Returned

An assortment of simple machines and rods/planes of different metals would be really handy. Being able to assemble a mechanical appendage on-demand from a variety of pieces, mediated by muscle, soft tissue, direct physical sensation, and personal attention could have all kinds of amazing applications. With the right materials a kandra could brace themselves nearly as well as Wax tapping iron, or leap as high as a coinshot, or lift something like a pewterarm would, among other applications. And it could all be stored pretty effectively when your body is totally malleable.

The Stormwardens are a great group in which to hide someone with esoteric knowledge, like any worldhopper would have. I'm skeptical that they are actually seeing the future, though. We don't know very much about Wind, so maybe it has some ability to see into the future, but that's pretty raw speculation. Even Shallan's line in your quote is 100% rumor with no evidence of any kind-- "it's the kind of thing they do, and a service that they offer, though never to you or anyone you know so you'll never actually see it". The mention that they "foretell the future" always seemed to me to be a combination of the esoteric, mystical air they affected along with the ability to tell when the next Highstorm would come. The setting makes it pretty clear that this is not seeing the future but rather studying the past to uncover a pattern that exists in the present and will probably persist into the future. Lirin does it as a hobby, purely a math exercise, with no Stormwarden airs or accoutrements involved. Something that has become increasingly clear as the Cosmere has developed is that seeing the future isn't very rare, and its lack of rarity also makes it a lot less useful than it sounds. Don't let me discourage you, though-- I'm on record here as believing that futuresight in the Cosmere is all but worthless for nearly everyone, and that it's just a plot device with all other properties being secondary at best (and probably irrelevant). Do you have any ideas on what the Stormwardens might have gained from this ability, if they indeed had and used it? I could imagine it being useful in maneuvering against the Vorin authorities, who clearly opposed the them in the past and specifically avoided anything that might hint at knowledge of the future (they don't even play poker!).

Great find on that WoB, @Jult! I'd never seen it before, or else I had and forgot. @Erremin, does that affect any of your thoughts about which Vessels wound up with each Shard? Since one of the few things we know about Rayse is his crafty, calculating nature, I would imagine he's the shatterer most likely to choose the Shard he ended up with. Given that we know he wasn't controlling Odium well by Stormlight, do you have any thoughts about how he might have wound up in that position?

I think you expressed yourself well and I was the one who was unclear! What I wanted to convey was that a set of options which included Odium would suggest that Odium is the worst/most in need of control, as hatred seems less fundamentally necessary and inert than does ruin/destruction. Of course it's a big assumption that the way we view the Shards at this point in the Cosmere is how the shatterers viewed it. The shatterers might have known about the Shards they were creating but not necessarily the true goals and intentions of their companions. Or they might have been strongly opposed to Rayse and his ambitions but didn't have the leverage to exclude him or make him take up a different Shard. Especially given that we know basically nothing about the events and motivations surrounding the Shattering I don't think we can parse the shatterers' suitability for the Shards they took with much precision. Most of the Shardholders we see seem to be pretty debased compared to their ambitions, even the relatively recently-ascended Sazed.

