Significance of Death? (spoilers)

[Faceless Mist-Wraith]

In Bands of Morning, it is heavily implied that Kelsier manages to get a Physical anchor and effectively come back from the dead. So what does this mean for the future of the Cosmere? The way things are going now it seems likely that Kelsier will become more involved, which means that the method of his resurrection could potentially become more widely known.

Additionally, in Secret History we see how people with large amounts of investiture tend to take longer to go to the Beyond. Since Brandon's characters often have large amounts of investiture, this means that in the future there could possibly be both means and opportunity for future main characters to return to life.

Does this potentially affect the stories being told? How do you feel about the idea of widespread resurrection knowledge? 

[lyht]

Everything you are saying is true, I believe. However, I think that even if the knowledge were known, it may not mean we get a bunch of people returning from the dead. I imagine that whatever process he uses will be very difficult to pull off, and very hard to replicate, because that is how Kelsier works.

Brandon has stated that he is often worried about having the death of any character not be permanent, because it can take away the level of danger the characters are truly in. He is kind of in that situation already, many characters we thought were dead have turned out not to be, but I imagine he will always be careful about it.

[Calderis]

The timeframe that Kel had to lengthen his stay wasn't remarkably long. The natural extension gained by having used investiture could be counted in minutes. 

Whatever method he's used seems to require one truly remain as a Cognitive Shadow, unless maybe you have all of the implements needed ready and waiting at the time of death, and depending on what's involved that may not be a feasible option. 

SA spoilers 

Spoiler

Healing based resurrection seems to be a much more viable option. Like what happens with Szeth. 

While I'm sure we'll see more resurrection in the Cosmere, I don't think it's ever going to be a "widespread" thing. Death is too natural a part of life. 

While I think in some areas of the Cosmere where healing could become more readily available via tech like magical advances, in applications I don't think it would be all that different from the modern day use of defibrillators. Get there fast and save a life... Or get there to late and they've gone beyond. 

So in short... I don't think this will actually ever be an issue. 

Edited August 9, 2017 by Calderis

[Nathrangking]

To further expand on that it seems that...

Spoiler

Even the resurrection of Szeth by Nale by his own admission had a time limit on it to be effective much like a defibrillator. Further as revealed in the SH most sane people choose to move on even the LR moved on plus the difficulty of it very unlikely that death disappearing highly unlikely.

 

[Toaster Retribution]

I dont want resurrections to be common, and neither does Brandon, as far as I know. I feel like a big part of the suspense goes away if death isn't permanent. For example, whenever I hear that a character from Marvels comics is dead, I'm like: whatever, the character will return in two months or something, no biggie. I dont want that to happen to the Cosmere, but I do think Brandon is too skilled to allow resurrection to grow that huge.

[Faceless Mist-Wraith]

8 minutes ago, Toaster Retribution said:

I dont want resurrections to be common, and neither does Brandon, as far as I know. I feel like a big part of the suspense goes away if death isn't permanent. For example, whenever I hear that a character from Marvels comics is dead, I'm like: whatever, the character will return in two months or something, no biggie. I dont want that to happen to the Cosmere, but I do think Brandon is too skilled to allow resurrection to grow that huge.

This was part of my question. I realize that Brandon doesn't want to make them common, it's just that if we as readers know there is a way for a future main character to return, even if they were to die, does this affect the feeling of suspense? 

[Nathrangking]

I don't think that it does because the complexity of a possible resurrection is such that it would not be common even if the steps were known also Kelsier was one of a kind type of crazy person.

[Calderis]

2 minutes ago, Faceless Mist-Wraith said:

This was part of my question. I realize that Brandon doesn't want to make them common, it's just that if we as readers know there is a way for a future main character to return, even if they were to die, does this affect the feeling of suspense? 

I don't think so. Kelsier was definitely an outlier. 

Unless we have reason to believe a character has been exposed to enough investiture that they would become a Cognitive Shadow, death means the Beyond. We know that there's no coming back from that. 

Characters capable of staying on in the Cognitive Realm should be pretty obvious cases. 

Currently, the only ones we know of are the Heralds, and the Shards. The nature of Divine Breath makes me feel like Returned aren't going to stay if they die. 

