Shardcast: Stormlight 5 Prologue Reactions!

Q: What does Stormlight Mario use to power up?

A: Ba-Ado Mushrooms.

The most confusing thing to me from the prologue: the Unmade are of Odium; why would the Heralds speak of betraying Mishram, and not defeating her?

A thought I had when y'all were discussing BAM: 

They discuss that if they didn't bind BAM it had world-devastating/destroying consequences, this sounds a lot to me like Ashyn. We know that Ashyn was destroyed by unbound Surges and these powers over the raw forces of nature being thrown around without restraint. Perhaps when BAM granted forms of power to the Singers in the False Desolation a similar sort of cascading effect of unbound Surges threatened Roshar. That's just my 2 second crack theory. 

Great episode, but I wish you had someone defending the Stormfaker theory. With a poll saying 70% of people didn't believe it was truly the Stormfather, having someone argue the popular other side would have been fun (or at least go over the points people have against it being the Stormfather). A lot of the viewers dont think it was the Stormfather, so no discussion of the other side was odd (especially when not-Chana got time). 

1 hour ago, teknopathetic said:

Great episode, but I wish you had someone defending the Stormfaker theory. With a poll saying 70% of people didn't believe it was truly the Stormfather, having someone argue the popular other side would have been fun (or at least go over the points people have against it being the Stormfather). A lot of the viewers dont think it was the Stormfather, so no discussion of the other side was odd (especially when not-Chana got time). 

Sure, but we just don't believe that. I don't think anyone on Shardcast thinks that is plausible, so there's no one to genuinely argue for that point. (Sorry to those who believe it isn't the Stormfather!)

5 minutes ago, Chaos said:

Sure, but we just don't believe that. I don't think anyone on Shardcast thinks that is plausible, so there's no one to genuinely argue for that point. (Sorry to those who believe it isn't the Stormfather!)

I will defend the StormFaker and the now infamous Chana theory I put forward anytime haha! But thank for another great episode! I know you all must be working overtime on these like mad

It's okay to be wrong (Though I like Chana at this point.) Things will be winding down a bit in Shardcast land, which is nice. Not quite as busy anymore.

Cant wait to see who is right! Though you seem so sure I am a bit worried you have some beta-reader information or something from another book haha

Great episode, I didn't pick up on that Death rattle actually coming true as we saw it happened so kudos on that.

My theory is still that BAM was/is the spren of Rhythms, I'm working to flesh it out how her imprisonment has caused deadeyes and slaveform parshmen 

Great episode all around! I particularly enjoyed the Stormfather discussion and the discussion on the Heralds' timeline.

Regarding the so-called "female Herald problem" (Shalash and Battar: "What are we to you?")

It's entirely fine for them to be off doing other things (yes, including giving birth to Shallan)! The male Heralds we've seen are all doing things which fit their characters/madness and it wouldn't make any sense to swap them around for another Herald in the name of "inclusion" or some other meaningless platitude. 

Think about this: In a society like Ashyn's which can produce a man like Taln - who essentially represents the peak of masculinity in the series thus far - no woman would have been allowed to carry the burden of being a Herald. The chivalry of men (or even just Taln) would require self-sacrifice before letting a woman put herself at risk.

So, if you can suspend your belief enough to accept that half of the Heralds are female, you can probably manage to suspend your belief enough to accept that their plot threads (again, sans Shalash, Battar, and now Chana) have not been relevant yet. 

tl;dr Let Brandon tell his story the way he has it planned out, you'll like it.  

8 hours ago, EddyJ said:

Great episode all around! I particularly enjoyed the Stormfather discussion and the discussion on the Heralds' timeline.

Regarding the so-called "female Herald problem" (Shalash and Battar: "What are we to you?")

It's entirely fine for them to be off doing other things (yes, including giving birth to Shallan)! The male Heralds we've seen are all doing things which fit their characters/madness and it wouldn't make any sense to swap them around for another Herald in the name of "inclusion" or some other meaningless platitude. 

