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Oathbringer Cover Revealed


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On 3/19/2017 at 10:26 AM, maxal said:

However, if the context of the Jasnah cover had bee retained, then I think it would have made a better cover.

I personally wish that Jasnah was positioned on top of the wall so that we can see over it. Aside from Jasnah herself, the best part of this image is the crazy lightning storm and the Thunderclast. The incredible scenes in the first two books were glorious. This one just shows us a stone wall. Boring. Let us see the full sky in all of it's terrifying, lightning-crossed glory. Let us see the army(?) on the other side, so that we care about the fact Jasnah's trying to fix it. Maybe a few more Thunderclasts way off in the distance? THAT would make an epic cover.

Don't hate this one, but I definitely don't think it's as powerful as the first two.

I don't know how well all of that fits the events in the book. Maybe she fixes the wall from the ground, maybe there's only one Thunderclast, maybe there's no army on the other side. But heck, it's not like he didn't take liberties just as big on the first two covers.

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Yay cover art!

Regarding the present discussion regarding Jasnah's appearance, I don't mind it, but it isn't what I imagined.  As other before have mentioned, I expected her to be more of a groomed elegance than just beautiful.  As I recall though, Vorin garb does tend to show off feminine curves, so it does fit the world.

Cross-posting from what I put on tor:

The Giant:  While this was not at all what I imagined a thunderclast to look like (I imagined obsidian quadrupeds), I figure it’s a pretty safe bet that it is one.  That said, I can’t imagine whatever else it might be, so I’m going to assume that thunderclasts are basically magical rock mechs now.  I’m surprised the main post suggested that a Parshendi was in there.  From Dalinar’s vision, I took it to just be animated rock brought about by a voidspren.  Another interesting tidbit is that the thunderclast is walking away from the wall.  Maybe that’s Rlain helping out?

The Lightning: The presence of red lightning is unsurprising enough given the presence of Voidbringers, but the blue lightning suggests that a Highstorm’s stormwall may be approaching.  Either that, or someone’s doing something funky with their spren.

The Spears and the Wall: The presence of spears clearly indicates a battle, at least of some scale, though we have no idea where.  The Parshendi were all over the world before the Everstorm, so there’s not really any place this couldn’t be happening.  I’m going to guess though that it’s one of the cities the party can teleport to from Urithiru just because defending anywhere else with their present force is basically impossible unless Navani suddenly gets a whole lot better at making fabrials.  We might see her make a new Oathgate by the end of the series, but I seriously doubt she’d be able to in Book 3.

The Glove: It’s Jasnah.  She’s an atheist and enormously pragmatic.  If she’s going into battle, she’s not vain enough to hide her safehand.  What’s more interesting to me here though is that she’s not wearing any armor.  While by no means a fighter in her own right, she still strikes me as the sort of person that would never willingly go into battle without protection.  Honestly, I think Jasnah might be hiding from the thunderclast.

The Sword: Ivory is doing something, but we’ve never seen anyone need to summon their blade when they weren’t getting ready to use it for something sword-like.  She might have had had Ivory out and is simply turning him into a different shape like Syl did at the end of Book 2.  Then again, maybe there are higher powers we don’t know about yet.

The Stairs: Well, this is just weird.  There’s no real…  yeah, I’ve got nothing.  I can only imagine she’s creating them on the fly, but then they’d be mounted to the wall.  These are floating, which is a power she doesn’t have, so maybe she’s halfway in Shadesmar or something?  Alternatively, this could be some new ability we’re not familiar with as mentioned above.

Edited by VoltCruelerz
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52 minutes ago, Ironeyes said:

I'd take all of that with a massive pinch heap of salt if I were you. It appears to be made up of speculation on the part of the author who doesn't seem to know any more about what's going on than we do.

For instance, they state that the Thunderclasts are Parshendi that have covered themselves in rock as armour. Yet Dalinar's vision of the Thunderclast in Words of Radiance showed them to be creatures made of rock that are animated by a type of spren.

And it speculates that it may not be possible to Soulcast anything with "material connected to a living soul", despite the fact that we see Jasnah do just that to the thugs in the Way of Kings.

Basically, I don't think that we can draw any new conclusions from it. :(

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14 hours ago, Ironeyes said:

I'll second @BlackYeti's word of caution - the author is just somebody who is both fan and a Tor employee, and the entire article is an opinion piece. It's full of assumptions, personal interpretations, and some statements I know for a fact are wrong. 

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15 hours ago, VoltCruelerz said:

Yay cover art!

