king of nowhere

it is possible that silverlight started as a center of learning because people from 3 different planets could come trade, and then it remained a center of learning while each and every planet was sistematically held back by major catastrophes. because all major planets did. so, maybe it's just that the time dilation problem was offset by the constant peace. in that case, silverlight should gradually fall behind the curve. at least unless all major civilizations wipe themselves out again.

that could be easily circumvented by someone else cutting her arms. one intriguing possibility is that her arms would regenerate with the manacles on, as they are somehow linked to her spiritweb just like that. i wonder, since they are heavily invested, what kind of effect would be achieved by the right kind of anti-investuiture

what are you referring to? i am not aware of sazed manipulating fortune to cause stuff. he helped wax in various ways, but in a "point him in the right direction and give him some stuff" way.

yes, you do indeed need a lot of brute force. i was just wondering what kind of brute force it would actually take, and if a custom-made machine is really the only way. if there could be ways involving a bit less of brute force. since an industrial tech has plenty of ways to generate brute force

i'm not aware of any cosmere force that can cause those kind of coincidence. if it was the wheel of time, i'd say ta'veren. hoid has the power to be where he needs to be, using fortune in some way. but none of the parties involved had access to it.

finished. i liked the book, a lot. but it really strikes as too much of a coincidence that sixth explored the emberdark, finds a dozen islands on it, points to one at random (possibly the closest, as he was on a time crunch), and it's exactly the one where cakoban died, while starling and her crew find that old map passed down through millennia and reach the same island within a few minutes of each other.

i have a hard time accepting that an object so small can be made virtually undestructible. surely there are ways to remove it. which won't involve the power source of a capital ship. just for start, you could chop off starling's arms. i'm pretty sure she would regenerate them, but the manacles will come off. sure, cutting off a dragon's arms can't be easy, she showed herself to be impervious to gunfire. on the plus side, it means you have more freedom in doing extreme things to starling, without worrying of accidentally hurting her too much. i'm thinking shardblades, industrial lasers, holding explosive in her hands, getting her hands crushed under a big spaceship, or burned by the exhaust... even in our investiture-less, pre-space age civilization, we have the tools to cut through mountains. i can't believe a thin band of silver, or a couple of arms, can resist that much. i'll leave out nuclear bombs because, while I would bet they can vaporize the manacles, i don't think there's a way to not kill starling in the process. edgedancers could make starling slippery enough to get out of the manacles with minor scrapings. elsecallers, if very skilled, may be able to teleport her while leaving the manacles behind. but i keep thinking brute force would be more practical, and technology is more suited for that. a silver or aluminium file may be able to abrade the manacles in a way that would not be restored. extreme heat may do the trick, or it may melt starling's arms, which would achieve the same goal. i just can't believe those manacles are so utterly indestructible as they are presented.

I wonder if in the more cosmopolitan parts of the cosmere there is a patji's park movie franchise, focusing on people getting chases and eaten by nightmaws, tuskruns, deathants, deepwalkers, and whatever else. with far too many sequels and spinoffs. would be funny to have it referenced

Honor and odium fit well together, while ruin and preservation don't - though they can be harmony, if well handled. I just had a train of thought where I wondered what kind of shard would come from the union of honor and wihmsy? the shard of "uphold oaths, except when you don't feel like it"? What are other higly disfunctional shard combinations? - odium + devotion: the shard of being really confused about one's feelings - retribution + mercy: I will find all those who ever wronged me... and forgive them! - ruin + cultivation: i don't even know how this one could work - endowment and dominion: I want to give stuff and empower others, but i also want to subjugate them... on second thought, could be the shard of loan sharks - autonomy and devotion: the shard of open relationships?

the real question is not "how many castes are there". in fact, even on roshar we never saw a lot of the nahns. the real question is, what does it actually feel to live in a caste system. how does it impact one's life, and society as a whole besides, while brandon may be inspired by india, his world is not india, and should not look like it.

additionally, i am pretty sure with his knowledge he can find workarounds to use other sources of investiture. also, he probably has enough breath to last a long time, enough to leave roshar for somewhere else if needed.

