aemetha

It didn't work for Kelsier because he was of Ruin, the power basically rejected him. Vin had no such impediment to using the power against Ruin. In either case the shardic intent didn't prevent the use of it against Ruin, only the holders ability to wield it. Shardic intent takes much longer to warp the intentions of the shard holder. I see a lot of 'it's against Cultivations intent to fight' discussion here. I think there is some confusion between Cultivation, and untamed blooming life. Cultivation involves specifically cutting out the unwanted growth to direct remaining growth in the manner desired with the dead growth providing nutrients to the remainder. The same applies to other uses of cultivation, when a teacher cultivates a student for example they teach the right things and correct the wrong. It's in my view not just not against her intent to fight Odium, she would likely be compelled to a large extent to fight him by her intent.

This one? It's understood to refer to Kaladin protecting the king from Moash.

The resonance isn't a consciously directed judgement on the part of Nightblood though (at least as I understand it). It's not that Nightblood goes "You're evil, wield me and kill all your friends then yourself" or "You're good, get sick when you look at me". It's that people look at Nightblood and are either repulsed by his wrongness or attracted to it. The judgement made is on the part of the individual, not on the part of Nightblood. So while Nightblood doesn't know what good and evil is, people know what good and evil is, or at least know what their intentions are, and if their intentions are to cause harm selfishly they are attracted, and if their intentions are to prevent harm selflessly they are repulsed. That's not quite the same as good versus evil, but a large part of why Nightblood doesn't understand good and evil is they are subjective judgements. It's still a reasonably good indicator of whether a person intends to contribute to or detract from society. In short, if Szeth is learning to make subjective judgements about the intentions of people from their response to the sword, that's probably not a particularly bad teacher. If he was learning to make subjective judgements about people from what the sword says to him, that's a horrible teacher and will likely end in Nightblood consuming the world.

Apologies if this has already been raised. It just occurred to me and there are too many posts to read through to try and figure it out if it has already been noted. So I wonder if this scene where Dalinar invites the archer into his service might have been intended to set some precedent where Dalinar takes a very pragmatic view of the realities of loyalty (and oaths) to a particular side. I can see that it would give him some degree of forgiveness toward Eshonai because she was very much a soldier. Who I wonder about though, is Szeth. I think the scene may be intended to demonstrate that Dalinar is capable of accepting Szeth into the fold in his new order when he is made aware of the circumstances of Szeths assassination of Gavilar. As is mentioned in the other threads, when it comes to keeping oaths and following the ideals of honor there is nobody who does that as completely as does Szeth. I think the purpose of the scene was less about exploring the history of Dalinar, and more about exploring the character and how he is capable of forgiving what is done in war in service to your cause. Thoughts?

Perhaps Szeth spending time with the Skybreakers is less about foreshadowing his becoming a Skybreaker, and more about his character learning from the experience and developing to be someone who decides his personal code is more important than laws that arbitrarily punish and can be deliberately misinterpreted. Perhaps Szeth is meant to be a Willshaper?

I agree, this was the same thought I had about Shallan's character development. To me that makes much more sense than a conscious development of an unconscious mental disorder (DID). It can be related back to something stated about the order of Lightweavers in Words of Radiance too. Seems like far more than a simple artistic impression if it so profoundly restored morale of the orders after a great defeat. Perhaps this, if it is shown to be the case can affect more than just the lightweaver.

