Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive

Just had a random thought as to the Weepings. Brandon said that the reason for the Weepings has to do with Roshar's orbital position. Could the period of the Weeping be the time Roshar is the closest to Braize? After all, there must be some reason the first Everstorm was made 100% of the Listeners caught into it Regals/Voidbringers.

So I just finished, and while I would normally be bubbling over with thoughts, this one was an exhausting ride. Not bad, just exhausting.

Though I have to wonder just how smug will Lopen be if he ever finds out that Kaladin actually followed his advice and bought Syl a hat?

So is the bit with the doll at the end our first time seeing another world's magic system being used overtly and unambiguously on camera, not counting Nightblood's weirdness? I can see why Sanderson doesn't want to trot awakening or allomancy out more visibly when we still haven't seen all of the surges yet, particularly for the sake of readers who haven't delved into his other stuff.

I liked the bit in the Thaylen temple where Dalinar noticed the defaced statues. Didn't we see Ash smashing them in an interlude in Words of Radiance?

When Gawx brought up Lift's thing for butts, I immediately thought of this comic. I was glad to see her take part in the climax.

Minor thing that bugged me: people whisper an awful lot. Lot of whispering going on.

edited 23rd Nov '17 10:25:32 PM by Durazno

Oh, I missed that! He did! He did buy her one!

Yeah, the last bit is definitely Awakening.

There was also some allomancy in Words, when Hoid senses Shallan's Investiture and pours some metal powder in his cup. This is more explicit than that, but it's still not coming straight out and saying "this is a magic system from another world." Someone going into Stormlight completely blind might mistake it for an aspect of Surgebinding we haven't seen.

And yes, we saw Ash defacing statues, though it wasn't in Thaylenah—and at the time, it wasn't immediately obvious that she was focusing on only representations of herself. Also, I believe the temple Dalinar was in, Taln's temple, was specifically mentioned to have suffered excessive damage from the Everstorm. Apparently Odium was pissed at him for holding back the Desolation for so long.

Originally posted this in the main Sanderson thread, but meant to put it here.

In the continuing adventures of "Guts hasn't finished Oathbringer but he can't help himself from visiting this thread":

I am reading at a snail's pace since I have to squeeze reading between work and exams but here are some thoughts on where I am so far:

Oh cool, is Azure supposed to be the Vorin version of a trans character? Azure identifies and presents as male and requests that his men use male pronouns, wich is obviously problematic in a culture like the Alethi. Really looking forward to reading more about him. I also find it kind of funny that Kaladin seems to be the one making all of the social faux pas when it comes to dealing with the queer characters. First he insults the gay member of Bridge Four (was it Drehy?) and now he can't keep himself from calling Azure "she".

Elhokar keeps dropping hints that he is slowly discovering his Radiance. First he sees Cryptics in his dream, then he demonstrates above average skill in drawing maps, then he recognizes Pattern's....pattern in Shallan's clothing. Or maybe Sanderson is just trolling us and he is going to die before the end of the book. In general, Elhokar is one of those characters that I most want to see succeed. He's really won me over with his genuine desire to be better and to recognize his failings. I guess that this new persona he has created for himself that is more thoughtful and careful is another manifestation of his potential Lightweaving: he didn't like the man he was so he literally crafted another personality for himself. He seems to be going about it in a more healthy way than Shallan however.

Shallan's slow descent into madness is genuinely becoming upsetting to read. I am at the chapter where she first joins the Cult of Moments in their revel atop of the Oathgate. The entire chapter leading up to that was all about her struggling to even remember that she is not actually Veil or Brightness Radiant. Some pretty creepy stuff.

Allright, that's it for me. Off to read some more.

Not going to comment on the others, but not really. Azure actually IS a woman, Vorin culture just has Views on women doing men's jobs, and vice-versa. It's equal workplace rights, like the female Windrunner.

edited 24th Nov '17 9:21:25 AM by Watashiwa

One thing that bugs me is that House Sadeas is starting to feel like Slytherin House. Their whole arc seems to be arranged so that they A) suck up a bunch of villainy and drama, then get cut cleanly away from the heroic coalition, and B) make it so that killing Torol Sadeas at the end of the previous book doesn't force Adolin or Dalinar into a difficult spot. I appreciate that they were exemplars of how Odium was grooming Alethkar to be his army, but it had to be them, didn't it? The house we already didn't like, that was awful and grubby in every way?

