Returned

He's doing alright for now, but I predict that the big issue he's going to have is that his view of utility is pretty arbitrary: whatever he says is best is best, so his obligations are really just to do whatever he prefers (and then pay any costs, as necessary). I feel like this has been amplified since his ascension. His reasons for why he must destroy the other Shards are essentially "I vaguely don't like the systems those Shards have imposed on the people that live on their worlds". His rationale for why his regime will be better have been pretty thin, so far, little more than just asserting that it will be better. I don't think that the nascent identity of Honor's power is ultimately going to be thrilled that Taravangian does a lot of what he does simply because he promised to do it. "I promise I'll rob your house" doesn't have the most palateable follow-through.

Maybe he bonded a spren of Odium rather than a Radiant spren, but in the same way that Radiants do (as opposed to the normal singer bonding method). Maybe even a big one-- Chemoarish? I'm equally curious about why he can't hear the rhythms of Roshar. What if they're related in some way? Even though El no longer holds the title of Vyre, the lack of rhythms seems to persist.

I was wondering more about the mechanics of the fights. My original ideas about how Shard-Shard interactions worked didn't survive the new information we got in WaT, and it now seems like it's essentially a Shard-level version of punching each other with Shard-level collateral impacts on the world across the realms. As for the scale of the destruction you're certainly right, but my question there is: would Taravangian/Retribution care about that? He was pretty ready to annihilate Karbranth, and even if he scooped up the souls of all the people there he still killed them and broadly removed them from existence. Do you think that Taravangian has some restraining factor or idea that would keep him from considering a destroyed world as an acceptable loss for taking down another Shard? (That's the collective you, all Sharders' ideas are welcome). This I'm not totally convinced of. I agree with the basic outline, that 9 vs. 1 would not be a good situation for Taravangian to be in, but we have a good amount of evidence that the Shards usually do not work well together, and certainly not over longer spans of time. It's not clear to me that Retribution's threat to them would galvanize any given number of Shards to cooperate, nor that they would be able to do so effectively. It's a danger, but seems more like an edge case than the most likely one to me. And even if it were to happen, I haven't seen any reason to think that Retribution would be better situated to deal with it anywhere other than the Rosharan system. I also don't think that the math is quite as tidy as you suggest, though this is a pretty minor point. Odium won against Ambition and Mercy, which as far as we know was a 2-on-1 battle, which suggests that a 3-on-2 battle (counting by individual Shards, rather than vessels) is hardly a foregone conclusion. If Retribution simply attacked Autonomy or Endowment in this manner, how quickly could other Shards arrive to help, and would they choose to do so in that way? Would enough Shards count on enough other Shards arriving to help to improve their chances as you describe? What we've seen strongly suggests that since the fight on Threnody Shards have been very reluctant to do direct battle with each other, with a minor and partial exception for Tanavast and Odium on Ashyn. We still don't know enough details about why that is. But if Retribution is likely to win any given direct encounter with fewer than four Shards arrayed against him, and he doesn't care about collateral damage, it's not obvious to me that he has to fear a combined assault. The Sunmaker's Gambit referenced upthread converts a battle into a political problem subject to negotiation, not just a reversal of fortunes in that battle. Whatever it is that Retribution is specifically concerned about it does not seem like it is getting beaten to death by a united coalition of all the other Shards. That's my read on the current situation, at least. What do other people think about Retribution's position and plans?

