Ansalem

Probably just created the Diagram before he found out about Szeth. No reason to make a Truthless if there conveniently already is one. Besides, it says "can we make to use a Truthless", not "can we make a Truthless".

Shallan had her Shardblade since the beginning of WoK. Or at least she thought she did. She never actually summoned it until WoR, but she considered it to be available before she said any truths on screen.

I don't see why not. Just saying them wouldn't do anything.

I don't really see how the murder story has taken a back seat. It was almost the entire point of Shallan's chapter. It's just not going the way anyone expected. We may not be getting much from Adolin about the murders, but the arc is definitely moving forward. Adolin just hasn't had a lot of screen time at all, really. And Dalinar has bigger things on his mind right now, he assigned people to it now he's letting them handle it. Shallan, however, seems pretty damnation focused on it.

It's obviously both. I don't think there's anything that says the boon and curse can't be the same thing.

The Unmade are often speculated to be spren.

Yeah, that's how it always goes. I come up with a theory, someone immediately posts a WoB that says "nope". Kinda starting to hate WoB's. They take all my speculation fun away. I'm pretty sure he's targeting me specifically at this point. Well, there was that one time he said "yes" to my question, but you know.

Undoubtedly. I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain all Shards have a Shardpool on a world they're Invested in. It's speculated that the Horneater oceans might be Shardpools. Hoid steps out of one, presumably that's how he got to Roshar in the first place. Speaking of Shardpools, Urithiru is said to have been built at the place closest to Honor. I'm suddenly wondering if that means Urithiru was built on top of Honor's Shardpool?

True, but the Shards' intents are open to interpretation to a certain extent. Hatred can manifest in many different ways. Sometimes it makes you want to hurt things, sometimes it makes you want to destroy them, sometimes it makes you want to simply be better than them, etc. It could easily be that he does want to wipe out humanity and maintain only the Listeners, but I can also see certain interpretations of hatred that would make you want to increase the number of people alive so you can increase the overall amount of hatred or suffering of those you hate. But the Desolations would seem to go against that notion, Odium clearly wants to destroy at least some large percentage of humanity. In any event, I don't really see any end state that could be considered positive. I think the real question has less to do with Odium and more to do with Taravangian's idea of what preserving humanity means. Is simply having living humans enough? If so, does that mean it's acceptable if they all exist in unending suffering? I don't think he's evil, so I don't really think that would be enough for him, but I could of course be wrong.

I thought he made it pretty clear to Szeth. His goal is to preserve humanity after the Desolation. I suppose he might think yielding to Odium could achieve that, but I don't really see it.

Well, if Dalinar is the author he's probably not actually writing it himself. When women scribe books for their husbands, they kind of... fancy it up. Navani has already been shown to do this with a book she scribed for Gavilar in WoK. She made him sound more scholarly than he really was. If she's scribing Oathbringer for Dalinar, then there's a good chance she's doing the same thing for him.

If you mean keeping the kingdoms separate as the goal Odium and Taravangian share, no they don't. Taravangian's goal is to unite the world, and more specifically his goal is to become king of everything. If you mean limiting Dalinar's power, then maybe. I don't think it's very clear what Taravangian has planned for Dalinar yet. The way the Diagram was worded still leaves it open to interpretation whether he thinks Dalinar is currently a threat to him or a potential ally. But either way, his goal is to unite the world and prepare mankind for the next Desolation.

Shallan murdered her father in cold blood after she already bonded Pattern. It's easy to argue she was justified but at the same time she was very calm and it was pre-meditated, not a crime of passion or defense. She had been planning it for a while, she was just looking for an excuse at that point. I don't think it's clear the first ideal is even a binding oath and it's certainly open to interpretation. Maybe Pattern wouldn't be okay if Shallan just started murdering random people for no reason, but he definitely allows for just about any other kind as far as I can tell.

As far as we know, that's only because Harmony is the most powerful (known) being in the Cosmere and Odium's goal is to be the most powerful being. Harmony is the only double Shard we know of (I think). He fears Harmony because he knows he'll have to go against him at some point to achieve his goal. If it weren't for that there would be nothing to fear since Harmony's nature makes it very difficult for him to act, unless Odium doesn't understand the nature of Harmony I suppose.

