Absolutely no relation to NLK
That doesn't count, he was a few spheres short of a goblet. A few cremlings short of a Sleepless. A few traumas short of a Knight Radiant. A few forced witticisms short of a Shallan joke.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
I find it hilarious that Vasher's idea of a retirement community is in the middle of, basically, Roshar S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters as their cranky and eccentric old professor. He could be bumming around the Purelake, he could be in a cave in the middle of nowhere, he could be an Ardent in some backwoods monestary reading 'Alethi Epic Novels' and arguing about the shipping, but NO, he has to be the local Obi-Wan. The only other person I know so strongly in denial about his Chronic Hero Syndrome is Mat Cauthon.
While Odium, spren, and other similar beings are bound by their word, there does seem to be some variation on what counts as keeping your word. Much later in the book, when talking to Taravangian, Odium claims that, unlike the highspren, who must fulfill the exact letter of their agreements (and only the exact letter of their agreements), when Odium makes an oath, he's bound uphold the spirit of his promise.
Makes sense, given Odium is all about emotion, so if an oath feels like it calls on him to do one thing, but technically calls on him to do something contrary, the former wins out.
Or maybe Odium was lying. After all, he tried to screw over the champion duel by naming Dalinar as his champion, when the spirit of their deal obviously had them on opposite sides.
Absolutely no relation to NLK
I believe he said he would honor the spirit, not hat he had to.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
That is an interesting way to get around Rules Lawyering: if someone will only obey the exact words of a contract, make "I will obey the spirit of the contract" part of the exact words.
World's Cutest Direwolf
And in fairness, it was just some dude's warcamp when he started. The world-saving came later.
Oathbringer chapter 17 reread up.
Kaladin and the parsh slaves.
The other relationship that begins to develop here is that between Kaladin's primary as-yet-unnamed guard and his young daughter. Between scenes, Kaladin got a look inside that one good tent, and discovered that it held children—parsh children, which we've never seen mentioned before, but of course they brought their children. We see this little girl's love for her father, and his for her, but we also get to see here her uncertainty and fear for him, and for all of her people:
Storms. How did you explain slavery to a seven-year-old?
Let's not forget that humans didn't just enslave the parsh out of revenge for their part in the Desolations. The Radiants accidentally turned them all so braindead that they simply couldn't operate without someone giving them orders. I'm sure there were plenty of people who enslaved them out of revenge or pure pragmatism, but I also think a lot of people allowed it out of pity. Would you really let an entire species die out because you didn't want to order them around?
- "The Everstorm," Syl said. "Power has filled the holes in their souls, bridging the gaps. They didn't just wake, Kaladin. They've been healed, Connection refounded, Identity restored. There's more to this than we ever realized. Somehow when you conquered them, you stole their ability to change forms. You literally ripped off a piece of their souls and locked it away."
A: Oathbringer shows us a lot more of things like Connection and Identity than the previous two books. These are concepts introduced in the Cosmere mostly through The Bands of Mourning and Mistborn: Secret History, so speaking as a Cosmere geek, it's rather exciting to see them overtly applied to The Stormlight Archive. Speaking as a human being, though, it's appalling to see more specifically what's been done to an entire race. The truly bizarre part comes in realizing that these sympathetic people (yay!) were healed (yay!) by a storm sourced in Odium (ack!! Help! NO!!). It's a little disorienting.