I think it's a combination of stuff being deliberately held back for future books (El, Dai-Gonarthis), the scale arbitrary pressure of the central conflict, and the profusion of other characters. We were never going to learn a thing about El or Dai-Gonarthis if they're meant to be surprises for later, so the biggest villains are out. Mraize and Iyatil are at similar, at least in part, in that it would be hard to learn more about them without learning more about the Ghostbloods and the Ghostbloods are enmeshed in secret plots relevant to other stories. Mid-grade villains like Abidi the Monarch and Lethian the Pursuer are shallow because what differentiates them from the generic singer cause are thematic gimmicks. If they're to be meaningful villains they'd need more than just revenge for invasion and being used to total war, but their lives are just hanging out on Braize until it's time to kill again. More meaningful villains like Leshwi have perspectives and depth, but these are overwhelmed by the constant pressure of Odium demanding that she oppose the humans 100%. And with the war-to-extinction being the main event that brings the characters together there is less to talk about than in other scenarios, such as the politicking within and between nations during Way of Kings. Finally, there are already a lot of characters that are expected to get screen time and this eats through a lot of pages and plot points. It's hard to add in more, especially when you'd need even more characters and plot elements to develop characters apart from the events already consuming the protagonists. This isn't limited to villains. I felt that Renarin got short shrift, and most of his character development was flatly narrated and most of his story was his romantic relationship. Rlain's story was only a little bit better. Lift didn't really develop or do much, nor did Notum. I would have liked a more well-rounded Mraize, but how many pages would it have taken to do that, and would it have encroached on the plot for other characters? I think many, and yes.

Did Autonomy create the Set, or simply use or co-opt it? I'm certain I don't know, though a definitive answer may exist somewhere. I'm in the right place to find out! As for the rest I can only guess. I suspect that the time dilation is less applicable to shards than to mortals, since the shards exist primarily in the spiritual realm where time is less relevant and doesn't track with the physical and cognitive. Taravangian seems pretty good at "persuading" others to act as he wants, or failing that to make use of circumstances as they are. Though you are right to suggest that Taravangian did not prompt Autonomy's assault on Scadrial. As you say, Autonomy was almost certainly moving there no later than the events of Rhythm of War, per the epigraphs, suggesting that those events pre-dated Retribution's birth. Maybe Taravangian's play was related to drawing attention to those events on Scadrial, or to highlight Harmony's difficulties in acting as an indication to other shards that a dual-shard wielder isn't such a big threat? Or to urge Autonomy's plans to move more quickly than originally intended? In any case my suggestion was that Taravangian is influencing events elsewhere in the cosmere but not necessarily going there himself, which would cut against his need to travel in order to pursue his goals. The dual-extremity nature of futuresight really makes it difficult to guess at shardic plans, but it seems like Taravangian isn't interested in another brawl like happened with Ambition and Mercy. I wonder why that is, since it seems like he should be more favored to win than Odium was in that struggle, which Rayse won but also didn't want to repeat. "Hurt in some way during the struggle" might be the answer, if an unsatisfying one, but that seems like it should cut the other way too and mean Retribution shouldn't fear such an assault from others. What does Retribution have to worry about, with respect to its own being? Do we have any indications of what a shard-on-shard, all-out fight actually entails?

Good catch, I'd glossed over that line. Even so the mechanics of a Shard leaving a planet have been described in the past as difficult, but without specificity we probably can't draw very strong conclusions about any of it. Could he Invest an avatar, as Autonomy did, and leave some portion of his influence and access to Warlight on Roshar while he leaves? Or is he sending a portion of his attention abroad, also as Autonomy did? Either way, I have to think that leaving Roshar would draw more attention and response from the other Shards, not less, than just staying there. Unless he's going into hiding it's hard for me to think of a way he would be safer without any of his Rosharan resources to draw upon. And if Roshar is where his amassed power base is, wouldn't it be easier for other Shards to destroy without Retribution there to oppose them? If he does go into hiding, what does he gain unless he can safeguard his Rosharan interests from other Shards? I'll suggest that "escape Roshar before the other Shards move against me" is not a very specific timeline, particularly with the time dilation in effect, and the other Shards we know about would suffer from the same difficulty (if any) in leaving their worlds. I imagine that Retribution's plan for dealing with other Shards is probably not fundamentally different from Odium's: attack first and win, which should be easier than ever with two Shards powering him. We still don't really know what an inter-Shardic fight really looks like though, so this view might be too simplistic. The plans presented in the conclusion of WaT suggests that Retribution somehow instigated Autonomy's incursion onto Scadrial, but there isn't any indication to date that Retribution was actually there for those events. Maybe that's his offense for now, creating distractions that are more urgent than himself? The key information that might inform us about Retribution's plans is specifically not available to us, which is frustrating.

