happyman

On 1/4/2021 at 5:48 PM, stonewalker16 said:

54. Hoid may not introduce The Lopen to Wayne or vice versa

(Gibbers in terror in the corner. "The quiping just never stopped!")

On 11/7/2020 at 6:46 PM, Ookla the Knight said:

Immortality and inability to cause harm to living things reminds me a lot of Preservation, and what Rysn has seems to be the opposite of that. So instead of immortality, short life? Either way, she didn't know what she was signing up for.

She was signing up to "live for more than two more minutes." A decrease in lifespan would be an acceptable outcome to her, I'd say.

That said, I seriously doubt the DawnShard will actively kill her; probably quite the opposite. After all, holding Ruin itself didn't kill Ati directly. He was functionally immortal, although he sprenified pretty bad.

7 hours ago, travisperro said:

So the question is

  Reveal hidden contents

In order to help Kaladin, Dalinar clearly reaches into the spiritual realm and uses the Connection between him and Tien to create the vision that helps Kal to accept the 4th Ideal, but should't this Connection be unavailable, as Tien must have already moved to the Beyond?

I thought Brandon Sanderson had said that it would leave the Beyond be, but this confuses me.

Any help to understand it? Thanks

Apparently time isn't a thing in the spiritual realm. I don't know how literally this can be true given that people continually make decisions that change the future, but the past is the past and thus fixed. However, I suspect that this does mean that spiritual bonds transcend time and space, and since Kaladin had an existing, and quite potent, connection to Tien, the fact that he had been dead for years wasn't a barrier in the spiritual realm.

On 1/17/2019 at 8:52 AM, CrazyRioter said:

Yeah that's a BIG Edgedancer moment. Most people would just keep on walking when faced with that kind of scene because they don't want to get involved.

To play devil's advocate, Adolin could get away with stuff like that because of his rank and because he's a Shardbearer.  There's other people who'd be willing to help out, but don't want to mess with Sadeas' men.  And they may well be right not to; they might end up making the situation worse.

That said, though, I feel it's still an indicator.  His rank could just as easily have made him arrogant and dismissive of the prostitute, but it didn't.  He stood up for her partly because he could, but also because he obviously felt it was right as well.

On 7/1/2018 at 6:43 PM, Drake Marshall said:

Very true. Then again, I believe the dragons of Yolen were already sapient.

As were the Sho Del.

It's been mooted.  Nobody knows.

On 5/24/2018 at 8:30 PM, Mordray said:

I'm asking because of the fifth heightening... ie the one where one becomes immortal. Seems kind of a cheap thing that after making it to that point... perhaps even having that state being the end goal... only to have some random critter be capable of taking it from you. Which could well result in death via rapid aging.

That's one thing about breath immortality that's really nice, especially compared to atium immortality:  It's actually stopping your body from aging.  If you lived until the age of, say, 25 before you got any breaths, and then got catapulted straight to the fifth heightening, lived for 2000 years, and then had it all stripped away from you somehow, you'd suddenly begin aging as though you were 25 again.  Your spiritual connections and what-not would presumably still "know" how old you actually were, but they would also "know" that you got that old through having an absurd amount of breath for 2000 years, and that you "should" be aging as though you had been in perfect health for 2000 years.  It's great.

In a re-read of Oathbringer, I discovered the following little quote, from Moash' POV:

Quote

He looked up towards the skies, towards both Damnation and the Tranquiline Halls.

What this strongly suggests, to me, is that Moash at least knows how to see Damnation and the Tranquiline Halls in the sky.  The two phrases aren't generic, like our human description of the Heavens; they are specific places which are distinct from each other and can be seen. 

We're pretty much certain Braize is Damnation, and also another planet in the Greater Roshar system.  This means that somebody who knows what they are doing could spot it on a clear night (when the geometry is right), just as easily as one of us could spot Mars or Venus.  Presumably the same could be said about Ashyn.

This strikes me as an indication of a couple of things:

1) At least some of the Rosharan humans were originally from Ashyn.  This is not a surprise, nor is it something I would seriously contest, but this is another point in favor of it.  The Tranquiline halls were (are) Ashyn.

