Jofwu

Could have sworn this has been flagged somewhere, but I'm not seeing it, so...

In RoW chapter 22:

Quote

That was fortunate, for while Shallan could slip into Shadesmar using her powers, she couldn’t take anyone with her—and she couldn’t return on her own. Even Jasnah, whose powers supposedly allowed it, had trouble bringing herself back from Shadesmar.

This is saying that Shallan can FULLY move herself into Shadesmar, and I think it was a mistake as written.

We've seen her enter in some sense, but Brandon has always stated that it is more of an astral projection sort of thing. When Jasnah pulls Shallan out of the beads and back into the Physical Realm at the end of TWoK, for example, she sees Jasnah's body still in the Physical Realm before Jasnah snaps back herself. So they have some kind of ability to enter it in their mind as if they had a body there, while not actually bringing their body in.

I believe this is all affirmed by the RPG handbook. All I'm seeing on the topic is a sidebar on page 235:

Quote

"The surge of Transformation grants a limited ability to look into the Cognitive Realm."

Entering fully, I think, is intended to be something entirely associated with the Surge of Transportation.

All of that said...

I suppose that, knowing what we do now about how STRANGE Shallan is due to her double-bond, it's possible she CAN do this after all and is just a very special case. I'm skeptical Brandon wrote it with that in mind. I would think this would be a pretty big deal with the characters wondering how this is possible. It's a useful ability even if it's a one-way trip for Shallan. I would expect her to be considering how she could use that ability to get out of danger for example.

But maybe I'm wrong, or maybe it's okay to "retcon" with Shallan's unique nature as the explanation.

Rhythm of War ch 45 is nine years ago and says:
"[Eshonai and Venli] were nearly adults, only a year off for Eshonai and a little more than two for Venli."

Rhythm of War ch 57 is eight and a half years ago and says:
"But Venli was still months away from official adulthood."

With only half a year passing between the two this seems like an error. I assume the ch 57 should say something like "over a year away" with her birthday having happened between the flashbacks?

That said, "months away" could technically mean more than a year's worth of months, so its not explicitly incorrect.

p592

"Stormstriders, enormous spren with long imbs."

Something tricky regarding singer/Fused skin patterns...

In Rhythm of War we are told that the Fused warp the skin patterns of their host body to match their own distinctive pattern. This is how Kaladin recognizes Leshwi even when she's in a new body, for example.

It came to my attention that there's no mention of this happening in Oathbringer Interlude I-6 when Venli's listeners are taken by Fused. Venli is able to identify Demid in particular after his transformation even though he has apparently changed both forms and skin patterns (to that of a complete different singer). In light of RoW, I would expect her to be more confused about what has happened, maybe to the point of thinking it's not Demid. At the very least I would think she would comment on the skin patterns as an oddity.

The "error" isn't an explicit one, and perhaps there's some other explanation for this. Maybe she just knows that's where Demid was and too much is going on for her to think further. Maybe the Fused's patterns just happen to be similar to Demid's? Maybe the skin patterns don't change immediately??

But figured I would raise the issue just in case there's a desire for a tweak in the leatherbound. I can't think of anywhere else in Oathbringer this issue might crop up, but it's possible that it does...

Discussion/reaction thread for chapters 7, 8, and 9. You can find this week's chapters here: https://reactormag.com/read-wind-and-truth-by-brandon-sanderson-chapters-7-8-and-9/

On 5/30/2024 at 8:56 AM, king of nowhere said:

Reading the notes, though, you see that a lot of that is speculative. in particular, in reference A427, the author notes that the time is very constrained, and he's making some generous assumptions to fit the timeline. that is, it does seem like kaladin is doing an awful lot of things in a very short time, but there are constrains in how long he can be spending as a bridgeman, so those assumptions are needed to fit the timeline - which actually does vindicate my point that kaladin spending less than 100 days as bridgeman seems short.

