king of nowhere

adolin killed sadeas for a very, very, very long list of perfectly good reasons. no, i do not think that in any way would correlate to him wanting to kill anyone else.

i really, really, really don't think it would be in character for adolin at all. adolin is perhaps the single most honorable person in the whole saga. he's got a very strong morality framework, and he's firmly planted on the side of radiants. together with everything he cares for. while he has complete disdain for the enemy, and won't even listen to his arguments, seeing as T is a known manipulator, liar and backstabber. now adolin would do a complete backflip in just 8 days, completely out of nowhere? he would betray all humankind - and most singerkind too, as they are being used as military slaves, cannon fodder, and body source - only because of a grudge against one single person? I think even brandon couldn't write that in a believable way. besides, odium already tried to tempt/break dalinar and kaladin, and in both those cases it made sense, because odium offered something those characters dearly wanted. if odium now tried with adolin, it would get boring. and adolin doesn't have the glaring weaknesses of the other two

Most likely felt was given a second one. The ghostbloods have those kind of resources.

ghostbloods are mostly pictures as evil on roshar. on scadrial, in the lost metal, they are the good guys.

you are generalizing too much here. moash is absolutely wrong. just because he suffered injustice, it doesn't give him a right to perpetuate more injustices. the one responsible is roshone. and yes, he got away lightly, with exhile that still left him rich. assassinating a king whose only fault was being manipulated, though, is absolutely not a good idea. just like it would be totally bad to execute you if you made some mistakes on your job. the "comes great responsibility" argument in this case doesn't work. a king has great power, therefore his mistakes are amplified. any small mistake is likely to kill someone, and even when the king does nothing wrong, people are still going to die. you can't hold the king responsible to that level, else no king would be able to perform their job for more than a few weeks before being executed for being guilty of something they couldn't have predicted. cultivation is not a "good" shard; as you correctly point out, she never seem to give a damn about anything. nowhere is ever implied she is good, except maybe as a check on the power of odium, an evil far greater than herself. honor was clearly good, he gave his life fighting odium and keeping him imprisoned; we don't know his position on the singers. preservation was good, gave his life containing ruin. we don't know about many other shards. but it is clear that good shards are, and they are limited in their ability to fix things by having to fight against other shards.

how did we miss spotting felt as a ghostblood spy, anyway? he's from skadrial. he worked closely with vin and elend. from there, it's a very small step to assume he could be loial to kelsier, maybe even a survivorist. we got too used to seeing worldhoppers around in minor roles doing nothing special and thinking nothing of them. we shouldn't have dismissed him

i was really worried about taravangian. in many stories there are characters like him, doing terrible things for a supposed greater good. now, since we live in an idealistic society where those things are frowned upon, those characters end up being hypocrytes who didn't really care for good after all. it undermines the whole thing. and i was very happy that taravangian wasn't taking that pitfall, he remained selfless and self-sacrificing as he was doing terrible things. and i was afraid something would come that would cheapen his character. but this is perfect. taravangian thinks he has to kill all other shards to stop conflict, which makes perfect sense. he's still acting selflessly. he's still a greater threat than ever. i like that the whole business is grey in a way that feels real. i don't like how, in common stories, that gets thrown away. Either for a reassuring - but fake - conclusion that you can never end up in a situation where you have to get your hands dirty, and if you're genuinely good and caring you can never take a morally bad decision in good faith. or, taking the opposite grimdark approach, to rub in your face how you can't achieve anything positive without wading through rivers of blood, and anyone thinking otherwise is a naive fool at best. with taravangian, there's nothing of the sort. he is in a situation where objectively there isn't a clearly right option, he still seem to have the best intentions, he's still doing something terrible and, most likely, wrong. but for a perfectly logical reason.

I normally would dismiss sigzil feeling he's not fit for a radiant as normal insecurity, but knowing how he ends up in sunlit man... I fear not for kaladin, but for all the other windrunners. Also for kaladin, because of what it would do to him. It would really stretch his fourth oath

I must point out that shallan can't be ruled out yet. does shallan know that kaladin will try to heal ishar? that szeth will try to bring justice to the stone shamans? kaladin's hurried explanation was vague enough that there's enough of an argument that she didn't knew their quest

have you guys seen the history of the real world? i don't think there's ever been a year without an armed conflict somewhere. and it used to be even worse until a few generations ago. and yet, just because the french, germans and britons fought dozens of war amid each other, with shifting alliances, we'd never say they are irrevocably at conflict and can never coexhist. fighting regular wars was just the normality before the present. i do believe that was what roshar would have looked like too. wars all around, but not annihilation wars; more wars over shared borders, or claims to thrones. And no more wars between humans and singers than there was wars between humans and humans, or singers and singers. it's not a "everyone lives happily and peacefully", it more a "and we don't really care about species, just about convenience"

not a question, really. there's plenty of wars that started without anyone enslaving the other first. there's plenty of nations that, given the power, tried to conquer. in fact, the exceptions are... well, exceptions. and i sincerely doubt the radiants of old would have tolerated the enslavement of a whole race for two millennia. if they did, they wouldn't have been pissed enough for the recreance to happen.