Well, here's the thing with Shallan possibly considering herself insane - that's not an evaluation we get to make for ourselves, because we cannot be objective about it. If we take insane in this instance to mean mentally disordered (which I'm doing because the original post suggested as much by relating the assessment back to the field of psychology), then that simply means that a persons behaviours, cognitions, emotions and motivations fall outside the established norms in said culture that make up the established ordered behaviour. Those norms do vary by culture, for example, schizophrenia in western society is largely the go to thought when someone thinks of a serious mental disorder, however there are cultures in the world that largely view the symptoms of schizophrenia less as a mental disorder and more as being blessed. There is some validity to that despite evidence of neurological differences in people with schizophrenia, when the social stigma is removed from the disorder the sufferer experiences significantly less impairment or distress, which would in some cases by our medical definitions remove it as a mental disorder. A similar observation can be found in France where diagnosis of ADHD is far less prevalent than in countries such as the US, because the behaviour is largely seen to be a symptom of a dysfunctional family and is treated (successfully) in that way. So, the question really becomes not whether Shallan is declaring herself insane, but whether her behaviours, cognitions, emotions and motivations fall outside the established norms of her culture as noted by an objective observer? I really don't think they do. She gets on well with others, she demonstrates particular attention to accepted cultural norms, she is strikingly ordinary really, particularly when one considers the trauma she has experienced. She can take care of herself, and by virtue of the coping mechanisms she employs function in a perfectly acceptable manner. If it were up to ourselves to declare our own impairment, the world would be made up entirely of the disordered.

@SLNC what you've said here stands in contrast to well established emperical observation of the nature of stress and coping. It is well documented that some sources of stress are too overwhelming to be confronted with approach coping mechanisms (which is what you're describing, so despite your insistence otherwise you're still describing coping as it relates to this discussion). PTSD is caused precisely because some trauma overwhelms the psychological resources of a person to confront it. Avoidance coping provides an adaptive response to situations where a person cannot employ approach techniques. It is only maladaptive if it causes more harm - which would be the case if a person became alcoholic as an avoidance coping technique, however presenting an example of a maladaptive avoidance technique neither makes all avoidance techniques maladaptive or all approach techniques adaptive. The circumstance as written so far is not maladaptive, there is no observable harm to Shallan created and there is an observable reduction in harm suffered. It is not a band-aid, it is a rational response to her situation. Could it at some point become maladaptive? Absolutely, but the comparison to alcoholism as a treatment for depression is a false equivalency. As an aside, depression is also a stress related illness, so an insistence that an unpalatable approach technique is the only valid response to stress would in all likelihood contribute to a worsening of a persons depression, not an improvement. In such a case the person should be encouraged to seek more adaptive avoidance techniques (i.e. if they can't confront the problem they should find a way to avoid the problem that doesn't cause them more harm).

@kari-no-sugata you're right, my apologies for the tangent. In stress psychology there are concepts called appraisal and coping, I'll try and summarise it concisely. When a person encounters a stimulus, a system of appraisal takes place. Primary appraisal categorises the stimulus as either irrelevant, beneficial or stressful. If it is considered stressful we call that stimulus a "stressor". Secondary appraisal appraises the stressor against a persons internal ability and resources to cope with it. Reappraisal is repeating the appraisal process in light of new information. The secondary appraisal part is what is relevant to what Shallan is doing. The stimulus - her sword has been appraised as stressful in primary appraisal, and she assesses that against her ability to cope with it. She has the ability to try on different persona's, so she employs that as a coping technique to reduce the impact of the traumatic stressor on her psyche. So we come now to the concept of coping. Coping can be described as adaptive or maladaptive. An adaptive coping response is one that reduces the harm associated with a stressor - the person successfully adapted their behaviour to the context to reduce harm. A maladaptive coping response is one that either makes the harms of the stressor worse, or that introduces new stressors and so increases the total harm. A coping technique can in fact be both adaptive and maladaptive at different points, lets take the example of opioids. A one of administration of opioids to treat an injury would probably be considered adaptive, but chronic administration that leads to addiction would certainly be considered maladaptive. Coping techniques are further grouped into what is known as approach techniques and avoidance techniques. Approach techniques seek to directly confront the stressor and remove it. Approach techniques are considered to generally be adaptive in the long term, but in the short term they can cause serious trauma - sometimes we need a period of adjustment before we feel confident dealing with something. Additionally, not all stressors can be effectively removed by approach techniques. The other type of technique is called avoidance techniques. As the name suggests, this involves avoiding or working around the source of stress. They are generally considered to be adaptive in the short term, but because they do not seek to remove the source of stress they can in the long term become maladaptive. What Shallan is doing would be considered an avoidance coping technique, she is not confronting the source of stress, and is trying on a different persona in an effort to avoid the trauma of the stressor. At this time, you couldn't call her response maladaptive, indeed it effectively shielded her from the source of the trauma, and there are at this time no significant harms introduced or a worsening of the existing harm. Far from being insane, it's an entirely rational (at this time) and beneficial response to the stress she has recently begun to experience. I could foresee a circumstance where it could become maladaptive, but at this time I would not be concerned about this particular response as long as she doesn't rely on it in the long term to avoid addressing the core issues.

