The Diagram is really about TOdium

[coolsnow7]

What sparked my thinking was the following: 

 

Quote

Taravangian: “I don’t have the intelligence right now to explain it to you. Odium will arrange things so that no matter what choice you make, he will win.”

RoW p. 774

Hmm... sounds familiar, but not something we’ve heard about Rayse... 

Quote

He sorted through Odium’s previous plans and saw all their flaws. How had he let himself be maneuvered into this particular deal with Dalinar? How had he let himself rely so much on a contest of champions? Didn’t he know? The way to win was to make sure that no matter what outcome, you were satisfied. 

 

- TOdium talking to himself, p. 1193

Contrast that with what we see Rayse doing constantly: sacrificing the optimal strategy - and his stability with the Shardic power - for victories that, as Wit says, “mean something”. If Taravangian saw in the Diagram that Odium was always going to win because of his craftiness and ruthlessness, he wasn’t seeing Rayse as holding Odium! 

One last point on this subject: we’re constantly confronted with the Diagram being wrong. Every time Rayse tried to make an important move, he - and the Diagram predictions - fail. As Dalinar points out: this is not a source of truth that I would put much stock in! If I were Taravangian I would have ditched the Diagram if I thought that that’s the big bad villain it was warning me about. I would only keep relying on the Diagram if there was a much deeper understanding embedded within it - one which presented Odium held by Taravangian the ruthless, cunning, brilliant manipulator, rather than the (frankly) quite hapless wannabe-show off Rayse.

The interesting implication here is that the fatalism that drove Taravangian was actually not his understanding of Rayse, but his understanding of his future self - a self that existed after Cultivation’s plans to have him hold the Odium shard were already complete. In other words the Diagram is really about TOdium’s destructiveness, which Cultivation clearly did not foresee (or she wouldn’t have arranged events this way in the first place.) 

This leads me to the whacky speculation that TOdium, not Cultivation, was the instigator of Taravangian’s Connection to the Spiritual Realm which brought about the Diagram. Even whackier and/or more speculative: Dalinar the Fused Connected him.