From what we've seen, Honor doesn't bind by contract, it binds by oath. Odium promised to do certain things, and someone else violating their own, different promises shouldn't release Odium from the promises he/it already made, even as a component of Retribution. He was never "bound" by the contract in any meaningful sense, just incentivized to adhere to it. The binding isn't some absolute. Even Tanavast could violate promises he'd made while holding Honor, and there were consequences for doing that. For Taravangian those consequences no longer include a direct, immediate strike from another Shard, since Cultivation has left. So now the relevant consequences for Tanavast and, presumably, Taravangian are increasing friction with the power of Honor's shard. That's bad for a host of reasons, and Taravangian had a front-row seat for just how bad it could become for him. So it's in Taravangian's best interest to keep the power mollified by adhering to the promises he/Odium made at least most of the time to avoid those consequences building up and repeating the same issues suffered by Tanavast and Rayse. At some point he could break the relevant promises, and option he always had, but Taravangian will almost certainly reserve such actions for especially important moments (if he does so at all). Leaving a planet seems tightly related to the degree of Investiture a shard has made there, so leaving Roshar would also mean leaving behind the infrastructure Odium has built there and starting from scratch somewhere else. Simultaneously, the other shards are now frightened of Retribution and unlikely to just leave him alone to do that. Especially with the time dilation, Retribution's best bet is to stay on Roshar and not antagonize his only remaining advantage-- the power of two Shards wielded together. It seems to me that the best way to do that is to keep as many of his promises as he can, at least for now.

This is the least of the revelations given or dangled from WaT but I was hoping for some kind of explanation about this. Why did Honor's perpendicularity move around over Roshar? No others seem to work that way, and I'd imagine fussy Honor's physical manifestation of divinity to be one of the most reliable. I'd been thinking that maybe it had something to do with being a part of the storm, but that seems like a tenuous connection to me, especially because the Highstorms were (usually) so regular. It doesn't seem like it can be related to Tanavast being in turmoil with Honor's power, otherwise we'd expect similar mobility from Odium's well and that one explicitly stayed put for ages. Honor's splintering seems unlikely, as the pool in Elantris seemed to have a single location (though Elantris is early enough that it might not be 100% canon-able for really specific details). Cultivation's was stably located, so Investment into spren doesn't seem like a strong guess. Ambition's seems like the most comparable case, but in addition to not having the same properties I can't think of why they would be similar in this (or any) way. Arbitrary plot reasons don't even seem good because the movement is so specifically undefined, only that it was unstable and dangerous; it could just as easily have been at the bottom of the ocean or otherwise inaccessible. So what gives? Have I missed a detail somewhere that gives some insight into the matter? If not, what other guesses do people have?

Heralds for sure. One billion and ten lions, on the other hand, would probably be enough to tip the scales.

Moash is barely even a character any more. He doesn't seem to do much of anything or even want anything at this point, so what's the substrate for any possible redemption? Introducing any new details or plotlines for him at this point would be so jarring as to feel totally arbitrary to me. Even in his own POV segments pretty much everything about him as an individual has been boiled away.

