galendo

Lots of people seem to disagree with me, and this is fine -- I'm glad that Venli works for you guys, even if she doesn't for me. I really don't get what you guys see in her, since you obviously see something more than a poor Eshonai replacement, and no matter how I look at her, that's all I can see. I see a character with less complexity than Eshonai, a character with less potential than Eshonai, a character given less development than Eshonai, who was shoe-horned into Eshonai's place. I maybe could have got behind Venli if she hadn't been so clearly an Eshonai replacement, but it would have meant a completely different story arc as befits a completely different character. It would have involved Timbre having left and returned to Shadesmar or finding someone else to bond or whatever it is unattached spren do (Venli and Eshonai seem to have pretty different characters, so a good spren for one probably isn't a good match for the other). It would have meant not having a Parshendi character for Dalinar to reach out to. It would have needed a lot of things to happen differently, in my mind. Like, every scene involving Venli, basically. As it is, Venli just comes across as a bad Eshonai replacement.

I'll try to explain, since I'm one of those people who think that Eshonai's death was the biggest mistake in Oathbringer and that Jasnah's "death" was probably the biggest non-Shallan mistake in WoR. I'll caveat by saying that this is only my opinion, so others might agree or disagree for different reasons. For me, it's about cost-benefit analysis. Look at what was gained, and what was given up. The only gain from Jasnah's "death" was a bit of tension (in the reader) about not knowing whether she was alive or not, and her arguable surprise appearance at the end of WoR. In exchange for this dubious and fairly transient gain, The Stormlight Archive was cemented as a "death is cheap" series, where the readers can't trust that a character is dead even after they've seen the body. It's possible that Gawx's and Szeth's resurrections would have been too much by themselves, but Jasnah's "resurrection" definitely put it over the top. You want to know why there have been so many Timbre = Eshonai theories? That's why. Because death is cheap. The only two ways we have to know that someone is dead in SA are "Death by Nightblood" and "Word of Brandon". And the reason this is the case -- the reason that we can't assume someone is dead even after we've seen the corpse -- is because of what happened with Szeth and Jasnah. In the case of Szeth, I'll allow that there were probably narrative necessities and that the ultimate benefits may outweigh the cost. In the case of Jasnah, that's clearly not the case. You can do the same analysis for Eshonai. In every scene we get with Venli -- literally every scene, IMHO -- that scene would have been more powerful and/or made more sense if Eshonai were there instead. What reason did Venli have to risk her life to hide Timbre, for instance? Eshonai would have, sure, I'd believe that; but Venli, not so much. Or for another example: when Dalinar reaches out through the Stormfather for a Parshendi to talk with, who would have made more sense narratively: the Parshendi with whom he'd already had abortive peace talks before, or some random Parshendi woman he'd never met? For a third example: when our main Parshendi is saved from the Fused who would inhabit her, which makes more sense: that Odium intervened personally to save Venli despite that she would later betray him (the scene we got), or that Timbre saved Eshonai when she opened herself to the storm (the scene we might have had)? You can do this compare-and-contrast for every Venli scene. Basically, I can't even think about Venli's scenes without imagining the much better and more coherent versions we might have got with Eshonai. The swap was the worst mistake in Oathbringer, bar none.

Maybe I don't really understand, but it seems like it wouldn't be impossible for a person's cognitive shadow to merge with a spren. I thought that was partly the point of Wit's story about Fleet in WoR, and of course we know that Honor combined with the Stormfather later. It makes extra sense when we see that the Fused are basically Cognitive Shadows who come back like spren (as spren? Is there a difference?) and bond with Parshendi. I'm actually kind of sad to hear that it isn't what Brandon's planning. I think that killing off Eshonai was the biggest mistake of Oathbringer (and maybe the biggest mistake of SA thus far), and one of the few ways I thought to sort-of redeem it would be to have Eshonai stick around in some way, shape, or form.

We can hope for the best, but I still think Eshonai would have worked a lot better. It's not like Eshonai would have been lacking in guilt -- she was the one who convinced most of the Parshmen to take on stormform, after all. And the arc of a good, well-meaning character who inadvertently destroyed her entire people seems significantly more compelling than a selfish, egotistical one who did the same. @WhiteLeeopard: While I don't necessarily agree with you about the fandom's response to Eshonai (I remember seeing at least one or two threads on here debating whether she would be alive or not. Most seemed to think she would be, but it definitely wasn't 100%. And many of those who thought she would be alive generally thought so because it seemed a really dumb idea to kill her off), much less Brandon Sanderson's reaction to the same, I do find your observation about each character "saving the day" during their respective flashback book to be an interesting one. I'm not sure whether the pattern will continue or not. I think we'd need to see a lot more from Venli in the next book for her to do the same thing in a believable fashion. There's basically no believable way for her to convince the entire Parshendi population to switch sides in a mere year or two, or even most of them, but it wouldn't be entirely beyond the bounds of disbelief for her to convince a significant chunk. Enough to swing a critical battle, maybe.

I actually think it's the other way around. Originally, I think Eshonai was supposed to have the role now assigned to Venli. I think that after Szeth's resurrection and Jasnah's pseudo-resurrection at the end of WoR, Brandon felt that bringing Eshonai back after having her fall off the cliff would be too much -- he's already made it clear that he thinks handling Jasnah in such a fashion in WoR was a mistake. Unfortunately, I think swapping Venli for Eshonai was an even bigger mistake. Literally every scene with Venli in Oathbringer would have been stronger with Eshonai in her role, IMHO, which is the main reason why I don't think the swap was planned. Venli didn't have any reason to risk her life saving Timbre, but Eshonai would have. Odium would have had more reason to harass Eshonai than he did Venli. He also didn't really have a reason to save Venli from the Fused who wanted to inhabit her -- but the command to "open yourself up completely" would have been a great opportunity for Timbre to bond Eshonai, and he could have chased off (or captured) the Fused. Fundamentally, I think Venli is basically just a last-minute swap for Eshonai. She doesn't quite work as well in the book as Eshonai would have, but by the time WoR was published it was too late to go back and give her the characterization she needed. She kind of works as a substitute, just not very well. If you look closely, you can pretty easily see the seams.

