Siaun Sanche

Tanavast _is_ the reason for the season.

I don't think that's quite right, about the Sons of Honor. If that were the case, then Amaram would have gone to Dalinar at some point when he became convinced that Taln was the Herald that he claimed to be, and worked with him to learn what he could as a result. Amaram didn't do that--he kidnaps Taln and has him squirreled away somewhere. That's not the actions of somebody who wants to be cooperative. And his broader political project of boosting the Vorin church is naturally going to put him at odds with Dalinar, who is more and more disillusioned from traditional Vorin teachings. And more broadly, it seems pretty obvious to me that Ialai means to be trouble to the Kholins right now, and that Dalinar's going to have trouble with the ardents too because he keeps saying that the Almighty is dead. Both of those things have been set up in the early Oathbringer chapters. And now we have Amaram, who is a fanatical Vorin believer working hand-in-glove with Ialai? That guy's definitely going to be one of the primary antagonists in Oathbringer. Everything's already set up for that. As for what Adolin knows: he knows that Amaram is a ruthless person who has done terrible things to fulfill his objectives. He knows that there is strong personal animosity between Amaram and Dalinar. He knows that Amaram is working closely with Ialai, who has every reason to want to see Dalinar and his family destroyed. And he knows that Amaram tells convincing lies about being honorable, so any claim of peaceful intent that he makes is basically worthless. There's a lot of reasons for Adolin to think that Amaram is going to be trouble.

Also he basically says that he's a Herald: And his "pay no attention to the Desolation starting around you" message is consistent with what Ishar has been telling Nale.

I like this theory a lot.

This is an interesting thought: why _wouldn't_ Adolin start thinking about killing Amaram? The situation has a lot of the same qualities that led Adolin to murder Sadeas: (a) Amaram is personally despicable, and thus in a sense deserves it; (b) Amaram poses an ongoing threat to Adolin's family-of-choice (which includes Kaladin at this point), being a scheming bastard heading a rival family who will murder to get his way; and (c) Dalinar couldn't bring himself to do it. If Adolin's still feeling under the gun, then maybe he holds off for that reason. But if he's starting to feel like he got away with it last time, then the idea has to be in his mind.

I just finished my second read-through of WoR, and I'm on board with your take on Dalinar. Here's the thing that gets me: once Dalinar hears the story from Kaladin about Amaram murdering his men, he has to make a choice whether to believe Kaladin or not. If Kaladin's story is wrong, then Kaladin is untrustworthy and has no business guarding Dalinar and his family. If Kaladin's story is right, then Amaram is a snake who poses a threat to anybody who stands in the way of him doing what he feels he needs to. In either case, Dalinar needs to decide who poses the biggest risk to his family and his mission and excise that person from his life _immediately_. Instead he plays this long extended game that gives Amaram sufficient opportunity to work some long-term mischief by alerting him to the existence of Taln and where Taln can be found, while alienating Kaladin to the point where he very nearly permits Elhokar's assassination. (Elhokar is alive because of Syl, it seems to me.) And then when he does turn on Amaram, it's at a point where he's in no position to do anything about it. People's faith in Dalinar (among the Alethi) is high because he wagered a lot of his reputation on being right about the Voidbringers and the Everstorm, and it paid off big. His other mistakes seem less pressing as a result. Even though he basically handled the situation with Amaram about as badly as he could have, this isn't weighing on people's minds as much as the fact that he said he had visions from the Almighty and it appears that he was right. In a perverse way, Sadeas's attempts to undermine him ultimately burnished his reputation. But I think at the root of a lot of his mistakes is that he's not quite the visionary (wordplay!) that he needs to be. So when he hears "unite them", he goes for the most obvious thing (unite the highprinces), and then once he learns that this has something to do with the Knights Radiant, he still treats it like an Alethi military order that he can appoint the best soldier he knows in charge of it. And now he's making the same mistake again with Urithiru, and not even considering how it appears from other people's point of view. (His other big flaw is that he's a terrible judge of character: he's quite wrong about Sadeas, Taravangian, Amaram, and Aladar, in different ways.) I should say that I have no problem with Dalinar as a character; he pretty much has to be a flawed leader so that the character arc has somewhere to go. But he's got a lot of things that he needs to work on. Well, Taravangian wants Dalinar to "be the Blackthorn" because he doesn't want an united Alethkar to stand against his efforts to take over Roshar, not because he's Dalinar's life coach.

I felt very confident that Elhokar was going to move against Dalinar to get the throne back, and so of course the little jerk up and bends the knee instead.

It's been a while since I've read the Mistborn books, and I don't particularly feel the need to get a karma score to everybody in the Cosmere, so maybe we could focus on the Stormlight Archive here in the Stormlight Archive forum?

