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galendo

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  1. My favorite theory on this: There were originally 16 Godspren: the Stormfather, the Nightwatcher, the Sibling, Cruciarch, the nine Unmade, and three others we haven't met yet. Depending on what happened to the missing three, this would also explain why trying to increase the number of Bondsmiths would be considered seditious: it's not that one couldn't theoretically bond a broken spren (Cruciarch, or presumably one of the missing three) or one of the Unmade, but it definitely wouldn't be good for the potential Bondsmith's outlook or sanity. (I'm also partial to my personal theory that Nightblood's origin accounts for one of the missing Godspren/Unmade; but even I have to admit that the theory, no matter how elegant, is unfortunately probably incorrect. Though if I were writing SA, that would totally be the explanation I went with.)
  2. Welcome to the Shard! We're glad to have you! Unfortunately, I've got to pick at your evidence a bit. The Shin sailor from the rattles saw the future, but so did all the other people who saw deathrattles. There's nothing to suggest that the Shin are special in this regard. The "Shin man" in the Cognitive Realm...have you read any of Brandon's other works? I don't want to spoil anything, but there are some hints that that person not only isn't from Shinovar but isn't even from Roshar. To make a long story short, it's plausible that the Shin have access to future sight in one way or another since they definitely have access to the Honorblades, perhaps the missing Shardblades, and who knows what else (though I think you could argue fairly convincingly that they didn't see the whole Desolation thing coming), but we don't really have any evidence that they do. It's an interesting idea though, and we're glad you're here to share it.
  3. I think the idea is not so much to get Rayse to drop his Shard but to answer the question of "okay, how do we deal with this now-Vesselless Shard of Odium" once you kill him. Having a single person pick it up would be a big problem in the long term, because eventually the Shard will twist the vessel (as we know happened with Ati, who per Hoid was very nice originally). Neither is having it just sit unattended, waiting for someone to come pick it up a good idea, and splintering it (and having as a result a massive number of splinters of Odium running around) isn't ideal either. But with a large group of people you could potentially stretch out the corruption out a long time. Perhaps indefinitely if the ex-Vessels have a chance to heal up in the interim between releasing the Shard and picking it up again. Actually, I could see such a situation functioning rather like the Oathpact: a group of like-minded individuals coming together to solve the Odium problem, each sworn to bear the burden indefinitely, one suffering while the others recover. Unfortunately I also see it ending like the Oathpact: as a bandage on a gaping wound, delaying the inevitable but not fixing the problem. Because any solution that says "we'll just keep this going indefinitely" is eventually bound to fail.
  4. I could be wrong -- I'm not completely up on all the latest and greatest WoBs -- but I'm fairly certain that the Nightwatcher was created pre-shattering.
  5. Ugh, please not Navani. I like her best in small doses. Here's keeping my fingers crossed for Rlain.
  6. Another possibility (which I consider more likely), is that you don't hear screaming from Shardplate because the spren that form the Shardplate aren't dead. It has nothing to do with whether they can't talk or aren't sentient or are a different type than Radiant spren, and everything to do with the fact that although they're trapped in that form, they aren't dead (and don't seem to mind being 'trapped').
  7. My own interpretation is that anyone born in Kharbranth, past or future, would be included in Odium's "protection". He explicitly promises to spare the city, and if he were to wipe out the next generation, he would be destroying the city just as surely. But as for Kaladin, I strongly suspect that while Hesia and Lirin might be under Odium's "protection", Kaladin and his brother would be out of luck. True, we don't know Kaladin's birthplace, but I feel like there hasn't been enough foreshadowing for him to be born there. For Hesia there is, IMHO, but not for Kaladin.
  8. Among main characters, Kaladin is still my number one overall, with Dalinar in number two. Adolin is a fairly distant third.
