Spren Pairings

[Noel]

Not sure if this is the correct place, but just an observation about spren.  I have been rereading the Stormlight Archive and it just clicked that every spren seems to be for purpose of human perception the opposite sex of the human they bond with.  Shallan has Pattern, Kaladin has Syl, Lift has Wyndle, Jasnah has a male (can't remember the name at the moment).  Knowing Brandon, there is a reason for that.  Now I'll be obsessing over what the reason might be.  

[Yata]

There is a WoB about this:

Brandon said that the pairing human-spren is based by Human's preference but it's not a codificated rule. For example Renarin bonded Glys (a male spren so far we know) but we have no clue about Renarin as gay.

EDIT: I am not english therefore if I wrote some word that it's not used in the righ context, I am sorry... It's a delicate topic and I don't want to insult someone

Edited July 3, 2016 by Yata

[Noel]

Thanks!

[Sam Script]

Jasnah's Nahel spren is named Ivory, and it's a male. I have the same observations as yours, but we cannot be sure about that XD

Btw @Yata I've known you're not native speaker of English :)) But curious what's your nationality :3

[Yata]

5 minutes ago, Sam Script said:

Jasnah's Nahel spren is named Ivory, and it's a male. I have the same observations as yours, but we cannot be sure about that XD

Btw @Yata I've known you're not native speaker of English :)) But curious what's your nationality :3

You have right I forgot Jasnah and Ivory, she seems not interesting in men but it's spren is male.

Sam Script, I am Italian 

[teknopathetic]

Isn't is kind of bizarre that spren have genders at all? Wouldn't it make more sense for the spren to have no gendered behaviour?  The spren dont die, but are we suggesting they reproduce sexually? It is a tad odd. 

[Eki]

15 minutes ago, teknopathetic said:

Isn't is kind of bizarre that spren have genders at all? Wouldn't it make more sense for the spren to have no gendered behaviour?  The spren dont die, but are we suggesting they reproduce sexually? It is a tad odd. 

Many spren seem to have their origins in human (or other sentient creatures') perceptions, so that might be why they have (or appear to have) gender identities. Also, some (or all) of them might not have a gender identity, but the humans observing them assigned one to them (which is what happened to Nightblood, for example).

[Yata]

21 minutes ago, teknopathetic said:

Isn't is kind of bizarre that spren have genders at all? Wouldn't it make more sense for the spren to have no gendered behaviour?  The spren dont die, but are we suggesting they reproduce sexually? It is a tad odd. 

The Spren don't reproduce at all. Probably they have genders because they are born by the influence of creatures who has genders (Human and other animals perceptions).

Edit: Eki was faster than me XD

Edited July 3, 2016 by Yata

[Noel]

My own understanding is that many of the qualities of spren are a reflection of human perception. Another example is their similarity to the quantum uncertainty principle in which they are in constant flux until measured, at which point they fix to that size until the measurement is removed (and I'm willing to bet it's alot more like the uncertainty principle than we have seen thus far).

Spren are described by Syl as parts of the very forces of creation/nature. They gain sentience in the physical realm through a nahel bond. It seems logical that the bond grants more than sentience to the spren; one of those other things is gender based on what the human wishes to perceive. That perception seems to favor the opposite gender. This ties in to the culture of the Alethi and most everyone else that strives to hold to Alethi ideals. Women and men have been given certain traits that are deemed appropriate, and those traits seem to focus on requiring the man and woman to be equal partners. A great example of this is that a man may tun the household or lead others to battle, but the woman handles keeping track of the finances to ensure they stay in the black or to act as scribe for any correspondence that the soldier may need to send or when he receives a communique. I could be wrong, but it does seem that Brandon set this particular culture up that way.

[Alfa]

I guess that spren on Earth also would have a gender, likely based on linguistics. For example "Earth" is female in most Indoeuropean languages (not in English, but English's gender neutrality for non-human entities is a special case), I don't know how it's about other families, so the Spren of Earth, let's call her Gaia, would be most likely female. Wind, on the other hand, seems to be male in the languages I know (russian, german, latin), so the spren of the wind as a whole would be male.

[Ari]

The humans that the Spren bond with see living things as having binary gender. Therefore the Spren pick up the concept of gender and self-assign according to their relationship with their human, through some wacky bond-based cognitive leakage.

[teknopathetic]

On 2016. 7. 3. at 8:51 PM, Yata said:

The Spren don't reproduce at all. Probably they have genders because they are born by the influence of creatures who has genders (Human and other animals perceptions).

Edit: Eki was faster than me XD

The Spen do reproduce somehow. Many were lost millenia ago, but their numbers have recovered.

[Yata]

5 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

The Spen do reproduce somehow. Many were lost millenia ago, but their numbers have recovered.

Spren may be produced, but they don't reproduce. There isn't something like "Spren made new Spren" (reprodution) but "Something made new Spren" (produced).

