earthexile

I think Aimia conceals fabrials on an epic scale. The kinds of fabrials you would need to, say, Soulcast a big chunk of Roshar into being Earthish instead. Or to flatten an entire region into a smooth, shallow basin. Or to shatter a plain in a symmetrical pattern. Or to make stone flow into massive constructs to create environments for humans, like Urithiru and the Windblades. I think there is terraforming equipment. Which is why the consequences of it being found could be "the ends of worlds."

I think I've got the four spren genders thing figured out. The Dawnsingers were the people now called Parsh. Their species is asexual unless in mateform, which almost seems to leave them with four distinct gender identities: -Sexual Male -Sexual Female -Asexual Male -Asexual Female I think the more common, asexual genders are what they mean by the terms "malen" and "femalen."

He did use Progression to heal, but he also projected some kind of vision of a perfected Adolin into Adolin's mind. It reminds me of the way Shallan draws idealized images of people, and made me think that it had something to do with the way his Illumination works.

I am convinced that he used a form of Illumination on Adolin when he healed his arm. His thing is that he "sees," and Illumination can be interpreted as gaining knowledge, rather than literally projecting light. We've seen that Dalinar is able to use a metaphorical version of adhesion to create connections between himself and other people. That's why Renarin isn't able to learn from Shallan, no matter how many times she tries to explain it. They use the same surge in very different ways. These things are forces of nature, but they're bent around the framework of human cognition, and our words have many definitions. This leads me to wonder about all kinds of things, like what would someone be able to do with different interpretations of Progression or Abrasion, or other surges we haven't seen? I think it's gonna get weird.

Following that concept, was Adonalsium a Shard of something even greater?

It seems to me that the entire Cosmere concept is based on a somewhat arcane belief in Mormonism, which is that any given human has the ultimate potential to ascend to godhood and raise their own world full of people. His stories all seem to include the concept of people growing towards divinity, and what a gigantic and consciousness-altering responsibility that would be.

We are overlooking something, I think. Nightblood is a heavily invested entity, with some kind of consciousness. Could Nightblood be the 'person' who made a deal with the Night Watcher?

So let's say Taln is tortured and twisted to see the other Heralds as his enemies, as nine entities that he's tied to and can't escape, nine opposites of himself. Nine shadows?

I've said this before, but I think the overriding theme of the Stormlight Archive is atonement with the past. Every story thread and every major character's arc is based on that theme, in one way or another, and the novels are all based on a flashback-centered layout. "Odium" means hatred towards someone for something they have done, which is the justification/explanation/excuse for so much multi-generational hatred in the world. Historical, cultural, racial, and religious baggage all come from the painful lives of people who are dead. All of which is to say, there is zero chance that Brandon will forget to have our heroes' pasts and actions come back to bite them in their asses.

I think Odium and the Desolations are collectively a metaphor for the way that history and cultural baggage wind up prolonging, or even restoring to life, pointless destructive conflicts that began before anyone in the world was even alive. The Fused are literally the angry dead, taking over the lives of the young so they can prosecute their ancient grudge. So much of what we become seems to be determined by things that happened, and actions that were taken, before we even existed. We drop into reality and we find that we're responsible for atrocities somehow, because our ancestors did them but only we are alive to stand in for them because we resemble them. People are born innocent but the cultures and societies that form the basis of their identity can label them as oppressors, or victims. If there is a single cohesive theme to the Stormlight Archive so far, it seems to be the theme of atoning with the past. It seems almost impossible to just drop it, but that makes it really hard to move forward.

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