Did Brandon retcon this?

[Sythrin]

Did Brandon retcon the fact that you cannot jump over ideals with Szeths 5th ideal?

Reinhartmax1

What happens if a Radiant is ready to swear an Ideal above the one they can't swear (i.e. a Windrunner who can swear the Fourth Ideal but not the Third)?

Brandon Sanderson

They would have to wait until they can swear the Third.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 3 (Dec. 16, 2021)

[Qianweilian He/him]

I don't believe the WoBs are actually canon until they make their way into a book

[Argenti he/him]

9 minutes ago, Sythrin said:

Did Brandon retcon the fact that you cannot jump over ideals with Szeths 5th ideal?

Reinhartmax1

What happens if a Radiant is ready to swear an Ideal above the one they can't swear (i.e. a Windrunner who can swear the Fourth Ideal but not the Third)?

Brandon Sanderson

They would have to wait until they can swear the Third.

YouTube Spoiler Stream 3 (Dec. 16, 2021)

Looks like it, Wobs aren't cannon until they're in the book.

[PrestigiousOwl]

As others have said, this may be him taking something that was basically "out of universe, this is how I'm thinking about this issue" and changing his mind once he started writing (just slightly different than actually retconning something that was in the text).

More broadly though, it feels complex, mostly because the Skybreakers are so damn strange. Aside from possibly having MULTIPLE sets of Oaths, possibly, it was also discussed a lot that his 4th Oath was extremely nebulous (i.e. "what counts as completing his crusade?"). Kaladin reacts to Szeth skipping an oath, but TECHNICALLY we don't know if that is really what happened (its possible it treated it as him completing his 4th oath AND him reaching the 5th). 

[+robardin he/him]

2 minutes ago, PrestigiousOwl said:

As others have said, this may be him taking something that was basically "out of universe, this is how I'm thinking about this issue" and changing his mind once he started writing (just slightly different than actually retconning something that was in the text).

More broadly though, it feels complex, mostly because the Skybreakers are so damn strange. Aside from possibly having MULTIPLE sets of Oaths, possibly, it was also discussed a lot that his 4th Oath was extremely nebulous (i.e. "what counts as completing his crusade?"). Kaladin reacts to Szeth skipping an oath, but TECHNICALLY we don't know if that is really what happened (its possible it treated it as him completing his 4th oath AND him reaching the 5th). 

Yeah, I didn't view it so much as a "skip over" for Szeth to swear the Fifth Ideal as that he was doing a kind of "double jump".

And poor, poor 12124/Aux. Befriending Kal and Syl, then losing them to Heraldhood; learning/growing with Szeth, only to be cut loose and rejected; and from TSM we know what ultimately ends up happening to him with Sigzil.

Brandon. How could you!

[+Oltux72 he/him]

Szeth had sworn the 4th ideal. It had just not been accepted by his spren.

[+robardin he/him]

2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Szeth had sworn the 4th ideal. It had just not been accepted by his spren.

Well, the way the Fourth Ideal of Crusade was presented to him by Nale when commissioned, was that his spren was to be the arbiter as to if/when he had satisifed it.

So perhaps it was the opposite: after hearing Nale’s description and admission about how “the corruption of the shamans” was really Ishar, and seeing how Szeth was struggling against Ishar’s last challenge without fighting back (which he had just sworn he was done with), 12124 sympathized/identified enough with Szeth’s dedication to his decision not to kill any more that he wordlessly gave him a pass on the Fourth Ideal, just as he was surging so powerfully to the Fifth Ideal.

In fact Szeth being so strongly in line with the Fifth Ideal could even have been a kind of “mental pressure” on his highspren to unblock the Fourth Ideal for him, so to speak!

And obviously, 12124’s time with Kaladin’s influence on Szeth (and seeing how it also helped/affected Nale) surely made it easier for him to bond with Sigzil later as Auxiliary, becoming close to a Windrunner/Skybreaker hybrid.

