Seloun

Lighteyes (general attitude is understandable, Kaladin just takes it further and irrationally): Not being in a life-or-death struggle (it's like he gets bored, possibly keeping in with his 'always in motion' sort of theme): New things (Kaladin is actually pretty conservative in many of his opinions; makes you wonder if he'd be so anti-light eyes under different circumstances): Claustraphobia - okay, he's in prison, which is not a bad reason to be depressed, but e.g. Adolin seems to have handled it rather better. It affects him more than the hypothetical average person, anyway. Getting people lost probably to their deaths. So this is not necessarily unreasonable, per se, but it has an interesting comment alluding to other events in Kaladin's past: Good food:

I'll go with the obvious - the rain: It's not necessarily specific to Kaladin, but the way it affects him isn't that common, as mentioned in the passage, and note that very next chapter Shallan goes on about how happy she is about the rain:

Kaladin having killed Helaran will need to be resolved somehow, and given the build up over two books, it's likely to become a significant plot point. I would wager that during Oathbringer Kaladin will be out of comms from Shallan, that she'll find out about Helaran's death from some shady source (Amaram or Mraize most likely), and make some bad decision about Kalaran as a result. Classic miscommunication plot. So it may not be a conventional romantic triangle, but Kaladin will certainly strongly be in Shallan's mind one way or another, and Adolin-Kaladin bromance is real. I woudn't be surprised if the romantic angle gets played up a bit early on, before the Helaran revelation (you could argue WoR already started this) as to make the reveal more impactful for Shallan.

The battlefield is actually quite a bit in Szeth's favor in that there's effectively unlimited Stormlight nearby, rendering Kaladin's superior efficiency moot. Kaladin's real strength is that he can heal from Shardblade wounds. Being able to change the form of his Shardblade is certainly a big benefit for Kaladin, too, but the fight probably would have been over very quickly had Kaladin not been able to heal his arm. Once Kaladin lets his instincts take over, Szeth can't really match him. Kaladin also has an enormous advantage in terms of endurance, despite the stormwall - he can potentially heal any non-lethal hits while any clean hits Kaladin inflicts on Szeth are essentially permanent. While the environment was chaotic enough that either could have gotten a lucky killing shot, and mostly mitigated Szeth's lack of stormlight efficiency, I think Kaladin still has a significant advantage in that matchup even with Szeth in peak condition.

Oh, I completely agree that bondfarming or blaming the spren for something is not a necessary conclusion to the premise that the Radiants intentionally killed their spren. It's just a hypothesis that seems to explain that premise well, or at least better than any others I'm aware of presently. I think a strong emotional investment into the act explains the Radiant's behavior best, but it's not impossible that they had no other choice but to act in that fashion to do whatever they needed to do, or their emotions could have been directed somewhere besides the spren.

The Stormfather says he didn't see what Dalinar saw (with the golden light, and the champions), suggesting that that was not actually part of the vision. I'm inclined to think that Gavilar is somehow related. Gavilar certainly seemed to have come very close to releasing the Unmade, and he was actively trying to bring about a Desolation (even if it was for what he thought was ultimately a good cause - Journey before Destination, road to hell, etc.). Of course, he has the slight problem of being dead. Looking at the references to 'champion' in WoR brings up this passage: I always assumed that this was a hint that Elhokar was a proto-Radiant, but what if it's actually something rather more sinister? One of the possibilities that came to mind was that the Thrill might be somehow associated with his Shardplate given how Adolin is affected by the Thrill in the duel against Salinor: However, the armor is golden rather than black, which is may be evidence against. On the other hand, Elhokar is pretty far from the army during the attack on the center of the Shattered Plains, where Adolin stops feeling the Thrill. This might be simply because Nerghull moved on (Adrastia talks about potentially triangulating its position using the Thrill, but that assumes it doesn't move), though that still begs to question why Nerghull may have moved on. I thought for a while that it might have been related to Kaladin recovering his bond (based on Elhokar comment about the shadows) but the timing doesn't seem to fit; Adolin's battle with Estonai appears to occur before Kaladin's recovery, though I don't believe there is any explicit proof of the relative order those occur. So my vague theory is that Elhokar may have somehow inherit something from Gavilar that ties him to Odium, and his resentment for how he's basically the butt of all jokes will end him in becoming Odium's champion. I'm not sure whether the fact Kaladin saves him from assassination would help or hurt the case; initially I thought it might be too ironic, but on reflection that could ultimately help Elhokar redeem himself after becoming Odium's champion (and lead to Odium's defeat).

