galendo

Sadeas. Torol or Ialai, take your pick.

Okay, forget all this boring racism stuff. Let's get back to the really interesting topic in this thread: languages. (Disclosure: no Stormlight stuff here. I've been meaning to write this response for a while but haven't had the time. If you're not interested in contemplating languages and their pros and cons, you're probably best off skipping this post.) Is this really true? Aren't there some languages where the inflections on the words indicate the part of speech and the words can be put in any order? I think I've read that old Icelandic did something like that. I mean, Japanese almost does something similar with its particles, with the primary exception that the verbs always come at the end of the sentence. I guess I'd just find it strange to think that all languages had a fixed word order. It certainly doesn't seem like a requirement. It would probably say something interesting about human thought patterns if true. I admit I'm not quite sure that I'm following what you're saying here. I mean, I get that the sounds themselves don't much matter. Like, if the word cat in my language is "blern" and in your language it's "smeth", then clearly one language isn't better or worse than the other. But if cat in my language is "blern" and your language doesn't even have a word for cat, then clearly my language is better at discussing cats than your language is. You'd better come up with a word for cat if you want your language to be as awesome as my language. So if French had hundreds of different words for foods and cooking methods over Middle English, then yeah, I'd say that French would have been the better language to discuss food in. Assuming that French and Middle English were otherwise equivalent (which might or might not have been true, I really have no idea), then I'd say that French was a better language than Middle English. Vocabulary matters, at least as I see it. All other things being equal, it seems the language with the larger functional vocabulary should be considered better. The language that doesn't have as many words needs to catch up before it can be considered equal. Doesn't it, though? Say I realize that I'm out of blue paint, so I ask my friend to pick some up when he goes to the grocery store. If he comes back with a tube of green or even a tube of teal, I'm going to be kind of annoyed. Or if I request someone to pour me a cup of tea in my personal mug, and they ask which mug that is, sometimes it's just easier to say "the blue one" than to describe it as "the one that doesn't hold quite as much as most of the others, kind of tapered near the bottom, with a large handle." Functional vocabulary matters, and more is better. Babies have to be taught everything. I'm guessing you're saying that it's harder for babies to learn color than it is for them to learn shapes, which may be true but I'm not sure whether that's relevant. I admit it's been several years, but I'm fairly certain my niece could eat all the Skittles/jellybeans/licorice/Starburst of a specific color out of a batch before she knew the formal words for what colors they were. It's not a burden in the "extra work" sense, but it is a burden in the "I'm forced to mention this" sense. Like, suppose I'm fine letting you know that I have a child, but for personal reasons I don't want you to know whether it's a boy or a girl. In English, I can just say "my child", but in Spanish I have to specify "my boy" or "my girl". By forcing me to mention the gender of my child, the language is taking away my freedom to withhold information. I guess it's really just the vocabulary problem again, flipped on its head (and due to pervasiveness, probably much harder to correct). By not having a gender-free word for child (or neighbor or cousin or...), Spanish forces me to disclose gender when I might rather not. This lack of a vocabulary would seem to make the language worse -- again, all other things being equal -- than one that did not. Again, I'm not quite sure whether I'm understanding you correctly, but unless I'm wrong, this "all languages are created equal" seems to me more politically correct than actually correct. Because I can think of at least one fully functional language that English is, for effectively all intents and purposes, strictly superior to: Pig Latin. Why is English better than Pig Latin, when Pig Latin is basically just English dressed up in a different coat? Well, along with things you can say (where more is better) and things you must say (where less is better), it seems to me that the conciseness of a language might also be considered (where faster and/or less space is better, depending on whether the language is spoken or written). To continue the example from earlier, if cat in my language is "blern" and in your language is "isselmanjorborakseminisselhorneth", then probably my language is better for talking about cats in. Yours takes too much space/time/tongue-twisting. I doubt this conciseness matters much for "real" languages, but it certainly does for Pig Latin. Pig Latin and English are clearly equivalent in every other respect, with exactly the same vocabulary and exactly the same rules, but Pig Latin has a pointless syllable added to the end of its words, which makes each sentence unnecessarily longer. No wonder we haven't switched languages! It's not that English and Pig Latin are equivalent -- it's that English is just plain better. So clearly some languages can be better than others For an even more extreme example, if I make up my own language with ten nouns and two verbs and only one adjective, then let's face it -- my language sucks. Or consider the fictional language from 1984. It's a severely restricted language that nonetheless is adapted to its cultural environment, though the theory in this novel is more that language shapes the cultural environment rather than the reverse. I don't know whether such a thing can actually happen, though it's always seemed quite plausible to me. I can't imagine that a culture without a word for entrepreneur would have quite so many business-starting risk-takers as a culture that does. I'm not saying it would be easy to compare real-world languages and probably all but impossible to do so in an unbiased fashion, but pretending that they're all equally valid also seems rather foolish. It's one thing to say "Comparing languages is really hard and involves some value judgments and would probably offend the speakers of the less useful language, so we're not even going to try," but that still seems very different from saying "All languages are equally good", which just seems wrong.