That said, I wonder what Ialai is going to do now, and what will become of the soldiers who got Super Thrilled, and the rest of Sadeas's armies. That does create a challenge for the coalition, doesn't it? Dalinar accepted responsibility for what he did under the influence of the Thrill, but will he hold the turncoats to that, as well?

Also, I'm glad they didn't end up slaughtering a bunch of Listeners at the end of the book. We kind of got enough of that in the previous books, didn't we?

I'm probably missing something with Sadeas, but it feels like maybe one or two balls may have been dropped out of the thirty-seven this series has been juggling.

One of the themes of Sanderson's works is how leaders shape their men. Dalinar kept his army as honorable as he himself was. Sadeas, on the other hand, treated his army like a pack of wild wolves, using competition both within and without, and relying on the Thrill to encourage them. Though he didn't realize it, he basically had an army of drug addicts. Then the drug dealer came around and called in the army's debts.

That being said, I do hope we get a bit about them in the next book. How they react to being cut off from the Thrill, how everyone else reacts to them. I highly doubt Dalinar is going to call them all criminals and have them executed—or that Fen would demand such a thing.

I like the drug analogy. It does make sense that an army that relied more on the Thrill would be more susceptible to this ploy. I just wish that Alethi villainy and hate sinkery was spread out a little bit more, you know? Apart from the gigantic heel revelation everyone's getting, I mean.

Also, it occurs that a lot of them have probably been broken by this experience. I wonder if any spren are watching.

Also, also, I wonder if Odium has, er, cultivated any other nations this way.

Something I'm curious about with Sadeas is what his motivations were the night Gavilar died.

We're told that what he did (pretending to be Gavilar, unarmored, in order to draw the assassin away and let Gavilar escape) was basically a suicide mission. That implies his loyalty to Gavilar was genuine, and something he valued even more than his own life. However, when we get a chapter from Sadeas's POV in Words of Radiance, he indicates that he eventually plans to dispose of Elhokar in order to clear a pathway to power for himself.

Is it that Sadeas's loyalty was only to Gavilar personally, not to his heirs? Did something happen in the intervening five years that made him a worse person? Or did Sadeas have some hidden plan or motivation that made his actions that night serve his self-interest?

It might just be Elhokar being a poor king.

I think that's it. He tells Adolin that Elhokar and Dalinar are just shadows of men he loved, and his POV chapters make it clear that he really does think killing them off would be doing them a favor. Yes, in the end it's just about his ambitions, but people are complex. Even the simplest of motivations can have multiple layers.

I think that Sadeas would have eventually turned on Gavilar just as Dalinar might have given time

Also, aren't there one or two Highprinces who are basically 'Fuck this, I'm doing my own thing!" and building a Kingdom in the warcamps?

That was their plan until Dalinar reestablished contact. No idea what they're up to now.

I imagine that they were an important link between Urithiru and the rest of the world, at least until the other oathgates were opened.

I will confess my hilarity: I'm reading the shipping thread on 17th Shard and I am LOVING the whining about how the ships turned out. Sure there's some good talk about character arcs, but it's so obviously a bunch of shippers kicking and screaming that their pairing walked the plank that I can't stop going back to watch them.

Well, I've been avoiding this thread since the book came out and finally got around to finishing in. Most of my thoughts have already been mentioned, but a few things that I have to add:

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with the Sanderson Avalanche at this point. There's so much going on, and it's great, but it's also so dense that I'm left feeling like I missed a bunch of stuff. I'm never entirely clear how much Sanderson actually expects his readers to understand and how much is "oh we'll understand all that later", which can be a little frustrating.

The Unmade became a major part of the story faster than I expected. They're also a large part of "stuff I feel like I'm missing" because there's a bunch of them, most with multiple names, with wildly varying attributes and abilities, and a lot of what we know about them comes from unreliable in-universe sources, so it's difficult to pick out fact from fiction. Combine all of this together and it's a nightmare to keep it all straight.

