Aliroz-The-Confused

Since you seem to be agreeing with me, I must assume you're being sarcastic. But, genuinely, the treatment of the Parshendi's bodies by Bridge Four was truly horrific and beyond the pale. If the series ends with all of Bridge Four executed (possibly with Nightblood because it is fitting for those who do not respect the dead to miss out on an afterlife) for crimes against Listenerdom, I will retract my statement that "The protagonists of the Stormlight books casually do heinous things which the narrative never condemns them for.". Otherwise, I will persist in my assertion that the people who are most supposed to embody honor continually go around lying, breaking promises, negotiating in bad faith, putting their own desires above duty and law, and in general engaging in pragmatic and results-oriented behavior, and that "the Shards here are very strict" does not seem to apply to POV characters as much as it applies to everyone else.

I'll grant that if you'll grant that I'm not totally bonkers to consider Shallan taking off Iyatil's mask to be essentially taking the clothes off of a corpse to stare at what's beneath and that I'm not insane to think that that's (1) heinous (2) disgusting and (3) unforgivable. I'll grant that if you'll grant that a legitimate argument can be made that Jasnah bears primary responsibility for Queen Fen having to switch sides. The protagonists of the Stormlight books casually do heinous things which the narrative never condemns them for. I don't think I'm entirely stupid to assume that they're being set up for conflict with everyone else (just mostly stupid).

Lookin' forward to it, buddy!

To me, a totally static, unchanging universe sounds very comforting.

Interesting. So, the Devise and Change shards are evil, and so is Odium, which leaves at most seven good shards. Drat! Almost a clean 8/8 split. EDIT: WAITWAITWAIT Endowment's good, so it's a clean 8/8 split. Swap Endowment for Odium (say that Odium is a change-one, a future-facing thing, because hatred is an intent to later destroy, and call Endowment a "feel" one) and we've got a nice coherent split.

You underestimate how sadistic and cruel authors are, and how cruel Mister Sanderson already has been. Reread Kaladin's chapters as a slave and a bridgeman. Or consider the implications of Reen threatening to sell Vin to a brothel (the implications of brothels that you can SELL people to, and the fact that Vin was a child at the time). Or consider the actions of the Set. If Scadrial was to have its happy ending, it would have been after the first trilogy. The very premise of the later books proves that the intent is not for Scadrial to have a happy ending.

I'd assumed Midius/Hoid/Cephandrius would be helping with that last part.

I communicated my thoughts poorly (as is characteristic). It wasn't the small Herdazian populations that worried me, it was the implication that their presence means that travel of populations between Roshar and Scadrial is possible, and, more than that, possible on a scale I had not anticipated. And I wasn't predicting that any of the things I worried about would happen in the near future (that is to say, the lifetimes of the mortal humans we meet in the Wax and Wayne books), but over a long period of time after that. I was imagining that, over time, the entire surviving not-retribution-aligned population of Roshar would end up on Scadrial.

The "Enlightenment" was very much not a good thing in my opinion, so that's hardly consoling for anyone who prefers Narnia to A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. And there is, as far as I can tell, no indication that Jasnah is going to gain a wild devotion among the common people, and the foreshadowing seems to me to be hinting that she's about to hit a massive backlash from the common people who don't actually like having their way of life turned upside down for a heretic lighteyed queen's ideas of benevolent reform, and might, just might actually like some of the traditions and aspects of the society that used to function more properly before the Kholin family took over and stopped maintaining them. None of the Bridge Four guys object to the duels. They express discontentment that they're not allowed to participate in them, and the way in which this feels bitter and raw implies to me that perhaps prior to the last couple of centuries or maybe even just prior to the Kholin monarchy, someone like Moash could, in fact, have called out someone like Elhokar and resolved it to his satisfaction or death. And, sure, maybe Jasnah's new legal labyrinth doesn't require mass literacy, but it sure as heck will require guides, scribes, interpreters, advocates, and an entire literate class of middlemen between the people and justice... and those guys aren't going to perform any of those services for free. I interpret the Kholins as people who benefit greatly from systems they do not put effort into maintaining or even understanding, and then, when those systems fall apart, they act like it's the system's fault, and introduce something new which just so happens to aesthetically, morally, intellectually, or in some other way have great appeal to them and allow them to take credit as creators and doers... which is what they want because they're too darn proud to value the world they grew up in and would rather be remembered as controversial changers who did important things than as maintainers who prevented disaster, and I think it's valid to interrogate that from the point of view of those who do not have the benefit of narrative representation through plot relevance or Point-of-View characterization. Especially the Vorin churches, which have been astoundingly patient and accepting of Jasnah, all things considered.