I do think this is a cool idea, but it seems to not really fit with how Kaladin loses his bond to Syl. It's very clearly the conflicting promises that Kaladin makes to Dalinar and Graves that causes the problem. Kaladin doesn't have to actually act against Elhokar -- he never explicitly does, that I recall. It's all in the words, the broken promises. Heck, when does Kaladin actually completely lose his bond? When he's risking his life protecting someone. If Kaladin's bond can break at the very instant that he's 100% embodying the Windrunner ideals, it's really hard to imagine that the Radiants of old would have needed to do anything nearly so drastic as intentionally leaving their Shards to provoke a massacre.

It's also said that the Fused tend to go a bit crazy with each reincarnation. It doesn't seem at all unreasonable for Odium to want to get some "new blood", as it were. I'm guessing that for now the existing Fused's battle experience is worth more to him that the current Parshendi's sanity, but once the new batch of Parshendi get some practical experience, I could easily see Odium making new Fused. Out with the old, in with the new.

This is a good question with an unsatisfying answer. The thing is, there seem to be lots of ways to fight Nightblood without, well, actually fighting Nightblood. I note that: 1) Not that many people can actually use Nightblood. Most of them go into a mad, jealous rage; and most of the rest get queasy at just the thought of drawing the blade. 2) The few people who could draw Nightblood in a pinch would probably be promptly consumed by him. Most of the world has only one Breath, if that, and it's not like Vasher goes around advertising "Hey, if you're going to draw this sword, make sure you have a lot of Breaths first, or else." 3) Vasher spends a respectable chunk of Warbreaker without Nightblood. It's not all that hard to separate Vasher (or whoever) from his blade. It's not like Nightblood's the sort of thing you have to worry about all the time. Nightblood doesn't play any sort of role in the Vasher/Arsteel battle, IIRC. Given all the above, why would anyone possibly waste thousands of Breaths in Awakening another sword just to counter Nightblood? It seems like you could steal him away from whoever has him for a fraction of the Breath and effort.

I'm doubtful. I mean, we haven't seen any instances of gemstones ever being Order-specific before now, and I think that would've been foreshadowed by now if it were going to be a thing.

Okay, I gotta admit that I'm pretty lost in this thread, but I did have a few questions based on other people's comments. If this is true, does a magic system have anything to do with whether a Shard has Invested? I mean, when the metal gets burned the power goes back to Preservation, when the Stormlight gets used the power goes back to Honor, when someone dies the Breath goes back to Endowment, when the Aon does its thing the power flows back to the Dor. It seems like the power's pretty much always flowing right back to the Shard. Some might take a little bit longer than others (Breath takes longer than Stormlight, for instance), but it all seems to happen pretty quickly on the timescale of Shards. Is the "Investing" part maybe the method by which the power gets accessed? The spren, for instance, rather than the Stormlight? So everyone else seems to know exactly what you mean, but...what windows are we talking about? I don't remember any windows. His visions of the future? This doesn't seem to follow to me. Well, maybe if you believe that seeing the future is entirely of Odium, but we know that Honor could do it too and that Cultivation was better at it than Honor was. Since Truthwatchers seem to be the Order closest to Cultivation next to the Edgedancers, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to conclude that the Truthwatchers could see glimpses of the future naturally. They probably just weren't supposed to talk about it much.

Minor correction: Preservation had Allomancy, with Feruchemy presumably being due to the interaction between the two Shards. I'd comment on your theory, but, um...I'm not really sure what it is. Is it that each Shard has different magic system? That each Shard's system is affected by the planet they're on? The sequence in which humans and Odium came to Roshar? Maybe you can clarify.

