Justice

Annotation is live on reddit. Displayed as link to avoid spoilery things: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormlight_Archive/comments/jmwe4r/last_weeks_annotation/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Cool glad you had seen! So I agree, there must be something with the two of them coming together. Speculation seems almost pointless since Sanderson always surprises me but then why else am I on a prerelease forum? The difference in how these characters deal with their individual challenges may echo the differences between Shallan and Kaladin in their handling of their mental health issues. Kaladin wasn’t fixed after learning of Shallans past but he did learn about another way people behave. The coming together of perspectives should be fruitful to say the least. Aaah I want to read it now!!!

Apologies, couldn't find the link but someone asked about disability representation in the r/brandonsanderson subreddit and Brandon replied and conversed with the person a lot about this. Not that it was spoilery but since you were asking about this I thought you might be interested. If someone else can google-fu the link before I get a chance please post below. Otherwise I'll keep searching and update when I find it. Edit: here'e the response. The initial post/letter/essay is worth a read!

Thanks all. Sorry, evidence of what? To be clear, my speculation is wild. I also like that it might be the Shin, but I’m enamored with the idea that it was the Mink who snuck the ruby to Navani. I have no evidence aside from thematic alignment, freedom and all.

Hi all, I keep seeing the position that someone who honestly seeks the freedom of spren would not use an enslaving fabrial to communicate their desire to end this practice. I would simply remind these people that Ruin could preserve to ensure further ruin and Preservation could destroy to preserve. Brando builds contradictions into his characterization and magic systems and thus we cannot use absolutes to predict plot outcomes. If shards can contradict their intent in the short term for larger goals certainly splinters and people can do the same. The surgically targeted communique to Navani using a spanreed to shutter her dispersement of conjoined and other fabrial technology is not some fundamental violation of absolute beliefs that renders it immutably either ingenuous or contradictory. A last-ditch effort by those with similar ends who would prefer to redirect the behavior of a dominant set of compatriots is more likely. Speculation given this set of assumptions: it isn’t a “sibling”. It isn’t Odium. It is a Wilshaper trying to avoid splitting the front against odium before things cross a line.

I think it is the Mink. This is the Willshaper Book, Willshapers seek freedom, and fabrials imprison spren. In addition, Willshapers are close to spren like the elsecallers of the past. The Mink could have placed it and his spren or another Reacher could have done the communicating.

I wonder about the role of Odium in the corrupted Nale version of the Skybreakers. I'm in the middle of part 3 of oathbringer for the upteenth time right now. The passions are always wanting people to give up their worries, their sorrow, their guilt. The Nale version of Skybreaker oaths seem to echo this notion: abandon what you know to be right and follow an external version. You don't need to worry about what is right, only enforce it. I think it is corrupted. Justice (ha! username) is more than enforcing the letter of the law. Windrunners aren't Skybreakers following an internal rather than external moral code. They want to protect people. Yes, that might be protection from injustice, but that is not equivalent to judication. A better Skybreaker seeks justice under the law, not enforcement. Nale's version is corrupted and flawed.

If you’ve never heard the song I Palindrome I by They Might Be Giants this will be new to you: "Son I am able, " she said "though you scare me." "Watch, " said I "Beloved, " I said "watch me scare you though." said she, "Able am I, Son."

Throwing my hat in the ring: Failing in journey, learn, stumble; learning to journey in failure

Oathbringer makes it clear that the wording of the later oaths, specifically of the Skybreakers and Windrunners, are individually determined and personal. The Skybreakers are all about finding a code you can follow and becoming the law in your own way. Without further evidence, this could be assumed to be only a Skybreaker trait. However, with the utterance of the third oath by Teft, it is clear that this extends to other orders. An aside, I really disliked Kaladin’s “so long as it is right” oath, but LOVED Teft’s version. Shallan’s truths in lieu of oaths foreshadowed this idea, for one person’s truth is not another’s. Each oath after the first two is very much personal and individual. I really like where this can take the series, and what it does for character development. Each Radiant will have their own path to each order’s advancement based on their lives, limitations, and “broken-ness” for lack of a better word. So, if we assume that the Windrunners’ final oath will be analogous to the Skybreakers’, what might Kaladin’s oath to “become Honor” look like? What does that mean? Shot in the dark: “I will uphold all of my promises to the best of my ability, and forgive myself when I fail, because the journey to Honor does not end when you stumble.”

