TheFoxQR

I think she's completely fine with that. She only Endows potential, and she does it where it has the greatest chance of helping. Doesn't mean it will always work. That war had Nalthians on both sides, she wouldn't simply have picked sides. She would just try and Empower the best of both sides, giving each a chance to win well.

I think you're falling in a trap - see, we've not seen much about Endowment's futuresight in action. Or much about Endowment, really. Compare this with Preservation, where we had an entire trilogy's worth of set up, and Cultivation, whose futuresight we only really respect because of a clear display at the end of OB (okay, and maybe because the Diagram exists). Both those things have required taking a certain long term perspective on those shards. This makes them popular choices, because we've had clear overt examples. If you think about it, Lightsong and Warbreaker, two returned, saved Vivenna's (someone with a higher concentration of Endowment's investiture) life and set her on a specific path. Highmarshal Azure has so far directly delayed atleast one scheme of Odium's, and she's still going strong. The five scholars, also Returned, were directly responsible for the creation of Nightblood, also now on Roshar. Vasher has so far atleast once probably saved Adolin's life, and god knows how many more he's responsible for via simple dissemination of certain knowledge. Both Vasher and Vivenna have played subtle supporting roles in keeping the budding Knights Radiant going. These aren't all indications of the strongest futuresight, I'm reading that into those events. However, considering how little we've seen of her, these are my suspicions - Endowment prefers to work in a much more hands-on manner than the other Shards. She instills potential where needed, knowing full well how that potential will be used. Much of her work seems defensive - using her investiture to weave a net around herself. But I think she's just as capable of precise cuts as Cultivation or Preservation, if not more.

The medium is probably Cognitive, but the means may go all the way up to Spiritual.

I think you're discounting another part of the equation - the state of most active investiture associated with that Shard. I've posted my theory before, but I think Endowment currently has almost everyone beat at futuresight. Perhaps Harmony is better, insofar has it is technically two shards with polar opposite intents, covering an extremely wide range of actions, and the fact that Scadrial is so heavily invested, giving Sazed a very wide net to cast.

I've been oscillating between interpreting Endowment as a verb: "The act of Giving", and as a noun: "What has been given". I think awakening highlights both these in different ways. Breadths are Edgli's Endowment to the people of Nalthis, whereas Awakening requires you to partake in the act of Endowment. Funnily enough, take a look at what an Endowment Policy is. In the simplest of terms, you pay your company steadily over some fixed period. On your death, the insurance company pays a lump sum to a designated individual. The Returned need Breadth to survive every week. They die when they give up their divine breadth (worth 2000 Breadths) to heal one particular individual. I don't know. Personally, I think Autonomy or Ambition are closer to being Endowment's opposite than Odium. Endowment is all about empowering others, Autonomy/Ambition are all about empowering one's own self. Odium is more internal focused, too. However, he's all about consuming what's there, leaving holes. Breaking things apart in just the right way for him to seep in. In that way, he's almost like Endowment + Ruin. Odium is more an exchange, where Endowment is a one way transaction.

The point was, in Awakening, you give your Breadths a Cognitive imprint, and then transfer these to other objects. But in theory, if you could give Breadths to yourself, could you also Awaken yourself? Extend your Cognition? So if normally, Breadths take the command and interpret them, forming a Cognitive basis for Awakened objects, could you... kind of... offload Cognition by Awakening yourself? In the cases we have seen for Breadth transfer, the Command was essentially inert. It just asked the Breadths to go and become a part of the Recipient's soul, and that's it. So Euphoria is understandable, as you're literally getting an extension to your spiritweb. But could more be done there? With the right Command? Especially of both the Donor and Recipient is oneself? With this, you could use Breadths to extend your cognitive capabilites. For example, a person can only see or hear. So you could in theory have WatchDogs/TonyStark' Sunglasses-esque capabilites, by having Breadths connect with other things through the spiritual realm and read surface level information, passing it back to you through your sight. Like... a Brains-up-Display. Or mimic Spider-sense. Or heaven's forbid, see the future. There is precedent to this in the Cosmere - in Allomany, burning Atium doesn't just give you information. It also expands you cognitively to be capable of processing said information.