2) At least some people on Roshar know this, to some extent.  It's not at all clear how much of the astronomy they've managed to put together, but it sounds like they have at least a couple of strong hints.

I'm not completely sure about this, because I vaguely remember some comments about the Tranquiline Halls becoming Damnation, but it's easy to see the elements mixing in various ways.  I don't think it rules out at least some people remembering that they were separate places, and even where they would appear in the sky.

Kaellok,

Your points make very good logical sense.  The thing about this kind of crisis of faith, though, is that it is mostly emotional.  There are people who logic their way out of their previous beliefs, but the Radiants are, by their very actions, True Believers.  Nothing speaks belief like the kind of action they have to take to keep the oaths.  Having their faith broken would lead to all kinds of things, at least one of which is depression.  In the depths of depression, people do things exactly as stupid as you are describing.  More stupid, even.

But I wouldn't be opposed to there being more about it than we have learned.  I do think, though, that some folks are pushing the logical side more than the Radiants in the book, of any age, did.  Certainly the actions of Kaladin and the bridgemen felt real to me at a gut level, even as I knew that it made no sense.

We have gone far too long in this thread without quoting the most important commentary on The Recreance Reveal in the entire book:  Kaladin and Syl's understanding of it.  I'm going to emphasize the bits which I think are most relevant for this discussion.

..."It's true, then?" he finally said.  "About the parshmen.  That this was their land, their

world, before we arrived.  That...that we were the Voidbringers?"

She nodded.  "Odium is the void, Kaladin.  He draws in emotion and doesn't let it go.  You...you brought him with you.  I wasn't alive then, but I know this truth.  He was your first god, before you turned to Honor."

Kaladin exhaled slowly, closing his eyes.

The men of Bridge Four were having trouble with this idea. As well they should. Others in the military didn't care, but his men...they knew.

You could protect your home.  You could kill to defend the people inside.  But what if you'd stolen that house in the first place?  What if the people you killed were only trying to get back what was rightfully theirs?

[Kaladin thinks about his family and news from the war.]

It got so complicated.  Humans had lived upon this land for thousands of years.  Could anyone really be expected to let go because of what ancient people had done, no matter how dishonorable their actions?

Who did he fight?  Who did he protect?

Defender? Invader?

Honorable knight?  Hired thug?

"The Recreance," he said to Syl.  "I always imagined it as a single event.  A day the knights all gave up their Shards, like in Dalinar's vision.  But I don't think it actually happened like that."

"Then...how?"  Syl asked?

"Like this," Kaladin said.  He squinted, watching the light of a setting sun play on the ocean.  "They found something they couldn't ignore.  Eventually they had to face it."

"They made the wrong choice."

Kaladin pocketed the stone.  "The oaths are about perception, Syl.  You confirmed that.  The only thing that matters is whether or not we are confident that we're obeying our principles.  If we lose that confidence, then dropping the armor and weapons is only a formality."

"Kal---"

"I'm not going to do the same," he said.  "I'd like to think that the past of Bridge Four will make us a little more pragmatic than those ancient Radiants.  We won't abandon you.  But finding out what we will do might end up being messy.

Notice that this quote does a pretty good job of squashing the folks who claim that the reaction from the Radiants was too small.  In reality, the reason it didn't have much impact on the book is because it came out towards the end.  Between when Dalinar first learned The Secret, and this scene was, best I can tell, within the same day, the day of the battle of Thaylen City.  It was a pretty busy (200+ page) day, but still the same day.  Dalinar had essentially the same scene earlier the same day, and he stopped thinking about mostly because the battle was quite literally right there, right then, spear-headed by Odium himself.

Pretty much as soon as they had a chance to absorb what they had learned, Dalinar, Bridge Four, and Kaladin almost instantly had the same gut reaction:  What are we doing, and why are we doing it?  We don't see Shallan's reaction, but then the records do claim that the Windrunner's were among the first affected, and the ones most strongly affected.

