Garfield

Kaladin apparently went on this trip unarmed, apparently even without his combat knife (???). He doesn't glow if he is not using stormlight. His eyes go light when he summons his blade,but that the eye colour of a darkeyes changes to light when he bonds a normal shardblade is common folklore, and very likely nobody in Hearthstone has seen a shardblade close up to be able to tell that Syl's blade is something else than a normal shardblade. So if he summons the blade they would simply assume he is a normal shardbearer.

He doesn't allow himself to be treated like that because he plays it safe, he does it, because he is again at the point where he is so despondent that he doesn't care.

I think when a bunch of voidbringers is going rampant people will forget about their prejudices rather quickly, when a guy with a glowing shardblade shows up. Also, shouldn't the king or Dalinar have given him a document that gives him full requisition rights and the authority to be in charge of the defense against voidbringers or other calamities that follow the storm? Why didn't they at least fix him a Captain's uniform. Was sending him home incognito, as a common soldier a deliberate choice by Dalinar, Elhokar and himself?

Why shouldnt he? Why should he go incognito as an escaped slave/deserter darkeye when there is work to do where he needs to be in charge, as the only person with a shardblade within probably hundreds of miles? What is supposed to be the advantage of that? I know that depression is real, personal experience. But when the need arises I can still mostly pull myself together to act coherently, despite being not in good shape emotionally. At least for a while, when it's important.

Autism is caused by a developmental problem in the early brain development, that most likely is already established when the child is still in the womb. It's not acquired later, for that reason it's not classified as a mental illness.

I just read through the chapter that BS has put online of book three http://www.tor.com/2014/09/30/brandon-sanderson-stormlight-archive-book-3-first-chapter/comment-page-2/#comment-563594 and I have to say, if this is how the character arc of Kaladin continues, I'm quite fed up with him.Two books full of it, at the end of book one Kaladin seems to come around and now he again regresses back to the state he was in when he was in those slave wagons or ready to give up and jump into the chasm. I don't mind at all if Kaladin continues to have his lows, is a bit emo when things go wrong. But repeating the same pattern for three books, THIS is not character development, it’s plain boring and pointless and I completely lose interest in the character. Oh and by the way, Dalinar was a complete idiot for entrusting Kaladin with this fortune in charged spheres in order to help out back at home. Is he eager to see, if his parents are still alive? Nope! Not high on his priority list. Wallowing in self pity is more important. Guard marches him into the house, another of the men whacks him over the head from behind, robs him while he is unconscious, surprised and happy for what he finds in his bag and they leave him to die with a cracked skull. All because he was too depressed to defend himself, let alone defend others. Life before death? Nope. No stormlight to heal him. End of story. Plus, in a state like that he will break his oath again, anyway, killing Syl out of sheer depression, because he simply can not muster the energy to uphold his oaths, not even the first one. Dalinar, declare him unfit for duty and lock him up in the disabled Radiant loony bin where he gets therapy for his problems. Wow. This is really annoying to read…. And I don’t want him to pull the Radiant heroics after a breakdown to save the day another time around, because we had that. Several times over! What a disappointment!

That one had me wondering, too. Deadspren shardblades take 10 heartbeats to borrow life from the holder, honorblades obviously don't have this limitation. Was that sloppy writing or deliberate. And if that was deliberate, why did Szeth have this idea that only after 10 heartbeats his blade will form.

Renarin is depicted to be a light case of Asperger autism, combined with a social phobia. (I know someone who is a high functioning Asperger and she has no general social fears but is quite extroverted)

Indeed, particularly compared to lightweaving. And Jasnah described soulcasting as potentially hazardous if you learn it unsupervised, making Shallan swear that she doesn t experiment on her own. With the windrunner abilities, I guess it s a bit like learning to ride a bicycle, or swim. Once you get a feel for it, it works pretty much automated, all you have to do is consuming large quantities of stormlight to power it over a prolonged period of time.

Then why didn t they use some volunteer guineapig, contain him, and then assess if he is dangerous or not. If yes, kill him. I mean, they were aware, that some forms were connected to their evil old gods that they didn't want back. So why was there not more precaution against this possibility? Why weren't they able to wait for a few days to conduct these experiments. In the Parshendi council several of the forms were against those experiments.

True. Days after she contacted Dalinar for a peace talk she suddenly decides that trying new, potentially dangerous war froms to destroy the humans once and for all is a good idea. Doesn t make any sense. Why didn t she wait until after the peace talk to decide? Why didn't she just openly explain the reasons why she had Gavilar assassinated. I mean, Gavilar had seriously dangerous ideas and preventing him from putting those into action was maybe bitter for Dalinar and the rest of Alethkar, but it was reasonable, and in the end in Alethkar's best interest, too. Also when Gavilar had these dangerous ideas of this secret society, why did he also read Way of Kings? Aren't Nohadon's ideas contradicting those of the secret society?

