Siaun Sanche

That would be a bold narrative gamble, wouldn't it? "Dave flipped the next page of Oathbringer and began to read the first Interlude chapter. Oh god, he thought with growing impatience, Sanderson's decided to break the fourth wall."

I'll say this--I think your instinct is correct when you imagine that the good guys will eventually be cornered in Urithiru, Odium having claimed the rest of Roshar... but that strikes me as a good place to end book 9, not book 5. It would be hard to keep the remaining books from feeling like anti-climax if you go there too early.

What orders would Adolin be making in this scenario? Wouldn't the people who have actually been running the Kholin lands this whole time be better positioned to make them?

If it's an emergency wouldn't Adolin be required to leave Urithiru and return to his lands, then?

I think Gavilar was a sincere Son of Honor because there's no reason why, were he pretending, he would have told Eshonai about the scheme. Once the Parshendi know that this is the scheme, then it's very easy to imagine a thousand ways why things could have gotten out of hand. The Parshendi may want to get on board, they may mention the scheme to the wrong person, they may get so incensed at his mad idea that they want to kill him, etc., etc. That's a crazy risk to take if he's just playing a part.

When did we ever see Dalinar making big decisions for his lands back in Alethkar before now?

Those two sentences contradict each other. If the princedoms pretty much run themselves, then why would Adolin need to take over?

I guess what I mean is, Elhokar could make some mischief if he had a mind but if he undermines Dalinar he's undermining himself as well. Doesn't mean that he won't do it, just that it would be self-defeating.

I agree that Elhokar was trying to take some power for himself, but I don't see how his new role could be used as a weapon against Dalinar. Elhokar made a big commitment to Dalinar and one that basically only makes sense if Dalinar _is_ the one responsible for uniting Roshar. Elhokar looks like a fool or a weakling if he's wrong about that, or if he tries to back off from his commitment later. Besides, if all Elhokar wanted to do was go back to Kholinar and take his seat again, couldn't he just do that? If he orders a small force to return to open the Oathgate, is Dalinar going to say no?

The arrangement seems destined to confuse everybody, to be honest. Dalinar isn't formally claiming any lands outside of Alethkar, but by taking a title higher than the king of Alethkar, isn't he implicitly claiming a status higher than the other monarchs as well? Wouldn't it seem that his current 'unity' kick is a pretext to justify moving against the other realms of Roshar? He seems _awfully_ eager to send his troops to 'help rebuild', or collect all of their Surgebinders for 'training.' On the homefront, Dalinar has a broad mandate to send commands to Elhokar and Elhokar has a vague right to interpret those commands as he sees fit. That seems destined for further conflict. Say that Dalinar needs to call up the troops for a battle against the Voidbringers--can he say how many? Can he say which houses he wants, who commands, who stays behind? Can he keep them for years? At what point does that start to infringe on Elhokar's sphere of responsibility? Dalinar's not mean-spirited but he's controlling and he doesn't really think much of Elhokar as a leader, and Elhokar's trying to claim some ground for himself so he's going to want some flexibility. (The irony of this business is that this is only a loss of status for Elhokar on paper; if Elhokar gets what he wants in practice, it's a massive increase in his power from what he was practically able to do as of WoR.) Meanwhile, are all of the highprinces cool with this highking business? We don't know, but we have to imagine that nobody expected when they rode out of the Shattered Plains to be serving Dalinar. Dalinar's loyalists will be on board, I imagine--but your average highprince doesn't necessarily trust Dalinar's goodwill more than the Queen of Thaylenah does. I'd been leaning towards the idea that Dalinar's assumption of command was going to alienate Elhokar and lead to a split between the two of them, but I don't think that works anymore. There's likely going to be tension between Elhokar and Dalinar still, but the highprinces who oppose Dalinar will probably oppose them both.

