Aminar

I think you could twist those in every direction to make them fit. Shallan may shine a light on people, but she also does shadowy spy stuff. If you gave Windrunners her Powers you could talk about how Giving people the resources they need to succeed is the soul of good leadership. How he transformed Bridge 4. How he showed them the light in their dark situation.

I'm still thinking Rock will end up a Bondsmith. Nothing brings people together like Stew. (Remember that Stonewards are basically the Radiant Infantry.)

I'm more talking in the meta-sense. If I were Brandon I'd be designing the system in a way where the orders follow a pattern. Given the surges don't, I'd think he'd start with the Oaths and meanings. And it's a lot easier to make a consistent feeling list like that with opposites than it is not. From there he ordered the powers in a way that created interesting capability dynamics.

I don't think its ordered by surges. I think the surges were basically dropped on top of the table. Like, they came second, largely arbitrarily. Because there is an order to the ideals. You can see that the orders related to the self are clustered(lightweaver, Elsecaller, Willshaper), as are the scholarly orders(Lightweaver, elsecaller, truthwatcher) and martial orders(Stoneward-Dustbringer, minus Bondsmith's who are generally leaders in charge of those orders while the other orders seem to have been more independent and mobile in their purposes, travelling Scholars, Regional Edgedancers, Willshapers building stuff, etc.)

I think the orders started from their ideals and Spren types. The surges are more or less random in order. What does Gravity have to do with honor or law? Why aren't Cohesion and Division next to eachother? What does Growth have to do with The Truth?

With the new information about the orders I got to thinking about how odd it is that Windrunners(Honor Spren) and Edgedancers(Cultivation Spren) aren't opposite one another with the other orders rnning a spectrum from cultivating orders to honorable orders. And that got me thinking about whether or not Windrunners and Lightweavers semi-opposite relationship isn't reflected in the other orders. I think they are. Let's look at the pairings. Windrunners have Honor Spren. They focus on protecting others and leadership. Their motivations are external and about their own actions. But we can see the biggest difference here in Cryptics and Honor Spren. Lies and Honor. Now we rotate a step. Skybreakers and Elsecallers. This one is much more pronounced. Skybreakers are about erasure of the self. They make no decisions, they swear to an external code, while Elsecallers are about the perfection of the self. They seek to be the best version of themself. Another step and we have Dustbringers vs Willshapers. Dustbringers embody With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. They're focused on absolute discipline and self sacrifice. Willshapers are focused on personal freedom and increasing the freedom of others. In a sense this is very similar to Elsecallers and Skybreakers. Next Up, Edgedancers and Stonewards. We don't know much about Stonewards. They're an odd order but they're described as very martial. Edgedancers are healers, they're their for the forgotten and underprivileged. They embody the difference between Kaladin's Kill to Protect and Lyrin's you cannot kill to protect. I think this is probably the weakest adversarial relationship. And the last dichotomy is likely the most important. Bondsmith's and Truthwatchers. Bondsmith's value unity. Truthwatchers value Truth. We can see this dichotomy everywhere. Governments have a terrible time with transparency. Leaders have to know things most people don't. But without oversight this can get skewed. Bondsmiths have to walk the boarder between Tyrant and Leader. We can see how Dalinar's attempts to unify have been dishonest and hidden things. We can see how he's been outed and how the Truth destroyed Unity. But how important that Truth was is also evident. And so I finally understand why Bondsmith's and Truthwatchers occupy that central space among the orders. They both are needed for good leadership. You need unity, but that unity has to come with oversight.

This is actually one of the more confusing parts about the series. Like, we know there's a lot of High Spren now. But the Spren Civilizations basically went through a Desolation with the Recreance. Pattern talks about there not being many Cryptics who remember when the Radiants were around because they were all killed. And that's raises a lot of questions. Were there just a few hundred Spren that would cross over and the rest just stayed behind? No retirement. No rotation? Or did most Radiants break their oaths and kill their Spren at some point? And if so, what happened to the Shards?

Not really. Cultivation is changing something to make it fit a goal. Changing strawberries to be huge through crossbreeding. Keeping a Bonzai Small for aesthetic appeal. Trimming Lilacs to get as many flowers as possible. Moving Lift partially into the cognitive as a tool againat Odium. Pruning Dalinar's memories so he could grow into the Bondsmith. Cultivation's intent is pretty wild in that its very freeform, but has to be kind of, schemy and indirect.