So unless we see someone directly wielding the power of a Shard, be it through a conduit like the Honorblades pre-splintering of honor, a Shardpool, or actual Ascension, then their death is permanent unless revived quickly enough that we'll know before we put the book down to discuss it. 

[lyht]

27 minutes ago, Calderis said:

So unless we see someone directly wielding the power of a Shard, be it through a conduit like the Honorblades pre-splintering of honor, a Shardpool, or actual Ascension, then their death is permanent unless revived quickly enough that we'll know before we put the book down to discuss it. 

I think a much more common occurrence will be like Jasnah where we think they are dead, but there are legitimate reasons for them not to be dead, and they pop back up later, "Surprise, rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated!"

[shadowwisp]

Fantastic talk by Brandon about his views and plans for resurrection and death in the Cosmere, with some particular attention to what happens at the Epilogue of Words of Radiance. I am not sure what the spoiler rules are for Cosmere threads so major Cosmere spoilers including Mistborn, Elantris, Warbreaker, and Stormlight Archive:

Spoiler

I've watched this conversation with interest, and wasn't planning to step in, as it's exactly the sort of thread that's generally better without me. Author intervention can derail a good discussion.

But after considering, I decided I did want to talk about this topic a little. There are two things going on here. One is the mistake I made with Jasnah in WORDS, which I've mentioned before. One is a larger discussion, relevant to the cosmere.

Warning, WALL OF TEXT. This is me we're talking about.

You see, Jasnah wasn't originally meant to be a fake-out. Jasnah originally was going to go with Shallan to the Shattered Plains--but she was really messing up the outline, diverting attention from Shallan's character arc and pointing it toward Shallan/Jasnah conflicts instead.

My biggest breakthrough when outlining the book in detail was the realization that the book would work so much better if things I'd planned to do with Jasnah in it were diverted to later books. When that came together, WORDS really started working. Hence her jaunt into Shadesmar. I initially wrote the scenes with it being pretty clear to the reader that she was forced to escape--and it was super suspicious that there was no body.

In drafting, however, early readers didn't like how obvious it was that Jasnah would be coming back. I made a crucial mistake by over-reacting to early feedback. I thought, "Well, I can make that more dramatic!" I employed some tools I've learned quite well, and turned that into a scene where the emotion is higher and the death is more powerful.

HOWEVER, I did this without realizing how it mixed with other plotlines--specifically Szeth's resurrection.

We get into sticky RAFO areas here, but one of the biggest themes of the Cosmere is Rebirth. The very first book (Elantris) starts with a character coming back from the dead. (As I've mentioned before, a big part of the inspiration for Elantris was a zombie story, from the viewpoint of the zombie.) Mistborn begins with Kelsier's rebirth following the Pits, and Warbreaker is about people literally called the Returned. (People who die, then come back as gods.) The Stormlight Archive kicks off with Kaladin's rebirth above the Honor Chasm, and Warbreaker is meant as a little foreshadowing toward the greater arc of the cosmere--that of the Shards of Adonalsium, who are held by ordinary people.

Szeth's rebirth, with his soul incorrectly affixed to his body, is one of the things I've been very excited to explore in the Stormlight Archive--and the mistake with Jasnah was letting her return distract from that.

That said, you're not wrong for disliking this theme--there's no "wrong" when it comes to artistic tastes. And I certainly wish I'd looked at the larger context of what happened when I shifted Jasnah's plot in book two. (Doubling down on "Jasnah is dead" for short term gain was far worse than realizing I should have gone with "Jasnah was forced to jump into Shadesmar, leaving Shallan alone." I consider not seeing that to be the biggest mistake I've made in the Stormlight Archive so far.)

However, the story of the cosmere isn't really about who lives or dies. We established early on that there is an afterlife (or, at least, one of the most powerful beings in the Cosmere believes there is--and he tends to be a trustworthy sort.) And multiple books are about people being resurrected. What I'm really interested in is what this does to people. Getting given a second try at life, being reborn as something new. (Or, in some cases, as something worse.) The story of the cosmere is about what you do with the time you have, and the implications of the power of deity being in the hands of ordinary people.

