ConfusedCow

I liked the ambiguity of Odium/Passion. It makes Odium a better character. More importantly hate and love are disturbingly, dangerously, intimately, connected. Also I really liked the Odium+Honor = Obsession idea. Eye for an eye is clearly a pretty vicious notion. It ends in blindness in many different ways.

Retribution has the word tribute in it, a payment that's due. To me it has a transactional quality. You hurt me this much so now I have to hurt you the same. As Ripheus23 points out, a system of justice based on retribution is particularly cruel and ineffective. I hope we agree that an eye for an eye is not justice. Revenge by contrast is more of a feeling than a principle. Revenge may be violent and pointless, but it has a kind of honesty to it. The person seeking revenge isn't trying to get justice or a balance a ledger, they're acting out of pain and loss. Honor isn't about a consistent set of rules. Nale is wrong. I think Honor is mostly about being bigger than yourself and your own needs. Which is the exact opposite of retribution.

I don't like Retribution. Shocking I know. What I mean is I think Honor + Odium, or Honor + Passion, ought to not equal Retribution. Retribution is a petty, small minded feeling, unbefitting of a shard let alone two. Incongruous with Taravangians' sweeping plans and philosophy. It is focused on narcissistic goals of getting even or some naive sense of fairness. It has none of the grandeur of Honor nor the consuming force of Odium. This one detail really irks me about the book, which I think is the weakest in the series. It undermines and cheapens this great calamity. Oppression, Enmity, Contempt, Pride/Hubris, or even Storm would have been better.

It comes down to who do you trust more, yourself or the people making the laws. I know my answer.

How dare you offend the heralds with your blasphemy!

Where does the water that falls on the shattered plains go? That's a lot of water and it drains away, not pools and evaporates. No big rivers or lakes nearby on the map or mentioned. The only possibility is some vast aquifer leading under the frost lands to the ocean. Shallan mentions the chasm fiend chrysalis resembles an aquatic great shell chrysalis. Creatures like chasm fiends need a ample food supply. Shallan speculates they migrate to some other unknown plain full of chulls but where? Why has no one seen them (and hunted) them there? You can see where I'm going with this, Jules Verne meets the Meg. There would need to be some energy source to power the cave ecosystem.

Good observation, though IMO. The child sacrifice in WOR is Shallan. The child sacrifice in ROW Eshonai. Thinking about this made me notice another pattern I wondered if anyone had observed. Each viewpoint radiant deals with a flashback ('childhood') trauma differently. Five Stages of Grief Denial : Shallan Anger : Dalinar Bargaining : Venli Depression : Kaladin Acceptance : Szeth IDK fits pretty well. Not sure what it implies. None of the above seem like a healthy response, though if there is a right way to deal with grief I don't know it.

Forts Board makes a good point and there is a question about how many side kicks. Moana has Pua and Heihei. Luke has R2 and C3PO. Harry has Hedwig and Buckbeak. Spin has a slug and a spaceship. Let me offer this other point in defense of 5th ideal (Stead). Brandon excels at world building. His works stands apart in the genre for the vibrancy and uniqueness of the ecology. Not since Tolkien, have the plants and animals been such a part of the story. I have this theory that there is an impending ecological catastrophe on Roshar. There are hints at this, Ashyn, visions, the very destructive nature of the storms. If the radiants journey ended back at connecting to the natural world it would be a pleasing convergence of themes.

Rysn Ftori means rising force in Aramaic. It's poetic, the person who looks weakest is secretly strongest. What a sweet world that would be, where Gods bow before children.

Rysn, Change.

So the pattern is, 1st ideal (1st surge), 2nd ideal (2nd surge), 3rd ideal (Blade), 4th ideal (Plate). I believe the fifth ideal will fit this general pattern, 5th ideal (Stead). This won't be a Ryshadium, but rather the ability to connect with the natural life of Roshar. Willshapers will ride chasmfiends. Edgedancers will run with whitespines. Elsecallers will cuddle sky eels. Windrunners will fly with Larkins.

Perhaps the Threnodite chain isn't cash but a card. Mraize might pay Rabonial by transmitting something (investiture/identity?) along the chain from some other place. We know the Ghostbloods pursue this. We know Ambition's investiture has to do with leeching, 'transmitting' identity. This would fit with Rabonial's anchoring comment. This would also explain the two forms of payment.

The weird thing about this death rattle are the pronouns. Why is it "his throat" and "its blood"? Are they two different beings? Which if any of them are the suckling child? Is it just an errant typo? That would be unusual for Brandon. Does it hint that the suckling child might not be human? The last phrase is also weirdly constructed "and with it gain us further breath to draw." Why not just write "and save us all" or "and keep us breathing a little longer"? What does 'with it' and the 'to draw' add? Why is the extra unrelated imagery about breathing there in the first place? Certainly the passage is vivid enough already. I suppose the true secret is to write in such a way that your readers can't tell whether your backward, bizarre, brilliant or benighted.

"To speak of what might be is forbidden." Why? It is implied that this is because the power originates with Odium, but that's a bad reason. Practical people use whatever tools they have and prepare as best they can. The prohibition is about keeping secrets. The real secret that caused the recreance or the storm father's secrets. There is only one reason though to never think about the future. Honor knew; they're all doomed. They have to fight anyway. Sacrifices to buy time for the Cosmere. So Honor lied to give them a terrible false hope. I think it killed Tanavast to do it. He acted against the intent of the shard. What do you think Honor doesn't want people to know about the future?

Kaladin has found purpose, friends, family, the missing piece is love. "I will protect Jasnah Kholin."

I think Dalinar will be forced to kill Adolin (and Navani and Renarin) to save Roshar. Then he will seize the shards of both Odium and Honor and become War. In his rage he will seek vengeance against everyone. Kaladin and Shallan will flee, join the ghostbloods and fall in love. Jasnah and Wit will go to silverlight to trade their knowledge about anti-investiture for the secret to Adonalsium's rebirth. Dalinar will reforge the Knights Radiant into an implaccable terrible force, the Knights Defiant . Thus begins the many war.

4500 years..., an understanding patient woman

I don't get the arguments about scale or symmetry. There are symmetric swirls on Jupiter that you could toss Roshar through. For each force there is an equal and opposite whatever. Newton thinks symmetry is a fundamental natural law. Though I recently read about how he tried squishing his eyeball to see if it changed the way he saw color so... I like the cymatic patterns but I'm not sure they are a better fit. I suppose I simply don't have Shallan's eye for symmetry. I would point out that, to me atleast, Shallan is a very suspicious source of any observation or idea, a fundamentally unreliable narrator. Let us assume her observations about the shattered planes, made after being almost killed, losing her mentor, smitten with a bridgeman, fighting with a bridgeman, being hunted and on the verge of drowning, were among her more lucid, rational thoughts. Still Shallan knows nothing about geology. She may be interested and even gifted in natural sciences, but she has no education in the matter and may be prone to leaping to exciting conclusions. Consider how quickly people were taken in by things like Oumuamua or Homo Naledi. Still I agree your suggestion about an anti-tonal investiture weapon has been alluded to in the books and seems more likely.

I quite like the idea of a Shallan being misled to believe the explanation had to do with ancient mysteries and high sorcery when instead it was some ordinary boring thing. It must be hard for people like Jasnah not to see everything as the design of some shard and to differentiate between science and 'religion/supernatural' realms. Find a cymatic pattern or a cracked plate that looks more like the map of the shattered planes than this stock photo of mud. https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.sciencephoto.com%2Fe1%2F47%2F01%2F58%2Fe1470158-800px-wm.jpg&tbnid=W2lnB3rMTukJSM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencephoto.com%2Fmedia%2F163198%2Fview%2Fcracked-mud&docid=mN4BAMZsNsZodM&w=533&h=800&itg=1&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F2&shem=canimge#imgrc=trwofe4WCbN4ZM&imgdii=W2lnB3rMTukJSM

I like alder24's theory better than my own. It fits better with the books. Still in defense of my theory. 1) The soil could have been created by the surges of transformation and/or destruction. 2) There may be other areas of roshar that are cracked. Perhaps this area was uniquely flat, or uniquely muddy. 3) Perhaps it is growing, it certainly is still eroding away. 4) If it was destroyed in some energetic event shouldn't we see a pattern that reflects that, cracks shooting out from a central place, a wave pattern where the rocks were thrown up. Find a way to crack a plate that makes it look even vaguely like the shattered plains.

