Ripheus23

I had a long while ago assumed/guessed that the "logical way" for Sanderson to develop the SA saga and the Cosmere saga together, here, would mean giving Honor to Odium. I didn't have much of a good idea as to the details of how this would bind Odium, I had some crackpot theory about manipulating the fused Shard into creating and thereby Investing in a new planet so that it would be stuck there instead, but I did think that it made narrative sense to use the Sazed/Harmony scenario as a trope internal to this cosmere storyline, except then to subvert it by switching out "the protagonist takes two Shards to save the day" with "the protagonist gives a second Shard to an already-evil Vessel to save the day." You can think of it like having to "do the math" in a more specific magic system, only in this case the thing is that Sanderson has to work out the workings of the inter-Shardic system, which poses the immediate "danger" of fourth-wall-weakening if not handled correctly. Like, on the one hand, it seems like the Shards can enchant whole planets in direct and indirect ways, giving rise to magic systems where things like the "fuel" and "form" and so on vary so much, so how can the inter-Shardic system be itself subject to almost any non-trivial restrictions as such? On the other hand, there are the narrative meta-laws of the magic systems, the story-telling reasons for developing them in a particular way. Don't make magic the answer to the major problems if the system is too powerful: make the magic, or even its very system, into the problem. Surgebinding/Radiance/etc. are staggeringly OP in a lot of ways in a sub-galaxy with a ton of potentially OP magic systems, so doesn't that give Sanderson a reason to do things like have major characters forswear their oaths, etc. in order to resolve the local plotline, which has reached only the intermission after all? Honor and Odium were both the problem, because of the powers they gave the other characters. So, to set up the back half, and other cosmere stuff, wouldn't Sanderson kind of like have to have Honor and Odium merge in a context where oath-breaking/being-unoathed is emphasized for the protagonists? You might also think of it as Sanderson being genre-savvy in the way of drawing inspiration from many fantasy series, including LOTR, where getting rid of the final power in the story was the key plot point. This happened in the second Covenant series, too, when he gives his OP wedding ring to the god of evil. I think I've read that Sanderson is confirmed to have read some of the Covenant novels, and I'm pretty sure the Ryshadium were inspired in part by the Ranyhyn from those, so applying that information, and with the sacrifice-the-power scene being at the closest thing to an "intermission" in that series, too, I could see Sanderon thinking stuff like, "Well, the LOTR and Covenant narratives made pretty good internal sense, they're even some of the reasons why I came up with the narrative laws for my magic systems, so to apply the philosophical trope/theme underlying those stories, to this one, hmm..." and realizing that at least one plausible solution would be having the Shard of Honor given over to the Shard of Odium. I will admit that I had no precise expectation of who would do the giving, but having it be Dalinar in rough conjunction with one of his sons helping atone for the sin of Honor's first Vessel and his other son enduring his (the other son's) weakness by finding a means of taking up empowered armor first, then a Shardblade... It was the furthest thing from my mind, as I read the W&T Sanderlanche, that Sanderson had randomly stumbled into these scenes. It all clicked way too perfectly for me to think that. Even specific word choices, like "Retribution" as the name of the new super-evil, fit the inspirational background (e.g. the evil god in the Covenant novels is consistently, deeply portrayed as punishment-minded). I should admit this too, though, I guess, then: at first, while actually reading that part of the book, I thought Dalinar really was just going to take up Honor and at least stalemate the situation. I mean, I was "praying" that he would give the Shard to Taravangian, I wanted my crackpot theory to come true, and I almost didn't even believe it when the one part of it at least happened. So I'm probably way biased in favor of this book

The description of Vin disappearing after colliding with Ati/Ruin makes me think that Preservation and Ruin enter into a sort of Light/anti-Light relation on some level. Not a comprehensive level, else Sazed could not hold them both (or he could but by keeping them separated on the appropriate level...). That, and/or the way that the Scadrial godmetals had been dispersed at that point was relevant; correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the destruction caused by Honor's attempt to battle Odium something that overlapped Odium's Shardpool? (I already gave my copy of W&T to a needy reader in my area so I don't know/can't check ) I mean, generally, I don't think Shardic power levels translate well into, say, DBZ-style power levels. Maybe the destructiveness doesn't always manifest initially as like a Shardic kamehameha hitting something, but more indirectly at first?

I'd be willing to bet that you're on to something, it sounds like a great schematic for a subplot/arc as the saga goes along. Cultivation seems to strongly indicate that at least one of the fundamental justifications for the Shattering involved some no-one-god-only protocol. Insofar as Rayse and Bavadin seem to see somewhat eye to eye on something having to do with the don't-have-multiple-Shards-in-the-same-area policy after the Shattering, and Autonomy's offworld meddling seems on the surface to be as far from avoidance of the other Shards as possible, yet what if the thing is that the process of distributing one's importance as the Vessel of a Shard, into Avatars, more deeply goes against the kind of process that would reassemble Adonalsium "by default" as time goes on? And/or is a way to deflect the "danger" of getting merged with another Shard? Imagine that Rayse might have reasoned like, "Well, she is specifically doing something that aligns in a certain useful way with my aversion to picking up other Shards, due to the Intent-merging risk," and had a tolerance(?) for her actions to where she could go on to plausibly convince herself that Rayse/Odium wasn't so bad/dangerous himself after all, relative to her anyway, and whatever his evident ambitions seemed to be. But then, the very anti-monotheism dynamic of forming entire pantheons on multiple planets, out of Avatars, is what would render Bavadin/Autonomy vulnerable to this exotic internal conflict? Bavadin is compelled to challenge herself for self-dominance again and again, fulfilling the Intent of the Shard like a puppet almost, rather than a truly autonomous being. And ultimately, to carry out her own preordinate Intent, she has to try for some concord with her Shard anyway, so it'd be a fine line to walk/delicate balance to maintain. Like, if she was deeply dedicated to the anti-monotheism aspect of the Shattering, she really would have an enduring ground for hostility towards Shards who did things that knowingly would contribute to the re/emergence of a super-Shard, maybe not Adonalsium anew really, but still something catastrophic enough to become a new mono-theos in the cosmere; and she'd also have a reason to distribute the worth of her own Shard through the sub-cosmere of her Avatars?

