TotES Curse breaking

[lacrossedeamon]

I think the way Hoid edited Charlie's curse is the weakest part of the novel (beyond Hoid handwaving the actual mechanics of becoming an Elantrian). It seemed to treat Aons more like letter rather than the logograms they are. Currently I am glossing over this by leaning into the fairytale narrative aspect of the story but I hope to see better instances of this in the future with more focus on the mechanics of it.

[Sandra she/her]

I just wanted to post a question, but I think you might help me. please can you explain how Hoid's and Charlie's curses were broken? I am a non-native English speaker and didn't really get it... thanks! 

Also the part about Hoid becoming an Elantrian confused me too. Was it really just a bet between him and the Sorceress?

[StanLemon]

The way I saw it, part of Hoid's curse was designed that it would forge a Connection with Arelon and allow him to become an Elantrian if he broke it

[lacrossedeamon]

6 minutes ago, Sandra said:

I just wanted to post a question, but I think you might help me. please can you explain how Hoid's and Charlie's curses were broken? I am a non-native English speaker and didn't really get it... thanks! 

Also the part about Hoid becoming an Elantrian confused me too. Was it really just a bet between him and the Sorceress?

Hoid's curse seemed to only require him returning to the tower to break and complete the "Shaod" and he let her curse him if it would allow him to become an Elantrian with the Sorceress foolishly thinking Hoid wouldn't be able to manage.

Charlie's curse would be broken if he brought Tress (his true love) to the Sorceress's home to also be cursed. Hoid was able to edit the curse to be fulfilled if Charlie brought Tress back to her own home to be "versed" (he wrote poetry for her). I can see the edit for where Tress needs to be taken working but the cursed to versed doesn't seem to fit with the logogrammic nature of Aons.

[Sandra she/her]

2 minutes ago, lacrossedeamon said:

Hoid's curse seemed to only require him returning to the tower to break and complete the "Shaod" and he let her curse him if it would allow him to become an Elantrian with the Sorceress foolishly thinking Hoid wouldn't be able to manage.

Well, how can you underestimate Hoid, that was foolishness  

I think there is still a lot to learn about Selish magic and Aons. As far as I remember, in the Elantris novel 

Spoiler

there was only one line missing and as soon as the protagonist changed that, the whole thing suddenly worked. 

About the logogram, it could be that the Aon used has just been changed slightly and now has that different meaning but translated to English it "rhymes".

[lacrossedeamon]

18 minutes ago, Sandra said:

 

About the logogram, it could be that the Aon used has just been changed slightly and now has that different meaning but translated to English it "rhymes".

Cursed to versed by itself still seems like too big a jump. Like maybe tweak how Tress was to be cursed to being subjected to bad poetry or sworn at. But I feel "curse" still needs to be integral to how Charlie's is broken while just the auxiliary Aons can be modified to change the analog to case, tense, prepositions, direction, scale, etc. 

[Sandra she/her]

Well I can imagine that if there is an Aon for speaking, you could maybe tweak it enough to get from curse to poetry. Maybe change its Intent from resentment to art. However I don't know enough about Aons to be sure that could work. 

[Myuken]

We do not know enough about Aons but maybe drawing on an Aon resulting in a valid Aon is a possible way to change it's meaning and use.

As an example Aon Tae center part is Aon Omi, if Aon Omi is used and and an Elantrian draw the outer part, can it become Aon Tae.

The picture in TotES shows that there are many Aons we do not know, those kind of changes might offer a lot of possibilities for changes, especially on curses (Aon Shao) that needs a ton of sub-Aons

[Leuthie]

On 1/8/2023 at 8:22 PM, lacrossedeamon said:

I think the way Hoid edited Charlie's curse is the weakest part of the novel (beyond Hoid handwaving the actual mechanics of becoming an Elantrian). It seemed to treat Aons more like letter rather than the logograms they are. Currently I am glossing over this by leaning into the fairytale narrative aspect of the story but I hope to see better instances of this in the future with more focus on the mechanics of it.

While 75% of the story is probably true, 25% of it is Hoid. Him changing Charlie's curse is 100% Hoid in service of the story. Hell, the curse and mechanics of him becoming Elantrian is probably 50% Hoid. The actual story is most likely messier and doesn't have as happy an ending.

Edited January 27, 2023 by Leuthie

[HSuperLee]

18 minutes ago, Leuthie said:

While 75% of the story is probably true, 25% of it is Hoid. Him changing Charlie's curse is 100% Hoid in service of the story. Hell, the curse and mechanics of him becoming Elantrian is probably 50% Hoid. The actual story is most likely messier and doesn't have as happy an ending.

I know TotES is clearly a story told by Hoid with some artistic license, but I don't like the idea of a precedent where we can't believe the things we "see" in a Cosmere novel. I understand the idea of an unreliable narrator, but there's a difference between an unreliable narrator that shows us events from the character's perspective, and an unreliable narrator that is lying to the reader. If we start opening the door to the idea that what we see in the books is a lie, its a quick drop to the narrative collapsing. This is how you end up with those, "the main character is in a coma and hallucinating the whole story" theories, which is the death of story.

