earthexile

I think El isn't a human, because of the way he talks about them. His musings illustrate Us Singers and Those Humans in contrast. He's not just without rhythms, he's had them removed.

You would have to do some kind of Aluminum Feruchemy trick for this, or at least it's the first things that comes to my mind for removing Identity from something. The question becomes, what process do we use to be able to apply that force to the metallic Aether? If we can bring in off-world knowledge and powers, a copy of "Rhythm of War" sure would be a handy thing for a Scadrian to get their hands on. They were doing stuff with blanking Identity with sound.

I have suspected for awhile that Jasnah's illness will turn out to not even have been an illness. It'll be one of those insane cultural things, like how in America rich people have had their 'troublesome' daughters hospitalized and even lobotomized. Twelve-year-old Jasnah probably made some comment about religion, or gender roles, or her utter disinterest in kissing boys and picking husbands, and freaked everyone out. And it's just been "her madness" ever since, and we don't talk about it.

You're completely right and I just plain forgot. Cultivation doesn't have that situation to grasp at yet, in the Stormlight timeline. Good catch.

I think AonDor makes a really interesting contrast to the more... I suppose 'primitive' magic systems like Allomancy and Surgebinding, which are often described as feeling very natural and instinctive to use in general, but can be developed and honed for specificity and complexity. They're like having a new kind of arm added to yourself, it doesn't take long to learn to swing it at someone, but you won't be doing calligraphy for awhile, especially since practicing is expensive, you have to burn through the little amounts of energy you can gather. AonDor is the opposite. Do pretty much anything you can think of, with limitless energy from nowhere, *if* you can put in the scholarly and manual dexterity work to become an expert in a complicated programming language of divine symbols and modifiers that you hopefully have a way of learning. And you've got the extremely detailed outside information that it takes to calculate the correct way to write your spell. And you make no mistakes. And nobody interrupts. And unlike those other systems, with active, willful Shards enforcing their will and intent on the powers they allow into their worlds, and over the beings that use them, Elantrians are just working with an inexhaustible well of loose high-intensity Godness that probably doesn't have a perspective on what's done with it. I am very, very interested to see what they are like in the high tech space age. They seem like they could be the scariest of all invested peoples, if they decided to.

I think she didn't, because Harmony and Autonomy are warring over the system, and it seems like one or both of them would have taken notice if yet another Shard popped in from offworld while the whole situation was coming together. Of course, her nature is to move carefully and let people not know she's around. So I could be wrong. Until we know for sure, she could be anywhere doing anything that smacks of growth and development. But I think of all the places for her to go when Roshar fell, places with active Shards and advanced civilizations already crawling all over them would make poor choices. Harmony might be the only thing in the Cosmere as dangerous as Retribution, not just because he bears two powers but because he's so young. The elder Shards are way more constrained to their powers' Intents, it's what destroyed Tanavast and left Rayse so vulnerable. Harmony has only been at it for a few centuries, and still behaves very much like a human man with his hands on great power, rather than a melodramatic false god like so many of the others. And Harmony may be one of the Shards who can perceive and manipulate the future even better than Cultivation can. Leras' capacity for plotting in a way that his confused and ignorant humans could actually discover and execute was *insane.* But that's the nature of Preservation, keeping things together. Holding steady. Not falling apart. Knowing what comes next. If I were Cultivation, I think I'd try to set myself up on Drominad. There is great potential for growth and development there, and it's got the potential to remain safe and neutral in the larger Cosmere conflict while also becoming more and more vitally important for everyone. And in my more cynical moods, I might try to do something with the fact that these people have placed a lot of trust in a giant magical serpent recently. I'm kind of a giant magical serpent. And these Aviar are just thrilling to my sense of Cultivation, aren't they? I wonder what happens when I feed the worms to more kinds of creature...