I think that's what Jasnah intends, and what she thinks she's doing, but I'm not sure that that's what she's actually making happen. For example, outlawing the honor duels. Those were a way for Alethi to get legal recourse they wouldn't otherwise be able to (just as duels served that purpose historically), and, furthermore, there were many regulating factors mandating a fair fight. In historical societies that allowed duels, the social and societal function of such was to resolve conflicts without escalating them (part of Moash's frustration in Words of Radiance is that he can't just straight-up call out Elhokar and duel him... in other words, that the social structures which were supposed to grant him means to seek recourse are not available as they ought to be), and we can assume that they served this function for the Alethi. Jasnah is replacing this with a legal system full of rules written by her and people like her, a world in which verbal disputation, rather than physical violence, reigns as the arbiter, and that overwhelmingly favors scholars, the charismatic, the literate, the intelligent, and, in short, Jasnah and people who remind Jasnah of herself. I think it would be very messed up to get rid of the Azish's complicated paperwork system and have them solve problems in the traditional Alethi ways, to take from their children their papers and pens and give them swords and spears. I think it's similarly messed up to take away the spears and swords from Alethela's children and give them papers and pens. Some kids love reading and writing, some love fighting, climbing, and exploring, and just because one way of life is closer to ours (as modern readers) doesn't make it inherently better. How is an illiterate darkeyes supposed to navigate Jasnah's reforms, her world of wit and reason and papers? It will take generations to adapt, and I think we underestimate the impact the replacement of "rights we know how to use and how to build a life off of" with "rights that are new and unfamiliar and require literacy which we don't have" has for the vast majority of Alethi. If we didn't have a pipeline into Jasnah's intentions, it would be very easy to suppose that she is restructuring her society to benefit people like her at the expense of those she regards as 'barbaric' and 'brutish', or, in other words, shifting the axis of privilege to a bureaucratic clerical scholarly class. Jasnah, in many ways, tries to have her cake and eat it, too. She expects people to adhere to the rules, and then rewrites those rules when she doesn't like them. She expects Queen Fen to be willing to sacrifice everything for the coalition but is not willing to do the same with her own domain and makes preparations to assassinate friends and allies while expecting them not to do the same. She wants the personal loyalty that is the backbone of any feudal system to be maintained while she systematically undermines that system and then is disappointed when the system kicks back. These are intentional characterizations, I think, and they give her depth and come organically from her personality, and I think Mr. Sanderson, though characters such as Queen Fen, is showing us the consequences of things we as readers have been ignoring and excusing because magical warrior queens who can make you explode and love reading are really cool. My whole point is that, regardless of what the consequences are and regardless of what the past is, the present needs of refugees outweigh all other concerns. My whole point is that, in the choice between harmony and autonomy, the correct choice is harmony and love of one's fellow man. Even if it costs you your home planet. I don't think that that's quite fair. Your metaphor assumes that TLR was not Scadrian and that there was a Rosharan population indigenous to Scadrial prior to TLR. Mexico and the United States are on the same continent, separated only by a state-created border (an artificial thing that does not naturally exist). Roshar and Scadrial are not only entirely separate planets, but were created by different deities. And my entire thesis is that the Scadrians should and must accept the Rosharans because it is the right thing to do, because no matter what they have done or might do, they are people and nothing can change that.

Well, then. It appears I am a grade-C doofus. Move along. (Though I might, perhaps, have something of a point in supposing that we readers underestimate the extent to which the sympathetic points of view of the Rosharan protagonists lead us to excuse and justify the ways in which these same protagonists casually commit heinous actions, and that this same sympathetic storytelling masks the extent to which the Rosharans are, in-universe, terrifying and threatening-- especially for those who do not have such a pipeline into the intentions of the Kholin family. I also think I might have a point in thinking of Harmony and Kelsier as being at least partially motivated by anxieties and dreads of past atrocities being repeated; and I think I have a point about Hoid playing clear favorites and un-favorites.)

Personally, I don't see the appeal of everything needing to be flawed and fallible. In my opinion, it massively cheapens Taln and lessens the series to have him break. The moral absolutism and idealism of Taln NOT breaking is interesting in itself as a subversion of the expected "everybody fails sometimes" lesson.

I have never heard of such writings. Perhaps you're talking about works which have not been in print yet?