Wild guess: the Godforge overlaps the Origin in the CR. Logicspren look like little storms, I assume this means that they're very electricity-y, and this future-wise has to do with the role of logic and electronics in computation/Cognition (on the Physical plane). But anyway, then, there's also the symbolism of the "logon agon" (the contest-of-words in Greek philosophy) in play, like logicspren are drawn to powerful arguments so the "stormy" quality of dialectic plays in turn into their presentation and role in the generation of storms at the Origin. So: book 10 would be a great entry to have the Godforge show up in, or even if they find it earlier, then guessing again that the Godforge is a mirror of the Origin/source of the highstorms, then if resetting Rosharan ecology is a major arc in the back half, well... And then, like, book 10 is Jasnah's flashback book, she's an Elsecaller, their armor is made of logicspren, and inkspren themselves have a weird Physical property (they seem kind of like they're more "bound" by Physicality than other Nahel spren, in the sense of not changing shape in the PR or not being able to become Physically invisible), so I wonder if something about this property would help mediate a process of conducting the "electricity" of a storm of logicspren, at the site of the Godforge, back into the PR? Though on another hand, thematically, it would hardly make sense if Sylphrena weren't present during some of the relevant scenes, no? I don't know... She's had a lot of cool scenes, but I'll be damned if she doesn't get her own true super-Sanderlanche someday At least, again, for the theme-of-the-story's sake, I hope she does something on that scale/level, and in a place with a stereotypically, but correctly, cool name like "the Godforge" wouldn't be a bad way to play that theme at all... But which would mean that Kaladin/Sylphrena cross paths with Jasnah in the back half, in such a context? Why would that happen??? ("Theory": a lot of the protagonists have to meet up in the end, it'll be book 10 for heaven's sake!) EDIT: OK, so, like, Jasnah is Dalinar's daughter. For her to reprise her argument with Taravangian in the back half would be to reprise Dalinar's expectation that the contest-of-champions would be an example of the logon agon. And also, if I'm right, Jasnah's place in Kharbranth in WoK, and her debate over theism/atheism there. So, like, Cultivation actually dropped a mother-of-all-reveals during one of the tangent scenes with Odium, she basically stated that the core philosophical justification for the Shattering was anti-monotheism. That not needing to have one god, or moreover needing to not have one, testified against Rayse's/Odium's desire to become the sole Shard. Jasnah's already denied the godhood of Honor, I bet she doesn't think Adonalsium was the genuine-article Almighty either. She'll be impressed by Taravangian as Retribution, but she won't think to worship him. Recapitulating the debate over the existence of God, relative to Dalinar's status as a "prophet" of the God Beyond on Roshar, with Jasnah being his daughter... Well, wait, I was separately thinking that part of the final showdown with Taravangian might be in the Spiritual Kharbranth, for some more narrative symmetry's sake. This would suggest Jasnah going there, to conduct her argument. Hmm... So maybe Kaladin and Sylphrena are at the Godforge, and they see a vast host of logicspren forming, because elsewhere, a great debate is being conducted, between Jasnah and the god she doesn't believe in, and part of Jasnah's argument is that yes, the Shattering of Adonalsium was to some extent justifiable, or at least understandable, from the point of view of monotheism's ethically problematic characteristics. Monotheism is often practiced in a manner energized by the most violent incarnations of the logon agon, and Retribution represents not only the hatred invested in this kind of rancor, but the insufferable self-righteousness of supposed victors in the contest-of-words at any time. I should like to note that the major use of the word "odium" in the pertinent real-world/Earth history, was as part of the phrase "odium theologicum," which is a specifically religious form of the logon agon. (That is, though the word didn't come from that time, what brought it to Sanderson's attention was possibly/presumably not just its default connotations, but its embedding in the relevant two-word phrase.) Accordingly, it is indeed Jasnah who must play the role that she ends up playing, in book 10, whatever it is? EDIT 2: sorry, I forgot, she's Gavilar's daughter. I guess in my head I got this image of Dalinar as her "adoptive" father via Navani. Actually, thematically, that factoid works even better, maybe, though.

