Aeshdan

I don't disagree with you that "an alloy of logos, pathos, and ethos, with other things" is better than pure logos for making value judgements, or that "the rest of creation deserves moral consideration, even if people deserve more consideration than things". I just disagree with your assessment of the relative balance of moral consideration between souled and soul-less beings. You may not "think like people think", but you do think. You can read and write, can consider abstract concepts and make value judgements. That's what separates sapient beings like you or me or Syl or Pattern from animals or subsapient spren, and I believe that the former have the god-given right to subdue the latter (which of course comes with duties regarding being a good steward). On another point and moving this back to the original topic (IoTE spoilers):

@Aliroz-The-Confused, I would like to bring up another incident from the books which I think really fits with what you are saying here (I'm actually suprised you haven't brought it up yet), and that is Dalinar wrestling with the Stormfather in Rhythm Of War, overriding him and forcing the storm to do things that it wasn't intended to do. That made me very uncomfortable when I read it, and I remember thinking "Okay, Sanderson probably isn't going to do this, but this sequence really feels to me like foreshadowing that Dalinar is going to push the Stormfather too hard and break the Highstorms themselves".

I understand your saltiness, but I don't think it is that simple. In the first place, Sanderson has talked about how he uses shifting between different works with different tones and themes and worlds to recharge and keep from burning out. So if Sanderson stopped writing non-Cosmere books, that wouldn't necessarily mean that we got more Cosmere stuff. Not to mention that I honestly like a lot of Sanderson's non-Cosmere stuff: Skyward, Alcatraz, and the Reckoners were all series that I greatly enjoyed. As for the Wheel Of Time, Sanderson has also talked about how writing the Wheel Of Time forced him to develop some of his skills as a writer, that he could not have written the Stormlight books as we know them without the lessons he learned finishing the Wheel Of Time. Maybe he could have learned those lessons elsewhere if he'd never gotten the call from Harriet, but "nobody is ever told what would have happened". And for another point, I'm pretty sure the only reason Sanderson was able to write his first burst of books so quickly was because he had a decade's worth of partially-written books and fragments of ideas to cannibalize for writing material. Early on he had all that partially-finished material to use as building blocks, and he had the luxury of doing things like writing the entire Mistborn series (including going back and rewriting things) before releasing the first book. But now he's burnt through all that initial backlog, and now he has tours and conferences (not to mention that he now has a family), all of which eats into his writing time.

I think there's another thing that plays into this cycle, and that is that Sanderson's fundamental position as a writer has shifted. When he started writing the series, he was a newbie writer, with limited fame and under financial strains. He had to write stories that would engage his audience and attract readers. But now he's on top of the fantasy world, with massive sales and fame. He already has enough money to last him the rest of his natural life with a little care, he has a massive fanbase who will be willing to give whatever he writes a try, and with the Stormlight books specifically he has a large readerbase who are going to be extremely reluctant to break the story off in the middle. As a result, he has much more freedom to write the books he wants to write instead of the books people want to read. And it would appear that there are a lot of people like you and me, people who wanted stories with moral absolutes and unbroken Honor. Sanderson started writing the Stormlight books for people like that, but I think he has reached the point where he doesn't think he has to worry as much about what we want anymore. And then on the flipside, one of the downsides of Sanderson's current status is that he is now publishing books as fast as he can write them. I think that was one of the problems he ran into with Wind And Truth (and possibly RoW to a lesser degree), he knew where he wanted the first half of the series to end, but he'd drifted off-course a bit over the first few books. He couldn't go back and change those, so he had to push the plot pretty hard in some specific directions in order to end Book 5 where he wanted to.

