Phalanx

What "good guy" in this series wouldn't do that? How many main characters have you read in *any* book that would run away from a dying *child*? (Extreme anti-heroes aside.) Heck, even a "hardened badass" like, say, the Punisher or Venom would be written to have a moment like this to engender audience sympathy. They'd just agonize over it on-screen for a little bit longer. She "went insane" once as a kid. She mentions it herself in a POV chapter (she "lost control once") then the adults in a Dalinar flashback mention it (she's "doing better"). You're probably right that this has been put in as a way to explain her bond's timeline. ----------- My own thoughts on Maya: LOVED her becoming a character, I'm a sucker for this kind of tragic heroine. Would love for her to be more fleshed out and I'm open to multiple ways of her getting revived. Although I do think that her eyes should stay blind, or some other kind of imperfection. I feel that if she just gets straight up "reborn" shiny and new that it would cheapen the emotional impact of the recreance and what we know about the rest of the shardblades/plate. It reminds me of when they started healing "Stilling" in Wheel of Time. What used to be a really big deal and a huge danger in the series became just kind of another thing to be fixed (assuming you got the right gender to fix you). She's a very tragic character, and I want her to stay that way. Bring on the feels.

I'm really torn on how I expect this to go (not how I want it to go - how I *expect* it to go). Multiple people have brought up very good points. I think from a narrative point of view, it really can't be "finished." As many others have brought up, Shallan clearly hasn't sorted out her issues, and in fact they got worse throughout the entire book. It wouldn't make sense for her to have somehow stabilized and suddenly be ok with all the rust she's been through, the extreme multiple personalities, etc. over the space of about 20 pages. It just can't happen in a well-written story because to do that she wouldn't be acting like the "human" she is. However, the other side of this is Sanderson himself. As a Mormon, he doesn't treat marriage lightly. While I could see almost any other writer using the marriage as a plot device to cause discord in Shallan's psyche (like Kal and Moash's Elkohar plot), it would be very very uncharacteristic for BS. He's also used this arranged marriage plot and female lead + handsome prince plot several times before and played it out without it backfiring. All in all, even if it's the greatest ruse of all time, I'll still think it shouldn't have happened this way. And if it does turn out to be all fine and dandy with Shallan+Adolin and she magically gets better because he's "nice," then this series has lost me as a fan. Because I just can't buy that as good writing given all the buildup that came before it. Ditching the ultimate slow burn for a shotgun wedding with a side character just makes no sense to me. And a ruse would feel like we got baited for a cheap "gotcha" moment.

So many good comments, I ran out of reputation and am not allowed to give any more today! I want to thumbs up almost all of you. Perfectly expressing how I feel about this. It's the execution that was so sloppy. It was ridiculously bad, and honestly even if it's a "bait & switch" that will be reversed in the next 2 books somehow, that doesn't make this ending ok. That's just cheap writing, you can put any words you want down on a page. The tricky part is *justifying* those words through making your characters behave realistically, like humans. And as for the discussion on "tropes," I'm just going to leave this here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropesAreTools Just because something is a "trope" doesn't mean that subverting it is automatically a good thing or good writing. The subversion *can* be a good thing, but it requires good writing just as much as playing it straight would.

I haven't read the whole thread, I was only just pointed towards this website a few minutes ago, but I wanted to chime in. To me, the way Sanderson handled the triangle at the end of this book has completely reversed my opinion of not only OB but the entire Stormlight Archive series. That may seem a bit extreme, but the growing relationship between Kal and Shallan was absolutely a huge reason why I kept reading after book 1 in the first place. Fantasy to me is all about the characters. You can create as much magic and as many Big Bad Evils as you want, but if you don't have the characters there is no reason to read the world you've created. And the way that SA was written to my eyes made it apparent that we were going to get a slow burn relationship between two very interesting main characters. I've even defended Shallan and her potential to other people I know who read the series many times. But the last 10% of Oathbringer just absolutely shat on that potential and represents a huge backslide in my eyes into a very uninteresting direction. Nothing against Adolin, I think he's a fine side character and very good for what he is, but he's not "protagonist relationship material." Even worse was the way that Sanderson went about it. Just straight up assassinating Kal and Shallan's relationship in half a page, the absurd justifications for Shallan's feelings for Adolin, and the shotgun marriage. Everything just went down the drain all at once at the end. Adolin doesn't really get Shallan, he's just nice and understands other people. Which aren't exactly unique characteristics, Kaladin himself is full of those, as are most people in real life. He doesn't have the life experience to match her, unlike Kaladin. I fear that what we're going to get going forward is more awkward justifications that try to ram the characters together regardless of how they fit. And we'll be deprived of the great potential badassery that Kal and Shallan could have gotten up to together. It's possible that Sanderson is baiting us with this "twist," but at this point I think reversing the triangle would require butchering their characters even more (because of the marriage), or killing off Adolin. Which I *don't* want to happen. Especially not with Maya around now.