The boundary dates are relatively fixed though. The "Rosharan Dates" link that Treamayne shared gives the date of Kaladin's first POV chapter, approaching the Shattered Plains (9.3.1 = K73, so 72 days prior is 7.8.3), and the end of TWoK at the Battle of the Tower (18 days after K73). So the official timeline has Kaladin spending less than 90 days as a bridgeman.

The assumptions being made in my timeline are about how some of the stuff in the middle fits in. It does need another pass. A while back I got Peter to comment on Kaladin's time in part 1: their official timeline apparently has that as 18 days and my guess was that it's 14. So there's definitely some guesses that need to be refined. Hoping to incorporate those tweaks in the Wind and Truth update.

Who hurt you?

Since this topic was double-posted, I'm merging the one from General into this topic in the Stormlight forum.

Potential continuity error caught by u/NKMEstadullo on Reddit, regarding where Wayne shot Telsin at the end of Bands of Mourning:

Hi everybody, Joshua here. My best friend in preschool tended to pronounce that as "Jof-wuh" and in middle school I figured "Jofwu" would make a great AIM screenname, so here we are. Middle school was also when I started reading the Wheel of Time, which quickly became a new favorite. I was too young to participate in the online fandom, but I liked to lurk... Fast forward to 2015, where somehow "Jofwu" had become a Reddit username and Brandon Sanderson's completion of Jordan's epic series made me give his books a shot. I fell in love with The Way of Kings a few pages in, and decided then and there that I wanted to go all-in on the fandom thing this time. I spent so much time on the Cosmere subreddits that they made me a moderator, then started editing Coppermind articles and helping with Arcanum until they spiked me on 17th Shard in 2017. The years since have been everything I hoped they would!

I live in South Carolina with my wife and three kids. When I'm not spending time with them or doing Sanderson fandom stuff, I enjoy reading sci-fi/fantasy by other authors, playing RPGs, and indulging the occasional video game / television show obsession.

17 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Pretty sure that was @Jofwu in this thread.

Just want to emphasize people should look for the one on the second page. The initial post was pre-TLM and the new world map that came in it.

On page 42 missed a lowercase "physical realm" that should be capitalized.

9 hours ago, HappyWhitespine said:

I came from reddit. That looks like it's imploding for now.

I never wanted enter the inner sanctum like this. Heck, I've been intimidated as hell to create an account over here for years. I know a lot of you have accounts over there anyway but this just feels like being in the room where it happens. So to speak.

So...ummm. Hi. Please take care of me.

Welcome, HappyWhitespine

FYI, I'm moving this to the "New Cosmere Releases" forum, on account of the Tress reference.

18 hours ago, Requiem17 said:

Is there a page on the Coppermind (or somewhere on the internet) that goes through all the secrets we've uncovered in the Stormlight Archive prologues? 

If there isn't one, any recommendations on how I could go about building it? 

  Reveal hidden contents

For example, in Book 1 prologue Nale is described visually. I'd like to include the quote from the book then a link to Nale's Coppermind article, etc.

 

Hey Requiem17, good question!

This isn't the sort of encyclopedic content that's fitting for a Coppermind article, so you won't find it there.

People are welcome to use User pages on Coppermind for something like that, but I'm not aware of anyone who has collected this information there. (You're welcome to.)

It's totally possible someone has made a list of this elsewhere on the internet, but I couldn't point to one. Have you tried looking around the forums? If you can't find one, and want to get one started, I would make a post in the Stormlight or Cosmere forum about it.

On 2/24/2023 at 9:37 PM, Lost said:

I believe there is a mistake in the section that talks about Shallan killing her mother. I'm going to put it in a spoiler just in case as it details events revealed in RoW.

 

  Hide contents

It states that she summoned Pattern as a Shardblade when she killed her mother, but I believe it was actually Testament she summoned because it was this event that caused her to break her Oath.

 

Ah, thanks for the catch. That would have been written prior to RoW, and we didn't go back and scrutinize every event detail in the RoW update.