"Strong conclusions about morality and ethics are unwise because they are nearly guaranteed to be incomplete and imperfect". That was Jasnah's realization, and Dalinar's, and Nale's, and Ishar's, and the Stormfather's, and Tanavast's, and Kaladin's, and Szeth's, and more. Possibly it's true of Taravangian as well, who was unable to force Dalinar to agree that brutal utilitarianism is correct. But I think that his viewpoint is undermined by his arguments against Jasnah (essentially that her understanding of utility was too limited to actually achieve good outcomes because she wasn't sufficiently informed and/or she wasn't smart enough). I find that interesting, juxtaposed against Taravangian of the Diagram and, now, Taravangian of Retribution. Are his definitions and knowledge of context good enough to achieve the ethical result, or is he still too limited despite divinity? It's awfully convenient for him to discover that the most right thing to do is also exactly what he already wanted to do, and had already committed to doing. Hoid maybe has the knowledge but is circumspect about saying what the right thing is, save for hating the Passions. Nohadon seems like he is the guy with the answers, but he speaks in parables and questions rather than actually giving those answers.

I also liked it. It gives some valuable human depth to Taravangian, shows an interesting congruence between him and the power of Odium, and introduces a break between his intellectual designs and his follow through. It seems like it will be a good symbolic and practical pressure point for him going forward and I expect some interesting plot developments to come from it. I'm also intrigued about how long it can persist. Since they're the real souls of the real people, rather than simulacra, will they notice oddities from existing only in this spiritual construct? What will the consequences of that be, and how will Taravangian respond? His behavior suggests removing memories, but how long can that go on and still satisfy him?

It's unavoidable to some degree, since it's a novel written for speakers of modern American English it has to be written in "our" language, however you want to define that. That changes over time in word choice, connotation, and some grammatical constructions, even over a period as brief as the one between the publication of Way of Kings and Wind and Truth. For a more extreme example compare a science fiction book from the 1950s to one written more recently. The difference in prose style can be pretty intense. It's possible to be more consistent with that than Sanderson has been, and I personally would prefer it if he were less responsive to... I guess I'll say novel, youthful, constructions (I'm really not sure what the right word is, though I'm sure there is one). It feels, to me, like use of more modern, faddish forms is more fleeting and less effortful, which I dislike in general. It's not just the modern-ness that irritates me: I would be similarly bothered if Rosharans described things as "tight" or "dope", which were (unfortunately) in vogue when I was younger. Language will leave these behind, too, so a lot of them will age poorly and I'll find them jarring before and after that. In fairness I feel similarly about some of the in-world, made-up slang. I always hated the word "deevy". It makes the novels feel more casually written than I want in such an epic series which asks as much of its readers as Stormlight has, and I think it's fair to say that Way of Kings and Words of Radiance were less colloquial to the United States in the mid-to-late 2010s or so. But I don't think that Sanderson is aiming for a fake-archaeology-found-literature style (like Book of the New Sun) nor a deliberate archaic style (like Lord of the Rings). Rather he's just writing the way that he writes and that happens to be pointed at modern audiences with a more conversational style. What bothers me much more, and makes me more prickly about the relatively isolated anatopisms, is that some of the prose seems more cookie-cutter interchangeable and therefore less carefully crafted and thoughtful. For example, Gaz's dialogue sounds very different in Wind and Truth than in Way of Kings, and he sounds a lot more like Red and Vatha than the old Gaz, and they all sound a lot more like Shallan than I would expect a given person to. Like the use of more casual language forms, this feels more accessible and convenient rather than deliberate and attentive. Ultimately these are just irritations to me, though. The books are still great and worthwhile, just a bit rougher and less engrossing for me in places.

I think this is the key that will come up in the back five Stormlight novels. Thaidakar won't give up on the portable Investiture idea, even if Stormlight isn't the way to do it now. I'm also curious about how the Unoathed armors work, which seems relevant. And access to the spiritual realm is always how people in the Cosmere access magic anyways, so realmatic shenanigans to access it will still be appealing (though probably no more Dalinar-style perpendicularities). It's an interesting solution to power inflation on Roshar.

I've been vaguely wondering if Evi could have claimed Dalinar in some way, though at this point I doubt the mechanics of Dalinar's soul leaving are all that important. I agree that he's gone for good, though with Odium's simulacrum of him I don't think that that is all that meaningful.

