Rainier

Except for the chasm scene, where she lets her walls down for, as far as I can tell, the only time. That's a great point, and one I had completely missed. So our timeline for Shallan personae is "Shallan Davar, betrothed of Adolin Kholin": when she first presents herself at the Shattered Plains; "Veil", when she needs a persona to spy, sneak, steal, and join the Ghostbloods. "Brightness Radiant", when she can't stand holding Pattern-blade I always maintained that Adolin had never seen the real her, but I never put it together with her debut at the Shattered Plains and the Lightweaving she did as part of it. With the context of OB, we can see exactly how she created a persona for herself to hide within, just like she did with Radiant in part 1. The wording is almost the same (be that woman, be this, do that). Just like she uses Radiant to be the woman who can deal with Pattern as a shardblade, she uses 'Shallan Davar, betrothed' as a woman who can deal with the pain of her travels and the demands of the court.

I completely fail to see how that isn't just waging the shipping wars on Kaladin's behalf. How, exactly, do you intend to discuss Kaladin's possible romantic interests without, you know, discussing his possible romantic interests? Shallan is one of those possible interests, and there's enough textual evidence for me to continue thinking that there will be more between them. It's not my fault Brandon decided to put his most obvious love interest in a betrothal with another character, and it's not my fault the last topic got closed. To be fair, we've got about 25 pages to go before we reach the length of the last one. I stand by previous posts: the best love interest for Kaladin is Shallan, there is significant textual evidence to support this pairing and undermine her actual marriage, and there's no way to have a topic about Kaladin's love life without it being directly involved in the love-triangle. I don't intend to fight anyone over it, and perhaps my phrasing as the great ship war was provocative (I don't think so, but maybe this while forum is as prudish as the author it's dedicated to), but talking about the love triangle simply has to be on topic. A short, heated, on-topic and completely necessary dabble in feminism, that I didn't really participate in. I appreciated the discussion, though. Once the thread was closed, it spread over every other thread even slightly adjacent, and I'm happy it did because there was a lot of good stuff (rehashed, of course) echoing around that's made its way into other topics. There's a lot of Shallan's characterization that's really, really good. There are ideas that got bounced back and forth, hashed and rehashed, supported and contradicted. That's just good theory talk, and that's what we're all (I am) here for. So I also want to push back against the 'topic drift' concerns. A certain amount of drift is to be expected 5 pages in, and I don't see it as necessarily a bad thing.

All aboard! We may be a small craft but there's still room for more passengers. This is the key, isn't it? Adolin helps Shallan, but Shallan helps Kaladin. And Kaladin helps everyone. Is it wrong to start imagining Adolin as Kaladin's wingman? Trying to get him laid, telling him to pick himself back up after the most recent rejection. Maybe even a double-date that ends poorly when Adolin and Kaladin's date both notice the obvious chemistry between Shallan and Kaladin and.....I'm gone again. Sorry about that. Maybe you don't have to take sides, but this thread is practically designed to fight the battles of the great ship war. There's room aboard the Good Ship Shalladin, if you want to come aboard!

Oh I absolutely believe this is what will happen...after book 10. After book 5 I expect the Fused to be driven off Roshar at high cost, namely the torture of the Heralds. And whatever 10/15/20 year gap Brandon decides upon will be the time it takes for one of them to break.

Yeah, actually, I do think it will be all 10. I don't see any of the crazy Heralds volunteering except for Taln and Ash (due to guilt). I see the remaining 8 background characters as pretty good Heralds in their own right. I'm absolutely convinced that the break between 5/6 is going to be the break between Desolations. That means someone has to go back to Damnation. Of course this relies on Ash being a Dustrbringer, not a Lightweaver, this time around. I mean, he's not a main character, he's a side character. That's like complaining we haven't seen enough Rock POV, and Rock hasn't had his own story. Or that we haven't had enough time for Navani to do her own thing. These characters are not meant to drive the story, they are meant to supplement the main characters. I personally really liked Adolin-the-son much more than Adolin-the-suitor. His interactions with Dalinar in The Way of Kings were great, and I loved him as a duelist in Words of Radiance. I just don't want him anywhere near Shallan as a romantic interest. Like Kaladin, individually I like them both, together I can't stand them. Oh, and what happened to Adolin the womanizer? We see him run through a few women, but we never see what he does to drive them away (except for one hint that he started wooing her sister). We never see anything from him that would drive Shallan away, or give any hints at his allegedly womanizing past. It seems like he was described as a playboy dilettante, but that never actually happened on screen. He just falls in love with Shallan and that's it. I got impatient and wanted to read the full Ketek, so I looked it up in the online pages. And then I saw Shallan's marriage and my heart sank. I kept up hope for about three chapters after that, but it hung over the ending for me like a storm cloud. Then when it actually happened....blech.

