Siaun Sanche

It seems to me that this thread is based a bit too much on the DSM and not enough on story structure. I've been treated for anxiety for a number of years, so I understand why somebody would be invested in that lens in particular, but I think it's obscuring more than it's helping at this point. The reason I don't think that Shallan is going to lose her personality is because it's antithetical to her character arc. Shallan's whole journey is becoming more and more honest with herself, which is why her abilities as a Lightweaver are tied to admitting difficult truths. It's the same reason why Kaladin's oaths all have to do with protecting people. Characters with the Nahel bond get magic powers because of character development, and so if they regress they get weaker and thus are unlikely to be that important. If she does in some meaningful way forget who she is, Brightness Radiant couldn't do much more than sit around drawing pictures of mollusks* and thus would generally suck as an epic fantasy character. It'd be like Taravangian keeling over tomorrow because of congestive heart failure. Theoretically possible, but dramatically not that compelling. Meanwhile, Shallan's still keeping a lot of secrets, from others and herself. She's doing less of that in both cases than she was in Words of Radiance, but she's not at a 100% healthy place right now, I agree. But of course she is: her character arc needs somewhere to go from here. Kaladin goes through a lot of Words of Radiance with unresolved issues about lighteyes and revenge, to the point where he loses contact with Syl--all so that Kaladin's character can progress in a climactic moment at the end of the book. Shallan's set up for something similar. There's going to be some other unpleasant truth that she needs to admit to, but in the end she will because that's how the series works. I don't know if, at the end of this, she'll still be a heroine. I've had her pegged for the "one of them may destroy us" role since early in tWoK, even if I've never had a solid theory how that would happen. But whatever road she chooses, she's going to go down it with her eyes wide open. * I apologize: she wouldn't even be able to do that, because Brightness Radiant doesn't draw.

Legally speaking, would he be able to use theories from 17th Shard or Reddit or what-have-you? I don't know the rules for authors, but TV producers concern themselves a lot with the possibility that something that they develop for an episode would mirror an idea that somebody floated that they happened to read. (There was an episode of Babylon 5 that was delayed by a year because it explored a subject that somebody had floated in a Usenet post on the newsgroup that the showrunner was heavily involved in; lawyers for Warner Brothers needed to track the guy down and have him sign a waiver before they would permit the episode to air.)

During my WoR readthrough, I came across the scene where Ialai and Sadeas had a conversation about what a firebrand Sadeas is, and my thoughts started going in a similar direction. However, I'm reluctant to embrace the theory because his PoV sections paint the picture of a man who didn't want to die without having a legacy.

I'm with this chain of logic right up until you start to suggest that all those individuals aren't also evil. I don't care about whether Szeth's or Taravangian's murders are justified by their own beliefs. Everybody who does evil acts has some method of rationalizing them. The worst humans in the world will come with some reasoning for why they were justified in murdering humans. Based on this logic, why would you ever condemn anybody for anything?

I agree with this. Also, assuming different roles to see how they work is something that's particularly pronounced among people around Shallan's age: they're the college kids who go from being goth for a few months to punk to something else. Brandon slightly exaggerates this by calling the different roles by different character names to highlight what's she doing, but I think that's a bit of dramatic license, not a sign of incipient madness.

Taking a look at your image, maybe it's "That which he must not know."?

Does that make it better? If he knew it was wrong but he keeps doing it, then he's particularly responsible. Nobody could say that he wasn't aware of the harm he was causing to others, or how little they deserved it.

Oh, that would make sense.

I don't see Eshonai as being broken by ambition, to be honest. She (absent the influence of the stormform) doesn't seem ambitious, she seems like George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life, stuck in the family business when all she wants to do is see the world.

I agree. The idea of a long series where one of the upshots is that the heroes should have committed genocide against the race that they'd enslaved isn't a very pleasant prospect to me. I imagine (and sincerely hope) that Sanderson is heading in another direction.

Hey, to my mind this is more fun than just finding the back cover text on Amazon.

I will say this: this is a lot of work we're doing to decipher something that won't be that revealing in any case, and regardless this is a fun exercise.

I think the Captain seeks "reconciliation," and the Traitor seeks "freedom." IMO, the Spy was broken by "cruelty." Also, I pulled the image out in paint and flipped it, and attached a cropped image.

Potentially, you could, but I feel like dropping a sword on somebody is a tactic that's maybe only situationally useful (since you have to anticipate where they'll be in ten seconds and if people don't like what you just did you don't have your sword for another ten seconds). Assuming that it's possible to do, it wouldn't be terribly common. So personally I wouldn't assume that it was impossible just because we haven't seen it yet.

Well, there aren't a lot of other places where you would want to summon it, right?

Well, certainly the whole Truthless system seems questionable from the beginning. It seems like you're asking for somebody to behave the way that Szeth does, even if they're not necessarily as good at it. But at the same time there's no enforcement mechanism. No external force stops a person from chucking the Oathstone into a river and going skinny dipping with the Reshi, and surely some of the Truthless must do something like that. People can and do leave strict cultures all the time, particularly when they're living far away from home. (My own upbringing was in a strict religious community of which I am no longer a member.)

