Kyn

I just assumed it was Kaladin. I may have missed what the fallen title was, though, since I just assumed that meant the title of Radiant. It could refer to far more.

Didn’t we establish that the Tower and the Crown was the Kholinar symbol used by Dalinar? WoK ch. 28:

Are you talking about the way Taln reacted to Shallan’s Lightweaving in Words of Radiance ch. 63? Before this, Taln was just sitting like a lump, repeating his Desolation-warning spiel.

Yup, that’s why I think it’s so important to a knowledge that Kelsier is a psychopath and that Dalinar is not. Even given identical consequences, a person who sees other people as background at best but does terrible things hasn’t risen to the same level of evil-doing as somebody who has to actively work to see people as enemies in order to kill them. One’s a casual evil, one’s very intentional. Likewise, when someone who doesn’t care about other people goes out of their way to do well by others, that’s a lot more impressive than when a person with normal empathy levels doesn’t have to make any effort to do the same. To be fair though, I think our brains are designed so that most people with normal empathy dehumanize their enemies to the point of not thinking of them as people. Not that it’s better to choose to have no empathy for some. That kind of “psychopathy by choice” might be largely automated, just as a neurological psychopath not considering casualties or other consequences as long as they get what they want can be; but in both cases, we can choose to derail that instinctual leaning and be better people. That. I don’t think “law-abiding” is anywhere near as positive a characteristic as “moral and prosocial”, so I focus on adherence to laws that meet that criterion. But you hit the nail on the head.

I 100% agree with you on that. This is not a psychopathic trait. I’m sorry to make it sound like that. I suspect I’m just a terrible communicator, but I was trying to point out that, for Kelsier, that drive for purpose and achieving his goals was all there seemed to be coming out of this loss. Well, aside from those darker emotions. Not the pain we usually associate with grief for another person as opposed to losing something that belonged to him, not hunger to protect what remained. I suspect that survivors lower in trait psychopathy tend more to focus on pressing ahead with life or protecting their people; although frankly, just pressing ahead is an effective short-term goal some of us never get past. I think of the less empathetic mind as focusing on achieving goals more exclusively. For a psychopath, perhaps dominating and attaining all goals rather than living and doing something good despite, with, or through the pain. I guess your real-life story makes that point better than I ever could, of how different it is – how much more constructive and prosocial – when Survivors find purpose like this.

