Disappointed in wat a take back of oathbringer

[Isilel]

On 1/13/2025 at 7:54 PM, Treamayne said:

some/most of these brightladies were looking for an excuse to "reject" the Kholin name that was rapidly becoming anathema to the Poltical scene of the Shattered Plains

 

Historically, people tended to take big risks with themselves and their families for the sake of ambition. For good chunk of WoK there was an expectation that Dalinar might step down, which should have upped Adolin's desirability to young ladies and their power-hungry families even more. And even later, there should have been no lack of people willing to roll the dice.

But there is generally a huge disconnect between what Alethi population and marital dynamics should have been and how they are presented in the books. Like, even with apparently low child mortality, average couple should have had at least 3 kids just to maintain the same population levels. And nobles should want sons to carry their family names and inherit their lands, as well as marry relatively early due to the risk of dying in wars.

Yet apart from Davars and the Horneaters we barely see anyone having more than 2 children. Most have one, if any. Most Highprinces appear to be childless and those who are not, apart from Dalinar, have a child apiece. It is not just Adolin, who was still unmarried, but so were his friendly acquantainces of similar ages in WoK, some of whom were already lords in their own right. Which is doubly odd given the repeated insistence on how it was really a married couple or a brother and sister pair which together made an officer and general reliance on women for communication, accounts, etc.

[Schneeente]

On 12/27/2024 at 8:06 PM, Sedside said:

it also gives me the impression of passing the rejected responsibility to someone else like a hot potato. Like "hey, I don't want to do it, let someone else do it instead of me".

Personally speaking: Someone who is not only theoretically willing to die for a cause but is literally dying for it - that's the opposite of rejecting responsibility and the opposite of pushing the difficult part onto someone else. 

If Dalinar had been reluctant to sacrifice himself and instead would have picked the easy way out, becoming Honor and continuing the unwinnable fight for another ten thousand years - would that have met your approval?

Or if Dalinar and Taravangian had done what happened on the last planet, giving more and more power to their followers until the planet got destroyed/uninhabitable - would that have been "taking responsibility" in your opinion? 

 

I'm really curious what you think Dalinar should have done. 

[Nitpicking]

On 1/9/2025 at 10:01 PM, Nitpicking said:

I read it as the exact opposite. Adolin says that promises last even after oaths are broken. That's the whole point of the Forgotten deadeyes coming to help when no human expected or asked them to. Even with the Nahel Bond broken, the oaths renounced, they still feel bound by their promises.

Secret projects spoiler:

Spoiler

Someone liked this message, which made me think again: this is also the realization Sigzil has in Burning Man, when he protects those who cannot protect themselves even though he renounced his oaths.

 

[Elegy he/him]

Stormlight was never about blindly accepting responsibility. It was about taking responsibility for the things you were responsible for. Even at the very start, in WOK, Kaladin is obsessed with the notion that he was in any way responsible for Tien's death - and responsible for all the deaths of the people he "could have saved". The books are very clear that this is something that he has to overcome. None of them died because he did something wrong, they died because they were victims of a cruel and brutal system that uses people as cannon fodder. The situations of letting go of responsibility in WAT are consistent with that line of thought. OB had Dalinar accept responsibility for burning down the Rift, and he did not take that back, in fact, he reinstated that this was his doing and his responsibility. He rejected another kind of responsibility - that he felt responsible for things that were not in his right to meddle with and that this prompted him to treat people in ways they didn't deserve (for example, Elhokar).

Similarly, Szeth's redemption arc may imply that he lets go of the responsibility of his killings, and I understand that this can seem like self-contradiction - Dalinar had to accept that the Thrill did not made him do these things but he himself did them, albeit pushed by the Thrill, while Szeth had to accept that he was being manipulated -, but that ignores the fact that the journeys of both characters are complete opposites thematically: Szeth never rejected responsibility, even when he saw himself as Truthless, he hated himself for the murders and apologized to those he killed, he even weeped while doing it. While Dalinar tried to escape his responisbility, Szeth accepted it from the get-go - that was never his problem, his problem was thinking that he could never better himself.

What I'm getting at is, WAT doesn't take away anything from the message of previous books that you have to take responsibility for what you did. I just emphasizes the fact that it is hurtful and deeply problematic to take responsibilities on behalf of other people - like Dalinar did when he took away Elhokar's power - or to take responsibility for things you couldn't have avoided - like Shallan, who mostly just killed out of self-defense and still beats herself down for that which she could never have avoided, especially the deaths of Tyn and her mother. And, furthermore, to believe that accepting this responsibility means that you can never better yourself and you are unforgivable.