Totally reasonable. I'll only note that there are any number of reasons that Ati might have taken up Ruin which could be described as bold. I debated about including the entropy piece because I worried people would focus on that, and I think I made the wrong call in leaving it in. Ruin is destruction, not necessarily evil destruction-- a Cosmere with no Ruin in it might not be a better place, with every villain continuing to exist forever (as an example). Contrast with Preservation being impressed by the Lord Ruler because he changed so little for such a long time, despite being a... less-than-great person. Preservation, as the fundamental opposite to Ruin (which is explicitly presented and reinforced in-text) isn't fundamentally morally awesome any more than Ruin is fundamentally morally terrible. And Ruin itself is at its most lustfully destructive at the end of its independent existence, which is after everything Ati did to temper it to be more entropy-focused. That's what I'd hoped to draw attention to: ruin has an inherent place in the Cosmere, even if it has some awful inflections such as atium making Allomancers so good at killing or the lust for savagery and murder shown by the inquisitors. Hatred, by contrast, isn't as fundamentally tied to physical realities in the same way-- even if we lean towards Odium as passion instead of just hatred, there is a viciousness towards others that we've seen in both Vessels. That's the thing I'd rather temper with the kindest and most heroic of the shatterers, if that mitigation the only thing we're considering. If we're in harm-mitigation mode when assigning Vessels to Shards, allowing Rayse to take Odium seems insanely incompatible. Rayse was crafty, so maybe he deceived everyone or contrived to shunt Ati towards Ruin. But my main point is that the only actual example we have of a Vessel seeming specifically opposed to the Shard they took up is Ati. We can maybe toss Tanavast into that category as well, though I think it's premature to do so. I wouldn't describe any of the other original Vessels that way without already accepting the OP's (interesting!) theory, which in turn means that they aren't very good evidence of that theory being true. I could be convinced otherwise, but so far am not. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ As a discussion question on the topic, how do people feel about the newer Vessels we see dealing with their Shards in comparison to the original Vessels? Are there similarities and differences in how we see them handle the Shards that are different from what we'd expect if the original Vessels were assigned for incompatibility, given that the new Vessels ascended opportunistically or by the designs of Shards with specific schemes? Rashek is described as succumbing to Preservation's influence very quickly (as described by Sazed, who notes that Rashek did not undo his bad choices in remaking Scadrial but preserved them instead and stacked more changes on top of them) Kelsier is a bad fit for Preservation specifically because he's too ruinous and so can barely hold it even for a brief period. Interestingly, he seems incapable of overwhelming Preservation despite being so strong-willed in basically every other scenario he encounters Vin overwhelms Preservation to at least some degree when she attacks Ruin, ultimately killing Ati and destroying herself Sazed is still very mysterious for RAFO reasons, and obviously has to balance two Shards, but he doesn't seem to be doing an amazing job of controlling his Shards and their balance (though I have a pet theory that he actually is doing this, and cleverly, but in a way that's doomed to fail. Off-topic here!) Taravangian has the same issues as Sazed plus more, since Honor is now more self-directed than Shards normally are. But he seems to be trying to influence his Shards through appeasement rather than strict opposition, even as he works to bend those Shards towards his own purposes and away from their preferences

I don't know of any information about the motivations surrounding the Shattering aside from the brief comment in Secret History outlining that the participants had different motivations. I don't agree that Ruin is the most evil Intent, or inherently evil at all. Hatred, existing in itself with no context, seems more evil to me as it's not a necessity of reality. Destruction, in the sense of things ending or breaking down towards entropy, doesn't have a moral component to it, so I don't see it as inherently evil or good. If we want to hold back something vicious by giving it to the coolest person I would think that Odium-Ati would be the pick. I think that with the information we have we're way too far out in speculation to feel confident about the reasoning for any shatterer taking any Shard, save for Rayse whom we know wanted Odium from an in-text description (though I suppose it could be untrustworthy or incomplete, so we shouldn't be complacent). Any guesses we make are going to be circumstantial at best and pure fantasy projection at worst. That said, if you were assigning Shards to Vessels by committee, would you ever agree to let the Shard of hatred be taken by the person who badly wants that very Shard? Not that my impressions are more valuable than anyone else's, of course. But my whole point is that there isn't evidence of much of anything about the Shattering because we've heard and seen almost nothing about it. In the absence of any information we can think of an unlimited number of things that could fit, if only because there isn't anything to confirm or contradict in the first place. Theorycrafting is fun, so assume away, but the sum of what we know of the Shattering is about a paragraph long and so any impressions or guesses we have are very tenuous bases for further supposition still. That's where I'm coming from in theorycrafting, so if a discussion is premised on "assume this is true and then expand" I'm all in. But I'm stingy about buying into assumptions absent more solid evidence than "it's not obviously untrue and I feel like it is true", so bear that in mind when reading my responses (or just ignore me, which is also totally valid ).

