ParaTulip

See first attachment or forum profile. "a new people" is hard to parse. *notices your forum signature* Yeah, you would. I think part of the arguing is being the Elsecaller personality type. Not to uncritically platform the idea of personality types, but it is a mood. The feel is asymmetric, but nice to meet you.

Oh, since you seem to be thinking about this a bunch: Have you talk to your mom about either clothes or makeup? Obviously none of that is essential, but it can be helpful to learn some background "How do I interface with the commodity culture" information if you want an easier time. I was unfortunately in the position where my mom had passed away by the time I started my transition, so I had to deal with the awkwardness of either asking a friend or going online when one wasn't around.

Do you want something recent? In which case I would say Saigo ni Hitotsu dake Onegai shitemo Yoroshii deshou ka and Tensei Akujo no kuro Rekishi were both strong anime from last fall. Also, Turn A Gundam is pretty good. It has a lot of neat theatrical drama devices around mistaken identity and doublegangers.

Well, no. The humans arrived, they increased the rate of hunting and made hunting into a competitive process with an exclusive winner, and this destabilized thing a lot. Again, Chasmfiends are going extinct as a result of this. No one is going to get to use them to eat food anymore. The Listerner hunting and agriculture practice seemed to do this for hundreds if not over a thousand years and it was not the end of Chasmfiends, but 6 years of the War of Reckoning conditions and it seems humans have done their truest ecological role of dooming megafauna.

Oh, this picked up a lot while I was gone. "Taking gemhearts" seems to be understood differently by various parties to this conversation. To me, this is effectively the same as "taking away the food supply for the Listeners of the Shattered Plains". The Listener agriculture model depends on having an emerald supply, but they are more efficient about using stones than the humans, so there is no risk of driving the Chasmfiends to extinction by their traditional methods. This is in strong contrast to how humans expend the emeralds for soulcasting and also how the Chasmfiends have been going extinct. Depriving a population of the means to feed themselves by doing hideous ecological damage is, among other things, the kind of action that results in mass exterminations. It inflicts famine. This is abhorrent to me.

Oh, do you cleave super hard to the "genocidal intent is what matters" idea of what makes genocide wrong? It is still an extermination campaign, which is morally reprehensible. Elhokar was a king. I know he was crippling incompetent at basically every turn, just the most helpless and useless person possible, but being a monarch actually put him in a position of power and authority. He should have used it better. Like, WWI is actually best blamed on the ruling classes of the various states that fought in it, because that was where decision making power had been located.

Well, Elhokar's actions produced the consequence of a genocide war in the name of vengeance. "Oh but he was responding to a regicide" is the kind of phrase that should inspire a republican ethos; no death can justify an extermination campaign against a whole people. Also, ignorance is a fault in a person. I think most everyone suffers from it, but it becomes really dramatic when that ignorance gets large numbers of people killed. Jasnah's 'illness' seems to have been pretty psychological in nature. Hence all the allusions to what seem to be padded environments.

Okay, so "I started the war that lead to a people's genocide over the death of my father and that took things too far" would probably be the seed of a truth Elhokar would have gotten to eventually. I agree with @RedBlue. The War of Reckoning was still ongoing when the Desolation started. Also, even if Elhokar and everyone else thought at the time that Gavilar was the best guy ever, we the readers know it is far closer to the truth to know that Gavilar was actually an abusive and corrupting force on all those close to him. Navani was abused by him, Jasnah went mad as a child in part due to his parenting, he craved immortality even if it meant causing Desolation levels of suffering for others. There is a whole metaphor in one of the minor plots of WaT that is about how the chasm fiends going extinct and how that is bad? Everyone killed in a war is a tragedy.

Not sure how we got to the topic of how the Human characters ought to be treating the Singers, but since it is being discussed: I feel like the Vengeance Pact is the exact sort of things that should be brought up as an example of an oath that needs to be broken and discarded. I think everyone has forgotten about it, but it was Elhokar's worst crime against the world and he died before coming to terms with it. I assume Rlain and Renarin are going to sit down and talk about it during some kind of dramatic moment after Renarin meets Adolin again and the idea of how oaths can be good or bad needs to be worked through.

Well, all of the 'gods' we have met in the Cosmere books are false gods. They are mortals who have slain what might have been as much God as the fictional creator of Middle Earth, Eru Iluvatar, and stolen that being's power for themselves. The Shard Vessels should not be getting the reverence that God would deserve; they should be treated like people who lived a long time, have lots of magical power, and maybe even had the chance to learn some interesting things thanks to their perspective. And on the personal note, while I don't care for any God that gives commands, I always liked stories where God has some kind of preference for beings who have freedom and use it. Every rule has circumstances which call for its exception.

Sorry to be a bother, but it has been about 11 years since I read Elantris. What do you mean by this comparison? My hazy recollection has Jasnah being a lot easier to relate to and see as trying to do the right thing than Hrathen.

Animal liberation is a niche idea, but it is worth going over in a book series that has so many themes of intentionally considered ethics and religious debate.

So, the Kaladin Therapy plan, but on a massive scale, or at least more than 9 patients? I am not terribly enthusiastic about Therapy Heaven. It's a form of Heaven, which I disdain, and I have skepticism towards most things called therapy these days e I do think it is highly plausible for someone with a bent towards medical structure design; Taravangian seems to be such a someone. But he's not really trustworthy on his own. Honor as some weird spren child is there to judge him and stuff. It's so hard for me not to imagine that Mass Effect 3 hologram child when thinking of that one.

