coolsnow7

Dropping a liter of anti-water in the ocean would make an explosion to rival the biggest nuclear weapon humans have created. It still would leave you with 99.9999999999999% of the water you started with.

I don’t see the Change Dawnshard helping you control a Shard. But a (speculated) Bind Dawnshard…

It’s Vin at the Well of Ascension I’m pretty sure that shower sex scene was exactly this. As if we didn’t already have enough reasons to think Adolin was going to die…

We know that Odium + Honor = [War/Justice/Vengeance/something like that] We know that Honor + Cultivation = [Science/Progress/Enlightenment/something like that] What is Odium + Cultivation? This question likely takes on a fair bit of importance because Brandon has had plenty of opportunities to hint at what it might be and is clearly hiding the ball from us. I'll give my best guess but really I'd like to inspire more discussion and speculation about what the answer might be. My best guess: we see that under two different Vessels, and despite Cultivation's best efforts, Odium reaches the same conclusion regardless: that the good of the Cosmere requires more direct Shardic intervention and a monopoly on Godhood (ie, the cleansing of competing Shards from the Cosmere.) Another thing that keeps coming up - in Taravangian's discussions with Dalinar, and then in Odium/Taravangian's internal dialogue upon Ascension ("and now he was going to save them all") - is the need to be the person/being to solve the problem (however that problem is defined.) There's a self-centeredness to Odium that isn't explicit in the shard's Intent but appears to be implicit in it. Finally Cultivation: what little we know about her is that she likes to see things grow in a prescribed way. Cultivation is not simply growth, but directed growth. However, growth comes from the subject themselves, as opposed to Cultivation imposing it on them. Note that it is Cultivation who accepts Venli's Words, which are about freeing those in bondage: the connection there is that freedom from bondage enables independent growth, which Cultivation would like to guide but not impose. So my best guess for the combination of these attributes is: Tyranny. Odium/Cultivation would represent a monopoly on the ends to which growth should aspire, namely serving them; and it would seek to shape the way a society functions so that it grows to serve them and their interests. "Oh come on, Coolsnow7, we already have a Dominion Shard!" I agree, but I think there's a subtle distinction which can work: Dominion represents complete negation of the subject's will. Tyranny does not always work that way; think of an autocratic society like Soviet Russia where people are free to pursue their own projects as long as their goals are aligned with the Party's. Diversity of thought and method is encouraged; diversity of goals is utterly prohibited.

Vengeance, my friend. Vengeance. If he doesn’t merge intents with Odium somehow, then it will be phrased like Retribution or Justice or something. Or maybe just Vengeance. He will chase Taravangian around the Cosmere on a single-minded quest to avenge himself, leaving destruction in his wake.

It is hard to deny that Brandon is setting up Rushu to fit the typology of a Dustbringer. Whether he will actually wind up being one depends more on whether the Ashspren decide to bond humans again. Based on what Malata said, that's what they object to. Anyway, excellent call connecting that description to the Radiant orders description.

Who do you think "the Broken One" is? I'll tell you what should be clear at this point: it isn't Taravangian. He's already been given the epithet "the Divided One". Szeth and Nale, though... now those are good candidates for "the Broken One". (The other good candidate is perhaps Kaladin.) Szeth in particular...

Because the reason they follow him in the first place is because he leads the Alethi - directly via Jasnah and indirectly via his previous occupation of the throne. If Gavilar shows up, and consequently the Alethi are no longer in his corner, there’s more than a possibility of the coalition falling apart completely - Fen and the Azish bureaucracy are pretty reluctantly involved to begin with. Whereas otherwise, no matter what happens with the Azish and Thaylens, Dalinar still has the Alethi. The absolute bare minimum I ask is that you not put words into my mouth while complaining that my comments are “orthogonal” to the discussion. I did not claim that Dalinar would demand any Shard at all. Sure, this becomes a guess at “how much of a priority do the Ghostbloods put on being prepared for anything during this mission” vs. “how well-developed are they in terms of their resources to be able to afford that level of preparedness”. Based on what we’ve seen so far in terms of their resources, I’m pretty confident that if they put sufficient priority on this mission, they’ll have the tools to deal with Radiants on hand even if they’re expensive.

