Eshonai resurrection

[ArtemisDarchan]

Anybody else expecting Eshonai to come back either physically or as a spren. Although I feel Venli has a good story arch, I feel like there was more to add about Eshonai. Any one else think she might make a come back?

[CrazyRioter]

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Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

Has Eshonai left for the Beyond?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Yes. I'll canonize this. I'm sorry. 

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

*sounds of horror and shock* Noooo, nooooo, RAFO it!

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

You wanted..that was a RAFO-bait but, so I never intended that..if you want to leave this one out there...But I never intended Timbre to be Eshonai's soul. When people said that in the beta, I'm like, "Oh, I guess you could see that, but I mean that's not how spren work, right?"

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

I was going to say, so you're saying Timbre is not Eshonai's soul.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

No. I never even thought they would make that connection. Because we saw Timbre in the previous book. I mean, I don't want to kill people's fan theories. But that one kind of blindsided me in the beta. I'm like, "Well I guess we'll go ahead and let people think that but...no." No.

You can leave that one off if you want to tease people and things. Some people really want to believe that.

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

I made a bet that Eshonai was not only still be alive after Words of Radiance, but would also become Radiant. And then the bet was if not I had to eat a shoe.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Oh no!

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

So I've been trying to get out of it for like...

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Well you could eat a gummy shoe or something like that. 

But no, I didn't intend this. No.

source

 

[Calderis]

Unfortunately, no

Quote

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

Has Eshonai left for the Beyond?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Yes. I'll canonize this. I'm sorry. 

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

*sounds of horror and shock* Noooo, nooooo, RAFO it!

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

You wanted..that was a RAFO-bait but, so I never intended that..if you want to leave this one out there...But I never intended Timbre to be Eshonai's soul. When people said that in the beta, I'm like, "Oh, I guess you could see that, but I mean that's not how spren work, right?"

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

I was going to say, so you're saying Timbre is not Eshonai's soul.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

No. I never even thought they would make that connection. Because we saw Timbre in the previous book. I mean, I don't want to kill people's fan theories. But that one kind of blindsided me in the beta. I'm like, "Well I guess we'll go ahead and let people think that but...no." No.

You can leave that one off if you want to tease people and things. Some people really want to believe that.

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

I made a bet that Eshonai was not only still be alive after Words of Radiance, but would also become Radiant. And then the bet was if not I had to eat a shoe.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Oh no!

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]

So I've been trying to get out of it for like...

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Well you could eat a gummy shoe or something like that. 

But no, I didn't intend this. No.

source

Edit: ninja'd 

Edited August 8, 2018 by Calderis

[Juanaton]

This has pretty definitively been answered with those WoBs, but I'm not sure why anyone was expecting this considering earlier he had said...<nope, don't have time to find the actual WoB right now>...something along the lines of how he didn't want to fall into the habit of making the deaths in his books lose their impact by resurrecting characters. It might actually be in an annotation or something, but he says how he's done it for one character, is about to do it for another or something like that, and that's the end of the "easy" resurrections. I'm pretty sure those were for Kelsier and Jasnah...so yeah.

[IllNsickly]

29 minutes ago, Juanaton said:

This has pretty definitively been answered with those WoBs, but I'm not sure why anyone was expecting this considering earlier he had said...<nope, don't have time to find the actual WoB right now>...something along the lines of how he didn't want to fall into the habit of making the deaths in his books lose their impact by resurrecting characters. It might actually be in an annotation or something, but he says how he's done it for one character, is about to do it for another or something like that, and that's the end of the "easy" resurrections. I'm pretty sure those were for Kelsier and Jasnah...so yeah.

Jasnah was never intended to appear dead... 

There is WoB on that. But i am crem at finding those.

we had enough evidence about Stormlight healing that it should have been obvious that she wasn’t dead from our 3rd person removed perspective. I knew that she hadn’t been killed. 

[Juanaton]

3 minutes ago, IllNsickly said:

Jasnah was never intended to appear dead... 

There is WoB on that. But i am crem at finding those.

we had enough evidence about Stormlight healing that it should have been obvious that she wasn’t dead from our 3rd person removed perspective. I knew that she hadn’t been killed. 

If I am remembering correctly, I linked jasnah with that because of an “appearance” or “fan perception” thing being mentioned...but I might be wrong about to whom it was to apply. For that matter, it might have been about Kelsier and Wax.

[+Extesian]

Here's the WoB you're both referring to. 

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

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.)

source

 

[IllNsickly]

@Extesian

Thank you for that.

The biggest flag for me that Jasnah was still alive was the absence of her body the next time we see the room. 

As for Eshonai, I had some hope that she was still alive after being thrown into the Chasm, but when Venli and Co. found her remains and Shards, she was Dead. If she had somehow come back as a Spren or only been Mostly Dead, it would have cheapend death in the SA for me.

Edited August 8, 2018 by IllNsickly
Wordy things.

[Juanaton]

2 hours ago, Extesian said:

Here's the WoB you're both referring to. 

 

Yes, that’s it. Although for some reason I hadn’t seen the whole thing in one place before, or at least don’t remember it all being together. I had it in separate bits and pieces and so was actually misinterpreting/misrepresenting what he said. Thanks.

[Toaster Retribution]

I’m glad Eshonai died. It was needed after the WoR ending with Jasnah and Szeth coming back. It was also a huge shock, since everyone expected her to survive. It also makes her an incredibly tragic character, in that she became a monster to help her people, and never got a chance to change. 

[Angsos]

With everyone that is dead and not dead in the cosmere, someone needed to stay dead

[cantabile21]

On 8/9/2018 at 5:28 PM, Toaster Retribution said:

I’m glad Eshonai died. It was needed after the WoR ending with Jasnah and Szeth coming back. It was also a huge shock, since everyone expected her to survive. It also makes her an incredibly tragic character, in that she became a monster to help her people, and never got a chance to change. 

And it will be doubly poignant when we get her flashbacks in the next book, to see how she lived her life and made the choices she did, knowing that ultimately she would die and that her death would be final. Her journey has already ended.

i was also never convinced that Jasnah was dead. She just seemed unkillable to me, though i wondered how she had managed to fake her death so convincingly.