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how there are as many plates as blades?


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when you swear the third oath, you get a blade. when you swear the fourth, you get the plate. We know a lot of radiants never swear the fourth.Yet there seem to be an equal number of plates and blades around. before the radiants started to reappear, the alethi and vedens were said to have both some 20 full sets. other nations had less, but always close numbers of plates and blades.

why don't we get a predominance of blades from all those radiants that were still at the third oath during the recreance?

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I don't think this is the case. I would say that we do get a predominance of blades in actuality but an equal number in people's memory. I have few reasons to support this:

  1. Plate sticks out more inherently because it can't go away like blades do.
  2. It's easier to get a blade once you have plate (see Dalinar).
  3. People with Plate and Blade are at the forefront of things so they get talked about more. 
  4. Under certain circumstances there's an advantage to keeping the fact that you have a blade hidden. 
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3 minutes ago, DougTheRug said:

I don't think this is the case. I would say that we do get a predominance of blades in actuality but an equal number in people's memory. I have few reasons to support this:

  1. Plate sticks out more inherently because it can't go away like blades do.
  2. It's easier to get a blade once you have plate (see Dalinar).
  3. People with Plate and Blade are at the forefront of things so they get talked about more. 
  4. Under certain circumstances there's an advantage to keeping the fact that you have a blade hidden. 

Let’s put it this way

In Feverstone Keep, where a small contingent of Radients broke their oaths, there were more blades there than known to exist in the entirety of Roshar (Alethkar has around 25 and they have the most)

Now every single Radiant broke their oaths, supposedly. That would equate to 9/10 of blades being hidden, which doesn’t make a lot of sense seing as you can make a lot of money from selling a blade and you would think it would have been done in the past 2000 years, and from Taln (I think)  we see it’s very very uncommon for a new blade to be found

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28 minutes ago, Harrycrapper said:

Also worth noting is the volume of deadeyes that gathered around Lasting Integrity leading up to the trial. Either there's a massive cache of Blades hiding somewhere on Roshar or some of the deadeyes only exist in the cognitive realm. 

Spren whose Radiants had not yet reached the Third Ideal are presumably deadeyes who don’t have a corresponding Shardblade form in the Physical Realm.

As for the discrepancy between the number of Blades and Plate that were left by the Recreance, and the number that are available in the present time - this has been remarked on quite a few times. I’ve seen a lot of speculation in the fandom that someone must have gone to considerable effort to hoard them.

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CONSIDERABLE speculation.

I freely admit I'm still not clear on how the "deadeye in Shadesmar vs Blade in Physical" idea is supposed to work.  Isn't it one or the other, but not both?  In other words, an unbonded Shardblade, hidden somewhere in the Physical Realm, cannot ALSO be a deadeye wandering Shadesmar.  Am I confused?

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3 minutes ago, AquaRegia said:

CONSIDERABLE speculation.

I freely admit I'm still not clear on how the "deadeye in Shadesmar vs Blade in Physical" idea is supposed to work.  Isn't it one or the other, but not both?  In other words, an unbonded Shardblade, hidden somewhere in the Physical Realm, cannot ALSO be a deadeye wandering Shadesmar.  Am I confused?

That is correct

But when the bond was broken all Blades could not be dismissed without gemstones so how would there be so many deadeyes? 

But it seems from Shallan that if you break an Oath while the blade is dismissed it stays dismissed which may explain the vast majority of all the Blades

But we are still missing 100 or so at the very best

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13 minutes ago, AquaRegia said:

CONSIDERABLE speculation.

I freely admit I'm still not clear on how the "deadeye in Shadesmar vs Blade in Physical" idea is supposed to work.  Isn't it one or the other, but not both?  In other words, an unbonded Shardblade, hidden somewhere in the Physical Realm, cannot ALSO be a deadeye wandering Shadesmar.  Am I confused?

 

7 minutes ago, Bejardin1250 said:

That is correct

But when the bond was broken all Blades could not be dismissed without gemstones so how would there be so many deadeyes? 

But it seems from Shallan that if you break an Oath while the blade is dismissed it stays dismissed which may explain the vast majority of all the Blades

But we are still missing 100 or so at the very best

I hadn’t clued into that myself, but I’m guessing RedBlue gave the answer above:

28 minutes ago, RedBlue said:

Spren whose Radiants had not yet reached the Third Ideal are presumably deadeyes who don’t have a corresponding Shardblade form in the Physical Realm.