I think if someone read this 50 years ago or reads it 50 years from now, it would just go over their head. Ie in a vacuum this tells us nothing at all. But because gender is a (relatively) hot topic these days, it’s a wink from Brandon signaling that indeed Rushu is non-binary. I am certain that they came armed with Aluminum leeching grenades, aluminum cages, aluminum bullets, etc. etc. If they have the initiative they can probably do whatever they want to her. That said I think you’re correct. Iyatil will let her think she’s in control for as long as possible.

Can Dalinar claim to be king of anything if all of humanity deserts him? Can he claim to be Honor’s representative in any meaningful way if his justification for the position he holds is “Give it to me. Now. I need it”?

Correct. This theory falls squarely into the “hey, could be, who knows” category. That said, I like it more than almost every other theory in that category because a) it doesn’t draw any crazy conclusions or rely on new whacky Cosmere mechanics; and b) because it is noteworthy that Brandon is hiding Szeth’s spren’s name from us. Oh and c) because it adds a very satisfying layer of development to know that Szeth’s current spren develops from being kind of an insufferable idiot to the heroic Aux.

Not sure what your particular theory is, but if Gavilar shows up - for whatever reason, whether he’s Odium’s champion or otherwise - Dalinar will certainly face a severe crisis of legitimacy I suspect Brandon wanted to hide the Unmade from us until the book came out… I think we’re about to find out that Szeth just unearthed a captured Dai-Gonarthis.

Contrast with the pacing of RoW - 40+ chapters of “the scientific process”, and Kaladin fighting a futile rearguard action against the Fused (we know he’s going to fail, if he was going to succeed then it wouldn’t be happening so early in the book!) - yeah I’m gonna say I’m much happier with the faster pace. The Navani stuff in particular killed me.

This is a brilliant call and I think you’re correct. I’ve been wrestling all week with “what is the connection between the Night and Nightblood” - I should have thought of this! In particular because of the points you noted below. I’m sure there will be some details that get tweaked (for example, maybe only certain aspects of the Night have made it into Nightblood, while the rest were left on the cutting room floor, or something like that) but I assign high probability that the main point here will be confirmed in this book.

The correct answer to your question is no. And indeed, we’ve gotten many, many hints that “the nature of oaths” is of crucial importance to the functioning of the Cosmere - and that we’ll get some explanations in Book 5 of Stormlight. So it’s a good question and I hope no one around here tries to convince you that they have answers.

I’m more interested in whether El’s metallic implants are aluminum, such that he’d be immune to the Tower’s influence that way. Alternatively they’re hemallurgic in some way. I’m also less interested in him attacking the tower and more in him performing some assassination or sabotage mission. Suppose he disabled the Oathgates? Or alternatively, suppose he opens them from one of the 3 battlegrounds? Now that would be a disaster - if the Azish conquering force, instead of hanging out in Azimir, immediately uses the Oathgate to invade Urithiru and wreak havoc.

Strongly agree with this. I’m tempted to write a meta-post “characteristics of good theories” along these lines, but no one will listen and the only purpose it serves is a borderline negative one. Still… phew, sometimes the vibes around here get nuts.

The big problem I have is your insistence that Ishar’s Blade is a Dawnshard. You have basically no evidence for this: Melishi could have captured BAM with vanilla bondsmith powers (endowed by the Blade), the way Dalinar did to Nergaoul. Anyway this was very interesting to read, the rest of the work that you did was high quality, and some of the points you’ve raised are intriguing in their own right, even if they don’t lead to this conclusion (the honorblade chipping has gotten surprisingly little attention from a plot/thematic perspective around here). And your theory about intents and commands and Dawnshards strikes me as spot on.

Thank [insert favorite Shard here] because these theories were getting more and more drug-addled by the minute.