Recently reading the books I came across several scenarios I found fairly odd, implausible and somewhat inconsistant. Not in chronological order: *Why do the stormform parshendi retreat and seemingly disappear as soon as Dalinar evacuates the all troops to the portal platform. Neither do they continue to attack the humans waiting on the platform, nor do they apparently try to attack the trek of the warcamps as they all make their way to the portal. There must still be thousands of them living out there. *The world is not believing Dalinar about the storm and the voidbringers, when he sends out message via spanreed. But the storm, moving from west to east was said to hit New Nathanathan shortly after leaving the Shattered Plains. New Nathanathan should have been victim of that storm and the voidbringers shortly after the Dalinar arrived at Urithiru, the people there fighting for survival confirming Dalinar's claims to the rest of the world shortly after Dalinar sent out word. *Teft tells Kaladin about "the radiant girl" when he meets them, waiting at the empty platform, after Shallan had evacuated the troops to Urithiru. He comes to the conclusion that Shallan must be the Radiant girl because he didn't hear her shardblade scream it was either an honorblade or she was a radiant. But with his oath broken and his abilities gone, he most likely wouldn't have heard a dead shardblade screaming in his head. One clear sign that she must be a radiant though would have been, that her shardblade could change form or length, just as Syl does, something only live spren shardblades do. He had seen her use the blade dagger sized to cut steps into the chasm walls and had used it full blade length against the chasmfiend. *Shallan "accidently" stumbling across the very person who oversaw the murder of Jasnah on the way to the plains. And this person takes her in and teaches her valuable abilities she needed later in the warcamps as well gives her information about how to infiltrate the Ghostbloods. Just tooooooo unlikely a coincidence for my taste. *How can big sailing ships operate in a world that has hurricane strength storms every few days. Even in a safe harbour a large sailing ship will not be safe, the storm would fell the masts, even if there are docks that can prevent the hull to be blown over or perish in the waves a storm like this causes. As a big fan of the Forrester Horatio Hornblower novels I cringe when I read about sailing ships under such conditions. *The amount of slaves/convicts Sadeas' bridge crews use up. The Shattered Plains are a rather remote place on that continent, which means, getting humans there should not be easy or cheap and I doubt that the war camps produce enough convicts out of their ranks to send to the bridges to fill up losses as great as Sanderson describe them in his first book. Like a quarter of the men per bridge per run. I would have to do the math how many die each week/month/year, but the amount seems grossly implausible to me, just as leaving the injured behind, as slaves are still a valuable commodity to have, even if they take a few weeks to heal up, because it takes more than a few weeks to cart a new batch to the plains *The scene where Kaladin swears the third oath: I call that dumb, uneffective and convenient antagonist syndomre in the face of victory. Maybe I have watched too much Doctor Who lately, where this comes up regularly and really pisses me off to no end because it happens just toooo often in movies, in TV series and books to conveniently give the hero time to shine. There is a showdown and instead of just killing off the protagonist/target the baddies stand there, start to argue, gloat, do all kinds of useless things, while exposing themselves to be discovered or defeated, just to give the hero time to do whatever dramatically heroics he needs to do, gives dramatic speech, gain back his superpowers etc. Graves gave me the impression he is quite the professional. As soon as he noticed that newbie Moash is not up to the job a person like that would have dispatched both, Kaladin and Elhokar quickly. Instead he starts to argue at length with Moash. And THEN, on top if it, incompetent idiot Graves gives now-superhero Kaladin the hint he needs to know that the assassin in white is right now attacking Dalinar, enables him to save him. No. I simply don't buy it. It's a typical case of horribly sloppy writing of those characters. * Fencing with shardblades one handed. While you probably can do it with strength support of the plate, or stromlight, a weapon that long needs the leverage of both hands to use it with precision, particularly if you don't have this strength support. I had some longsword fencing lessons, even if the blade is light for the length (a normal longsword weighs about 1.5 kilos and is about 1.2 to 1.3 meters long) you can not use something that long reasonably with one hand. And an armoured fencer would use a two handed weapon as in an unarmoured warrior with a sword needs the second hand for a shield. Did anyone find more?

The Shinovar people are not allowed to use weapons. And once he was Truthless I highly doubt that he trained with a Shardblade fencing master.

