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[stormscience]

How Shallan, Adolin, & Kaladin would Divide up Chores (If They Lived Together)

If these three were roommates (reader's choice as to whether they also share a bedroom ha ha) and also lived in the modern world, here is how I think they would divide up the house chores.

1. Laundry: Adolin

This is because Kaladin & Shallan would both look disdainfully at the "gentle cycle" or "dry clean only" instructions on a piece of clothing, shove it directly into the washer with everything else, and dump on some bargain-brand detergent. "Clothes that cannot survive this are too weak for me," Kaladin would intone and Shallan would be like, "Yeah, if they die, they die." And Adolin in the background would scream, "OKAY I DO THE LAUNDRY FROM NOW ON."

2. Dishes: Kaladin

I'm just thinking back to Kaladin's surgeon training and how his dad was like, "We must wash our hands son" and Kaladin was like, "Nobody else washes their hands are we sure that rotspren even exist" and Lirin was like, "It is the wisdom of the heralds, my son." Or something like that. Anyway, Kaladin seems to be uniquely trained in hygiene and avoiding sickness, so he should take care of the dishes.

3. Dusting: Shallan

Shallan would fill the house with art, and she wouldn't want it to get dusty (plus, I'm feeling knick-knacks from her), so I think she would be the one to make sure all of the art and books and other stuff stays dust-free.

4. Cooking: Shared

I don't think any of the three is a stand-out cook, so they should just take turns. Shallan-as-Radiant follows recipes very exactly, Kaladin keeps making soup, and Adolin is pretty sure adding wine makes any dish fancy.

...Sometimes Rock cooks for them and then they have good food.

5. Paying Bills: Kaladin

Kaladin scoffs that no lighteyes know the value of money and that Shallan & Adolin won't budget correctly, so he'll take care of any shared household finances like paying utilities. I bet he balances checkbooks, too.

6. Taking out trash: Adolin

"You can handle gross things. You poop yourself all the time," says Shallan, a wording that Adolin does not appreciate but cannot argue with.

7. Vacuuming: Shallan

Pattern likes it when the vacuum makes neat lines in the carpet and hums excitedly the whole time.

8. Grocery Shopping: Shared

No particular reason. I just think it would be cute if they all went to the grocery store together.

9. Cleaning gutters: Kaladin

It's high up there, but Kaladin is not afraid of heights. He kinda likes being on the roof. It's like chipping crem off of a roof, only it's leaves. It makes sense.

10. Answering the door: Adolin

When the doorbell rings, the resident extrovert is sent to deal with it while Shallan and Kaladin hide behind the couch.

11. Getting rid of scary bugs: Shallan

If there is a spider or a big moth or even a centipede, it is Shallan who handles it because, as a wise tumblr poster once said, "Cremlings is bugs."

[stormscience]

The Kaladin/Shallan/Adolin situation is not a love triangle. It’s a couple who love each other and also their very tired best friend while the best friend is oblivious. Every single time I read about Adolin worrying about Shallan’s crush on Kaladin, I’m like, Adolin, you also have a crush on Kaladin. That throuple will thrive the moment Kaladin gets an actual vacation and has time to think about things not related to work.

[stormscience]

SHADOLIN YAYYY!!! (everyone cheers loudly)

[stormscience]

queen Kholin ✨

[stormscience]

idk man but something about Stanley "taught himself extremely advance physics/math/probably many other things while running a relatively successful business" Pines and Stanford "is wanted in almost every dimension with a judicial system of some kind" Pines is sooo fucking funny to me

[stormscience]

I AM SO FUCKING OBSESSED WITH YOUR ART AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

Thank you ❤️ Here, have some smol Kholin brothers (this crem came from a discussion about Chasmfiend onesies)

[stormscience]

And after a while you just stop. You stop watering your plants. You stop watching netflix. You stop reading. You stop replying to your friends as fast as you used to. You stop buying yourself nice things. You stop putting an effort into how you look. You stop taking care of yourself like you used to. You stop sleeping. You stop eating healthy foods. You stop petting your dog. You stop socializing.

You stop with everything. You find yourself sitting in your room for hours on end, without doing a single thing. Days feel like years. And you think you can’t do it for much longer.

[stormscience]

[stormscience]

Radiant Healing Is OP and Also Terrifying

Ok so buckle up because I have opinions and concerns.

Look, Radiant healing is just far, far too powerful. There are no obvious limitations outside of the injury/illness being fairly new, availability of Stormlight, the patient still being alive (unless you're Lift), and having tissue to work with (and since whole limbs can regenerate like they're salamanders, even this is dubious).

So first, narrative wise this is just not great because the stakes are so much lower when most anything can be healed. I'm pretty sure anti-stormlight was invented to overcome this somewhat, but the reality is that injuries feel far less consequential when Radiants can heal themselves so fast and two orders can heal others as well. Pain, injury, disability, and death are all risks that make for compelling storytelling, and being able to just recover from penetrating head injuries makes fights seem less significant and intimidating.

But this isn't my big gripe. Oh no, my nerdy friends. See, I have questions that fall into two categories: 1) knowledge, and 2) illness.

Knowledge: ok, so if you're closing, say, a stab wound to the thigh, it seems like Radiants can just touch a patient and the wound heals. Which is absurd because even relatively straightforward cuts that go through multiple layers of tissue require expertise. You can't just hold two sides of a wound together and call it good. You need to make sure everything lines up properly. That the blood vessels go to the right places and don't leak. That muscles can move properly. That tendons are repaired. I am down for healing, especially field medicine healing, but for it to be believable you can't just have someone with no knowledge of anatomy and physiology touch someone and fix a complex gut wound or a deep laceration to muscles. They need to know what they are doing so they don't connect the wrong stuff.

Illness: can Radiant healing fix diabetes? Stroke? Liver cancer? We know it can fix visual impairments, can it fix other organ dysfunction? If it can fix chronic diseases of the body, why can't it fix mental illness, or at least the neurochemical aspects? If it can restore someone's spinal cord, can it fix epilepsy? If it can regrow limbs can it restore blood after major bleeds?

Limits would make the narrative more compelling. Plus, we need more representation of disability in fantasy! Not everything needs to be "fixed", and once you look at cultures around disability, saying a Radiant could make a deaf person hear when they are culturally Deaf feels off. Plus the internal, subtle journeys are far more interesting than the simple external "fixes".

Plus now you have to take your private medical concerns to Lift, who would handle intimate problems with all the subtlety of parrot on cocaine. You get to go to people like Renarin while having a difficult labor and delivery, because having someone who cannot bear to say the name of the parts in question makes treatment easy. You get the Stump for fertility concerns.

Surgeons are needed. Training is needed. Limits are needed. This is a recipe for chaos.

[stormscience]

QUEERING FAIRYTALES: Beauty and the Beast

[stormscience]

[stormscience]

"you're not just evil, you're a selfish, crem-crusted eel who is trying to strangle this kingdom with his bulbous, bastard hand."

Reading ch. 50 of Words of Radiance and I KNEW this quote from Adolin sounded familiar--

TOROL SADEAS?

STUPID IDIOT KALAK'S BOLLOCKS TOROL SADEAS STORM-CURSED FOOL UNCUT GEM-COLLECTING DUST-EATING CREM-CRUSTED OLD BASTARD EEL IDIOT HIGHPRINCE OF BETRAYAL BIGGEST FOOL ON THE SHATTERED PLAINS LAUGHED OUT OF CAMP TRAITOR STORMING TOROL SADEAS.

STOP PINNING ME WHEN I TALK ABOUT TOROL SADEAS I HATE HIM SO MUCH WHY DOES HE HAVE SO MANY UNCUT EMERALDS WHY IS HE TRYING TO STRANGLE THIS KINGDOM WITH HIS BULBOUS BASTARD HAND IS HE DEAD IS HE A BASTARD MAN HAS SUCH A VISCERAL AFFECT ON ME NOT EVEN IN THE ROOM NEVER DUELED THIS MAN AND I KNOW HES ROSHAR'S MOST CREM-COLLECTING SHARDBEARER GET AWAY FROM ME

[stormscience]

we need more disabled people in fiction who have roles outside of “disabled person”. we need more disabled people just existing and being casually written into the narrative and being just as much a part of it as the abled characters. we need more disabled people who are more than objects of pity or plot devices we need more disabled CHARACTERS.

[stormscience]

this is amazing 🐈 ♥️♥️

[stormscience]

oohhjskskdkkkw fem kaladin moment because shes my muse

[stormscience]

Absolutely awesome fic, I highly recommend!

A Promise Full Filled

Below is an excerpt from my most recent fic:

***CONTAINS WIND AND TRUTH SPOILERS***

It had actually happened. Kaladin wasn't sure if any warping of reality on his part had occurred but Dalinar had done what he had needed to do and the three of them had survived until the end. They had all suffered terrible losses but, tonight, they were choosing to ignore all that because they were fulfilling a promise they had made to one another. At the end. Drinks. Jokes. Laughter.

Currently, the laughter was at Kaladin’s expense. Shallan and Adolin had managed to wheedle out of him the particulars regarding what Szeth had mentioned. Szeth had made astounding progress on their trip to Shinovar, so much so that he and Kaladin had laughed easily and often by the end and Szeth had surprised both Shallan and Adolin by interacting with them comfortably when they had returned. Perhaps a little too comfortably. To Kaladin’s chagrin, Szeth had told them that Kaladin had been unable to best the Shin architecture. Szeth had refused to elaborate further and Kaladin had had also refused to give a full account at the time, citing a need to see his family. But, today, there was no diverting them so Kaladin had to explain in painstaking detail, while Shallan howled with laughter, what Szeth had meant.

“The Shin are much shorter people than the Alethi so there were a lot of doorframes, cultivated trees, and even ceilings that would not accommodate the stature of a normal-sized person—"

“An Alethi giant you mean.” Shallan corrected, as she craned her neck in an unnecessarily exaggerated manner to eye him pointedly.

“Fine. Someone of normal Alethi height.” Kaladin conceded.

“You’re tall, even for an Alethi, Kal.” Adolin asserted, appraising him with a slight smile and a lingering look that had Kaladin feeling...on edge. He was not that tall. For an Alethi. He was only a few inches taller than Adolin. 

“So what did you do?" Shallan asked, her eyes glittering expectantly. "Try to punch and stab your way through doorways or…” 

He wished that were the truth.

“No, um, many times I didn’t notice until—"

“Stormfather! You walked into everything, didn’t you?” She asked with excited incredulity.

Kaladin pressed his lips to a line. He had not walked into everything. But she was right, it had happened. And more than he would have liked. She seemed to guess her aspersion was at least partially correct and he could see the joy in her expression ramping up as he replied.

“Well not everything but there were a few times I—"

Kaladin didn’t get to finish, Shallan erupted with a shrill scream of unbridled glee and Adolin’s barking laugh split the air next to him seconds later. 

Sure, Kaladin felt a little embarrassed about how many inanimate objects his face had unexpectedly encountered but he had promised, drinks, jokes, laughter, and he was certainly delivering on the last part. Kaladin found himself chuckling too, after a fashion, but Shallan was definitely the most affected. It took several moments before Shallan wiped tears of mirth from her eyes and rested her hand lightly on his as her raucous sounds of merriment became a subdued giggle.

Kaladin’s laughter became uneasy and died as he processed several disturbing things at once: the hand Shallan had placed on his was her clothed safehand, the topic of conversation had changed to a distressing one, and the seating arrangement was...disquieting and too close. In short, somehow he had gotten trapped between Shallan and Adolin while they argued about Kaladin's farewell hugs all the while Shallan touched him in an arrestingly inappropriate and intimate manner. In the middle of a very public tavern.

How had this happened? He thought back. Kaladin had been sitting in the middle since they had arrived but he hadn’t given the arrangement much thought since they had started the evening a respectful distance apart from one another and they had been discussing a suitable topic: the strange Shinovarian flora and fauna. Shallan had shown a keen interest and Kaladin, grateful for the distraction from all the needling about Shin architecture, had seized the topic like a pouch of stormlight during an Everstorm. Kaladin had explained how lazy the grass had been, laying about and getting trampled all the time; how there had been these delightful happy animals called ‘dogs’ that acted like axehounds but were soft and squishy with no carapace or mandibles and enjoyed probing your backside with their noses; and how some animals Szeth had called ‘goats’ had been able to Surgebind—Szeth had insisted they did not Surgebind but there was simply no other rational explanation for how they scaled sheer cliffs like that, Kaladin had seen them at it with his own eyes—they had to be using adhesion or gravitation. Szeth was mistaken. Unfortunately, mentioning Szeth had reminded them about the storming architecture again but even those laughs at his expense had been better than this.

“You got two hugs.” Adolin insisted to Shallan.

“I had to initiate the first one though and Kaladin suffered it like a chull bound in a heavy stormwagon yolk. The one he initiated was much shorter than the hug he gave you.”

Somehow as the conversation and alcohol had flowed, the distance between them had shrunk to almost nothing, such that Shallan’s and Adolin’s present and disconcerting tete-a-tete was taking place practically on top of Kaladin. Kaladin was immensely uncomfortable. Why did the hugs he gave them matter and why were they chatting about it with no space for Honor between the three of them? Kaladin was finding it harder and harder to follow the exchange because he was becoming increasingly aware of their proximity to him in several would-be innocuous ways...

Here's a link to the rest of it, if you want to keep reading. Please take care, it is rated EXPLICIT because I cannot keep my hands off the smut when it comes to these three...or in general. You know that part in A Bugs Life with the mosquitoes?

Mosquito 1: Harry, no! Don't look at the light!

Harry: *entranced* I-can't-help-it. It's-so-beautiful. *Harry gets zapped and DIES*

Harry is basically me with smut...wait, there's a When Harry Met Sally reference here...if you want to have what she's having you might like my writing 😂 You've probably heard of a gutter ball. *Jumps up and down* Oh, yes, bowling! I've heard of that! Well, I have a gutter brain. There are balls involved in my gutter brain and many other euphemistic sports accoutrements that I could mention. But I won't. No one wants that. In fact, no one wanted this paragraph at the end, not even me, but I typed it already so...pipe down, I got the conch and... *does best Leonidas impression* THIS—IS—TUMBLR!

(RIP Piggy, sorry about your ass-mar and brutal murder—Roger was a right Piero Manzoni piece of work)

Well, that stream of consciousness was a trip to read in the stark light of day. Someone should take my keyboard away. Alright, shutting the fuck up now...

PS: See, I did mean what I said

[stormscience]

List Some time ago a friend on discord approached me with a prompt for a Szeth moment from Way of Kings. Mainly him getting the list with all the kings and head of states to assassinate. Image Description: Loose digital painting in a fairly monochrome set of blues, greys and violets with black as the dark colours for the shadows and a pale violet blue as the highlights, We see Szeth standing alone in a room in front of a table. His form is silhouetted by the Nomon's light falling through a window near the ceiling. He stands straight and very still, Jezrien's blade in one hand a piece of paper in the other, which he gazes down towards, although his profile is so shadowed that it is hard to read his expression. On the table before him the moonlight reflects off a plate and the bulky and gruesome form of a decapitated head. Soft wisps of stormlight waft from Szeth's hands and head. Leaving him a forlorn figure in the moonlight and its shadows.(edited)