Ripheus23

I don't know if the continent-spanning darkness will cover the oceans or not, but either way, Roshar's ecosystem is going to be so messed up by Retribution's dominion that there will be a need for environmental healing on a vast scale, if Roshar is to truly survive. Lift, Jasnah, Shallan, Rlain, Renarin, and whoever else won't be powerful enough to do that without Sylphrena and Kaladin's help, and the help of the other Heralds. I wish I remembered what Kaladin says about the sanctuary they're in at the end but doesn't he already say something about preparing to return "one last time"?

No, I meant this seriously. I think there's something about Chemoarish being confused with the Nightwatcher that's relevant, something about the Night leaving Roshar that's relevant, etc. What with Chemoarish being called the Dustmother, and the Dustbringer reputation for Voidishness/destructiveness, IDK... I feel like there are thematic links between all these entities/concepts.

From the Coppermind: And, "It is unknown what path the Dawnshard Change traveled from the Peaks." Also Urithiru was set up relatively close to the Peaks, and to the Valley of the Nightwatcher. So, the Change Dawnshard being in the ambit of Cultivation seems highly likely, per the relevant timeframe, i.e. as something Taln would've been minded to seek out in trying to kill Cultivation, and as something Nohadon could have been using to Surgebind prior to the Knights.

Zig-zag contribution: I wonder if the Kalphrena/Syladin ship could be diagonalized as asexual-but-not-aromantic, or as a case of "romantic friendship," or something else along those lines. I worry that Kaladin is doomed to be single otherwise as of now but maybe he's at a point in his life where he can embrace an ace identity, say. (I guess he could relate to Ash on this level, or Vedel or another Herald. Maybe not Ash, if the symbolism of her being Jezrien's daughter messed with the symbolism of Kaladin as Jezrien's replacement.) I mean, sure, Chana didn't despite being a Herald, and assuming Kaladin and Co. free Roshar from Retribution, he'd have a new chance at romance then, or even in the midst of things beforehand, but (A) it was hard for me to interpret him dancing with Syl as non-romantic but also (B) the surrounding text didn't resonate with the parts of previous books where Kal's lack of luck in his love life is mentioned. Like, it didn't seem that Kal was himself interpreting his dance with Syl as traditionally romantic. Hell, maybe the Venladin prediction could still come true down the road I'm fine with Rlain and Renarin fulfilling that theme, though (of human-listener/singer reconciliation through love's true power: it seems necessary for the Archive's ethical symbolism, and Rlain and Renarin freeing Mishram was a great way to carry through that representation). (Another option for Kal: Leshwi, maybe? She's big on Gravitation and spear-wielding, which match to Kal quite well.)

I mean, if Sylphrena can become what she seems to have become, for example. Worse, then: could Sylphrena and Wyndle, if both are quasi-Ascended, then go on to replicate the presence of the Sibling? Or, not so much "worse": but if they can join their powers, could they help distribute Towerlight outside of Urithiru? (Random subtheory: Chemoarish kills the Nightwatcher, leaving an opening for Wyndle.)

I realize this thread has more to do with the moons, but I don't want to bump my gas-giant thread, but I do want to quote the Arcanum some: So, earlier, in 2018: But in 2020: Also, Sanderson DOES mention the super-storm on Jupiter a bunch of times as the inspiration for the highstorm (type "gas giant" in the Arcanum search, then read through). And there's also this, then: So maybe he's changed his mind from the 2018 quote, or he was being super-coy and hiding behind that word "culturally": given Cognitive/Spiritual shenanigans, the gas giants being "merely culturally" significant, in principle, is actually code for "they're potentially very important on the Cognitive/Spiritual level." Moon stuff: depending on whether Hoid gets Valor's help (W&T said he was looking for this??? I don't remember, my mind was so blurred out by the time Retribution Ascended), maybe Sanderson will change his mind about having a fourth Shard interfere with Roshar, but otherwise, I thought he had said that the Archive will involve only three Shards directly? If that holds (or if he hasn't already WoB'ed a mind-change on this score???), then whatever the fourth moon's import, it won't be Shardic (at least not in the sense of having the Vessel as a character with Archive "screen time"). Alternatively, then: each moon is correlated with a gas giant, so four of those. Mishim relates to Ishi, maybe, etc.

