Crackpot interpretation: BOTH Honor and Odium were equal Big Bads throughout the front half

[Ripheus23]

I wasn't sure, at first, how to parse the thing on the back about "now the power of Honor has begun to ask questions" or whatever it says there. And I'm not actually saying to apply the Big Bad trope to this case: I think on some level, Sanderson wants us to move away from interpreting various specific agents as Sauron- or Shaitan-stand-ins. Yes, he'll have antagonists on the narrative level, but he'll constantly try to hammer home how warped the protagonists are, morally, also. I think Jasnah's debate with Taravangian in W&T is a good example of this, and so is the whole vision of Tanavast and his dark, treacherous past.

So, that's my crackpot interpretation: if you at least hypothetically apply the Big Bad trope to the Stormlight Archive, you end up with there having been TWO Big Bads "all along": Odium, the obvious one, and Honor, the totally-not-obvious one. And I mean Honor as Tanavast, as the Stormfather (who however seems to have atoned for his ways, at the cost of accepting his desolation as a sacrifice in Dalinar's gambit), as the Shard, and as a component now of Retribution, the most dire being in the known cosmere.

At the same time, we are shown Dalinar being shown a vision of the Honorshard as a growing child, so I don't think we're supposed to treat Odium-the-Shard or Taravangian, either, as uniquely "most evil." If Honor can grow and learn, so can Odium, albeit with greater difficulty. Yet so I think the prophecy of letting slip the blade against a child might have had as much to do, metaphorically, with what happened with Gavinor as what could, or even did, happen between Dalinar and the Honorchild: there was a prayer in place that Dalinar would let the Shard go, perhaps unto its destruction, or then its further radical Splintering. Maybe that might have been an "even better" decision than allowing it to fuse with Odium, who knows, but again, I think that we have to be able to hope that Taravangian is, if not entirely redeemable in some mundane sense, yet capable of repenting, among other things. One is minded to wonder whether the solution to Retribution will be to convince it that it has, as a Shard, betrayed itself, so that it Splinters itself completely in the end.

Bonus crackpot theory: the Unmade will figure in the final confrontation, not just as perhaps one or another of the "final-area monster class," but as precipitating Retribution's willingness to punish Taravangian, even at the cost of its own existence. They'll be some of the "fault lines" in the Shard's Spiritweb, hammered apart by the gavel of eternal punishment. They will live, though, and what's more, the myriads of new Splinters will all be themselves alive, and innocent, so that in their new life, they can represent the true atonement for the sins of both Honor and Odium, and Tanavast, Rayse, and Taravangian. (Weird to see now that I put those names so close to each other: why is Taravangian's so much like that of Honor's first Vessel?)

ADDENDUM

1. I think Sja-anat has objective reason (much as we all do, I suppose) to think that there was something very wrong with Honor/Tanavast/the Stormfather, and so of all people, that she might have had some anticipation of Retribution seems perhaps most plausible to me at this time. At least, if I was going to try to rank the plausibilities, here, I might bet on that Ryshadium (or Ranyhyn, as the case may be...). That is, she would gamble on the possibility that a di-Shard of Warlight would inherit Honor's horrible habit of Splintering himself a bejeezus number of times, and Odium's history of Splintering himself a few times, such that Retribution (or whatever she thought its Intent would be) would Unmake itself eventually, so that it would free from itself, by its self-division, spren ripe for her Enlightenment. She would be, so to say, the Herald of the "freespren"(???).

2. Do we have any indication, even in the terms of suggestive gaps in the lore, that zillions of Unmade of some sort or other will be roaming/rampaging across the cosmere in the future? Arguably, the above theory works better if, in fact, the newly-minted Unmade/retributionspren* aren't figures of incalculable nightmare, both individually and collectively. I've also seen some Coppermind stuff about Midnight Essence showing up outside of the immediate Rosharan zone. Now we need some clues as to what Shallan will be up to in the end, and Re-Shephir has been hypothesized to be a former creationspren, like Shallan's armor. So: what will Re-Shephir's role in Sja-anat's plan be? Or BAM's, for that matter? And while we're still sort of on the subject of Shallan, what about the if-mistaken conflation of another Unmade, Chemoarish, with the Nightwatcher? For the Nightwatcher is another one I'd bet on, to play a crucial Sanderlanche role at some point in the back half. I think Lift might be in the lead as a "fan favorite" for a Nightwatcher Bondsmith, I don't know that for sure and I do think it would make for a great scene, but so I wonder if we'd also have Shallan bonding with Chemoarish in a similar way?

*What the heck are these gonna actually be called? Punishmentspren? Faultspren? Sinspren? Guiltspren? Warspren???

Edited January 4, 2025 by Ripheus23