king of nowhere

Well, part 1 is coming to an end, and generally the end of a part is marked by some important even/cliffhanger. So far, I get the impression that both shallan and adolin are close to snapping, but neither is that close; I mean, they don't look like they are nearing a cliffhanger, either of them. Shallan has too many subplots that just started and they'll probably arrive at some sort of conclusion first, and that conclusion will be bad for her. Adolin has no plot of his own, he's mostly a support to shallan and occasionally a foil to dalinar. i expect part one to end with some momentous revelation in kaladin's plot. Something dramatic happening with shallan or adolin is gues number two, but I think it more likely to happen in the end of part 2 or 3. @Harry the Heir: shallan was eventually discovered all the times (tyn herself remarked that no lie lives forever), but it was never a setback for her; in fact, all her failures had pushed her ahead: get discovered by jasnah --> she becomes closer with her than she was before get discovered by tyn --> she survives unschated, gains her contacts, and gains the respect of vatah get discovered by the ghostblood --> we still don't know what will come from it, but so far they seem likely to bring her family to her. Now, it is possible that all this is setting her up for a greater failure, as she won't be able to juggle all of this forever. In that case it was only a case that the kickback was coming later (which incidentally is often the case with liars). But she has sufffered no setback comparable to dalinar being betrayed at the tower, or kaladin being enslaved or killing syl, or jasnah being "assassinated". That despite being the most inexperienced at what she does. She was virtually a prisoner in her home until less than one year ago, and now she's consistently outperforming extremely skilled people in their respective fields of skill. looks dangerously close to mary sue terrain.

yes. many, many of us. every once in a while a thread like this pops up. You are far from the first venting out this problem

it is possible that alethi law forbids this, though. giving the misticism surrounding those blades, and the general favoritism the alethi laws place on the privileged ones by shifting the burden of proof on the weaker party, I wouldn't be surprised if it was forbidden to force someone to relinquish his until after he was proven guilty in a trial

"Shallan, I have a confession to make. I killed a man who deserves it. I am a murderer" "OMG! Me too! And twice over" "We have so much more in common than we ever realized!" "I feel bad for you being less accomplished than me on this field. Do you want help with your second one?"

on the other hand, I wonder what else could have dalinar done when amaram was elevated highprince. I don't think any of us has a master in alethi law, but I would bet the only way dalinar would have had to prevent amaram from being crowned was an open war against the princedom. Either that, or he could have threatened. He may have indicated that he would send a radiant to assassinate amaram if he had been crowned, and he certainly would have had the power to do it; dalinar would not use such tactics, however. Indeed, for all that they are technically part of the same nation, dalinar has virtually no power over sadeas' princedom aside from the power of arms, and the princedom itself is more akin to an hostile nation. if dalinar is not willing to take the assassination shortcut, that's a huge mess

wasn't reply to you in particular, but in general to all shalladin shippers. I'm not saying there is nothing, but I am saying that over 90% of times I've seen people start a romance in similar conditions (having shared a very intense and exciting experience, minuts the almost dead part), it failed as soon as the initial excitement died off.

