Welcome back to the Words of Radiance Reread on Tor.com! Last time, the secret societies began to reveal their purposes in aftershocks from the climax. This week, Adolin gets angry and the new Radiants gather in conference.
This reread will contain spoilers for The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, and any other Cosmere book that becomes relevant to the discussion. The index for this reread can be found here, and more Stormlight Archive goodies are indexed here.
Click on through to join the discussion!
Chapter 89: The Four
Point of View: Dalinar, Adolin, Dalinar
Setting: Urithiru
Symbology: Duelist, Jezrien, Shalash, Ishar, Palah
IN WHICH Dalinar has a vision of light and warmth; he awakes in his rooms in Urithiru; people are arriving from the warcamps.
… Adolin walks the halls of Urithiru pondering life; he encounters Sadeas, who intends to undermine Dalinar and take leadership from him; Adolin attacks and kills Sadeas; shocked, he drops Oathbringer out a window and removes the traces of his presence.
… Dalinar ascends to the roof of the tower; he shouts at the Stormfather, who finally responds; their conversation is depressing; Dalinar demands to be made a Knight Radiant; defying the Stormfather’s anger, he states the First Ideal of the Radiants, and the Second Ideal of the Bondsmiths; the words are accepted, with conditions; the Stormfather denies having sent the morning’s vision; Dalinar descends to meet Shallan and Kaladin; they identify their three Orders, and Renarin joins them as a fourth; Dalinar shares the bad news confirmed by the Stormfather; Kaladin prepares for a trip to Hearthstone while Renarin goes to requisition spheres for him; Dalinar and Shallan consider the situation and pledge to do what they can.
Quote of the Week
Warm light bathed him. A deep, enveloping, piercing warmth. A warmth that soaked down deep through his skin, into his very self. He stared at that light, and was not blinded. The source was distant, but he knew it. Knew it well.
He smiled.
Then he awoke.
I really don’t know the significance of this vision, and neither does Dalinar, but it’s profoundly beautiful. The first part of the vision places it in his childhood home, with his brother laughing in the next room and his just-outgrown collection of wooden swords carved like Shardblades still on display. It’s fairly clear that this is not a memory—or at least, the part about the light isn’t—but… what is it?
WoB says that the last chapter of the SA has already been seen in one of these two books (thank you, zad-man, for finding that for me!!). Does this seem a likely candidate? I’d suggest that it may be a preview of Dalinar moving from the Cognitive realm to Beyond. On the other hand, last week STBLST suggested the Fleet scene or Taln arriving at Kholinar. Of those, I think the former is more likely. Do you have other suggestions?
Off the Wall
There has to be an answer What is the answer Stop The Parshendi One of them Yes they are the missing piece Push for the Alethi to destroy them outright before this one obtains their power It will form a bridge
—From the Diagram, Floorboard 17: paragraph 2,
every second letter starting with the second
This seems fairly clear, once you separate the words. Apparently genius-Taravangian realized that if one of the Parshendi made the connection with the Odium spren, it would set up… well, exactly what it set up. Unfortunately for genius-T’s credibility, his solution—“destroy them outright”—is also what pushed them to the desperation that resulted in Eshonai’s bonding with the stormspren. Two questions arise, though:
1) Did the Diagram actually have any influence on the Alethi trying to destroy the Parshendi, or was that normal Alethi hawkishness?
2) Was Eshonai “the one” who formed the bridge, or was it Venli? I’m becoming convinced that Venli had already bonded a Voidspren before she trapped the first stormspren, so my answer is leaning toward “Venli.” What’s yours?
Commentary
This is another chapter with several major events and a plethora of minor ones. Warning: overuse of parenthetical remarks may be encountered.
Aside from the content of the vision/dream Dalinar experienced, the timing is weird and the source is unknown. There’s no highstorm, and the Stormfather denies sending it. So where did it come from? Maybe we’ll find out at the end of book ten?
There are other complications in Dalinar’s life for now, though. He’s got a zillion or so people arriving from the warcamps, for one thing. The new arrivals were able to make the trip much faster than the four armies, partly due to the map he sent and partly because they needn’t watch for Parshendi. It’s a good thing, too. Those already in Urithiru need the supplies and Stormlight from the camps, and those who had stayed behind need to get off the Plains before either the Everstorm or the highstorm wraps around the planet to strike again.
Speaking of new arrivals, Sadeas arrived—more’s the pity. It doesn’t take much conversation to explain his coming in spite of continuing opposition to Dalinar; in fact, it’s because of that opposition. His sole purpose in “obeying” the order is to continue his efforts to weaken Dalinar’s authority. He’s too short-sighted to drop his petty quarrel for the sake of all Roshar, the vindictive old fool.
“…You can’t have an army with two generals, son. Your father and I, we’re two old whitespines who both want a kingdom. It’s him or me. We’ve been pointed that way since Gavilar died.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“It does. Your father will never trust me again, Adolin, and you know it.” Sadeas’s face darkened. “I will take this from him. This city, these discoveries. It’s just a setback.”
Honestly, when I read that again, I can’t blame Adolin at all for his reaction. Sadeas just said outright that he intends to destroy Dalinar by any means available; though he knows Dalinar is right, he simply doesn’t care. Nothing matters but his own ambition. What I can’t quite understand is why Sadeas was so willing to reveal all this to Adolin, and why he so deliberately needles Adolin with it. I can only conclude that he thought the Alethi traditions and customs, the game of political and social manipulation, would keep Adolin from taking direct action against him.
He was wrong.
It’s worth wondering, though we can’t answer it, how much of Adolin’s violent response to Sadeas is triggered by the disruption to his view of life caused by the return of the Radiants. He’s been through a lot lately: the loss and restoration of his fiancée, the march to the center of the Plains, the battle, the fight with Eshonai, his thrashing by Szeth, his father’s seeming destruction and rescue by Kaladin, Kaladin going all Radiant and flying off to fight Szeth, Shallan going all Radiant and bringing the armies to Urithiru just before they all died in the Stormclash—it’s a wonder anyone is functional anymore. Humans are resilient as a whole, though, and survival is a strong motivator. All that said, however, the fact is that the author chose to open this section with Adolin feeling overwhelmed specifically by Shallan’s change in status, and the reversal of their relative positions. (More on this below.) So… is that partly to blame for his eruption?
A major question for Oathbringer is how successfully Adolin managed to destroy the evidence. At first I thought that he’d done a good job, but… Did anyone see him in that part of the tower, someone he didn’t see? What did he do with his bloodstained cuffs? How is he going to explain cutting them off, if someone notices before he can destroy the shirt entirely? Also, why toss Oathbringer out the window? Granted it takes the Blade (theoretically) out of the control of Team Sadeas, but eventually someone’s going to wonder where it got to. Then what? Maybe he should have tossed Sadeas out the window, too.
As a side note, this is one of the rare cases where Sanderson puts in a bit of graphic violence… and I think it’s more disturbing for being the exception. It sets the scene apart, in a sort of bizarre I-fell-into-the-wrong-book way… which is, I think, pretty much how Adolin is feeling the whole time. Effective, no?
Back to Dalinar. On top of the mass migration of the Alethi, he’s got to figure out what to do about storms, Oathgates, Voidbringers, and Radiants. And he’s got a Stormfather to confront. (In the nitpicking-detail category, he recognizes what the Oathgate in Kholinar must be, and considers Shallan’s intent to unlock them all. Which reminds me… Given that only the Oathgate to the Shattered Plains had been left unlocked, might there be a connection between the unlocked Oathgate and the Plains being shattered? Some sort of backlash from whatever locked the other nine Oathgates? Or something like that? Not quite sure what I’m suggesting, but there might be something to consider. Theories in the comments, please!)
I have to say, this place is huge. A hundred stories, each successively smaller than the lower by the depth of a gardening terrace… that bottom floor by itself has to be enormous. It’s also worth noticing, as Dalinar does, that the top is so high there is very little crem on it.
But there’s a bigger reason for Dalinar to be at the top of the tower beyond appreciating the scale. It seems to be the best place for confronting the Stormfather—and if no one answers, well, at least Dalinar is alone this time! Fortunately, he answers—and we finally begin to learn more of what’s behind the visions. They were sent by Honor/Tanavast, and as his personification, the Stormfather literally had no choice about sending them. (We don’t know, still, whether he’d ever sent them to anyone before Gavilar.)
Stormfather is downright hostile here, though, and it’s a little intimidating. “Yes, I have to bond with you, but I want you to know that I hate you and I hope you die. Also, you don’t get to have a Shardblade or Plate. Thhbbbt.” Bizarre.
Still, the scene yields a lot of information, most of which I won’t take time to discuss in detail. (Please do so in the comments, though!) World rulers ignore warnings of the Everstorm; most think Dalinar is mad; Taravangian is pretending to be a friend; parshmen who come in contact with the Everstorm will assuredly become Voidbringers; there’s rioting in Kholinar; there’s a plague in the Purelake. I wonder if there’s an Iriali curse about living in interesting times.
Also, we learn the second Ideal of the Bondsmiths:
I will unite instead of divide, Stormfather. I will bring men together.
Once the Stormfather gets done with his rumbling and grumbling, we get to the title scene: The Four. Shallan and Kaladin are waiting for Dalinar in the very top room of the tower, with its ten pillars mirroring the ten Oathgates and the central pillar like Urithiru. (I can’t help wondering… are these remote controls for the Oathgates? Or just artwork?) Apparently this meeting was planned, and Renarin heard them talking about it, or something. As Dalinar demonstrates what Kaladin & Shallan have told him about sucking in Stormlight, he finishes healing, and knows he’s done it before, though he doesn’t seem to know for sure when. (Will we find out in Oathbringer?) Anyway, Shallan identifies the three Orders to which they belong, from her studies and all, and then Renarin pops in.
We all know this is a matter of some debate. We have only Renarin’s word that his spren, Glys, has made him a Truthwatcher. To support his side of the argument, we know (and Shallan knows) that Truthwatchers are one of the Orders; we also know from WoB that Renarin does see a spren no one else sees. His eyesight has healed from holding Stormlight, and he certainly hears the screaming of the dead spren when he summons his Shardblade, which only happens when a bonded (proto-) Radiant touches it. If he is a Truthwatcher, his Surges would be Progression and Illumination—a combination eminently suited to creating an Order’s “quirk” of looking into the future. It’s worth pointing out that Honor claimed Cultivation was better at seeing the future than he was; with Palah/the Truthwatchers directly opposite Ishar/the Bondsmiths on the KR diagram, it seems reasonable that they would be the ones most closely tied to her abilities. Also: why put Palah in the chapter arch, which most readers don’t really notice, unless she’s there in the same capacity as the other three?
The arguments against are, IMO, mostly a matter of people trying hard not to fall for an unreliable narrator. The readers have neither seen nor heard Renarin’s spren, probably because Brandon wanting this scene to be a surprise. Renarin seems to use his unique ability very reluctantly and perhaps involuntarily, which is different than the experiences of Kaladin, Shallan, and Lift… although I’d suggest that Shallan has come pretty close to “involuntary” a couple of times. The only other argument I can recall—and I’m mostly drawing on the Coppermind, since whoever wrote Renarin’s entry seems to be on the skeptic side—is that he and Shallan should share the Surge of Illumination, but we haven’t seen them do any of the same stuff. He hasn’t created any Illusions (that we know of) and she doesn’t use Illumination to see the future, so they must not be using the same Surge. As noted, though, every Order has something unique—it’s “quirk”—in the way the Surges combine, so that two Orders which share a Surge won’t necessarily be limited to using that Surge the same way. We’ll have to wait and see if Renarin (perhaps with Shallan’s teaching) can learn to create Illusions. I don’t recall anyone suggesting it, but perhaps the best argument “against” is Renarin’s apparent fear in claiming to be one of them. With Kaladin and Shallan being heroes, and his father demonstrating his own Radiant development, why would Renarin be so nervous about admitting it to these three? ::RAFO-sigh::
Anyway. Dalinar’s confirmation from the Stormfather that all the parshmen will go Voidbringer on them when the Everstorm comes gives Kaladin a sudden fit of filial duty. Not that I’m objecting to him finally deciding to go back and see his parents, really; I’m just feeling momentarily cynical. He hasn’t bothered to write to them and let them know he’s okay, but now suddenly he has to fall all the way there, using increasingly valuable Stormlight. Well, I guess. I’m kind of glad he’s going—for the sake of seeing what’s happened since he left, if nothing else—and glad Dalinar approved it. It’s just a little unfair that he’s the only person in the world who has the privilege of rushing off to protect his family; everyone else just has to take their chances.
So Kaladin heads off to pack, Renarin goes to requisition emerald broams from Elhokar, Lopen has been claiming he’s an Alethi king? and in the quiet of the top room, Shallan and Dalinar face the enormous task that lies ahead of them, with only their Ideal to guide them:
Life before death, Radiant.
Stormwatch
These events take place one week after the climactic battle and the Stormclash.
Sprenspotting
There are three mentions of spren in this chapter, and while this was not the original intent of the “Sprenspotting” unit, I’m going to address them here because it’s easier. And I can.
THE EVERSTORM IS HERE, AND THE SPREN OF THE ENEMY COME TO INHABIT THE ANCIENT ONES.
