Mason Wheeler

There is a word for "giving aid to the enemy in time of war," which is precisely what Sadeas did by abandoning a winnable battle. Interestingly enough, the same word also covers "attempted violent overthrow of a high government official." What Sadeas did was treason. And he was openly planning further treason and bragging about it to Adolin. He was an unrepentant traitor and murderer who was insulated from formal consequences by his high position in society. In such a situation, what Adolin did was not only right, but quite possibly the only morally correct option available to him.

Jasnah is quite clearly a pro-social psychopath. (Ie the charismatic type that in our world ends up running cults or Fortune 500 companies. Apparently on Roshar they end up running kingdoms.)

And for half of that equation, we haven't seen anything from Cultivation's POV yet...

Thanks for the tip! I just checked on there, and apparently the forum is no longer active and they're shutting it down 2 days from now.

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On the recent Shardcast he was a guest on, Brandon said that a WoB is basically what he plans to do in the future, but those plans can change as the stories evolve. The only canon is what actually shows up in the published books.

Perhaps the most definitive thing of all was in book 4, when she gave a big rant about doing away with hope. This instantly calls to mind the words Dante famously placed over the gates of Hell! Which seems more likely? That Brandon, a notably religious author, is completely unaware of a well-known quotation from one of the most famous pieces of classic Christian literature ever written... or that he knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote that?

You know what I mean, though. When someone's first instinct to resolve any and all problems is "murder someone," that person is what we call a psychopath. And even though Jasnah doesn't always follow through with it, that always seems to be her first resort. Suspicious woman marrying the king? Hire an assassin "to keep an eye on her." Thieves terrorizing a local neighborhood? Use magic to slaughter them in cold blood. Figure out that the Parshmen are the Voidbringers? Bitterly complain what a shame it was that her ancestors enslaved them rather than genociding them as they ought to have done. Hoid shows up unexpectedly? Point a Shardblade at him. Something seems off about her cousin's spren? Clearly he needs to be murdered! Learn the truth about the Desolations? Let's go hunt down a few Heralds and murder them! Even in book 4, when she decides to do something unambiguously good, she goes about it in arguably the worst possible way, invoking a villain trope that tends to backfire badly both in fiction and in reality: "Not a paragon of moral virtue all the time" is the understatement of the century. She's a flat-out evil villain who happens to be fighting on the good guys' side, what TVTropes calls the "Token Evil Teammate." WoK Prime's version of Jasnah wasn't. I liked that one a lot better.

Wow, that's kind of horrifying, and makes me want to read the back 5 a lot less. If I wanted a villain protagonist story, I'd be reading villain protagonist stories, not heroic fantasy!

Ugh, I hope not! Where did you hear that? I'd always heard that the back half was going to focus much more heavily on the Heralds and emphasize the modern Rosharans a lot less.

Yeah, just that one minor detail...

The thing I've always wondered about (always since Brandon wrote that, at least) is, if "Surgebinding" is their term for magic in general, then what's up with "the Old Magic"?

We know that Odium was already "injured" in some form due to previous conflicts with other Shards. This most likely means that its power, rather than being stronger than all of the others, was diminished somehow. Rayse won those fights with others based on skill and craftiness, not raw strength.

Are you sure? There are a lot more real-world historical civilizations and cultures that no longer exist at all than there are ones that exist today. The vast majority of past civilizations have been wiped out, either by natural disasters or by their enemies. Our modern view of genocide is colored by a very specific event that proved a spectacular failure, but it only failed because half of the planet worked together to stop it. But from a historical perspective, that's very much the exception rather than the rule. If genocide didn't work, people wouldn't keep trying to do it. Which vision? Can you cite which book and chapter contains the vision in question? Because you appear to be the only one here who remembers reading a vision that portrays Singers fighting on humanity's side.

What exactly were you expecting? For him to turn on Dalinar? Try to kill his father? Raise an insurrection against him in the middle of a war?

It was more than one line; it was showing in the entirety of their interactions. (Which admittedly wasn't much because it was pretty early on in the book when Adolin and Dalinar parted ways for their own separate plotlines, but what was there was quite noticeable!)

Remember how in WoR, Pattern classified sarcasm, exaggeration, and figures of speech as very fascinating lies. The imaginations of children would almost certainly prove delicious to them!

Just look at how Dalinar (and to a lesser extent Kaladin) has been able to persuade the Stormfather, a literal force of nature, to change for the better at times. If the Stormfather can change, why not any other sapient spren?