Let’s start with laying out the options. The influence of the Unmade is a function of their location (see Hessi’s Mythica on Moelach); consequently, if we’ve seen an Unmade somewhere outside Shinovar, we can be 99% sure that they didn’t spend Szeth’s childhood in Shinovar, jaunt across the planet to where we’ve seen them, hang out for a few days, and then hurry back to Shinovar to maintain their corrupt influence over that nation. There are 7 Unmade we can be confident are not involved: 1) Nergaoul: trapped in the King’s Drop 2) Ba-Ado Mishram: trapped in the Spiritual Realm 3) Sja-Anat: we’ve seen her in Alethkar and several other locations that are not Shinovar. Moreover, she mostly slumbered until the advent of the Everstorm 4) Midnight Mother: we don’t currently know where she is, but we know she was hanging out in Urithiru until she was banished from there - she couldn’t be both there and in Shinovar 5) Ashertmarn: again, he was busy corrupting Alethkar 6) Yelig-nar: similarly was hanging out with Aesudan and then with Amaram 7) Moelach: has been in Jah-Keved this whole time That leaves us with Dai-Gonarthis and Chemoarish. My claim is that despite all the “dust” talk, the Unmade in Shinovar is Dai-Gonarthis. Reasons being: 1) Pronouns: Szeth pointedly refers to the Unmade in this chapter as “it”. Chemoarish is explicitly gendered, like Sja-Anat, Ba-Ado Mishram, and Moelach (Hessi’s Mythica refers to “his touch”.) Dai Gonarthis is not: 2) “Manipulations”: Szeth claims that, for unknown reasons, the Shin accepted the Unmade and collaborated with it due to its “manipulations”. This whole transaction speaks to an intelligent Unmade; this is beyond what we could expect of Moelach or Nergaoul. And here we have the well-established theory that the craftiness of a given Unmade is signaled by the dashes in their names. Chemoarish may not be one of the “three great mindless Unmade”, but she is likely to be on the “Re-shephir” tier rather than on the “Sja-Anat” tier. 3) What they can offer: we don’t know anything about the Dustmother, so who knows, maybe she can fit this criteria too. But there are enough hints that Dai-Gonarthis offers something similar to the “gift of silence” that Odium grants to Moash: This is something that could conceivably be accepted by the Shin in exchange for… whatever Dai-Gonarthis wants. And here’s the kicker: we already have some foreshadowing building up to that point! Is Szeth not struggling with this exact challenge - of balancing being overwhelmed with pain and guilt vs. the need to be human? It would be quite fitting for Szeth to need to confront the ultimate avatar of “Silence” in order to resolve both his personal challenges and to fulfill his quest.

Point in his favor: “the Broken One” would refer to him better than anyone.

I mean… sure? But Szeth doesn’t seem like he wants power either. Or Adolin. Or Shallan. Or Renarin. Or Lift. Or Gawx. Or even the Mink. We have a whole plethora of wholesome people with admirable goals. I don’t think we have any information about who’s suited to the Honor shard that we didn’t have before.

Two things: 1) it’s not implausible that we don’t spend much time in certain locations. Adolin in Azimir might be, cumulatively, a chapter. Out of approximately 120. Same with the battle for Thaylenah. Narak, I believe the back cover already told us (indirectly) that Venli is going to show up and help with the Listeners. And we might not even hear of Herdaz. 2) Maybe I’m the only one but I felt RoW went incredibly slowwwww. I devoured the book in about 40 hours, pausing to eat and sleep, but even with that enthusiasm I started skipping Navani chapters. Brandon got way too into his own head with this “writing about the process of scientific discovery” business. We had to go through the motions of Kaladin staging a resistance when we knew it was never going to work - what, we’re 600 pages into a 1200 page book and Kaladin is going to figure out a way to recover the Tower? And Venli’s development went basically nowhere plot-wise (and don’t get me started on her flashbacks.) My point isn’t to bash the book - it has more than enough redeeming qualities at the beginning and the end for me to be happy. My point is that Brandon could easily have doubled the amount of plot movement that took place in RoW without making the book any longer. So I regard the fact that this book is going to have a lot of important things happening as a very positive sign.

Vengeance, my friend. Vengeance.

In his letter, Sazed tells Wit “you had that chance, and didn’t take it. Wisely, I think.” (I’m paraphrasing but only a bit.) No, I think Wit is actually being precise.