Child of Hodor

Not a Shard yet! Possible Shard combo in the future or perhaps not, but that stuck out to me too.

A throwaway line, but it is said by someone who survived whatever happened in SA and all the "Unite Them" "I am Unity" talk in SA it feels like it has a double-meaning much like Honor's visions saying "Unite Them" may have multiple meanings or at least a meaning Dalinar hasn't hit on yet. To me this line reads like Nomad is reflecting on the creation of Unity the Shard or something of similar significance beyond ending wars between groups of people.

Yeah I was hoping for slightly more. He did say the one he and Hoid held is opposed to any kind of violence towards others which to me implies it can't be the CHANGE one because destruction is a type of change and is involved in ultimately positive change breaking down muscles causes them to strengthen etc. But I kind of assumed that already from Hoid being unable to directly harm people.

I had that thought too. “If Sigzil joined they must have improved post-Nale” In the Szeth era I guess they got better. (Szeth probably won’t make it out of book 5 but you never know)

I think Brandon has got so many ideas and has so many different interests he wants to pursue that it comes down to either someone else writes these books with Brandon's supervision and the support of Dragonsteel or these books don't get written. I've made peace with it by choosing to only care about Stormlight 5 and view everything else as a little bonus, but I know that won't work for everyone.

I didn't mind the info dump that much, but it was inelegant. I love the FF14 reference . The experience of this book was: "I see exposition is in order" *Brandon leans in close to your face, stares you dead in the eyes and speaks 4 paragraphs of exposition without blinking*

Nightblood killed Rayse allowing Taravangian to ascend. That's huge. It's true Vasher hasn't done much, but attack Kaladin with scarves and such. Spren like Syl change when they go from unbonded to bonded when their radiant dies. Even when they bond someone new they have trouble remembering their past for a while. It could also be that Stormfather chooses not to mention it to Dalinar. Towards the end of the prologue Gavilar is like "You can lie?!". He speaks very differently to Dalinar from how he interacted with Gavilar. It could be that the Stormfather's personality changed for magical reasons or he's choosing to behave differently this time because last time was a disaster. Stormfather as currently constituted is a merger of the cognitive shadow of a dead shard vessel (Tanavast) and a Bondsmith spren that used to be a separate entity. This entity is both the ghost of the guy that charged the spren to seek out Bondsmiths to show the visions AND the spren that received the charged to do it. He's a weird amalgam we don't fully understand and he may have been playing dumb on some things while genuinely not remembering others.

Roshar system is number is 10, Braize's # is 9. Which is a nitpick by me, but that's what we do here :). Roshar has 10 planets in it which were created before the shattering (or at least not by Honor and Cultivation). So it seems like it was set to be that way before they existed. My pet theory is that Braize is 9 because of what was done to trap Odium there, more than Odium's mere presence. Honor & Cultivation used Adhesion against Odium and made it Your question is still totally valid. Shardworlds tend to have a magic number 1 -16. 13 pops out in this story with Yumi's rituals.

Hoid being the narrator again bugged me. A little if him goes a long way. The Lopen and others I don’t mind when they aren’t a main character or the narrator of the whole thing. I was so tired of Wayne as that series went on because of overexposure and Brandon is just not that funny to me.

These people take a lot of baths, huh? It was pretty good. *shrug* I was a little thrown by Hoid narrating this similar to Tress. I don’t need Hoid’s smug asides to the audience all through a book. I did appreciate Design being there and a part of the story. I felt like most of the twists were not well disguised. I immediately thought the idea that they were from separate planets was wrong no matter how much they kept saying it. Painter confronts a nightmare and next thing he knows nightmare is gone and Yumi is there. I assumed she was Nightmare and they are just misunderstood. “I, the one they call Painter, am actually good at painting!! I was pretending to be less good” didn’t add much to the story or the character imo. Sometimes maybe there doesn’t need to be another secret.

Good thought. It kinda sounds like the Godking from Warbreaker, but obviously that's not what he is talking about. It's a little different because they give him all this power but take away his ability to actual use it. Somewhat off topic, but this isn't first he pitched something he kinda already did. On a recent Intentionally Blank episode Brandon was pitching as an idea for a story: what if an evil overlord comes to kill his underling, like Vader does in Empire, but the underling manages to kill Vader and then tries to masquerade as Vader to cover up that Vader died. I'm thinking isn't this exactly what you did in SA4 ending and epilogue?

The Voidbinding chart that was in the back of WoR will be much more relevant in the back 5. People could Voidbind long ago, probably on Ashyn. No one in the modern day knows what it is, not even Khriss. I think Odium get folded into the surgebinding Magic system making it modern Voidbinding. Only other thing I can think of is the character specific chapter icons have a hidden meaning.

I just typed "Brandon Sanderson" into google and got an interesting suggested question. Is he Religion? Sound off in the comments!

Kelsier has a history of setting himself up as a religious figure despite not being anything close to a god. He sets up a fake resurrection with a Kandra in Final Empire which begins a religion, Survivorism. He masquerades as the Lord Ruler in the south after he gets a new body. It seems like his solution to all problems always involves him being worshipped. He can't leave the system he's in because of cognitive shadow issues with Connection. He is looking for a way to change that on Roshar. He doesn't want to admit he has limitations so he pretends to be a god too important to be bothered with coming to Roshar in person. In reality he just can't.