Wow, so many great responses! Thanks to all! I don't have time to respond to everyone's every point, but I'll try to hit a few of the ones that stand out to me: This is a very good point. I'm not sure that I buy it entirely, since it seems like there would be plenty of other ways to mess with Moash if they felt like it, which they apparently didn't. But it's a perfectly reasonable explanation. Huh. I didn't really think about it as neurological damage, though I suppose that must be it. The way I was thinking was that spren were usually 100% in the Cognitive, where they were intelligent, but that Radient spren were bringing themselves partway into the Physical Realm (leaving them, say, 50% Physical and 50% Cognitive -- not that physical and not that bright). Then the nahel bond drew them further into the Physical, but simultaneously supplemented their reduced Cognitive abilities with the Radiant's own intelligence. It explains the mindless screaming of the deadblades (trapped mostly in the Physical with only a hint of Cognitive -- maybe just enough to comprehend the horror of their situation). The mental trauma interpretation fits better with what we saw in Oathbringer, so I like that, but at the same time it fails to explain why Syl would "go dumb" as her bond regressed like we saw in WoR. Once the mental trauma from the transition was healed, one wouldn't think that losing the bond would cause the spren to regress. I guess, though it kind of relies on Ruin being pretty darn stupid. If you knew that your polar opposite, your mortal enemy, who was compelled by his very nature to try to thwart you at every turn, needed to keep the precise letter of his oath...I dunno, it seems like you'd make pretty sure there wasn't any weasel room in whatever agreement you reached. But the tattoos did stick, at least until he drew in Stormlight. I'd have to double-check, but I don't recall him breathing in Light during that sequence. He might have breathed some in unconsciously, I suppose. Wow, I totally missed that. So normal hungerspren are brown, but corrupted ones are black? Makes sense. It kind of prompts another question, though: Why would Sja-anat corrupt painspren and shamespren first, then get around to corrupting hungerspren later? Does Sja-anat think that Shalan would trust a corrupted gloryspren? Also, Shallan's thinking of using the Oathgate now. There isn't time to speak with Glys/Renarin, who are hundreds of miles away. I suppose Sja-anat could be urging her to talk with Glys to confirm the "not an enemy" part in some distant future, but they were basically arguing over whether Shallan should activate the Oathgate right then. I took her words to be in reference to that, especially since she seems to think that Shallan will likely die if the Oathgate is activated. The question is how you'd grow a city, though. None of the magics we've seen so far could do it. Though I suppose it's not too terribly different from the way some of Odium's spren can create a Thunderclast out of solid rock. You know, I suppose it very well could have been a Cryptic's hum she heard. There should be one hanging around Elhokar, after all. Though why it would go with Shallan to deliver food is a bit of a mystery. I don't think there's really much reason to believe that Cryptics serve Odium, though. Pattern certainly doesn't seem to. Though there were an awful lot of them hanging around Kharbranth in TWoK, now that I think about it. Though of course the Diagram wasn't about serving Odium but stopping him, so that's not particularly strong evidence either. Yeah, but she said at one point that they had hunts for spren in Shadesmar, the way that Alethi hunted chasmfiends. So it's not like they're unused to killing spren, I wouldn't think. If it hadn't been a pretty clearly evil spren tormenting a child I could understand her shock, but she seems pretty blase about hunting certain kinds of spren. It makes me wonder if the spren wasn't a corrupted version of a type that honorspren wouldn't have hunted. That might be enough to trigger her aversion, I suppose, though even then it seems like it'd be more like killing a zombie rather than a person. It could be referring to the Horneater peaks, though in that case I'd expect the line to be "something is different there" rather than "something is different here", since they're at Urithiru at the time. This makes me think -- do we know who the Herdezians are descended from to get their hard nails? The Horneaters clearly have some Parshendi blood to see spren and hear rhythms. The only other sentient race that we know about is the Aimians. Maybe Lopen does know something about spying cremlings. It doesn't surprise me a bit that the Shin fought at Aharietiam. My theory for their pacifism was that they fully believed the Herald's proclamation of victory at the time, which made further fighting on Roshar unnecessary. Though the Shin invasions are weird and out of character for the present-day Shin, at least from the little we know about them. That's an interesting quote. It would make more sense for spren to inhabit a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere, too, since they don't need to eat or drink or anything. I wonder what the Cryptics would get out of it, though. Maybe tales from travelers? Those do tend to contain the occasional departure from the truth. You know, that's a good point, too. Why didn't Odium take up Dalinar on his offer? Perhaps it was still too much of a risk. Dalinar wouldn't have picked Szeth, that's for sure, but he very well might have picked Kaladin. After wrestling with one of his men, Dalinar admits that maybe he should let one of the younger Radiants be Honor's champion. Kaladin is mentioned explicitly, if I remember correctly. And a match between Kaladin and the Blackthorn would be epic. I have read Secret History. I don't remember it very well -- I only read it once -- but that could well be what I was thinking of. The empty plain, with the ghostly shapes that rise up out of the ground and then disappear just rings a bell. Still doesn't really explain why the Stormfather would do a similar thing, though, unless there's an underlying reason for it.

Do we really know the other spren weren't, though, when they first started to bond? I mean, if Pattern had been buzzing to the Rhythms, would Shallan have noticed? I think it's quite possible that most of this thread is correct -- that Timbre is pulsing to the Rhythms because, for Venli, the Rhythms are a form of communication. But I also think it's quite possible that all the spren resonate to the Rhythms in their own way before their bond is fully formed, but only Venli is in position to recognize the Rhythms when she sees them.