good point here. There is however an important difference between dalinar and the others: all of dalinar's mistakes and failures can be attributed to external causes or stuff he could not predict very well. Other characters instead had intentionally failed to confront issues because they didn't want to. dalinar worked with sadeas because he trusted sadeas for their previous history, dalinar trusted sadeas in a ploy to push other highprinces to cooperate more, dalinar don't take control from elokhar because he does not trust himself to reign. On the other hand, kaladin does not confront moash with treason because he feels uncomfortable, and shallan does not confront plenty of stuff because it makes her uncomfortable. Even adolin, from the little we've seen in his POW, does not confront the sadeas accident because it makes him uncomfortable. Dalinar makes mistakes in good faith, and he is a pretty bad judge of characters, and he is politically naive, but he always tries his very bestest. Other characters have intentionally failed instead. Which I'm not fauling them for; I don't think there is anyone who never had similar issues. Dalinar is borderline unbelievable in how uncorruptible he is. At least on how he's been in the latest years; we know he went as far as getting large parts of his memory erased because he didn't want to confront them either. But the point is, there is a difference between dalinar's mistakes and everyone else's mistakes. which is not to say that dalinar should not be criticized, but I can totally understand why some people (including myself) go easier on him than on everyone else. ok, point taken. Still, i don't think adolin will act until he will see some active threat on amaram's part. Re: kaladin and shallan: it is actually uncertain how strong an attraction there is. Consider what they've been through in the chasms. There was forced cooperation in the face of imminent death, and wild adrenaline swings, and a lot of enforced physical closeness; this sparked confidence, which in turn brought even more closeness. I am sure if I had a similar experience I would also end up with strong feelings for the girl: atraction or hate. Now, if the girl was not my type, attraction would eventually fade within weeks to months; but I would feel strongly attracted to her in the meantime, as a side effect of the experience shared. I don't know the feminine perspective, but I would be surprised if it was much different. So, nothing strange that kaladin and shallan lliked each other at the end of the ordeal. It would have been strange if they didn't. Only time will tell how it evolves, but so far I would be cautious to take their budding pseudo-romance as much more than the brain's natural reaction to an hormonal storm coupled with a lot of suddenly found mutual respect.

as far as both we and adolin know, amaram is not scheming against dalinar, he's not posing any threat against adolin's family or loved ones. in fact, according to stuff we know, and shallan knows, and adolin does not know, amaram should be very cooperative right now: the voidbringers have been successfully brought back, now it's time to unite. That was the plan of the sons of honor. Then again, they want a teocratic government, which goes against dalinar, bt they expect the heralds to come back, so amaram should still cooperate with dalinar. Therefore, I don't think adolin would strike against amaram in the near future. Not unless amaram starts moving against dalinar. May I also point out how shallan has plenty of sensitive information about ghostbloods or amaram or radiants that would benefit the other characters and she is sharing none of it? everyone is griping kaladin or dalinar for not having done this or that, but shallan is the worst offender here. she is trying to be like jasnah and take charge of everything, and look how it worked for jasnah: she got assassinated and her life work would have been lost, if not for a ward that she got against her will because events conspired for it. by refusing to take partners, jasnah doomed everything to failure if something happened to her, and shallan is making the same mistakes

on the other hand, dalinar is a main character. Main characters generally have to struggle through failures the whole book and only succeed in the end. Let's apply the same reasoning to kaladin: Basically, almost everything kaladin does in WoR before the last 100 pages is one bad judgment call after the other; kaladin mostly shines when he hit people with a stick. Similar cases can be made for all other main characters, except maybe shallan, who got everything suspiciusly right in WoR (but she got most things completely wrong in WoK, anyway). In a big epic story, main characters will not succeed until the end, and so they will all face their fair share of failures. Granted, dalinar is not good at playing politics. He is however a very honest and dedicated man. That's how he won fans.

As for Helaran, he clearly had something to do he thought was very important. Shallan realizes that. She realized, after Jasnah opened up to her, that protecting the world from a desolation was more important than protecting her family. I think she can understand that. Just as she can understand that kaladin has no fault for kiling her brother. Because shallan is a clever person who understands and accepts logic. Even if often she needs to be rubbed against it kicking and screaming because she's quick to avoid things she find uncomfortable. But once she is forced to confront the truth, she can be expected to come to conclusions like a rational adult. Regarding kaladin... how did kaladin broke shallan's trust? I don't get it. Unless you mean by killing helaran, but it cannot count, kaladin did what was the right thing for everything he knew. Shallan is many things, but I've never seen her as petty, and it would be very petty to hold a grudge against kaladin for killing an enemy soldier on the battlefield. I also read that as being more awkward than insensitive. Adolin simply didn't knew how to act there, so he went for full honesty; and then he let the argument die. The fact that he did not try to talk to her more in the lift shows how awkward it was. Incidentally, it's pretty much how I would have reacted, and I also am mentally direct, bad with people and honest. the more I read about adolin, the more I feel i have stuff in common with him. Also keep in mind that adolin still has no idea what goes on in shallan under her surface. she never opened up to him and she's very good at faking. there's no way adolin will discover, or even suspect, the hell she has within if she doesn't open up first. And without that knowledge, adolin can fully expect shallan to not react badly to the news. Incidentally, I wonder how shallan commented on adolin's best friends trying to kill him during the duel. they must surely have spoken of it during one of their interactions off-screen, but we never got to see it