I didn't particularly care for Shallan's whole struggling-with-her-identity thing. I don't know why, it just underwhelms me. I sort of feel like Sanderson isn't selling it very well. Wit's whole heart-to-heart about "you didn't deserve the bad things that happened to you", while true-to-life (many victims of abuse feel that they must have deserved the treatment), doesn't really seem to apply to Shallan. Her problem was never that she thought she deserved abuse, it's that she deals with the trauma of having been forced to do terrible things by trying to block it out, rather than working through it and moving on. The whole subplot is a bit incoherent; it briefly touches on a lot of different things, but never actually commits to any of them. For example, Shallan thinks the "real" her is a broken shell of a person, and that "Shallan" is a persona that she invented to keep functioning. But in previous books she's comfortable with the idea of inspiring people to improve themselves with "lies" — using flattering sketches and putting them in positions of trust in order to show them You Are Better Than You Think You Are. She's doing the same thing to herself, and has been since childhood, but doesn't seem to realize it, and that's never really addressed. (The repeated conversations with Kaladin on the subject just reinforce this.) Veil is initially a persona she puts on for other people (Shallan creates her in order to be able to investigate the Ghostbloods without getting that whole mess mixed up with her interactions with Andolin and House Kholin), but it somehow shifts into a "refuge" personality that she uses when Shallan herself doesn't know what to do? Radiant was created as a refuge to begin with, but in order to stop thinking about Pattern as a shardblade due to the trauma involved there — but that's after she's already spoken of her killing her parents as a Truth to Pattern, and she'd previously used her Shardblade (such as against Tyn) without any issues. The whole thing sort of feels artificial, really — like it was something added just to give Shallan some more drama, rather than something that makes sense given her situation.

On the subject of "things I didn't get", basically everything about Dalinar creating a Perpendicularity falls into that category. I guess it was "binding" the three Realms together? But how does that make it Honor's Perpendicularity? Because he's bound to Honor's godspren? Would someone bound to the Nightwatcher have created a Cultivation Perpendicularity? (Or is that impossible because Cultivation is still alive and still has a Perpendicularity already?) It was mentioned that he spoke the Third Ideal, but I'm not even sure what part of what he said was the Ideal. What was the deal with all the gloryspren? There was clearly more to it than him just being super glorious at the time, but I have no idea what. Are gloryspren somehow associated with Honor? (Given that honorspren are a thing, that seems unlikely to me.) Are gloryspren the secondary spren for Bondsmiths? (In which case, isn't attracting secondary spren associated with the fourth ideal, not the third?) Actually, while we're on the subject of "things Dalinar did that confused me", what was the deal with him working the Oathgate? Did he just force the Stormfather into manifesting as a shardblade somehow? That passage confused me, but I was left with the impression that he somehow worked the Oathgate without actually summoning a shardblade, but I'm not sure if that's right or not.

Man, reading back on that, it comes off as pretty negative. For the record, I really enjoyed the book, but all of the "that was great, I can't wait to see what happens next!" comments have already been said, so the few new things I have to bring up weren't as positive.

I must in good conscience ask how sleep deprived you were when you read the avalanche? This isn't an insult, but I personally was pretty sleep deprived when I read it and had to read it again in the morning because I'd forgotten the text of the last two pages after I passed out. I haven't been like that since the Harry Potter and Wheel of T Ime books.

And yes, gloryspren seem to be the Bondsmith's secondary, the way Windspren are Windrunners. They seem to manifest every time you're at least 2nd ideal and doing something awesome with stormlight. It's just the sheer scale of what Dalinar did, basically only equaled by someone who's using the Well of Ascension, more than anything Kaladin's ever done, made os much of them show up.

The Oathgate thing seems to be deliberately vague for the next book, so you can rest easy not getting it. It's basically theory-fodder.

edited 26th Nov '17 3:53:49 PM by SCMof2814

No, she definitely thinks like that, she's just really good at covering it up. Her first flashback in Words had her referring to herself as a monster, she agrees when her stepmother says she's the only one in the household who actually deserves to be beaten, refers to herself as a murderer for what she did to her father, and her initial plan to get her brothers to safety involved staying behind to bear the brunt of their father's anger herself.