Kaladin also describes the basic problem with trying to keep the Oaths with this kind of sucker-punch.  It's important to remember that original the Knight's Radiant were, in many ways, religious orders.  They literally drew their power from their god, and they did so by keeping some of their god's commandments (situational commandments, sure, but they fit the individuals pretty well).  Discovering that the commandments themselves may be literally impossible to keep...it's one of the world's most extreme examples of a crisis of faith I've ever heard of.  And like most crises of faith, the reaction probably differed from person to person.  Some made a big public demonstration of it, like many Windrunners.  Some probably just---disappeared.  In all cases, though, they probably didn't do it because they wanted to.  They did it because---because they didn't believe any more.  It wasn't that they wanted to hurt their spren, it was because their was literally no way forward that they could see---perceive---in which they kept their oaths.

I do kind of like hoiditthroughthegrapevine's idea, though, that the last straw was how the remaining Radiants treated the listeners during the False Desolation.  His reconstruction of events makes sense.  Combine the effect the end of the False Desolation had on the parsh (e.g. turned sapient creatures into mindless slaves) with the fact that said sapient creatures were in fact the original inhabitants of the planet, and that humans had brought their own evil with them...yeah, that sounds like just the one-two punch that would send the bulk of the orders into a destructive spiral which eventually ended up killing all their spren.

On 8/16/2017 at 6:25 PM, FirstSelector said:

Also, we should not be so hasty as to assume that Preservation's intent (under any of its holders) would stay their hands.  There is a good argument to be made that making someone a mistborn/misting would drastically improve their chances of, say, surviving the events of the Final Empire.  As such, it would be in line with the Shard's intent to allow them to Preserve their own life.

It gets better.  As per the events of HoA, a part of Preservation's power, under Leras, actively made normal people mistings as part of his deliberate effort to preserve the planet and its people.

Pretty sure it is within Preservation's power to create Mistborn directly.  Probably not easy, but definitely possible.

13 hours ago, The Flash said:

What deep secrets of hoid would be revealed? What would he have been? I know nobody is going to have true answers, but I wonder if maybe his funky spiritual aspect would mess things up. 

I wonder if you wouldn't see him as one of the Vessels?  In Secret History, Leras implies that Hoid turned against them for some reason.  If he hadn't, that seems like one plausible outcome.

I like this thread.  My main concern is that it's missing Dalinar's vision of the Recreance.  I feel like that should really be included.  In doesn't tell us as much about the bigger situation, like the annotations do, but for completeness, it seems like we should at least include a few snippets.

On 5/24/2017 at 10:00 AM, jofwu said:

I mean... It's ultimately a cultural thing.It's an Aonic name if it contains an Aon and is used by someone from an aonic culture.

Just like an Irish name is a name originating from Ireland.

Oreo COULD be an aonic name. Though, it would be pronounced something like "o-REE-OH" not "OHR-ee-oh".

Now I'm thinking of the Oreos from Wreck-it Ralph (Oh-ree-oh. Oh-Reeee-oh. Oh-ree-oh. Oh-Reeee-oh. ).  That gag really worked in that movie...

You've pretty much summed up why people who like the story, well, like it.

I was reading it earlier today in my copy of Arcanum Unbounded.  It really is a three-way character study (Shai, Gaotona, and the emperor) and I think it works beautifully.

Incidentally, if you want to learn more about what Brandon thinks about all of this (plot vs. character) you should totally check out the writing excuses podcast.  They talk about different authors approaches to creating stories and what works and doesn't work for different people.

It turns out that evolution has been referenced in the books.  When Sazed is busy remaking the world during his Ascension, he talks about how he had to rebuild human genetics. The direct quote is:

From the Canzi teachings about the body, Sazed determined that the physiology of mankind had changed-either by the Lord Ruler's intention or by simple evolution-to adapt to breathing ash and eating brown plants.

This doesn't say whether evolution actually happened in the Cosmere or not, but it strongly suggests that the concept was known and understood to the Keepers.  It seems very likely that a Shard, even an inexperienced Shard like Sazed, would be able to figure it out the details pretty quickly, seeing how they can see and understand DNA almost instantly.  As far as I know, this is the most canonical evidence that we have about evolution in the Cosmere, and it's pretty unambiguously in favor of the idea, even if the time-spans we experience the Cosmere on are too short to see it happen in practice.

