[OB] On pacing, and what is yet to come

[shawnhargreaves he/him]

This is a post of two parts.

 

Part 1:  Attuning Praise

Of the many things I love about Oathbringer, a big one is Brandon's mastery of pacing.  As fans of epic fantasy, we appreciate the depth and complexity that can only be developed when a story spans many thousands of pages and is revisited over many years as successive novels are added to a saga.  But we've also seen countless examples of just how hard it is for a writer to keep control of a story of this magnitude.

Most often, giant stories sag in the middle.  They open strong as characters, challenges and worlds are introduced.  Things slow as these existing elements are maneuvered into position, ready for the finale to pay out with an intensity far beyond what a shorter, simpler story could achieve.  We're all used to (and generally forgive) trilogies where book #2 is the weakest of the three.

Some writers try to overcome this by resolving plot elements early and often, then introducing new ones to replace them.  The danger is this can devalue everything: here lies soapyness.  You end up with many small stories strung together, rather than the epic scale we crave.

Others overlap large numbers of simultaneous elements, so that some can periodically be resolved while others continue.  The risk here is overwhelming or confusing the reader, who can no longer tell which things are most important to pay attention to  (here's looking at you, last couple of ASOIAF books).

Now that we are three books into what is by far the largest and most complex story Brandon has attempted to date, I love how masterfully he has avoided these pitfalls.  Important developments and massive revelations occur all the way through the book, but everything felt earned to me.  I never found myself confused, or emotionally underinvested because something important came out of nowhere, or unsure where the story could go next because too much had been resolved too quickly.

I've been thinking about why pace feels so right to me in Brandon's writing, and believe there are two main elements:

1. Moving big things forward slightly faster than I expect.  Momentum = excitement.
2. Having even bigger things waiting to replace them, which have already been carefully prepared, but in a subtle enough way that they did not distract focus too early.

The interludes are part of this, giving a structural mechanism for presenting information in a way that makes it clear this is background richness for now, even if it may become important later.  But Brandon is also just very good at hiding things in plain sight, writing what appears to be neat worldbuilding flavor but later combines with some other detail to become a Plot Critical Big Deal.

A tour de force of pacing in this book was the speed at which he moved from disclosing that humans were the original voidbringers, to showing this in action as Odium took control of Amaram's army, then taking the same idea further as Odium attempted to make Dalinar his champion.  All of this occurred in rapid succession during the avalanche, but each step was so well prepared that it made total sense and the twisty/revelatory aspects enhanced rather than distracting from the emotional impact.

Well done, sir.

 

Part 2:  Mistrust Anyone Who Claims To Predict The Future

We got so much new stuff in this book:

1. Multiple people interacting directly with Odium.
2. Seeing not only the Nightwatcher, but also Cultivation in person.  Learning what she was up to with Dalinar, plus major clues that she is attempting something along similar lines with Taravangian.
3. What's up with listeners and Stormform and being controlled by Odium.
4. Cause of the Recreance.
5. Who Odium picked as his champion.
6. Meeting, fighting, and defeating several of the Unmade.
7. Confirmation of many popular theories (Oathpact, Desolations, Skybreakers, Sons of Honor, Helaran...)
8. Meeting multiple Heralds.
9. How squires work.
10. Spending time in Shadesmar, and seeing how society functions there.
11. Watching a Larkin in action.
12. Lift joins the main stage!
13. I can't even remember what else.  So, so much.

We are now 30% of the way through the Stormlight Archive.   But let's ignore that for now and consider only the first 5 book arc.  We can assume that Brandon will not reduce pace - if anything it will probably increase.  He's certainly not going to quit with the Big Reveals to focus purely on character development or resolving existing challenges.  So we can expect two more books, each containing at least as much as the above list.

I started enumerating the obvious remaining "known unknowns":

1. Aima and Aimans.  Scouring thereof.  What secret is hidden there which could "destroy worlds"?
2. Voidbinding.  How exactly does it work and what can it do?  (fwiw I believe the Fused are using Surgebinding, not Voidbinding at all...)
3. Dawnshards.
4. Braize and Ashyn.
5. The Ghostbloods.
6. Ryshadium.
7. What shattered the plains?
8. Why is one of the Unmade missing?  (is it captured beneath Kholinar?)
9. How, why and when were the Parshendi enslaved?
10. Of course we still have more Heralds to meet, and surges to learn details about, and oaths to be spoken.

