LightReader

The Japanese and Korean Light Novel/Manga/Webtoon vibes were strong with this one. Which worked for me because I often enjoy those mediums, and also made a lot of sense once I read the postscript/afterword. I love the artwork in this one. I'd say I enjoyed the story in Tress slightly more, as it took me a bit longer to get hooked by this one, but not by much. I'll need to re-read them both to be sure. I did not see most of the twists in this one ahead of time, which was cool. As I was reading it I made the assumption that Hoid's audience this time is probably Rosharan, as most of the cosmere references he makes seem to be related to Roshar, however I will need to read again more carefully to be sure though. I might've missed something and it's just that Design's references are to Roshar since that's where she's from. I'm curious if anyone noticed a line that specifically marks the audience of this one. He does seem to be telling the story relatively shortly after it happened considering that he assumes Painter and Yumi to still be alive at the time of storytelling. (He notes that they like off-world visitors in the present tense.) This book may be a clue about where Design was during the events of Tress: maybe she was just doing the same thing, living as an eccentric human in some city there, running a noodle shop or some other thing from her list of human experiences she wants to try. Design is fantastic and fabulous in every way. The fact that their spaceship landing on the Sho Del planet and having first contact with aliens will probably be completely overshadowed in their planet's history books by the revelation that the sun exists is kind of hilarious to me. It also made me laugh when I realized Hoid's ridiculous situation here, the protocol he set up, was most likely in response to what Taravangian did to him in the RoW epilogue. I think my one plot nitpick is that none of the painters at the end use their bell thingies to get more painters to come help. I suppose they were just overwhelmed and didn't have a moment to spare, but I kept waiting for someone to think of it during that last fight. They were introduced but Yumi failed to take advantage of it because of her lack of training, which made me think that the people who were trained would obviously know that it would be a good idea to get more help in that situation, especially since there were Dreamwatch painters known to be in the city, and the only painter who knew they were probably useless at that point was Painter himself. Also, if I am remembering correctly, and while it may be simply that Hoid is choosing to translate it this way, I found it interesting that Yumi uses the same -nimi suffix as a mark of respect (e.g. "Warden-nimi") that Szeth uses when he speaks to Nightblood, which he calls "sword-nimi" a few times. Overall, a very enjoyable read.

I've seen a few people ask the question in other threads but I haven't really seen anyone give a theory about it. This story is clearly meant to be taking place in the later stages of the Cosmere, well after SA, so why is Ulaam the one who shows up to record Hoid's embarrassing poems instead of Design? Because if anyone was going to be there just making fun of Hoid I would've expected it to be her. Is she just hanging out somewhere else on the planet or maybe in the cognitive realm? Are they still bonded? Did he just get so sick of her interrupting/spoiling his stories that he decided to find a way to undo the Nahel bond? He didn't seem to use any of his Radiant powers at all, and I didn't notice any Cryptic-like designs on his clothes or anything either. Thoughts? Did anyone see a clue that I missed?

Actually, even if Vin doesn’t realize that what she’s doing is Allomancy, her use of her “luck” as she calls it initially, does seem to be intentional at least some of time. She wills Camon to calm down and then it happens. It’s not a passive effect. There is an argument to be made about pewter burning unconsciously though. But even if there are occasional exceptions, it is rare for magic to happen accidentally in the Cosmere, and the more complex or powerful or precise the magic, the more intent seems to be required.

I think the main idea of intent is that within the cosmere you generally can’t do magic by accident, and often the more precise your intention is the more control you have over the results you get. So basically you can’t do hemalurgy by accident, someone has to intend for it to be done. In the case of Vin’s mother, the intent was coming from Ruin directly. When Kaladin seems to accidentally stick something together, I would guess that the intent actually comes from Syl. It’s possible for the intent to come from someone else other than the actual magic user, but I suspect they would have to be Connected to that person. It’s also possible that external intent would have to come directly from a Connected Shard or splinter(such as a spren).

We need to see what the Regals look like in Shadesmar to know the answer to this, since they’re the ones with voidspren in their gemhearts.

The way the guy talked about laws suggests Skybreaker to me and it seemed like his plate was functioning as a spacesuit. I agree that he was likely using warlight or some other hybrid light and that the gun was his spren. I was imagining the gun would be essentially a laser gun, firing some kind of concentrated hybrid light that would burn out the eyes of anyone living it hits and blast holes through inanimate objects. The fabrial powerpack being like a high-tech gemstone battery able to hold super-condensed light so they can carry a lot of light in a small container. Their other powers could also be fueled by directly accessing a similar light-storage device. I don’t think the weapons themselves would use/apply the surges, same as the current blades don’t.

Actually one of my favorite flashback moments was seeing Rlain interacting with Thude and Eshonai pre-war and getting a little insight into his personality back then. And of course, Eshonai’s send-off gift from the Stormfather was fantastic.

Ham would be a Stoneward, Kelsier would make a good Willshaper. Most of the others could go several directions... It’s harder to go the other direction since allomantic powers aren’t related to your personality necessarily.

If Ruin and Preservation were each others’ anti-investitures, then Sazed would never have been able to pick up both Shards and mix them together. Anti-investitures don’t mix, they cancel each other out, which seems to result in explosions. I don’t think the intents are really relevant once the investiture is brought to the physical realm. I think the Shard/intent is more like a filter that the investiture goes through when it is brought over from the spiritual realm, which results in the different rhythms (which are essentially frequencies of investiture). This is also why the Shard’s intent has more to do with the ability to access investiture and than with the actual powers that the investiture fuels. The names Towerlight and Warlight are something people gave the hybrid lights after the fact because they needed something to call them and these names seemed fitting/descriptive. They aren’t indicative of some new Intent being given to the investiture. I don’t think investiture itself has intent, or else you couldn’t use Preservation investiture to destroy things. It’s the Shards themselves (and people) that have Intent, which shapes the rhythm of the investiture that they bring into the physical/cognitive realms.

I was assuming it was Cultivation who accepted Venli’s oath because the listeners have always seemed closer to Cultivation than to Honor. Wasn’t it a femalen voice that accepted Rlaine’s oath too? Or maybe that was his spren. It could’ve been the spren in both cases actually, since I think they were both female spren. I’d go check but my husband is currently reading.

That does seem to be the case, since there are ten surges here... maybe this is referring to what happens when radiants use voidlight? Except that when Venli uses voidlight the results seem to be the same as when she uses stormlight, so that seems unlikely as well. So maybe it’s the surges powered by anti-light... like anti-surges? Would a radiant even be able to use anti-light... and what would happen to a radiant if they tried to suck in anti-stormlight when they were already had some stormlight already? would they just not be able to absorb it, or would they just explode? That seems really dangerous. These questions might require a thread of their own, if there isn’t one already.

@Honorless The Fused surges powered by voidlight are voidbinding, though it seems each brand of Fused only has one surge and the void-surges are all slightly different from the Radiant ones. But we’ve definitely seen voidbinding. There is the issue that the current Singer forces are barely trained, while the ones in the past were probably much better soldiers. Their numbers were probably a lot higher too, with maybe a lot more Regals. I think Melishi’s gambit had more to do with making sure the war wouldn’t happen again because he knew Honor was in trouble and wouldn’t be able to support future Radiants. I would guess that he hoped to remove their access to forms of power but didn’t realize they’d lose access to all the forms. Also, it seems like past bondsmiths couldn’t open Perpendicularities the way Dalinar can? That ability of Dalinar’s seemed to scare Odium quite a bit at Thaylen Field. Although Ishar was able to do it to travel to Shadesmar... but he is also a special case since he doesn’t have oaths, and Honor may have prevented that before he died, so it might be a relatively new skill for Ishar too.

