A better opponent for Dalinar. Thoughts on the final duel.

[eriwancoselyn]

Ok, now that we've been given some time to sit with Wind and Truth, I think we can see a few common complaints rising to the surface. One of the biggest is "Gavinor ending was cheap." Many people feel that this ending wasn't really earned and it's hard to care about a character who's done all of their changing off screen. I'd like to put forward a suggestion for a better candidate. I believe this would have had more thematic relevance and made more sense in the context of the overall story.

It should have been a singer.

Not a fighter. We can still do the whole innocent thing. But it makes more sense this way. Odium has access to endless singers who would want to do this. As opposed to Gavinor, who has to go through a bunch of coincidences to get into the SR to begin with.

One of the biggest shocks of Oathbringer was the reveal of Elie Stele. Humans weren't native to Roshar, they were an invading force. The singers weren't trying to destroy the land, they were trying to reclaim their homes. This reveal, to me, was such a huge moral shakeup for the story. it changed the whole narrative of stormlight in a way that no event after could really match. I understand that the humans needed to keep fighting. it was their home too, and they couldn't just surrender to odium's whims but this moral issue has sort of been left to fester for the later books in the series. I propose a solution.

Instead of forcing him to confront Gavinor (Which meant basically nothing), we force him to confront the ethics of his war. we also skirted around the alethi massacre of the listeners. Dalinar is never really confronted with the damage they did to them. I understand that he's only one man and he didn't have control of the war, but it's still important to acknowledge this. The price for success is, as has always been, the murder of more singers. Dalinar will need to make an actual ethical decision here. to me, him ascending to honor is a lame way to dodge the moral quandary. and dodging it doesn't make it go away. I'd rather he'd have pushed through and stayed committed to his morals.

for the singer, he'd have to be like 'ok, but we've been doing this the whole war, what is one more body on the pile?' then we can actually get an examination of the ethics of war, another under discussed moral issue in the series. is it ok to kill all of those singers if it's under the guise of war? finally, I believe he would accept that the murder of the singer wasn't something he could do. it's very different from killing armed combatants who have agreed to fighting. so he lets the singer kill him. this, ironically, is what finally gives him access to honor. he would have actually surrendered his chance at godhood to stop the violence.

Edited December 15, 2024 by eriwancoselyn
spelling error

[Nitpicking]

Brandon had to do the Gavinor thing, after spending so long setting it up (e. g. with the death rattle). Was that the best choice decades (!) ago when Brandon plotted this? Hard for me to judge, because a different decision would have meant a significantly different book.

I'm an old-time TTRPG player. My immediate thought was to name Taravangian as Honor's Champion. T would either have to let himself be killed (so Odium won, but he was gone) or win (and thus restrict himself). Unfortunately, the champions had to be willing.

[Returned he/him]

I understand where you're coming from and agree that Gavinor wasn't a very interesting champion, narratively. I've said as much from the earliest days of the "Gavinor will be Odium's champion" fan theories.

On the other hand I think that the narrative point of the confrontation was that the contest of champions really didn't matter, at least not as Tanavast had considered it. So it's fitting that we get an opponent that leans into that: thematically appropriate for Dalinar, and indeed predictable, but the contest was never going to be the actual conclusion to the conflict. I think that it would have been nice to get an opponent that made the contest interesting in some way, though I personally don't feel a random singer would have done that. But the contest ended up being kind of an afterthought that Dalinar had already mostly outgrown by the time he got there, and fully outgrew by its end; the event itself was always kind of pathetic.

All the rest happened anyways. Dalinar considered what killing Gavinor would mean, whether it was or could be worth it (dredging up a topic that the books have already returned to many times), ascending to Honor, realizing that that ascension only gave him the ability to magnify the death and destruction of the war with Odium, and then giving up godhood to stop the war (on Roshar) and force the cosmere-wide violence Odium promised into a 

[Dalluminum he/him]

I personally loved the way it worked out. I get where you're coming from, a singer would force an examination of the war, and that would be great. However, my impression of the scene was more that Taravangian was proving his philosophy to Dalinar in the most personal way he could. The conflict was so much more emotional with Gavinor as the champion, and I think that's what ultimately made the scene for me.

