Happy Thursday, Cosmere Chickens! This week’s chapter is a very short but heavy read. As The Stormlight Archive does so often, it’s dealing with neurodivergencies and the treatment of such. Kaladin, bless his Windrunner heart, is trying so hard to help those suffering with PTSD and depression (and goodness knows what else), blissfully unaware of the army marching on his doorstep, about to turn his entire world upside down…
Reminder: We’ll be discussing spoilers for the entirety of the series up until now. If you haven’t read ALL of the published entries of the Stormlight Archive (this includes Edgedancer and Dawnshard as well as the entirety of Rhythm of War), best to wait to join us until you’re done.
Heralds: Jezrien, Herald of Kings. Windrunners. Protecting/Leading. Role: King.
A: This is a very Windrunner chapter—not in the sense of Kaladin out there flying around killing people, but in the sense of protecting and leading. Kaladin is gaining a new angle on just how many ways there are to do both. (And now I wonder how many different ways Jezrien tried to protect and/or lead. I’ve always just seen him as a battle leader.)
Icon: The Banner and Spears icon tells us it’s a Kaladin POV chapter.
Epigraph:
We must assume that Odium has realized this, and is seeking a singular, terrible goal: The destruction—and somehow Splintering or otherwise making impotent—of all Shards other than him.
A: “This” refers back to the previous epigraph, where Harmony notes that combining Shards doesn’t necessarily give the Vessel more power. The next epigraph will provide further detail, so we need not go into the implications this week. But… he whanged the nail on the crumpet, as they say. Odium is most definitely trying to destroy all other Shards.
L: Who… who says that?
A: LOL. I’ve watched a lot of British television in my time. I probably picked it up from Campion or Red Dwarf. Or more likely, Jeeves & Wooster. (P. G. Wodehouse FTW!)
Chapter Recap
WHO: Kaladin
WHERE: Urithiru
WHEN: 1175.4.4.3 (Nine days after Kaladin’s last appearance, in Chapter 25)
(Note: For the “when” notations, we are using this wonderful timeline provided by the folks at The 17th Shard.)
Not much to recap with this one. Kaladin and his mother, Hesina, are attempting to help the patients that Kaladin discovered shuttered away by the ardents.
Overall Reactions
A: First note: Yes, this is a very short chapter, and in some ways should have been combined with another one for reread purposes. Unfortunately, the chapters before and after are long-ish, and involve a completely different plot, so… it’s awkward. Sorry about that; it’s just going to have to stand on its own.
Second note: This is one of those chapters where the reader has to grab himself by the scruff of the neck and administer a firm reminder that things will not continue to go well, given that we’re just past the halfway mark of Part Two. It’s such a hopeful scenario: Kaladin is working with his parents to find a better treatment for those who suffer symptoms similar to his own, and it’s working. They haven’t achieved any major breakthroughs, but we can see that they’re on the right track for this group. The outlook is hopeful, right here.
L: In narrative structure terms, the “Call to Adventure” or “Inciting Incident” hasn’t happened for Kaladin yet. He may think that it has… but things are about to change in Urithiru in a big way very soon.
Buy the Book
The Witness for the Dead
A: Very soon. We know that Venli and Raboniel are on their way, but we also know that Navani has beefed up security in the tunnels. On a first read, there’s an odd mix of hope and a sense of impending doom. At the very least, Kaladin seems to be getting better, so he’ll be ready to defend the Tower, right? Right…?
L: ::laugh cry::
A: Well, for now, we can focus on the things that are going well.
At his father’s recommendation—then insistence—Kaladin took it slowly, confining his initial efforts to men who shared similar symptoms. … Kaladin had complained that the ardents were treating all mental disorders the same; he couldn’t swoop in and treat each and every person in the entire sanitarium at once. First he needed to prove that he could make a difference for these few.
A: I know a lot of readers dislike Lirin, and I won’t say he doesn’t have his blind spots.
L: That’s putting it mildly.
A: However, when it comes to treating patients, he does know his stuff, and his wisdom balances Kaladin’s drive.
L: Fair enough. I’ll give you that point.
