Aliroz-The-Confused

Again, not your fault, I'm just salty because Szeth was one of, if not the only character in fiction I ever related 100% to and then mister Sanderson, on fully understanding that kind of person, went "this is wrong, such a person needs to become somebody else and should stop thinking and feeling the things he or she thinks and feels. This person's thoughts and feelings are invalid and need to be corrected and improved. Roshar has no place for this kind of person unless he or she fundamentally changes." (or, at least, that's how it felt to read it. I'm not sure mister Sanderson intended such a message.). It's okay, I can still write fanfiction in which Szeth can run over Kaladin's stupid feet with a mack truck and slap him upside the head for that ten-day psychological torment session. Bonus points if he gets Kaladin to admit that he did it out of revenge for Beld (honestly, that headcanon is the only way I made it through those chapters... imagining that somewhere, the ghost of Beld and the ghosts of all the minor characters and randos Szeth killed were all wearing "we deserved more pagetime" jackets and having a party at their killer's distress).

Oh, wait, now I remember. Szeth renounced his oaths. He is dead to me, he isn't Szeth any more, I must have convinced myself he died because it hurt less.

Wait, wait, Szeth survived? When did this happen? I swear I remember reading his death and crying.

There are truths that cannot survive such examination. There are truths that cannot be proven. There are paths to truth outside of Reason's map. There are things which are right, which cannot be coherently expressed in such a manner as to fit within the strict confines of logic or survive the cruel arena of critical thought. Reason is a pesticide for error, but modernity's method of crop-dusting everything with it is not without consequence to the soil. You warn me not to treat opinion as fact. Fact is an unwelcome anachronism in the context of fantasy, as foreign to a fairy-tale as a saxophone or fax machine would be. Of my three favorite genres of novel, the fantasy is the backwards temporal escape from modernity, the western is the spatial escape from modernity, and the science-fiction is the frontwards temporal escape from modernity. All of them point to a longing which our modern lives cannot satisfy, a yearning for the wonder of a not-yet-ruined world. Navani Kholin, as well as Jasnah, Kaladin, Dalinar, Adolin, Shallan, and Taravangian, all are philisophical and thematic colonizers of Roshar's fairyland, cynical modernists who think in terms of "fact", have no issue with dissection of the human form, insist that the "objective" is real and the "subjective" is nothing but experiential, and who are, in effect, "Connecticut Yankees in King Arthur's Court". For all their reason, it is only Kaladin, least educated and most mystical of the lot, who arrives at the insight that the invasion of the Shattered Plains is not justified, an insight which leads him to... stay on the same dang side and have sad feelings about it and seek absolution from Rlain so he can stop having sad feelings about it. Perhaps this "fact"-based rationality, this early-stage modernity, is why they are so comfortable with genocide, having the tools of reason to rationalize it to themselves, and having the fixation on progress that was the hallmark of reality's largest atrocities. As soon as "WE CHOSE" happens, the last major non-evil philisophical/moral/narrative obstacle to the narrative of the rightness of the protagonists is gone. They are no longer on trial in the eyes of the readers or the author, pardoned of all sins past, present, and future. More than that, the very basis on which they may be questioned is eroded as the Kholins claim (perceived) moral superiority over the Honorspren of Lasting Integrity, depriving those Honorspren of the moral authority to judge humanity. The other holdouts for absolutism are cleared away in Rhythm of War and Wind and Truth, culminating with Szeth, the last absolutist, being corrected until he breaks down, accepts "healthy" thoughts and "clearsighted" regard for his own worth and volition, and dies rather than stay an inconvenient metatextual reminder of what Kaladin just destroyed. Strangely, the trial of Adolin and its climax is the point where the Honorspren cease to exist as beings whose perspectives and priorities are allowed to threaten the heroic framing of the protagonists, becoming nothing more than another bunch of fallible, flawed, compromised, contemptible, "believable" characters who are all too human. Mister Sanderson makes them messy and "real"... just like Ishar will later be revealed to have done. And, just as with Ishar, this process ends in the spiritual becoming temporal, in the immortal becoming mortal, in the killing of that which was not meant to be killed, once Navani invents anti-spren weapons and gives them to Odium's minions. I find it fascinating that the trial for humanity ends in a mistrial through the prosecution destroying their case by trying to cheat. Interesting that humanity never gets a fair trial. I do not think that they would be acquitted in a fair trial, and I think mister Sanderson knows that. So rather than prove that humans are worthy, he portrays the Honorspren of Lasting Integrity as being unworthy. And then in later books he jettisons the very idea of right and wrong as anything more than "benefits the children of Ashyn / does not benefit the children of Ashyn". So, yeah, I would very much like to see that moment undercut, as so many of my favorite moments have been undercut. It's also interesting to me that the Honorspren of Lasting Integrity lose because of a fact they did not know and could not possibly have known. I know that feeling.

TheRunner, you are right and I am wrong about everything, always. I know this, you know this, your dog knows this. Given that, there is no point in engaging with you, because, contrary to popular belief, I do not actually enjoy being an intellectual sandbag for wiser minds to relentlessly correct no matter what I think or write. You're going to disprove anything I write anyways, so why even write? Why even think or imagine or try to understand, if all that results is wrong thought after wrong thought after wrong thought? You insist on reasonable discussion and will allow no unreasonable expression to go uncorrected, even when I restrict it to one specific thread. And before anybody starts typing "but, Roz, you made some good points-" think about whether you're typing that because you want to be right and fair-minded and correct me, and think about whether or not correcting someone's attempts to concede makes that person feel as though he or she did something right or is capable of doing something right. My interpretation, incorrect as it may be, is this: I think the narrative presents the Honorspren in Lasting Integrity as wrong because they are Honorspren and not Reasonspren, because they do not prioritize the things the protagonists prioritize. If you measure everything by Reason's yardstick, everything but Reason looks crooked and wrong. If you always have reasonable discussion, you deny all other forms of thought the chance to thrive. Reason is a virtue. Take care, lest it become your only virtue.

One of these days Sja-anat is gonna touch Sylphrena and you're all going to cry when she says "I chose this, Kal. This is what I want." and abandons him because she's all Sja-anattified.

Please do not refer to me as "they"; it hurts my feelings. And to make this post go back to the thread's rightful "overly excited and surprisingly erudite six-year-old explaining to a four-year-old a story that the ten-year-old just recounted" tone: There's Kul and Mash. They're brothers by blood or blood-brothers or something. Everybody was certain that Kul died but then Kul came back and said "SURPRISE I'M ALIVE". Mash has spikies where his eyes used to be. Mash once did a sneaky and killed King Elly who was a big fancypants (and who was also nicer than his dad). This was after Mash got grumpy and fought his own friends. Also they tried to get rid of Kul this one time by putting him in some sort of geographically-significant cavernous locale and making him do work without recompense. There's Shashy. She's supposedly very creative, in a scary way. Also a nerd and a fighter, and maybe insane. There's also Sez. He's very polite and proper, always plays by the rules. Wins fights, best person.

(Psst, the joke is that if it's written, it's libel, not slander. Yeesh, I gave you a perfect setup there and you whiffed it.)

Don't slander my GOAT Elodi like that.

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! PLACE YOUR BETS EVERYBODY! TWO SHARDERS ENTER, ONE SHARDER LEAVES!

vi as in steels things she has puppy who bite and talk

Wow, I wish I had a magic "mister Sanderson is my friend and confirms my headcanon as canon despite it contradicting what the person I'm talking to gathered from reading the actual books" button. Getting real darn tired of these WOBs. I hope mister Sanderson starts answering all reader questions with "Read and Find Out" from now on. Not mad at you, Frus, just mad at mister Sanderson.

I don't like el becus i think vi desrvs bettr byfrnd we not same

A three-year necropost... -sheds single shining tear- It's beautiful. Don't let the mods catch ya, Oranjejuicemonki. I'll hold 'em off as long as I can.

the Nahel bond is a sharing of thoughts, of feelings, of intentions, of soul. The Radiants' priorities become their spren's priorities. The Radiants' values become their spren's values. And all the while, the spren is convinced that these are his or her own feelings and thoughts, because the Radiant genuinely thinks that they are the spren's feelings and thoughts. The Radiants do not want to blame themselves, they want the spren to choose it of their own free will and volition. So that's exactly what happens. Much of this is almost certainly unconscious and unintentional (Kaladin and Sylphrena both seem to think of Sylphrena as having free will), but it's hard not to see echoes of Navani subsuming the sibling and Sja-anat's "enlightenment" of her forcibly-adopted "children" in the way that bonded spren have, throughout the series, prioritized their radiants over themselves, over Honor (after Taravangian took up Honor), over principles, over everything. Every time a bonded spren insists it's choosing for itself I just can't stop thinking about those poor corrupted Oathgate-spren insisting that they're acting of their own volition. If the protagonists of Stormlight lived their oaths and kept their promises with the same constancy and fullness as their spren show in their devotion to them, I'd regard the influence as being more mutual (both parties giving up some of their free will), but, as-is, Rhythm of War and Wind and Truth show that the Nahel bond can be exploitative and abusive, and my paranoid dumb-as-a-rock lizard-brain goes NONONOBADBADBADRUNRUNRUN whenever it recognizes the pattern of Dubious Consent or Questionable Volition, especially when that pattern links to the pattern of Learning To Break Rules, Compromise, And Do Things One's Younger Self Would Not Approve Of. Oh, rusts, ruins, streaks, beans, shades, storms, and almonds... that's what's wrong with me. I look at the nahel bond, and see my younger self, the memory of being slowly subsumed. The justifications for everything, the testing of boundaries, every reasonable and nuanced persuasive argument for why I should stop refusing and kill my conscience. At my moment of truth, I refused to do what I knew was wrong; I ended the love that could have defined my life, for right, for good, for principle, for my faith, for my soul, for nothing that can be measured and weighted or proven but everything that's actually true and real. I just realized why I like the stories I like.

If I respond to everything all at once, the post will be too long. Also, I do not regard the Rosharan humans' devotion as sincere. They obeyed only when it benefitted them, and disobeyed otherwise. That puts them in the same category as Wax and Wayne, of whom I do not approve. As for the radiant spren at that point, as far as I can tell they were already bonded (otherwise the Radiants wouldn't be Radiants), and I'm not sure, after Rhythm of War and Wind and Truth, that I regard bonded spren as truly having free will. @TheRunner, that's not how I remember the order of those happenings, but, then again, I'm stupid and can't find my notes on Wind and Truth. I was talking about non-enslaved children, and your counterexample is an enslaved child. I'm not sure that that actually contradicts what I wrote. I guess I phrased my prior post poorly, I was trying to say that child labor of the specific type associated with the mills and mines of the industrial era was the exception rather than the rule for non-enslaved children prior to the industrial revolution, because other forms of child labor were the norm for such, being so normalized and ubiquitous as to not be recognized as labor but seen as necessary functions of living. But that's probably outside the scope of this thread. I did not mean to imply that I thought enslaved children lived "lives of leisurely idleness". I meant to imply that the vast majority of non-enslaved children in history lived lives that contained leisure and idleness in addition to an almost-unimaginable-to-us amount of work. I would dispute your characterization of Spook as having led a life of leisurely idleness relative to, say, Elend Venture, though I would say that it could be described that way relative to, say, Jassa. No, my copy of Isles Of The Emberdark has not arrived yet. I kind of dread it a little, since you're clearly looking forward to me reading it, and you don't seem to be alone in that. I have not read The Sunlit Man.