I'll make a note to get it updated. (probabyl into something more ambiguous so that it isn't spoilery)

I can't imagine there will ever be revisions to the Omnibus, but it feels wrong not to make a note of typos and continuity errors.

• Page 10, Glossary - "A'Kar" should be capitalized as "A'kar" (several other Ars Arcanum pages use the latter, K is only capitalized here it seems)
• Page 119, big speech bubble from Kenton - "Los'een" should be "Los'seen"
• Page 143, final paragraph - "influencial" should be "influential"
• Page 241, line by Jon Acron beginning "Just before Baon came back..." - is missing a quotation mark at the end of the line
• Page 291, paragraph beginning "I've read about the Dayside phenomenon..." - "After a four hours" should be "After four hours"
• Page 362, top panel - Kenton says Khriss "once said Dayside was primitive". She did in the original version I believe, but this was removed in the Omnibus. She no longer says anything about Dayside being primitive.
• Page 408, Aarik in the first panel - "nevermind" should be "never mind" I think.

(still got to do the last 100 pages or so, so likely I'll be back to add one or two more)

On 12/9/2022 at 3:13 PM, Oltux72 said:

Which real world mile? Why not nautical miles or the Scadrian equivalent?

Yes, Scadrial is an analogue to Earth. But the Earth is larger than peoples using customary British units.

Sure, you can go that route if you want.

I don't think Brandon is playing with that kind of pedantry. The point of being Earth-like is "it is what it looks like".

Maybe I'm wrong to assume that, but I'm comfortable with.

On 12/9/2022 at 3:13 PM, Oltux72 said:

Do we know into how many hours the Scadrians split their day?

I don't know off the top of my head, but I'd be extremely surprised if it's not 24 SI hours. See above regarding that assumption.

On 12/9/2022 at 3:13 PM, Oltux72 said:

I am already hard pressed to accept one people who are abyssimally bad at seafaring. Yet another?

Agreed there. But there's more flexibility to explain it away than the Norhterners and Southerners had at least. If it happens.

But it doesn't have to mean there's people out there. Could just be unclaimed land.

2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

We should also note that Scadrial seems to have a lot less land than the Earth, unless there are even more unknown continents.

There was a Cosmere.es interview from a bit before the TLM release where Brandon said we would get a new map but it would NOT be a map of the whole planet. And probably by Era 3 we would. So there must be more. Now, it's possible the only thing left is the land at the edges of this map and no telling how extensive those get... Regardless, I feel like it must imply there's *something* notable out there.

2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

By this point I think we need additional parties to explain this. If I may propose

It is interesting that the AoL broadsheet mentions "a strange seafaring people." I would have assumed it's the Southerners... But maaaaybe there's other people out there???

3 hours ago, Treamayne said:

But they have had contact. Even the Alloy of Law Broadsheet showed:

You're not really disputing that point though, because the encounter from the Alloy of Law Broadsheet was "300+ years later"

But anyways...

I realized tonight: "Duh. We have the scale on the Elendel Basin map which largely prompted this whole post in the first place." So if you look at the Elendel Basin map, the distance from the center of Elendel to Bilming is almost exactly equal to that 100 mile scale at the top of the page. I'm using those two points because they're relatively distinctive on the new Scadrial map and because if we want to measure a greater distance as a baseline then we start adding more error in to the measurements. So anyways, let's assume that Scadrian miles are the same distance as a standard real-world mile. Which given the whole "Scadrial is like Earth" premise is probably a safe assumption?

When I pull up the new Scadrial map, I'm measuring somewhere between 14.3 and 16.8 pixels from the center of Elendel to Bilming. Just sort of depends on which pixel you measure to. This is going to be the greatest source of error in all this. So from here we back up and measure the distance between lines of longitude, which are equally spaced, and for that I get 125 pixels. This tells me that the distance between lines of longitude is between 745 and 874 miles if we extrapolate our Elendel to Bilming scale? We have to be careful here because the scale on a Mercator projection increases the further you get from the equator. That scale factor is pretty small if we're under 30 degrees latitude though, which seems like a pretty safe bet here. All that to say, that's some more error... but probably not much compared to the error we're already working with.

