Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

Point well taken, and taken well, gave you an upvote for your troubles. It would seem that our only concrete source materials about voidbinding are the ars arcanum entry and the Surgebinding and Voidbinding charts. Here's Kriss' less than clarifying comments on Voidbinding: Here are the charts for comparison too: So we know Voidbinding accesses the same 10 fundamental surges as Surgebinding, voidbinding has 10 "levels", and that Voidbinding is esoteric (but not as esoteric as another set of abilities (possibly forms of power?) that are possibly related to voidbinding (the phrasing of the Kriss' entry is quite esoteric itself). I think this is a clear case of not enough information. I have a feeling that we are going to see the true Voidbinders in book 4, coming from the Origin and Like Puuli's grandfather says in the I-1 interlude: One thought I just had while typing this up is, "The sailors lost on the infinite sea" strikes as a possible metaphor for the problem with Roshar's afterlife. What if this is a metaphorical description of souls after death being unable to go to the great beyond? I really hope that Kaladin and/or Szeth go and investigate the Origin early on in book 4.

SETTING: The glass wall backed Council chamber in Urithiru, Dalinar, with the sleeves of his Kholin blue military shirt rolled up is pacing with a lavis polyp sticking jauntily out of his mouth, while Navani, sitting in a rocking chair, is working on a fabrial in her lap. The assembled heads of state of Roshar are looking to Dalinar as he begins to explain all about.... SONG: Urithiru (Sung to the Tune of Oklahoma, from the musical Oklahoma): We couldn't pick a better place to wage these fights! It ain't too easy to use an Oathgate I've been livin' here with my Radiant Knights, Soon we'll be fightin' the shard of Hate The Shard of hate That don't sound great Gonna grow some lavis, tallew and chicken parts, Pasture for the great shells So we can harvest gem hearts Flowers on the prarie where the wind spren zoom Plen'y o' air and plen'y o' room Plen'y o room to swing your shard Plen'y o heart cuz we try real hard Urithiru where the storms come sweeping down the plain Where the lavis wheat could sure smell sweet If we could find that sibling to train Urithiru ev'ry night my gem heart and I Sit alone for reals and watch sky eels Making lazy circles in the sky. We know we'll defend the land And the tower we belong to is grand And when we say Kalak! A-YIP-I-O-EE-AY We're only sayin' "You're doin' fine Urithiru, Urithiru U R"

Hahahaha, totally anonymous.

"Sure, I can hold all your glasses, you just go out and enjoy the party. I'm good here, ya know, all alone, sitting in Damnation for 4 or 5 millienia, holding all your glasses. No worries mates" - Stoneward "One second." she grabs an emerald broam "Ok, the glass is full" - Elsecaller "Hehehehe, hey spark, check it out, hehehehe the glass is all broken, hehehehe" - Dustbringer

That's an interesting way to put it, I think that your right about what the spren get out of the Nahel bond, they get to put some of themselves into the spirtitual realm by filling in their bonded person's cracked spirit web. This would in turn make there more substantively real, and would allow them to both grow and change. So higher spren grant surgebinders access to the surges in order to have a soul of their own (which happens to be part of their surgebinder's soul too, but what's a sentient idea going to do, they can't pick up a new soul at Walmart right?)

You forgot the bondsmith one: "I am the Glass"

"Kaladin, you can't protect them all" "I know Syl, but I can't just sit back and watch them be taken one at a time!" E4xD5. "Noooooo!"

Here's a Ketek that sums this up niceley: Dumb people born to die stupidly die to people the dumb.

I think OB Shallan would be singing "A Part of Our World", she Radiant and Veil would be singing it to Adolin on a boat in the Sea of glass beads that is being spun by glorysrpen on the aft and the prow, while Anticipation spren circle them, doing choreographed routines with their grody long tongues. It's a very moving scene, really.

Interesting point, but to know to kill Hitler when he's a baby requires pre-cognition of baby hitler's adult crimes, and pre-cognition could be wrong (even if you traveled back in time, the chain of events leading up to a future event could be irrevocably altered by simple inadvertent happenstance), and a possibly flawed judgement is no basis for killing a baby. I think that's a pretty hard circle to escape, while it's pretty clear Killing Babies is very Bad.