@Calderis that's a good argument for intervention, but it is a poor argument for a public intervention. A public commentary on the issue inevitably causes stigma and would in all likelihood alienate the person concerned from the profession that can help them. A persons actions can be public knowledge, but that does not make their diagnosis public knowledge or justify the publicity of their diagnosis. One is a disclosure about themselves by a person perfectly entitled to disclose their information in the public domain, the other is a disclosure by a person without any right to make that disclosure, without having met the professional standards required to properly establish the information they are disclosing, without the permission of the person the disclosure is about, and - lets be honest - is not being made out of a sense of civic duty, but rather for the publicity associated with the disclosure. The reason the Goldwater rule has been heavily questioned is the notoriously left leaning profession wants to justify the removal of office of Donald Trump. They are by the professional standards (many in addition to the Goldwater rule) of their own professions not qualified to do so in that instance, so they seek to modify the professional standards to advance their own political agenda. Now I am a member of those groups and I would also like to see him removed from office, but sacrificing the protections in place to protect all individuals for a selfish political agenda is an unacceptable sacrifice for me. If mental instability is a civic concern for elected officials, then a confidential system of assessing the mental stability of elected officials overseen by an independent body is the proper way to deal with that, not removing the ethical protections in place for people who turn to the profession for help. Psychologists and psychiatrists have the same right to vote for that as any other individual. They do not have the right to arbitrarily appoint themselves as an agency empowered to disqualify someone from public office.

Yes, I agree. I had meant to make the argument that the argument against using the DSM to diagnose a fictional character doesn't hold water because it's based on a misinterpretation that developed because of people not applying the protections included in the DSM against diagnosing every man and his dog with a mental disorder were not rigorously applied. If Shallan is to be said to have a mental disorder, then that should be defined as a mental disorder in the DSM, not based on the fairly abstract thoughts of Freud and Jung, which as you rightly point out have been refined and distilled into more precise and accurate theories in the intervening years. Goldwater rule or not, confidentiality is an essential element of the therapeutic alliance and it is never ethically appropriate for any professional to publicly diagnose a person without the explicit wishes of said person. The profession of psychotherapy exists to help people, and removing confidentiality handicaps and harms the people it tries to help. I know of no professional psychotherapy organisation that does not require confidentiality.

A few points. The DSM-V can only be used to diagnose "anyone" with a mental disorder if one ignores the catch all intended to prevent "anyone" from being diagnosed. It is not enough to just exhibit the specific diagnostic criteria for a disorder, it must also constitute significant impairment or distress in order to be clinically significant. Also, it is considered an ethical breach to diagnose someone publicly and without a private consultation, and so the armchair psychologists and psychiatrists that have caused the development of this misinterpretation of the dsm should be acknowledged for exactly what they are - unethical hacks. As is pointed out above, dissociative identity disorder is an unconscious protective response, which is quite different from what Shallan is doing, which would best be described as an avoidance stress coping technique. Generally speaking avoidance stress coping techniques are considered adaptive in the short term as they shield the person from sudden overwhelming trauma but may become maladaptive in the longer term if appropriate approach techniques for coping with the stressor are not employed. I think it is unfair to say that Freud was wrong about a lot of things. He was imprecise more often. He is often ridiculed as being overly fixated on sexuality, but most people don't even know what the actual references are. I would encourage people to look up his psychosexual theory of development, in which the sexual analogies for the stages actually make a great deal of sense. It probably says more about a cultural immaturity toward issues of sexuality than it does about him that we find what is a reasonably apt analogy to be worthy of giggling over. Freud may not have been as right as we want, but he was more right than those who came before him and his work is the foundation of the psychodynamic school of thought. It is also worth considering that several very prominent psychologists would tell you that Shallans traumatic past just isn't worthy of this degree of analysis. Why does it matter that she killed her parents, the issue is that she feels guilty when she holds her sword. Ellis and Beck would encourage her to explore the faulty assumption that is causing her to have this irrational (Ellis) or dysfunctional (Beck) response, and not give more attention to the history of it than is required to disabuse her of that assumption. Emperically the cognitive school of psychotherapy is as valid, if not more than the psychodynamic traditions.