I think of the parshmen who have been affected by the Everstorm (outside of the Shattered Plains) are just... fine. People who woke up with their minds undulled for the first time in their lives. They're not crazy monsters or fulfilling some cunning plan, they just want to go find someplace and live their lives.

Well, hold up a second. Two of the people you just described as simply "willing" to do specific things. (The other one is a more complicated case than either Szeth or Taravangian, in that you're looking at a number of actions that caused harm and a number of other actions that liberated people.) First off, he literally did devise the Diagram himself. He may have been given the "capacity"--which is a slippery term--but he wrote the thing himself. Secondly, correct me if I'm wrong, but the blood-letting in his hospital isn't specifically directed by the Diagram. It's designed to supplement the Diagram, which means that that whole murderous enterprise depends on being able to trust Moelach and his dark eldritch powers. And on what basis are we to do that? Does Moelach have an honest face?

Those are both quotes from Shallan, the character, commenting about herself. Her self-esteem of course plays a role. Besides, colloquially referring to yourself as crazy in a self-deprecating fashion is incredibly common; haven't you heard anybody say, "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps"? Those folks aren't actually requesting a diagnosis.

Strictly speaking, this fake death would have happened _before_ Jasnah's and only been revealed afterward. But I'm giving up on the Helaran's-still-alive part of this, because of... Well, damnation. That would seem to settle that. If Amaram knows who the Shardbearer was, then I see no reason why Taravangian wouldn't also know... and Taravangian believes that Helaran is dead.

To my mind, Mraize wouldn't have approached Shallan again if he didn't think that the answers that he had for her would shake up her loyalties, and in particular her loyalty to Jasnah. Moving her brothers to Urithiru will only do so much for him. I have a couple of thoughts in that area. First, maybe there's something in Shallan's flashbacks that I'm forgetting, but couldn't he claim that Shallan's father joined them to protect her (specifically, from the Skybreakers)? In this telling, they were doing their best to protect her and her family. Not for free, certainly, but ultimately in a mutually beneficial relationship that kept Shallan safe without her realizing it. Lin Davar's ultimate breakdown was tragic, but not something that they could have done anything about. They're not world-hopping therapists, after all. Second, I've been toying with the idea that Helaran is still alive and has been working with Jasnah and Liss this whole time. This ties together a few things, but it's pretty speculative (and maybe there's even something that I'm forgetting that rules this out): - When Helaran writes back to the family, he includes a book by Jasnah Kholin for Shallan. - Helaran uses Hoid as a messenger, and we know that Jasnah and Hoid have a pre-existing relationship that we don't know everything about. - 'Helaran's' Shardblade would actually be Liss's, in this theory. The person who went after Amaram would actually be the "Veden brute" with reddish hair that works as Liss's servant. - Mraize says that Helaran sought out the Skybreakers, but he doesn't say that Helaran joined them, or that he joined the Ghostbloods themselves (which surely Mraize would have mentioned). And yet surely Helaran joined some faction, because otherwise him getting a Shardblade from mysterious friends doesn't make a lot of sense. The upshot of all of this would be that Mraize intends for Shallan to learn that Helaran is still alive, and that Jasnah could have told her at any time but only Mraize actually did so.

I appreciate you saying that, and that helps me understand where you're coming from. Having also experienced panic attacks, I understand why "mental deterioration" came to mind for you. I had read that as a larger comment on her character arc, but I see now that you didn't intend that. I'm not trying to say that people should ignore her distress as it happens, since it's an important part of her character arc. I have noticed a method of discussing it that strikes me as reductive and dismissive, and indicative of a double standard. Canonically all the KR are 'broken', but it seems like Shallan's attracted more of this kind of talk than male characters do.

I really don't see Shallan acting more stable in tWoK than she is now. What are you basing that on?

I don't understand the distinction that you're making. What strikes me as the larger context is that a number of people have reacted to a normal literary device by dismissing Shallan as "crazy", referring off-handedly to "mental deterioration", diagnosed her with DID or multiple personality disorder, or in your case comparing it to addiction. This strikes me as a strained reading of Shallan's larger arc--she is healthier, more honest with herself, and more confident than she's ever been over the course of the series--and a gendered reaction that feeds into a larger stereotype of women as crazy or unhinged.

You compared it to alcoholism in another thread.

I dunno. Seems anti-climactic to use up the Odium threat at the end of book 5 and then spend the next five books cleaning up the mess. To my mind if there's a big climactic confrontation (of any kind, with Odium or with a medium-term antagonist like Taravangian) in book 5 then the good guys are going to lose it and be forced to regroup for a time. But in any case, my larger point is that it's hard for me to imagine that Eshonai's character remaining static for a number of books, which seems like bad plotting to me.