Welcome to the Shard! I like the idea for some Shards but less so for others. I think that Autonomy is dead-on in alignment: the Shard seeks Autonomy for itself, on the basis of conflicts between two differing wills being zero-sum, and so Bavadin has to get her way. She is and must be the most autonomous by her very nature, which necessitates limits on others' ability to be so independent, if only because they cannot be entirely independent of her should any disagreements arise. The Endowment example feels weak since her whole thing is about willingly giving power away and not simply giving power away all the time in all cases, even if she has the capacity to do so (which I think is debatable, but off-topic here). Cultivation prefers change to stasis but definitely works to guide change where she cares to intervene at all. I'm not sure we've seen anything from Cultivation that is change for change's sake, rather than something she interacts with and also tries to guide. We don't know anything about the motivations of the people who participated in the Shattering, so it's unclear how much an individual shatterer's preferences mattered compared to the will of the group or any mechanical or philosophical requirements they had to meet. We do know that the Shattering was intentional, and that some of the participants were more actively motivated while others felt they had no other options to pursue. We don't know how well the shatterers understood what the effects of their actions would be or what holding a Shard would really be like, how well they'd be able to resist the Shards' influence, and similar issues. It seems unlikely (to me, at least) that the shatterers would have assumed they could oppose, forever, the Shards whose natures they defined. But I can't say I'd rule it out. My imagined details of the Shattering and what followed are essentially that: There were constraints on what Shards (or combinations of Shards) could be created by the sixteen-way Shattering, meaning that not everyone could just get their ideal match (or ideally poor match, per your theory) The perceived need for the Shattering forced a lot of compromises on who would take up each Shard-- perhaps no one wanted to hold Ruin, for example, and so the kindest and most self-sacrificing shatterer did so because someone had to The shatterers were people and so could be deeply wrong about their abilities to match and integrate with Shards. For this I'm imagining Tanavast: Honor sounds great on paper, but it seems like holding that Shard was not what he expected. His descriptions did not sound, to me, like he had assumed a duty to specifically oppose what Honor was/wanted/represented The shatterers had perspectives that were inadequate to divinity prior to the Shattering and spent millennia discovering their mistakes. Rayse, per Frost's letter to Hoid, specifically wanted Odium and got his wish. But the pressure of a Shard's Intent appears to be incessant and powerful, and once the Vessel starts to lose ground in a struggle against it there seems to be a consistent, spiraling erosion of the Vessel's mind and will. I'm not sure that anything less than a perfect alignment of Shard and Vessel would ever produce any other result than Rayse or Ati experienced, with the major variable being how long it takes that degradation to become complete

I don't know for certain, but my impression is that the memories do not extend back before the Shattering. What makes me think so is one of Sazed's epigraphs from Hero of Ages (the one from the 39th chapter, I think): If the Shards' memories extended back to before the Shattering Sazed would not be so ignorant of Adonalsium as the Shards would remember being a part of Adonalsium.

Honestly, I don't think that Veil is all that impressive in terms of how well she lived up to what she claimed to be or tried to be, or even at espionage in general. Most of the schemes we see her hatch are things that a person could learn from reading a handful of adventure stories which involve lightweight spying and con jobs. Case in point: everything we see Veil do is inherently something that we have read in a novel, and Veil's activities pale in comparison to what you'd find in a Ludlum or le Carré story. And Shallan is certainly a reader! We don't know all of the specifics she learned from Tyn but presumably it was a good amount, and Shallan seemed to value those lessons quite a bit. Shallan also learned a lot of social maneuvering and politicking (of a specific variety, maybe) from her landed-noble/horrifying upbringing. Those skills, plus her natural intelligence and charisma, took her a long way (dealing with Jasnah, Amaram's compound, and early interactions with Mraize). Shallan's major issue seems like it was inaction, at least prior to where her story begins in WoK, but we have almost no reliable information on her childhood so who knows what the truth is? That's the big, practical thing Veil did for her: Veil was definitely willing to act. Where Veil tended to do the most poorly was due to some combination of inattention and lack of imagination. Veil's plot to find the spy among the Unseen Court while in Shadesmar was pretty entry-level, and it didn't even work. Her Swiftspren gallivanting assumed she knew enough about street life, gangs, and situations like Kholinar's to manipulate events to her advantage, but she totally missed a lot of the most significant features of all of those. The actual experience she gained in those (mis)adventures would certainly help her do that kind of work better in the future, but assuming she had the experience when she did not both directly hampered her and probably prevented her from thinking things through as much as Shallan would have (and to better results). Veil is worse at what she does than Shallan would be because she trades most of Shallan's actual strengths for experience that Veil trusts implicitly yet doesn't actually have. That's my assessment, at least. OP (or anyone else who disagrees), could you elaborate on where you feel Veil's skills really shine, especially to the point of being inexplicably good?

We still have very little information on the specifics of what Shards can and cannot do in general, and we usually don't have a lot of details on extra constraints they have to deal with (like being bound by promises made on Roshar). You'll find lots of theories here about what the exact limits are. My personal feeling is that we know so little that we're stuck building our understanding from empirical examples only-- whatever we see Shards do, they can do, and we have to revise our guesses about their limitations to accommodate those observations.

