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sistertotherain @10: I'd have to do some digging, but I thought Nale's justification was that widespread Surgebinding through genuine Nahel bonds might trigger a Desolation. Which does seem really odd, as I'd assume he was paying attention when the Oathpact was originally enacted. According to the information available to us, the Desolation occurs when the last Herald asks for their torture in Damnation to stop. Maybe there's always another secret. Maybe Nale's crazy. I mean, Nale's definitely crazy. And Ishar.
dashardie @4: No, we don't know for sure that the Siah are immigrants. I feel like it's possible, but who knows? The Dysian Aimians seem like a more solid bet for having evolved on Roshar, being made up of their hordelings, but it's also possible they could have come from elsewhere, and tailored their bodies to the Rosharan critters. But no, I haven't seen WoB on a firm origin for either Aimian race.
William @59: Your response is precisely what I was hoping for with this article. I'm so glad that it hit home for you.
Celebrinnen @18: Beautifully put. I dearly love the depth of meaning different people are able to pull from the First Ideal. I'm sorry for the difficulty you went through after your father's passing, but I'm glad the grief has lessened over time. Thank you for sharing that.
asw122 @11: Edgedancers unite! I think a lot of the volatility in the world today springs from a majority valuing (apparent) victory above understanding. Somebody has to care.
Also, that is a LOT of rereads. Wow.
I call Kaladin’s trick with the windspren a Windblade, after the rock formations that help divert winds around Kholinar. Who knows: maybe the Windblades at Kholinar were originally named after this ability.
Elle @26: The comment on stormtents was about how Dalinar didn't make the lower castes pay for protection inside barracks. I'm thinking that the stormtents would only be useful to keep the rain off, and a hit by any debris is going to result in death.
But, again, we're talking about other Highprinces' bridgemen here. No big loss, according to them....
FSS @13: I would expect three in the Rosharan system, since there are three Shards in residence. It remains to be seen whether Odium's shardpool/perpendicularity would be on Roshar, or on Damnation/Braize where he's supposedly bound.
Caleb @14: There's nothing that definitively says the Listeners have been there, but the clues seem to be there in the text. All animal life on Roshar seems to have two defining characteristics.
1. They interact with spren as part of their physiology. Skyeels float and greatshells move their huge bulk thanks to the innate use of the Gravitation Surge or Stormlight-infused strength. The Parshendi forms are a higher form of that.
2. They have armor, an evolutionary adaptation to withstand brief exposure to highstorms.
@3 & @4: Good points. And of course the seed number would be 16.
Braid_Tug @1: I may have a problem. I can't stop this feeling deep inside of me. Girl, you just don't realize what song lyric mashups do to me...
Hey yeah, Lyn.... Did the "Restaurant" reference drop in because of thoughts about Alice?
Ccstat @31: Totally agreed. This is one of the reasons Lift is my favorite Stormlight character.
John @17, I figured 7 years plus the release of the movies was long enough. Can't make a Horneater stew without cracking a few cremlings. Just, you know, make sure the shells go in too.
Thanks to everyone for the compliments. We're glad you found our effort helpful.
Tektonica @2 and Jeremy @3, those are things we can work in. Trying to summarize these two tomes was tricky, but the Amaram thing does deserve a mention. Thanks for the feedback!
Season 1 was a really enjoyable ride. Can't wait to see where they go next.
And nice Thor headfake from The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.
Personally, my mental image of Sazed the first time I read Era 1 was Dhalsim from the Street Fighter arcade games, but less caricatured and sans skull necklace.
I’ve done this once before but I’ve never been fully satisfied with the way it turned out;
Bridget, this line works really well as a Hamilton reference, but it's so subtle that I can't tell whether or not it was intended. Was it?
Different people have different dreams? Film at eleven...
@47, Chow Yun-Fat was #3 in the running, I believe.
Yeah, my cousins showed me Poltergeist when I was in first grade. I had issues with scary trees and static on the TV and clown dolls for a while.
I also went to a friend's house about a year afterward, and he had basically the exact clown doll from the movie on a chair in his room. Can you still call it a sleepover if you don't sleep?
Alice, well done! Congrats on getting to the end of it. Did it feel like its initial title, the Tome of Endless Pages? Can't wait to dig into Warbreaker with you.
1000 points to the Wetlander for the apricity bit. So great meeting you last weekend!
My Dearest Leigh,
Shenanigans trump all. Muahahaha. Haha. Ha.