I understand where you're coming from and agree that Gavinor wasn't a very interesting champion, narratively. I've said as much from the earliest days of the "Gavinor will be Odium's champion" fan theories. On the other hand I think that the narrative point of the confrontation was that the contest of champions really didn't matter, at least not as Tanavast had considered it. So it's fitting that we get an opponent that leans into that: thematically appropriate for Dalinar, and indeed predictable, but the contest was never going to be the actual conclusion to the conflict. I think that it would have been nice to get an opponent that made the contest interesting in some way, though I personally don't feel a random singer would have done that. But the contest ended up being kind of an afterthought that Dalinar had already mostly outgrown by the time he got there, and fully outgrew by its end; the event itself was always kind of pathetic. All the rest happened anyways. Dalinar considered what killing Gavinor would mean, whether it was or could be worth it (dredging up a topic that the books have already returned to many times), ascending to Honor, realizing that that ascension only gave him the ability to magnify the death and destruction of the war with Odium, and then giving up godhood to stop the war (on Roshar) and force the cosmere-wide violence Odium promised into a

I don't recall the details of the fight with Shan and don't have time to check right now, but could the cut to her face have been really thin? Still enough to scar, but not enough to be a noteworthy feature of her face? That's the only in-setting explanation that comes to mind for why we don't see it described or depicted.

I'm in the same boat, and the choices are to wait on starting WaT or abandon the end portion of the the re-read of RoW. I'm going for option 2, for two reasons. One, I doubt I'll be able to restrain myself. And two, the end of RoW was mostly big reveals and fewer subtle, setup details (a common conclusion to a Sanderson book). I figure that of all the RoW details I remember the big reveals best of all and so I won't get quite as much of those out of the re-read as I will get from the rest. So it won't have too bad an effect on my WaT read through, especially because the recaps in previous SA books have been more than solid.

I think that "be a sword" is a solid Command for this purpose, and I think that it's a good guess for what Vivenna's Command was when she created her own. I do wonder if it would have worked as intended here for Shashara though: she seems to have wanted a powerful, destructive sword and the thread's goal of limiting Nightblood's destructiveness may simply not have been what her visualization and Intent would produce. Though it would probably still have been an improvement on the actual Nightblood's behavior! If a sword's purpose is to kill and destroy, even a well-intentioned Awakener might still run into trouble with minimizing its destructiveness with any Command. There's just too much unspecified abstraction in the intent and visualization components of Awakening for anyone to feel confident in a given Command performing exactly as planned, particularly when creating a permanent, self-aware entity.

Discussion happened, it just wasn't the discussion you'd wanted. People focused on the "Vasher" part and not the "what Command would have been better" part. I can sympathize, having been on the other side of it! In a funny way it's kind of on-topic for the thread: the specific phrasing, and how it was interpreted, went in a totally different direction than what you'd intended. Though Shashara may have gotten what she wanted from Nightblood-- she seemed to use him enough, from what (very) little we know. I thought of another, even more inert Command: "do nothing". I'm sure that could be monkey's paw-ed too, but I'm at a loss to think of how. Which I guess is the point of that whole story...

Lol, the Shard is a place that attracts people who take the books seriously, and where they take them seriously! Especially a lot of the more frequent posters. I would avoid Commanding a sword to do anything which involves value judgements, or ideally any judgement at all. "Destory kinetic Investiture", or something similar, might be workable. It's not clear to me that an Awakened object could do anything like that though. "Oppose evil" might take some of the raw destructiveness out of the Command, but then we have two poorly-defined words which are the basis of the sword's existence. If we just want the sword to not cause damage, maybe "never cut" would work, but that seems like a cruel thing to do to a sword that you are making self-aware. Maybe "defend wielder from immediate harm"? Wordy, though, and probably not enough to prevent the sword from hurting a lot of people. I think that creating a sword and also trying to prevent the sword from causing death is a fundamental contradiction which is going to be hard to get around. The other issue is that the unintended consequences of an imperfect Command/Intent/visualization are really hard to predict, and I don't think that I could do it any better than Vasher could, so I have zero faith that I could figure out what the Command should have been. Vivenna's sword is a tantalizing potential counter-example, but outside of that I'm not sure there is a safe or effective Command, which would track with how Endowment works. Awakening has a very monkey's paw-like element to it, and trying to issue a Command that resolves to "function as I intend" seems inherently unworkable. So anything I can think of I would also assume will fail, undermining the exercise.