I agree on the first part. you restart a dead brain, it gets a new soul. Not sure, however, if the emperor counted as "dead". His brain was still working enough to perform the basic functions. does that count as "dead"? while in the real world I'd certainly argue for yes, because the whole personality and mental capacity got destroied beyond repair, in the cosmere it is possible that the information stored in the brain could also have a backup in one of the other realms. I say in case of (mild) brain damage there are two scenarios: 1) the cognitive and spiritual self is damaged as much as the spiritual 2) the cognitive self is not damaged, but it cannot interface with the physical self anymore. Notice that in case 2) regrowing the brain would not restore the capacity for the cognitive self to use it: a brain can think and remember because of all the neural connections formed by thinking, and a newly grown one would lack those. So if the case is 2), and the emperor was not dead, it is possible he retained his old soul. Otherwise... what? the body doesn't have a soul (except the soul of the corpse, his spren we may say) but the stamp tricks it into thinking it has one? If I get it right, the brain is the storehouse of the information and personality, but the cognitive self also is. We have a WOB that a sufficiently advancced computer would develop a realmatic soul; so it means that the information contained in the computer is actually in the hard disk, but the cognitive aspect of it would also have all the information.

that's the crux of the issue. Also, when a person's brain is damaged, what happens to their cognitive self.

Strangely I don't find dalinar's chapters particularly brutal. Oh, the first one was a shock, that for sure. But after that... The thing is, I read so many comments of people saying that they would get much worse and putting stuff under spoilers that I would not dare to read, that eventually I ended up imagining something even worse than the reality. Like, I imagined a scene where dalinar, after killing the last enemy on the battlefield, turned to attack his elites while ordering them to offer him a proper challenge and killed them all (possibly while they dropped their weapons and tried to reason with him), except for kadash. In the end, the truth turned out to be much milder than what I assumed, and so I wasn't horrified in the slightest by those subsequent chapters. In retrospect, dalinar having killled some of his own men without realizing it should be pretty horrifying, but I don't feel it because it pales compared to what I imagined. It reminds me a time when a professor explained us principles of pshycology by reading us a letter from a college student who went like "hello parent, I got pregnant from a drug addict who also got me some STD, and my house burned down. Oh! Just joking, I actually dropped out of school" To which the parents were supposed to react with "whew! well, dropping out is not really that bad...". Dalinar's chapters and their expectations got me a similar mechanism.

If you know well enough when you'll get the book, you could reread part 1 starting a day earlier, so that when you receive the book you'll be able to immediately delve into part 2 without any break between the parts. that's what I'lll try to do, if I can know when my copy will come. Which I'll probably won't, because transoceanic shipping is always erratic

not talking about the book, but the real thing. The emperor got wounded, was left in semi vegetative state. then a stamp was made to fix him. I wonder what happened to his actual soul, congitively and spiritually. Did the emepror die, his soul going to beyond, and the stamp animated the body with investiture? Or maybe the emperor died and the stamp created a new soul for him, so that in the beyond there will be two emperors in the end? or perhaps the soul of the emperor was still with the body, and the stamp repaired the damage to it?

"highprince" "highprince" "bastard" If that conversation had happened in a forum, adolin would have won the internet.

am I the only one who thinks adolin was right in telling shallan? she was going to learn anyway, and sooner is better than later. I especially don't like the idea of letting a person be misled on something like this.

