Fanghur Rahl

Well, all I know is that I don’t believe for a second that Adonalsium, assuming that it actually is God, can be completely reduced to only sixteen different aspects; even an ordinary human being is orders of magnitude more than that, never mind a being infinitely more complicated as a God would have to be. So something must have determined which aspects of Adonalsium became Shards and which didn’t. Or, like I said, Adonalsium simply had no cognitive identity at all, and it was each of the sixteen who overtime bestowed the various identities to the Shards. Honestly, my suspicion is that it’s probably a bit of both.

It might just be something akin to Shallan’s inability to change the Stick though; maybe the Shard’s cognitive identity is just now too set in stone for it to be more than very slightly changed. But if they originally started out as essentially blank slates before being molded by their Vessels, it’s at least conceivable that the original vessels might have been the origin of the Shards’ identities. Unlikely, but at least a theory worth considering. There are some concepts of God or creative force that lack any real sense of self. Though I agree that the above WOB seems to suggest Adonalsium was not like that.

Either that or it was the defining characteristic of each of the 16 that somehow ‘imprinted’ the intent onto the pieces of Adonalsium. i.e. Rayse was hateful, Bavadin was independent, Aona was loving, Skai was domineering, Leras wanted to preserve things, Tanavast was honorable, Edgli was philanthropic, Uli-Da was ambitious, etc. I guess Ati pretty much falsifies this picture though, since he was described as being the complete opposite of ruinous. But he does in many ways seem to be the exception to the trend.

Fair enough. Like I said, I think it largely just depends on how someone defines ‘passion’.

Well, I guess it largely depends on exactly what is meant by ‘passion’, because insofar as how it is commonly used, it can certainly be at least associated strongly with love (or at least the lust associated with romantic love), and I would argue that ambition is almost synonymous with passion viewed in a certain way. If you’re ambitious about something, it’s something you’re passionate about.

Plus, Odium can’t be ‘Passion’ because at least three of the other Shards not counting Odium have intents that are at least arguably types of passions, namely Honor, Devotion (love), and Ambition. At most Odium could only embody a certain range of passions, but not ‘Passion’ capital ‘P’.

The problem I see with that though is that in the weight analogy the weights are something external to yourself and pressing in on you, whereas in the case of a Shard the Vessel effectively IS the Shard; they effectively transfer their consciousness from their brain to the Investiture. So Sazed would be experiencing it as effectively a feeling of compulsion akin to what an OCD feels. In this case, the opposing compulsions of ‘preserve’ and ‘degrade’. In someone only holding a single Shard, the compulsion would feel all-consuming, whereas with someone holding Ruin and Preservation this simply could not be the case. It may still be strong enough that it’s very hard to resist, but I simply can’t see how it could be equally strong as, say, Ruin or Preservation individually. Am I explaining myself properly here? This is getting pretty abstract. As for the matter of how Ruin, Preservation and Cultivation relate, let’s just describe it as three points on a line, with Ruin and Cultivation on either end and Preservation in the middle. It may be a little oversimplistic, but I don’t think it’s incorrect.

Well, like I pointed out once before, logically there would have to be some degree of ‘dilution’ of the strength of each ‘intentic’ compulsion in Harmony’s case, simply because the two intents are directly opposed to one-another, and you can’t have 100% A and 100% ~A. And if each intent is only 50% as strong as it otherwise would have, it might make it easier to resist. And inthst vein, adding Cultivation to the mix might further ‘dilute’ it to only 33.3% as strong. Like I say, I have no idea if this is actually how it would work, but logically something like this would have to be the case, if only because the alternative would seem to imply a logical contradiction.