As a Christian, I am under orders from my God to eat his flesh and drink his blood every week. Even sacred relics are not dishonored by being used for the purpose for which they were given, and creating Allomancers is the purpose for which Lerasium is created. I'll agree that Hoid might not have had the right to claim such a divine blessing, though. Of course, that begs the question of who has the right to make those sorts of decisions with Preservation dead (as he was at the time Hoid took the Lerasium). I can understand where you are coming from on this one, though I am not sure I agree. I firmly believe that sapient races have the right to subordinate and even kill non-sapient species for our own benefit (though I also believe that this right comes with moral duties to steward the resources we have and to avoid unnecessary cruelty and destruction), so I guess the question comes down to whether there is a qualitative difference between subspen and physical-realm animals on this front. You seem to believe that there is, I believe that there isn't.

I agree, this really sums up one of my problems with Wind and Truth (and Rhythm of War) to a lesser extent. One of the things that I particularly loved about the first three Stormlight books was that they were books where morality played an important role, where characters drew power from acting with Honor and we got to see moral principles played out in a practical fashion. And then in Wind and Truth it feels like Sanderson tried to shift focus from morality to therapy, abandoned the emphasis on Honor and virtue that drew me to these books in the first place.

In a certain sense, that's very plausible. Sanderson has talked before about how the Shards and their Investitures in a sense always existed, even before Adonalsium's shattering. In the Shattering, a certain portion of Adonalsium's Investiture was labeled as belonging to Cultivation, and another as belonging to Honor, and so on, but those powers had always existed and done what they did even before the Shattering.

Okay, the first relevant point is that I subscribe to the telelogical argument for God (among others). That is to say, I believe that a world such as we exist in, a world where cause produces effect and effect arises from cause, where Things are made of Stuff and Stuff is organized into distinct Things, a world which follows consistent laws that can be learnt and comprehended, necessitates an eternal, omnipresent, omni-intelligent, and omnipotent entity like the Christian God to create and sustain such a system. Since the Cosmere likewise obeys those same fundamental rules of causality and definition, I believe it must likewise have a capital-G God ruling over it. I am less than certain whether Adonalsium could be this God. Obviously, if the God of the Cosmere could truly die the Cosmere would never have existed in the first place, but on the other hand the God of the Cosmere would have to exist outside of time, and we know that the power of Adonalsium resides in the Spiritual Realm where all places and times are one. It is possible that Adonalsium still exists despite being Shattered, or that the Adonalsium of the past and the future are sustaining the Cosmere in the present. The key point of all of that was that if there is a God Beyond (whether or not the God Beyond is also Adonalsium), He must be able to interact with the three Realms of the Cosmere. However, there is no reason why he has to have interfered with the Cosmere via what we might call "miracles". There is nothing contradictory or illogical about a God creating a world and then leaving it to run on its own like a machine (to be clear, I don't believe that this is what God has done with the world I live in, just that he could have if he'd wanted to). Now, on the other hand I am just about certain that those who have passed Beyond will never interfere with the three Realms again. Brandon has repeated so many times that those who pass Beyond cannot be brought back, and he has talked so often in his interviews about the narrative damage that uncontrolled resurrections can cause, that I find it hard to believe he would break his rule and bring characters back from the Beyond (other than as Spiritual Realm visions, which are more like looking into the past than anything else). As for whether souls do pass into the Beyond... I am inclined to believe that they do. Partially this is just because I instinctively associate the idea of sapience and self-awareness with the idea of an eternal soul (and I suspect Brandon does as well). But a bigger part of it is that if souls are not eternal, if the soul falls apart and decays into Investiture as the body does, then it significantly changes the tone of certain events and aspects of this setting. It means that when Sazed failed to catch Vin and Elend's souls at the end of Hero of Ages, it was a tragedy rather than the happy ending and rest Sazed described, for example. And at the end of Wind and Truth, Retribution's description of trying and failing to catch Dalinar's soul reads Which certainly sounds as though souls pass intact into a Beyond rather than falling apart into Investiture. Same with Wayne's death at the end of The Lost Metal. All of which is to say, I think the most likely answer is that souls truly do pass into the Beyond and remain there, but that they have no ability to influence anything back on this side. (Incidentally, how do you change your vote on a poll? I clicked before I read the thread, and I think I misunderstood the options presented).