I want to jump on that thought for a second, because I think it gets at the heart of the issue between Dalinar and Elhokar. Dalinar doesn't want to take Elhokar's throne, I agree. What he does seem to want is to exercise all the powers of the king without bothering to hide that he's the real authority. It's not that he wants to be the power behind the throne--that was Sadeas. These days Dalinar seems to want to be the power in front of the throne. And sometimes he feels guilty about this but he keeps doing it because ultimately it's still what he wants. Dalinar's character growth over the course of the series to date has come at Elhokar's expense to a fair degree, but he hasn't really had to confront that this is true. To some degree he's been able to have his cake and eat it too. Dalinar has a lot of good reasons for behaving this way, and I don't mean to imply that he's a bad guy--but this is a tension that I feel like the story should address. And it's true that Elhokar's been pretty cowed, but repeated humiliation (which is what he confesses to Kaladin) can create some powerful resentments so there's no reason to think that he can't find his courage. And he wouldn't necessarily be alone in opposing Dalinar either, since there are a number of highprinces that haven't become Kholin loyalists yet. Okay, fair enough. When I read books I predominantly read for character and theme and in some cases narrative voice, and less the sort of plot structure stuff that I've been talking about here. I often am surprised in books by very obvious mysteries and twists because I'm not looking for them. It's only when I'm on a message board developing theories about where a story might go that I start to think about how the plot is structured.

Yeah, Moash is going to be on his own for a while, and I'm curious to see how that turns out. Somebody on the Shardkeepers Podcast floated the idea of a Moash novella in Oathbringer detailing his time with the Diagrammists (a la Eshonai in WoR and Szeth in WoK), and that idea sounded very cool to me.

I read the first Mistborn trilogy and then the Stormlight Archives, so the first time that I read WoR the worldhopper references generally flew over my head (with the exception of Hoid, which had been flagged for me before I started reading Sanderson). Reading up on it after I was finished with the Cosmere books (to date), I thought it was really cool and in hindsight it gives a wonderful sense of stakes to the story. There's a lot we don't know about the battle against Odium, but we do know that people from all over are getting involved because it's just that important. That's very cool to me.

I should clarify that I don't think that Elhokar won't change. What I think is that Elhokar won't change to service his own story, he'll change to service the stories of the main characters. I am imagining, specifically, that Elhokar become more antagonistic towards Dalinar as his personal feelings of humiliation and paranoia evolve into a deep feeling of resentment, driving towards an unavoidable conflict between the two of them. Is that "monochromatic villainization"? That depends on how the story is executed, but it doesn't have to be. Dalinar is unlikely to see Elhokar as irredeemably bad even if the two of them end up at odds. (Also, I should say that I don't hate the character of Elhokar. Quite the opposite. I am trying to envision an end to his story that strikes me as dramatically satisfying, not kill the dude off.) Moash is actually a good example of what I'm envisioning. Moash has his own arc, yes, but clearly it's in the service of putting Kaladin in a particular position, highlighting his internal conflicts that he's been wrestling with over the course of the book. Moash being a secondary character doesn't mean that he never changes or that he's one-dimensional or that people can't have a complicated reaction to him. (I for one don't hate Moash as much as a lot of people here seem to, for example.) But Moash's story in WoR is there to highlight Kaladin.

I agree with that. Beyond that, I don't really understand what the point of Elhokar having a redemption arc would be. Springboarding off of what you've said in the past, Elhokar's not an important character in and of himself. He exists as a supporting character to service other characters' stories (like Kaladin or Dalinar). And I don't see how Elhokar getting better is really in service of Dalinar's arc. Dalinar's decided that he needs to unite Roshar, well and good. But for that journey to be compelling, there have to be consequences and hard choices for him to make along the way. So far his journey has involved him slowly getting what he wants: authority, respect from (some of) his peers, the woman that he loved. (Even the death of Sadeas, while not exactly what he wanted, removes an obstacle to his ambitions.) I think Oathbringer is going to be the book where Dalinar has to choose between some of his fundamental relationships and his new authority. If Elhokar quietly accepts a life in Dalinar's shadow, I think that lets Dalinar off a little easy and makes his journey a little unsatisfying.

