the unbalanced impression comes from the fact that most of the time in the books we see K interacting with lighteyes in power, not with normal, low rank lighteyed citizens like the quartermaster

He doesn't stigmatize them in general, he is quite okay with Dalinar's quartermaster, despite being a lighteyes. He only has a problem with lighteyes in a position of power. Why? Because since Wistiow as a child until Dalinar all he had been confronted with have abused their station and harmed him considerably.

We also have to take into account that Alethkar doesn't have a UN carta of acceptable warfare techniques. Taking hostages was a perfectly acceptable strategy in medieval Europe. I would despise Dalinar if he had raped women or slaughtered civilians to shock the enemy into submission or something

Indeed. The Sons of Honor and Taravangian are the most deluded and dangerous players on Roshar. I wonder how the situation as a whole political, religious and social structure on Roshar will play out, now they get regular everstorms and monster infestations to cope with while crazy T and Dalinar both stupidly compete for control instead of working together.

Oh, I like Jasnah. It s just not very advisable to step on her toes. She is not very erratic in her aggression and her ultimate motivation always seemed rather constructive and not overly selfish.

As far as I remember, Dalinar bonded one of the blades that Adolin had won in the duel.

Yeah, sweet Jasnah. LOL. Adolin would duel you to get rid of you, Jasnah would send an assasin or soulcast you into a ball of fire. Sweet.

We also have to keep in mind, Adolin's chosen Calling is not warfare or politics, it s duelling. That s more of a fairness based gentleman's activity, not something cunning, or crudely aggressive. He seems to be a very, very capable generic good guy growing up in a basin full of sharks and is only accpeted in his society because he is so good with a sword. With his attitude he is almost as much of a misfit in his society of cunning, backstabbing a-holes as his brother is.

Frankly, in the flahsback chapters to Kaladin's early years we always get to see him during times when some kind of trouble is brewing for him or his beloved family. It is mentioned that Kaladin feels quite miserable every year through the weeping weeks and his brother helped him considerably to get through these. The rest is situations that wouldn't be easy or happy for any teenager. After the death of the old citylord he is isolated and has no friends, his family is living in a situation of oppression and isolation, his father urges him to become a surgeon to enable him to escape the life in Hearthstone. Would you feel in general happy and relaxed growing up like that?

I just read through the chapter that BS has put online of book three http://www.tor.com/2014/09/30/brandon-sanderson-stormlight-archive-book-3-first-chapter/comment-page-2/#comment-563594 and I have to say, if this is how the character arc of Kaladin continues, I'm quite fed up with him.Two books full of it, at the end of book one Kaladin seems to come around and now he again regresses back to the state he was in when he was in those slave wagons or ready to give up and jump into the chasm. I don't mind at all if Kaladin continues to have his lows, is a bit emo when things go wrong. But repeating the same pattern for three books, THIS is not character development, it’s plain boring and pointless and I completely lose interest in the character. Oh and by the way, Dalinar was a complete idiot for entrusting Kaladin with this fortune in charged spheres in order to help out back at home. Is he eager to see, if his parents are still alive? Nope! Not high on his priority list. Wallowing in self pity is more important. Guard marches him into the house, another of the men whacks him over the head from behind, robs him while he is unconscious, surprised and happy for what he finds in his bag and they leave him to die with a cracked skull. All because he was too depressed to defend himself, let alone defend others. Life before death? Nope. No stormlight to heal him. End of story. Plus, in a state like that he will break his oath again, anyway, killing Syl out of sheer depression, because he simply can not muster the energy to uphold his oaths, not even the first one. Dalinar, declare him unfit for duty and lock him up in the disabled Radiant loony bin where he gets therapy for his problems. Wow. This is really annoying to read…. And I don’t want him to pull the Radiant heroics after a breakdown to save the day another time around, because we had that. Several times over! What a disappointment!

The problem with you is not that you disagree with something, the problem is, that you aggressively attack people with different opinions,claim that your opinion is the only valid opinion and you are entitled to call people with different opinions "ignorant". Again, we are talking about OPINIONS about a work of fiction. This is not mathematics. There is no absolute wrong or right when interpreting a piece of fictional writing. It's all subjective OPINION. So stop trolling threads on this board.

Nah, Kaladin has had seasonal depressions all his life (means he had considerable periods of time where he was not depressed) and recently went through some serious traumatic experiences. I would rather call him a PTSD sufferer right now, not the typical clinically depressed. Kaladin lost his brother, was betrayed and enslaved by Amaram, several times beaten to unconsciousness, forced into risking his life twice a week while again seeing friends die, and then put under the strain of being responsible for the life of Dalinar s family and the training of the ex bridgemen while figuring out his strange new abilities, training to fight shardblades, riding etc so he probably had 16 hours work days. Clinical depression is when you get depressed without a plausible drastic outer cause for the mood problem. Kaladin had plenty of reasons to lose his emotional balance over the course of the past year.

The level of entitlement as the opinion police of this forum and the impertinence you display while trying to enforce your superiority complex this is intolerable. The only ignorant person in this thread is you.

Ah, and you are the allknowing judge on who is ignorant and who is not.. Yeah, great......

It seems Adolin likes and accepts his brother no matter what, something that I find is the highest recommendation for a person living in a society like that and growing up with the blackthorn as a father.

I guess he didn t want to disappoint his father, for that reason he didn t tell him about the screaming in his head. As for the Vorin religion. I don t think that at this point in history the ardents still knew, that a more or less sentient spren talking to you meant you would become a Radiant. We don t know enough about vorin theology and doctrin to determine how much factual knowledge they have about Radiants.

