Wind and Truth Full Book Reactions (No Cosmere Edition)

[Kheran]

5 hours ago, Soccorro said:

I don’t know for sure but I’d guess Taravangian is one of BS’s favourite characters. I think he has said that Taravangian is the character he’s most proud of. In terms of writing quality, I mean. I personally don’t understand what’s so interesting and complex about character who only wins because all other characters lose their brain cells and act like utter morons. It’s not that Taravangian is smart, everyone around him is stupid and the plot itself bends around Taravangian to let him succeed. Poor Dalinar was character assassinated to let T win. Jasnah too

Exactly, yes. And how convenient that Nightblood was right there for Taravangian to use and kill Rayse...

[Nitpicking]

On 4/9/2025 at 5:58 PM, king of nowhere said:

... nobody alive remembers or understands, no matter how atrocious.

You don't consider the Heralds, Fused, or Vessels alive?

On 4/9/2025 at 7:10 PM, Mason Wheeler said:

Honestly, this is something that really bugged me about Oathbringer.  The notion of collective guilt spanning millennia even though the facts on the ground are completely different today is utterly bizarre from a factual perspective, and from a moral perspective it simply cannot be squared with the religious doctrine that Brandon is supposed to adhere to, that "we believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for [an ancestor's] transgression."  Neither the Radiants of old nor the people of modern Roshar should need Honor to set them straight on this point; it's obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

So, you think the current-day humans of Roshar weren't keeping the Singers in slaveform as property, treating them as  livestock?

[king of nowhere]

5 minutes ago, Nitpicking said:

You don't consider the Heralds, Fused, or Vessels alive?

 

i don't consider them to be relevant for the purpose of determining the morality of whether the humans deserve to be invaded and enslaved. the common people - even learned ones like jasnah - have no way to know, and can't be blamed for it

Quote

So, you think the current-day humans of Roshar weren't keeping the Singers in slaveform as property, treating them as  livestock?

as far as everyone could determine, the parshendi were not sapient. smarter than regular cattle, but not by much. they even experimented putting them in the wild, they were unable to survive. what are you going to do, give them their own nation when they don't have the capacity to handle it?

if we discovered that our livestock was actually made of people magically transmuted to cattle, i'd be horrified to discover, and would absolutely call for giving them some land and treating them as equals from now on. but i would not feel guilty for having treated livestock as livestock, because i had no way of knowing it wasn't regular livestock. no more than i would feel guilty if some villain triggered the ignition of my car to detonate a bomb somewhere.

i'd consider myself morally obliged to help those unfortunate victims, and yes, even to give them compensation for having used them as cattle. but i do not consider myself morally guilty for something i had no practical way to know was bad.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

10 minutes ago, Mason Wheeler said:

As King of Nowhere pointed out, they were livestock.  They lacked the mental capacity to care for themselves, even in the most basic things.  Had humans not taken them in, they would have all died out.

And they were fully aware of this after the Everstorm swept through and restored their lost sapience.  Which makes their reaction a rather stunning display of ingratitude!

Maybe people who were enslaved not feeling grateful for being kept as slaves is normal.

I think I recall the Azish Singers trying to start a lawsuit demanding freedom and back wages so they could start normal lives at some point, and they got slow rolled while the people they were negotiating with got ready to fight, with no honest intent to make restitution on the part of the humans.

Quick check over to the coppermind, this cites to Oathbringer chapter 12 if you want to double check.

Spoiler

As in the rest of Roshar, the Azish Parshmen awoke from slaveform following the arrival of the Everstorm on Ishishach 1173. Initially, they followed the example of their bureaucratic former masters—instead of going to war with the government, they sued it for back pay. The Azish began negotiations, although they had no intention of giving in—rather, they sought to buy enough time to fortify their cities.

If the humans of Roshar had responded to the awakening of the Singers like someone whose disable child was suddenly given their missing faculties, this probably would have all gone differently. Instead, they treated the matter like a slave revolt, and so they got a slave revolt.

 

[DSCrankshaw]

Hmm. Noura's explanation in Chapter 65 doesn't make it sounds like the Azish were negotiating in bad faith, and I wouldn't really trust the communication in Chapter 12, as there were quite a few lies in it, as the Azish were not at all trusting of the Alethi warlord.  Anyway, from what Noura said, it was the singers who broke off negotiations, when their leaders managed to get them moving.

Frankly, I doubt the Alethi and their Parshmen ever could have settled things peacefully, as they both were strongly influenced by Alethkar's warlike society and the Thrill, but I suspect the Azish, and maybe the Thaylens, could have come to some settlement if not for the Fused and the Voidspren, and above all, Odium.