More importantly (at least to me) I've always felt character deaths are actually somewhat narratively limp in stories. Perhaps it's our conditioning from things like Gandalf, Obi-Wan, and even Sherlock Holmes. But readers are always going to keep asking, "are they really dead?" And even if they stay dead, I can always jump back and tell more stories about them. The long cycle of comic books over-using resurrection has, I think, also jaded some of us to the idea of character death--but even without things like that, the reader knows they can always re-read the book. And that fan-fiction of the character living will exist. And that the author could always bring them back at any time. A death should still be a good death, mind you--and an author really shouldn't jerk people around, like I feel I did with Jasnah.

But early on, I realized I'd either have to go one of two directions with the cosmere. Either I had to go with no resurrections ever, stay hard line, and build up death as something really, really important. Or I had to shift the conversation of the books to greater dangers, greater stakes, and (if possible) focus a little more on the journey, not the sudden stop at the end.

I went with the latter. This isn't going to work for everyone. I'm fully aware of, and prepared for, the fact that things like Szeth coming back will ruin the stories for some readers. And I do admit, I've screwed it up in places. Hopefully, that will teach me better so that I can handle the theme delicately, and with strong narrative purpose behind the choices I make. But do warn you, there WILL be other resurrections in my books. (Though there are none planned for the near future. I took some extra care with the next few books, after feeling that things happening in Words and the Mistborn series in the last few years have hit the theme too hard.) This is a thing that I do, and a thing that I will continue to do. I consider it integral to the story I'm telling. Hopefully, in the future, I'll be able to achieve these acts with the weight and narrative complexity they deserve.

If it helps, I have several built-in rules for this. The first is that actual cosmere resurrections (rather than just fake-outs, like I did with Jasnah) can happen only under certain circumstances, and have a pretty big cost to them. Both will become increasingly obvious through the course of the stories. The other rule is more meta. I generally tell myself that I only get one major fake-out, or one actual resurrection, per character. (And I obviously won't use either one for most characters.) This is more to keep myself from leaning on this narrative device too much, which I worry I'll naturally do, considering that I see this as a major theme of the books.

...

(Sharders, please don't start asking me at signings who has had their "one death" so far. This is me drawing the curtain back a little on the process, I really don't want it to become an official thing that people focus on. Do feel free to talk about the mechanics of resurrection though--it should be pretty obvious now with Elantris, Warbreaker, Szeth, and a certain someone from Mistborn to use as guides.)

Reddit link where this was taken from for more context. Again major Cosmere Spoilers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormlight_Archive/comments/6qcljx/wor_enjoyed_the_book_until_the_end/

 

To sum it up, without spoilers:

Quote

 But do warn you, there WILL be other resurrections in my books. (Though there are none planned for the near future. I took some extra care with the next few books, after feeling that things happening in Words and the Mistborn series in the last few years have hit the theme too hard.) This is a thing that I do, and a thing that I will continue to do. I consider it integral to the story I'm telling. Hopefully, in the future, I'll be able to achieve these acts with the weight and narrative complexity they deserve.

If it helps, I have several built-in rules for this. The first is that actual cosmere resurrections (rather than just fake-outs) can happen only under certain circumstances, and have a pretty big cost to them. Both will become increasingly obvious through the course of the stories. The other rule is more meta. I generally tell myself that I only get one major fake-out, or one actual resurrection, per character. (And I obviously won't use either one for most characters.) This is more to keep myself from leaning on this narrative device too much, which I worry I'll naturally do, considering that I see this as a major theme of the books.

 

Edited August 9, 2017 by shadowwisp

[Thanatos]

I dont think theres many people as invested as Kelsier after to going to the well. 

When he was just a Mistborn invested person his inevitable pull to the other side wasnt that long time wise. Thats why he went to the well. Once he went to the well said pull vanished or became so little he could stay in the CR indefinitely.

I dont think any but Heralds and possibly Returned has the same amount of spiritweb change in the Cosmere.

But then neither a Herald or Returned are anywhere near as invested as Kelsier after the well or even when he took Preservation. Him taking Preservation made him more invested than TLR. Who was the same as Kelsier between him at the well and taking up Preservation. 

Edited August 10, 2017 by Thanatos

[lyht]

On 8/9/2017 at 0:51 PM, shadowwisp said:

Fantastic talk by Brandon about his views and plans for resurrection and death in the Cosmere...

Funny, I found that post and was like "Hey we were just talking about that on the board. I should post a link." To slow!