Regarding the present discussion regarding Jasnah's appearance, I don't mind it, but it isn't what I imagined.  As other before have mentioned, I expected her to be more of a groomed elegance than just beautiful.  As I recall though, Vorin garb does tend to show off feminine curves, so it does fit the world.

Cross-posting from what I put on tor:

The Giant:  While this was not at all what I imagined a thunderclast to look like (I imagined obsidian quadrupeds), I figure it’s a pretty safe bet that it is one.  That said, I can’t imagine whatever else it might be, so I’m going to assume that thunderclasts are basically magical rock mechs now.  I’m surprised the main post suggested that a Parshendi was in there.  From Dalinar’s vision, I took it to just be animated rock brought about by a voidspren.  Another interesting tidbit is that the thunderclast is walking away from the wall.  Maybe that’s Rlain helping out?

The Lightning: The presence of red lightning is unsurprising enough given the presence of Voidbringers, but the blue lightning suggests that a Highstorm’s stormwall may be approaching.  Either that, or someone’s doing something funky with their spren.

The Spears and the Wall: The presence of spears clearly indicates a battle, at least of some scale, though we have no idea where.  The Parshendi were all over the world before the Everstorm, so there’s not really any place this couldn’t be happening.  I’m going to guess though that it’s one of the cities the party can teleport to from Urithiru just because defending anywhere else with their present force is basically impossible unless Navani suddenly gets a whole lot better at making fabrials.  We might see her make a new Oathgate by the end of the series, but I seriously doubt she’d be able to in Book 3.

The Glove: It’s Jasnah.  She’s an atheist and enormously pragmatic.  If she’s going into battle, she’s not vain enough to hide her safehand.  What’s more interesting to me here though is that she’s not wearing any armor.  While by no means a fighter in her own right, she still strikes me as the sort of person that would never willingly go into battle without protection.  Honestly, I think Jasnah might be hiding from the thunderclast.

The Sword: Ivory is doing something, but we’ve never seen anyone need to summon their blade when they weren’t getting ready to use it for something sword-like.  She might have had had Ivory out and is simply turning him into a different shape like Syl did at the end of Book 2.  Then again, maybe there are higher powers we don’t know about yet.

The Stairs: Well, this is just weird.  There’s no real…  yeah, I’ve got nothing.  I can only imagine she’s creating them on the fly, but then they’d be mounted to the wall.  These are floating, which is a power she doesn’t have, so maybe she’s halfway in Shadesmar or something?  Alternatively, this could be some new ability we’re not familiar with as mentioned above.

In case you missed my response on tor.com:

Someone commented on the Thunderclast looking different on Reddit and mused that maybe they’re a class of creatures rather than things that always present in the same form, and Peter Ahlstrom said, “This,” so that explains what’s going on there. I’m pretty sure that those stairs are “Shardstairs,” and they’re fading away just as Ivory is going into sword form. They don’t look right for Soulcast stairs.

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I'm not really sure that they are Shardstairs. That seems unlikely. I was at a signing at SF, and somebody asked if a spren could become two separate objects, such as a bow and arrow. He said that it's possible, but would take a ton of energy. So, I don't think Ivory would be able to turn into three or four stairs.

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4 hours ago, Figberts said:

I'm not really sure that they are Shardstairs. That seems unlikely. I was at a signing at SF, and somebody asked if a spren could become two separate objects, such as a bow and arrow. He said that it's possible, but would take a ton of energy. So, I don't think Ivory would be able to turn into three or four stairs.

A hardware store I've gone to recently sells porch stairs (2-4 steps) for mobile homes & other things, so I can easily see Ivory being able to do it if viewed as a small staircase, rather than several separate steps. We don't view a bookcase as 5 separate shelves, now do we?

But I'm fairly certain Brandon has said the stairs on the cover were artistic license. The.. Warsaw signing I believe

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12 hours ago, The One Who Connects said:

But I'm fairly certain Brandon has said the stairs on the cover were artistic license. The.. Warsaw signing I believe

He said Jasnah floating was artistic license. I didn't ask him about the stairs, unfortunately (I kind of assumed they were soulcast and captured here a moment before they fell to the ground, which would look significantly less cool). 

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  • 5 months later...

I just came to say.....this cover is terrible. The composition is odd, Jasnah looks odd, the thunderclast is too freakish huge and isnt intimidating at all.

I would be embarrased to be awen reading this in public. Luckily, Im a hard cover man so i can just remove the dust jacket

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