It’s clear, but worth noting, that the Stormfather speaks of the connection between the Voidspren and the Parshendi, who he calls “the ancient ones.” (FWIW, I don’t believe he could mean the Unmade instead, primarily because Honor & Cultivation were on Roshar long before Odium showed up and started dropping spren. Also, because the Unmade are more or less spren themselves.) When Brandon was asked (in separate questions) whether the Parshendi were of Odium, or of Cultivation, or of Honor, the first two were answered with “Not originally,” while the later just got a “No.” My theory is that the Parshendi, along with many of the shelled life forms, are native to Roshar and were there prior to the arrival of Honor and Cultivation; they may even have been direct creations of Adonalsium. Also, I assume that humans arrived with Honor & Cultivation from another place, or possibly that they created humans here like Ruin & Preservation did on Scadrial. Incidentally, I think the extension of the theory would imply that the non-Void forms of the Listeners result from a bond with spren either natural to the planet, or Adonalsium-spren… and the two may be the same thing.
Moving on:
I AM HIS… SPREN, YOU MIGHT SAY. NOT HIS SOUL. I AM THE MEMORY MEN CREATE FOR HIM, NOW THAT HE IS GONE. THE PERSONIFICATION OF STORMS AND OF THE DIVINE. I AM NO GOD. I AM BUT A SHADOW OF ONE.
The Stormfather’s description of himself confuses me no end—but almost everything about Splinters, Slivers, fragments, and shadows confuses me if I think about it too hard. This makes me love Dalinar’s response all the more: “I’ll take what I can get.” Another WoB from JordanCon this year expanded my previous understanding of the term spren, when Brandon indicated that Rosharans will call anything a spren, if it seems to be a sapient form of Investiture. Nightwatcher, Honor, Nightblood, Adonalsium… to a Rosharan, all of them would be “spren.” Which might apply to the Stormfather’s words here.
Third instance:
“The other orders must be returning as well. We need to find those whom the spren have chosen. Quickly, for the Everstorm is upon us, and it is worse than we feared.”
I love this casually-tossed-in implication that Dalinar is thinking the same things as the reader: if some Orders are returning, they probably all are, and we should expect to see them soon. Unlike Dalinar, we’ve had the advantage of meeting Ym and Lift already, and we know that Jasnah is still alive, so (assuming you believe Renarin) we already know representatives of six out of ten Orders. Seven, if you count Szeth as a Skybreaker. That leaves only the Dustbringers, the Willshapers, and the Stonewards to show themselves.
All Creatures Shelled and Feathered
A fanciful picture, with animals from mythology. He recognized a few from children’s stories, like the enormous, minklike creature with the mane of hair that burst out around and behind its head. What was it called again?
It sounds like a lion to me. It also sounds like something that wouldn’t do well on Roshar. Interesting, though, that such creatures were still a part of the fairy tales and myths. This could be another indication that the humans of Roshar originally came from another world. When they emigrated, they brought only animals that would be useful enough to be worth the effort; the rest they brought in stories.
Ars Mechanica
Storms, this place was high. His ears had popped several times while riding to the top, using the fabrial lift that Navani had discovered. She spoke of counterweights and conjoined gemstones, sounding awed by the technology of the ancients. All he knew was that her discovery had let him avoid climbing up some hundred flights of steps.
I’m going to assume that this really is a fabrial, since Navani was able to identify things like counterweights and conjoined gemstones, which we already know she understands quite thoroughly. It seems to be a relatively straightforward mechanical device, powered by Invested gemstones. (I’m still not convinced that the Oathgate is really a fabrial in the same sense.)
Have I mentioned that Navani makes my little engineer’s heart happy?
Heraldic Symbolism
The symbols in the chapter arch are too direct to need further clarification.
The Duelist: Adolin
Jezrien: Kaladin, the Windrunner
Shalash: Shallan, the Lightweaver
Ishar: Dalinar, the Bondsmith
Paliah: Renarin, the Truthwatcher
Shipping Wars
As Adolin walked the dark halls of Urithiru, he tried not to show how overwhelmed he felt. The world had just shifted, like a door on its hinges. A few days ago, his causal betrothal had been that of a powerful man to a relatively minor scion of a distant house. Now, Shallan might be the most important person in the world, and he was…
What was he?
We’ve been discussing this aspect of their relationship for several months now…
The initial revelation was pretty clearly not a problem for Adolin. He was delighted that Kaladin saved his father, and equally delighted that Shallan saved the army. The discovery of a couple of powerful magic-users during these terrifying events, and on his side this time, was all for the good, even if he felt a little awkward when he saw Shallan a couple hours later. (Considering how reserved Adolin normally is with regard to public displays of affection, I don’t find his apparent discomfort all that significant anyway.)
Five days later, though, it’s clearly been on his mind throughout the work of exploration and resettlement. I don’t think he ever felt patronizing toward her, despite his awareness of the difference in their social status; if anything, he deliberately ignored the difference because he found her so fascinating. It’s not so easy to ignore the reversal, though: his entire nation is now dependent on her, and her presence is very much in demand. Even his cousin, the king of Alethkar, isn’t as indispensable as Shallan is. Where does that leave him?
I still stand by this ship; I still think Shallan and Adolin are a far better match than Shallan and Kaladin ever could be. (Your mileage may vary, of course!) But… Brandon says he’s fond of conflict in relationships, and these two definitely have some conflicts to resolve! Whether or not Kaladin will be part of the conflict remains to be seen.
Just Sayin’
Silently, Adolin cursed the wind that had persuaded Sadeas—of all people—to heed the call to come to Urithiru.
This was the only Rosharan wind-idiom I caught this week, but I do like that wording.
And so we complete the final chapter. Next week, the Epilogue; the following week, in theory, the ketek and the Ars Arcanum, and then we’ll be finished. This almost makes me sad… but we’ll move on to other things.
Alice Arneson is a long-time Tor.com commenter and Sanderson beta-reader. Rumor has it that Oathbringer will start beta sometime in September, so if she goes into hiding, you’ll know why.
Holy crap, that’s my name! :P You’re quite welcome ^_^
Here’s the link again for anyone who didn’t see it: http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1069#24
Great roundup of everything going on in this chapter!
The stress might be a contributing factor, but I think Sadeas’s track record, his callousness, and his lack of empathy are really the things that push Adolin over the edge here. Like you, I don’t blame him. We wouldn’t want someone to kill Sadeas in a peaceful country with strong judicial institutions, but Alethkar and the Shattered Plains are so far from those that I think Adolin’s action is laudable.
It will probably prove expensive to him in the future.
One of my favorite things from this chapter is Dalinar’s complicated relationship with the Stormfather. Of all the spren we’ve met, he’s the only one with a long-established personal identity. He knows Rosharan history, and fears for the future of his people if they become involved with humans again. But he’s also open enough to change his mind and enter negotiations with Dalinar.
In my view, that’s more powerful than a sword and a suit of armor. He’s a strong ally and more evidence that the Bondsmiths are more than just your average KR order.
@3 Not to mention, they’d been trying to deal with Sadeas by the rules and it just hadn’t been working. Unless Sadeas really screwed up, there’s no way to take him out of the game permanently. The only effective solution is to break the rules. It will be expensive though.
I think Dalinar’s dream of hearing Gavilar laughing and the light was symbolic of Dalinar finally letting go of the guilt over Gavilar’s death. He finally fulfilled the vengeance pact and he confronted his brother’s killer. In fighting Szeth he realized he couldn’t have saved his brother even if he wasn’t passed out drunk.
There may end up being a greater significance to the dream, but I read it as Dalinar no longer feeling guilty and terrible when he thinks of his brother. Now he is at peace.
@Alice why does the fragment of the Diagram have to reference a parshendi bonding an Odium spren? We know, or at least take it for granted, that a parshendi will bond a Cultivation/Honor spren so couldn’t this passage just as easily be about stopping them from doing that? It would seem to fall in line with previous entries that seemed to want to keep the human Radients from manifesting as well iirc.
The Stormfather not wanting to be a Blade rang as very unique until I read the sneak peak of Edgedancer. Though I have a feeling the spren from Edgedancer will come around eventually.
After much reflection, I think I have figured out why I believe that Adolin will face significant consequences in the next book for killing Sadeas. It is a combination of several reasons (in no particular order).
First, is my sense of justice. (Yes, I am implying my morals onto a society that may have different morals than the typical person does in RL). That there are consequences for the killing of another person where the murder was not “in self defense” or the combatants were not in a war.
(I concede that in RL, Adolin’s actions may be voluntary manslaughter. Even if you argued that once Adolin and Sadeas’ fight began, only one would live, I do not consider Adolin’s actions as a pure self-defense killing. Adolin initiated the first physical contact.)
Even if Alethian society would conclude that Adolin should not be sentenced to death; banished from Alethkar and disinherited; stripped of his Shards; or any other similar punishment, I think Adolin should face some consequences. (Query: can Adolin be banished from Urithiru as it is not Alethkar – notwithstanding that at the moment, only Alethian’s are at Urithiru?) At a minimum, there should be full-fledged investigation. This investigation would have to detail Sadeas’ past actions against Dalinar, the King and Dalinar’s House. If Adolin was cleared, so be it. At least Adolin and the other characters would not know the result of the investigation until the investigator(s) released the results.
Second, (especially after WoR) Adolin the character we know — from his actions and thoughts, is not an immoral or evil person. This is the person who was willing to stay in jail as long as Kaladin was in jail. In WoK, he comes to the rescue of the prostitute whom Sadeas’ soldiers hassled. Thus, I think he should have at least some mental anguish for his actions. If not, then why did he clean up after the fact and ask himself “had he just murdered a highprince” (italics included in original quote). I do not believe it would be consistent with Adolin’s character to not have some mental anguish/issues with killing Adolin.
Third, I think it would be weak (for a lack of a better word) from a literary perspective. In the first two books, there were a lot of buildup between the conflict between Dalinar/Adolin and Sadeas. At the very end of a novel, Adolin and Sadeas have school-yard fist fight that ends in Sadeas’ death. For Adolin not to face any consequences, would (IMO) be a major literary disappointment.
Thanks for reading my musings,
AndrewHB
(aka the musespren)
@6 Don’t forget Sadeas’ wife. IRRC, she works with assassins. I’m inclined to think she’ll be the primary deliverer of unpleasant consequences.
Spren are living ideas right? So maybe Stormfather is bits of Honor mixed with the collective idea of what God should be?
OK, taking a few minutes during lunch break to post here.
I like your theory re: Dalinar’s warm light vision. Here’s an alternate: Maybe the light (or the entire vision) comes from some piece or splinter of the shard Honor, and it’s calling Dalinar to come and retrieve it, perhaps to begin putting the shard back together. I think he has some kind of destiny or quest that he’ll lauch off to achieve at the end of Book 5, and I think he’ll see the warm light again then. If this was to happen, it might be another reason for the (current) Stormfather to hate him: if Dalinar does anything like what I theorize, it would surely impact the “memory [that] men create for [Honor],” which is how the Stormfather describes himself. A wild bunch of speculation, but interesting.
A guess re: the last SA scene that we’ve already read somewhere in WoK/WoR. I think it’s the part of one of Dalinar’s visions where he sees the Roshar crumbling into dust. In other words, and with great sadness, I think that ultimately Roshar will fall to Odium. I’m hoping that the planet’s inhabitants (all sapient races and as many species as possible) will find a way to flee before the end, whether in ships, or via sharpools, or whatever other means Brandon comes up with – maybe some kind of vortex through the Cognitive realm?
I don’t know about the other orders, but my money’s on Elhokar to become a Dustbringer. When you read that descrpition from one of the epigraphs, it sure sounds like him to me.
Re: this Diagram epigraph – It reads entirely different if it was actually Odium-inspired; it might even be every other phrase that is/isn’t from our Big Bad. What if the “bridge” isn’t between him and the Parshendi, but between the Parshendi and the humans? and Odium wants to prevent the two races teaming up? The “this one obtain[ing] their power” could refer to Eshonai becoming a Knight Radiant (or the Parshendi equivalent). However, I totally agree that Venli had it going on with a Voidspren long before we met her. I wonder if she *could* have bonded a Stormspren if she already had a Voidspren bond – hmmmmm.
Lunch is over. I look forward to reading everyone’s comments and theories! And as always, thanks Alice for a terrific post!
I thought someone caught him holding a conversation with something that wasn’t there (obviously Glys). Whoever saw him just chalked it up to “Yeah, I know this guy’s kinda strange.” and the subject was dropped.
It seems like the next book will be Law & Order: Stormlight Archives.
Dalinar promised Kaladin that Amaram would face a trial. Amaram doesn’t seem to be ducking it as he is bringing Taln to Urithiru. As an aside, is Amaram the new High Prince now that Sadeas is dead? Sadeas has no children and I doubt his wife will inherit the title.
There will be an investigation into Sadeas’ death, hopefully no one is falsely accused. Throwing away the blade was smart because it looks like someone killed Sadeas and took his blade. If someone killed Sadeas and left the blade it could make it seem like whoever killed him didn’t want the blade because the killer already had one.
To keep some of you out of the hands of the grammar police, it should be “Sadeas’s wife”.
Sadeas’s wife terrifies me. She may end up being more dangerous than Sadeas was.