For all we know, the Diagram included a chain of calculations that made it make sense for Azir to stand for some reason. It works out to draw Coalition forces away from places Odium considers way more personally vital, like the Shattered Plains and Thaylenah. Maybe it even works out for Retribution that there's a single powerful human nation still planted on Roshar. His galactic conquistador army has to practice with *someone.*

I've written a bit about this before, but I think the Order names are built on more poetical and interpretive understandings of the words. For example, Edgedancers. This seems like a straightforward reference to sliding with Abrasion, sure. It is. But I think it's also other things: They are the Order that goes among the forgotten and ignored, and brings them miracles. We could say they're at the *edges* of society, doing something beautiful and inspiring. Someone showing they're particularly skilled and agile at anything is often compared to a dance, even if it's something like cooking or computer programming. We speak of elegance, grace, confidence. They can reach across even the *edge* of death itself, and get you back on your feet. And of course we should keep in mind the way these compound words probably work in Vorin writing and language. It's probably a glyphpair, and these glyphs are open to some amount of interpretation themselves. I think a very fun example is the Elsecallers, which as you pointed out seems like it specifically refers to Transportation. But if you think about it for a minute, you'll probably recall that our only Elsecaller is Jasnah, and she does a heck of a lot more Transformation than she does Transportation. In fact she seems way better at Transformation than any of the Lightweavers, when it comes to changing this stuff into that stuff with speed and precision. So there's more to it. The glyph pair for Elsecaller would probably be one symbol for "else," and one symbol for "caller." But we know these symbols are all used with a little poetry and subtlety. "Else" could also be "difference," "change," or "other." "Caller" could be "announcer," or "demander," or "messenger." Jasnah behaves the same way with humans as she does when she's commanding objects and substances to Transform: Sheer obdurate willpower, and the ruthless force that it takes to back up her demands. She doesn't try to inspire people to realize complicated moral truths on their own with clever stories and questions. She says "We're not doing slavery anymore, and that's what it is, and if you don't like it, get your sword and I'll kill you in front of everyone and do it anyway." So I see Elsecaller as something like "One who demands for things to be different." They're all like that, the ideas and powers all operate on the Physical, Cognitive, and Spiritual levels. Windrunners and Skybreakers both fly, but they fly differently because of their other powers: Shaping the winds and air pressure with Adhesion, versus just slamming through the world full-force.

The Shards are not merely superlative expressions of their Intent, it also matters that they are out of context. Each of the Shards is a piece of a whole, so they're all incomplete. Honor is separated from Mercy, or Ambition, or Preservation. It's one million percent focused on doing what you said you would do and behaving how you promised to behave. Leaving an abusive relationship bothers it, showing up to a duel and killing a guy pleases it. We like the idea of honor, but without all the other things, it's just a kind of stubbornness. I think that's what makes Odium's "Passion" something different from love. Without the context of those other parts, raw raging emotion isn't really good for anything, it's not constructive or sustainable. I can crave and enjoy things just fine, that's a part of life and it can exist in balance with the others. But without the others? No sense of honor, no call to grow and change, no drive to preserve, no devotion, no reason, no whimsy? You couldn't love anyone or anything properly like that. What a hollow, pointless way to be. Truly a void, despite feeling so intense at first.

Honor and Odium are frightfully compatible, I think that's how the people who worshipped them could fully switch religions and forget. They're both obsessive, relentless, and rigid. They both have no chill at all. Tanavast trashed his Connection to Honor largely through pretty reasonable choices, although that one thing was pretty gross. Honor and Odium are both things that can keep people at war forever.

It seems to be the ability to imagine something and then, from scratch, make it real enough to matter and exist in the Physical world. Like a version of what a Shard does when they conjure life on a world, only it might be even crazier than that, because it seems like something that's not easy for them to do. Honor's account mentions discovering the Singers, and shepherding Humans from somewhere else, and finding them in places, but not making them. The beings he creates with Cultivation are primarily Cognitive, only kind of touching on the Physical world where "real people" exist. The sentient lifeforms of the Cosmere seem to be either Adonalsium's work, or there's some other reason they exist in places, but it's not the Shards doing it. You can convince something that already exists to Transform, you can puppet an illusion around, you can bring random things to a semblance of life, you can bring a just-murdered guy back to life. But what Shallan did is take nothing and make there be a whole armored knight with a sword instead. That's getting into the kind of divine shenanigans that could really wreck a planet if you started being silly with it.