What about Cultivationspren? ...huh? Did you read the same Rhythm of War that I did? Their relationship has very noticeably been impacted by the revelations at the end of the last book!

I finally finished this. It was a very interesting look at what might have been. WOW that book was dark! Stormlight gets dark at some points, but... it's there for contrast. All the darkness that characters have to wade through sets it up so that when they overcome their problems and get to shine, they shine all the brighter because of it. Here, it's just bleak. Everyone just ends up losing and falling apart, and I'm very glad Brandon didn't end up going this way for SA. Also, it was far less epic in scope. Everyone mentions there not being any spren, but it was more than that. You just sort of get the sense that everything is... lesser. The entirety of human history on Roshar was only 4000 years here; in SA that's just how long they've had since the Desolations stopped happening. Windrunners being some sort of second-rate Airbender rather than the awesomeness Bridge Four gets to become. Highstorms being something that would make you miserable if you're caught out in one, rather than being considered a certain death sentence, and so on. The things I did like: Jasnah. She was a much more interesting character in this, having to struggle with real dilemmas and deal with real emotions. In SA, Jasnah is a bizarre blend of Mary Sue and homicidal psychopath that's just really offputting and hard to relate to. I wish this Jasnah had made it into Stormlight. Onyxeers. Oathbringer really threw me for a loop when we found out that Renarin's visions were related to his spren being corrupted. It always felt obvious, from the way the history was discussed in the first book and especially by the end of the second when we found out about Renarin being a Truthwatcher, that the whole "there are no prophecies and foretelling the future is evil" thing came about as a result of the Recreance and the Vorin church's subsequent slide into general corruption and apostasy, so having Renarin's powers in that regard suddenly turn out to be of Odium in the third book was really jarring! It's nice to see a Roshar where future sight was part of the plan all along. Taln. Just... everything about Taln. I really hope therapist!Kaladin can help him in book 5 so we can get this guy in Stormlight, because so far Mr. Cata-talnic has been utterly useless to the plot. Shardblades shaping themselves to suit their wielders. And just the way that they were treated as generally rare, but not epically rare. Ever since that one vision Dalinar has, everyone's been asking, "where are all the Shardblades?!?" Now we have our answer: they're on Roshar Prime! A minor detail, but we finally get an in-universe answer to the question of why they use gemstones rather than gold and silver for money on Roshar: because Awakening/soulcasting can create gold and silver, but it can't create polestones. So yeah. This was an interesting book, but overall I'm glad that we got the Roshar we did, rather than this one.

...you completely missed what I said. There doesn't need to be a shorter project in between Stormlight and the next Wax & Wayne book, because the Wax & Wayne books are the shorter projects! They were explicitly created as such.

That's not what I'm referring to. It may not be in that one specific post you linked, but he said several times that the timeline for writing "Stormlight 4" was fixed, and he planned to write The Lost Metal before that, if he could get Starsight finished soon enough, but if not, he wouldn't be able to push back the start time for Stormlight 4 in order to accommodate it. And while this was never explicitly stated as such, it's kind of reasonable to assume that, once that ended up not working out, The Lost Metal would at least be next in line. So it's a bit galling, after his work on that (ultimately rather disappointing) book ended up leaving him unable to bring us a much-anticipated Cosmere work that we've been anxiously waiting for since even before Oathbringer due to the cliffhanger the last one ended on, to hear that it's being displaced yet again, for another year... by a sequel to the book that blocked it the last time, of all things! I'm well aware of this. I've been around the fandom since pretty much the beginning. (My introduction to Brandon was when my brother got me his entire corpus of books -- all two of them, Elantris and Mistborn -- as a birthday present.) The first time I heard about his practice of writing something shorter as a refresher in between longer books was when he was talking about how The Alloy of Law was one such in-between book, and the entire "Mistborn era 1.5" was going to be books like that, which it certainly has been so far. So that argument doesn't really fly.

Doing a bit of Cosmere theory talk with a friend, who suddenly said to me, "I can't help it. I keep picturing some huge room in Brandon Sanderson's house with writing all over every surface. The whole Cosmere plan!" And now I can't get that image out of my head.

True. If you knew they were always wrong, then you could trust them to be consistently wrong. Untrustworthy means you should not put any credence in the idea that they're consistently ether right or wrong.

Is "grunt writing" even a thing when the fans are paying for a premium product from someone with an established style?