ftl

Yeah, in hindsight, this seems set up in a lot of ways. First - radiancy eliminating the idea that darkeyes will always stay darkeyes. There's been a whole host of former darkeyes that have now turned lighteyes. The nobility all know that, the way it is today, literally anybody might the next day turn out to be a shardweilder. The social structure is already in upheaval. Second - the advancement of the bridge crews, specifically. From slaves to the most powerful people in Alethkar and the backbone of their army. Third - the awakening of the Parshmen. Alethkar already lost most of its slave population, and has to adjust to life without them - unless they immediately create a new underclass that they'd treat like Parshmen. And fourth, of course, Jasnah herself. It's entirely in character for Jasnah to sit down, figure out how she wants society to run, and say "yep, I'm Queen now, this is how we're gonna run this country now." She's not one to avoid rocking the boat, or to go along with things just because it's the way it's been. I find point 3 to be a key here. The country's already in a situation where they've lost almost all of their slave labor. There's a clear decision point here - either enslave lots of humans to make up for the missing parshemen, or re-organize to not use slaves anymore. Jasnah's picking the second option. And looking at the long-term here, this is probably a key step in the fight against Odium. Odium wins not when the Singers kill the Humans, but when the humans turn to him. Trying to get all Alethi to stay loyal to Alethkar rather than turning to Odium seems reasonable, and the slaves would certainly be Odium's prime conversion targets. And vice versa, the war is won not when all the singers are dead, but when Odium is defeated - the bigger of a wedge you can drive between the singers and odium, the easier that fight gets and the better the rebuilding afterwards would go. Not sure how this affects the eventual singer-human relations, but I think it does. Anyway, I totally didn't expect that - it certainly blindsided me, and I bet it's blindsiding everyone in-character as well (c.f. Dalinar). But once I think about it, it makes sense.

Not sure I agree there. While our main PoV characters are all plenty broken, radiancy is definitely accessible to all sorts of people without mental illness. If you "have to be broken" to become radiant, that stretches the definition of "broken" so far that literally every human being qualifies. Which, in a way, is true. Everyone has their struggles. That's been changed in Era 2, though!

My take was that Autonomy is interfering in the places where the planets are advancing too fast, and might then start conquering each other. E.g. Taldain is technologically super-advanced - they had guns way back before everyone else - but then Autonomy blocked travel to/from there. Now Scadrial is advancing super-fast, building ships and guns and having no sense of keeping to themselves and leavine well enough alone, so Autonomy's trying to stop them. Could also be tied in to how the Ones Above in Sixth of the Dusk aren't supposed to interfere. Basically, Autonomy want each society to develop independently, autonomously.

I think the causation is backwards. They are mad because they've abandoned their purpose, stepping away from the Intent they were created for. I think the best way for them to heal is to start fighting Odium again, regain their purpose. Having access to the spiritual realm via Dalinars perpendicularity helps, but it's got to be the combination of Investiture with them re-aligning to their Intent that can make them better again.

Isn't that what a Returned already is? A cognitive shadow of the person, kept alive with a bunch of investiture (a Divine Breath) and shoved back into their old body.

Hah, this is fun. I guess I'll wait for the last preview chapter and Dawnshard to drop before filling it out, just in case something changes.

Shallan's been making progress! It's slow, but it's definitely progress! She's in a very different place right now (with Veil, Radiant, and Shallan) than she was at the end of WoR. Better in some ways. Still struggling in others. I agree that I think the last truth about her childhood is going to end up being significantly different than the previous two. The most recent two were all about how she, as a child, dealt with her horribly broken household - defending herself against her mother and defending her family against her father. But we never learned - why, exactly, was the Davar household so storming horrible? There's got to be more there. I don't know what that "more" is, but I'm going to guess it's something different than the previous two truths, so it won't feel like a rehash (and it won't be.) It's just always hard to see from Shallan's point of view chapters, precisely because she's so "good" at repressing things she doesn't want to deal with, so anytime it feels she's dealt with something she immediately goes "Yep, that's the only thing that was interesting, I'm fine now!" when she most definitely is not fine.

Don't they also say their names? I always thought part of the joke was that in that scene, Ishikk think it's ridiculous that they gave him these fake names ("Temoo" and "Vao") when actually, they literally said their actual names ("Temoo" = "Demoux", "Vao" = "Baon", just with some pronunciation difficulties in the local language.)

Hah. That's like the perfect WoB to encapsulate this discussion - ambiguous. Even the author himself, even when he isn't RAFOing it, can't give a straight yes or no!

Yeah, wayne would win. Spook isn't really that great of a fighter. I mean, he's certainly proficient, and good compared to untrained folks, but I don't think he'd really hold up against a master.

