Fanghur Rahl

Not in a civilized, reason-based society they don’t. Admittedly, Roshar is far from universally that, but still. There is no universe in which a child should be punished for something they had absolutely no part in. And didn’t the Recreance happen relatively shortly after the last Desolation?

None of it would have happened if Odium hadn’t willfully caused the Desolations. And yeah, according to Ash, the last Desolation was nearly five thousand years ago (4500 years give or take). Regardless, the modern Radiants had absolutely nothing to do with the recreance, so wanting revenge on them is just stupid. Like I said, the one they should want revenge on is Odium.

I mean I guess I might be able to see someone becoming something more like Razer from the Green Lantern series, who’s power comes from hatred, but in his case ‘righteous hatred’. Still, at absolute best, it’d still be an extremely thin line to walk.

Well if so then the new Dustbringers and their Spren are basically gonna be the Az Sweldn rak Anhûin of the Cosmere. I really hope not, since in my opinion that was one of the stupidest things in the Inheritance Cycle, and it would be no less ‘cartoon villain logic’ here either. I mean at least with the Skybreakers their betrayal does have a kind of twisted illogical type of logic to it. But helping Odium because you want revenge on the humans opposing Odium because Odium ultimately lead to their ancestors of nearly five millennia ago ‘killing’ a bunch of Spren? That truly is nuclear facepalm logic.

Irrational, mindless hatred stripped from any context with which to channel it can’t really be seen as a good thing. And I still say that ‘Prudence’ would be a pretty good name for the ‘survival shard’.

Well she’s also a complete psychopath from the way she’s described, so I don’t really think we can consider her to be representative of her order as a whole, anymore than we can consider Nale to be representative of the Skybreakers as a whole. It wouldn’t really surprise me if her Spren was corrupted, either by Sja-Nat or her own dark personality, since it’s kind of implied that a Radiant’s Spren ‘inherits’ qualities from the one they bond.

This isn’t so much an idea for an undiscovered Shard as it is speculation of the outcome of a particular combination of Shards, but I recently had an awesome idea for what might result if Harmony somehow managed to acquire Cultivation as well, admittedly requiring the assumption that the three Shards meld together perfectly since they are basically three bits of a single spectrum. What would be more poetically fitting than if Sazed became the Shard of ‘Potency’, essentially the quality or ability to act, given that he was a eunuch? I doubt it’ll happen, but it’s awesome fanfic material. Sazed, the eunuch, becoming the Shard of Potency.

I kinda think ‘Soulblade’ would probably be a better term, since the soul (whatever the frakk that even means in this context) is what the blades cut, at least at first.

From what I understand, Brandon seems to be just flat-out misusing the term ‘avatar’ in this context; the images that Shards display when they interact with mortals are more what the term ‘actually’ means.

Yeah, I completely forgot about that, that’s an even better example. He seems to have two completely different definitions of the word ‘soul’, one being essentially the equivalent to what we would call ‘spirits’ or ‘ghosts’, and the other being basically synonymous with ‘cognitive identity’. I’m not sure if that technically qualifies as an equivocation fallacy, but it’s definitely confusing if nothing else. But I was referring to him referring to the Stormfather as a Sliver. Like I said before, I actually think he SHOULD be considered one since I think arbitrarily declaring that only humans can be them is kinda dumb, but Brandon apparently said that Spren can’t be slivers since they aren’t physical enough. That and like you said in a previous thread, how loosely and nebulously he describes the various realms and their precise natures (or at least how they relate to one another).

I’m just curious, does anyone else get annoyed by how Brandon often uses various terms and concepts like slivers, cognitive shadows, etc. inconsistently in different works, or is it just me? Because I recently made a perfectly civil statement to that effect on the Facebook group, and someone basically turned it into a slanging match. Am I the only one who has this beef?

Well I’m glad one of us did. lol. That was actually totally unintentional.

Actually, not all of them. Lopen didn’t have any real ‘issues’ (unless you count how annoying he is). Or at the very least nothing even remotely as severe as all the others.

Actually, I think he stands a relatively good chance of convincing Sazed to help. Sazed is arguably the wisest and most practical character we’ve seen, and I can’t see him scoffing at the threat like Endowment and Autonomy did. He’d be able to see if that eventually he’s going to have to deal with this problem one way or another. And fair enough about Odium, but presumably Hoid would be able to if nothing else send Sazed another letter/essay outlining everything he needs to know and explaining why he feels it’s too risky to come himself. Again, Sazed is reasonable enough to not begrudge Hoid that, I think.

Still though, considering how powerful we know Hoid is, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he could get to and from Scadrial in just a couple weeks; that and I doubt the Fused are any real threat to him. Hell, he didn’t think even Odium stood a good chance of actually being able to kill him (assuming he even can die).

I can’t imagine Hoid NOT immediately dropping what he was doing and going immediately to Shadesmar and thence to Scadrial’s Cognitive Realm to immediately meet with Harmony. Hoid isn’t an idiot. Everyone else who he’d asked for help basically told him to butt out and stop fussing, and then finally the Cosmere’s most powerful being expresses interest in helping if only Hoid would meet with him. He would have to be a total moron to not jump at the opportunity. For all we know that exactly what he did in one of his many long hiatuses from the story.

Even that seems too broad though, since that would make the Unmade a type of ‘spren’ as well, and they seem more like their own category altogether.

Do we even have a rigorous definition of what a Spren is? Because the term is used so broadly in SLA that it basically includes absolutely everything that’s Investiture-based, including Shards themselves.

Most likely, but who knows? Honestly, after that letter to Hoid, I would be quite disappointed if Harmony doesn’t get involved in any meaningful way. Sending a Kandra spy just won’t cut it for me, nor ‘help’ Hoid in any appreciable way against Odium.

Live I said before, I freely admit that this is less something I believe will actually happen and more a daydream. But you’re wrong about the standalone part. Yes, as it currently stands Brandon has most of them as stand alone, but in the beginning of Arcanum Unbounded he hints that eventually this won’t necessarily be the case anymore.

I agree. They would be ludicrously overpowered otherwise. As much as I love nigh-omnipotent tricksters like Q, Gabriel, and Mxzptlyk, I think the Cosmere can do without them. lol.

I don’t think so, because we kind of saw Shallan doing that as well at the end when she was implied to have been using soulcasting to give her illusions substance; she clearly wasn’t ‘touching’ those. I think radiant soulcasting just works differently than fabrial soulcasting. Soulcasting at a distance also seems to be considerably weaker too, otherwise Jasnah essentially would have been Mr. Mxzptlyk in the Battle of Thaylena with Honor’s Perpendicularity effectively providing limitless Stormlight.

I think at this point it’s really difficult to say one way or another. Of all the magic systems Brandon has invented, BioChroma is in my opinion by far the least well-defined (and in my opinion hardly even coherent) of the lot. So until Brandon goes more into depth about it, I don’t think we can draw any confident conclusions regarding it whatsoever.

Fair enough, though at the very least a Shard’s power qualifies as Clarketech of the highest possible kind.

It’s really hard to draw confident predictions based on physical laws when you have magic in the picture, and especially when you have magical, nigh-omnipotent beings who are able to casually violate said laws with impunity. So who knows? After all, didn’t Harmony pull a ‘Last Thursdayism’ when he recreated Scadrial? If not for the fact that he actually cared about people on Scadrial knowing the truth, they easily could have come to the erroneous conclusion that Scadrial was billions of years old rather than either hundreds or thousands depending on whether you want to consider Harmony’s Scadrial to be the same planet that Ruin and Preservation created or not.