Fanghur Rahl

Same. I think Manu Bennett would be perfect as Dalinar; he certainly looks the part. And I’ve always been partial to Aidan Gillen as Sadeas, personally.

Well then we shouldn’t ascribe them to human beings either. After all, if you refuse to describe a being who revels in the suffering of others and causes vast destruction and cruelty on a star cluster-scale as ‘evil’, then how could we ever possibly be internally consistent calling someone like Hitler or Stalin ‘evil’? They were saints compared to Rayse-Odium. If you don’t believe in using the terms at all, then that’s fine. But I’m just saying, you can’t have it both ways. When most people say that someone is ‘evil’, what they generally mean is that at the very least they have no qualms about causing others to suffer, and often take pleasure or satisfaction in doing it. Well, Odium does that and far more. As did Ruin before it became Harmony.

Either him or Bavadin.

Well you know, since Hoid is clearly at least superficially based on the Doctor (I think the fact that the glyph for ‘doctor’ is clearly a TARDIS makes that quite clear), it’s not hard to draw an equivalent parallel between Rayse and the Master; the Doctor and the Master used to be friends too. The only question is, was there some equivalent of Rassilon there as well who manipulated Rayse into becoming the deranged psychopath that he now is? Okay, maybe I’ve pushed this parallel a little to far. Still, it wouldn’t really surprise me in the slightest.

I think Shardbearers vs Jedi is probably a better match-up. lol.

This is a point that I’ve argued against several times. If by ‘Shard’ you mean just the raw power and intent, then sure, since the Shard itself isn’t a person in any meaningful sense (although some people would consider things like disease, tornadoes, etc. to be ‘evil’, but let’s set that aside for now). If however you mean the that the Shard + Vessel are neither good or evil, then this is completely false, at least unless we render the very terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ essentially meaningless. Rayse + Odium is clearly evil insofar as what any sane, moral human being means by that term. As was Ati + Ruin. Whereas based on what little we know of her, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that Aona + Devotion was probably a very benevolent being.

The problem with that line of thinking is that if true it would have a similar effect on you and me; we all contain all 16 of the Shards’ intents as part of us as well, and for the most part we aren’t paralyzed with indecision. The problem with Harmony is that it consists solely of two intents that are both equal and in direct opposition to each other. Adonalsium would not have had this problem, at least not to the same extent.

Okay, I have no idea about the OPs theory, but can I just say that Tenacity is a truly awesome name for a Shard?

Yeah, and like I said, I never meant to imply that I thought Cultivation = Growth in some naive sense, only that the two concepts are undeniably closely intertwined.

I agree that looking at Cultivation as merely being synonymous with growth is simply false, however I don’t think it can be reasonably denied that cultivation as a concept is strongly related to the concepts of growth and various related concepts. I mean if nothing else cultivation certainly involves refining things into something new and better, which I would still argue is more directly opposed in a mathematical sense to Ruin’s intent of taking things and destroying them outright than Preservation who simply wants things to remain eternally timeless. But I certainly agree that merely looking at Cultivation as a personification of nature is very oversimplified. Though to be fair, Cultivation does pretty much say outright that she controls all things that can be grown. And just as an aside, if Cultivation can be said to be ‘directed growth’, which I agree is the case, then Ruin could just as easily be said to be ‘directed destruction’. Since it certainly isn’t merely natural entropy regardless of what Ati-Ruin claimed.

Fair enough. I admit that I still have a lot to learn about the mechanics of the Cosmere, and I haven't actually gotten to the works in which Autonomy is specifically relevant. Though I still think it's a bit misleading to say that a Shard's Investiture extends potentially across infinity and yet the Shard is not invested across infinity.

You're right, I misspoke. Let me rephrase that, a Shard can acquire knowledge of anything that it is invested in, though not all at once. My point was just that a Shard can know anything about what they are invested in. Ruin didn't invest in making humans sentient, so it couldn't know their thoughts. Thanks for pointing that blatant mistake out, I have no idea where that came from. Regardless, the question of how exactly that line is drawn is still a valid one I think.