Right, so, a sourced reply. We’re not using Kelsier’s actions to say he’s a psychopath. That would be conflating psychopathy with bad deeds. We’re using the fact that the person who created him – an author who most assuredly did do the research – says he is neurologically a psychopath and wrote him that way, supported by Kelsier’s own behavior and especially his internal reactions, to argue that Kelsier is a psychopath. Even people incredibly high in trait psychopathy are capable of feeling for themselves, just not others. But people lower in trait psychopathy – as I imagine Kelsier to be – may be capable of actual caring. And once somebody is part of their circle, many psychopaths can feel for that person – as an extension of themselves and their identity. People separate from them don’t matter. People who are part of their crew can matter to them to the same obsessive, intense levels as the psychopaths themselves. …Sounds like someone we know. Or maybe let actual psychopaths, and real-world studies about them, explain (all emphasis mine). Let’s look at Kelsier. First, please share citations of Kelsier showing empathy. I found evidence of him having feelings for, or being attached to, people, but that is entirely different and I would like to understand where you’re coming from. Yes, he seems to genuinely miss Mare. I personally believe he’s not on the high end in trait psychopathy for a psychopath, because he seems to feel for those he has adopted into his crew. However, most successful psychopaths are disturbingly good at intellectual empathy and at faking empathy even though they lack normal empathy, so he could be higher than I think and still look like he’s grieving. But as pointed out by real psychopaths, mourning for somebody a low trait psychopath has accepted into their circle is not impossible, and the appearance of real feelings is a hallmark of successful psychopaths. But I’m convinced Kelsier is neurologically a psychopath like his creator says because there’s a reason Kelsier is the type of person who And then, what did you mean by “just” (as in “merely”) war crimes? War crimes are among the worst possible atrocities that can be committed. Every genocide tends to fall under the term because they are inherently acts of war. The Holocaust was a war crime. If you are saying that accusing Dalinar of a war crime is letting him off, you are dismissing what war crimes actually are. And if you are saying that committing war crimes like genocide makes somebody a psychopath, you are demeaning psychopaths and putting the rest of us on too high of a pedestal. Dalinar committed atrocities, and even if the Thrill pushed him further than he would have gone without it, he willingly gave in to it and even sought it out. However, glorying in wreaking destruction and being bloodthirsty is a Hollywood depiction of psychopathy-used-as-a-slur, and is completely divorced from the reality of the neurological differences of psychopathy the author was portraying in Kelsier. The extremities of desire to fight and kill brought on by the Thrill are neither relevant to psychopathy nor – given the even more intense effect the Thrill had on soldiers from nations not accustomed to engaging in such devastating wars, making them kill nearly everybody – to Dalinar’s neurological makeup. The Thrill is a mind-altering substance. Dalinar’s embrace of the Thrill, however, tells us something about him. Like that he needed help to not feel for his victims and to continue killing as he had. tl;dr if you’re not here for the sources: Kelsier was willing to destabilize his world, betray his friends, and even die to achieve his goals and vengeance, whereas Kaladin repeatedly prioritized protecting people who weren’t even useful to him even while seeking vengeance. Dalinar, who was guilty of war crimes, nevertheless was unlike Kelsier in being too addictive, sentimental, and willing to give up on what he wanted (Navani) to be as goal-driven as someone neurologically a psychopath. Conflating committing atrocities with psychopathy does nobody any good, and refusing to accept Kelsier for what he is demeans any effort he takes to be(have like) a decent human being.

You’re right, they don't technically slash things with Light. They’re just made of the Investiture from their overarching Shard as its godmetal. I always assumed Shardblades and Plate were charged with Stormlight because spren are. But just because I think of them as fueled by Stormlight through the spren comprising them doesn’t mean that’s an appropriate way to describe them. It would be more accurate to talk about Investiture in the form of Shardblades damaging the spiritweb, and Investiture in the form of Light doing the same thing when wielded as a weapon, thanks.

…That’s not how guilt works. You can feel that what you did was bad without feeling either like you shouldn’t have done it or like you need to make it better somehow. Psychopaths regularly acknowledge wrongs done without wanting to redress them, and Moash is likely in a similar state, as he has deadened his feelings (and shows no empathy for Teft or others even in these moments when his feelings come back). Feeling guilty merely means knowing what you did was wrong. Feeling sorry means wanting to make recompense. Until Moash shows signs that he wants to fix the things he’s screwed up, he’s not ready for redemption. Again, the books tell us that Honorblades don’t heal wounds caused by Shardblades. If they can’t heal Stormlight wounds, they’re unlikely to be able to heal Towerlight wounds. So Moash’s continued blindness is a function of his inability to heal given the tools at hand, not of his perception of himself.

Psychopath ≠ evil. It is not meant to be merely an insult casually thrown out to say that someone has done terrible or crazy things, and the term is not being used that way in reference to Kelsier (well, presumably not by the author). I’m pretty sure @Kingsdaughter613 can explain exactly why finding Kelsier admirable doesn’t mean he’s exempted from being called out for what he is, and vice versa. And this deserves a more in-depth, textually-supported response. But for now, psychopathy (Wikipedia) is: That is Kelsier. That is not the other characters you mention. Hatred does not make Kelsier or anybody else a psychopath. The human incapacity to empathize with much more than a handful of people is normal. So is the brain’s heuristic tendency to divide the world into us and them, and then dehumanize the “them” to conserve thinking and empathy bandwidth. In their extremes, these are all far from admirable qualities; but like the psychopathy-adjacent ability to detach from others’ pain enough to perform surgery, they are adaptive in minimal to moderate amounts within the appropriate context. So, listing examples of other characters behaving like jerks, just like normal people, neither makes them villains nor makes Kelsier less of a potentially-diagnosable psychopath. Even comparing Kelsier’s mass murders to Dalinar’s war crimes doesn’t change anything, since psychopathy is a personality disorder and not a label earned by evil deeds. Kelsier is a psychopath. Now, if you mean only to claim that he is not the evil person or villain he is perceived or portrayed as, that’s a different argument altogether.