A: It does my heart good to see Kaladin acknowledge this. Can you just imagine what he might have tried otherwise? His frustration with the treatment of “keep them in the dark and alone” would have him pulling everyone out of the sanitarium and treating them all alike, just in a different way than the ardents. It would not only have been unsuitable for some of them, it would also have overwhelmed Kaladin with the weight of this new responsibility. He’d have ended up helping no one, rather than helping a few. Besides, this way he can chart a path for finding better treatments based on the specific symptoms of the individual, and that has hope for all of these patients.
Relationships and Romances
He still didn’t know how his father balanced work and emotion. Lirin genuinely seemed to care for his patients, but he could also turn it off. Stop thinking about the ones he couldn’t help.
A: Do we have any doctors or nurses in the group here? How do you do this? I have zero experience in this regard, but great admiration for the health care professionals who… well, care.
L: One of my best friends works in health care, and he describes it like Lirin does. I doubt it’s a thing that anyone could explain how to do… it’s something you just have to learn as you go. As Kaladin himself says;
…descriptions from books was never good enough for him. He had to try something to understand it.
A: That makes a lot of sense. I would imagine that not everyone can do it.
His mother rested her hand on his arm, and her face looked so sad he had to turn away. He didn’t like to talk to her about his past, the years between then and now. … She didn’t need to know about those darkest months. They would bring her nothing but pain.
A: I will always wonder about this. On the one hand, I do appreciate his sentiment about protecting his mother from the pain of knowing what he went through. On the other hand, I’m a mother. If one of my kids went through something horrible, no matter how horrible, I would want them to tell me as much as they were willing to talk about. I would want to understand as fully as possible. I don’t think he realizes how strong she is, and that it might be better for him to trust her with that knowledge.
L: Yeah. I appreciate the sentiment, but sometimes all it takes is asking whether it’s okay to place that burden of care on someone else. “Can I tell you about…” is giving the other person the choice to opt out, but I doubt Kaladin’s mom would ever do that. I think there are certain kinds of relationships in which that level of burden of care is expected, and close family bonds is certainly one of them. This said… this is completely believable. I had a very close family member hide their cancer from the rest of the family for years because they “didn’t want anyone to worry about them.” So this sort of mindset? Super realistic.
A: Oh, very realistic. Just… wrong-headed, IMO.
L: There’s also something else going on here, in that Kaladin always assumes that what’s good for others—like, say, how he encourages the other patients to talk about their problems—isn’t right for him. I think in a lot of ways he’s in denial over his own mental instability and won’t truly be able to find a stable way to deal with his depression until he embraces the fact that yes, he has a problem and he needs to confront that problem rather than stuffing it into a dark spot in his mind and let it eat away at him.
A: He’s actually pretty… practiced at that. (I was going to say “pretty good at that” but it’s definitely not good.) We’ve seen hints of it before. It’s very hard for him to admit that he needs help, despite what he says about “lifting the bridge together.” He’ll gladly come along and help someone else lift their bridge, but won’t acknowledge needing help with his own.
L: One last thing I wanted to point out here… Kaladin’s being a dunce if he thinks that his mother doesn’t have a very good idea of what happened to him. Does she know details? Maybe not. But he’s given her enough hints even in this little chapter to put together a pretty solid set of assumptions. And that’s assuming she hasn’t heard stories, or asked people like Teft.
A: She’s too smart not to know a great deal of it.
“I understand,” his mother said. “Your father understands.”
He was glad she thought that, wrong though she was. They were sympathetic, but they didn’t understand. Better that they didn’t.
A: Okay… Again, I get that he wants to protect them. And to a certain extent, they wouldn’t be able to enter into his experiences, because they didn’t live it. I still think he’s wrong; they would be able to understand a lot more than he thinks. Hesina and Lirin are strong people, and have gone through trials of their own. And if he were to let them see what he’d been through, they would understand his decisions better. Who knows, if he’d been willing to talk to Lirin sooner, they might not have had quite such a personal conflict. I think Kaladin has always underestimated his parents.
L: His mother, yes. I’ll agree with you there. Again, as I stated last week, I agree with Kaladin that there’s a difference between “understanding” and “sympathy.” Sympathy is nice. But true understanding, that’s a completely different thing.
A: Heh. (She’s never going to willingly give me an inch on Lirin. I still have my arguments, though… for the right time….)