This got me thinking – what do we know about the Shardholders’ ability to create? Ruin and Preservation had to work together to create Scadrial, but I don’t see why combining their abilities would lead to creation, so perhaps the combination gave them access to Adonalsium’s ability to create, and therefore any combination of Shards could create (like Honor and Cultivation), but not an individual Shard? Maybe I just need to understand how destroying and preserving can be used together to create…
Just to pipe in on Dalinar’s visions, it is implied briefly in one of the chapter snippets documenting Taravingian’s death rattles that one of the victims had also received the Stormfathers visions. Pretty brief though, and I don’t recall exactly when that was.
Delat @5 – You’re quite right; I simply never thought about it that way. I’ve viewed it in terms of what would generally be thought good for humanity… which is inconsistent with my current view of the Diagram. So it truly could be a matter of “destroy the Parshendi before one of them becomes a Radiant and creates a bridge between the two species.” Nice call.
That still leaves the question, though in a different light, of whether the Diagram had anything to do with the Alethi’s war/tactics…
I think that Sadeas is so open about his plans, because he started to see Dalinar – and thus by extension Adolin as too bound by honor to murder him. He sees them as having grown weak, while in truth it’s he who’s grown complacent and prone to mistakes.
Great post, and in case I don’t get a chance to post on the next few week’s, thank you for doing this re-read, Alice. It’s been fantastic.
I personally am not bothered by Kaladin being the only one who gets to “go off to rescue his family.” Why? Well, he can fly. He’s literally the only person who has a reasonable chance of reaching his family. Also, the Kholins are all together, and Shallan’s been told hers are on their way to being delivered to her. Who else would even ask for permission to run off on a rescue mission?
I believe that Renarin is probably a Truthwatcher. I will not, however, carve that into stone until we get a little more textual evidence.
@6: I honestly hope Adolin gets away clean from a Rosharan law-and-order perspective. In a situation where there is no legal recourse, and a man has repeatedly threatened my family and has actually taken direct action against us, I just might make the same decision. That is not to say I don’t think he will suffer consequences from his actions – that is something we all must face for our choices, whether they are legal or not.
@8: I think some spren are “living ideas” – the spren of natural things that exist in the physical realm, and that were given form in the cognitive by the thoughts of men. These are the spren of the stick (“I am a stick”), the ship, firespren, rockspren, etc. Other spren are literally little pieces of a Shard – these are the Cryptics, the Honorspren, and the like. I think that will be an important distinction at some point in the series.
Lastly, I wonder if perhaps the “salvation” of the Parshendi will be the bonding of Honor or Cultivation spren. Bonded to a “good” spren, they will be protected from the involuntary bonding of Odium-spren. I also wonder if Parshendi have a Connection (capital C – see Secret History) to both Odium and Cultivation, and therefore will be unable to bond with Honor spren? Anyway, that’s just wild, random speculation.
Adolin killing Sadeas here really makes me think that Ialai is going to become a major antagonist in the near future. House Kholin beware!
Concerning Renarin’s desire/lack thereof to be a radiant, it seemed to me at the time that it didn’t bother him to be a Radiant, or that he could see the future per se. It seemed to me that it was WHAT he saw that bothered him.
Could someone enlighten me about Lopen? He was using stormlight to heal his arm. Does that make him a radiant, and we just don’t know which order yet?
Thanks Delat @5 and Alice for raising the epigram issue in this chapter. I had originally thought of Eshonai bonding stormspren as the subject, but Venli bonding voidspren may be a more likely candidate in this point of view. However, such a perspective is not in accord with the theory that Odium is the instigator of the thinking leading to the Diagram – which I, too, support. That lead me to Kaladin whom the Diagram appears to fear becoming a full-fledged Radiant (pun intended) – albeit unnamed. The hypothesis would then be that fighting the Parshendi in order to save his men and the Alethi army might precipitate his development into Radiancy. However, now I favor Delat’s view that it refers to Eshonai bonding an honorspren, becoming a Radiant, and influencing the Parshendi to make peace with the Alethi and oppose people like Taravangian.
Thanks also to Alice for stressing the possible significance of Dalinar’s dream. It can’t be a throwaway item. My conjecture is that it may be Hoid’s doing (or someone with such or greater power). We know that Hoid practices Lightweaving in order to encourage Radiants (e.g., young Shallan and Kaladin), but can he do it remotely while the subject is sleeping? Could Cultivation have finally done something? The ‘sun’ that he can stare at in the vision reminds me of the distant weak sun in Shadesmar. Could he have entered it even if there were no spheres but there was radiating warmth? In any case, the effect, as has been noted, is to make him feel better about himself.
I am glad Adolin killed Sadeas. Sadeas has sent assassins against his family and betrayed them in battle. I think you could morally argue that Sadeas has committed treason at least twice, once on the tower platform and again now where he plots to knowingly stop Dalinar from saving the world. I think that argument would work in Roshar, especially given the paranoid king.. Sadeas deserved everything he got here. His wife and successor may be trouble but he won’t be missed.
Also, back in Way of Kings Navani left the capital city saying the Queen was doing well. Now in this book we see the riots and how decadent the Queen is. I wonder what caused Navani to leave and what she actually saw in the Queen.
I also wonder about Cultivation. Since she is better at seeing the future, is she the one who created the diagram? Could some of her spren bonded to the Parshendi been the dawnsingers? They involved in healing and other Cultivation/life things. Seems possible to me.
Regarding Dalinar using stormlight somewhere before, don’t know if the theory has been somewhere or if it’s just to far out there, but if it want him as a proto radiant, then perhaps he was a squire of some sort to another proto radiant like Jasnah or Galivar and since he knew nothing of it he wrote it off… Sorry for the run on sentence.
I can kind of see the magic system acting like he was a radiant’s squire. After all he was incredibly loyal to several protos..
Just my thoughts.
Here is my take on the Adolin kills Sadeas thing. (also this is my first post on tor. i’ve read for years but have been waiting for this chapter and finally caved and registered) I think everyone focuses on the wrong thing in this scene. There is a lot of “oh he killed him!” etc. 1. I’m glad he killed him. Sadeas had it coming. 2. I honestly don’t think there will be negative consequences. I think this is a turning point for Adolin, and a good one.
In fact: This moment is what makes him become a radiant. stay with me!
“Adolin grabbed Sadeas by the throat with his unwounded hand, slamming the highprince back against the wall. The look of utter shock on Sadeas’s face amused a part of Adolin, the very small part that wasn’t completely, totally, and irrevocably engraged.”
Something breaks here in Adolin. He has lost his horse, his sense of place in the world, and he has been through a LOT lately. And now Sadeas is going to just keep going. He breaks and it’s irrevocable (which BS emphasizes himself).
Then note the verbiage when he actually kills Sadeas.
“With a surge, Adolin forced the blade up past Sadeas’s nose and into the eye socket…”
Surge means… well surge. As in a knight radiant’s surge. BA has only used that word when one of our characters is using stormlight whether they know it or not. So right here Adolin uses stormlight. Therefore, knight radiant incoming. He had to break for it to happen. He broke – right here. And THAT is the most important thing in this scene imo.
My theory for Dalinar’s vision is that it is the first breaking of the Nightwatcher’s curse. Dalinar becoming a Radiant and using Stormlight is healing the curse and he has started his flashbacks that will continue through Book 3. He will re-live his life and remember his wife. The “light” in the vision is the Stormlight breaking in and healing his memories.
Could ShShShSh have been a Radiant? Maybe one who healed? That might explain his scarring and familiarity with stormlight healing while also explaining why he doesn’t know why he is familiar with stormlight healing. It would as be sad AF.
Ahhhhh, I love how Adolin kills Sadeas here. Not because I agree with the action – I think in fact it is the wrong thing to do. But regardless of personal morals and the like, it’s just a brilliant scene from a literary perspective. First, as Alice pointed out, Sanderson goes out of his comfort zone to craft a scene that is more gratuitous than he usually does, which helps set the scene apart and make it uncomfortable for the reader, like it is for Adolin. Second, while I usually fall on the side of leaving a character alive lets you do more with them later, this is about the best way to get rid of a villain. Murdering Sadeas like this does absolutely nothing to help Adolin’s position – we’ve already seen earlier that Dalinar has grown into enough of a statesman that he can play the political game with Sadeas and win. Politically, Sadeas projects confidence about how he can take it away from Dalinar, but the events of the finale put Dalinar in a great position: sure he’s going to be all kinds of busy, but his “gamble” on heading off to fight the Parshendi completely upended the status quo in a way that favors his position over Sadeas’s. So, Sadeas’s threat moving forward would largely be in regards to more assassination plots and other secret methods…which we’ve learned is more the hallmark of his wife, Ialai, who is if anything more vicious than Sadeas (not only does she run the assassins, she also casually mentions they could hold a coup after Dalinar leaves – it’s Sadeas’s restraint and desire to see Dalinar fail that saves them from a potentially ruinous division). Third, it’s just a wicked cliffhanger – Adolin is in a confused mental state even before committing the murder, how is he gonna respond to the knowledge he just murdered a highprince? He at least had enough clarity to try and hide the evidence…but how will it weigh on him with time? It just leaves the reader with a lot of questions, which is good, even if we’ve had to wait quite a while for them! And fourth, it’s a nice balance to the unexpected revivals that sandwich it, especially Szeth’s revival: one could even consider it like Sanderson traded us Szeth’s death in the highstorm for Sadeas’s murder, so we could at least have one established villain removed from the equation.
Besides that, the rest of the chapter isn’t that impressive, but I feel that’s almost by design. Dalinar managing to negotiate being a Bondsmith with the Stormfather is impressive but Dalinar approaches it as an inevitability, because he knows his KRdom is necessary at this point. Similarly, Dalinar’s early vision is nice but brief and raises way more questions than answers. And the final scene between the Radiants…I always felt like the characters seemed awkward in it a bit, with some stilted formality that isn’t there in early scenes. And no wonder: how do you respond to the realization that as of the moment you are just three four people who are heirs to ancient orders that you need to help re-establish to stop the apocalypse? It’s enough to push anyone out of their comfort zone!
As for Kaladin leaving at the end…yeah, it is a bit odd. He’s so adamant about it but he’s only actively thought of his parents occasionally (outside the flashbacks which are mostly glimpses into the characters’ pasts for our sakes). But then again, the whole stormlight becoming an extremely important but limited resource is a very recent development that almost feels like it’s here right now so that Kaladin’s chances of getting to his hometown quickly off of falling is…well 0 (not to say it doesn’t make sense and isn’t consistent with what we’d expect – I suspect this feeling is mostly an artifact of these ending chapters being a bit stuffed with new developments). That said, Kaladin is the only one in that room without his close family safe from the Everstorm, and he did get the best view of the horrifying devastation the Everstorm + Highstorm combination can wreak. Plus, Dalinar at least hopes Kaladin can swing by Kholinar pretty quickly…he doesn’t have the advantage of knowing either the epilogue or the beginning of book 3.
I’m hoping many parshmen are spared the Voidbringer fate due to being sheltered from the ‘storm. We know this is possible (and that intent plays into the equation, but how much intent, or lack thereof, can a parshman muster?). How long the parshmen can avoid being transformed is, of course, a pertinent question. Can they stay sequestered long enough to rebuild the race once the Desolation is ended (assuming all the Voidbringer forms are killed off)? Or perhaps long enough to become the Listener version of a KR? Or to help turn the Voidbringers back to the lightside somehow?
I think the theory on Lopen is that he is one of Kaladain’s squires and the squires also get to use stormlight though the evidence for this is weak to me. Until reading here I thought he was a radiant too (and as I find him annoying was upset).
For request on what to do after this is done … and to sound like a broken record…I’d love a new sun reread. Lord knows there is a lot to talk about in that series.
On Lopen: Am I the only one wondering if he’s the Herdazian king or whatever their leader is? And this makes him kin (cousin) to all Herdazians?
It’s strange to compare Jasnah to Adolin. She’s much more cold-blooded about killing. At the beginning of this book, she was getting ready to have her sister-in-law murdered. In WoK, she takes Shallan on a field trip as she kills a gang of robbers. But, I feel like she gets a lot less flak for this than Adolin gets for Sadeas (or maybe I’ve been discussing her killings in the wrong places/with the wrong people). Yet, I’d say Jasnah’s killings were less justifiable than her cousin’s.
What I worry about with Sadeas is that I can think of one reason for him to provoke Adolin: Adolin getting mad enough to attack him was just what he wanted. If Adolin attacked him in a way that breaks Alethi rules or if Sadeas was able to beat him to a pulp, it would have helped Sadeas.
Of course, both those scenarios only work if there were witnesses.
There is nothing unusual with Kaladin’s behavior.
Kaladin avoided contacting his parents because of shame, not because he did not care. This is well established. He assumed that they were safe and that there was no need to bring them into his (failed) life. But now that they are the ones in greater danger, he knows he must act.
As for Stormlight, the investment will pay off when he opens the gate in Kholinar. Because that is clearly where his storyline is headed.
Just to add: I think Kaladin is also the only person who has a chance of reaching his family and of making a difference when he gets there (which, given Kal’s life, probably means something awful will happen instead).
Sadeas is a mass murderer and a traitor who said he will kill again and, in fact, endanger the very survival of his nation and people. He needed to die before he killed more good people.
As far as Kal going to Hearthstone – in addition to his family, the protagonists need intel. And this is as good of a way as any to get it.
dwcole @28 – I’m not a big Gene Wolfe fan; he’s very good, just not my style. I’ll stick to Sanderson. But it would be a very interesting reread/read-along if done by someone who really groks Wolfe.