I wish I had a chance to ask Sanderson one of those questions that gets put up on the Arcanum, but I wouldn't want to waste my chance if I got it, either. For this one, I might phrase it as, "How much foreshadowing is there, about Retribution, in the earlier books?" On the other hand, if I asked about this example specifically, I might get an answer that would help me work on my theory about Retributionblades in general. Hmm... But part of me would also want to ask, "Should we expect the back half books to each be as long as the front half ones?" among other things, so who knows...

Blargh, for an example that would probably not help my case much, if at all, I would say look at the emergence of the Kuomintang/Guomindang in China. When Sun Yat-sen was the #1 leader, not Chiang Kai-shek (the latter was a monster who'd make Dalinar-in-the-Rift look almost angelic, arguably).

@RedBlue hmm, maybe the prophetic import of the phrase, if there is any, has to do with Nightblood instead. Like, Nightblood sees itself as shining brightly, so maybe the image of Nale's mythic sword (if not an Honorblade) is a vision of that. But so why does the Coppermind even have a separate entry for the phrase at all??? That's part of what gets me. We don't have entries for every curious phrase; we don't have separate entries for every Honorblade (AFAIK).

I used to think that Edgli was a dragon, but between our knowledge of Cultivation's Vessel and a WoB, that apparently can't be. So why all the dragon themes in Endowment's world/system? The Coppermind says stuff about dragons posing as deities before the Shattering, and Endowment seems to have a positive opinion about Valor, which was held by a dragon at some point. Edgli's system of giving Breath is reminiscent of dragons giving boons to people. What if Edgli wanted to be/come a dragon??? Or act like they did. Maybe she's Sho Del (@alder24, this idea came to me kinda at random but there's been discussion of this option already???), so fainlife, like dragons in that way already, but she wanted to emulate their culture more. What with the colorfulness of Nalthis, this bit of info is a bit interesting: Maybe what she was denied before the Shattering was dragon-like status ("an honorary dragon" instead of "an honorary degree"), maybe she was denied such a status even after getting her Shard, or has been using her Shard to try to become a dragon. Or if she already was a dragon at some time, now she isn't, and is trying to get back into that state (maybe she shape-shifted into a Sho Del during the Shattering, got stuck in Sho Del form, and has been trying to revert ever since).

Nale was considered the Herald of Justice, and "Justice" was a name I saw floated on these forums for a possible Honor + Odium combo. (Sidebar: and Taln was the Herald of War, another concept related to that combination.) The Coppermind for some reason has an entry, last updated in July of last year, for Nale's legendary "sword of retribution." Nothing in the entry references Nale's actual Honorblade, however, nor his Shardblade via his Skybreaker spren. So I wonder what, if any, foreshadowing is suggested by the legend of the "retribution sword"? Nale was not much involved, in any direct way, with Retribution's Ascension. Like, sure, everything on Roshar played some implicit Spiritual role in that event, on some level, but scene-wise he was far away and preoccupied with Ishar, Kaladin, and Szeth's actions, the shielding of the spren. Random theory: talk of the "retribution sword" was a veiled prophecy, perceived as a myth for the past by those whose future-sight lead to the prophecy, of a weapon Nale will use, after Retribution came along, a combination of his Honorblade and something of Odium (of course I'll predict "one of the Unmade") such that this combination embodies the theme of an Odium + Honor combination. A Retributionblade, I guess. ADDENDUM: a possible candidate for a new meta-prologue? The Coppermind says: And: I'm thinking that Ishar's partaking of the Well has to do with Nale's destabilization, but so what if that was the meta-prologue scene: the influence of Ishar's deed on the Heralds? Since we're in the 1100s as of the Archive, we'd be shown the scene that more or less started the modern Vorin timeframe, maybe.