That's an interesting death rattle, but it seems to me to be describing what Taravangian is doing by using any means to preserve a small sliver of humanity. It's a pretty starkly awful image presented in the Death Rattle.

@Toaster Retribution Well played, well played. I'm out of upvotes at the moment, but as soon I have them you'll get one for sure! Nale as Javert is brilliant! Love it! Here's a link to a video of the Song Stars (so the Sharders can sing Storms while watching Stars): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urxk4mveLCw If you have a preferred version of this song, put the link in your post and I will get rid of this one.

Hahahaha, that's the whole point. His POV in all of WoT was a gigantic time sink. H e w a s s u p p o s e d t o s l o w t h i n g s down, My god, by end of Knife of dreams I wanted to destroy all Locksmith puzzles just on the principle of the thing. I don't know if you ever listened to the WoT audiobooks, but Michael Kramer's Perrin is seriously 1/4 speed. Rand chapters fast, Mat chapters—even faster, Perrin Chapters—time to go make some popcorn. He's d u l l and anticlimatic. Lan is a lot like Dalinar, only less talkative. Both of them are amazing characters, Dalinar is on of my SLA favorites and Lan is one of my WoT favorites, they seem to be bound together by an overarching sense of duty. They are capable, responsible men, who happen to be able to break the puny insignificant world that they live in two (without much effort, which is pretty awesome really)

You can't have Gibraltar without the rock of Gibraltar. I think that you are a WOT fan, and you know what the absolute best thing about Dalinar Kholin is? He is freaking Perrin aybara without the damnation lock smith puzzle references. You KNOW he will do the right thing given time, he is the Moral center of Urithiru and he has the best come back for any potential political attack, the strategic grunt.

Ok, so this will be the last shameless plug for what I think might be the single greatest thing ever written, it's the Song of Szeth and Nightblood, called "Szeth's New Knife" from the thread Stormlight the Musical sung to the tune of Mack the Knife from the 3 Penny Opera: In regards to this thread, I think that all that is required to make all of team good guys accept Szeth and Nightblood is: Their observation of what Szeth and Nightblood did during the battle of Thaylen Fields The Ideal that Szeth swore to have DALINAR as his moral basis of the LAW. That he killed everyone that he did, though he abhors killing, all because of a Shin law that has been SUPERCEDED by the LAW OF DALINAR FREAKING KHOLIN! Yes, sword Nimi, we must go scratch the backside of Dalinar Kholin because that is what is right and proper. I for one am incredibly glad that, unlike Jezrien's blade, both Szeth and Nightblood showed up on the side of the Good guys.

Well, if it's not going to be Toshiro Mifune, then HOLY CRAP, Chow Yun Fat is the best Asian Dalinar you could have!!! Totally upvote that!

He's arguing from the hardest position, the position of Devil's advocate. I too have experienced what he is going through, the shard is perhaps the greatest collection of individualist thinkers/philosophers that the interweb has known, but there do seem to be unwritten rules that are hard to gauge for the newly initiated. Part of the problem is that this is serious, scholarly work that is done here, and not everyone realizes that. Also, not everyone appreciates that their pet theory will clash with a lot of other people's pet theories and an unholy poop storm (with incredibly well reasoned arguments and many WoBs to back them up) will rain down on them. It's a bit disconcerting to be shut down for simple speculation. I think that @insert_anagram_here took an unpopular position, created a very SOLID OP for it, and defended it doggedly. Isn't it time to say, like Dalinar did to Teleb, you might be on the wrong side son, but you sure have amazing skills? Just my two cents, but you know what I will do, is plug my Stomrlight the musical thread, particularly the Song "Szeths New Knife" sung to the tune of Mack the Knife. I poop you not, this is entertainment at it's finest. Have the video with the song going in a separate window while you read the lyrics. It's solid gold.

\ Ok, I personally think that Jürgen Prochnow (Duke Leo Atreides from David Lynch's Dune) IS DALINAR KHOLIN (he's absolutely who I imagine), if we are going with an asian cast I would suggest the modern day equivalent of Toshiro Mufane: Dalinar doens't have to be any particular race, but he does have to be AWESOME!