L: #noredemption
Bruised and Broken
Battle fatigue, nightmares, persistent melancholy, suicidal tendencies.
A: And this is where my lack of psychology training shows up…. Am I right in thinking this is the basic symptom set of PTSD for former soldiers?
L: It’s missing flashbacks and panic attacks in order to be a comprehensive list, but yes. I did quite a lot of research on PTSD specifically in regards to battle for one of my own books, including interviewing Vietnam and WWII veterans and psychologists, and suffer from mild medical PTSD myself. Not every PTSD patient presents every symptom, though.
Today they sat in seats on the balcony outside his clinic. Warmed by mugs of tea, they talked. About their lives. The people they’d lost. The darkness.
It was helping.
A: It reminds me of Rock’s stew around the campfire, you know? A sense of community is so often built with a little food or drink—something positive shared, that can both bridge and relieve the pain of shared negative experience.
“The squad is stronger than the individual. … Get them to lift the bridge together…”
…
“The ardents’ stories about inmates feeding each other’s despair… probably came from inmates who were situated next to one another in the sanitariums. In dark places… In a hopeless situation, it’s easy to convince one another to give up.”
A: It works both ways, which is in one sense obvious, and in another sense surprising. The thing I love about it here, though, is that it’s being described so well in a fantasy novel. Typically, we see characters with mostly external issues to overcome, or sometimes characters who grittily overcome their internal issues alone, usually by just pushing through and pretending they don’t exist. We rarely see a character interacting with others who have similar issues, working together to find a way to actually address their problems and symptoms.
L: Yes. This is one of the things I love most about The Stormlight Archive. Brandon’s done an amazing job of portraying a truly dizzying array of neurodivergencies and different ways of being physically disabled in a positive and uplifting manner. He’s not falling prey to the usual pitfalls of “inspiration porn” or characters just grinning and bearing their issues. It’s been very important to so many readers, and it’s beautiful to see.
“It changes something to be able to speak to others about your pain. It helps to have others who actually understand.”
A: I… don’t actually have anything to say about this. I just needed to put it here.
L: It’s true, and it’s beautiful. If only we all could have this experience when it were truly needed most.
…no matter how isolated you thought you were, no matter how often your brain told you terrible things, there were others who understood.
It wouldn’t fix everything. But it was a start.
L: This tugs on my heart strings for sure. It’s such a blessing to find someone, or even better, a whole community who truly understands your pain. That knowledge that you’re not alone. There are others in the darkness with you, just waiting to reach out their hands and hold yours. And maybe, together, you can find your way back to the light.
Oaths Spoken, Powers Awakened
A: This is one of the rare Kaladin chapters where he doesn’t use any of his powers, once he found them. (Okay, maybe it’s not really rare, and it just feels that way, but… whatever.) It’s pretty cool, though: He wouldn’t have to be a Radiant to do anything he does here. And it is a lovely and hopeful thing for people in the real world. You don’t need magic to find help.
L: You know, it’s funny. I always love seeing storylines like this about superheroes. Yeah, we love to see Superman clobbering huge baddies, but there’s also something very human and compelling about seeing him struggling with trying to help people through his job at the Daily Planet. It gives us normal people a little reminder that yeah… fictional superheroes are incredibly powerful. But they’re still people. (Side note that could be a whole tangent: This is, generally speaking, why I prefer Marvel over DC. The “secret identities” are a lot more important in a lot of the Marvel stories than in the DC ones.)
During those years she’d lost her loving boy, Kal. That child was dead, long ago buried in crem. At least by the time he’d found her again, Kaladin had become the man he was now. Broken, but mostly reforged as a Radiant.
L: I always find it interesting to see how Kal views himself. He has a tendency to see the worst in himself, and boy… isn’t that relatable, sometimes? Ask almost anyone on the street in Urithiru and I bet they’d have a very different description of who Kaladin Stormblessed is. Ask his bridge crew, or the patients he’s helping, or any of the hundreds or thousands of people whose lives he’s saved…
A: He’s been doing that since the beginning of The Way of Kings—thinking of himself as cursed because sometimes, even he can’t save all the people he cares about. He has come a long way, but at this point, he’s still falling back into his old way of thinking. It is understandable—which is what’s going to make the climax of this book such a delight.
