Should Dalinar not have become a Fused?

[OverlordBob999]

So, while rereading the RoW, I thought that Dalinar should have become a Fused because that is what the contract that he made with Odium explicitly stated. however, as we know, Retribution was unable to claim his soul as it faded into the Beyond, and he was left instead with the Blackthorn spren. Am I incorrect here? Is it stated why this happened?

[Soccorro]

It happened because Dalinar broke all his oaths including that one about contest of champions. So his soul was free from fusedfication 

[OverlordBob999]

Oh I see. Thank you 

[Ninth of the Night]

To be fair, I think Dalinar was originally planned to become a Fused. Based on a WoB we know that one of the characters ended up making the opposite decision from what was initially outlined.

Spoiler

Questioner

As an aspiring author I know how your own characters can surprise you while writing. My question for you was, especially during Stormlight but for any of your books, which characters have surprised you the most by the direction they went, how they affected the plot, etc?

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question! So the way I view this as an author is, I'm a heavy outliner. But I always give the characters volition. I don't know a character until I've seen through their eyes, and as I write things change. I would say Adolin is the most surprising. Adolin was not meant to be a main character. He did not have any viewpoints as I was originally planning The Stormlight Archive, and, as you can see from the books, he has a lot of them. And so Adolin is the big surprise of Stormlight.

I will say, oftentimes, I was actually talking about this to some people in the line just recently, characters will reach a point of decision. And at that point the outline usually will say "have them do this." But I will have written them for months at that point to be who they are at that point and I give them the opportunity to make different decisions. And someone at the end of Wind and Truth made the opposite decision. It's not magical where I'm like "oh the character is alive", no, it's just that who I wrote them to be and how the themes of the plot progressed I realized that at that point they can't make this decision. And so I rewrote their part and revised it to have the opposite decision get made. Once Wind and Truth is out I can tell you what that is. But you will have to read it and see if you can guess who, in the outline, was making a very different decision.

FanX 2024 (Sept. 26, 2024)

This would explain why the Blackthorn Shadow comes off a little messy narratively. It was always the intention to turn Dalinar into a Darth Vader type, but by the end of WaT it didn't make sense for him to make that decision. So instead he "dies" while we still get a version of the Blackthorn who'll work for the enemy. Brandon trying to have his cake and eat it too. It works well enough I suppose.