Could simply be cultural. Many cultures or languages refer to things or ideas with specific genders. We do it a little bit in English, for that matter. "Necessity is the mother of invention" for example. Why not father? Because. Scholarship in Vorin cultures is so often considered a feminine art, it's not surprising if they would refer to a generic teacher as female. Especially if their audience is expected to be female who would have been mostly taught by other women. If they used a metaphor about experience being a general or something I would expect them to refer to it as male.

Wait, I could vote more than once? Well, crap. I'm looking forward to Jasnah showing back up the most, though. I'll be really disappointed if she's gone for most of the book again.

Szeth himself can write. The words left at Gavilar's corpse that Dalinar thinks Gavilar wrote, Szeth wrote them. So I would say probably not. Szeth seems unlikely to me.

Before Honor was shattered, the Stormfather existed. Sometime after the shattering, the Stormfather merged somehow with Tanavast's cognitive shadow. So from one view the first two are both dead and there is a third entity made of them both. It isn't Tanavast and it isn't the original Stormfather. It's both and neither. So it depends on how you choose to look at it. Personally I would say that Tanavast is dead, but I also wouldn't disagree if someone said he wasn't. You're getting into a probably unsolveable philosophical question about the nature of the self, identity in general, and the nature of consciousness. It's a pretty deep rabbit hole. In short, "in a sense" Tanavast is not dead, but what does "in a sense" really mean here? And does it even matter? The Stormfather himself speaks of Tanavast as though he is a separate entity and he doesn't act as Honor likely would act in his place. Are you still you when your personality has changed that much?

I'm guessing it has something to do with how they consider stone to be holy or sacred. If I remember correctly in the Prologue to WoK, Szeth wondered how the Alethi could use something sacred as mere illumination (talking about the gemstones filled with stormlight along the walls).

Except the primary Vorin nations we know about are about as far from honorable as can be. In Alethkar especially, corruption and debauchery reign. They don't worship Honor, they worship war, wealth, and power at any cost.

The Resonance of Windrunners is not just that they have squires. They aren't the only Order that has squires. They just have a lot more of them and their squires are likely stronger than the others as well in some way. It may not be super exciting, but I would consider it pretty powerful. Kaladin has, what, 20+ squires already and there's no telling what the limit is. But for the sake of argument, let's call the limit 30 squires. And some Orders don't have any squires or only one or two. Whether you think Adhesion is strong or not, you're comparing one Surgebinder to a whole squad of them. I don't really care how strong one Dustbringer is, they're going to lose against 30 Windrunners. Another way to think about it is one spren makes one Surgebinder vs one spren makes an entire squad of them. It could easily turn out to be the strongest Resonance, especially if the limit is much higher than we've seen so far. edit: And like Calderis said, it could be that Windrunner squires can actually surgebind compared to other Orders' squires only being able to get the basic benefits of stormlight. We just don't know yet.

Oh, I missed that part. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Maybe Jasnah put her remaining stormlight back into it, which may or may not be a thing they can do.

My understanding is that for normal soulcasting you would need a particular gemstone to perform a particular soulcasting, but for Shallan and Jasnah they only need stormlight. Jasnah asks for a garnet just to cover up the fact that she can soulcast without a fabrial, but she actually uses stormlight from a different stone.

Considering everyone there thinks Jasnah is dead, I doubt Brandon would just make an off-hand comment about her being there. There would be at least a good chunk of a chapter dedicated to her return, surely.

I wasn't crazy about Tyn but I did like Shallan during that part. I didn't hate her, but I got a bit of a "future enemy" vibe from her pretty fast so I was mostly thinking about her as an obstacle more than a character if that makes sense. I was a little surprised how quickly that was resolved, though. But just generally speaking, whether I like a character or not has little to do with how I think about them as a person. Some of my favorite characters are absolutely vile. I tend to judge more based on how they fit their role in the story. I thought Tyn was decent. A bit forgettable but not terrible. I agree completely with your assessment of her personality, though. She was dripping with hubris.