The Abrahamic God tends to deal in "next life" or "next world" promises. There is either Heaven or some kind of world to come wherein all people are immortal. I have immense disdain for such things. I rather enjoy being this finite thing that exists only in finite dimensions. To put things to a sharp point: Salvation often sounds like a threat. I prefer to understand myself as being certain to eventually die and for that to be the end of me. I am not looking to go to Hell or something. I think creating such a place, or letting it continue to function, is a kind of moral failing. I also think we should strive to abolish all prisons, so maybe I am just morally weird.

I feel like this results in blowing up stars for some reason. Endowment is hard to judge since we essentially see Nalthis' richest city come out of an era of mismanaging a huge store of investiture due to the corruptions of the priesthood. But how the Returned impact the course of history more generally is hard to assess. Koravellium Avast and Edgli might subscribe to the same basic ideas on what a good but very much lower case god should do, and Edgli just avoided becoming the third wheel in a several thousand year long hate-screw-war affair between Tanavast and Rayse.

I don't know if that's really what is being said there. The quote is "She [, Jasnah,] would make a good candidate [to hold Odium]." but why isn't something Sanderson is commenting on. It could be that her compatibility with Odium is due to other factors, like perhaps the compatibilty is because she's willing to use violence even on her family members in the name of a higher purpose while Taravangian could not bring himself to actually kill his.

Sorry if it is rude for me to not engage point by point, as seems to be the style in this thread at the moment, but it seems like the debate has changed terms from "Should a being of higher power, taking the form of a Shard as presented in the Cosmere books, but with a 'benevolent' Intent (in the Cosmere sense), heavily intervene in a society for moral reasons" to "Should such a Shard control a world-state". I question if the role of ruler or leader or god is really the best way to get improve the world and people in it? All of those feel as if they carry with them the notion of becoming the master of the people rather than just trying to make their lives better. Sure, Taravangian in the story is setting up to make himself a double-god galactic emperor, but I continue to think that Taravangian is more into being in control of things than actually helping them due to his actions. Let's look at the history of religion for a bit: Two of the world's largest extant religions are Christianity and Buddhism. While both invoke ideas or histories of royalty and nobility in their founder/savior figure, both such figures are more accurately understood as teachers of divine wisdom than conquerors or rulers in their mortal lives. Rather than seeing technology as an unalloyed good, I see an understanding of the world we live in as the thing that a magical super intelligence should be providing people with. Thinking in terms of how to use or create a state to accomplish goals is limiting.

What is imposing the condition where technological development is desirable? What if the social conditions being allowed to progress with more time is better, since it allows the scientific developments to be implemented in a different set of conditions? I do wonder how long it will be until Roshar has its own version of the nuclear bomb. Scadrial has the Haronium-Trellium device demonstrated as a concept, so I wonder if Roshar has its own fabriel version of that? Holding back the development of items that can render entire planets lifeless seems like it is hard to weigh. On the whole, I am doubtful of the idea that technological development is an unalloyed good.

This is actually the thing that disappoints me in a lot of the Cosmere books. No one ever suddenly demonstrates how their ethics are alien to ours in an interesting but understandable way. Sure, there is the odd fanatic who will die for their cause or various forms of deranged characters, the Fused and the Inquisitors both demonstrate this kind of behavior. One of the last things I am remotely invested in for Stormlight at this point is someone refuting the notion of "Watchers on the rim", because I am very much against the idea of an warrior elite that is vital to society.

Yeah, he is able to see the broad "Those with power ought to do what they can to improve the lives of others" concept. There is something obviously hideous to being aware of and able to help people who are starving or unclothed or suffering immense deprivation while refusing to render aid because "it would be unnatural". But this is the guy who was willing to run a secret death camp in order to gain bits of information, and I far as I can tell he does not regret that, so he can't really be trusted to not make hell while claiming good intentions. This is a bad cliche. Power enables people to do what they want to do. Sure, a lot of people seek power for their own enrichment, and then we see them engaging in the hoarding of wealth and resources. This speaks to the society which produces these people, and not the nature of power as a concept. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case. There is just so many hard concepts that need to be developed in order to really get into this. But it seems the drive to be entertaining constrains such a development. Ultimately, the argument in the books is being had between two people who are fundamentally weird in how they are presented. Todium is some kind of fractal of a human with unlimited divine wrath seeping into his soul making the case for intervention while a dragon with a force that thinks the military developments of war is worth it makes the case for non-intervention.

You are thinking of this in really narrow conditions. Suppose Fen was a critical part of enabling something like the Coalition Wars or, had her reform program been met with more resistance, providing support to the opposition to her reforms via marine supply. You are thinking that her plan to kill Fen is some immediately pending thing, that this is a "Any day now, I will kill that woman for making me pay too much for jewelry" type of situation. It simply makes sense to have a plan and hope to not need to use it than to never plan for unfortunately possibilities.

Jasnah's political projects are worth killing people for. Her efforts to end legalized slavery among humans is actually worthy of transgressions. I also have zero pity for a monarch being faced with the prospect of death. The story of Damocles always felt to me like how power should feel.

This is a very unfair exaggeration. Sure, she is willing to assassinate a political leader if they become a problem. I think that is fair enough if the situation calls for it. I can imagine a lot of situations where one state's leader would want another dead, such as during an ongoing war between the two states. Is it permitted to send people to kill each other only when both sides are called soldiers or knights? Sure, a flawless saint will never kill another person or give the direct command to do so, since such a person could resolve all differences without resorting to violence, but that is not the standard we use for good people.

I can't believe my amazing queen Jasnah keeps getting dumped on. She loses one argument to a guy who had limitless magical powers and now no one appreciates her as the planet's only abolitionist.

The Emperor's Soul is a really strong novella that makes Forging the invested art with the best explored sense of "What is it like to do that?" of anything in the setting. It is probably also the only book Sanderson has written where a critical reader would say "You maybe should have expanded this some more", which of course means people want to see more of certain elements of the story.