MagicMaggot

After the shard "Harmony" being all about enabling choices somehow, the shard of "Honor" being totally legalistic and uncaring about deliberate deceptions, and the shard "Autonomy" being all about spreading her franchise, I can't say I feel much confidence in predicting what Intend matches the shards we haven't gotten to know yet...

So, to be a bit tongue-in-cheek... The solution to the problem of all the shards being incomplete parts of a whole, robbed of their necessary context, is... having them sitting together in self-help sessions, and teach each other what they are missing? Adonalsium is dead, but I'm his therapist and will see what I can do. I can just imagine. No, but seriously, something like that is possible, of course... but I feel it wouldn't be very impactful for the reader, if we hadn't gotten to know those shards as characters before. And you certainly can have too many gods in one story.

You're saying that as if Honor reasoned its way through it. That doesn't really seem to fit the way the Intent had been setup as inherent to the shard's nature. Honor is all about oaths and people seeing themselves as people of oaths. The part of Adonalsiom that was all about that, without the rest of the being to give it context. That's not a decision, and could not have been one, because it wasn't self-aware before it stewed without a vessel for millenia. And Tanner did not set out to define objective morality, he followed Ishar's advice in creating a system that balanced power with responsibility through oaths, to keep radiant powers in check. And we haven't really seen anything to suggest that that was a bad idea, I think. I get the logical underpinning, I don't get how it helps to justify Adolin's position, or even to explain how it diverges from Dalinar's. I guess we could go into the text and fish out anything that Adolin says about promises and oaths and try to see which definition might fit best, and then compare and contrast the two terms, but I feel that the intuitions he based that on were too vague to make that very helpful. Especially considering that Adolin's position doesn't actually have to be logically sound to be his position. That is part of it, but that's not really the end of it. Yes, at first Adolin explains how keeping stupid oaths is stupid, with the chair-story, but later he mostly vibes about how a promise is "deeper than an oath", and how the promise would always be there for you, even if you failed and cry with you, and understand you... So I get @Ripheus23's impression that the promise might actually be going beyond duties here, and not just be too rigid to be reasonably kept in all situations. But I don't think we're getting anything close to a logical structure here. What I'm getting is more along the lines of "I think a promise is a personal thing that shouldn't be judged by those outside of it".

