Gilphon

I mean, Hoid didn't actually say that Shallan was too young for him. Adolin said that Shallan was too young for him, and Hoid replied with 'Well, that's kind of a problem. There's only one woman in my age group in the area, and I've never gotten along with her.'

So I broadly agree with the of the Fused having Oaths of some kind, but I don't think they're directly reversed from the Radiants ones like this. Like the Heavenly Ones, who appears to broadly analogous to the Windrunners, aren't focused on destruction. I would say that the Heavenly Ones seem to focused on competition. They like to prove that they're better than their enemies by fighting fair as along as their enemies agree to do the same, and have a particular affection for 1-on-1 duels.

I couldn't say much beyond that though; Lezian and Radoniel are only Fused from other Brands where I feel like I understand them as individuals, and we don't have enough information to say how representative they are of their Brands. 

Brandon weighed in the whole 'dropping the Thrill in the Ocean' thing on reddit yesterday: 

Quote

therealkami

The main concern I saw with people on this chapter [Rhythm of War Chapter Sixteen] is the whole thing with where The Thrill ended up. Do we just lack info, or did Jasnah allow something that powerful to be simply tossed away and hope no one finds it?

Brandon Sanderson

Betas had some questions about this too, and my team keeps pushing me to put more info about it--but I haven't found the right place. It's more secure than you'd think.

My assumption is that what this means is that there's no easy way to find it in the Cognitive Realm. 

3 minutes ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Ash is mentioned to have Shin eyes.

I stand corrected. Missed that detail in the description. Still, Taln doesn't seem to have Shin eyes, so my overall point stands. Really, Ash looking like a mix of Shin and Makibaki strengthens my 'faster evolution' theory.

It's weird to me that we're apparently not going to get heavily into the Shinovar stuff until book 5; I always felt like an Oathgate, seven Honorblades, and an easily defendable country with lots of fertile land and no Singers would be a prize that the coalition would want to get their hands on ASAP. Six of those Honorblades are not as important now that Radiants are more common, but having another Bondsmith would be huge. And now we have Jasnah bringing it up as a priority. 

I guess with dealing with Emul and Tukar is gonna take up a significant chunk of this book? I don't know, it just seems weird to establish Shinovar as Jasnah's goal now if that's not going to really happen this book.

I mean, I don't know if I believe there's romance, but Jasnah certainly seems to uncharacteristically trusting of him. Like Navani mentions that she didn't drop the mask until after Shallan had left- Jasnah apparently trusts him more than Shallan. That's... well, that's evidence of there being more than just exchanging knowledge. Close friendship at the absolute minimum. 

1 minute ago, Nahema said:

I have a question concerning the Shin. It is always pointed out how different they are - in looks and in culture. In this chapter too.

Yet, if I understood correctly, Shinovar was the land that was given to the human refugees from Ashyn. But the humans got greedy and took over the whole planet. 
So, how did it happen that you have two different human peoples?

I‘m very curious for book 5 (and 4,6,7,8,9, and 10 of course  ).

There are lots of different human peoples on Roshar. They've had ten thousand years to diversify their cultures. And the Shin in particular have been isolationist for quite some time, leading to their culture not being directly influenced by anyone else's, and there's relatively little intermarriage with outsiders, so they maintain a distinctive appearance. 

(In addition, I suspect that Cultivation's presence means evolution happens faster on Roshar, so the humans who left Shinovar have evolved to be slightly better suited for Roshar's environment. Which in particular means epicanthal folds to deal with wind, hence why the Shin are always mentioned as having large, round eyes. Although since there's no mention of Ash and Taln having Shin eyes this chapter, those were probably reasonable common among Ashynites to begin with)

1 hour ago, robardin said:

The Fused hadn't returned to Roshar yet, not until after the Everstorm, so this would have to be a Fused trapped in a gem from the previous Desolation where they occured - the last "real" Desolation, i.e., Ahrietiam.

That doesn't jive with Leshwi's horrified reaction to the idea that a Fused could be trapped in a gem, if it'd already happened before.

On the contrary, it jives really well- Gavilar nabbed a Fused off of Briaze shortly before the Desolation started, so Leshwi didn't have a chance to notice that person was missing. But Raboniel realized it happened, and that's why she's so confident that this will be the final Desolation. Although Raboniel doesn't realize that they only human who knows how that was accomplished died without telling anyone about it. 

4 minutes ago, the_archduke said:

Does aluminum have a cognitive aspect?  If so, couldn't you search for the aluminum?

I imagine that in theory it does, but there'd be nothing obvious to distinguish it from any other Bead in Shadesmar, so you'd have to search manually.  

So. If Nergaoul has an obvious manifestation in the Cognitive, that's a pretty big flaw with the plan. But I feel like they would've thought of that, and used an Oathgate to check what it looked like. So I would suggest that either it's been pulled entirely into the physical and doesn't have a manifestation in the Cognitive, or they did go with the Aluminium cube plan and found that that blocked the manifestation. 

19 minutes ago, Karger said:

Security is a balance between strength and secrecy.  You generally can't have both at once so people usually opt for one or the other.  I personally think having the "radiant council" send Kaladin to dump it at super specific coordinates and only sharing this info with successors would work quite well.

I am of the opinion that this is a context where strength is irrelevant, because it's not just about keeping it safe in the current war, it's about keeping it safe from all future generations. No amount of strength could ever be enough. So the rationale decision is to go all in on secrecy; if there's only one person who knows where it is, that's one person too many. 

I'm of the opinion that picking a particular place to dump the gem would be a mistake- that's leaving clues that somebody looking to find the gem could pick up on. If its location is known, then it's just a matter of breaking through whatever security they've placed, and there more security there is, the more conspicuous the location will be. 

Personally, I can't think of a defensive measure that's better than 'if you want it, you're literally going to have comb through the entire storming ocean'.

So I'm saying that the Black Sphere contains a Fused- it's clearly not just regular Voidlight, it's being emphasized too much to be a regular Voidspren, Navani would've noticed if it was an Unmade, Gavilar was talking about trapping Singer Gods, Rlain was talking about it being bad for his soul, and the Fused are worried about the humans learning to trap them- implying that that's been successfully done at least once. Everything fits. 

I also think that tossing Nergaoul in the ocean is a good call. Like keeping the gem somewhere where humans can get to it is just begging for it to get broken someday, so keep it out of everyone's hands forever. And, in a more meta sense, getting rid of the Thrill was the entire emotional climax of OB; undoing that would just be undermining OB for no reason other than to throw antagonist the heroes have already beaten at them all over again. I honestly not think that that gem's getting found. 

People focus too much on gunpowder when deciding this sort of thing. It was discovered 1200 years ago in the real world, after all, and most Cosmere worlds appear to be further along than that. 

For my money, Threnody appears to be the most primitive- although we have no idea what things are actually like in the Homeland. But in the society we've seen, the Simple Rules are gonna do a lot to limit technological development- they represent severe restrictions on trade, travel, agriculture and fire. And if you're struggling with those, just about everything else is gonna be even harder. They should count themselves lucky that they haven't been blasted back to the stone age yet. 

This does appear to be a case of them having lost a lot of what they once had, rather than technology never having been developed at all, but that's possibly also the case for Sel, since Odium's visit there was probably pretty dramatic. As for Nalthis, well, they have relatively easy access to the rest of the Cosmere, and scientifically-minded worldhoppers meddling in politics, so they can't be that far behind. 

I mean, I feel like we're using the term 'organic fabrial' because 'fabrial' is the only word we have to refer to the magic system under discussion here. Technically you're probably right; I believe there's a WoB saying that fabrial is gonna end up being a general term for magitech, and therefore it should only refer to the metallic ones, but we don't have any better terms. 

3 hours ago, IcaroRibeiro said:

As a non-Warbreaker reader, I would probably didn't understand anything (Type 1 invested, what?)

You're definitely focusing on the wrong detail there, given A) that he immediately explains that 'Type 1 Invested entity' refers to spren, so there's minimal opportunity for confusion, B), he's not using the term in the same way he did in Warbreaker, so having read Warbreaker doesn't actually help you understand what he's talking about, and C) pulling out a bunch technical jargon out of nowhere that the PoV character doesn't understand and just kind of hoping they'll catch up as he explains was exactly how he operated in Warbreaker; it was meant to be initially confusing there, just as it was here. 

So, really, I suspect that the organic fabrials are the 'true' fabrials- it's what the things that evolved on Roshar use. The metal-based versions developed by the humans are a weird hack designed to get around the way they can't hear the rhythms. Most visibly, this has got to be what the Singer forms are- they transform by going out into the Highstorm, attuning the right Rhythms, and trapping the right kind of spren in their gemhearts.

From a more Realmatic point of view: In the Metallic Arts, the molecular structure of the metal acts as a 'key' that tells the Investiture what to do. We have seen other keys that have similar functions elsewhere in the Cosmere; most notably the language-based magic systems on Sel. And if a language can act as a key in this context, it makes perfect sense that a Rhythm can as well- the Rhythms do seem to be something fundamental about Roshar, after all. Then we get that the humans have replaced one type of key with another.

But the real holy grail here, I think, lies in combining the organic and metallic fabrials. The Rhythms are probably gonna produce some effects you can't get with metals, and vice-versa. Using both in a single fabrial could lead to all kind of crazy things.

Priority one, though, should be finding a way to make an organic fabrial that's more efficient than 'have a guy sitting there, constantly beating a drum'. Perhaps that why the Heralds and Fused have been so impressed by the things accomplished by the metallic fabrials; metals are a lot easier to mass-produce and scale up. 

Just now, Raphaborn said:

I agree. In this case, Type II is now divided into Spontaneous Sentient Manifestations in a Deceased Host and Mindless Manifestations in a Deceased Host.

This further makes me wonder if we will eventually see Spontaneous Mindless Manifestations in a Deceased Host.

Surely Spontaneous Mindless Manifestations in a Deceased Host are what Shades are. Or perhaps what would happen if a Shade got shoved into a body.

My thought was that he no longer draws a hard distinction between Returned and Lifeless- we know from WoBs that Lifeless are more aware than they believe. They're both Cognitive Shadows stapled to a body, Lifeless just have less agency (and perhaps that's solely a function of how Invested they are; perhaps a Lifeless would become something extremely similar to a Returned if given enough Breath). So both are Type 2 is his new classification. Indeed, I suspect that realizing that was the reason he was forced to acknowledge that his old classification was wrong. 

He might be drawing the distinction between Cognitive Shadows with and without bodies- certainly the definition of a Type 2 he gave in this chapter would imply that- but the Fused show us that that's not a hard distinction either, so I doubt it.

I would suspect that his new Type 3 is beings that didn't arise naturally and aren't based on a dead being; things that were artificially created. So Awakened Objects, spren that were directly created by a Shard, and stuff like that. I don't know if he needs any other Types at all after that; Nightblood would just the Returned to the Awakened Objects' Lifeless; the distinction based purely on amount of Investiture, rather than any actual fundamental difference. 

But, y'know, it's all ultimately just the way Vasher has decided to refer to things in his head, not any kind of fundamental truth.

Hmm. So. The fabrials that Navani's been talking about in the epigraphs have three main components: gem, spren and metal. But here we see that the Listeners knew of a different type of Fabrial, made from gem, spren and rhythm. This is probably exactly the kind of fabrial that Singers just naturally are, and indeed probably why the Rosharan fauna doesn't need metals; they can just use their heartbeats, or perhaps attune to various rhythms like the Singers do. Really this has to be the 'natural' form of the fabrial magic system, with the metal-based version being more a hack; combining the system with Allomancy.

But, we also have the epigraph talking about Logicspren pulsing in a specific pattern when poked the right way. Pulsing in one of the Rhythms, surely. And metals let you modify this pulse, perhaps moving it to a different Rhythm. So perhaps this could be used to combine the two types of fabrials, which could lead to a lot of new things.

That's technically true, but only technically, because you can soulcast things out of air.

Very good question that I hope we learn the answer to next week.

My favourite of the theories I've seen is that it can as a logic gate, letting you predict and control the effects of stringing multiple spren together into a single fabrial. 

2 minutes ago, robardin said:

Just think of all the poor "singers" who were awakened from mindless slavery just to become Fused Fodder.

I thought it was interesting that there are so many insane Fused, who just sit around staring or giggling. Why are they even coming back into a physical form? Is it a cycle they cannot control? Like, wouldn't Odium be better off "unplugging" them so that the sacrifices of bodies for housing Fused aren't essentially wasted?

Or are there more of them than before, because of the very long time that has passed since the last time there was a proper Desolation (the "False Desolation" not featuring any Fused)?

I suspect the insane ones still have some uses. Like maybe they can still be cajoled into following orders, and the old instincts take over when a fight breaks out, or something like that. I fully believe that Odium would pull the plug on them if they had become truly useless to him.

2 minutes ago, robardin said:

And the comment that Brandon Sanderson made in Reddit (I think it was) about not wanting Team Odium to suffer from "Skeletor Syndrome" could certainly be taken as an ominous sign that Rhythm of War will be like the The Empire Strikes Back with the protagonists getting dealt a few major setbacks.

Mhm. That comment really makes me think specifically of Lezian. Like his entire schtick is aggressively going after people who have beaten him in the past, and I think he has a pretty low chance of actually managing to kill Kaladin. So I find myself wondering how that's gonna be handled. 

2 minutes ago, Karger said:

Given the difficulty soulcasting just a normal human I don't think a random Lightweaver or Elsecaller would be up to the task.  Also Odium has probably known how to kill the Heralds for a considerable amount of time given what Moash did to J.  I don't think killing them is good enough for him.

Oh, right, just remembered a thing: Jasnah can not directly Soulcast Fused. She can kill them pretty quickly by doing stuff like soulcasting the air around them into fire, but they're too Invested for her to be able to target them directly.

So, whether or not it would kill them permanently, it's not a thing Jasnah can do, and therefore not why they're cautious of her.