SERIOUS EXPLANATION Actually, I think that that's more realistic than the alternative for not-enslaved youth. Child labor, at least in the specific form we see in the mines and mills of the industrial revolution, didn't really become a thing until the industrial revolution, simply because it was the industrial revolution that made such exploitation possible with improvements in lighting and heating making it possible to get enough output from such small workers as to be functional, and improvements in agricultural productivity allowing for fewer workers in the fields. Improvements in medicine also allowed for greater exploitation of humans--the susceptibility of children and elderly to disease is much higher without advanced medicine, and thus pre-modern non-enslaved populations tend not to work their children and elderly in tight, cramped conditions in which sickness is known to spread (they tended to work them in other conditions, in different ways, but not mills or mines). In a society without indoor plumbing, quite a lot of effort goes into getting water, either from wells or pumps. In a society without indoor heating, quite a lot of effort goes into tending the hearth (the Greeks and Romans had a goddess whose entire job was the tending of the hearth--putting it up there with war, death, love, etc. as one of the basic things people do). And so on and so on and so on, and you'd be surprised how much of it was done by children and teenagers. Every quality-of-life improvement that the Final Empire doesn't have places it further and further away from the kind of society that can sustainably have the specific flavor of youth-labor exploitation where it's the rule rather than the exception for non-enslaved kids and teenagers to work in mills and mines (arguably it isn't sustainable in real life, and is associated with specific civilizations during times of great change). And if there's one thing Rashek's going for, it's a stable-period kind of tyranny, not a transitional-period kind. Also, Vin was on the run for much of her childhood and then living with Camon's gang on the relative downlow, so she's actively trying to stay on the fringes of Luthadel's society, which means her situation isn't as representative of how most of the skaa in Luthadel live as it might seem. And Spook's uncle, Clubs, was a skilled carpenter who took him in (successful enough at his carpentry that nobody thinks it's weird that he owns his own place, which believably puts Clubs in a social strata where Spook being an apprentice carpenter to him and thus spending his time at Clubs' place rather than working for someone else checks out) So, I'd argue that, rather than mister Sanderson missing a trick here, it's him and his editor Moshe Feder keeping the worldbuilding on point. SILLY EXPLANATION But of course! Rashek knows that he would get arrested for violating child labor laws! What do you think he is, some kind of... unscrupulous person? I'll have you know that the Interdimensional Cosmere Kid/Youth Betterment Service is very active in making sure that everybody in the cosmere has an entirely wholesome and pleasant childhood, and is in no way understaffed, dealing with a backlog going back to before the Shattering, incompetent, lazy, or a front for a dog-fighting ring that gets its money by scamming elderly dragons into donating their hoards to "charity". Click here to donate to I.C.K.Y.B.S.

Ati, you magnificent [rude word deleted], I read your book!

Not a spoiler for fiction, just spoilered for excessive prolixity. My inner school lunchlady and inner school lunchlord (what else would the male equivalent of a lunchlady be) are screaming "But it's a health code violation!". But yes, Sadeas deserved it, and a lot worse, a lot earlier. Wait, are you my cousin? Or... or is there a third person in addition to my cousin and I who hates Navani (we're respectively the President and Treasurer of the Navani Hate Club)? Nope, though Straff was the first Cosmere character to get on the hate-list. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no. They're from a novel series very dear to me, which, when I read it, became my favorite fiction of all time, displacing the Cosmere from that position. My cousin got me into it, in the same way that I got my cousin into the Cosmere, and we regard the two introductions as equally significant in our reading lives. There are no fanfictions of it on the internet. There is no fan art of it on the internet. No mentions on TvTropes or Wikipedia. No fan forums. It is... pure, innocent of the ways of the internet. I watched the Cosmere go from being something I could think was meant specifically for me to something that belonged to a massive fandom. I'm not gonna let the other series have the same fate... and its lack of internet presence implies that all who love it have felt the same way.