It is the correct reaction to Chouta, my friend. I also genuinely think that Rosharan humans are fundamentally incapable of caring about the rest of the Cosmere as anything other than a resource to exploit. In all of the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written on Roshar, I have not found a single instance of a Rosharan ever feeling anything about the rest of the Cosmere other than indifference, disgust, or desire. Even Mraize's desire to "see" is a desire to explore, to know, to understand and make his own. Everyone else, on the other hand? They've all shown that they're able to work together and positively collaborate (the Ghostbloods... other than those who are on or from Roshar, who have clearly gone rogue or are at least starting to at the higher levels). So, in light of this, I consider the idea that Rosharan humans can have any better-than-neutral regard for the rest of the universe to be headcanon at best, and headcanon directly contradicted by thousands of pages of evidence to the contrary at worst, in intentional and specific contrast to everyone else. Note how Shallan removed Iyatil's mask after she died. That's stripping a corpse, taking off her clothes, violating cultural and religious taboos. This is the basic level of respect and understanding Sanderson sets up his protagonists to have. The readers' affection for Shallan and sympathy for her trauma does a lot of heavy lifting in downplaying the horror of this and making it seem unremarkable.

Furthermore, Midius/Hoid/Cephandrius is obviously involved with this. He plays favorites with worlds and with peoples, and it's obvious that his favorites are the Roshar system and the Rosharans (especially Alethi). For someone who's supposed to always put the cosmere first, and who's supposed to be mysterious and otherworldly and unknowable everywhere he goes, he unerringly favors the children of Ashyn... heck, he's literally and figuratively in bed with Jasnah Kholin. And that makes me wonder whether he planned it like this, whether he was eyeing up Scadrial as a backup planet for his favorites for a long time. Dang. Retribution is scary, but I think I'm just as scared of the good guys.

NOTE: This is all theory and speculation and opinion. So, I realized that there is chouta on Scadrial, and I figure that those red-haired people who keep getting mentioned are Herdazians, and that means that there is a population of Rosharans living on Scadrial, and that means that there's no hope for the Scadrians, and that makes me sad. I don't really want to see the Scadrians become slaves again. I don't want to see species go extinct on Scadrial again. I don't want the children of Ashyn to claim, desecrate, and then leave a THIRD world. It's what's going to happen, though. We're going to get Navani Kholin XVIII telling a first-generation Kandra that she's "just as native" as any Kandra. We're going to see everything unique and interesting about Scadrial get commodified, made extinct, enslaved, exploited, trafficked, forgotten, or repurposed. Because that's what they did to Roshar. That's what Navani and Jasnah did to Roshar. That's what the good guys, the honorable faction, of the Rosharan system, do. None of what I describe is appreciably worse than what has already been done on Roshar, it's just that we never had a bunch of books to learn to care about the Listeners and the Spren in the way that we had for the Scadrians. Slavery is no stranger to Rosharan societies. Navani herself is innovating new ways to subordinate Spren to her whims and the material needs of humanity, and she's one we're supposed to be rooting for. The Lord Ruler oppressed the Skaa for so, so long. A millennia. It has only been about three or four centuries that the Skaa have been free since then, that the Terris have not been selectively trafficking and breeding themselves just to stay alive. And the Set, serving Bavadin, do the same thing with the ones they take. Because that is what happens when outside Shards take an interest in Scadrial. One can only hope that Scadrians are not interfertile with non-Scadrian humans, or else... eugh. No way is anybody going to let them have reproductive autonomy, not when Feruchemy and Allomancy are genetically passed and the need to oppose Retribution is so great. The Terris will probably go back to how they were in the times of the Lord Ruler, as will the Skaa. And, honestly? That's probably going to utterly break Kelsier and Harmony... especially Harmony, considering Tindwyl... That's probably how we get Discord and why they will love him for it. Because the Scadrians rejected Bavadin. They rejected Autonomy, and stayed true to Harmony. True to Ruin and Preservation. And you can't reject Autonomy in favor of Harmony without repercussions, without an exploration of what it means to choose Harmony. The Scadrians will, I predict, accept the Rosharans, as the Listeners and Spren did. And they will end up just as the Listeners and Spren have. Because they must. Because it is the right thing to do. Because the Rosharans in question are refugees, and that is worth everything. The worth of a world, of a society, of a people, is in how they treat such. To not accept the Rosharans would be to lose something irreplaceable and eternal. Something worth more than freedom, more than autonomy, more than life, more than the world. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?

