Scriptorian

Me: *hears the title of chapter one* *frowns* “Alcatraz, what are you doing in medieval England?”

I’m rather satisfied with the fact that I spied Hoid’s lemony narration for what it was, well before he was name-dropped.

So, Zahel wasn't on Syl's list of people Kaladin can't intimidate. Theory confirmed! I legitimately feared for Kaladin in this moment. Fighting a master Awakener amidst the laundry is like fighting a Mistborn in a minting facility.

Transporting Investiture off-world...my first thought was a Bondsmith power to sever the Connection somehow (Has Sja-anat corrupted the Sibling and that's why the Ghostbloods want an alliance with her?! ). My next idea was to encase the cargo in aluminum, like they're able to temporarily cut the connection between conjoined fabirals. Though I suppose this might cause problems once you take the Investiture out of the aluminum. With all the times Shallan was catching flaws in Mraize's disguise...did anyone else get the feeling she is going to end up underestimating him at some crucial point? I mean, Shallan has gotten pretty good at this, but my money is still on the probably-immortal creepy worldhopper.

Nightblood: "Do you know what always makes me feel better?" Kaladin: "I really don't care." Nightblood: "Destroying evil!" Syl: "Maybe I should have gotten Jasnah instead..."

My initial reaction was that Syl had made the perfect choice in fetching Adolin...but then Jasnah "Storming" Kohlin was mentioned as an option and now I really want that scene for some reason. Also "at best" there are three people that aren't intimated by Kaladin? Come on, Syl. You can do better than that. Off the top of my head, there's also: Dalinar, Lift, Hoid, Zahel, Mraize, Gallant, Taln, Nightblood, the Nightwatcher, Odium...The Stormfather doesn't make the list because he's a wuss. I'm just saying, we have more than three options here.

Ah...mixing Investiture from different Shards. The 17th Shard isn't going to be happy with this... Shumin's, shall we say, "spunk" and willingness to join a violent revolt is all the more notable when you remember that one of workforms quirks is a tendency to avoid conflict. So it's been hinted at before, but this line seems to indicate pretty strongly that the Unmade were originally cognitive shadows.

As amusing as Kaladin being ambassador to the Azish would be, I think there's an assignment that plays directly into his arc, and in fact he is probably the best equipped of any character for: ... Ambassador to the Singers.

*surreptitiously puts away a large metal spike* I am very curious to know what the 17th Shard is up to right now. It would definitely be interesting to find out they’re behind one of the ongoing mysteries.

My argument though is that these changes in personality don't constitute a separate "persona" in the same way that Veil and Radiant do. Chronologically, there is a shift in her persoanlity, starting with the flashbacks, through WoK, and then WoR, but it's gradual overtime. She doesn't slip in and out of entirely different outlooks like she does in Oathbringer. Veil thinks like Veil; she's tough, gritty, and revels in her difference from Shallan. When Shallan is being the "perfect daughter", she's constantly torn up inside. She's behaving differently sure, but her internal narrative doesn't suddenly switch to respecting her father and have all the sensibilities of proper lighteyed lady. Yes, she tries to be a different person, and acts accordingly, but there is a difference between that and literally thinking she is a different person with different skills and backstory. The former fits perfectly with someone whose suffered that kind of trauma and abuse, and doesn't require it being the result of a new "persona". (Though, granted that real-world dissociative identity problems are often the result of abuse and trauma. We might just be splitting hairs here.)

So I can see an argument that Shallan is a persona in the sense that "I am broken and traumatized inside, but I smile and crack jokes so people don't see it" is her deliberately putting on a false face. But she's often aware that this is what she is doing. There is a notable difference, in my mind, between the above and "I am now Veil, a gruff darkeyes that really likes knives". To be reductive, Veil never questions who she is, but Shallan does. To me, this suggests a qualitative difference in the way that "Shallan" is a lie versus Veil. I think we're on the same page here. I was just reacting against an idea I've seen intimated a few times, that Veil and Radiant are individuals in their own right, and that re-integrating them would be like killing them. Eh...I disagree. There are multiple times where she consciously develops and assigns traits to the other personas, traits she doesn't normally have, like she's writing characters. Though there are cases of things we'd normally attribute to Shallan splitting into Veil or Radiant, her attraction to Kaladin being notable. In any case, I'd hesitate to use every particular of a real-world diagnosis here because the magic-system involved is almost certainly complicating things. The completeness to which the personas developed in such a short span of time suggests to me that something more is going on here than vanilla dissociative personality problems. This really is were we disagree. Although I believe the text is deliberately ambiguous on this point, so your's is a valid interpretation. As I indicated above, I think there is a distinct difference between the Shallan personality and the two added in Oathbrigner. Though I will grant that there are definitely aspects to her personality that are the result of trauma and maladaptive coping strategies, I don't think her current personality was created as a response to her early trauma. I think rather that she began to internalize the lie that "I can't be this optimistic quirky person because such a person would never kill their parents". She tells herself that she must deep down be a monster, and so "Shallan" must be a lie, despite the fact that she's been "Shallan" for most of her life with no major discrepancies in her personality, other than what could be accounted for by her deliberately masking her trauma, and her natural character growth. There doesn't have to be a secret, dark and murderous aspect to her, she was just a confused child who reacted in self-defense. That's where I think she's an unreliable narrator: she's not secretly a monster, but that she's been telling herself that for so long that she believes it. But there is room for interpretation here, this is just where I see her arc going. In any case, free-willed human beings are able to shape themselves over time, so regardless of where Shallan started, she is capable of becoming whoever she wants to be. But her current mindset has her partitioning aspects of herself into predefined personas, so she won't be able to develop into a better version of herself so long as she doesn't accept herself as one complete, flawed individual.