Having the spren able to manipulate the Material before having a bond isn't really fundamental to the theory, regardless. It's not necessary for the spren to have personally physically caused the KR to break, e.g. they could have convinced a group like Sons of Honor. That said, given that unbonded (possibly non-Nahel) spren can definitely affect the Material world, and that spren presumably can communicate with each other in the Cognitive, it seems likely that any spren can potentially convince a more manifested spren to affect the Material world. Even if this is somehow the case, it's not really an issue for the theory as long as there is some way for the spren to have been ultimately responsible for generating more broken individuals for their purposes (e.g. through intermediaries, leaving messages, misrepresenting when communicating with people visiting the Cognitive, etc.). Doing something in the Cognitive that e.g. extended the duration of Desolations likely would have qualified, or possibly convincing the Heralds to break their Oaths in the first place, neither of which requires any direct manipulation of the Material.

It's not really clear that Shallan's mother had a chance to tell anyone before she acted. It's possible that e.g. she wanted to deal with it quietly so she wouldn't be tainted by association. Helaran didn't run off immediately after her mother's death, either, so he had a long period of observing Shallan not Surgebinding. He definitely believed that her father killed her mother and friend: (em mine)

I'm not sure there's enough information to conclude this. Soulcasting seems to occur through interaction in the Cognitive. There are spren that do have partial physical representation and they seem to be able to interact with Cognitive spren to some degree: So spren generally can have manifestations in both the Cognitive and the Material, and different spren manifest in differing amounts. Objects have(?) spren, which can at the very least transform themselves, causing a physical change. We see this with Shallan's transformation of the boat and pretty much all of the fabrials as well, e.g. It doesn't have to be easy for the spren to manipulate the Material world to do so or want to do so; indeed, one could easily argue that that very difficulty could be the reason why they'd want to do so. It's worth considering what the spren get from the bond, whether they value it, and whether they value it enough to do potentially stupid things for it. Given that Pattern seems to think he's essentially committing suicide by bonding with Shallan, but still finds it worthwhile, I'd say what they get from the bond is quite highly valued indeed: So the spren want to bond, and at least some of them are willing to die for a chance to live, so to speak. Also, the spren don't necessarily understand humans all that well in their original form: So in my bondfarming theory, I'd assume the spren began somewhat innocently (e.g. some bright spren realizes that Desolation => more people become KR => more smart spren, therefore: cause more Desolations!) and possibly continued even they began knowing better (bad behavior that becomes normalized due to lack of counteraction is notoriously easy to maintain) but ultimately were sufficiently involved that the KR could be convinced that the spren caused them to break for their own purposes. Hence to huge counter-reaction to the spren by the KR.

This theory runs into the already mentioned problem of 'why did the Radiants choose to break their oaths in this particular manner?' It also doesn't explain why even if the Radiants were betrayed, they would take it out on innocent people/spren (presumably the KR are still Cool Dudes, just butthurt, so to speak, in the betrayal scenario, or it must also explain why they suddenly became callous, immoral individuals). Wouldn't it make more sense that they would act against/lash out against the ones that betrayed them? Which is why I reiterate: given that they specifically killed the spren in a way to make it essentially impossible for them to revive, the spren must somehow have been responsible for whatever caused their actions (or were otherwise indirectly associated with whatever caused their action, e.g. Heralds betrayed us -> somehow spren power the Heralds -> kill spren to punish Heralds (please note this is an example of a chain of reasoning that would validate against this specific point; I don't subscribe to this particular theory). Hence bondfarming. There doesn't really seem to be a lot of direct reasons to punish the spren otherwise given what's currently known. This runs into the same problem as the above ( 'why did the Radiants choose to break their oaths in this particular manner?') but in a different way. If this is the case, why not leave instructions? The KR don't say anything to the soldiers as they leave the Shards; this is really strange given that no matter what their aims were, saying something probably would have furthered them, even possibly as a reverse-psychology sort of thing. Further, this seems like an odd way to leave a lot of Shards, given there aren't really that many. The 200 or so from just the two Orders are more than Dalinar believed existed in the entire world: Of course, Dalinar could be missing a huge cache of them somewhere, but even so in the best case you're talking about (number of KR during Recreance) + (number of KR in the modern era) which is unlikely to be much larger than the first number.

It's worth noting that there's probably a way to recycle the spren, at least while the bond is active. Otherwise, the entire planet would be hip-deep in shardblades from all the Radiants/Surgebinders that have existed throughout history (far before the Recreance). Since figuring out how to bond dead shardblades was something relatively recent (post-Recreance, for sure) this suggests that the dead shardblades are a relatively new thing. Given that it seems unlikely that a KR never broke an oath pre-Recreance, there's probably a way to rebond, revive or recycle the dead spren. Maybe what the Skybreakers are doing are related to this - there's no reason to think Helaran's Blade was a live one; perhaps Nale knows of a way of reawakening them somehow though the Oaths, similarly to how Kaladin 'resurrected' Syl.

It's actually not at all obvious that he's Shallan's mother's lover. That's a story that her father concocted to protect Shallan's reputation. In particular, he let it be rumored that he murdered his wife and her lover in a jealous rage so the fact Shallan killed them wouldn't be known. And it's almost certainly Shallan that killed him, since near the end of WoR when she's recalling the scene she says (Emphasis mine) It's theoretically possible that she means this metaphorically (she killed her mother for sure with the Shardblade, but it could have e.g. led to her father killing the other man) due to the 'blood' associated with the other man, but she also mentions that the bleeding wound wasn't what kill him. I don't think it explicitly mentions his eyes being burned out or that Shallan killed him (as a direct reference, rather than as the group) but it's very heavily implied. There are lots of possibilities regarding why her mother and friend came after Shallan, but the most reasonable (and I think commonly assumed) theory is probably that she was associated with the Skybreakers. Given what we've seen from Lift's chapter and Edgebringer, and Helaran being associated with the Skybreakers, this is a pretty good bet.

It doesn't really have a lot of Cosmere relevance, but The Emperor's Soul is probably my favorite non-Stormlight work by Brandon Sanderson. I actually didn't enjoy any of the Mistborn series, so YMMV.

The specific quote is So it's actually not clear that the Rosharians need to choose a champion. It's definitely talking about Odium choosing a champion (with the potential implication that the Rosharians will also need to choose a champion if e.g. the specific rule is about a duel or something). It might also be Odium e.g. choosing a champion to fight, but in either case it clearly suggests that it's Odium's choice.

Spren are absolutely sentient and can indeed plan things without being bonded. There's something about coming over to the material realm that seems to cause them great trauma, but they're perfectly capable of agency in the Cognitive. There's multiple references for this, including a number of things Wyndle says, what Jasnah talks about regarding the Highspren, and references of cities and other edifices in the Cognitive. Just from Wyndle from Lift's chapter in WoR: There's plenty of issues with the bondfarming theory (though mostly areas that other theories also have trouble explaining) but the spren not being able to plan and act on their own isn't one of them.

I tend to prefer critical moments in dialogue or points of revelation. Not that I don't like awesome action scenes, but I sometimes feel those are 'cheap' because the author can often throw those in without a lot of preparation. Turning points in conversations that cause character development or put previous actions in context? Lot less cheap. In no particular order, and not exhaustive: Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway. But this was who she was, who she had to be. “For the bridgemen,” he said. “A true scholar must not close her mind on any topic,” “We enslaved them.” He clung to her, this monster, this callous thing that had once been a Herald. “Sometimes,” Taravangian said, “you must tear down a structure to build a new one with stronger walls.” “I’m sorry,” she whispered, unhooking her necklace. “Thank you for what you did for me.” She wrapped the necklace around his neck. “You are what I’ve been looking for.” “I believe I can actually agree with that, though I suspect for different reasons than you imply. Perhaps this walk won’t be as bad as I had feared.”

