Odium and the Royal We

[+Child of Hodor]

I wanted to draw attention to a couple of idiosyncrasies within Odium's speech pattern and speculate wildly and wrongly about what they could mean  

Odium occasionally uses what appears to be the Royal We or Majestic Plural (love that term) and he repeats words and phrases / rephrases the sentence he just said for no reason. 
 

Quote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we

The royal we, or majestic plural (pluralis maiestatis), is the use of a plural pronoun (or corresponding plural-inflected verb forms) to refer to a single person who is a monarch. The more general word for the use of a we, us, or our to refer to oneself is nosism.

 

The Royal We goes along with how he likes to present himself as royalty. He wears a gold crown and carries a scepter he uses to make Dalinar kneel before him when they first meet. This goes along with him (Rayse) wanting to be the most powerful being in the Cosmere which is his motivational for shattering all other shards. The inner fire he shows Dalinar & Venli and Voidlight glow a dark violet color. This seems like the shards natural color, but he likes to dress up in White and Gold and the herald killer knife is white/gold. Shard colors aren't completely consistent, but I suspect the white/gold is part of him putting on airs. 

"No!" Odium screamed ... "No, we killed you. We Killed You!" - Ch. 119 OB 

"Little Man. Why did you write to us? Why did you have your Surgebinder unlock the Oathgate, and allow our armies to attack Urithiru?" - Ch. 122 of OB

Repitition

"Passion, son. Glorious, wondrous passion. Emotion" Ch. 59 Passion

"There, there. That was a smidge too much, wasn't it?" CH. 59 Passion

"Passion," Odium Said. "There is great Passion here." Ch. 116 OB

"Good, good. Let us begin." Ch. 117 OB

"No! No. We Killed You! We Killed You!" Ch. 119 OB

"Kill him! Attack him!" Ch. 119 OB

"Good, good. We understand one another" Ch. 122 OB

Speculation

Perhaps the repetition is Brandon giving Odium a distinct manner of speaking. Brandon is very good at doing this, you can tell the writer of one of the letters is Harmony on first glance because Sazed appends a lot of sentences with "I think". 

The "We" statements are odd, assuming he's referring to killing Honor/Tanavast who is the we? Did the Unmade or The Fused help in some way? Honor died in between desolations before the Everstorm. Odium couldn't manifest on Roshar before the Everstorm and the Fused were stuck on Braize.  But, the fact is he managed to kill Honor while the Oathpact was still, barely, in place. He could be referring to some combination of his team of minions and himself or another party I know there are lots of theories. 

"Why did you write to us?" "Our armies?" We don't know who Travangian wrote the letter to or who it was sent to exactly and the Fused did a lot of work with the armies. Odium isn't shy about sharing credit and praising the Fused in between threatening to destroy them if they don't do what he says (classic abusive relationship). So he could just be talking about the Fused and himself. 

But, let's assume he is referring to only himself and there is some reason why Brandon gave him the weird repetition tic: 

Could it be that while Rayse & Odium are virtually inseparable without killing Rayse, The consciousness that communicates with others understands that it's really a collaboration of two entities? Some cognitive dissonance, so to speak. Or the words are coming from both Rayse and Odium who are on the same page emotionally, but they both want to get their word in even though they are saying the exact or almost exactly the same thing because they are practically the same entity, but not quite. Something is off, that makes him double up almost like a video that's buffering or Shodan from the System Shock games

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZMD_eCpEo

 

Edited February 20, 2019 by Child of Hodor

[Shardbearer]

Actually, this makes me wonder something. A Shard without a Vessel might not normally have it's own sense of identity or personality. We don't really know enough to say for sure...

But I do believe Investiture will begin to gain sentience if there's enough of it gathered together for long enough. So now I'm wondering if the Shard Odium was separate from any vessel long enough to start to have it's own mind, which could be why Rayse is using the "we" pronoun.

I kind of doubt this is the case, considering that Rayse doesn't want to absorb another Shard because that would change him from Odium to something else, but it's an interesting thought.

More likely he really is using it as the royal we.

Or possibly there is a race or culture out there in the Cosmere that uses these types of speech patterns.

[+Invocation]

22 hours ago, Shardbearer said:

But I do believe Investiture will begin to gain sentience if there's enough of it gathered together for long enough. So now I'm wondering if the Shard Odium was separate from any vessel long enough to start to have it's own mind, which could be why Rayse is using the "we" pronoun.

I doubt it was ever separate for long enough to do that. That would be a really long time, and considering how much we know of Rayse's activities, there doesn't seem to be a time where he wasn't hunting Shards or causing Desolations that would be enough time for anything approaching that to happen.