Oltux72

Gavilar and Thaidakar having a real time conversation across how many light years are between Roshar and Scadrial mean that Seons are FTL. I'd say the gaps in the communication between Shallan and Thaidakar are because Thaidakar would simply hear nothing if his Seon played sound at real time. Her speech would be incomprehensible low in pitch. So he listens and replys to her messages at his convinience.

I would say that he already has. Odium's defense of passion as a necessary motivation would apply just as well for Reason. Jasnah? Dalinar? Hoid? They fail monumentally due to thinking for themselves. I think you are missing a fundamental feature of the book and the Knights Radiant. This book is the story of a defeat. The Knights Radiant lose the war. That is in accordance to their ideals. They'd rather lose honorably than win dishonorably. Well, in that case testing them on that is fair. There is the basic issue with most of the oaths. Whom do they apply to? Whom is Kaladin to protect? Which law do you enforce? Who is locked up unjustly? Well, I am afraid I have to contest that. Absolute morals can be divided It is objective. That is, one could compute for any given individual the most moral action if one knew all relevant facts It is universal. That is, it comes to the same conclusion for all individuals What that means in practice it may mean that person A needs to do action X and person B must prevent action X and both are objectively right. The fact that Shards do have Intents and that oaths can be accepted by some exterior force and that oath pacts enforce themselves point to the Cosmere having absolute morals in the first sense. That is not strange. This used to be implicitely understood until the early 20th century. It was clear that fighting for your king and country in a war was the moral and noble thing. Though obviously the contrahents in a war have incompatible goals. Or look at the Bhagavadgita if you want. If it is your duty, killing relatives will be moral.

In materials you have elastic and plastic deformation. In the former case if you apply a force to an object and it deforms. If you remove the force, the object will go back to the old shape. In the case of a plastic deformation, the object changes its shape permanently. It seems to me that Tension is a manipulation of elastic properties. Cohesion changes the shape of a solid object. Cohesion can make a rock soft, but not springy.

It can. It does not need to. Ambition I would see in the social sense. The collective sense of achievement against adverse conditions is too close to Invention or even Cultivation. If you have competitors, you necessarily will have losers. That would turn Mercy into the firefighter who turns arsonist to get fires to fight. Shards can take the approach that one has to restrain oneself and accept an exception for the greater good. That is precisely what Cultivation preached to Odium. Mercy may have decided that the clash against Ambition is inevitable. Hence it was better to get it over with quickly. You may note that no other vessel had a high opinion of Uli Da. Mercy may have just been a realist.

In hindsight I think it was no accident that the Rosharan left out to the sun in The Sunlit Man was Thaylen.

Failure results in suffering. The surest way to avoid failure is to not even try. Hence there is a reason Mercy and Ambition do not get along well.

This is in effect a peace treaty. All peace treaties are signed under duress. That is kind of the point. One side has been defeated or its defeat is imminent.

Nale does not consider whether he should uphold the law whenever the question arises. He has sworn to do so, because he feels that is a worthy goal to dedicate your person to. He swore that oath because he wanted to be noble. In Battar you have a person acting totally rational. She does a service for a fee because it pays well. Yes, she is mentally ill. She is mentally ill precisely because she acts fully rational. People are supposed to have emotions that constrain their behavior.

You are showing an example of emotion. Nale has sworn on his honor to uphold the law. If you want an example of a rational actor, look at Batar.

Yes. Elhokar was a weak king. That is the very point. Had he been a king who would have executed his uncle for that deed, Dalinar wouldn't have needed to do it. Note that I never argued for Dalinar being a good man, let alone a saint. He betrayed mankind. There can be no excuse for that.

He took up arms against his own people. That is treason. Not necessarily. But the point is moot by Gavinor being a traitor. The obligation is mutual. Gavinor has broken it.

It is impractical. That is the reason it isn't used. Nale does explain this to Lift. That it would leave the world blind, however, is not based on logic. By that reasoning locking up people for crimes would end up with everybody in prison. It absolutely is fair. You could say that it is too mild, because the one who breaks a rule needs to suffer more than the one who is harmed. But if the punishment for the crime is milder than the consequence of the crime, you do not have justice. Any form of justice is based on emotion. From a practical perspective in most cases prosecuting or even reporting a crime is not worth the effort. We do it to shore up our reputation. For this to work we need to become angry to act in an irrational manner. Now, yes, to be just we need punishments based on the severity of the crime. The worse the crime, the crueler the punishment. That is why it is Retribution, not Revenge. Revenge is a passion. You do as much as you can to those you are angry about. This works to shore up your reputation. For the community this is problematic, as it removes the incentive to moderate criminal activities.

This is a case of mistaken identity. I am the spren Cultivation has created to replace the Nightwatcher. In her infinite wisdom aided by her Futuresight the Great Mother had recreated the 17th Shard outside the Cosmere to serve as a refuge. Yet her purpose must be served everywhere. Those that inhibit the growth of their own tribe must be smitten, for they poison the field they grew on.