I agree Adonalsium wasn't a separate Vessel for the power, he was the power. Some of it may want to rejoin. I would argue that the Shard Odium is not interested in that. In the RoW epigraphs we get Harmony telling Wit that Odium is still going around destroying because it is what the Shard itself wants. Odium has been splintering shards this whole time. I think it wants to stay mad. It doesn't want to be merged with the other aspects of Adonalsium that would give it "context" as Frost put it in his letter to Hoid. Odium is the divine hatred of a specific god that these 16 people killed and took the power of. It seems to be holding a grudge. This is just my head canon based on what Harmony said.

Fun Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque romp. I can see why something like this was a good palette cleanser for him.

My question is why 16 (or 17) and not 4? One for each Dawnshard. What were the others doing? The Dawnshards are what allowed them to do the Shattering, but they can't do much without an invested art. Did they need so many people because they needed a bunch of different invested arts to be used with the Dawnshards and no one had access to that many arts individually? Did they rapidly hand off the Dawnshards amongst each other, do their part of the Shattering and then hand it off again? That's pretty goofy. Maybe they all worked together simultaneously through the Dawnshards? The Dawnshards could make use of what the non-Dawnshards were doing, something like that.

Updating my old thread to show that the technology has gotten far better. From Midjourney AI Art bot: Kaladin a muppet: Dalinar Kholin fighting alongside muppets:

*Shardcast voice* What IS a moon? I agree those moons are super weird could be artificial.

Agreed on WoK having the best interludes and RoW interludes being too main plot focused. The last two installments I think he wrote more and had to cut stuff to get it down to a page count Tor could reasonably bind without raising the price. OB especially had some glaring omissions like somehow Szeth is Navani’s bodyguard. Feels like that would have required a big discussion. Shallan got married off page. I wasn’t dying to see it but that’s a big thing to skip. Navani and Jasnah reunited off page. Id rather have those missing pieces in there.

That was my initial thought, but I think their homeworld that they are supposedly destined to return to will be a more significant planet than this one. I've always thought Yolen, but who knows.

It's Autonomium. We have no evidence that the vessel matters at all when it comes to the nature of the Shard's investiture. Atium and Lerasium were just a way to sneak the vessel names in to the original series I don't put any meaning into those names beyond that. "Trellium" was used to hide the fact it's Autonomy behind things. Atium, when separated out, still does the same thing in Era 2 as it did in Era 1, as far as we can tell. Leras died in the middle of Hero of Ages and Kelsier was briefly, sort of, holding Preservation, allomancy didn't work any differently, the mists didn't change color or behave any differently.

I think the hold up with the adaptation is that all of the major streaming companies have been getting hammered financially this past year and the economy is uncertain right now. There's been a lot of belt-tightening as far as budgets and layoffs. I think whoever it is may have had to slow down the spending on new stuff and that may have delayed this project. Most of his meetings seem to have taken place in the spring and early summer. Things have gotten a lot worse for streaming companies since then which might be the reason for the delay in going forward with a special effects heavy adaptation of a guy who has never been adapted before. Netflix lost subscribers for the first time ever in Q1 2022 and then lost even more in Q2. This led to a bunch of layoffs there. Disney lost $1.5 Billion in a quarter on their streaming service which is the main reason they fired their CEO. HBOMax is now owned by Discovery who has a lot of debt they need to pay off and they have been laying people off, canceling series and shelving older series. sources https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/19/netflix-loses-970000-subscribers-its-largest-quarterly-loss-ever/ https://www.tvrev.com/news/with-streaming-losses-mounting-is-disney-turning-corner-upward-or-down#:~:text=Overall%2C the company's four services,help ease deficits next quarter. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/15/hbo-max-cuts-14percent-of-staff-mainly-in-casting-acquisitions-and-reality-tv.html#:~:text=The job cuts%2C which amount,acquisition of WarnerMedia in April. https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/rip-hbo-blame-warner-bros-discovery-david-zaslav-budget-cuts

I like them to a point. In RoW I really got sick of the Kaladin fight scenes. Agree. The magic systems are what he is better than other authors at. I love his worldbuidling especially in Stormlight. I enjoy a lot of his character work overall, but he has some real clunkers. He's bad at writing romance and his attempts at humor come off as trying too hard. Especially the "funny" characters like Wayne. I can't imagine him writing a character as genuinely funny as Tyrion from A Song of Ice and Fire for example. He uses the same joke format a lot and I've grown tired of it. Usually pays off with "I meant a real ___" Stormlight & Mistborn examples: He has his moments usually with odd couple pairings like Wit - Design, Kaladin - Syl. I've probably read too much of his stuff in too short a timeframe. I reread Stormlight twice in the year before RoW came out. After I read RoW I was like "Is this not as good as the other 3 or am I burned out?" perhaps both.

As we know Szeth and the rest of our heroes have no clue that Taravangian lives and is more powerful than ever. Nightblood is not very reliable. He forgot trying to eat Szeth and Lift in OB 5 seconds after it happened. If they are going to figure it out how will they do it? Szeth does have a Spren, who (conveniently) never talks to him, but surely must have been somewhere close by when all this went down. Even if the Spren was not right next to Szeth at first some part of the sequence of events would have interested it. 1) Szeth is in a(nother) crazy rage. 2) Taravangian broke the gemstones releasing corrupted Spren. 3) Rayse appears to Taravangian yelling at him as they transition to the golden room. I assume Szeth and his Spren will be on speaking terms in SA5. It’s possible the Spren felt Odium paying close attention. In WoR right before Seth's first attempt on Dalinar, Syl freaks out saying “The One Who Hates” is watching. In RoW Sja Anat senses Odium coming before he shows up in her interlude. Maybe this what will help Szeth et al piece together what really happened. Again, Nightblood not a great witness: