Rainier

Oathbringer was 138 chapters, including pro/epilogue and interludes. There are 157 weeks between the release of Oathbringer and the release of Rhythm of War, with 17 weeks of preview chapters before RoW. That's pretty close to an entire massive Stormlight novel every third year, right on schedule, with other stuff in between. So just keep trickling out the chapters one by one, and in 2023, we'll have the ending, and book five will be ready to release...one week...at a time.... Nevermind, please never do that, I don't think I could stand it. Or, more likely, I'd just quit reading.

I've thought a lot about this. Would you rather Brandon publish like Dickens, serially once a week, for the rest of the Cosmere? No more novels, no more trilogies, just an undending parade of weekly content, jumping all over the Cosmere? Brandon's big and popular enough to do it, and I'm not sure I'd be upset if this is how we got some of the ancillary stories. I don't think it will ever happen, but I've definitely thought about it.

Think bigger. Why chain yourself to a shard, when you can get all the unconnected power yourself? I've long thought Hoid is trying to get some of each shard, so he can combine them all for himself, and their Intents will combine as well, allowing him, Hoid, to hold power comparable to a shard without the corrupting pressure of the Intent. Now I'm thinking he's not the only one looking for power free from the parent shards. It sounds like the Ghostbloods know more about Connection than Intent, but their aims certainly overlap.

The easiest explanation is the one given by Vasher, to Kaladin. It's easier to get as Stormlight than it ever was as Breaths. You don't need to convince another sentient soul to give up their own Investiture, you just have to be around when a Highstorm blows through. I don't think there's anything special about what you can use Stormlight for, I think it's by far the most abundant and easily accesible form of Investiture in the Cosmere. I made the comparison of the Ghostbloods to Standard Oil, so I'm going to keep the oil analogies. Stormlight is the light sweet crude in Saudi Arabia, where you can practically fill your car up from a hole in the ground the oil is of such high quality. Breaths are shale oil, accessible through fracking at much higher cost, and if you don't have other options, still worth the effort, but not comparable in terms of accessibility. Or take gasoline vs liquid natural gas. One can be transported in a cup or bottle, the other needs high pressures and will evaporate away if not properly contained, although now I've switched my metaphors and suddenly Stormlight is the one that evaporates through leaks and Breaths are the ones you can pour from one vessel to another without much loss.

I'm with @DeployParachute on this one, but that's because I think Shallan is the first alter created (Shallan became the perfect daughter), which means that everything else from the original person had to go somewhere. You'll notice in this chapter, too, how Shallan brings back her memories, which aren't from that early in her life, they're from after she already killed her mother. These are from the alter, not from the whole person. So, since we, the reader know that nothing is getting better, and that she's not fine, why should we believe her when she says she's not experiencing continued memory loss? I think this is being built up for a twist, and no-memory-having Formless seems a better bet than most.

I'm not sure why, but I thought owl. Something about the description, maybe it was the prey?, something gave me the impression OWL. That said, it's very clearly green. Parrots can hunt rodents, I suppose. This seems like a scene that didn't need a full year to come to fruition. It really took a full year for Mraize to threaten Shallan's family? You can paper over this with the in-between, but chronologically, this scene felt out of place. This is the first time when the time skip really felt poorly executed. Maybe this is one-chapter-per-week syndrome in effect, maybe I'm really picking up on something. Shallan once again refuses to do for herself what she could instead do for another. Veil is out here desperately trying to confront her past, then Mraize comes along and says, "Hey, I'll tell you all about your past! All you have to do is what I say." Shallan, being the stooge that she is, leaps at the opportunity to have someone else remember what happened to her, sparing herself from the task. Of course, nothing Mraize says is going to fix her, and nothing she needs is going to come from him. Hearing it from him isn't going to be any better than dredging up the memories on her own, but hey, her best skill is avoidance and Brandon needs a hook. Also, the promise for answers felt aimed directly at readers. Yes, dear reader, get through this book and I'll answer all your questions....in the next book! As for Restares, I immediately thought he was Vasher. Of course, not everyone is the same person, and I'm sorry for combining two different people, but we do know Vasher's being hunted (by Vivenna). We know so very little about what he's doing or why, but he straight out told Kaladin he's on Roshar for the same reason the Ghostbloods are: cheap and easy Investiture. We know that Warbreaker was a pseduo-prequel to Stormlight, because it tells Vasher's backstory. That's an awful lot of connection to one guy who hasn't done diddly thus far. And think some more: what could Restares offer to Lasting Integrity that would prompt them to grant his asylum request? Why, the knowledge of one of the Five Scholars. TL;DR: Vasher built the Cosmere nukes, Lasting Integrity is offering asylum because good talent is hard to find, and you don't ask too many questions of the genius who builds your weapons. The Ghostbloods, on the other hand, are out here trying to be the Cosmere's version of Standard Oil, and Mraize is giving off some There Will Be Blood vibes. God forbid you get in the way of the Investiture pipeline being built through the Horneater Peaks, that stuff needs to make it to market!

I want to disagree strongly with this. Amaram, especially, was anything but straightforward. Hated, yes, but not straightforward. He was always closer to Taravangian than anyone else, and it's disappointing he died before we got to see any of the supposed greater good he was working towards. Frankly I think Brandon did him dirty, and failed his story in OB by making him the cartoonish villain Kaladin always saw his as. Big missed opportunity, and you can see some of that discussion in the topics created after OB's release. Sadeas, too, was always morally grey, right from the prologue chapter where he plays the decoy. Hated, again yes, but morally grey. He embodied Alethi values perfectly, but that doesn't make him evil, that makes him Alethi. We have seen this pattern before, where Eshonai was the noble foe, and Venli was the dangerous ideologue. Now, Eshonai is dead, Venli has become the noble foe, and we have a new ideologue in the form of Leshwi. Leshwi isn't replacing Eshonai, but rather Venli, from that earlier pattern.

I think Leshwi is taking over the Amaram role, which was taken from Sadeas. Or, rather, the Sadeas to Kaladin's Dalinar. The grey villain, sympathetic in some ways and abhorrent in others. Leshwi is also the authority figure in another POV, Venli, and so we get to judge from two perspectives. I expect Leshwi to be a major antagonist for Venli, mostly, but we clearly see the interest in the man who refounded the parallel order to the Heavenly Ones. You should love to hate your enemies, but we'll see if we get more from Leshwi to skew sentiment one way or the other. We shouldn't be sympathetic, but skip a year and portray the noble-ish foe, and you can work from there.

Hit F12. You just opened the inspect tool in your browser. Basically it lets you see the code behind the webpage, and edit it for your local instance. That's how you get the picture of the 9999 reputation. Inspect the spot, make the edit, take the screenshot. It's also why you should be skeptical of things you see on the internet.

Well, no, but then again, these people have DID and aren't the most reliable people. People can choose to be self-destructive, or want to be self-destructive. They can want all kinds of things, or resist things they know are good for them. Furthermore, I'm not talking about everyone who has DID, I'm talking about one character in these novels. What most people want is irrelevant. Just look at Kaladin in this very chapter. If you ask him what he wants, he wants to be left alone to cry in a heap in his room, but we all correctly identify that as his weakness, not his strength. Some people with depression just wallow in their own misery, too, or commit suicide. It was convincing to have Kaladin consider kill himself is not sufficient reason for it in the narrative, and in fact completely disrupts the narrative. It's convincing to show suicidal tendencies, but it would be a waste of everyone's time if he actually went through with it. This is what I'm talking about when I've referenced the story serving the DSM instead of the other way around. If the only reason Shallan doesn't achieve unification is because some real-life people don't, then it's a failure as a story and she's a failure as a character. The recommendation seems pretty clear, though: the therapist's job is to work toward complete unification. I suppose in this case, that's Pattern. Everything I linked said that while some people's treatment is less successful than others, we know what success looks like, and we know what failure looks like. It's the phases of treatment I quoted. In fact, from those links I'd say that having alters at the end means you didn't deal with the issues, or at least you're not done dealing with them. If Shallan resists unification that's a bad thing, and a sign that she's unstable, unreliable, and no longer progressing. What we've seen in RoW tells us Shallan is not getting better, instead she is getting worse. What we've seen from Shallan in RoW is her resisting unification and suppressing memories. This is not a coincidence, it is causal. Everyone knows Life Before Death and Journey Before Desitnation, but it confuses me that so many people mistake Shallan's Weakness for her Strength. Then I'll see....what exactly? I think we're looking at different things.