Absolutely. Well, no. I, for one, have no problem with releasing Odium. If i were Rosharan, I would see no valid reason for shielding the rest of the Cosmere from Odium under horrendous cost to Roshar. The issue was that the price Dalinar payed for releasing Odium was way too high. Yes. Gavinor, whatever be the excuses, is a traitor. He deserves death. This solution is a defeat for all humans on Roshar. It may be better for the Cosmere in the long run. That remains to be seen. But to humans on Roshar it means in many cases serfdom or death. It ruins much of the ecology of the planet. To be frank, if I were a human Rosharan, I'd see Dalinar as a traitor either out of weakness or out of excessive nobility. Yes. Absolutely. It is necessary that people with different interests see the same events differently. And this is not just a question of outcome. A leader has an obligation to his people. Dalinar failed the people who fought under his command in his armies. No, I am sorry, but that is not true. Ultimately the humans are the invaders. The Stormlight Archive cannot be reduced to a tale of good versus evil.

No, we do not agree. An eye for an eye is justice. As a form of justice to be practiced in a community it has obvious disadvantages. But it has these disadvantages precisely because it elevates justice above everything else. That is the very point why Shards are a problem. They set their Intent above everything else. "God's divine wrath without anything tempering it" (from memory). Odium is necessary. Retribution is necessary. That is also true for justice. Sometimes you have to tolerate injustice for practical reasons. But that does not change the principle that an eye for an eye is the closest you can get to justice. That goes both ways by the way. You don't mutilate people although they would deserve it, but you also at some point decide that a career criminal shall not live among the general populace and lock them up for life for any crime.

Hoid, however, suffers people who disagree with him, notably Frost and the 17th Shard. Furthermore his viewpoint is determined by him not being Rosharan. That means that he does not suffer the full consequences of Dalinar's decision.

Seen from a certain angle the Heralds are doing something fundamentally dishonorable. They are helping people given a refuge steal the land of the very people who gave them refuge.

That would have made the book preachy. Hence it would have been a serious mistake. Brandon's books are good precisely because they allow multiple ways to see the same issue. Do the Parshendi deserve to win? Did Moash have a point when he accused Kaladin of selling out to the establishment? Abstractly speaking, if you introduce believable antagonists into your books, as you should, you will necessarily cause a part of your readers to accept their stances. Likewise if your protagonists are to be realistic, they cannot find a perfect solution under pressure and in difficult circumstances. Now you could argue that actions should have consequences and a massacre of the spren should have happened. But that is a different issue.

I'd say that this could not happen anyway. The Lost Metal and the Secret Projects have already been published. I doubt the space age of the Cosmere would work if the story arc of the back half of SA were significantly altered. And the formation of Retribution and the time dilatation of Roshar was most likely necessary for the internal logic of anything to come. That is the issue of everything coming together. Again I have to mention the time jump. A year of constant war against an enemy that keeps coming back. Frankly, the books should have shown orgies and drug addiction. It was also very sanitized with respect to the behavior of the troops in the field.

In Wind and Truth? Almost none. Probably the function of having him in Urithiru as they were locked in is to make it plausible, even necessary that some of the ardents and Jasnah become top level arcanists in time for the back half.

I don't think the develoment time line would work. Secretspren have been available for only a year or so. It seems to me that the development of the "crystal inquisitors" was inspired by reports from Scadrial. Hence it is likely that the development started centuries ago and she had no reason to assume that spren would work any better than other Investiture. In fact why start with something as complex and hard to get as a Spren? Especially if the reports most likely spoke about Invested spikes and not the way they were created. The Steel Ministry did not publish manuals on how to make Steel Inquisitors, but the results were visible to the public and sample spikes may have been obtained. Nor do I think that she started out by ramming spikes into somebody's head. That is pretty gruesome and makes finding test subjects needlessly difficult, given that the first ones most likely died.

Well, they'll have a way to refer to the concentration of alcohol. Given the state of science they are showing we must assume so. This is not an issue of consistency, but of style. Sanderson is not Tolkien. We should not expect a dictionary and grammar of Alethi and its derivation from Protoaltethovedenic. Which style is better? In terms of politics Roshar has just left the age of feudalism. The next major releases will - in terms of technology - be nearly contemporary to us and Roshar is its time line only years away of being confrnted with 20th century technology. You can make a case that the style used from now on should be modern. Why? They have centuries of research and reasoning about logic and psychology. They must know the phenomenon of confirmation bias, at least among upper class women.

The spikes shine with the color of Voidlight. A spren should not do that. Neither should a spike charged in the conventional manner. Hence I think we must assume that they are basically charged with Voidlight they got from Odium. Apparently the same bind points for sight were used. That suggests that the points matter everywhere. And that gives us the third function of hemalurgy: It adjusts the body. Ramming a pair of spikes through your brain should kill you.

Yes, but they also react to touch. So every time a twig blown on the wind hits a plant there will be a gap in photosynthesis. Indeed. The question here is crops. Crops are less fit in the wild than wild variants. They depend on humans removing weeds, herbivores and parasites. It also raises the question how Rosharan plants do fertilization and how the fertilizers do under altered conditions. Also crops are far fewer species. That means there is a higher impact on crops than on wild plants. EDIT: Look at how they plant Lavis. They basic glue the spores to a rock. Is that going to work on permanently wet rock? Or look at lait, I think they call them. All of Roshar now has a lot less wind. More weeds will grow. More work for weeding. And so on.

It is even worse. Rosharan plants retract into shells during a storm. No photosynthesis during a storm. even if some ambient light gets through. Several probably not. But making a horrible example of one of them may be attractive an idea to Retribution or his deputy. Exactly. Intent matters. You need to praise Retribution to charge your spheres. You probably need to meet a minimum of sincerity in that praise. He has no incentive to do so.