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kiapet

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  1. True, although it's important to note that Spensa did not just conclude that she was not a coward because she did not eject. She concluded that she was not a coward because she did not eject when it mattered. She's not going to throw her life away like Hurl, but she will risk/sacrifice it when doing so could save Alta. Part of the point of that scene is her rejecting the societal norms about what cowardice is (i.e. ejecting under any circumstance is cowardice), and realizing she can decide for herself, which for Spensa is a huge step.
  2. I'm pretty sure there are at least 3 distinct ethnic groups. You have the Chinese/Korean ship descendants, who are directly identified as an ethnicity. There also seems to be a strong Nordic strain, with people having blonde hair (as previously mentioned, rare even among white people) and a prevalence of Norse names/legends. Then you have Jorgen, who has "brown skin", black hair and a German name, Kimmalyn, who has Southern mannerisms and tan-brown skin with black hair, and Spin, whose only identifying marker is "brown hair". All of these could be any degree of mixed race. I particularly wonder if Spin's grandmother's claim that Spin is descended from everyone of Earth is symbolic or more literal.
  3. I'm not saying no one should die, or even that major characters shouldn't die. I'm saying this shouldn't be the type of series to establish a character as likely major, make us care about and expect a lot out of them, then kill them in an ignominious manner after having them forced to betray everything they believed in. Character death should mean something, otherwise it becomes deeply unsatisfying, and all this death means to me is that a good and heroic person was used and tossed aside without being given a chance at redemption. I get if other people feel differently, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
  4. My problem with this is that Brandon Sanderson has said repeatedly that he is not George R.R. Martin. There is a place for a narrative where anyone can die and deaths are sudden and shocking. The Stormlight Archive isn't that type of series, or at least it hasn't been in the past. The Stormlight Archive is a series about heroes, where ordinary people who persevere through the worst of circumstances are empowered to become paragons to others. Eshonai really seemed like she was being set up to be that hero for the remaining Parshendi. In my opinion, to deliberately set her up like that and then abruptly kill her off for shock value doesn't align with SA's tone and message, and honestly it would erode my faith in the series more than another fake-out death. I am up for a Venli redemption arc, but it can just as easily happen with Eshonai secretly alive and otherwise occupied as with Eshonai dead.
  5. Okay, this chapter was a whirlwind for me. I listened to about the first ten minutes on the way to a dance rehearsal, then was forced to stop. I spent the first half of that rehearsal freaking out. Eshonai is one of my favorite characters, and I have always been a strong supporter of the Willshaper Eshonai theory. Killing her now makes no narrative sense. You have a deeply sympathetic character who is ingrained enough in the lore of the series to have a prologue POV and flashback chapters. She has a strongly tragic backstory and a sister who is obviously the villain to her hero. You establish that she is an incredibly strong-willed person, fighting her possession from the inside, that she has a spren who happens to be near her multiple times, and the descriptions of Willshapers sound like they were written about her. And the result of all of this is that she destroys her people then dies in between books by being kicked into a chasm during a Highstorm by a secondary protagonist. That seemed like a betrayal of a character I had so quickly come to love. But I knew that people were all up in arms about the fake Jasnah and Szeth deaths, and that Brandon explicitly said he regretted making Jasnah's death so convincing, so having Eshonai live, while being what I would prefer, wasn't exactly a great option either. So yeah, I was upset and really pissed. Then I listened to the last 3 minutes during a break and it all fell into place. The chapter is from Venli's POV- of course she has to be sure that Eshonai is dead, so she can leave her alone and take her shards. But the spren is as clear a sign that Brandon can give (without tipping Venli off) that Eshonai will survive. Why put that scene in there if that was not his intent? The spren plus the spent gems on the Shardplate (has someone been taking in Stormlight?) are pretty big signs that Eshonai is a Radiant for people who like to pay attention to things like that. And we know from Kaladin and Jasnah that a Radiant can come back from literally the brink of death if they have Stormlight. I don't think twists like fake-out deaths are bad if you clearly have the foreshadowing there, so perceptive readers can go, "Oh yeah, that makes sense!" That's where Brandon went wrong with Jasnah, but the groundwork for Eshonai is all there. So yeah, I have hope this will all work out.
  6. I don't know enough actors to do a fan cast, but as far as races go, I'd cast dark-skinned Asian actors as Alethi, and give them modified hair/eye color and everything else through makeup and/or CGI. Changing skin color and eye shape are not on the table for cultural reasons but otherwise movie magic can do pretty much anything. Characters like Adolin, Renarin and Shallan could be lighter skinned Asian actors. Mixed race actors would work well for any Alethi but I'd say they should have epicanthic folds, since Sanderson has said eyes are really how the Alethi see race.
