Makes you wonder how Lightweaving will be used once Roshar discovers stuff like uranium or plutonium.
World's Cutest Direwolf
The radio trick means that Lightweavers need to be able to interpret radio waves, and I don't recall any indication that Radiants have a special sense for gravity or whatever else they manipulate.
Well, that's what spren with a thing for pattern recognition are for.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Humans naturally have an excellent sense for gravity, so that might not be the best example.
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
Technically we have a very fine sense of motion, not gravity itself.
I mean, the amount of people who have hands on comparison between non-neglible and non-radical gravity differences (ie discounting people with Multi-G force experience like Jet Fighter pilots) is very small.
edited 22nd Apr '18 5:41:45 AM by 3of4
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Jupiterian Local
Humans are very good at judging the effects of gravity on objects. We're one of the only animals capable of throwing things for long distances with any accuracy, for instance; judging how hard and what angle to throw at in order to get a good arc and hit what you want to hit is a surprisingly difficult math problem that people do pretty much instinctively.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
The small segment of the human population who have experienced the odd gravity in space and other such environments have in fact done much better than animals put in similar situations. Admittedly, at least part of that is because you can't exactly warn an animal what's coming, but still. There are a few tests you can do in a normal environment to prove it; like Jovian said, we're the only animals with any sort of good aim at range. One or two other primate species occasionally throw things, but we still have much better accuracy.
World's Cutest Direwolf
To reiterate, Radiants display no special sense for gravity or whateverthefuck, evidently relying on their normal human or Listener come on Venli senses to observe the forces they manipulate. And if Shallan had started being able to perceive waveforms she couldn't before I'd expect that to get some attention in her narration.
It's possible that special senses might become available with later oaths or truths, but we probably would have heard about that, too.
I dunno.
Jasnah plays her cards close to her chest and Nale isn't the most sharing of individuals either.
Plus it could be exclusive to only a couple of orders.
"But if that happened, Melia might actually be happy. We can't have that." - Handsome Rob
My point about gravity is that humans don't need a special sense of gravity, so if spren are going to give their Knights some special senses to better utilize their Surges, that's not going to be on the list. The Windrunner windsense is a better example, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the mix of Surges and technology, which is where all this started.
As for Shallan, it's not quite clear how many extra senses she has. Her Photographic Memory is obviously supernatural, but is her ability to read the strata lines in Urithiru an extension of that, or just a completely mundane side effect of being an artist? It could be that she (or Pattern, who would then translate) could detect and mimic radio waves, but there are no radio waves around so it hasn't come up yet. Hell, Syl didn't even know she could sense highstorms until they left the warcamps, and that's something much more relevant to Kaladin's situation than radios to Shallan's.
Jupiterian Local
I don't think extra Radiant senses are out of the question. Windrunners seem to be able to sense the currents of a storm (which is how they ride the winds even better than Skybreakers do, despite both having Gravitation surges), Skybreakers are said to have a supernatural ability for judging guilt and innocence, Lightweavers seem to have a sense for patterns (going by Shallan's ability to follow the strata in the tower), etc. We can't really confirm this for certain, but it seems reasonable that this extends to other Orders as well.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
World's Cutest Direwolf
Sanderson actually specifically mentioned that the Skybreaker ability to ferret out the guilty isn't a special power like Shallan's memory.
edited 23rd Apr '18 2:04:22 PM by rikalous
They even said that in the books. I don't know why everyone is having so much trouble with it.
My guess is that it's a cultural ability, just like how normal cops get good at reading people.
- The parshmen seized cudgels made from branches or the handles of brooms. They bunched together and held the sticks like frightened villagers, no stance, no control.
Kaladin hesitated. I could take them all in a fight even without Stormlight. He'd seen men hold weapons like that many times before. Most recently, he'd seen it inside the chasms, when training the bridgemen.
These were no warriors.
While I love the Azish Parshmen the most, the Alethi Parshmen are still a great demonstration of how not monstrous they are. Even the slaves from a warrior culture aren't actually warriors. They're willing to fight, but they're not ready to fight.
- She could see only before herself, and she wanted to run, go somewhere. Be away.
No. No, just be someone else.
A: She did make a lot of terrible decisions in Oathbringer—with a few good ones sprinkled in between—and I know it drove some readers straight up the wall. As I've said before, though, I think it was well done. This scene is a perfect example: I so badly wanted her to accept Pattern as her Blade and get on with the awesome. At the same time, it would be totally unrealistic; she's just recently acknowledged that the first time she used that Blade, she used it to kill her mother. On top of that, the knowledge of that Blade's existence was the primary thing that kept her father from treating her as badly as he treated her brothers... so that he would hurt others in her place, giving her all the guilt and no means of expiation. So yes, of course she hates the Blade, even though she has used it since then to save her own life, and also to save the lives of the entire human army at Narak.
