king of nowhere

the side effect of brandon using foreshadowing the way he does is that the forum has developed a lot of epilectic trees ready to jump on any detail, no matter how insignificant, and see deep meaning on it. not saying it is wrong in this case. i also found it suspicious. just like there are thousands of other innocent details that can be possibly suspicious if seen under a certain light. only madness lies in that path.

I don't like that. classics are classics for a reason. remakes are like reheated leftovers from the day before. they can't be as good as the original.

yes, it was aknowledged. but that brings out another big problem with killing to protect, which is, you do not have all the information, you can be wrong. So, if you do not try to kill, and it is a mistake, and people die for it, people have died. If you kill to protect, and it was a mistake, people die for it, and people die because you killed them, so more people die for it. So the consequences of making mistakes are worse for those who kill to protect. Also, in general killing - to protect or for any other reason - tend to have more unpredictable consequences than not killing. for example, your alllies may disagree with you on the need and turn on you, which is less likely to happen otherwise. And let's not forget that while you try to kill to protect, you may not be skilled or powerful enough to manage it, and that also tend to have dire consequences. which all lead to the point that killing to protect is extremely dangerous business, and should only be considered as a last resort. And while lirin was technically wrong in saying you cannot do it, given the state of roshar and the aamount of pointless warfare, it is at least a passable approximation. And how old was kaladin at the time? I don't remember; ten, eleven? when speaking with one so young, you hardly can slice the fine points of philosophy. You can be forgiven for making some generalization.

how would "being there against their will" make the bridgemen any different from the others? Last i checked, in that battle took part soldiers that were conscripted against their will, soldiers who enrolled because they had to eat, and soldiers who enrollled because they were tricked with bogus about honor and the principles of vorinism, which we know being false and being a corruption of the original story. add there parshendi soldiers who technically volunteered, but only because they needed the gemhearts to eat, and would have gladly avoided the alethi if they could. In fact, in every kind of battle, you can generally split most of the participants in people who are there agianst their will, and people who think they are doing their duty but would much rather their duty asked something different from them. Plus a smattering of people who do it for the pay, although technically you can count them under "duty" - only duty towards their working contract instead of duty towards a country or an ideal. the people who actually want to be in a battle are a tiny, tiny minority - and for most of them you can make the arguments that they must have a mental illness of some kind or are terminally stupid at the least. Yes, I agree that taking some slaves and forcing them to run unarmored against archers at point blank is a real nasty thing, but i find the distinction between those who are there by will or not to be mostly a matters of semantics.

as far as i know, there is no information. however, since ruin directed the events that led to the downfall of the lord ruler, it seems possible that the order to send her to the pits was given undr the influence of ruin, to make kelsier snap.

no, what he did was using his windrunner powers to protect his people. which caused the listeners to panic, which caused them to become voidbringer as they desperately seeked a way out. yes, i know, it's not a perfect correlation, and it probably would have happened anyway. still, a strong case of kaladin's attempt to protect by kill always causing more strife can be made. by the way, we don't know exactly how pacifist lirin is. just because he told his son that he would not be saving lives by becoming a soldier (and figthing in pointless border skirmishes) or by going vigilante-mod, doesn't mean that he does not believe in self defence or that kind of stuff.

ever since i moved for my PhD, all my loved ones are in another country. So, unless their specific power was teleportation, I'd just remain where I am and call it a day.

in the notess from robert jordan, it was stated that it must be clear that without moiraine, the forces of the light would have gone to fight separately. that was her role, and why mat was needed in rescuing her.

Lirin is a surgeon. he does not protect people by killling other people. actually, in civilian life, the instances where killing to protect actually works are exceedingly rare. basically, if someone needs to be killed to protect someone else, then it means the situation already went down the drain. it means there was some big failure already. a failure at diplomacy, so that a war happened. a failure at educating, causing a kid to grow into a hardened criminal. If you must resort to killling to protect, someone already screwed up big time with the protecting business. And by the way, you may notice that for all his selfless protecting, kaladin didn't really save lives in the big picture. he saved his soldiers by killing enemy soldiers; still people died. probably, more people died because of kaladin proteting his small unit than would have died otherwise. So, Lirin has a point. unfortunately, the desolation does qualify as "already went down the drain".