We’ll be leaving further speculation and discussion to you in the comments, so have fun and remember to be respectful of the opinions of others! Next week, we’ll be back with chapter 34, “A Flame Never Extinguished,” in which Adolin finds a way to get Shallan out of hiding.
Alice is enjoying spring, a new refrigerator, and beta reading. She’s a little less excited about being hip-deep in a remodeling project, but will hopefully find the end result worth the work.
Lyndsey is busy making costumes for this year’s Robin Hood’s Faire, and is also a fantasy author herself. She’s been doing weekly tie-in videos to the reread and silly cosmere cosplay vids on TikTok, or you can follow her on Facebook or Instagram.
Speaking as a doctor, if any healthcare worker is unable to “switch-off”, they are in the wrong profession. It is too easy to break down and even become suicidal if every failure and death affects you personally. Not to mention, completely useless as a HCW. A colleague of mine found switching off so difficult that she left medicine and works as a scientific writer now (and is much happier).
A: And this is where my lack of psychology training shows up…. Am I right in thinking this is the basic symptom set of PTSD for former soldiers?
Yes, these are some of them.
L: It’s missing flashbacks and panic attacks in order to be a comprehensive list, but yes. I did quite a lot of research on PTSD specifically in regards to battle for one of my own books, including interviewing Vietnam and WWII veterans and psychologists, and suffer from mild medical PTSD myself. Not every PTSD patient presents every symptom, though.
Very accurate.
Be fair: Lirin and Hesina keep lots of secrets from Kaladin, too. He inherited that, even if he doesn’t realize it. I mean, he still doesn’t know Hesina is part-Lighteyes, as far as we know. Remember the theft of those diamond chips? They kept that completely secret. I would not necessarily trust them in Kaladin’s position.
And what makes it hard for psych types is, there are no unique symptoms of PTSD. Every one can be caused by other things. That’s why diagnosis is a giant problem even before you think about treatment.
Says Kaladin, who spent years enslaved, trying to lead escapes and failing and finally giving up.
We will get into more important Lirin chapters later, but I never liked him and his holier-than-thou attitude and his absolute refusal to accept his son as is. Then what happens later in the book—where Lirin basically consigns Kaladin to death because Lirin’s beliefs are more important—basically closes the book on him for me.
I don’t have a lot to say about this chapter…
I did love seeing Kaladin find a new way of helping people. He also encourages people to help each other; just like with Bridge 4, the process of improving for these men includes reaching out to others.
I actually didn’t hate Lirin. I tend to agree with what Alice has said about him, and I am interested to see the discussion once we reach the relevant chapters.
Bret Devereaux had a great series of articles in February about whether the experiences of warriors and soldiers were similar across time. I recommend the whole collection, but this one talks about whether or not soldiers in the past would have had PTSD or anything like it:
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/
I found it interesting because I think post-Recreance Rosharan soldiers’ experience would have more in common with old-world soldiers’ than WW/Vietnam soldiers’ (shardblades and plates being basically the only difference, since horses are big and scary to a footsoldier even if they aren’t extra-big and magicky)… right up until all these Radiants and Fused come and turn war upside down, sometimes quite literally.
Kaladin does what many self critical people end up doing: they take everything that happens as their fault/failure. In a way, it’s like saying that you are the center of the world. It also diminishes the self agency of those around you. If you don’t act, all is lost. If you make a mistake no one else will be able to fix it.
I suppose in Kal’s case, some of that is true. A Radiant is more able to fight a Fused than a regular soldier, unless he freezes and doesn’t fight at all.
My wife is an oncologist, and she gets by sometimes by turning off, but also looking for the positives even in the “failures.” Even when she loses a patient, she can often look to how she made things easier for them or their families and friends prior to their death.
A lot of my research collaborators are pediatric oncologists, and I imagine that they have the same sorts of coping mechanism. As a statistician, I have the emotional distance of being able to look at the data in aggregate and focus on the positives: This trial improved outcome; that trial reduced side effects. That’s something I need—I could never deal with direct patient care in pediatric oncology. But every once in a while, I find myself looking at an “interesting” data anomaly and realizing that I’m seeing it because a 13-year-old died of their cancer. It’s a sobering reminder of what my collaborators deal with all the time.