But on Roshar, in the cosmere, we have no such reason, as readers, to be skeptical about things as mystical and enigmatic as are indicated by words such as "holy orders" and "transubstantiation." So a "normative powers" theory of promissory duty seems natural enough, and even "provable" enough, there. But in deontic logic, we have many categories of morally-charged action. Some theories/models include just "basic" stuff like permissions, bans, and duties. Others have multiple flavors of permissibility, or extra levels like "beyond the call of duty"/"supererogatory." On a normative-powers definition of promissory duty, what we really have is an instance of a general scheme, a normative power to concretize a deontic status. So as we say sometimes that we "grant permission," or "impose an obligation," then there is a multiplicity of promise-like abilities for "generating, by magic" those ethical (Spiritual) arrangements of things. Whereas Dalinar did draw near to the Intent of Retribution, very near thereto, Adolin, despite some moments of unique anger, seems to represent something more of "grace," not just in the aesthetic sense of his swordplay, but in the template of virtue for his character. Dalinar had to renounce oaths of the moral type that Adolin had never really committed to, so their resolutions were indeed dual to each other but such as to showcase the meaning of Adolin's inner discourse on promises vs. oaths. But so that is to suggest that what Adolin inchoately understood, in his reasoning, was that we can establish things "beyond the call of (rigid) duty," we can motivate valiant acts of grace, by an inner normative power that it would be better to use more than the power to impose duty has been used through to his day. So, there is a historical quantity of exercises of the power of duty, and another quantity for the power beyond the call of duty, and regardless of whether it is appropriate ever for the former power to be exercised in the first place, the total number of its exercises would be better if it were lower than the number of exercises, across history, of the latter power. (Negative/corollary reasoning: a deep theoretical error that it is possible to make, in making moral judgments, is to over-conflate different categories in deontic logic. There are structural rules for converting a prohibition into an obligation, and vice versa, and other things besides; but so sometimes the intended distinctiveness of the categories is stronger, so it requires more negative mental effort to substitute one for the other in one's description of something being morally judged. Accordingly, because of how finely the distinction between obligation and supererogation must be comprehended to go through in the limit, to even really have the concept of supererogation would prerequire comprehending that limit, and reversing one's comprehension on this score would be a drastic intellectual maneuver, one using a sizable, and psychologically traumatic, amount of cognitive "fuel." The philosophical tragedy of Honor would then be that, in Tanavast's hands, the Shard was made to uphold a worldwide system of magic grounded on the wrong normative power.*) *Observation: naively, "may" goes with "permitted" as "ought" goes with "obligated." However, it has been argued on various grounds that there is a serious natural-language distinction between "ought," "should," and "must," that they are not formally interchangeable (they are not emotionally interchangeable, that is also true, but in logic we would partly omit this fact from structural consideration). Accordingly, the ensemble of normative powers might theoretically far eclipse the use to which Tanavast put it, his purported admiration for the mathematics of Roshar notwithstanding in that end. I've read through that a few times now, and I'm no stranger to academic philosophy, but to be honest, I don't get what you are saying about either Dalinar's, nor Adolin's conception of promissory obligations and promises here, nor do I understand your point about "the tragedy of Honor". Which is basically everything, except the philosophical concepts you based it on. I guess the idea is that Dalinar is too focussed on morality being build on promissory duties, while in your reading Adolin thinks that true goodness should go beyond duties? Fair enough, but what has that to do with the oath/promise distinction? The promises Adolin makes and wants to make still impose promissory duties on him, just like any oath would, don't they? What else would they be for? If he intends to go beyond duty to keep them, that's nice and all, but that's hardly something Dalinar would disagree with. And you can't go beyond a promised duty, without first creating said duty. The more I untangle your (honestly, kind of unnecessarily) complicated phrasing, the less I understand the point. You're saying that Adolin and Dalinar make promises/oaths with different kinds of normative power. How so? And you are saying that Roshar's magic system is based on an understanding of oaths/promises that isn't compatible with Honor's. How so? Not sure I see that, either. Dalinar seemed to want to give Honor to Taravangian, so that it could learn why people break promises and thus could hopefully become something that wouldn't insist on keeping any oath under any circumstances, no matter what gets crushed in the process. That's not about making it more compatible with Adolin's morality, but about making it more compatible with Dalinar's morality. Adolin just isn't very much of a rules-oriented person in the first place, so I see no reason why one would think a version of Honor that's a tad more sophisticated would suddenly be a good fit for him.

To be fair, we haven't heard that from said ex, we heard it from her assumed BFF, and that could be interpreted as a touching degree of loyalty. Apart from that, I'd say she mostly just doesn't like Hoid, and certainly doesn't trust him with her plans. Which describes most of the shards, doesn't it? Hoid is too much of a wild card for any responsible deity to invite.

Well... someone should probably tell them. I don't think we've met any original vessel that fit that description, yet. Which might have been a point of the "actually, the gods of this world are just guys like us"-thing that's so terrifyng about them.

Considering the search for Valor is now Hoid's explicitly stated priority I do think it likely that we'll get a trail sooner rather than later, and with therw being 5 planned books (which might well include the first real on-page experiences of world-hopping) and something like 70 Hoid-years between SA 5 and 6, I personally doubt that she'll be on Roshar just based on that. Otherwise it would seem an odd choice to me to tease it now. And yes, I also got the feeling that the Hoid-Valor-relationship was more personal than that to other shards, and I also got a very protective vibe from Endowment, who immediately went after his sinister motives after talking about Valor. It's generally not a bad time to start delving into the person behind the jesk, if Hoid is going to make the step from plot convenience to protagonist sooner or later, so I don't think introducing personal elements in his chosen mission would be much of a surprise, either. He has one dragon-friend already, why not another one?

We already have 3 shards involved on Scadrial, and the corpses of two that we haven't really explored yet on Sel, and you want to throw more shards into the mix there? From a story-telling standpoint, do you really think that is a good idea? At its core the stories still have to be about mortal protagonists figuring things out, and throwing more players beyond mortal comprehension in that change the way physics work, and with a background that you get from a different series of novels, doesn't sound especially appealing to me. I personally don'T expect to see her active outside of SA novels. Maybe a mention hinting at what she might be up to, but certainly not settling on another plot hotspot.

Sure, and if there were, I'd personally have a hard time giving it to this fictional character. But I meant to say that we haven't seen the on-screen experimentation to say that he couldn't do it.

Yeah, but there are characters that are technically older around that were explained through time dilation. So there is enough extreme time dilation around, be it Silverlight, the Dor's investiture, or just an overlong trip to the spiritual realm. Felt certainly lived through some time since Mistborn Era 1, but not necessarily too much time for a mortal.

Not totally relevant, but do we actually know that he extended his life? I mean, there is also time dilation that could explain him still being around, isn't there?

I'm not entirely sure he can't use the Honorspren surges right now. Ishar's experiments seemed to assume that the spren would have control over their surges while maintaining their immortality, if he managed to get them into the physical realm. I think Notum comes pretty close to what the crazy old man was going for. I guess as he is he would probably have some problems affecting physical stuff even with his surges, but all the other Honorspren have no problem flying in the physical realm, and while he might not be able to lash armor and sword, he doesn't really need to to fly, if they are working with him, does he? Give the guy some Stormlight and let us experiment. Or is there a reason we know that that couldn't work?

I'd argue much of that is probably going to get some deeper exploration in the later half of SA, and Venli's arc as well as Rlain's were very much in preparation for that. Rlain and Renarin are probably going into the singer empire itself (with their corrupted radiant spren, who might have goals themselves), and Venli and the Willshapers will probably have something to say about oppressive practices going on there - and bring parts of anciuent singer identity with them through the stone they talk to, And then there is Mishram, who wants to wrest the singers from Odium (I guess from Retribution now). The second half seems to have a much better setup to explore singer identity and their vision of the future and the past from different perspectives, than the first half did. And I guess that's where we will see if the characters were just underdeveloped because they were an afterthought, or if there is really too much about them that's hard to relate to.

I mostly agree, though especially with the regional deals I would actually expect some differences by region. Thaylenah's deal will probably be good enough to basically still be human-led, and yeah, wherever El makes the rules will probably won't put a ceiling on human promotion potential. But with the fused being... well, crazy and broken, I would still expect there to be enough racial mistreatment somewhere to make a plot point from. Though I'd agree that it might be less than one might expect. The recuitment drive and draft might be a bigger topic than that - and even here we might expect exemptions for Thaylenah. Which is another point altogether, with different areas of the realm having different deals, and with Retribution being unwilling (or partially unable) to change the deals, problems are to be expected.

I honestly expect book 6 to be somewhat lighter than 4 or 5. Yeah sure, Retribution's empire is now a thing, but that just seems like a nice setup for plots about resistance within its borders. Kind of like Mistborn, but this time we are already aware of all kinds of cavallery that could come to save the day in one way or another, like adult combat radiant Lift, Navani's awakening heralding tech advancements, the Heralds' return, Mishram's love for "her" people, Sja-Anat's double-dealing, the Order of freedom-loving Willshapers, and agents of the cosmere that want to destabilize Retribution, to name a few. We're taking a step back from sending armies of thousands to their death, and getting closer to ground-level. While getting rid of Retribution is an ultimate goal, there will be more relatable smaller goals that the protagonists can and likely will achive in the earlier books of the second half. If you're far down, there is a lot of way you can go upwards, without making the top seem to close. From what we have seen so far the singer empire is about as bad as most rosharan human realms (better than some), just with some singer supremacism mixed in. I doubt we'll see large-scale torture and slavery here. It seems much more likely to me that we'll tackle racial prejudice and Retribution's draft for the cosmere war. And while that's not exactly a nice thing, it's not really worse than the way people were treated in the first installments of the series. The Foreverstorm certainly gives the setting a darker mood, but so did the ashfalls in Mistborn. Dark empire, darker weather, opressed lower class, ruled by a divine dictator, a resistance out of their depths but trying their best... yeah, I've read something like that before, and it wasn't very grimdark. Nothing that a hopeful cast of characters couldn't light up. Now, we'll certainly get back to more abundant power and god-smiting stuff sooner or later, and the stakes will rise again, once we do, but I find it hard to predict how the world will look and feel multiple sanderlanches in advance.

Ah, ok, that helps a bit, but now I don't understand how the contest plays into that. The actual result of the contest made her divest from Roshar rather forcefully, leaving all she had invested behind. So she could do it, if there wasn't the oath between the gods holding her back. If she was willing to pay the price. She probably could have mitigated that price, if she didn't have to retreat so hastily, but either party winning the contest wouldn't have loosened her binding, so it wouldn't have helped, or a I missing something?