On 2/26/2017 at 0:00 PM, AerionBFII said:

Pehaps Helaran was just an initiate? He had just joined the Skybreakers after seeking them out and was under guidance until he could attract his own Highspren, until he could perform the Nahel Bond he was "loaned" a Shardblade. Heralds are considered deities, who could loan out a Shardlade without fear of them not returning it? The Answer:

An insane immortal leader of a highly dangerous group of super powered vigilantes. Who you just stiffed.

 

 

 

I don't care if this is true or false (OK, not completely true; you make a good point).  But I seriously love the wording.

My personal guess is that if they aren't in any other secret society, they are part of the YASSOR.

(That stands for Yet Another Secret Society On Roshar.  It's the default I give to anybody who's even a little bit mysterious.)

On 2/2/2017 at 7:24 AM, Ironeyes said:

Most of this went over my head, but are you suggesting that there's a "Ruin" electron field and a "Preservation" electron field, and that the particles we're discussing are excitations of those separate fields? 

At it's most simple, yes.  They'd be related to each other, though, in complex ways which allow them to be exchanged without changing the way the world works.  It's subtle, though, and I'm not planning on working out the details.  It's enough handwavium for me to remember that things don't have to be either fermions or bosons, but with more fields, they can be more complex.

2 hours ago, Belzedar said:

For movies, I think there'd be spren for different tones and genres. Actionspren. Suspense-spren (evolved from anticipationspren). Epicspren (evolved from gloryspren). Witspren, for Joss Whedon dialogue. Artsyspren, for Oscarbait. Marketingspren, for product placement.  

Plus modern-world spren for both real life and fiction. Cutespren. Awkwardspren. Hipsterspren. Nerdspren. Memespren. Tweetspren. Probably Pokemonspren.

In this world, Nintendo would be seriously irritated by how easy it would be to spot large groupings of virtual Pokemon.  You wouldn't even need to buy the game!

11 hours ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

We didn't know of ambition when we got the WoB. We hadn't seen him yet. That's why I say it can't be him.

The Selish Shards seem to be the most shattered to me, due to being stuck in the Cognitive realm.

Resisting....

Resisting....

OK, here it is.  Let us pray that Brandon never tells us it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, as of the time BoM was published, who Trell actually is.

It would be hilarious, but still very wrong.

21 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

*In a time short enough for 'the scouring of Aimia' to be seen as one historical event, anyway. I can see it being done over centuries of settlement, clearcutting forests etc. - although that wouldn't be complete enough to keep creatures that can split into a thousand little bug-lets from hanging on in the changed environment.

Sapient creatures no less.  Surely that makes wiping them out much, much harder?

Ruin is perfectly happy to build a building if it can then be knocked over and take out half the city.  Doing a little bit of preservation on one person in order to create the killing machines we know and love as Inquisitors is perfectly within Ruin's Intent. 

57 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

I was under the impression that the prophecies listed the Hero of Ages for two things. Firstly, they would be the ones who would use the Well to fix the world and reinforce Ruin's prison every 1000 years, and secondly the last one would be the one who took up the power of both shards to save the world.

That's why Alendi was called the Hero of Ages as well, because he was chosen to take up the Well's power. 

Don't forget that Preservation had to plan ahead with Ruin's interference.  The secrets hidden in the prophecies had to be obscure/ambiguous enough that Ruin wouldn't be able to counter them.  It makes sense, then, to create a prophecy with multiple interpretations, all true.  Thus it makes sense, strategically, to have a series of heroes whose job is to fight Ruin, all to mask the identity of the very last hero who would finally fix things.

I'd like to add to this that Vasher considers it significant that Vivenna is descended from a Returned.  He thinks it would affect her ability to awaken.

If just being descended from a Returned would do that, what would that imply for actually being a Returned?  Especially if they came back to save one of their relatives from dying?  They had a brief glimpse of the future before Returning as well.  They saw into the spiritual realm.  Surely that gives them insight beyond everybody else.

Awakening was almost certainly learned from a Returned.  It just seems like the most direct, and hence most likely, way to discover it.