[OB] What’s your favourite part about Roshar?

[ICanDream]

Vote for your favourite aspect of the world of Roshar (does not include characters!). 

Edited January 14, 2018 by ICanDream

[Prelude]

I love the Shattered Plains. Urithiru isn’t very interesting to me, I hope we get back out there to the plateaus and chasms. 

[Song she/her]

I love the storms and the stormlight. I think it makes such an interesting premise for a world, and how people and flora and fauna might adjust.

Sprens are fun. I love particularly emotions being expressed by their appearance.

Third is the gender stuff.  The women write/read is such an interesting take on gender norms. I love how as Dalinar learns to read he begins to think the men got the short end of the stick.

And the concept that your left-hand as a women is super racey is hilarious. Those Alethean prudes!

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine he/him]

I had to vote for other because it's really a tie between 5 separate elements of Roshar.

1. Stormlight-This is the coolest magical visualization ever! Magical power trapped in gems, used as a source of illumination and as complex batteries/circuit housings for magical machines, rad! Not to mention how amazing it is in use for Surgebinding. Light that is inhaled, that makes Knights Radiant...We'll radiant. That it steams off of KRs, that it is exhaled in luminescent puffs, again rad.
2. Spren-Collective thought given poetic form, this is SO amazing. Shame spren manifesting like red petals that fall around a person who is ashamed, orange pain spren wriggling out of the ground like clasping sinewy hands, anticipation spren flapping like red banners in the wind. This is living metaphor! I also love that only a small aspect of the spren's true being manifests in the physical realm and that collective ideas exist in a separate realm where they have actually built cites. Freaking rad!
3. Shardblades/Shardplate-The coolest magical weapons and armor ever created. Shardblades are like lightsabers with serious philosophical implications, they can cut through anything but what are they actually doing? I love how shardplate is like a magical mech suit, it's like a Magi-tech suit from final fantasy but without the necessity to bulk up the person using it. I also love how a full shard bearer is essentially an M1 Abrhams tank dropped into feudal Europe. Talk about a serious game changer in the tactics of war 
4. Surgebinding- We're less than a third of the way through SLA, and really there's only one form of Surgebinding that we truly understand, Windrunning. That said, Windrunning is quite possibly the coolest combination of powers for an epic hero to possess that has ever been. Kaladin's fight with the Assassin in White at the end of WoR is one of the high-water marks in all of epic fiction. This said, we do know a lot about how the surges of illumination, transformation, and progression work, but the specifics for these surges haven't been addressed in anywhere near their full operational complexity. We have gotten small crumbs as to how cohesion and division work, but I think Brandon is waiting to explore the full range of possible application until these surges are narratively more important. But given what we've seen so far, I feel confident in saying that the future of Surgebinding is going to be awesome.
5. The Dysian Aimians - Possibly the most amazing alien lifeform created in all of epic fantasy or Sci-Fi. A sapient lifeform that exists primarily as an idea of existence, that utilizes and breeds seperate forms of life to add components to its corporeal body based on its evolving needs is just SO freaking amazing. I also love this alien lifeform because of the philosophical questions at the heart of its existence. What is Identity? What is consciousness? What does it mean to be a composite entity governed by the principle of "I"? This is one aspect of the future SLA books that I most looking forward to, seeing how Brandon addresses, in a taut narrative, some of the deepest questions of philosophy. Again, I have to say rad!

Edited January 15, 2018 by hoiditthroughthegrapevine

[StormingTexan he/him]

This is a tough one. Ultimately I went with culture/history because I think we are learning that Roshar seems to largely be a refugee camp of at least a few different Human races. As well as a couple mixtures of native and non-native races. I find this really interesting considering that Roshar is not what I would call the most habitable planet in the Cosmere for Humans. So why did everyone go to Roshar? It may partly be proximity if all came from a planet in the system but I think at Iriali are not from Ashyn. On top of the refugees you have Singers and Aimians. 

Edit: In my head Aimians are native to Roshar but I remember now they are confirmed to be refugees as well. 

Edited January 15, 2018 by StormingTexan
Spelling

[digitalbusker he/him]

*sings: FAB-rials!

(Despite the ethical implications. I'd love it if we could get a Flintstones-style aside where a painspren sticks its head out of Navani's bracer, shrugs, and says "It's a living.")

[Iarwainiel I she/her]

I voted "Other" because the thing that keeps coming back to me is how BIG Roshar is. Anything we think we have figured out is based on only the small part of the planet and its peoples that we've seen so far. There will be whole cultures, whole races, whole ecosystems, whole systems of supernatural forces that we cannot begin to guess yet - - so much that's hidden, by who we don't know, for what reason we also don't know. Just such rich world building! Looking forward to lots of surprises in vols. 4-10.