Reactions to Dalinar's crime

[yulyulk]

So, everyone found out Dalinar killed his wife Evi because Oathbringer (in world book) draft copies were distributed. 

in RoW we get two mentions from Adolin that he's disturbed by this, but trying not to think about it. (Very Shallan coping mechanism, that.) We get one Renarin chapter in which he says he has to think of it as Odium killing Evi, otherwise he gets upset. 

But...did we get anyone else's reactions? Especially Navani and Kaladin's. Navani because THAT'S YOUR NEW HUSBAND!!1! I know Navani didn't think highly of Evi and she probably trusts Dalinar's reformed personality but still. 

And Kaladin because Dalinar's his commander and Kaladin feels strongly about protecting people. I could see him having reservations about serving under Dalinar after learning about this.

...

Anyway, this is not a very strong complaint, I understand these books are massive and sometimes I have to fill the blanks myself, I accept that. But this seemed like a matter of great moral import. Did I maybe miss some other people's reactions? 

[Honorless]

iirc, either Kaladin or Navani think about how the Kholin soldiers, who looked very proud after all the glory the Kholins got with the resurgence of the Knights Radiant and Urithiru, and all the moral superiority, started walking with hunched shoulders after the book started getting distributed.

Jasnah's reaction was pretty interesting too, I would say. She was very supportive and understanding, I'm assuming Navani is too but yeah... there should've been more... something there. I expected bigger fallout from Adolin and Renarin but their reaction is still quite appropriate. Kaladin, I expected that there'd either be absolutely no reaction or a lot of drama, absolutely no middle ground.

[AquaRegia]

It's not like he MURDERED Evi.  He didn't know she was in the city when he... you know, did that war crime.  It was an accident.  Everybody in Alethkar who wanted to know about it already knew about Rathlas - that was the whole point of doing it.  He was a soldier, and you don't make an omelette without breaking eggs and yada yada.

An analogy: let's say pilot of the Enola Gay found out after the bomb dropped that his wife was, against all odds, in Hiroshima that day.  Yes, he and his family might have some feelings to work out, but I really don't think anyone would suddenly see him as a murderer - at least, not any more than they already did.

Maybe the real question is why don't more people ALREADY hate Dalinar for what he's done?  I think we are asked to accept that those close to him can see him honestly trying to be a better person each day, and writing Oathbringer is part of that.

[jamesbondsmith]

I'm pretty sure the majority of Oathbringer (our one, not the one Dalinar wrote) was about people hating Dalinar for the general warfare that includes the Rift massacre, if not for the Rift on it's own. Almost all the monarchs have their moments of 'dude, you did some bad things'. The mink in RoW was largely just grateful the city-burning warlord was pointed away from him. 

Alethi culture is frankly pretty nasty anyway, so it isn't much of a surprise they don't hate Dalinar. As for those close to him, they've seen his changes from who he used to be. There does seem to be a vibe of 'let's deal with this when we aren't fighting extinction'.

[+Child of Hodor]

I think Brandon made a good comparison when talking about why the Coalition was still working with Taravangian. He compared it to the U.S. and U.K. working with Stalin in WW2. Yeah, he's a problem, to put it mildly, but he's on our side and we can't afford to be picky. Many people in the coalition probably feel similarly about Dalinar. Some like Queen Fen seem to have recognized he is different from how he was and have grown to trust him a bit. 

Edited January 29, 2021 by Child of Hodor

[yulyulk]

20 hours ago, Honorless said:

iirc, either Kaladin or Navani think about how the Kholin soldiers, who looked very proud after all the glory the Kholins got with the resurgence of the Knights Radiant and Urithiru, and all the moral superiority, started walking with hunched shoulders after the book started getting distributed.

Oh, that rings a bell. (I just completed a RoW reread and there are still so many details I immediately forgot...)

[Dracnor]

On 29/01/2021 at 6:02 AM, yulyulk said:

So, everyone found out Dalinar killed his wife Evi because Oathbringer (in world book) draft copies were distributed. 

in RoW we get two mentions from Adolin that he's disturbed by this, but trying not to think about it. (Very Shallan coping mechanism, that.) We get one Renarin chapter in which he says he has to think of it as Odium killing Evi, otherwise he gets upset. 

But...did we get anyone else's reactions? Especially Navani and Kaladin's. Navani because THAT'S YOUR NEW HUSBAND!!1! I know Navani didn't think highly of Evi and she probably trusts Dalinar's reformed personality but still. 

And Kaladin because Dalinar's his commander and Kaladin feels strongly about protecting people. I could see him having reservations about serving under Dalinar after learning about this.

...

Anyway, this is not a very strong complaint, I understand these books are massive and sometimes I have to fill the blanks myself, I accept that. But this seemed like a matter of great moral import. Did I maybe miss some other people's reactions? 

Same here, and that's not the only thing that disappeared in the time skip. What about the Elia stele (huge element of OB end), and the realization that humans are refugees fighting to keep conquered land against its original owners ? Not a word. Or Dalinar/Venli relation (from both the vision and Thaylen fields) ? Nothing.

That's what I dislike about roW : while it's a (very) good book by itself, when you consider it as a part of a series... it just feels like a parenthesis ("meanwhille in urithiru..."), and doesn't adress several the problematics introduced by the former book (probably because timeskipped).

Edited January 30, 2021 by Dracnor

[yulyulk]

1 minute ago, Dracnor said:

What about the Elia stele (huge element of OB end), and the realization that humans are refugees fighting to keep conquered land against its original owners ? Not a word.

Oh!! There was a hilarious throwaway line about this, where Dalinar (I think it was him?) says that they now call the enemy "singers" instead of "Voidbringers" because "Voidbringer" had turned out to be an imprecise word. I imagine that after the battle at Thaylen city, the Urithiru PR team decided: let's delete that term from our propaganda so that people don't think too hard about the implications of humans bringing Odium to Roshar.

