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[OB] Jasnah's "Lunacy"


JPark317

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I'm highly skeptical that this experience is directly associated with Ivory. In the WoR prologue, Jasnah was never reacting to some kind of deep inner fear. Everything about it reads as an experience with the unknown. The shadows seem new. Ivory is alien. Shadesmar isn't in any way familiar. I understand the idea that it could be some kind of repressed memory... But I highly doubt Brandon is going to do that twice to the same extent, and even Shallan gave hints of familiarity with what had happened in her past. If Jasnah was experiencing anything she had seen before, it would have come with hints to that effect.

The overall timing doesn't work great either. Jasnah was apparently "recovering" from whatever happened 23 years ago. Other than Jasnah, the earliest nahel bond we know of is Shallan with Pattern and that was about 7 years ago. Maaaybe a few more if it was going on for quite a while before her mother noticed and did something about it, though that seems unlikely to me. Everything I can think of hints that spren seeking out humans again is a very recent development. So placing Ivory's first appearance at roughly 15 years before the next instance makes the idea difficult for me to accept without more evidence (either for this particular case or even just evidence that other spren were looking for bonds that long ago).

Just because the experience "broke" Jasnah doesn't mean that Ivory showed up on the spot. Spren probably weren't bonding humans at the time. I'm sure a LOT of humans broke over the last 2000-some years without ending up in a bond. That's not to say this same experience isn't what let Ivory come in. It just means Ivory wasn't standing there waiting when it happened. The same cracks were just there 17ish years later when he showed up for the first time on the night Gavilar died.

I also don't think there's any reason to think a family member was abusing Jasnah. The fact that they refer to it as "lunacy" makes me doubt whatever it was involved abuse in general, because the only way I can see that working is that she was adamantly accusing someone of abuse/rape/whatever and nobody believed her. That also doesn't fit with the true pain of the whole experience came from "people she loved".

There's a lot of holes and missing gaps in our knowledge... But my best guess is that she simply had some kind of bizarre but totally natural mental condition that they didn't know how to deal with. So they locked her up until things started looking better, which left her feeling super betrayed. Logical as she is, she would understand why they did it and not let it ruin her future relationships... But the emotional scars would still be there.

My next best guess is that she witnessed/discovered/learned something that nobody else would believe. Could be something fantastical (magic of some kind), a discovery she made and insisted on but nobody believed, something religious-related (refusing to accept Vorinism, so they labeled her a lunatic), etc.

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I never bought the idea of "Jasnah was abused as a child". Gavilar and the Blackthorn had a million flaws and nearly every single idea they had was wrong, but both strike me as the type that would skin alive anyone that lay a finger on their children, and from then on they would actually get nasty.

The lunacy is likely when Jasnah broke and started walking down the path that led to many of her current ideas. What led to the lunacy...that I don't have any ideas on.

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49 minutes ago, WhiteLeeopard said:

I never bought the idea of "Jasnah was abused as a child". Gavilar and the Blackthorn had a million flaws and nearly every single idea they had was wrong, but both strike me as the type that would skin alive anyone that lay a finger on their children, and from then on they would actually get nasty.

The lunacy is likely when Jasnah broke and started walking down the path that led to many of her current ideas. What led to the lunacy...that I don't have any ideas on.

 

But see, that would rely on Jasnah being willing to tell someone what happened to her.  We know that a lot of times, victims blame themselves or think that no one would believe them.  If it was someone important or someone their parents are friends with, it makes it even harder.  Navani says something about this...one sec while I get the quote.

 

Quote

“She wouldn’t let me be a mother to her, Dalinar,” Navani said, staring into the distance. “Do you know that? It was almost like . . . like once Jasnah climbed into adolescence, she no longer needed a mother. I would try to get close to her, and there was this coldness, like even being near me reminded her that she had once been a child. What happened to my little girl, so full of questions?”

 

Edited by RShara
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Except she clearly hates the robbers in Karbranth and says those Men, instead of people, if she just hated criminals. That could be right or wrong. On the other hand, I do like the idea of child Jasnah telling adults she's seeing things and them surrendering her to ardents for treatment. Torture in the guise of religion would explain why such a prominent person is a heretic since feigned belief would probably be much easier at her level.

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I had also guessed she was abused as a child, both based on her thoughts that even those you trust can hurt you, and her great anger she shows in disposing of the murderer/rapists in Kharbranth.  Perhaps by an Ardent or someone Gavilar trusted like Sadeas/Amaram?

I never got the impression that her father was the abusive party, just an extremely distant parent.  She mentions that Gavilar's interest in scholarship regarding the Parshendi was the first moment she ever felt close to him.  I do think he may have dismissed or ignored an abusive instance in her past though.

The screaming in a dark room part is explained by how they treat perceived madness in Roshar.  We see Taln placed in similar conditions in WoR when they thought him just a madman.  Historically, locking "the crazies" in a dark and isolated place to avoid "over-stimulating" them, was an all too common theory of treatment in pre-modern mental asylums :( . 

It's possible that her madness and time in an asylum were a result of her abuse. It's also possible that Jasnah manifested her powers (glimpsing into Shadesmar) at a young age and confided in this to someone she thought was trustworthy, and they responded by declaring her mad/hallucinating and handing her to the Ardents for treatment.

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  • 2 years later...

Yes, saying this before RoW, so who will knows what will come, but considering the dark color of Ivory, I believe she like Shallan was making contact with the “shadowy” man, and maybe since people don’t know meet high spren these days I suspect she was deemed insane. Possibly in the dark of her Illness where Anoly the shadowy figure talked to her.

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My working theory is this; 

We know Navani talks about how hard Jasnah was to raise; the kid was always independent and too smart for her own good, always apart from others, likely always considered strange (a prodigy perhaps, but strange).

At some point in her youth (we can likely guess her age by comparing the "lunacy" comment to Adolin's age but I forget the chain of events) some male close to her or the family abuses her; someone with a reputation for honesty and honor who was deeply trusted by the Kholins. I'm guessing it may have been an ardent (setting Jasnah on the road to denouncing religion), but I'm nowhere near sure about that. This would help explain why she hates Amaram so much, because he reminds her of her attacker. Or, if they were old enough for it, he may have been her attacker himself.

This traumatic event leads to her first use of Investiture and likely her first glimpse of Shadesmar. Being the highly logical child she is, she tells the proper people about it (likely her parents). And the stories about seeing another world makes the Kholins (or whoever the authority is) think that Jasnah is just a hyper smart little girl with too much imagination and too much stress. The story about her abuse gets tossed aside in the face of the fantastical tales of Shadesmar (if she imagined a pretend world, her accusations against a trusted individual are likely false too), and the conclusion is that Jasnah is losing her mind.

Dalinar, when looking for "the madman" at the old war camps, ruminates on how medical theory says sunlight is bad for the mentally ill and they're kept in dark rooms. So that's where this reference from Jasnah comes from. 

Jasnah, before longs, starts telling the healers what they want to hear so she can leave and they declare her lunacy to have past. But her trust is broken, both by her abuser and the family who didn't believe her, her faith in the Almighty is shattered (especially if the abuser was an ardent) and her search for answers about Shadesmar would have fueled her meteoric rise among scholars. 

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Could Jasnah have indirectly been responsible for the Sons of Honor and Gavilar's interest in going offworld? If the belief in her lunacy was because she perhaps visited Shadesmar and told her family, then perhaps it eventually gave Gavilar the inspiration to seek deeper. The reason that Jasnah could have started reconciling some shortly before his death is because he may have realized that she was never crazy, and he had failed to take her seriously.

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