Now again, "Scadrial is like Earth". We're basically 100% confident that Scadrial is Earth-sized, which means it has a circumference of 24,901 miles. If 745 to 874 miles is 15 degrees as I had been assuming, that means it has a circumference of 18,000-20,000 miles. So there's two possibilities: (1) the scale on the Elendel map is slightly off or (2) these lines of longitude (and latitude) have some other spacing.

I do want to emphasize that (1) is VERY POSSIBLE. There's a scale on the original maps of Alethkar in The Way of Kings. They removed it from the leatherbounds because they realized it was wrong. I actually spoke with Isaac a little bit about it at JordanCon in 2021 and he made some comments about how it's always a bit of a gamble putting scales on these maps. They look nice... but they don't always have these things worked out decades in advance. And if something comes up and they want to make a change... They will. I think it's abundantly clear that the GRID on the Elendel Basin map was made up just to look cool and doesn't really fit into this new "world map" in a logical way. So blindly assuming the scale must be correct is a mistake.

But with that as our only thing to work with, and because this is fun, let's assume it's correct.

For the measurements we have, it suggests the longitude lines are spaced at 10.7-12.6 degrees... out of 360. Now, they could be spaced as 12 degrees. It wouldn't be the most unreasonable number to go with... But it IS odd. And we've been wondering about the possibility of Scadrians using a different number of degrees in a circle... Well, if we back up just a tad, what I'm getting is that there must be 28 and 34 lines of longitude (at 745 to 874 miles spacing).

Hmmm... Suspicious that 32 is within that range... Guess what? If Scadrians use 256 Scadrian degrees (let's call them Sdeg) in a circle (that's 16 squared) that gives you 32 spaces at 8 Sdeg each. That's RIGHT within our margin of error.

To be clear that's 8 Sdeg out of 256 Sdeg. So 8 Sdeg is equal to 11.25 degrees (out of 360 deg).

What that means is the whole map needs to be scaled down even more than what I had before... It actually puts the Northern and Southern continents COMBINED as roughly the size of Africa. And frankly that's enough to make me skeptical about this. Anyways, here's what I come up with adjusting to that scale. I'm... not 100% I can just scale it like this... Someone more familiar with map projections might want to weigh in. (I was assuming the lines at 15 deg and had the grids matched up. If they're supposed to be 11.25 deg now, that means I had to scale the Scadrial map down by 11.25/15--or in this case scale the underlay of Earth up by 15/11.25)

Just to be clear, if you suppose the lines are at 16 Sdegree spacing out of 256 Sdeg, the following is what you get. It seems like the Final Empire region is probably too large at that size to me? And that means the Elendel Basin map scale is off by a factor of 2.

If I had to put money down, I'd still suppose that the lines are at 15 degrees and the Elendel Basin scale is slightly off. The size of the land just... feels more right to me in that one and I'm not sure I have enough faith in the Elendel Basin scale with the "fake" grid on it.

But hey, maybe they're using 256 degree circles and I'm onto something.

@Otto Didact When you've got some free time maybe looking at this map would be fun.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything weird about the Southerner climate. I don't think there's any implication that their own climate is significantly more suitable than the north. Kelsier found them "freezing to death" and needing medallions in their own homeland.

22 hours ago, Ookla of axi said:

I'm assuming for now that those grid lines represent divisions of 16 degrees

I actually see no reason to suppose that they are different from an actual Mercator projection at this point. I was supposing other ideas to try to make sense of the grid on the Basin map, but I don't see any rhyme or reason behind that grid now. I'm left imagining that it's some alternate grid system.

I'm going to assume they're using 360 degrees and the map has 15 degree spaces until evidence to the contrary shows up.