*squints* "Physiological"? I claim even fewer armchair-credentials with physiology than psychology, so I'm not surprised that I would be wrong in such an assessment, I just didn't think I'd made one .

I’m going to be contrary and push back against the idea that “Shallan” is a persona in the same way that Veil and Radiant are. Before OB, where Shallan starts having her current problems with disassociation, we see her already asserting that her current self is “lie” because she believes she should instead be the broken and utterly despondent image she shows Pattern. The thing is, I think this is her being an unreliable narrator: Shallan thinks it’s impossible that she can be the not-broken, sassy person we see her as in most of her POVs. But this is not necessarily true. Granted, she undergoes changes (dare I say, character development) through WoK to WoR, but there’s a consistent through line with her character arc and her personality. But because she believes that she is fundamentally broken, she attributes her newfound self-confidence and competence to just another layer of lies. At this point, this seemed pretty clearly to just be part of her pathological inability to see herself in a positive light. This reaches critical mass in Oathbringer, where, because she assumes that “Shallan” is broken and incompetent, she developed alternate personas, each of whom are allowed to be competent and functional in their spheres. In my arm-chair opinion, the only reason Veil and Radiant exist is because Shallan will not acknowledge to herself that she is capable of everything that her personas are. And while Investiture certainly complicates this assessment; I don’t think her personas have external validity other than as an expression of Shallan’s pathology. It’s all Shallan; just an extreme form of psychological dissociation reinforced by her surgebinding. Some people seem to be taking Shallan’s word for everything when it comes to her personas. The thing is, we can say with absolute certainty that she is far from a reliable narrator. In particular, we know that she considered “Shallan” to be fake long before the personas developed. Until Oathbringer, we had no reason to assume that her personality was literally a magical construct with ontological distinctness from whoever she originally was, which is what some are treating Veil and Radiant as. As I’ve alluded to previously, I don’t think the key to her character development is going to be based on remembering more dark buried secrets that reveal what a horrible person she is. Though there very well could be more dark terrible things in her past that we haven’t discovered yet, she already thinks of herself as a monster without having remembered them. Her development isn’t going to be based around her somehow being worse than she already thinks (she already assumes the worst about herself). Her entire arc up till this point is based around her inability let herself move past the things she’s done (Radiant was created as an almost direct consequence of her being unable to face having killed her mother). The personas aren’t the solution, they are just another way of her dodging her need to let herself be herself. Dalinar’s whole arc in Oathbringer was about taking responsibility for who he used to be, while still moving forward. Shallan doesn’t need to accept that “Shallan” is just a lie and find who she really is; she needs to accept that she is Shallan, flaws and all, but, more importantly, that she is worth fixing. The lie that she has to overcome is that she is not worthy of redemption. And oops I’ve written an essay instead of a forum post. Feel free to disagree, but I’m going to go find some food. Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not saying that it's "all in her head" or that she should just "get over it". I'm saying she suffers severe emotional trauma and what constitutes a psychiatric disorder, which should be handled with all the steadfastness and empathy such things warrant.

No, silly Navani, we call that the Internal Physical Pushing metal. And then Navani promptly assumes that the mysterious person writing to her must either be a woman or an ardent. *does a spit take* Current theory: Formless is the embodiment of Shallan's negative self-image. I.e. a cold-hearted, lying, psychotic killer. Also, I wonder if maybe Shallan's final secret is that there is no final secret? That she's been suppressing things to herself for so long that her psyche hasn't adapted to not having anything major to repress any more, and so she's subconsciously creating this idea that there's this last thing that will finally break her and make her completely unlovable. Just spitballing here.