With the opportunity for a do-over, I don't think that Vasher would have Awakened a sword at all, at least not even close to how he approached Nightblood. We see Vasher constantly revising his understanding of the cosmere and Investiture, meaning that he can't ever be totally sure that his understanding is good enough to do something so dangerous. Nightblood is unusual in a lot of ways but one of the most important is that he is a distinct entity with his own mind and agency (to some degree) and so it is hard to imagine a Command being predictable enough to be safe in the ways that Nightblood is not. The potential big exception to this is Vivenna's sword. It seems different from Nightblood in many ways, especially in being less obviously dangerous. Still dangerous, though-- Vivenna warns a spren about her, stating that the sword didn't yet know the spren and implying some danger associated with that. So maybe the issue is solved and we just don't know how, or maybe Awakening swords is so far just incredibly dangerous. It's also possible that Vasher opposed the creation of Vivenna's sword. My impression of Vasher is that he deeply regrets most things he's done which relate to Nightblood and is not interested in repeating any of it, though it's far from clear that this is the case.

Narratively, probably not, though I can see a case for it. It's too pat a solution to kill him when so many elements of the current conflict have revolved around him, and redemption and self-improvement are driving themes of SA. It's also problematic that he has surrendered a significant portion of himself to Odium, and so the things he's done since around the time he attacked Elhokar may (to some degree) not exactly be attributable to him. At least not in total. He could die in a battle and that would be appropriate enough but I view him as more of a symbol and avatar of the broader conflict than as a driver of it and so killing him doesn't strike me as especially necessary. The only exception to this that comes to my mind is that his death could be a major crisis for Kaladin, with Odium returning Moash's pain to him just before Kaladin has to strike him down (or see him killed by someone else). That would mean that it's Moash that dies rather than Vyre and would be an appropriate complication for Kaladin achieving the Fifth Ideal, which I expect him to do. I also think that Moash's pain, and therefore his true identity as a person, being returned to him at a particularly pivotal and vicious moment has been foreshadowed pretty strongly. In such a situation only his death or redemption really tracks, and the shape of the story suggests to me that it's more about Kaladin than Moash which makes him more likely to be an object (what happens to him affects others) than a subject (what happens to him is his own, proper story, which can contain redemption). If I were writing Stormlight (and good thing for all of us that I am not!), I would probably conclude Moash's story with him getting free of Odium, being remorseful about his actions to the point of being ruined, but not being redeemed. We already have too much "they were bad, so they died" to really need one more instance of it, and a lot of redemptions (most of the POV Radiants), and an endless number of people who aren't on that axis at all. What we don't have is someone who fails, survives, has to live with their regrets, and doesn't overcome their brokenness. Moash already has shown some of the self loathing, and the remorse, and has dealt with it by anti-Radiant development via Odium. I think he could manage to reach regret/atonement-without-redemption, though it would be a sadder and far less dramatic than death by any means. In practical terms (like, if I were a Radiant on Roshar and fighting against Odium) I would do it in a heartbeat, if able. Moash is skilled, dangerous, and so far utterly committed to Odium's service. I would never believe that he has been marginalized or otherwise dealt with short of his death (barring some miraculous plot development as yet unknown), and even that may not be enough given what Odium has done with the Fused. He's as dedicated and implacable an enemy as there could be.

Like I said (though probably managed to hide in my very long post!), different people mind to different degrees. And, similarly, different people look for different things from stories. It's fine to feel differently about it, and no one is wrong about it either way. I just feel that there are some significant differences in how the plot details are presented and how plot obstacles are resolved in the more recent Cosmere works than in the previous ones, and this dimension has become a bit flatter than it was in the past.

I'm not @Sedside, but I can tell you why it bothers me. The problem is not that there are questions and mysteries about specific details of magic/individuals/organizations. The problem is not that there are no events in the books that establish rules for fantasy systems that can only exist in-world. The problem is not that there are inter-connections between Shardworlds, nor that things work differently in one location versus another. The problem is that many of these details aren't established (and, in a narrative sense, don't exist) right up until they solve an important problem. They are, more and more often, out-of-left-field and totally unpredictable right up until they make the entire plot issue go away-- they are deus ex machina revelations that make all previous thought and efforts by characters largely irrelevant. That makes paying attention to the details that we already know about in the books unsatsifying for many, including me, because awareness of those details doesn't matter for the plot. I'll give a couple of examples: Some of Wayne's POV chapters in Mistborn era 2. Wayne's behavior is random and unfocused in many instances, particularly his swapping of items. When we start a sequence knowing that Wayne has some outcome he needs to accomplish, and his random swapping ends up achieving that outcome, there really isn't any point in paying attention to what he does: the first thing that he steals doesn't matter, nor does the next, nor does the next, ad infinitum. None of the middle "steps" matter in any way. The only thing that matters is that he will end up with what he needs because that is, arbitrarily, just what happens. So paying attention is a waste of effort for the reader because the specific events are totally unimportant and the successful outcome is pre-ordained. We can still get some nice things in those chapters, like character details about Wayne, insight into the setting, etc. But the specific challenges and conflicts that are presented are pointless because no matter what Wayne does he will end up succeeding, randomly. Some people love that kind of progression. Others (like me) are fine with it in small doses. But when it reaches a certain point it can undermine plotting entirely: "and then Odium just left, with no further conflict" would not be a satisfying end to SA for me. I'm invested in the story and want the ending to have a substantial connection to the characters' efforts before it, and a never-before-seen Cosmere detail being revealed which tidily resolves it would be distressing and unsatisfying (to me). The Worldhoppers in Lost Metal. There were things I disliked about how they were incorporated into the story, but the relevant piece for this discussion is that they just happened to be equipped to immediately solve plot problems as soon as they arose. That makes the problems uninteresting because they are specifically fixed by an agent who has little to no other purpose in appearing in the story except to trivially fix them. If it turns out that Cultivation's godmetal is "fixium", and when held it un-corrupts Investiture, fixes Herald-style madness, and cancels all outstanding contests of champions, and all that was needed was for someone on Roshar to go to the Pits of Cultivation to pick some up, that would be a terrible conclusion to the first SA arc. It would make all previous struggles by the characters totally pointless (in terms of the grand Rosharan conflict, at least) and mean that efforts to learn about the Surges, and the Radiants, and Shards were wasted. All of this even though the plot-relevant mechanics are, in this contrived example, completely defined. The problem would be not just the tidiness of the solution but also that these details become known to us only when they completely and exactly resolve the plot's conflict, with no setup or previous presence in any of the stories. It was exciting for me when Shallan had to make use of her limited Lightweaving powers to figure out how to accomplish tasks, and the details of what she could and could not do were important and intriguing. She had to find some way to succeed and the books spent time detailing her efforts. As Cosmere magics reach higher levels of power and Worldhoppers just show up more often we're starting to get less of that. What's replacing it is more like "this is a Green Lock, which we can't affect in any way" being suddenly addressed by "all Nalthians inherently have Green Keys", so more conflicts seem to be dealt with by waiting for the right solution to just... arrive and then fix it, which is often totally disconnected from anything the characters on-screen do. That makes me less invested in plot conflicts, which makes me less invested in the books, which makes them less interesting to read.