clowncarcrash

OK, reading your remarks, I'm kinda confused where you're coming from. Are you saying that Brandon would do a disservice to India culture if he didn't include all the nuances and varieties of the caste system? Or is your goal that you want Brandon to rail against the caste system because the caste system, as much as its cultural, hurts your nationalist interest in India on the world stage?

I was trying to figure out who/what this is regarding, is this referring to this? : There is a rumor about a man who made every person he touched fall upwards ever since he visited the Old Magic.[2]

I'm not sure if the Shards would have distinguished surges, because their investiture materializes completely differently. If I recall, Raboniel says its not a true surge because a true surge would be of both Cultivation and Honor. I was thinking about why. I was thinking, hey, maybe restriction is something that cultivation doesn't really like because you want room to grow. But then i was thinking of tree staking. I did a google search and apparently on /r/gardening tree staking is very controversial, lol. SO yeah I guess maybe thats why Cultivation cant sign off on it.

1. I forget why, but after a long hiatus of not reading books, I saw Brandon Sanderon's name came up on reddit on highly recommended authors, so I checked out Mistborn. For the longest time, I really really got irritated with fiction books, because I get frustrated when I imagine something wrong in my mind and I have to correct my beliefs. I remember reading The Final Empire for the first time, and I imagined ska as the Gelflins from the Dark Crystal for some reason. But yeah, I got over it and now I enjoy fantasy fiction. 2. I think I heard about it by checking out the coppermind. 3. I played dota for a long time, and I'd always change my handle to compound words. Clowncar stuck with it, and I think i add crash whenever clowncar is taken elsewhere.

I used to believe in YHVH, as the one true creator god, but I no longer believe.

oh man that is so morbid and metal (pun intended), its like kelsier is the real kandra utilizing spook's body to the extreme degree.

I don't find this persuasive. He has his own in-house editorial team but there are still typos and continuity errors that we document on this forum.

I object to the use of the term retcon. I don't think it can be called a retcon if its published in the same book. Its just a reveal. A lot of people got the moments I like. But the moment I got was that second scene of Taravangian staring into the night sky. Like, I imagined the first scene of him doing that, is just you staring into an uncaring universe. but the second time? Where he feels them turn and look at him. I got chills. Nightblood showing character development at the right moment was heartwarming. "This time I wont let him go alone" got me to ugly cry. This is kinda metatextually, but going through the table of contents and seeing all the horrific epigraphs from WoK being names of chapters. More chills there.

I think Ati is a punk but you know what? I like this idea, it parrallels Marsh's one pivotol moment of defiance.

We've seen spren die outside of being broken from a broken oath. Maybe dawnshards could generate antiinvestiture and zero sum the spren. Also....maybe sleepless count a hordeling as 1 life and that could pad the numbers? Or you could think of the Doyllist analysis -approach and Brandon wrote that because it sounded cool without actually processing how many people need to die to make that make sense. (like how most fantasy stories, the currency doesn't make sense if you scrutinize it or when George R.R martin was surprised to find out how big a 700 foot wall was when his works got adapted).

I'd say day 9 or 10. But honestly it felt like there were more sanderlanches sprinkled about. Like what Trea said, there were multiple times where certain weeks when the preview chapters came out that made it feel like a sanderlanche when we were reading them serially.

Oh thats a cool observation! I figured it was a throwaway description to make the clash seem more awesome.

Yeah, I agree Matel. I still kinda wish there was an ending where the choice was played straight. I think I wrote this before, but I really wish we had examples of Radiants walking away from easy wins because it was "right". Maybe that's how Brandon can explore whether being strict with contracts is good or bad. I think I like the ending more and more, but I really wish we had more of that before we had the subversion of dismantling the oath.

I think there's a lot more nuance to that. And I think that's why we had three characters struggling with the same idea: What is right and wrong? with Nale, Nightblood, and Szeth. I think there's more nuance. If laws can't dictate moralities, maybe there's also problems with honor codes as well. I don't think it's a deus ex machina decision. Brandon commited a lot of pagespace in Wor and Oathbringer with Wit trying to solicit help from the Shards and the Shards totally being fine of letting Odium be as long as he was contained on Roshar. And I don't get your objection to Dalinar not wanting to win the contest by killing someone dear. Because there are still consequences to Dalinar's actions and he got himself killed. And I think the two instances of renouncement, we had an instance of not-so-bad consequences with a windrunner and no consequnces with a skybreaker. I felt the logic of why there's a disparity made sense in the story.