I could be wrong, but I didn't think that Ishar's ability to move as though he could see the future was a function of Fortune, just mundane skill taken to a level no human could ever attain without immortality. Ishar had been fighting so long and gotten so much practice that he could instinctively read the flow of a fight, know from a person's slightest twitch what their next moves would be in the same way that a chess grandmaster can think three or four moves ahead in a chess match. As for the OP question, I think a lot of it hinges on exactly what resources each side has. How much Feruchemical Investiture does Rashek have stored? Does Taln have a finite quantity of Stormlight and if so how much? Where is the fight taking place? If it's taking place out of doors, Rashek could probably do very well by using steel to take to the air and pelting Taln with coins to wound him and use up his Stormlight reserves (assuming Taln has a finite quantity of Stormlight and is not being refilled by Honor). Or if Rashek has big enough Feruchemical reserves, he might be able to use hyper-compounded zinc and steel to beat out even Taln's speed and reflexes and get in a blow that would pulp Taln's head (which even Stormlight won't let you survive). But on the flip side, if Rashek can't Compound high enough to beat out Taln's speed and get in a killing blow, Taln probably has the edge in a close-quarters fight. I'm pretty sure Stormlight can heal physical injuries more cheaply and quickly than gold Feruchemy can heal spiritual damage, and even Rashek's healing won't save him if the Honorblade hits his head or spine... Yeah, too many variables to really make a call.

Hmm... of all the books, I think Oathbringer was my favorite. It had a very strong moral lesson in the principle of taking the next step, both for Dalinar and conversely for Moash. That was something that I think I had always believed, but had never quite been able to articulate. It had very strong character arcs: Watching Dalinar change from the Blackthorn to the man we met at the beginning of WoK and simultaneously watching him struggle through the revelations in the "present", watching Kaladin struggle with divided loyalties and the horror of war making good people die on both sides, Venli realizing the inexcusability of what she has done and starting to walk the path towards repentance and forgiveness, Moash and his gradual descent into darkness, even Shallan struggling with her divided mind, those were all very good character arcs to me. And it had strong worldbuilding and action scenes and solid magic system revelations, and I liked the romance between Shallan and Adolin. After that I would be hard-pressed to decide between Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. They both had strong moral principles woven into the text (the Ideals in WoK, Kaladin learning when to kill and when to protect in Words of Radiance), they both had beautiful worldbuilding, exciting action scenes, and good character arcs. Rhythm of War would be close behind those two. On the one hand, this was the book where it felt like Sanderson started to shift his focus from morality to therapy, abandoned the focus on Honor and virtue that was one of my favorite things about this series to instead focus on mental health. That being said, I did think that the therapy scenes themselves were quite well done. I loved the scenes of Kaladin reaching out and counseling the soldiers suffering from depression and battle shock, and I really enjoyed the whole arc with Shallan, Formless, and the eventual reintegration of Veil. I also really enjoyed the whole sequence of Navani experimenting with fabrials and discovering anti-light and Warlight. I deeply love strong, detailed worldbuilding like this, it's part of what drew me to Sanderson's work in the first place. And then Wind and Truth was my least favorite book of the bunch, for a lot of reasons. There were some things I liked: I felt like Szeth's arc was actually quite good, and I enjoyed the alien-ness of the Spiritual Realm (slight tangent, but the fact that people could physically enter the Cognitive Realm and need food and water and all the rest while there was one of my first great disappointments with this series), and I mostly enjoyed the Azimir and Shattered Plains battle sequences. On the other side, this was the book where Sanderson really seemed to double down on his focus on mental health, as opposed to the focus on Honor and morality that was what got me so invested in this series. And the mental health scenes themselves felt a lot less convincing: it felt a little too easy for Kaladin to help out Szeth and (especially) to talk the Heralds around. The Unoathed also felt like a bit too much of a deus ex machina for me: I don't mind Adolin being able to bond Maya because we see him putting in the time and effort to establish a Connection, but all these random people being able to get Blade and Plate without properly bonding spren and swearing the Oaths felt cheap. The romance between Renarin and Rlain also felt very forced and uncomfortable to me, very much unlike Dalinar and Navani, or Siri and Susebron, or Adolin and Shallan. And then the ending... I guess Sanderson failed to convince me that Dalinar did the right thing in abandoning Honor like that. I can't help but feel that there were a lot of other things Dalinar could have tried after ascending that didn't hand Roshar and cosmic freedom to Taravangian, and I'm not even convinced that killing Gavinor would have been unjustifiable under those circumstances. More than that, the ending basically took everything that I'd spent four books and ten years getting invested in, all that worldbuilding and characterization and everything, and completely smashed it. Makes it very hard to care about the second arc, when everything I liked about the first arc got destroyed.