The general complaints readers have had about the book (based on posts here, at least) suggest that "what went wrong" is pretty deep seated and pervasive in the book. Fixing that may be beyond the sort of thing that new editions typically do, significantly more so than just re-working a few scenes or conversations. Personally, a second edition which involved such a rewrite would make me pretty angry. I paid full price for a book at launch and would not be pleased to find out I was buying an early, unfinished draft in order to be part of crowd-sourcing major editing, all so that I could purchase (again, at full price) the true final draft. That would be very disrespectful towards the biggest fans of his writing, if not outright abusive. I expect a second edition to be pretty minor in its changes: addressing the most common reader complaints would take a lot of time and effort while also suggesting that he releases books before they're ready, and doing so would make it harder to stick to his self-imposed schedule (a schedule which may have led to those very complaints arising in the first place). We may get a more polished version of the book that already exists (minorly revised conversations in a few places, maybe). Perhaps decades down the line we'll see a fuller revision.

Quoting is always forbidden. I'd say you can quote me on that, but it would be forbidden. (Kidding! ) I've seen many people post quotes from external sources here and have done it myself many times. The biggest thing to watch out for is to keep spoiler-related information in the appropriate forums and use spoiler tags where appropriate. It's easy to lose track of when you're posting in a non-spoiler-segregated section of the forum sometimes. I've made the mistake a few times, at least. It's also nice to post a link to the original source sometimes, though often it's not necessary.

The truly symmetrical ones seem like they're designed to shock, if only slightly, but there clearly isn't a religious prohibition on them. Maybe it carries a whiff of pretention or mild impropriety at worst. Vorins also know it to be the case that the Heralds' symmetrical names were not their real names but were arbitrarily created at some point long after their births, and so their symmetry is a cultural artifact rather than one that actually derives from the religion itself. I've tended to think of it like the name Jesus in the real world. In many cultures with a strong history of Christianity the name simply isn't used, but no one seems at all upset to meet someone with the Spanish name Jesus. The Alethi polities seem to have a relatively loose daily connection to the Vorin faith anyways. Cultural strictures are more important, like those outlined in Arts and Majesty (and even those seem casually discarded in private), but the Vorin faith doesn't seem to have much hold on most of the characters we see.

The big problem this theory has to contend with is that we have living witnesses of the Shattering, and their descriptions of it seem to lean far more towards the "intentional shattering via Dawnshards" idea that is the common belief (if we can describe a belief as common when there are so few people who are aware of it but did not participate). It's an intriguing idea, and it might blend with the events currently believed to have taken place (i.e., maybe this mechanism is somehow how the Dawnshards worked in what came to be known as the Shattering). I think it's obvious that Hoid and the original sixteen Shardholders could be lying or mistaken about what happened, but to what purpose? Are there possibilities that involve them being deceived or mistaken as well? Do you have ideas about the discrepancies between this idea and the statements from Hoid and company/WoBs?

Not really. Are you a religious figure to an ant or a dog? It seems like you're reverse engineering the term into a religious context. Have at it. You can hold it in your hand in a gem stone, you can store it in a cloth, it has mass (faint, but it exists), and spren have physical bodies in the cognitive realm and (sometimes, at least) in the physical. It follows conservation of mass and energy and can be quantified and measured reliably, though it certainly does have its own magical element to it. Elend has some interesting thoughts on the subject, though brief, in Well of Ascension (I think, I could be mistaken on the book). There is some interesting discussion to be had about where the physicality of Investiture breaks down, especially when the realms are not equally physical but are all places where you could physically go. I can help you out here with some people: everyone in this thread except for you, Sanderson, the lexicographers who compile the Merriam Webster dictionary, and all of the people whose uses informed that compilation. It seems, however, that we will have to disagree. I'm not going to post any more in this thread. If you refuse to engage with examples and arguments and refuse to accept the dictionary's definitions then there isn't any discussion to be had, and your manner here has regularly come off as aggressive if not hostile (to my reading, perhaps others would disagree. Hopefully that wasn't your intent-- I can sympathize with that too, as I know I come off more aggressively than I intend in online forum posts at least some of the time). The question in the OP has been answered about as well as it ever could be anyways, if not satisfyingly.

