king of nowhere

that's a possibility. he loved her, but he never felt really comfortable about loving someone, and when she died it crushed him that he never dedicated himself to her as he would have wanted; hence his trip to the nightwatcher, and hence his inability to properly deal with adolin. it's not, however, the only possibility

I can't wait to see Dalinar's interactions with shshshsh. I see that the new dalinar, while at first glance having nothing in common with the old, is really just a refurbished version of himself, with new, more noble goals than the thrill and glory of the battle and with some new skills at politics he had to learn for his new trade. I consider that maybe he's hard on his son simply because the warlord dalinar has no knowledge on how to deal with a loved one, but then I remember he had a wife who clearly meant a lot to him. I still think that his interaction with his wife, and especially the way he dealt with her loss, is a very important piece we're missing on his relationship with adolin.

does the battle at the tower counts? Also, he'd been warring on the shattered plains for five years, I bet he called his fair number of retreats. he can't have a reputation as a good general if he never did.

I don't think anyone is going metaphysical here, but there are good life philosophies to be found in fiction. Look, after "the big lebowski" came out, some people created "dudeism", and it has a few hundred thousands adepts worldwide. Incidentally, as I happen to share a good bunch of values with that particular "religion" too.

the tenets of pathism and survivorism are described in the mistborn adventure game, which I got as part of a humble bundle. I have to say they are pretty strong religions. I'm not a religious person, but survivorism, with its emphasis on independence and self-reliance, suits me very well. there is a part that goes something like "it is good to help others, if they ask, but unless they ask expect them to be able to handle themselves". This is how I behave. I have a lot of trust in other people's ability to ask help if they need to, and I am annoyed by well-intentioned unwelcome meddling. In general, except for going to religious services, I pretty much follow survivorism already. pathism is also nice, but it is really poorly defined. it merely says to do good and meditate, which can be interpreted many ways. in fact, one could follow pathism and another religion at the same time without conflict. I don't do any "scheduled" meditation, but I frequently ponder philosophical questions, so... maybe I can be said to also follow the path? Well, either way, they are good religions. sliverism instead is pretty bad, much worse than one could suppose from the novels. it says that the lord ruler will come back and rule with an iron fist again and those who remained faithful to him will be exalted over others. it completely glosses over all the development with ruin and harmony. which is good, because ironeyes can just give orders to sliverists and let harmony manipulate them.

well, in the wheel of time there were characters with vastly different power levels, and they had different plots. for example, the whole plot of mat escapping ebou dar with tuon would have never happened if there had been rand or egwene with him. but they weren't there, so the plot worked, as long as there were believable reasons for the characters to become separated. What I am worrying about instead is the power level of all radiants. we have seen that whole armies are of little consequence to the likes of szeth or kaladin, and it's getting even worse when they'll get plate. So unless they will spend all their time fighting thunderclasts, or not fighting and doing politics instead, I have a hard time seeing what kind of challenges they may face. but I am confident brandon has plans about it.

oh, and regarding the adolin duel scene: the difference between dalinar jumping in and someone else jumping in is that they would have done their best to kill dalinar, and with the advantage of plate, they would have done it - they could just rush him, taking a few blows, and dalinar would have had no defence. while they would have probably tried to avoid killing someone popular like amaram. but yeah, I agree that it was selfish of dalinar to be angry at others for not jumping to help his son. and while dalinar is correct in treating his son as any other soldier for the purpose of war operations - to do otherwise would be nepotism - he is way too cold towards him, even in private.

oh, ok, if dalinar had sent his troops to a needless slaughter, then I would have seriously questioned his competence as a general, and yes, it would have been a terrible decision. after all, those soldiers will still be needed later. but that's not what dalinar did. he said something like "if we all die here and stop the desolation, it will be worth it". which is totally true. with the everstorm, i believe the death count is already at millions. Also, with the everstorm and the unexpected highstorm raging, retreat was not an option. had they retreated, they would have died to the last man. fighting and giving everything he had was the only rational decision at that point. I think if dalinar had lost lots of troops and there was no hope of victory anymore and retreating had been an option, I am sure dalinar would have retreated. yes, I'm talking about that chapter. and yes, your objextions are pretty good. I wonder if it will get changed to make gavilar a beetter diplomatic or if something was posssessing gavilar and pushing him to act that way. of course there's always the easier explanation that his judging capacity was clouded by fanatism.