Founding through dishonorable means - probably not. Maintaining the Orders through dishonorable means - almost certainly. My bondfarming theory is that the KR were keeping their numbers up (again, probably without the KR themselves knowing at first) through the spren intentionally causing traumatic events to break candidates. As an aside, note the spren bond itself doesn't seem to depend on the Oaths (surgebinders existed before KR). Instead the text seems to suggest that the Heralds (Ishi specifically) found a way to bind the spren abilities to the Oaths in some fashion that makes them work the way we do with the modern KR. It's not really the bonding that's at issue so much as the Oaths. We've seen Szeth abandon his oaths (and it was as extreme and traumatic as we would expect). Kaladin does abandon his oaths for a short period of time. Really all it takes is for them to change their minds, which any sort of new revelation could potentially do. I think something on par with bondfarming or learning the Heralds abandoned their responsibilities, or understanding how the Desolation cycles worked (or misunderstanding) could have been sufficient for this particular point (though as noted before, the reactions of the KR suggests to me that it was something personal and related to the spren). I agree though that it's unlikely every KR or even nearly every KR would have come to the same conclusion about their oaths. I think it's more likely a large number of them did agree (let say a signiicant majority), and that some that agreed felt it was justified to enforce their views on the rest (e.g. Skybreakers). Sort of a murder-suicide thing. This would require a lot less of the KR necessarily agreeing. I don't think it's immediately obvious that the spren would have immediately attempted to re-bond. Based on what we've seen from the modern KR spren, the process of crossing over is extremely traumatic and probably would have required a good support system to succeed on a consistent basis. We've seen from Darkness's vignettes that newbie surgebinders generally don't have much of a chance again Nale hunting them down, and the way he talks in Edgebringer suggests that he's dealt with quite a few surgebinders. I'm not completely sure that the spren could have been killed so thoroughly without bearers that acted in extremely dishonorable fashion. Causing the infighting could have basically been the whole point of the exercise. Based on the vision, it seems like the result was specifically intended (since as noted, there were plenty of other, more rational alternatives if the infighting was not desirable) or the KR proactively didn't care (e.g. due to very personal reasons - sort of cop out, but KR don't seem immune to making bad decisions due to personal feelings).

If there's something dishonest underlying the Radiants, I think this could have resulted in all (or most) of the Knights abandoning their oaths. One of the big things about the first Oath is that the ends can't justify the means: If the KR were founded through what they would have viewed as dishonorable means, I could see all or most of the Knights disbanding, since it breaks the first Oath.I don't think it's also definitively established that every KR abandoned their Oaths for the same reasons; it certainly seems possible that a large chunk of the KR disbanding could have caused the organization overall to start falling apart. Alternatively, the Skybreakers deciding that they suddenly had to hunt down all KR while the greater part of the military arm of the KR disbanding could have led to the organization collapsing. As to the second point, we actually don't know that the Recreance happened all at once. Dalinar's vision shows two Orders (and possibly not the entirety of the Orders) disbanding. This is likely the first instance since there's no rumors about this possibility or anything at all that suggests anyone besides the KR knows what might be going on, but it's not really at all clear that this was being simultaneously repeated by every KR nor that this is the entire Order of Windrunners and Stonewards. For the third point: I think it's possible that the entire point was to make the spren essentially unrevivable. It's still unclear what happens if a KR dies/retires in good standing, so to speak, but it seems unlikely that it results in a dead spren in the same way the abandoned shards do (or there should be a -ton- of dead shards floating around from before the Recreance). The trickiest part is the lack of good documentation or explanation for their actions; it's possible that it was documented (later) and it just didn't survive (quite possible given the scarcity of information from that era in general) or that documentation would defeat the purpose (e.g. KR wanted to make sure there would be no future KR by obfuscating as much as possible; this potentially ties in with the Skybreaker/Nale's activities). Basically we really don't know that all the Radiants disbanded in the same manner or for the same immediate cause, nor the specifics of the timeline, beyond what Dalinar's vision shows us (it's also worth noting as an aside that Dalinar's visions can't literally be what happened, since he can affect what happens in the vision).

The humor isn't really the appealing part of Lift (for me, anyway). And indeed, I found her initial interlude story pretty annoying - until: The last sentence I always find to be especially haunting, and more than anything else puts Lift into context: She's the one who listens and remembers. Her irreverence is almost more of a means of coping, something that Edgedancer seems to convey pretty well. On topic: I found Dalanar to be somewhat overhyped. Especially in WoR, he really doesn't do all that much and a lot of his talks are of somewhat questionable reasoning. Kaladin and Syl shills for Dalanar a lot, but for the most part it's just that he's not a complete monster or completely incompetent like the other leaders. Don't get me wrong, I like Dalanar for the most part; I just think he's not really the paragon of virtue that a lot of characters seem to think he is.