Can an Awakener, with some mental gymnastics, view themselves as both the Donor and Recipient for Awakening? Like whispering "My Breadth be yours" to oneself, where both "My" and "yours" refer to the same entity. If so, is this what Vasher uses to hide his Divine Breadth within himself? Maybe with some other inert command? If so, could an Awakener holding 20 breadths use a command and give these to themselves, making the command bring up a HuD for example (Maybe with a command like "Connect with things and reveal secrets")?

Now there we can speculate. The Shard does have an effect on the Vessel. Eventually, all the Vessel can think of is enforcing their Interpretation on the world. Shards erode the mind over time. However, this is a gradual process, and Vessels retain significant freedom of action closer to their picking up the Shard. There's WoBs on this on the Arcanum. You're looking for Harmony's ability to act, and if Sazed is beginning to be influenced by his powers by New Era 2.

@Confused huh. I was not aware of that classification. I do like the idea of differing terms for those two things, although I'm not 100% a fan of the terminology proposed. I have my reasons for that, let me see if I can put them to words properly. I think that first generation vessels and their "Interpretation" of their own Shardic "Natures" as elements of personality were more influenced by their perception of Adonalsium and Yolish culture/philosophy, and that second gen vessels' "Interpretations" are not so attached to personality. For example, God's own urge to Preserve and Ruin vs Harmony. The former are more interpreted as elements of Adonalsium's personality, the latter a comment on the nature of said investiture, independent of personality. Similarly, God's Honor to Unity may be a shift too, where the former was interpreted knowing things about Adonalsium and what the Shards are, vs the latter being a more general comment on the nature of investiture associated with said Shard. This could be a subtle play by Brandon, as a more general shift in the Cosmere from high/epic fantasy to sci-fi, showing a certain maturity in the understanding of Realmatic theory across the Cosmere, similar to how we've grown out of using terms like... miasma for example. If what I suspect is true, we might eventually move out of describing shards with personality, as the study of realmatic theory becomes more and more... academic. Might I propose splitting it into "nature" or "behaviour" vs "interpretation" or "vessel's cognitive filter"? Nature of the investiture being something akin to the affinity to binding for Honor's investiture, whereas Honor is the interpretation that Tanavast had. I wanted to write all this down, but I wanted to first do a metaphorical testing of the waters, which is why I only tried to separate those two out in my other post.

As for Autonomy, Shameless Plug (kind of - most everything I have to say on it, I've said there). As for Autonomy on Taldain, there is a slight hint of that intent in Sand Mastery. This is that each sand ribbon is completely Autonomous, and the strength of a sand master is judged on how many separate, Independent, autonomous ribbons they can make. Pardon my language, but doesn't this invoke a similar image to some would be godling in the cosmere sitting behind a metric Storms-ton of autonomous Avatars?

Oh Shnapp... Thanks for pointing those out!