So, an update. I was considering never reading any more of mister Sanderson's books, because I was feeling as though they were written not for me, but for people whose thoughts are the opposite of mine. I'd considered doing this a few years back, but, as a last gesture of thanks for what the books had given me, recommended Mistborn to one of my cousins, who is as a sister to me. Her love of the works reignited mine, and reading new ones as they come out and texting each other and having long phone conversations about them has been a delight through the years. Here's what she told me over text, when I told her I was considering dropping the Cosmere. I get it. Wind and Truth was A LOT. It left me pondering. Thinking. Crying. Laughing. Considering. I'm still processing it. I'll be processing it for years. Each Stormlight book has helped me heal a part of my heart that desperately needed help. This one was no exception. That even in failure and darkness, we deserve healing. We deserve love. Our journey is worth taking. We can be redeemed and forgiven. Our choices matter. Our agency matter. Our hearts matter. That which is broken can heal. There are no easy answers, but there is a way forward even in uncertainty and darkness, the light will always find a way to guide us. Lopen's cousins ain't got nothing on mine. I'll be reading mister Sanderson's books until he stops writing.

I never said I couldn't relate anymore. I just said I wasn't going to. I'm the sort who would rather have no cookie than break the cookie in half and share it. You can have the character. I'm just a little cheesed that what I had interpreted as a spiritual and religiously motivated character struggling with matters of the soul was intended to be a brain-type thing all along, and I was too stupid to realize it. There are lots of characters who I relate to on the level of brain-type things, but very few who have felt that same "I want to hide in a hole and never die so the justice that I desperately need to exist can't find me because I refuse to accept any mercy for myself" thing, and reading about someone else feeling that helped me deal with it and get to a place where I could stop feeling it.

On several sparsely inhabited planets unimportant to the greater Cosmere, the word for "butthole" in multiple languages is "Rayse". Hoid is only one of the individuals responsible for this.

Dang. Dang. I liked relating to Szeth. I liked it a lot. Never realized that it was supposed to be that kind of thing.

Heh, I might be the one person to whom such a thing isn't boring. Then again, I read dictionaries and phone books for fun, and it would be entirely silly to go all "hey, I think that Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, Ninth Edition is a very compelling read, the best in the series, even better than Seventh Edition" and expect people to go "Ah, yes, that makes sense, I will buy a copy for my nephew even though he asked for Watership Down". If you're reading this and haven't read Watership Down, go and read it. It's amazing. Mr. Sanderson has been writing a colorful and grey and sophisticated vision of existence since Elantris, and never made any pretense that he was going to write black-and-white morality. Preservation isn't the same thing as Good, as much as I might want it to be. Honor isn't the same thing as Good, either. As early as Words of Radiance, there was exploration of how Sylphrena can't say whether things are morally right, just whether or not they are honorable. But, that doesn't mean that Preservation and Honor and Devotion aren't among the virtues, and aren't worth striving for. It means that they are pieces of something more. I don't unquestioningly accept that Mr. Sanderson intends the sophisticated practicality of the "oh, cool, let's all enslave the spren because screw the Horneaters and their deities, our Alethi protagonists say it's okay, and while we're at it, let's all achieve self-actualization by thinking whatever those protagonists say our own true thoughts are" tone of Wind and Truth to be more morally satisfying than the almost unthinking, uncompromising, no-reason-to-expect-a-good-result absolutism of "Storm it, we have to go back", more interesting than the question of "Does Szeth truly have free will if he genuinely doesn't believe he has free will?", or more inspiring than "Life Before Death. Journey Before Destination. Strength Before Weakness". I think that, if anything, Mr. Sanderson might be setting up this materialism, this results-obsessed thinking, this it's just a rock willingness to change and adapt and compromise, as a temptation for the second half of the series, one that asks whether the survivors will move forward... or whether they, at the moment of truth, will say "We have to go back. Storm it, we have to go back.".

In one breath you say that he's not trying to say that ideals are worthless and in the next you say he is opening a dialogue. There is an inherent contradiction there, I think. If you ask me, there is no dialogue to be had which does not end with 'rationality' overcoming 'sincerity'. If you use reason's methods to measure the worth of honor you are playing a game with rules that will never ever let there be any other ending than nuance... it will always come up short when weighted on that scale. There is no argument that can be made for ideals, because ideals don't work like that. The most important statements of human rights never say why, they never try to justify, they simply state. Notions like "self-evident" and "inherent" are necessary if one is to even try to comprehend. Furthermore, to my mind, to trailblaze is to set things on fire and destroy them so they can't grow back, for the purposes of carving a path to make further change, development, and progress easier. It is to change and destroy and to pave. I do not think that Mr. Sanderson will ever portray Reason (or, most likely, Invention) as flawed or show it to be unequal to morality in the way that he has for Preservation and Honor, or, for that matter, Autonomy. I hate that it's always, invariably, and in every case proven to be the right thing to do, and that any character who thinks like me either ends up learning such thought-patterns or ends up destroyed by the narrative. It feels like "think for yourself" always refers to the same thought process. I take issue with the fact that fate coerced him into doing so... because Navani flipping Kholin, suck-empress of garbage, eternal failure at Operational Security, she who writes her notes in plaintext, second-least-tolerable character in the Cosmere, created a way to kill spren. I am equally glad to be me, and to live my faith. Maybe that makes me mystic or fanatic or primitive, but I am no less free than you. TLDR; I guess, in the end, I wanted something like Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc, and what Mr. Sanderson had intended all along was essentially A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, and that's fine. I just wish the intent had been made clear at the start.