I just have to stop here and say that BRANDON IS DEFINITELY TROLLING WITH US ON THOSE EPIGRAPHS. Seriously, "I killed someone who loved me dearly". That could mean shallan, of course. It could mean Dalinar, we still don't know what happened with his wife. It could mean kaladin, he feels responsible for the death of tien; also killing his spren could count, even if she got better. It could mean jasnah: if she hadn't called her father and distracted him during the fight, he may have prevailed against szeth. and it could of course mean taravangian. really, how many main characters who killed someone who loved them dearly can one write into a book? It's like brandon actually wants us to keep guessing by giving us equivocal information. And it doesn't make it any better that it is actually the case. So that's it. Enough is enough. I'm gonna stop playing the epigraphs game. I don't care who wrote them until we'lll be told for certain.

"Race" is an ill-defined term anyway. A species is clearlly defined: individuals are of the same species if they can mate and produce fertile offspring. Still, even there there are ambiguities, because there are cases (so called "ring species") where you have a population B that can produce fertile offspring both with populations A and C, but A and C cannot interbreed between them. race, however, does not have a clear-cut definition as far as I know. It is basically a matter of semantics to decide whether a certain distinction can be considered a race or not; it does not change the facts. And personally I have to go against the flow and say I don't like the modern politically correct stance of denying the existence of races in the name of equality. That carries the risk of indirectly legitimating discrimination. Suppose that in the future we were to discover that there were some tiny genetic differences that caused small - but measurable - differences among human populations. Or suppose that some colonists are sent to Mars and they remain isolated for centuries and they have a genetic drift until they became distinct enough. Now, with all the emphasis we are putting at the moment on "we must not discriminate because we are all equal", if those scenarios happened some would jump on it and say 'haha! Now those are demonstrably different, and so we can discriminate them at leisure'. No, that's not what equality is about. The key point of equality is not that everyone is equal to everyone else. The key point here is that people must be judged solely according to their actions. And it doesn't matter a damnation if people belong to different races or whatnot. It's not like we do not discriminate because everyone belongs to the same race. We do not discriminate because we judge people only based on their actions. So in this scenario where we send a small colony on mars, and everyone we send will have a phd and be phisically perfect and stuff because of course we want to send on mars people who are good enough to survive there, and those healty geniuses only interbreed among them, and when space travel becomes cheap enough that we can have regular contacts, we now have the homo martianus who has an average IQ of 140 and no genetic diseases. And it would be pointless to say that they are not a different race; they are. And it would be stupid to say that they are not better on average; they are. It's just that they don't get to discriminate anybody. They don't get all the best jobs because they are homo martianus. Some of them will be dumber than others and will get menial jobs. Regular humans will not be kept off from intellectual jobs because they are dumb. Those few peoople with an IQ of 140 will be able to compete with the martians on equal footing. Especially, the martians won't get to enslave the regular humans because they are smarter. Just like those who have an IQ of 60 and are mentally retarded are not enslaved, but they are instead helped. That's what equality means. And every time we stress on how it is important to not discriminate because we are all equal, we implicitly affirm that if we actually were to find someone who was different, it would be all right to discriminate. And we are also helping racism survive: in a "judge people only for their actions" scenario, racism has no reason to exist whatsoever. You judge everyone independently. A racist trying to argue that someone should be discriminated for his genetical association to a certain segment of population would be as ridiculous as someone suggesting that since most crimes are committed by single males aged between 20 and 30, then all such people should be preemptively jailed. But instead we argue that there are no differences; and since there are plenty of differences related to culture and socioeconomic status, it is nigh impossible to provide a clear enough evidence of equality. So racist people can still argue their point.

depending on the moon's orbit, navigation using the moon may be possible. If the moon is circling around the equator (which is not the case for all mooons) then you can at least figure out the latitude from where you see it raising and setting.