Life in Roshar seems to have a unique component - the presence of so much readily accessible investiture in the ecosystem has caused life to use it much more. Honor and Cultivation being dominant on the planet probably helped matters too. Beings like the Chasmfiend have evolved to use Spren bonds as an integral part if their physiology, and the Singers seem to take this one step further. First, Spren are investiture come to life, and so should have a spiritweb of their own. The Singers seem to be taking advantage of this - they seem to have evolved to have some kind of symbiotic spiritweb, where some part of their spiritweb is external to them, and comes from whatever spren they bond to. This would allow them to have almost composite souls, where parts of the spiritweb that define stuff like gender, identity, and to an extent even cognition, are partially external and variable. This would explain the effect of different forms on the cognitive capability of singers, where certain forms make them better fighters and others make them better at producing art. After OB, I always assumed what had happened with the Parsh was the result of Bo-Ado-Mishram being connected to the Parshmen, providing them with this external portion of their own spiritweb, and the Bondsmith ability to use Adhesion to spiritually connect to others. As in Bo-Ado-Mishram was connected to the Parsh, and when it was pulled in, Melishi used Adhesion to maintain or maybe even strengthen its bonds with the Parsh while the Unmade was being pulled in, ripping apart parts of their spiritweb that connect with the external spiritwebs and imprisoning them with the Unmade. It's like normally, the Parsh computers attach to Spren USB sticks. Then Bo-Ado-Mishram, a giant external Hard drive, connects to a lot of Parsh computers with USB cables. And then while being imprisoned, instead of Melishi just pulling the cables out and leaving in the capability to connect with other USB sticks, used super glue to glue together the cable with the USBsockets, causing the USB sockets to rip themselves out from from the Parsh Spiritweb computers, leaving them unable to connect with anything at all, and leavig parts of their spiritweb ruptured. The Everstorm then, would have an additional purpose of healing the Parsh, since a big portion of Odium's army, the cognitive shadows of ancient Singers require Parsh spiritwebs to manifest in the Physical (the Fused). I'm just trying to the How if your theory. Also, I do think Bo-Ado-Mishram is an Unmade. My personal theory on the nine unmade is that each of them was unmade from one specific realm. This there would be three Unmade from the physical, three unmade from the cognitive, and three unmade from the spiritual. I think Bo-Ado-Mishram, Yelig-nar and Sja-Anat were unmade from the physical, and as such are closest in nature to Spren, having very little presence in the physical and capable of doing all the different things that spren can do. Am I making sense?

I do think this works as an extension of what I'm proposing here. If the investiture itself has an intent to it, then systems using that investiture designed by their own vessel would naturally have that intent incorporated in them. Preservation seems the odd one out, but I think that has more to do with Preservation's plan to beat Ruin. Leras purposefully designed a system capable of processing Ruin's investiture, and hid it in plain sight. Moreover, WoB and published text says that Leras originally was not the best of men, and designed Allomancy before he got to the Intent-fetish stage that most vessels seem to get over time toward their own Shardic Intent. Seons and Skaze are splinters, I don't think they facilitate the magic. Or atleast the Seons don't seem to. I do think there is some automated picking mechanism acting in Arelon that slects people to be Elantrians, I don''t know if it is an effect of the City and it's construction, or something Aona and Skai built before they were splintered. But AonDor, ChayShan, etc. are all powered by the Dor. They work by establishing connection to the raw Dor, and tapping/channeling/shaping it so that it produces the desired effects. This is what makes AonDor powerful - theoretically if you can figure out how to make the connection, it has no range limit in the cosmere, and unlike Allomancy or Surgebinding, doesn't even use something for fuel. Only an intent and the ability to figure out and draw the Aons is required. Cultivation could easily have close ties to evolution - what the Nightwatcher is doing could be a form of Realmatic Mutation, like picking parts of your existence in one realm and sticking it somewhere else, or twisting parts of your spiritweb. I can't however figure out what her base investiture behavior would be. There is a suffusion element to it, like Preservation. However, it also seems to affect change like Ruin.

Right, let me rephrase that. The question that was asked was "Was the magic always sickness based?", to which Brandon said no. That, however, does not preclude it from always having been micro-organism based. Moreover, there are other WoBs, where Brandon explicitly, carefully states that the system was slightly different, or was not exactly the same. Emphasis italicised. And as I said, people on Ashyn seem to have been desperate enough to have considered options like making cities fly, or fleeing to another planet. @Calderis I don't think it would have been possible for them to adapt to a completely new system and use it that precisely. Especially because making a city fly over volcanic barren wasteland requires you to have figured out a lot of stuff - the complexities of providing food for example. Or water. Healthcare would permeate everything, including Policework. I suspect Odium tweaked it a bit to serve his purposes, and he wasn't opposed by a Shard there so he could have changed whatever he wanted. But I really do not like the idea of it being too different, as that would make it extremely hard for people to switch to something like that and regulate it systemically. Just the resources required to run that, like production of syringes, or cold containers, and all the other things that proper medicine practice requires, might not be easy to develop and make in a short time - particularly if the rest of the planet is turning into barren wasteland - meaning you really need to go out there and try to collect as many varieties of such micro-organisms as you can, or you possibly lose access to a wide variety of powers permanently. And you need as many powers as you can get, access to something like that could mean access to crucial options necessary for survival. There is a counter point to this argument - the plot of Silence Divine was supposed to revolve around someone discovering the equivalent to Penicillin.