Yeah, but the point is that Odium was still hatred while part of Adonalsium, it was simply hatred with context. I mean, I suppose that ‘familiarity’ is at least tangentially similar to ‘preservation’, but it certainly isn’t a synonym of it. You basically suggested that Cultivation was ‘Foresight’ in Adonalsium. No, it was still God’s desire for growth and refinement, but it was tempered by the context of the other 15 Shards. That’s what we disagree on I think. As for your analogy about each Intent effectively being like a gravitational tidal force pulling on its vessel, I’ll just take that analogy further and point out that in such situations with multiple distinct forces pulling on something in different directions, there’s always a Lagrange Point, a point where the opposing forces effectively nullify each other and leave the thing feeling as if no force is affecting it; this isn’t the case with only one force, but maybe with multiple conflicting intents there is something analogous to this, if the Vessel is wise enough to find it. Assuming this analogy holds up, presumably Sazed has found this point, and when he wants to either destroy or preserve, he effectively ‘exits’ the ‘Lagrange Point’ and moves closer to either Ruin or Preservation respectively. Though I’d have to think that if he wanted to do something that both preserved AND destroyed, it’d probably be a lot easier for him since both facets of his new intent would be satisfied.

Well, I guess the difference between us is that I generally take the Shard’s intents to be what they say on the tin while you typically don’t. And for all I know you could be right, but at this point I don’t see how it’s anything more than speculation. Ruin is the aspect of God that destroys when it’s time, Preservation is the aspect that preserves and maintains when it’s worth doing so, Cultivation is the aspect that desires its creation to grow and progress, etc. I just don’t see any need to assume that the Shards were completely different (or at least significantly different) while part of Adonalsium than when they were independent.

@Calderis “Preservation as the desire for familiarity and the need to live in the moment.” How on earth do you get that out of what we saw of Preservation in Mistborn? If anything, it’s Ruin that only seemed to care about the short-term, not Fuzz. Preservation was unambiguously described as rivalling even Cultivation in terms of his ability to plan way WAY ahead into the future with phenomenal accuracy, certainly not just living purely in the moment. Planning ahead is not something any one Shard can lay claim to. I agree that planning ahead is a big aspect of Cultivation (I have absolutely no doubt that her roots run very VERY deep), but I think that’s a result of her intent, not the intent itself; it simply isn’t possible to effectively cultivate/grow anything without careful forethought and planning. But if that actually were the intent, I don’t think that Brandon would have given it the label ‘Cultivation’. It would have been something like ‘Prudence’ or ‘Prescience’ or ‘Perception’. ”Then why couldn't Leras stab Elend to prevent Vin from releasing the power and keep the world from changing?” Maybe because he wasn’t as intellectually impressive as Sazed was when he first acquired his Shard and thus wasn’t able mike it such that sometimes to preserve you first need to change? Who knows. A similar argument could be made regarding the supposedly kind Ati and Ruin.

@Calderis, that could be completely true and yet it wouldn’t imply in any way that her intent doesn’t also include physical growth, refinement and transformation as well. I mean, the fact she makes her nexus of power a heavily wooded area and that Cultivationspren take the form of growing plants would tend to imply that it does. Plus, Ruin clearly included cognitive decay as well, considering that pretty much everyone in connection with him slowly (or not so slowly) lost their minds (the Lord Ruler, Inquisitors, spiked people in general, Koloss, even the Kandra to a lesser extent). I agree that Cultivation includes cognitive growth as well, but at present there’s no reason to assume it doesn’t also include physical growth. She even outright says to Dalinar “I control all things that can be grown, nurtured.” So I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to make here, because I completely agree with you that Cultivation’s intent includes more than just physical growth (though I disagree that Ruin’s doesn’t as well), and I never claimed otherwise. Or if I did then I certainly never intended to. And @Quantus, I understand your point, and I actually agree with you that it isn’t very aesthetically pleasing, but I think it’s even more aesthetically displeasing for God to have the intents of regression and stasis but not progression. It may have been better for Brandon to have just had Shards of Preservation and ‘Change’, but ultimately he instead divided ‘Change’ into two opposing Shards, or at least that’s certainly what it appears. But I’ll say one thing, if Brandon ever does a book signing in Toronto, this is definitely something I would ask him about, because I really do think this is something that needs clarification.