Something I just connected, I can't believe I never considered this before. The last desolation, aharietiam, was 4500 years before present. the fused were stuck on braize since then, thanks to taln. 2000 years ago there was the last desolation, when ba ado mishram granted forms of power to most singers. it ended with ba ado mishram captured, and the singers lobotomized and turned into slaves. the radiants forsook their oaths afterwards, mostly in protest. but this means that for 2500 years, between aharietiam and the recreance, humans and singers cohexisted. i doubt they were at war all the time. if they were, they'd have had occasional conflict intermixed with more or less prolonged periods of truce. besides, without fused to act as superpowered people, and without even regals - ulim said ba ado mishram started granting forms of powers later at some point - i find it hard to believe that the singers could stand up to radiants in war. much less for 2500 years. so, the humans and singers must have lived together, with occasional conflict but not locked in perpetual war (probably no more warfare than has exhisted between human nations), for over two millennia. this argument should shut up all those people, mostly among fused, who claim war with humans is inevitable, the humans will try to enslave them, so they may as well strike first and try hard to win. it's patently false. there's 2500 years of history showing the opposite. furthermore, the humans had radiants at the time, several thousands of them, and access to the oathgates, while the singers lost all supernatural help. if the humans had wanted, they could have enslaved the singers. they didn't. they only did so after the false desolation, and it was mostly an accident. that said, all the people using that argument were either ignorant, newly awakened parshendi, or directly connected to odium, and thus unreliable. but now we can safely dismiss it as baseless propaganda. historical traces of this must have been erased by the hierocracy; very few written scripts survive that long anyway, it's not implausible that all were tampered with by the hierocracy, therefore nobody knew about it until recently. however, somebody like jasnah is knowledgeable enough to connect the dots, and ask the heralds about that time period. and it could be used as an argument at some negotiations sometime in the future.

alternatively, you could hire tress. she may be able to get something good out of soulcast ingredients. somebody needs to ask sanderson who's the better cook between Tress and Rock

it would still be lashed upwards

put a lightweaving on the box. now they can be the luggage of the high lady. still, the sneak objection has merit. though they didn't know about screamers, or didn't know whether they had to sneak into the city. but yes, as a rule of thumb, plate is hard to conceal

in oathbringer, kaladin, adolin and a few others fly to kholinar to try and rescue it from the siege. a major plot point there is that while they fly lashed by windrunners, they can't carry plate, as plate can't be infused. with adolin and elokhar armored, assaulting the palace would have been a breeze. but is plate resistance to investiture really an obstacle? 1) put shardplate into a box 2) lash the box problem solved. ok, maybe not so easy: plate is a lot heavier than the box, so to compensate for the weight of plate, you'd have to lash the box upwards dozens of time. so many lashings would drain light very fast. hence alternative plans 1) have a blacksmith make a big, heavy metal box, roughly the same weight as plate. 2) lash the box or 1) put shardplate in a large, sturdy box 2) put big stone, roughly as heavy as shardplate, in the box 3) lash stone upwards. lash box for fine control. dozens of people knew of the trip to kholinar, and they had weeks to come up with ideas. did nobody really think of it? did none of the beta readers raise the point? is there some reason why my plans wouldn't work after all?

what do you mean, brandon does romance poorly? brandon is great at romance. elend and vin, siri and susebron, shallan and adolin... there's plenty of very solid stories there. granted, 90% of what i read is sanderson, i don't have many other reference points. the main ones were robert jordan, whose characters acted like petty bullies towards each other while they inexplicably felt attraction for unfathomable reasons, and terry pratchett, who doesn't focus on those anyway, and when he does they just feel completely unnatural. maybe i find sanderson good only because i have low standards, but he's by far the best at romance that i know.

alcohol fermented from soulcast grain would still be alcohol. but if you try to brew a beverage, there's dozens of molecules from the grain - or whatever you're fermenting - that contribute to the taste. so beer brewed from soulcast grain would taste different, though if you were just trying to get alcohol, the alcohol is the same molecule.

i don't understand why ba-ado-mishram can communicate with shallan for a short while, and she makes threats. you're stuck in a cage, someone is coming to try and help you, and you threaten them with complete annihilation of his whole species? for all the damage to the singers and spren, I'm starting to think maybe BAM should stay locked away...

thank you, brandon!

really, I would like to see adolin stand up on his own against a fused. he's more than skilled enough for it.

It was incredibly hilarious that hoid is reading the same romance novel as that ardent in the monastery in an interlude. Weird minds think alike, and like the same novels

at the same time, a book should have verosimilitude. a story is an organic thing. if every little thing that happens is there for meta reasons, it stops being a story. in the best case, it loses some authenticity. in the worst case, it becomes a political statement. besides, there's several statements by brandon (which i'm too lazy to search and link) where he says that he plans the plot, but he let character development grow organically. he let characters grow as he thinks they realistically would. which sometimes can conflict with the plot. i can easily imagine he just decided they would take that step simply because of who they became - especially since it wouldn't impact the main plot otherwise.

seems a very bleak concept of why characters should hook up. i don't particularly want them to have romance or not; I can't speak for others in that regard. i just trust sanderson to know what he's doing and where he wants to push the characters. if sanderson thinks that's what those characters should do, he surely has reasons.

while i do like platonic relationships and i find them underrated in media, i would not want a fictionary relationship to go a certain way simply because it has to represent something. let sylphrena and kaladin decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives. and by that i mean, let sanderson write them as he sees fit. he's said that while he outlines a plot, he let the characters develop naturally. by the way, that's very ridiculous for a simple reason: ok, maybe they develop feelings eventually. so what? how is that a negation of close friendship? it would be like saying that food doesn't exhist, because all food gets eaten eventually, and then you don't have it anymore. besides, there's a level of closeness where the distinction stops mattering. they are extremely close, they have strong trust, they appreciate each other's qualities, they like the company of the other person. now they are still extremely close, they still have trust, [...] and they also shtup each other. if they are so close, is there any good reason they shouldn't be shtupping each other? which incidentally brings me to when and why close friendship can turn romantic. from what i've seen in my life, close friendship between men and woman stays that way if at least one of them is already happily engaged. in that case, they can happily stay friends. but if they don't have any real reason to not turn romantic, then why would they not?