The actual scene suggest that Rii might have Nalthian breath, he squints at Kaladin (probably to check his biochromatic aura), before dismissing that his investiture comes from Nalthis.

Holy crap, no kidding! Combine that with the fact that the ending of every part would have been an AMAZING ending for any other book you have ever read, and you are left just with your own puddle of drool, collecting at your feet as you bask in the singular glory of Brandonalsium.

I am stepping in to completely and irrevocably back @insert_anagram_here, Adolin is the closest thing we have seen to an amoral actor in all of Storm Light Archives. He acts instinctively without moral compunction, every instance you could possibly bring up, the refutation will always be the same: Did he stop to consider the moral implications of his actions? The answer will always be NO! There is a great divide between the Intuitive man (Michelangelo) and the Analytical man (Leonardo Da Vinci), one acts without conscious thought and lets intuition guide their actions, the other analyzes everything synthetically, breaking everything down into its constituent partst to understand the whole through the sum of its parts. One approach is not more correct than the other. Adolin is not a person that analyzes a situation, he's a person that responds on an intuitive, visceral level to all the problematic situations that life presents him with. He has a solid foundational morality, from his Mom, he has respect for authority and the chain of command from his Dad, but in the grey area between these two Poles of his Morality there is nothing other than a desire to be a good and likeable person. From WoR, we know that the great desire of Adolin is to get back at Sadeas for the wrongs he has done to his family. Insults to Dalinar, the betrayal at the Tower, and generally just being an unrepentant prick. Adolin has been wanting to get Sadeas for a long time. Is he held back from seeking his retribution by a strong internal prohibition against killing? No, he is held back because of an external and accepted moral code for the exacting of personal retribution. The thing that is striking is that he is presented with this golden moment, this point in space and time where he is given due cause to fulfill his long suppressed wish to take out the most active force working against his dad and really the cause of humanity as Adolin sees it, and instead of seeing the murder of Sadeas as a noble act for the greater good of humanity, he is immediately ashamed of what he did. This is the heart of the conflict, this is what makes this whole discussion interesting. I posit (and since I am playing devil's advocate for @insert_anagram_here I hope he/she agrees, this is the point at which his action is immoral. I personally believe that he did the right thing killing Sadeas, the better time to do that would have been at the I'll swap you Oathbringer for a bunch of dirty bridge men meeting, but I can see the moral underpinning of both murders. But instead, what he does is he Murders Sadeas in a pique of rage (the thing that piqued his rage would be justifiable as the reason for killing him, but Adolin drops it in short order) and then hide all the evidence that he did it). Adolin has led, up to this point, the classic unreflected life. He hasn't had any struggles or adversity where he has had to question the deeper mysteries of life. I am not calling him dumb, just inexperienced in hardship. This is where his amorality comes from. He's never known adversity, so he's never had to struggle. Life has been black and white for him, mirroring Szeth's journery but less obvious. He intuitively does what he thinks is right, but this is not based on a solid, reasoned morality. He is noble in a lot of what he does, but this does not come from a moral code, it comes from an intuitive sense (inherited from his mother) of what is right. This is all A'priori not synthetic. He has led a life that causes him to question that which doesn't fit into his understanding of the world and not to question how his understanding doesn't fit with the world. He intuitively killed Sadeas (he had wanted to for a LONG TIME) and he feels no guilt or shame. The implicit morality of this action is simple expediency, that's it. It was convenient for him to kill him and he has no fear of repercussions (to me this is extreme amorality).

I totally agree, this whole thread has kind of ruined the Shin for me. Short bald Caucasians just aren't as interesting as large eyed bald hobbits.

Here's my take on the Szeth, given his amazing detective skills in OB, that I posted on another thread: *Edited* I would love to see a Bollywood musical of Stormlight Archives!!!

Holy crap, that's funny! I always thought they looked like this: But in all seriousness, I say this with a grave and serious tone, you have not found anything funnier in this Cosmere or any other than this (my shameless plug for more people to look at Stormlight the Musical (especially Szeth's New Knife sung to the tune of Mack the Knife)): Holy crap, you'll laugh, you'll cry and you won't even have to kiss 3 bucks goodbye.