Well then, I guess, if this thread is over, I might as well sum up everything I've been trying to say so it's all in one place, one massive tantrum for all my salt so I can be chill and reasonable from here on out and still be the official Number One Hater Of Ashynites. Here goes... I'm unreasonable, and prefer idealism and absolutism to nuance and pragmatism. The Lost Metal and Wind and Truth left me without hope for Scadrial. Scadrial always had by far the weakest magic system, and that was before it was nerfed into the ground. Scadrial has the smallest population of any shardworld. Its Shard is paralyzed and unable to effectively act. There are zero Mistborn books in which scadrians aren't being trapped into horrifying breeding programs, and zero Mistborn books with happy endings that aren't revealed to be false later. Its only "advantage" is "technological progress", which just means any any enemies can easily reverse-engineer their technology (Invention is an entirely different Shard, I do not trust technology to end up being any sort of actual advantage in the long run). Furthermore, in this field it is behind Autonomy's worlds and presumably behind Invention's worlds. One bomb could kill a quarter of Scadrial's population. Meanwhile, the Rosharans have teleportation, matter conversion, instant communication, telepathy/mind-control in the Nahel bond, antigravity, control over friction, implements to cut on the level of fundamental particles, perfect hologram-type illusions, and can casually violate thermodynamics. In addition to this they are learning the secrets of the fundamental forces of the universe so whatever parts of the previous are limited will soon be commonplace for them. But none of this is "technology", it's all magic that can't be reverse-engineered. Also Windrunners are always right and everyone ends up agreeing with them or being wrong so that's like emotional allomancy times infinity. Furthermore, Scadrial is themed around Preservation and Ruin, which essentially means it's about getting wrecked and enduring it. The moral structure of the Mistborn books is idealistic and absolutist, which makes it an anachronism in the framework of mister Sanderson's writing and a threat to the consequentialist, pragmatic, oaths-are-stupid-and-ideals-are-meaningless-nonsense be-reasonable-don't-be-fanatic kill-your-conscience the-ends-justify-the-means there-are-no-consequences ethos of The Stormlight Archive (exemplified by notorious atrocity-committer and taboo-breaker Dalinar Kholin giving Honor to Taravangian, breaking oaths, committing genocidal acts, rejecting Tanavast's plan for his own, and then getting off entirely without eternal or spiritual consequence--the gods themselves are helpless before mortal chicanery--there are no consequences for oathbreaking (no law, no meaning, only a cold nihilism without justice), and even more exemplified by Navani's subsuming of The Sibling and enslavement of the spren). The protagonists of The Stormlight Archive are heartless, soulless pragmatists who, at the moment of truth, choose reason over all other virtue and then act as though the ideal failed them when what truly happened was them choosing a different ideal (reason rather than honor); but who come off as the good guys because of their sad backstories, likable personalities, and an unearned resonance with the notions of idealism and honor which turns out to be mere aesthetics covering a fundamentally amoral, casually heinous, and exploitative core. The protagonists of Mistborn are zealous, uncompromising, sincere idealists and absolutists who, at the moment of truth, embody the purposes of their gods; but who come off as scoundrels and rogues because the narrative prioritizes the viewpoints of those they most oppose over those they most help, because the Mistborn novels' focus on intrigue and secrets primes readers to be suspicious, and because of the Mistborn series' general aesthetics. In other words, while The Stormlight Archive appears to be about Lawful Good Paladins and Mistborn appears to be about Chaotic Good Thieves, in practice the Radiants are unrestricted by their oaths and fail to act in good faith where the heroes of Scadrial act in the way opposite of that. The children of Ashyn destroyed their own world, came as refugees to a second, eradicated and enslaved the natives after convincing the gods and spren to betray said natives for them, killed spren and lobotomized a species by imprisoning Mishram at a parlay, and took over said second world. When they eventually found the last remaining free natives, they went from first contact to having killed one fourth of them in six years. Then they invented a new way to kill spren and shared it with Odium's forces. They also enslaved the spren in fabrials and mind-controlled their only advocate into compliance. And, at the end of the last we saw of them, Dalinar more or less gave Honor to Taravangian, pointed him at Scadrial, and said "Sic 'em, boy". Notable Jerkface Kaladin orders an atrocity for the purposes of survival, nearly kills Sylphrena, keeps Rlain as a slave, tells Sigzil to kill his conscience, and "corrects" Szeth's thoughts until he breaks down and accepts a "healthy" conception of reality (especially upsetting, as this is the last absolutist on Roshar finally submitting to reason). Shallan "I murdered both my parents and caused the apocalypse" Davar murders Iyatil and takes her clothes off. Jasnah "so freaking creepy they had to lock her up as a child to protect the world from her bad vibes" Kholin loses a decency-off to the final boss, making it impossible for the coalition to be negotiated with and leaving Fen with no choice but to accept Odium's rule. Numuhukumakiaki'aialunamor puts POOPIES in people's FOOD. Navani "suck-empress of Garbage" Kholin is number five on my Fictional Hate List and the top three are all dead. And all of them maintain both reader and author sympathy throughout. Also none of these people have killed Moash (number four on my Fictional Hate List), which suuuuuuuuucks. When Honor and Odium merge, the honorspren choose the children of Ashyn over their own god. Sure, he would have destroyed them, but the prospect of being ended never stopped the Honorspren from serving Honor before. The narrative doesn't portray this as betrayal because the honorspren are consistent with what is, in the end, the one and only moral rule of The Stormlight Archive: Good is defined as whatever is best for / desired by the children of Ashyn. We get almost no Singer points of view compared to human points of view because having any more Singer points of view would have shifted the moral "center of gravity" away from the humans. If we cared about those slaughtered Parshendi as dozens of individual and named characters with personalities and hundreds of pages of characterization, if we knew their names and stories, if the books let them be main characters, it would be much harder to get invested in the anxieties and love triangles of the Kholin family and those in their orbit. In short, the children of Ashyn are a narrative black hole that warps everything around them, who always get what they want through sheer main character energy and author favoritism, and now that they're on Scadrial which has more "fated for bad things" flags than a veteran cop two weeks from retirement going on one last case to finally get the evidence to put that corrupt senator he's been chasing for decades behind bars teaming up with a young rookie main character and showing said rookie a picture of his wife and kids while promising to explain the mysterious past of his adopted child as soon as he gets back... I'm sensing a future clash between Roshar's cynical realism and Scadrial's idealist absolutism, and I might have hope for the latter if mister Sanderson hadn't spent several thousand pages teaching me not to hope, if every WOB about magic systems didn't favor Roshar's magic systems over Scadrial's, and if we hadn't gone the ENTIRE MISTBORN SERIES SINCE 2008 without any actual Mistborn doing Mistborn things (for crying out loud, the upcoming Ghostbloods series will probably nerf Allomancy and Feruchemy AGAIN until we have only one type of Ferring and only one type of Misting), if we didn't have a WOB confirming that mister Sanderson's author-avatar Hoid thinks Scadrial should have Taldain instant noodles AND the presence of chouta on Scadrial implying that other cultures can, should, and will replace what already exists on Scadrial, if every "Scadrial/Scadrial-related-thing vs Roshar/Roshar-related-thing" thread didn't end with the latter roflstomping the former, or if things weren't such that Retribution, Bavadin, Hoid, and certain of the children of Ashyn all have decided that Scadrial should be their new stomping grounds. Gosh-dang it, mister Sanderson, please throw the world of mists and metal a bone! Let Sazed finally have his crash-out! Let his name be Discord and let us love him for it. (Also I think Autonomy helped Odium kill Devotion and Dominion and maybe Ambition; and I think Reason might be on Roshar messing with things and that's why everyone on Roshar acts all reasonable instead of honorable but zero of my theories have ever turned out to be true so I won't be surprised if neither turns out to be the case.)