Could be some of both, most being Singers with a few humans thrown in. I also think there’s a good chance that some of the Unmade were originally humans.

I was guessing it would be Dai-gonarthis in Shinovar, first because we haven’t really seen much of this one yet and it would be cool to learn more, and also because isn’t this the one that’s supposed to make everyone really suspicious of each other, the Black Fisher? I’ve seen it theorized that this is the one that was involved in making Shallan’s family messed up, was possibly involved in the scouring of Aimia, and it could be doing that same sort of thing in Shinivar now. Ah, apparently there was a death rattle referring to this one consuming sorrows... I could also see it being BAM set in a gemstone on a pedestal somewhere, Yelig-nar inside some Shin leader, or chemoarish who we also don’t know much about.

This discussion of whether Whimsy is scary or not totally makes me think of the Whimsydale hidden level in Diablo 3 where everything is rainbows and unicorns and teddy bears that suddenly try to murder you. I think it can definitely go either way and be really morally ambiguous. I also think the Shard itself might have a lot of trouble settling down on one planet for any length of time. @Truthwatcher Artifabrian if you look closely at the definitions up above, Whimsy is actually a noun, the adjective would be “whimsical”

Wit and Kaladin’s conversation after the Dragon and the Dog story and Kaladin asks Wit to confirm that it’s going to get worse after he leaves their little bubble: "It will,” Wit said, “but then it will get better. Then it will get worse again. Then better. This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you, Kaladin: You will be warm again.”

I’m trying to figure out whether she wanted to save Roshar and thought Taravangian as Odium would choose to stop the war since he asked for the capacity to stop what’s coming. Is she that bad a judge of character that she didn’t realize he is a machiavellian megalomaniac? I mean he believed that the best way to save the world was to take total control and become the emperor of everything by murdering a bunch of people. Now he’s smart and passionate at the same time, minus the sympathy and love emotions. What makes her think he won’t do that same thing as Odium? Maybe she’s playing a longer game and foresaw a path for the heroes to win without setting Odium free if she went this way.Or maybe she’d be ok with setting him free if it protects Roshar. Maybe she thought T would be easier for her to influence? She does seem to want T to work with her as an ally, but I don’t think he’ll be amenable to that at all. I mean, he never once considered the possibility of working with Dalinar to save the world, even once Dalinar proved he wouldn’t become Odium’s champion he still thought the best thing was to take over as the head of the coalition and make a deal with Odium. I’m not totally on board with the idea of evil Cultivation though because I think Cultivation still loves her singer/listener children and she did help Dalinar. I think she’s the Chasmfiend who helped the listeners: the whole dragon who has changed her form to fit in/hide thing. I also think it was her voice that Venli heard when her oath was finally accepted. It seems like it would be in her nature to want the humans and singers to join together, it would be an opportunity to cultivate more hybrids like the Horneaters or Herdazians.

I absolutely think it was seeing the formation of Kaladin’s shardplate. Brandon has said that one of the big inspirations for the series was the idea of magical power armor: Questioner So do you have, like, "what if" questions and then you build a universe from there? Brandon Sanderson Usually they're "what if" questions, but Sanderson's Zeroth Law--I've got these laws on magic you can look up, they're named humbly after myself--so Sanderson's Zeroth Law is "Always err on the side of what's awesome". And usually it's less even a "what if?" and it's a "That's so cool, taser toads!" Like if you really want to know the truth of where The Stormlight Archive started, there's all this cool stuff, like part of it was like "What if there was a storm like the storm on Jupiter". And then I eventually changed it to a storm that goes around the planet, something like that, but the real truth was "Magical power armor. YEAH! Magical power armor is cool! Plate mail power armor! Why would you need plate mail power armor?" Y'know, and it starts with the really cool idea. Mistborn started by me drifting in a fog bank at eighty miles per hour in my car and loving how it looked as it drove past and saying "Is there a world where I can imitate this feel, where you look out and it streams by." It's those early visuals or concepts that make me say "Oh yeah, I wanna do that!". That is where my books really come from, and then I layer on top of them the "what ifs?" and trying to build a realistic ecology based around these ideas. Footnote: Brandon has previously discussed this electrified world in relation to a novel titled Dark One. DragonCon 2016 (Sept. 3, 2016)

I theorize that the dawnshard commands are all concepts we have already been identified in the cosmere. The fundamentals of cosmere life and magic are Connection, Identity, Change, and Fortune. Fortune being the “command” that is different from the rest. Change: remake, evolve, adapt, grow, invent, entropy, (influence your surroundings and your self) Connect; unite, bind, form relationships, love, feeling, (perceive your surroundings and your self) Identify: persist, exist, continue, survive, remember, think, (recognize your surroundings and your self) Fortune; this is the different one, involving luck, serendipity, destiny, and the flow of time. I also think that the various Shards each have some measure of these concepts, but in different amounts. I like the idea of overlap or a spectrum.

It’s not being a vegetarian that’s the issue, there’s nothing wrong with being a vegetarian, it’s that he isn’t really doing it by choice. He’s a vegetarian because he’s incapable of doing otherwise; even though he loves the taste of bacon, he’s incapable of actually eating it. It’s more similar to someone who loves the taste of peanut butter being allergic to peanuts. Being incapable of eating your favorite food would really suck.

I also thought it was well done. Especially her emotional struggle against feeling like a burden or like she was worthless because of it. I have a brother who is paralyzed from the chest down, with only partial use of his arms, and he’s described his experiences in similar ways, that the emotional battle is often the hardest part. Especially in the beginning when he was trying to relearn how to deal with basic daily tasks. He’s become similarly successful too; since his accident he’s gotten a business degree, built a successful business by noticing a need, and he’s an awesome dad to three kids. I really like the idea of Rysn eventually becoming this amazing world/cosmere traveler who will pop back up in Misborn 4 because she’s a dawnshard, floating around in a futuristic hover chair with her Sleepless friends (since they’re apparently immortal). I used to think it would be good for her to get a spren and be healed, but now I’m actually really glad to hear that she won’t, that she’ll remain disabled while being super important to the cosmere.

His ability to see two sides of the issue could serve him really well as an ambassador. Dalinar mentions him becoming an ambassador to Azir, but I really like the idea that he could be the ambassador to Venli’s group of listeners in the future instead.

While I do think there’s a strong possibility of Sebarial being a member of the Ghostbloods, I’m not convinced that he’s Thaidakar himself. Thaidakar is someone who has been Cosmere aware for a long time, long before the start of the series. The Ghostbloods have a lot of knowledge about Shadesmar, and its founding/leading member must have at least spent some significant amount of time there exploring things. If he’s not a worldhopper himself, he must at least be involved/acquainted with some knowledgeable worldhopper(s) who are aware of Stormlight’s value to people from other planets, which means they have either visited those places or learned about them in detail from worldhoppers. I’m suspecting that Thaidakar is some kind of big-time, shady merchant from Silverlight (or possibly an immigrant to Silverlight) where Investiture is well known and understood and is likely the number one commodity. Discovering how to transport Stormlight is like discovering gold in California (let the gold rush begin!) only Thaidakar is being careful to keep his discovery under wraps so as to monopolize the market.

For the record, all the discussion about whether Shallan’s DID is done right can be solved simply by noting that her actual real world diagnosis would probably be OSDD-1b (Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder, type 1b), which is the diagnosis usually given in cases where the alters don’t have amnesia barriers between them. I do really hope that Brandon doesn’t use the jekyll & hyde stereotype where one of the alters is a muderer/serial killer type though, because that’s been done a lot and is probably the most damaging trope when it comes to how DID is usually portrayed in entertainment media.

While I highly doubt he’ll fade into the background for the next six books to suddenly pop out in book ten, I do think there’s a good chance Kaladin could swear both the fourth and fifth ideals in RoW.