thanks for the clarification, @maxal, it makes your stance clearer. yes, it is true that often in history lives were spent to fact threats that turned out to not really be such. on the other hand, it is easy to judge in retrospect. And considering that roshar has a well-documented history of voidbringer invasions, dalinar has good reasons to take the threat seriously. regarding the duel, dalinar was not willing to "discard" adolin. there was just nothing dalinar could have done once the duel started. the original plan (adolin dueling for shards) was perfectly reasonable, and mostly risk-free. I would say accepting a duel 1v2 for 2 shards against 6 was a very high risk vs reward; I blame narrative conventions here: the story woul have never let him get away with a good plan that worked as planned without risks involved. once the four people went out to face adolin, the only one who could end the duel was adolin. and he tried, but they stopped him.

I have to disagree with the definition of "moral" here. A general on the battlefield cannot afford to not sacrifice the lives of his soldiers. Especially when he is fighting against the equivalent of demons. what else should he do? retreat his army to save those precious lives and let the voidbringers rampage freely? only engage battle in the most favorale of conditions, which means never? or conlcude that he's fighting for a goal that may be not attainable and so disband the army and tell everyone to go cower in some basement and hope the voidbringers don't find them? No, he is in a position where he can potentially stop an enemy that, if left unchecked, would cause much more damage than the lives dalinar is about to sacrifice, and so I call his battling moral and just. I am of the opinion that moral is a lot like newtonian and modern physics: while we leave our comfortable lives in peace and safety, there are some hard rules, like don't kill, dont take justice in your hands but go to the police intstead, that kind of things. but as more and more lives are threatened with premature violent death and society has less and less capacity to provide safety, we shift to a different kind of morals, just like when we approach light speed we find some different physical laws. and stuff that was true and stable gradually becomes uncertain. that's because resorting to violence has a high chance to go horribly wrong, but as the stakes get higher and higher, the risks and collateral damages are gradually less relevant. and so calling immoral dalinar over the lives he wastes is like calling immoral a man who cracked a window to escape from a fire. yeah, we normally don't crack windows, because it creates a damage. but faced with burning, the damage of a cracked window doesn't matter anymore; even more so if we consider that the wondow would have probably been destroyed by the fire. In the same way, while human lives are invaluable under normal circumstances, in the face of the voidbringers the lives of a thousand soldiers don't matter much; even more so if we consider that if those soldiers do not fight, they are probably going to be killed by the rampaging voidbringers eventually. history may eventually tell us that those goals were unworthy and his attempts futile and wasteful, but he has no way of knowing that, and he certainly cannot ask the voidbringers to stop until history has decided which causes are worthy and which aren't. now, an argument can be made when the listeners were just that. but they did assassinate the alethi king, and what was dalinar supposed to do? pass the message that everyone was free to betray and assassinate the alethi, cause they would not be willing to risk lives to defend themselves? And he was trying to find a peaceful solution. old dalinar, the one we see in the released flashback chapters, is a pretty bad person instead. honorable, but bad. no questions about it. as for dalinar supposedly keeping slaves, two things must be kept in mind: first, this is not the "whip and chains" kind of slavery. slaves have some basic rights and a basic pay and they can earn enough to be freed. Ok, we know from kaladin's experience that there are several dishonest slaveholders who will cheat on documents to never free the slaves, but I'd bet good money that dalinar is not one of those. so that kind of slavery is not much worse than a job you cannot refuse (again, I would bet good money that the abuses that happened to kaladin are not sanctioned by dalinar, and probably not by alethi laws either. In particular the killing of a sick slave is almost certainly illegal). ok, slaves live in miserable conditions, but considering the tech level, they aren't much worse than those of your average farming family. And the second thing to consider is that he lives in a society which considers slavery ok, and he can't be expected to have modern sensibilities. social standards of what is right or wrong change all the time, I am sure that in the future something that our society is doing will be considered wrong and immoral, so we have two alternatives: we can accept that in discussing morals we have to make allowances for times and cultures, or we have to accept that we are all horribly evil people for some reason that we can't grasp but that will be clear to everyone in a few centuries. ok, we can also try to claim that we have the perfect culture and the perfect grasp of morals and everything that came before and that will come after is wrong, but it's not a very logical proposition. And so we have to accept that people acting within certain cultural boundaries can be excused for some bad deeds because they don't know any better. we have to accept that good people are limited in their capacity to understand what is good, and we can't expect a warlord living in a society with slavery to figure out that slavery is wrong. We can expect him to figure out that mistreating the slaves is wrong, but as long as dalinar gives his slaves decent food and housing and doesn't cheat on their release due, I am willling to overlook the whole issue. The part about the slaves earning freedom is, I think, the most important in the difference between a slavery that can be excused and one that can't. If we accept the definition of Kant that it is evil to use people as tools and not giving them the chance to live for themselves, then keeping a slave for life is always bad, but a few years of indentured servitude are acceptable, because the person can repay their debts and then move on. Incidentally, mandatory military service can be considered as indentured servitude, and modern laws do make specific exeptions for it. We see military service as something that needs to be done and mandatory service as a way to share the burden equally, but who knows, maybe two hundred years from now some people in a forum will argue that president Roosvelt was irredeemably evil for reinstating conscription in 1940. discussing morality over different ages is always tricky. Now, you have generally proved a better judge of character than I am, and so I would not be very surprised if it turned out you were right after all. But from what we have seen of dalinar in books 1 and 2, I can think of nothing he's done that I would call bad or immoral. I would call Lift much more immoral than him. with her skills she could easily find an honest job, but she'd rather steal to hard-working people. But if we are looking for radiants whom we can call honorable but immoral, Nale is really the only truly fitting example so far. And since he's crazy, there's no telling how much that is truly how a skybreaker should act and how much he warped the order. No, I am not rejecting the "radiants can be bad people as long as they're honorable", it is almost certainly correct and we know that orders disagreed on many things, but we do not know how bad those disagreements actually were and how much crap could a radiant actually do while keeping the letter of honorable before his spren deserted him - remember, the two worst cases, szeth and nale, both have no spren, and syl said that no spren would bond szeth, implying that even though he was supremely honorable, that didn't excuse his actions in the eyes of spren.