FWIW, I’ll probably start a Warbreaker reread in mid-September or so. I think it’ll be fun to do a reread of something that’s so thoroughly annotated by the author.
@23 That same line caught me, but I’ve always interpreted it the opposite way. I think being broken here will open Adolin to Odium’s influence and the results won’t be pretty. My theory for book 3 is that Ialai will figure out what happened and use it as leverage over Adolin and force him to compromise himself further. Also, in addition to having difficulty coming to terms with Shallan’s change in status, I think he’ll also deal with a lot of stress over Renarin’s. The frail little brother you always protected becoming a superhero who outranks you as heir to the princedom won’t be an easy adjustment.
My fear is that these various stress points will send Adolin into a downward spiral that eventually leads to him becoming Odium’s champion, whatever that entails. I hope I’m wrong. I like Adolin.
@25 The late Mrs. Kholin as a (proto) Radiant would be an awesome touch and I hope you’re right.
I’m currently reading Words of Radiance for the first time and thus can’t follow this reread yet, but I look forward to reading through the Stormlight Archive Reread after I finish the book. Thank you in advance.
I have no idea why Sadeas chose to provoke Adolin the way he did when no one was around. It’s so out of sync with his character over the past two books. Sadeas has never confronted Dalinar or Adolin when it wasn’t public, so he could inflict the most embarrassment possible when Adolin had to stop himself from attacking Sadeas with other Alethi watching. Confronting in public also meant he was always protected from something like this. It did nothing for Sadeas to provoke Adolin privately.
He had to go. There are more important things going on than highprinces trying to one-up another, and Sadeas couldnt see that.
@34, I hope Adolin doesnt’t become Odium’s champion. Dalinar would have to have someone kill his his own son – or maybe do it himself. It would be heartbreaking.
@29 – IIRC, Lopen is saying he’s king of the Alethi because he won some kind of bet with Elhokar when the King was sheltering in Lopen’s mother’s house. Elhokar probably didn’t take it seriously, but the Lopen – you can bet he would. ;-)
@24 – I hope you’re right. That would be really beautiful.
@27 – I hope you’re right too. I really think that Eshonai’s mother and the others who ran away won’t become Voidbringers, so at least that’s a few. And I am still really, really hoping that a KR with Progression will heal that dear lady’s memory/cognitive function. The fragments of the Listener songs were so tantalizing – I feel like the answers to the whole puzzle and keys to victory will be found within them by Book 10.
@34 – I too hope you’re wrong, but I can imagine things going that way. If I were to nominate a champion for Odium, at this point I’d pick Venli. (This sounds like a good poll question to post over on the 17th Shard! ;-)
My understanding of what spren are is as follows:
I think of Adonalsium as being like one huge sheet of glass. It (s/he?) could break of tiny splinters of itself (say 1/1,000,000,000,000 portion), put a part of it’s consciousness/intent (proportionally less complex) into them, and they would go off and do stuff as per their basic instructions. Adonalsium could reabsorb these into itsel later at will (maybe?). This is where the unaligned/original spren of Roshar come from (and maybe other magic stuff from some other worlds). It could do this millions of times without having any real impact on the original.
When they shattered Adonalsium, it broke into 16 main bits, with possibly some additional tiny bits. Maybe some of these additional bits, while still tiny in comparison, were huge compared to the original spren (1/1,000,000,000th, but 1000 times more powerful/conscious than the original little ones). This could be a possible origin for Cusicesh (sp?) or the Nightwatcher.
The 16 Shards can each also voluntarily split off splinters, but their splinters can only be given something that the Shard has, so all the little splinters (spren) are like a simplified version of some aspect of their creator. The more they splinter themselves, the less power left in the original Shard, but the more viewpoint / active players available. So glory spren might be 1/1,000,000,000,000 of Honor, honor spren might be 1/1,000,000,000, and the Stormfather might be 1/1,000,000.
This also explains BWS’s comment that a Rosharan would call all of them “spren” including Honor, Cultivation and Odium.
I’m really not sure why Adolin killing Sadeas would present any kind of problem beyond the practical issue of not getting caught, which he seems to have handled well. Adolin isn’t going to suddenly decide to betray his family and join Odium because he killed Sadeas after Sadeas openly threatened his father. That’s Star Wars logic, where emotion leads to the dark side, and anyone who deviates from the party line inevitably ends up dressed in black with a red lightsaber. Dalinar isn’t all wise, and his system of morality is extremely flawed. Yay to Adolin for putting his father’s best interests ahead of his father’s ridiculous code of honor.
dptullos @39 – Well, aside from the practical question of whether he did a good enough job of covering all the evidence, this is Adolin. He’s killed before, but only in battle against an acknowledged enemy. He’s fought duels. But he’s never killed someone he was not even “supposed” to be fighting, and never in secret. It may well eat at him. He may feel a need to confess it to someone – Dalinar, Kaladin, Renarin, someone in Bridge Four, Shallan… But the only one of those I see making an issue of it is Dalinar, frankly. The rest would say, “Well, good for you!”
That said… I honestly don’t see Adolin going on a downward spiral into the dark side. A downward spiral into depression or self-imposed exile, perhaps, assuming Dalinar doesn’t make some issue of it. If it got to him badly enough, I could see him deciding he had to “atone” by killing himself, though I certainly hope Brandon doesn’t go there. But without something else really bizarre going wrong, I’m mostly with you: I don’t see him going over to Odium and opposing everything he’s ever stood for.
Could Rlain be the bridge? He’s already established loyalty to his Bridgemates and rejected the Stormform. I think he’s a good candidate for a radiant of some sort, but if not, he could at least be a go-between that helps establish trust between the non-stormform Parshendi and the Alethi people.
Re: Adolin – he is in for a lot of heartaches in the next book, that’s what I see. :-( but I am and will always be an Adolin fan girl :-
Late to this important part of the party. Kids and work do that.
Dalinar’s dream – I see it as something Cultivation sent. Not sure why yet, but it will happen again. Prediction for SA 3.
Surprised no one has said this yet on the thread. The Alethi people see predicting the future as an act of EVIL. Renarin, always an outsider, is now a Radiant. Yeah, a man with power, right? No. He’s still an outsider. He’s seeing the future. He’s “doing evil.”
The others powers are going to be more readily accepted by the society at large. Especially Kaladin’s fighting powers.
Renarin seeing the future is going to trip over all the cultural taboos. I feel for the guy. He’s still the odd man out.
As for Adolin…. My prediction for SA 3 is we won’t see real fall out until halfway into the book. Seeing Ialai’s search for her husband’s killer would be running too perfect of an interlude chapter to pass.
And I agree with a poster above, dumping the Shard will help confuse the issues of why Sadeas was killed.
@23: goddess, welcome to commenting! Good points.
PS. On phone, sorry about the spelling the names wrong. Edit: have fixed.
I really hope Adolin will “stay on track” and therefore like the “godess” interpretation @23.
And now onward to a stupid question that’s been bothering me:
did the clash of the unscheduled Highstorm and the Everstorm anihilate those storms? Because if not, wouldn’t the first Everstorm traveling eastward have hit the Warcamps and transformed the Parshendi there before the people there could have started for / reached Urithiru?
So if the storms anihilate each other, it would be significant if future storms come somehow coordinated or not, right? And where the Everstorm will have his origin. Because if this will always be on the Shattered Plains and the normal HIghstorm comes from the Origin, they would (if coordinated) meet and clash far in the east and for the rest of Roshar essentially the storms would stop, right?
@43 It is not just the Alethi people, or Vorin peoples. This is from WOR Chapter 5:
“I remember… something,” [Syl] whispered, “Something bad. Seeing what is to come – it isn’t of Honor Kaladin. It’s something else. Something dangerous.”
Apparently even Sly thinks that seeing the future is EVIL as well. What does that mean for Renarin? I think this is where a lot of the ‘Renarin isn’t a Truthwatcher’ theories are coming from.
@45 I’m trying to remember while at work where on the wheel truth watcher is vs Wind runner. Wind runner is honor and truth watcher is cultivation so that may explain the isn’t of Honor comment and why Sly is distrustful of it.
Dangerous does not equal evil. Knowledge or vague knowledge of the future is often quite dangerous. There has been plenty of stories or movies on what knowledge of the future has thrown all sorts of harm if that information is not used wisely. Think of what happened here. Renarin carved into the wall his messages and everyone was attributing it to Dalinar causing him and others to question his sanity. Renarin isn’t handling foreknowledge well from a mental standpoint as we have seen several times in this book, see his freak out when they were trying to open the oathgate.
Re: seeing the future – Jennifer has an excellent point. Even Syl didn’t say it was evil – just that it was dangerous. This is likely what’s behind the epigraph about Truthwatchers, which said something about how they didn’t talk about their activities much. If knowledge of the future is dangerous, and it certainly can be, it makes sense that those who (as an Order) can see the future would be likely to try to get all the information they can before letting slip any foretellings. Particularly so, when there is great danger involved. But Renarin is on his own, with neither training nor other Truthwatchers to consult, so… he does what he can. In future, I’m guessing that he will at least bring his foresights straight to the “Radiant Council” or to Dalinar personally, so that they can decide what to do with/about it.
ETA:
FWIW, Truthwatchers are opposite Bondsmiths on the wheel, and are likely the most closely connected to Cultivation, who is much better at seeing the future than Honor was. And there were definitely situations where the more-Honor spren clashed with – or at least distrusted – the more-Cultivation spren.
travyl @44 – Despite the maps and things we saw earlier, the warcamps are actually on the west side of the Shattered Plains. (I’m so used to maps where up is north… and the first pictures we got of the Shattered Plains had north at some wonky angle that we would think of as SSE or something!) The first inhabited place to get hit would be New Natanatan, and after that the Everstorm has to wrap around the world before it hits Aimia and Shinovar. As to the storms cancelling each other… apparently not. Somehow, each retains its integrity even when they crash, and when they disentangle, each moves on again. I guess that’s what you get when magic and physics get involved with each other?
Off topic – for those who might be interested, my cousin’s kids are all HOME now! They will have ongoing care for the tender regrowing skin, of course, but only one needed skin grafting (the 6-year-old) and he was allowed to go home this past weekend. You should see their smiles!
Great to hear Alice @@@@@ 48. I’m sure everyone in your family are happy that everyone is home. :-)
1) I think Renarin being so reluctant with things is just his personality. He’s a very complicated person with a lot of pressure from multiple sides and sources. He’s kind of used to being the “weak” son of one of the most powerful men and I think his interactions with the bridgemen is him trying to feel like he has earned the right to be powerful and not just have the power thrust on him by him becoming a KR. Kind of like if someone won the lottery but wanted wait to collect the prize and keep working until they earn their first million dollars by their own labor. I think there’s multiple possibilities to explain his actions and attitudes and it’ll be up to Brandon to decide how that goes.
One thing I AM curious about is whether Stormlight has healed his epilepsy or whatever it is he has. Can Stormlight or an Edgedancer cure a permanent disease? Could they cure a diabetic or cancer? What about an auto-immune disorder that’s being caused by your body’s own healing ability? It cured his eyesight but that’s probably not caused by a degenerative disease.
2) I can understand why Kaladin hasn’t contacted his parents: when he does that he’ll have to tell them that his brother is dead and I’m not sure he’s done that yet. He might have because there was some time between when his brother dies and the opening of WoKs but I wouldn’t be surprised if he just hasn’t been able to bring himself to do it. True story, (this is as far as I know) in the book and movie of “Black Hawk Down” one of the soldiers is portrayed by Josh Harnett and at the end of the movie he is talking to the body of the soldier he tried to save but who died anyways. In the movie the final line is “I’m going to talk to your family after I get home.” Afaik, in real life the soldier hadn’t been able to bring himself to go do that but he said in an interview that the book/movie gave him the strength to do it. It’s not something that is easy to do. So it’s possible that even if Kaladin’s parents know about what happened that Kaladin himself hasn’t been able to deal with his guilt enough to open a dialogue with them.
3) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Sheesh the Stormfather is a whiner! He’s always apologizing and saying he can’t do anything to help people and generally being a whiny little puppy. Grow a pair! But I suppose in his defense he doesn’t feel like it’s his role to intervene in the world but still… what a whiner. Speaking of growing a pair, Dalinar probably clanks when he walks! He’s got a pair of brass ones for binding the Stormfather to him! Dalinar goes big or goes home.
Long time reader first time commenter. Thanks Alice for a great re-read! It’s been fun going through my favorite series with you all. I had to throw in a comment about Renarin. I remember back in WOK when Dalinar, Adolin and Renarin were all talking about the visions and what to do with them. Renarin was so sure that the visions were not of the Nightwatcher. In fact he said, from what he read the visions didn’t match. He seemed so confident which seemed a little out of character for him and that stood out to me. So for my thought:
1. There has been a theory that the nightwatcher is often attributed to cultivation (If there is a WOB that contradicts this now let me know). The “stormfather” of cultivation as it were.
2. Truthwatcher’s are opposite of bondsmiths on the wheel.
3. We have not seen Renarin’s spren yet.
4. Night”watcher” and then Truth”watchers” coincidence?
So with all of these factors, what if Renarin is, like his father, bonded to one of the great sprens like the Nightwatcher. What if Renarin didn’t read about it, but knew the visions were not from the Nightwatcher because of his bond?
Just a thought, I’m sure its out there somewhere so if there are WOB to the contrary please enlighten. Thanks again all.