[DiePie]

Personally, I assumed El would be the champion until Gavinor fell into the spiritual realm and there were simply too many good options. He's an intimidating figure with an interesting personal philosophy, though honestly I thought the contest would end up being more like the end of WoT, where (spoilers):

Spoiler

Rand and the Dark One create visions to try to convince the other to change their perspectives.

In this case, Taravangian and an ascended Dalinar creating visions out of the spiritual realm. I think there's a line implying that Dalinar thought that would be the form of confrontation also so I'm sure Brandon has thought about it.

 

But I think Brandon wanted to go in another direction with it. When Dalinar visits Nohadon in the vision, Nohadon states simply that his policies have killed people. So I disagree that Dalinar would have refused to kill a Singer, I think he would've killed Gavinor if it brought about total victory (he floats the idea to the Stormfather. But Brandon wanted to illustrate not an individual coming to terms with the crimes of his ancestors and surrendering, but a individual realizing that the problem at hand isn't which option to choose, but instead the system that lead to him having to make that choice. The power itself must change.

 

Though I would love to see a character being forced to confront their anti-singer racism, if you remember back to book 1, Dalinar was the one trying to empathize with the listeners (and sign a truce with them, which almost worked until Odium got to Eshonai first). I don't think this was the place to be having this conversation, especially because under Odium, singers and humans are more or less living in harmony. At least based on what we've been shown; it's unclear how much of the human population remains enslaved.

[clowncarcrash]

As someone said, I think Brandon already invested so much in Gavinor that he couldnt pivot.

 

I love the idea though. The unfortunate effect of Dalinar being written out of the story, is that he didnt really suffer the reckoning he deserved given his war crimes/race politics. I was hoping we'd see that through a Fused Dalinar.

[duladen he/him]

On 12/15/2024 at 10:22 AM, Returned said:

I understand where you're coming from and agree that Gavinor wasn't a very interesting champion, narratively. I've said as much from the earliest days of the "Gavinor will be Odium's champion" fan theories.

On the other hand I think that the narrative point of the confrontation was that the contest of champions really didn't matter, at least not as Tanavast had considered it. So it's fitting that we get an opponent that leans into that: thematically appropriate for Dalinar, and indeed predictable, but the contest was never going to be the actual conclusion to the conflict. I think that it would have been nice to get an opponent that made the contest interesting in some way, though I personally don't feel a random singer would have done that. But the contest ended up being kind of an afterthought that Dalinar had already mostly outgrown by the time he got there, and fully outgrew by its end; the event itself was always kind of pathetic.

All the rest happened anyways. Dalinar considered what killing Gavinor would mean, whether it was or could be worth it (dredging up a topic that the books have already returned to many times), ascending to Honor, realizing that that ascension only gave him the ability to magnify the death and destruction of the war with Odium, and then giving up godhood to stop the war (on Roshar) and force the cosmere-wide violence Odium promised into a 

This is exactly my take. Heck, Gavinor wasn't even involved for much of the confrontation. The whole point is that Dalinar could never win the contest as constructed, because Odium would never agree to one that he could lose, so Dalinar had to find an alternative. The identity of the Champion mattered less than Dalinar's decision to "walk away". I wish there had been more done in previous books to set up the "walking away" but there is a bit, and it was heavily foreshadowed throughout this book.

All that being said, I did cringe when Gavinor was revealed...

[PrestigiousOwl]

One other small note: we do have to see what Sanderson decides he wants to do with Gavinor now. 

If this is everything Gavinor is used for, I do agree it was a meh choice. Might land a little better for folks who hadnt already spent 10 years anticipating the twist, but it definitely wasn't the cleanest. 

