king of nowhere

Pahn Kahl. their discrimination isn't bad, in fact they are more ignored than actually discriminated; they are as smart as anyone else, and can have a good job. would you rather the earth be hit by highstorms on a regular basis, or the lord ruler in his full power materializes on earth fully intent on taking over?

You merely have to kill them in ways that can be survived easily with investiture, like a knife through the gut. In the worst case, you'd at least rid yourself of some relevant characters who were going to be in your hairs eventually

but she's also interesting. I mean, she's writing. if they locked you up thinking you mad, and you had this important message you'd absolutely have to rely, then writing it everywhere with everything at hand is the common procedure. Thematically, one uses his own blood (cfr, among others, the first assassin's creed) to reinforce to the story (and to the reader, who by that time still doesn't understand the message) that the message is important, so important that people are willing to die just for a fleeting chance at passing it. I'd say the woman in the prison is smarter than that: she's not killing herself to pass the message. On the other hand, writing in blood strongly reinforces your credibility, while writing in excrement does the opposite. So maybe not that smart after all. Anyway, we can expand the cosmere-wide law: not only you can't tust the beggars, you also can't trust the mentally unbalanced. they are probably magic users of some kind. When someone is BOTH mad and beggar, there is a greater than 50% chance he's actually Hoid. In fact, I'm going to add it to my signature I wonder if some genre-savy character will think to storm all the alleys and sanatoriums to find the worldhoppers. Just go in and kill everybody, those that won't die are worldhoppers. Or protoradiants. Or mistborn urchins. Or escaped kidnapped princesses. Regardless, kill enough destitutes and you'll find the plot-relevant characters.

So, what we learn from sanderson's books is: never give charity to beggars. They are all secretly ultra-powerful people with secret agendas and they don't need your help.

I've never been good at finding wob, as they are scattered through so many places, at least that I know of. So I just take the lazy man way out of citing an unsupported wob and then hope some more coscientious sharder will provide a direct reference, and then upvote said coscientious sharder.

Unfortunately I can't; it's something I remember reading in the comment of another sharder. Alas, if this was an academic paper, it would get thrown into the trash for that, but a post in a forum can accept somewhat lower levels of verification.

edgedancer (minor) spoiler:

never seen a theory about him. okay, he could be hoid, but then again, anybody could be hoid. not every random beggar can be hoid, and hoid already makes several appearances in some of the characters backstories (not sure if you read edgedancer, so I'm not saying more). therefore i ppropend for "just a random beggar, but not 100% sure"

that, or pay some hospital to put you into a pharmacological coma and wake you up in november.

I think the reason could be as simple as sadeas having a name. the emotional impact of a death is always linked to how much one was close to the victim. Those thieves were never intriduced to us, we never saw them, and so we feel nothing for their demise and we are not prone to get annoyed by it. We knew sadeas pretty well, and so his death hit more strongly. there is also a lot of emphasis on the difference between a combat and noncombat situation bordering on double standards, where you are excused pretty much anything in combat, but outide of combat you are expected to apply obfuscating stupidity until your life is immediately threatened. I think it results from having a very flexible war time morality, a very inflexible peace time morality, and no gradual shift between the two. it is actually very common, in any kind of fiction, or the heroes to get free pass at exterminating hordes of mooks while having to face all kinds of moral conundrums for killing the bid bad. often, they will spare the big bad to show off how good they are, but they will rarely stick to nonlethal force against the mooks, even though they were generally much more deserving of mercy. Even in real life it happens: nazi hierarcs got a trial with a lawyer to defend them, most of their underlings didn't get the same courtesy. It would be easy then to say that flexible morality is better. Unfortunately, flexible morality can be abused. I think flexible morality is better in the hands of a genuinely good person, like adolin, who will not abuse it but will use it to do the best out of any situation. Knowing dalinar's past, and how he could be if he didn't have a code to stick to, I'd say he's right to be inflexible.