There are so many juicy opportunities for conflict in this! I think Shallan’s affiliation with the Ghostbloods will be part of her moving away from her wardship relationship with Jasnah. Shallan has proven herself and has a role in the KR without Jasnah, and Jasnah’s reappearance threatens that position. In the end, I imagine we will see them become peers that use the ghost blood connection to seek out hidden histories.

I think the deeper truth is that they are all lies, all parts of her that emerge in different situations for different needs. She needs to embrace the girl who couldn’t laugh as part of who she is, stop burying it and let it live alongside the many other people she has been and will need to be. This allows her to both confront the horrible past but doesn’t fall into a mental health stereotype.

Ah, thanks @Leyrann. Knew i probably jumped the gun on the theory there. Hard to keep the timeline straight when I get excited about something. The similarities between the issues that Kaladin and Nale/Nin/Darkness are having, along with the Tanavast and Dalinar discussion, and even the alleyway scene with Jasnah and Shallan all make my brain itch! Luckily we will know more in just a few days! It is probably just Kaladin’s processing to get to the next oath. But still, even if it is that, there’s something more there. It is almost as if there’s always another secret or something...

I’ve been thinking about the Kaladin chapter from this week and his conversation with Syl about what is “right”, while happening to re-read the end of WoR and Edgedancer and something leapt out regarding relative morality: Emphasis added and all. Then I read in Edgedancer: And This seems to be a series of hints to me. Our curren KR are bound by oaths, as the KR were in the past. What’s missing? A living Honor to guide the oaths. Without Honor, the oaths could lead to (and may have led to) another desolation. But you have to stick to a chosen code. The most recent oath Kaladin has spoken included the phrase “so long as it is right.” Yet his current situation with the Parshendi suggests that he is unsure of the foundation of what is right and wrong. How does one uphold an oath to do what is right when one doubts the foundations of right and wrong? Kaladin struggles with this more than any other POV up to this point. Now Dalinar is our main POV and he converses with Taravangian about what makes a good ruler. (An aside, Taravangian is about the most utilitarian moralist I’ve ever seen in a fantasy novel). The theory? Without Honor guiding the oaths, the foundations of the oaths that guide the KR lose their foundation. This revelation builds over time, resulting in the recreance, where the KR as a whole aknoclwge that, post honor’s death, by following their oaths, they have been enforcing a relative morality guided by the “fallen” heralds that has no moral foundation. Instead of continuing to abide by these oaths, they break their bonds and walk away from their duties. This solves the problem of 9 out of 10 with Darkness’ justification of his actions. Without delving too far into moral development, obeying the law is actually considered a lower level of moral development than following a code of ethics. To obey the law to avoid punishment is lower on the progression of morality than to follow your own moral compass. Yet Darkness retains his order by imposing the law, as it exists in a particular jurisdiction, as the chosen code. This allows his skybreakers to avoid the catastrophic impact of the death of Honor. They retain a reference to guide their oaths, while those orders who could care less about the particular laws of a given country, lose their moral foundation. Very much welcoming thoughts on this as we eagerly await Oathbringer’s release on Tuesday!!

Hey all, on my regular reading of io9.com I found an exclusive audiobook excerpt from Oathbringer Chapter 3, the first Dalinar flashback. https://io9.gizmodo.com/hear-an-exclusive-preview-of-brandon-sandersons-new-fan-1820300131 Cheers!

I think this is a matter of assumptions. What an author chooses to include explicitly and to allude to implicitly or leave absent depends on their assumptions of their audience. This is reflected in the annotations of the WOK. What can an author expect of their audience? Tanavast/Honor is the Author of the visions and he must assume certain things of his audience. If the questions deviate far enough from the base assumptions of what the author thought the "reader", or seer, should know, the characters start to view the person as insane. Therefore there is a lot of space for learning IF Dalinar is capable of walking the line twixt that which the author assumes is known and what Dalinar wishes to learn. This balance was struck with relative ease I must say in WOR, but could be taken advantage of much more in revisiting. The ultimate concern is, what does Dalinar know he doesn't know, and what does he not know he doesn't know. This is pretty ripe fruit for a talented author like BS.