I have this sinking feeling that Adolin, being lighteyes and closely related to royalty, will turn out to be effectively above the law. As an American with modern republican sensibilities, it really grates on me every time the golden boy’s enormous sense of entitlement is validated. (Of course he gets martial training from the best swordsman on Nalthis. Of course he gets an unimaginably expensive magic sword, becoming practically unbeatable. Of course he gets unimaginably expensive magic armor, becoming practically bulletproof. Of course he gets his pick of all the single ladies, and no matter how fast he burns those bridges, he doesn’t seem to hurt his chances with the next one. Of course nobody forces him to learn to read even a few glyphs.)
So, he will escape all personal consequences for killing Torol, except a bit of internal anguish. Consequences (by which of course I mean Ialai) will fall instead on his family and his father’s mission. Ialai will be hostile toward Adolin, but the harm from her actions will fall on others. This I Foretell.
He will also eventually become a Knight Radiant, because it’s just not enough for him to be in two One Percent groups (upper-crust lighteyes, Shardbearers), if there exists a third such group. This too I Foretell. (Though I am less certain about his inductance into the fourth One Percent group, the Worldhoppers.)
Alice, wonderful news about your cousin’s children!
I am confused why the Stormfather told Dalinar:
The Stormfather’s revulsion would be perfectly understandable if Dalinar had a Shardblade, but he has Talan’s Honorblade (he bonded it as part of setting up Amaram to expose his duplicity).
Here’s what Syl said about Honorblades:
The only reason I would think that the Stormfather would call an Honorblade a monstrosity would maybe be because he blames those blades for the spren imitating them and thus somehow leading to whatever disaster the Recreance represented.
Thoughts?
@54 – forkroot, there’s a few other things that imply that Taln’s Honorblade vanished shortly after he showed up in Kholinar, and a regular Shardblade left with him in it’s place. This is just one of them. Another might be that Dalinar never showed any special abilities, as bonding an Honorblade should in theory do.
I suspect Hoid. It’s usually a good first step in any case.
@52 – Apologies for the long comment but I felt that I needed to respond to your implications in some depth. Your observations on Adolin are at best deceptive.
First, considering the two groups (upper-crust lighteyes) and (Shardbearers), membership in these two are not, as you imply, uncorrelated. Rather being a member of the second inherently implies membership in the first by the rules of the society. Additionally, due to active cultural dynamics, a “new-money” prejudice against said newly generated members is unlikely to develop so any new shardbearer is likely to immediately be inducted into some high class family if there are no existing ties, resulting in an even greater correlation between the two. His later becoming a Knight Radiant or Worldhopper is currently unsupported and current trends do not support that if such an event occured the manner would match your characterization of him as an entitled brat.
First, looking the subset of statements relevant to Adolin’s status as a Shardbearer, we must consider the nature of the society. One of Adolin’s primary expected duties is likely to be that of a general and being a Shardbearer enhances both status and ability in this duty. As such, seeking and obtaining training from the best swordsmen possible becomes more analogous to a corporate heir seeking to attend the best business school available. While it is likely that they may have had an advantage due to status, given displayed competence or excellence, as in the case of Adolin, accusations of entitlement ring somewhat hollow due to the obvious goal being to better fulfill their obligations. Additionally consider that modern Shards are not considered to be of noticeably varying ability so given Adolin’s displayed ability, your underplaying of his skill by attributing it to his tools is not reasonable.
Next, consider the statement considering his inability to read glyphs. Here, it is necessary to note that Alethi society drives males not to learn to read glyphs, and the ability is not anywhere near ubiquitous. Indeed, Adolin’s situation is not that of entitlement but rather of status permitting a closer adherence to a harmful ideal. To quote an earlier passage from Kaladin’s point of view “A man writing was seen as unmasculine, even blasphemous—though Sigzil was only writing glyphs.” Additionally, the glyphs are both an ideographic writing system and are frequently stylized. So when you cite his inability to recognize the glyphs safety and glory as distinct from victory, this is not inherently a case of an obvious discrepancy as the concepts are sufficiently similar that the ideograms may be derived from each other or a common root. While he is also unable to identify specific numbers, it is necessary to consider that he is able to at least tentatively identify them as numbers. Given the aforementioned ideographic and frequently stylized nature this may not be as trivial as modern culture and English make it.
Finally, examining Adolin’s dating patterns, it is necessary to consider that he as mentioned seeks to fulfill the Alethi male ideal and is of a social status where political considerations are more likely to encourage pursuing him. Of the examples you cite, this is the most reasonable, but at the same time it is necessary to consider that if we examine his behavior in the described examples he is in some ways more pursued than pursuing, lessening the usefulness of the observation.
Considering his attack on Sadeas in this chapter, it is necessary to consider that Kholin and Sadeas are effectively in an undeclared war. The state is such that Kholin cannot reasonably declare said war without a verifiable and obvious justification to ensure the continued survival of the unification of Alethkar, while Sadeas cannot publically declare the war until the destruction of Kholin is certain. As such, and given the past actions in this war, Adolin’s act is while morally questionable not entirely unreasonable. The main problem with the action itself is that it must be hidden and that there was no formal declaration of enmity, with the primary issue being the setting of precedent and possibly the implications of Adolin’s emotional state during the act. Part of your problem when judging that Adolin will escape personal consequences is that you refuse to consider that Adolin holds his father’s mission as one of his primary goals. Ialai’s probable continued enmity cannot be considered as a consequence of the attack as it is merely a continuation of past actions. While the possibility of Kholin having killed Sadeas might be used to drive additional internal strife such accusations are not going to be entirely in her favor, reducing the consequences which can be directly attributed to the act.
For the morality argument on Adolin’s actions, the arguments attributed to both Adolin and Dalinar have their merits. Dalinar is attempting to find a way to deal with Sadeas in a manner that may be publicly cited while simultaneously limit the damage to the law that is generated. As of the beginning of the book, Dalinar therefore requires a situation that will circumvent an active civil war which would certainly cause the entirety of the civil structure to disintegrate. This results in a situation where active pursuit of Sadeas’s death through untraceable means becomes difficult to consider as a solution. Adolin’s action is inherently opportunistic and comes after Sadeas explicitly makes statements which could be considered a declaration of continued war while under existential threat. It also does meet the requirement of not being obviously tied to Kholin. However, it does also result in a situation where it cannot be claimed publicly as deterrence without generating additional issues which could be considered to be one of Dalinar’s additional goals. How such a declaration would have resulted in Dalinar modifying his own plans is uncertain.
For the predictions that he will later become a Knight Radiant, I do not personally have a strong desire to see him become one but at the same time I do not have any strong inherent objections to the event. I do think that a more unique and interesting narrative role would be in the examination of his status as an honorable bearer of dead shards.
Forkroot, welcome back! I didn’t realize you were following here!
Hope travels are treating you well.
As @55 said, it’s implied that the blade was a normal dead spren blade. What happened to his real blade will probably be a minor mystery to SA 3.
Did you all see that Brandon has moved his percentage bar to 67% for SA 3. That’s over 2/3rd done!!
@24 adjbaker, thanks for that insight about the significance of Dalinar’s dream. I believe now that you’re basically correct except that it’s not related to the Nightwatcher curse. That curse erased his memory of his late wife. The prior absence of dreams about his past is more likely related to the guilt that he felt about not being able to defend his brother due to his drunken state. His defeat at Szeth’s hands (literally), however, convinced him that he would not have been more successful in confronting Szeth together with Gavilar had he been sober. That guilt is now largely or entirely gone. If stormlight can also effect mental healing, that may also have contributed (we’ll see if Renarin’s weakness and autistic behavior is removed). In any case, as adjbaker pointed, the way is now clear for many such flashbacks some of which can occur in the form of dreams.
class4kayaker@56, don’t apologize for a long comment! It is what we do here. Elsewhere on the tor.com forums we used to write “walls of text”, hence my grammar-poor handle.
First of all, I must point out that you missed a nice meta-rebuttal of my position: my claim that “as a moden American” I was annoyed at the feudal roots undergirding Adolin’s giant sense of entitlement. You could have pointed out, but didn’t, that Americans as a whole are pretty darned entitled too – not the overt classism of Vorin society, but slightly more nuanced First-World presumption. E.g., I can read books like these and post to forums like these in my native language. (Also, full disclosure, I’m probably a lighteyes. Not that it does me so much good in this world.)
Anyway, Alethi classism. You point out that membership in high society and ownership of priceless, overpowered war matériel is hardly uncorrelated. Just so. And so it goes for candidacy for the Knights Radiant: the spren buy into the system too. Of the five Vorin proto-Radiants we know of, how many are (were) darkeyes? One. Now, I don’t know the ratio of society as a whole, but in the real world, if you see two rigid social classes, the lower class will vastly outnumber the upper class. (You have to have a great many more servants than masters, or the distinction wouldn’t have much power.) So, 80% of the proto-Radiants seem to come from, say, 5 to 10% of the population. So ingrained does this idea seem that when members of Bridge Four begin to manifest Radiant powers, we immediately assume that of course they can’t be actual Radiants, they must just be “squires”, an entourage of sorts for Kaladin. But why not? I guess because the Radiancy already has a token darkeyes?
You took issue with me saying Adolin was “practically unbeatable” and “practically bulletproof” in his Shards. I stand by it. 99.99% of enemies he might meet on a battlefield have approximately zero chance of doing him any serious harm. He’s basically driving a tank through an infantry formation. He can cut them down by the half dozen. If he weren’t so highly trained he might have to cut them down one or two at a time. Either way it is not by his intense Samurai training or his mighty thews, it’s all about the Blade. The other 0.01% are Shardbearers or, you know, Kaladin. I call that practically unbeatable and bulletproof.
Illiteracy. Adolin don’t need no education. Yes, he is expressing an ideal, but as you said, he is also training for the lighteyed man’s burden, leadership in war. Reading numbers at least seems like a pretty basic skillset for that job. If his elite martial training were really intended for practical ends, as opposed to basically a fencing hobby, maybe he could’ve submitted to the boring parts of his education, just a little bit. And I agree that these stylized pictographs (Chinese characters meet Arabic calligraphy?) seem challenging, to these Western eyes. Not really an excuse. It’s either part of your education or it ain’t. I also disagree that it’s normal for men not to learn glyphs. I’ve always gotten the impression that while they don’t write them so often (unmasculine), most can read them. (Speaking of which, I wonder when/why Szeth learned the Alethi script, so he could record Gavilar’s last words. Fine, Shin men are literate … but literate in Alethi?)
So, um, back to my original prediction, that Adolin would escape legal consequences for killing a man after a mere verbal altercation. I don’t disagree that Torol would have continued to oppose House Kholin in all things, or that Dalinar’s social and legal avenues for defusing the conflict had sputtered out, or that by taunting an enemy Shardbearer in a place with no apparent witnesses, Torol effectively declared himself too stupid to live. Not even saying I didn’t cheer a little when this horrible human being finally got his. I’m just saying that not just anybody could get away with killing a Highprince. It would normally be a capital crime. But I bet Adolin will not be executed. I bet that even if Ialai paints an enormous “justice” glyph on the ground, Adolin will not be punished. The consequences will not be legal means, but the redoubled enmity from Ialai and her network, visited upon the House and their plans.
I hope I’m wrong. I think at least a bit of exile would be good for the boy. He should live like the beasts and eat grass like the ox for 7 seasons. Might acquire a bit of perspective.
FWIW, Adolin inherited his Shardplate, but he had to win his Blade. So… not totally “entitled” to it – he won a duel no one expected him to win in order to earn it.
Sigzil can write because he isn’t Alethi and his culture doesn’t share their view about men’s literacy. Adolin is expected to marry a woman who does all the reading and writing for him. His failure isn’t that he can’t read but that he doesn’t have a wife.
The only people who have legal power to punish Adolin are Elhokar and Dalinar, who are both related to him. Ialai has more power than Moash to do something when the justice system fails.
Yes, Airsick Wetlander, Adolin did win his Blade, in a fencing match I presume. (I don’t clearly remember the event.) This is very much an opportunity of privilege, though. There’s thousands of darkeyed soldiers all around, some of them probably pretty good, but you never see any of them winning Shards that way. (Or, y’know, at all.) We all know how well it went when Kaladin tried to challenge a lighteyes to a duel.
Wort, I think I would have actually liked to have seen the sparks that would have flown if Gepeto were still commenting. Anyway, a couple things. I cannot blame Adolin for his life of privilege up to this point. It doesn’t grate on my own sensibilities mainly because he isn’t an arrogant dick. I mean he could have turned out like Elkohar, a truly worthless specimen if there ever was one and a shining example of when nepotism goes wrong. It’s not always about the advantages you start with, it’s more about what you do with them. Next, there is no guarantee that Adolin graduates to KR. At this point Elkohar has a better shot at it (spren have been watching him for quite a while now). If he does get the bump up then I cannot imagine another character who would represent the KR much better than him. If he doesn’t, he is still a compelling enough character to remain relevant to the story at large.