As for how exactly Hoid was able to change the curse, this was something that bothered me as well in the reading. Aons are so specific that the idea of changing them based off a pun (and a pun in English, no less), but I suppose, as I think about it, the Aons used for curses must last beyond the initial casting for them to have a permanent effect. If that's the case, it makes enough sense why Hoid can't erase them, they're already acting as conduits for investiture, after all, but also that he can add more modifiers to what already exists in order to change the final outcome. In other words, I don't think he changed Riina's spell at all, I think he added to it. I can't be sure how exactly he did this, because Aons are extremely complicated, but I imagine it had to be something like this:

We are told, "The curse had said [Charlie] needed to bring the person he loved most to the Sorceress's home, to be cursed, in exchange for his freedom." So the things that the curse needed to be able to do includes detecting where Charlie is in relation to the Sorceress's home, detect who Charlie loves most and her proximity to him, and detect the condition of Charlie's love to react if she has been cursed.

Breaking this down into these three steps, the second is the part, detecting who Charlie loves most and her proximity to him, Hoid didn't have to modify. This function probably works off of detecting Charlie's Connections, his bonds, and then a simple Aon Tia modifier that measures location and creates an upper bound for the condition, something like Tress having to be within 20 feet of Charlie.

The first part of the mechanic, bringing Tress to the Sorceress's home, could work in a number of ways. It could be detecting Riina herself, searching for her Identity, but the specific wording, "the Sorceress's home," indicates that it instead was tracking physical location. This makes a lot of sense as Riina probably didn't expect to be leaving her island any time soon. So if the location of the curse was based on planetary location, it probably operated off of something like a coordinate system, and all Hoid had to do was add distance to the target location. To explain, if the curse was programming, Riina put in a function something like, "When Charlie is within 500 feet of location x, y, z (x y and z representing the coordinates of Riina's island), then..." Hoid couldn't change the code, but he could add to it, making it instead, "When Charlie is within 500 feet of location x+a, y+a, z+a (a representing the distance from the Sorceress's island to Tress's home), then..." Thus, Hoid could adjust the target location of the curse being lifted without actually needing to erase and of Riina's Aons.

The third part is the strangest. Somehow, Charlie's curse needed to detect when Tress was cursed. In my mind, the easiest way to do this would be to detect whether or not Tress had any Aonic Investiture affecting her, but its clear that couldn't be how Riina was doing it, or Hoid shouldn't have been able to do what he did. Plus, it might not have been possible to write the curse to detect Tress's condition directly, since the curse was placed on Charlie, and Riina had never interacted with Tress to code that part to her identity. So perhaps it instead targeted Tress through her Connection with Charlie. If that's the case, the curse may have been set to check for Charlie's perception of Tress. This might, and I stress, might, be where Hoid's pun comes in. If Charlie's curse was checking his perception of Tress for its end condition, then it could have been tied into Charlie's mind and thus understanding of language. The curse was checking for the condition "cursed" as Charlie understood it. The code equivalent might be something like, "If connectiontarget = charliepercption(Cursed), then..." As for how Hoid could have changed the perception target of Riina's Aons, I have no idea. That goes beyond the Aonic knowledge I possess.

Frankly, it seems to me like it would have been easier for him to just give Tress a very minor and easily broken curse himself, which would have fulfilled the conditions for Charlie's curse, then just broken Tress's curse via the very easy conditions. He could have saved them a lot of time by just putting Tress into a endless sleep with the condition to pull her out being true love's kiss, and then Charlie could have just kissed her and woken her up. Bam, easy solution while maintaining the fairy tale ending. But that said, I very much understand where Hoid, being Hoid, may have intentionally taken the harder path for everyone involved for the sake a climatic entry, as well as forcing Charlie to write a beautiful poem for Tress, simply because he saw that as a better ending.

[Frustration]

2 hours ago, Leuthie said:

While 75% of the story is probably true, 25% of it is Hoid. Him changing Charlie's curse is 100% Hoid in service of the story. Hell, the curse and mechanics of him becoming Elantrian is probably 50% Hoid. The actual story is most likely messier and doesn't have as happy an ending.

Um, no.

Spoiler

SleepoPeepo

How is Hoid able to talk about events that he wasn’t present for in such great detail, including a person’s internal thoughts and emotions?

Brandon Sanderson

A combination of things. One, he was there for some of it. Two, in some cases he was there kind of. And in other cases, artistic liberty.

He is, particularly in [Tress of the Emerald Sea], taking some artistic liberties. Now you can assume he has tried very hard to get his stories right when he is taking artistic liberties to the point that you can take most of it as canon, even in Tress. Did I get to the point in Tress about the Dougs? I don't think I did. There's a point, for instance, in Tress where Hoid's like, "I can't remember all these people's names. I'm going to all them all Doug." He does things like that--him acknowledging that he's telling the story after the fact. But he has a supernatural ability to retain stories and get close to the actual soul of the story. You may view all of these things as canon except for some of the places where he obviously fudges a little.