When I was reading through Oathbringer, I made notes about some of the weird stuff that was mentioned. Stuff that's probably foreshadowing. Stuff that might be foreshadowing. Stuff that just seems a bit weird. Mysterious singing, ethereal smoky shapes...you get the idea. All page references refer to the hardcover page number. Anyway, here's my list of some weird things that were mentioned and what (if anything) I think they mean. Very often I don't have a clue, or at least not a good one. If I'd a clear explanation, it probably wouldn't have qualified as a curiosity in the first place! The following are roughly in the order that they appear throughout the book. Without further ado: 1) When talking to Kaladin about his family, Syl mentions a mysterious voice: Is this a reference to Tien? They're talking about his family, so it seems plausible, but I'm not sure why she'd mention it if so. Reminding Kaladin of things that depress him isn't something she generally does. But I don't know what other voice she'd be referring to. It's also another mention of music ("a song like tapped crystal, distant yet demanding"), which might mean nothing but which, as I note below, seems to play a pretty big background role in the Stormlight Archive. 2) Urithiru is weird: I think we can agree that Urithiru probably wasn't built along strange, twisted curves in order to fool invaders. It doesn't seem like the sort of place that would be attacked by anyone ever. How would you get your army there? It's not like Odium's forces could have used the Oathgates, and they don't have all that many Fused who can fly. There's also a line earlier about how there's more air circulating than there should be, though I didn't copy that one down because at the time I chalked it up to clever engineering. The second of the two quotes above indicate that more is going on than meets the eye, though -- no amount of clever engineering would make temperatures higher at Urithiru than on other similar peaks. The weird thing, though, is that this all seems to be happening without Stormlight. Urithiru's been uninhabited for ages, and it's too high up for most highstorms. If it were ancient fabrial tech...that still takes Stormlight, right? Soulcasting does, at least. So how is the place staying warm? Something weird is going on. 3) Dalinar sees a strange shadow-world: Later on the Stormfather claims that he made this in-between place, but the description sounds familiar to me. I can't place it, but I feel like we've seen this place somewhere before. Why would the Stormfather bother to create an in-between world, anyway? 4) Something is different about the Fused's lashings: So why didn't the Fused lash Moash? They can clearly lash people, since Moash himself got lashed upwards during the fight in the same scene and Kaladin later got lashed sideways. Seems strange that they'd choose to carry him rather than lash him. It's not like they're worried about running out of power, either. Later on, we see that the flying Fused use their lashings pretty profligately. I don't have a quote, but there's a scene where one of the Fused hovers while reading a book, apparently just because he/she can. Also, the Fused in Shadesmar are flying about willy-nilly despite Investiture apparently being more difficult to get there. In fact, I don't think we've ever seen a Fused run out of juice. Something's clearly different here. 5) Lopen looks under rocks for some strange reason: Now this could just be an instance of Lopen being weird, but it's hand-waved off a little too blithely for that to be the case. Lopen might be different, but he's not the sort of different that does things for no reason. Maybe he's supposed to be humoring his spren? Syl might want to look under rocks just to see what's beneath them, so that could be it. The scene in question is a pretty touching Bridge Four moment. It seems strange to call out Lopen for behaving bizarrely unless there's some ulterior motive behind it. He's never done anything that seemingly nonsensical before. 6) Odium and his spren appear Shin: Now supposedly Odium came to Roshar along with the humans, so it's not terribly surprising if he and his look like those original humans. But if that's the case, what happened to make everyone else appear non-Shin? We know a few races interbred with the Parshendi, but that shouldn't have given a homogeneous appearance to every non-Shin person on Roshar. Again, something is strange here, either with what happened or with what we've been told. It's also worth noting that stone is clearly associated with Odium and his spren. Where Syl flies about, Odium's spren clearly walk on stone, as seen in the quote above. The Thunderclasts rise up out of stone. This might give a new interpretation to the Shin refusal to walk on stone and Szeth's belief that Urithiru was formed of stone unhallowed. Do the Shin revere/worship Odium? It seems a bit weird -- they're basically pacifists, after all -- but not entirely implausible. Still, they can't really be directly allied with Odium, either. If they were, Odium could've had all the Honorblades by the time of the battle for Thaylen city, since Shinovar isn't all that distant when one's emissaries can fly. Then again, maybe he does have them already and just didn't want to risk them in the battle? 7) Some spren are changed by Sja-Anat, some are not: What explains this? Are hungerspren more of Odium so Sja-Anat doesn't feel the need to corrupt them? Were hungerspren corrupted en masse during some previous Desolation, so that all the present-day "normal" hungerspren are actually the corrupted form of some prior version? There probably isn't enough information to tell what's going on yet, but maybe someone has ideas. 8) Hoid. Strange as always: First, Pattern says Wit feels like "one of us." It's not clear whether "one of us" means a Lightweaver, a Radiant, a Cryptic, a spren, or something else. He also plays around with Shallan's lightweaving/Stormlight in a way that (if I understand correctly) shouldn't be possible: Maybe he's just drawing it from her spheres, but considering that he needed her help to get the lightweaving going in the first place, it seems a bit strange. He's piggybacking off of her somehow. I'm not going to try to guess how, but it's worth noting, perhaps, as a thing he can do. 9) More weirdness with Shallan's lightweaving. Kaladin's shash brand doesn't stay covered up like it's supposed to: Later, Kaladin checks to see that the gem Shallan tied the illusion to still has Stormlight, and it does, so it's not like he sucked it up without realizing it. Kaladin couldn't get rid of his brand in Words of Radiance, and now Shallan can't cover it up for long, either. I get that the WoR thing is due to Stormlight healing, but that shouldn't mess with Shallan's illusion, I wouldn't think. 10) There's some weird humming/singing going around in Alethkar: First, we've got one of the revelers humming in what I take to be a manner similar to Pattern, then later we've got the queen singing a song that Kaladin almost recognizes. I'm not really sure what to make of these, but given the apparent importance of music to the Stormlight Archives so far, I think it's worth noting. 11) Syl freaks out after killing a spren: I'm not sure why she's so upset about killing a spren, honestly. She doesn't have any problem killing humans or Parshendi. She was even protecting Elhokar's baby from the red spren, so she should be happy. Maybe it's because she's a spren herself? But then, she mentions that honorspren hunt at least some types of spren, so that doesn't seem like the answer, either. Again, something doesn't quite add up here. 12) Sja-Anat mentions a son that Shallan could apparently ask for advice: So at first I thought she might have Renarin's spren, but this doesn't work because Renarin isn't even anywhere near Shallan at the time, so she certainly can't stop and ask Glys for advice on whether to use the Oathgate even if she were likely to trust a corrupted Radiant spren anyway, which seems doubtful. So who or what could Sja-Anat be referring to? It has to be someone nearby and who Shallan would find trustworthy. 13) Winespren: sometimes rare, sometimes common: I know it's mentioned that some spren are more location-dependent than others, but why is this the case? I could see it if one country tended to drink a lot more alcohol than its neighbors, but from what I can tell, people all over Roshar are drinking a lot of alcohol. So why would the winespren only hang out in just one spot? 14) Syl's memory doesn't come back at all when she returns to the Cognitive Realm: Maybe I don't quite get what's going on, but since she had to leave most of her memory behind when she left the Shadesmar, I'd have thought that she'd have gotten her memory back when she returned to Shadesmar. Instead it looks like she's going to continue getting it back piece by piece, as Kaladin progresses with his Oaths. From a meta perspective, I get that there are probably narrative reasons to keep her (and thus the main characters) in the dark for a long while yet. But it's still not what I'd expected. 15) Syl doesn't want to enter the lighthouse: This might just be that she doesn't like to be confined, which is established more explicitly later, but I wonder if there isn't something more to it. Pattern goes in and happily starts poking around, so it can't be anything that repels spren in general. 16) Chapter 103: This is Dalinar's dream/vision of Nohadon where he goes grocery shopping. It's pretty weird. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a dream or if it's supposed to be magical. It doesn't quite seem like either one -- too coherent for a dream, but too incoherent to be a vision. 17) Odium's word versus Preservation's: Mistborn original trilogy spoilers: So anyway, that's my big list of "weird Oathbringer stuff" that might or might not be worth talking about. If there's anything I missed -- and there almost certainly is -- feel free to point it out.

