Which Character Do You Relate To The Most?

[Raelynn]

All the characters in the Stormlight Archive have some very traumatic pasts. While we haven’t all survived countless battles and/or killed our fathers, I was wondering how we can all relate to the different characters in our own lives?

I, for example, can relate to Kaladin’s trouble in Rhythm of War. I didn’t have friends for several months, and I know what it’s like to keep going back to that dark place even when the world becomes brighter around you. It’s hard to remember that things are good when they’ve been dark for so long.

I’d love to here other people’s thoughts!

[coldfuzion76 he/him]

Some of the time I'd say Kaladin, sometimes Renarin.

I really want to help people, sometimes to the detriment of myself like Kaladin tends to.

But I also relate to the loneliness and isolationism that Renarin experiences due to his illness. I grew up a pretty nerdy kid in a rural area, so I was often left out of a lot of activities and such. It led to pretty bad social anxiety, so I've spent a lot of my life alone, and have never managed to have many friends.

[earthexile]

I know she's not everyone's favorite character, but Lift's chapters and the Edgedancer novella hit me like a ton of bricks. A grown man, laid low by a deliberately goofy tween's little adventures in basic, essential compassion. Me and Nale, destroyed together.

To be brief about it, being a kid was kind of weird, being a teenager was awful, and a lot of how I got myself through the lean, lonely part of my early 20s was by disconnecting. If things stressed me out too much or made me afraid, I'd let them drift away. I was barely even conscious of doing so, a lot of the time. Lost touch with a lot of people, lost interest in the wider world and the troubles of the people around me, living in a dreary rut working a pointless job and scurrying home to play World of Warcraft in an undecorated room.

I had no plans. I had a girlfriend who was great, and would eventually join me in making a better life together, but she was away at college most of the time. I was always afraid she'd realize I was worthless and meet someone cooler, so I just tried not to think about it. I tried not to think about a lot of stuff. I let everything slide unless it'd get me arrested or homeless this month. I was existing.

"Wasn't even like being alive."

Getting better was a process of waking up again, caring about things again. Trying again. I had to remember who I'd been forgetting, and listen to what I'd been ignoring. I didn't have those Words, this was all awhile ago now. Coming up on twenty years. I tried therapy, tried the gym, all the things you do to sort yourself out. No one thing really 'did it,' nothing clicked and made me feel fixed, but something about just living as though my effort was worthwhile and imagining that I even could be better began to make a difference. At some point I realized it had made a huge difference. I would look back on my self of years past and feel pity. And I'd realized how just the attempt, just trying right now, was everything I really needed.

And then I stumbled into reading these books, and I could relate to Kaladin or Dalinar or Shallan just fine. But the annoying little Edgedancer hit me like a thunderbolt. I saw my path articulated, examined, and vindicated. Codified and coherent. Sometimes hearing something you already believe can be a kind of revelation, if you'd never laid it out and considered it quite that way. The concept of the Edgedancers has become deeply meaningful to me, and I try to live like it. These days I'm working for a subsidized childcare program, which feels right in a way that my jobs mostly haven't.

And I feel like I know some of what's to come for Lift, because I know what the next step was for me. There is still someone Lift has been fanatically ignoring and forgetting, the same person I was neglecting to care for, for awhile: herself. She has poured herself out on helping and healing, on being the best Edgedancer she knows how to be, but she's also been lonely and starving and delusional a lot. Letting things about herself slide away on the Awesomeness. She is going to have to look herself in the face at some point and realize, that's a person who deserves my attention and care too.