But didnt we know that being the blackthorn, the most notorious of all the high princes must mean, that he was at least as ruthless as Sadeas and the most violent of the whole bunch? He was best friends with Sadeas at a time when they had a pretty similar attitude. Plus, this battle Thrill is a force that makes you singleminded about one thing: Killing what you feel needs to be killed, until it's all mowed down, it doesn't contain any moral values, when you have it, you turn into some kind of Terminator mode. So yeah, it s a bit revolting, but it's not surprising, at least not to me.

Radiant Renarin shows signs of autism, Radiant Kaladin cycles through clinical depessions, Radiant Shallan has PTSD and copes with repressing stuff. If Szeths revival means he becomes a Skybreaker Radiant, we can expect him to be a complete nut case. There apparently is another Skybreaker nut case out there who executes a homeless proto Radiant kids for breaking into houses to steal food and another proto Radiant for having committed a murder decades ago.. Jasnah seems the only emotionally stable one of the bunch, she has "only" ordered the murder of several people. Mmh, poor Dalinar and his psychiatric Radiant ward..... .

That I had been wondering too. Stringing out people in the highstorm is not an ordinary punishment, It is a trial by ordeal, and so far nobody seems to have survived it. Either you are guilty and perish or god's will and intervention makes you survive it because he works a miracle for you. Pious as they are, he ardents of all war camps should be totally beside themselves if that ever happens. A miracle of god, that should be the talk of the day.

No, there is a simple technical plotting problem. He can not have told the whole 1st person narrative of the first two volumes in the time given in the books. It s technically not possible, unless the days on this world have something like 50 hours or so and he doesn't have to take care for his inn. Try listening to the audiobooks as I did, then it becomes extremely obvious that the time frame and the amount of 1st person narrative is not only a little, but massively out of balance. And now he has to finish this in one volume, with all the tons of open plot points. that has to be told, because he can not simply decide to do two more volumes instead of one. The other thing I don't like is that after two of three volumes, the Chandrian plot has not advanced in the slightest. I'm not a reader who needs frantic action all the time, but Rothfuss excessively meanders through uninteresting side plots that BORED me after a while. Character development stuff and main plot are out of balance too.

Classism was a very ugly word when class differences were more pronounced than they are in Europe today. The French and Russian revolution were triggered by "classism". Neither absolutistic France nor Russia needed physical characteristics as a distinguishing feature to create a society like this. And India still has it today without the need for physical characteristics to base it on.

Sorry, but ONE rather small phenotyical difference doesn t justify calling it two races. Apart from the very different skin coloration, that has a biological reason and function (high UV protection vs low UV protection in caucasiand to enable us to make enough vitamin B with less UV light) Black Africans have different facial features, hair structure and it turned out that we white caucasians have a small percentage of Neanderthal genes that black Africans dont have. So a Nigerian person and a Norwegian do not only look differently in a small detail, we have different genetic makeup due to different environmental needs. You would not call a blond person from Scandinavia and a dark haired Italian different races.

Indeed. That s like in pre WWI Europe, where you had aristocracy and and normal citizens, and the chance for the average citizen to be ennobled were near zero. Despite that fact the aristocracy of Europe was not a different race than the normal citizens.

You have to remember that there are not only more mild forms of Asperger autism where you can have very good quality of life if you have an understanding environment, the right job etc, but also much more severe forms of it that inevitably come with a lot of suffering.

I guess the news that someone was strung up in the highstorm and survived would make it to the news through all the camps. The camps do not only consist of loyal soldiers, but also civilians, and the camps are in too close proximity that there are no contacts. After all, being judged by the highstorm is a type of trial by ordeal, someone surviving it must be seen as divine intervention. In a society that is so superstitious about the will of their god that should be a big deal!

That s the point of it. Every single one alone can be explained away with talent, luck, good training etc. But collectively, after a while there is this "oh, has that Kaladin guy with the slave brand again pulled it off" effect.

With reason, since Wistiow and his daughter as a child he has never met "normal" lighteye citizens that didn t order him around or treat him bad. He has never lived in a place where there were average low level lighteyed citizens that have a good, normal relationship with their darkeyed neighbours. We, the readers know, that there are lighteyes that work for their money, that don't have servants, in that world, but Kaladin has never lived in a place where he could have made positive experiences with the friendly lighteyes carpenter who fixes his fathers operation table or the reputable lighteyes merchant where he buys cloth for a new dress for his mom.

For the normal people, true. But not Dalinar with his visions. And there is still real, powerful magic in this world, people seek out the Nightwatcher and the boons he grants are real. There is soulcasting. In the middle ages in Europe people believed in the return of Christ. In a society like that supernatural forces are seen as very much a reality. And on Roshar exist all kinds of sects that believe in odd "supernatural" stuff. Jasnah seems to be the only person immune to supernatural superstitions and ideas.