earthexile

Yeah I'm sorry, I did not mean to imply that Sanderson is prejudiced. I just figure that he knows about that part of the religon's history and was inspired by that, and other cultures' ways of doing the same thing, when he created the various forms of racism in the Cosmere. I am not, however, wrong about the LDS church's historical position on race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormonism

It might be worth considering that Sanderson grew up in the LDS church, which until very recently taught that being born white was a reward for serving God in a previous incarnation. Those who failed to serve God were born into other cursed races. The Native Americans were actually a tribe of Israelites who were cursed with their new appearance. And many systems of slavery and prejudice have been 'justified' with the Curse of Ham concept, a reference to when a character in the Bible gets cursed so that all his descendants will be servants and menial laborers. They decided that it clearly meant black people. Other times the concept was Manifest Destiny. Basically "Here we are conquering this place, clearly God thinks we ought to have it." This isn't so much a thing Brandon does, as a thing Brandon recognizes as a pattern in cultures. People don't like hurting other human beings, so dehumanizing others is a requirement for certain types of civilizations to function. Everybody has done this, they come up with reasons that their hate and suspicion are correct, it's never justified.

Chouta makes me think of falafel, although I know that isn't right. Chouta is fried meatballs in gravy, wrapped in a flatbread, although soulcast meat might be nearly as boring as ground chick peas. I find it amusing that Kaladin is offended by the idea of eating while working, that seems like the sort of thing soldiers would get used to quickly. Maybe Alethi food taboos are more extensive than I realized. The 'chicken' concept also got me thinking- if every bird on Roshar is known as a chicken... then how do we know what kind of bird the characters are actually eating? The obvious implication is that they're eating the kind of bird we call a chicken, but on Roshar a chicken could be a turkey, or an eagle, or a raven. We know they have geese because Rock identifies a goose-feathered arrow. I wonder what spicy curried parakeet tastes like.

Another thing to keep in mind is that genetics don't express on Roshar the way they do on Earth, or apparently any other Cosmere worlds. The patch-and-stitch nature of genes on Roshar is bizarre, there are people like the Iriali and Herdazians with weird metallic body parts, and when couples with different hair colors have a child, the child just has both hair colors in patches. These people probably look a lot stranger than most of us are imagining, most of the time.

The thing about killing Baby Hitler is that you are left in the timeline where Hitler never did all the Hitler things, and you've now killed a baby