robardin

Ahhh that's what you mean. I assume that was with some non-CR based help (i.e., Spook doing something in the Physical Realm). I can't see how a literal ghost in the CR could pull it off. But we'll see, won't we!

When did he do this? I totally don't recall ... I remember him swallowing a bolt from a chair and trying to burn it, which had no effect, as the extent of him trying to use the Metallic Arts known to him while in a shadow in the CR. And at the end, he gets Spook to insert a spike in the Physical Realm to be able to appear/talk to him. When does he spike himself, how and with what? I'll go back and find it

Which element from Mistborn speaks to this? I only remember seeing hemalurgical changes seen as undone in the Cognitive Realm - in Secret History, when Ghost Kelsier sees former koloss appearing after being killed as humans again.

Thank you for your contribution, Mr. Charles Dickens, now please return thee to the Nineteeth Century

True, but wouldn't the idea of visiting Ashyn pique her curiosity? Maybe it's the archaeologist in me, but the idea of "Not only is your Eden Story kind of based in reality, you actually can go see its ruins!" would be very tantalizing. I mean if she was raised Vorin and believed that her life and afterlife's mission was to retake the Tranquiline Halls... Doesn't that start by knowing how to get there? Even if she no longer believes it as literal truth?

Or that he's broken off the Nahel Bond by then, or perhaps that the way to get off of Roshar with a bond is to suspend it somehow, like leaving your shoes in a cubbyhole at Chuck E. Cheese (and getting it back later when he returns to the Rosharan System).

Oh, and this stood out to me as well: She seems awfully unsurprised about being bound to Roshar extending to two more planets - one of them being Damnation and by implication, ... The Tranquiline Halls?! My assumption is that she doesn't at that point recognize either of those two names and they may as well just be any two other planets she's never been to (and doesn't expect to visit) that she can go to with a spren bond. But only a little bit later, in the same conversation with Mraize, he drops this: So at some point do you think something will click in her mind and say hey... Wait... Braize = Damnation = I can go there from Roshar... Then Ashyn = ...?????

Right, I don't mean "master" in that sense, but "master" in the sense that OG Shallan, or Deep Shallan, is aware of what The Three are doing and thinking, but not vice versa. And evidently, and maybe only seen at this point when that identity is close to the surface nearing its integration - whether melding or simply getting "a seat at the table", able to "take control" for some actions while still leaving the Three in the dark, which after all is the reason OG Shallan created "Shallan" in the first place (who then created the other two). So, "master" over them in the sense of a one-way flow of information, plus the ability to take control without leaving a memory trail in them.

I'm coming around to the "Formless has been around the whole time and is the Original Shallan" And that at a deep level all versions of Shallan remember what has been suppressed... Which means any examples of "Formless took over and did something and The Three didn't notice/remember it" is even more interesting Explained as, "Formless" is actually the master who is intentionally leaving Shallan and her Two Adjutant Identities in the dark so they don't have to deal with what OG Shallan accrues to her ledger"

I like it. We do know that Renarin has relatively recently learned to read/write just like Dalinar - maybe Navani doesn't recognize his handwriting because of that!

I take this tack too - he's admitted to reading up on DID to add depth to how Shallan's personas express themselves, which is laudable because it means he's using real life experiences to add realistic depth to a fictional character (in a way he did not, for example, with the character of Adien in Elantris, who comes across as "off" to people who know actual autistic people of that nature)... But it shouldn't parameterize, define, or drive the character's story arc. "Expecting people with DID to eventually integrate into a single personality is not healthy" can be true without therefore implying, much less requiring, "it would be harmful to make Shallan Davar a poster child for DID and then have her integrate into a single personality, so that should not be the outcome". Anyway let's please remove this kind of discussion to another thread, if indeed there is anything left to be said, at this point everybody has said what there is to say and we can just sit back and see how Brandon ends up writing it, then complain / admire as appropriate.

