Heralds

[frozndevl]

So, can't search for a damn, but had this thought the other day. Could the heralds not just be insane because of thousands of years, but since they are effectively spren, might they have also been wounded by BAMs capture in some way? We all know that two of the back five main characters are two heralds, and Ik not really looking forward to books of insane people, maybe we release bam and the heralds also get "fixed".

[Tmorg]

Yes this is very likely … I read a long hypothesis on it somewhere on here a couple years ago with very well written arguments. Idk how I’d go about finding it tho

[+Child of Hodor]

12 hours ago, frozndevl said:

So, can't search for a damn, but had this thought the other day. Could the heralds not just be insane because of thousands of years, but since they are effectively spren, might they have also been wounded by BAMs capture in some way? We all know that two of the back five main characters are two heralds, and Ik not really looking forward to books of insane people, maybe we release bam and the heralds also get "fixed".

It's possible it had an effect on them. They are definitely insane because of something more than the torture. Some kind of magical inversion is going on. Their insanity manifests as an inversion of what they were known for as Heralds, their divine attributes. Shallash is known for Art and Beauty, she spends her time destroying art, especially art of herself. Ishar was Pious and Guiding he's declared himself a god demanding to be worshipped and gives out terrible advice. Nale was Just now he uses the law to murder people. Kalak was Resolute now he can't make up his mind. 

Quote

Questioner

The Heralds seem to be insane in the ways of their Divine Attributes, at least somewhat. Is this because they're Heralds? As Cognitive Shadows, they're subject to people's perception, like how spren are?

Brandon Sanderson

That's a very astute question, and yes, that is influencing them quite a bit. I'm doing something here with the Heralds. Like, I want the Heralds "madnesses," as we call them, to be magical diseases. And the contrast of something like Kaladin's depression, which I'm trying to treat very real-world. I'm trying to treat them as these things that couldn't exist in our world. They're fantastical mental diseases, like we have fantastic physical diseases in Elantris. So I did make them thematic, and I would say part of the reason for that is people's perception of them and their mental state reacting against that. And that should be a theme among all of the Heralds.

San Diego Comic-Con@Home 2020 (July 23, 2020)

I think it is in part because they are so full of Honor's investiture and 9 of them broke their oaths repeatedly by letting the Fused escape and then they outright quit which is not very honorable. It sort of curdled their investiture or something. I dunno. 

[Stark he/him]

Could it be in part that Ash recognizes that people's perception of her has a measurable impact on her?  Which has led to her madness forcing her to destroy any iconagraphy of herself?  Does she think that is she destroys enough of people's representations of her, that her madness will retreat allowing her a measure of sanity?

[alder24]

13 hours ago, frozndevl said:

So, can't search for a damn, but had this thought the other day. Could the heralds not just be insane because of thousands of years, but since they are effectively spren, might they have also been wounded by BAMs capture in some way? We all know that two of the back five main characters are two heralds, and Ik not really looking forward to books of insane people, maybe we release bam and the heralds also get "fixed".

It can be a factor, but they are insane mainly because they've been living for thousands of years, much of it was them dying and being tortured. This is just too much for a soul to handle simply because a mortal soul was not made to live for that long. We can see how this affected them as early as  in the WoK Prelude.

Spoiler

Questioner

Why or how are the Heralds the only ones we've seen so far that are affected by magical maladies due to either their high Investiture or long lives?

Brandon Sanderson

I would argue the Fused are having the same situation, so they're not the only ones. The why and how... there's a whole host of things going on here. Like a lot of physical and mental illness, it's not one thing or the other. But it is a compound of other things.

One is going so long without certain protections that you kind of need to take. The human being's soul might be immortal, depending on your argument in the cosmere. (That's really up to you.) But they certainly aren't meant for thousands of years of existence, the same way that our bodies aren't. There's some of that.

There's some of the things they've been through. Like, legit trauma; this is not all simply a magical ailment. You've got people with PTSD, layers of PTSD on top of layers of PTSD, for thousands of years, bearing things that no human being without their level of Investiture would even be able to bear. You've got that manifestation, you've got their own sense of guilt.

And these things are all just kind of overlapping together with the fact they've been alive for so, so very long. And a lot of the people that you've seen otherwise have not been alive nearly... orders of magnitude more for the Heralds. The only people you've seen that are that old are: some of the dragons, Hoid, and Vessels of various Shards. And you're basically at that group. And this is a group who knows what they're doing. Either they were built like the dragons, this is part of their innate nature, that they are functionally immortal. Or you are getting the Shards. Or you're getting people that are 300 years old, which is a very different thing, cosmere-wise, than having lived for thousands and thousands of years, part of it being torture.