People definitely complained about Shallan here.
World's Cutest Direwolf
A: That’s sort of foreshadow-y, there, you know? Reminds me of Shalash way out yonder in Chapters 117 and 121. Is this a Lightweaver thing?
The Shardblade didn’t respond, but Adolin imagined that it listened to him. You couldn’t use a weapon like this, a weapon that seemed like an extension of the soul itself, and not feel at times that it was alive.
edited 26th Apr '18 1:01:11 PM by rikalous
Given that, I'm starting to think it's not whether you're an honorable person or an artist that dictates what happened to you, it's what kind of mental screw up you have that dictates your Radiant Order. Both Kaladin and Teft have a hangup about 'not having been able to protect those they were trying to help' (Teft has that thing where he tattled on the suicidal cult his parents were to try to get them to stop and ended up having them executed). Shallan and Elhokar had self-worth issues they tried to deal with using appearances. Skybreakers have a sociopathic myopia when it comes to the law bereft of morality. Other orders have not given me a large enough sample size to identify what their deal is.
Thirded, hail the Azish parshmen. Azish in general for that matter. There's just something so cute about a civilization who, when told The alliance is going to foist all the paperwork off on you get excited and ask ALL the paperwork? like a kid not able to believe they were leaving him alone in a mall with an unlimited credit card.
edited 26th Apr '18 4:49:24 PM by SCMof2814
World's Cutest Direwolf
So it's not just about breaking so there are cracks for a bond to fit in, the cracks have to be the right shape for a particular spren? I could see that.
Doubtful about your Skybreaker example in particular, though, since having the Skybreaker view of the law doesn't strike me as breakage in and of itself.
I don't know. I personally find it a bit Javert-y, and feel you need to be a special kind of crazy to divorce law-application with circumstances.
Or maybe it's a 'man is unreliable, so go with the law' approach? Since humans are nepotistic, but laws are, theoretically, equally applicable? And their breakage requires they end up with that mindset to Skybreak?
edited 26th Apr '18 8:15:54 PM by SCMof2814
World's Cutest Direwolf
Remember the Secret Test of Character where to get top marks in freshman Skybreaking you needed to investigate the circumstances behind the prisoners escaping? I think you're giving the Lawknights too little credit. Just because most of them, including the guy responsible for recruiting the most notable exception, are signing on with a guy named Hate doesn't mean their philosophy can't have nuance.
Further, I would not say that Javert was broken at the start of the story. His ideology may be black-and-white in the extreme, but he's comfortable following it. It's only when Valjean defies his expectations of lawbreakers and places him in a situation where he must either betray a man who aided him (bad) or let a criminal walk free (bad) that he breaks.
On Szeth, I'm assuming his break was either when the authorities declared him Truthless or he found out they were wrong, which on the face of it seems like it shouldn't support a Skybreakery mindset. Not strong evidence while I have to assume, though.
Jupiterian Local
Szeth definitely breaks when he finds out he was wrongly declared Truthless. Before then, he's slowly losing it because of the stuff he has to do, but he still accepts that he deserves it and that doing it is ultimately the right thing.
When he really breaks is when he finds out that he was right all along and it was actually all for nothing.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Absolutely no relation to NLK
I think Skybreakers, by necessity considering the circumstances (I blame Nale), get a bid of an undeserved bad rep. Of course when one of the Orders is about protecting the innocent at all costs and another is about enacting justice unfailingly and impartially, we're gonna tend to root for the former, but it doesn't make the latter unjustified necessarily.
Did somebody say
Chronic Hero Syndrome?
Also, I would like to restate both how much I liked that Shallan actually regressed somewhat after unlocking her repressed memories (narratively, that is, I do like her), that her alternate personas are much faker and less healthy than the story treats them (particularly towards the end), and that Radiant in particular felt much shallower than Veil.
Oathbringer chapter 16 reread up. Dalinar sparring with Kadash and trying to talk to some monarchs at the same time.
- With [the Honorblade], you would be a Windrunner unoathed. And more. More that men do not understand, and cannot. Like a Herald, nearly.
A: No, I don't believe we did. Is it possible that the Stone Shamans don't know about all the powers the Honorblades bestow, and so don't train to use the extended abilities? Or is it that they do know, and keep that part secret? Either way, there's clearly more going on with the Honorblades than we've been shown. Yet.
We definitely didn't know this before. The previous books implied that the Heralds only had the powers of a normal Knight, weaker due to the amount of Stormlight they consumed, but much, much more skilled.
