Bloodfalcon

Yeah on his site is a preview chapter of the next Song of Ice and Fire book. Check it out! http://www.georgerrmartin.com/excerpt-from-the-winds-of-winter/

Welcome! I've had the same problem getting my friends to pick up thousand page books. You can only sit on your questions for so long until the itch to join sets in.

I spent several afternoons looking at that database - most of it on 5 or 6 topics that I care about most - and as good as my memory is, finding it again is a pain. You can only make shallow promises so many times before you just start saying, "Trust me, I saw it once, I swear." I am going to try to work on that blog post of mine to organize the ones I feel are important, and recently a couple posts have started compiling them, so that is helping. All that considered, it is still great to have backup.

Thanks Weiry. It's difficult to find support for most of this. Don't know how you slog through all that WoB, but I appreciate it.

Question: what would this theory propose is the reason for the plate staying around after the Recreance but acting differently than it did before? There's no bond, so it wouldn't really be like a dead spren body on the ground sort of deal as the Shardblades feel like, but it also does act differently in a lot of ways.

Brandon is intentionally shifty at these signings a lot of the time. If things don't get RAFO'd, it is a refreshing treat to get a solid answer on something as big as this issue. We all know what the word similar means, but the way you are using it to define things is actually using it to say nothing at all. Like saying "they will meet some qualities but not all" could also mean that they meet everything except holding some authority over a group of spren. There are so many individual qualities, known and unknown, that you are effectively only saying that we don't know. Which is the point of theorizing. The number being three is discussed up above, and comes to the same conclusion. Those are some possibilities, but perhaps not all of the Bondsmith spren we will see. You slightly misinterpreted the seditious line as well. What the quote is saying is that because they are specific/special spren, limited in quantity, asking the Order to expand and recruit more members was going against the very nature of the Order. It was an explanation of the limited size and its perception, not of the type of spren.

Right now I'm on episode 52 of FMA:B and I'm not liking it nearly as much as FMA. I hope the ending does it for me. The filler episodes that I see people trashing were what developed the characters enough for me to enjoy. Right now it feels like there are far to many characters with nearly no purpose. But that is pretty negative for a show that I'm not even done with. I'll post again when I'm finished, which should be soon. Really loved FMA including the movie at the end, so I have hope for the last dozen episodes of this one.

Plausible or not, this sounds fun.

Oh, I don't think Szeth is going to have some huge personal beef with Kaladin for any reason... I mean, Kaladin did kill him, but he had it coming. The conflict we were talking about is the one that is the same as the Windrunners/Skybreakers fued. It's just that the way they get things done collides. They have different views of what is the right way to enact justice.

He definitely said currently, and someone did ask him a question about Adonlasium/Roshar, but I don't have time to find it. There are SO MANY interview recordings and transcriptions. I tried to start creating my own personal database of important ones in a blog post and found that it is incredibly difficult to categorize, and also I had no idea the size of that task. I'll try to find the ones I'm referencing, but I'm at work now, so I can't. Pretty sure he laid it out though that there is no 4th Shard involvement. Sorry to disappointing It might be good for us though, because there is already so much going on. Leave some for other stories just for my sanity. Argent just made a post from one of the signings where he specifically says that 10 is not the number of Unmade. I came away thinking there were probably less, but I can't remember off the top of my head. EDIT: Here is the Unmade one Quote So I guess I had no reason from this to assume it was less than 10. That was an assumption. My bad.

Another view of this to consider is the classic "It's not possible! How are you doing that!?" reaction from old timers in response to young-bloods using powers. If any of you have read Wheel of Time, Experience can be overrated in magical worlds.

I agree, Moogie. I'm hoping that Stones Unhollowed is the one that puts both of us in our Venn Diagram middle zone as it relates to Szeth. After we see the backstory we'll be able to sympathize drastically better and hopefully he becomes a more understandable character. We are going to see his actual origin story, then understand exactly what WoK/WoR was all about - they remind me of adolescence in almost every way - and now he is going to hopefully take a turn toward the right path. He'll remain an annoyance to Kaladin, but overall his goals will adjust to become acceptably good. If not, we get to keep our awesomely bad character, and that is OK too. The Adolin incident is another place I agree. When you have solid proof - including admission of guilt - that a dude is responsible for throwing thousands of people to their deaths, it becomes almost a responsibility to take action when you can. (NOTE: This is a personal opinion and not a valid topic for discussion in this thread) That logic is going to be the difference between the two hopefully, but it is noticeably different than Szeth's stance before. I mean, it was just blind, mindless following. Here's to hoping it turns around. I really want to like our Assassin.

I could see that playing into rivalry that we know comes between Windrunners and Skybreakers though. Kaladin is all about protecting and doing the right thing, but "Justice" as determined by the Skybreakers might not fit into that. Szeth would adopt this view of justice that is just as twisted as his "you are not strong enough to kill me so it is your fault I'm slaying all of the people around you" theory.