You'll see.
Philosophical tangent incoming! According to what I know of Realmatic Theory, tons people dying isn't necessarily all that bad. Spoilers for Secret History...
According to Harmony in Secret History, people who die in the Physical move on to the Spiritual Realm, which is just some other, unknown state of being. If we see a Knight Radiant not as a spren-empowered human, but as a symbiotic organism composed of human and spren working together through the nahel bond, then it would always be better for the KR to do what is "right", risking death, than to do what is "wrong" and sever the bond which gives the Physical access to the Cognitive and the Cognitive access to the Physical. Physical death doesn't sever the bond. Betraying ideals does.
From this point of view, the Diagram seems like a plan for a Second Recreance.
Yes, please! Dan is awesome, even though he's a serial killer. Of lobsters.
Was that a Wilhelm scream when the bridge exploded? Nice. Gotta respect the classics.
Boo! I didn't make the highlights.
throws chair through window
If you're interested in taking another look, I though Jason's advice was very good for aspiring authors. Question posted by rnewb.
Like many others said, I've been waiting for you to hit this chapter since you started the read. Bravo, and bravo. All of my tables are yours to flip.
You see, Alice, this is the epigraph that is the cornerstone of my Recreance theory. Bondsmiths figured out how to sever the Nahel bonds of all of the Voidbringers, all at once, and went through with it before considering the consequences, namely that all Nahel bonds would be severed. Radiants and Voidbringers alike. Very little hard evidence to back this up, other than that I've never been able to pin Brandon down when the question comes anywhere near this.
Thanks, Team Jordan! Can't wait to read it.
Do NOT underestimate testosterone. Elle McPherson is 11 years older than I am. If 28-year-old Elle had walked up to 17-year-old me and started batting her eyelashes and cooing at me, you can be fairly certain I wouldn't just have believed anything she said. I quite likely would have seriously considered committing felonies. And I'm an Eagle Scout.
Good stuff, Alice! I get a huge chuckle every time I read that "most articulate and refined" line, considering the only Edgedancer we know so far...
Have a great vacation!
Love Paul's stuff!
I'm still sticking with my pet Recreance theory. A Bondsmith realized that he/she could sever all Voidbringer spren bonds, but only by severing ALL Nahel bonds on Roshar. And he/she pulled the trigger.
Great article. I love that it stands on its own as a great action movie, a visual and auditory spectacle, but also manages to work in all of this subtext.
And yes, Max in The Road Warrior had no idea he was the diversion.
Not written by a woman, but when it comes to magic swords, the Cosmere's Nightblood is a pretty good one...
Thanks for all the hard work, Carl! I've really enjoyed your analysis.
Alice - Don't rule out magical OCD! My main question with Auri's behavior is whether she acts this way because it's required by her personal brand of magic, or whether she's been afflicted with something that won't let her think any other way...
radnyski @2, I think the Shaper proclamation comes from later on, in The Hidden Heart of Things. It'd be worth it to give the whole chapter a thorough re-read, but I'll give you a few lines:
But underneath, there was a secret deep within the hidden heart of things. Mandrag never told her that. She did not think he knew. Auri found that secret for herself. She knew the true shape of the world. ... Auri was urchin small. Her tiny feet upon the stone were bare. Auri stood, and in the circle of her golden hair she grinned and brought the weight of her desire down full upon the world. And all things shook. And all things knew her will. And all things bent to please her.I put in a little extra because the rhyme and meter are so awesome, weaving in and out through the paragraphs, but anyway: What she did there isn't Naming. She didn't fully understand something enough to control it. She saw it the way it had to be, and it changed.
About all Bondsmiths being bonded to the Stormfather, the closest we could get at JCon 6 was to have Brandon agree that, if a spren were powerful enough, it could form Radiant bonds with more than one person.
This would look great in my to-read heap (it's gotten too big to be a proper pile).
That was quite a Wall o'Text, Chris, but very, very well said. I can find no fault with your logic.
By presenting herself and her subjects as the people she wants them to be, unrealized versions of themselves, she actualizes their potential.I like your words.
You got your RP in my Mistborn!
You got your Mistborn in my RP!
Mmmm. Two great tastes that taste great together.
Yep. Lies, as defined by Pattern, seem to be the things we think or say to shield us from harsh realities.
RobMRobM @3: Would you say you like them like a brother? Like a... brother of battle?