[+Oltux72 he/him]

2 hours ago, robardin said:

Well, the way the Fourth Ideal of Crusade was presented to him by Nale when commissioned, was that his spren was to be the arbiter as to if/when he had satisifed it.

So perhaps it was the opposite: after hearing Nale’s description and admission about how “the corruption of the shamans” was really Ishar, and seeing how Szeth was struggling against Ishar’s last challenge without fighting back (which he had just sworn he was done with), 12124 sympathized/identified enough with Szeth’s dedication to his decision not to kill any more that he wordlessly gave him a pass on the Fourth Ideal, just as he was surging so powerfully to the Fifth Ideal.

You are reopening the can of worms of who accepts the oaths. It is entirely possible the Highspren and Nale are claiming an authority they actually do not have, as the Stormfather did not have it, and that it looks only like they had that power because their knights accept that claim.

[teknopathetic he/him]

Also, Skybreakers could be different. The law etc is strange. 

[DiePie]

Ishar, official Dungeon Master for the quest, does open the fight by implying the quest is complete:

Quote

"Ishu," he called out, "I have finished my pilgrimage."

"Indeed," the man said, his voice loud, commanding. "You are worthy of my precense, child. You may approach."

If you consider the quest to be the pilgrimage. Which I don't think Kaladin does, and he is the one surprised by Szeth swearing the 5th ideal.

12124 might've accepted it right then and there, though. Not that we have any real indication in the book.

[ShadowBroker]

I think it works thematically for Szeth's Fifth Ideal to supercede this restriction. Szeth becoming the law effectively means he no longer needs to care about arbitrary rules like "You can't get your 5th Ideal before your 4th."

[RedBlue]

The Skybreaker oaths, as Nale described them, have always been weird. The other Orders’ oaths are much less structured. Also, Nale is clearly unreliable.

With the new info that there are other groups of Skybreakers who do things differently, I think Szeth’s ‘I am the law’ oath was not his fifth oath, but his fourth. It’s not that he skipped one, and it’s not that the order is arbitrary, it’s that Nale’s info was wrong to begin with.

[+Oltux72 he/him]

1 hour ago, RedBlue said:

With the new info that there are other groups of Skybreakers who do things differently, I think Szeth’s ‘I am the law’ oath was not his fifth oath, but his fourth. It’s not that he skipped one, and it’s not that the order is arbitrary, it’s that Nale’s info was wrong to begin with.

The Skybreakers whom Szeth was training with at the Purelake confirmed these oaths.

[RedBlue]

3 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

The Skybreakers whom Szeth was training with at the Purelake confirmed these oaths.

And they seemed to be getting their info from Nale.

I get that some of them achieved the fourth oath, but that doesn’t mean they understand how it’s done. They did it by completing a quest, but other Orders have oaths much more personalised to the needs of a specific Radiant following a loose template. I think it’s not truly necessary to approach Skybreaker oaths in such a rigid way, but Nale’s Skybreakers don’t know about that because they take Nale’s word for everything.

[+robardin he/him]

5 hours ago, RedBlue said:

The Skybreaker oaths, as Nale described them, have always been weird. The other Orders’ oaths are much less structured. Also, Nale is clearly unreliable.

With the new info that there are other groups of Skybreakers who do things differently, I think Szeth’s ‘I am the law’ oath was not his fifth oath, but his fourth. It’s not that he skipped one, and it’s not that the order is arbitrary, it’s that Nale’s info was wrong to begin with.

This is an interesting point, because the most recent breakaway "dissenter" Skybreakers broke away just before Ishar began molding Szeth, so it can't have been that long ago.

Unless Nale's comment about how Ishar "wanted to make a true soldier out of you [Szeth]. He did not like me or my Skybreakers much at the time, as this was right after Billid and his dissenters broke off from me with their traitorous spren" is another example of how an immortal Herald doesn't really have a good grasp of mortal time.