At the same time, he may become a more important character in the back half and have a bit of a redemption arc, in which case I think this is arguably not as bad

 

[Ailvara]

For me it all clicked. There was no possible candidate that would have worked as someone having their own arc of becoming an OC champion. The only character that made sense to me before WaT was Adolin, but then he wouldn't fit too well with themes of this book being so much about second chances, and accepting mistakes both in oneself and in others. The only answer then was that the OC doesn't matter - at least as a literary character. The contest is, in the end, between Dalinar and Taravangian, full stop. I really liked how that played out with Gavinor doing just a few streaks for show, all easily avoided by Dalinar, and then got frozen for the rest of the "contest". He's Taravangian's prop, a mirror for Dalinar to look into, and he got just the amount of setup and development that a prop needs. It sounds heartless, but I'm not mad about treating him like this, as yes - I don't care about Gavinor. I don't think we were ever meant to. It could have been any other innocent, but it wouldn't prove all the same points. It forces Dalinar to think if he'd spare him because he's an innocent, or because he's his grandson. In the end, this is not much unlike what Taravangian did to Jasnah, and I like this consistency in approach.

Edit: One more reason why this choice makes sense for Taravangian, is that he's looking for understanding. He's looking for validation for what he did to Kharbranth and his own grandkids, that this is what any king should do. And he comes for it to someone whom, as he says, he respects and considers a friend. Taravangian doesn't choose a conundrum that would be most relevant to Dalinar, but a conundrum most relevant to himself.

Edited December 20, 2024 by Ailvara

[MagicMaggot]

Seeing how it played out in general, I kinda don't understand the contest and its meaning anyways, so I find it nard what champion would have made the scene more interesting. Maybe I forgot some important tidbits, but I can't really wrap my head around the whole thing. 

I mean, I kinda get why the Rosharans  would find the idea of following the plan that THE ALLMIGHTY set out and that promised some kind of solution for the war problem attractive, but well... Wit was heavily involved in pushing for that contest, and he certainly wouldn't have any delusions about Tanavast's infallability, would he? Nor would he be likely to overlook that his good pal Rayse, holder of the shard of unlimited divine hatred, certainly wasn't planning for lasting peace, but at best for invading stuff in the Cosmere instead of the remaining rosharan nations, or more likely, betting on humans breaking the peace anyways at some point. 

And Dalinar going in there with some vague "well, I don't understand myself how the contest is actually supposed to work, and I am permanently giving up on half of Roshar even if I win, and my own soul if I lose, but for some reason I think that it is our best chance for lasting peace and Alethkar" felt to me like we were being given incomplete information, and that the characters surely would have to know more, or that would be some additional planning meeting or something...

The reader didn't even have that much of a stake in it. So... If Dalinar wins whatever that thing is, two nations where no pov character currrently is, and that we haven't actually gotten to know that much as settings, will be controlled by the good guys, and if he loses... he'll be Odium's superpowered champion in a cosmere crusade? I mean, that doesn't really make me cheer for his triumph.  

Well, after TaW, it doesn't seem like our information was really incomplete. The contest was indeed a plan that a not particularly smart dead god set out 1000s of years ago... and the added context is only that it was supposed to be a casting for his successor. When the time came, said successor held the power of Honor for 5 minutes, looked at the situation with his enlarged intellectual capacity,  and enhanced understanding of the cosmere, asked a dead mentor for his opinion and... more or less instantly judged the whole thing to be useless and stupid. 

Well, yes, of course I agree with him. I don't understand why I wouldn't have thought so before? If it wasn't supposed to be useless anyways, we wouldn't have send Dalinar on a divine sidequest into the realm of neverending exposition for basically all of his preparation time. Not that I mind the spiritual realm arc, but it certainly pushed the contest totally out of my mind while reading, since everyone, including Dalinar, was too busy with other stuff to care about the specifics. The contest wasn't treated as an event in itself, it was just a reason for the countdown. 

So when the contest came around I was genuinely a bit surprised that that was still a thing that was supposed to happen, and when it just came down to "here, just murder your brainwashed grandnephew or lose", I was kinda happy that I hadn't been expecting anything, because that would probably have been a letdown otherwise. I do think the "aging up" is kinda stupid, and sets a precedent for the cosmere that I'm not wholly comfortable with, but I don't really think any other innocent would have made it much better or worse. Because it was just so irrelevant. It was all about Dalinar's character moment. 