I don't think any of these claims are in any way in contradiction to the first four books. On the contrary, for all the faults of this book, I think the thematic work in this book was a remarkably well-done extention of the series up until now.

[Sedside she/her]

On 1/19/2025 at 10:48 PM, Schneeente said:

Personally speaking: Someone who is not only theoretically willing to die for a cause but is literally dying for it - that's the opposite of rejecting responsibility and the opposite of pushing the difficult part onto someone else. 

If Dalinar had been reluctant to sacrifice himself and instead would have picked the easy way out, becoming Honor and continuing the unwinnable fight for another ten thousand years - would that have met your approval?

Or if Dalinar and Taravangian had done what happened on the last planet, giving more and more power to their followers until the planet got destroyed/uninhabitable - would that have been "taking responsibility" in your opinion? 

 

I'm really curious what you think Dalinar should have done. 

Well, first of all, I don’t think that being ready to die for something equals taking responsibility. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. Sometimes death is a result of being irresponsible, it happens all the time. Secondly, I don’t read Dalinar’s decision as being ready to die for it, his death reads to me as a side effect of his decision, not something he has deliberately chosen, but maybe I just wasn’t reading it carefully enough.

And finally, after thinking about it a great deal, I’ve revised my opinion about it. It was probably my lack of self-awareness that I thought that was the thing I didn’t like. I’m not so good at defining the reasoning behind my emotions as 90% of WaT characters, lol. 

It’s not passing of the responsibility that pisses me off about this contest, but the way it was written. And I am viewing this from the reader’s standpoint, not from character’s. I mean, the most of us pretty much knew Dalinar isn’t going to survive this book, didn’t we? It was pretty obvious he is going to die, it was all about how it will happen. And to me the way it happened was extremely convenient and anticlimactic. He has faced a moral dilemma, and it turned out that the right decision was not to solve this dilemma at all, but find a way out of it. It undermines the dilemma, the contest, the choice of the champion, the Taravangian’s plot about it, everything. Moreover, the dilemma itself and the way Taravangian handled the contest was the entire reason for Dalinar to come up with the decision in the first place.

Let’s do a couple of mental exercises. What if someone else was the champion? Taravangian himself says it didn’t matter, just like he says the same thing to Jasnah after the debate, that he would have taken Thaylen anyway, which undermines the entire debate thing as well. But back to the contest, Taravangian says it is about killing an innocent, but Gav is not just an innocent person, he is Dalinar’s grand nephew and his wife’s grandson. This is the way we, the readers, identify this character. If it was, say, Adin (remember him, right?), it would have been entirely different, and I would definitely be reading it like Dalinar doesn’t want to kill an innocent, but when it’s Gav I read it like Dalinar doesn’t want to kill his relative, just like he didn’t want to punish his son for murdering the highprince. In both cases Sanderson just handwaves the problem by saying «well, this is the right thing to do, so there». If the problem is handwaved, I don’t understand why introduce the problem in the first place.

So, if it was someone like Adin, I as reader would at least be sure that Dalinar is genuinely trying to do the right thing, and not just avoid killing his kindred blood. It would have enforced the moral part of the dilemma. If it was someone like Moash, I as reader would be sure that Dalinar wants to do what is best for the cosmere, because he would have to spare the character almost every reader hates to do the right thing. If it was Adolin, it would enforce the emotional impact of the contest, and give us a really cool Retribution Vessel for the back half, but yeah, sorry, I’m talking about Adolin again, I’ll try not to do this anymore.

Also, the way it happened, should it have happened on the tenth day exactly? I mean, Dalinar could have come out of SR a couple of days earlier, it’s entirely possible by the world rules, manage to meet Odium somehow and then do the exact thing he did, only without the contest at all? In that case I would have said oh yeah, Dalinar is indeed brilliant, and that would really have been a twist. But no, Dalinar comes to the contest, sees that the champion is someone he doesn’t want to kill, then Taravangian freezes the champion to give Dalinar more time to think, and then Dalinar makes his «brilliant» decision. And in this case Taravangian is dumb, because he has set himself up to fail. And if it’s not a failure, then Dalinar’s decision is not brilliant, because he has doomed the whole planet, crippled all the Radiants, could have killed all spren and Heralds, and all just because he didn’t want to kill his grand nephew. But if his decision is brilliant, then it’s not because he is so good and clever, but because Taravangian has chosen the wrong champion to prove his stupid point in his stupid moral dilemma.

But answering your question, in given circumstances I would have preferred Dalinar to kill Gavinor. In my opinion, it would be the only outcome that would justify picking him as a champion from the writing standpoint. But Sanderson doesn’t want any drama in this book, he wants everything to be lackluster and convenient for the plot, so we got what we got.