Why would Regrowth encourage her to grow? Regrowth is just healing. And she's not constantly using her surge on herself. It's not a constantly active superpower. It's important to remember that Cultivation is just as much about the pruning shears as she is the planting. A Bonzai Tree kept tiny for a purpose is well within and arguably central to what Cultivation is. If she wanted Lift to stay 10 forever she could have made that happen, regardless of her Surges, but she didn't. She gave Lift something different. And we need to stop referring to what happened to Dalinar, Lift, and Taravangian as The Old Magic. The Nightwatcher is the source of the Old Magic. Cultivation can do so much more and doesn't have to follow rules she doesn't want to, so long as they are in line with the purpose of cultivating. Grow or shrink. Prune or Plant.

13 is a pretty standard age for a girl to start menstruating. Given Lift's tendency to burn through Calories I'm surprised she'd have it at all. So I doubt the old magic wearing off is the culprit.

Depends how velcro'd the friction gets. It would require practice and athleticism, but increasing the friction could make it doable. I still think with enough friction you could basically make steps in the air. Might be a surface tension thing though and those don't mix.

Right. But we know next to nothing about those and they're not really related to the surges so they aren't predictable enough to matter at this point.

That's not really true. Gravity is the same between Skybreakers and Windrunners. We don't know what a Truthwatcher's lightweaving is like but it's likely exactly the same, minus the Mnemonic ability kind of augmenting it. But there is no real evidence Surges vary by order beyond Bondsmiths and lots of evidence they aren't different in execution.

Soulcasting is inarguably useful. But I would argue Growth is the most useful. It's easy to destroy people. Healing is something else. And insta-fertilizer to boot. It isn't as much food as Soulcasting, and it can't make tools. But no tool is as valuable as a person. People can make just about anything. From there it's a question of Truthwatchers or Edgedancers. And while I'm biased towards Edgedancers I think Truthwatchers are probably more valuable. Friction is nifty, but Illumination has some real concrete uses, from entertainment to education to infiltration.

That implies adhesion and stormlight healing just as much, if not more. His surges cover it all just fine.

I'm more surprised by Skybreakers given the way they've been portrayed. Loopholes and brutality in spades, all to keep a worse thing from maybe happening. But I can see the Edgedancers. Windrunners often have to kill to protect. They're a very martial order and war is always more, ends justify the means. Edgedancers are doctors, therapists, social workers. People who, in our society, are held to incredibly rigorous (to the point they can be ridiculous) ethical standards. HIPPA is incredibly frustrating sometimes.

He goes where he is needed. I don't think he was needed that night.

It likely depends. But Gravity doesn't really decrease. It just can pull in multiple directions at different intensities. It's still all a pull. I foubt we'll see growth/regrowth as decay. But it seems very likely that friction, and possibly strong and weak force are more malleable.

Pretty sure they could run on air with enough stormlight.

That is often how maturity is gained. I have done these bad things. I have grown in these ways. I'm not the awful person I believe myself to be.

He doesn't use the Stormfather as a Sword. He slams raw investiture/stormlight in the Oathgate and makes it work. (Possibly with a form of Adhesion given the connection mentioned) And yes, the stormfather is saying no Shardblade because it makes him vulnerable to being killed and he won't do that. It's him saying, Nope, won't do that. And so far as I can tell it's worked. It's not that no Bondsmith have ever had Shards. It's that being a Shard is a vulnerability for the Spren.

Yep. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with fiction as an idea. Increase the fiction of the air Kaladin is falling through and you get something a mix of horrific and awe inspiring. Reduce it and suddenly there is no terminal velocity.

Yep. They're too disciplined and productive, making choices that use their time wisely.

The timeline suggests they left Urithiru after the Cognitive Genocide but continued for some time after that. Or at least that was what the Crystal Epigraph's seemed to suggest that was what was happening. I remember it being suggested that the Feverstone Keep Vision wasn't exactly factual, so much as a symbolic version of the Recreance.

I don't find the complicated version all that convincing either. They destroyed the planet with unrestrained power granted by the god of make decisions with your feelings. All it takes is one look at the Thrill to realize how the planet was destroyed, and why the Nahel Bond largely invalidates that. I can see it causing unrest and some people to forsake their oaths. But all the orders but the Skybreakers? It doesn't make sense to me. People don't act in that uniform a manner because of something that happened millenia ago. There's a reason there's a million different variations of a handful of major religions out there. People can't all agree the Earth is Round, let alone that they should abandon protecting the world. The Cognitive Genocide and enslavement of the Singers is far more devastating a choice. The Radiants actually did that and kept going. But it's so much worse.