Well, I've said it before so I might as well say it again. I like Adolin and Shallan together, so I'm glad that seems to be a thing. As for everyone's favorite brooding Windrunner, my preferences after Oathbringer are still pretty much the same as they were before Oathbringer: 1) Kaladin/Lift -- The similarities between "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves" and "I will remember those who have been forgotten" make me think that these two must have pretty similar overarching philosophies. They're both have a thing for helping others (even at great risk to themselves), they're both big into healing, they just seem like they'd get along well and compliment each other nicely. 2) Kaladin/Syl -- Talk about two people who get along well. Syl very much provides for Kaladin the counterpoint he needs. It's not quite so clear that he's as helpful for her, but he clearly cares for her quite a bit. Honestly, if Syl were human, this would be an easy pick. But that whole "being a spren" thing might cause issues. On the other hand, issues are the foundation of good storytelling. 3) Kaladin/Nobody -- Not every character needs a romantic counterpart, and Kaladin has certainly gotten along fine without any romance worth mentioning so far. I'd rather have nothing at all than some poorly shoehorned-in relationship.

Well, I don't want to open a huge can of worms here, but there does seem to be some evidence that some languages are...I don't know if better is the right word, but certainly better for certain purposes. I'm not a linguist expert or even an aspiring one, but I did once read a couple papers that, taken in tandem, showed that there are very real differences between languages. Here's an example from one of the papers. The researchers did an experiment, where the researchers showed people a bunch of colored papers one by one and asked the people what color they were. Then, later, they showed people two similar colors side-by-side and asked them which one they'd seen earlier. The results were interesting. They found that the more color words there were in that person's native vocabulary, the more likely that person was to be able to correctly identify the color they'd seen earlier. Japanese, for instance, has one word, aoi, which means both blue and green (well, they also have midori, and you can basically add -iro to the end of anything and make a color, like saying coffee-colored or somesuch in English, but that's neither here nor there). For the Japanese people who had seen aoi earlier, they remembered they had seen aoi, but couldn't tell which version of aoi they had seen. English-speaking people, on the other hand, were able to correctly identify whether they had seen the blue or the green. But the English speakers struggled when asked about which two different shades of pink they had seen earlier, while the Russians were able to pass this one with flying colors, apparently because Russian has two different words for pink, let's say pink and rose. I don't really remember this part as well, since I don't speak a word of Russian (it might have been two different shades of red), but I remember the gist. If you want to remember and/or communicate colors accurately, the best choices were...I want to say Russian was first, followed by some African language I'd never heard of. English was third, if I remember correctly. The authors had looked at...forty different languages? I forget the number, but there were several I wasn't even familiar with by name. The other article talked about defining the utility of a language in terms of what you could say and what you had to say, with I suppose the implicit assumption that the more things you could say and the fewer things you had to say, the better your language was. Could say is basically just a proxy for vocabulary -- the larger your language's (functional) vocabulary, the better. So let's look at things you have to say. Let's take a look at Spanish. In Spanish, it's impossible to mention your neighbor without mentioning his/her gender. You can say mi vecino, my (male) neighbor, or you can say mi vecina, my (female) neighbor. Same thing for your children: mi hijo is my son and mi hija is my daughter, but you can't really just say my child without telling the listener your kid's sex. A lot of gendered languages have this problem. English actually scores really well on the "not having very many things you have to say" scale. The only thing you really have to say in English is when something occurred. You can say "I went to the store" or "I will go to the store" or "I am going to the store", but you can't really just say "I go store" without implying something about when the event happens. In some languages, this time-specification is not a necessity. Now, there are some strikes against English. Primarily, it's a fiendishly difficult language to learn. The spelling is atrocious, and we have way more irregular verbs than many other languages. And that really big vocabulary we mentioned earlier? Sucks when you're trying to learn all those new words and their fine shades of meaning. But there is some evidence that once you have learned English, it's definitely one of the best languages to know. This is entirely apart from its status as a lingua franca, though that is a very real advantage in today's world as well. English (by one quite plausible metric at least) is simply one of the most powerful, most flexible languages in existence.

But the point is that they already do things the old fashioned way. You mentioned mining tools, but remember that the Shin explicitly wanted soulcast metal rather than mined metal because it didn't require breaking rocks. Also, Shallan's father specifically created mineral deposits which were presumably then extracted by conventional mining methods. So it's not like mining is unknown or even all that uncommon on Roshar. In every case we've seen them, soulcasters make life easier but are nowhere necessary other than for specific niche purposes like trading with the Shin or providing easy food for your army. The common folk -- i.e., most of Roshar -- don't have access to them at all. I don't foresee any sort of technological collapse if they suddenly vanish. True enough. I think I'm seeing Stormlight in general being much less vital to life on Roshar than you are, other than for the "animals" that require it to pupate. I also see it as the next logical step of where to take the story, because in my opinion Dalinar's gotten too powerful too fast and needs to be put down. Splintering the Stormfather -- which may or may not stop the highstorms themselves -- seems like the best way to do it, from a story perspective. Your average merchant may or may not be able to distinguish a dun sphere from a fake, though I suspect that many of them could since the old apothecary was willing to take Kaladin's dun spheres after checking them under a magnifying glass. And up until recently, it wasn't as if your average merchant on Earth could easily detect the difference between, say, a real coin and a clever fake. That's why counterfeiting was generally punished by death. But society went on. For most of human history, people rose with the sun and set with the sun. Artificial light of any sort is a relatively modern invention (several thousand years, but that's still a drop in the bucket, comparatively), and affordable light only goes back a couple hundred years, and even then not to everyone or for casual purposes. Candles and lamps were for rich people before that; and I don't think torches were ever as commonly used as modern pop culture makes them out to be. I dunno. It's not even clear whether the Stormfather is strictly necessary for either the highstorms or the associated Investiture dump. Things would certainly be different if he were gone, but it's not clear by how much. See, I guess I'm seeing that Brandon has to go somewhere after the first five books, and having Roshar be totally wrecked and Stormlight only a fond memory seem like a very plausible way to go. There's a few reasons for me to think this: First and foremost, Brandon's going to run out of Oaths real fast -- I'm guessing the end of book five. All our on-screen Radiants have at most two Oaths left to go, and so far we've been going through them at a rate of about one a book, so...what happens then? There needs to be something else for characters to strive toward, once their Oaths are sworn. Yeah, there's a lot of Ideals we don't know from other Orders, but you only really get to write the "Radiant gets Shardplate" scene once, just like we only got the "Kaladin gets Shardblade" scene and not the Shallan/Jasnah/Renarin Shardblade scenes. Second, there've been several hints that music might let you get at Investiture on Roshar. Hoid tried to get Kaladin to learn to play the flute, Aramam has a collect of instruments despite music not being a masculine pursuit, humming makes Soulcasting more likely to work, etc. Maybe you have a different interpretation, but I'm guessing/hoping that this is a long-term setup for the eventual removal of Stormlight from Roshar. There's a Misborn analogue, where In the same sense, I think that Stormlight might be the "easy" way of getting Investiture, but that it's also possible to get it via music as well.

Are you leading them off a cliff? More seriously, though: I expect the next Oaths will be different than you've proposed. I don't think that Kaladin would have struggled with the Fourth Ideal if it were just about helping other people.