On one side, that was partly on purpose. Heralds are human, and in fact they are all some brand of crazy now. I wonder what it would to to vorinism to learn the state their heralds are in. On another angle, the concept of god as omnipotent and all-knowing developed with the monoteistic religions. Ancient religions worshipped people like zeus: a guy who does not age, has magical powers and can shoot lightning. A common wizard of roleplaying games would be worshipped as a god by ancient people, because a god was something completely unrelated from the idea of it those who grew influenced by monotheistic religions have. I'm curious as to what would think of the whoel business a chinese or japanese or someone else raised in a society with a politeistic pantheon. The complaints about Jasnah were because she culd appear to be trying to be alluring in the middle of a combat scene, which is ridiculous. and there weren't many such complaints, because ultimately they were unfounded. Shallash instead is not fighting or doing anything else, and she's supposed to be an impersonation of beauty. So she can go around half-naked without people complaining. It's all a matter of context. Shallan would want to take a picture of her. The same reaction she has with everyone else.

I am curious at vorin prudeness clashing with depicting an herald in a very revealing outfit. I mean, she's the herald of beauty among other things, but that safehand would be scandalous even for a commoner. Not to mention the legs. The books so far are unclear on what's the status of female legs, but we've never seen any woman showing even an ankle (not intentionally at least; clothing damage does not count), so I assume legs are as taboo as they were in victorian england. Which is, as scandalous as that thinly veiled safehand, possibly more. And yet, if this was made by dandos the oilsworn, it must have been officially approved by the church. Maybe they make a special exception just for her? Maybe there are historical accounts of shallash going around like that, and the church could not say that she should have not, but also could not say that it was ok to ddress like that, so they said that only shallash, being shallash, can. Or maybe they made an exception because it's the only thing ardents are allowed that can pass for porn I am also curious at her being barefeet. Why was she depicted barefeet? It certainly does not seem to fit the rest of the dress. Does bare feet have a special significance in vorin church? Ishar... well, Ishar is just doing a "look at me, I'm awesome" pose. It certainly is achieving its effect, but I worry about the people in the background. What surprises me more are the moons. We were told that they were small and close to the planet, so I always imagined irregular moons, like thebe or amalthea. The fact that they are round means that they must be big enough to become rounded under the force of their own gravity, which means a minimum diameter around 500 kilometers. Which means they must be really BIG when seen from the planet, because they are very close: it was calculated that the only thing consistent with their behavior is that they are in an elliptical orbit of the duration of one day and running opposite the rotation of the planet, so that they can cross the whole horizon in a couple hours during the night; they would also be high in the sky during the day, but they'd be invisible against the greater light of the sun. But moons that big would be viisible also during the day. Also strange is that they are heavily cratered. You can estimate the age of celestial bodies by looking at how many craters they have, and those moons are ancient. However, roshar is fairly new by geological standards; the orbit of the moons are not stable in the long run, they can't be older than a few million years. I always assumed the shards made new moons, but maybe they just grabbed some dwarf planet and put them there in orbit? But why?

That site is the best reference I know of to read the wheel of time, especially when you arrive in the later books and suddenly you found some minor character and you forgot who he was and what he was doing. However, it was never completed. It was updated until the prereleased chapters. But after the book was released, nothing was done anymore. Does anyone know why?

on the other hand, dalinar wasn't trying to think about Evi at the time. Memories don't come up until you dredge them generally, and so this may well be the first time someone mentioned his wife after he got healed by the painrial. another ooption is stormlight healing. the chapter was oddly phrased in a way that would left it ambiguous: the stomrfather said that it was not something caused by the bond, but he never mentioned stormlight or healing, just the bond. And we have precedents of the nightwatcher causing people to have numb hands, like they were blade-severed, which we know stormlight can heal. Anyway, seeing navani put the nightwatcher into a fabrial would be a really great scene.

This discussion started at least 40 years ago; before internet forums, there were letters sent to newspaper. There was even a wikipedia article about it at one time. I have no idea what makes this discussion so enthrancing for many people. Such a small, inconsequential thing. Not at all like discussing the plot of fantasy books