  9. So one possibility that no one's pointed out yet is that the Honorblades did provide massive amounts of Investiture, but only while the Herald was holding it. In which case shutting off the Heralds' invincibility would be a (comparatively) simple matter of disarming them. Admittedly harder to do with Jezrien or Ishar (might literally require dis-arming them), but still well within the bounds of possibility for a thunderclast or Fused. This would also explain why the Heralds didn't have or need Plate. No need to protect the body when you've got massive Stormlight healing, and Plate probably wouldn't much help an Investiture-filled being grip its Blade any tighter. Might even make it worse, if the Stormligiht-granted strength was more than the Plate-granted strength.
  10. Personally I don't find the new version to be as good as the old version, but part of that might be because I read the old version first, though honestly I think the older one flows better and makes more sense in context. Kaladin's fighting for his life against a known mass-murderer who knows more Windrunner tricks than he does. That's not the time to hesitate or show mercy even if he thinks that Szeth's surrender is genuine. I also think a main reason for the change was to eliminate one of the three "fake deaths" in WoR, which are still casting their long shadow over the series. Unfortunately I think the change doesn't really work in this regard because there's no realistic way that Szeth survives the fall. Yes, the reader doesn't see the body and maybe I'm biased from having read the old version first, but his resurrection-after-supposed-death still seems fundamentally the same as Jasnah's or Gawx's. Personally I think that if one were editing WoR, the best way to "undo" one of the three fake deaths would be to undo Jasnah's. She still has to disappear during the ship scene and Shallan has to believe her dead (too much of the book would need to be rewritten otherwise), but adding a brief interlude scene of her and Ivory fleeing through Shadesmar and explaining why she can't get back sooner would go a long way toward mitigating her fake-out death. The longer she stays missing, the more the reader wonders if maybe she's really dead after all and the more of a fake-out her sudden return is. A two- or three-page interlude could largely fix this.
  11. Does anyone know why January 1 is the deadline for publishing in 2020? As opposed to, say, early January or Jan. 8 or something? I mean, clearly the whole proofreading/editing/publishing process takes time, but I'd think that especially this time of year, taking an extra week or so to finish up would dramatically decrease the time pressure he must be under. I doubt the in-book art even gets started until much later. He's still in rough-draft mode. No use commissioning art for a scene that might need to change before publication.
  12. A gun probably wouldn't work. Too many small moving parts. On the other hand, a Shard cannon seems quite possible and effective. One of the issues with cannons historically was getting them strong enough to not blow up in their users' faces. This wouldn't be a problem with a Shardcannon. Another issue with cannons was portability -- they were quite heavy and difficult to transport. That also wouldn't be a problem with a spren. (The ammo itself is another issue, unless you get a second spren to form the cannonball.)
  13. I'll bite. Why do you think that the fletchings couldn't be made out of metal? I'll admit that Shardmetal as we've seen it doesn't seem very flexible, but I would expect that sufficiently thin strands would be somewhat hair-like. Heck, from what we've seen about spren's ability to change their shape, I suspect the spren could grow, retract, or curve fletchings as needed, granting a minimal sort of guidance/course correction for the "arrow".
  14. There doesn't really seem to be a valid, well-supported love interest that will be happening in the next two books. Not that it's impossible, but I'm kind of hoping that it doesn't happen. Brandon is pretty bad at writing romances, so two books in five probably isn't enough time to do it well, and moreover Kaladin doesn't particularly need a love interest to be an effective character. I can't think of a single character (other than Syl) who I think could be developed satisfactorily as a romance option by the end of book five. After the time-skip will be a different story. While presently the Oaths provide plenty of character development, that won't really be the case in the back five, so there will be more need for interpersonal character development -- and romance is the primary interpersonal character development for good reasons. Therefore I'd be somewhat surprised if we didn't see some Kaladin romance in the back five. Lift seems like a promising candidate, but I would note that after a ten-year time-skip and with five full books to build and introduce new characters, pretty much anything at that point is fair game.
  15. Do we know that Honor had bad futuresight compared to Preservation? And more to the point, do we know that Cultivation has bad futuresight compared to Preservation? Because I'm pretty certain that if Tanavast was trying to make a plan based on foretelling the future, he'd be a fool not to get Cultivation's take on the same.
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