What does Critical Reviews in Toxicology have to do with the article I linked, which was published in Journal of Trauma and Association? Yes. I think it takes an incredible feat of self-delusion to partition yourself, and that re-integration is the only thing that could reasonably be understood to be treatment, or success. It seems that this is the current standard, as well. From Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, Treatment Goals and Outcomes: From a diagnostic perspective, there's no reason we should believe Shallan will or is capable of unification. From a narrative perspective, it's clearly where she's heading. I'll also throw this out there, from the same document: Shallan seems to have accomplished phase 1, which was at the end of OB and during the gap year. We've seen her shy away from phase 2 in the early parts of RoW, which means I expect most of this books to deal with 2. It's phase 3 that I think is a prerequisite for the fifth ideal, approaching full self-awareness.

This is not what your abstract says. You seem to have been taking some liberties. So, what this says is that there's a Host personality, which is not significantly different from a control, and that there are alter personalities, which are significantly different. I'm not sure how you're reading this to mean that the alters are as real as independent people, when it's specifically the host who is compared to the control, not the alters. It says more or less the exact opposite of what you're claiming. It's saying that the alters are less real, less coherent, than the either the host personality or the control actors. If you want to explore some more of the literature, I'd recommend the following: See, now that sounds like the Shallan we've been reading about.

What have we seen each time someone swears an oath? First, you say the words. Then the spren accepts them. Why, if you're Maya, would you ever accept words from humans again? Even if Adolin can somehow revive her, there's no reason to think she'll bond a human ever again. In fact I'd guess the only reason she would bond a human is because she has no other choice.

Well, if she wasn't lying to herself, and if Veil and Shallan really are different people, then why doesn't Veil get to have romance of her own? Oh yeah, because she even admits to herself that, when push comes to shove, there has only ever been one. You say she is Veil, I say she's always Veil, because the difference between Veil and Shallan isn't the difference between Drehy and Skar, it's the difference between R'lain pretending to be a parshman and R'lain revealing himself to be Parshendi. Not two distinct people, one person playing two (or more) roles. It's the apocalypse for these people, and they've got no Heralds. Somebody needs to lead each order, and somebody needs to reach the fifth ideal in each order. I do not think it likely that we'll get through ten books and only nine orders will achieve their zenith. In short, yes, stopping short of all five ideals I would consider half-baked. Not everyone reaches all five, no, but I don't think we know how rare it is. Did Nale say something to Szeth? We've got very limited information from the gemstone pillar, and slightly more from in-world Words of Radiance. Those are the only three sources I could think of. If you consider Shallan a real person, of course it doesn't make her a failure if she can't get to #5. But as a character, yes, I would consider it an abject failure if she doesn't. Like I said earlier, I hope this story is not that story. This is epic fantasy, not slice-of-life adventures. This is the crux of our disagreement. I view it not as something that makes it harder, but as something that simply can't be reconciled with further progress. She's stuck where she is, and she will continue to be stuck, relative to Pattern, until reintegration. Depression doesn't stop Kaladin from protecting people, and if it did, then yes it would be something he needs to fix, cure, get over, or otherwise handle before progressing. But we can't compare oaths about protecting with truths approaching self-awareness. Lightweavers are unique in that way, and it is this uniqueness that makes DID not just an obstacle, but an intractable problem. If Shallan were a Willshaper, she could keep lying to herself all she wanted. If she were an Edgedancer, it wouldn't matter who her alters are or what roles they play. Lightweavers, and Liespren, require self-awareness, because without that you'll eventually believe your own lies. Shout out to Tyn, for dropping that foreboding line which still hasn't fully manifested for Shallan.

Function and be well is a rather low bar. I would say reintegration is necessary for her to reach the fifth ideal of the Lightweavers. If she wants to quit early, retire, and live out her life as a half-baked Radiant, then yes, she can keep the alters. If she wants to reach the Fifth Ideal, and protect Pattern from becoming deadeyed, the alters need to go. Well, sure, we can play this game. Is Pattern a truthspren, or a liespren? It depends on who you ask. He sure seems to be attracted to lies, after all. Without truth, there can be no lie, because all lies have truth in them. The lie is that Veil is distinct from Shallan, that Radiant is distinct from Shallan. The parts of Veil may very well be parts of the whole person, but by cordoning them off into an entire personality, Shallan is lying to herself. She's always herself, whether she gives herself brown or blonde hair, whether she disguises her eyes, and no matter her feelings or responsibilities. There's only ever been one person there, and there will only ever be a single person. Perhaps, if she weren't a Lightweaver, she could live happily ever after without reintegrating the three (or more) personalities. That story isn't this story. Or, at least, I hope this story isn't that story. Just like I want to see Kaladin speak the fourth and fifth ideals, I want to see Shallan reach self-awareness.

