Aminar

I don't know. It isn't my theory. But you asked a question that was in the original post. Personally I don't buy the theory. It would undermine the themes of the story. But people are rarely rational so Taln holding out of love for Ash makes as much sense as Taln just somehow holding against torture for centuries because he can. Either way the Heralds can't really be suicidal. They don't die, they just transported to another planet(until Odium worked out a way to steal their immortal juju at the end of Oathbringer.)

Child of Hodor explained that in the post. He surmised that Taln fell in love with Shallash and refused to betray her after the last desolation.

Occam's razor says that there's these giant High Storms that circle the planet coating everything in mud and that early on before they were cherished relics many many shardblade were lost to the Crem. Think about how coated in Crem the Shattered Plains are. There's probably hundreds of blades buried around the planet, many in places where floodwaters accumulates. Much easier to lose things than have them all stolen. Rule of Cool on the other hand, has them in a giant Stockpile where they will be used in a giant final battle Ala the Kandra and Atium. But well... Been there, done that.

The original home of the humans. But it's twisted by history from a place that was destroyed(made uninhabitable on some level) to a place that was taken from them and could be won back. It's a lot easier to spin being put upon by your enemies than that you stole their land because you ruined your own in justifying war and oppression. (Especially because the actual enemy is Odium, not the humans or singers and at some point Odium switched sides and lost. I'm sure that story will be told in the back half.)

Or Dalinar. Although I'd hazard that if/when that happens Dalinar won't still be alive and it's likely to pass to whoever the central protagonist of the back half is(potentially Lift?) It hasn't been all that clear.

I think that would come off really badly. Taln is the least privileged of the heralds. Having him then be revealed as a traitor/double-agent just doesn't say anything good or all that intriguing and sort of flies in the face of the series theme.

We know it's Glys in that his Lightweaving was showing him the future and that isn't something Surgebinding does. It's Odium's influence enabling seeing the future. Now, we don't know what nom-corrupted Truthwatcher Lightweaving looks like for sure, but given that Transformation, Gravitation, and Regrowth seem to work the same across orders I think Bondsmiths are more likely to be a big exception to the rules than anything else. Truth watchers might just kind of... Have a different approach to Lightweaving given the artistic nature of Lightweavers. Either way we've seen both Shallan and Renarin dig for the ideal truth of someone, what amounts to their spiritual aspect, and use that in their surgebinding. But I doubt there's anything a Truth watcher could do with Lightweaving that a Lightweavers couldn't. Just different approaches.

I wasn't disagreeing persae. Just, Hollywood makeup always reads as fake. I would guess an experienced Returned would be much less noticable.

Minus the artificiality. And without the crazy nonsense. I can't see a Returned making themself look like Killer Croc. But if you can change your weight with any level of localised precision you can massively change your face shape to the point it's borderline unrecognizable.

I feel like Roshar would have the hardest to adapt recipes of pretty much any fantasy novel I've read. Like... You'd need a lot of rarer meat types on the seafood side. That said, I'm pretty sure I've bought Chouta at Taco Bell.

The backlight would be so bright...

We can surmise that if an Unmade can rebel he doesn't have absolute control. And if he is choosing the visions it's pretty interesting because we know his fortellings have been unreliable in the past. Renarin was sort of tapped into them and he saw Dalinar falling and Jasnah killing Renarin, neither one of which happened thanks to what appears to be a tendency to assume the worst in people. I don't know quite how to summarize the whole thing, but enough things don't seem to line up with Moeloch being guided or the death rattles being intentional. The unmade seem to hunger for something they've lost and their actions follow that. They're defined by a lack and act to to try to fill that lack. but how they do so doesn't seem overly directable. Just a big AoE alteration of the world that Odium tries to direct to where it will cause chaos or where feeds it best.

I get where they come from. But Moelach seems to be one of the unintelligent beings. Odium doesn't seem to have constant direct control over the Unmade. He might be able to direct them, but Moelach seems to be doing some kind of connection forming between a dying person and a vision of another time. And largely at random. I'm sure there will be a reveal on how exactly the unmade works, but I doubt its going to be, He was a hole into Odium's PoV.

I fully buy that Rayse with the Passion Shard is Odium. That's the name he's been given. I don't think the letter holders understand everything either and the Coppermind is only as accurate as we are and seems to editorialize the whole Odium vs Passion thing pretty hard. I figure if anybody is going to define what a Shard represents it's the guy holding it and Passion makes a lot more sense. As for whose words would come from a Death Rattle. I think they're like a mid-death vision, often from a third person PoV but some from observations being in others heads and hearing their thoughts. One could have been in Odiums head or someone else's. I don't see them as particularly directed.

It makes sense to me. Odium never felt like an appropriate Shard name to begin with and there were comments in one of the letters about ATI being a pretty nice guy and Rayse just not being one. So him saying he was Passion and all the talk about the Passions really clicked for me. I don't see Ambition and Passion as the same thing. Both are forms of motivation, but Ambition has always had more of a heartless unempathetic selfish connotation while Passion is very individual. It's malleable. And if we're going to see someone else take over Odium's Shard it wouldn't surprise me to have that person become a different Passion. Dalinar becoming Duty or the like. (That and I like the idea that one of the Shards is Adonalasium's free will of sorts. And that Shard being the most dangerous and malleable makes sense.) He may regret killing Tanavast, but there are a lot of people that kill out of amplified emotions and regret it later.

I guess. It still doesn't fit the best. I question this interpretation of the artists(admittedly just bizarre) choices.

At which point Kal wouldn't have had a Spear and he never had a shield(while fighting) . It still feels like it was intended to be Eshonai. And page numbers help nothing between Hardcovers and the different paperbacks, ebooks, audiobooks etc. Chapter numbers are the only useful reference point.

It's an example of a well known pattern people will understand.

Isn't the person on the other side of the chasm Eshonai on WoK?

I don't think he's been consumed by Odium. Odium is the primary facet Rayse seems to have brought with him. The Shard itself is Passion. But Rayse feels hate so much more strongly than other emotions that he's become the embodiment of it. Passion is likely the least corrupting of the Shards (in the sense that the bearers personality would be amplified by it rather than molded because our Passion is in many ways who we are) but the easiest to misuse because it dictates are, Do as you feel.

I assume Cryptics names are the mathematical patterns behind their fractal appearance. Not just 1s and 0s but literally like the fibonachi sequence.

Stress and poor nutrition will really age you. Kaladin's had a fair bit of both of those.

That would destroy some of the more natural linguistic decisions Brandon has made. Language develops in strange and often stupid ways. I mean... Think of how we use branding. Shard is a little bit like the i on iPod. It's this descriptor the people have started putting before any powerful combat based Fabrials. It stems from one misuse of a word into another. The same way humanity has always done. Language changes and the meta-narrative behind that makes the world feel more real. It gives a sense of history as you can track down the bizarre little things people have twisted and misused.

Draw Weight doesn't care about material, wood, metal, fiberglass, etc. It's just a measurement of how much force it takes to pull the lever back. The fabrials just make a material strong enough to not shatter from the force imparted bendable enough to be drawn back. We're still looking at how much force it takes to launch a 1.5 inch stick 50 meters with enough force to punch through the target. And the other bit is confusing semantics. They're shardbows because people call them that. Shardblades aren't Shards like Honor or Cultivation either. Honorblades are more Shardblade than Shardblades. Every reader here knows what a Shardbow is but Grandbow is likely to get confusing.

The arrows are described as three fingers thick. I'm going to use my fingers for scale here. My hands are bigger than average but Alethi are tall so that feels accurate. That means the arrow is about an inch and a half thick. A ballista bolt is about 2.5 inches thick from some quick googling. A 50 m shot with a 1lb bolt from a ballista I found had a draw weight between 4500 and 4700 lbs. Roshar's gravity is 70% of Earth's. So the shot would likely to go further on Roshar. And Rock's Arrow is about a third the mass of a ballista bolt. That puts the draw weight of a shardbow at around 1000lbs. (I could be doing the math wildly wrong so I'll put my source below if anyone wants to make corrections) https://wattsunique.com/blog/1772-foot-lbs/