Silverlight

I used to be you. Trust me when i say that. "It's just a job" is easy to say until you see drones take off loaded and land empty. "I need the money" is easy to say until you hear about the US betraying and abandoning her allies and you watch an empty lot in the desert fill with tanks that, until a few days ago, had been protecting the people you thought you signed up to protect. "I didn't have a choice" is a lie you tell yourself when you hear about an AC-130 crew destroying a hospital.

Have you directly supported combat aircraft that have killed people? Have you directly supported logistics aircraft that moved weapons and ammo and troops into combat zones? Have you heard about war crimes committed by the US and realized the war criminals and their tools were able to get where they did because you helped keep an airfield in operation? Have you seen armed white men supervise impoverished Indian and Filipino migrant workers building and maintaining infrastructure on behalf of the US government and Kuwaiti royal family like some sort of 21st century version of plantations in the Antebellum South? Have you seen a team of hurricane "first responders" treat the hurricane response duty like a vacation, drinking and partying every night while the people off the base are dying due to lack of electricity?

I have. I haven't seen combat, I'll admit that. But everything i just described, i saw in Kuwait in 2019 and Puerto Rico in 2017. I saw and experienced other things, too, things I'd rather not have seen.

Rhythm of Affirmation (part one of two, part two is here) The time felt right for some more Rlainarin fluff, so please excuse (or join me in) my indulgence 😄 image description:

Watcher at the rim

AAAAAHHH

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I might be missing something dumb here but is it canon that Rosharans have epicanthic folds or is it just a widely accepted fan aesthetic? Either way I’m down with it but I can’t remember a specific reference to this in the books and seeing it everywhere is driving me nuts

Yes, it is canon. Brandon himself has said about this several times, though the following comment he once made on Reddit is the most reliable source:

Alethkar natives other than the Shin have the epicanthic fold, but the Alethi wouldn’t look strictly Asian to you–they’d look like a race that you can’t define, as we don’t have them on earth. I use half-Asian/half-arab or half-asian/half-Polynesian models as my guide some of the time, but Alethi are going to have a tanner skin than some of those.

Brandon also made this interesting comment in an interview:

One big reversal is when readers realize that most of the main characters probably don’t look like them. Most readers don’t make that connection for quite a while… I like the idea that as you read you assume that the offbeat Szeth is “the other” and Kaladin looks like you, when in reality Kaladin is an Asian-Middle Eastern mix, while Szeth is caucasian. Of course, if you read it in Taiwan, then the characters really look like you and Szeth is the oddball…

Did anyone order STORMFATHER PIZZA-KINESES? NO? Too bad. 💙