@alder24 I should have specified how thin my picture is of how Nightblood might figure in Retribution's possible future conflict with Harmony. I didn't think, "By forming on Oathpact-like barricade around Scadrial," or so, but that's an interesting option, actually. From what I might outdatedly remember at this time, there's a WoB somewhere where Sanderson RAFO's something about the ability of any Shard/metal to specially manifest in a sword-like way. Humans throughout the cosmere learning that Shards can be bound by special rituals involving these kinds of swords would be a super-interesting way to connect the intraplanetary magic systems on an interplanetary level. There could be factions pointing out how Braize is relevant to the prototype, daring and desperate protagonists willing to try to find a surrogate for Braize in their area, etc. But it could be a way that some mortal groups might be minded to rebel against the dominion of the Shards. Other than that, I should think that War-with-a-captital-W is an Intent, specifically a possible Shardic Intent. You say that it's incidental to the case that Lifelight and Stormlight intertwine as Towerlight. Not too many things are further from what I believe, since one of the things I believe very sharply is that Adonalsium had some kind of super-special city-like manifestation. I assume this because of how many Cosmere books take place hugely in directly or indirectly enchanted cities: most Scadrial stories, Elantris, Warbreaker, WoK (Kharbranth), WoR (the warcamps and listener enclave), O (Kholinar and Urithiru), RoW (Urithiru again), to name the ones I know. (It looks like there's not so much urban journeyfare in a lot of the side-stories, including the ones I know I haven't read yet.) And there'll be a book about Silverlight, reportedly. Silverlight, again... If Urithiru has a spren, and one of the deeply mightiest spren no less, then I think it stands to reason that the fusion of the Intents of Life and Cultivation with those of Storms and Honor would bear the implicitly deific title of "the Tower," even as an Intent. One of the forms of Intent that can be carven from the Spirit-crystal of Adonalsium (such as if the group who Shattered Adonalsium had chosen to read its Intentional architecture differently, to put its nature into different categories, different by type and/or number (if I remember my WoB's correctly)). So, I see no problem with thinking that if Dalinar had taken up Odium and Honor, he would have personified the Intent of War; and Navani was studying the fusion of Stormlight and Voidlight under the auspices of her love for Dalinar, among other things. So her conceptualization of the fused Intent would have gravitated more towards a representation befitting Dalinar's personality more than, say, Taravangian's. It's not incidental to, "He had to come up with a cool name for the evil beings, so he slapped 'Void' and 'bringer' together and voila!" that Sanderson uses the word "Void" as the key prefix-epithet in this context. That is true enough in its own way, but Sanderson also has had his characters analyze the emotional effect of Odium as explicitly void-like. So the Intent of the Void is a shadow of the Intent of Odium, nothing more, but nothing less. It is a way that Sanderson has generically stipulated that philosophical disputants in the cosmere might follow, in the sense of different participants in the Shattering being deeply-thought-through individuals, each with specified Intents and so on of their own. So, the Shard of Odium could well have ended up as the Shard of the Void instead. Or then the Voidshard, knowing the way some cosmere peeps like to slap words together... Anyway, I really don't know what I was thinking might happen except, like, Retribution would be funneling a tiny, but possibly compoundable, amount of his power through Nightblood, into Harmony, to kind of "worsen" the itch of Discord's shadowy presence. There's a tad bit of evidence that Harmony might, just might, be slipping a little in the struggle, at some time or other. So Retribution wouldn't have to send a huge burst of energy through the Nightblood Connection to maybe "tip the scales" if the problem is already there/happening. It's also the kind of creepy-zany move that I could see Taravangian making, when confronted with the persona of Sazed (can you imagine a philosophical debate between those two???). ... And as for those two again: to my understanding, one aspect of Spiritual Connectivity has to do with the "greater emotional and moral significance" of things that have happened in history, not just things from "the beginning of time" or some surrogate for that, but at any future time that turns out to be "important," too. It's like thematic/narrative connectivity, but infused into the Cognitive and Physical Realms via the setting (a series of fantasy books). Stuff like romantic love is a good exemplar of the dynamics of it all; Sanderson has certainly had a bunch of curious love stories threaded into the Cosmere saga, after all. I assume that another special way that Adonalsium's power manifested was in a book-like format, and this is why Ruin and Preservation would ever end up in a weird duel over manipulating their direct and indirect local scriptures, or why Odium would be both willing and able to annihilate Dalinar's copy of The Way of Kings. Those phenomena were holdovers among the Shards from the manner of some of Adonalsium's magic, I'm guessing. So, as far as the actual IRL readership goes, we haven't been shown the Shattering yet. We have, however, been shown the dual Ascension of two philosophical powerhouses, one sensible, the other unstable, so we can sort of "just see" the spiritual connection between them, from our point of view. Sanderson has shown us variations on his philosopher-king enigma/theme, with both these figures. Granted, I assume that some/many of those involved in the Shattering would have been analytical and authoritative in some domain or other (like the dragons at least??? I've seen stuff about them have a deity-like stature already???) but again, even internally, in terms of the timelines of the stories we're reading, the emergence of the di-Shards has been one of the pinnacle moments in the saga to date. Each time it's happened, it's sent shockwaves through the community of the Shards and other cosmere/Realmatic powers. The level of Connection in the story has to be read, in part, off our level of interpretative connectivity in reading the story; the schematic content of the concept/imagery, of Connection, is, "Imagine that all these events were taking place in a story someone were writing with a plan like divine providence for the entire story." But we, the readers, know that it's a story. So the same command given in-world is the command for the readers, but for the readers, it is not just to be imagined that this world is a story, but this is known. So, whatever we know, about the content of the story as it has been written in the time that we know, is reflected in the intended content of the talk of Spiritual Connection, in the Cosmere books, themselves.