I agree, with a slight caveat. The books could have been longer and been fine (or better, or worse). While there is a telling-not-showing problem there is also a problem with available capacity and how it's used. There is a lot that is set up and does not pay off within a specific book, which consumes capacity (pages, plot density, there are a lot of ways to think about it) but feels outside of the actual story. If the setups never pay off then it was a total waste-- fluff. If they do pay off it may or may not have been worth the inclusion (depending on the payoff itself). Taking more time and care to establish and develop the setups (like Vasher is suggested upthread to have been) wouldn't feel crammed, it would feel artful and interesting, though perhaps long. It's forcing the setups into the books but not weaving them in with the narrative, plot, or events very well that makes them stand out. I like to think about Hoid in WoK and WoR for this: he's there, it's nearly all setup when he is, and the payoffs don't come until later books. But he isn't there too often, and when he is it is (usually) in the context of a scene that has other relevance to the main story. That is to say, the scene in which these interactions take place aren't only about the setup being established-- it's the King's Feast (so Dalinar and Hoid both have a reason to be there), and there are plot-relevant political maneuvers which play out during the scene (so it's not just about Dalinar's conversation with Hoid), and the scene matters to the story and the book it's in rather than only serving some book that hasn't even been written yet. Vasher is like that too in WoK and RoW, but later... his scenes are more 1:1 conversations with nothing else happening and so they could be lifted from the books in which they take place without much consequence. That also makes the setups feel more like exposition info-dumps than parts of the story. I don't think that there is enough plot for RoW and WaT to become three books. WaT especially struggled to fill its pages, though its structure may have been responsible for a lot of that. Without enough plot for scenes, events, and character interactions to connect to we can't fix this problem no matter how long or short the book is. Plotlines only have so many spots for characters to reasonably connect to, it takes time and craft to make those connections, and too many plots that don't interact with each other (or at least, not sensibly or plausibly) causes many of the same issues. If the only reason Kaladin and Vasher are having a conversation in book A is to set up some event in book G, that's problematic. Even if the payoffs are ultimately worth it, that doesn't help the awkwardness of the blunt setup in the earlier books. The events in a book need to serve that book in some way. A lot of stuff in recent Cosmere works seems to be there only to make it obvious that there is an explicit connection to some other work. We go through one book at a time, not the Cosmere extended universe in its entirety, and I think that some of that has been lost lately. It's great and important to be aware of the forest, but we experience it tree by tree.

I flip back and forth between preferring Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. Overall I think that WoK is a better book but sometimes I'm in the mood for the payoffs and context that you don't get before WoR.

I liked Lift a lot at first but over time she's been too one-note for me. She hasn't gotten a whole lot of character development yet (though she's supposed to get more attention in the next set of books), but she shows up too often for her catch phrase and singular behaviors to support. By the end of Oathbringer I winced every time she entered a scene. Sometimes those scenes ended up being good, but mostly I wish she wasn't there (or was developed better along the way).