[Nitpicking]

11 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

as far as everyone could determine, the parshendi were not sapient. smarter than regular cattle, but not by much. they even experimented putting them in the wild, they were unable to survive. what are you going to do, give them their own nation when they don't have the capacity to handle it?

You're clinging hard to the human perspective. From the point of view of the Singers it looks very different.

[Mason Wheeler]

10 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

If the humans of Roshar had responded to the awakening of the Singers like someone whose disable child was suddenly given their missing faculties, this probably would have all gone differently.

Had the Singers not demanded massive, society-destabilizing changes immediately, they'd have probably gotten a more worthwhile outcome.

To put it in real-world context, there was a massive wave of abolitionism throughout a great deal of the world in the 19th century.  A whole lot of nations that had formerly been OK with slavery/serfdom decided to get rid of it, all fairly close together.  Most nations set up some sort of program of gradual integration, where slaves would gain freedom over the course of several years, while being taught how to be normal, productive members of society, the sort of stuff that free-born people pick up in childhood but slaves, for obvious reasons, had never been taught.  And it worked pretty well.

There were two notable exceptions, nations that decided "we're just going to free them all instantly and leave them to fend for themselves:" Russia and the USA.  In both cases, it was a catastrophic failure, leading to decades of civil unrest and leaving scars that linger to this day.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

1 hour ago, Mason Wheeler said:

There were two notable exceptions, nations that decided "we're just going to free them all instantly and leave them to fend for themselves:" Russia and the USA.  In both cases, it was a catastrophic failure, leading to decades of civil unrest and leaving scars that linger to this day.

You should try to tell this story in Haiti.

Those scars you are describing, who's fault are they? In the USA, how long should slaves have waited to be given freedom in the South? Should the Russian peasants have accepted that it was their lot in life to be sent to die in WWI and not resist?

Also, where do you think society is without the ugly scars of class division? Do you think that the UK, which did abolish slavery by law after first instituting it across the world, is without racial strife or material inequality? Do you think the people who desperately try to cross the channel into England, and are subjected to deportation, aren't the scars of the English Empire in the same way that the racial disparities of the USA are the scars of that country's history of cattle slavery?

Likewise, the Napoleonic Wars were what ended serfdom in huge segments of Europe. Is a decade of warfare somehow not scarring?

I don't know where and how you think truly peaceful social progress has been made, but I think you should learn more history. Where neither slavery or serfdom itself was not the pain of the lower class, there is the similarly horrible experience of the 1954 Guatemalan coup, where colonial overlords have brought down terror to shape society in their favor.

This is not to say that no project like social democracy is possible. There were successful programs to implement social security, workers rights, and even certain women's rights during the time period you are describing and they were larger civil.

Getting back to Roshar, I think if Jasnah's program of freeing slaves and instituting legal equality had been what the Alethi had been doing, instead of their War of Reckoning, then I would get someone saying "The Singers are ungrateful fools", but that's not the world they awoke to. Their experience was one of being hated, lied to, and memories of being slaves.

This is in the non-cosmere thread, so I can't ask you to explain your perspective on the dynamics of Era 1 mistborn I guess, but I hope I have demonstrated a broad enough understanding of history to enable a dialogue on this topic.

[Mason Wheeler]

29 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

Those scars you are describing, who's fault are they?

The people who tried to make massive social changes by fiat, all at once, of course.  If there's a single example anywhere in history of that being a thing that has ever ended well, I'm not aware of it.

[Treamayne]

Spoiler

Please move this to either a current Singer discussion thread or start a new thread. The "Full book reactions" thread is supposed to be a safe place for people to say what they thought and felt. It is not a place to debate those people's feelings and thoughts - that's what discussion threads are for (by definition). 

Maybe an admin can splice off all of these digression posts and move them to your new thread once you make one.

57 minutes ago, Chaos said:

Discussion naturally occurs in reaction threads, and has always been the case. I think this is fine so far. Please report if you feel things progress, and we will make a determination. This seems totally fine so far.

 

 

Disregard - My apologies.

Edited April 11, 2025 by Treamayne
SPAG

[Chaos he/him]

2 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Please move this to either a current Singer discussion thread or start a new thread. The "Full book reactions" thread is supposed to be a safe place for people to say what they thought and felt. It is not a place to debate those people's feelings and thoughts - that's what discussion threads are for (by definition). 

Maybe an admin can splice off all of these digression posts and move them to your new thread once you make one. 
 @#1 Taln Fan

Discussion naturally occurs in reaction threads, and has always been the case. I think this is fine so far. Please report if you feel things progress, and we will make a determination. This seems totally fine so far.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

1 hour ago, Chaos said:

This seems totally fine so far.

