Ripheus23

There is a goat in contradiction. --- Lord Mhoram (Stephen R. Donaldson)

As far as Heaven/non-Hell locations---and themes/philosophy by implication---I was going to advert a lot of this to the dreamworld. The initial notion was "an epic fantasy, with adventures and wars and prophecies and blablabla but in this Hell-dreamworld setting." (Actually this also tied in with the "army of books" image I came up with earlier, via a buried evil tree, but 'tis another story for another time...) Now, I was thinking having the dreamworld be three-layered, with the supposed real world being a dream within a dream within a dream. So some people who "wake up" to the regular dreamworld (in death) then get it in their heads that THAT is the real world, but then some of those find out that the whole dreamworld as such, is just another level of another dream. The spiritual puzzle would be, what happens if you actually wake up, into the actually-awake state? Real reality, Heaven, X...?

Technically, my thought is based on the following WoB:

While asking myself recently if I would be willing to go to Hell or not, I came up with an idea for a story about someone who dies and goes to Hell. The idea is that people are re-killed over and over again in Hell, but that otherwise the environmental factors are more than less "natural." So, the Lake of Fire is actually a massive (infinite) expanse of water, with a surface intermittently covered in oil. For unknown reasons, the oil is constantly being ignited (this would be explained near the end of the story, sort of...) so people who stay near the surface of the Lake risk getting burned to death. However, most people end up having to choose between drowning in the water over and over again, or burning up, or switching between these two fates. I supposed, to explain the imagery anyway, that children would be harder pressed to assume they could swim on the surface of the Lake and avoid the ignition episodes (more often it would be adults who would be so defiant or obstinate or what), so most children in Hell would end up drowning forever. Now there's supposed to be a place deep in the Lake where horrible Worms exist ("and their worm does not die"), so people who stay under the water might get chomped on by the Worms, but anyway I made up a situation where unfathomable numbers of dead children (not just human but from any planet with sentient beings) "sacrificed" themselves to form a pocket in Hell, shielded from the water of the Lake and the Worms. Since the water is infinite in scale, I figured it would produce some gravitational effects that would suffice for the pocket realm to "look like" a planet surrounded by empty space (when I say "unfathomable number," I mean enough for there to be a solar-system sized region around the Hell-planet). There are also supposed to be giant sentient insects that keep re-dying on the surface of the Lake, so their enormous quasi-corpses can be climbed onto to protect others from the fire of the Lake. These are the "Carcass Cities," and I thought of one as named "the Cauldron," where one of the protagonists starts out from. So, let's suppose you survive the major dangers in Hell and die from old age. Usually a person is resurrected right where they died before, but if they die from old age, they end up teleporting to some random location near/at the surface of the Lake. Now, the source of the fires is supposed to be a specific monster, a demon, let's just say "Satan" for now. Satan looks kind of like except with 3 splitting heads and a humanoid torso, and dragon-wings. So, Satan is a tremendously massive entity who is trapped in a throne with hydraulic gears for torture devices set into it, and it uses drops of blood that are cultivated from all the other damned in history to push the gears. So, he's always trembling in pain and the oil is his blood, dripping into the water, and when his tears collide with the oil, there's a chemical reaction that ignites the oil. Now, at some point in the story, the protagonist are supposed to find a way out of Hell, that leads into the dreamworld. One of them wants to go back to the living world but discovers that he will have to be transformed into a being made purely out of sadness to do so. Meanwhile, the antagonist frees Satan with the Sword of Wishes, which can be used three times to cut through anything the wielder wishes it to---so: Satan's chains, spacetime itself so that Satan can go to the living world, and... Well, the antagonist then holds the world hostage by telling Satan that he'll kill the demon if the demon doesn't obey him (sending Satan back to Hell), or he WON'T kill Satan (if people try to resist the demon contrary to the will of the antagonist). THE END

IDK isn't mainstream Christianity the idea that God loves us so much that He shows us mercy when we sin (as long as we believe that someone else who is also God, was punished already in our place)?

An interesting angle to think of the topic from, that I'd not considered. A mortal literally in love with God, o the themes this could lead to...

Thus Calderis wins the Internet for the day

I'm sorry I can't help actually answer your question, but I do have to note that I first thought the thread's title was "which ebook vendors are edible"

HOL is like watching a movie, effectively. The implicit pacing caused by the changes in text flow gives off a "shaky-camera" vibe sometimes. There's also a nifty part you can only directly read in a mirror (though the text is the same as a "parallel" part so if you read the parallel...). Only Revolutions and now The Familiar have their own peculiarities. OR is kind of like a flip-book merged with epic poetry; TF is... TF is Sanderson, if Sanderson was writing books while USING the magic systems he makes up EDIT: S. (sort of by J. J. Abrams) is also pretty whack. For a less typographical oddity, there's always The City at the End of Time.

Apparently you've never seen the show Supernatural...

Mercy = Devotion/Love/Aona, I would suppose.

@ all the kandra/Sleepless arguments: The kandra on Roshar is posing as a Sleepless. Make that, an Awakened Sleepless

Under the circumstances, Hammir?

He would probably think that that would be like outlawing the police, a self-defeating idea.

I wouldn't say that Odium was already under compulsion to engage in the contest of champions, although he was under abstract compulsion to accept the possible existence of the contest. He was only otherwise compelled if he wanted to be free from the Rosharan system. If he "wanted" to stay, he just had to avoid appointing a champion ever, or whatever.

If you are preventing something from occurring, the thing is not fully actual yet. So the contest is, metaphysically, still more in the domain of possibility than actuality, and will remain so until specific champions are appointed, and then ultimately when the champions face off.

I wouldn't think that the actuality of the contest is binding (since it is not yet actually taking place), but the contest's mere possibility (under the circumstances) is.

The Stormfather said that Odium was bound by the power of Honor and Cultivation. The thing that seems to be binding Odium to the system is the possibility of this contest of champions. So, I'm guessing that the contest has to do with Cultivation too (I'm guessing that Honor and Cultivation being romantically involved, lends probability to some of Honor's programs being entangled with Cultivation's, even in the aftermath of Tanavast's death). EDIT: Maybe the connection to the Oathpact is that the Heralds were supposed to be the original candidates for the position of Honor's champion. Each was to be tested by their usage of the Honorblades. Comparatively, Odium tests his possible champions using the Unmade. So far, no wielder of an Honorblade has proven worthy of the championship of Honor, and no prey of the Unmade have proven worthy of Odium, so...

I think in Nightblood the Breaths were "melted" together, unified, and factored upward in degree of Investiture, accordingly. Whether being Awoken using 1,000 Breaths is 1/50th of holding 50,000 Breathes, is not necessarily clear (at least I don't remember any account of this question).

I'm going to speculate that Shades are mostly made of Invested electricity, so silver's electrical conductivity is the quasi-source of its ability to repel Shades and heal Shade damage, although the influx/reaction of electricity, in the Shade-silver contact case, causes the silver to physically deteriorate. However, I don't know if silver is that much more conductive than all other metals, or if it's the most but by a small margin, or whatever (I'm going off half a memory of a Wikipedia article).

If Cultivation has her own storm and X-light, what's to stop her from having a champion(ess) too? Is there a chance of a three-champion contest, as such? (Two-on-one, maybe?) If so, I want to guess haha... What would be an interesting arrangement... Lift and Kaladin vs. Moash, maybe. Or, Lift and Kaladin vs. Nale (ooooh I like this square-off!), Shallan and Dalinar vs. Taravangian... Lift and Dalinar vs. Talenel (rando!)...?

Nightblood is the Rabzeen, the Anamnesor.

Justice, Retribution, Punishment, Vindication?

If Bavadin has multiple personalities, how do we know her avatars don't have multiple personalities? Maybe Trell is Autonomy's co-opting of the place of Ruin in the Scadrian pantheon (the "real" pantheon including Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Marsh, Ati, and Leras, and sort of Rashek?). So maybe Trell has an alternate personality that thinks it has to be Ruinous. However, I was also thinking, what if the "endgame" here involves some twisted choice between exile and extinction? Like, "We have decided to remove life on this sphere," or w/e, means, "Either you leave Scadrial or you die when the planet is destroyed." Maybe allowing this choice to be made would seem consistent with Scadrian "autonomy" (seem consistent to Trell, that is)?