That makes sense to me. Before the binding of BAM, there were no deadeyes, after, all spren became deadeyes when their Knights broke their Oaths, regardless of level. That means a lot of Knights who were level 1-2 would have created deadeyes with no Shardblade to be claimed by anyone. Maybe higher levels in some orders, we’re not positive they all get them at level 3.

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4 minutes ago, Jondesu said:

I hadn’t clued into that myself, but I’m guessing RedBlue gave the answer above:

You’ve still got maybe 1,000 to 2,000 3rd ideals at the very least judging by how quickly there were so many Windrunners

And only 60 Shards

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12 minutes ago, Bejardin1250 said:

You’ve still got maybe 1,000 to 2,000 3rd ideals at the very least judging by how quickly there were so many Windrunners

And only 60 Shards

Yes, sorry, two separate points. On that part, I agree with @RedBlue as well, someone’s been hoarding them, possibly since immediately after the Recreance. Maybe someone was able to bring a number into Shadesmar to make them no longer accessible as Blades. Maybe Nale and/or the Shin and/or others have a huge stash somewhere (like you said it’d be a thousand or more, easily). Maybe something else explains it. That part is still very mysterious.

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A lot of shards were lost to the bottom of the ocean, or scattered somewhere and covered in crem.

some others were hoarded.

but the point stands: there should be more blades than plate, and there is no answer to that. @DougTheRug is the only one that tried to come up with answers, but they are all purely speculative, and not at all convincing.

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3 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

A lot of shards were lost to the bottom of the ocean, or scattered somewhere and covered in crem.

some others were hoarded.

but the point stands: there should be more blades than plate, and there is no answer to that.

If someone is hoarding Blades on a large scale, and they are not hoarding Plate to the same extent, then the numbers make sense. 

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15 minutes ago, RedBlue said:

If someone is hoarding Blades on a large scale, and they are not hoarding Plate to the same extent, then the numbers make sense. 

Actually that’s not completely true, seeing as all Plate at the time is in the PR and only a few blades are in the PR it’s possible that their numbers are close to the same.

It all really depends on how many blades were summoned at the time of the Recreance and how many were 4th Ideal

But either way the numbers that the hoarding has to be, makes the difference between plate and blade negligible so I wouldn’t call it a different extent even if there were less Plate. if that makes sense

 

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the plate is happy to be plate while the shardblades are not. Imo it sould only take a few people or a herald working on behalf of spren to reduce the number of shardblades. Additionally there may just be different survivorship patterns for example if somebody doesnt know you carry a blade then shoves you off a cliff, you die and your blade is covered by crem for years. Whereas if you have a plate not only is that known but its more likely you'll live to pass it on.

Recall that when Sadeus died they still had his plate but his sword was not found until much later.

Edited by Waffles
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Maybe some shardblades ended up being taken away from Roshar? Not sure how one can do that, but maybe if you bond blade and then move off Roshar, the bond is not broken and you can summon it once you are back from cognitive realm.

From what I understand, there is no known way to bring shardplate into cognitive realm, so It may be much harder to move it off world as you cannot dismiss  and summon it.

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12 hours ago, Master Silver said:

What if the experiments Ishar was doing were on dead eyes. Ishar could easily have moved a large number of blades back to the cognitive realm. 

Ishar has only had his blade back for less than ten years.

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6 hours ago, Frustration said:

Ishar has only had his blade back for less than ten years.

Ishar very easily could have taken his blade during the Recreance and then put it back. But it is just as likely that since the Radiants including their spren didn't know that they would be creating dead eyes, they tried to do what would allow spren to recover faster. Maybe that means being in Shadesmar when the bond is broken.

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On 7/16/2021 at 6:20 PM, king of nowhere said:

the point stands: there should be more blades than plate, and there is no answer to that. @DougTheRug is the only one that tried to come up with answers, but they are all purely speculative, and not at all convincing.

According to the Coppermind, we (the readers) know, from the text, of 10 specific sets of Plate, and 19 specific Shardblades.  I don't see any reason to assume their numbers are the same when we are explicitly told there are roughly twice as many Blades as Plate.