@Asrael, I agree that total destruction of the Humans on Roshar is not the direction to go. It is not warranted by their previous actions. Odium might want this as the outcome, but this seems significantly less than his cosmere-level goals. It seems that you are trying to answer Sah's question from Chapter 20: You suggest they forgive and move on? That would be best for all in the long run, but where will they live? How do they protect themselves? The vengeance pact makes the Listeners an enemy. The prior condition of ownership makes the "healed" Parshmen escaped slaves. They will be hunted and fought wherever they are found. Even if we agree that the immoral actions of the Rosharans do not justify the Listeners killing all humans, their previous experience and the current political, social and economic position they are in certainly warrants they learn to defend themselves from re-enslavement and create their own nation. Finally, the true danger is that even the smallest sense of injustice on the part of the transformed Parshmen would most likely be fanned into flames by Odium's intent: Divine hatred directed at those who held them in millennia of enslavement. They are fertile soil for the seeds of Odium's intent.

Briefly ignoring the debate on was it right/wrong to treat the Parshmen as slave labor, I am interested in the question posed here: Was their sense of superiority racism? Interesting question. It is certainly unclear. I might argue that if it was racism they would treat the Listeners differently than they had when they encountered them. They did not assume the Listeners were slaves, nor did they attempt to enslave them to use as labor based solely on appearance/apparent similarity. They engaged them as a nation, recognizing their rights to the lands they occupied and negotiating a treaty to use their lands. Back to the main debate, Eshonai's POV in the prologue to OB demonstrates that even the Listeners saw tremendous differences between themselves and the Parshmen. It comes to mind then, that through some magical or supernatural means, those Listeners who became Parshmen were physically and mentally altered in a way that made them unable to care for themselves. At this point there may be a moral obligation to care for them, but the form of that care (and the labor extracted as a cost of that care) are of concern. This reminds me of the difficulty in deciding when someone is no longer capable of consent, such as in the cases of medical powers of attorney or extreme disability. The legal status in the US is of Guardianship or Conservatorship. A Guardian or Conservator is granted the power and authority to make decisions on behalf of the incapacitated person, or ward. To declare that the Parshmen were in no way wronged by modern Rosharans requires the assumption that the Parshmen are so unable to care for themselves that they are incapacitated. This seems to be a good assumption. However, for them to have done no wrong, they must be acting in the ward's best interest and cause no harm. They certainly cannot be financially gaining from the labor of the ward. Can it be said, in treating them as slaves, that the Rosharan's were acting as responsible and moral guardians of their wards? At best, they were neglectful and wrong. In truth, they were taking advantage of their wards to benefit themselves, and so were acting immorally.

I'm not sure exactly. My gut reaction is that investiture is the granting of sentient control over natural forces (gravity, weak force, light, etc), which isn't so much cognitive. The control is spiritual and the particular forces are the physical. That being said, per a very helpful PM, the shards and their intents dwell largely in the spiritual realm. I haven't figured out how that plays in yet. I'm about to re-read The Emperor's Soul and that might give me some ideas of where to go with this.