- The Thrill. Soldiers spoke of it in the quiet of the night, over campfires. That battle rage unique to the Alethi. Some called it the power of their ancestors, others the true mindset of the soldier. ... He couldn't remember feeling the Thrill in months—and the longer he'd been apart from it, the more he'd begun to recognize that there was something profoundly wrong about the Thrill.
A: We know it's not really limited to Alethi, since we learn later that the Vedans felt it during their civil war. I suspect it might be a combination of things; the first is obviously the proximity of Nergaoul, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were some kind of genetic susceptibility, too.
L: So we've got a chicken and the egg scenario here; which came first, the Alethi predisposition towards violence, or Nergaoul? Did he come to them because they were already heading in that direction and he could just heighten their society's already warlike nature, or is their culture irrevocably changed by an outside force?
That is an interesting question. We know the Alethi were always the nation of soldiers, and Alethela was the unofficial capital of the Knights Radiant. But it's quite likely that things only started going bad when Nergaoul showed up, and he only chose to hang out there because the Alethi liked fighting so much.
As for the "genetic susceptibility," we know that long-term use of Investiture can create effects that are passed down to descendants. That's where the light eyes come from. So maybe it's possible that using the Thrill too much could have an effect on your children.
- Dalinar owned ardents who were experts in all manner of specialties, and per tradition any man or woman could come to them and be apprenticed in a new skill or trade.
A: We've run across this concept before—that anyone can come to the ardents for training. The biggest functional restriction is the simple ability to travel, and that's not an insignificant difficulty. Assuming you can come up with the money to travel to where there are ardents capable of teaching what you want to know, though, there are still societal restrictions, such as the prohibition against darkeyes using swords. We did see ardents, however reluctantly, training Kaladin & his men to use swords, but they're still restricted to actually carrying spears.
Basically, it's a guarantee that you can learn a skill or trade other than what was available to you at home; there's no guarantee that you'll be able to use that skill, but you can learn it. I doubt most people would waste their opportunity by demanding to be taught a skill they'd never be able to use, though. The whole point is to be able to make a living, after all.
Vorin society is full of contradictions like this, which is probably a result of trying to combine the wisdom of the Heralds with a caste-based society. The Heralds taught that people should be free to travel and learn, but the culture made it so people couldn't actually make use of those rights.
- "What of the thing we fight? Odium, the origin of the Voidbringers and their spren. Can he break oaths?"
No, the Stormfather said. He is far greater than I, but the power of ancient Adonalsium permeates him. And controls him. Odium is a force like pressure, gravitation, or the movement of time. Those things cannot break their own rules. Nor can he.
A: I love this little passage! There's so much Cosmere truth buried in it. We'll learn more about this concept later, and we'll talk about different aspects then, but this subject has come up several times recently. Odium, like Stormfather, like the spren, and like natural laws, simply cannot break certain rules. The way things are is, well, the way things are.
I think this holds the key to why Kaladin almost killed Syl in Wo R; as a spren, she cannot bend or break the Ideals that form the Windrunner bond. It's not that she's too stubborn to stretch the rules a little, or even that she's unreasonably demanding that he do what she wants. It's simply, totally, inherently impossible for her to maintain a bond when her human doesn't live by the Ideals that bind them together. She's not "punishing" Kaladin by withdrawing her powers; even though he doesn't understand how it works, his inability to remain committed to his Ideals damages the bond—blocks the pipes, in a manner of speaking. I have to assume that the old Knights Radiant had some understanding of this, and it would have been part of the training to learn about how the bond functions.
We discussed this here during the reread of WoR. Kaladin had trouble understanding that Syl wasn't trying to punish him for his choices, he was causing all his problems himself.
edited 3rd May '18 9:02:24 AM by Discar
Absolutely no relation to NLK
Vasher is still the best. I believe WOB confirmed he came to Roshar because it had the equivalent of really cheap gas prices, ie a method for his survival that doesn't involve being Powered by a Forsaken Child. Nightblood might've gotten lost in transit. And it makes sense that a guy who was known as a god in his home world isn't too pious elsewhere.
I also like Kadash a lot. He's not a super prominent character, but his progression as a person and motivations are so... human. He's an interesting one to be sure.
And immortality aside, I'm fairly sure that Heralds are more than just dudes and dudettes with magic swords. Taln being ridiculously strong is just a hint.
The 'Various Waveforms' parts implies radiowaves. Maybe in he past the Lightweavers formed some kind of Lightweaver Hivemind Network by keeping connected to each other using radio? It's shown that Lightweavers are comparatively more energy-efficient when it comes to Stormlight use than Windrunners are, possibly because their surges don't involve messing around with physical forces.