This brings us to your main point. You think Adolin gets away with the crime, possibly with some mental anguish but ultimately a slap on the wrist. Furthermore, the murder will sick the Wife on all the Alethi nobility and Addie will not have to face the brunt of her wrath. Second point first, her loyalty to her husband means all of the Kholins are targets for her knives in the dark. However that was true even before Sadeas was killed. How much could she redouble her effort? They were already marked for deletion. Adolin just accelerated the timeline. Next there is no guarantee Dalinar just lets this one slide. In fact, it’s more likely he gets a particularly harsh punishment. Dalinar has a lot on his plate with trying to rebuild the KR and trying to hold Alethkar together. He needs people he can trust. Addie broke faith and trust with a fearsome choke hold. Dalinar won’t kill him. Could not kill him without alienating Shallan. He will be made to feel some pain. Lastly, don’t underestimate mental anguish as punishment (this is of course assumes that no one else found out about the kill). I Fortell he goes dark for a period then gets a redemption arc just before he is chosen as one of the Champions at the Last Battle.
Evil Monkey @@@@@ 63 – Well said. Thank you.
Yes, where is Gepeto? Haven’t seen her for sometime but I’m not actually paying much attention. :-( I think like most of us here, it’s summertime and our social calendars are just busier than usual. :-)
@52, 59 Wortmaeur
I am disappointed that the series in going in the direction of “uniting to face the outside threat” and away from the possibility of “uniting to punch out the insufferably arrogant and oppressive ruling class”. I am generally frustrated by books where everyone just has to work together (under the existing leadership, of course) to fight off the Big Bad, without any promise of meaningful change after the war is done. Sometimes it would be nice to see some revolution in fantasy, instead of always falling back on the outside menace.
It can be frustrating to see Adolin rolling through a battlefield with his magical sword and armor, slaughtering Parshendi with no more danger than a farmer harvesting crops. There’s a sense of feudal entitlement there, the invincibility of the armored knight in a world of peasants wielding cudgels. However much they talk about honor and bravery, Shardbearers are really only courageous when they’re fighting each other. Also, you’re completely right about the KR/lighteyes ratio. I never thought about it before, but the vast majority of new KR should be darkeyes. As it so often happens in fantasy, though, the supposedly detached Powers that Be seem to cast their blessings primarily to the aristocracy.
However, I don’t think Adolin killing Sadeas and planning to get away with it is a sign of entitlement. I think it’s a sign of sound judgement. Adolin didn’t murder Sadeas because of “a mere verbal altercation”. He murdered him because Sadeas had already tried to murder his father twice (At the Tower battle, and when he paid a man to sabotage the bridge that Kaladin fell from). Though everyone knew about Sadeas’s betrayal at the Tower, there was no legal proof. It was the kind of clever backstabbing that Alethi society approves of wholeheartedly; as long as you don’t get caught, you’re demonstrating superior intelligence and ruthlessness, not committing treason.
Not just anyone can get away with killing a highprince. Sadeas could have gotten away with it if he’d managed to kill Dalinar. There wasn’t any hard evidence of his treachery, and he has the social position and personal army to prevent retaliation outside of a courtroom. Adolin also didn’t leave any evidence that he’d committed the murder, and even if people come to suspect that he did it, most lighteyes will respect him for protecting his family in a decisive and effective manner.
Ialai and Sadeas were already trying to murder Adolin’s father. If someone does trace the murder back to Adolin, then word will get out that you can’t hide behind the dysfunctional Alethi legal system while bragging about your plans to destroy House Kholin. The rest of the time, Adolin is an entitled lighteyes so deep in a privileged system that he takes it for granted. With Sadeas, he was an enraged young man protecting his father against a genuine threat who’d just told him that he wasn’t going to stop. Torol and Ialai declared war, and they were surprised to find out that Adolin, unlike his father, wasn’t going to let the Code stand in the way of a proper response. In a society without real law, there are still real consequences to plotting the murder of your peers, and I doubt a single high-ranking lighteyes would be upset to find out that Adolin finally retaliated. Those who live by the sword…
@63 EvilMonkey
Dalinar does need people he can trust. In this case, he could trust Adolin to protect him. Adolin is devoted to his father, and sometimes that means ignoring Dalinar’s orders to do what’s in his actual best interest. As a tyrant, Dalinar expects to be obeyed, but as a father, he should understand that his son cares more about keeping him safe than following his arbitrary and ridiculous rules.
While I don’t underestimate mental anguish as a form of punishment, I don’t think Adolin stays awake at night weeping for Sadeas. He’s killed plenty of Parshendi who were only trying to defend their homes, and he doesn’t seem to feel too much grief about them. As an Alethi lighteyes, he grew up in a culture that doesn’t place much value on human life, and he has very personal reasons for not being upset about Torol Sadeas.
Don’t forget that Dalinar is working on changing the dysfunctional government of the Alethi and that there are riots in the capital city. The government will likely change, and if it is proven that light eyes are created via Spren bond then the soceity prejeduces may fall apart as well.
For now, I see no reason to call Adolin entilted. He is a good man, and on top of everything is a general in the army. As a general, obediance is required from pretty much everyone. As for killing Sadeas, Sadeas had committed treason twice. Glad he is gone.
@66 Vulcronos
If by “changing the dysfunctional government of the Alethi” you mean making himself tyrant, keeping all of the highprinces in place, and failing to change any of the strict rules governing social class, then you’re correct. Dalinar has never shown any interest in change because he buys into the “good king” idea. If the man in charge is nice, and he encourages people to behave honorably, then the whole system will be better. He struggles to share power with high-ranking lighteyes, let alone ordinary darkeyed subjects. As a tyrant, Dalinar belives that only he can guide Alethkar and the world through the Final Desolation, and he’s certainly not going to accept a system where other people can stop him from doing what he thinks is right.
Darkeyes changing to light through a spren bond changes nothing. Everyone knows that a darkeyes can change if they bond a Shard, and the official explanation is that the Almighty has found them worthy to enter the ranks of his chosen people. They’ll simply use the same explanation for Kaladin, or any other darkeyes who becomes a Radiant. This individual “chosen one” has been elevated by the Almighty into a higher caste, and their eyes have changed color as a sign of their ascension. Since the other peasants still have dark eyes, the Almighty clearly intends them to remain where they are.
You see no reason to call Adolin entitled? Let’s see:
– By right of birth, he has a magical suit of armor that renders him impervious to harm. Or at least to any harm that doesn’t come in the form of another Shardbearer or a battalion of soldiers with giant hammers.
– By right of birth, he enjoys a life of luxury, drinking the finest wine and wearing the finest clothes. When they go to war, he has to wear a uniform all the time, but that’s it. His father does make him serve as a foot soldier in the regular infantry, a valuable learning experience that gives him a taste of life among the lower classes, but once that’s done he’s back to a life of the best food, drink, and really nice parties.
– By right of birth, he is the heir to a small country.
– By right of birth, he is a general. Adolin is unusually capable, disciplined, and qualified for a high-ranking lighteyes, but let’s not kid ourselves; soldiers don’t usually become generals at twenty-four. If he wasn’t Dalinar’s son, he would be a very good junior officer.
Adolin can be entitled in a good way or a bad way, but he’s always entitled. Literally entitled- as a member of the second dahn, he outranks pretty much everyone. He stands at the right hand of the most powerful man in Alethkar, and he holds that position by virtue of being born. We can like Adolin, or find him cool, but his goodness or niceness has nothing to do with the privilege that defines his position in life.
Wetlander @47, thanks to your response about the storms.
Likely it’s for the best, that they don’t anihilate each other. Though it would have given the story another plot twist if the Highstorms would have become scarcer just when society needs/relies on Stormlight more than ever..
dptullos – If you are into class struggles in fantasy, read the “Red Rising” series by Pierce Brown. The whole series puts many revolutions to shame. The three books are great reads.
@@@@@ several – My, my. You sure do know where Brandon is taking this story, don’t you? Personally, I’ll limit what I know to what’s in the text so far, and identify my expectations as theoretical only. I haven’t read Oathbringer yet; have you?
ETA: Seriously, this is Sanderson. For all we know, one of Ialai’s assassins could kill Dalinar in chapter 7; Elhokar & Adolin could die trying to take her down, and Jasnah could swoop in and avenge them all, leaving Navani in charge because Jasnah and Renarin categorically refuse to do it. Okay, that whole sequence isn’t likely, but in his last fb post, he mentioned that the main characters in the first 5-book arc – those who survive, anyway – will be significant in the second set. It’s a bit much to assume that “we must unite to fight the outsider” equates to “there will be no change to the arrogant ruling class” when we don’t know how many of the “arrogant ruling class” are going to be alive by the end of Part I.
But we can always hope that a few more of the insufferable ones get theirs…
As of yesterday, the Stormlight Archive Pocket Companion is available as a free download on Tor/Forge’s blog.
I really don’t want to get involved in this class superiority discussion, but I do feel like someone needs to point out that the high percentage of lighteyed KRs we know about has more to do with narration than definite facts about population. Out of what I would call the three original main characters (Kaladin, Shallan, Dalinar), 2/3rds were lighteyed. And as the POVs have expanded, we’ve gotten more lighteyes mainly due to proximity. I would bet there are plenty of other (originally) darkeyed KRs, we just haven’t met them yet. And now that Dalinar is refounding the orders, I would bet (or at least hope) that we’ll get a lot more (former) darkeyes coming forward. (now that they won’t have to worry about being murdered for being a Radiant. That’s another thing to think about. Sad as it may be, the refounding of the KRs had to start with lighteyes, otherwise they would have been squashed out immediately. But luckily we have a group of fairly open-minded lighteyes to start it with, so I think there is real hope for long-lasting social change coming in the future.)
I mean, think about Lift. I don’t think we know her eye color, but as she’s Reshi, I don’t know if it even matters. Regardless, she is definitely not part of the elite. Neither was Ym (though he may have worked his way to be comfortably middle class). Those two right there bring our percentage of darkeyed KRs much closer to parity. And I’m sure we’ll find more.
Idriana @72 – Quite true. Also, Nalan has been going around killing proto-Radiants for a while now, and he’s likely eliminated more lower-class than upper-class people. 1) They’re easier to get to. 2) They would stand out more, if odd things happen around them. 3) It’s easier to find “justification” for killing someone who has had a harder life and greater opportunity/need for minor lawbreaking. 4) No one hears about the unexpected death of a bunch of poor folks scattered across the continent, so they haven’t been “in the news.”
I’m betting that as we see the remaining Orders rising, they won’t all be lighteyes; there will be more people like Lift and Ym. Out of curiosity, how many people expect Rysn to become a Radiant?
Idriana@72, you’re right that Ym and Lift are clearly not in the One Percent. They also aren’t Vorin, which I was careful to specify in my claim that 80% of Radiants are noble. We know much less about how class works in those other societies. Perhaps the spren are less snobbish in cultures that are less snobbish. (:
I do hope we start to see more darkeyed proto-Radiants, it would counter the distinct feeling that statistically, Radiance is yet another privilege you can expect from being Kholin. Wetlander points out that we’re doing a lot of speculation beyond the text. (Which… come on, Wetlander, what else are these threads for?) And that brings us to Bridge Four. Where did this idea come from that Lopen and other bridgemen beginning to manifest powers are not real Radiants? A lot of people seem to be assuming this. I don’t want to doubt that there be textual evidence, but I don’t remember seeing it. But if something as arbitrary as being a Kholin tends to attract R-spren, why shouldn’t the military formation you belong to?
(Side note: isn’t it a little weird that the Kholins who have been chosen by R-spren happen to all be in different orders? I mean, sure, maybe some sort of criteria are genetically or culturally heritable … but we know the 10 orders are vastly different in how their members are chosen. What are the odds that whatever it is that attracted Glys to Renarin runs in the same family as whatever it is that attracted the Stormfather to Dalinar?)
Yeah, that. (With, you know, the rare exception like when Hellarin runs into the business end of Kaladin.) Well said. All these “The Blackthorn has killed thousands, and Adolin tens of thousands” accolades are pretty empty. In-story, most of the “fighting” between Shardbearers has been in sport, with wealth on the line, not in battle, with lives on the line. Perhaps – we can hope – this will change as the Desolation unfolds. Sanderson is on record as saying he wanted to build a world in which there was actually a legitimate need for the comically overspec’d weaponry you sometimes see in fantasy. I hope so. I hope the Desolations provide some real mortal danger to Shardbearers. This renown for mowing down infantry in your armored tank is a bit much.
(I do have to say I was quite amused when Adolin was boasting to Shallan about his martial exploits, and she shows him just exactly how impressed she is with his awesomeness as a big manly warrior, by abruptly changing the subject to, uh, the process of elimination. Oh SNAP. To his credit, he took it rather well.)
As for how Adolin should have handled the taunting from Sadeas, well, that’s simple. He already challenged him to a duel. Sadeas already accepted. Adolin should have said “OK, now you’ve really started to piss me off. Let’s take 10 heartbeats to summon our Blades, and then it’s on, right here, right now, mano a mano. No timeouts to go fetch our magic armor, no ceremony, no notarized contracts, no waiting for spectators, no stalling, ready set GO.” I would not fault him for that. Nobody would. Though perhaps some would-be spectators would express disappointment at the wasted opportunity for dramatic and high-stakes public entertainment.
EvilMonkey@63, you make a good point that Ialai already had knives pointed at the Kholins and their allies, and the act of assassinating Torol may not in fact aggravate a situation that was already on a brink. Indeed, if Adolin at least covered his tracks to the point where there’s no solid evidence he did the deed, he may benefit not from being above the law as a Kholin with Sanderson plot armor, but above the law as an Alethi noble who is expected to backstab other nobles – or literally frontstab them, as the situation requires. But I do hold out a faint hope that Dalinar’s sense of honor proves higher than his sense of political pragmatism in this instance, and he strips his son of Shards and titles, at the very least.
