king of nowhere

if nothing else, sades was with dalinar at the rift, and he planned strategy with dalinar as an equal. sadeas is as much responsible for the rift as dalinar. in fact, all the crimes dalinar ever committed during his time as warlord, sadeas was on his team, and equally responsible. may i also point out that dalinar was trying to find excuse to not loot towns, while sadeas had his soldiers pick the good looking girls among the townspeople for him to rape? for all of dalinar's troubled past, even at his worst, he still was much better than sadeas.

moash had a moral code. but after a while he gave up trying. particularly telling is that he recognizes that kaladin is good, and he's intentionally trying to destroy him. to get him to stop trying. heck, he tried to kill kaladin in book 2. for no other reason than to go on with his vengeance.

what's the point? amaram was never a candidate for redemption.

laral is a good woman. she cares about her community, she has at least that in common with kaladin. then again, i'm not sure she'd be ready to start a relationship just after her husband was murdered. and she may go for a political marriage anyway. kaladin, on his side, need to work out his issues before being ready for a relationship. unless he's lucky enough to find one girl who could help him with those, but such people are rare. personally, i've seen/heard many instances of a lover trying to help hir mate through issues that are disrupting to the couple, and it very rarely ends well. kaladin needs a pshycologist, and before that he needs to realize he needs a pshycologist. and then he needs to worldhop on some more advanced world, because i doubt they have developed pshycology on roshar. but all this is moot. what really sets me thinking on this coupling is trying to decide whether "kalaraldin" sounds cool or awkward

moash has always been nothing but honest throught the whole saga. he was outspoken against kaladin at first. he never tried to hide what he was doing from kaladin. we got his viewpoints for a while, and he was never duplicitous with anyone. wait... does this mean moash has some positive trait?????

at least, it is for someone like kaladin who suffers from depression

brandon can write a character so loathsome, it cannot be possibly redeemed. and then he can write a satisfying redemption arc for it. that said, i don't want moash to be redeemed. i want him to die, and not even in a climatic battle with kaladin. i want him to waste away in the most anticlimatic possible way. he choose nothingness, and he should get it.

strange. adolin is one of the nices guys ever

but we do not wrap danger signs around hot dogs, and we do not dive under the desk when someone brings out a pen. we're still good.

when you heal with investiture, you restore your idea of yourself. to the point that if you see a scar or disability as part of yourself, that won't heal. so, if you see your clothes as part of yourself, then they should "heal" with investiture. as you don't heal clothes, you probably also don't lash them. i admit that it's not a 100% certainty, but i would definitely call is most unlikely that you lash your equipment with yourself.

yep, when i read that story i would have never thought we'd also be reduced to wearing masks and staying locked up at home within a few years. though tbh, in our case it is a temporary measure against a real, specific danger, while in that story it was just the normal state of things.

actually, yes. windrunners lash their bodies, unless they are specifically trying to lash their stuff too. their clothes are just dragged along with the rest of the body. i can't think of any specific quote from a book that can clarify the question for sure, but it's very likely this way. after all, when renarin heals with stormlight, he does not mend clothing too. i don't see why lashings would affect your equipment if healing does not. and carrying heavy gear will slow you down. worse, the gear will pull in one direction (normal gravity) while the rest of your body is pulling somewhere else, making it more difficult to control your flight. even assuming that the lashing act on your equipment too, it should be more expensive in that case, it should take more stormlight to make the same lashing because you are affecting more stuff. but in this case there would be no big downside to carrying up to 10 kg of gear or so. more than that, it will significantly affect agility in combat too.

on the other hand, when you are flying every bit of weight reduces your manueverability. a few darts with grappling hooks would be a good trade, but a lot of the equipment suggested here is probably too impractical to carry around, or limited to niche uses.

ah, well. as far as that is concerned, yes, i also have faith that brandon is a good writer and knows what he's doing. it still can leave me puzzled. jasnah had a big solo adventure in shadesmar while everyone else was doing book 2, and we never learned anything about it. only that she came out looking like an action survivor protagonist. yes, i also get that there are enough characters and plots going on that we can't follow all of them. but strangely, i never got that feeling with the wheel of time, that i missed seeing what character X did in situation Y that was never shown.

i liked it for starsight, because while those months were eventful, nothing that happened was particularly momentous. but in this case i really feel like we're missing stuff

when brandon first said that there would be a 1 year time skip between the books, i assumed that nothing particularly important had happened in the meanwhile. nothing worth narrating. but! lots of things happened! kaladin had a lot of confrontations with the fused. he recruited more squires as long as he had willing spren. shallan infiltrated the sons of honor. somebody made a trip to aimia, where one of rock sons got some shards. there's just so much. why not write it too? the only reason i can imagine is, there was little character development involved. well, except kaladin got depressed again. so, all in all, it's been an eventful year. why did brandon decide to not narrate it?

huh. so brandon picked up a name that is a profanity in a foreign language, and then changed the name, and it was a coincidence? crazy world. and he made canon the profane word. now i wonder whether brandon does not know what the word means in italian, or if he knew and went ahead. after all, as the the number of names you invent increases, the likelyhood of one or more of them having some unfortunate meaning in a foreign language approaches one.

ok, this is something that i always wanted to ask about, but i never dared to. until today, when i discovered that the coppermind page still uses the original name. so, in the first mistborn book, there is a passing reference to "the people of cazzi". in later books, there are some more references to the same preascension people, but their name has been changed to "canzi" instead. so i wonder, did brandon change the name because someone told him what "cazzi" means in italian? if not, why else change the name? and why, in all the years since then, nobody in the coppermind who knew italian raised the question?

i would ignore the prologue if i were you. many fans love it, but i always found it too confusing for a first read. it makes sense after you're past book 3. you need to pay attention to the characters mentioned. the festival and everything is not particularly important, though if you don't like to dabble a bit into the various cultures of the world, then perhaps you should not get into the wheel of time. as for the larger worldbuilding, it will be unfolded with time.