I also think the fact that Blades can be lost or hidden much more easily has greatly reduced their numbers over the centuries, and I expect we will see reasons why fewer deadeye Blades were produced during the Recreance than we might have expected based only on the number of Radiants at the time.

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1 minute ago, AquaRegia said:

According to the Coppermind, we (the readers) know, from the text, of 10 specific sets of Plate, and 19 specific Shardblades.  I don't see any reason to assume their numbers are the same when we are explicitly told there are roughly twice as many Blades as Plate.

 

With the amount of plate and blade we know as a fact existed added on to a logical amount that should have existed 9 more blades than plates is completely negligible and means nothing 

And how does a civilization just lose hundreds of artifacts worth more than kingdoms?

All answers are speculative, which is why it’s mostly a waste of time to try, but the question is very strong from what we know

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The source for the number of Shards that Alethkar, Jah Keved, etc. is Dalinar in TWoK when he witnesses the Day of Recreance at Feverstone Keep, but he specifies Blades, not Plate. The Coppermind also leaves out Amaram/Helaran's Shardplate.

Quote

There looked to be a good two hundred Shardbearers out there. Alethkar owned some twenty Blades, Jah Keved a similar number. If one added up all the rest in the world, there might be enough total to equal the two powerful Vorin kingdoms. That meant, so far as he knew, there were less than a hundred Blades in all of the world. And here he saw two hundred Shardbearers gathered in one army. 

TWoK Chapter 52: A Highway to the Sun

I agree that it might be that someone wouldn't have to work too hard to hide them if they could just toss them all back into the Cognitive Realm somehow without a gemstone bond, and there are a lot of deadeyes in Shadesmar. In RoW Chapter 75, Adolin assumes that when they turn to mist in Shadesmar, they are being summoned by their owners. 

Pattern also suggests that the Cryptics have done a little research on how to cure deadeyes when he gives Shallan the run-down on the Recreance.

Quote

"All dead," Pattern said. "To us, this means they are mindless--as a force cannot truly be destroyed. These old ones are patterns in nature now, like Cryptics unborn. We have tried to restore them. It does not work. Mmmm. Perhaps if their knights still lived, something could be done ..." 

WoR Chapter 75: True Glory

Experimenting on the dead might also contribute to the supposedly fearsome reputation of the Cryptics. Pattern could even be talking about the use of a gemstone as the method they used to try and restore the old ones. Who knows?

I almost think that the dismissal function of the gemstone is, like, a side effect of whatever pseudo-bond it's creating, rather than the main thing. The gemstone bond to the human seems to create some kind of connection to the Cognitive that was severed when the oath was broken, so that the spren's Investiture can be sent into the Shadesmar. Navani notes in WoR Chapter 67 that the Shardblades were said to have to have altered their shapes to adopt the gemstones--something that isn't typically possible of a dead Blade--so maybe the original function was not to have a bonded and dismissible weapon but to give relief to the spren? Maybe the former Radiants innovated that particular development? The deadeyes in Shadesmar, at least, aren't screaming constantly, and the bond seems to comfort Maya and even Oathbringer to some degree. Stone is supposed to be similar to a mind in its ability to hold Investiture. 

I also don't think it's too implausible that the spren might be the ones who somehow contrived to recover their dead over the years so they wouldn't be used as weapons against their will or trapped forever in their own corpse. The honorspren have a system to care for the deadeyes. The spren who make up Plate probably wouldn't need the same kind of mercy.

And in another direction entirely, might it be possible that maybe the Investiture that makes up the Blade may have just leaked back into the Cognitive Realm over time? It happens to living spren whose Radiants have died. They don't have anything anchoring them to the Physical Realm, though it doesn't seem to happen immediately. The practice of attaching gemstones is also said to date from "several decades" after the Recreance, which could be about the length of human lifespan. When their former Radiants died, did the Shardblades suddenly lack a valid Connection to the Physical Realm and gradually fade away, like Jezrien's soul when it was trapped in a gemstone? Could attaching the gemstone might have been the solution people came up with to keep possession of the Shards?

This is all just speculation, of course. I'm not sure that there's any real answer that can be pieced together from the available information, but it is fun to think about.

 

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