Because she believes she doesn't deserve that sort of redemption. It's more of the self-hatred and all that. She can do it for other people better than she can do it for herself.

Once she spoke the Truth, she couldn't keep pretending. When she used the Blade against Tyn, she pushed down all memories of doing the same thing to her mother, leaving her with nothing but a vague dislike of the Blade. Using the truth as an Ideal prevented her from doing that. And as she explained to Pattern, she sees Pattern and the Blade as two separate things. She knows they're the same, but she can hate the Blade without hating Pattern. No, that doesn't make sense, but that's the point.

edited 26th Nov '17 4:19:02 PM by Discar

That was something that tripped me up at first, too.

At least we can be glad that she doesn't slip back into denial and kill Pattern, like Kal did.

She spoke the Truth before she killed Tyn. She speaks the Truth near the end of Way of Kings, and kills Tyn early in Words of Radiance. She doesn't really start having trouble with her identities until Oathbringer. That's kind of my point — it would have made sense to me if the identity thing had come up and she'd solved it by facing her past and speaking the Truth, then that would have made sense to me. Instead she speaks the Truth, and then starts having problems? It doesn't seem to make any sense that way.

That was a different issue. Shallan was never in danger of going back on her Oaths (though how do you break an oath when it's just a true statement about yourself?), whereas Kaladin was torn between "help the innocent" and "punish the guilty", which were conflicting motivations.

Actually, that's sort of a good contrast. Kaladin's personal development has been driven by his oaths — first he has to start caring again instead of giving into depression (first oath), then he has to come around to protecting people because they deserve it instead of because it benefits him (second oath, when he goes back to save the Kholin army even though it means Bridge Four won't be able to escape like they planned), then he has to get over protecting people if they deserve it, even if he personally hates them (third oath, defending Elhokar), then he has to come to terms with what it means to protect people "so long as it is right" (still the third oath, when two groups of people he cares about end up fighting each other). All of this flows fairly naturally, whereas Shallan's development... doesn't.

Actually, Shallan's works for me. She was due for a mental breakdown but it was held in check by a combination of mental repression and terror. When she killed her father, she went with mental repression so severe it was able to make her function like a normal person, which shows it was a TRULY EXTREME amount of repression. After telling her Truth at the end of the first book, that massive repression that was helping her hold it together started coming apart, and since she couldn't use repression to deal with her issues anymore, her mind went with other avenues of breaking. Shallan is still at the point she's admitted she has a problem but has NOT asked for help in dealing with it, leaving her in a holding pattern where she's being dynamically unstable. Her Mind Mansion has all it's furniture broken, but instead of cleaning up and getting new furniture, she decided to take all the broken pieces and make artistic arrangements, maybe mosaics and garbage sculptures. It works, it looked orderly, but you're still going to step on stuff and break that even more, and occasionally you'll end up cutting your feet. Eventually, she's going to need to REALLY clean up and fix things. She doesn't have to throw everything out, and some of the arrangements she's gotten fond of can stay, but that won't happen untill she admits making the mess look good is unhelpful, because it's still A MESS.

It actually works, in-universe wise. You need to be broken to get Investiture in Roshar. Shallan broke so hard the pieces didn't fuse together, they started growing on their own.

edited 26th Nov '17 5:04:02 PM by SCMof2814

I was assuming a Lightweaver could break their oaths by denying the truths that they shared.

Crypics are weird for me. they're implied to be the spren of the quantitative mathematics inherent in the universe, like ratios and constants like the speed of light. They're looking for lies, but ask for Truths. At least now it makes sense they provide Lightweaving and Soulcasting. Light, sounds and waveforms have a lot of quantifiable constants, and I suppose Transformation means you have to keep the numbers related to mass and energy intact, re: E=MC².

What? No, the Truth at the end of Kings was "I killed my father." That had nothing to do with the Blade. It was a relatively minor Truth, since there was no way she could pretend her father was still alive and there were witnesses to her killing him. There are even a few moments in Kings where she tries to repress it but has to force herself to confront the memories because they're so tied up in what she's doing at the moment. She only accepts that Pattern is her Blade and she used him to kill her mother at the end of Words. That leads directly to her first scene in Oathbringer, when she's frantically trying to distract herself but can't.