In part, sure. But he is a person who makes choices for himself without compulsion, as is anybody else. If somebody launches a violent pogrom because they come from a society and a religion that emphasizes anti-Semitism, that is an evil person doing an evil thing, even if you could also make an argument that the society that they come from is complicit in that act as well. Also, no culture in Roshar is painted so black and white that fundamental beliefs go completely without challenge. There are Alethi who don't agree with the gender segregation, who don't believe in the Almighty, who oppose the rule of the light-eyes, et cetera. I'm sure that Shinovar is the same way regarding their fundamental beliefs.

I will say this. I am not so enlightened that I would ever forgive somebody who conspired with my enemies to murder me, that's for sure. And I personally would not judge Elhokar as a character if he wasn't forgiving about that either. I think it would be very reasonable if Elhokar hated Kaladin as a result, felt betrayed, felt like a fool for ever admiring him, and began to get paranoid again. And it just so happens that I'm re-reading WoR (for only the second time) now, and I got to the point recently where Dalinar decides that the king's guard can't be trusted, and puts Kaladin in charge, and those that Kaladin selects, to keep the king safe. Knowing that Kaladin and his buddy Moash were conspiring to murder Elhokar just weeks after that point, it would be very reasonable for Elhokar to wonder anew about Dalinar's loyalties.

Szeth is a full grown man, capable of deciding for himself what he believes and what his values are. If he values an abstract code of conduct enough to take the lives of innocent people, that's evil in my book. EDIT TO ADD: I want to clarify that I have no issue with how Szeth is written. This is just how I see the character morally, not how compelling I find him.

I mean, all that made him a dangerous zealot, but the fact of the matter is the idea that he was 'compelled' to do these things was a lie he told himself. He wasn't literally compelled to do so, by some sort of magic. He had the ability to walk away at any time. He preferred to abide by blind zealotry at the cost of many many lives. That's evil. And it doesn't cut a lot of ice with me that he walked away when he was no longer able to lie to himself. He should have walked away when he was first asked to murder an innocent. According to the herald of Justice, Lift and Ym needed to be killed. The herald of Justice is crazy.

I gotta be honest, her reaction didn't strike me as notably suspicious, nor does her decision to work despite the fact that her husband died. Maybe it adds up to something, but nothing about that jumps out at me yet. As for Ialai versus the Diagramists, can't it be both? I don't anticipate things between Taravangian and Dalinar to come to a head in book 3 (since surely what you would want for story purposes is all out war between Jah Keved and Alethkar and neither country is ready for that yet), but Taravangian has every reason to support those who would bring Dalinar down in order to keep Alethkar off balance. And with Szeth out of the picture for the moment Taravangian will likely have to change up his strategy in any case.

I also tend to think that Ialai ordered the killing, and I doubt out of revenge. (He's a named character, but not somebody who was particularly close to Dalinar or Adolin.) Adolin killing Sadeas is (IMO) a big danger to Dalinar's position. Dalinar has a fancy new title, Highking, but to the degree that people follow him it's because they believe in his character and his judgment. Now Dalinar's son has murdered one of Dalinar's political enemies, and (quite by accident) everything that Dalinar has done about it since then appears designed to cover it up. Once Adolin's involvement is revealed, Dalinar doesn't seem like a good guy who is trying his best for the people of Roshar, but a typical amoral lighteyes with a tendency towards pompous declarations of principles. At best, he'll have to cast Adolin aside, and I don't think that would completely quiet the rumors about him. Ialai doesn't know that it was Adolin specifically, but it won't take much for her to figure out the general score: the murder of Sadeas must have been committed by somebody close to the Kholins, because they had the biggest reason to hate him. So having 'the killer' turn on the retainers of other highprinces is designed to undermine Dalinar further, building the case that the Blackthorn has seized power through assassination and intimidation and can't be trusted. How many people will really believe that Adolin committed the one murder but not the others? This also hinges on the real killer being revealed, of course, but based on Ialai's characterization to date it would make sense that she already has an idea who she would frame for this if the real killer fails to materialize.

Wait, Szeth isn't evil? He's murdered a whole bunch of innocent people.

I was a relatively new Sanderson reader when I was going through the Stormlight Archive for the first time, and I didn't find the Cosmere references distracting because I generally didn't recognize them as references. There were parts of WoR that I genuinely found confusing, particularly when it came to sorting out the various secret societies and who was in what and which shadowy agenda they were pushing, but none of that is Cosmere-specific. In general I think the Stormlight Archive books are for people who have confidence that Sanderson knows what he's doing, which he's said himself. To me the benefit of having read the first Mistborn trilogy before SA was that I had already seen Sanderson clarify mysteries in an appropriate and satisfying way, so I had faith that he'd do it again and didn't get impatient when I didn't immediately understand what was going on. I don't think you need Cosmere knowledge specifically.

I like this theory a lot, and intuitively it makes sense to me. The novels to date are primarily focused on Alethkar and Jah Keved--with the intention of spreading outwards from there--and you would want to start the story at the front lines.