That's a decent list, but not twice as much as what was revealed during OB (and nowhere near to 7x as much, if we also include the second Stormlight arc).

So, basic math says there are more secrets yet to be discovered.  Knowing Brandon, many of these have already been extensively foreshadowed, or are hiding in plain sight.

Some wild guesses about places I suspect they might be lurking:

The death of Honor.  This appears to have happened some time after the Recreance, but the only real mention of it is information from OB that in the time before he died, Honor became unstable and told the Knights Radiant they might destroy everything.  Surely killing a Shard who is invested on a planet is a massive deal that would be hard for anyone living there to miss?  Other big events from Roshar's history (the Desolations, the Recreance) are reflected in its history, religions, and myth, but not the splintering of a Shard?  Huh.

Odium in OB was not what I expected, and Honor appears to be darker than I expected.  Are there deeper misunderstandings about the nature of these shards?  I was chilled by the moment when Dalinar finally remembered the Rift (one of the worst things I have read about in quite some time!) and Stormfather says "sure, I have no problem with that - they attacked you, so you killed them - this is honorable."  I also noted how Odium placed a high value on getting Venli to spread misleading propaganda to the former parshmen.  History is written by the victors, and all that?

Cultivation.  She played a key part in Dalinar's victory over the Thrill, and appears to be behind the Diagram as well, but this is a full active Shard we are dealing with here.  What else is she up to, and what's her end goal?

What really caused the Recreance?  There's already a thread speculating that we didn't get the full story in OB  (or possibly not the truth at all).

If humans arrived in Shinovar first, then later broke an agreement to invade the rest of Roshar, why are Shin a different ethnicity from all other Rosharans?

We don't know the details of how humans and singers switched allegiances between Honor and Odium, or how the Oathpact was set up.  Devils may be hiding in these details.

Rosharan biology is weird.  There are strange connections between things like sky eels and santhids.  The chasmfiend lifecycle is not understood.  Parshendi have gemhearts - does that mean they pupate like other Rosharan species?  Brandon spends significant page space on these things without fully explaining any of them.  Seems important beyond just background worldbuilding color.

Edited November 23, 2017 by shawnhargreaves

[Stairdweller he/him]

I also am suspicious about upcoming big reveals.  Here are some I'm wondering about:

 

1. Urthiru.  Why did they build it way up in the mountains like that?  Why was it abandoned?  Why did it start to "die?" (Before the KR abandoned it.)  There's an epigraph that says it couldn't be built in Alethela for 'obvious reasons.'  But, the KR from Dalinar's vision said they lived in cities across Alethela, even though the vision took place in Natanatan.

 

2. The Origin.  What is the origin of storms?  I don't think it can be anything to do with Honor because a. Highstorms are an imutable part of Rosharan ecology and b. the epigraph I mentioned said that Urithiru (west of jah keved) is closer to honor than Alethela (which is closer to the origin of storms.)  Also Brandon has made a point of bringing it up pretty frequently - most recently Rysn's ship being called the Wandersail.

 

3. All the lovely people.  Rosharans aren't just ethnically diverse, they're downright weird.  Horneaters (crunch the shells!) and herdazians (flick my sparks!) owe their unusual features to Singer heritage.  But why are Iriali golden?  Why do Thaylens have long eyebrows?  Why are Natans blue - and why _weren't_ they blue during Dalinar's vision?  (I have a hypothesis about this.)

 

4. Rall Elorim.  I feel like this city gets mentioned too much to not be important.  Personally, I like to think this was the city built inside stalactites Kaladin saw during his storm vision in Way of Kings.

[shawnhargreaves he/him]

@Stairdweller, I agree all those are both highly suspicious and likely important.

2 hours ago, Stairdweller said:

All the lovely people.  Rosharans aren't just ethnically diverse, they're downright weird.

The crazy biological diversity, with associated cultural, religious, and linguistic differences, suggests that Roshar has seen multiple waves of immigration over a long period of time.  Older groups like the Horneaters were pushed out into less desirable territory (Rock even tells us the tale of how that happened) - very much like how eg. the Picts ended up in the northern tip of Scotland when pushed out by the Celts, who in turn were being pushed by Saxons...