Alice. I disagree. Even if Kaladin had been willing to talk to Lirin about what happened to Kaladin since he left Heathstone to protect Tien, I do not think Lirin would have changed. He is too stubborn. It took a near death moment to acknowledge that Kaladin has a different approach to saving lives than Lirin does. Lirin does not change his mind (either that Lirin’s beliefs are not the best and Kaadin’s may in the end cause more harm than good); however, he does acknowledge that for Kaladin, Lirin’s philosophy/beliefs do not work. This is a fair compromise given that terms of stubborn behavior, Kaladin is truly Lirin’s son. In this debate, I am near the front of the bandwagon Lindsey is driving.
Austin @@.-@. I agree 100%.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewHB
aka the musespren
He has a cunning plan…
A: Do we have any doctors or nurses in the group here? How do you do this?
By accepting that I can’t do everything for everyone, and by focusing on what I can do instead of worrying about what I can’t. I can’t speak for everyone in the field, of course, but I don’t -stop- caring, I just put the pain aside until I have time to address it.
Surely Harmony’s experience wouldn’t apply to dual-or-more Shards whose Intents aren’t contradictory? For instance, it is easy to envision how Ambition + Dominion combo, for example, could have directed the power of both Intents against Odium or another Shard to great effect. For that matter, I imagine that if Shards currently present in Roshar system combined, they wouldn’t be paralysed either, despite it being somewhat tricky to point all 3 Intents in the same direction. Tricky, but possible.
Yea, I think that Hesina would have been motivated to ask around, and the broad strokes of the bridgemen experience are widely known in Urithiru at this point. So, of course she can’t know like one who has been through it does, but she knows enough. Also, I’d say that “loving boy Kal” is very much in evidence, despite what Kaladin choses to think. And speaking of mental health, I feel that the family needs to talk about Tien at some point. It currently seems like the parents have completely supressed/pushed aside his death and their part in it. Another question I had since WoK, but now even more so is – why didn’t Hesina beg her birth family to save her boys once they were taken? Yes, Lirin’s absurd pride brought them to that pass and she went along with it, but once it became the matter of life and death for her children, shouldn’t all such considerations have been pushed aside? From what we learned in RoW, it should have been possible for their grandfather to bribe them, or at least one of them, free from the army. Or get them some safe garrison appointment.
It is an interesting direction to take with Kaladin to make him invent new mental health approaches. We know that not all Windrunners used to be primarily fighters – Syl’s previous Knight Relador mainly protected people by providing them with cisterns for safe water supply. However, I personally can’t help but see very strong parallels between Kaladin withdrawing from the battlefield and Dalinar doing so. IMHO, Kaladin is being prepared for taking over as a Stormfather’s Bondsmith and maybe more during/after Book 5. Syl and the Stormfather will just have to learn to share him!
IMHO, Kaladin’s travails also give a good idea of how Jezrien was affected by the cycle of Desolations and Aharietam, and why he in particular was almost completely destroyed by the failure of the Heralds to find a definitive way to protect Roshar. All the Heralds are, among other things, suffering from PTSD x 10000, so maybe Kaladin can indeed help them a little. Particularly since they wouldn’t have been able to really talk about it with anybody but other Heralds, where it probably would have done more harm than good, reinforcing the vicious cycle of guilt and self-recrimination. Too bad that he didn’t get to try his approach on Shalash before he has to treat the super-dangerous Ishar…
I mentioned before: Kaladin is one of … one? … people who can talk to the Stormfather even when not swearing a Windrunner oath. He is routinely shown unifying disparate and often hostile people (forming Bridge Four, notably, and in this book inventing group therapy). Making Connections is his thing.
So yeah, if he isn’t a Bondsmith it’s not because of a lack of aptitude.
I see the end of Book Five as involving some of the Heralds who survive going Beyond, and being replaced by new ones, which would include Dalinar replacing Honor as giver of the Oaths and Honorblades. He did Ascend, after all, according to Rayse. That would leave a vacancy for a Bondsmith Radiant.
(Note: in the post-Everstorm world, if a Herald dies and goes to Braize, she could presumably just leave again, same as the Fused can now do. I’m sort of surprised the incumbent Heralds haven’t figured that out, even Ishar.)