Clearly I need to pay more attention to the logistics and less attention to small character developments and hunting for shreds of foreshadowing. I remember, now, that Navani was riding in a capsule, with Kaladin and Dalinar flying outside (with more windrunners). So I guess some/most of the windrunners are there, but the big boat itself is slowly making its way across Alethkar.

It has to come eventually, but I'm not surprised it hasn't happened yet. This chapter was literally the very first moments after they (Fourth Bridge) gets back to Urithiru. I expect to see this interaction in the preview chapters prior to the book being released, since it can't be held out for that much longer, right? His break with his father runs deep, and it's not going to be fixed in a single conversation. Remember, Lirin lost both his sons at once. One was taken from him, and the other left. One was killed, the other never returned. Now, finally, the prodigal son has returned. Kaladin returns to Hearthstone a hero to the people, but a broken man. Much like the prodigal son, I expect Lirin to accept him with open arms, especially as a surgeon. After all, you do not scorn the prodigal (wasteful and extravagant) son, you celebrate him. He was lost, and now he needs to come home and be found. Technically, no, she doesn't reveal that she's actively suppressing a broken fragment of her personality, but here's the interaction in its entirety. That last line reminded me of the, "without you I fade," that she gave Adolin at the end of OB. The fact that she admits to half-formed personas are already trying to tear down the dominant personas, then drops TWO and-yets. Downward spiral here we come.

Not to derail, but I think Adolin, if he does revive Maya, is not going to bond her. Think of it this way: if you were Maya, and somehow you were brought back from the nearly dead, why would you go and put yourself in the same situation that got you killed in the first place? No, I think she'll hang around him, but there's no way she's accepting Words from anyone. That said, remembering those who are forgotten is what he's doing, and that's what Edgedancers do.

I know this is a silly list, but I want to actually brainstorm. Dalinar has to be one, but he just demoted Kaladin, so even though Kaladin can't intimidate him, he's useless to Syl at the moment. Jasnah is mentioned, but she would be stern instead of affable. Adolin, we saw. I think Lift would be intimidated by Kaladin, if she's even nearby. Hoid/Wit would not be intimidated, but he's probably busy at the moment. However, having given Kaladin one gift that was discarded, I don't think he'd be willing to offer another. Zahel. Ahem, excuse me, what I meant to say was ZAHEL. That's better. Yeah, this is the one I wanted to see. This is the one who might be able to relate to Kaladin, but I doubt he'd be able to help. If anyone can know what it means to wield power without being able to protect who you love, it's probably the slightly-immortal worldhopper who killed his own lover to prevent a secret from getting out, that his protege found out anyway. But Zahel is not kind, not understanding, and has little patience. He might have done something very similar to Adolin, but it would not have stopped at the orange wine. Mraize. Not intimidated, not willing (for free, and you don't want to ask the price). Gallant is a horse, and not even Kaladin's horse. Taln is the person absolutely least equipped to support someone else in the entire Cosmere. Nightblood would happily destroy evil, which in Kaladin's state, might be most of the known universe. The Nightwatcher is like Mraize. If you could get her, you wouldn't like the price. Who else could there be?

I'm really sad to see Rock go, and so soon into the book, too. Especially that final goodbye to Kaladin, tears my heart out. While the scenes with Veil/Radiant are cute, even Adolin knows it can't last forever, and he seems to think it's not even going to last much longer. Once again, the slow drip of chapters works against me. If I had read this moments after chapter 11, it would have been much better all around. This is the restart in the story that we needed, even if one character's story is just now ending.

If there's a character who's going to die, this book or the next, my money is on Adolin. It's a common enough sentiment, but he just seems to be the right combination of central to the plot and expendable to the plot that his death would be meaningful for multiple characters (his wife, his brother, his father). This would be actual body-feeds-the-Rosharan-equivalent-of-worms dead, not some kind of deception. That's honestly who I thought you were referring to by a death in the family. The family at the center of the story is Dalinar's family, so I assumed you meant a death in his family.