  7. Sorry, but I have to call out your use of Just War Theory here. Just War Theory does not blindly approve of any war fought with just intention; just methods must also be used for the war to be considered justified. That's what Jus in bello means, justice in or during war. The use of atomic weapons in any circumstance is near-universally considered to fail Just War criteria. First, deliberately targeting civilians is a huge no-no in JWT; while the principle of double intent justifies some collateral damage, your first intention needs to be to target military bases/people, and the numbers of civilian lives lost need to be small. Bombing an entire city with the intention of killing its civilians to intimidate the country into surrendering is strongly against JWT. Second is JWT's principle of proportionality, which states that the good resulting from the action must outweigh the bad. Atomic bombs, which destroy cities, kill thousands indiscriminately, kill thousands more slowly via radiation, leave stretches of land uninhabitable for generations, and pollute surrounding areas, are considered to fail this principle pretty much automatically due to the sheer degree and scale of suffering they cause. Not to mention the possibility of starting a nuclear war, which would obliterate all life as we know it- which almost was the result of the United States creating and using this weapon.
  8. From what I can gather, the purpose of a Bondsmith is to unite, not through war and suffering, but through creating trust. Dalinar's past highlights this: he conquered Alethkar with an iron fist, and the result is a group of states that are too busy competing with each other to come together and fight the Desolation. Now, with the visions, Dalinar has another way. Taravangian's belief that the ends justify the means is an interesting disparate viewpoint, but I believe that Dalinar's will win out the day, and that ultimately Taravangian is doing more work for Odium than he is against him.
  9. I definitely got the sense that Illumination was the cause of Shallan and Renarin sensing the Unmade, as Illumination was the surge that it was attempting to copy/warping. Not sure what that says about Mraize.
  10. Reread it! You pick up so much more that way. I really liked how highly Adolin obviously thinks of Kaladin at this point. His hatred towards Amaram even though he wasn't personally hurt, the sympathy and respect in his words when discussing Kaladin saving Amaram's life, "the two of us spent time in jail"... I don't necessarily ship Kadolin romantically but I live for protagonist bonding.
  11. I would say moral culpability, as we've defined it, doesn't actually have that much influence on the overall situation. In a situation where you discover your culture has perpetuated a great evil, the last thing you should be doing is sitting down and saying, "Well, technically we can't be blamed for this." You see something as deeply wrong as the Parshmen enslavement and you fix it, period. Now the Alethi obviously have different cultural values than me, but that we're supposed to read them saying, "Parshmen are slaves and that's it" and disagree with them, because we know better.
  12. Yes, this is what I was saying. I think it's perfectly possible for someone to unknowingly contribute to some evil- heck, we do it all the time by buying things that come from questionable sources. That doesn't mean the person themselves is morally culpable for something they had no way of knowing, but it does give them the responsibility to remedy the situation once it's discovered.
  13. I would argue that yes, it was wrong to imprison Joe, because imprisoning an innocent man is wrong. There is a difference between a person committing a deliberate immoral action (a sin, as religion would term it) and between an act being, in and of itself, wrong. The act of killing someone is wrong whether or not the person responsible intended it; there's a reason we have "manslaughter" as a charge.
  14. Okay, I think we're arguing at least three different things here. First, was keeping the Parshmen enslaved wrong? I argued that this is an unambiguous yes, as keeping a sentient race in slavery is pretty much always wrong and we have proof the Parshmen suffered from how they were treated. Second, are the modern humans "guilty" for enslaving a group of people they had no way of knowing were more than cattle? This kind of depends on your definition of guilty- if it's determined by intention, then the answer is no because they didn't know, but if it's determined by the results of one's actions then they were still complicit in causing great suffering to an entire group of people. I would argue that they weren't at fault, necessarily, but they are as a people responsible for the effects of their society, and for making up for whatever wrongs they discover have been committed. Once the humans realized the Parshmen are people, the humans would be morally obligated to give the Parshmen whatever reparations they could. I doubt this is how the humans will react. Finally, which I believe was the original question posed, was it wrong for the humans to enslave the Parshmen in the first place, or was it the "best" or least evil option? I think we need more information to tell for sure, but I highly doubt that either genocide or slavery were the only two options available, especially as we have proof from the Parshendi that the Parsh-people were likely mostly Voidbringers against their will and were capable of living as a normal society. It seems more likely that the humans enslaved the Parsh-people as victors of war generally do, and mentally imprisoned them as well, which is just plain wrong.
  15. I think a fact missing here is that the Parshmen were always people. Just because they were of low intelligence does not mean they should have been treated like livestock, with families broken up for breeding purposes, ect. We have definitive proof that the way the Parshmen were treated was severely emotionally scarring, and they had no way to fight back as they were mentally and spiritually crippled. Kaladin got yelled at this very sequence of chapters for assuming that the only reason the Parshmen were deserving of basic human rights is they had back their ability to communicate and act like "normal" human beings. And let's not act like their enslavement was some sort of benevolent attempt to keep them from dying; for the vast majority of Alethi culture, it was for economic profit, pure and simple. It's understandable that the Alethi didn't know how the Parshmen were feeling, but that does not erase the fact that the enslavement of the Parshmen was wrong, as the enslavement of an entire race of people will always be wrong. I feel like saying slavery is wrong should not be a controversial statement.
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