Pattern likely would not mention it. It is a bit of an ongoing theme that spren are continually amazed that their humans don't notice things they think are obvious. With Syl it is often things like the nature of spren, and with pattern it is patterns. How often do you talk about grass when you walk through a field of grass? It's obvious right? What if your companion is blind, is it any less obvious to you that you're walking through grass? You have to consciously be alert that your companion does not perceive a thing for it to be noteworthy.

I double checked, it is said in Words of Radiance in Taravangian's interlude near the end.

I'm not explaining this very well I don't think. What I'm getting at is that Av's father may have travelled there to ask for cloth, returned home with the cloth, but that it seems unlikely that the nightwatcher just gave him cloth. Presumably Av's father doesn't live with the nightwatcher, so some kind of travel was necessary to visit her. My proposition is that the nightwatcher did something cognitively related that led to him acquire a heap of good cloth in the intervening period of time between when he made his request and when he returned home. Aside from the everything else we've seen of her being cognitive related, it just seems very unlikely that the nightwatcher would just give him what he asked for on the spot. Why would a spren have a heap of good cloth lying around? Just in case someone asks for it? If the idea is that she just magics stuff into reality, the closest we've seen to that is soulcasting, and it just seems very unlikely that even if it were possible to soulcast cloth that it would be good quality (soulcast food is considered bland), or fetch a good price (market economics being what they are).

I also interpreted that the way @Yata has described. The body dropping to me was proof he was living and taking a really long time to die. With regard to Vin dying quickly, I did consider that when thinking about it. I chalked it up to if she was less influenced by the shardic intent due to having recently taken it up, it may be the case that the shard exerted less influence on others in the same way. In other words, because the shard hasn't had enough time to influence Vin (she's more Vin with a bunch of power than she is Preservation) how people interact with her is similarly less influenced. Maybe I'm grasping at straws?

This is less a theory and more an observation and a curiosity. We know that the shards are pretty heavily limited by their shardic intent. My curiosity is about how the intent influences other shards interactions with them. Take the case of Ruin and Preservation for example. Ruin had won for a long, long time. Preservation just took a ridiculously long time to die. Is that because when interacting with Preservation Ruin is weakened when applying a final death that is contrary to Preservations intent? Now take Ruin, when Vin kills him, he dies literally right away. No hanging around in that case. Is that because Ruins own intent accelerates his demise at the hands of Vin? Moving more into the realm of supposition, many assume Trell to be Autonomy. Harmony despite theoretically having twice as much power as her can't even find her! She is autonomous, her intent confounds him from exerting influence over her. I know there are contextual considerations in those scenarios. Preservation's plan, Harmony's relative ignorance about what shards are capable of. I am mostly just curious as to whether other people have had any similar thoughts, or if it seems plausible that the context is in some way a result of shardic intent in the interaction between shards rather than simply on the shard themselves. I haven't covered Honor, Cultivation or Odium here because I don't think we've seen enough of those interactions to draw conclusions, but if anyone else has ideas related to them I'd be interested to read them.

Doesn't he specifically say he couldn't see the future at one point though?