(And, somebody either on here or on reddit pointed out that labeling an entire race as your enemy is also not a good move. It probably makes Rlain's life a massive pain and discourages coalition building with the common singers that don't necessarily want to fight.)

[Kyn]

@yulyulk That throwaway line from the very end of RoW ch. 16 gets at a lot of what you’re saying:

Quote

“We don’t use the term ‘Voidbringers’ anymore,” Dalinar said. “It has proven to be … imprecise. We call our enemies the singers...”

Even though Dalinar seems, in ch. 10, to flinch from mentions of who the real Voidbringers were, here he is, still labeling an entire group of people enemies. 

Spoiler

It makes perfect sense for Dalinar, longtime leader of bloody conquest against his neighbors, to dehumanize an entire peoples in order to maintain the purity of the distinction between “us” and “the enemy”. Dalinar isn’t used to thinking of longterm existential consequences for this sort of bifurcated oversimplification and its gruesome costs, and isn’t a historian or sociologist to be equipped to recognize what those might be, anyway.

I suspect the reason we don’t get much of a response to Dalinar’s previous crimes has to do with the moral limitations of the characters and societies in the book. This is actually a realistic portrayal, so that statement isn’t a ding against the writing, even if I wish we saw more reactions from Dalinar’s sons, and maybe the Windrunners. What we do see is very much in character, though.

And in the real world, people tend to brush under the rug crimes they know they aren’t going to suitably address.

Spoiler

 

In real life, also, many people will make allowances for atrocities committed by a friend, but get worked up over inconveniences inflicted by an enemy. Most people will get upset when a single family member is hurt because of unsafe conditions they ignored as millions were harmed before that. Empathy limitations keep us from getting burned out, but they also keep us from getting invested in fighting wrongs done to “them” – whether the “them” is Singers or the people of the Rift and one wayward wife.

 

Even though each individual in this story has their own likely reasons for not reacting more…obstreperously, it’s a bit of a letdown to only hear (glossed-over) reactions from (I think) out of the main people it affects, Dalinar, Renarin, and Adolin, and then out of everybody else, Kaladin.

Dalinar seems to be avoiding the level of destruction he was willing to inflict at the Rift, even against enemies he doesn’t consider human, so it’s likely many others see this level of change as one of numerous reasons to assume he’s a different person.

I feel like he might consider the matter largely settled after hearing his dead wife forgive him, too. Otherwise, it would be odd that he shows more of an emotional reaction to the Parshendi revelations, in this book.

In light of Jasnah’s remorseless perspective on how to deal with the Parshendi, I’m not sure it could be a surprise she isn’t worked up over Dalinar’s past atrocities. I suspect that she is simply too Alethi (or calculating) to truly condemn actions that accomplished a favorable outcome in a war, however brutal the cost. Especially when it put down a threat left over from previous mercy.

Spoiler

And of course, she is Jasnah, so there are multiple other reasons she’s unlikely to mention Dalinar’s past crimes.

One, she likes to learn from the past, not dwell in it or wallow in emotions about it (or anything else, really). It’s done, so she can only deal with the fallout and move on.

Two, even if she wouldn’t have done the same thing herself, even if she wouldn’t have been content with the way the Rift spurred other Alethi to respond back then (and I think she would, on both counts), Jasnah has already addressed any concerns she may have had in the in-world book Oathbringer. Presumably, if she’d been bothered unduly, her undertext  would have been included in RoW (or Oathbringer) somehow.

Navani is the one we see questioning the way the Windrunners and Heavenly Ones restrain themselves in RoW, so we’re unlikely to see censure for Dalinar’s past burnt-earth tactics from somebody pushing for more fighting to the death.

I suspect Shallan is too caught up in her own internal state and her tasks to spend bandwidth on an issue that probably strikes too close to home for somebody who killed both her parents. And somebody who thinks she’s somehow worse than everybody making mistakes around her.

Adolin says Kaladin’s learned to worry about his squad and cut out extraneous information (RoW ch. 12), but even so, Kaladin’s still thinking about Adolin killing Sadeas. The way he similarly elides what Dalinar did makes me think addressing it for real was past his emotional capacity in that depressive state, but it would Venice if it’s dealt with later, if only because he’s a Windrunner and a whole city was burned down.

I don’t think we could expect more of a reaction from Renarin when he’s working so hard not to think about what his father did. It’s not like reiterating that denial repeatedly would give us any more of his emotional response. And he doesn’t much know what to do with his emotions even in more pleasant situations, like when Rock hugged him at the end of Oathbringer. But that means he should have some sort of meltdown later, when he has to deal with this reality – potentially as a part of the progression of his oaths.

Adolin, though. We basically see his reaction from Kaladin’s perspective in ch. 12, talking about how his father has been wrong in the past, and then, finally, in RoW ch. 21, we see him react to his father. A poignant moment of suppressing a verbal response because he wasn’t sure if it would be anger, frustration, or shame; the admission he couldn’t forgive his father; and the acceptance that he was making his own way in the world even if his father disapproved of some choices.

And because this is Adolin, even though everything he does and tries to be after this is built on the determination to be useful in his own way, he doesn’t dwell on the emotions that seethe within. It’s not surprising we don’t see them revisited directly again and again, instead seeing him blaze his own path in response. I still wish we could have, though.

I’m sure we’ll see more of a resolution of Adolin’s feelings on this matter in the next book, but it seems less likely we’ll get something from anybody else. 

[Elerosse]

To be fair, RoW is a year or so after Oathbringer, so they may have dealt with it off-screen.