I'm intrigued by how distinct each group has remained, though.  There is some blending (eg. Horneater blood in some Veden family lines) but nowhere near as much as we'd see on Earth after such a long time period.  Cultivation influence, perhaps?  Gathering up interesting species, planting each one in a different corner of your garden, and pruning occasionally to make sure they stay put over time, is exactly what gardeners do.   Shinovar in particular reminds me of wandering around Kew Gardens and marveling at how those Victorian engineers managed to build a heated greenhouse to keep tropical ferns alive in a climate that otherwise would have been far too hostile for them to survive.

Multiple waves of immigration casts doubt on the human origin story we learned in OB, though.  That sure seemed like Parshendi were writing about the very first humans they had seen.  At minimum our understanding would be incomplete if there were later waves of different arrivals - and if not all humans came with Odium in that first batch, this would massively undermine the explanation we were given for what caused the Recreance!

I have wondered before if multiple sets of immigrants arriving at different times correlates with the desolations?  Each time was newcomers vs. everyone already there..

[Shuffel]

Is the missing unmade in the stone Szeth is given after he murders Gavilar?

[shawnhargreaves he/him]

13 minutes ago, Shuffel said:

Is the missing unmade in the stone Szeth is given after he murders Gavilar?

I thought so at first, but then remembered Gavilar had at least two such stones.  He gave one to Szeth (in the WoK prelude), and another to Eshonai (in the OB prelude).

My new theory is that the missing Unmade is somehow trapped under Kholinar.  This is why we see the Fused at the end of OB dismantling a particular part of the palace - they're trying to find and release it.  Gavilar knew about this, and used the trapped Unmade to fill a number of black stones with Voidlight (for purposes as yet unknown).

[Stairdweller he/him]

35 minutes ago, shawnhargreaves said:

My new theory is that the missing Unmade is somehow trapped under Kholinar.  This is why we see the Fused at the end of OB dismantling a particular part of the palace - they're trying to find and release it.  Gavilar knew about this, and used the trapped Unmade to fill a number of black stones with Voidlight (for purposes as yet unknown).

So, that would mean that there were, at one point, four out of ten unmade hanging out in Kholinar?  (Sja Anat, Ashertmarn, Yelig-nar, and a 4th trapped unmade.)  Plus Nergaoul likes living in Alethkar.  I wonder if there's a reason for so many unmade in this area?

Side note: could Sja Anat be the trapped unmade, and that is why she appears in mirrors instead of physically like everyone else?

 

@shawnhargreaves I like the idea of human monoculture "crops."  I'm also kinda curious about the kinds of non-human introduced species we see.  Some make a lot of sense - horses, cows, pigs, (domestic) chickens probably were introduced on purpose.  Rats follow people everywhere.  But what about mink and (parrot) chickens?  And all the plants in Shinovar.  It seems like that would be an incredibly complex undertaking.  Did the introduced humans have help?

[Dryone_2]

I think the Aimians were entrusted with the dawnshards when the humans arrived on Roshar. Obviously you couldn't let the humans keep those and destroy _another_ planet. Instead they got 10 honorblades which are more limited (theory: Dawncharts give access to all surges).  When the KR appeared, Ishar was hellbound to limit them with ideals, lest they destroy Roshar. 

[shawnhargreaves he/him]

I think "mink" just means "small non-rat mammal" on Roshar, the same way "chicken" means "bird".   The one Dalinar saw when he climbed up and looked into the ventilation ducts sounded a lot like a cat.

[Stairdweller he/him]

5 hours ago, shawnhargreaves said:

I think "mink" just means "small non-rat mammal" on Roshar, the same way "chicken" means "bird".   

 

Yeah, I thought about that.  It makes sense, with the way Adolin thinks an image of probably-a-lion was "minklike."  But there would still have to be minks around for them to be the species that mammals all got named after.

 

But oh!!  I just thought of something.  Adolin sees a mural of a lion in Urithiru.  So some of the KR knew what a lion was.  Was it because...

 

1. lions used to inhabit roshar but died out?

2. Lions are limited to Shinovar and the mural-maker was either Shin or had visited Shin?

3. It's a remnant of a "fantastic beasts" legend that lasted into Urithiru's days but has since died out?

4. It was made by someone who was personally experienced with a non-Roshar world, that has lions? 

 

Edit: but I think the animal Dalinar saw really was a mink, or at least a weasel-oid of some sort, because he calls it "tubular."

Edited November 24, 2017 by Stairdweller