Nah, as foreshadowed in this book, Syl will die. Or, alternatively, the Stormfather (by WoB containing Tanavast’s Cognitive Shadow) will merge with Dalinar as part of replacing Honor; and Syl mirror-Ascend and replace the Stormfather, which I actually think would be even cooler.
Wow, something just occurred to me in free association that has nothing to do with this chapter or Isilel’s message.
Throughout the Oathbringer reread, I kept harping on names and mirror symmetry. Here’s one: “Moash” and “Marsh” are darn similar names. And Moash is the mirror-Marsh. Both dominated by the “bad guy” Shard of the series. Both granted insanely great amounts of supernatural power by that entity via artifacts. Both lose their eyes. Both start out on the protagonist’s side, then switch over. The mirror aspects include Marsh’s constant, seemingly-futile resistance that ends up paying off, while Moash actively seeks to be completely submerged in Odium’s will to avoid handling his own pain. (Eshonai continues Marsh’s theme of resisting for years until finally succeeding just before death.)
Now I feel silly for missing that.
Chitnis @1 &2 – Thank you! Both for your input here, and for the work you do in caring for others. I can certainly see that an ability to “switch off” would turn out to be a vital component for the profession. I wonder if that’s why Kaladin was never really able to settle into being a surgeon. Not that soldier is the obvious and logical alternative in general, mind you…! If the urgent crises are over before he dies, I wonder where he’ll end up.
Carl @3 – Very true; Lirin and Hesina have not been forthright with Kaladin about their own history. I can’t help wondering if he’d connect better with Lirin if he understood more of his parents’ backstory and their struggles to get where they are. I find that if parents tell their children what to think or believe or do, without helping them understand why, the lessons don’t really last. In Kaladin’s case, he knows what his father thinks about surgeons vs. soldiers, and the superficial reason, but he has no idea how Lirin came to that belief. IMO, that is a large part of what has prevented Kaladin from understanding and working through his own conflicting thoughts on the subject.
Austin @@.-@ – I will eventually attempt to change your mind on that. :P
havokinetic @6 – Looks interesting! I’ll have to go read it soon.
bad_platypus @8 – My thanks to you, your wife, and your collaborators, for the vital work you do. I can’t imagine how hard it would be, as an oncologist, to be continually dealing with a deadly disease. The wins would be glorious, but the losses excruciating. I’m like you – I’d do better dealing with the aggregate data.
AndrewHB @9 – Like Austin above, I will eventually attempt to give you a different perspective.
Roger @10 – Bahahahaha! Exactly! (It’s so fun when someone shares one of my oddball interests…)
CruelSadist @11 – Thank you for putting some “feet” on the “how to switch off” question.
Isilel @12 – Very true. Ruin and Preservation can balance one another, carefully, or they can just shut everything down. Some Intents do seem like they’d have “constructive interference” and magnify both rather than paralyzing the Vessel, which could be terrifying.
IMO, some of the disagreements among the readers are because we don’t know much from Lirin & Hesina’s backstory. We learn a little, later in RoW, but even then we don’t know much about how they dealt with the loss of their sons. We don’t know if they tried and failed to get her father to intervene, or if they didn’t try for a specific reason. We don’t know whether they spoke of their shared grief to the point that they don’t need to talk about Tien for themselves, and they haven’t had a “family conversation” because Kaladin refuses to talk about him at all.
I’m… not sure what I think about the idea of Kaladin becoming a Bondsmith and the various complications thereof.
A very short and heavy chapter, indeed.
I think a lot of the Lirin debate is driven by the same thing that is making people so divided today in the real world – the belief that imperfect views (in MY eyes) mean that YOU can have nothing in common with ME as a person and therefore are trash if not converted to MY way of thinking. In my opinion, this doesn’t work well (in the real world or in a story) since people are constantly evolving; whether that is growth or regression is in the eyes of the beholder (happy that Cultivation got the one up on Odium with Dalinar, though!). I can’t wait until we really dig into Lirin because I tend to side with Alice in that I think he has plenty of good characteristics. Considering things only up to this point in RoW, I think he is actively trying to be a better father to Kal, likely with nudging from Hesina, and I think it is telling that Kaladin respects him so much.