Certainly it could be a situation where they're using 256 degrees per circle, so 16 spaces of 16 degrees? Actually, that particular idea I'm skeptical about. Because that puts the southern tip of the southern continent almost at the geographic south pole, and I doubt that's the case. I mean, maybe they use... 16x24=384 degree circles??? Maybe.

Here's the map on top of a Mercator projection by the way, assuming the lines are at 15 degrees:

Seeing as people want to talk about this and the topic is pointless to proceed without the new map in TLM, I'm going to move this topic to the TLM spoiler board.

TLM

I've been sitting on an idea for a few months now, and I figure it's finally time to throw it to the whitespines...

It began even further back, with the Stormlight 5 prologue reading, which left us with one shocking discovery: "The Stormfather could lie?" Many people of course have been interpreting the Stormlight 5 prologue as teasing that "the Stormfather" is not really himself. Some have proposed that the being we see is actually someone else entirely, such as Ishar, somehow pretending to be the Stormfather. Others have supposed that he is being manipulated to some extent. But I'm one of those thinking that we are seeing the real deal. Stormfather in the prologue is the true Stormfather. If the Stormfather that we "know and love" is different, I would submit that it's because his bond with Dalinar has changed him, because the Words of Radiance Stormfather seems entirely compatible with the SA5 Prologue Stormfather to me.

Then in August of this year, on an episode of Intentionally Blank, Brandon did some teasing his plans for the ending of Stormlight 5. Obviously he didn't want to spoil things by getting into specifics, but he said one thing in particular that really wormed it's way into my brain: "When you read it, I think it will recontextualize a ton of important other moments in the series." My brain went into crazy mode trying to think... what would be the craziest thing that could be recontextualized? I came up with a few wild ideas, but with the Stormlight 5 prologue still bouncing around in my head there was one in particular that really latched on.

If the Stormfather could lie... What if Honor has been lying?

About what? Who knows... But wouldn't it be crazy? Maybe it's not even an explicit lie he's told, but simply a withholding of key information. The potential implications are wild. We take his word for granted on so many things. What if, for example, Honor was interested in the "greater war of the cosmere" as well? What if Honor and Odium made a deal to work together to build an army for some purpose and then they had a falling out? Could that have been the underlying cause of the Recreance--people realizing what their god had secretly been planning?

Okay, I'll reign it back in. I just want to give an example of how wild things can quickly get if we consider that Honor didn't give us the whole truth...

I do want to get ahead of the objection that "Surely Honor can't lie?" After all, bad things can happen to Shards who break their promises. But those two aren't the same thing. Can a Shard lie? You bet. Brandon actually just addressed this in the latest spoiler stream! Can Honor promise to tell the truth and then not? No, that would be against his very nature. But if he made no such binding promise... why not? Certain spren may find this difficult to swallow, but then Tanavast is the mind behind Honor and he was no spren.

Brandon has always been careful to leave open the idea that "honor" is not an inherently GOOD THING.

Quote

[...] I don't call the Shards good and evil. There are no good and evil Shards in my opinion, like and so, what's evil and what's not evil- you can totally have spren that are of Honor that you would consider evil.

Odium says as much as well:

Quote

“Honor cared only for bonds. Not the meaning of bonds and oaths, merely that they were kept. Cultivation only wants to see transformation. Growth. It can be good or bad, for all she cares. The pain of men is nothing to her. Only I understand it. Only I care, Dalinar.”

I don’t believe that, Dalinar thought. I can’t believe that.

The old man sighed, then heaved himself to his feet. “If you could see the result of Honor’s influence, you would not be so quick to name me a god of anger. Separate the emotion from men, and you have creatures like Nale and his Skybreakers. That is what Honor would have given you.”

Now, this is Odium speaking and he has is own agenda here. We need to take this with a grain of salt, yes. But I think it would be foolish to completely dismiss his claims outright.