I'm not sure things are nearly this bad. Let's look at these reasons one by one: This just isn't true. It's repeatedly stated that to wage war in the manner that the Alethi do, Soulcast food is required. But this is by no means true for the general population. Hearthstone, for instance, gets along perfectly fine without any Soulcasters at all, food or otherwise. It's unclear whether the bigger cities such as Alethkar absolutely require soulcast food, but it's unlikely. The outlying regions seem to be taxed in a manner similar to middle-age fiefs, so it's likely that larger cities could subsist on grown grain, just like Earth-analogue cities did. The loss of soulcasters would no doubt mean a decrease in the quality of life, but hardly on an epic scale. Most of Roshar doesn't seem to have access to Soulcasters at all. This is maybe true, but honestly counterfeits existed on Earth as well throughout history, and they didn't bring anything near economic collapse. Moneychangers are already willing to accept dun stones for fresh ones, so clearly there's a large segment of the population perfectly able to detect counterfeit gems without Stormlight. If anything, flooding the market with gemstones (such as is happening now as a result of the Vengeance Pact on the Shattered Plains) is much more likely to have an effect than any number of counterfeit gemstones. See, for instance, what happened to Spain's economy after discovering the New World. Again doubtful. Thanks to the "wisdom of the Heralds" the average Rosharan knows to behave in a sanitary manner, e.g., by washing their hands before performing surgery. They might not know why they ought to do as they do, but they know the right things to do. In fact, due to the presence of rotspren and the like, even without Stormlight Roshar would be miles ahead of Middle-Age Earth. How easy is it to avoid the infected guy when there are literally a swarm of spren effectively screaming "Hey, this guy's sick! Stay clear!" Not sure what you're saying here. If you're saying that the Desolations would be worse, then yes, that's definitely true. But then, that's kind of the point. This is the True Desolation, after all. Things are supposed to get worse. Yeah, the Reshi are totally screwed on this one -- if the greatshells require Stormlight to survive. This isn't totally clear. They certainly require a spren bond, but it's not clear that they require Stormlight after the bond is formed. In fact I'd say it's unlikely, since the Listeners don't seem to require Stormlight to maintain their bond. But regardless the Reshi Isles are a very small part of Roshar, judging by the map. Sucks for them, and in the worst-case scenario where all the islands suddenly sink, there would quite possibly be a huge refugee crisis in the nearby countries, but that's not exactly catastrophic for anyone except the Reshi themselves. This just doesn't make sense. I agree that population dynamics are complex and do not always follow the trends our population models predict, but rarely if ever do large predators expand so quickly as to hunt themselves to extinction. There's probably been a case where it's happened -- I'm almost certain there is, at least in isolated regions, since the scenario sounds vaguely familiar. But it's certainly not the standard case. That's not to say Roshar's ecosystem won't be wrecked. It will be. But the reason it'll be wrecked is that most "animals" on Roshar require Stormlight to pupate, so without Stormlight there's no reproduction and no second generation. Most species of greatshell go extinct within a single generation without another way to get Investiture, and that would have an effect. This is no doubt the greatest blow to Roshar in general, and depending on the extent to which these animals are harvested for food this could in fact trigger the famines discussed above. We don't really have enough information to know to what extent the Rosharan food network relies on greatshells, however, so we can't really say how they'd react to its loss. Is it like meat in the Middle Ages, where your average family might get some once or twice a year? In that case, probably no big loss. But we just don't know. Meh, the Listener society is pretty much gone anyway. And much like with the Reshi, even if the entire society were to suddenly just disappear, well, sucks for them. But Roshar proper would barely notice. Clearly it doesn't help plants grow all that much, or else farmers would be putting infused spheres out in the morning and collecting them at night. Since they don't, we can safely say that though Stormlight might have a beneficial effect, it's clearly not a significant one. For the above reasons, I'm nowhere near certain that this is the case. In fact, I'm very strongly hoping that the Stormfather is splintered one way or another, and the sooner the better in my book. It does seem that the Stormfather is sufficiently Invested that Dalinar breaking his Oaths wouldn't be enough by itself, but I'm strongly hoping that Odium might pitch in and lend a helping hand. In fact, the story of Dalinar, onetime Bondsmith, seems interesting enough that I'd almost hope for him to survive the Stormfather's destruction. I think I'm still slightly leaning toward having him go out in a blaze of glory, but the story of a Radiant who lost his bond without breaking his Oaths seems interesting in its own right, and probably more interesting with a Bondsmith than with another Order due to the difficulty of bonding another similar spren. Though the struggles of a non-Bondsmith Radiant who keeps attracting the right spren but doesn't particularly want to replace his old friend with someone new could also be pretty good, so I'm not particularly tied to Dalinar being the one. He takes up too much of the story as it is.

Do we know they don't? Flamespren hang out in fires, so if they were using Division that would just make things burn a bit faster. Not particularly noticeable or noteworthy, is it? Plus there's the old question: "Do flamespren cause the flame?" To which the answer just might be, yes.

I think the answer to this question is that windspren are mostly in the Physical realm because the wind is mostly in the Physical realm. Since the wind is always blowing, there's no reason for them to ever return to the Cognitive. Contrast this to, say, flamespren. Flamespren might pop into the Physical to hang out in a really hot fire, but then that fire burns out and they need to go back to the Cognitive. But thanks to the laws of momentum and motion, the wind almost never really stops, just goes somewhere else. Thus windspren are constantly being "pulled" into the Physical by the ever-moving wind. I suspect that the fact that they're basically always in the Physical is what allows them to use lashings. They can affect the Physical more than other spren because they're much more in the Physical than other spren. Now these are good questions. Why are windspren indistinguishable from mindless honorspren? Of the Orders we know, they're the only ones with this property. Perhaps it's just because, for story purposes, it was important for Kaladin to mistake Syl for a windspren (and for Syl to mistake herself for a windspren) early in WoK. But it's possible there's more going on here, too.

That's what's so great about killing off Dalinar and splintering the Stormfather. It solves all sorts of problems. And yeah, Odium's overpowered. But the bad guys are supposed to be overpowered. Look at the Lord Ruler. Or Sauron. In almost every story, the enemy's got quite the foot up on the good guys. @MountainKing: Just to clarify, yeah, I was looking at Mistborn as a single trilogy, not taking into account anything that happened afterward.