How exactly is the line drawn though in terms of how much of their own Investiture and the area it is infusing a Shard can be aware of though? I mean, Ruin and Preservation were supposed to be aware of the whole Scadrial system at once (or at least all of Scadrial itself) because that's where their power was invested, and yet that certainly isn't something any human being could do. If their own Investiture, effectively the Shards themselves, extend across infinity, then why doesn't their awareness as well? I mean technically speaking in the middle of all that Investiture there is still a human being, right? It seems pretty arbitrary to me to declare by fiat that a Shard has perfect knowledge of the system that they Invest, and yet despite the fact that their essence extends perhaps infinitely beyond that boundary their awareness basically comes to a dead stop at the perimeter of their domain.

Well, like I said, Brandon’s got his work cut out coming up with a way to explain how and why that could have happened in a realistic way. On the other hand, going off that same line of thought, shouldn’t the Investiture beyond the Cosmere that the 16 weren’t able to absorb eventually give rise to other minds of their own?

I’m not entirely sure what the relevance of that is to the points I just made; I agree that that’s a valid theory in its own right, but it certainly doesn’t explain either the means by which the 16 could have shattered it, what possible motivation Adonalsium may have had for either allowing it or effectively shattering itself and making it look like the 16 ‘killed’ it (though the ‘making itself into parts of the universe’ idea is certainly an interesting one), or any of that. Though just to clarify, Calderis, is it your contention that Adonalsium was only ‘killed’ in the Cosmere region and still ‘alive’ and whole beyond it? That seems to be what you were implying, though I could be mistaken.

Chief of Cop-outs.

Agreed. Although I’m still not entirely convinced that she’s as bad as everyone seems to assume. Either way, not really relevant to the theory.

Well if we’re being technical, most people would say that a big-G God would be omnipresent by definition. Regardless, I’m obviously not explaining myself well. My point isn’t that accepting the premise that Adonalsium was localized to the Cosmere region and resulted from the spontaneous ‘accretion’ for lack of a better term of raw Investiture means that any of the above-mentioned theories are false, only that they’re incomplete. Like I said, IF one assumes the above two premises, then it begs the obvious question of whether there are other similar being that arose through the same means throughout the greater Cosmere universe? And if not, why not? What’s so special about the star cluster that all the stories are part of? Conversely, IF we assume that Adonalsium was a universal being that arose spontaneously from the ‘accretion’ of all the raw Investiture in the entire universe, which is what most people tend to assume so far as I can tell, then this begs its own set of questions, namely the ones Calderis and I were discussing. These are all things that any complete explanation of Adonalsium must be able to provide answers for, and up until now, we simply have not been provided with these answers, mostly just RAFOs. That’s the point I’m trying to make here. We have a large puzzle with most of the pieces missing.

I admit right off the bat that at this point this is almost entirely a matter of conjecture, since there isn't really a shred of hard evidence for it one way or another, but I thought I'd put it out there and see what everyone thinks. As per Oathbringer, we know that the Unmade Sja-anat wants to defect from Odium (or at least that's what she has claimed, and for the sake of argument I'm just going to assume that this isn't merely a ploy and that she is being genuine), and that she seemingly aided Kaladin, Adolin and Shallan by preventing the Oathgate she had corrupted from killing them. And that got me thinking: Sja-anat, along with the other Unmade, are supposedly Splinters of Odium's power that gained sentience (at least in the case of some of the Unmade) or else were deliberately created by Odium, which should mean that they would share Odium's general nature, but from what we've seen this doesn't appear to necessarily be the case with Sja-anat; she seems to be fighting to free herself from Odium's influence. Ironically, it would almost seem like the corrupter is itself corrupted, or at least in the process of it. So if this is true, and admittedly this does depend on a number of unproven assumptions, it begs the question of what exactly could be behind this. Honor? Possibly, though I personally don't think so, because corrupting Sja-anat so as to make her betray Odium doesn't really seem like it would be consistent with what we know of Honor's nature. Cultivation? Again, possible, and in my opinion far more likely than Honor. But what if it's another Shard altogether? A Shard who most people assume is an ally (albeit probably in a very loose way) of Odium and whose Shardic Intent would certainly seem to be compatible with 'corrupting' something with the desire for freedom and individuality. Might it be that Autonomy isn't quite as sympathetic to Odium's cause as she would have him believe? Like I said earlier, at this point this is purely conjecture. However, we do know that in spite of what she would have others believe, Autonomy has no qualms about meddling in the affairs of other worlds, including other worlds that have Shards, if we assume that she is the one behind the opposition of Harmony on Scadrial. So, is it really that big of a stretch to assume that maybe she's meddled on Roshar as well? Could it be that Autonomy is subtly opposing Odium by 'infecting' one of his greatest servants with a spark of her own power? At this point, I honestly don't know, and I'm by no means convinced of this (in fact, I honestly think it's probably more likely false than true). But it would have a certain poetic form of irony if it did turn out to be true.