Right, the point isn't whether or not it is a Shardblade or like a Shardblade. It is a invested blade, so that's what he said, but that wasn't the point of deceit. It's the effects of the blade (whatever anyone wants to call it) that is focus here. However I thought you were talking about how Nightblood doesn't really know what Justice is. IIRC it was a noted point in Warbreaker that Nightblood's idea of evil is shifty and vague. That's where the deceit would be... .... but I agree with deadlyDomino that Nightblood's forced will isn't all that effective. Where I disagree is that I think Szeth is extremely weak willed. Kaladin ended up saying in WoR something that I have felt for a while now - Szeth is hiding behind excuses to justify his carrying out orders related to his Truthless nature. He's a coward and a follower. I could see him being turned by Nightblood. Having a corrupt sense of justice feels like the next step for him.

Darkness wasn't going to be like "Hey buddy, I know that your entire planet refers to magic swords as 'Shardblades', but this is only like a Shardblade. In fact, it is an otherworldly sword that has a different planet's investiture - we'll get to that in a minute - so it is not the Shardbalde that you know and love." The point stands. He gave Szeth an invested blade, and I don't think the point was to deceive him. He just used the local terminology which isn't far off. Brandon's quote isn't talking about this specifically, he is just saying that the concept is the same.

Would you mind elaborating? I don't really know where you are going with this. He didn't imply that it would be difficult. If anything, he just put emphasis on the rarity. The superspren portion uses the word similar. So the beings that they bond are more like superspren than unlike superspren. The suggested correlation is what this theory is about. Any better than that and he would have been straight up confirming that the old Bondsmiths bond god or super spren.

Brandon said in an interview that Nightblood is a Shardblade. I believe the follow up question was whether or not bringing him to Roshar would then produce a spren, and I think it got the equivalent of a RAFO. There is about as much new interview information floating around as we got from all of WoR! PS Mikanium, what is your user image supposed to be? It looks kind of like a stylized Mistborn symbol, but I'm curious.

Thanks for doing this, Argent. It looks like a lot of work goes into these signing posts. The two answers that caught my attention the most were the Windrunners-squires information and, surprisingly, confirmation that Ash is Shallash. We kind of knew that, but I was still very surprised that he confirmed it. I'm excited to see all of the other specialty powers of the other Orders. Anytime there is another unique quality to each, I get happier and happier with the idea as a whole.

Yeah, that is a good question I don't know the answer to. And it is only a theory that they contribute to the Bondsmith spren group. BUT, there used to be 3 Bondsmiths. Brandon said there still is a limited amount, but perhaps the Unmade are more recent but qualify. Maybe there are like.... 6 potential Bondsmiths now. Could also be for another Order or none at all.

Brandon does have a pronunciation guide that he gives to Kate Reading and Michael Kramer, the orators who read the audiobooks, but he said that even they change things sometimes. As mentioned, his stance is that they are open to interpretation.

We have it said explicitly by Brandon that 1) The Unmade could potentially be bonded. 2) There have only been 3 Shards on Roshar.

It's a good point, but the Stormfather isn't exactly trying to help humans either. In fact, he summons a storm to annihilate them all when the Everstorm is coming. There needs to be a limited amount of them and they need to be spren, and these god-spren fit the bill better than anything. We don't know much about Unmade right now anyway.

The moment Lift teams up with Willy Wonka, it's all over. One Everlasting Gobstopper and we enter the Era of Eternal Awesomeness.

Unless Brandon's account does another Q&A soon, he's going to get passed up. Would it make sense to just bump him to the top artificially?

It sounded to me like there were a couple of characteristics that fit the Stormfather spren that qualify two other candidates that we have heard mentioned. They boil down into this though - They move around, and they distribute something to the people who are in X range. I'm speaking of the two spren that Taravangian has been tracking. The Stormfather travels around Roshar distributing Stormlight and crem. Spren 2 travels around (as noted by Mr. T) and distributes the Deathrattles. Spren 3 is also mobile (same reason (I think)) and distributes the Thrill. Whether or not they are mobile, I guess, does not matter, but it indicates that they are sentient beings instead of natural forces alone that occur everywhere. So my thought was that one is from Honor (Stormfather), the second is from Cultivation (Nightwatcher?) because it has to do with future sight sort of thing, and the third is of Odium (?) because of the whole loving to cut living things to pieces mechanic of the Thrill. As evidence of the Deathrattles being Cultivation, several times people say that seeing the future is of the Voidbringers, but we know to some degree that this is a little bit unfounded because Renarin is a Surgebinder and as far as I know, not a Voidbringer. I don't know if any of this is right, but I've stopped creating theory threads of my own, and this seemed like the best time to drop this down.