StrikerEZ

I mean, they’d just be saying the fear an Unmade. I doubt the advice about leaving when there’s odd spren around is the only advice the Radiants gave to the common Rosharans about the Unmade. And the best place to hide something you don’t want anyone to know is in plain sight. If you tell people that you fear X because of Y, most people aren’t gonna suspect that you actually fear X because of Z. And granted, both of our arguments are based on Hessi, and her knowledge could easily be incorrect in some way. You see, I don’t think or theories have to be mutually exclusive. I could totally see Cultivation setting up Glys’s corruption. Maybe it was just step one in getting Sja-anat to flip sides?

I mean, I don’t think it’s that big of a stretch to imagine that the Radiants would want to keep morale up in their non-Radiant forces by keeping the fact that their spren can be corrupted a secret from those forces. I just think it’s weird that Sja-anat suddenly gained the ability to corrupt true spren. None of the other Unmade appear to have changed how their abilities work, so I don’t see how Sja-anat could have. I guess we’ll just find out eventually.

Personally, I really don’t like the lesser spren theory, but this isn’t the place for that. As for why the Radiants were afraid of Sja-anat corrupting spren, it could be that she could corrupt true spren all along, and the Radiants just said that she could only corrupt true spren so that the populace wouldn’t be afraid. Because, think about it, would you really trust the Radiants if you knew that their spren, the source of their abilities, could be corrupted to the enemy’s side? Another idea is that maybe the Radiants didn’t know if Sja-anat could corrupt true spren, but they didn’t want to find out, so they recommended staying far from anywhere there were signs of Sja-anat’s corruption. Which is probably a good idea on its own, because who wants to be hanging around a city with the confirmed presence of an Unmade? I think either of those theories work with Sja-anat saying that she hadn’t been able to corrupt an Oathgate spren before. The fact that she was able to corrupt the Kholinar Oathgate spren is probably due to Honor’s Splintering and how those spren made an oath to Honor before his death. Maybe Tanavast was protecting them from Sja-anat’s corruption somehow, and without that protection they’re open to her influence.

The real question is whether or not Glys was corrupted the last time he had bonded a Radiant.

Woah, I haven’t read or even heard of very many of those! Granted, I’ve only ever really been around the 17th Shard side of the fandom, so I guess I haven’t had much opportunity to discover any of them. YKYASW you can’t go a day without checking the Shard. Or if you do, you get really annoyed that you didn’t get to check the Shard that day.

When this is the only post you’ve received a heart for:

There’s a new Nightblood in town now.

Oh yeah, I totally agree on the epic part. Brandon will probably surprise both of us and do it completely differently.

I’m pretty caught up on all post-OB WoBs, but I think I’m interested enough to go see if I missed one about this. EDIT: Yeah, neither ‘Sja-anat’ or ‘corrupt’ with the search settings set to after OB was released turn up any results about humans being corrupted.

Oh, I’ve always thought that the guards were being influenced by Yelig-nar, via the bond with Aesudan. Though, in hindsight, I’m not sure how the Surges would make that possible...and it doesn’t quite make sense for Ashertmarn to be influencing them, because they don’t show any signs of the Revel like the Ardentia does. So, maybe Sja-anat can corrupt humans. That’d be a really good question to ask Brandon.

I mean, if she can do things like the Nightwatcher can (who knows if she can though, or if she’s fundamentally limited to beings made solely of Investiture), then she should be able to corrupt humans. I still can’t think of any place in the Shadesmar sequence where it was even suggested by anyone that Sja-anat could corrupt humans.

@Pathfinder This is almost exactly why I feel Adolin needs to revive Maya without any external help. It already feels like a lot of what Adolin has achieved is just handed to him (to some people), so reviving Maya could be Adolin’s own accomplishment. Don’t get me wrong, the path you envision with Dalinar and Adolin rebuilding their bond after Adolin finds out that Dalinar killed Evi, coupled with Maya’s bond being renewed with Adolin sounds really awesome...but I think that that can happen with or without Dalinar being explicitly involved in Maya’s revival. I think this just comes down to how differently we view the well-being of dead spren. You think something has been fundamentally taken away from them and they can’t be revived until that is replaced. I think that their Investiture was redistributed via the nahel bond so they could exist more in the Physical Realm, but that the breaking of the nahel bond didn’t take away anything that was already there before the nahel bond and all that needs to happen is that someone forms a new nahel bond with them.

@Lightblood I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t be able to corrupt other types of Investiture since she can corrupt spren. Though I have no idea where you got the idea that she could corrupt humans. I definitely did not get that impression while I was reading OB, so would you care to show the relevant passage(s) that give you that impression?

@Pathfinder I’m not gonna quote your entire post for brevity’s sake. If we’re being literal here, Dalinar’s Unity moment was technically deus ex machina, since he was relying on the power of a Shard. Seriously though, you do make a good point about the deus ex machina definition and denotation. I just think you have a very specific connotation of it, which is different from mine. But now that you’ve said this, I think I wouldn’t mind as much if Dalinar was involved in the revival of Maya. I still think it’d be more powerful if Adolin and Maya had to work on this alone, without the help Dalinar, though. The one thing that I’m absolutely certain of is that if Maya is revived, it will be at least tangentially because of her bond with Adolin. I don’t think, even if Dalinar helps, that Maya can’t be revived without bonding Adolin. EDIT: there’s a huge difference between can and can’t, autocorrect.

I mean, I wouldn’t say that is the implicit assumption. That is the assumption most people make when they first learn about the greater Cosmere’s events, but I don’t think there’s anything in the books that implies that the Evil is a result of Ambition’s death in the system.

Well, Odium has to have already hunted down and injured Ambition before getting stuck on Roshar, which happened at least 4,500 years before Way of Kings. Era 2 of Mistborn happens at about the gap between books 5 and 6 of Stormlight Archive and is only 300 years after Era 1. So, yeah, Ambition had already died on Threnody by the time Secret History happened.

The problem I have with the theory that Maya needs to be ‘fixed’ by a Bondsmith or some other highly Invested thing is that it really wouldn’t be all that interesting to read. It’d just feel like a deus ex machina thing, like “oh, Maya is dead, let’s just shove some power into her, and now she’s alive!” Yeah, no. Brandon is too good of an author to rely on something like that. I think it’d be much more interesting and far more powerful if Maya revives just through the budding bond between her and Adolin. Mainly because, narratively, I think it’s more important for characters to have to work to get what they want instead of having it handed to them.

That’s fair. Though, generally, if a thread has been dead for more than a year, it’s time to just make a new one. Also, try not to double post. If you need to add something to the thread and no one’s responded since your last post, there’s an edit button for a reason.

@IGetLIFTed How many thread necros is this for you now? Two? Three? You should always check the date of the last post.

I would like to just take a moment to point out that Brandon has managed to make such a controversial arc in his books that people are always talking about it in like at least three topics at any given point. It’s been this way for over a year since the book came out, and doesn’t look like it’s gonna end anytime soon. That’s at least one way to get people to keep talking about your books.

You see, with Veil, I see her as just Shallan, without all the tragic stuff about her parents affecting her and less of Shallan’s qurkiness and humor. Veil is a part of Shallan simply because Veil is Shallan, but there are parts about of her that are not true. There are parts of Shallan that are not true. There are parts of Radiant that are not true. But at the core of each of these masks/personas/whatevers is a piece of who Shallan really is, with some extra stuff added on top. At least, that’s how I view it.

I think @Weltall meant that the potion mimicked Connection enough to make the person who drinks it look like an Elantrain, but not actually become an Elantrain, like in the hypothetical scenario in the WoB above.

Maybe she took off her boots and put on slippers? I don’t think it’s all that big of a deal. I think this might actually go in the Oathbringer typo thread. I’m pretty sure some people also use it for continuity errors as well.

@Xanthys Well, what is it?

I mean...I guess that’s fair. I definitely don’t think that his YA books are super toned down, but to each their own.