I've been banging together this theory in my head for a while now. WoB says that at the Shattering, each Shard took something with it. The intent of a Shard is a result of this "taking", and while the Vessel can filter this intent somewhat, there is a certain... truth to it. Practically all the intents we know are some sort of aspects of personality - Honor, Preservation, Ruin, Cultivation, Odium, Endowment, Autonomy, Devotion, Dominion, and Ambition. These all come from Adonalsium itself. Now, this raises the question - What was Adonalsium? My personal suspicion is on Adonalsium being a reaction to the evolving sentience and consciousness in the early cosmere. That as life developed and grew, the mechanics of the cosmere allowed it's perceptions and thoughts and general understanding of it's environment to reflect in the investiture of Yolen, forming a sort of imprint in the Spiritual: a proto-Adonalsium. This created a feedback loop, where as this proto-Adonalsium began to become more capable of affecting things in the cosmere, the more powerful it became - eventually becoming the Adonalsium of Yolen. A primal God of sorts, intertwined with the fundamental nature of the cosmere by the very mechanics of it's creation. This would imply that at the Shattering, each intent inherited some of his connections to the fundamental forces of the Cosmere - and that each element of his personality that was split off represented some of these forces as understood by those that, for lack of a better phrase, designed the Shattering. Moreover, as each Shard seems like it is some sort of a spiritual epicentre or focal point of all investiture associated with it, I think that investiture associated with each Shard also has a certain fundamental behavior associated with it, not unlike how we in physics define the four fundamental forces of the universe. It is this fundamental nature/behavior that informs the intent of any Shard, and gives it a kind of "Truth" - this is why Odium is fundamentally Odium and not Passion just because Rayse thinks it is Passion. To inform this, I've been trying to find hints of this across all published work in the Cosmere, and this is what I think is best indicative of each Intent-Investiture combination: Honor Represents external bonds? I put this first because it is by far the easiest to accept. Honor's investiture behaves as glue - it tries to bind things together. This could explain Unity as a different interpretation of the same fundamental investiture, where Honor was binding cultural rules, Unity is binding people together. The same investiture, the same fundamental force of binding, interpreted through the eyes of a different Vessel. This implies that even among the Spren, it is Honor's investiture that facilitates the Nahel Bond. There could be interesting implications for this in Voidbinding, which might need Honor's investiture to facilitate the bond, and so be replacing Cultivation's investiture with Odium's Preservation Represent Stillness Investiture seems to be "cold", focused on stillness, is suffusive, and I imagine forms a stabilizing matrix inside whatever it suffuses in its natural form, preserving it. A bit like how we find ancient organisms preserved in Amber, just this is more internal. There is some contrast here to Endowment, which seems to have an external aspect to it's suffusion properties, though they work differently. There isn't much evidence for this one, mostly because Preservation's own system, Allomancy is an odd one out among the other known systems. Practically every system highlights the Intent of their Shard, except Allomancy which only uses Preservation's investiture, and that only as a power source for a wide range of powers. Ruin Represents Entropy On the opposite end as Preservation, it is "hot" and dynamic Extremely destructive, and just breaks down things in general - I keep thinking of this as vibrations that shatter. The best example I have is Hemalurgy itself. There are two seperate acts in Hemalurgy The first is to steal something with a spike - here you use Ruin's investiture to cut away a piece of somebody's spiritweb. This isn't a clean cut by any means. In cases where the victim survives, it is traumatic and there seems to be damage to the spiritweb. I imagine this cutting process to "vibrate" part of the spiritweb hard enough to break the connections between the spiked part of the spiritweb and the rest of it. You then put this invested spike into somebody else. Because this spike is contains an actual spiritweb, it is invested enough to directly pierce the recipient's spiritweb. Because the placement is important, I suspect this placement is specific enough to automatically connect the two spiritwebs. Odium Represents Consumption? Odious investiture is not unlike fire - it burns and gives power but seems consumes something as fuel. In this it could be very close to Ruin in nature. Odium is always described as the Void, which while itself is not enough, combined with Odium's philosophy throughout OB is what gave me the idea. I suspect this is how Voidlight differs from Stormlight - Odium's light consumes, and creates a void. I think a good example is what seems to be happening when