We actually don’t know that, though. Until we find out explicitly that Nightblood consumes the soul, it’s entirely likely (and presumed in-world) that he feeds off of Investiture only. In which case, Nightblood would have just severed the Connection to the soul by consuming Investiture, thus sending souls on to The Beyond. Likewise, while we don’t know that spren have souls that go to The Beyond, there are in-text and WoB reasons to assume it. I just…don’t see the rationale for spren like Phendorana to be considered uniquely soulless or unable to enter an afterlife just because their bodies are Investiture. And if souls exist independent of Investiture, and thereby could have an afterlife, there is no textual or logical support for anti-Investiture destroying those souls.

That’s probably most of it. But for me, none of the things you listed as other aspects or results of hate actually spring from hate, no matter how it might play into them. Defiance, maybe. So it’s entirely possible that the author also doesn’t associate hatred closely enough with those more constructive things you’re thinking of. That seems all about survival (preserving the self) and revenge (ruining the other) to me. Spitting in the eye of somebody by surviving or thriving isn’t something I associate with hatred, even if the emotion plays a role, but rather with the desire to prove them wrong or inferior. I’d actually credit ambition or disdain more than hatred, since this seems more about forcing people to admit you’re better than about outright destroying them. Rubbing their face in it is the point, not obliterating them. It’s likely I just don’t get hatred, though. That seems extremely apt to me. Perhaps because I don’t see hatred as being necessary, or necessarily even instrumental in, the other actions you mentioned, I can actually see the combination of a desire for preservation (survival) and a desire for ruin (overcome, even thrown down oppressors/opposition) driving those actions. Hmmm, I thought, in-universe, Honor was about connection, oaths, and binding. which I imagined would mean binding hatred into something more directed, more channeled.

Isn’t channeling the hatred (properly, potentially) exactly what we would get if we combined Honor and Hatred? I think the reason we only see the destructive aspects of hatred is precisely because it’s been unnaturally separated from the focusing or constructive aspects of what Adonalsium used to be. It’s hatred in a void, absent limiting or directing factors outside that raw aggrievedness.

This is all based on what the people in-universe think or WoB says. We are all maybe wrong. I just don’t understand the logical connection between some of your assertions. These are other ideas you stated: Why is it that you think humans and animals have souls? If it’s because they’re sentient, why would you assume sentient ideas – what you call “Investiture gaining sapience” – don’t have a soul? If they all have souls, and all of their souls are connected to their bodies by Investiture but – according to you – Investiture ≠ the soul, then why would destroying (but really just recycling back into the Cosmere) the Investiture that spren are made of prevent their souls from going to The Beyond? It just seems like a convoluted way of denying Phendorana whatever afterlife death normally provides in the Cosmere. Believing in no souls at all or in no Beyond for any would be consistent. But this seems to be an argument that spren just don’t get souls like other sentient creatures? Or am I misunderstanding?

The first part would be why I had a parenthetical included, since it doesn’t look as if traditional attraction is involved. And I never mentioned falling in love. Pretty sure being demiromantic is vastly different from the easy crushes or falling hard for virtual strangers many people describe, but if you say so. You’re right, but I genuinely don’t know a term that limits to the non-sex emotional+physical intimacy aspects of the whole romantic relationship shebang. I shouldn’t have defaulted to an obviously-inaccurate one in my ignorance, sorry. That is actually worth arguing. I can’t imagine Jasnah would want to sacrifice her family, even if she’d otherwise be willing to doom her planet to save the Cosmere. But…consider how calculating Jasnah is. Can we really agree she’d let several other planets die just to save the one that matters to her? Would that calculus change if she could get her family exempted from the sacrifice? I have to wonder if there’s a tipping point, even if Hoid betrayed her, beyond which Jasnah would see the benefits as worth the costs of helping Hoid let her world burn in order to save something bigger (assuming that’s what he’s after). Personally, I imagine that Jasnah – unlike Taravangian – would find a way to bargain for more. She’s probably good at finding the Third Option (to save [mostly] everybody, assuming she cared to), maybe good enough to even get Hoid to take it alongside her. With or without a relationship. …Although, thinking about it, the relationship could very well be another leverage toward such an end.