Well, that's a relief.

Back to posting I guess.

3 hours ago, Mason Wheeler said:

The people who tried to make massive social changes by fiat, all at once, of course.

I am sorry that you think this is obvious, but it is not to me. I always found this quote from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court a bit helpful for getting my views on this across. I hope you don't mind the continued focus on French history but french scholars as a fondness of mine

Spoiler

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror⁠—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Further more, I do not know when or how "social changes by fiat, all at once" in a literal sense can be said to have happened. I know of periods of rapid social change, but those tend to be the product of the confluence of systems collapse driven by material and social conditions. I admit, I am not a historian in any formal sense of the term, but give me some examples of these kinds of moments of "massive social changes by fiat" so we can understand each other.

[Mason Wheeler]

4 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

Well, that's a relief.

Back to posting I guess.

I am sorry that you think this is obvious, but it is not to me. I always found this quote from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court a bit helpful for getting my views on this across. I hope you don't mind the continued focus on French history but french scholars as a fondness of mine

  Hide contents

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror⁠—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Twain's "minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak" was anything but, and his "older and real Terror" is vastly overstated.  The truth is, the French Revolution was one of the greatest political catastrophes in human history.  No sooner had the revolutionaries seized power than they turned on each other in an orgy of violence that they themselves — not their political opponents, as one might expect for the origin of a name like this — called the Reign of Terror.  And it's true that this period lasted less than a year.  But the scars lingered for centuries.  The destabilization of the French Revolution left France a perpetual basket case of a nation that kept falling apart over and over and over again.

The current French government, the Fifth Republic, dates to 1958.  So we can blame one French collapse on the Nazi occupation, but even after that ended, more than a decade after V-E day, the government fell apart yet again and had to be redesigned.

And the truly crazy thing?  None of it was necessary.  Far from the callous "let them eat cake" persona that the libelles smeared her as, Marie Antoinette was a kindhearted ruler who gave generously to the poor and to charitable causes helping the most vulnerable.  Yes, there were real problems, but the people in charge were aware of them and were actively working to resolve them.

[Negative_Null They/Them]

32 minutes ago, Mason Wheeler said:

And the truly crazy thing?  None of it was necessary.  Far from the callous "let them eat cake" persona that the libelles smeared her as, Marie Antoinette was a kindhearted ruler who gave generously to the poor and to charitable causes helping the most vulnerable.  Yes, there were real problems, but the people in charge were aware of them and were actively working to resolve them.

Someone defending French monarchism in 2025 on a Brandon Sanderson forum was not on my bingo card for the day but there you go.

To bring this back a little bit, I think the Singers were 100% justified in asking for freedom and redress, and heck, in being angry! I'm with  Paratulip

5 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

Getting back to Roshar, I think if Jasnah's program of freeing slaves and instituting legal equality had been what the Alethi had been doing, instead of their War of Reckoning, then I would get someone saying "The Singers are ungrateful fools", but that's not the world they awoke to. Their experience was one of being hated, lied to, and memories of being slaves.

The alternate timeline fae give is an interesting idea, and that would be something where Venli's and Rlain's anger would be a little less understandable. I wish we did get to see more of what the newly freed Singers think and thought, rather than just focusing on the Listeners, as cool as they are. I do see a little bit of a connection to the founding of Israel after WWII, where the LIsteners break off and found their own "nation" and that's kind of seen as a solution to the problem, and I bet it will give similar problems as we see where there's still a lot anti-semitism and militant zionism (Read, anti-Singer racism and a movement of Singers to the Listener nation). The fact that Odium is over all of this gives even more complications that we can't possibly link back to our world (which is why it's fantasy).

I personally think that we are supposed  to see Jasnah's changes as a little bit idealistic, what with her trying to enact them during  a massive war, but I don't think Brandon had any intention of saying they were bad changes, just maybe that Jasnah could have picked a better context. And, in case we forget, she wasn't just freeing Singers but also human slaves.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

50 minutes ago, Mason Wheeler said:

Yes, there were real problems, but the people in charge were aware of them and were actively working to resolve them.

People were starving in France. This is the common matter between a lot of periods of the most rapid social change: People in mass will tear down the old system because it was killing them, while smaller groups will try to vie to be the one to replace the system.

While you are right to be critical of the propaganda put in the time period, you should understand that there were actual shortages of food in France before the revolution.

24 minutes ago, Negative_Null said:

I wish we did get to see more of what the newly freed Singers think and thought, rather than just focusing on the Listeners, as cool as they are.

 

Same. It feels like their perspective on the war would be so different from the Listeners or the humans.

[Mason Wheeler]

10 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

While you are right to be critical of the propaganda put in the time period, you should understand that there were actual shortages of food in France before the revolution.