I guess I killed the thread. I'll pose a comparison and a question, then. In The Lost Metal, it is established that the Harmonium-Trellium bomb would have destroyed or made uninhabitable the Elendel Basin. In the same book, it's established that the Elendel Basin contains at least half the population of Scadrial's northern continent (which we can assume is the more populous of the two continents, given that the Southern Scadrians experienced Harmony's fixing of Scadrial as a sudden climactic shift that almost drove them to extinction), and thus, we can assume that the Harmonium-Trellium bomb would have killed a quarter of Scadrial's population. Considering that the children of Ashyn killed a quarter of the Listeners in six years (while maintaining both reader sympathy and author sympathy!), and Dalinar was complaining that it was taking too long... What would the Kholins have done with something like the Harmonium-Trellium bomb?

I was being sarcastic.

Move Scadrial into the sun while flipping off Autonomy. The only true preservation is the stillness when all things are done.

-puts on Evilroz hat again- Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, this changes everything. Change of evil plans: Don't torment The Sibling, free The Sibling. Start freeing spren from the Nahel bond, from that horrifying mind-control share-thoughts-share-feelings-mix-souls think-you-have-free-will-but-actually-you-are-entirely-compromised-by-sympathy nightmare that is the most horrifying thing in the cosmere. If they refuse to help after being freed, then bond them to us. Things are gonna be way easier if we have The Sibling on our side. Still gonna lose, because there's no way to win against Rosharans (mister Sanderson's favoritism is the strongest force in the universe), but we might make them have to confront some uncomfortable truths about how Bondsmithing works. And putting a crack in their infinite superiority is a victory greater than I had imagined possible. -puts on Whimsyroz hat- Okay, so we use the wish, and wish for a gigantic banana of sanity that tastes delicious and smells good to everyone, and we give it to the grumpy Herald so he or she will be so happy and sane as to no longer want to attack Scadrial.