Hey, I never said it would be pretty. A relationship takes work, ya know? You've got to support one another through thick and thin (and torture).

I like this idea the best, but I don't think they have gemhearts. They just aren't of the local type to be true natives. It makes perfect sense that their bond with spren mimicked or co-opted the Listener rhythms, even if they themselves are merely adapted to Roshar, and not native. But given their intelligence, I wouldn't be surprised if their symbiosis with the spren is similar to that of the Radiants, where the spren that are attracted to Ryshadium are granted a measure of intelligence and closeness to the physical realm like we see with Syl and Pattern. Or maybe they're not music spren at all, but the intelligent equivalent (Honorspren:Windspren :: Ryshadiumspren:Musicspren). I definitely want to know more about Ryshadium, and I absolutely want to see what it takes to bond one to you. Hopefully we get a scene in an upcoming book where this happens.

The key is self-awareness, and I believe the in-world Words of Radiance says that Lightweavers need to reach a threshold of self awareness. This makes me agree with you that 'new lies' wouldn't work, as believing those new lies would make you less self-aware. At the same time, I want to say that it doesn't matter when the lies/secret truths originate as long as the individual can first achieve and then maintain a sufficient level of self-awareness. It's an example of Shallan being self-aware by recognizing herself as a murderer who was intent on killing her father. This means it wasn't an accident, it wasn't justified, it was murder, and she knows it. "I killed my father," wouldn't cut it because it isn't self-aware enough to identify her killing as murder. This is the explanation that I like. Pattern was trailing around Shallan in the cognitive realm, and his fellow Cryptics prompted her speak a truth which would revive him. They essentially led her to the solution in order to revive their friend (probably more like esteemed colleague) and continue the experiments. I'm just going to agree and reemphasize that truth is missing the point, and that self-awareness is actually the point. Sure, self-awareness is caught up in truth and lies, but it's fundamentally truths and lies about oneself that oneself is responsible for perpetuating or ending. This is again involved in the new truths/old truths which also misses the point, in that for Lightweavers all that matters is self-awareness in the present. ALL ABOARD! Seriously, I was very disappointed in Shallan getting married, but when I saw Ash and Taln, I couldn't help myself. Combined with my hunch that the gap between books 5 and 6 is a desolation and the fact that we're at least one Herald short, but with a brand new Bondsmith, and I'm expecting someone we know and love to get trapped in Damnation for the duration of the break. Why not Shallan and Kaladin, and why shouldn't they come out the other side much, much closer? Me too, me too.

This is what I love. Everyone here is sidetracked into Tien, but the OP has a crazy theory about the origin and you have evidence someone that matches her style made it into Urithiru. I doubt the that she was an assassin, but I'm perfectly willing to believe that she's in Urithiru somehow, and if so must have recognized Kaladin by now.

And you don't wonder the same for Elhokar, the one who attracted that spren in the first place? I know Hoid has dark secrets in his past, that's the whole point of having a character in the background doing his own thing at crucial moments, pushing the boulder of time ever so slightly. Elhokar, on the other hand, may have been broken by his father's murder and his own ascension to the throne, or have been broken much earlier, or a million other things. His self-awareness, while never going to be as interesting as Hoid's, was about his return to power and just rule. In that way, he's like the eponymous Emperor in The Emperor's Soul.

This is the best part, which made my eyes bug out. Of course the thousand eyes of Trell belong to the shard that speaks in the plural. And of course there's got to be some shard acting on the same scale as Odium. We've got 10 books and entire Cosmere to fill. We need conflict and strife.

I agree, and posit that he does have a nice butt, because if one thing is for certain it is that he is not to be trusted.

First, remember that Ishtar wasn't just a Herald, he conceived of and implemented the Oathpact. Second, recall that Dalinar just implemented his Bondsmith powers and surprised the Stormfather. Finally, imagine the list of characters we think might volunteer to submit to eternal torture for the sake of others. It reads a lot like the list of POV flashback characters, doesn't it? New Heralds by the end of book 5, you heard it here first (I hope).

Not if he's in Damnation with the rest of the NeoHeralds backstory characters. That scene was so brutal on my re-read. All she had to do was let Venli go first, then put a stop to it. Alas...