I don't understand what the problem with the they/them, filling-out-a-form-to-live-as, etc. stuff is. Sanderson has done a great job of GSRM representation ever since frickin' Sazed (who can be interpreted as ace-adjacent, I think, maybe asexual specifically if not aromantic). If you think some of it sounds like ideological pandering, well, I don't know what to tell you but if you have talked with LDS missionaries enough (among other things...), you would be able to tell how much of the ending of The Hero of Ages might come off like ideological pandering, too, if you were disposed to read it in an unnecessarily hostile way. I'd even venture to say that the Kasbal/Jasnah dialectic in WoK might sound kinda "cringey" in its own way. But you know what? A lot of fantasy authors love to write out the Logon Agon in their own way, we had Miyazaki do it with the weird, out-of-tune debate between Nausicaa and the Heart of the Graveyard, for example, which was inspired by one of the Earthsea books which had a zany philosophical speech at the end, etc. It's a thing that happens. Sanderson had to do it before, with Rand vs. the Dark One, by the way, and depending on how bad a case of Sayre's law you're infected with, you might think that some of Rand's reasoning is "cringey" too. As a gay guy with certain, let's say "aesthetic," applications of the sentiment in play, I can say that I would've loved seeing Drehy's arc be the one that Sanderson fleshed out in these books, for that kind of reason/in that kind of context. Drehy's in principle the hot-action-packed dude on this "spectrum." (To be even more honest, a lot of us would never have objected had Adolin ended up being given over to bi/pan representation, like a Rosharan Fiyero so to say. However, I do appreciate that Sanderson did not do such a thing, and I have no belief that there was any "need" for him to do so. Would Kaladin and Adolin be "cute" or whatever, together? Sure. But I myself have no problem with the romance arc Adolin and Shallan have been given.) But Sanderson has emphatically stated that he wants to be precisely respectful about how he does GSRM representation. And, he had a thematic reason to look towards human-singer romance as relevant to the reconciliation super-plotline. I voted for shipping Kaladin and Venli years back, that didn't happen, so Rlain and Renarin being the ones Sanderson went with was, I thought, a really smooth move. He'd already fleshed out a lot of Renarin's neurodivergence representation status, Rlain was a good ethnicity rep in context, so while pairing them up and giving them a hell of an Elphaba-wants-to-free-the-animals endgame to boot, Sanderson had more character details to work with than w.r.t. Drehy. Pandering to the GSRM community would've meant doing something silly with Adolin, or inflating Drehy's role inexplicably, or whatever. Instead, a very good argument can be made that Sanderson figured out one of the ideal options for the narrative problem he set himself in this case, that he optimally solved the problem with the Rlain-Renarin pairing and their fateful decision-making in W&T. I would also like to add that the total number of explicit/overt references to GSRM issues/representation, not only in W&T but the entirety of the SA and the Cosmere saga moreover, is a microscopic % of the total number of words per this book, those books, and those other books. Take a book with 400,000 words. If 1000 words were spent on GSRM stuff, that'd be 1/400 words, which would be what, 1/4 out of 100? So like 0.25% or something? (Sorry if that's not right, I have a slight headache and I'm not gonna provoke it by being overly precise about microscopic fractions.) Then, out of the millions of words in all the books/sagas together, well... (This would be my reply to the issue of anachronistic wording: even Tolkien simulated the act of translating e.g. The Lord of Rings from material where Sam and Frodo had less English-sounding names, among other things. A writer who is writing in a real language, yet to simulate alien and fantastical languages, has only so many words, usually, to choose from, in writing this or that scene. Sanderson isn't Donaldson, for example, so he's not given to wacky let's-eat-the-thesaurus mode, and he's not me for sure, either, so he doesn't get possessed by the ghost of Dante every other sentence he writes. He doesn't try to use abstract philosophical metaphors so much, when describing physical reality. Hell, he uses more physical descriptiveness to describe spiritual reality, than the other way around. So anyway, there's no moral requirement in world-building/conlanging, that mythologically translated texts and dialogue have to conform to overly rigid patterns of word usage. People do not swear the same way all the time, people notice differences in word usage to different extents, to different degrees, at different times. For a flippant justification: earlier in the SA, people on Roshar would've cared more about odd swear words because those would've been breaches of etiquette twice over, and they didn't know that multiple corrupted gods were vying for dominion of their world, etc. By W&T, if someone swears in an offworld way and no local character points this out, so what? They have way more important things to worry about!) Another gap in the presentation: if W&T were so gravely distorted by pandering or whatever, yet why does Sanderson display the obviously intricate structure of the book from the get-go? He made a super-precise pacing decision, to set the book up as a sequence of parts corresponding very particularly (and hence thematically) to the concept of the Final Ten Days. He does a super-complicated move with the epigraphs, cycling through the sources from the previous books a lot in a way he didn't do as much in any of the others, IIRC. So, a very nice, very subtle full-circle kind of thing. The scene with the Ryshadium and the spren? Do you know how long Sanderson probably had been waiting to do a scene like that? A very, very, very long time. I don't know if he foresaw the need/value of it as soon as he read the books, long ago, that inspired the concept of the Ryshadium and therefore this specific scene most of all, but having read the same books and being comparably inspired for a separate reason/in a rather different way (I exploited the inspiration for fanfiction), I wouldn't be surprised at all if Sanderson has wanted to play the theme of the musicspren-Ryshadium connection for at least ten to twenty years. Adolin and Co. becoming the Unoathed Shardbearers? I don't think he envisioned that one for quite as long, except I do think he knows how to apply the Rule of Cool in terms of his super-duper Magic A is Magic A mode, so he knows what he did with Elend and the magic system in The Hero of Ages, and what would be that kind of scene but in Rosharan terms? (Is it "repetitive," then? Yes and no. Yes, because he's repeating a chord in the song of the Cosmere saga: what happens when the dashing, daring prince of goodness democratizes the local magic power base in a certain way? At least in the military-bro sense, here: Sanderson does the civilian democratization of magic in Elantris, however, if I remember correctly.) Anyway, great scene. A great Sanderlanche. Not so OP as, like, Sazed Ascending. But it didn't have to be, and it wasn't. My final counterargument: there are a zillion well-written fantasy stories in the world, have been for ages. Expecting every author, new or established, to literally come up with extremely original and universally compelling content on every page in a multi-million-word superstory, seems like a terribly, even unfairly, tall order. My takeaway from W&T is that regardless of what I might or might not feel like are random weaknesses/deficiencies here or there, in the text, yet the vision of this novel as a whole was so powerful and well-executed that the dominant merit of the text is either completely dominant in fact (and there are no "serious" errors in Sanderson's presentation at all) or sufficiently dominant that those deficits don't affect my overall judgment of the book's total merit. Like, I could analyze questions of consistency and mathematical triviality w.r.t. the magic system, and find "holes in the plot," yadayadayada; or not; or it doesn't matter much, if at all, to me, in the end, because I don't expect any author to be perfect enough to make no "mistakes" as such, and I've seen worse, for all that, to boot. If his editorial team seems lax, this could be explained, in part, by the fact that if Sanderson can't figure out how to write his books correctly, there's no way that team would be able to figure it out either. For one, really, there's nothing really to figure out; Sanderson can't magically compute the only perfect phrasing of everything possible, and there probably isn't always an absolute perfect phrasing of things anyway. So secondly, he's the only one who would be able to "compute" that even if it was available for being "computed." The willingness of Jordan and his wife to involve Sanderson so outstandingly in the outcome of their own popular saga is a stark testament to this, I think. For better or worse, Sanderson is the only one who really seems capable of knowing how to make the Cosmere meta-series concept work correctly. He knew how to step in to Jordan's shoes, but I don't think that anyone knows how to step into Sanderson's in turn. Or not in the same way. Even if they had all his notes and stuff, then, I don't think they could fill in the gaps and balance the possible inconsistencies in the "correct" way. I mean, I know that there are recognizable techniques for emulating style/voice, etc., but otherwise, I think that if you look at literature from a logic/mathematics angle, sort of, then Sanderson is to the genre what someone like Euler or Einstein were to those kinds of fields. Not beyond criticism, of course, and he does have a huge team helping him. So he's doing his best, and he's not doing it "all by himself." So I'm not sure how "serious" the problems with W&T really are, neither do I know that having a longer delay in processing the drafts of the book, or some kind of stricter editorial oversight, or whatever, would have done much good. Arguably, there would have been potential weaknesses in the book as produced in that way instead, other weaknesses that is, and so it wasn't like Sanderson could have written an utterly "perfect" book no matter how hard he and his teams tried. Having tried many times to write books that take up even a few hundred pages, I can hardly do more than imagine what it must be like to have the talent to see thousand-page books through over and over and over again, so I myself am not in a very good position almost at all, to negatively judge W&T. Not just because of what I've lacked in accomplishments, but because when I have managed to write extensively about a specific story or topic, I can see that the process of trying to make sure that I've written all these things well is a difficult process, but it's a process that Sanderson has consistently demonstrated his ability to handle very well.