Page 292, chapter 31 Deadeye? He peered ahead at the other cryptic. Was that what the bent tines in the head meant? I guess it's supposed to be "lines"? The vocabulary returns some meaning for the word 'tine', but they don't seem extremely appropriate - especially not compared to lines, when describing the head of a cryptic

Jasnah is a very interesting case; I believe she was implicitly working under a mild version of omniscent morality license: she could make decisions for others, she could take agency from others, she could be an exception to the rules, because she is so much smarter than anyone else, that she knows better. And she really is so much smarter than anyone else, and everyone can see it, that everyone just went along. Still, everything that Jasnah has done, taravangian has done 100 times worse, so if I was Fen I'd have never taken his deal. karbranth gave itself to taravagian, so he was allowed. just like odium could interfere directly with his people. but yes, then he could have just saved his family regardless. besides, the agents of cultivation were also taken in the blast, and they were not his, so nothing should stop T from throwing tsunamis at other coastal cities... in general, when it comes to shards, the magic becomes a lot softer than normal sanderson. and this is a problem, because the books are hard magic and use magic that the reader understands to drive the plot. I do think sanderson wrote himself in a corner when he introduced too many godlike powers, and "their covenant stops them from interfering directly" can only carry you so much.

now spoilers for wind and truth are allowed, right? wind and truth spoiler

What? No, it's what happens to waxillium ladrian in the first two books

A man shot his wife in the head, then he got engaged to another woman. unbecknownst to everyone, the wife survived. she forgave the husband who shot her, and came to him to explain that she only wanted to be his wife again. the man didn't even listen to her. as soon as she got close, he shot her in the head again. this time, she died. he was hailed a hero. it's worth mentioning he also narrowly missed headshotting the sister of his new fiancee. twice. and he tried to shoot his sister.

supposedly, kelsier could make the bands of mourning because he had all powers. attempts by people with a single power to create more elaborate medalions failed. however, we later learn that kelsier never recovered his powers after death. so, how did he make the bands?

i was refraining from commenting further because it was clear the discussion was going in that direction. i posted because you gave permission. i will go back to refraining mode, then

Ok, back to posting them No, I am trying a perspective of greater good which accounts for the well-being of both humans and listeners. and that, unsurprisingly, entails coming to an agreement that allows both sides to live, rather than battering one into submission. if i am focusing on "what else the humans should have done" instead of what the singers could have done, it's because the slaveform singers couldn't have done anything. I don't care how it looks froom the singer's side. revenge is not justice, especially against people whose wrongdoing were entirely made in ignorance. they have every right to defend their newfound freedom; they have no right to infringe on the freedom of others. besides, the singers got coopted into mobilizing for war by the voidspren, their lives wasted by the hundreds of thousands. most of them would have taken a truce with the humans, had odium allowed it. There is some truth to that, if put properly in context. Luis XVI was trying to fix things. In fact, a more callous ruler may have ordered the army to shoot on the protestors, avoiding the revolution. and it wasn't him who caused the economic crysis, but the large spendings of his ancestors, mostly luis XIV. Not sure about marie antoniette, i heard that she gave charity but also that she spent big time. regardless, the people in charge kept making a mess of things. so in the end the revolution that started the decline of the monarchies wasn't caused by an evil king, but by an incompetent one. an evil kind would have crushed the revolution under an iron boot. anyway, if the people had just trusted in the rulers to fix things, we'd still have absolute monarchies and kings by divine right. so i would say, some good did come out of the whole mess. "collapse" is a word used way too often. the economy "collapsed" many times, yet most people got on without problems. I'm hearing the word "collapse" many times per day in my news feed, and yet nothing has collapsed at all. it seems "collapse" is used as synonim with "temporarily inconvenienced". but the media must always exaggerate to sell the story. I don't know about france, but in italy we have the second republic after the "collapse" of the first... which entailed a large trial for corruption involving all the main political parties, that lost popular support, and within a few years got disbanded and substituted for new ones. Good times, actually. None of that caused any major inconvenience for the citizens. I feel most nations could use some of that "collapse". Instead, nowadays, when a politician is condemned for embezzling money, his voters defend him. he gains more votes. no, i'm not even talking about any specific politician, it's happened on most democracies in the last decade. I wonder what went wrong with the average voters. We should be happy when the law applied to those in charge. we used to support the judges on that. Meanwhile, north korea has kept a stable system of government for the last 70 years, without any hint of an institutional crysis. if you value stability by itself, that should make it the best-ruled country on the planet...

i don't consider them to be relevant for the purpose of determining the morality of whether the humans deserve to be invaded and enslaved. the common people - even learned ones like jasnah - have no way to know, and can't be blamed for it as far as everyone could determine, the parshendi were not sapient. smarter than regular cattle, but not by much. they even experimented putting them in the wild, they were unable to survive. what are you going to do, give them their own nation when they don't have the capacity to handle it? if we discovered that our livestock was actually made of people magically transmuted to cattle, i'd be horrified to discover, and would absolutely call for giving them some land and treating them as equals from now on. but i would not feel guilty for having treated livestock as livestock, because i had no way of knowing it wasn't regular livestock. no more than i would feel guilty if some villain triggered the ignition of my car to detonate a bomb somewhere. i'd consider myself morally obliged to help those unfortunate victims, and yes, even to give them compensation for having used them as cattle. but i do not consider myself morally guilty for something i had no practical way to know was bad.

i cannot symphatyze with a group bent on subjugating and enslaving others on behalf of an evil god, despite their other circumstances. I especially cannot get worked up over something that happened 2500 years ago and that nobody alive remembers or understands, no matter how atrocious. especially because we know the leaders of the human coalition are reasonable people and an agreement could have been reached. an agreement was about to be reached, in azimir, before the fused show up. it's not a happy ending for the singers anyway. they are going to get used as fodder for the future cosmere conquest.