Think about this: In a society like Ashyn's which can produce a man like Taln - who essentially represents the peak of masculinity in the series thus far - no woman would have been allowed to carry the burden of being a Herald. The chivalry of men (or even just Taln) would require self-sacrifice before letting a woman put herself at risk.

So, if you can suspend your belief enough to accept that half of the Heralds are female, you can probably manage to suspend your belief enough to accept that their plot threads (again, sans Shalash, Battar, and now Chana) have not been relevant yet. 

tl;dr Let Brandon tell his story the way he has it planned out, you'll like it.  

I will preface that the existence of female Heralds is not only realistic but expected, in my opinion.

From Tanavast's point of view, it makes sense that he also raised female Heralds as he knew first-hand what women can be capable of. There are female Vessels, especially Koravellium Avast who is his partner and settled on Roshar with him, who was as perfectly capable of shattering Adonalsium as the other Vessels. Most importantly, he did not have your proposed Ashynite misogynistic cultural bias, if that even existed, because he was not an Ashynite. He wanted a well-rounded team and if the best human in a particular field is a woman, who was he to deny her Heraldhood?

From the Ashynite point of view, I do not think that Ashyn has a medieval sense of chivalry and, even if it had one, that it would survive the destruction of the planet. After all, Chana was a soldier and Jezrien let his potentially really young daughter be a Herald alongside him. I would like to emphasize the latter point as I believe Jezrien as the Herald of Kings, as opposed to Taln as the patron of soldiers and who was a commoner, would be the pinnacle of masculinity just like how kings were supposed to be a paragon of masculinity in the medieval era. If the traditional pinnacle of masculinity is down to not only having women suffer through warfare and later Damnation with him but also having his own daughter be counted among their numbers, what does that say about the culture if said culture is patterned after medieval Europe? What is more likely is that the Ashynite refugees have a shared appreciation for self-sacrifice and personal courage from having to survive an apocalypse.

Moreover, we know that the Heralds underestimate how much suffering being a Herald would bring to them and as such, I think the immortality aspect of being a Herald was more of a selling point to them. This was a culture that must have lost a lot of knowledge from the destruction of Ashyn and knows that they will probably lose some more knowledge because of the early Desolations and that would make immortalizing their foremost scholars and healer an appealing choice. Plus, said scholars and healer now have access to Surges which included Progression and Transformation. They might not be warriors but neither was Ishar and they can significantly bolster the support system of the more martial Heralds and the soldiers. A pretty good deal for the society, a little less so for the Heralds. Who are they to stop Pailiah, Vedel, and Battar from becoming Heralds and allow inferior colleagues who happen to be male to take their place?

For Taln in particular, I don't think his sacrifice came from a culturally ingrained sense of chivalry. It was just him being the best guy ever and having a very substantial self-sacrificial streak. If the Heralds came from a culture of medieval European chivalry, why would Ishar, who I will note is a male Herald, venture out and mess around with the Oathpact Connections to sever himself and the other Heralds from it and why would the other male Heralds except for Taln be down with it? That does not sound particularly chivalrous of them.

All in all, I do not think female Heralds is a stretch of the imagination for multiple in-world and unmentioned Doylist reasons.

N.B. I think Battar could have a Nale-style murder nascent Radiants as her madness or be his partner-in-(not) crime because her attributes are wise and careful which can lend itself to paranoia and utilitarianism.

I feel like there's a fairly obvious theory here that wasn't brought up- When Kelsier says that the Ghostbloods have put something into motion, he's referring to the Herald's death. (Which does of course make me think of a certain place where we know there was a Seon and Ghostblood agents and suspect that there was a Herald, but it doesn't have to be there; there were a bunch of Heralds around Kholinar and therefore within Thadiakar's reach, and the Ghostbloods might have other Seons.)

But regardless, it would make the timeline feel a lot less coincidental. A Herald did just coincidentally die the same night as Gavilar set a dozen plans into motion, she was killed by one of said plans.