On the one hand, this sounds worse than it was, since the Radiants did it on accident. On the other hand... maybe they should have anticipated this outcome and been more careful. If you toss a noisemaker into a crowd and it turns out to actually be a grenade, you're still going to be in trouble.
edited 10th May '18 7:57:08 AM by Discar
Absolutely no relation to NLK
There's an interesting parallel to the Nahel bond in the mechanics behind the parshmen and Parshendi. Radiants get the cracks in their souls, caused by trauma (far as we've seen, Lopen seems okay though), filled with Investiture and a Connection to their spren. The Listeners were bonded to Ba-Ado-Mishram (collectively, it seems), who gave them Voidlight and forms of power, and in incarcerating her the Radiants broke the bond and broke the Connection the Listeners had with her and apparently their Identity with it, turning them to parshmen/slaveform. And now the Everstorm has repaired that. Which brings a couple of questions to mind — did Ba-Ado-Mishram come back, did Odium fill in the cracks himself, or is a specific person not necessary and the Voidlight from the Everstorm does the job? Do these Singers have spren in their gemhearts for this form? And were the Listeners broken in the first place to be oroginally bonded with Ba-Ado-Mishram?
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
I'm pretty sure it was just the Voidlight in general that repaired the parsh. Most forms of Investiture have demonstrated healing in their pure forms. Stormlight is of course the most obvious, but Scadrial's mists do the same (even if it's much more rare for people to actually be able to use the mists).
I'm pretty sure the basic forms were just a result of the healed parsh bonding with whatever spren happened to be nearby at the moment. Just like the listeners don't need a Connection to a higher power for warform and mateform, neither do the singers. The Regals, however, seem to be granted specifically by the sentient voidspren, so presumably they're handling any necessary Connection to Odium.
edited 10th May '18 2:20:09 PM by Discar
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
Theory time:
The reason Parshendi can now bond Spren is because after the Radiants 'broke' them (and took presumably a part of their spiritual entity away from them) that void got filled by what was around by the other sentient species on Roshar. Hence why Parshmen behave like the country they were in when they got 'fixed'. Essentially instead of 'resetting them' they got a piece of Humanity to patch it up. This is what now allows the Nahel bond to work with them
Random thought: what kept the Parshmen 'broken? If they all had spiritual damage, why didn't spren or anything else slip into the cracks before the Everstorm? And what manage to relay that damage across generations without maintenance? Because if this was something the Radiants did to the Listeners, why did it continue to affect their children long after the fact? After all, cutting the tail off a mouse should not mean it gives birth to tail-less mice. Is this what the 'sibling' was doing? Was it being used as a doorstop to keep those holes form closing?
Jupiterian Local
We know that Spiritual shenanigans (like potential for allomancy) can run in families, so presumably this is something similar.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Except we know the potential for allomancy decreases every generation. We have not seen any indication of the effects on the Parshmen having gotten better or worse.
Absolutely no relation to NLK
Spiritwebs are clearly as hereditary as DNA, considering taking a Lerasium bead fosters a line of Allomancers ![[nja]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/user_ninja_2074.png "[nja]"){kind=small}
. I'm sticking to my theory that Odium broke the Listeners in the first place to make way for the Unmade bond.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Same reason bloodlines get diluted IRL. If I had a black great-great-great- grandfather and nothing else I wouldn't expect to look very African.
edited 10th May '18 6:06:39 PM by Ninety
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
Jupiterian Local
Only because there aren't that many allomancers around, so allomantic strength gets "diluted". If two full mistborn had kids, their kids would likely be full mistborn themselves.
That implies that the child of two allomancers will always reliably be an allomancer. But if that were the case, in the history of the final empire, someone would have tried it, and they'd have "bred" their allomancers accordingly. And yet the Venture's ended up with Elend, and there are implied to be a lot of nobles like Cett who were mundane.
Absolutely no relation to NLK
Not really? Everyone in my family has green-blue eyes except for me. It's not a certainty, but it's a strong tendency. Without knowing more about the intricacies of the system, I can't say that it's remotely feasible for a parshman to just up and be born with the fundamental bits of his soul that his entire species lacks.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
There were only a limited number of Mistborn to start with (thirteen, I think; I believe there were sixteen Lerasium beads, the Lord Ruler took one, and there were two left behind). Even if the originals all tried to breed with each other, they would have been forced to breed with mundanes sooner rather than later. From there, dilution was inevitable. Especially since you can carry the traits for being an allomancer without actually being one yourself. The parsh, on the other hand, never had any chance to breed with anyone who didn't have the exact same inherited damage they did.
