AonEne

OR IS IT?

My, my, such aggression! I think it works fairly well. FT, you wanna give a new word?

I STARTED MISQUOTING A SPEECH BY AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT. SO BASICALLY JUST OUR USUAL INSANITY AFAIK WOO CAPS

I don’t mind at all. Give me a bit to read everything, it looks like there’s a lot of content here and I don’t want to rush in.

Hi

380b. Unless the enemy has someone who can control your dreams; they may be manipulating you.

FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN WEEPINGS AGO

It leaned forward slightly. “Do the gods seem sane, to you? Have they used their Power in front of you? And - what is the state of the wars?”

Sorry to remind you then True, I didn’t realize I’d stumbled upon something you hated

I really shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but is there a story behind this?

It was in WOA, when the mist was coming during the day and their crops were failing in remote villages, and one guy was so freaked out by it that he wouldn’t leave a building. Other people had died there, because their food ran out, but one man was living by eating the dead.

Hi

Wait, but neither of you won.

SHE IS ADORABLE. The white one who was curled up is dead now, that picture was from a little while ago

When was the last time you ate an egg?

Rats And I’ve never played that.

That building where Sazed found the poor cannibal man?

What job do you have that lets you read on your shift?

Discord streaming does work! I don’t know about video calls, but is there such a limit to voice chats?

Oh yeah, anytime. You created a genuine topic and someone trivialized what you were saying, which always sucks. This is something I don’t think has been touched upon much, actually. The above scenario is actively damaging to Moash’s mental health. It is saying that he should be in close proximity to, and passively helping, someone who helped to kill people who meant a lot to him. That can be really freaking bad for someone’s state of mind, especially when - at that point in the series - Elhokar was still not a good person. He began to improve a little later on, but it’s important to remember that Moash never saw that. If we had gotten the story completely from his POV, I think people would be seeing things very differently - and not because of unreliable narration or anything like that, because his POV chapters have been mostly unbiased, last I remember. It’s easy to say someone should take the morally high road, that they should forgive and respect the protagonist and move on, when we read these books from an outside perspective. We can analyze and see all sides and know what Brandon says; and we’re unbiased. Most notably in that we never lived through what the characters have in their pasts, not even in the way we live through events that are currently happening. If all we get is a description of what happened, then in most cases, we’re automatically not going to have as much of an emotional attachment. (For every character, there will always be those few who laud them as their favorite, and write fanfics and create headcanons until it does have that attachment, but it’s not written into the source material.) If we had had that in this instance, with a flashback of Moash hearing the news that his grandparents had been arrested, with a chapter of their POVs fleshing each other out as background characters and dying together or something, if we’d gotten anything more raw or closer to the source than a page of their grandson explaining to Kaladin why he hates the king, it would be next to scenes like Tien’s death or Shallan killing her father or the Rift. Huge and tragic and memorable. Nobody (or in any case, very few people) expects Kaladin to forgive Amaram. People don’t ask Dalinar to forget how Sadeas betrayed him at the Tower. No one insists that rather than disliking Mraize, Shallan should put herself in his shoes and think about how he isn’t all bad and might one day redeem himself. These characters have no reason to believe that their various adversaries will change, no evidence that they’ll get a redemption arc, and it would be unhealthy to hold them to the impossible standard of give everyone another chance and hope for the best! It’s a fantastic philosophy and I theoretically love it, but practically, it’s not a safe idea. It’s exactly the same for Moash. The only difference is which characters the story focuses on (nothing wrong with that, you can’t make it about everyone) and our outsider perspective letting us know that Elhokar was getting slightly less arrogant, recognized he had problems, and was also on the way to Radianthood. We read those signs to mean he was being redeemed. Moash did not have access to that same evidence, and therefore didn’t form the same conclusion. Saying Moash should have taken the high road just doesn’t add up when he had absolutely no reason to think that was the right decision. I honestly loathe this phrase because nothing is ever just a book. Literature and media heavily influence and are influenced by real life, as all culture is. If there’s something in a book, it’s because it exists irl. If there’s sexism or racism or homophobia, it’s because that crem exists outside of the book, too. “It’s just a _____” is a copout answer by default, because no literature is ever JUST anything. My belief is that it’s far worse, because generally speaking, IAAS doesn’t hurt people. The Moash hate has grown to the extent where half of it is hating on anyone who likes Moash. And that is bullying, plain and simple.

Of course the time I get immediately taken out of commission is when I’ve just announced we must hurry Also blue! And that absolutely counts, because it’s one of the best! (The different soundtracks there, ahhh)

Did we actually just go two days without posting on this thread? Okay guys, it’s time to make a new record, plunk ourselves down here in this thread, and have a conversation until we hit 700 pages LET’S GO

Thanks! It was difficult to keep the meaning of what I was saying while doing it, but I think I managed