somebody binds to Yelig-nar Yelig-nar seems to constantly feed, like Nightblood. When a proper connection is made, Odium is directly able to power this Yelig-nar + Person entity with voidlight - staving off the hunger. However, when a proper connection isn't made, Yelig-nar starts burning off all non-essential parts of the person's spiritweb as fuel - I suspect this is what happened to Amaram at the end of OB. Endowment From here on out, things get harder to nail down. Endowment's investiture seems to bond to internal cognitive aspects (somewhat like Honor's Investiture), but then it also has a suffusing aspect to it, like Preservation's. Divine Breadths are what suffuse a Returned spiritweb and allow them to be cognitive Shadows, and Breadths are classic suffusive investiture. Endowment's magic systems have an external suffusion theme among them, although the name Endowment is probably a hint towards that. When a Returned gives up their Divine Breadth, it suffuses something else and facilitates healing to a spiritual ideal, like regrowth. In awakening, the Breadths carry the Command and suffuse whatever is being Awakened, and then try to interpret said command. As the Command shapes what the breadths try and do, it acts as the focus in this system. Moreover, Breadths seem to have a cognitive aspect to them - as drabs seem a bit "dull" (I do not mean dumb, don't bombard me for this.) And having too many Breadths also comes with cognitive enhancements - like perfect pitch, more nuanced sight, better capability to form Commands (which seems to be a very cognitive process, a cognitive imprint of sorts), etc. Cultivation, Devotion, Dominion, and Autonomy, Ambition I have no clue The Dor seems to acts as a battery, but that might just be because of the state it was left in. The Aons seem to do two things - one, they form a connection to the Dor (which requires incorporating location in the Aon) and two, tell the Dor what to do (not unlike the molecular structure of metal shaping Preservation's investiture). The Dor however is a mixture of both Devotion and Dominion oriented investiture, in someways not that different from Harmony's ettmetal, where the latter is power in condensed metal form in the physical, the former is plasma-ish in the Cognitive. Philosophies on Sel might indicate to the nature of Devotion and Dominion, but I don't think we have enough to guess on. Cultivation should logically be all about growth, but we've barely seen what she can do. There is the Old Magic, but why that would be attributed solely to her is a question I don't have an answer to. There is also the Nightwatcher, but I suspect just as the Stormfather technically predates Honor's arrival, so would the Nightwatcher and her boon-curse magic predate Cultivation's arrival. As for Autonomy and Ambition, again. I don't have very many guesses. Now I know this has holes in it, and I fully expect some of the experts here to break this. However, I think this explains certain other questions in the Cosmere we've had for a while. For example, Vasher is capable of living off of Stormlight. This is relatively easy, because the Returned seem to feed on investiture periodically as fuel - any investiture should do here, as the primary use is subsistence. However, powering Awakening with anything other than Breadths would be significantly more difficult, as you'd have to transfer the Cognitive Command through that flavor of investiture, and then make it try and interpret that - things I think can atleast partially be attributed to the very nature of Endowment-oriented investiture that constitutes Breadths. This also explains Brandon's comments on Odium lying to himself about being Passion. If his investiture was suffusive, and added to something else, maybe that would have been a fairer comment to make. Maybe Odium + Cultivation could actually be Passion. But Odious investiture on it's own seems to consume, and that is what defines him as Odium. There is also something interesting that comes up in OB - Renarin Voidbinding with Stormlight. The fact that Voidbinding, which seems to be Odium co-opting Surgebinding, can be powered by Stormlight, is telling. Perhaps Renarin's weirdness in Powers comes from this fact. Voidbinding may be Surgebinding modified to work with Voidlight, and Renarin's Illumination futuresight weirdness could be attributed to him Powering a Void surge with Stormlight, and the differences between the investiture constitution of Voidlight vs Stormlight. And perhaps this explains why Shards... "corrupt" their vessels over time - the Intents are fundamental forces intertwined with personality. Thus, anyone holding Ruin would eventually be dominated by that personality, and try to enforce that fundamental force (not my most well written sentence). I don't know if this is because over time, the Investiture of a Shard completely replaces the original investiture composition of the Vessel's spiritweb, ala Theseus' Ship, but maybe? The only other thing I'd like to add is, maybe the Shards have a personality associated with them because they hold a slumbering piece of Adonalsium's consciousness? I'm not too sold on this idea, but it could be a thing. What do people here think?