Yes, but at the same time we've spent three volumes of SA - each book a trilogy unto itself, effectively - with many scenes and POVs with Shallan Davar, and we saw her construct both Veil and Radiant and then proceed to lean on them increasingly, eventually to the point of endowing them with equal footing with herself. To only begin to find out only at the very beginning of SA 4 that hey, there's a buried "master identity" even deeper than Shallan, that created and has been using "so-called Shallan" as a mask the way that Shallan then created Veil and Radiant - basically, the version of her that had reached at least the Third if not Fourth Ideal before the age of eleven... And is starting to "emerge" to do things without "Shallan" knowing? Well, I was originally going to object that that feels like lying to the reader, but no it's fairly in line with the Shallan Davar story arc. The only problem I have with the "emerging to do things Shallan doesn't know" is that it seems impossible for her to do it in so short a time like as needed to poison Ialai without "Shallan" noticing a time gap. Nor would there be any obvious motive for "Formless" to want to do that, unless Mraize has also been talking to "Formless" without Shallan realizing it and convinced her of the need, which would mean Formless has been fairly active in the Shallan body and surely somebody else - Adolin, her brothers, Kaladin, Jasnah, Navani, etc., - might have noticed? It would imply that "Formless" not only isn't in potentia but has been around the whole time? And that does feel a little unsatisfying (like lying to the reader). She can lie to herself, sure, but shouldn't we as readers have been clued in on that over 8 years and three mega-volumes? Then again, we have had such hints all along. Like how Shallan could summon a Shardblade to kill Tyn, or to Soulcast the goblet to blood at the Palanaeum, both of which would seem to be "too advanced" for the nascent stage of Lightweaver she thought she was.

Oh yeah, good pick up. If Sja-anat can leave spanreed notes for Shallan somehow, then sure, why not be able to do so for Navani? Though who was the agent to plant that paired ruby under Navani's desk?

Well he did specify or qualify with the phrase "in Shadesmar". I don't think the GB's intent is to overstuff a Shard to become a Supershard, if that were possible to do with Stormlight; if it were, why didn't Honor and Cultivation "bulk up" before Odium's arrival and then beat him down with it? Maybe Thaidakar is resident in Silverlight? Yeah, and you don't demonstrate allegiance to a conglomerate consortium by getting a tattoo. Well, except for Amazon. I may have said too mu--

Oh it's not about money. It's about Investiture that is cheap and easy to obtain, if only it could be transported. "It’s about power, obviously. ...Portable, easily contained, renewable. You hold the energy of a storm in your hand, Veil. That raw energy, plucked from the heart of the raging tempest. It is tamed - not only a safe source of light, but of power that those with... particular interests and abilities can access. ...Suffice it to say there are places in Shadesmar where our Stormlight - so easily captured and transported - would be a valuable commodity. ... This gemstone cannot go where it is needed... the one who unlocks the secret would have untold power... The power to change worlds..." The last bit sounds suspiciously like Ascension. But how would taking Stormlight off of Roshar result in that? Even if you captured all the Investiture dumped by a given highstorm and took it off Roshar, how many highstorms would you need to siphon off that way before you had enough to represent a Shard's worth? We know that highstorms pre-date the arrival of Honor and Cultivation to Roshar... Are they at some level a kind of ongoing, net-positive "Roshar-Connected Investiture Generator" set up by Adonalsium that has simply kept going all these years after the Shattering?

Hmmm, I kind of doubt that Restares=Kalak would be seeking to bring back the Voidbringers and trigger another Desolation, eh? Which he apparently was, as the head of the Sons of Honor.

No, the way I read it is that Mraize wants to bond a corrupted ("enlightened") Radiant spren, the way that Renarin has bonded Glys. But she's concerned about how Renarin has been treated because his spren was "touched" (i.e., Jasnah was about to kill him, and who knows what else since). Interesting, because Mraize also said that having a Nahel bond would effectively tie him to the Rosharan system, whereas he seems to have been able to move about more freely otherwise - he seems to have the "life sense" associated with having enough Breath for at least the First Heightening. Given that Glys's "Illumination" grants visions of the future, I would think it likely that whatever kind of "enlightened" radiant spren this is, one of its Surges will be similarly Odium-ized - perhaps it's another Illumination granting spren that Mraize would be particularly interested in. And now Sja-anat has sent one of her "children" to (potentially) choose someone to bond with among the GBs, who may be Mraize, another one, or nobody. I wonder how taking Stormlight to Nalthis or Scadrial would be valuable. I guess it's basically an arbitrage play, because Stormlight is cheap on Roshar (it literally rains from the sky on a regular basis), and the GBs already have a way to convert it to something locally useful? And Restares hiding out in Lasting Integrity... Is he the reason, or one of them, that the honorspren are refusing further bonds? And what, if not killing him, would Shallan "know to do" upon finding him there (and he is a human, so it's not like she can imprison him in a gemstone)? Or... another hidden identity of Shallan's, haha. The "Formless" that Shallan thinks is suppressed but is actually Doing Stuff without "Shallan" knowing. That feels inelegant to me somehow, but it is a possibility, as Mraize seems a bit too amused that Shallan doesn't know. What about the Oathgates granting direct access to Shadesmar, that Dalinar's (Navani's) scholars have been slowly unlocking the secrets of? I thought they were locked from doing so "by the word of the parent" who is "dead now" in "the parent's last days" in Oathbringer? (Was that parent not Honor, could it be the Sibling who is now "sleeping" as a spren cannot really be "killed"?) So Gavilar had obtained Voidlight on Braize. When it's said that the Fused and the Heralds "go back" to Braize after being killed on Roshar, are they there physically the way they are on Roshar? What else is there on Braize but Fused engaging in a Herald Hunt, and why would the Fused have given a human like Gavilar a gem with Voidlight? Since all the Fused now hang out in the Everstorm instead of going back to Braize upon getting killed, is there nothing there at all? Hmm.