If Kaladin isn't going to end up with Shallan (which I haven't given up on yet, onwards good ship Shalladin), I don't see any other character we're familiar with as a good partner. I'm baffled at the Jasnah/Kaladin pairing, because I would think that Jasnah would have had ample opportunity to find a suitable mate by now, and I'm having trouble seeing how she's gone this long resisting the pressure to partner and marry, only to succumb to our Brightlord Brooding-eyes. I'm frankly a little disturbed by the Syl/Kaladin pairing. I mean, they're already paired in the nahel bond. It's not like they're going to sleep together, or raise children, and they've already got the only bond they need. Syl wants Kaladin to be happy, and she's going to keep pushing him to find someone that makes him happy, and that's great. Tarah is the most likely to come back, what with the small flashback we get in OB, but at the same time I'm happy with her as a previous character to illustrate the time between losing Tien and killing Helaran which isn't very fleshed out. Frankly, I'd be surprised if she's even still alive. There's an apocalypse going on, you know. Rysn I could see, but only in the way that they're opposite sex and approximately the right age. There's some duality in the Wind/Waves, as well as Strong/Weak (physically) and then consume stormlight/pet consumes stormlight. Those are the kinds of things I was looking for with regard to Shalladin, so if Sanderson isn't interested in thematic contrast, then so be it. Frankly, I expect Kaladin to stay lonely and single through the front five books, and I expect the gap between to change everything we thought we knew.

I'm going to agree with one part, at least: that Honor deliberately splintered off the Stormfather. Why he would do so, and for what ends, obviously are unknown, and I like your ideas, but I'm right there with you that he did this on purpose. I think he saw his own demise coming, and started planning for it, just like Preservation.

I noticed that too, and laughed. Which order of Knights cares the least about oaths, and is more concerned with truth? Which spren would be most understand of breaking an oath if it came from higher self-awareness? I wonder if we know anyone who might be like that... For all the people bemoaning love-triangle tropes and cliches, I figured love-at-first-sight was the least likely to actually come true. I can live with opposites-attract, and I expected main-character-romance, but love-at-first-sight I thought was the basest, least imaginative trope to use, and thus least likely to be actually used and most likely to be subverted. It's only sloppy if it isn't showing us that Shallan isn't well, she isn't better, and she's not making the right choices. It's sloppy if she ends up happily ever after with her dreamboat. I'm with you, especially about the symbolism. How can Brandon be so good at subtle foreshadowing when it comes to magic and cosmere and gods and plot, and so bad at doing the same thing with interpersonal relationships? Is he really bad Well, if that other thread wasn't locked, we wouldn't be here in the first place. A few familiar faces seem to be making the rounds, and we want to talk about Shallan and her taste in men.

I like this, a lot. I'm on board with Nohadon being a Bondsmith, and that it's his voice that we're hearing in Dalinar, much like your Mistborn example. The next question, of course, is so what? So what if Nohadon is a cognitive shadow bound to the Stormfather influencing Dalinar? What does it mean? Brandon has been coy about the afterlife on Roshar, with the Fused as the most obvious example. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Nohadon is our source for more information, via the Stormfather somehow, about the state of the three realms around Roshar. He could also be a Bondsmith-mentor to reveal some of Dalinar's more godly powers. Great work bringing all this together.

Yes, by tried Veil I mean immediately thought to switch to Veil, before realizing what that would mean and abandoning it and being forced into codifying the third personality. She didn't want Adolin to know about Veil, or the Ghostbloods, at that point. I threw in what I did about the Desolations and apocalypse because I see you and others say, "I'm done if such and so," and that's just so far from where I am. I'm a disappointed Shalladin shipper, but I'm all aboard the Stormlight Hype Train and while I've given up on a Sanderson series before (between Well and Hero in the Mistborn trilogy), I lived to regret giving up. But maybe I'll be a little less invested in the interpersonal relationships, and stick to magic and cosmere.

I'm with you here. I was very much looking forward to finding out what happened to Shallan at the end of the battle, and when it was Radiant who was the 'real' image, it confused and disheartened me. I'll also cop to being a shameless Shalladin shipper. There's too much foreshadowing that needs to be discarded now, and it makes me think less of Brandon as a writer. If it was always meant to be Shadolin, then it was done sloppily, and if he changed his mind while writing OB, it was still done sloppily. When I'm used to tight, well foreshadowed endings where all the clues are there. A causal betrothal isn't a clue, it's a prop. Shallan starting out on the Wind's Pleasure is a clue. And so forth. I'm with @PhineasGage in that I'm feeling misled and I'm not pleased about it. It's a good thing I'm here for the apocalypse, not the romance. The reveals we had in OB were much better foreshadowed than Shallan's.....mess. The clues were not any clearer, but made sense in retrospect, and it's the Cosmere-level story that's going to keep me coming back, regardless if Jasnah gets a man or Shallan flits back and forth between men. Coming back to the point of this thread, I think the scene I quoted extensively is where Shallan finally broke into (at least) three. She wanted to go to Veil, but couldn't, forced the new persona of Radiant to take over, and firmly split herself into three.