@alder24 my argument relies heavily on bizarre minor details about the relationship between the Heralds and Odium that lent itself to the Oathpact, such as established the Honorblades which the spren would imitate, wherein in turn the Five Scholars would imitate the spren and so the Honorblades in Nightblood. So that's already an extremely powerful cluster of Spiritual Connections between Nightblood and the Spiritual nature of the process by which Odium was bound. Add to this the Spiritual fact that it was by wielding Nightblood that Taravangian killed Rayse and Ascended, eventually to Retribution: then throw in Nightblood's friendship with the Honorblades on the eve of the Oathpact's revival. What do we get? A hell of a lot more Connection, Spiritually, between Nightblood, Odium, Taravangian, Retribution, etc. Like part of it would be just the sheer pathos of it. Of this diabolical weapon learning restraint and even grace and mercy, maybe, someday, yet being darkly influenced yet by its own inheritance from Ruin and its Spiritual entanglement with the greatest malice in the known cosmere. It'd be a great way to play the living-sword trope, too. I'm reminded of the Soul Calibur franchise, and its zany, zigzagging plot. Like the theme of these living magic swords with all this fancy stancework that goes into exercising them, it gives off that vibe, similar to the Final Fantasy vibe Sanderson gives off a lot (among other things). But the "logical" argument is super-heavily dependent, again, on the WaT stuff we've been given. Like, we're told that just because of however they interacted with Rayse on Ashyn, the old Heralds could play the role of the Oathpact as close to perfectly as was available at the time. It doesn't seem, to me, that any of the Heralds are more Connected to Rayse and/or Odium than Nightblood. Being the instrument of Rayse's killer seems like a deal-breaker Spiritual factoid when it comes to rankings: no matter how important any Herald's relationship with Odium's power was back on Ashyn, it wouldn't be more important, but only at most as important, as Nightblood's outcome in this case. I mean, I'd even be willing to gamble on an argument that Nightblood is more strongly Connected to Odium, than at least some of the Heralds. For example, maybe Kaladin as the new Herald-King. We were, if I remember correctly, given a relatively definitive statement of the purpose of the crimson-eyed Kaladin in Rhythm of War, as someone that Rayse sought to square off against Dalinar. Nevertheless, did that make of Kaladin someone more personally Connected to Rayse/Odium than, say, Nightblood would be? Or what was Rayse's strategy on getting to the Rosharan system? He's learned a lesson from his work on Sel, he's learned another one from his fight against Ambition. So he goes to... Ashlyn? Where Honor and Cultivation are not so present? To manipulate the Ashynites into serving/expressing him? And then going on this series of crazed rampages millennium after millennium? So he wants an army, to span the stars. Why does a Shard need such an army to accomplish the goal of killing all other Shards? I think that a lot of their power is actually "offset" in the Spiritual Realm. I mean that in part on the narrative level: to be Shards of a god like Adonalsium, these people have to interact in a mystical way with the flow of history on worlds they've invested heavily in. They have to have a seemingly indirect order of divine providence in history, like the meek and hopeful deeds of Preservation for example. Kind of like a super-complicated version of "the gods lose power if they lose worshipers" trope, except in this case it's more like certain "conceptual paradigms" (read: Intents) have to be maintained in a civilization, for that civilization to engage with the magic potential of the relevant Shard. It was by using Dawnshards in an unfortunate way that the Heralds desolated Ashyn. Not by using the Shard of Odium directly. I could admit that Ishar, for example, might very well be more Spiritually bound to Odium than even Nightblood at this point, what with going in Odium's Shardpool. But maybe not: if the godmetal of Odium is the Physical aspect of the Shard par excellence, then Ishar would arguably be much more Physically Connected to Odium than directly, "purely" Spiritually so (Connection being a Spiritual matter in se, it must be that even Physical and Cognitive Connections are Invested symbolic representations of Spiritual patterns/structures, though). But Taln? Or Jezrien? Or Kalak? Or Chana? Or Ash? And even back then, when the thing relevant to the Oathpact had already been done, Ishar had not went into the pool of Odium. So, whatever Odium did, in engaging with the future Heralds, that inspired Ashyn's ruin and enabled the Oathpact by way of Connection's power, and which got crystallized in the godmetal Honorblades, seems like it just has to be related to Nightblood's future role in the Roshar situation. Now, the other thing would have to be (for the theory to work) that Nightblood has the right connection to Ruin/Discord. It has a strong Physical Connection, directly-speaking (by virtue of being able to destroy many things very precisely), but a seemingly very weak Spiritual or even Cognitive one. As far as I remember from the Arcanum, it's not even post-RAFO yet whether Endowment deliberately intervened in Nightblood's creation to get the weird fragment of Ruin into it or whatever (or: whether she was involved in the first place!). And Vasher certainly didn't plan on that happening; a bunch of magic academics trying to mimic living magic swords made by alien nature spirits from a different planet, aren't planning on summoning the shadow of the dead god of destruction, one assumes. So the reasoning would really have to draw on the alleged overlap of Discord and War (as Intents/"Shardshadows" (Intentional names of possible Shards/combinations)), which would be better supported with the postulate that something on a more general level, having to do with Shards combining at all, leads to certain kinds of interlocking/merging symmetries. Like, Preservation and Ruin as a dyad would be symmetrical, along some angle of metaphysical reflection, to Honor and Odium as a dyad, so while there would, from many angles, be many differences between the one dyad merging vs. the other one doing so, there would also be some kind of "harmony" between them, from whatever other angles. Incidentally, then, there is a huge Fortune-based/Spiritual Connection between Harmony and Retribution: they're the first two di-Shards, both in the hands of mortals who Ascended under certain auspicious and tenebrous conditions related to the overthrowing of the old Shard-holders. And Harmony's Spiritual Connection to Kelsier, relayed through the Ghostbloods and the way their meddling contributed to the Final Ten Days, well... Bonus points if the Ghostbloods have an interest in monitoring, or at least being aware of, Awakened swords that contain elements of Ruin's ancient power. If there is supposed to be a serious Roshar/Scadrial problem in the future, then the Intents of Discord and War would be simultaneously, intersectingly realized in this context anyway, maybe (since even when those things are not the same on various levels/in various ways, they are both happening...).

For what it's worth, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on promises includes a subsection about vows and oaths compared to promises.

What exactly is the deep/non-superficial difference between discord and war? Or, the "Intent-relevant" distinction? For that Harmony inherited the possibility of destructive Discord not just from the having of any two Shards at all, but by the Spiritual progeny of Ruin in him most emphatically: is this how the problem of the cosmere develops in terms of Roshar-Scadrial system interactions? That Retribution, holding the implicit Intent of the Rhythm of War and its Light, would be able to inflame the shadow of Discord inside the balance of Harmony? Through Nightblood even, maybe? That would be a weird substory in the back half: we're given a simple glimpse of front-half character development for Nightblood that turns into major character development down the road, but we also find that through the sword, Retribution would be able to affect Harmony in a special way? (Does Nightblood have an exotic Connection to Retribution, via Odium, akin to that of the Heralds and their Honorblades, from which it has learned so much? If the back half dwells on the character of the Heralds so much, what might this portend for the personality-based role of Endowment's dire allowance in the same context?)