The thing is, Dalinar is also an Alethi. He's acting in the name of an Alethi king, he's handing out Alethi titles, he's seen internationally as an Alethi leader. Nobody of any substance in Roshar makes the distinction you're making between Dalinar's people and Alethi people. Dalinar's people are also Alethi (with the exception of Shallan, I suppose, who is engaged to an Alethi nobleman). I think it's quite likely that Dalinar will assume ultimate power at some point as head of the Knights Radiant, but he hasn't even really begun to attempt to do that. That's not as simple as going through a magic door and getting a thundercloud for a friend. You have to get people to buy into the idea of the Knights Radiant as a vital and necessary institution, and that's going to be tricky given the history. It's not impossible, but it's not where we're at in the story. And really the immediate problem that Dalinar faces is that a bunch of the Alethi highprinces probably had no idea that they would be living under Dalinar's effective rule when they came to Urithiru, and they don't necessarily have a lot of reverence for the Knights Radiant as an institution due to many centuries of suspicion. So they're going to start out with strong reasons for suspicion, and the whole bit where Adolin murdered Sadeas is going to strongly test Dalinar's reputation for integrity. So it's going to be a struggle. And if people start to have the idea about Urithiru as a place separate from, or ruling over, Alethkar, it's going to be after that struggle and not before.

"Urithiru" doesn't exist as a political entity. It was an empty city in the mountains until a week ago, and the Knights Radiants have been gone for a long time. So the 'principle' that the Alethi king is subordinate in Urithiru to the Bondsmiths is not one recognized by anybody currently in Urithiru. (This includes Dalinar, who is handing out Alethi titles to Alethi highprinces.)

Like the saying goes, you can't make an omelet without dropping a few eggs.

Well, Dalinar and his most loyal supporters don't care, but the vast majority of them (a) were relieved to know that he's dead and (b) take it for granted that they didn't have anything to do with the murder. There are a bunch of highprinces who weren't at the wedding who probably feel otherwise.

IMO, Kaladin still thinks of Moash as "friend" so that it hurts him when Kaladin and Moash have to face off in battle later on in the series.

I agree with that. Uniting the world behind the Knights Radiant is an inherently political task. Lines of authority are going to be redrawn, new powers are going to rise up and old ones will fall away, and people are going to have opinions about all of that as much as one might wish otherwise. If you're going to require their help, you need to bring them on board somehow. I imagine that Dalinar's going to get a lesson in this. Also, something has to serve as Dalinar's main plot for this book. Taravangian's going to be rebuilding Jah Keved for a little while before he can make a major move, and there's enough chaos back home to suggest that Dalinar & co. will need to focus on rebuilding Alethkar. Meanwhile, it makes sense for Dalinar's character arc that he finally be pushed to assume the throne for real. So I think a Dalinar v. Elhokar showdown makes a lot of sense at this point in the series. That is an excellent observation.

I think Dalinar's making a lot of trouble for himself, and courting a strong response from reactionary elements in Alethkar. - First, his dismissal of traditional Vorin religion (while understandable and based in fact in many cases) is going to alienate a lot of people who would otherwise be sympathetic to him. He's trying to introduce a lot of new ideas at once, and he needs a source of legitimacy more secure than his personal reputation for integrity. - Second, he's not even maintaining the forms of submission to the throne anymore, which is going to be a constant source of humiliation for Elhokar. Aside from Elhokar's personal feelings, there's something inherently unstable about reserving real authority for Dalinar while Elhokar is nominally in charge of everything. It turns the king into a potential rallying point for anybody who wants to attack the status quo. - Third, quite by accident his behavior immediately after learning of Sadeas' death could not be more suspicious. He alerts only his own cronies to have a secret conference, and appoints his biggest loyalist among the Highprinces to handle law enforcement for Urithiru. Aladar can't credibly promise to investigate Dalinar and his people seriously after everybody knows that he would follow Dalinar "to the end of the storms" if necessary, so any result that he comes to (short of calling for Adolin's head) is going to look tainted as a result. One can easily imagine the story that Ialai will tell: Dalinar has usurped the throne in all but name so that he can impose his radical new ideas on Alethkar, and he'll murder anybody who gets in his way. All true Alethi need to rally around our true king and our one true (and definitely living) God.

I dunno. Would Amaram, who seems to be personally loyal to Gavilar's legacy, be on board with the murder of Elhokar and Dalinar? Would Taravangian be all "agree to disagree" about triggering the Desolation before his plans are in order? I think they're mainly not opposed to each other because Amaram couldn't do much up until now and Taravangian has other fish to fry.

According to Amaram, Gavilar's plan did work--the events at the end of WoR were what Gavilar wanted to happen (save for his own assassination, I imagine). There was no other plan that involved fighting alongside the Parshendi against their old gods.