That's just betrayal. Nuance. Compromise. Progress. There's no ideal in that, no certainty, no devotion or sincerity or conviction. The subordination of the spiritual, that which was intended to be free, to the material needs of encroaching modernity, is anything but good. Adonalsium made the spren to be free. This is a "compromise" in the same way that we speak of someone's abilities being compromised. Dang it, you're almost certainly right. Sigh. If I'd known this series was going to be another nuance-fest about how relativism is awesome, another fascinating fantasy world slowly paved into something soulless and modern, another story to explain why ideals are dumb nonsense for losers too stupid or mentally ill to think for themselves, I'd have saved myself thousands of pages. Clearly, this series was written for your reading pleasure. I hope you enjoy it. Sincerely, I do.

For the record, I'm not actually okay with how that got resolved, and Fallible Imperfect Protagonist Man Tries His Best, Recognizes His Mistakes, And Sticks The Landing can be just as tedious (or, alternately, just as wonderful) as Infallible Perfect Protagonist Man Rides To The Rescue (heck, Casablanca, one of the best movies of all time, gets a lot of mileage out of having the two archetypes play off of each other). Kaladin is now a Herald, and, as such, people are much, much less likely to give him the kind of "do not assume I will endure you trying to 'save' me. Not all within your judging gaze are in need of your protection" pushback that Szeth did. There's a reason confessions are usually to familiar and local priests rather than the heads of religions, and there's a reason therapists aren't supposed to be authority figures. Kaladin might not, in those chapters, be coming from the same place as Navani and Dalinar and Sja-anat and Taravangian do, but the distance is small at best. I agree that it's not equivalent, but it rhymes, and the patterns match. Having lived through the start of this decade, I would VERY much like to have seen " 'following instructions even when it makes you miserable' can, sometimes, be not only the noble choice, but the only acceptable option, and 'questioning authority and deciding for yourself' can, sometimes, lead to total disaster and a more horrible helplessness than any obedience... but not always, so be careful who you trust and what choices you make or choose not to make " be the endpoint, rather than a complete endorsement of unrestrained personal volition and a renouncing of oaths. Couldn't the Skybreaker be right, rather than the Windrunner, for once! Just once! (Also, why do you call me OP? Is it some kind of 17th-shard in-joke I'm not getting?)

When you don't like or trust your own thoughts, being told "Your thoughts matter, and it's okay to do things because you want to do them rather than because you think they're the things you ought to do" is very distressing. When you resent the fact that you have thoughts, feelings, and opinions, being told to accept and listen to them feels like abandonment. When what you want more than anything is exact, perfect, reliable, right answers for morality, being told that nobody can provide you with such and you have to trust your own judgement feels like drowning, not liberation. What Kaladin's saying (or at least trying to say) is good and is in good faith, but when you're convinced that your prison is where you belong, you interpret your desire to be free as a horrifying temptation to escape life itself. Kaladin, of course, couldn't have known that Szeth would interpret "you deserve to be comfortable in your own skin" as "you deserve the comfort of an ending", but for the readers who have been in Szeth's head, it makes total sense that he would get that out of it. To Kaladin's eternal credit, he self-corrects when confronted with the effects of his efforts, which neither Dalinar nor Navani do. Yeah, can't argue with that. Note how Kaladin finally resolves himself to turn down the offer of becoming royalty at about the same time he turns away from the "I'm helping you, this is for your own good, shut up" tendency we often see in the Kholins. It was a close thing, though, and perhaps, in becoming a Herald, he has accepted (or will find himself accepting) that which he had just turned down. So, you're saying that Szeth's character development in this isn't a second misalignment, but a realignment? That makes it a lot easier to accept. But it still proves that people are flawed and changeable. And that's not a good thing, I think. Hmm. I suppose my interpretations might have insufficiently appreciated the sheer amount of Odium-induced-misalignment that chronologically took place before the non-flashback events of Wind and Truth. Say no to Odium-juice, kids! Realignment is an interesting interpretation. It's probably correct.