+1. it is a downside of stories about people with superpowers, at some point those who lack said powers are just useless. i prefer when normal people can contribute too.

no idea, but i guess he'll at least want to finish the last draft before releasing chapters

not that i remember. keep in mind, though, that most people subsist on plants and little else because meat is more expensive. but i doubt that's what you were asking about.

you know, this reminds me of the wheel of time, and rand coming to cahirien the first time and getting involved in politics without doing anything, because even that is a political move. Brandon: "does nothing" fanbase: "oh, by his lack of action, he is clearly expressing his lack of support for ..." Brandon: "facepalm"

I'm not particularly familiar with american conservatives, but i don't think most of them are racist. I think a lot of them would be more along the lines of "yes, it's a tragedy that a guy was killed by the police like that, and the guilty policemen should and will be punished according to the law. but look from the other side, how many policemen get killed because they play it nice? because they don't put the knee on the suspect's neck and the suspect take the chance to pull a knife on them when he's close? or they get shot because they hesitate to shoot first? we must not remove the police's capacity to defend themselves" which is not a bad argument. as a rule of thumb, most people aren't that stupid, if a large % of the population holds an opinion, they must have some good reason. they aren't necessarily right, but it's unlikely they are totally in the wrong. also, most people aren't particularly evil, some may upheld oppression because they profit from it, but most would not, if they were given an honest alternative. which is pretty much the point; people will rarely pick clear evil over clear good, but they will easily pick evil against what they perceive as a greater evil. conservatives are rarely blind against social injustices. they merely see greater evil in the alternatives. in this case, they may think that making the police more nice will get more policemen shot. or that giving money to help the poor will take away money from the more productive parts of society, resulting in economic collapse for all. or even yet, they may think that if people make a riot, and we give them money, that would only encourage them to riot worse. or they may even think, we already run programs to fight racism, isn't that enough? why would we need even more? all those are reasonable concerns that need to be addressed if you want to win minds. you can often get people to your side - if not to agree with you, at least to accept that you have a fair point - if you listen to their concerns. if you try to understand why they don't agree with you - under the premise that they are neither stupid nor evil - and then you show them good answers for their concerns (of course, you need to actually have good answers to their concerns). attack them, accuse them of being stupid or evil, and they will go all defensive, even if they may agree with you at some point. most people are not evil. most people do evil when they see no better options. give people better options, and most often they will stop doing evil. those who still misbehave are the truly bad ones, and you can focus your attention on them. if a few people misbehave, they are probably evil, and should be repressed. but if large portions of society misbehave, they probably don't see good options, and you should try to help them.

I see. interesting approach. i knew of brandon's political stances from reading his commentaries, back in the time when he still wrote them. in particular stuff like trying to give every opinion a fair representation. also, all the charity auctions he takes, that were occasionally advertised on his site. this tipped me that, regardless of other political views, brandon is a good guy (be careful to equate conservative with oppressive; there are many good conservative values). that came only from reading the front page of his site, so i assumed it was more common knowledge than it actually was. yes, that's something that's difficult to understand from my perspective (italian, by the way, not polish). in europe we are facing a recrudescence of racism tied to the great migration wave of the last decade, but it's racism linked to social problems, not really to race. millions of immigrants went to europe without speaking the language of the new country, without having the qualifications to work, during a time when the economy had a hard time providing jobs even to the natives, so of course a lot of those immigrants turned to crime, or were recruited by the mafia. or came to live on charity, or on social service money. and of course there are the cultural issues, especially regarding women's rights, for most immigrants come from countries where those topics are... let's say, not particularly progressive. and not all are willing to adapt. and so of course the population is suspicious of racial minorities. but our problem with racism is all there. nobody thinks that immigrants are worse because of race. you hear people giving racist-sounding speeches in pubs, but if you confront them about their african coworker, or the arab guy at the kebab kiosk, or the chinese waitress, and they say "oh, but those guys are ok, they work for a living and respect our laws. it's not with them that i have a problem". i saw a youtube video of an afroamerican exchange student commenting on it, and she said that racism is the wrong concept, it's more xenophobia - which is not completely injustified, since it stems from actual social problems. Hence why i'm saying that those immigrant's children will be the measure of our success or failure in handling the whole immigration issue. I know that in some places in america it's different, that there's people who actually say "those guys work for a living and respect our laws, but i still have a problem with them, because race". it's hard to understand, though. my first instinct to deal with racism is still to consider it a social problem of disadvantaged people living in the ghettos, and treat it accordingly. which, anyway, shouldn't hurt.