Personally, I find Oathbringer to be the least compelling of the Stormlight Archive so far. If anyone wants to read why I think this, let me know and I'll post a more detailed list of my pros and cons. With this post, I'd rather explain my theory for why this book is so divisive. It's about broken promises. Only implied promises, not explicit ones; but broken nevertheless. Compare these two situations. At the end of The Way of Kings, readers were implicitly promised: 1) That Kaladin would join with Dalinar and help him continue his duty on the Shattered Plain. 2) That Dalinar would bring the Vengeance Pact to an end, or at least make great strides in doing so. 3) That Shallan and Jasnah would reach the Shattered Plain and start interacting with the other cast. 4) That Szeth would be sent after Dalinar, and thus come into conflict with Dalinar and Kaladin. 5) That Adolin and Shallan would begin courting. All of these were promised, and all of these promises were fulfilled in Words of Radiance. (Well, Jasnah got a bit lost along the way, but these sorts of plot twists are perfectly acceptable.) Now compare this to what happened in Oathbringer. At the end of Words of Radiance, readers were implicitly promised: 1) That Kaladin would rush to Hearthstone and either avert the crisis or deal with its aftermath. (Turns out, there was no crisis, and he was in Hearthstone for all of about five minutes. Somewhat anticlimactic.) 2) That Shallan would interact further with the Ghostbloods and we would learn more of their means and motivations. (This did not happen.) 3) That Jasnah would join up with some of the other characters, armed with important new information from the highspren and/or Hoid. (Jasnah did rejoin, but not so much the "new information" thing.) 4) That Navani and/or Shallan would plumb the secrets of Urithiru. (Marginal success here. We the readers know almost nothing more about Urithiru than we did a book ago, but they did do some plumbing.) 5) That Dalinar would learn more of the Knights Radiant, including the reason for the Recreance. (This happened, but whether or not it happened satisfactorily probably depends on each individual reader's satisfaction with the given explanation for the Recreance. 6) That Adolin and/or team Dalinar would suffer some consequences from Sadeas' murder. (This did not happen.) 7) That Moash would join the Diagramists. (This did not happen.) 8) That Bridge Four would continue on the path to squire-hood/Radiance. (This happened, and in spades. Probably the only out-of-the-park home run on the list, IMHO.) Well, there were a number of other promises as well -- I for one feel rather annoyed about what happened with Eshonai and don't feel that Venli is at all an acceptable replacement -- but for convenience I've only listed the main promises about the main cast. When you compare the 100% promise-completion-rate from The Way of Kings with the 25-50% completion rate of those promises made at the end of Words of Radiance, it's not surprising that plenty of readers aren't as happy with Oathbringer as they were with the previous book(s). How happy you are with Oathbringer probably depends on how happy you were with the arcs we got instead. For instance, I was actually fine with Kaladin's nonexistent Hearthstone arc...but I can totally sympathize with the readers who feel that Oathbringer didn't have as much Kaladin-being-awesome as they anticipated.

There's definitely something weird with the eyes of the Shin versus the non-Shin, but it's worth noting that Odium and his spren also have Shin-like eyes. If humans came to Roshar with Odium, I'd imagine that he and his spren would look like them. It doesn't mean the current Shin aren't more recent worldhoppers, of course, but...maybe the better question is, why does everyone else on Roshar not have Shin-style eyes?

I think we get it, we just don't find the explanation compelling. Your god says you'll destroy Roshar? You'd think they'd get a second opinion from their other god (Cultivation). Your power has destructive potential? That's nothing new -- some surges, like gravitation, are obviously dangerous -- but if it suddenly worries you, there are a lot better options than "kill all the spren and hope the others are sufficiently horrified to never bond again," which, when you think about it, is a pretty dumb long-term solution. Even if it works for all the spren currently alive -- something which seems by no means certain (though it seems to have happened) -- there's still no reason to suspect that their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be so similarly horrified that they refuse to bond (which also seems to have happened). Breaking your Oaths is a short-term solution at best. [To be fair, not breaking your Oaths is also a short-term solution at best, since eventually Knights with less caution might do something rash. But if the surges on Roshar are simply too dangerous and will eventually destroy the planet no matter what, the solution would seem to be to use your powers to abandon Roshar, not to surrender your powers and wait for the inevitable rise of a new and completely ignorant generation of Knights.] The near-destruction of an entire species of sapient life? If the in-world Words of Radiance is correct, they were considering exterminating the Parshendi. Trapping them in dullform doesn't seem all that horrifying by comparison. Plus, even if they were horrified by what they'd done, it seems like using your powers to find a way to reverse it would make much more sense than surrendering them and being stuck with the results. Worse-case scenario, it seems like you could try releasing your captive Unmade, if that was what caused the mindlessness in the first place. Realizing they were a danger to all they loved? Seems overstated, at the very least. I doubt any individual Knight felt personally dangerous to everyone he loved. You could give me the powers of a god, and I guarantee you I would not be a threat to those I love -- I'm guessing most other people feel the same way. So why would all the Knights decide they needed to break their Oaths? It just doesn't add up. I'd think a fair number would have made themselves conspicuously absent when the time for the Recreance rolled around.