@Calderis @Karger Maybe the micro-organisms didn't always cause diseases? Like, pre-cataclysm or pre-odium, maybe they behaved more like symbiotic spren bonds, giving only benefits to both parties? The question that was asked was "Was the magic always sickness based?", but it has always been micro-organism based. Even when we say disease based, it's not the diseases giving the power. It's the micro-organisms giving both the disease and the power. Thoughts?

@Karger That could have happened, yes. Also, true. Pointless to argue about this at the moment.

Can't be. There may be changes to it, but it can't be a completely different system. See, with the disease based system, you would get a society well versed in the arts of medicine. They would need to categorise all the different kinds of micro-organisms, with their powers and symptoms. They would develop a capability to preserve and store these micro-organisms, and understand how to quickly get infected with and cure those diseases. Cataclysms don't boost progress. They're regressive. WoB says that the same cataclysm that forced cities into the sky was the same cataclysm that caused the Exodus to Roshar. WoB also says that the cities are held aloft by the disease based system. They can't have switched to a completely new system, and learnt all the technological, infrastructural and realmatic expertise required to run it after the cataclysm - they had to have known that stuff before for it to be one possible solution. Now if you say that when Odium went to Ashyn, he co-opted that system, and his version was the one responsible for the cataclysm, I could see that. If you say that there were more systems on Ashyn than just the disease based one, sure, could be. If you say that micro-organisms in that system have evolved over time, yep, possible. But the disease based magic system has to have been well studied and widespread in atleast some parts of Ashyn by the time of the cataclysm for it to have been used to lift up the cities.

@Blightsong @Karger @Argent Maybe the refugees from Ashyn brought with them some of those diseases, and Cultivation, well... "grew" her boon-curse Nightwatcher magic from them? Sort of adapting the Ashynite Magic system to work on Roshar? We know that the nature of Highstorms and, by extension, the Stormfather was changed by Honor. Maybe that came after seeing Cultivation adapt Nightwatcher? From OB onwards, I've always liked the idea of the old magic being the original Ashynite System.

@Scion of the Mists To be honest, so do I.

@Scion of the Mists I'm basically saying something more subtle is going on there. On Taravangian's Visit, Cultivation may have asked him if he'd be willing to pay a big price, if his doing so will lead to victory. And Taravangian being the good soul he is said yes, but had this part of his spiritweb taken by Cultivation to remove the memory, similar to what she did to Dalinar. The idea is that the Diagram is the real "plant", Taravangian having created it with nothing but sheer intelligence and for the purpose of making him king is what sells it. The fact that it's flawed from a Shardic Perspective (its predictions have failed several times) is also a selling factor - that maybe no supernatural element was used to make it. This way, it allows Cultivation to influence things without Odium noticing. And it allows her to play Odium a bit too. It's not exactly against T being a plant, more a sister theory to that idea.

@Karger My process was something like this: Odium thought he had a pretty good handle on things when he first came in just before the battle at Thaylenah. He had his enemies cornered - he brought his own "troops" faster than they expected, he pretty much had a champion in there, and he knew how he could break their morale by using their own troops as his. Then, not only did he not win the battle, he failed to get Dalinar spectacularly, who in his Unity moment did something that got an exhortation out if Odium. Nergoul was captured. And he had just agreed to a contest of champions - with his primary candidate as champion now in a much better position to win against him. So he would have been terrified. This is the Shard that goes around murdering other Shards because he doesn't want the competition. This is the vessel that doesn't pick any other Shard because he thinks that would change him. He's gonna be a bit desperate, willing to take chances. He needs a new plan. Which, I think, is precisely what Cultivation wanted. Potentially even planned for. Practically all these losses were a direct result of Dalinar not falling to Odium - and this was directly due to Cultivation's meddling. See, this is when he first goes after a Herald's soul. Using someone (Vyre) who's only really in the position that he is because of direct interference in his life by the Diagram. This is where he goes and makes his deal with Taravangian, this is when he starts seriously considering the Diagram as a potential option. The Diagram is then Cultivation acting by proxy. The Diagram is then a means to set the board for Odium to lose. Or maybe the Diagram is meant to direct his efforts in a certain way. It's meant to be seen as precise, but it does have one known flaw. It doesn't account for compassion. Maybe it comes attached with a tiny asterisk in some detail, which Odium may have caught if he'd been planning himself, but because he's using the Diagram as a framework, he overlooks. I dunno all the precise roles it plays, just that it's gonna be important. Using it may come back to bite him in a certain place on his perfect, passionate, Shardic self.

I'm not quite sure if I like what T being a plant implies - I don't like the idea of Odium, a flippin' Shard, not being able to immediately see through that. This is not to say that the Diagram isn't influenced by Cultivation. Just, there has to be more to it than that. It may be Cultivation trying to get certain things done under Odium's nose. Or influence other characters without arousing Odium's suspicion. There's also this whole almost feruchemical thing going on with Taravangian - would like to see what happened on that one day of brilliance, and what happened on his Visit. And then there's this goofball of weird called Lift. My personal theory is that the Diagram achieved it's primary purpose by the end of OB, when Odium uses it as a base and expands on it using his future sight. You know how sometimes, you're thinking of something, and then someone comes and says a couple words and your entire in-head thought process just shifts to something related to those words? It's gonna be like that. Odium was influenced in some way the moment he saw the diagram and decided to use it to his own ends - there's some flaw in his plans derived from it. Some sort of subtle cascade of cause and effect. The whole deal with Taravangian was meant to be smoke and mirrors - a distraction - so that Odium does not look too closely. So long as he thinks the primary purpose of the diagram was to make Taravangian king of the world, he would not be too suspicious of it. Moreover, the Diagram is what lead to Taravangian removing some of the most prominent figureheads in Human Roshar, and that also fits with the cutting and trimming aspect of Cultivation - sometimes you need to cut some things away for there to be further growth. It may also have been her way of getting rid of people likely to be used by Odium in the future.

I was mostly referring to this WoB: If Mnemonics are confirmed to be their resonance, then do they have two? Or is this mood influencing thing something else entirely? Or maybe they're both different components of the same resonance?

In OB, Odium says that he has been preparing Sadeas' troops for a long time, and certainly the murder of Sadeas played a huge factor in their state of mind by the time of the Thaylen City Battle. Moreover, that particular murder is the only time we've seen Adolin break his cool - in many ways it was an Act of Passion. Was Adolin influenced by Odium when he murdered Sadeas? If so, did Shallan choosing Adolin over Kaladin - given her resonance - actually have a positive effect on Adolin, where she saved him from a potential turn to the dark side in the future? (Evidence: Adolin comes out and confesses said murder to her and Dalinar after Shallan makes an active choice in choosing him)