Necessary Eagle

Wyndle implies in Edgedancer that it's distressing, but not fatal. But he would really please like Lift to not die in an overly painful way, to make it easier on him. (Er, it's funnier in context).

I'll be the umpteenth person to say: the whole sequence of Kaladin swearing his third Oath. I keep coming back to read that scene, over and over again. "Stretch forth thy hand..."

When you realize that certain concepts in your stories, which you've been having a lot of trouble putting into words, can be explained with Realmatic Theory. When you see that your Uber driver is named Honour, and think "I guess he's not dead, then."

Thanks!

That looks awesome. Is there any way to browse the deck between games?

Link please? I need to see this.

Another vote for Elantris. It just felt... rough. Like, it's his first published book, and it shows. Sarene was too boring for me- a bog-standard "unladylike princess". I didn't find the autistic kid very convincing, and his "counts steps" thing felt more like a plot device than an organic part of his character. And how on Sel did his family manage to hide him being an Elantrian, anyway?!? That being said, there was a lot of penitential in that book; it's just the execution that was off. Sanderson has grown leaps and bounds as a writer since then, and if he ever writes that sequel, I suspect I will really enjoy it.

I think there's a WoB somewhere about how Cognitive Shadows like the Heralds have difficulty leaving their homeworlds.

*perks up her ears* In Oathbringer, or the already-published books?

Well, like I said, if he's a traitor than I don't have anything to add. But if he just regular old Herald-crazy, then this is what I think that crazy is.

Lightsong and Hoid-as-Wit (as opposed to Hoid-as-random-storyteller, who he already met). They could host a Cosmere-wide snarkfest.

There's been a lot of debate, especially since Edgedancer, as to whether Ishar is lying or just plain nuts. If he's some sort of double agent, I've got nothin'. But if he's just crazy, then I have a theory on what his particular flavor of Heraldic madness is. Ishar seems to have been the Heralds' ideas man. One of his attributes is Guiding. He was the one who theorized that the Oathpact would still hold if only Taln was Damnation, which as far as we can tell seems to have been correct. Nale still goes to him for advice, and trusts his interpretations of events even when those interpretations sound pretty out there. Ishar's madness, I believe, is that he has become convinced he is infallible. He knows that he is brilliant, and his theories are logical and elegant. But when his theories are contradicted by facts- whether because his thought processes are getting more erratic, or just because he's bound to get something wrong eventually- he can't back down and say, "Nope, back to the drawing board." No matter how compelling the evidence is that he made a mistake- even when there's red-eyed Parshendi throwing lightening outside his window- there must be some other explanation than "My hypothesis was wrong."

Okay, that makes sense to me. I hadn't noticed the lifesense or the circle game, but I tend to miss out on the details. I'm not the meticulous sort of reader who pours over every passage, finding 2 in one chapter and 2 in another, and putting them together to make 4. I tend to figure out plot twists from meta-logic or not at all.

I mean, there's some strange things about Zahel, yes. And once you tell me that, hey, Zahel is Vasher, I can connect them to things we already know about Vasher/Nalthis. But if someone's starting from square one, what was it that made people make the connection? After I read that Zahel was Vasher on TV Tropes, I went back and reread all the parts I could find with him in them. And the only conspicuously odd thing I found was the bit where he thinks about how he used to hear a voice in his head- and that could have been anything, there's so much we still don't know about Roshar. It could have been a spren he bonded and then killed by being dishonorable. What was the smoking gun here?

In Lift's account, he jumped in on purpose.

EDIT: nvm misunderstood your question.

Heh, the other day I was reading an article about MRI machines. And it mentioned the dangers of metal implants, and I was imagining your pacemaker dramatically flying across the room... and then it talked about causing problems by just moving an inch. And I remember thinking, that's right, it's harder to Pull metal when it's in your body- wait, what did I just say?

I mostly try to avoid, but I caved in and read the Kaladin chapter. I figured that if it was right at the beginning of the book, then by definition it couldn't be a spoiler.

I'm sorry if this is something of an incoherent mess, but I'm writing this half-asleep and I may not know what I'm saying. From what we've seen so far in SA, the budding Radiants have to figure out their oaths on their own. They reach a point in their development where they exemplify the spirit of the oaths, and then they suddenly know the right words to say. And they don't know that their spren can turn into swords. Wyndle says (or rather, dances around the topic not-saying) that bondspren are not allowed to mention the Shardblade thing before it happens. Since there's only a handful of proto-Knights scattered all around Roshar, and it's been thousands of years since the KR were a thing, they can't know anything in advance. But as you get more and more Radiants, sooner or later they're going run into someone else of their own order. And the Noobs Radient are going to ask their more experienced counterparts, "So how does this work, exactly?" The system is going to change, unless the bondspren have some objection to sharing the Words. Would the bondspren want the Words to stay secret? Would they object to their human partners telling the Noobs Radiant where Shardblades come from, or is it just against the rules for the spren to say it? Because if it's supposed to be all Top Secret Classified Keep Out That Means You, I can't see that working very well. It only takes one person to hear a KR talking to her sword and drawing a conclusion, or one Knight to have a Kaladin moment and find his Words while in public, and word will spread. Two possible conclusions about the Words: 1. The Words are instinctive when you reach a certain level, but nothing bad happens if you say them early. Nothing good happens either; the Words are just words until you grow into them. You can't just, say, bond a cultivationspren, read the Edgedancer oaths off of an index card, and boom, you're a full-blown Edgedancer. 2. It's the intent to fulfill your oaths that counts. You can read them off an index card and progress all at once if you sincerely mean to hold up your Order's Ideals. The KR 2.0 is doing things the slow way because they don't have anyone to tell them what the Ideals are until they level up themselves. Just to put that out there as a hypothetical possibility that I don't think fits with what we've seen; something in the back of my head that I don't have words for sees a way this makes sense, but that may be because of the aforementioned sleep-deprivation. I'll come back and see if still works when I'm not tired. Closemouthed Spren: Are bondspren mum about the swords because it's against their nature to give Radiant spoilers, or do they have a specific reason for keeping quiet? Also, do they forget the Ideals until their bond develops, or are they deliberately not telling those, either? Discuss.

My interpretation of the crem and unbroken glass was that it was mostly above the highstorm- that the destructive heart of the storm passes beneath or around, but that maybe stray gusts fling the occasional crem splat up. After all those centuries of no one cleaning the windows, the mud would build up. That's just my theory, though. Have they actually been in a storm in Urithiru at the time they say that, or are they just assuming that it will come normally like it does anywhere else? That's a relief.

Do parshmen/Parshendi need to be outside in the storm to transform into voidbringers, or would it reach them even if they were in an (intact) indoor structure? I can't help but think that in Edgedancer, when might have been just the worse possible thing they could have done. And then there's poor Rlain. I think Urithiru* is above the regular highstorm, so maybe the Everstorm can't get there either- but that would still mean he'd have to stay in Urithiru almost full time to avoid turning into a monster. But if he can just stay indoors, and people figure out how to build backwards laits, then he could just make sure to hunker inside whenever it comes. *(And am I the only one who keeps mentally pronouncing "Urithiru" as "Urethra"?)

Doesn't Fuzz's death scene in M:SH have a line where he tells Kelsier to hurry with the ascending because Ruin is trying to splinter his power?

That does make sense.

I was under the impression that "malen" and "femalen" only applied to dullform? I'm going to have to go back and reread those interludes.

So the Dustbringers had red eyes- no wonder superstitious people mixed them up with Voidbringers.