I don't know whether they've got any big hairy Shin looking fellows in the Ardentia, but I'd love to play Brother Lhan, the Party Ardent from the interlude in Words of Radiance. Like many of the interludes it seems at first to just be a random little story of some Rosharan slice of life, and in this case it's this ridiculous fallen priest who starts new recruits on their first day with a blunt explanation of how chill and easy this job is, if you're just willing to suck up to the Queen. It's so revolting and corrupt, and it's baffling, how could this be happening? Are the Lighteyes really this psychotically self-indulgent? I thought the women were the smart ones, how are they partying even harder in Alethkar than the guys at the Shattered Plains? At this point in the story we're experiencing a lot of Kaladin's struggles with racism and injustice, Dalinar's frustration and disgust with his culture, it kind of just blends in. Alethkar sucks. But it's not just that, and when we find out what's been growing in the city, centered on the palace, Brother Lhan and his bizarre culture of worthless party Ardents take on a whole new shade. I think it would be a lot of fun to be a guy whose religious dignity has begun to bend to the will of demonic hedonism. He'd make some interesting expressions.

I think a lot of the names of the Orders, and the core identity of the Orders, comes largely from the *interaction* of the Surges. They're layered and interconnected, the way the Realms are. The Windrunners and Skybreakers both fly but not the same way, because their flight interacts with their other power. Windrunners have additional control over the pressure and movement of the air, Skybreakers just slam through the world. Shallan does a whole lot of Transformation in tandem with her Illumination, I think she's just not understanding it that way. The way Kaladin's Spiritual Gravitation makes him someone who draws men like a magnet, Shallan is Transforming her own spirit when she invests so much of herself, along with power, into her alter selves. She's Transforming others when her art resonates with them in a way that makes them truly want to be their best self all of a sudden. "Weaving light" in the mystical sense of adding something noble and healing to the world. In contrast, Jasnah has incredible command over the states of matter, and can comprehend and visualize things like molecular chemistry in detail, so her Transformation of physical things is amazing. But we rarely see her persuade anyone to anything, the way a Lightweaver can. She changes you through force of will and the raw application of knowledge and power. Get your sword out and see how much good it does you, idiots. Things are going to be different now. If we found a glyphpair for Else Caller and tried to translate it, we might come up with Difference Orderer, or Change Demander. Like "I call for things to be else." I like to play these kinds of twisty games with words, and when I apply it to the Radiant Orders I get the impression Brandon is doing a lot of the same stuff. He's gone out of his way to introduce all these ideas about how Rosharan languages work, and why words might be considered or read in certain ways, and such. I think there is a little crystal of poetic meaning and inference built into all these names.

I think it's a great example of a situation that *could* become a Love Triangle, but because it's about intelligent, introspective people who really want to connect and be happy, rather than anyone just craving to possess someone, it works out in a healthy way while still presenting some interesting internal dilemmas for the characters. The desires and anxieties that drive the situation all make sense for who they're happening to, and help them grow, but it never becomes one of those obnoxious Team Jacob Team Edward things. There's a very funny scene in one of the Interludes that suggests to me what Brandon thinks of those kinds of stories.

It's a couple of things. Firstly what Treamayne said seems right to me, Dalinar is physically present in the Shattered Plains during his visions, and his consciousness is not separated from his body, he jerks around and speaks out loud, like a person nearly awake from a dream. He is able to teach himself to move and act in the vision while making himself sit still and speak intelligently to a listening scribe. So he's there and so is the Thrill. But it's another thing that I think is just as important and meaningful- he is a man of Alethkar, and Alethi culture is wound around the Thrill the way American culture is wound around Football and Cars. They don't understand or experience it as an alien force driving them crazy, usually. The way they understand it, that's just how it feels to be a badass Alethi dominating your opponents. I can get really hungry, I can get really aroused, I can get the Thrill. The idea that it's a demon doesn't come up for at least centuries before Dalinar's story. And it's reasonable to imagine that a man of Alethkar might not understand or care, when you consider all this, where his own mind and emotions end, and the Thrill begins. It feels to him like his own wrath and joy and desire, off the chain. So maybe just starting to get normal human amped up for a fight, an Alethi would think of it as the first hit of the Thrill coming on.