I'd lean towards describing this potential use of "gods" as poetic (here read as "not literal") for the reasons I already described, more than once now: an extreme disparity in relative power/capacity/influence of some beings over others. The "gods of rock 'n' roll" example I gave expresses this very precisely with literally no metaphysical aspects. In such a usage, "hyperbolic" might be a fair descriptor. I'd lean against suggesting that Cosmere magics are metaphysical because the books go to great lengths to establish that magic is a part of the physical universe in which the stories take place, and that that magic is bound by very specific rules exactly as mundane phenomena are. I could probably be convinced otherwise. But that's off-topic for this thread as the point I'm making is that the word "god" can be used without religious or metaphysical implications, as above. That one definition might fit a usage, among other definitions that also might fit, does not mean that that one definition is definitely the one that was intended. The old Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man is a great example of exactly this phenomenon. Another perspective on this might be Vorinism, which specifically held that there was only one God, the Almighty, and no others (as far as I recall, maybe other posters can correct me if I'm mistaken on that). From the Vorin perspective, then, Retribution could not be a god in the same sense that they considered the Almighty to be. A very powerful being, certainly, but categorically different from the Almighty whom they believed to be the only god that could have that description. When multiple definitions of a word are listed, that word can mean any of those definitions. It does not need to mean all of them at once-- that's why there are multiple definitions instead of just one. The baptized member part is not the only definition listed, and the other definitions do not include that limitation, and so there are uses of "heresy" which do not require the baptized member component. Either a person meant to use that one specific definition for Jasnah, and was wrong in trying to use it, or they were using one of the other definitions and so that component does not apply. There isn't any reason to think that the former is the case. Etymology is interesting but that a word once meant one thing doesn't indicate that it can never ever mean anything else, no matter how people use it in practice. Merriam Webster's dictionary, as posted here so many times now, lists several definitions for "heresy" which are currently in use. Several of them are perfectly applicable to Jasnah in relation to the Vorin church. Feel free to write to them to complain, if you feel so strongly about it. You are free to not like that usage of a word has expanded, and that as a result you have to accept people expressing some of those other usages in order to communicate with them. Again, I sympathize: I like language to be precise. But your preferences aren't going to control how other people use English, and violating your linguistic preferences doesn't make a person wrong. The dictionary entry is decisive here: you are 100% incorrect in deciding that other people must mean what you want "heresy" to mean when they use that word, rather than any of the other definitions (which have almost certainly been in use for longer than any of us have been alive). The word has more possible definitions than you assert, and that's true whether you accept it or not, whether you like it or not. You are not the czar of American English (that's czar, meaning "one having great power or authority" or "emperor", derived from tzar, derived from tsĭsarĭ, derived from kaisar, derived from Caesar. I am using the current definition, not suggesting that there might be confision over whether or not you are the long-dead Roman emperor ). In any event I don't see anything more to discuss here as you've chosen to ignore the plain definitions listed in the dictionary because you don't like them, and in ignoring them there simply isn't any way to engage on the topic. Maybe usage of English will shift more towards your preferences in the future. Good luck to you.

There's also an element of Mary Sue-ness to Herdazians that makes it hard for me to believe any of the named ones have been felled unless I see it happen. Bad things happen to Herdaz, but not named Herdazians. Even apart from that, the Mink has been Roshar's single greatest expert in what seems like it will be the core of the next segment of SA: insurgent military action against a foe that has more of every conceivable resource. That makes me think that he's likely to be involved in future books, and I expect that at minimum he will live long enough (even off-camera) to design the military doctrine that Urithiru will use.

Not so, per the dictionary definitions included multiple times above. Your claims that the word does not and cannot mean anything but what you feel it should (with the implication that it has never been used in that way) would be greatly supported by you showing a definition which conforms with your position and specifically excludes all others, or better still offer an explanation for why the accepted, alternate uses listed in Merriam Webster's dictionary should not be accepted. Continued refusal to do so is telling. This is particularly the case given that the OP suggests (jokingly, I assume) a dictionary be sent with the definition for "heretic" highlighted. You yourself seem unimpressed by the dictionary definition Merriam Webster's definition specifically does not contain the limitations you assert. It seems that you would prefer the word be used in a more limited, precise way. I can sympathize. But "the definition of the word is [X], and everyone who uses it differently is wrong" is a difficult position to maintain when the dictionary definition is not, in fact, [X] (or, more precisely, is not only [X]). For reference: If a religion's dogma states that the world was created on a Tuesday, and Jasnah knows that, and she specifically says that this is not true and that the world was created on a Thursday, that fits definitions 1c, 2a, and 2b. You appear to be focused on definition 1a as the only valid definition. You've offered no support for why this should be the case and only restated your assertion over and over again. I'm not interested in interacting with that assertion again. You seemed incredulous as to how Sanderson's use of the word to describe Jasnah could have happened. The above-quoted definition is how. Yes. I sketched out an explanation in my earlier post and explicitly mentioned that it could be sloppiness in word choice on Jasnah's part (which would mean she's using a word without accounting for its connotations, including religious overtones), but more precisely the word "god" is frequently used in colloquial and poetic ways unrelated to religious statements. A concert billed as featuring "the gods of rock 'n' roll" is a concert claiming to have the most important rock 'n' roll groups performing, not promising a rock music-based religious event. My suggestion was that she might have used the word to indicate the pinnacle of capacity, the most powerful thing which exists, without necessarily attaching any spiritual or metaphysical elements. I'd direct you to the dictionary for this, also, but that has not been an effective tack in this thread previously. I'll include the definition here for completeness:

I didn't mean to imply that he hadn't hidden anywhere else. I meant that Hoid had expressed a specific fear of being caught by Rayse on Roshar, rather than a general sense of caution. We haven't seen a similar concern about other Shards, at least not that Hoid has given voice to.