Which also means there's probably some group of Skybreakers out there who did not swear to Odium.

I find it hard to believe that Nale's "information" about the Skybreaker Ideals is wrong, I mean he was involved with them from inception and has seen innumerable Skybreakers, before and after Aharietiam, and became a Skybreaker himself sometime after Aharietiam.

I would assume the Ideals he is enforcing are surely the ones he himself underwent in his journey to the Fifth Ideal. And since part of his "going mad" was to become more and more rigid, what used to be a more personal journey (the way we see Teft, Lopen, Huio, etc., all have different "flavors" of the Second and Third Windrunner Ideals) is now "Skybreakers under my direction must follow my template for progressing in Ideals, both highspren and human alike".

Another tell is that however the highspren in Nale's orthodoxy form the Nahel bond with their humans, it's different than normal: they maintain a distance somehow so that the availability of the Surges are under the spren's control, and forswearing the bond did not result in a deadeye (with B-a-M imprisoned). And Nale's spren admonishes 12124 for getting "too close" with his human.

[Isilel]

47 minutes ago, robardin said:

became a Skybreaker himself sometime after Aharietiam.

It was before, since Nale's spren was tortured with him on Braize, according to 12124.

[+robardin he/him]

6 minutes ago, Isilel said:

It was before, since Nale's spren was tortured with him on Braize, according to 12124.

Nice catch -- I didn't remember that detail (when does he say it?).

I always thought NAle "eventually joined his own order" after reclaiming his Honorblade after Aharietiam, and the Coppermind entry (as of right now, not yet updated for WaT) suggests the same: 

At some point before the Recreance,^[37] Nale secretly retrieved his honorblade from Shinovar and bonded his own highspren, officially joining the Skybreakers. He is the only known Herald to have joined their order.^[38]

[Isilel]

@robardin:

It is in chapter 95:

 

Quote

Once you’re a Herald, I’m … ready.”
“What is the cost to you?”
“What you do, I have to do with you,” the spren explained. “Nale’s spren was always trapped with him on Braize, and subject to the pains 

 

[Szeth Pancakes he/they]

13 hours ago, ShadowBroker said:

I think it works thematically for Szeth's Fifth Ideal to supercede this restriction. Szeth becoming the law effectively means he no longer needs to care about arbitrary rules like "You can't get your 5th Ideal before your 4th."

It also works thematically because Szeth's arc is about that he doesn't need to follow the rules. In skipping an oath, he acknowledges that to complete his quest wasn't something he needed to do to grow as a person; it was just something he'd been told he needed to do.

Now that I think about it, this works really well with Dalinar's climax -- i.e. realizing that keeping your oaths is sometimes not the best way forward.

[+robardin he/him]

28 minutes ago, Ookla the Pancake said:

It also works thematically because Szeth's arc is about that he doesn't need to follow the rules. In skipping an oath, he acknowledges that to complete his quest wasn't something he needed to do to grow as a person; it was just something he'd been told he needed to do.

Now that I think about it, this works really well with Dalinar's climax -- i.e. realizing that keeping your oaths is sometimes not the best way forward.

True, but the surprising thing is that the mechanics of advancing in Ideals in the Nahel Bond allowed for it.

[Bigmikey357 he/him]

It's not quite a retcon, Szeth swore the 3rd Ideal. I think once you get to the 3rd, you can under extreme circumstances jump up to 5. I don't think you can jump from 1 all the way to 5, spirit web ain't stretched out enough for that. Of course all bets are off now, everything seems likely to work differently with the new management.

[therunner he/him]

Could also be that Honor being 'dead' allowed Szeth to do this jump

In one of the Honor POV flashbacks, he mentions that he put Oath restrictions on Radiants, i.e. Oaths as method of advancement were artificial construct on human surgebinding.
With Honor not active to enforce this, it could have let Szeth reach maximum bond without the need for middle step.