Good point. And the only other sample group with damaged souls that reproduce are in Sel, but that's invalidated because Endowment seems to give everyone Breath at birth. The only way to test it is to see if two people without Breath had a kid away from Endowment and the kid turned out similarly damaged. Something to ask Brandon on his next book tour? Skyward will be coming out soon.
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
There's also the implication that Misting status is the 'natural' state of things, given that The guy who'd thought he was the Hero of Ages first was a Seeker
"You can reply to this Message!"
Oathbringer chapter 18 reread up. Shallan goes to the market.
- How had anything ever grown up here? Her breath puffed out in front of her, and coldspren grew around her feet.
All these hints are interesting, because we know that the old Radiants didn't really have much in the way of actual technology or fabrials. The elevators are kind of cool, but ultimately pretty simple. So I agree that most of the interesting things in the tower are the result of a direct intervention of a godspren.
- "Veil is just a face."
No. Veil was a woman who didn't giggle when she got drunk, or whine, fanning her mouth when the drink was too hard for her. She never acted like a silly teenager. Veil had never been sheltered, practically locked away, until she went crazy and murdered her own family.
A: This is a really big open-ended question! Part of the point of being a Lightweaver is to create illusions, and Shallan is becoming quite good at disguises. But sanity requires her to recognize them as disguises—as "just a face"—if she's not going to go completely crackers. My guess is that she'll make most of that progress between books, with a little work remaining to be done in book 4. (I'm assuming that Sanderson plans the year lapse to take care of a lot of logistics and progress that has to happen, but that would be boring to watch. After the agony of seeing Shallan falling to pieces in Oathbringer, I have to admit I wouldn't mind if her recovery took place mostly off-screen!)
I wonder if Shallan's interactions with Shallash will make this better or worse. On the one hand Shallash doesn't appear to have any dissociative identity problems, but she also doesn't have her powers, so maybe she just can't bring her dozen or whatever personalities out easily.
- "My brothers. Pattern, I didn't kill them, right? ... I talked to Balat over spanreed. But... I had Lightweaving then... even if I didn't fully know it. I could have fabricated that. Every message from him. My own memories..."
"Shallan," Pattern said, sounding concerned. "No. They live." ... His voice grew smaller. "Can't you tell?"
A: It may be wise of her, and I'm glad she can check with Pattern when she doesn't trust herself. But this freaked me out. She honestly doesn't seem to know if she killed her brothers, or if she just talked to them: they look like equally probable scenarios, and she doesn't even know which is true.
This small moment was one of the most disturbing in the book, to me.
- The first moon had risen, violet and proud Salas. She was the least bright of the moons, which meant it was mostly dark out.
A: There are three moons: violet Salas, big blue Nomon, and little green Mishim. There's a story about them later, which Sigzil fails to tell properly in chapter 35, and Hoid (of course) succeeds in telling well in chapter 67. We have no way of knowing whether it's just a story, or whether there's some grain of truth in it, but we do know that the moons' orbits are artificial—for whatever that's worth. The colors seem to be significant, and I wonder if they're connected somehow to the three Bondsmith spren. Or... to the Shards?
Did we know the orbits were artificial? I had heard that people with astronomic backgrounds were pointing out that the orbits didn't really make sense, but I didn't hear any Word of God confirming it.
edited 18th May '18 10:00:39 AM by Discar
World's Cutest Direwolf
Which fits with my knowledge of psychology, since I understand Dissociative Identity Disorder develops in response to childhood trauma, and we've seen people who don't seem to be broken until adulthood.
Do you suppose, if Shallan were a Feruchemist, she'd be able to fill a coppermind up with fabricated memories?
Whatever extra powers they have, it didn't stop Jezrien from getting shanked in an alley by fucking Moash.
Which is probably a good thing, given how hard Nale is gonna need to go down. Sorry Lift, I don't think talking it out will cut it at this point.