I'd want to look into various political transitions in Chinese history, for example to/from Confucianism in various ways. I'm not focused so much on transitions to/from democracy in Chinese history but just major political changes of whatever kind; I'd be looking for an example where China's political system underwent a "large" change that resulted in a new system of administration which was at least temporarily stable. Or where something like this happened in India, or Persia, or wherever. If it's generally possible for such changes to take place, and we've seen this IRL, then I would apply that information as a "rule," not of necessity but possibility, and say, "So Sanderson is not being that unrealistic about this after all," at least no more unrealistic than when he has magic and the like in his stories. This is in terms of character building. We don't need everything directly stated in the text, I mean people figured out a huge chunk of the Metallic Arts by deduction, people figured out that Chana was Shallan's mother likewise, I deduced that Taravangian would pick up Odium and then that Dalinar would give him Honor and that Honor's power was involved in Shards being bound by certain conventions well before those things were stated "out loud." So we've been given repeated character-building information about Jasnah's ethical philosophy going back to WoK, I don't see why we can't deduce things from all that. Even if that wasn't plausible reasoning, though, we could invoke Sanderson's religious background to explain a preference for democracy in his representation of "the good side" in this conflict. Same argument as for (2), then. I'm sure there are systems, most of them even, which have been called "democracies" and which include varying degrees of hierarchy. However, I didn't mean that all hierarchies inevitably become dictatorships, only that they can more easily become this, depending on their rigidity, and it's an issue in political philosophy, whether democracies themselves tend to mutate into dictatorships eventually (a particular case being the mystery of Gödel's loophole), but so for a more authoritarianism-adjacent system (a non-democratic hierarchy) to slip towards this state does seem easier in some general respects. OTOH maybe all democracies and hierarchies are so generally unstable, along with dictatorships, that really it's just a matter of perturbation theory adapted to the social level.

I'm referring to the history of the Sunmaker, not sure how long ago that was (many centuries AFAIK). Now that Korea thing is interesting as the Alethi culture draws inspiration from there, and one might compare Japan to Alethkar and North Korea to Retribution's system. Moreover, though, I don't think that the Azish decision to take in the Alethi was "unrealistic" or "wrong" or what, I just meant that people might think that it was unrealistic/wrong, depending on their theories of psychology and sociology, etc.

Regarding the second part first: Azish society is modeled in part off Confucianism, and the Alethi, who wrought a genocide upon that land not that long ago (all things considered), are much housed up there now, so... Or, imagine if alien-demons from both another planet and another plane of existence invaded 1800s Europe, and the leading power in Europe became a government-in-exile situated in part in India and Saudi Arabia (and among the remnants of Native American tribes, apparently). If for nothing else than historical flavoring, I think we would do well to factor in cultures/societies/histories that Sanderson has said informed his representation of Azir (and other places on Roshar, incl. Alethkar, which is not supposed to be all that much like 1800s Europe AFAIK). I mean, forget how "unrealistic" it is for Alethkar-in-exile to accept democratization at the whims of a heretic and a man bonded to a corrupted spren, who is now romantically involved with the "enemy" (who with that enemy man helped set free Mishram!). How unrealistic was/is it for Azir to take in Alethkar as it has? You could be like, "There's no way, if a country murdered 10% of my fellow citizens, that I'd be willing to accept people from that country as refugees unless it was civilians or soldiers who didn't know any better. But to take in a general who massacred tens of thousands of people, including his own wife? What the hell!" Now, as for Jasnah and Renarin's moral attitudes: w.r.t. Jasnah, it's based on the outcome of her debate with Taravangian, her need to reflect on, and better personify, her ideals. The decisions she's making after that scene are informed/motivated by her experience of that debate. As for Renarin, in the interests of diversity and inclusion, which are real values for him after all, he is going to gravitate towards political systems whose themes resonate more with openness to more and more perspectives and possibilities. Dictatorship isn't that, and hierarchy leads to dictatorship fairly easily (also note that no real human dictator has the kind of physical power that Radiants and Heralds have, so cannot function as singularly as they might, but a real dictator must depend on the agreement of the seething oligarchy below them); Renarin's culture already has a history of opposing the Hierocracy, we should not forget; and in Sanderson's hands, the word "democracy" here might have a very general significance. The LDS interpretation of reality involves a very sharp commitment to the importance of agency, as a strong concept of free will even, and this plays into the idealization of democracy on various levels. In a sense, greater personal diversity is symptomatic of a more open system, a system of more "freedom" in some appropriate sense. Too much rigid order is totalitarian, which is more than just authoritarian. Too much random chaos is not stable. So a balance of political order and political randomness is variously closer to optimal, ethically, and democracy at least overlaps this balanced range to a moderately greater extent than an overbearing hierarchy based on e.g. eye color. We also shouldn't forget that one of the most prolific fantasy authors ever lives in southern Utah, among the landscapes that inspired the Shattered Plains, and since I would be surprised if Sanderson had no knowledge of this man, I would instead expect that Sanderson is at least passingly familiar with his (the other author's) dialectic of order and chaos. At any rate, though, Renarin internal to the Archive's storyline and externally, outside the fourth wall, is meant to symbolize the potential social dynamics that are reflected in his representation of, and drive towards, democracy as a medium of political and personal autonomy.

Would the Blackthorn-Shadow be able to fill a sort of "inverse neo-Kelsier" role without being crystal-spiked like Vyre, though? I wonder if he won't be used more for Cognitive/Spiritual purposes than Physical ones. Retribution doesn't seem to need more generals for Roshar, he thinks he's smarter about almost everything than Dalinar was anyway, yeah? So even for the wider cosmere war, why bring in this ghost? I mean, there could be utility to it, but I'm not sure whether Taravangian, especially now as Retribution, and in the face of the ominous danger of the other Shards, is going to see the Blackthorn as the ultimate emblem of his wider ideals and intents. Does he think that Dalinar-of-old would be good at dueling not just with other armies but a host of other Shards? I personally want to see a scene where Navani awakens after a long time, so she's more or less the only one in a normal position to not know that Dalinar died when Retribution Ascended, and so Retribution uses the manifestation of the Blackthorn to (try to) manipulate her, if only for a moment, then. If you've ever read the beginning of Fatal Revenant, I mean something like that for example, maybe not so drawn out though (I doubt it would be hard for Navani to find out what was up). I mean, remember how frickin' creepy Taravangian was about captive spren in OB? The Blackthorn-Shadow is basically another "abused pet" spren of his. I could see him wholeheartedly abusing this entity for disturbing pseudo-moral reasons rather than as (or in addition to) a combat manager.

In Tolkien's background stories, Sauron didn't always try to raise huge armies for his purposes. Neither did Melkor, exactly, IIRC. In the Covenant novels, it's explicitly stated that the Despiser's strategy in the first arc was heavily based on the idea of using an outside army, then an inside army in the second arc, and finally no real personally directed army at all but an elaborate manipulation of circumstances, like a pattern of inverted divine providence, in the last arc. On the other hand, the Dark One was waging war right through to the Last Battle's last ending. The reason/way this possibly applies to the Archive's back half would be: what if Retribution won't be the tangible antagonist almost/at all? As if to say: It'll be Mishram primarily, there'll be duels with Fused and Unmade and all that, but not the direct meddling from the evil Shard like we've dealt with throughout the front half and especially as of the third book. Ishar will be more volatile than we'd have hoped (think Esmer from the last Covenant arc, if you're familiar with those novels). There will be ecological and technological dangers. Secondly: it's possible to write an absurdly epic conclusion to a fantasy saga that does not depend on a final-battle scene. A zig-zag, to some extent, of the whole template is at the end of His Dark Materials (which seems like an absurdly good option when it comes to, "If any other books inspired the idea of the spren and bonds therewith..."), where I am reminded also of the Genesis of Shannara novels, arguably the finest entries in that whole convoluted, even repetitive, meta-series. The endgame is such that It's tragic, too, incidentally. So now why should Sanderson, who has already "written the book on" battle sequences involving transcendent evil beings (the end of The Wheel of Time, that is), go and duplicate that narrative rhythm in the Archive's back half? Actually, I shouldn't say that it would be impossible for him to justify doing so. He could well conceive of a battle sequence culminating in an assault on Retribution's power that is as epochal as the apocalypse of the Dark One in The Wheel of Time. He'd figure it out. But, so, does he have to? This is what I'm mainly wondering. Suppose, for example, that Retribution is truly meant to be the broader-scope villain also, i.e. will in fact go on to menace the entire cosmere not just by desire but by deed? Wouldn't it kind of be a let-down to have Kaladin and Co. square off with him somehow, especially in some dramatic multiple-magic-systems-engaging manner, and he was not defeated by this? Now, if I want to push the Covenant analogy some more, I'd claim, "Well, he could write it like that, too: Retribution is sealed away at the end of the back half, but there's a known 'timer' on the sealing, so the later interstellar conflict will involve him when he returns; this is what Donaldson did with the Despiser two times over, after all (implicitly more, if you count the implied prehistory)." Still, I would also then want to emphasize that the second arc's ending was split in half, and one half of that was a healing-themed scenario more, with surprising undercurrents of what was at the time pathbreaking queer theory/representation in fantasy fiction. This representation evolved into one-third of the ending of the third arc, no less, which though it involved a separate corrupted deity than the main enemy in the series was not about defeating this dire goddess in combat. Meanwhile, another one-third of the third ending was an elaborate Battle Within the Mind kind of scenario, focused on metaphysical puzzle-solving more than combat or emotional outbursts either way. And even the other half of the second ending, though it had more "battle-like" characteristics, was really instead one of the greatest subversions of the final-battle trope in fantasy that I've ever read. So, for all that, again: and no doubt, Retribution will play a deep role in the text no matter what, but will his role now be more like, say, the Keeper of the Underworld's role was in Goodkind's peculiar series? (I mean the earlier books, there: IIRC, the mythos of the Keeper was eventually transformed into some multiversal situation involving a diabolical prophecy-machine or something) Or just: will a final personal confrontation with Retribution be the apex of the last endgame (in the Archive), or will the ultimate focus be on a different scenario involving enormous magic power? So finally, I also want to bring up Sazed's triumph, then: even already Sanderson has equipped a fantasy climax with both a divine battle scene and a divine regeneration scene. Does he actually need the former for the end of the back half, or would it work even if he had only a world-healing scene at the end? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ADDENDUM: FFX So, that's Sanderson's favorite FF game, yeah? Maybe even his favorite video game, period??? (I'm not sure how to read the article's meaning correctly.) There HAS to be a clue to the Archive/cosmere-saga in that. I mean, there's another thread here correlating FFX and Yumi/the Night Painter story (which I haven't read yet, though). But so, as far as goes this question of, "Will there be a final battle, or at least rather will there be a final battle and then a non-combat final dramatic scene?" then what could we question about the theme in terms of how FFX goes at the end? Because, like, there's a complex battle sequence for sure, where you're fighting the visual embodiment of the thing you've known as Sin itself the whole time. You're going into it, no less. Then you're in this mystical realm where you eventually fight another major enemy figure who's showed up before over and over again. (A guy not all too unlike Ishar, after all...) Eventually, Kaladin, err, Tidus confronts an awful truth in that So, there's a final battle that you can lose. But then, for some mysterious narrative reason: Another thing: Sanderson's said something about gloves being off or what, recently(ish)? From what I'm seeing, it was something to do with crossovers from different parts of the meta-series. But that's also, technically, a pacing question, w.r.t. the whole meta-series, yeah? Like how much the tempo of RAFO adjustment on the wider scale is intensified. Something I'm wondering is if we should assume that all the back-half Archive books will be ~1400 pages each. Is it possible that we see shorter main entries and maybe longer intermediate entries instead? Maybe he picks up the pace in some way proportionate to how he paced W&T, even (not that the whole back half covers mostly just ten days, but still something metaphorically like that, sort of). I mean, FF6 But now in FFX, once you get to the twist/everything-changes-now moment, it's closer to the end. But "all gloves are off" because whereas before you were kind of stuck going from point A to point B down the road, now you can go to all sorts of locations in preparing for the final battle. So in the Archive's back half, could we see Kaladin and Co. doing a lot of things a lot more quickly than we're used to them doing things in the front half?