It's immortality skill levels. You can get really, really good at something if you have a hundred years to practice. Normal humans get maybe 20 years of being "in their prime" physically. At around age 18 is when someone's first physically strong enough to really be a swordsman, and by the late 30s people start physically declining. Immortals can stay at their physical peak for much longer. So yeah, not surprising that someone who's been training as a swordsman for 100 years is going to be be better than literally anyone who's only been a swordsman for a paltry few decades. I'd guess Heralds would also be even more ridiculously good, if they weren't all storming insane.

No, it won't be necessary. Brandon's said he's written both so they're decently independent. (Everyone who's reading the preview chapters right now hasn't read Dawnshard, since Dawnshard isn't out, and they seem to work fine. ) (In spoiler is comments about the experience of reading RoW chapters having not read Dawnshard, shouldn't really be spoilery at all but putting it in an sblock just in case people really want to have *no* comments at all until they start reading)

Well, it's "functionally immortal" meaning that they can still be killed, they just won't die of natural causes.

Sanderson never keeps his big bads around for a long time, though! In Mistborn, So I'm not expecting Odium - a Big Bad introduced in book 3 - to be the enemy all the way until book 10. I think one way or another the "Odium" fight is going to be resolved in book 5. Maybe he's killed/splintered, maybe Rayse is killed and someone else Ascends, maybe he "wins" and escapes Roshar entirely (and the characters struggle is to save Roshar in the process). But I think the back 5 books are going to be a different conflict.

Well, you can see part of the reason in all the Shards' (and Frost's) responses to Hoid's letters. "Rayse's not a problem. He's contained. Stop interfering, you'll just make things worse." is what's said by Autonomy, Endowment, and Frost. Harmony would be sympathetic. But he's busy. And perhaps whatever that "Red Mist" around Scadrial is supposed to represent is what's preventing tech from leaving there. (I've heard the theory somewhere on these boards that Autonomy wants the different planets to all develop independently, without interference; it's why they blocked travel to/from Taldain, so that Taldain tech wouldn't influence the rest of the cosmere's development. Perhaps Autonomy's doing the same thing to Scadrial, preventing their tech from being exported - at scale, at least, though individual people might get out.)

Huh. Interesting. I like it, Sadeas was always a snake. I doubt the "bribed" scout is alive, he was probably executed too, just in a way that makes it look like he ran away or died to an accident.

Well, for one you could try and verify whether Jasnah's telling you the truth, or whether she's just trying to destabilize your country. What's more likely - that Parshmen are secretly the voidbringers of legend and are about to all magically tranform into demons? Or that the storming Alethi are trying to stir up trouble again? ...yeah, unless you know you're in book 2 of a fantasy epic, the latter is gonna seem a heck of a lot more likely until the info is independently verified by someone with no connection to the warmongering Kholins.

Actually, that could contribute to the reason to why reviving deadeyes hasn't been done before. Something with having to form the bond in the Cognitive realm rather than the Physical realm, because of some sort of realmatic jiggery-pokery. Or something with the perpendicularity to help, maybe the bond needs to be made via the spiritual realm which has to be closer. Basically, something in all the new Realmatic discoveries has to contribute to making the healing work, otherwise it would make no sense why it's literally never happened before. (But of course, since it's a Spren bond, Adolin doing his part of the bond and acting like a Radiant probably also has to contribute.)

That seems plausible. The bit that is most suspect there is Honor dying. Why then? How? It seems so different from the rest of those things.

Good point. Storing literally all of your speed might be an excellent idea if you are trying to hide by staying motionless.

Yeah, becoming radiant isn't a major milestone in the books anymore. People with way less on-screen character development than Adolin have become Radiant (in fact, so many that we don't even know all their names, like all the nameless edgedancers). I think the POV that Adolin has no flaws and is boring is mostly due to the fact that he's a secondary character and isn't being developed as much as the protagonists. Which makes sense! He's not a main character, he's a supporting one. The books are big enough as it is, and if Adolin were given the same screentime as Kaladin they'd be way too big.

Ishnah being the assassin is only "obvous" to people who hang out on forums and cross-reference things on wikis. I'm 95% sure that people that just read the books straight through, one after the other, will have long forgotten the things that make it "obvious" its Ishnah - it'll just seem like good foreshadowing after it's revealed. I'm fully on the Ishnah-as-killer train!

That sounds like exactly what the Ghostbloods would think. Good parallel!

Huh. What are the differences between Shallan's and Hoid's version of the story?

Harmony is one "bigger" Shard now; if Sazed were to die, there would be one shard Harmony that someone could pick up. In Era 2 we've only seen relatively minor changes to the magic systems - no full mistborn and feruchemists but now there's twinborn (both due to dilution/mixing of inherited potential), there's a different godmetal (harmonium) instead of atium and lerasium, the mists are a bit different and snapping is a bit different though we don't know how exactly. But overall the magic systems look in large part unchanged.