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My space kids 💙💜

There's some sparkles going on, but I'm not sure you can tell 😥

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Adolin "sometimes homicide is necessary" Kholin

Inktober Day 17 - Necessary

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Kaladin colored + shaded sketch page for @/theknightartorias

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Just finished Way of Kings. Absolutely delighted at this book series I’m so excited to start Words of Radiance. So here’s some fanart in the mean time. happy new year!

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early days

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queen Kholin ✨

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tiny death roll

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Wind and Truth spoilers:

Throughout the series, Lirin shows that he disagrees with a lot of what the ardents teach about Vorinism. He also doesn't hold much respect for people in authority over him. However, he does show genuine faith in and reverence for the Heralds. He taught Kaladin to follow the "wisdom of the Heralds."

And now, Lirin is going to get a message that his son was killed by a Herald.

Hopefully 🤞, Lirin will then later find out that Kaladin actually became a Herald. What a journey Lirin's faith is going to go on in the upcoming years of his life!

Also, I found these quotes from the first and last scenes between Lirin and Kaladin to be so interesting together:

(from The Way of Kings, Chapter 10 "Stories of Surgeons")

(From Wind and Truth, Chapter 2 "Taking the Next Step")

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"I can't believe Szeth got married and has a wife in the 6 years post Wind and Truth" yeah I get it Masha's a surprise to everyone but also consider

you're a historian living in a time of upheaval. You're specifically a scholar on the Recreance. 18* years earlier there was a civil war in your country and the past 2 years the next desolation you've all been aware of has begun again. The Honorbearers are kind of being weird currently and you're pretty sure it's the end of the world. You move back into your parents farm in an isolated area near the Bondsmith's monastery. You hear stories of other farms being attacked and are worried but are trying to help your older parents, continue your studies (hey the past isn't going to reveal an unbiased truth by itself), and not worry about how current events parallel past ones and times of political strife and all.

You decide to sleep in one morning. When you go get breakfast, your parents mention that your cart and two horses were borrowed by some nice young men early in the morning. You make conversation- hoping that your mom won't mention that one was just your age (seriously mom?) and seemed nice- and somewhere in the conversation it's brought up that the "nice young men" were the Assassin in White, now on a pilgrimage, and the former high-marshal of the Windrunners, and that Nin-son-God was also with them, but he was sitting with a blanket around his shoulders looking sad and you're trying to get your parents to back up hang on they lent your cart and horses to the guy who started that civil war 16 years ago, one of the first radiants of the current generation, and a herald??

And then a few hours later you hear a knock at your front door, and it's the assassin in white the guy who started a civil war in your country at 19* and he's now missing an arm and wow that scarring does not look good and he asks if someone could help him bury his friend and glories above you have written at least two papers on this guy and he looks like he is about to cry on your doorstep and you have several questions you want to ask about the accuracy of reports from the civil war that happened and if the radiants have better records of the infighting that happened before the Recreance than most scholars do and also all the various murders but that would be a bad thing to ask now, right?

The current leadership in your country are apparently all dead, and have been for a while it seems. Szeth's decided, once he's recovered from almost dying, that he'll do what he can to help in Shinovar, along with living for himself and being his own law. And you're a historian, who has just entered into a new era of history. You start to help and slowly get to know him. To hear about the quest for Wind and Truth.

*I might be getting the year wrong. I think it's 16 or 18. Szeth was 19 or 21, I think.

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Taravangian and Jasnah have the same fatal flaw - they both claim it is right to sacrifice the few for the many, but apply that logic unevenly when it comes to their loved ones. Jasnah keeps assassins in her employ to remove potential threats to her family, and Taravangian keeps a carbon copy of Karbranth in the spiritual realm even while trying to prove his city can't be used as leverage against him. This is why Odium is able to so deftly out-maneuver Jasnah in Thaylenah - he understands her philosophical weaknesses, because he shares them. But that understanding goes both ways - I suspect that in the second half of Stormlight, Jasnah will at one point work to undermine Taravangian philosophically as he did to her. Maybe she will somehow learn about the pocket dimension where he's keeping his little snow-globe city and expose him?

Ngl the Thaylenah debate frustrated me when I read through the book - it felt like Fen was willing to switch sides too quickly. But the more I've set with it, the more I've come to appreciate the parallel it draws between Jasnah and Taravangian. Now that Dalinar is gone, I think Jasnah is going to take up the role of Taravangian's ideological rival - especially as she is forced to rebuild her ethical worldview.

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idk if this has been discussed but i do wonder if there was a way jasnah could have won over fen. jasnah calls her very emotionally intelligent and she only started responding positively to dalinar in ob once he got truthfully frustrated with her and did some yelling and idk i wonder if jasnah had set aside all her philosophical talk and made a passionate and emotional plea if fen would have been more receptive. but of course jasnah wouldn't do that

short answer: agreed. long answer: ive been wanting to talk about this for weeks. so you're getting kinda a long one.

jasnah is obviously one of my favorite characters and that's almost why i was clapping and cheering during the taravangian takedown--like all of her flaws and everything that makes her compelling was completely cracked open. if jasnah cares about anything at all, it's how she is perceived. we dont know what happened to her when she was a child and we dont know why it seems that she was institutionalized or at least in confinement for a period of her youth but we do know that every single thing she does is a measure to keep her from never going back to the kind of powerlessness she felt back then. i remember shallan commented on her perfect her hair and makeup and clothing was waaay back in book 1/2 and thought how interesting it was for a self professed heretic to still take care to make sure the darkeyed sailors on their ship to the shattered plains never saw her out of makeup. jasnah has been vulnerable in this series, sure, but only to her family. or maybe shallan. or maybe hoid? persumably. every single page she has appeared on in this entire series has reinforced that to her a huge part of the way she does her job (and im considering hiring a spy to follow her sister in law her job too, not just being queen. i mean what she considers her role to be in her family) of statecraft is in the perception that she is perfect. and yeah, that's why it was never going to work with fen

dalinar did have a hard time cracking fen because i think that in the beginning of their interactions they both made fundamental misinterpretations of each other based on where they came from. fen only thought of dalinar as a warmonger who would walk all over her country in the name of conquest, and dalinar straight up did not understand that fen's perspective was so heavily influenced by the thaylen mercantile culture. they still found common ground and yeah it was a frank conversation and an abandoment of diplomat speak that did it. jasnah's made emotional pleas before but i think the crux of her error with fen is that she DID know how important the mercantile culture was but she interpreted it as "fen is going to leave the alliance if she gets a better deal for her country so i need to prove that im her best option" instead of "fen values exchange of commerce but she really values relationships. fen's culture involves building relationships with other merchants so that they can trade with each other and understand each other" (please see the original two rysn interludes). fen didn't need a perfect argument from jasnah but she also didn't need dalinar's approach either. all she needed was for jasnah to TRUST her enough to treat her like an equal partner in their alliance instead of a marker to be moved around a war map.

cause let's be honest. fen is an extremely capable ruler. she's smart and she's been in power for a long time. i do not think for a second that she was genuinely aghast that jasnah sent spies after aesudan or well, the kharbrath murders were pretty bad but im certain that a middle aged to senior member of ruling nobility has seen worse. it's not a bad thing for jasnah to put her people first. i am convinced that fen felt betrayed because jasnah had already set the parameters of their relationship by even engaging in this debate with taravangian. fen saw her logic backfire on herself and went "oh. okay. you are putting YOUR people first because you do not see the thaylen people as having the kind of relationship to you as, for example, vstim had with the shin or with the reshi king. you see us as an argument to be won over, as numbers on a map, as a thought excersize. not onyl withh you walk all over my country in the name of conquest (like dalinar might have) but you'd do it for the sake of what, rhetoric??" in that way, at least taravodium was honest.

but yes. jasnah would never do that. jasnah put on a full face of makeup every morning in her cabin just in case a handful of sailors that she never learned the names of would see her. of course she would never let a queen that she respected see her worry for her kingdom on purpose but it's over now. the mask has cracked, she lost, and she knows that the trap she fell into only closed around her because of her own hubris/the kind of love you have for winning that you'd have to have in order to spend your pre-apocalypse time actively arguing about heresy with every scholar and ardent out there. taravangian's arguments would not have worked on fen if jasnah had never put her in the position to be won over in the first place. i cannot stress enough that jasnah was my first love in this series and watching her finally crack and expose what i have always considered to be the most interesting thing about her was easily one of my favorite moments in the book. insane shit. i can't wait to see how she builds herself back up.

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no szeth hair mention in the flashback chapter. i'm choosing to picture him as a bald little child like aang

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knights of wind and truth

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couldnt resist painting the extremely silly scene from the Wind+Truth preview chapters.... i loved it haha

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Herald of Second Chances // “Kaladin…your eyes”

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Screaming and crying and throwing up about this still.

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