so there will be secret history 2 and 3? woah. but this is so confusing. marsh has both eyes spiked. unless he gifted a spike to kelsier and then made another one to replace it?

i looked at the store but i didn't see that offer. where did you find it? and how can I find out if there will be a similar offer for oathbringer?

@maxal: we derail this thread. I linked to that old thread because someone referred to it. maybe if we want to continue that specific discussion we should go back to the other thread? for my part, I will only say that times when one ddoes not think clearly are perfect to discover new powers. adolin does not stop to think that he is summoning his blade and it takes ten heartbeats, so he summons it faster without realizing it.

not reallly, because in that case at least we know where the treasure is, we only need to go there digging. in this case we have a map and we're told that the treasure is somewhere in it, only we have no idea where, and we don't even know how the treasure looks like, nor could we recognize it if we accidentally stumbled upon it.

http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/56576-proof-that-adolin-has-already-partially-revived-his-sword/#comment-502999 here it is. i preferred adolin fighting scenes because kaladin is just so powerful, he borders to a boring invincible hero. adolin doesn't have any wacky superpower, he has to earn it all.

can you show me where? if they were tangential to the thread, then it is good to have a thread dedicated to this, but if there was a thread for this that I somehow missed, then this thread should be merged

ah, but now he has red the book and he has to keep it all inside, no spoilers until november 14. and it will rise and bubble within him and he will try so hard to keep it inside, until it will burst.

I live in europe, so I will order it as soon as available, but I won't receive it before a few weeks. and then I'll read as quickly as I can. You don't have that option in your poll. By the way, since the price of an ebook is almost exclusively intellectual rights, they could (should) offer a big discount on the ebook to those that buy the paper book. buying the paper book I purchase the paper AND the right to read the book, so what sense does it make that I have to purchase the right to read the book twice? So, while I would like to participate in the release and be among the first to read and then post in this forum, I am not paying some 20+ dollars to get the ebook. Simply because I think it's unfair for the sellers to charge me the right to read the book twice. my late november and early december will involve a lot of waiting and checing the mail box.