Dragonsteel 2023 (Nov. 21, 2023)

 

10 minutes ago, Stark said:

Could it be in part that Ash recognizes that people's perception of her has a measurable impact on her?  Which has led to her madness forcing her to destroy any iconagraphy of herself?  Does she think that is she destroys enough of people's representations of her, that her madness will retreat allowing her a measure of sanity?

No, it seems like she thinks they don't deserve to be worshiped after what they've done to Taln. Her madness won't go away just because people would stop worshiping her as the problem is much deeper. 

Edit: 

Another WoB about perception's effects on CS:

Spoiler

Questioner

Spren are reflections of how people in the Physical Realm see things. So if you have a Cognitive Shadow, would their personality change based on what people in the Physical Realm see them as?

Brandon Sanderson

The short answer is, not as much as you're worried about, no more than we tend to change based on what people say to us and how we interact with the people around us.

The long answer is, over a long period of time, it can happen. And it's gonna depend on a number of factors. But we're talking a matter of centuries not years. The same sort of thing you see happening to Vessels of Shards can happen to Cognitive Shadows.

So, the long answer is yes, but it's not an immediate worry. It's not like people start thinking of you and it shifts you because your perception of yourself is enough strong usually that it rebuffs these sorts of things, being self-aware does that. And a lot of the influence to spren and things like that happen during kind of formative not-quite-self-aware times, if that makes sense.

If you were to become a Cognitive Shadow right now, it wouldn't be a major concern, but in a thousand years, you may look back and say "wow, I was shaped by public perception in ways that I wasn't expecting".

Dragonsteel 2022 (Nov. 14, 2022)

 

Edited November 7, 2024 by alder24

[+Lewis Nethur He/Him]

15 hours ago, frozndevl said:

So, can't search for a damn, but had this thought the other day. Could the heralds not just be insane because of thousands of years, but since they are effectively spren, might they have also been wounded by BAMs capture in some way? We all know that two of the back five main characters are two heralds, and Ik not really looking forward to books of insane people, maybe we release bam and the heralds also get "fixed".

I'm gonna offer my best guess, so take it with a grain of salt, buuuut:

My understanding of what is going on with the Heralds is that they accidentally went and got themselves cognitively and spiritually pulled apart in opposing directions because even when they were damaged beyond all repair, they still refused to give up in their own ways...

1. The Heralds were tortured; this was mentally and emotionally damaging.

2. The Heralds were super popular and well-loved and they came by it perfectly honestly.

3. The Heralds tried to spare the people who loved them the pain of knowing that they had been broken beyond all hope, and had their idealism all but snuffed out. They were, ironically, a little too successful on that front. People still harbor fond memories of them and offer prayers in their names...

4. This puts constant planet-wide pressure on their souls every second of every day. Everyone projects a concept of them into the CR which hasn't been valid in a long time and which also contradicts and invalidates the burdens that they still carry in their hearts for the rest of mankind...it's darn near ghoulish.

Imagine if a billion people all took turns measuring and recording the same flamespren with different measuring devices that were all impossibly badly calibrated and riddled with different errors. It would attempt to conform to their perceptions and expectations and fail all billion of them. This would break it; maybe by enough to unmake it into a completely different creature entirely.

Healing the Herald's madness is going to require a widespread recognition of, and commiseration with, what was done to them so that everyone can finally move forward with truth illuminating their paths again. Then they're going to have to essentially rebuild new identities I suppose. Taln and Ishi's cases are going to be extra complicated I assume, as their parts of the story, both real and fabricated, place them under harsher focus of the lens of widespread human perception...

I'm uncertain of BAM's imprisonment impacted them noticeably, as they were deeply insane already when that went down. It may have legitimately made things worse and left an additional layer of scars, but the root of their madness, I think, is the cognitive and spiritual torsion that their souls are under due to having been tortured and broken and having (almost) everyone believe that they were not.

 

Edit: the part that's really gonna boil your noodle is that: if the Heralds had just told the truth from the beginning, then everyone would have thought they were insane, treated them that way, pressured them spiritually that way, and they would still be in the same position as they are now anyway...

Edited November 7, 2024 by hwiles

[Stark he/him]

One thing I have noted with Ash, she will refer to herself as sane.  She thinks Ishar is the most Sane, other than her.  Ishar also thought he was sane.  Nale though Ishar was keeping him sane.

 

They all seem to have a hard time gauging their madness levels.