@RShara: You paint a pretty good picture, I will admit. I could see that getting most of the Radiants to break their Oaths. But all of them? It seems unlikely. Honor's ravings would, I imagine, be taken with a grain of salt. He might be their god, but you'd think they'd at least get a second opinion from Cultivation. She's also represented prominently among their artwork at Urithiru, so they clearly revere her as well. But who knows, maybe Cultivation was in a bad mood at the time -- her lover had just been killed, after all -- and wasn't answering questions or something. Breaking your Oaths based on Honor's ravings still wouldn't make much sense. Whether his words are truly prophetic -- if Surgebinders will destroy Roshar eventually -- or whether they're just an exceedingly credible warning, either way you're probably better off using your powers to evacuate Roshar. Get everyone to a safer world. Start mass evacuations through the Oathgates or Perpendicularities into Shadesmar. Abandoning your powers and waiting for the inevitable destruction seems...questionable. But maybe you don't want to evacuate, or can't. Even then, if the spren are totally convinced that this is a serious danger, why don't they just stop bonding people? They clearly have the ability to decide whether to seek a bond or not. Rather than keep the reason a secret, I'd think the spren would spread it far and wide. If 100% of all bonded spren thought there was a real danger here, wouldn't the spren in Shadesmar be even more likely to agree? It's not like bonding is a priority for those spren. No need to break any Oaths, if the spren are in agreement with the Knights. Just stop bonding humans.

But if there were dissension, then some of the spren must not be ignorant of the reason for the Recreance. If the Knights were "dealt with harshly" -- by which I assume you mean killed -- then their spren would have been freed and not trapped as Blades. I guess with enough subterfuge this might have been possible. But if this were some mass suicide-pact, as the theory seems to be proposing, it's weird that the Skybreakers wouldn't have needed to promise to go along with it like everyone else. If they did promise, then failure to do so would have been breaking that oath, at least. Heck, given the destructive potential that the Skybreakers represent, I'd be surprised if the others didn't put some pretty clear laws in place as well and have another Order watching to make sure they went along with it. Yes, I suppose I am. But, well, let's take Progression. I think it's established that it only affects living things. So if you're worried about a few rogues to use it to destroy all human life on a planet, you're pretty much limited to disease vectors, plants with deadly pollen, stuff like that. Now maybe Progression can force evolution in particular ways and maybe not. I'm leaning towards not, but even if so.... That's pretty much where we are, right now, on Earth. Have you looked into the crazy stuff that CRISPR can do? Between gene driving and genetic bombs and probably other sorts of nasty possibilities, it wouldn't surprise me if we could kill ourselves with our medical technology alone. Heck, maybe it's already happening. Have you had your DNA sequenced lately? Of course, a rogue cabal in the wrong place could probably do it with nukes, too. But you know what people aren't calling for, at least not in large numbers? A complete ban on medical research or a complete ban on nuclear technology. Since it isn't happening on Earth, it seems weird to suppose that it would happen on Roshar. The Recreance would be the (rough) equivalent of all the world's medical researchers deciding to stop their CRISPR research and burn their records. Now, we've sort of done that in a few areas. There are still widespread bans on human cloning, for instance, though honestly I'd be pretty surprised to learn it's never happened. And the world's nuclear powers have made great strides in disarmament (I think we might only have enough bombs left to wipe out humanity a few dozen times), not that they couldn't reverse the trend at any moment. But a widespread call to abandon CRISPR? Much less a vast majority of the world's researchers agreeing to it? I'm just not seeing it happen. And a madman with a knife is arguably more dangerous than all three combined.

Okay, time to play Devil's advocate. I made a big long reply a while back about why I found no theory to be a compelling justification for the Recreance. I don't know how to do the fancy link-insert thing, but the post should be here. For those who don't feel like reading the whole post, much of which related to other theories about the Recreance that didn't work, I'll quote here the main part applicable to this topic, which are the three main questions that any reasonable Recreance theory must answer (ellipses indicate information relating to the original post that has been removed for brevity and clarity): The main problem with this theory, as with most theories, is point number one, though it also struggles a bit with points two and three when taken together. I'm supposed to believe that every single Radiant (except, for some reason, the Skybreakers) decided to kill off their spren? There weren't a few people who were like, "Yeah, maybe our powers could be used to destroy the planet. So? That doesn't mean we should kill our spren." And why all the Orders except the Skybreakers? What about the Edgedancers? Their surges seem pretty safe, as far as surges go. How are you going to use them to wreck the planet? Why did all the Edgedancers feel the need to quit? (I'm guessing Bondsmiths are pretty safe, too.) Heck, why did anyone quit, if the Skybreakers didn't? They've got gravitation, probably the most obviously destructive power (Great big rock goes up, Great big rock comes down), so the logic seems suspect. "Hey, since our powers might be dangerous, let's all quit. Except the guys with the most dangerous powers and the tendency to blindly follow the law, they can stay. There's no way this goes wrong." There's a few other issues with this theory, but for now I'll settle for explanations for the above.

Okay, you know what my favorite Hoid scene is? Fleet. I appreciate that a lot of it rhymes, I like the story it tells, and I like its relation to Kaladin's predicament near the end of the book. There aren't any jokes or gags, that I recall, but I think in a lot of ways that makes it even more powerful.

You could easily deal with the Desolation and the Everstorm Respawn Point without dealing with the Everstorm itself, though. Heck, just convincing all the Parshendi not to sacrifice themselves for their gods (which, in most cases, probably just means letting the Parshendi know that opening themselves to their gods will straight-up kill them, not just change their form, since so far the Fused are basically getting their hosts by deceit) would probably be enough to end or at least severely curtail the respawn nature of the storm. In contrast to the Desolation Respawn Point, though, the Everstorm is likely here for the long haul. But it's not that big of a deal, really. By itself, the Everstorm is basically just a highstorm that doesn't recharge spheres. This is not much of a problem for Roshar in general. It was only super-destructive because they weren't prepared for it. I'm also imagining that Odium is still around, too. You know, go for a "defeated but not vanquished" type of ending, at least for the first series. The only thing that really has to end for a satisfying conclusion to the mini-series is probably the Desolation. And, of course, whatever the Night of Sorrows is.

@Calderis: Thanks for the link! At least I know not to expend more energy trying to work out the physics of something that apparently doesn't have solid physics behind it. It's kind of funny, really. Mistborn was written with such logic and detail that I just assumed that there was solid physics behind the scenes. It shows, I suppose, the power of a good cognitive illusion. Props to Brandon, and props to Calderis, Pagerunner, and company for saving me from too much frustrated physics!