so, there was some speculation before due to gavilar talking to amaram, but it wasn't of much substance. now the prologue to oathbringer confirms it without doubt. gavilar was of the sons of honor, and he was planning to turn the listeners into voidbringers to unite the world against a common foe. he explained the plan to eshoonai, in detail. and this changes everything. szeth's assassination of gavilar always had a deep impact on me. gavilar was a wise and magnanimous king, and he got killed. it was more than a crime, it was a worldwide tragedy, made even worse by the fact that everything was going well, and then someone for some unfathomable reason just had to shatter it all. but now, it reads completely different. gavilar, how could you do that to us? turned out you were no better than amaram. so much for reading nohadon and bringing your brother into it. was it all ever an act? ok, nowhere in the alethi war codes did it ever say "don't summon demons just to unite people against a common foe", but hey, one thinks that shouldn't need mentioning. Two things worthy of mentioning: one, gavilar was receiving visions. they did not stop despite his plan, which was far from honorable. does it mean the stormfather approves? or does it mean that once the visions start, the person stopping to be honorable does not stop the visions? or does it mean that gavilar was well-intentioned enough that he still counted as honorable? and if gavilar could still count as honorable, I wonder if amaram could earn redemtpion. I'm thinking sacrificing his life to help kaladin would do the trick and be a nice development. I can see the dialogue "your team was a bunch of nobodies, and i was a general, so it was right to sacrifice them for my sake. but now you are a radiant and i am just a lighteye, so it is right that i sacrifice for your sake" "wait, you're telling me you actually believe all that rubbish?" "judge my ideals as you wish, I stand by them. always" goes to commit heroic sacrifice. probably just wishful thinking on my part, but if gavilar was in league with amaram, then i can expect anything. I am surprised nobody commented on this before.

seems to me there is a vast gulf between "there are clues about the ending scattered in the epigraphs" and "we know how the book will end". especially if you consider that even in mistborn the epigraphs could only make sense in retrospect

well, considering that we know nothing of an age that comes before ours, it would make sense that whatever comes at the end of the 7th age is a sort of big reset button for all civilization, starting back to no further than the iron age, and causes to forget the power too. so if we accept that whatever begins the first age is major, it's another argument in favor of our age being the first. and i insist, it makes no sense that randland is 1000 years before the fall of the roman empire. we know pretty well what was happening at the time, we have plenty of archeological records from way before that, and there's no way we can forget channeling and lose all power objects in that time. ok, i can agree with you that there is some inconsistency over what myths survived. but you are trying to introduce several major inconsistencies to explain a small one

regarding liss, I think if she had knows what szeth could do, she would not have sold him. really, sell someone with an honorblade? shardblades are worth kingdoms, honorblades are worth more than shardblades, and szeth offers a complete package of a shardblade and someone extremely skilled in its use and absolutely trusted. I am also fairly sure that szeth mentioned during his assassination of gavilar that it was the first time he let some stonewalker see his powers and live. as for the shin, they are likely to have evolved like every other culture. consider how much cultures on our own world evolve with time. 230 years ago not a single one of the nations had the same flag that it has today (the oldest one is the french one, adopted after the revolution), slavery was widely practiced, and almost every government around was a teocratical absolute monarchy. if we didn't knew it was our world, we would not recongize it. and while globalization and the information era spread social change much faster than in the past, there has never existed in human hystory a culture that remained the same for 1000 years, much less 5000. Even the roman empire, which lasted a millennia, by the time it was done it had a very different culture, religion, even language compared to when it started. China has probably been the most long-lived monolithic state, or maybe ancient egypt, but both underwent regularly civil wars, revolutions, splits and reunifications. So, I do not believe the existance of a shin conqueror in the past is in any way significant or has had a deeper influence on the shin. the mongolians were a nomadic people living in steppes, and after the collapse of the empire of gengis kahn they went back to be exactly that. while some conquerors managed to influence culture for centuries, most just... didn't.

brandon loves to insert those little meta musings. hoid makes several of them, and thom merrilyn in the wheel of time has a really good one in the last book.

another one for mistborn, because that one is just so easy and well of ascension and hero of ages and secret history

raoden taking shards is certainly possible, and he certainly fits the prerequisites, but that's all we can say for now