LazarusLong

Dalinar's decision was 100% dumb and the book does not convince me otherwise. As an analogy, let me take you to an alternate version of the American Civil War. Near the start, Abraham Lincoln realizes that the South is strong and there will be great bloodshed on both sides if they fight, and the South will be able to gain too much strength if he seeks peace. So instead, Lincoln names Jefferson Davis as his vice-president and kills himself, making the entirety of the United States turn into the Confederate States. Lincoln justifies this by saying that the other European powers will now get involved and defeat the Confederacy for him. And the author stand-in character says this was very smart for Lincoln to do. Dalinar was dumb, and I would have been happy with an ending where our expectations got subverted and Dalinar lost because he was dumb. But What I'm not happy with is this attempt to gaslight readers into thinking that Dalinar was not in fact dumb. Wit was right originally, dalinar was an idiot. Then Sanderson's author insert powers took over and dumbed down Hoid.

Jasnah is kind of a loser. She is supposedly the most-experienced, modern Radiant, but she accomplishes very little during the True Desolation. Jasnah never saves entire cities like Adolin, never rescues entire governments like Kaladin, never fights off entire offworld organizations like Shallan, and never comes close to saving the whole world like Dalinar. Before we started getting Jasnah chapters I was expecting to hear that she was managing some sort of off-world trading empire and bringing strength to Alethkar/Radiants that way, but no, she was kind of doing nothing. She doesn't seem to use her Elsecalling abilities at all actually. She couldn't even do the right thing in Thaylen City which was: kill Fen herself and take control of the city so she could hold it in the final moments before the contest. She didn't even consider doing it. Like, really, she's just ineffectual. How can she reasonably view herself as some cutthroat genius ruler when she never does anything more cutthroat than killing a couple robbers attacking her on the street. She put assassins on Aseudan, but didn't kill her before she got corrupted: Loss. She did all this research on the Voidbringers, but didn't take any steps to stop the coming of the Everstorm: Loss. She has too many losses to count and no wins.

Adolin is not for spren bonding, he's too perfect for that. Adolin is for resurrecting Maya and bonding with her, paving the way for the resurrection of all other spren lost to the recreance. Then we get to see what all the real spren who chose to bond with humans back in the day are like. edit: Oh yeah you get it in writing perspective. In-world I think it could be explained similarly. A lot of spren that would otherwise bond him see the connection he has with the deadeye and are either a little in awe of it or frightened by it. Radiant's can't use dead spren armor so maybe a guy that hugs his dead spren close like adolin, no matter how perfect he is, won't get approached by a spren. The spren have a really big taboo with deadeyes.

You don't speak in clichés Kyn. You're eloquent and make your points well. I did not mean for my quoted statement to refer to you or the thread in general. It refers specifically to the one person who continually responds with nonsequitor one liners in this thread so much so that he reads like a spam bot.

Saying Lirin's profession was pointless was exaggeration. However, this is literally a Lirin hate thread so I think the exaggeration is necessary and completely based. My actual belief is that Lirin is overall a net negative influence on the world because the mental trouble he foists onto Kaladin causes Kal to save less people than Lirin actually saves through his surgery. It would be better for Roshar if Lirin was a non-existent Japanese salaryman dad rather than the weirdo he is. In simpler, cliché terms for the simple person who only speaks in clichés in this thread, Lirin does more harm than good.

Very virtue-signally reply here. If your first reading of someone's post gives you the impression that they literally don't care about saving lives you should reconsider if you misunderstood what they wrote. I never said saving lives was pointless. I said his profession was pointless. And by the time Lirin's in Urithiru and the Edgedancers and Truthwatchers can heal virtually all ailments, his profession is virtually pointless. Practicing as a surgeon is a major waste of Kaladin who can do so much more good doing anything else (as we see when Kaladin saves thousands of lives fighting and improves the lives of many by pioneering psychoanalysis). Forcing Kaladin to do surgery is in essence damning all those that Kaladin would have otherwise saved through fighting. Surgery is even pointless for a man as smart as Lirin too because his talents could be much more efficiently spent at any number of fields, because again, the Edgedancers and Truthwatchers have him severely outclassed.

At the end of part 2 Lirin is about as unlikable as a character can be. I can at least understand why the Pursuer is evil; Venli's horrible treason against her people was at least done mistakenly; Shallan is pretty unlikable, but her chapters are interesting so I can forgive her that. But Lirin, man he is 100% a POS with 0 redeeming qualities. He practices a profession that is completely worthless and flies into childish bouts of rage whenever his son chooses not to follow him into pointlessness. He definitely contributes to Kaladin's mental troubles and that is a very grave crime indeed because Kaladin - mental trouble is probably enough to single-handedly protect Urithiru from the invaders. I can only imagine a world in which Kaladin's dad was a good guy who was overcome with joy after discovering his son was still alive and eternally grateful he was chosen to be a Radiant protector of Roshar. Kaladin would probably have sworn the 4th ideal much sooner and a lot of pointless deaths would have been avoided. Honestly, storm Lirin.

Oh thank you I was looking for a thread like this but my search skills weren't up to it.

The physics of steelpushing and ironpulling are inconsistent and make absolutely no sense. And I'm not being a turbo nerd complaining about how magic doesn't exist in the real world so allomancy is nonsense. For steelpushing to work as described in the Mistborn Trilogy there must be some major fundamental differences between Scadrial and baseline reality. The root of the problem is that the weight of the object you're steelpushing against shouldn't affect the force against you. Let's examine how steelpushing would work in baseline reality: #1. You're a Coinshot standing on the ground and there's a metal coin beneath you. You steelpush on the coin with the same amount of force as you weigh (yes allomancers typically don't have the skill to be that precise with their force exerted, but let's assume you have more precision than Zane). That force will counteract the force of gravity and if you jump into the air or raise your legs you should begin to float over the coin. #2. Now you're in the same situation as before, but you're standing at the edge of a massive cliff. You drop the coin off the cliff step over it and being steelpushing with the same amount of force. You will still begin to float! You won't even be able to tell when the coin stops falling and hits the bottom of the cliff. It'll all feel the same to you. While the first situation plays out how it would in Scadrial you'll notice that #2 runs counter to every single described instance of its kind in the Mistborn Trilogy. You can flip to a random page in The Final Empire and you'll probably read a section where Vin is pushing against a coin but then suddenly thrown back/up/forward when the coin connects with a wall/floor. This is described as a natural consequence of the force of her push colliding with something that's pretty massive, but unless Sanderson means something unintuitive when he says the "force of her push" this is just an incorrect description. I would like to state for the record that this doesn't affect my enjoyment of the series nor do I think it reflects poorly on Sanderson's writing. I do however think that Sanderson could forego the attempts to cling to baseline reality which in this case fall flat.

There's a lot of oddities between Szeth and Dalinar. Neither really have a good enough reason to ally up so quickly. From Dalinar's perspective Szeth killed his brother, murdered his way across Roshar, tried to kill him twice, and killed many of his guards, allies and even another highprince in the latest murder attempt. At the end of WoR Dalinar looks at Szeth seething through his teeth and realizes he's insane. Yet somehow one conversation with Taravingian makes Dalinar forget all that and Szeth becomes his new personal bodyguard. From Szeth's perspective, well there's not much. We see from his chapters that he doesn't know much about eastern Rosharan history. He probably doesn't know about the vicious Blackthorn, but he probably doesn't know much about the new Dalinar either. He's been busy ever since Gavilar's death either trouping about with lowlifes or murdering at Taravingian's command. He met Dalinar twice in his entire life and they didn't speak for more than ten lines total. Yet somehow Szeth decides that he's going to cure his craziness and grow attached to Dalinar over the course of about three perspective chapters in which he doesn't see Dalinar once! How? Why? I could maybe understand swearing to Kaladin or Adolin (because Adolin stood up to him on the Shattered Plains) but Dalinar? Does Dalinar actually have some mystical Bondsmith power that makes Radiants swear to him? It hasn't worked on Malata yet. I really do like Szeth as a character and I'm looking forward to his perspective book. I even enjoyed his sparse interactions with the main cast we got in WoR. His usage at the end of OB really leaves a lot to be desired.

I think there is something to the Vorin myth of the dead fighting to reclaim the Tranquiline Halls. Every other aspect of the basic Vorin mythos is true physical, actual history rather than theological metaphor. The Fused returning to Braize when they die and resurrecting back on Roshar is kind of similar, but certainly not as strong as the other parallels. I wonder if the Aimians have an important historical role that closes this discontinuity. The important elements of the Rosharan system come in threes and maybe the Aimians and their third of the story is what's missing to line up the Vorin mythos with reality. There are three important planets, three shards of Adonalsium, three worlds to the Vorin mythos, and three realms of existence. There are three different intelligent races but most of our theories focus on only two of them. Maybe, like humans, Aimians aren't native to Roshar. Maybe they originated on Braize. It seems that the Aimians were the most advanced race on Roshar, but now they're weak and fractured. Could they have undergone a longer period of technological/investiture-based discovery on Braize before they eventually moved to Roshar? I don't have any good theories at this point to tie the Aimians into the story, but I think they're at the core of a lot of our unsolved mysteries.