It s not even clear what the human population did to piss off the Radiants. There was a lack of military discipline at the Keep, at that time, sure. That points to maybe the humans taking too little responsibility themselves, expecting the KRs to do everything for them. On the other hand, after the last desolation, for unknown reasons the cycle of the desolations ended (at least for the time being) so the KRs were no longer needed. BTW, one question came to my mind. Did KRs die of old age when they weren't killed in battle just as regular humans are? Shouldn't there be spren that had lost their human partners due to old age or battle rather than betrayal? Do KRs become immortal or at least very very long lived through the bond and the healing abilities of stormlight? One would assume the aging caused by degradation of the gene material through cell division doesn t affect a human with access to stormlight healing as it does a normal human. So, where these KRs that broke their oath "newbies" that had never fought in a desolation or were they maybe really old and tired.

I found that a bit odd too, when comparing the Recreance vision and the mechanics of Kaladin's bond-breaking. Kaladin's bond broke once he had made two contradictory promises, one of them explicitly deciding not to protect someone worthy of his protection (Elhokar was not a harmful villain that needed to be removed but just incompetent and annoying, harming others not with intention but through his personal unsuitability as a king, so removing him from this office might be reasonable, but not outright killing him) The bond broke in Kaladin's mind the harmful intention formed and solidified, not with an official declaration of his intention to others. So the spren of the old KRs should have died the moment, the human bondees had decided to abandon their duty. They shouldn t have been able to travel to that Keep as intact KRs and then lay down their armour and blades.

Recently reading the books I came across several scenarios I found fairly odd, implausible and somewhat inconsistant. Not in chronological order: *Why do the stormform parshendi retreat and seemingly disappear as soon as Dalinar evacuates the all troops to the portal platform. Neither do they continue to attack the humans waiting on the platform, nor do they apparently try to attack the trek of the warcamps as they all make their way to the portal. There must still be thousands of them living out there. *The world is not believing Dalinar about the storm and the voidbringers, when he sends out message via spanreed. But the storm, moving from west to east was said to hit New Nathanathan shortly after leaving the Shattered Plains. New Nathanathan should have been victim of that storm and the voidbringers shortly after the Dalinar arrived at Urithiru, the people there fighting for survival confirming Dalinar's claims to the rest of the world shortly after Dalinar sent out word. *Teft tells Kaladin about "the radiant girl" when he meets them, waiting at the empty platform, after Shallan had evacuated the troops to Urithiru. He comes to the conclusion that Shallan must be the Radiant girl because he didn't hear her shardblade scream it was either an honorblade or she was a radiant. But with his oath broken and his abilities gone, he most likely wouldn't have heard a dead shardblade screaming in his head. One clear sign that she must be a radiant though would have been, that her shardblade could change form or length, just as Syl does, something only live spren shardblades do. He had seen her use the blade dagger sized to cut steps into the chasm walls and had used it full blade length against the chasmfiend. *Shallan "accidently" stumbling across the very person who oversaw the murder of Jasnah on the way to the plains. And this person takes her in and teaches her valuable abilities she needed later in the warcamps as well gives her information about how to infiltrate the Ghostbloods. Just tooooooo unlikely a coincidence for my taste. *How can big sailing ships operate in a world that has hurricane strength storms every few days. Even in a safe harbour a large sailing ship will not be safe, the storm would fell the masts, even if there are docks that can prevent the hull to be blown over or perish in the waves a storm like this causes. As a big fan of the Forrester Horatio Hornblower novels I cringe when I read about sailing ships under such conditions. *The amount of slaves/convicts Sadeas' bridge crews use up. The Shattered Plains are a rather remote place on that continent, which means, getting humans there should not be easy or cheap and I doubt that the war camps produce enough convicts out of their ranks to send to the bridges to fill up losses as great as Sanderson describe them in his first book. Like a quarter of the men per bridge per run. I would have to do the math how many die each week/month/year, but the amount seems grossly implausible to me, just as leaving the injured behind, as slaves are still a valuable commodity to have, even if they take a few weeks to heal up, because it takes more than a few weeks to cart a new batch to the plains *The scene where Kaladin swears the third oath: I call that dumb, uneffective and convenient antagonist syndomre in the face of victory. Maybe I have watched too much Doctor Who lately, where this comes up regularly and really pisses me off to no end because it happens just toooo often in movies, in TV series and books to conveniently give the hero time to shine. There is a showdown and instead of just killing off the protagonist/target the baddies stand there, start to argue, gloat, do all kinds of useless things, while exposing themselves to be discovered or defeated, just to give the hero time to do whatever dramatically heroics he needs to do, gives dramatic speech, gain back his superpowers etc. Graves gave me the impression he is quite the professional. As soon as he noticed that newbie Moash is not up to the job a person like that would have dispatched both, Kaladin and Elhokar quickly. Instead he starts to argue at length with Moash. And THEN, on top if it, incompetent idiot Graves gives now-superhero Kaladin the hint he needs to know that the assassin in white is right now attacking Dalinar, enables him to save him. No. I simply don't buy it. It's a typical case of horribly sloppy writing of those characters. * Fencing with shardblades one handed. While you probably can do it with strength support of the plate, or stromlight, a weapon that long needs the leverage of both hands to use it with precision, particularly if you don't have this strength support. I had some longsword fencing lessons, even if the blade is light for the length (a normal longsword weighs about 1.5 kilos and is about 1.2 to 1.3 meters long) you can not use something that long reasonably with one hand. And an armoured fencer would use a two handed weapon as in an unarmoured warrior with a sword needs the second hand for a shield. Did anyone find more?

Do we know who the other godspren are? What other godspren exist?

I decided to read Terry Goddkind now and then maybe give the Stormlight books a second round, watching out for little hints of all kinds that I might have missed the first time.