Then again, it could be as simple as, "Yep, it was Yondu all along."
KiManiak @6: I wonder if Honor's Perpendicularity might not be the Origin, where highstorms come from.
Caucasian male? Check. 30-60? Check. 5'10"? I'm 5'10.5" In Atlanta? Check.
Looks like I picked the wrong year to have a nice, steady job...
Alice @14: So. No medal, then. *sigh* :-)
ETA Ways @15: Yay!
In that case, do I get a Conversational Medal of Honor for jumping on that grenade?
It seems that my fault vis-a-vis the chest-rubbing was attempting to look forward instead of backward. It still seems like an odd turn of phrase, if it's only put in to have Kaladin notice in his PoV something that happened before, but I agree that the evidence supports the Dalinar beatdown hypothesis. Thanks, folks!
Yeah, excellent catch on the (possible) Sandor/lame gravedigger thing.
Ah. I'll have to go back and check that out. Thanks!
For me, the most interesting bit of the chapter is this one:
"What I really want to do," Dalinar said frankly, "is beat the lot of them senseless. That's what I'd do to new recruits who weren't willing to obey orders." "I think you'll have a hard time spanking obedience into the highprinces, Uncle," the king said dryly. For some reason, he absently rubbed at his chest. "You need to disarm them," Kaladin found himself saying.Even though WoR is a hefty tome, everything inside it is there for a reason. Brandon isn't the type of guy to throw, "For some reason, he absently rubbed at his chest," in as a throwaway line. I think we're meant to infer, from Elhokar's line about spanking the highprinces into submission, that someone is somehow coercing him through pain or other means. Thoughts?
Bellaberry @71: The way I see it, spren view conscious access to the Physical realm as being just as useful and novel as humans view Surgebinding. When Shallan withdrew from the bond due to her multiple psychological traumas, Pattern was left searching for a way to get back what he'd lost. I assume that he and the other Cryptics that showed up in Shallan's drawings were researching her in the Cognitive realm in an attempt to reconnect.
Braid_Tug @60: My attempt to get Brandon to confirm the Stormfather as being bonded to all Bondsmiths was kind of RAFO'd. We did get him to confirm that a sufficiently powerful spren could be bonded to more than one person, but he stopped short of saying that the Stormfather was multi-bonded.
Once again, I come to the thread too late to make much of a meaningful contribution, so I'll share one of my worries instead.
We've seen plenty of the Physical Realm, and a few scenes of the Cognitive, but absolutely nothing so far in the Cosmere that could be said to take place in the Spiritual, other than maybe a tiny bit at the end of The Hero of Ages. I worry that, when it's finally introduced into the story arc, it's going to hurt my head. A lot.
This town needs an enema! *FWEEEE*
My pet theory on the Recreance is that a Bondsmith did something really nasty to sever the bonds between all voidbringers and voidspren. The severing removed the consciousness of all the voidspren, and even though it was a "good" outcome for the humans, it was looked on as an atrocity by the denizens of the Cognitive Realm.
At that point, it was decided that the grand experiment of Physical Realm spren consciousness wasn't worth the risk, and all the bonds were severed. I'm guessing the Stormfather had a hand in it.
Merriam-Webster defines causal as: making something happen. So, an arranged marriage, as opposed to a marriage due to romance. I thought it was a typo as well, when the preview chapter got posted, but Peter set me straight.
Great start, Alice! Keep 'em coming!
Congratulations! I can't wait to finish my novel and get it lost in your slushpile!
jcsalomon @21: I think that's a big thumbs-up from me.
Ways, you dirty, dirty man!
Leigh, you're a treasure.
Kote/Kvothe on the King of Spades has one other difference that I see. On one side, the bottom of the mounting board says Folly. On the other side, it says Wary.
Braid_Tug @2: Peter said at JCon that most writers aren't lucky enough to have a Peter. Well, he didn't say lucky, because he's too modest, but I'm leaving it that way.
Love the moon detail, Jo. That one would likely have slipped past me.
I sort of agree that the Mat/Shaisam ending didn't come off right, but I would have much preferred to have it end quickly, but without Mat's conscious action. Like, Mat dodges an attack and brings his staff back to whack someone, but it hits something on the way, which just so happened to be Fain/Mordeth/whatever sneaking up to stab him with the dagger, and redirecting the thing into his/its heart. Then Mat says, "Huh, would you look at that?" and walks away.