I didn't think of the families, and it can make sense. I don't remember the passages where egeanin said the families were compensated, despite being almost done with my fourth reread, and it requires that being an assassin is seen as a perfectly acceptable and honorable profession in seanchan, which I don't think we have proof one way or the other. However, given how almost sacred the nobles are, to the point that even the seekers are not allowed to spill their blood when torturing or when executing, I'd be really surprised if commoners were given leave to stab them. Still, it is a better explanation than everything I can think of.

I'm putting together a few things we know about seanchan noble society and assassination: - from suroth and tuon, we know that every single high blood has received several assasssination attempt suring his/her life. Indeed, the first attempt will generally happen while yoou're still in the cradle. - from galgan and mat we know that even when seanchan nobles don't want each other dead, they still send assassins, it's sort of courtesy. - most of those assassinations are carried by brute force: suroth was saved by her lopar, and only three of her bodyguards survived the first attempt on tuon. as she has dozens of deatwatch guards around, one can only guess how many assassins were sent to almost kill them all. From that we can deduce two things: 1) there must be plenty of assasssins in seanchan 2) most assassinations fail, with the assassin killed. And so the question is, what would possess anyone to try to become an assassin? One has to undergo a hard training, start a specific career, with the prospect of a 90% or greater chance of dieing on his very first job. And most of the times he would just be meant to die, as a way of sending a political message. Even if you happen to be one of the lucky few who succeed, you're not out of your misery. while all nobles try to assassinate each other, I'm fairly sure it is against the law, if proof of it can be produced; so a succesful assassin has an even chance of getting paid or getting killed to ensure his silence. If, at the end of all this, the assassin is still alive, given how effective the seekers for truth are, the chances of him being found and executed are still fairly high - although, admittedly, if one hasn't been discouraged by the odds up to this point, he certainly won't worry at the chance of being found by the seekers. The only chance I see of this making sense is from something tuon said, that if an empress succumb to assassination then she wasn't strong enough to rule. So maybe according to seanchan law trying to kill a nuble is a heinous crime, but actually killing a noble is commended. In that case, assassins would be a respected profession, discworld-style, seen as the people in charge of removing the metaphorical dead wood. the chance of not being killed by the bodyguards of the target are still slim, but if you succeed, you become rich and important and your eyes are raised a lot. Still, it's not a profession with much of a future, and i find it hard to believe that even the seanchan could be that strange anyway. The point is, everyone who start a career of assassin in seanchan must be seriously brain-damaged; it's amazing they find enough people to do the job. Also, it follows that every assassin is an amateur at his first experience; they either die in the attempt, or they become filthy rich and retire from business. That could help explain why so many assassinations fail.

expanding on that, headshots are lethal less often than assumed. sometimes dealing damage to the brain shuts it down, and sometimes it will continue to function with loss of some functions. she could have kept the heart beating, the breathing going, and someone would ahve realized she was still alive before buryng her. then she could have gradually recovered. faking some memory losses, a difficult rehabilitation, and it would have been a perfectly plausible survival. the doctors would have called her very lucky, but no one would have had any reason for suspicion

it was said that harmony wanted lessie to do something she resisted, but she eventually gave in and got along with it. at least if i remember correctly. so dieing was the thing she didn't want to do, but eventually agreed to.

terry pratchett is a good choice, and it has some stylistical similarities to alcatraz - namely, the deaddpan snarker writing style

He, I have similar issues on that. If people are enthusiastic towards something, it make me istinctively critic of them. When people are overly enthusiastic, I tend to assume they are biased and distrust their enthusiasm. Plus, I always try to see the good and the bad of all things, so if someone gives a very positive opinion of something, I instinctively try to find flaws in it, just to bring it down to a more reasonable level; and viceversa, if someone express a very negative opinion, I look for the bright sides. Because of that, someone trying to get me to do something with enthusiasm will generally push me in the opposite direction. Even if I agree to try, I will be in hyper critic mode, ready to pounce on every flaw, and I'll likely not enjoy it, whatever "it" is - a book, a movie, a game. At the same time, I am not good at promoting stuff among other people, because my way of doing it is the way that would actually work on me - moderate enthusiasm, never insisting, if possible putting emphasis on trust - and it doesn't seem to work on most other people.