Yes.  Sadly, this was a thing that happened a lot before the invention of modern chemical fertilizers and agricultural techniques.  Most of the time, it did not result in cultural suicide.

[Negative_Null They/Them]

3 hours ago, Mason Wheeler said:

Yes.  Sadly, this was a thing that happened a lot before the invention of modern chemical fertilizers and agricultural techniques.  Most of the time, it did not result in cultural suicide.

Cultural suicide? Why are you defending monarchist France like it was some kind of bastion of culture? The reason that this specific famine led to such an upheaval was because the nobility were living a lavish lifestyle while people starved, and there were enlightenment ideas that said that was immoral for the first time, somewhat similarly to the stuff going on in Mistborn Era 2, but that's a side note. 

Generally, I hope we do get to see the larger, civilization wide effects in the back half rather than it getting skimmed over. People should be desperate, fighting, willing to change things

 

[Mason Wheeler]

9 hours ago, Negative_Null said:

Cultural suicide? Why are you defending monarchist France like it was some kind of bastion of culture?

I'm not.  Why are you taking me out of context?  I'm saying that whatever the (very real) problems may have been, 1) they were legitimately working to fix them and 2) the French Revolution proved to be an abysmal alternative that left France a wreck of a nation for centuries.

You can't fix a problem by making it worse.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

11 hours ago, Mason Wheeler said:

the French Revolution proved to be an abysmal alternative that left France a wreck of a nation for centuries.

France was one of the great world powers of the 19th and 20th centuries. It continues to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

I don't know how to respond to the idea that France has been a ruin in the last 300 years. I think there's a lot to be said about how France has brought ruin to West Africa, South East Asia, and North Africa, but then I am not sure what rich country isn't connected to that history.

[Mason Wheeler]

10 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

France was one of the great world powers of the 19th and 20th centuries. ... I don't know how to respond to the idea that France has been a ruin in the last 300 years.

Just look at how many times it fell apart entirely.  There's a reason the current government is called "the fifth republic."

Brandon has said that he took inspiration from the French Revolution for Misborn.  Well, look at the rest of the metaphor: the people who proved skilled at destroying the government proved far less skilled at establishing and running a new one, and in the end it turned out that they were unwittingly serving Ruin all along.

Barbarians have been destroying civilization since the dawn of time.  I cannot for the life of me understand why this particular instance of it gets so glamorized.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

2 hours ago, Mason Wheeler said:

Just look at how many times it fell apart entirely.  There's a reason the current government is called "the fifth republic."

This is a baffling way to measure a country that I don't know how to extend to any other region. Is Japan your gold standard for culture because their imperial institution is among the oldest in the world? Does the USA become less good in your eyes every time an amendment is passed to the constitution?

What do you think the movement of one Republic into the next has been for France? Why do you think the reform of the state is somehow a black mark on it?

[Mason Wheeler]

13 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

This is a baffling way to measure a country that I don't know how to extend to any other region

The Constitution was written 2 years before the French Revolution began, and ratified the next year; in historical terms, they were essentially simultaneous.  In the intervening time, how many times has the government of the USA collapsed and had to be rebuilt from the ground up?

Zero.

47 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

Why do you think the reform of the state is somehow a black mark on it?

Are you simply trolling at this point, or do you legitimately not understand the difference between reform and collapse?

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

2 minutes ago, Mason Wheeler said:

Are you simply trolling at this point, or do you legitimately not understand the difference between reform and collapse?

Do you? Do you think France collapsed at some point in the 20th century?

[Negative_Null They/Them]

49 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

Do you? Do you think France collapsed at some point in the 20th century?

Tbf, I think the Commune during the Franco Prussian war could count as a "collapse" (whatever we define that as), even if that's before the 20th century. It definitely did not come from any kind of "fiat" changes, just from people being fed up with the current government and seeing an opportunity due to the war, again, similarly to what we see in multiple Cosmere books

Edited April 13, 2025 by Negative_Null

[Mason Wheeler]

42 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

Do you think France collapsed at some point in the 20th century?

Twice.  There's the big obvious one in 1940, of course.  (Which largely came as a direct result of measures the French government set up in the Treaty of Versailles, which led to the economic instability in Germany that brought the Nazi Party into power.)

After the war, the Fourth Republic was established, and didn't make it even 15 years before it collapsed into a violent crisis, with a military coup bringing the nation to the brink of civil war.  In the end, about the only thing Parliament could agree upon was that they were unfit to handle the mess, so they voted to dissolve the entire system, put war hero Charles Du Galle in power to resolve the problems (a "dictator" in the classical sense!) and get someone else to set up a new constitution.