Actually (with the usual caveat that assuming Dalanar's vision is correct): The Radiants didn't all break their bonds at once here (presumably). It's notable enough that Dalanar comments on it to himself. The ones that did break their bonds in this event are probably the two most 'honorable' Orders based on what we know about Windrunners, the founder of the Stonewards (Taln) and their apparent positions on the Surgebinding chart. It's quite possible (in the context of the bond farming theory) that their spren were only peripherally involved or most willing to accept the necessity of the broken bond. Again, whatever theory trying to explain the Recreance has to be able to explain why the Radiants (these particular ones) chose to break their bonds in this fashion. Surely there would have been ways to break their bond in a more private or more respectful manner towards the spren. The Radiants throw away their spren like trash, in a highly public way. It's hard not to interpret this as being something done out of highly personal motivation rather than simply calculated.

The most important aspect of the Recreance from my perspective is what the Radiants apparently did during it, assuming Dalanar's vision is more or less accurate. In particular, they killed their spren. This is in my opinion the single most important aspect that needs to be explained by any theory regarding the reason for the Recreance. What would cause Kaladin to callously kill off Syl? Because this is effectively what the Windrunners do in Dalanar's vision. It's pretty hard to imagine that, if the Windrunners are anything like Kaladin, that they would all be so casually willing to kill off innocents regardless of the potential consequences or peripheral association with the real problem. Even if the bond was somehow causing the Desolations or whatever, I don't think that alone would be sufficient to treat their spren so coldly. If the spren weren't the cause or otherwise intimately involved, surely the Radiants could have found a different or at least a more respectful solution. This leads me to believe that the Recreance must have been somehow related to the spren themselves, in a fashion that would lead the Radiants to believe that the spren were guilty of something that justified killing them. Let's look at the end of WoR for a possible candidate for something that might qualify (emphasis mine): What's something that could cause Kaladin to consider killing Syl? Well, let's see what caused Kaladin to become broken enough to bond Syl in the first place: Tien's death. What if Kaladin was convinced that Syl caused Tien's death somehow? And that she benefited from Tien's death. We know that Radiants need to be 'broken' to bond with spren. We know that spren gain sentience from the bond, and that the spren like the benefits of being bonded. What if the spren (perhaps only a subset of them) intentionally caused trauma to make more hosts available for bonding? It doesn't necessarily have to just be the spren. Maybe somebody thought it might be really helpful to a bunch more Radiants around and made it seem like the spren were complicit (or perhaps just not opposed). Ultimately, something that seemed to indicate their spren were somehow benefiting or profiting from their breaking, and doing so intentionally. That's my 'bond farming' theory of the Recreance: The spren intentionally (or perhaps unintentionally, but inevitably, e.g. natural reaction as 'dumb' spren) created potential Radiants by 'breaking' them, or were framed as doing so. This 'secret' was what caused the Radiants to disassociate with the spren, and in a fashion that punished the spren.

Navani does seem to be selling herself somewhat short, but her internal monologue seems pretty self-deprecating regarding her scholarship. I view her as someone who's pretty talented, but not dedicated enough to be a researcher (there's some implication that she spent most of her youth in politics).

What is your derivation for this? Looks like you're asserting 10,000 earth-hours in a Rosharan year, but I'm not sure where you are getting that from (or rather, I understand 10 x 1000 hours; I don't understand how you determine 1 Rosharan hour = 1 Earth hour). WoB regarding Kaladin's age;

I always found the following quote to be interesting: From this, we can conclude that: A: Jasnah has some issue with Amaram (either personally or perhaps just as a romantic partner) and that it's a significant enough issue that she says it would 'never' happen (this is a very odd position for someone who's rational and evidence-based to be taking - remember her point about how a scholar should always leave herself open to new evidence); B: Jasnah's issue with Amaram was something she didn't share with Gavilar. This isn't necessarily a strong indictment, since she's hiding her dealings with Liss as well (but then again, potentially plotting the murder of your sister-in-law is a pretty extreme thing to hide, too). However, there's indication that she was on pretty good terms with her father otherwise ever since Gavilar's return from the Shattered Plains, so whatever her issue was is presumably something she felt she had to hide. While Jasnah doesn't necessarily connect with people (e.g. coldness towards Navani - though perhaps that's understandable...) she's pretty forthright about telling people what she's expecting from them. If it was just a matter of disliking Amaram or something, I don't see why Jasnah would have simply told Gavilar that. Quote for A: Quote for B: