Gakuka

I'd say it's closer to judging the first season of Lost and not liking Locke after you find out later that Locke is just some guy making everything up. Jasnah just wasn't as good as we were led to believe she is. There's freezing up in a difficult situation and there's walking into a difficult situation completely and massively underprepared, which is what she also did. I can look past freezing up, but not anticipating things like Todium's personal attack on her credibility is something I think the Jasnah in books 1-4 just would not have done. Can we think of anything she was so storming incompetent at related directly to an argument or debate in any of those books? Of course not, she was the master of her domain in every conversation. Ruthless to a fault sometimes, but never incompetent. I do understand that Todium knew just how to beat her, I just wish it wasn't so easy for him. Still, great book, just don't care about Jasnah anymore. She can have a redemption arc where she actually becomes somewhat competent in books 6-10 or whatever, that's great, then she'll finally elevate to be just an average character in a world of above-average characters. To all the Jasnah fans out there of course I'm truly happy for you, and before this book she was my favorite character, that's why her sudden out-of-character (IMO) wild incompetence was such a slap in the face for me. Sanderson knows what he's doing so I trust him to have an arc in mind, let's see where it goes I guess.

I *think* this is what I was practically screaming at the book for Jasnah to do, and afterwards I completely stopped caring about her character in any meaningful way. This should have been a lay-up of an argument to win, and she already said the thing that should have won it. Todium had already betrayed them once, and with so much more knowledge and resources now it's practically a guarantee that he will betray them again, and much more thoroughly, later. Jasnah could say, rightfully, that there is no way for a limited human to make a contract with a god that the god could not build in a thousand ways to subvert given enough resources and time, which Todium clearly has, by his own admission. Yes, Jasnah might betray them for what is perceived as the greater good for her people, but Todium almost certainly will, and the betrayal would be much more severe given Todium's immense power and capacity for cruelty. Yes, Todium is bound more strongly by pacts but, as they already stated in the conversation, he can find very inventive was of bending a pact to his advantage without technically violating it. In the end I got the impression that Jasnah was simply not very good and what we've been told she's good at, and that made her a rather worthless character for me. She wasn't trapped in an unwinnable confrontation, she went in wildly unprepared for what Todium would say (somehow not even considering that Todium would attack her credibility, are you kidding me??) and she didn't argue her strongest point enough about how untrustworthy Todium was. Disappointing and character-destroying, which might have been the point but we've spent so much time building her up that it feels wrong, like when I re-read the books I'll just roll my eyes and skip her chapters because all of it comes to nothing in the end. Loved the other character arcs :).