I dunno. I mean (Mistborn and Warbreaker spoilers below) And, heck, he killed off Elhokar in Oathbringer. I think he's willing to make the sacrifice when the sacrifice is necessary. I think you're looking at this wrong. Other than Adolin, Kaladin's like the least powerful main character at the moment. Getting rid of Dalinar (doubtless the most overpowered character at this point) and splintering the Stormfather would be a pretty good idea, in my opinion, precisely because Dalinar is the overpowered cliche who's crowding out other characters. A number of people are speculating that the Stormlight Archive will end with Honor being reforged, and if someone's going to do it, the only real choices are Kaladin, Dalinar, and Taln. I've already expressed my opinion on Dalinar's continued purpose in the story (namely, to go out in a blaze of glory), so that leaves only Kaladin and Taln. I think either one could be interesting. Maybe you'd rather have it be Taln? But I don't think I'd argue with anyone who wants it to be Kaladin, either.

Sort of yes but sort of no. He wanted to protect Bridge Four, but the way he did so was by uniting them into a single, unified group, That seems to be what he's doing with the squires/Radiants of the bridge crews, too. I think there's not a whole lot of difference between protecting, leading, and uniting, at least in Kaladin's view. Kaladin is a Windrunner, but judging by the Ideals we know so far, he could easily have been a Bondsmith or an Edgedancer instead. I do agree that Syl getting handed off to someone like a spare pair of boots would be pretty weird, though. I kind of disagree here. Yeah, it's an ensemble cast, but almost every ensemble has a lead or two and Kaladin is definitely one of the leads. I also think there are some good narrative reasons to get rid of Dalinar, mainly to allow Adolin and Renarin to take a bigger role, but also to up the tension, since killing him off would be a pretty big victory for Odium's side. I thought he was going to die in book one, then thought he was going to die in book two, finally accepted that he probably wouldn't be dying in book three, and am now back to hoping for him to die in book four. I think it's more likely that Dalinar dies in five than in four at this point, but one can always hope. Also, I really wish the story was mostly about Kaladin and his sidekicks. I realized during Oathbringer that all I really want to read are The Bridge Four Archives, with Dalinar as an honorary member. Except for Sigil's and one or two of Moash's scenes, I loved all the Bridge Four scenes, and even the scenes I didn't love were still better than like half of the book. If I could read an entire book about Bridge Four's trials and tribulations, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Since Odium says he will spare "[t]he city itself, and any humans who have been born into it, along with their spouses," I imagine this would include the following groups: 1) Anyone living in the city, regardless of where they were born. 2) Anyone born in the city, regardless of where they now live. 3) The spouses of the groups above. So I doubt that complete extermination is possible, within the bounds of this oath. Not that this makes your theory wrong, necessarily. It just means that Odium would have to abandon or otherwise reclaim whatever Investiture remains in the few people who are left. If you want to know the narrative reason that Odium excludes children in his oath, I suspect it's because there's truth to the speculation that Kaladin's mother was born in Kharbranth. The oath as given would exempt her and Lirin from Odium's devastation, but importantly would not include Kaladin or his new baby brother.

Some of these are real issues, but really blaming the problems in WoR on Kaladin getting too much screen time is wrong. Kaladin got probably just about the right amount of screen-time, it's just that Shallan's screen-time is so poorly used. Well, her scenes with Adolin are pretty good, but her scenes with pretty much everyone else, especially any involving Kaladin, are just...they have issues. A good chunk of the problem is the forced and awkward love triangle. But it's mostly problems with Shallan as a character and the Lightweavers as an Order. Partly it's the pacing of her story (not explaining in her flashback book how she attracted Pattern definitely seems questionable), and certainly several characters had to be holding the idiot ball for her to be accepted in high Alethi society at all. The main problem, though, is that Radiants without Ideals just fundamentally aren't as interesting as those who have them. Shallan's Truths are a very poor substitute. I fully expect this problem to continue plaguing her for the remainder of SA, or at least the remainder of the first five books. Shallan's no better in the first half of Oathbringer than she was in WoR, maybe even worse; but if it's any consolation, her story improves significantly in the second half. As for Eshonai, I thought Eshonai was fine in WoR but didn't like her story in Oathbringer at all. But, on the other hand, if you didn't like her much in WoR, maybe you'll like her OB plot line better. So there's some hope for you there. I think Oathbringer as a whole is rather worse than WoK and WoR though still a fine read. Still, a good part of my disappointment, though by no means all, is due to Eshonai's plot line; so if her story works for you in OB then maybe you'll have a better opinion of it. Just don't expect too much.

Storms, I hope not. I actually like the way that the Hearthstone plot was wrapped up: as a minor aside that was once a huge cornerstone of our main character's life but is really rather inconsequential in the big picture. I think Kaladin realizing that was one of the strongest moments in the first part of Oathbringer. Especially him realizing that Roshone really was a disgraced, impoverished, and exiled lighteyes who really had been punished for Moash's grandparents' deaths even if not in precisely the way that Kaladin or Moash might have wished. Also this, although I think it only fair to point out that Jasnah was planning on having the queen assassinated, so her getting too upset over someone trying to assassinate the king would be a bit hypocritical. And that wouldn't be particularly logical, now would it? Also it should be pointed out that Kaladin did save Elhokar's life once, which ought to count for something if she's keeping score. Furthermore, he never really let Moash escape, either, unless you count him rushing off to save Dalinar, which was rather more of a priority at that point anyway. He did let Moash off the hook for his part in sabotaging Elhokar's balcony, but that was about it. And there were (arguably) extenuating circumstances. I could see Kaladin and Jasnah working out; but then again, I could see Kaladin and almost any of our female characters working out. Or Jasnah and just about anyone, for that matter. She at least has the temperament to make a political marriage with or without love involved.

I'll agree that the romance could have been handled better in Oathbringer, but in my mind it's a small disappointment, comparatively. I'm pretty certain the romance arc wouldn't make my top five list of things to change within Oathbringer. It might or might not make my top ten. That being said, I do believe the SKA triangle is resolved, if for no other reason that Adolin and Shallan are getting/have gotten married. Unless anyone expects their relationship to end in divorce, there isn't much of a way to continue it. Kaladin (and even Syl, I think) has too much respect for marriage vows to pursue a ruinous relationship with Shallan despite them. I do sometimes get Lancelot/Guinevere/Arthur vibes from these characters, so perhaps it's more that I hope that it's not going to happen than that I can't see it happening, because I technically could see it, but I really hope not. Drawing out the triangle is arguably among the worst things Brandon could do with the characters. Honestly, I'm pretty certain the whole thing would have been much more enjoyable if there hadn't been a love triangle in the first place. If Adolin dies, well, then the Shallan-Kaladin relationship may be back on the table but Adolin is definitely out of it. So no triangle that way, either. Thank goodness, and good riddance.

I think you're right about this. I normally wouldn't reply just to say "Yeah, I agree", but I feel like we've been on opposite sides of several discussions lately, so I just wanted to also say that I've always appreciated your contributions. Even if we do seem to have pretty differing viewpoints of late. But introducing Nightblood without Szeth would have been strange. I suppose Vasher could have had the sword, but there wasn't really anyone else that Nalan could have possibly given the blade to. Though, now that I think about it, Vasher could have taken Szeth's place at, say, the battle of Thaylen City without much difficulty. It is a bit weird that we didn't see him at all in Oathbringer, or at least not very much. I can't claim credit for the Fleet interpretation. I first heard the theory on these very boards, but I've loved it ever since. I hadn't thought of Kaza becoming a smokespren, either, but it does seem at least plausible -- she's a pretty Invested being with a strong smoke affinity, which seems about 90% of what a smokespren is. It's probably more likely that she just turned herself into smoke and passed Beyond, but I could easily see it going either way. I think Isilel was referring to the Brandon quote he/she linked saying that Szeth's resurrection was a late change to WoR. If Szeth's return was a late change, then any Brandon quotes from before WoR was published about seeing a flashback sequence from someone already dead would have most likely referred to Szeth than to any other character, since his flashback book was book 3 at the time.

Maybe it's just me, but I kind of got the impression that Venli was "tricked" into doing what she did about as much as Eshonai was. Certainly neither expected the results they got. There's also some hints in WoR that Venli had taken voidform before, as Eshonai notes that she seemed suspiciously comfortable in stormform. So she may not have been in her right mind for all of her research phase. You mean they might have executed her by, say, tricking her into the storm to bond a Fused exactly like they did Venli? I don't really buy most of your reasons for why the Fused would supposedly execute her (at least, not any more or less than they would Venli, and since they didn't outright kill her I can't think they'd have done so to Eshonai either). I do believe that they'd have forced Eshonai into the storm to bond one of the Fused, exactly like they did Venli and, for that matter, all the other surviving Parshendi. The difference is that with Venli, we needed the literal deus ex machina of Odium personally intervening on her behalf. For Eshonai, we'd only have needed Timbre to do for her what he did with Venli later. Why did Odium intervene? It seems crazy. We know he can see farther than Tavargian, and smart Tavargian would have seen her rebellion coming from a mile away, so Odium has to be able to see Venli's rebellion coming if he's paying enough attention to her to intervene on her behalf. Unless it turns out that her rebellion is somehow playing into Odium's hands, it seems like a pretty gaping plot hole. This would be a good point, if at any point in Oathbringer the difference had mattered at all. Venli didn't do any scholarly things all book, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that she'll do any in the future. I'll retain the right to eat my words if in book four she's somehow forced to do a bunch of research that Eshonai couldn't possibly have done, but right now I just don't see it happening. This actually is a good point, though I'd argue that Eshonai proved herself plenty capable of subtlety in WoR, when she sent her friends down into the chasms rather than force them into stormform. That might or might not have ended up working out -- we don't really know what happened to them -- but it was at least a subtle and clever idea. The Renarin/Jasnah comparison doesn't seem quite the same as Venli/Eshonai. Yes, they're both exceedingly similar -- there's a reason some people dislike the idea of "yet another Kholin Radiant" -- but they're saved from coming across as functionally identical first, because they've each had a lot more screen time. I'm guessing Jasnah and Renarin have shown up on at least ten times as many pages as Eshonai and Venli, and that gives time to emphasize the differences between them. Second, they're saved from coming off as identical because they're struggling against different things. Jasnah was struggling to find Urithiru, Renarin was just struggling to fit in. Those are very different struggles, unlike Venli and Eshonai who both struggle to save their people. As for Venli and Eshonai.... I dunno, I guess I do see them following the same progression. Imagine for a moment that Eshonai had survived. Rather than finding her corpse, she'd have been found alive. Do you think the story would have been any different? Eshonai still would have been forced into the storm. She still would have bonded Timbre. She still would have chafed under Odium's thumb (and Odium would probably have had a better reason to harass her than he did her sister). She would still have worked covertly to save the Parshendi heritage. Most of their scenes would have been almost exactly the same. Everything that Venli did, Eshonai would have done. Everything that Venli felt, Eshonai would have felt. The specifics of their actions and regrets might differ somewhat (Eshonai, for instance, would have been mourning her sister in the scene where Venli was mourning her lover), but they'd be fundamentally the same.

I dunno, the characters seem way too interchangeable to me for that to be the case. I'm not sure how Brandon's phrased things or whatever, but for every Venli scene, it's very easy to imagine a comparable scene with Eshonai as the viewpoint character. Maybe not the one where they find Eshonai's corpse -- Eshonai can't find her own corpse, after all -- though I'd imagine being found by Venli and Ulim would work as well, if the scene were even necessary (no real need to find her corpse if she's not dead). You don't see them as both following the same path? Both horrified by the destruction of their people? Both wracked by guilt about their own contributions to the cause? Both rebelling against Odium by keeping their history alive? They seem like almost identically the same character, just with different backstories. And I think Eshonai's backstory fits far better with the narrative. Huh. I had no idea that Szeth was a late narrative change. In that case, I mostly agree with you -- Szeth's resurrection cheapened death even more so than Jasnah's. But at least with Szeth, we get something out of it. We get to bring Nightblood into the story and we get (potentially) an interesting character arc that we wouldn't have otherwise. With Jasnah, we got...a semi-surprise appearance at the end of WoR. These two things aren't comparable. Gawx worked for a couple of reasons. The fact that he could plausibly still be alive (or at least, very recently dead) when Lift healed him is a big one. The other is that his death and resurrection happen in the same scene. By itself, it wouldn't be significant at all. It would just be a cool scene introducing a new Radiant and her two powers. It's only when taken in conjunction with Szeth and Jasnah that it becomes at all troubling. Sure, that was obvious -- if you noticed and/or remembered the spren from WoR. For most active people here, it probably goes without saying. For a lot of people, who might not have read WoR for several years before Oathbringer, it mightn't be nearly as obvious. Timbre plays only a very minor role in WoR. The issue becomes even more murky when you learn that dead Parshendi can come back via Everstorm and join with their living descendants. So now you've got a dead character (who died right around the time the Everstorm was overhead) and a mysterious spren hanging around her corpse, who then joins with that character's sister and...yeah, I see it. If you consider Wit's story about Fleet to be more than fanciful, there's also the precedent of living people merging with spren/Investiture after they die. So even someone who did remember Timbre could reasonably think that they'd merged into one. It would give Timbre a reason to bond with Venli, too, which otherwise seems like something of a plot-hole. You said something like this before, but I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. Venli and Eshonai are basically the same. High-ranking Parshendi in Odium's army? Check. Have knowledge of Parshendi culture from before the Everstorm? Check. Able to secretly convert huge swaths of Parsendi to their cause? I actually think Eshonai would be better than Venli here, but whatever, check. Basically, I don't see how Venli is adding anything at all to the story that Eshonai wouldn't have.