Wait, I thought that Shallan was already level 4 at the start of book 2. I seem to recall WoB that Shallan was one level over Kaladin at the end of book 2, and the last time we saw her speak any truths was when she soulcast the goblet to blood in book 1. So she's not slower to progress, she's much faster to progress, but is having trouble maintaining her progress and backsliding, which I think she started pretty much immediately after waking up from that incident. Kaladin still doesn't have level 4, and unless you're going to argue that Dalinar jumped levels 3, 4, and 5 in about 90 seconds at the end of Oathbringer, neither does he. I think that if you only have 1 deep secret, you simply won't attract Cryptics. Makes enough sense to me. It's also not just secrets, but self-awareness. You don't have to have deep secrets to constantly lie to yourself about yourself. For a moment I got excited thinking about what kinds of secrets Elhokar was hiding, but it's more likely that his progression would have been acknowledging that he's a bad king and confronting his own self-image.

I really like this idea. It seems appropriate for the intent of Autonomy to keep its own parts autonomous from one another. It feels like a Shard that would keep splintering itself into smaller and smaller bits, each autonomous. I'm not sure what overarching control or power there would be, or what this collective hive-mind-sounding author means, but I could see the new avatar being a fresh splinter of Autonomy that's held by a new person.

Yup, that's what I was thinking of. That, combined with the RAFO answers to where the Heralds are from makes me think not-Roshar (again, the planet). I'm not surprised Brandon is coy with this, as two of our 10 backstory characters are Heralds. I can see the flashback chapter now, "7349 years ago..."

I'm trying to recall, but isn't there a quote somewhere (Arcanum Unbounded, Epigraphs, somewhere else) that the Heralds are at best partially human, and definitely not of the local variety. That makes me think that the Heralds are humans, or were humans, from somewhere besides Roshar (the planet, not the solar system).

The most important thing to remember with Shallan is what Words of Radiance (the in-world book) says about Lightweavers. This is what we need to be looking for when we're examining if Shallan is progressing or regressing, and whether she's going to be in a good spot or a bad spot come SA4p1. I think @SLNC has done a good job of striking to the heart of this by separating True-Shallan from Mask-Shallan (proto and pseudo, in his terminology) As to Wit, I've got to believe that he's telling her to remember the original Shallan, the original girl-person who birthed all the other facets. This makes sense coming from him because it's what he's done since time immemorial. Whether he's Wit, Hoid, Midius, Cephandrius, or any of his other aliases or personae, he remembers who he really is, what he's really doing, and what he really cares about. He keeps his masks on at all times but never forgets who is wearing the mask in the first place. I'm not certain what's going on in the Heart of the Revel, but I don't think Shallan is hearing from Wit because the advice doesn't match what we know Shallan needs to do. I also want to point out what Wit/Hoid says to the Cryptic as he bonds it: I've got plenty of secrets. He knows that self-awareness, acknowledging secret or hidden truths, is the path to increased powers and sanctuary for the spren. As for Adolin, I'm as certain as I can be that he's in love with Mask-Shallan, as we're regularly reminded that Shallan is trying to make herself into the person he would want to marry. She succeeded, and married him with that persona. When Shallan was flipping through personalities and fixed on the one Adolin recognized, that was her selecting the persona created specifically for him. Here's where the Brightness Radiant persona is christened, edited for brevity: So much to unpack here, but I think it's the heart and soul of what's happening to Shallan over the course of the book. She's afraid and wants to hide, so creates a persona to hide behind. Look at Patterns reactions in bold. He's pleased at first, then confused, worried, and asks what's wrong as True-Shallan panics and retreats. It's also one of the few times when, as I've put in bold, the truth refuses to budge in her mind. Other times she'll slip into a trance, which still hasn't stopped happening by the end of the book. Every time she goes into one of these trances, her bond with Pattern is weakened further. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Pattern loses sentience in these times, and comes back slowly after Shallan comes back to reality. I bet it's a miserable experience for him. Edited to add, one of the first times Shallan refers to herself in the third person comes within a page of the above passage. So Shallan glances down at Radiant's improved bust, but Radiant steps forward into a sword stance and refers to Shallan in the third person. Edited again to add one more: I don't know how much more explicit you can get. Fractured personalities directly because of how painful the truth is to acknowledge. The very opposite of self-awareness.