When I first read WoK, I was working a fairly miserable job, one that had a sort of reputation to the effect that people working this job were "low-value." Still, not even close to the horror of being a bridge runner in the Shattered Plains. Anyway, the employee was divvied up to where the "pretty girls" would all work the public/service section, and it was a hodgepodge of "misfit men" in the kitchen: current or former drug addicts, people with physical or mental developmental "abnormalities," ex-criminals, etc. So, I got it into my silly little head to try to be Kaladin for them, to try to instill discipline and self-esteem in my "men" (I ended up being the show runner for the kitchen for the better part of my four-and-a-half years there). I'd crack jokes molded to their personalities, explain training so that I didn't come across as barking incomprehensible random orders at them, and demonstrate how the job could be done in a way that would put to rest any idea that we were "low-value" people for being here. It. Didn't. Work. I mean, there were a few decent results, moments of successful long-term training and crew morale boosts, but nothing like equipping us to move on to better pastures but staying behind to help some valiant managers we happened to notice being valiant. Like, nothing close to what Kaladin got at the end of WoK. We weren't being ground down by participation in a genocidal, nonsensical war where we were the apex of expendability, the level of trauma my coworkers had gone through was hardly anything like what Bridge Four's members went through before and during their stint as bridge runners. So, if what Kaladin did in WoK was more realistic than what he did in W&T, well... Also, an enormous amount of my therapy experience was being given one weird medication after another, being told, "Come back in two weeks and it'll be working by then," unintelligible gibberish about how I shouldn't use the word "shouldn't," games of UNO in the psych ward (when I ended up there) along with hundreds of pages of practice drawing cartoon landscapes/characters, yadayadayada but what good was it? So when Kaladin can heal people's minds at all, in part because he's empowered by divine glory in the process after all, I don't know whether I can judge it to be realistic, unrealistic, or something else, on the philosophical level. Maybe if I were more physically attractive, I'd have gotten better results in the one direction; maybe if my therapy crew wasn't embedded in a sociopathic military-economic system (the mental health campus I worked at was partly under local military police jurisdiction, among other things), they would have treated me in a more effective way, in the other. Maybe my coworkers and I were doomed to live as, as well as in, filth, no matter how hard any of us tried to stand up for ourselves. I don't know. EDIT: the job I mostly am talking about in the above was not the job I had working at the mental health campus. My campus job was part of a vocational rehab program, I wasn't looked down on for having it, but the previous job was one people looked down on others for having.

Jasnah/Renarin think that their system is morally better than the previous one. They don't need any more justification than that, morality is not always, if ever, about "what works." The remains of Alethkar are concentrated in a magical city that still has its magic, in another country not blighted by the Night of Sorrows, and in the Shattered Plains, which is also not under Retribution's direct political control. And for all that, we don't know how long the new order will endure, what challenges it will face, etc. so it seems strange to accuse Sanderson of writing a fairytale of political success when he hasn't written the tale almost at all, yet. I'll look into it more for sure. The dialectic of Confucianism (more hierarchy) vs. Taoism (borderline libertarianism in some ways) and so on, is something I have only a little knowledge of for now, but I could see it as entirely pertinent to analysis of the case. I don't mean that we'll see specific parallels, but I meant Scadrial went from a New Eden scenario, to a city with people biting at each other's ankles in all sorts of ways, to a network of even more fractious cities (incl. an attempt by one to hyper-nuke another!), I don't see why Future Alethkar would have to be portrayed as eternally stable???

My argument was that political science is a soft science, bordering on pseudo-science actually, without much rhyme or reason so if someone's like, "Significant political changes can't be imposed by force and last a long time when distributed throughout a huge population in an ecologically stable area!" is a confused thought process, because sometimes such changes have been imposed in such a way that they last for a while (who knows how Japan will be governed after the next hundred years have passed, what with all this authoritarianism and nationalism worming its way across the Earth right now, including there), and anyway: Jasnah/Renarin are working in an ecologically and technologically unstable world, administering a population concentrated in a city empowered by the child of gods, another city ruled by a civilization that their predecessor the Sunmaker inflicted a huge genocide on, warcamps in quasi-neutral territory (where their immediate predecessors committed yet another genocide, of the Parshendi!), and I don't remember where else, but decidedly not a huge region of Roshar. We have no proof that Sanderson is going to claim that their new government is perfectly stable for time and all eternity; if anything, we'll see how, 300 years down the road, neo-Jasnahian Alethkar is just as factious as Scadrial 300 years after the emparadised outcome of the Catacendre. Like, there is zero reason to accuse Sanderson of not knowing "how history works," for starters because history doesn't work and even if it did, things here would be more like, "Well, this is how I interpret history vs. how he does," so again saying that Sanderson is being foolish about this subject is not a realistic criticism. Also, way too many Euro/American-centric analogies in this thread when we should at least be looking at Jewish, Confucian, and other such analogies as well, and more emphatically.

On a serious (sort of) note, and considering Sanderson's genre-savviness: Sanderson seems to get a lot of inspiration from the Thomas Covenant books. The opening scenario from Elantris screams, "I contracted leprosy and all I got was this lousy pariah status," the Ryshadium resonate with the Ranyhyn, etc. So, Donaldson, the Covenant author, promised us a few things with the end to his 10-book meta-series: (A) he wouldn't mess up like King did with the end of The Dark Tower, and (B) he'd explore his evil god's personality on a deeper level. Well, Donaldson failed to keep either promise, or he fulfilled them to a bare minimum rather I guess. Two-fourths of The Last Dark's last chapters were extremely good, but the actual last chapter, and the epilogue, seemed rushed, didn't answer questions that would've been appropriate to answer as of that moment in the story, etc. And if we strain our brains to Diagram-levels, we can maybe glean some deeper tidbits about how the evil god's mind worked, from the given material. So anyway, Sanderson is carrying the burden of the Dark Tower let-down now, and on a level far beyond the level Donaldson took it to (which in a way was less than the level King was working on). Also, having Odium merge with Honor does slightly remind me of Covenant giving his magic super-weapon to the evil god in those stories, at the sort-of-midpoint of the meta-series. Between all that and some WoBs about the topic, I get the impression that Sanderson will continue to develop his Big Bad's personality. He'll "make up" for Donaldson's deficits, so to speak, and instead of ... then Kaladin, if he's even involved with the final Kirk Summation in the Archive (I'm leaning heavily towards Jasnah filling this role, though), will do something moderately more involved and much more interesting. But for a lot of reasons, like the logic of the magic systems and so on, I don't see Kaladin squaring off against Retribution. The other half of the midpoint-resolution scene in the Covenant meta-series was about healing the natural order of the world after it had been desecrated by the evil god, and Kaladin is a lot more like the character (Linden Avery) involved in that process, than he is like Covenant. So I expect Kaladin and Sylphrena to focus on bringing back the highstorm and other environmental-activist kind of maneuvers, while Dalinar's moral successor Jasnah is left to argue with Taravangian (in Spiritual Kharbranth).

For some reason, I'm remembering a scene in Shinovar, related to Ishar, where they found a cave with spren with crystal spikes in them or something. Maybe this is why Ishar thought that there WAS an Unmade in Shinovar, because he was aware of his own intentions in a confused way? Or he had even managed to do something like: The Arcanum has this: Technically, "now," Shinovar would be where the first major human settlement on Roshar was, so maybe some place in Shinovar could count as "the First Capital," but I don't know what that city was supposed to be in WoKP.

Bind him, break him, or... give him some stew

I was hopping through the Coppermind and made a mental note when I read this: Also: Then: THEORY TIME: the Dawncities were not simultaneously built, but at different times, in the name/with the help of different Heralds (before they were Heralds in some cases, maybe). More precisely, each Dawncity is to a Herald what Elantris is to Elantrians at large, with the cymatic signature of each being comparable to an Aon. So, for example, Sesemalex Dar was Jezrien's Dawncity, and this pertains somehow to why Ishar was so enmeshed with the war over the place (he wanted to do something with SD's power). Then what other people are saying about the Unmade and the Dawncities is correct: the Unmaking of the cities' spren was part of where the Unmade came from. However, then, which Dawncity never "fell," so to speak? For that he is the Herald of War, I wonder whether Taln was the Herald of Alethela/Kholinar as such, but Kholinar is sprenless nowadays too, so I don't know. But Taln seems to have Returned near Kholinar, so I wonder if each Herald Returns near their appointed Dawncity (on the supposition that they have these). I'm gonna assume/guess that these are Dawncities: Kholinar Rall Elorim Thaylen City Vedenar Panatham Stormseat Azimir Sesemalex Dar Akinah Kurth So, if Stormseat was just annihilated by the interface of Honor and Odium's tones (is that what Shattered the Plains??? my memory is blanking), maybe it never had a chance for its spren to be Unmade in the usual way, and it's pretty stony, so maybe it was Stormseat that Taln was affiliated with. Maybe Taln wanted to kill Cultivation because she could've protected Stormseat with her tone but didn't, etc. GAS GIANT CONNECTION? AFAIK, IRL, Saturn has a huge hexagonal storm going on, on it. I assume, then, that there are cymatics-correlated storms on Roshar's gas giants. Like, per giant, there's a storm whose cymatic signature was involved in the pattern of the Dawncity associated with the appropriate Herald/planet pair. And then e.g. Kurth's description as the "City of Lightning" means that its corollary giant-storm is the most electrically charged, maybe; or Akinah's protective storm is partly channeled from the corresponding gas giant. (Extra guess: Dai-Gonarthis is then the Unmade of Akinah.) OATHGATE CONNECTION? Sesemalex Dar doesn't have an Oathgate, and we don't know which Shin city/site has theirs. The Windrunners and Skybreakers are the flying Radiants, so maybe their affiliated Dawncities don't need Oathgates and/or the Shin Oathgate isn't in a city? However, I don't know that Nale would be associated with the Shin like that. Revv doesn't sound like a Shin name, where was Revv??? (Would Nale have been appointed a Dawncity from Revv upon his acceptance of the Skybreakers, according to this "model"?)

I forgot that one completely thank you! And oh man, this makes me hope Adolin gets to be there for Shallan.

