Im more worried about Mercy then Odium

[Acolyte of Radiance]

I know, odium is probably the big bad.But look at what Mercy's done. He probably made the shades, helped odium killed ambition,(Messed up, who would help odium?),it was either wit or Sazed that were worried of him, which either way is big, considering harmony is the strongest shard and anything that scares wit is probably beyond dangerous.

 

And we know this with only a bit of info.

To back the "Mercy created shades",in the copper mind shades were originally created on purpose.Mercy probably took mercy (haha) on the dead humans who were killed during the shattering of Ambition.

[Quantus he/him]

Thematically I think Mercy is the polar opposite of Honor, which is as problematic as Odium when stripped of the context of it's siblings. 

Per WOB, Honor is all about being Bound by Rules even when you dont have to be, and conceptually Mercy is really just choosing to cast those same Rules. It's choosing not to balance scales, choosing Not to enforce Laws, etc.  And just like Honor there's a cultural sense of Nobility in that, but it can become very Problematic when taken too far and/or applied without restraint.  
 

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Questioner

Shards. We started with fairly obvious ones, magic wise. Trying to keep this spoiler free, so: Ruin, Preservation, this kind of thing. Then we get the weird ones. Why do we have Shards that can only exist in the mind of a sentient creature? ...Like the concept of Honor can only be done when it's carried out, essentially, by a sentient creature.

Brandon Sanderson

So when I split Adonalsium I said, "I'm going to take aspects of Adonalsium's nature." And this involves personality to me. So the Shattering of Adonalsium was primal forces attached to certain aspects of personality. And so I view every one of them this way. And when I wrote Mistborn we had Ruin and Preservation. They are the primal forces of entropy and whatever you call the opposite, staying-the-same-ism-y. Like, you've got these two contrasts, between things changing and things not changing. And then humans do have a part, there's a personality. Ruin is a charged term for something that actually is the way that life exists. And Preservation is a charged term for stasis, for staying the same. And those are the personality aspects, and the way they are viewed by people and by the entity that was Adonalsium.

So I view this for all of them. Like, Honor is the sense of being bound by rules, even when those rules, you wouldn't have to be bound by. And there's this sense that that is noble, that's the honor aspect to it, but there's also something not honorable about Honor if taken from the other direction. So a lot of them do kind of have this both-- cultural component, I would say, that is trying to represent something that is also natural. And not all of them are gonna have a 100% balance between those two things, I would say, because there's only so many fundamental laws of the universe that I can ascribe personalities to in that way. 

So I find Honor very interesting, but I find Autonomy a very interesting one for the exact same reason. What does autonomy mean? We attach a lot to it, but what is the actual, if you get rid of the charged terms, what does it mean? And this is where you end up with things like Odium claiming "I am all emotion." Rather than-- But then there's a charged term for it that is associated with this Shard. I'm not going to tell you whether he's right or not, but he has an argument. 

Emerald City Comic Con 2018 (March 1, 2018)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 20, 2024 by Quantus

[Atlas333]

I don't think we have a ton to go off on mercy but I honestly don't think they'll be evil by any means. We don't know how much they helped Odium but I struggle to see a mercy shard as the aggressor. I think it's much more likely that odium left ambition gravely wounded and mercy exercised mercy by finishing the job.

 

I don't really see mercy being as dangerous as odium (a shard that wants to wage an interplanetary war). While there is a chance that Brandon wanted to go for a nice juxtaposition of a "good" quality shard actually being evil, I don't think it's likely given what little information we have.

[Duxredux he/him]

On 8/20/2024 at 2:42 PM, Acolyte of Radiance said:

I know, odium is probably the big bad.But look at what Mercy's done. He probably made the shades, helped odium killed ambition,(Messed up, who would help odium?),it was either wit or Sazed that were worried of him, which either way is big, considering harmony is the strongest shard and anything that scares wit is probably beyond dangerous.

 

And we know this with only a bit of info.

To back the "Mercy created shades",in the copper mind shades were originally created on purpose.Mercy probably took mercy (haha) on the dead humans who were killed during the shattering of Ambition.

There's been a lot of us over the years who find Mercy worrying, but we don't have much concrete information. Here's the link to the thread I made 2 years ago, mostly because it had a compilation of other threads and @Treamayne made an awesome exhaustive list of references to "mercy" in the available books. It was Harmony who found Mercy worrying.

A summary of my thoughts: In general... when people in the books claim mercy as their motive more often it's a brutal kind. There still is giving leniency and forgiveness, but it seems outweighed by the likes of Sadeas, Moash, and Ruin claiming killing their target a mercy. We know Hemalurgy is a universally accessible art of Ruin, so I wondered if another Shard, Mercy, had similar far-reaching influence.

If you find anything more in that list, that Treamayne made, we'd be quite interested to hear about it.

[The Sovereign]

On 8/20/2024 at 4:42 PM, Acolyte of Radiance said:

helped odium killed ambition,(Messed up, who would help odium?)

It seems more likely to me that Mercy put Ambition out of her misery (a "Mercy killing" so to speak) after she was severely (possibly mortally) wounded in her fight with Odium rather than actively helping Odium in the conflict.