Well, if you don’t want to view it in that way, that’s fine, just as long as we’re in basic agreement as to the basic underlining point, even if you want to reject that Brandon intentionally set the trio up like that. I just find that the easiest way to think about how they stand in relation to one-another, especially in light of Sazed effectively fusing two of the three into one.

@Leyrann “So I can't find the WoB (I spent a good ten minutes looking for it), but Brandon has said somewhere that Ati's vision of Ruin was "one of the better versions of Ruin possible".” Perhaps, but if so, it was still clearly wanton destruction, just not as extreme as it potentially could have been. But it sure as hell wasn't in any meaningful sense merely entropy; indeed, Ruin’s actions were about as far from natural entropy as it’s possible to get. “Again, agreed. I don't think that makes them opposite, however, as they are both about change, it's just that Cultivation only changes certain things.” Yes, both are change, but in polar opposite net directions. That’s my point. And for all we know, Cultivation’s ‘roots’ ARE behind the scenes in everything on Roshar, or else her Vessel just interprets it more liberally. But again, without a Vessel, I see Ruin and Cultivation as opposite forces of change, while Preservation is basically the force opposing ALL change. “What's the point you thought I wanted to make?” Weren’t you referencing the theory of intents that basically subdivides the 16 into four groups of four? If not then I apologize, as that was the theory I made my point against. At any rate, we don’t really seem to disagree that much, just in how we personally view the Shards in question. But I really do think that the way I view these three is the most logical way of looking at it: it makes absolutely no sense that a God could have the intents of destruction/decay and preservation but NOT some kind of growth/progression.

Wanton destruction WAS how Ati interpreted Ruin, regardless of what he said to the contrary. Otherwise he would have been content to wait a few billion years for the star to go nova. At any rate, my point is that Ruin is basically about breaking things down, making things more disordered, unrefined, etc. while I view Cultivation as being about selectively building things up, refining things, and increasing complexity. Stripped from any subjective interpretations of Vessels, I can’t see how Ruin and Cultivation could be anything other than directly polarized forces of change. And as for your point of divisions of four, we already have at least one other case of groups of Shards that clearly form a larger sub-unit, namely that of Devotion (which Brandon identifies as love) and Odium (hatred), and if I’m right, a third one embodying Objectivity or Dispassion, but I won’t get into that here. So I don’t really see how your point here can be correct in light of what we see in the books, and attempts to shoehorn it into the Shards always seems extremely contrived in my opinion (no offence intended, it’s just my honest opinion).

Well, I don’t see any other way of looking at what basically amounts to the Cosmere-equivalent equivalent of the Hindu Trimurti. Decay - Preservation - Growth. You can view Adonalsium in many different ways, but even Mistborn explicitly defines Ruin and Preservation in this way, and if Ruin and Preservation are, then so are Cultivation and Preservation. And by extension, Ruin and Cultivation as well. Unless you flat-out reject that Cultivation’s intent is basically ‘change to growth, refinement, and complexity’, which is pretty much exactly how she describes herself as well as the picture her actions paint.

True, but in the case of Ruin, Preservation, and Cultivation, the inter-relatedness is far more striking. They’re basically three pieces of a larger ‘sub-unit’ of Adonalsium.

Harmony vs Discord, both the same person. I guess that could potentially work if Brandon played the cards right. Though it rubs me the wrong way because Sazed was arguably the wisest and most self-aware character in the entire Cosmere to date. He never once tried to hide from his faults or repress any aspects of himself, and that mindset is supposedly the reason he was able to unify Ruin and Preservation into a semi-cohesive (though in my opinion still incomplete, but I’ll refrain from derailing) whole. The idea of Sazed being mentally broken in the way you suggest would, if true, be entirely out of left-field and, if you’ll pardon the pun, not in harmony with his character.

I think that if anything they would have to in some sense be ‘pieces’ of Ruin that splintered off somehow prior to the majority of Ruin and Preservation fusing to become Harmony. It doesn’t make much sense to say that Splinters of Harmony are effectively waging war against Harmony. But if some piece of Ruin still exists as Ruin, then perhaps it could hold a grudge against Harmony for effectively co-opting most of the rest of its Investiture. I highly doubt that this is the case (even I now grudgingly concede that Autonomy is the most likely candidate, though I still don’t like it), but I think it’s more plausible than saying that it’s splinters of Harmony.