I think it's interesting that you see it this way, because one of my major problems with RoW and WaT is that it feels to me like they have switched emphasis from morality to therapy. One of my favorite things about the first three Stormlight books was that they were books where Honor and morality played a major part in the world and plotline, where the protagonists drew power from doing the right thing even when difficult and where we got to see moral lessons played out in a practical fashion. But with the more recent two books, it feels to me like Sanderson has shifted his focus away from Honor and morality to instead focus on mental health and therapy. I'm curious why you think that the relationship was "forced"? Granted it started out as an arranged betrothal, but both Shallan and Adolin had plenty of opportunities to break it off if they had wanted to. I don't deny that Shallan and Adolin both have their issues, but based on everything I have seen of the two I think they genuinely love and care for each other.

Personally, I agree with you. I don't think I can imagine myself being sexually attracted to something as different from me as a singer. That being said, I don't think there is anything objectively immoral about such a relationship, and there are people who have far more bizzarre sexual tastes than that. If someone is sexually attracted to a member of another sapient species, and the attraction is reciprocated, I don't see any reason why such a relationship couldn't exist.

Yes, the therapy stuff was there, but it felt like it was a more secondary element. My problem is that in the last couple of books, the focus on mental health has expanded to the point where it completely displaces the focus on virtue and honor that drew me to the books in the first place. In Real Life? My father, mother, sister, brother-in-law, my pastor, I would assume my co-workers (I only know them at work, but I've worked in the same office as most of these people for years without them displaying any notable mental issues)... In the books? Adolin, Lopen, Yawnagan, Sebarial, probably more that I can't think of off the top of my head. Hmm... I think I can agree with that moral, but I don't feel like that was the lesson I got from the book. Except maybe in the debate between Jasnah and Taravangian, where it felt to me like Jasnah failed because she didn't have any fundamental basis for her morality, that she was just following her instincts as to what was right and wrong even though her worldview didn't actually give her a concrete basis for making ethical decisions. But based on what Sanderson has said in interviews about writing Jasnah, I don't think that was the message he meant to send. I suppose I can also see that moral in Szeth's arc through the book (and through the previous ones, honestly). I just don't see it in Dalinar's choices. I think this is a big part of the problem we're facing in attempting to analyze this story: we haven't yet seen how this twist is going to play out. Tolkien did something very similar in The Lord Of The Rings, where it was a major theme (at least as I read the books) that victory achieved by immoral means is not worth having and that it is better to let the world burn than to save it by the enemy's methods. We are told that if Gandalf or Galadriel or Boromir had taken the Ring and used it to overthrow Sauron they would inevitably have become an evil as great as Sauron himself. But in LOTR, our judgement of Gandalf's and the Fellowship's actions must inevitably be shaded by the fact that we know that they won, that in the end Gandalf's gambit paid off. It's difficult to answer the question "If the Quest had failed and Sauron had reclaimed the ring, would we still say that Gandalf and the Fellowship had made the best choices they could?" with complete objectivity. By the same notion, if Sanderson wants to really convince us that Dalinar made the right choice, he's going to have to use future books (both Stormlight and possibly non-Stormlight) to do it. Only once we have books 6-10 (or at the very least book 6) will we be able to properly judge book 5. Actually, I wonder if that is what Sanderson is going for? He's talked before about how Mistborn grew out of his desire to write a "What if the Dark Lord had won?" story, what if this is a different permutation on that idea? What if Sanderson asked himself "Okay, can I write a story where Sauron takes the Ring and still convince my readers that sending the Ring to Mount Doom was the right choice? And simultaneously, what happens when the Dark Lord really and truly wins, even more so than in Mistborn?"