The Spren are Splinters, and every Splinter is Investiture who develop sentience. On Roshar many Spren was lost during the Recreance but a lot of them was created by Honor's Splintering.

[Ari]

16 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

The Spen do reproduce somehow. Many were lost millenia ago, but their numbers have recovered.

Have their numbers actually recovered? I don't recall reading anything like that in the Stormlight Archive...

It does seem plausible that Spren can be born in ways that don't directly involve splintering from a Shard, but I suspect Yata is right that if Spren repopulate, it's so dramatically different from biological reproduction that it should probably use a different word.

[Eki]

How many spren could really have died? There is a very limited amount of shardblades in circulation, and from what we know, all bonded spren turn into blades when they 'die'. Maybe, to the spren, a few hundred deaths is a huge amount.

The alternatives are that there are large amounts of shardblades unaccounted for, or that some have come back to life...

[teknopathetic]

Well the Liespren/Truthspren said that their order had been devastated. The spren that knew about Roshar and the Nahel bond had all died. He implied that almost everything had been lost from that time. He wanted to come so he could research how this all worked since it had all been lost. 

[Yata]

2 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

Well the Liespren/Truthspren said that their order had been devastated. The spren that knew about Roshar and the Nahel bond had all died. He implied that almost everything had been lost from that time. He wanted to come so he could research how this all worked since it had all been lost. 

Not every Radiant Spren of old time died.
Just the one bonded with Human when the Radiant Knight decided to break their Oaths. But there are Spren don't bonded with Humans (maybe because their previous knight died or something like that)

Edited July 6, 2016 by Yata

[Emerald101]

22 hours ago, Eki said:

How many spren could really have died? There is a very limited amount of shardblades in circulation, and from what we know, all bonded spren turn into blades when they 'die'. Maybe, to the spren, a few hundred deaths is a huge amount.

The alternatives are that there are large amounts of shardblades unaccounted for, or that some have come back to life...

I 'm not so sure that all dead spren turn into shardblades. If a radiant who isn't yet strong enough to summon a shardblade were to break his oaths (i.e. if kaladin didn't save Elhokar and speak the oaths at end of WoR) why would the dead spren get pulled into the physical? That just doesn't make sense to me.

[Yata]

8 hours ago, Emerald101 said:

I 'm not so sure that all dead spren turn into shardblades. If a radiant who isn't yet strong enough to summon a shardblade were to break his oaths (i.e. if kaladin didn't save Elhokar and speak the oaths at end of WoR) why would the dead spren get pulled into the physical? That just doesn't make sense to me.

I think the Radiants in the vision were all complete Radiant Knight with 5 Oaths.

Anyway just a couple of Orders may have decided to put their Shards in others hand... Maybe the other 7 Orders didn't leave their Blade and Plate where someone may easy find them (also putted them in a iron box and throwned in the sea. Not to mention that a Plate or Blade may be covered of Crem pretty fast if they are not finded in a couple of years.

[Emerald101]

8 hours ago, Yata said:

I think the Radiants in the vision were all complete Radiant Knight with 5 Oaths.

I agree, it's just that an assumption has been made when there's no proof to back it up. The radiant's in Dalinar's vision were probably full strength, but hypothetically speaking, if a low-level radiant (say, Kaladin at end of WoK) were to break their oaths, then the spren wouldn't become a shardblade because it was never fully in the physcial realm. I expect you'd have a dead spren in the cognitive rather than a dead one in the physical.

[Pathfinder]

23 hours ago, Emerald101 said:

I agree, it's just that an assumption has been made when there's no proof to back it up. The radiant's in Dalinar's vision were probably full strength, but hypothetically speaking, if a low-level radiant (say, Kaladin at end of WoK) were to break their oaths, then the spren wouldn't become a shardblade because it was never fully in the physcial realm. I expect you'd have a dead spren in the cognitive rather than a dead one in the physical.

But Kaladin and Shallan did break their oaths at a low level, and what resulted was the spren losing sapience in the physical world. 

[Yata]

When the Oaths were broken the Spren dies where he is... Kal "killed" Syl breaking his Oaths but at that time he didn't progress enough to fully mafifest her in the Physical and the result was a Dead Spren without any physical residue. If now He breaks his Oaths, Syl will spawn as Dead Shardblade because it's more pulled in the Physical Realm than before.

The only case of Spren who survives without damage to a Oaths breaking is Pattern. Shallan began to slowly break her Oaths (or Truths) and Patter run away in the Cognitive before She can kill him.

[Emerald101]

24 minutes ago, Yata said:

When the Oaths were broken the Spren dies where he is... Kal "killed" Syl breaking his Oaths but at that time he didn't progress enough to fully mafifest her in the Physical and the result was a Dead Spren without any physical residue. If now He breaks his Oaths, Syl will spawn as Dead Shardblade because it's more pulled in the Physical Realm than before.

This.