The technical term for a conception of God in which it effectively transforms itself into the universe is called ‘pandeism’. And I had actually forgotten that story by Ym, that’s a pretty interesting theory, although I don’t quite see how it connects with Adonalsium and what happened to it, although I grant that there’s a pretty good chance that Ym was indeed referring to Adonalsium in at least some allegorical sense. The only real problem is that long before it was shattered, Adonalsium had already effectively ‘divided’ itself by creating intelligent life throughout the Cosmere and possibly beyond; as I understand it, using your own Investiture to create something effectively makes it a part of you (or at least it came FROM your own essence), so it wouldn’t have needed to let itself be ‘killed’ like that if that were its goal.

Well, that might well be the case, and I completely agree with you that IF Adonalsium is/was a literal God, the alternative is simply ridiculous. Though in every case we’ve so far seen, the Shattering has always been described in ways that imply that the Sixteen effectively did to Adonalsium what Odium does to other Shards (that is to say, it implies that they in some sense rose up against and killed Adonalsium). Though admittedly, I suppose Kriss and the other worldhoppers are simply going by what they themselves know, which is presumably quite limited in this particular area since only Hoid and Frost (that we know of anyway) were actually there. Regardless, I think my point still stands that Brandon is going to have to come up with a pretty extraordinary explanation for how and why all this occurred; it certainly isn’t something one would typically expect to happen to a God outside of really bad fiction, which Brandon’s works clearly are not.

Well then at some point Brandon is going to seriously have his work cut out for him trying to come up with a believable way to have a universe-spanning subordinate God effectively killed or destroyed by a group of power-hungry mortals, or some reason to allow itself to be destroyed in such a fashion in spite of the fact that at least according to Hoid the result has been that its divine plan has been royally messed up. Quite frankly, I think that would be quite the herculean task if that truly is what happened.

I think that it was limited to the Cosmere simply because it seems to me that if it truly is/was a universal entity, then I fail to see how a few uppity humans and dragons could have shattered the entirety of Adonalsium; at most I would think that they may have been able to shatter an infinitesimal fraction of its power/essence, and even then only if he/she/it deliberately allowed it. It just makes more logical sense to me to think of Adonalsium as being in some sense localized rather than universe-spanning. Now admittedly, we don’t have anywhere near the full story on this, but from what little information we do currently have, this just makes more sense to me.

My point was just that if we assume that Adonalsium is ‘merely’ the equivalent of a star cluster-sized pool of ‘raw’ Investiture turned sapient, then what about all the other star clusters? Other galaxies? Are there other ‘Adonalsiums’ out there? I wasn’t suggesting that it disallows the theories, but I do think it at least makes them incomplete. That’s why I personally favour the ‘ascended mortal’ theory, since at least then it would make sense that Adonalsium was localized to the general Cosmere region, if we assume a rare-earth view of naturally-evolved intelligent life in Brandon’s universe. Like I said, I’m in no way confident that I’m right, and this may well qualify as a crackpot theory stemming from not allowing for nearly enough creative licence, but still, who knows? If mortals can Ascend by absorbing splinters of Adonalsium, why not theoretically by simply absorbing a huge amount of ‘raw’ Investiture?

Another really interesting take on much of this kind of stuff is Peter F. Hamilton’s ‘Night’s Dawn’ Trilogy. In some sense, it’s actually like Desolations in space, in which one of the ‘Fused’ than comes back is none other than Al Capone... IN SPACE!!!