I also wish Kaladin would confide in his parents. I know some people really do think this way, but this maniacal focus on the individual experience as being unrelatable to others is not healthy. Of course we all experience life differently, but we have no hope of moving past sympathy and into empathy if people don’t share their experiences with us.
I could never work in healthcare personally because I cannot turn off the caring. Thank you to all the wonderful doctors and nurses out there who care for us so well!
Not sure if two characters can be a trend, but pacifists don’t come off very well in Brandon’s stories. Lirin here of course and I am thinking of Wax’s grandmother as well (I just read the prologue of “The Bands of Mourning” in a reread). Lirin and Vwafendal are very similar in their certainty about the rightness of their way and they both have that thrown in their face by the World.
havokinetic @6 – Interesting article indeed! It’s funny; I’ve been aware of all those different approaches to warfare, but it never really sank in how different the definitions of “courage” are in those contexts. I’d love to read more on the differences in “battle shock” or whatever you call it in the different eras. And, of course… how does Rosharan warfare fit into these?
Havokinetic @6:
A very interesting article! Particularly since it highlights that different definitions of courage throughout history favor different kinds of psychological make-up. Though, I’d intuitively say that standing firm in a phalanx has more in common with standing firm in formation and reloading under fire than the author suggests. But that’s just a feeling.
This also supports something that I have been wondering about for a while when reading about various political repressions and purges – how the people who had demonstrated conspicious valour on the field of battle later often proved to be moral cowards. Or even just speaking about physical courage, how they let themselves be arrested instead of committing suicide, even having a pretty good idea that they would be tortured, forced to accuse others, maybe even family members, and eventually executed.
Carl @13:
I no longer believe that Dalinar will fully Ascend. There are too many hints of him being a Moses/ John the Baptist figure and of Kaladin being the one to eventually do it. Alas…
Wetlandernw @14:
Everything points at Dalinar being gone as a Bondsmith after book 5, one way or another, which would also solve the criticism of too many Kholin Bondsmiths. Yet, who would replace him? There is no fleshed-out character other than Kaladin who could. Kaladin had been uniting like mad in the past 2 books and he already has a very special relationship with the Stormfather. His trajectory away from a battlefield commander in OB and RoW mirrors Dalinar’s. I mean, I would be happy with a plausible alternative, but I just don’t see it.
What about Adolin? He develops bonds with everyone he meets, and is a person of honor (even if he doesn’t necessarily believe it).
My problem is that I now want to cast Tony Robinson as Rayse and Rowan Atkinson as Taravangian…and that’s just WRONG!!!!
I can definitely relate a lot to Kaladin here.
@7 – this is very true, and I know I’ve done it. I once had a priest I was close to (gently) call me out on my false humility which was basically another form of pride.
I don’t have it in me to get into my thoughts on Lirin (or the Lirin/Kal relationship) right now; I’m just glad to be caught up :)
RogerPavelle @@@@@ 19:
I believe being able to bond the Stormfather involves a very close connection to Honor. While I would agree that Adolin is one of the purest humans in the series, his connection to Maya and Edgedancer ideals leads me to think that he would align more with Cultivation than Honor.
Perhaps Adolin could bond the Nightwatcher instead, and I could get my dream Kadolin ship if Kaladin bonds the Stormfather at the same time haha.
The Kholins definitely hold too much power now, although I do not personally have a problem with this. All of their living family members, except for Adolin and Gavinor, are Radiants and Adolin himself seems to be a good candidate for an Edgedancer.
I also kind of see Adolin and Shallan as being a world-hopping couple after this war with Odium is done, for some reason, so I am not sure he can do so as a Bondsmith where he would be needed on Roshar to unite/lead.
Roger @20 – Oh, my. Ooooooh, myyyyyyyy. Yes, that is definitely wrong. Also, will have me snickering for a long time… like, every time we see Taravangian, especially when Odium is involved. Too funny!! I may never see Taravangian the same way again… (but with my memory these days, maybe I’ll manage to forget… sort of.)
@RogerPavelle: Adolin is the true Unity of Book 10. He has Connections to Honor, Cultivation and Odium. (He hates quite well–think of his reaction to Amaram for one, and he certainly has Passion.)