Oh, by all mean, theorizing is part of what we’re here for, especially at the end of the book. I just find it bizarre when people make assumptions about where Brandon is going with something, and then get all frustrated about what they’re only assuming he’s going to do. The guy’s middle name is PlotTwist, so it seems a little odd to expect him to keep going the direction he seems to be pointed in at the moment. If anything, the observation that it looks like he’s going due east should be a clear signal that he’s probably going to turn north-by-northwest at any moment now. *
As for Bridge Four becoming Knights Radiant… we’ve had repeated subtle clues, both in the text and in WoBs, that every Order includes a number of people who aren’t actually Knights, but are still critical to the function of the Order. Brandon told us that one of the peculiarities of Windrunners (and Kaladin in particular) is something he called “strength of squires.” In Dalinar’s highstorm vision back in Chapter 4, we saw a number of the ordinary soldiers with the Knight Radiant begin to glow, more faintly than the Knight, as they joined to attack the thunderclast. The in-book Words of Radiance mentions sixteen Windrunners arriving at some event “with a considerable number of squires.” Given the timing of the events – the bridgemen glowing faintly, just before Kaladin arrived – it seems reasonable that their glow was directly related to Kaladin’s return to his Oaths and his level-up.
That isn’t to say that one or more of them might not become Radiants (of any Order), but there are solid indications that most of them are Windrunner squires. IMO.
* And likely end up WSW, having crisscrossed the compass several times.
@69 sheiglagh
I did read the Red Rising series, and I enjoyed it. The main characters still have plot armor, and the protagonist can be overpowered at times, but it’s extremely fun. Also, I like stories that involve ethics more advanced than “my tribe beats their tribe yay”. Darrow really cares about issues that count.
@70 Wetlandernw
It’s not that we know where the plot is going; Brandon Sanderson is notoriously unpredictable. It’s that we know where the plot isn’t going.
SPOILER ALERT FOR MANY SANDERSON BOOKS- PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK
SPOILER ALERT FOR MANY SANDERSON BOOKS- PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK
In the Mistborn series, Kelsier’s crew starts out fighting to kill the Lord Ruler and overthrow the oppressive social system. Kelsier’s body isn’t cold before Vin replaces him with a Good King chosen from one of the wealthiest and most powerful noble families. They proceed to pardon all of the aristocrats, including the ones who orchestrated crimes against humanity (remember Obligator Yomen), and the ones who described in detail how oppressive and evil they were towards the skaa (remember Cett? There was something endearing about his honesty). Those evil, oppressive aristocrats became subordinate kings under Emperor Elend. Their descendants are still part of the aristocratic ruling class as of the Alloy of Law era.
Elantris ends with the Evil King dead and his Good Son on the throne. The good nobles all agree to be nice to their peasants because the clever princess tells them it’s a good idea. The sneaky, treacherous priests are thwarted, the outside invaders are coming, and all the people who used to own peasants are still at the top of the social ladder. They’re not allowed to own peasants anymore, which is obviously nice, but the people have no more say in their government than ever. They just have a good tyrant now, so they’re happy.
In Warbreaker, there’s a plot twist; the evil priests are actually fairly well-meaning and dutiful, though they’re stuck in their ways. There’s still a Good King (God King), and once he regains his magic powers he thwarts a plot by an oppressed people to gain their freedom (admittedly, they were going to free themselves by starting a bloody and hideous war between their rulers and a neighboring kingdom, so…). The oppressed people don’t become free, the Hallendran end up actually ruled by a God-King instead of having one as a figurehead for their theocratic government, and the Idrians are still governed by a monarchy that frowns on color, smiling, and anything that leads to fun. In fairness, the Idrians themselves frown on fun, so that’s not really the monarchy’s fault.
No matter how different the books are, there’s a common trend. Autocracy itself isn’t good or bad; the key is to have a good man (or woman) in charge. Once the right person has absolute power to do what’s right, the whole thing works itself out. After their first attempt at democracy predictably, realistically, and sadly fails in the Mistborn series, their solution isn’t to try again. Vin just gives up and politely deposes the elected government Elend worked so hard to transfer power to. From then on, it’s all about making alliances of convenience with the Lord Ruler’s old administrators and fighting against the Big Bad.
There’s a trend here. Good Guys need power, and the best way to get it is to take over from the baddies. Then they’ll do what needs to be done, with all the decisions kept within a tiny circle of friends, and everyone outside the buddy system frozen out of any meaningful role. Whatever lip serve they pay to change, it’s their change, on their terms, and they never surrender power.
@74 Wartmauer
Murder is murder. Generals don’t earn their paychecks by engaging in “fair” fights. Adolin decided that Sadeas is an ongoing threat to his family, and he removed that danger. A fair, honest fight would have given Sadeas a better chance to win. If he wins, he gets to continue his plans to assassinate Dalinar, and Adolin won’t be around to protect his father.
Honor is a lie that Alethi nobles invented to protect themselves. They didn’t want to be poisoned or stabbed in their sleep, so they told themselves that some methods of murder were “honorable” and others were “dishonorable”. Slaughtering peasants from inside a magical tank? Honorable. Ordering thousands of conscripts to kill each other over your land dispute? Honorable. Assassinating a man who is bragging about his evil plans, giving him no chance to survive and continue plotting? Dishonorable.
Warriors fight to fight. Soldiers fight to win. That means shooting an opponent in the back rather than giving them the chance to turn around and shoot you. It means refusing to give someone you’re going to kill advance notice of your plans, like this was some kind of feudal joust. For once, Adolin decides he just doesn’t care about the polite niceties that Alethi society cares about so much, and I have never liked him more than I did in that moment.
It makes some in-world sense that Alethkar seems to have a higher proportion of Radients from the upper classes (at least until Brandon states differently in word or text). First, location. The present day kingdom of Alethkar used to be a major training hub for the KR, at least as far as the more militant orders are concerned. It wouldn’t be out of the question for those displaced after the Recreance to make their homes there. Present day Alethi nobles are the decendants of those former KR who very likely had a dominate relationship to the locals in the area. Over the centuries light eyes became synonymous with great power, hence the present day situation.
Next, Investiture on Roshar does not have a genetic component like say, the Metallic Arts on Roshar. While that may seem to go against my point it actually supports it. With genetics comes the possible thinning out of favorable traits due to breeding with the unpowered. Therefore today’s Radients would be likely weaker than the ancients with the same powers. On Roshar however, the spren decide who gets to Invest. Different Spren are drawn to different personality types; personality (and eye color) is genetically transferable and spren are eternal. Therefore a Spren attracted to a certain personality type will tend to pick the same one over and over. Since it’s been proven that Alethi nobles tend to by and large posess traits the Spren find attractive, it would make sense for the noblilty to have a higher proportion of KR, at least in Alethkar.
By the way, I say proven because light eyes are synonymous with the KR and are the present day ruling class. If it were any different then the situation would have been reversed and Dark Eyes would be at the top of the social structure. The decendants of the ruling class were actually bonded to spren, hence they posessed traits spren found attractive.
That’s an interesting angle, but I don’t think I buy it. Can you find an example of genetically transferred personality on Roshar? I can’t, offhand. The pattern I see is that children (sometimes) learn much from their parents, but have quite distinct personalities. Dalinar’s sons aren’t much like him. (Though maybe they take after Shshshsh.) Lin’s children have their issues – boy, do they – but none of them are clones of Lin. Jasnah the freethinker isn’t much like her parents. And Elhokar, poor bastard … whatever he picked up of his parents’ personalities, I’m surely not seeing.
Good on BWS for not creating a pile of carbon copy characters! But if the spren are picking KRs genetically, I doubt it’s anything to do with inherited personality traits. Alternate theory: created and maintained as they are by collective human thought, spren reflect the biases and prejudices of the societies in which they operate. Including, in the Vorin sphere, that lighteyes are inherently suited to leadership.
@@@@@Alice, glad your cousins are home. I’m sending them speedy healing thoughts.
@@@@@ Several, SA is going to be a set of 10 books. The system Sanderson has established is going to break in minor and major ways. Because he’s established the current system as a major point of conflict. But I don’t see the major fall out happening until the second set of 5. The first wave of the war with the Voidbringers is going to be a focus of the next 3 books.
All this I predict due to listening to almost every episode of Writing Excuses and his current lecture series. His advice on world building is constantly a variation of “don’t make a major issue of something, unless it helps dive the plot.”
The shape of the new system is yet to be predicted. We could hope for egalitarian. But even when the Knights were in power, it wasn’t an egalitarian system.
The current culture would not adjust to an egalitarian society quickly. That takes time and education. None of which are in great abundance during a war for survival.
See the cultural of Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold. Or even American history. Most people ignore or are ignorant of why the United States was a success. We had 40+ years of mostly self rule because of distance and distraction from England. The Napoleonic wars keep them very occupied. Then we failed in our first government, the Articles of Confederation. Again, if England hadn’t been distracted, we could not have prevailed.
On an different issue, Kaladin might be one who marries later in life for his culture. So we might not see a final shipping for him until the second half. Peter said something that made me start thinking this.
Kaladin & Lift FTW!!
@43 Braid_Tug: The idea that any fallout for Sadeas’s murder waits until the middle of book 3 makes a lot of sense to me – as @75 Wetlandernw pointed out Sanderson likes to zag when it looks like he’ll zig, and Sadeas’s murder is such an obvious plot hook for book 3 that it wouldn’t surprise me at all for it to lurk until the middle of the book (plus, iirc it looks like Adolin might not get POV until Part 2, which would also fit with this perspective).
@80 Braid_Tug: Having two massive oceans flank the Americas has always been pretty helpful (to the US…I’d rather not dwell on what Spain did below the border) and I think something it’s easy to miss in the modern day, what with how small distances are time-wise relative to the past. One of those obvious details that people tend to just never stop and actually realize (kind of like how I remember back in high school when our anatomy teacher pointed out that meat was just animal muscle – and half the class was shocked because it had never occurred to them to actually consider it that way).
As for that last note, that’s…interesting.
I would not mind that at all, although if I’m honest that’s for a more selfish reason: it implies Kaladin survives the first 5 books after all! I’m sure if Kaladin does die Sanderson will do it justice but he’s my favorite character (well, along with Syl, it’s not *really* cheating to count a KR and their spren is it? >.>), so I would like him to last until the end at least.
I suppose it’s either not a comment you can share or one you don’t remember well enough to quote verbatim? I admit I’m not the best with keeping up with the little tidbits that come out online all the time, my 17th Shard skills are rusty.
@81: Not gonna lie, it took me a couple minutes to even comprehend that. As they are now, Kaladin and Lift are like…matter and antimatter, if they got too close together they would cancel each other out and destroy everything nearby in an explosion. But after the time-skip is an open book so…
A Windrunner and Edgedancer battle couple *would* be pretty awesome.
@82: He commented in the Storm Cellar on a shipping post, but no I can’t find the exact quote. It was along the lines of his preference for shipping Kaladin & Lift, once they both grow up. The odds of them meeting in book 3 are, IMO, slim. But meeting before the end of the series pretty high.
It’s a fun ship, and a very unexpected one. She would defiantly help bring him out of his bad moods. I believe their sprens are more inclined to get along, even if Wyndle is of Cultivation. And, once they both grow up, the age difference is not extreme. An 8-14 year difference between spouses is pretty common.
For those who don’t know, the Storm Cellar is a Sanderson fan Face Book group Alice and I moderate. It’s a closed group to more easily keep out spammers and to prevent your comments from showing on your FB feed. This way, only your fellow FB friends that are in the group will see your posts.
Alice asked us to speculate about Rsyn’s Radiant potential. I believe that she may become a candidate in that her resolve is akin to that of Shallan when she first met Jasnah. Her resulting near brush with death may have also conditioned her to appreciate the content of the first Radiant oath. In any case, the Larkin who now attends her may bespeak a spren connection. Besides, she could become dangerous to the Radiants if she weren’t one of them, by virtue of having that investiture stealing Larkin.
As to the Kaladin-Lift speculation that Brandon may have initiated, that would unite two of my favorite characters. However, Lift would first need to mature. She is a likeable enough intelligent young teen-ager with an attitude. That know-it-all attitude in the face of real ignorance is not so endearing – even if understandable. However, she may well grow out of her prejudices – as will Kaladin. I can see a possible interest by Kaladin in a mature Lift who is interested in learning things – not as she is now. Such a pairing, however, assumes that Kaladin’s clear fascination with Shallan will not mature into a continuing romantic relationship.
I was speaking of personality traits in general. An in book example would be how Sadeas sees Adolin acting like the Blackthorn incarnation of Dalinar. He along with many of the other highprinces see the similarities between Adolin now and Dalinar back when he was Adolin’s age. But I was speaking in a more general manner. It’s like the teenager that rebels against their parents time and time again. They vow they will never be like their folks yet they find themselves as they get older saying things or acting in a manner similar if not identical to the way their parents act. There will be variations because you aren’t the same people; that allows for a variation on which spren you attract. But that underlying worldview is the same. That jives with the First Ideal being the same across Orders but the individual oaths being different.
dptullos – I don’t understand you. Quite frankly, we are talking about a story here. Yet, you’re political beliefs seem to be front and center in all your comments, instead of discussing the storyline. Of course, this is a free forum and you can post whatever you want to post as long as it is within the rules set by tor.com.