I wouldn't draw too many conclusions about Odium being trapped from mistborn

Perhaps it is misunderstood, but guiding and uniting is just a small aspect of leadership. Protecting, which is emphasised by the windrunners is equally important. Remember we haven't seen all the oaths yet. The first windrunner oaths correspond to Jezriens attribute of protecting, but the others could be related to leadership and that's not inconsistent with the character of Kaladin. It may be the case that bondsmiths had a valued advisor type of position consistent with Ishars attributes of pious and guiding. Remember as well, Dalinar was in the highest position of leadership we've seen from a radiant long before he became one.

@Calderis I can follow that part about the first oath originating from the imitation of the spren bond. How is the oath enforced though? Spren won't hold them to an oath they didn't understand because its not the idea they communicated. Honor can't enforce it, he's dead. The heralds have no interest in enforcing it. It's not really consistent with the shardic intent of cultivation. Odium is trapped. I don't see how a residual effect of Honor could enforce it because such things rely on intentions. Now admittedly many of these arguments are new to Roshar since the last desolation, but a part of this discussion is about the broader implications for the future of the radiants. What need they fear about a misleading oath that can no longer be enforced?

The part I don't get is this: If the theory is that Ishar implemented the oaths to restrain the radiants, why do spren die when radiants break the oaths? This theory suggests that the oaths were an arrangement between the heralds and radiants, while the evidence we see in world is that the oaths are a relationship between radiants and spren. We haven't seen anything that suggests the heralds have any power over spren. If the suggestion is that Ishar fundamentally added those consequences, well, that would be a level of power we haven't seen from any non-shard. Mistborn spoiler There is also the issue of the exact wording of the oaths not mattering and being an outgrowing of the Spren. http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1158#25 So if the exact words don't matter but the ideas do, that makes it difficult to trick radiants into making oaths they don't understand. It's not enough for the oaths to just be spoken, they have to also communicate the concept. None of the radiants would have communicated a commitment to eternal damnation, so the oaths wouldn't be binding. Spren are about ideas and thoughts being of the cognitive realm, the words are just a vehicle for communicating it. http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1083#5

Well, I had actually thought that Shallan would be the one turning red, but Siri works too. Jasnah would probably need to be there to take notes. "Do you always do that with your hat on Wayne?" asked Jasnah. "Of course, you can't properly apply yourself without the right hat." replied Wayne. "What about pooping?" asked Shallan "You don't poop in your hat do you?" "Wayne..." Blushweaver interjected. "Poop in my hat? What is wrong with you woman?" Wayne shouted in outrage. "Wayne..." Blushweaver said again betraying some frustration in her tone. "I meant do you take your hat off when you poop?" Shallan quickly responded. "No, of course not" replied Wayne. "What if someone killed me while I was pooping, I don't think I could survive the embarrassment of dying without me hat." "WAYNE!" Blushweaver screamed in desperation. Jasnah wrinkled her brow looking up from her notes "You don't think you could survive the embarrassment of dying without a hat?". "Right, finally someone is listening to me. Say, that bracelet you have on there is pretty nice? Want to trade for this fancy dress I have here?" Wayne asked Jasnah. "Wayne, that's MY dress" objected Blushweaver. "Is not, you gave it to me. No backsies." replied Wayne. "Wayne dear, I let you take it off me because we were going to...". "Oh." replied Wayne. "OH! Umm, is the quiet lass supposed to be that colour?" he asked looking in Siri's direction.

Blushweaver and Wayne. And Shallan to watch, just as a science experience to see how red it is possible for a person to be without paint.

Yes, apparently quite a long time after though the exact timeframe isn't known. My personal barely formed theory is that Honor betrayed the radiants, at least from their perspective. I think it's possible that Honor could have done things differently and spared humanity the suffering of the desolations, but his shardic intent wouldn't let him. Honor dictates that odium must be opposed whatever the cost, and the cost has been untold suffering for humanity. I wonder about the Tranquiline Halls too. If the Tranquiline Halls were Braize, and Braize is now Odiums prison, who does that suggest is more likely responsible for mankinds eviction, Honor or Odium? Feel free to debunk my barely formed theory, I likely won't have time to expand or debunk it myself until I finish composing my ode to Lift 'The girl who ate the world'.