So why wasn't plan A just do manipulate Dalinar into freeing her? Or even just asking/trading for it. A mortal who was already very much in her sphere of influence had the power to negociate for it. And he didn't really have much reason to antagonize her. Even if freeing her meant freeing Odium, he might well have been convinced, if someone other than Wit told him how the cosmere situation actually was, and what not freeing Odium would look like. If that was her main goal, I can't say what she did seems more genius to me than if she just blundered around...

Amd that's why I said she doesn't have to do the same thing she did last time, since they don't need forms of power from her, so the risk wouldn't be the same, either. Why not? I mean, it's not like we have gotten to know her that much.

By getting captured by some new dastardly human weapon? Not sure I'd blame her for that in their position, assuming I'd know anything about that at all. Apart from that... it's not really the singers' choice, is it? If she decides to support dissidents, she'll support dissitents, and they can't really stop her. What are they gonna do, tell Retribution?

I don't disagree, but I'd say that takes about as much headcanon as claiming misdeeds by Adolin. It's a way of explaining the situation that requires going beyond the text, and making assumptions about Alethi women and dating practices that aren't really spelled out. Could the women have been all ego? Sure, but wouldn't they have mothers and fathers that would pressure them to try again for those highprince grandkids and those royal connections? Could the women still have been after Adolin, even when Shallan got her foot in? Sure, but if it is relevant to the characters, one would expect it to be something you would notice while reading, isn't it? I personally would assume that Sanderson really, really didn't want to write about all the background girls of the camps having catfights to get some oh-so-desirable man, since that could easily go into very cringey cliches. But I don't think he very convincingly avoided it. Don't get me wrong, I am fine with the result. But if one is looking for flaws in the writing of Adolin and his relationship I do think this one is a fair place to look.

Which singers? Which is kind of the point of the thread, isn't it? Apart from that, neither the ex-parshmen, nor the fused have had anything to do with the false desolation. They might be able to get accountsa of it, but it wouldn't be any more personal than accounts of the ancient radiants were to the humans. If Retribution himself doesn't stoke resentment against BAM, I don't see why there wouldn't be singers that would flock to her powers. BAM isn't necessarily a one-trick-pony, either. Odium's power is around, dissident singers don't need someone to grant them forms of power. They might need someone with power to back them up, though.

I'm not sure if there will be larger-scale conflict between singer nations, but I am very, very sure there will be resistance and subversion to Retribution's empire going on. And I am just as sure that Venli's Willshapers, the "I will seek freedom for those in bondage"- guys, will be involved (finally paying of that sloooooooowmoving development...). And considering that we are likely planting Renarin and his Mindbridger in these areas, I'd guess that human-singer-relations within the singer empire could be a major point of contention. I actually don't think that that will be as simple as Retribution-alingned vs resistance, since Taravangian and his officers like El were quite open to more egalitarian treatment, but we also have singers and a lot of fused, who probably wouldn't take legal equality or anything close to it with grace. Oh, and then there is BAM. The less attention Retribution can spare, the more Mishram can be expected to meddle, and she certainly will be where her people are, if anywhere.

I agree that that is most likely the author's intention here. But I also think there is a glaring plausibility issue with so many of the ambitious ladies of a feudal court caring too much that the good-looking, fashionable, sports-champion, Shardbearer, heir to a Highprincedom, and cousin to the King, gave them some minor slights and awkward moments during courtship. And when there is such an implausibility in the world-building, people tend to fill in the blanks themselves, which in this case would likely include some more serious kinds of misbehaviour in Adolin than mere inattentiveness. Since it's not on the page it goes nowhere, but I would put some of that on Sanderson.

If they can come back without putting the spren in danger, why are they on Braize at all? I really don't get the mechanics here, yet. It vaguely made sense that the heralds would have to be on Braize to keep the fused there. But I guess it is more about being on the planet to somehow channel its "well of souls". To... bind Retribution somehow? Or are they binding the spren? Either way, that should get undone, if they stop doing it, shouldn't it? I really hope future content or WoBs will give us more clarity here.

That seems like a nonstarter for me too. Lift's boon/curse would basically be irrelevant, if she could just open a perpendicularity for Lifelight suppy, so that would be undermining instead of reinforcing what Cultivation did with her. Also... why not just have someone else bond the Nightwatcher? It's already there, no reason to kill it, to get it into the game. ....or did I miss the joke? I probably missed the joke.