Hey all, first bonafide theory and it's only my second or so post. Something from my classes on moral and social philosophy has been popping in my head as I re-listen to WoK, especially they emergence of Syl. It reflects the notion of shardic intent, the cognitive realm, and spren. Hold on tight, I'm about to stream of conscience this. The intents of shards as we know them are social constructs insofar as they are all human conceptualizations of natural and social forces. EG preservation is a categorization of natural events that hold in common the resistance against entropy. Ruin is entropic. We perceive different phenomenon (death, decay, heat loss, systemic information disintegration, etc) and apply a particular conceptual notion to bind them together as similar. They become ruin, yet without the idea, they are all isolated phenomena. They do not exist as a whole idea without the imposition of boundaries and definitions ascribed to reality by a shared perception by humans (sentient beings). Thus established, the question emerges as to what exactly intents are and how the notion of human generated categories can impose their characteristics upon individuals, and what exactly the cognitive realm is. Here I will introduce a concept i have yet to see on the shard. The idea that abstract concepts can impose structure upon reality is reification. Through social power, manifested as norms, language, expectation, roles, and so on, abstract ideas can emerge with real power that constrain and direct behavior. People in society invent an idea of how the world is structured and then impose that idea up on each other using overt and covert, insidious and invidious means. For instance, without seeing the hidden strings, some particular scientific explanation of how people come to have different skin color becomes a justification for social power structures that already exist, reinforcing those structures and adding a normative value and scientific weight to those structures. Suddenly attempting to address those structures is not just going after individual instances of injustice but fighting the basic shared understanding of science and the natural world, a much more difficult opponent. Where does this idea go when thinking about spren, the cognitive realm, and the SA? It seems pretty clear to me. The notion that human thoughts and ideas create real objects in a separate realm that then have real impacts on the "physical" realm is a clear link. Real objects have representation in this world of ideas, but the more "permanent" (perceived), large (observed as singular), or important (ideas as opposed to objects) they are, influences their existence in the cognitive realm and, in turn, their usefulness or power when encountered by or wielded by a human. See: honor as opposed to wind, a ship, a stick, the land as opposed to the sea, the space between planets... Changing something in the realm of ideas can then have a major impact on the physical world (changing a rock into gas!?!?!?) Pretty generic notions so far. What's the theory? The fluidity of interaction between the physical and cognitive realms allows for major changes in the way things work, especially on Roshar where the cognitie realm is so close. The honor pact creates heralds who have individual abilities toed to "natural forces" defined as surges. We have heard that the heralds first emerged to fight in desolations and the knights radiant came much later. Maybe the delineation of surges can be tracked back to the intents of the shards or something else. That's for another post. Nonetheless, these heralds' repeated engagement with the different sentient species on Roshar led to the emergence of cognitive entities that reflected these singular individuals and their powers. These are the spren that radiants eventually bond. The idea of heralds is reified in the form of spren in the cognitive realm. These cognitive entities impose order and structure on the physical realm, forcing humans to act in a particular way and make "abstracted" promises to gain access to power. Once the power was available this structure was further reinforced by the heralds in the form of the orders, which further reinforced the cognitive idea of the bond being the source of the power, and so on. The important idea is that all of this is imposed through repeated actions of people. The cognitive realm is mutable through what people believe, and as such the structure of bonds and powers are mutable as they relate to how people observe them and understand them. Here's the logical leap (since nothing up to this point is actually a theory about what might happen in the books). The heralds are nothing special. Their link is a promise that only exists through social bounds and structures. Therefore other people can replace them. The new knights have become reified versions of the old heralds and their powers. In addition, our new heroes are gaining the ability and experience to survive damnation. I imagine the horrors Shallan and Kaladin (think Bridge 4) have been through have steeled them for damnation. They have the powers of former heralds and the strength and willpower to replae the failed heralds in the oathpact. Our main characters are going to be the new heralds at the end of the first set of 5 books, They all die or are sent to damnation to suffer. The oathpact is renewed. The second half of the series is the actual resolution of the oathpact. This vibes with the idea of the cognitive realm, the social concept of honor, and even the notion that viewpoint characters can die. Renarin and others can "die" before his viewpoint book and still have a major role. Thousands of years can pass between the halves of the series if necessary. The old heralds can try and prevent losing their old role or try to circumvent the desolations, but they gave up their role. If they do not fulfill the idea of herald they no longer hold the position. This take leads to a lot of other ideas I have (such as the roles of the shards and intents and how fundamental the boundaries and oppositions of each intent truly are as well as the meaningful merging and destruction of shards). What the idea of reification does in this conversation is allow for a foundational relationship between how the physical and congnitive realms interact. Thoughts?

Hey all, first post, this type of topic is what got me out of lurker status. I've personally been on the side of Justice as a combo of Honor and Odium for a while, though much of this topic has me reconsidering. Honor reflects upholding and maintaining values and agreements, and Odium reflects the incurring of the divine wrath of the enforcer of the agreement or originator of the value. These are not opposites. Instead they are intertwined in the idea of Justice. That being said, Justice is not really a divine notion. It is a part of society. A society can be described as a contract between people, and a civilized society could be one where the basis of that contract is acting with honor. Break the contract and punishment is incurred. This is justice, but it lacks any form of divine wrath for breaking a promise. It should be impartial. It is simply the means by which a society can be maintained. This has all been said before, and I'm starting to agree with this position. A shard that has not been mentioned here but that could encompass others mentioned is the idea of Grace. Grace is core to principles of christianity and includes notions of forgiveness, mercy, and love. It would be the true antithesis of divine wrath. The closest to grace in the known pantheon would probably be Endowment, in the form of bestowing blessings. This is only a small part of the idea of divine grace however. Interested to hear your thoughts.