Fanghur Rahl

Jasnah, because she and I have very similar personalities and outlooks in many respects, including being hyper-rational and intolerant of people being idiots of their own volition.

Not necessarily. I mean, Kevlar armor can theoretically tank a machine gun, but jab/slash it with a sword and it wouldn’t stand a chance. And arrows aren’t overwhelmingly less powerful than bullets are and yet they don’t even scratch Shardplate under most circumstances. We’ve never seen Plate damaged by anything other than Shardweapons or weapons/projectiles weighing ridiculous amounts, like half-ton hammers or mini boulders thrown from slings. And even if a bullet could put a hole in the plate, so what? Good luck with the one-in-a-million shot required to put a second bullet in exactly the same place as the first.

DOES he change for the better by modern standards though? ‘No longer a death eater’ is hardly equivalent to ‘is a morally exceptional individual’.

So is there any real-world analogy for this that relates it to anything in our folklore like there is with cognitive shadows (i.e. analogous to ghosts), or is this an entirely original idea on Brandon’s part? I know that Brandon bases a lot of the Cosmere’s metaphysics on Hindu (or at least Eastern) mythology, but this idea specifically isn’t something I’m familiar with.

What exactly is the relationship between so-called ‘spiritual corpses’ and the actual people that they appear to represent? Because this is something I’m a bit confused about. After Dalinar breaks free of Odium’s influence and temporarily ascends, he hears “Evi’s” voice telling him that she forgives him, which I had originally assumed was her ghost that had somehow resisted being pulled Beyond for this very purpose. But a few months ago @Calderis later corrected me on this and informed me that it was actually her spiritual corpse, the same as the screams that Szeth used to hear. But I’m really confused what exactly this means. Was it actually Evi in any real sense, whether it be her actually speaking from the Spiritual Realm somehow or Dalinar somehow ‘receiving’ the last thing she said before she died which was stored in the SR? Or might it theoretically be the case that Evi actually died hating Dalinar and all Dalinar actually ‘heard’ was his own mind poetically forgiving himself and she had nothing to do with it? To be clear, I don’t think Evi actually did die hating Dalinar; I think she loved him right to the end (to whatever extent she ever loved him in the first place anyway) and probably did forgive him, since she always seemed to somehow know that Dalinar was driven by what we know as the Thrill to be the terrible man he used to be. But can we actually know this for certain based on the “I forgive you” scene? If a cognitive shadow can be thought of as either a literal ghost or the cognitive equivalent of mind uploading, then what exactly is a spiritual corpse?

The collossal plot hole of Doctor Strange conveniently not using his most powerful weapon that rendered even Dormammu effectively helpless really irritated me. All he had to do was freeze him in time and then bash his skull in. Unless Dormammu intervened on Thanos’ behalf to ‘unpause’ him like he did with Kaecilius, there’d be absolutely no defence against that...

I’m pretty sure you’re misremembering. To my memory, Kahlan never once threatens to go and slaughter innocent children, least of all in Book 6 in which there was literally zero instances when such a thing would have even been feasible much less useful. What she DID do was loose the D’Hara’s equivalent of the League of Assassins on the Emperial Order’s leaders. That may be what you’re thinking of.

No more than a lot of other series, pretty much every fantasy series ever made emulates earlier ones to some extent, including the Cosmere (Unmade vs Nazghul, etc). I agree that SoT closely emulates Wheel of Time (which blatantly rips off Hindu and Christian mythology) at first, but honestly, at least so far I think the former is better. But that’s just my opinion.

For the life of me I’ll never understand why Sword of Truth gets so much hate. I mean sure, it has problems, but so do all series. And most of the most common criticisms against it, like it being nothing but libertarian propaganda, are absolute bollocks...

Didn’t Hoid imply that even Odium would be unable to kill him though? And if even Odium can’t, then who else could?

We think. Then again, the Shards aren’t flat-out unkillable Jack Harkness-style like Hoid is implied to be.

Why not? He already has a bit of a god complex. lol.

For me, I think the most emotionally difficult scene for me was the one where Elend was killed, just because it didn’t really seem necessary. That and I really liked Elend as a character.

