Is Stormlight really just Electricity?

[Jondesu he/him]

Just now, Eki said:

The rest of Jupiter is also a storm, pretty much. The spot is also, if I recall correctly, a whirlwind. Highstorms aren't, they blow in one direction. I don't think Jupiter is a fair comparison.

Yeah, it was more just to point out that there's freaky weather patterns on other planets.

jW

[kenod]

1 hour ago, Jondesu said:

Are they any more unnatural than Jupiter's Red Spot, though? A massive, unending storm that circles the planet isn't incomprehensible. Keep in mind the geography of Roshar is insane: a single continent set in a massive sea, no other land on the rest of the planet so far as we know. With those conditions, nothing would ever completely stop a storm like that, even if the part over land broke as it does. It might be of magical origin, but I'm not convinced it absolutely must be.

jW

IIRC the Red Spot is slowly getting smaller, and it is also said that by the time the Highstorm reaches the end of the continent it is extremely weak, so it is a lot weirder then the Red Spot.

Edited July 21, 2016 by kenod

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

One way or another, most life on Roshar is engineered around highstorms. They have shells to weather the force of them, and most of them have gemhearts which I believe form a sort of symbiosis to let things like massive chasmfiends not break the laws of physics with their size and proportions. A lot of this depends on where things like the listeners came from... It seems like they were there before humans, and I presume honor and/or cultivation made the humans... We still can't know that the stormfather has been around for ages, but I venture to say that there has always been something weird going on on Roshar, even if this is just the presence of spren. Spren are a sort of fascinating anomaly on Roshar... It's almost like the cognitive realm is more alive, and bleeding into the physical realm a bit.