I thought it was wondrously eerie. Like I got a really strong feathery-blurred-edges-movie-scene vibe from it. (Outdated example: Sisko in the realm of the Prophets in DS9.) If Jasnah's flashback book is 10, if Sanderson loves playing the magic-city trope as straight as can be (and then some), then part of final showdown with Taravangian being in the City of Bells, one of the places where the story began as a whole no less, would fit really nicely. The other major beginning-scenes chunk (WoK-wise) was in the Shattered Plains, where Odium's Shardpool is. So there'd be a good reason for part of the final showdown being there, too. There's a lot of symmetry to do, here and there... (And wherever the Heralds were in the uber-flashback, would be great for the climactic epilogue...) Unfortunately or not, I think that this book is the best fantasy book I've ever read, period, so I might be biased in favor of every major scene, though

To my knowledge, we have it confirmed that Hoid, holding a Dawnshard, therefore has held a Dawnshard in the Rosharan system at some time. If he came with the refugees from Ashyn, I assume he had it then too. If he mediated Odium's early interactions with the humans of Ashyn, and if he had a Dawnshard, and a combination of Odium's influence and Dawnshard levels of power is what brought ruin to Ashyn, do we imagine that somehow using Hoid's "Exist" Dawnshard would be liable to causing that kind of effect? Elsewhere/wise, we see the Change Dawnshard on Roshar. From the theology of Ruin, we know how the Intent of Change can coincide greatly with the will-to-destruction. So, I could more easily try to predict that it was the Change Dawnshard that was the primary relevant type of culprit in the desolation of Ashyn. (Or: why would the Sleepless worry about the carrier of Change? Undoubtedly, they as a secret society are interested in Hoid; but worried about him when he has/had a Dawnshard? I don't know...) But, isn't it always written that the Dawnshards, plural, contributed to Ashyn's fall? Now if Change can be so dangerous, then Change and Exist could be too, I should guess. In formal logic they say that if it's a fact that A, and A implies B, then if some random other C is true on its own, then (A & C) also implies B. It's called monotonicity or something. So, it's not a difficult exercise in abstract representation to subsume, "Dawnshards, plural, devastated Ashyn," under, "Change primarily, modulated by the otherwise less menacing powers of Exist, did that thing." One of the following statements is not a theory or prediction. It's not even supposed to be a guess. It's more like a thought experiment, following the internal, rigorous logic of magic in the cosmere. So: it's generally possible that three or all four Dawnshards were involved in what happened on Ashyn. However, if using all four, perhaps alongside implements like the First Gem or whatever, could destroy the most powerful physical entity in the cosmere's known history, how could Ashyn have not been utterly atomized (axified!) instead, then? So, I would like to think that not all four Dawnshards were involved with what happened on Ashyn as such. On the other hand, it's rather surprising that the Change Dawnshard would be in the Rosharan system specifically, that Hoid would not only go to Ashyn and meddle, but then transfer to Roshar and meddle some more, holding another one. These are the kinds of powers that Ruined Adonalsium, yet the Shards, in their epigraphic letters, don't seem to be worried about anyone or anything having them on Roshar. Like, okay, you might not think Rayse to be all too bad, maybe like Endowment you think that e.g. Ambition was equally or more menacing, no less. Okay. But Odium was in the proximity of at least two Dawnshards, one of the bearers of which he gained horribly direct powers over the mind and body of at various inopportune moments. From Hoid's reaction to Retribution's manifestation, it seems like he feared that the Exist Dawnshard could fall into some kind of enemy hands. In context, that would probably be his Rosharan enemy par excellence, it's not like we see farsighted Ghostbloods or Scadrians or whoever popping up at the moment Hoid is vaporized and trying to grab the Dawnshard. So, it will have always been that Odium getting the Exist Dawnshard would be an unwelcome development, and nothing much suggests that Rayse would've been overwhelmingly averse to holding a Dawnshard. (Granted, he would still have not wished that his Intent, as Odium, would Change, so that e.g. the Change Dawnshard might specifically not appeal to him. But the Exist one? To exist generally doesn't seem incompatible with retaining the profile of divine hatred.) Moreover, Rayse would've been willing to do something with the power of the Dawnshards, being one of the sixteen who directly or indirectly used them to kill Adonalsium. And then however he influenced the Ashynites, well... So, again: and the rest of the Shards really were just like, "So what?" (Okay, maybe not Harmony, or not other ones we've not seen letters from.) All that being said, it seems like there could be a third Dawnshard in the Rosharan system. This is a guess: perhaps that's what, "Unite them," is about, something left behind by the power of Adonalsium that would reach towards the reunification of the Shards. Maybe from Adonalsium's point of view, being killed and having its power redistributed was at best a temporary dynamic that would inevitably be recouped by reunification. Who knows (besides Sanderson, if he's settled on a canonical final outcome yet), but (A) Honor was worried that the Knights Radiant/Rosharan Surgebinders would be themselves the true desolation of Roshar, as had occurred on Ashyn, except (B) the Rosharans were later bound by oaths to limit their powers (this was the point of their relationship with Honor's power!), and had not the Dawnshards. Or did they? If holding a Dawnshard has a special impact on one's Spiritweb, I daresay it seems plausible that Nohadon held one, that this accounts for his especial presence in some of the visions. However, I haven't yet found a way to reconcile, "Honor was worried that Rosharan Surgebinders would destroy Roshar," and, "Honor knew the Dawnshards were necessary for that," alongside, "And Honor blessed the Knights Radiant for their oaths," but, "It was in Nohadon's time that the oaths were first sworn," and yet, "There were Surgebinders before the Knights Radiant." We are not shown (to my memory/knowledge) anything about whether Rosharan Surgebinders retained Dawnshards during or after the voyage from Ashyn, etc. How were Rosharans Surgebinding without swearing the oaths that entangled them so magically with the mindful spren? Why were Honor and Cultivation allowing this? If humans had lost access to the dangerous Dawnshards at that time (even whenever Hoid was focused and present on Roshar), then why would Honor be so worried? Yet then in the present time, why would he worry about the loss of the Dawnshards and their dangerous powers? I don't get it...