Yeah, this has been one of my biggest disappointments with Wind And Truth. One of the things that I really liked about the first few Stormlight books (particularly Words of Radiance and Oathbringer, but also Way of Kings to a lesser degree) was that they were books where morality was a major part of the plot, that characters drew power from their Honor and we got to see moral lessons played out in a practical fashion. Words of Radiance helped me really understand the importance of protecting even those you don't like, Oathbringer showed me what repentance looks like and helped me to understand what I already believed about how it works. But the last two books, it feels like Sanderson has shifted his focus from morality to therapy, lost a lot of the book's original focus on Honor and virtue to instead focus on mental health. If there was supposed to be a moral in Rhythm of War I missed it, and I don't understand what lessons Sanderson was trying to teach in Wind and Truth.

Agreed. I've honestly been bothered by this ever since we saw people entering Shadesmar in flesh and blood. I understand that we gain certain things by that, but I feel that making Shadesmar a place that can be physically entered, a place where you breath, need food and water and all the rest of it, really undermines the distinction between the Physical and Cognitive Realms. I would have preferred to keep Shadesmar as something more mystical and non-physical, a little closer to the way Brandon presents the Spiritual Realm.

Personally, I just find that trying to imagine a sexual relationship between Syl and Kaladin feels... icky to me. It feels like it makes Syl less...herself, less magical and supernatural and divine, to imagine her bumping uglies with Kaladin. And that's where the confusion comes in, because I don't think we're accustomed to thinking of relationships which are romantic without being sexual. The middle ages had something like that with their idea of courtly love, and we have something like that in the Heterosexual Life Partners trope, but neither quite hits the note I'm aiming for here. It's something that is not quite friendship or normal platonic affection, but also not quite romance as we usually think of it.

I agree, I think a big part of the problem with judging Book 5 is that we haven't yet seen how the second half of the story plays out. We don't know what is going to happen to Roshar in the ten-year time skip, we don't know how other characters (and in particular the other Shards) are going to react to Retribution's ascendancy, and so forth. For all we know, the message of the second half will be that Dalinar was, at the last, a coward who was unwilling to risk casualties to stop an evil that needed to be stopped, and so ended up squandering all the sacrifices that people made in the first half. I don't think that's particularly likely to be Sanderson's take, but it would still arguably be a viable message. In Lord of the Rings, our judgement of Gandalf's and the Fellowship's actions must inevitably be shaded by the fact that we know that they won, that in the end Gandalf's gambit paid off. It's difficult to answer the question "If the Quest had failed and Sauron had reclaimed the ring, would we still say that Gandalf and the Fellowship had made the best choices they could?" with complete objectivity. By the same notion, if Sanderson wants to really convince us that Dalinar made the right choice, he's going to have to use future books (both Stormlight and possibly non-Stormlight) to do it. Only once we have books 6-10 (or at the very least book 6) will we be able to properly judge book 5.

Also, if you recall Scadrial was already tearing itself apart at the time: earthquakes, tsunamis, large parts of the ground catching on fire from the sunlight, etc. Very likely there was a significant amount of collateral damage from their clash, but it wasn't as remarked on because there was already an apocalypse going on at the time.