Well, he did blame himself at some point. he had that conversation with adolin, where he was telling adolin something like "say it! say it's my fault" and adolin replied no, it's sadeas' fault, or something like that, and it was a good dialogue. and later dalinar muses that he would never put himself in a position like the tower again. and at another point dalinar wonders why he forced his sons to upheld the codes but did not try to force the highprinces. So, as tactical mistakes go, it was fully acknowledged. It also goes to show how dalinar treats his son more like a soldier. that's the curse of reliable people: others rely on them, and they put more and more stuff on their shoulders until they collapse.

well, as for emotional control, a simple tinfoil hat is enough to take care of that. as for control of a shard, I'm a bit hazy. A shard has the power to move planets, it also has the power to incinerate somebody on the spot; so if the shard wants to stop that person, it does not need to take control of them through hemalurgic spikes. In some case there is a problem with the shard's intent, but I always seen the whole point of when and what a shard will do as a somewhat weak point in the cosmere.

I wonder how would a spren react if you stole a nahel bond with hemalurgy. probably not well. and probably the nahel bond will break unless the new user behaves with his spren. I also wonder if you steal a nahel bond and then you break it, if the spike would still be functional, or if it would just revert to a piece of metal. same goes for a divine breath that is acquired that way and then spent.

yeah, I agree on that. But adolin kept having prejudices on dalinar and especially adolin even after they showed times and again that they were good people. It's like, you see a laborer and you assume he doesn't have much instruction, because most laborers don't; no prejudice so far. Then this guy quotes stuff from the divina commedia. Instead of saying "well, I have to revise my opinion of him", you think "he must have memorized a few lines to pretend to be more learned than he actually is". At this point becomes a prejudice, because the conclusion that the guy is not learned is no longer the most reasonable conclusion according to what you know, and you're not willing to reevaluate your assumption. I can understand kaladin, and his life eperience is certainly a huge attenuating circumstance for his prejudice, but it is there. Personally, I don't give him such a huge black mark for his role with elokar, because he was actually trying to figure out the right thing to do and, knowing elokhar, it's not far-fetched to assume that it would have been a good thing to remove him. So kaladin has two grey marks, which he seems to have overcome by the end of WoR. I can't think of any bad mark against dalinar in the first two books; of course he has plenty of black in his past, but he seems to have left that behind him EDIT: Also, I personally do not call honorable to upheld honor before reason. honor, like everything, should be evaluated in context. if you cause a lot of harm and no good whatsoever to keep up with a positive ideal, then you are not uphelding that ideal, you are doing something stupid and pointless. so I'm not calling szeth honorable, because what he does doesn't have enough of a point to be sensible behavior. Honor must be good for something to be honorable. at least that's my definition. foor exampple, elend relinquishing the throne is somewhat of a grey area, because his argument (if I'm not willing to step down when voted against, then I become a tyrant; and these other guys may have a point) makes sense.

No, that's a completely different line of reasoning there. assuming something based on reasons is never prejudiced. not keeping an open mind and not being ready to change your assessments once you have more informations, that's prejudiced, but to make assessments based on incomplete informations is necessary to survival. you can't just wait to have all informations before coming to any kind of decisions. Really, what does assuming slaves aren't trained to fight has to do with forcing elders to retire? Consider an enterprise looking to hire an engineer and going through applications. Sure, it is entirely possible that the guy who never attended even high school and has a past as drug smuggler did actually have a passion for engineering, and he read all kinds of books by himself during his free time, and he really regrets his past as drug dealer and want to work extra hard to atone for his past misgiving. It is absolutely possible, yet nobody will ever interview him. Why? because you don't have time to interview all the whacky applicants in the hope for a miracle. Because the guy with a degree in engineering is, as far as you can know, much more reliable. Because as much as you should keep an open mind, you have to draw a line somewhere and start making assumptions. Is this behavior prejudiced? No. At least, not any definition of prejudiced I want to accept. It is just necessary for most social interactions with anyone you don't know particularly well. To sum it up: it is not prejudice if both those conditions happen: 1) it is a reasonable deduction based on the informations you have, and 2) you are willing to revise it as soon as you get new information. Dalinar had no reason whatsoever to suspect that those slaves were anything more than average slaves, and can't be faulted for being surprised by something extremely unlikely. EDIT: I missed that scene. Was it in the unfettered antology, or i forgot about it?