Secret Project #3 Reveal and Livestream (March 22, 2022)

Hoid went out of his way to get it as right as he could, anywhere that he isn't obviously doing storytelling is true.

[Leuthie]

1 hour ago, Frustration said:

Um, no.

  Hide contents

SleepoPeepo

How is Hoid able to talk about events that he wasn’t present for in such great detail, including a person’s internal thoughts and emotions?

Brandon Sanderson

A combination of things. One, he was there for some of it. Two, in some cases he was there kind of. And in other cases, artistic liberty.

He is, particularly in [Tress of the Emerald Sea], taking some artistic liberties. Now you can assume he has tried very hard to get his stories right when he is taking artistic liberties to the point that you can take most of it as canon, even in Tress. Did I get to the point in Tress about the Dougs? I don't think I did. There's a point, for instance, in Tress where Hoid's like, "I can't remember all these people's names. I'm going to call them all Doug." He does things like that--him acknowledging that he's telling the story after the fact. But he has a supernatural ability to retain stories and get close to the actual soul of the story. You may view all of these things as canon except for some of the places where he obviously fudges a little.

Secret Project #3 Reveal and Livestream (March 22, 2022)

Hoid went out of his way to get it as right as he could, anywhere that he isn't obviously doing storytelling is true.

How did that quote contradict anything I said (aside from the random percentages I picked. Maybe it's more 90-10 or 95-5)? How is his Aon hand waving anything but an obvious fudging? It's an absurdity. "I can't remove someone's curse, but I can confound the words as long as they rhyme" is a fun ending to a story, not how Aons work. He may have fixed Charlie's problem of being a rat, but he didn't do it the way he described. He took artistic liberty there. Until Brandon fields a question that directly confirms that "if you know the exact wording of an Aon, you can find fun analogues and rhymes to change them", that's how I see it. What Hoid actually did could be very close to what he described, but much more involved and much less entertaining. Same with the true story between him, the Sorceress and becoming an Elantrian. There's something missing there, but it doesn't serve the story so Hoid doesn't include it.

I'm not saying he's lying about the results in the story, I'm saying he's taking artistic liberty with the details. I could be wrong. But it's how I explain the absurdity of those particular methods in the context of the Cosmere as I know it. 

[Frustration]

19 minutes ago, Leuthie said:

How did that quote contradict anything I said (aside from the random percentages I picked. Maybe it's more 90-10 or 95-5)? How is his Aon hand waving anything but an obvious fudging? It's an absurdity. "I can't remove someone's curse, but I can confound the words as long as they rhyme" is a fun ending to a story, not how Aons work. He may have fixed Charlie's problem of being a rat, but he didn't do it the way he described. He took artistic liberty there. Until Brandon fields a question that directly confirms that "if you know the exact wording of an Aon, you can find fun analogues and rhymes to change them", that's how I see it. What Hoid actually did could be very close to what he described, but much more involved and much less entertaining. Same with the true story between him, the Sorceress and becoming an Elantrian. There's something missing there, but it doesn't serve the story so Hoid doesn't include it.

I'm not saying he's lying about the results in the story, I'm saying he's taking artistic liberty with the details. I could be wrong. But it's how I explain the absurdity of those particular methods in the context of the Cosmere as I know it. 

Hoid could be lying to Tress and Charlie, thinking something along the lines of "hey it's the same result either way, and it's sweet"

[lacrossedeamon]

5 hours ago, HSuperLee said:

I know TotES is clearly a story told by Hoid with some artistic license, ..., simply because he saw that as a better ending.

How I see it is that Hoid could probably add an Aon with the same meaning as the morpheme a-/anti-/un-/de-/dis- or something similar in front of "to the Sorceress" to make it "away from the Sorceress"; as for the "to be cursed" part I think Hoid could get around it by specifying what the curse and boomer humor his way out by viewing marriage as a curse. And then he lies to Tress and Charlie while making the latter write unnecessary poetry.

[Honorless he/him]

Maybe Hoid used Aon Ene to overwrite the curse rather than actually edit any Aons? (Basically, adding extra modifications of his own and invalidating part of the original modifiers)

Like, maybe the Sorceress just stated "the Sorceress' Home", and the Aon had to define what that meant via Intent but Hoid defined the Sorceress' Home as specifically the Rock.

Because I don't think Hoid could just delete part of the Aonic structure, if he could then this wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.

I'm not sure how curse became verse though...

But maybe Aon Ene strikes again? Ene isn't just the 'add modifier' Aon, it also means "wit". Maybe Hoid defined the meaning of Aon Ene to change it into the latter.

Edited January 28, 2023 by Honorless
typo

[FollowYourMuse she/her]

 

I have no clue on how curse was modified to verse, but I was thinking that now that much of it would depend on Hoid's intent, and now that Tress is a sprouter "user of the spore magic"  she could technically be considered a Sorceress "User of magic".