ParaTulip

Kaladin remarks to himself about feeling his light usage being more efficient near the start of the book, while he is using tower light, but it is explicitly because he has attained his 4th ideal. That is probably where you got confused?

This bugs me too, but because I am fond of history instead of psychology. I have taken a 101 level course on the matter and my mom had a bachelors in the topic, so I know the broad outlines of the science, but my real interest in having something like this in a fantasy book is to explore what Micheal Foucault's Madness and Civilization presents: how does the world go from one where being told by the spirit of the virgin Mary to rally the locals to take the holy land is something people believe in and will join in on that to one where we all agree that is crazy. I was especially interested in this because of how Zane and Vin's mother were both insane (lacking full moral agency due to a psychological condition) but that was in fact one of the creators of their world talking to them in order to bring about a coherent plan. It's a bad plan that involves killing basically everyone, but it is a plan. This is one of my problems with this too. I kind of had this idea that Roshar was a world that had a much more rules centered way of thinking due to the influence of the radiant oaths on society and culture, while Scandriel has a much more outcomes based way of thinking because Kelsier was the savior figure for so much of the population and I don't think he had ever met a rule he couldn't except himself from outside of being good to his friends. I don't think I have ever seen a piece of media treat therapy better than The Sapranos, based on my own experiences with the practice. The way Tony in that refuses to become a less violent and horrible person, but instead uses therapy to make it easier for him to live with himself while being crap to his therapist, feels very real to me about how therapy works when applied to people who focus on being happy. I was thinking the whole time that Kaladin was trying to talk Szeth into being happy: No, Kaladin, Szeth should feel really bad about all of those people he murdered. He needs to feel bad about that because otherwise there's going to be nothing to stop him from engaging in systematic murder campaigns based on a personal sense of either satisfaction or righteousness. Nale is actually pretty fine with himself; his problems aren't mental health; they are ideological. The problem is that no one in this story can commit to "I will feel as bad as I need to, such that I never kill again." because that basically means giving up on doing action scenes with cool magic blades. Well, except Dalinar I guess.

Have we seen any of the Enlightened Spren take on the form of a blade? They should be composed of something that is a blend that includes Tanavastium while having some other properties. I haven't thought about this before, but my instinct is to suggest it could be a terribly opposite effect. I wonder if it might be the opposite: Warlight might have some horrible tendency to cling to a person like the traumas of battle. Especially with the way it is being distributed, Taravangian is personally willing that the power be granted into vessels, blessing the person by choice rather than by accident of nature. Maybe using Warlight is comparably inefficient to expend, but holding it is easy? I could also imagine that using Warlight has some weird dynamic where it flows into people, friend and foe, around the user instead of just dissipating into the air. This would work really well for Taravangian's desire to become The God to all peoples, since then fighting his soldiers would mean tasting their blessings. We know that the mechanics for stuff like this can change with a new shard vessel, in addition to the forming of a dishard, based on the stuff about how the souls of Scandrians got changed in time between eras 1 and era 2.

It is probably Syl. I just can't stand her whole personality. I could kind of dig Kaladin some if he wasn't spiritually attached to her, but I often find myself not liking him the most when she is getting focus. She gets craploads of screen time, and I cannot recall a single time I have been happy about this.

Penguin. The belly sliding, diving, and cultural norm around transient relationships appeal to me. I am basically only into his Comsere stuff. Looking at the coppermind, it looks like I missed that The Sunlit Man, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, and Tress of the Emerald Sea came out. [answer]

I am reminded in this of the way ancient mesopotamians thought about their gods with all of this. The original version of the flood myth, as best as archeology can find, goes that the gods destroyed humans for being too noisy. But then there was no one left to make food for the gods, and so they made one woman and one man immortal. Thus they were assured there would always be someone to make offerings. This situation feels like a riff on that. The crop that Retribution seeks to reap is not any grain or animal sacrifice, but legions of fanatical warriors who will destroy the other Shards in his name. One of the things that has me actually wanting to read on after WaT is to see how the heck the Singers feel about their victory. Could you imagine winning a glorious liberation struggle to overthrow thousands of years of domination, and then all the wonderful things of nature are destroyed before your eyes as the world is engulfed in endless darkness? Hopefully most of the oxygen everyone needs to breath and stuff is made by ocean life on Roshar, or otherwise Retribution is going to be knocking on the doors of Urithu asking if Jasnah could soulcast all the corpses of the Singers and their humans subjects into smoke so he doesn't have to look at them and be reminded of how badly he messed up.