In my defence, I stumbled across it completely by accident via Google. But seeing as how outspoken I've been regarding this exact theory, I just couldn't resist. lol.

@tobar14 I know I’m like 2 years late to this discussion, but this is a theory that I recently came up with as well, so kudos to you, man! I love the idea of Sazed uniting all three Shards of change. As for the name, I think ‘Potency’ would be an extremely fitting and applicable name for him if he were able to both unite all three Change Shards and overcome his ‘Intent paralysis’ in the process. Sazed, the castrated man, becoming at long last potent again. Awesome poetic justice there, I think.

I just finished my second listening of Words of Radiance, and I’m a little confused about something. It’s pretty heavily implied that prior to Shallan having to use Pattern to kill her mother in self-defence, she and Pattern had progressed quite far in their Ideals, presumably at least to her third Ideal/Truth considering that she was able to summon Pattern as a blade (or are the Spren technically able to become blades from the beginning but just don’t until they feel their partners are ready?). But after that, it’s implied that Pattern essentially vanished from Shallan’s life entirely until the events of Words of Radiance, which if I’m not mistaken was about five years later. So did Shallan accidentally ‘kill’ Pattern by effectively betray the truths she had used for her Ideals like Kaladin did with Syl? Or was Pattern able to escape that fate and just willingly ‘recede’ from her life for that time for lack of a better term? Because it seems pretty clear to me that Shallan DID basically betray her truths, which in Kaladin’s case was enough to effectively lobotomize Syl, and it wasn’t until her memories began to unwillingly resurface that Pattern came back. So was Pattern basically lobotomized as well during that interval or was he just patiently biding his time?

So yesterday I had just gotten back from the gym, and the first thing I see when I get in the door is literally my entire living room floor absolutely covered in little pieces of cotton, and my dog looking if possible extremely smug by what was left of the pillow she had gutted. And literally the first thing that popped into my brain was: Nightblood: “I knew I liked you.” Lift: “You almost ate him! You almost starvin’ ate me!” Nightblood: “Oh, I wouldn’t do that. But maybe I was just really REALLY hungry.” And seeing as I WAS more than an hour late feeding her, ‘I suppose I can’t really blame her for that’. As soon as my brain made that connection, I seriously just started cracking up laughing uncontrollably at the sheer absurdity of it all. LMAO!

To be clear, I was using the term ‘connected’ in a colloquial sense, not in the sense it is used in Cosmere lore. I confess I don’t really know what the term means in that context. Like I said a few posts ago, I think the closest analogy I can come up with for what I believe happens with the Well of Ascension is Richard Rahl connecting to the Power of Orden at the end of Confessor; they gain the ability to command the power, but they never actually become the power. Whereas a vessel literally becomes one with the Investiture. But like I said, this may just be arguing semantics insofar as whether both these processes should merit the label of ‘ascension’ or not. Though I still maintain that ‘transcension’ would be a better term for the latter.

I definitely never got the impression that the Well constituted more than a fraction of Preservation’s total power (setting aside the whole ‘infinite power’ thing). But even if I granted that Fuzz allowed 99.999% of his power to pool in the Well, the important distinction I see based on at least my first reading (listening technically) of Mistborn is that Rashek and Vin didn’t absorb the power of the Well into their being, they merely ‘connected’ to it and basically willed it to do what they wanted. Whereas with a full Vessel, they absorb the full power into themselves and effectively transfer their minds into the power. But again, I could be very much mistaken about this interpretation of the facts, but based on my first reading of Mistborn, that’s the impression I got. Now whether we want to stipulate that nevertheless the same term still ought to be used to describe both processes (the taxonomist in my balks at that but whatever), I still think if nothing else we should at least acknowledge the categorical distinction between the two things, assuming my interpretation of this isn’t completely wrong.