I wonder what would have happened if paalm had dropped that mr cravat line BEFORE being shot.

what do i see, a fellow biochemist or molecular biologist there? but anyway, making sounds is so much easier than manipulating dna. we figured out the making of sounds over a century ago, bby scratching a disc so that a needle running over it would make the right sounds. we are still struggling to understand genetics today. i can undderstand that moving a planet in the right place in orbit is difficult - there are so many feedback mechanism altering the climate, like ice melting and reflecting less sunlight, or rain patterns changing and ultimately modifiying the local albedo - and so i can accept a shard may not be able to do it accurately. but sounds? also, there are only a handful of planets in a star system to try to use as an example for how orbital placement affects climate, but there are millions of people speaking all the time. studying them and learning to do the same should be easy. otherwise, there is still the option of written messages. we know ruin could alter written texts, so if nothing else that kind of communication should work easily.

still seem unsatisfying explanations to me. why talking to someone telepatically does not violate the balance of ruin and conservation but mmaking sounds in the air does? harmony is already uusing a lot of power to make the elendel basin fertile (that requires constant replenishing of the nutrients in the terrain, which involves moving literally millions of tons of materials around), so the idea that spending some millijouls to make some pressure waves in the air would be too big a use and clash against his limitations is not convincing. Also ruin could modify written text easily despite preservation's attempts to stop him, so harmony could also communicate by making words appear on a piece of paper. Yes, it seems that all shards are reluctant to communicate non-telepaticallly. I wonder if there is a reason.

yeah, but my point is that harmony does not need telepathy. he can just make sounds audible only to a specific person in a variety of mundane ways and listen for a verbal answer.

Something I've never understood in the second trilogy. During the time of preservation and ruin, the two shards used their powers to nullify each other, and therefore they could only manage to talk to people with whom they had some special relation, or the power of the other shard woul block them. But now? Harmony is the only shard left. there's no one there to stop him. He has the power to move a planet in his orbit, or to alter the DNA of every living creature. Why does he need the earring to communicate with wax? Accepting that he can't read or talk into minds, can't he just create vibrations in the subject's eardrums to convey a voice, or something like that? In the same note, why does he need the earring-spike to empower wax with some pewter allomancy with the mists? Can't he just use his power to make wax stronger at need without having to rely on an earring or the presence of the mists?

yes, it has already been speculated that with steel allomancy and iron feruchemy one may be able to fly that way. in theory, there's nothing to prevent it from working. as far as i know, no one has ever asked to brandon if it would, however.

This kind of argument would make the whole discussion moot. If we assume that harmony has used his super intelligence and predictive power to take the best possible action, then we may as well stop arguing. Next thing, we could assume that the politicians know stuff we don't and are taking the best decisions, and even if it seems to us that they instead caused the nation to bankrupt and the industry to collapse, we are wrong and we must not protest. I'm not saying harmony is a bad god. I am sure he is doing his best. I can't think of anyone who would do the job any better than him. Having that kind of power is a daunting responsibility. that does not make harmony immune from making bad choices, and does not make him immune from criticism when it happens. Furthermore, it is important that people criticize harmony. people, even those with godlike powers, can only improve as long as they recognize that they have failings. if one is convinced that he's always right, he won't improve, ever. Harmony should not be encouraged to go down that path

that's actually a good point. However, there are key differences here. we may think of diifferent ways harmony could have achieved the same result with less collateral damage. i have no idea how preservation could have defeated ruin in any other way. By the way, preservation's plan did not account for the near destruction of humanity; that only happened because vin didn't figure out her earring until it was almost too late. I'd be glad to bash leras if if turns out that he could have defeated ruin more effortlessly and with less casualties. Also, preservation wanted to preserve the human race, and acted accordingly. harmony wants to give people free will, but he manipulates both the world and individuals with kandras, emotional tugging, and likely causing a few coincidences like wax's brother dieing of sickness to ensure wax would become the headof the house.

I was studying for a chemistry exam, when I read "Lews Therin catalyzed ..." before realizing that it doesn't make any sense. I had to go back and look again to find out that it actually spelled "Lewis acid catalyzed"

we don't know that. as far as we know, harmony never took direct control of lessie before the end (and in the end it was a matter of stopping an assassin, so it was justified). I don't remember the relevant pplaces, but I think lassie decidedto disobey and harmony let her go, since he could obviously have taken control of her back then. may or may not be accurate. anyway, the argument further reinforces my point that asking nicely > manipulating and bullying. In time of peace, some nations only take volunteers as soldiers. In war, every nation uses conscription. those nations who didn't lost the wars and changed their law afterwards. still, i concede the point about soldiers at least being informed of what they do and what they are up against. which further reinforces my point of asking nicely.