Anyways, I think you get the idea here. If Honor has lied in some way, things could get pretty interesting. Personally, I really like this whole terrifying idea. I particularly like the crazy ideas about how we have been misled by Honor regarding things like the Recreance, the Oathpact, and the Desolations. I'm not going to go too far down into the weeds exploring one of these ideas here. I guess part of me is hoping some of you will be interested enough to do so, because when you start breaking down assumptions around Honor and, well, recontextualizing everything we know about the past... there's a lot of moving pieces!

But there's one other cool idea to dig into first...

Consider THIS particular thing that Honor told us:

Quote

“I am … I was … God. The one you call the Almighty, the creator of mankind.” The figure closed his eyes. “And now I am dead. Odium has killed me. I am sorry.”

I'm not going to try to argue that Tanavast was lying here. We've seen plenty of claims that Honor died from others, and we've seen plenty of evidence that it's true. Both from the books and from Brandon himself. And yet... Death in the cosmere is not necessarily final. And, uh, both Brandon and the books have been screaming at us that Tanavast's death was not final. To be clear: Tanavast died... and he became a Cognitive Shadow that attached itself to Stormfather.

Quote

[...] the Stormfather absorbed... is basically Honor’s Cognitive Shadow, which means he’s got a connection to a lot of different things, so he’s not bound by a lot of the rules that others are.

Quote

“I am the one left behind,” the voice said. It wasn’t exactly as he’d heard it in the visions; this voice had a depth to it. A density. “I am the sliver of Him that remains. I saw His corpse, saw Him die when Odium murdered Him. And I . . . I fled. To continue as I always have. The piece of God left in this world, the winds that men must feel.” (Words of Radiance ch 82)

Quote

I am no god. I am but a shadow of one. (Words of Radiance ch 89

Quote

I see what is left out in the storms, and that darkly. I am no god, Dalinar Kholin. No more than your shadow on the wall is you. (Oathbringer ch 16)

Every Cognitive Shadow that we have known retains some sense of its identity, right? The singers who became Fused didn't completely lose their identity. The Heralds certainly didn't. The Returned lose some memories, but their identity is still in there. We've got the Lord of Scars of course... Even the Shades on Threnody seem to retain a piece of their mortal selves. So why should this case be any different?

Well, okay, there is a reason for it to be different... The Stormfather was a powerful spren long before Honor died, with... SOME level of sentience? Perhaps it should be no surprise that if a Cognitive Shadow binds itself to a sentient piece of Investiture then things might not go quite the same as what we've seen elsewhere. But... how can his identity be gone completely? I don't think that's the case.

Yet we continue on like Tanavast has gone to the Beyond. I think the issue here is that... we've never really seen something in Stormfather that we can identify as distinctly Tanavast. (despite the fact that we have no reliable point of comparison and there's evidence that Stormfather wasn't entirely sapient prior to Honor's death) And of course Stormfather has repeatedly denied that he is not the Almighty (because he's mostly not... in a sense).

And of course we can trust Stormfather, right? Right?

So here's what I propose.

The soul of the mortal who held Honor was not killed by Odium and did not go to the Beyond. When Honor was Splintered he attached himself to a Stormfather who was quite different than the one we know. Less sapient. More a force of nature. And his mind is still in there. He's still scheming. He's still got plans. And he will lie to achieve them. We need only look at his interactions with Gavilar in the Stormlight 5 prologue to see this.

As for what happens next, I can only guess. To be clear, I do imagine that Stormfather's own nature greatly colors what we see. We haven't been dealing with "just Tanavast" all along. We've been dealing with a mesh of the two. I only want to argue that Tanavast is much more part of Stormfather than we generally imagine. And he's been lying about some things, and holding some things back. I also think that his bond to Dalinar has changed him--that it is changing him. So it will be interesting to see where that leads.

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  • Search Help - Everything you wanted to know about using search on Arcanum.
  • Collections Help - Information about how to make and use the Collections feature.
  • Coding - Curious about contributing to the software we use? See this page for more info on how you can help.
  • Arcanum Bots - Details about using bots to access Arcanum.
  • Staff Info - Contact information and a history of the website.

With the new menu, we hope that accessing and using the site is easier than ever!