Raven Wilder

'Cause Ishar and Dalinar have that weirdo Bondsmith Connecting stuff going on. Once Taravangian settled on the name Retribution, those two were presumably still Connected enough to Honor to sense the change.

I don't think Retribution can afford to be "stingy" with Warlight. With the Everstorm blanketing almost the whole continent, food production is almost entirely dependent on using Warlight infused gemstones to grow crops. This means not only will there need to be a lot of infused gemstones floating around, just waiting to be acquired, but that the distribution of Warlight will need to run more or less on autopilot - Retribution's attention is often pulled away from micromanaging Roshar, and they can't afford to have their subjects starve just 'cause Taravangian was too busy to infusing anything today. I do think stormlight is going to come back in a big way, though, simply because the title of the series is The Stormlight Archive - it'd be weird to have the thing it's named after disappear halfway through.

Now, with the whole land/sea inversion thing, what would the world of Tress of the Emerald Sea look like in Shadesmar?

It was a really neat gimmick, though it took me an embarrassingly long time (something like 500 pages in) to catch on that it was happening.

Thanks! So it sounds like only horses on the smaller end of things would be able to fit into Shardplate - I guess that rules out going into battle on a Shardbearing Ryshadium. Unless a Ryshadium were able to become Radiant and swear the Fourth Ideal on their own, maybe, but that's a whole different query.

Shardplate changes size/shape to perfectly fit whoever wears it. We've seen that even if you put a helmet on your hand instead of your head, it'll still morph to fit your hand perfectly. But what about someone who doesn't fit the standard human bodyshape? Like, if you put it on a Ryshadium, or a Sleepless's hordeling, or some off-world speices like an Ula Da or a boneless kandra? What are the limits to how far the Plate is able/willing to change?

I feel like some shifts in the prose might be a deliberate choice, done for thematic reasons. In Tanavast's chapters, the writing style becomes very grand and formal, because that's how Tanavast thinks and talks. But during those chapters, whenever Rayse talks, it's in a very casual, modern-sounding style that clashes so much with Tanavast's narration, it's clearly meant to feel discordant - a demonstration that Rayse isn't playing along with the grand narrative that Tanavast is trying to build up. That gets me thinking, since this is the book where the characters start really questioning Honor and whether they should follow the plan the god laid out for them, maybe the characters choosing their words in a different way is meant to be symbolic of them no longer being so aligned with Tanavast's will.

What if the Unmade come from the Heralds? I just got to thinking, being "Unmade" could also be phrased as "broken", and the Heralds giving into torture and releasing Odium is consistently referred to as them "breaking". So I got to thinking, maybe each time one of the Heralds breaks on Braize, they give up some hard-to-define part of who they are, which Odium could then shape into a unique form of spren. And Odium could only make nine Unmade to oppose the ten Heralds, because only nine of them ever broke and gave Odium something to work with.

I mean, there's Kaladin in Words of Radiance.

We're never shown the full text of the contract, nor do we have access to the Alethi legal code the contract was created under. Instead, we're told that one of the sharpest legal minds in the cosmere has looked over everything, and concluded that changing the capital and any other loophole that might help the coalition, it ain't gonna work, just gonna have to take their word on that. As for what promises do and do not bind Taravangian, my guess is the contract had some wording along the lines of "I, Odium, do hereby swear ..." That'd make it a contract specifically with the Shard of Odium, and so anyone who takes up the Shard and inherits the title of Odium also inherits that contract. Meanwhile, Rayse saying they'd honor the spirit of the contract and not exploit any loopholes, that's considered a promise from Rayse as an individual, not from the Shard.

I'm not so sure about that. For one thing, Odium could still motivate the singers and grant them forms of power, even if all the Fused were gone. Also, while Rayse made the original batch of Fused during the first generation of the conflict, and never made any more afterwards, Taravangian's comments about wanting to have Dalinar and Jasnah as Fused servants indicates that creating new Fused is possible. It's not spelled out in the text why Odium wasn't creating loads more Fused all this time - best guess is the agreement between Honor and Odium creates a limit on how many people they can Invest that much of their power in, but once some of the Fused were perma-killed, it opened the door to creating new Fused to replace them.

There's also the bit where Radiants need to have been "broken" in some way, creating cracks in their mental/spiritual psyche that the spren can fit into. So how broken does someone need to get to have room for two or more spren?

Another benefit to a Stormlight anime: those ginormous eyes anime characters have would make identifying someone's eye color super-easy.

Does Lin Davar's death happen before or after the Alethi/Parshendi banquet? 'Cause Rhythm of War indicates that Nale didn't start going after other Radiants until after talking to Venli at the feast, so the attempt on Shallan's life wouldn't have come from the Skybreakers if it happened before then.

Healing seems to work much the same way as repairing Shardplate: long as you have a piece of it, and feed it Investiture, it'll regrow back to its full form from that one scrap (unless someone else as a larger piece they're also feeding Investiture to, then that'll take precedence).

So sounds like the word "singer" might be like the word "Jewish", where it can refer to either ethnicity or religious affiliation, depending on context.

Everything in the Cosmere contains Investiture, especially living beings, and especially sapient beings. Given that, I'm not sure singers are actually more Invested than your average human - they take in a spren to grant them forms, but without forms, they're the not-fully-cognizant parshmen. So it could be that taking a spren into their gemheart, which grants full sapience, is just what it takes to get their Investiture up to normal.

It's common to call the indigenous people of Roshar singers, since most of them are singers. But at least according to Rlain, that's more an indicator of nationality or allegiance than biology - those who serve Odium are singers, while those who broke away are listeners. So what would be the correct term to refer to the entire species, singers and listeners together?

What about a kandra who was given Allomantic abilities? Their bodily processes are weird enough, I could buy that they could take ettmetal into whatever counts as their stomach without bringing it in contact with moisture.

Shards only produce magic systems when they settle on a planet for a time. If some of these Shards are nomads, just traveling through outer space and only touching down briefly on various worlds, there might not be a magic system associated with them.

Though it's possible that Navani will only have Bondsmith powers while in the tower. That's not an issue for Dalinar, but given that nearly all stormlight on Roshar comes from the Stormfather, it could be said that he's kind of everywhere.

Thanks! And I think I know the contradictory WoB being referred to there, and that was Brandon saying some of the Inquisitors Vin fought during Hero of Ages were female. Since those Inquisitors (except for Marsh) were the creations of Ruin, that doesn't contradict the Steel Inquisitors under the Lord Ruler being an all-male group.

Presumably, the Skybreaker could turn their Shardblade into a Shardshield, crouch behind it, and then just fly/charge at the Coinshot/Bloodmaker at full speed.

It now occurs to me to wonder how well Odium is capable of lying, given his inability to break promises without dire consequences. Can he lie all he wants so long as he never specifically promises to tell the truth, or is there a point at which lying to someone about what you're offering them becomes a breach of an implicit oath? And can Odium and other spren still make a contract with someone if, beforehand, they've given the other party false information related to the contract?

I can't recall any mention of female obligators during the Final Empire, and checking the Coppermind indicates that all named obligators, at least, were men. So was the Steel Ministry an all-male organization?