Did they choose their Shards?

[Swimmingly he/him]

Except that we have WoB that Hoid and Rayse were once friends. Feather(?) got it written in her book.

[Pathfinder]

Ah! I did not know that! So then that adds implications to Hoid's character. We've always known his moral compass was one of dubious quality, but if he was friends with an individual who he stated himself always was sneaky and a horrible person, one wonders how Hoid himself once was........

[Swimmingly he/him]

Or Rayse did something very, very wrong that forced Hoid to reconsider the meaning of everything he'd ever done...

[Pathfinder]

Great minds think alike 

 

I don't have the exact quote of Hoid describing Rayse but Hoid did imply Rayse was SNEAKY (correct me if I am wrong) as well as all the other descriptive words he used. Perhaps Rayse played the nice guy when the shattering occured, and convinced the group that he was like Ati, and will try to mitigate the damage. Or at least that is how I see Ati's actions. That he was a good person, trying to lesson the damage of Ruin. Thereby everyone agrees to Rayse getting hatred's shard. Rayse then reveals himself to be the horrible person he is, and thus Hoid....is....PISSED lol. 

[WeiryWriter he/him]

Except that we have WoB that Hoid and Rayse were once friends. Feather(?) got it written in her book.

 

It was Alaxel.

[Kelvin]

I'd be interested to know what he thought of Aona and Lwras

[DSC01 he/him]

I especially want to know about Leras. What if Leras was kind of a jerk? Or a stodgy conservative that was a perfect fit for Preservation? It would be especially interesting if Leras' personality contributed to Ati's corruption.

[Observer]

The fact that sixteen people who all just so happened to know one another wound up holding a monopoly on Shardic power tells me that not only were all of them directly present for the Shattering, but almost certainly had a hand in causing it or defending against it. Could be that they were on two ends of a war, and when the dust settled random members of each side scrambled to grab a Shard, like the people in front of Feverstone Keep if the enemy army had been there with them in the Sword Forest.

[DSC01 he/him]

Yeah, that's what I think, too. I don't really imagine it as a war, but who knows? I suspect that Rayse and Bavadin were the architects of the shattering, and that's the source of Hoid's grudge.

[Swimmingly he/him]

I just remembered mistakenly thinking Feather got that once before. Someday, I'll hammer it into my brain.

[aeromancer he/him]

Perhaps Rayse + Hoid friendship tells us more about Hoid than it does Rayse. Hoid currently appears to be 'good' (I use the word loosely) however he is working towards a specific goal. Perhaps to right an ancient wrong he perpetrated with Rayse?

[Levian]

I've been wondering about Shardic Intents lately. We've been told that the Intents of the Shard doesn't always align itself with the nature of the person who holds it. I doubt they knew the intents of the shards when it was first shattered and they chose them (if they did indeed choose them willingly). I know it doesn't quite fit but I've been wondering if a person's personality focuses a Shard when they first picked it up after the Shattering, and it magnifies to become the Shard's Intent, until it is so powerful it become all consuming to the person holding it.

 

I know we've been told the Intent doesn't always match the personality of the Holder, but do we know if that is true? It could just be one person's flawed opinion. We know there have been similar situations where we've been told something by a character, only to be shown down the road it was wrong, but what they believed at the time. 

 

Maybe it doesn't even have the be the person's personality, possibly just the first feelings they had when the picked up the Shard, and those feelings got picked up and magnified. Because why would pieces of a massive source of power have Intents so similar to feelings and emotions naturally? If they were all combined before Adonalsium shattered and sort of balanced each other out I could see it being possible, but it seems to me Adonalsium, and Shards, aren't (or weren't originally) things capable of emotions, or Intents. It was most likely originally just a source of massive power. 

 

It sort of makes sense if you don't look at specific Shards where the Intent doesn't quite line up with the Holder's personality (but like I mentioned earlier, maybe some of the Shard holders weren't as well known to their friends as they thought. Possibly with secret, unshared feelings). The majority of the Shards seem very close in Intent to the Holder's personality, or as close as you could expect it to be after the Intent of the person was magnified by the Shard. Sort of how Naln was all about justice, but after abandoning the Oathpact it became his absolute focus until he started acting on a corrupted idea of justice, I think the Shards were only capable of one Intent, so the one that it picked up just kept magnifying until that became the Shard's whole purpose.

[Observer]

It should be worth noting that Brandon has told us that Adonalsium could have broken into a different set of intents if things had gone a little differently. This implies to me that the intents were already a part of Adonalsium, that Adonalsium was sentient (Like most Investure of that size)and/but balanced in the goal of that sentience. When its spiritual Investure split mostly evenly, and the cognitive aspect that was once rounded broke off into sixteen blends of various base emotions, ones that could have just as easily been other things. I don't think the original holders created the intents. It makes more sense to me if they were already there.

[DSC01 he/him]

Oh, hey! What if Rayse and Bavadin aren't allies? That the 16 Shardholders may not have known each other that well may suggest a conflict between them, pre-shattering. What if Hoid's grudge isn't because he's mad at a particular faction? What if he's mad about the outcome of the conflict in general, and Bavadin and Rayse were actually the leaders of opposite sides?

 

I know I'm drifting off-topic here, but it is related to where the discussion has been drifting and didn't seem worth starting a whole new thread over.