This is actually far more impressive an act of will than simply to avoid reading all of the early-release chapters. It's like... You've opened up a bag of potato chips and actually ate only one! Especially since at the Tor website, Chapters 4 and 5 were released together! I take it you mean you read those two and stopped? Because if you literally stopped in the middle of that release... Storms!

I'd agree that a direct segue into Mistborn Era 2 fresh from finishing (and loving) the Era 1 trilogy is a mistake - it greatly ruined my initial enjoyment of Alloy of Law. Letting time go by and and reading other stuff in between and then going back to re-read it improved it greatly. Consciously or not, I kept wishing for or looking for info on where the original crew ended up, of which are there a few hints as an easter egg kind of thing, but not the central point of the story. Yes, the way the Metallic Arts play out and interact are very different now. It's going to get even more different in Era 3 - the medallion technology we see in BoM is surely going to have a major impact, when those who needed it to make up for their lack of Metalborn hook up with a land relatively rich in Metalborn. Because there are no more Mistborn or even Full Feruchemists, there is a certain "awesome factor" that is now lacking except for the moments when Marasi or Wax wielded the Bands "to surpass even the Ascendant Warrior" in power level and become, for a while, another Lord Ruler... But that is OK. The time of gods among men is passed, and it's time for people to make the most of what they have left. It's what Harmony wants. And how cool is it that he still sounds like Sazed when talking to Wax? I get where you're coming from with Wayne beginning to come off as "a caricature of himself" at times - I alternate between loving and hating Wayne as a character (fun to read, but with a heavy dose of oh come on now). I actually think he comes off as much more fleshed-out (i.e., seems like a real person) in BoM, maybe because we see more of him independent of Wax.

Which is a combination of odd and ominous, if you think about it. From a Cosmere POV, I'm going to assume "looking for planets" as Khriss does is (at present) a matter of searching the Cognitive Realm, as they are not really interested in uninhabited worlds, and certainly still lack the technology to scan the heavens for possibly habitable worlds and then reaching them to find out. We have a WoB that all the pre-Shattering Vessels of the sixteen Shards came from Yolen, as well as Hoid and Frost, and that that is where the Shattering took place (or was done), and that Frost still resides there, so the planet was not destroyed in the Shattering. It had enough people to support things like taverns or restaurants, where Tanavast could have bought Hoid drinks once upon a time, or for a young Ati to refuse to partake in card tricks. It seems that humanity originated on Yolen as originally created by Adonalsium (and later physically replicated on Scadrial by P+R), with the only sentient species we've seen in the Cosmere other than humans being the singers/Parshendi on Roshar, who also pre-date the Shattering. (Leaving aside Frost, who has not officially been shown in canonical work except indirectly, though we have plenty of WoBs that he is a dragon.) Every Cosmere planet we've seen has humans on it, who are primarily responsible for doing the thinking and associating that create the CR in the first place. In fact, worldhopping from one planet to another via the CR is only even possible because there is nothing sentient in between the planets, so the loci of activity are not so much like islands but vortices of consciousness-generated "cognitive mass". So... Is Yolen now devoid of people? And/or are the beings who remain there (dragons?) either so few, or think so differently, that their footprint in the CR is obscured (or they have a specific means of making it so, and want to do so)? Also, in the cases where we know humans have migrated from one world to another they have preserved some kind of history or legends about the event, even if in legendary or religious terms. How most Rosharan humans say they came there "from the Tranquiline Halls", but the Iriali say it is the "Fourth Land" in their Trail of a predicted Seven Lands, or the distant Homeland of the people now living in the Forests of Hell on Threnody (implied to be a land mass on the same planet, but who knows for sure yet?). It seems odd that humanity everywhere would just forget about Yolen if by and large, they all originated there. Though the Iriali may implicitly preserve it as their "First Land", we don't know if they have names for the first three before Roshar. And some kind of link is still going to Yolen, otherwise how does Hoid's Letter and its reply reach Frost there, or the three Seventeeth Shard members at the Purelake expect to communicate with Frost?