One thing about the groupings is that there would be extra headings for groupings of combinations and so on. Like, when two Shards combine as another Intent, well, how many combined Intents could there be? You could have any two Shards combine, any three, etc. This whole mathematical superstructure is available (and per what they indicate in WaT about the design of Roshar, such mathematical intricacy was a signature of Adonalsium's "plan" for Roshar). So the more fundamental fourfold scheme has to be situated in such a way that it "plays into" the greater ensemble of combinations. Little that we know explicitly would allow us to infer what the fourfold basis is, but Sanderson's put "clues" in the general structure of cosmere magic systems, so maybe there's some implicit knowledge that would get us from A to B. here. From the text-engagement POV, and his religious/intellectual background, I would say that Sanderson would be aware of the traditional three-fold description of deity as all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing. The other reliable "property" is a special uniqueness, but then one of the Dawnshards, too, is not "like the others" (whatever that means). So in this context, we would have groupings of Adonalsium's nature that were subsumed under the concepts of its power, its goodness, and its knowledge, and then also its uniqueness. However, when it comes to philosophical abstractions, it's often easy to generate fanciful and thoughtful systems of categories and concepts, so even assuming that Adonalsium would be internally diversified according to Sanderson's academic background as such, it would still require too much effort, maybe, in the moment, to show why e.g. Valor goes under this heading and Ruin that one, etc. So like, there'd be maybe well over a hundred possible pairings of Shards, from the base 16. The total number for all combinations of any number of them, I don't really know, hundreds and hundreds at least I assume. (I don't know what the exact formulas for these questions are...) Then there might be weird provisos about balance and imbalance depending on whether the combination is of an even or an odd number of Shards, etc. 1 is the trivial case of non-combination where an odd-numbered balance occurs, but the expectation would be that tri-Shards, penta-Shards, etc. could not be in the same kind of fundamental equilibrium as di-Shards, tetra-Shards, etc. I.e., that's one of many, many mathematical themes Sanderson can experiment with in his structuring. So, not saying that it's the "real" one here, just saying that there are so many options that I myself kind of can't know which one the author is going with, ultimately. But maybe that's just me

Let's start with Wit's little sermon about gobbledygook names and people being ripped apart. I would've just stuck with, "He's talking about Adonalsium," but I noticed some stuff people were saying about how BAM's name is the most complex name for an Unmade. Also, the imprisoning of BAM seems to thematically resonate with the Shattering, like it was morally similar in the eyes of those involved. So maybe Wit was talking about Adonalsium AND the Unmade. But I was also rereading that section of book 2, where Pattern is incredulous at Shallan's explanation for why Nohadon got that name, since it was supposed to be more symmetrical than his original name. Given all that, why didn't they just change his original name to be more symmetrical without being an effectively different name? But note the first syllables of the first name: "Ba"; then the next one is Noh-adon, maybe, like "ado," or if it's No-hadon, still, you've got "hado." Ba-hado-... you catch my drift. So, random guess, the Hierocrats didn't like that Nohadon bonded an Unmade and retconned his name and stuff on account of that. Because of that bond, and because of BAM's apparently key role in the Rosharan magical ecology, his Cognitive Shadow/Spiritual remnant became imprinted on BAM's aura, transmitted into Dalinar's dreams later. Worse theory: BAM is "Unity," no less, and though we were presuming that the Unmade really were direct or indirect servants of Odium by the by, BAM actually wasn't. She was able to set up the whole False Desolation without tipping the Heralds or anyone else off in advance, at least no one in a position of power who could have thwarted her. Also we find out that Odium's tone became integrated into Roshar's when BAM was imprisoned. Odium wants the humans more for his future war, he was the god of the humans first, yadayadayada so it never looks like the Shards physically fight each other during their millennial world building/unbuilding projects, even Ruin vs. Vin was a very unusual event, so I could see the way that Odium fought Honor was by infecting the moral cognition of people on Roshar, especially that of the humans. Then BAM's imprisonment was able to represent a distinct victory for Odium, in part in terms of his prioritizing humans over singers. So anyway, BAM was, as an Unmade, under Odium's power, but we see in Sja-anat that this doesn't translate to outright servitude all the time. And so Odium saw a "we" in his own will, and the will of the humans (the Radiants, incl. Melishi) who imprisoned her, so that when she was able to reach out to Dalinar during the confrontation in book 3, she portrayed herself as "Unity." (Weakness: why "killed you" then, not "banished you" or something? unless BAM became a deadeye inside the gemstone, on account of her bond with the entire singer people being negated? and the honorspren are surprised when Maya speaks, e.g. when deadeyes speak, it tends to be surprising...) Sidenote: Ishar's mad grasp One of the WOR epigraphs suggests that it is contingent that the number of Bondsmiths is only three at most, and that those who wanted the number to be more were considered menacing. What if there are various unusual spren, like Cusicesh, who at some point were involved in attempts to generate Bondsmiths without using the natural/known godspren? Alternatively, of course, it could be that the menace was in the idea of multiple people bonding one godspren, but otherwise, I do wonder if Ishar, who was the one who compelled the foundation of the Radiants under exacting strictures, had some sense that unique spren could be "manufactured" in the relevant manner, and if this then has anything to do with his dire experiments. In this vein, BAM and other Unmade might have been such irregular spren, formed in some prior phase of history (maybe even before the singers knew Honor and Cultivation, unless Adonalsium's Shattering predated the establishment of religion, and hence religious spren, on Roshar?). Also, this might be why Odium thinks Rosharan humans are especially suited to its plot: an army of Bondsmiths would pose an extraordinarily powerful danger compared to armies composed mainly of other apex-type magic-users in other systems. I at first thought maybe it was because of the Dawnshards, because it seemed weird that they'd use those to break Adonalsium, but then Odium wasn't using them to attack the other Shards (at least, I don't know that that's been indicated clearly or not), and if for some reason they were concentrated in the Rosharan system, IDK... So instead, I thought maybe Odium was trying to figure out how to create new Dawnshards, using the magical ecology that Adonalsium had graced Roshar and its solar system with. If you think about it, Honor and Cultivation usurped Adonalsium, in the Rosharan system. One wonders whether Odium ever feels like the other Shards are being preposterously self-righteous in overseeing the religious affairs of various worlds, including worlds like Roshar. Granted, in the Nalthis case for example, the local Shard isn't clearly recognized by the religious majorities of her world, so until we learn more about why Adonalsium's Shattering took place, it remains that accusing the Shards of being merely power-hungry is not necessary. However, at the time Rayse and Odium in parallel even now could've easily lied to themselves about the other Shards to motivate the decision to attack. It remains that Roshar's religious history, in the form of its spren no less, seems to have been peculiar for Adonalsium to have established as it did, so even the Honor/Cultivation godspren don't seem to be the only possible original such "unique" spren, sufficient in order to the Bondsmiths.