Yeah, Renarin mentions in his sequence that they don't work now (or at least the ones inside Urithiru don't). And the spren said that "Our era has ended".

Actually... could they have? Sure, if a couple of Shards got together they could have destroyed Rayse, but then what? You can't destroy the power of a Shard, and even Splintering it seems to have all manner of side effects. Honestly, I think you could make a very good case that as long as Honor's challenge kept Rayse trapped in the Rosharan system and mostly unable to damage even that, it was better for everyone (including the Rosharans) to leave things as they were. If (say) Valor had teamed up with Honor to destroy Odium, then the conflict between them would have first probably done horrendous damage to Roshar, and then left a bunch of unguided power running rampant. So who exactly would have benefited from such an action?

So at the end of Wind and Truth, when Shallan is talking with Thaidakar, he says But even though Stormlight no longer exists, Warlight is now apparently almost as freely available. You need Retribution's permission to access it, but the permission appears to be mostly automatic. And even if the Ghostbloods are worried about Retribution taking offense at their harvesting of Warlight, I'd expect them to at least try and approach him and strike a bargain for access, or trade with the singers for Warlight spheres in exchange for goods from other worlds. Plus it appears that the binding restricting spren to the Rosharan system is broken, which may indicate that Warlight can be taken off-planet freely. I could understand if Thaidakar proposed a truce because the time dilation renders any operations on Roshar impractical until it subsides, or because of the lack of accessible Perpendicularities, but the way he phrased it seems to specifically imply that it's the loss of Stormlight that makes Roshar non-viable for their original plans.

Yeah, this is my impression as well. I think, based in part on what she said in RoW, that her strategy is less focused around very specific long-term plans (like Preservation or Ruin), and more around trying to maximize her options and then improvising based on what ends up happening (sowing seeds and then seeing what grows from them, so to speak).

Building off this theory, I'm going to add three more speculations: 1) The shattered moon is the fourth Dawnshard. (That is to say, the shattered moon is currently holding one of the four Divine Commands). Perhaps all four moons were Dawnshards at one point, before the Seventeen took the four Commands and used them to Shatter Adonalsium. Anyway, at some point in between the Shattering and Honor and Cultivation arriving on Roshar, one of the Commands was returned to the moon that once held it. 2) The command for the Moon Dawnshard is "Destroy". We already know two of the Commands are "Change" (something into something else) and "Exist" (keeping something as itself). It's logical to guess that the other two are something like "Create" (making something out of nothing) and "Destroy" (making something into nothing). 3) After it was invested in the moon, the Command was turned on itself, shattering the moon and making it fall from the sky. The fragments of the broken moon are collectively the fourth Dawnshard, and to extract the Command it would be necessary to find and unite them all together. Something like Thanos's trick in Endgame, where he used the Stones to reduce the Stones to particles and scatter them across the universe so they couldn't be used again.

I don't think that Brandon would have specifically gone out of his way to mention Dalinar's soul passing on to the Beyond if he had any intention of bringing him back. Not when he's been so firm elsewhere in the Cosmere that even Shards can't bring back someone who passes Beyond and not when he's talked so much about the narrative risks of too many resurrection plot twists. Leaving aside the Blackthorn (who I don't think counts as Dalinar), I don't see Dalinar coming back in person. Now, Dalinar visions might be possible, because we've already seen that the Spiritual Realm can produce echoes even of people who are dead and gone (Evi, Tien, etc.)

Nightblood also burns Investiture like a blast furnace to keep running. I always thought the differences between the Blades was deliberate, that the creators of Vivenna's Blade accepted a much lower level of power in exchange for 1) not requiring a constant influx of Investiture to fuel its abilities, and 2) not making something which is intelligent and capable of mind-controlling people if its containment is even slightly relaxed.