When it comes to determining the sex of non-human creatures, it's not always easy, but there are known examples that we can use for comparison. The one that leaps to mind is sexing chicks, which, despite the name, is the process of separating the males from the females among newly hatched chicks. It's not quite the same, since you're actually staring at their genitals to make the determination, but it's not as simple or easy as you might think. What I'm actually getting at is the common reports of intuition being critical to the process. You could be taught to tell the difference, but it was by immediate reinforcement, not articulating the differences aloud. I doubt Brandon is thinking of chicken sexing when he's considering how humans interact with singers, but he's clearly made many distinctions. Maybe some humans could tell the sex of parshmen at a glance, intuitively, but the skill is underdeveloped. The Fused, on the other hand, are not like either the parshmen or Parshendi. They're the same body, hollowed out of the person who inhabited it, filled back up with an immortal malevolent spirit. The voidlight/stormlight process changes the physical form, so it stands to reason that the body conforms to the mind when it reincarnates and bestows whatever evident power comes with. It's closer to the upload consciousness sci-fi seen in Altered Carbon (and many more), except you need to kill someone and haunt their corpse, instead of growing one in a vat for yourself.

No, me neither, and I hope it stays that way. I agree with you that it currently seems more applicable to Shallan than to Kaladin. If Kaladin were written like Fitz, I don't think we'd be having this conversation. I love Sanderson, but his characters have never been among his strengths. Don't get me wrong. I love Kaladin. He is easily my favorite character in these books, and it was his story that made me fall in love with the series. I have no problems with him having depression. His near-suicide where Syl brings him the poison leaf to cheer him up was a fantastic scene and made him relatable to me while still carrying the emotional weight it needed. But he was never just depressed, and his depression was never the whole or even the most important part of his character. But that scene where he's about to give up hope isn't there to make a point about depression, it's there to serve his character. It needs to be there so when he does have hope, when he's offered the chance to escape, we're rooting for him to take it, which is what we need to be doing so when he goes back for Dalinar on the Tower we feel that moment with the appropriate impact. What gets me annoyed is the difference between, here's Kaladin, our main character, he's a former soldier now slave battling his depression, to, here's Kaladin, our Main Character With Clinical Depression. There's a flanderization that's happening as this single aspect of his character is reinforced. If I were reading this as a complete book, I'd spend a few minutes reading chapter 10, then a few minutes on 11, then a few minutes on 12, and so on. Instead, a whole week spent on a single chapter makes you focus on only those things that happen in that chapter, and makes it harder to string the narrative segments into a coherent whole. So yes, in chapter 10, it feels like we're getting Kaladin, our Main Character With Depression, because you can't make every scene serve every purpose. This scene is serving one purpose. There are other scenes which serve other aspects of his character, but right now, and for the last four days, we can't move on from Kaladin Is Depressed because there's not yet more story to move on to. Being forced to wait has its advantages and disadvantages.

This is probably also why it gets so tedious. I don't care what Brandon has to say about depression. I care about fantastical power armor and giant magical swords and demi-gods fighting other demi-gods. It's nice that he's doing something a little more realistic instead of succumbing to seterotypes, but it has become the cart before the horse. I care about Kaladin's depression because he's a mythical Knight Radiant. I don't care about the Knight Radiants because I love Kal and identify with his depression. It's a matter of whether this aspect is serving the greater story, or if the story is serving this narrow aspect. The latter is the source of the complaints you're hearing, that the story itself is being hijacked by the DSM, instead of the DSM being used to flesh out the story.

This is exactly what we're saying. Brush up on the Ten Essences, and notice that Protecting and Leading are associated with Jezrien. I would expect the second and third oaths of each order to be based on one of these two attributes, and the fourth and fifth oaths to be based on the other. So I expect Dalinar's future oaths to be more about guiding, since his first two were more about piety (I will unite is basically a prayer). You also see this in the Skybreakers. Their second and third oaths are about Justice, but their fourth and fifth are about Confidence (pick some cause to pledge yourself to, confident in your application of Justice). Since we've seen Edgedancer oaths, we can compare them, too. This first few are about Love, but they haven't yet been about Healing. I would expect Lift will have to say the words about healing others, in addition to not forgetting them. And so on. When we're looking for patterns, let's use all the patterns we already have. I've been beating this drum, too. I don't think the fourth or fifth oaths are going to be about protecting at all, since two and three have that aspect covered. The other divine attribute of the Windrunners, besides protecting, is Leading, and I expect Kaladin to have to swear oaths that make him a leader more than a bodyguard. If he swears two more oaths about different ways to protect people, I'll be very disappointed. "I will let others die in my place."