If it's dismay over common use of a word being upsetting (especially through being used in imprecise ways) I can totally understand! I got to go through my rant about the word "nonplussed" twice recently, and even though it's never anything more than me venting it's still very cathartic.

I'm not ignorant of the terms. Hindus are considered heretics by some other religions, some religions are less certain and strict in their beliefs and approaches to knowledge and so do not label others as heretics. I'm not sure why you keep returning to this example, history is replete with religious groups engaging in conflict with other religious groups with charges of heresy for not believing the same things. It's not the only way things happen but it certainly has happened. People have responded in this thread with the dictionary definition of heretic and it covers Jasnah's position. Even if that's not your preferred use of the word it certainly fits and that definition exists and is in common use-- the most common use, perhaps. I was giving examples of different words that might describe Jasnah's beliefs and orientation towards Vorinism and Rosharan religions more broadly, not listing out everything Jasnah definitely is. I prefaced this by saying that we only get a little bit of insight into Jasnah's beliefs and then listed some potential descriptions along with explanations of why the text might support them. Again, I was describing a possibility about Jasnah's beliefs. Ancient Greeks and Romans certainly did believe that their gods were fundamentally different from mortal humans in some important ways, different from something like a Surgebinder (definitely an ordinary mortal who has access to magic powers beyond ordinary mortals) which is the difference I was trying to highlight. The objects of worship don't need to be participants in a creation myth. The point of that item in my list was to suggest that Jasnah may not have been using "gods" in any religious sense (contrasting with the Vorins) while the Vorins seem to use "god" exclusively in a religious sense. Someone is showing something in this thread, but it's not me showing ignorance of English. Dictionaries directly oppose your position here, and in relying on them Sanderson is on pretty solid ground. You're coming off a bit abrasive (maybe it's just my reading and not you at all) and I'm not sure why-- dictionaries flatly refute what you're saying. Suggesting that use of the word should be different than it is is one thing (and I'm sympathetic to that position!) but using a word in the way a dictionary defines it is about as close to definitely using a word correctly as it's possible to be. Maybe you can expand on why you feel the dictionary definition isn't suitable in this case?

I suggest that cuts can work, as a method of simply getting rid of bits that aren't good (per a given reader or editor). But the problems with recent SA books, wherever you may feel those problems began, are not that the books are too long. The problems are about specific sections not working well. They do more than nothing (they're not just fluff and waste) and so if you cut those parts you lose their awkwardness as well as what they actually contribute to the story, and individual tastes will have a lot of influence over how bad the awkwardness is and how valuable the contributions are. But I submit that rather than cutting those sections being the best cure, improving them would be better still. The care and subtlety of how Kaladin was presented in WoK was really impressive to me: his depression, his despair, his hope, his sense of duty and obligation, his conflicting commitments to medicine and soldiering, his efforts to improve his situation and the challenges he faced along the way, genuine uncertainty over how the plot arc would end in the book-- I thought it was done well and contributed meaningfully to the story. Relevant and artful. Contrast that with Szeth in WaT: it's a lot more blunt and told-rather-than-shown: the sequential quest through Shinovar doesn't provide many situations to interact with (so Szeth doesn't get much chance to show his characterization) and is largely predictable (I predicted Ishar almost immediately, via process of elimination). Szeth doesn't do much besides fight and arbitrarily eat stew. His character does change and grow but we're mostly just told about those changes rather than seeing them, and the changes don't seem like they have much influence over what Szeth actually does or how events conclude. The plot through that sequence is necessary (we'd lose a lot by cutting it entirely), but I find it to be far less artful than the Kaladin plot from WoK. There is a lot that could be removed because it contributes little and does so awkwardly, and even if those segments felt a bit light as a result there would be less "badness" to drag the book down while still getting the bare minimum needed to advance the story. But I'd rather keep what the section offers and have it be more carefully done so that it's more like the WoK Kaladin section. I feel that way about a lot of sections in SA, particularly after RoW. There is plenty of stuff that's worth more than nothing (I like different perspectives on the world for fleshing out the setting and events) but fits so poorly with other sections around them and is clumsy in developing and expressing what it's meant to show that it feels like an annoying delay from the story rather than a supplement to it. Sanderson is a better writer than these sections suggest and I would rather see that than get more plot points cranked out on an arbitrary schedule. Better writing, even if more slowly produced, is what I want. Not less and more quickly.