That said, I cannot help but detect a certain level of idealism in you. Which, by the way, I do understand. But, I have also seen Communist China which is supposed to be a egalitarian society but it is not. It has the worst record in human rights. And there is a privileged class. Communism should have been a classless society, but ask the billions of Chinese and they will tell you otherwise. There is a class system in China, and it is worst that you imagine. Check out The Gang of Four and you will see what Mao Tse Tong did after he replaced the Chinese Emperor. Mao was supposed to free the people. He did but he turned around and then had a reign of terror with his Gang of Four.
If China is not enough, then the former USSR can also attest the fact that communism does not work. And there is no such thing as a classless society. There will always be someone in charge.
If you are not convinced, check out the bees and the rest of the animal kingdom. Even there, there is someone in charge. :-) Just my thoughts.
sheiglagh@86: If I’m getting dptullos’s points correctly, he/she is not arguing for a progression to communist utopia, but is merely bristling against feudalism and a rigid class system in which you cannot transcend your birth. dptullos sees a fantasy literature rife with the assumption that a ruling class deserves to rule and a working class deserves to be ruled, and even when there are cataclysms large enough to potentially upend all of society (which is more or less a definition of epic fantasy), it is rare for this to result in any fundamental challenge to the divine right of kings.
But a rejection of a rigid class system does not imply a communist utopia! Marx and Engels may have thought so (I’m not sure) but if so, I think they were wrong. There’s quite a lot of territory between the two. (For example, the “One Percent” in the US, sometimes thought of as a rigid class, is actually quite fluid over time: there’s plenty of “new money” alongside the “old money”. And anyone can become president, especially if you marry the right guy. (: ) dptullos would, I think, like to see fantasy literature explore some of this.
Wortmauer said “anyone can become president, especially if you marry the right guy. (: )”. Quite funny. Or (in the interest of political equal opportunism), especially if you have had your own TV show and have your own brand.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewHB
aka the musespren
Bees are not an example of someone being in charge. The “queen” is just the reproductive organ of the swarm organism, not a ruler.
@@@@@ several – Let’s all give and take the RL political commentary in good humor, please. I’m not gonna squash it, because it doesn’t need to be squashed; just let’s make sure to keep it civil. :) Y’all are awesome that way.
Re: “KaLift” – I think it was Peter who stirred that pot, not Brandon. On one twitter exchange, he said, “I kinda ship Kalift.” In response to objections about age and personality issues, he said, “… it’s hard to know what Lift will be like at age 23.” I will refrain from analyzing further at this time.
Wortmauer @@@@@ 87 – That is the reason why I mentioned the “Red Rising” trilogy, a fantasy series about class struggle. Those three books are really great reads. And then there is the Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne, which is not about class struggle but it is also about change of the political structure of an empire. All three books are great reads. Both series – Red Rising and the Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne had been heavily advertised here at Tor. In fact, that’s how I found them.
As readers, we have a choice on the books we will read. On the flipside, authors have a right (or choice) on what they will write. It has been pointed out many times in this re-read that SA is Brandon’s story and he will tell it the way he wants to. I believe in that. Brandon Sanderson is a great storyteller. And I refuse to second guess him.
That said, insisting that SA become a class struggle epic fantasy and second guessing how Sanderson will tell the story just does not sit right with me.
Anyway, enough said about this. :-) There are more important things to do like read the next book in our reading list for the summer. :-) Ciao!!!
@86 sheiglagh
We are talking about a story. And in most good stories, readers grow to care about the characters. Caring about characters means caring about their choices and their beliefs. Though I have no objection to pure and simple entertainment with no deeper meaning- yay for Buzz Lightyear!- I don’t think fantasy has to be detached from the moral choices and questions of life. I think that fantasy can benefit from addressing those problems within the context of a story, helping us to understand how characters influence and shape the lives of others outside their immediate circle. Look at Harry Potter and Dobby in the second Harry Potter book for an excellent example.
Can revolutions go horribly wrong? Yes. Was Mao evil? Yes. Are the USSR and Communist China good examples of how to build a society? Obviously not. I would suggest, though, that there might be options on the menu besides “absolute monarchy” and “Mao Zedong”.
I’m guessing that you live in a liberal democracy, a society where your rights are protected from the whims of the powerful. You can write what you like without fear of how “someone in charge” might respond. There are still powerful and wealthy people, but they live within a society that seeks to control their worst excesses and hold them accountable for their crimes. Even if it’s not always successful, it’s worlds better than the “Kneel Before Zod” style of absolute monarchy that so many fantasy works favor.
If Sanderson didn’t want his readers to talk about politics, he wouldn’t have his characters spend so much time dealing with it. Most of The Well of Ascension consists of Sanderson’s main characters trying to forge a functional democratic system after a thousand years of tyranny under the Lord Ruler. They give up and decide to have a nicer tyrant, but that doesn’t mean that democracy isn’t a significant part of the story. Dalinar spends much of TWoK and WoR considering his role as a tyrant, while class conflict defines much of Kaladin’s character arc. I am talking about the storyline; I’m just doing so in a way that treats all of the characters and their decisions as real and meaningful, rather than just focusing on their conflict with the Big Bad.
@92: and 300 years later the world Vin and crew fought for have managed a type of democracy. Elend’s plan for a government with all people having a chance of input is working. With some hiccups, yes.
It took: time, education, and not being in the middle of the world tearing itself apart.
His overarching POV with Mistborn is to show a world that changes. One that goes under major technological and social changes. A fantasy world that is not stuck for 5000 years at the same level of everything. The Earth has not stood still for 5000 years, why should any other world?
As was pointed out by Alice’s countdown, book 2 took place in the span of less than 4 months. Lets wait to see how the culture is changed a year from the refounding of the Knights Radiants and the return of the Voidbringers.
But yes, the rich that hold onto their wealth, will still be in better positions than the poor.
The ligheye rulers, will still have privilege. How much privilege, and how the culture has changed is a great unknown to speculate upon.
There are some great Lois McMaster Bujold quotes, sadly I can’t find the one about privilege vs rights. But a few I did find apply to the SA.
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.
War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It’s peace that’s wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.
dptullos, life is basically unequal. Some are born to well to do, educated parents who send their children to choice schools and provide good connections. Some are born poor with limited educational, cultural, and economic opportunities. Some rise above their original situation; some do not; and some don’t need to. Let’s face it, we don’t have a true democracy even in the US, and it has become less democratic. More to the point, fantasy literature deals with the hero figure. While it is very hazardous and undesirable to give one person total power in real life, we are dealing here with fantasy fiction. In real life we have the adage attributed, I believe, to Churchill or Niebuhr which reads, approximately, “people’s dreams make democracy possible; their inclinations make it necessary”. Offering a democratic system in terms of elections as an alternative is not as attractive, however, nor would it fit readily into the genre. At best, it provides an interesting background such as the Hobbit society in the Lord of the Ring appendices. On the other hand, a novel involving an election and personalities such as what we are facing today in the US would be interesting, but not fantasy – even if truth can be stranger than fiction.
@93 Braid_Tug
“300 years later, we managed to build a democracy. Kind of. Despite the best efforts of Kelsier’s original crew, who set up an all-powerful Emperor in charge of a system run by evil bureaucratic agents of the Lord Ruler (Yomen) and openly, cheerfully vicious aristocrats who talk plainly about their plans to keep the skaa under their iron heel (Cett).”
If someone else builds it long after you’re dead, and you set up something completely different when you were alive, you really don’t get any credit. I agree that Sanderson deserves credit for not building the kind of purely static fantasy world that some many writers love. But if things change, it’s because someone changes them. The simple passage of time is never enough to create a better world; at some point, someone had the courage to stand up to the aristocrats and demand representation for the professions. They’re the ones who forged the beginnings of democracy on Scadrial, not the well-meaning tyrants who taught people to obey their superiors without question.
@94 STBLST
I have never encountered anyone who believed that life was equal, and I don’t know many people who think that any system of government is either perfectly democratic or perfectly just. I love the hero figure in fantasy, and I find that giving protagonists arbitrary power can make for both an engaging setting and an excellent test of character. We should have kings and emperors and feudal lords in fantasy, and the genre is better for their presence. I simply believe that, if we give people absolute power, we should have a chance to see the results.
In the Mistborn books, we never get to see the horrific consequences of allowing Yomen and Cett to run their own parts of the empire. I look forward with great interest to seeing how Dalinar deals with the riots in Kholinar; will he use Radiant powers to awe the people into compliance, or will he enact real change that requires him to surrender some of his absolute power? The jury’s still out, but I’m betting that Dalinar won’t tolerate disobedience. He’s not that kind of man.
On Adolin, Privilege, and the Bridgeboy
Or, Wort Continues to Beat a Horse Toward Liquefaction
To me, nothing exemplifies Adolin’s excess of privilege quite like his favorite diminutive bridgeboy. I recognise that this doesn’t bother most of you. You figure Adolin and Kal are both pretty young,* so the one calling the other boy is normal and harmless. Jocular, even. And, of course, Bridge Four is proud of their heritage and they still call themselves bridgemen. Maybe even Adolin believes all this. So why would it bother me? Because, to me, it sounds a lot like what white Americans used to call African-Americans, before I was born. The accepted term of the day was Negro, but many used a variation of that word, which I won’t repeat here. A simple variation on the word. Harmless fun? Camaraderie? “Don’t worry, he knows we’re just kidding around”? Hardly. It was and remains a not-so-subtle message that me and mine are better than you and yours. Black Americans can still use that word today, but nobody tolerates it from anyone else.
And what was that other thing white Americans would call African-Americans? The other thing used not to express a shared sense of humor, but to reinforce the superiority of their station? Oh yeah. They would call a grown man boy. Turns out that wasn’t taken as all in good fun, either.
Yes, Kaladin thinks of Adolin as a spoiled “princeling”. Yep, he has his own insult. But, one, he hardly ever says it aloud. And two, it’s all the difference in the world to poke at the superiority of a social superior than at the inferiority of a social inferior.
Also, you know what princeling reminds me of? One of my favorite arias from The Marriage of Figaro, right near the top, in Act I. Figaro, a servant, addresses the Count, his employer:
He uses the correct form of address to a superior, grammatically, but calls him My Lord Countling! I love it. (Also, it’s a catchy waltz.) I do note that he waits to sing this until the Count has left the room!
* Nope, not wading back into “how old is everyone on Roshar, really” from http://www.tor.com/2015/05/14/words-of-radiance-reread-chapter-38/ !
** “If you want to dance, Lord Countling, I’ll play the little guitar for you!” Figaro then offers to literally school him (in dancing). He is declaring that he is joining the battle of wits, and will beat the Count at his own game of petty court maneuvering, which of course is the opera’s main plot.
Re: KaLift – I agree this would be an interesting ‘ship, and I love the possibilities between these 2 characters and between Syl and Wyndle too. That being said … From her Interlude and especially from the preview we’ve been shown of “Edgedancer,” I got the impression that Lift will actually not age. Near the end of section (chapter?) 1 of “Edgedancer” it says, “She was supposed to stay the same, and the world was supposed to change around her. She’d asked for that, hadn’t she?” And we’re told there and in the Interlude that she’s been thirteen for at least several years – we really don’t know how long. So if she’s going to be shipped with Kaladin, or anyone else, are we thinking that whatever Nightwatcher did for/to her will be healed (or modified) so that she won’t be thirteen anymore? Because I don’t see Brandon putting a controversial topic like the alternative in SA or any of his books (just my opinion – YMMV). Maybe we are thinking that, since someone theorized a similar thing for Dalinar’s memories. Fun to speculate. :-)
FWIW, in the Interlude Lift said she was ten, and privately thought that she’d been “that many” for three years now. So she’s technically 13, if you don’t count whatever Nightwatcher may have done.
I’m deeply disturbed by the talk of Lift shipping…
In my head, Lift doesn’t want to age up because it’s dangerous for a young girl to be a teenager on the streets alone. Yes, it has always been dangerous for her, but Sanderson’s worlds gloss over any possibility of child prostitutes. Teenage prostitutes is much more likely. Being kidnapped and forced into the life is much more likely for a 13-16 year old, than an 10 year old.
Thus, it’s safer for Lift to remain 10. Even if that is not factually true. No magical age changing evolved. Just a under nourished girl not developing the curves of a “woman”, so it’s much easier for her to pass as a 10 year old.
Welcome to all the new posters and the long time lukers!
Setting someone up for the hunny… (Post 100) Appropriate so close to the end.
Edit: Oh… I’ll take it then. When I started typing I was going to be 99.
@99: The Lift ship is for second set of SA. There will be a time leap, something like 10-15 years. So she’ll be much older then. No, a ship between them now would be wrong. But once everyone is over 21, whatever.
@@@@@ 23:”Surge means… well surge. As in a knight radiant’s surge. BA has only used that word when one of our characters is using stormlight whether they know it or not. So right here Adolin uses stormlight. Therefore, knight radiant incoming. “
I like that thought. It would fit to a skybreaker, considering what crimes Nalan kills for. Sadeas definitetly is guilty of treason and thus getting thousands of Dalinars soldiers killed. The problem I see is that highspren stick to the letter of the law. And here Sadeas could not be charged, as far as I understood it in WoK (or did Dalinar just let it be for peace and “stability?).
So there still is the danger of floating little red spren, reacting to hate. I really hope Adolin doesn’t become the next victim to them. Eshonai was tragic enough.