I am assuming that you want to understand where people are coming from with these positions, instead of wanting to rant against people who didn't like a book you enjoyed. I actually came to this forum looking to see if other people had similar reactions to me about this stuff, and it is funny that you seem to have found most of my issues, but without understanding why I have them. This book has an obvious thing to get to, the confrontation between Dalinar and Taravangian that was set up by the events of the prior book. The stuff about Mishram that Shallan is headed for and whatever Kaladin and Szeth are off to do in Shin was also something to look forward to, but I have this horrible problem where I don't actually like Kaladin that much. The pacing issue arises when other stuff becomes so much of what the word count of the book actually is. Between Adolin and Sigzil, the largest portion of the wordcount ends up being about these elaborate battles, discussing strategy, and exploring the character of these men as leaders. This is not what I was looking forward to in this book, and it failed to convince me that I am better off with the surprise. Adolin getting put through the "this is what it is to be one of the nameless spearbearers in someone else's epic" was still good, but it took so long getting there. Rehashing Adolin's problems with his dad again felt tedious. Adolin making friends with people was really slow feeling, and the way the battle would go was telegraphed so much that I started to consider skipping Adolin PoVs out of sheer lack of interest. Not to say there is nothing good there, I actually like Maya as a character, and the whole "Azimir has done the state admin stuff of trans rights" is interesting, but it was like too little jam spread over far too much toast. Yeah, so I actually like Shallan being a messed up fujoshi. The fact she responds to her family being threatened with "Well, I don't want to actually be around them to keep them safe. I'll just play the sith rule of two game with my murdering teacher." is so cool of her. What actually bothers me about her is something of the modern prose issue: She explicitly has begun thinking about her "mental health". This phrase is very much a modern feeling one. There is also that she is spending a lot of time re-treading stuff that I thought she just did in the last book, which was set less than a week before this one. I get that people lose ground on their struggles, I know I have had this happen to me, but this gets back to the pacing issues: I was not looking forward to more of Shallan waffling on how much murder she should do. I thought she figured this out last book. I don't know if it is the particulars of the prose, but there are points where I felt like the characters were thinking much more like I would expect a modern person to and not someone who had lived in a pre-modern world that has only been cast out of its traditional patterns for less than two years. If you have ever looked into the history of psychology, then you know the actual way people would think of a lot of stuff is as demons. This is treated as silly now, but imagine being Kaladin: Rotspren and painspren are extremely real to you. Why wouldn't he think about his depression as being a kind of wicked spren that he has been drawn to him by the mix of events he has experienced and his personal nature? He instead thinks of these feelings as being parts of his brain, which is the way that is more correct, but it is less interesting. There was a similar problem with Jasnah and her argument against Taravangian: She completely fails to think like someone who has lived in a feudal structure all of her life. Even I, who only thinks sometimes about what feudalism was like, was thinking as I was reading "The response to Taravangian saying 'what about your children and grandchildren?' is to offer to adopt a child of Fen's choosing as your heir and child or to propose a marriage of Gavinor to whatever person Fen chooses" and this never even seems to cross her mind because she's thinking like someone trying to win an argument on the internet instead of as a person who grew up with the threat of being married off to secure an alliance looming over her from the moment someone decided she was a girl and a noble. I worry that the Cosmere stories are losing the aspect of fantasy where these stories let us imagine thinking about problems and situations in genuinely different ways, such that we might understand how we ourselves see things. Characters seem to be getting shaped to avoid them being offensive to modern sensibilities, not just about what is morally true but even how such things ought to be expressed. To put this another way, I respect The Beatles because they got weird with their music once they knew they had it made. Wind and Truth felt too safe.

Yeah, I made this account like 4 years ago and haven't used it since. I came to get involved in discussing Wind and Truth, since it landed really poorly in a bunch of ways with me and wanted to explore why. I thought this made me caught up on all of the cosmere stuff, but I guess I missed that the blitz of books that happened included some? Also, I could never get into the comic for White Sand.