I think he says something like "nine out of ten people I ruled", which means the number apply to him. But then he mentions that a couple other countries were hit even worse. So he may have been hit harder than most, but he wasn't the only one hit pretty darn hard. The point about us still being in the beginning of the Desolation is pertinent, but there isn't very much time left if we're going to get it wrapped up by the end of book five. If I knew the Desolation lasts all the way into the second series, I wouldn't be so antsy. But I thought that Brandon made some comments about wanting to do two mini-series rather than one long one, and it would be a bit weird to not get the Desolation wrapped up in this series if so. Well, Lopen's Oath was basically a gag and could have come at any time. I'd even say it's a bit weird for Lopen to be so far behind Teft, since Lopen is always shown on-screen as being more advanced than the rest of Bridge Four (among the first to suck in Light, an early user of adhesion, the first to reverse gravity that we see). Then Teft says his Oath out of nowhere and it turns out that Lopen's still stuck on the first one. I feel like the flow would have been a lot better if Lopen's and Teft's earlier Oaths had come, well, earlier. There were reasons not to show any of Renarin's Oaths, though I do feel it's a bit weird that Jasnah's maybe done with her Oaths and we still haven't seen a single one. I can see not showing the Oath that gave her Shardplate (if she has in fact said it), since that's a surprise to save for next book. But it seems like we should have seen something. But even if the Iriali want Adolin's Plate specifically, just give it to them. Then before Adolin goes onto the battlefield again, give him Renarin's Plate to wear. It's...I dunno, it seems a really simple problem to solve. This is one story arc I'd be happy to see quickly and easily resolved. You do make some good points about Evi, too. I don't know that I'd like to see the story go that direction with Adolin, but I could see the truth about what happened to her wrecking any possible alliance with the Iriali. If the alliance were to have difficulties, it seems more plausible for it to run into snags because Dalinar killed his wife than because he refuses to give back a set of Plate that he doesn't really need anymore anyway. Not that I can really see "ally with Odium" as a believable alternative, either, but maybe. Odium seems to be able to put on a pretty good show when he wants to, and we don't really know anything about Iri or how their parshmen reacted when the Everstorm hit or anything like that. But unless the Shardplate is just an excuse, it seems like a pretty weak justification to fail to ally against the literal embodiment of hatred. Maybe it depends how you look at it? There have been plenty of Earth cultures where having children at 13 or 14 was the norm. Plus, I mean, the girl's getting married. Turns out children can come whether the mother's ready for them or not. To be clear, I don't much care whether Shallan has a child or not when we come back to Roshar again. I could go either way. It's plausible that it happens; it's also plausible that it doesn't. But if she's ever going to have one, a year-long time-skip is a great place to have it happen. Yeah. Szeth, in particular, seems a hard one to deal with. What do you do with Szeth for an entire year? You could have him deal with the Shin shamanate (and return with Ash's Honorblade), but that doesn't seem like it would take a full year. But having him hanging around Urithiru with the rest of the Radiants seems like it would engender some...mixed feelings among the Alethi, not to mention nagging doubts among the other rulers in the alliance. I'm not sure that you need to get Ash or Taln out of the way, though. No one would recognize them (even the names they go by aren't widespread knowledge), and it's not like they're really in fighting shape. Well, Taln definitely isn't, and we haven't seen evidence that Ash has kept in practice. They could easily just hang around as general advisers. Or maybe Ash decides to hunt down the Herald of Healing on Taln's behalf. There's quite a few unexciting things they could do for a year.

People have already mentioned Teft, with the realization of what his addiction led to and his subsequent Oath. That was certainly a big one, but I think it was one of only three powerful Bridge Four scenes. I'm surprised the others haven't been mentioned yet. Maybe they didn't hit other people as hard as they hit me. The first chronologically is when Renarin comes to Rock and complains about how he's the odd one out (the middle of chapter 37). He goes on about how he's always the odd one -- the one Truthwatcher in a group of Windrunners, the one guy who can't fight, the one guy who's always been pressured by those around him, who's always been seen as unmasculine and weird. Then Rock points out himself, who won't fight. He points out Dabbid, who can't. Renarin admits that Rock, Dabbid, and Lopen are all out of the ordinary, but he insists that he's still the oddest one of the bunch. Then Rock points to Rlain. Renarin responds, and so does Rock. The whole scene is beautiful. But perhaps the most touching scene comes at the end of a chapter called "Alone Together" (chapter 55, for those who care). Rock asks how many of Bridge Four have come to him, saying they feel like they don't fit in anymore, and basically all of them admit that they feel that way. Maybe it's that it builds so well on the previous scene mentioned, like a one-two knockout punch, but this is the scene where I realized that, forget The Stormlight Archive. All I really want to read is The Bridge Four Archive, with Dalinar as an honorary member. They have all the best scenes.

Not saying it's right or wrong, but if you're trying to get to Roshar proper, it seems way easier to go via the Horneater peaks than through the Origin. Even if there is a perpendicularity there, you still need to get from there to the main continent. And most ships on Roshar won't sail away from land for fear of highstorms, so you'd need to hire a dedicated crew and a seaworthy ship. Sure, some people could be using off-world building and navigation techniques to run a clandestine transport industry, but it seems way more likely that the worldhoppers we see have come via the Peaks or somewhere else on the continent. After all, it's not like outsiders are particularly unwelcome at the Peaks. Rock invites the whole bridge crew to come visit several times. Well, he's running a lighthouse. Maybe he gets paid by government and/or shipping interests to do so? Or maybe he's running a trading post and the light's a way to attract visitors to his island? The ship of spren certainly stopped there. His place did kind of seem filled with a bunch of bric-a-brac; maybe it was for trade. I don't know if the spren sail ships of cargo around (though there's certainly a lot of spren sailing large ships around for some reason), but his lighthouse was obviously a port of call of some sort.