Eh, I think the therapy stuff was always there. Like, in all the books Kaladin struggles with depression and obviously Shallan has her Dissociative identity disorder. Like, the entire premise of Knights Radiants are people with broken spiritwebs. I don't think you can form a nahel bond if you're a well adjusted person. While your opinion is valid, I don't think thats applicable to what I was saying. Like Dalinar didn't do reach his decision over a breakthrough session at therapy. His decision is more about questioning honor and being done with honor when its not useful.

I like your take but I disagree with your last sentence. It's not the story' job to tell the reader where to draw the line, but I'd love to have the character make the choice, and we as readers ask ourselves, as well as fellow readers if that was the right choice. Like I said in my original post, I think it would be really interesting if we had a victory in the bag, and we purposefully fumbled it and gave Taravangian the win because it was "the right thing to do". I like this idea. I'm reminded of the lyrics to a song I really like "rules without exceptions last eternally". When I was younger I interpreted that line to mean, Really good rules don't have exceptions. Or that exceptions lead to the death of rules and enforcement. Now I'm thinking.... maybe thats the point. Rules shouldn't last eternally.

As someone said, I think Brandon already invested so much in Gavinor that he couldnt pivot. I love the idea though. The unfortunate effect of Dalinar being written out of the story, is that he didnt really suffer the reckoning he deserved given his war crimes/race politics. I was hoping we'd see that through a Fused Dalinar.

Yeah, this is the correct take. Maybe Brandon sandbagged her or maybe we can take it as commentary on how debate-bro culture sucks. Regardless, it'll give Jasnah a good arc in the future which I think she needed.

One thing I loved about the book is..... Brandon does this good job at playing against my own bias. Like, even though Taravangian proved he could do these clutch plays when he "weak", I still saw him as weak whenever he was dumb, and that really made the end of Book 4 really surprising. But Brandon went in a way different direction that I anticipated, and the gist I got from it is "word of the law is stupid, honor matters more". But the ending of book 5 seem to suggest "Hey.... honor can be just as stupid as word-of-the-law." I think I'm still conditioned by the other four books that honor matters more because it safeguards you to becoming something you don't want to become. I expected our heroes to lose by adhering to honor because they don't want to win dishonorably.....so to have our heroes lose....not dishonorably but not with honor. It's wrinkling my brain. Really interesting conclusion because I thought this ending was going to be about the breaking point of “Protecting ten innocents is not worth killing one.” Cool ideal but is that true when we're talking about millions? So yeah, I wanted to gauge the room and ask what everyone else got from it because I'm very conflicted as to what I think Brandon was going for.

I'm for it.

Fourth of July - Sufjan Stevens, really sad song, its making me dread the inevitable.

I think Dalinar is going to have a reckoning, probably something to do with Moash. One aspect of the story that's not REALLLLY addressed but I think Brandon is too conscious not to, is Dalinar needs to have a reckoning for his sins. I think we as readers can love him....but he did kill a lot of innocents. Usually this is resolved by the bad guy having a heroic sacrifice like Kylo Ren or something, its write them out of the story as heroes while not having to deal with their mess by putting them in jail for the rest of their lives. Another aspect that I think probably needs to be addressed is Dalinar's upholding of eye-racism. Even as soon as RoW, Dalinar is still in favor of holding up the racist institutions.

Taln's wasn't in Shinovar because it went with him to Braize. The location of the blade is unknown since he came back to Roshar. Moash has Jezrien's, which was previously held by Szeth. Nale's used to be in Shinovar but he took his honorblade back at some time in the past. And Ishar's was taken by Neturo, and now Ishar has it back. I'm not sure what the timeline is for the 9 shardblades, but we do know that Szeth practiced with all ten surges.

Do we know the timeline of when Ishar's honorblade was taken? I like the theory a lot. Are we thinking that the knife Shallan's mother used was the honor blade in question?

You did not get nearly enough love for that X of Swords panel. Absolutely wonderful. Anyway, I wonder if TOdium is bound to the "spirit" of the deal like Odium is, or if his personality or because he hasn't been a god for that long if he's able to do word of the law foolery like this.