Yeah, it’s just that in every other case we know of so far, all the ideals of a given class of Knight Radiant at least up to and including the 3rd seem to pertain to a single general theme. With the Windrunners it’s about protecting people and doing what is morally right. With the Skybreakers it’s about justice and following the law. With the Edgedancers it’s basically about paying attention. In the case of the Lightweavers it’s more abstract, but in general it’s about abandoning self-delusion in favour of self-awareness. And prior to the end of Oathbringer, it had seemed that the Bondsmiths were about bringing people together and unification. But Dalinar’s third ideal seemed to me at least to be at best extremely tangential to this. In fact, I’ve often thought that it sounds more like a Skybreaker or Windrunner ideal than a Bondsmith one, because taking responsibility for your actions and striving to do better is at least closely tangential to their themes.

Sword of Truth was not at all a terrible series (not the first 11 books anyway), and it genuinely baffles me why so much hatred is directed at it.

Honestly, I don’t know how else to describe it other than ‘physically’; we just don’t have vocabulary adequate for it.

Then why did Odium need to ‘physically’ (for lack of a better term) travel to Sel, Threnody and Roshar in order to kill Devotion, Dominion, Ambition and Honor? Presumably the other Shards would need to actually go to Kelsier-Shard if they wanted to splinter him.

How would they stop it? At least most of them are heavily invested in planets presumably light years away from Scadrial, and thus would not be able to go there without withdrawing their power, possibly with catastrophic results to their Shardworlds. For the record, I don’t think Kelsier will become a Shard, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here.

Probably. But my point was just that the fact that he would probably meddle is irrelevant to whether he might eventually become a Shard or not, as there’s precedent for that among Shards already.

You mean like Bavadin and in a different sense Rayse?

I'm just curious, but did anyone else besides me think that Dalinar's third Bondsmith Ideal seemed really out of place based on what we know about the Bondsmiths? It seemed to have no relevance whatsoever to his second ideal, or really to the Bondsmiths in general for that matter. It was certainly meaningful to Dalinar specifically, but the Bondsmiths generally? I dunno. And on a tangential note, do we know if "I am Unity" was also an ideal? Because that's always sounded to me like the kind of thing the Bondsmith's final ideal would be, like how the Skybreakers' final ideal is supposedly "I am justice".

Honestly, given the nature of the Land as such that literally everything is sentient to one degree or another and the people of the Land sense this, I don’t really think that the absence of any advanced technology is all that unusual given the circumstances. Pollution, destruction of the land and forests, etc. would likely make the people cringe at the thought.

It always irritates me when I hear people bad mouthing the Thomas Covenant series for what are in my opinion entirely misguided reasons. Yes, in the first book Thomas Covenant in a moment of complete mental breakdown commits an act that can only be described as evil. And that action continues to haunt him for literally the entire rest of the series. The fact of the matter is that Covenant being written as a decidedly unlikable character is NOT a flaw of the series. On the contrary, it’s an essential aspect of many of the most fundamental underlying themes of the entire series, the most important of which being how broken people can come to terms with themselves (“There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything: give him back something broken.” “Only the damned can be saved.”) Plus, can anyone honestly say that Dalinar used to be any better? At least Covenant only hurt one person (like that anyway), rather than countless thousands. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, in my opinion, is and always will be one of if not the single most brilliant pieces of literary work I know of, and whether you like it or not, if you actually read the whole thing and still think it’s badly written, then you clearly missed the entire point of the series. I’m sorry, that’s simply the objective fact of the matter. I agree readily that it isn’t for everyone, but it’s still an amazing series.

I don’t think it’s crackpot at all. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of the remaining six Shards were Jealousy or Envy.

Part of me wonders whether there might be some kind of parallel between Shallan and her personas and Adonalsium and the Shards. Each of Shallan’s personas is basically taking a single broad attribute of her identity and making that the core of that persona’s identity. In a way, the Shards are similar to this. Each of them is basically a single facet of Adonalsium’s identity. If I were to take that analogy seriously, I might say that Veil is essentially ‘Guile’ and Radiant is ‘Confidence’ or ‘Bravery’.