Perhaps not as much as you think, actually. Gravitational acceleration is certainly the dominating force over any reasonably long time frame, but if the coins aren't in the air for very long, gravity doesn't have much time to act. If a mistborn could do 140 mph horizontal, shifting to vertical doesn't slow the coin down all that much over 200 feet. I actually ran the numbers according Calderis' assertion (which I believe) that the coins are being constantly pushed. The problem is that, assuming that an 80 kg mistborn can push with a constant 800 N of force for however long it takes a 1 oz coin to travel 30 meters (neglecting air resistance, it turns out to be about a sixth of a second), you still end up with coins flying around at supersonic speeds. Only mach 1.2, rather than the mach 4.4 calculated above, but still patently unreasonable. Can I say that I'm impressed by your ability to quickly and accurately source such a bizarre request? Because I am. That being said, I'm afraid it doesn't help much. Did the coin shatter the cranium? Did it break through the spine? Did it miss the bone entirely and tear through the flesh? The fact that it broke a tooth in passing is somewhat telling, since that's got to take at least some energy before it makes its exit. But without a more detailed description of what's going on, it's hard to say for sure. Plus, there seems to be a dearth of research about the amount of energy required to tear a hole through the back of someone's head. It's almost like no one's ever researched it. Weird.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Shallan was my favorite character for the first part of The Way of Kings, but IMHO she's really struggled since. Partly it's that I'm not a fan of characters with "convenient" mental illnesses. Amnesia, in particular, is overdone in fiction; I don't think I've ever seen it done particularly well, and that was pretty much her shtick for an entire book. Now I guess we've moved on to multiple personalities; but schizophrenia is another trait that's been overdone in fiction, and rarely well. Another huge part is that she has nebulous "Truths" rather than Oaths, and... ...I just can't agree here. Shallan's Truths are something like I'm terrified, I killed my father, and I killed my mother. Well...okay? You can come up with similar truths that all the characters had to face: Dalinar: I am a tyrant. I failed my brother. I killed my wife. Kaladin: I fear failure. I failed my brother. I broke my Oaths. The point is that the other characters have their Truths, and then they have the Oaths as well. Because you take all those true statements about Kaladin above, and weigh all of them together against just "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves," and I think the Truths come up wanting. Similarly, all Dalinar's Truths aren't worth the single Ideal of "I will unite rather than divide." The Truths, fundamentally, are simple statements of fact. The Oaths are...well, they are Ideals, and watching a character attempt living up to his Ideals (and sometimes failing) is far more interesting than explicitly stating some random factoid about his past. I don't really think so. Look at Lopen's Oath. Look at Teft's. Are you telling me you wouldn't want to see more of that from the rest of Bridge Four? I personally would love to see how (or whether) Rock is able to balance the Windrunner's oath of protection against his own philosophy of nonviolence. Maybe he can't. Maybe he ends up some other Order rather than Windrunner. That would also be awesome. I agree that the "new" Oaths (i.e., any Oath we haven't seen some version of before) should have some impact and should be used sparingly. I fully expect Kaladin's next Oath to be at some climactic moment, and I think it will be awesome when it happens. Ditto with Dalinar's next Oath, and ditto with the first Oath we see from Renarin. Even Shallan will probably be climactic, because I'm guessing she'll get Shardplate at just the right time. If we go the "Adolin revives his Blade" route, which seems likely, I'm guessing his Oath will be pretty awesome as well, even though we've already seen Lift's version. But I don't think having other characters swear their Oaths onscreen takes away from any of that. When Kaladin got his Shardblade, that was awesome. When Teft got his Blade, that was still pretty awesome. (I actually think it would have been even more awesome if we'd seen him swear the previous Ideal as well, so that when the climactic moment came, I didn't have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of wondering whether he was swearing the Oaths out of order or not.) So no, I don't think they'll lose their impact one bit. Not so long as the Oaths are the conclusion to a character arc. I'm not really all that bloodthirsty. I just want this Desolation to feel worse than all the others. If Nohadon had said that he'd lost one person in two, I'd have been fine with seeing commensurate casualties, for a beginning. But however bad it was previously -- take the worst Desolation there ever was -- I feel that this time, it has to be worse. Team Honor has never been in worse shape. Team Odium has never been in better. This can only reasonably end in one way. Ironically, that's exactly the conclusion that Tavargian has reached. He foresees such destruction that the salvation of one city's population is worth the destruction of all the rest. Since there are way more than ten cities on Roshar, he must figure saving one in twenty, one in fifty, one in a hundred to be a pretty fair trade. I just hope he's right. This is actually a pretty good point. I guess it depends what kind of book you want to read. Do you want to read about political maneuvering on the level of nations, with grand clashes of armies and battlefield tacticians constantly one-upping each other? Or do you want to read about smaller groups, struggling to get by in an ever-more-hostile environment, where victory seems impossibly distant and simple survival a daunting task? I don't know that there's a right answer or a wrong answer. It's really up to personal preference. Do you want Mistborn: The Final Empire or do you want A Memory of Light? Which one better suits the story so far, and the story to come?

@Vissy: Well, Shallan falls kind of flat for me. I think she's easily the least-interesting Radiant that we know, other than maybe some fringe Radiant like the Stump from Edgedancer. So that's what I mean when I say she needs spice. She needs something to liven her up, to make her not flat anymore. Her split personalities are more of a gimmick than an actual character trait, and although the conflict did actually grow on me somewhat in the latter half of the book, it's going to wear out its welcome really soon. Still, that's all presumably going to be resolved when she says her last Truth, and then she's got...what going for her, exactly? Her conflict with the Ghostbloods? (Boring!) Her coterie of Gaz and company? (Boring!) Her love triangle with Adolin and Kaladin? (Oh God please no.) So, yeah, Shallan is boring. I kind of feel like the author's just throwing stuff at her to see if anything will stick. Is a baby going to be the answer? Probably not, but who knows? And at least, when it doesn't work, then maybe she could start spending more time off-screen, taking care of her little one, and leave the limelight to characters who better deserve it.

I'm with you on skipping more of Dalinar's political machinations (though I didn't think they were all that bad. Honestly, Shallan's parts bothered me more, in the first half). But I absolutely do not want more Radiant oaths spoken off-screen. I feel that was a huge reason why the first half of Oathbringer felt like it wasn't going anywhere. See, Oaths provide a meaningful sense of progress. Once someone says an Oath, they've moved forward. They can't move back. (Well, unless they're Shallan, but I think her character is pretty much irretrievably broken, and her lack of Oaths is a huge part of that. Three books in, including her flashback book, and I still have no idea what would cause Pattern to become a deadblade or what attracted him to her in the first place.) The fact that we went something like eleven hundred pages without seeing a single Oath in Oathbringer was, in my opinion, a huge mistake. It didn't have to be much. Even something like Teft having his first Ideal accepted (er, second? "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves") would have shown that, yes, progress is being made. Things are happening. We've got something like a dozen Radiants now. Honestly, I think we should have seen at least one Oath and probably two or three by the halfway point. I'd be fine if Shallan had a baby during the timeskip. That's exactly the sort of thing that could reasonably happen, would be boring to actually read about, but might provide some much-needed spice to Shallan's character. The only real problem I see with it is that family is already very important to her, so giving her more family to be important doesn't really accomplish much. But a character trying to balance Radiantness and motherhood...well, it'd be something new, at least. And Shallan needs something. I too like the personal story arcs a lot more than the supposedly bigger ones. The Fused and, by extension, the Parshendi, have really fallen flat for me as villains. (The Unmade are hit-and miss, with Sja-Annat being the big hit and Yelig-nar being the big miss.) Amaram was a much better villain in my mind, and I'm sad to see that he was more-or-less wasted at the end of Oathbringer. That being said, is the Iri problem really that difficult to solve? Dalinar and company have like four sets of Shards or something like that (well, maybe less, since they gave some of them away; but Renarin still has a set of Plate that he's not going to need much longer), so just give back Adolin's Plate. Heck, throw in a Shardblade along with it (whatever happened to Renarin's deadblade?) just for good measure. Seems pretty much a no-brainer for someone who's sworn to unite rather than divide. Simple problem, easy fix. I'll be kind of disappointed if it's blown all out of proportion. Well, I guess we can dream, but I really wanted there to be some consequences for Adolin murdering Sadeas as well, and that really didn't happen. Since we didn't get any complications from Adolin murdering Sadeas, we shouldn't expect anything for Dalinar accidentally killing Evi. I mean, what is there for Adolin to find out? That Dalinar hasn't always been perfect? That he sometimes made mistakes? That he was more of a warmonger in his youth? That he used to get caught up in the Thrill? Adolin knows all that already. If he ever find the truth out about Evi, I wouldn't expect him to blame Dalinar for it any more than Shallan blames Kaladin for killing her brother. No, the real potential for drama like that was having Dalinar find out about Adolin and Sadeas. Dalinar finding out his son wasn't as honorable as he thought. Adolin discovering he'd severely disappointed his father, discovering that by killing Sadeas he'd actually made things worse. Dalinar shocked that Adolin lied to him, that he hadn't trusted him enough to tell the truth. That's where the story was. Since we didn't get that, there's no realy hope for your proposal. Dalinar, Evi, and Adolin are small peas by comparison, and probably wouldn't be that satisfying anyway. You're probably right, but honestly, I hope not. I want Roshar wrecked by the time the last five books roll around. This is supposed to be the True Desolation, but so far this feels like Desolation-lite. I want the "nine out of ten people dead" that Nohadon mentions, and then I want things to get worse. I want Dalinar dead, I want the Stormfather splintered. I've been promised that "So the night will reign, for the choice of Honor is life," and I'm going to be disappointed if the night doesn't get to start reigning sometime soon. I want things to get worse (so they can eventually get better again, of course). Alethkar is what I call a good start. Now I'm fine if not all of this happens right away. It's been established that splintering can take a while, so I'd be fine if, say, the Stormfather got splintered at the end of book five and then spent a good part of the time-skip dying, so that when book six rolls around the characters have to deal with infrequent, unpredictable, intermittent highstorms and the twin impacts of ever-rarer Stormlight and the corresponding devastation that the lack is having on the Rosharan ecosystems. But you know what I don't want to come back to? Happy-go-lucky explorers traveling around in their super-awesome flying ships fueled by massive amounts of Stormlight, clearly the product of massive investment and infrastructure, having somehow survived the Desolation of all Desolations without much difficulty despite Honor being dead, his Heralds being broken, his Knights Radiant being annihilated, and his peoples at each others' throats. If flying happyships need to happen, make them happen sooner rather than later. If we've got to have them (and we probably do, unfortunately), I hope they happen by book five at the latest.

I guess that's a good point. It doesn't help if he's too late and the Blade's already inside the bubble, but if he's too early, he could just set up another bubble a second or so after the first collapses. Still seems like he's going to burn through his metals a lot faster than the other guy -- in order to effectively estimate the trajectory and dodge, he'd probably need to burn at least five seconds of time per bubble, which would add up pretty fast if he has to burn multiple bubbles per toss. It's made worse by the fact that the Windrunner doesn't have to let the Blade hit the ground. If he sees that his target is suddenly 30 feet away from where he threw, he could summon the Blade back immediately and save a few seconds on the turnaround. Not explicitly. IIRC, the calculations were done disregarding air resistance but rounding "down" from what they would be in a vacuum. Provided her terminal velocity is greater than the initial velocity of 70 mph (which seems very reasonable, for something thin and bladed like a sword or spear -- not much surface area there), then she hits in less than two seconds no matter what. So it's something like...I think it was a bit less than 1.4 seconds in a vacuum and a bit less than 2 seconds in a super-duper thick atmosphere. So 1.5 seemed reasonable. But maybe a bit more. Certainly less than 2 seconds, though. Heh, maybe so. Shallan was able to keep up first her Veil disguise and then her illusory boulder for several hours when she met with the Ghostbloods, on probably not that much Stormlight. I think a little bit of Stormlight goes a long way, if you're just doing one thing. You know, I think you might right about the pushing (constant application of force versus initial starting velocity), from the way the powers are named (steelpush) and they way they're described. There's a couple of problems with this interpretation, though. First, if this were so, then Coinshots would actually be far more destructive from a distance, since they'd have more distance to apply force to their coins, and I seem to recall that not being the case. More importantly, the math just doesn't work out. (At least, it doesn't if I've remembered my physics well enough. Someone should probably double-check me on this.) Assuming that an 80-kg mistborn (probably about Kelsier's weight) can "hover" himself at a height of 30 meters (around 100 feet): ... Okay, there might be one way to tell, sort of. What's the most amount of damage a coin ever did in Mistborn? Any coin, ever, off of a regular steelpush? We could then approximate backwards from that to an effective "muzzle velocity", at which point my previous numbers become relevant, 100 mph seeming like the magic number as far as muzzle velocity is concerned. If the mistborn can fire at above a 100 mph equivalent, he can potentially hit the Windrunner. If not, he's toast.