Given that it uses cards but has movement rules, i'd hazard some combination of magic: the gathering and warhammer.

me too. those shards doing nothing makes them accomplices of odium i disagree. those events were 7000 years old, you can't pass judgment on that. i mean, 7000 years is more or less the same time frame when the indoeuropean people moved from india to europe. they conquered europe, supplanting the local people, with the exception of sami reindeer herders, who lived in too cold a climate for the indoeuropean. now me, a modern european, am a descendant of those indoeurpean invaders. I have a strong sense of morality, but i really do not believe that it would be right for me to give up my home and all my possession to a sami reindeer herder - descendant of those people that my ancestors wronged. and let's not even get started on me getting deported back to india, where i would legitimately belong under this crazy interpretation. i don't get why the revelation that humans were the original invaders was so shocking. it was 7000 years ago. it was a different time. everyone invaded everyone else a dozen times since then. even the reveal of BAM betrayal, while a very bad action, doesn't reflect in any way on the current humans on roshar - because those people have no relation whatsoever to those who did the deed. I disagree also on that. this kind of sectarian "my side, right or wrong" mentality leads to an endless cycle of war. it is important that one be willing to object against actions taken from his own side, and defect from it in the worst case. imagine what star wars would have been if darth vader in the end had said "the empire is my people. there is no excuse for betraying it" and had executed luke. or if the protagonist of avatar had said "well, i can see that the humans here are doing imperialism and war crimes, but they are my people, and there can be no excuse for betraying them", and had destroied the na'vi. i don't think you would have called those actions moral or just. on the other hand, i also disagree here. oh, i agree that gavinor did nothing bad - except perhaps trusting odium*. However, that applies to the vast majority of soldiers in any battlefield. most of them see things from their perspective. radiant dalinar ordered the death of thousands of enemy soldiers whose only fault was seeing only half of the picture. that's war. gavinor has no faults of his own, but he is supporting the cause of odium. he must be treated as an enemy at war**. actually, i blame dalinar for being unwilling to kill his nephew. he would have killed any other soldier or fused without thinking much of it. that other soldier or fused would have been no less innocent than gavinor. it's just that dalinar would have killed someone else, but he made an exception for his family; in that, he was hypocrite, though of a very understandable variety. * I mean, if your father figure is focusing your whole education into instilling a deep hate and is raising you to fight someone else, you should question his methods and intentions and wonder that maybe he's manipulating and using you. but then, gavinor never had anyone explain those basics to him. ** notice, this doesn't make taravangian right on morality. there is a lot of nuance between "no end justifies the means" and "you can do whatever as long as you claim it's for a greater good".

interesting question to explore. singers are definitely too inhumans for me to feel attracted by them. i'd be buddy-buddy with them, but without romantic inclinations, just like i'd be with other men. then again, i do notice that my stance on what i consider feminine enough to be attractive can change. i used to dislike piercings because of the unnatural look, but i gradually came to associate them with a woman trying to look more attractive, now i like them. in a similar vein, if i were to hang around a femalen with a very feminine personality, it is possible the subconscious part of my brain that gets to decide what is attractive would eventually decide to consider her a woman. it would take some getting used to, but i can imagine getting there. at least for the one in the picture; a direform would probably be way too much. someone like syl would be very easy to be attracted to, she looks like a girl and she's very girly; besides, the way she's easily excitable triggers my protective feelings, a lot. i don't care that she's incorporeal, it's probably too abstract as a concept for the aforementioned subconscious part of my brain. a kandra like melaan, i can also easily see them as a woman, and the fact that she can change shape wouldn't put me off - though I would not want to get intimate with her when she's using a male body. so, having thought about it, it all depends on whether i would perceive the "alien" as a woman.

what? how is shallan cruel? how is she vindicative? did i miss some major parts of her character? show me a single scene where she is cruel or vindicative. i wouldn't call her a bully either, though she does tend to get things done her way, so does kaladin, or pretty much anyone else. shallan is a good person grown up in horrible company. she killed her mother, her father, her best friend, and two of her mentors; of those, four were clearly instances of self-defence, and the fifth was basically an accident. i don't see how she can be accounted for those acts. in fact, shallan probably has the lowest body count among main characters, by far. i don't remember her killing anyone else. her only real fault was being part of the ghostbloods for so long, which i pin down to immaturity and not wanting to face her problems.