Odium stealing Gavinor

[ashaw596]

How could Odium take Gavinor? I thought shards weren't allowed to take direct action.

[Hexagonal He/Him]

Shards cannot usually take direct action due to this leaving them open to being attacked by another shard. In this scenario, Honor was not in that great of a position to counter Odium's actions. I am not entirely certain if we have a true answer to your question, but at least part of it is due to how unwilling Honor and cultivation were to counteract Odium.

Side note, due to thread topics being able to be seen from the home page, I would recommend renaming the thread to something else. Could be something like "Odium's direct action"

[Returned he/him]

We still have very little information on the specifics of what Shards can and cannot do in general, and we usually don't have a lot of details on extra constraints they have to deal with (like being bound by promises made on Roshar).

You'll find lots of theories here about what the exact limits are. My personal feeling is that we know so little that we're stuck building our understanding from empirical examples only-- whatever we see Shards do, they can do, and we have to revise our guesses about their limitations to accommodate those observations.

Edited May 20, 2025 by Returned

[Jult]

I think you could make an argument that it wasn't a very direct action.

Odium didn't open the perpendicularity to the Spiritual Realm - Dalinar did.
Odium didn't force Gavinor into the Spiritual Realm - he just got sucked in when Mraize disrupted Dalinar's perpendicularity.

They basically giftwrapped Gav and brought him to the place where Odium was most powerful.
Odium did create a duplicate of Gavinor and swap it with the real Gav. That was probably his most direct action. But it was a very small and subtle action. Almost certainly more subtle than the Kharbranth shuffle that he pulled earlier in the book. 

[Through The Living Ash he/him]

To the best of our knowledge, Odium was able to take as direct an action as he wanted as long as it followed the agreement on limiting power given to others. What he did to Gavinor is very similar to what Cultivation did to Dalinar when he visited the Nightwatcher. The reason that the Shards were not intervening that much I believe is that it is a sort of cold war situation - if one starts to take a specific action then the others will too, ramping up the war and generally leading to not much of an advantage, just more carnage. Since the war was going to end really soon anyways, Odium figured that it would be a perfectly safe thing to do. 

[AlmightyGir]

It's likely the simplest explanation:
The contest of champions allowed Odium to recruit a champion for himself. There was no direct stipulation as to how he could go about doing that. And given the timey-wimey nature of the spiritual realm, he likely just talked to Gav for long enough in his child years, to convince him that he could right all the wrongs of his life.

We don't know enough about Alethi (or any other Rosharan for that matter) legal code when it comes to children, particularly princes/kings in waiting, and what they can or cannot legally agree to.

It's highly likely that Big T just convinced Gav to stick around for a bit, and that he could provide the solution to his emotional problems if he did.

[Through The Living Ash he/him]

10 minutes ago, AlmightyGir said:

It's likely the simplest explanation:
The contest of champions allowed Odium to recruit a champion for himself. There was no direct stipulation as to how he could go about doing that. And given the timey-wimey nature of the spiritual realm, he likely just talked to Gav for long enough in his child years, to convince him that he could right all the wrongs of his life.

We don't know enough about Alethi (or any other Rosharan for that matter) legal code when it comes to children, particularly princes/kings in waiting, and what they can or cannot legally agree to.

It's highly likely that Big T just convinced Gav to stick around for a bit, and that he could provide the solution to his emotional problems if he did.

Well, TOdium didn't have to convince Gav to stay, it wasn't like Gav could leave. We know that he impersonated Elhokar to get Gav to listen to him, and showed Gav visions of Dalinar doing cruel acts until Gavinor willingly agreed. Really, Taravangian didn't even mess with Gav, he just altered the visions of the SR around him.