Edited December 21, 2024 by MagicMaggot

[DSCrankshaw]

On 12/20/2024 at 8:15 AM, Ailvara said:

For me it all clicked. There was no possible candidate that would have worked as someone having their own arc of becoming an OC champion. The only character that made sense to me before WaT was Adolin, but then he wouldn't fit too well with themes of this book being so much about second chances, and accepting mistakes both in oneself and in others. The only answer then was that the OC doesn't matter - at least as a literary character. The contest is, in the end, between Dalinar and Taravangian, full stop. I really liked how that played out with Gavinor doing just a few streaks for show, all easily avoided by Dalinar, and then got frozen for the rest of the "contest". He's Taravangian's prop, a mirror for Dalinar to look into, and he got just the amount of setup and development that a prop needs. It sounds heartless, but I'm not mad about treating him like this, as yes - I don't care about Gavinor. I don't think we were ever meant to. It could have been any other innocent, but it wouldn't prove all the same points. It forces Dalinar to think if he'd spare him because he's an innocent, or because he's his grandson. In the end, this is not much unlike what Taravangian did to Jasnah, and I like this consistency in approach.

Edit: One more reason why this choice makes sense for Taravangian, is that he's looking for understanding. He's looking for validation for what he did to Kharbranth and his own grandkids, that this is what any king should do. And he comes for it to someone whom, as he says, he respects and considers a friend. Taravangian doesn't choose a conundrum that would be most relevant to Dalinar, but a conundrum most relevant to himself.

Agreed. Taravangian never cared about winning the Contest. He fully intended to grab everything else, and would have but for some sneaky actions in Azir and the Shattered Plains, so he didn't care whether Dalinar won Alethkar and Herdaz, if in doing so, Dalinar proved Taravangian right. And if Dalinar lost, he would have also proven Taravangian right by letting him show Dalinar the consequences of not sacrificing the innocent for the good of the world. 

Forcing Dalinar to fight someone who could challenge him would not have proven Taravangian right. Dalinar could have legitimately killed someone in good conscience if they might kill him. But making him kill someone whom he knew was innocent, whose life he couldn't justify taking, was how Taravangian thought he could win. 

[DSCrankshaw]

5 hours ago, DSCrankshaw said:

Agreed. Taravangian never cared about winning the Contest. He fully intended to grab everything else, and would have but for some sneaky actions in Azir and the Shattered Plains, so he didn't care whether Dalinar won Alethkar and Herdaz, if in doing so, Dalinar proved Taravangian right. And if Dalinar lost, he would have also proven Taravangian right by letting him show Dalinar the consequences of not sacrificing the innocent for the good of the world. 

Forcing Dalinar to fight someone who could challenge him would not have proven Taravangian right. Dalinar could have legitimately killed someone in good conscience if they might kill him. But making him kill someone whom he knew was innocent, whose life he couldn't justify taking, was how Taravangian thought he could win. 

Ultimately, I think that's why it couldn't have been Adolin. He may be a very good boy, but ultimately he's not an innocent. Odium's Champion needed to be someone who was not just an innocent, but someone that Dalinar would have acknowledged as an innocent. He knows that Adolin isn't innocent, especially after he killed Sadeas; and if Adolin could have been convinced to be Odium's Champion, one way or another, it would have been a choice knowing the stakes and consequences.

On the other hand, it's impossible for Dalinar to see Gav, who was kidnapped and subjected to twenty years of indoctrination by Odium, as anything but an innocent.

And that makes perfect sense, as long as you remember that Taravangian's goal is not to win the contest, but to win the argument.

[AlmightyGir]

On 12/15/2024 at 11:48 PM, clowncarcrash said:

As someone said, I think Brandon already invested so much in Gavinor that he couldnt pivot.

 

I love the idea though. The unfortunate effect of Dalinar being written out of the story, is that he didnt really suffer the reckoning he deserved given his war crimes/race politics. I was hoping we'd see that through a Fused Dalinar.