Take the set {a, b, c}. {} (as zero) is appended off the bat, then we have {a}, {b}, {c}, {a, b}, {a, c}, {b, c}, and then the copyset {a, b, c}. So the powerset of 3 is 8 (letting {a, b, c} = {0, 1, 2}, the von Neumann ordinal 3). For infinite cardinals, the problem is infinitely more difficult. For example, one subset of ℕ (the set of all natural numbers) would be every even n, another would be every odd n, another is the set of all squares of n, all cubes of n, all the n starting from 1 instead of 0, all the n starting from 2 instead of 1, all the n with the exception of various random n, say 17 and 23 and 42, etc. It is impossible by rote to list all permutations of n as defined vs. all n criteria, so we have no hope of identifying the powerset of ℕ by rote. All we have is the general rule that this powerset is larger than ℕ (is size-equivalent to ℝ, the set of all real numbers). This general rule is not an axiom, but a theorem, something to do with a generic function from the base to the powerset that is demonstrably not one-to-one; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on type theory reports the theorem like so:

This theory worked better in my head when since he was the one who was averse to picking up more Shards, not his Shard's own quasi-personality/Intent/w/e. But maybe Rayse has left an imprint of his own aversion, on his Shard, so IDK. Anyway, the gist of the idea is that Team Honor will somehow learn that if one of these divine beings holds two Shards, this changes that being's will, at least eventually possibly leading to a stasis threat (as with Harmony). So to defeat Odium, Dalinar will compel him to take up the remnants of the Shard of Honor, forming a di-Shard (of War?) that will be tempered to relative inactivity. There's a more intriguing possibility woven into that possibility, though. IIRC, Ruin and Preservation were the only Shards to form their own planet relatively ex nihilo (this is a universe with pre-existent substance, though, so no absolute ex nihilo creation except unknowably, perhaps, by the God Beyond), and their joint power was required. Given the role of the Set in all this, what I suspect is that when we get to the deep mathematics of Shardhood, we will be told that each individual Shard has power equal to some transfinite cardinal ℵ, but a di-Shard has power equal to (ℵ to the power of ℵ), which is equal to the powerset of ℵ, which is always a larger transfinite cardinal. So the di-Shardic power level is significantly greater than the mono-Shardic one. Anyway, I'm supposing that individual di-Shards have the same "let's make a planet out of thin air" power that paired Shards seem like they might as such, too. (I can only imagine what the interplay between the Cognitive Realm and set-theoretic forcing might be: forcing is a technique that allows you to create versions of set theory that compute powersets differently from each other, including by forcing powersets to be drastically larger than their bases; so if people forced the powerset of the Shards' individual power to be even greater than it already is...?) So a further assumption: this is relevant to the proposed interdict on paired Shards. For some reason, creating new planets rather than Investing in older ones is problematic. Here, then, might be a reason for Honor and Cultivation to see themselves as acting in the spirit of the interdict, despite clearly being paired: besides keeping their magic systems sufficiently distinguishable on-world, they also did not imitate Ruin and Preservation, here. Ditto for Devotion and Dominion. At any rate, vs. Odium, I'm guessing that Team Honor could force Odium to take up Honor and become War, and then trigger War to create a new planet 'out of nothing,' an act which will severely drain War's power, thus at least temporarily defeating him. That would be an epic subversion of final-battles-with-an-evil-god tropes all across the board, as far as I know (as long as such a plotline hasn't been done before...). One problem I have with this idea, though, is that it seems like it would set the stage for a story set on this newly minted planet, yet we've no indication that the back-half SA will involve travel to a currently hypothetical/unnamed realm, much less any other Cosmere novel yet outlined for us is expected to include such a journey. If it goes through, though, I would anticipate other Shards debating the merits of pairing/merging. Perhaps mass production of planets will be a plot point in the final Mistborn sequence? And then the risks and prospects of tri-Shardic Ascension, etc. It's not clear to me whether Adonalsium exnihilated the entire Cosmere or if it too Invested in some pre-existent worlds, but if a tri-Shard's power level was equal to the powerset of the powerset of a single Shard, then if a di-Shard can 'easily' manifest a planet, I would expect a tri-Shard to be capable of 'easily' manifesting at least either much larger planets (like gas giants) or even stars of various sizes/types. (Eventually, we would have to consider what it would take to form decent-sized black holes; Investiture can already be condensed such as to produce phenomena similar in abstract nature to the kind of spatial warping involved in gravitational singularities, so...)

I just finished The Last Druid, and though I enjoyed it and think it works, thematically, for the most part, I do wonder if it could've been more... epic? For example, the final duel was way less intense than the one in The Wishsong of Shannara or The Gypsy Morph. Thoughts? Thanks!

I don't doubt that the long-term consequences of Autonomy's actions will lead to crisis events, but how deliberately diabolical these would be...?

Everyone knows that Sanderson books are too short, especially Stormlight books. What to do about it? A: origami coding. Fold the pages to line up parts of words for more content. B: invisible ink in the margins/spacing. Possibly include magnifying glass with purchase and blacklight for the ink directly. C: invent an alternative English that can be read two ways, so that after reading the actual text in original English, you can start over with second English. In fact, you can do this multiple times, maybe indefinitely, and once translations are brought in... D: coat the paper in mild hallucinogens so readers add their own books to the books while reading. E: start a forum for people to transcribe hallucinations, both chemically induced and meditatively realized.

Then there's Hoid, Hoid, and Hoid

I have a notion of free will as involving the structure of time, such that we don't always or even perhaps mostly make choices "moment by moment." Free will ranges over entire line-segments (of the timeline), sometimes, consolidating our actions over periods of time. So once a word's meaning is learned, the chain of thought behind that learning gets consolidated, so it doesn't manifest as a "decision" to know what words mean, each time we use a word. I guess, to a degree, that decision has already been partly made, by the time we learn the word. But then think of those moments when you say a word over and over again and its meaning seems to sort of dissipate? I wonder if that's relevant to what I'm saying... In my model, I guess this appears at the erotetic level. Here, thought has an assertion function, but also a question function. The question function is the one that allows us to directly keep ascending the staircase of recursion (always taking itself as an input...).

Two things, though. Well, three even, but anyway, first, Odium isn't actually "Passion." That's a complex lie of his. The Dawnchant description of Odium was of something that drained all emotion, leaving a void. Second, supposing Sanderson was inspired enough by any of this to incorporate it into the Shards, it had to have been going back some years, before the planes got these mechanisms tagged to them? Third, but this is just me, I always preferred yugoloths over baatezu and tanarii, on a conceptual level. I mean, I held strongly to that "neutral good is most good, neutral evil is most evil" notion (I started out as chaotic good but then found out it wasn't "pure" good, so I switched to neutral good, etc.). I feel like Odium's evil is great enough to be the closest in the cosmere (of the Shards we've seen) to pure evil. Now granted, the yugoloths also have a major hub in Gehenna, it's where their lord is after all, but otherwise, the yugoloths supposedly originating in Hades also pushes me in the Odium:Hades direction.