So, no Shallan-dedicated flashback sections for a whole book, right? In the back half? Would the only way we could have a Shallan flashback to that day, would it be in like a recurring prologue? I mean, if we're following the front half like that. Or would we see a scene where Shallan has a Spiritual vision of herself giving birth to her first child/ren? (Why???) Another way to have the scene is have it where the Oathpact-abandonment meta-prologue was in the front half, maybe. Would Shallan having a child be that characteristic of the back-half theme, though? I mean, it'd be an interesting mirror of the assassination/taking-a-life scenario from the front half, though I'm still keen on Navani's awakening as a better parallel. I also feel like it might be easier to keep Navani suspended for years and years, so that if there is a recurring prologue scene, it won't be something like "NINE YEARS AGO" or what. (Besides, how many people would be there when Shallan's pregnancy is completed anyway?) So maybe more like: Shallan having a child (meta-prologue scene) (but why?) Navani awakening (recurring prologue scene) (I guess you could be like, "Why would that be public enough for five POVs about it?" too, but I'm thinking like, if she's been in stasis, kept alive by the Sibling, for years and years, there's a chance she'll be in a crystal sarcophagus for public display, or some other crazy neo/Alethi practice along those lines. Like, instead of turning her into a statue, they put her in a crystal display, as a weak symbol of hope in the possibility that she might awaken one day. The Coppermind does note that, perhaps oddly (I suppose), "Such funerals [as when someone is Soulcast into a statue] are the only times where Soulcasting is performed publicly." Oooooh, oh no...! Maybe the scene could be like, they're about to finally Soulcast Navani into a statue, and right as they're about to do it, thinking her too far gone to ever come back, she awakens. Or, someone intervenes, halts the situation, convinces everyone around them to let them try to awaken her, it works, etc. Anyway, Shallan though... Hmm... Would it be a waste of a character moment, to pass over this one for the most part? Like, we're not really shown anything, of course, about Oroden or Gavinor being born, among many, many others. Actually, I don't clearly remember a childbirth scene anywhere right now, in all of what's now written. So... Hmm... On the one hand, Sanderson doesn't seem to have a strong motive to write childbirth scenes with the regularity of arranged-marriage scenarios but so that might give him a reason to want to write one for Shallan, as a way to emphasize something particular about Shallan, both as a character/personality profile, and as a figure in the magic/logic sequence of the story. But then her child/ren will have to have a narrative role that's in some sense comparable to the Heralds, and in a way that mirrors the Heralds' abandoning of the Oathpact??? And Adolin might not even get to be there? I mean, it seems like a physical possibility, that getting to Shadesmar in time, or Shallan finding a secure location on Roshar again, or whatever, might be too much for him to accomplish/receive. OTOH, less than a year in to Retribution's tyranny, Azimir might still be pretty safe, so... hmm... Sidebar: I was also wondering about possible long-term/short-term flashback scenarios set in Shadesmar. Like, if the Grand Knell corresponds to a scene accompanied by an implicit history lesson when it's shown, this might be something like "thousands of years ago" and we see why it got its name, or else characters in modern times met there and something important to spren politics happened, something parallel in importance that is to the political outcome of Gavilar's assassination. You might reason that we've been shown quite enough C-SPREN as of Lasting Integrity but why couldn't we get new such scenes that carried the plot well, later? Look at how many battle scenes we've had. Or even debate scenes, Alethi political scenes, etc.; I see no reason why Shadesmar shenanigans of the same social kind would not be available. Anyway, my go-to guess would then be: a scene involving the deadeyes making a certain collective progress in their process of enervation. Anyway, another option would be: there's not a recurring prologue, but a recurring epilogue, and it is to this day of Shallan and Adolin's, and it's something that shows us the spirit of their family Connection, shows us what they are fighting for on some level. For example, if Shallan ever became a Heraldic figure, replacing or alongside her mother, that would resonate with the family Connectivity of the other scene, etc. Then the meta-prologue is also switched out for a meta-epilogue. Actually, that might be an efficient structure regardless, though what, then? "4500 YEARS FROM NOW"??? More unreconciled data: if I predict that Shallan will take Ash's mantle as a Herald, not because Ash dies necessarily, maybe because it's part of a process for healing her of her ancient trauma: if I predict that, then Shallan should have an important scene in Ash's flashback book, too, but what? I mean, besides if she becomes a Herald, I guess. Well, though, I guess then that that would be the important such scene to have, hmm... Also, if I'm assuming that there's a reason for Shallan to Nahel-bond with Re-Shephir, I'd have to integrate at least the canon about Shallan and her interaction with Re-Shephir with the vision of Shallan's being a mother as an important thematic element of the back half. So, too many variables (meaning: and how many variables have I forgotten, no less?)...