This is a very common fictional conceit dramatize the thoughts of somebody who is trying to play a number of different roles, that you and a couple of other folks are needlessly pathologizing to act like Shallan's going crazy. Shallan was scarcely able to think about the Blade in the first book. The fact that she's able to use this persona to train with it now is a sign of her character progressing, not getting worse.

Shallan running herself down isn't proof that she's crazy. I could do the same thing with Kaladin, more or less.

So is this Odium's champion business going to be resolved by the end of the third book? Or is she just going to remain a static character for the next seven-and-a-half books until her big moment?

I don't buy that he was _that_ opposed. All he had to do was toss the Oathstone in the garbage and walk away. The only thing that's stopping him is that he really really doesn't want to. One might be sympathetic to the reasons why Szeth really really doesn't want to. But ultimately that's not a good reason to murder even a single person, much less many people. What, does the number of people holding to a particular position mean that said position is more likely to be true? Should we conclude that the Almighty is alive? You say that they're psychological constructs but then you introduce this idea of a moral spectrum that implicitly assumes the existence of good and evil, which I find contradictory. I can see how calling a character "evil" comes across as reductive, as if I have little interest in, or understanding of his characterization. But that's not my position. I think Szeth's psychology is fascinating, and I find the character compelling to read about. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the character (although I have sympathized with characters that I thought were evil) but I don't need a character to be sympathetic for me to find them interesting. I dunno, man. I could come up with an elaborate hypothetical scenario when the way to save the most lives is to drop-kick an adorable moppet (who talks with a lisp and and walks with a limp and has the biggest blue eyes you've ever seen) through a plate-glass window into a vat of acid and then dance the Macarena in your underwear, and then I might ask you what you would do in that scenario, but I don't think that answer would be as revealing as my need to construct said scenario. In real life, and I suspect for Taravangian, the need to see existence in such terms is very frequently a symptom rather than a cause of the desire to do evil. In short, I don't think that the Stormlight Archive is going to turn into a ten-book argument for the murder of invalids.

I see Adolin as an exile by the end of Oathbringer. I don't know where he goes from there, but I think he's set up for a fall.

Well, there's a reason why most TV shows will return your unsolicited script to you unread for legal reasons. And while it's probably hard to prove in ambiguous cases, I'm not sure what the consequences would be if Brandon Sanderson said, "May Aladar wasn't going to be all that important, but I decided that she was Odium's champion after reading a fun fan theory by such-and-such on Reddit."

Well, I'm the guy who got the last thread derailed, so let's delve into my argument a little bit. I think murder is bad. I think somebody who commits murder is a bad person. I think somebody who commits murder a great many times is a very bad person. My judgment of individual people and individual acts may be swayed if you killed somebody to prevent that person from doing harm; you were coerced through force into killing somebody; or something else of that nature. But broadly, I'm in the murder-is-bad camp. So, I suspect, is everybody else here. It's interesting to debate these issues as they come up in a fictional context, but if your co-worker revealed that he's bleeding people to death in his basement to prevent the end of the world you would call the police. (I'm trying on purpose to keep out of really tricky moral questions, and just stick to a consensus view. I'm not making the case for pacificism, or against execution, or anything like that.) Now, let's talk a little bit about adherence to a code of honor. Some folks here see that as mitigating, at least in some degree, the obvious badness of a person's actions. I think that gets things backwards. The value of any personal code is how it drives you to treat the people around you. In Szeth's case, it leads him to murder a bunch of people that he would have otherwise left alone. Szeth himself is not better off for having followed this code, but neither is anybody he's ever met. His code cannot redeem him, even partially, because the code itself is malignant. Taravangian is a slightly different case, because in his way of thinking he does terrible things now in order to prevent much greater harm in the future. This is a mode of thinking common in would-you-kill-baby-Hitler hypotheticals, but it usually falls apart outside of the context of thought experiments because the reality is that, even if you buy the underlying moral logic, you cannot remotely be sure that the baby in front of you will turn out to be Hitler. Arguably a good reason not to blindly follow a prophecy about the future is that it causes you to do monstrous things like murder people in your basement so that eldritch powers can reveal hidden wisdom to you. (Seriously, Taravangian is the bad guy from every D&D module there is. He's Mola Ram of the Temple of Doom.) More broadly, it is true as a matter of psychology that people rarely do bad things without in some fashion having rationalized it for themselves. So what? People rationalized lynching people and slavery and pogroms and the Holocaust, and built vast structures of rationalization that permitted them to cause a lot of avoidable misery for a lot of people. That's not exculpatory, it's philosophical CYA. Assuming that you're the good guy because you have a lot invested in that belief doesn't mean, to any degree, that you actually are a good person.