No, dalinar was progressive well before that, and he had no qualms about giving important positions to darkeyes before. we get hints that he would have been more progressive had society not frowned on it. As for the example you quote, it's only natural to assume that a bunch of slaves didn't act of their own initiative - after all, isn't the whole point of slavery that slaves obey orders? - or that slaves used as cannon fodder should not have fighting skills - after all, who would waste competent fighters as bridgemen? who would spend money to give military training to men who are not expected to fight and are expected to die soon? that's not prejudice, it's simply a statistically sound assumption.

I wouldn't call him "most depraved", unless I missed some of the flashbacks that gave a different picture of him. He was bloodthirsty, but he always had several redeeming traits. He was fair and meritocratic; his elite guard is made of both light and darkeyes. He shows no qualms about killing foes in battle, and can resort to questionable tactics, but I've not seen him deliberatly hurt civilians, or betray an ally, or stuff like that. For the standards of bloodthirsty warlords, he wasn't a bad person. I would say his core personality remained the same, only his goals became more noble and he learned some political skills.

I did read those scenes (not those in unfettered, but a few other released oathbringer flashbacks). And yes, dalinar was a very different person back then; a bloodthirsty warlord, and the only reason I'm not callling him a horrible human being is that I'm cutting some slack because he's a product of his own culture. But he's changed, a lot. So much that I'm not holding up his past against him.

Again, "weird genetics making the distinction between the two castes physically obvious" is 97% the layman definition of ethnicity. Ok, scientifically we may want to look at DNA, and find that there are people very similar physically but very different genetically, and viceversa, and in fact all the ethnicities who share the greatest genetic differences are african and most wouldn't see any difference between them (that's because humans went out of africa some 50000 years ago, so all non-african ethnicities share common ancestors no farther back than that point, while african ethnicities may have split earlier). But really, we all know that when it comes down to it, what really matters is the color of the skin, or the shape of the hairs, or the eyes, or some other easily-recongized physical trait that convenientely allows to distinguish between "us" and "them". And while yes, kaladin hatred of lighteyes stems from them being the ruling class, the thing is that whenever kaladin sees someone with light eyes, he assumes the worst about him. I think. Have we ever seen him interact meaningfully with tenners? they are not ruling class by any possible definition, and if kaladin was fine with them, then it would be something about the ruling class. If he spontaneously assumed the worst in a lighteye tenner but not in a whealty first nanh merchant, then I'd call him truly and strictly racist. EDIT: Dalinar has also shown pretty egalitarian views, rewarding merit alone. Adolin also never discriminated. We've never seen Navani interact with darkeyes, but I'm pretty sure if she talked with a skilled darkeye engineer, she would be ok. On the other hand, Kaladin doesn't seem to have anything against ardents, regardless of eye color. So it could be more of a classism than racism thing, with the physical trait being associated to class and therefore taking the blame. but yeah, we're really going into semantics there. kaladin is prejudiced, and that's that. many other characters are also prejudiced. I argued in another thread that we must cut some slack to people living in a prejudiced society, because they can't be blamed for believing true something they have no way of knowing false, so I should give some free passes here. Kaladin's prejudice only rankles me when he directs it at people he does know (adolin, mostly) and about whom he should therefore know better

I can see the scene where adolin is under trial and going to be condemned and kaladin storms into the room and gives a big speech on how bad sadeas was and how adolin was fair to him even though he disliked kaladin, and somehow sway the court. That would be another potential great scene.

Being biased against a specific ethnic group is 97% of my definition of racist.

I think shallan will try to help him, but only within the limits of the law. She'd rather lose adolin that spark a civil war among the alethi. heck, I think adolin himself will want to be judged according to the law if caught; the adolin I know would not put his well being in front of alethkar's unity. they could also invoke some sort of "our finest warrior in our hour of need" clause, where they agree to condemn adolin, but only after the desolation is ended. Sort of like galad's judgment of perrin in the wheel of time. There are just so many ways this could turn out. then maybe brandon will surprise us all and have adolin just never be discovered.

Alas, this. his allies will need to go hard to show they are not playing favourites, and his enemies will go hard on him because they are his enemies. Considering how it went with amaram, I think exile is the most likely solution.

But how do people know that Sazed does not like the name? Did Sazed told the people how to not call the metal? He doesn't intervene directly in mortal affairs, I don't see him doing an apparition just to retcon a name

yeah. kaladin has lapses, especially when it comes to his prejudices against lighteyes, while I've never seen dalinar do something bad in the books. he has a superhuman honesty