But Honorblades can’t heal as well as a Radiant Bond can. When Taravangian was trying to fool Szeth into thinking Kaladin had an Honorblade, he specifically said it must have been one of the ones with Regrowth to account for healing from a Shardblade wound. Words of Radiance I-14: The inability of an Honorblade to heal wounds caused by Stormlight suggests they also can’t heal wounds caused by Towerlight. This inability, combined with Moash’s insistence that he didn’t want to feel, tells us he is not currently ready to acknowledge, let alone atone for, anything he has done wrong. This is not a man who is either seeking or ready for redemption: In fact, this sounds like a man who has blinded himself to his flaws and mistakes, thus crippling himself so that his physical blindness is merely a reflection of his own willfully-blind, unrepentant and inflexibly cognitively-dissonant internal state. Moash isn’t sorry for his actions, so how could he be ready to atone for them, let alone be redeemed?

So, I was agreeing with you but providing clarification. Because Jasnah is not at the “extreme” aro end of the spectrum, but she’s deinitely not showing signs of what most people think of as normative sexual appetite. Demiromantic has no bearing on orientation.

Jasnah’s self-admittedly demiromantic on the aro spectrum, only attracted to (or at least interested in heteroromantic relationships with) men she has an established respect for or connection with. RoW ch. 99, emphasis mine: Although, her feelings (apathy? unenthusiastic willingness?) about the physical-intimacy part of the relationship she’s in suggest she might be as transactional about sexual relationships as she is about everything else. That this function of being together is worth it for whatever else she gets out of the relationship. Intellectual stimulation can be worth a lot for someone like that, but I’m sure it has come with genuine fondness for her to seek more.

I actually think the Alethi language should fall into patterns pretty easily, but not all languages do. One like English, that draws from a host of different source language roots, and cobbles together all sorts of grammar and other linguistic rules in the process, should be pretty hard to figure out, compared to more ordered languages. It’s possible that the way the Alethi substitute certain sounds for others seems illogical to certain mindsets, thus making the pattern difficult for this particular Cryptic to crack. Probably this is just a Cryptic who does better with different types of patterns than linguistic ones. In the real world, there are plenty of people who “get” numbers or logic but are stymied by languages. Just like there are people who are excellent with a particular “hard” science but struggle with a similar theoretical one even though both might require the same heavy math skills…just applied differently.

If there is an afterlife, there’s no reason for Phendorana’s soul not to have gone to it. tl;dr If souls go on The Beyond, a dead spren’s should, too. Everything loses its Investiture at death, and a spren’s “body” being formed of Investiture shouldn’t make losing its Investiture somehow destroy its soul’s identity but not other sentient beings’. So, lots of related WoBs. Loooong WoBs (always subject to being one-upped by the text, and italics mine) confirm: that most things have souls, that souls in general are composed of Investiture, ...but the Investiture is not the soul that the souls of at least sentient beings go on to The Beyond, that Investiture isn’t destroyed, and, in the same vein, that Investiture and energy and matter can be thermodynamically interchanged. If, when Investiture connecting a person’s souls (to their bodies, their lives, their friends, etc.) is sent back to the universe, their identities in their souls presumably continue to The Beyond, then there’s no reason for a spren’s soul to be destroyed in the same situation just because it’s body basically was Investiture. The dead spren still merely lost its body and the power animating it, just like the soul of a dead human would have.