Right, so there's the IRL "writerly" answer - "...because when I built atium, I didn't have the rest of the cosmere built, right? And so it breaks a lot of rules that I later set up that everything else has to follow... Nightblood will too, and some of these things that were built even after the cosmere was coming together." But of course in the specific case of atium and it being something that can be Pushed or Pulled with Allomancy, you could also construct an in-world reason linked to it having been fudged into the "Allomantic Table" by Preservation. So perhaps once the power of Preservation is (re)configured to be able to make Mistings of that metal, it becomes linked in a way that is affected by Allomancy? *shrug*

Yabbut @Rainier has consistently parameterized that characterization in the context of Shallan being a fictional character in a tale of epic fantasy who's blocking at the Third Ideal, in which this DID type thing is clearly meant to be a factor. Even if a DID situation can be considered "handled" in real life without an "integration" occurring, as you are citing, it is very hard to picture a narrative event that would resolve the tension points already built up in Oathbringer and the early chapters of RoW without one. Is it impossible? Probably not. Would it be easy? No. I would agree we shouldn't assume it's definitely or definitely not "integration" in the sense of "dispelling alternate identities as useful but imaginary constructs under Shallan's full control"; but you needn't argue so strongly against that scenario, either. It's basically the default one. From a narrative perspective. Another tack would take a lot more work. And considering how long SA is in general, would Brandon devote the text space to it? The answer could be yes, if the payoff were huge (and it might be). But I wouldn't invest myself in that. I'm assuming an integration-type event is likely and will hopefully be pleasantly surprised if that proves not to be the case.

I doubt even a spren like Syl would be particularly invested in the idea of reviving a deadeye spren - it wouldn't enter their mind as a serious possibility, in-world. Their default attitude could well be that what Maya showed was certainly... Unusual... But at best a kind of echo of life, not the real thing. Which maybe even seems even more monstrous and tragic to them. And yes, if it were holding Adolin back from a "real" Nahel bond, not only would Kaladin advocate for that from the POV of "you're the last Kholin without a spren bond" (even Elhokar, who Kaladin held a lot less respect for until the very end, was about to bond one), imagine also that a spren of another order - perhaps even a "live" Cultivationspren if he is indeed attractive as an Edgedancer - might feel... Insulted? That he's clinging to a dead one instead of bonding a live one that's looking to bond?

Hmm, I wouldn't say that "having alters" - at all - precludes her from it. But the specific alters she's got now, I think so. At least when "Shallan" considers herself (the Shallan personality) "the biggest fake of them all", and Shallan is the originator and boss of "The Three" (she "stuffed them away" in Oathbringer when they resisted or objected to her choosing Adolin over Kaladin), and all three share some kind of awareness that "we" (the three of them, as a semi-joined entity) are suppressing a deeper, even more painful truth than what happened to her parents (i.e., death at her hands). This "Formless" identity they all find threatening is probably one that would be "master" to all three of them by holding this truth over all of them. I also think that having someone with such distinct "alters" such that Adolin is literally not with his wife half to 2/3 of the time he's around her by mutual agreement, is pretty messed up, in terms of having a functional and healthy relationship. As for whether integration is a requirement for a real-life person with DID to be considered healthy - I leave that completely to the experts and the unfortunate patients in question. But since "integration" is usually a target goal in such treatment, I will say that from the POV of reading an epic fantasy narrative, while using first-hand clinical knowledge of DID to add depth to a fantastical version of it in a fictional character is certainly a good idea, worrying about it can't (or shouldn't) take over the narrative. Shallan herself, and Pattern, and Adolin, and now Kaladin, all spend POV time worrying about her increasingly deepening the reality of Radiant and Veil, and possibly having more identities "on tap", and it's related to her being unable to advance to the Fourth Ideal. That's setting up the tension for the problem. The resolution has to result in all of them no longer worrying about it, and Shallan reaching the Fourth (and eventually, the Fifth) Ideal. The obvious way for that to happen is some kind of integration, or at least "subjugation", of the different compartmentalized identities into or under a master one. That may mean Shallan continues to think of "switching gears" into being Veil or Radiant at times, internally, but with all of them being consistent with each other and the master one in the ways that matter. Or Brandon can find a way to weave in a form of permanently multiple DID into the Shallan Davar character that can be "accepted and moved on" by all involved, including Shalland and her spren, as well as Adolin and everybody else. I cannot imagine what that would be, but hey, he's the storyteller here.

What about Hoid? He's got the power of so many different magic systems and knowledge of how to use them, including being a Lerasium Mistborn. And Pre-Shattering magic that is involved in his healing and his immortality, it would seem (such that he doesn't even fear Jasnah's Shardblade as a serious threat to his existence - Nightblood being a different story). Yeah yeah, he has some sort of vow that prevents him from hurting people (in the Physical Realm, anyway)... But is that something he could work around with the proper Soulstamp, do you think? Unshackled Hoid could be pretty terrifying!