I think we will still see that. Given that Retribution has a spiritual doppleganger of The Blackthorn. From that he can create an unmade, or maybe even his own version of a herald... Something whos body in the physical realm is made of pure investiture, but has the spiritweb, memories, personality of The Blackthorn.

[Kadollan]

Not to mention with the implication that he's able to do this to anyone else. Navani, Renarin, Shallan, Rlain. Dalinar he couldnt, because that will infringe on the pact, yes. But why not just pull those other 4 into a "100years in 1hour" vision. They'll instantly die, with no repercussion to Odium.

[christianrapper]

That battle of champions took this whole series down from 9-10 to a 6.5  for me. Choosing Gav as the champion made absolutely no sense. Todiium was lucky that Dalinar even decided to pointlessly go into the spiritual realm. What was he going to do if Dalinar didn’t go there? That won the whole battle for him. Taravangian didn’t do one thing to earn that win. It’s like Sanderson needed him to win so he made Dalinar and Navani idiots for this book. This was some crappy writing. Then all Dalinar wound up doing is freeing Odium which is what Jasnah suggested in the first place. 

Edited December 28, 2024 by christianrapper

[alder24]

2 hours ago, christianrapper said:

Choosing Gav as the champion made absolutely no sense. Todiium was lucky that Dalinar even decided to pointlessly go into the spiritual realm. What was he going to do if Dalinar didn’t go there? That won the whole battle for him.

Taravangian wanted to make a point. He wanted to prove Dalinar that he was right, that his philosophy was the only one providing good answers. For that, Gavinor was not needed, it was just too good of an opportunity to waste it. Without Gav, he would have chosen any other random innocent person from Roshar, whom Dalinar would have been equally unwilling to kill. WaT ch 136:

Quote

“My predecessor worked so hard to find a champion. You failed him, then little Stormblessed rejected the call. His final plan had been to use the traitor, Moash. But what would that prove? There’s no poetry to it.”
[...]
“I could provide you with an innocent you don’t know,” Taravangian said. “A sack over their head, so you don’t have to look them in the eyes, placed on an altar as my champion. Would you pay that price for your kingdom’s freedom, Dalinar? Is that what you’d prefer?”
“Storm you!” Dalinar said, stepping toward him. “There are prices that aren’t worth paying to win.”
“I disagree. No price is too high for the greater good.”
“Just give me a true contest. A real fight.”
“Do you want the world to be won by strength of arm, then, Dalinar? Or would you rather it be a choice between morals?”

WaT ch 137:

Quote

Gavinor was crying. It was such a cheap trick, to use him as a pawn—but at the same time, Dalinar understood the greater message here. Taravangian could have used some unnamed innocent just as easily, as this wasn’t about whether or not Dalinar was the better fighter. It was to force him to agree, one way or another, with Taravangian.
Kill Gav, and Taravangian’s philosophy proved correct. Walk away, and Dalinar would be forced to join him in advancing that philosophy anyway.

While I wasn't a fan of the child champion theory before WaT, I'm fully satisfied with how it was executed. The contest of champions became meaningless, Taravangian has already won either way. Twisting the contest to be about the clash between two opposing morelities both Taravangian and Dalinar represent, rather than having another flashy duel of swords makes much more sense for Taravangian. He's not a fighter, he's a philosopher and a politician. But even though I'm fine with this, I understand while others might find this disappointing - the set up for the contest was enormous, it goes back to the first book, but here it just became meaningless. 

Edited December 28, 2024 by alder24

[DSCrankshaw]

One thing that Taravangian was able to do that Rayse probably wouldn't have been able to manage is offer the nations a better deal. The rulers of Emul, Tashikk, and the rest had met him and considered him an ally as a mortal. They might not have fully understood or believed Dalinar's story of the conflict between the two of them, so when he made the offer of peace on his terms they were ready to consider it, and ultimately accept. It was this, more than conquest, that allowed him to win almost all of Roshar, with the only real battles in Azimir and the Shattered Plains. That is why he could afford to make the contest more about philosophy than victory, as the stakes had become much smaller by then.