So I've always assumed that the Shattered plain was shattered by some large force directed downards at the center of the plains. This is alluded to in the books right? I personally imagined some sort of weapon used by the knights radiants right before the recreance. Recently, I was reading a paper about crack patterns in plains on mars, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06220-3 . The paper is well above my level of understanding, but Rapin et al. say that hexagonal crack patterns suggest repeated flooding. While block like patterns are caused by a one time flood event. This made me think about the shattered plains. Could the shattered plains have been caused by repeated flooding and drying cycles? That seems the most 'natural' explanation exspecially on a world with frequent storms. Looking at the map makes me think hexagons not square. Further there aren't any large cracks converging on some central point to like I would expect on a plate struck by a hammer. Imagine an area of heavy agriculture around Narak, perhaps where humans had imported soil to grow crops. Now imagine the humans abandon it and it gets flooded like a muddy lake and then dried repeatedly by highstorms, the mud over time forming deeper and deeper cracks and hardening to stone. Perhaps its a red-herring to assume it was caused by some act of investiture or war.

I liked the recent keteks. They made me want to try and write one too, but I failed at that and wrote this poem instead. My Favorite Color Regrets color memories red. Fondness colors them gold and green. The future is a misty grey. Yellow a lie. Blue a dream. Black waits, but brown is a present color. Brown is what it seems.

And light with smaller wavelengths (ex. violet/ultraviolet light) has greater energy. So a void light sphere set to release the same amount of light as a storm light sphere for the same length of time has more energy and thus mass.

I was initially disappointed by ROW too. I think mainly because I did not care at all about Venli's story or past. Venli thinks in her head this isn't fair and what have I done but she never acts on it, so it never feels real. I wish Venli had made some dramatic attempt at rebellion and failed. And then been tortured to hopelessness by Lezian and then 'rescued' Leshwi before being sent to spy on Rabonial. My favorite characters, Adolin, Shallan, Dalinar, Jasnah, Lift all seem to be off stage most of the books. I came around a lot when I realized that ROW is about Navani. Were I to give advice to Brandon, (which I am in no way qualified to do), I think it would have been better to write the flashbacks about Navani's life. We got a lot of Navani the scholar but not enough about Navani the person. I think Brandon should have delved deeper into Navani's rage about losing her son. Navani could have sent Kaladin into a reckless situation in search of vengeance. She could have been genuinely angry at him for not killing Moash. An early conflict would give their later joint heroics more weight. We should have learned more about Navani feelings with Dalinar. I would love to see some doubt in Navani about being with Dalinar. Why wasn't she with him years ago? Did she betray her son? Is Dalinar really a new man or is she going to end up like Evi? Navani's religion is important to her and she has set herself at odds with that. There should be some fallout to this. She should wonder if the gods are punishing her for trying to pry out their secrets, for her wayward heart. If we had got all this personal conflict and confusion, her struggle to figure it out, imposing order on the chaos, and rising to become a power in her own right would have been more impactful. Like imagine if Dalinar had simply walked out onto Thaylen field without struggling to remember the Rift and Evi or build the coalition. It would have seemed trite and gimmicky and been disappointing. Brandon understood this and tried to put it all in the prologue, but it was too much to hang on one scene. Anyway I think if you try to write Navani's inner struggles and her backstory in your head it makes ROW a much more interesting read.

(IMO), The industrial revolution was driven by capitalism and colonialism. Capitalism and colonialism also create specific kinds of strife. "Strife leads to progress" sounds an awful lot like "poverty and wealth motivate labor" and "competition creates efficiency" and other capitalist slogans. I'm suspicious that strife leads to progress is a way of justifying strife. Kelsier was born into conflict, an endless, hopeless, horrible conflict. This business about strife and progress, about needing to compete with the other worlds. I feel like he misses the fight, like he needs it. He's a soldier who can't accept the peace. He must feel so alone, so out of place. Who is left who understands the skaa vs nobles, the horror of the lord ruler? So I'm left wondering whether "strife leads to progress" is an idea that Brandon really believes in. Or whether this is just Kelsier's damaged perspective on the world. There is some evidence in Brandon's other works, warbreaker, cytoverse, and stormlight that he has considered what causes progress from a lot of angles. On Roshar, There's frequent references to how Taln's sacrifice brings peace and progress, but in ROW Raboniel and Navani make enormous progress through conflict. We see the conflict drive progress in both the Nahel Bond and fabrial technology. In Warbreaker, Brandon almost claims that progress creates strife. A kind of central question in his works.