…It seems like such a disservice to Jasnah’s character to expect her to fall into some sort of vengeance-seeking spurned lover stereotype. I’d bet she’d let hurt feelings fuel vengeance against Hoid if he betrayed Roshar or her family, but over a relationship? Even ignoring that this is Jasnah, vendetta-ing over a relationship seems out of character coming from someone either where she seems to be on the Ace Aro spectrum, or where she seems to be in regards to letting emotionless über-practicality rule her. Let alone from someone in both those places together.

I don’t think Odium could be all emotions. He’s certainly nothing more than the passionate or intense emotions, that some paradigms might term high-arousal. Odium is also very likely skewed toward what some emotion paradigms might consider “negative valence” or unpleasant emotions like anger. Most importantly, though, if Odium were additional emotions unrelated to hatred, the way he affects his Vessel should be different. Taravangian was weepy and highly emotional in his “dumb” state, so he was open it whatever emotions Odium offered. Yet this is what we see when Taravangian interacts with Odium (emphasis mine): Row ch. 113 RoW ch. 114 …That’s the emotional drive overwhelming Taravangian moments after taking up this power. It’s not nuanced or balanced, it is destructive and violent. So, if Odium is part of a spectrum of emotions, he would have to be just the extreme emotions we might think of as Passion; only, in a very specific, limited sense that explicitly has nothing to do with love...one that might as well be termed as Hatred.

That’s one of the few things we have direct confirmation of when it comes to a connection between Ba-Ado-Mishram and the issues with spren. Rhythm of War ch. 49:

The general idea of other methods than outright war being used if one world were going to attack another makes more sense than invading. But biological warfare isn’t some easily-controlled weapon that a sane and knowledgeable organization would intentionally employ against a place they intended to come into contact with in the near future (while the organism is still present), let alone inhabit. It tends to be more suitable for clearing out or culling a population (or particular individuals). Even simpler biological weapons are unpredictable. They have a tendency to mutate and spread, and moreso when introduced to very distinct environments/populations from where they’ve previously developed but where they take root. After all, an ordinary, common stomach bug (repeatedly and independently) became The Plague. I wish we had reason to think nobody would be full enough of themselves to risk going to a place they’d just seeded with a biological weapon in order to play hero / take advantage. We’ve had “vaccine tech,” including very advanced antiviral and bacterial options for prevention and treatment, for a long time, and biological warfare is still utterly terrifying. Speculating on the likely-impossible when it comes to Roshar’s potential medical capabilities:

@LewsTherinTelescope Thanks for the correction, I suck with names, but I actually knew Ashyn, so who knows why I just inserted the earlier world the OP mentioned after Autocorrect did its thing. I consider it a victory when I catch its autocorrecting to it’s. But I was really looking forward to a story with subatomic manipulation that could set off a fission reaction, too bad it’s not a thing yet. @Sylvass Kind of figured that was tongue in cheek. And I guess it would make sense that if Hoid screwed up like that, he might then choose to take up a violence-inhibiting Dawnshard, perhaps in recompense. But maybe we’ll both get lucky and there will eventually be a story about Yolen and its hopefully-inadvertent first microkinesis-induced nuclear winter.

…With you up until the second tinfoil hat. That last theory doesn’t really go with doing no harm. However, did Stonewards (or any Order, really) exist as an organization back on Yolen? Would they even have taken oaths there, or was that a thing born of the desire to limit the powers in order not to destroy another world, and of Honor and/or the spren, after coming to Roshar? Although, isn’t it likely most of the Surgebinding abilities would also have been on Yolen, if the humans fled to Roshar after destroying their homeworld using surgebinding? I’m not sure why the abilities would remain the same when they’re supposedly born of Honor and Cultivation, who were already on Roshar. So, especially since Odium can offer (most of) the same abilities to his Fused, these abilities are likely more universal, inherent to Investiture in general rather than limited to individual Shards. Or at least to Investiture the way it manifests in the Rosharan System (although similarities with certain abilities from other systems seem to exist, as well, hmmm). At least, most of the abilities seem likely to be universal – there may be questions about Adhesion, for example.