Stormlight Archive and the unequal conflict
(i’m on a reread, mid-WoR now, so my memories of Ob and my perspective on RoW are a bit...stale)
ok so the hypocrisy and unequal values got to me yesterday again. branderson makes his antagonists into “this is Chancellor Hellfire, in his society all are treated equal but he eats infants for breakfast so he needs to be stopped” and that is why we our morality must always be skewed towards the protagonists
in sla he does get around to calling himself out, mostly by kaladin arguing with syl whether killing the listeners is o.k. but killing amaram or elhokar is bad but like, it gets nowhere? there are like...3 or 4 points where this inequal morality pops up and all of them piss me off so much lmao:
- the elhokar, moash, dalinar point: imo elhokar sucks and moash was justified in killing him. branderson has a hard-on for royalty (as seen in mistborn era one which is a burning landfill in that regard i hate it so much) but elhokar proves off- and onscreen that he’s not a good ruler. yeah, by the end of OB he was about to become a radiant and moash killed that potential but...Your Actions Have Consequences and i can’t fault moash for killing him! i just! can’t! perhaps his future better actions would’ve eventually balanced the ledger but it’s not that awful that he died the circumstances and moash’s further blackening in RoW of course, again, make us less sympathetic for moash. “this man has good points about an incompetent, mediocre, unsuited for his position person but he’s allied with evil incarnate so all his arguments are automatically invalid”. way to make a nuanced argument and dalinar. where to begin? walks all over elhokar, calls the shots, and blatant amounts of hypocrisy - though he does call himself out. oh and i am still pissed about him forcefully bonding the stormfather haha
- lirin idk he just annoys me at this point, possibly because he just refuses to see another person’s perspective? ...wait, i know who he reminds me of, he just has less of a spine lmao i’m not saying who though or i’d get torn to shreds
- pre-RoW i would’ve made a point about szeth here but honestly, at this point he’s just spinning the wheel of his soul and doing whatever the arrow lands on. godspeed, idiot
- nale. complete dick by abiding to the law, also allied with odium, also a bad look even though his argument of “this is the singer’s planet” is a decent one
- taravangian. god do i understand his perspective so much, yet this is also invalidated by him bleeding people out what the fuck not to mention starting wars
- singers, listeners and all the jam: this is the last point because it’s also the biggest point and where the crux of the issue lies all the spren allying with humans and not with singers is a fucking betrayal. there. i don’t think this si very fleshed out yet? what set off the conflict? likely odium had its hand in there. but the humans fucked up their planet, right, and migrated to roshar, the planet of the singers, who then allied with odium to, likely, stop the humans from fucking up everything and taking their land because let’s be honest, that is what we always do and by allying with a force called Literally Evil, the fused’s arguments are invalid and they are evil and they must be stopped. several thousand years are several thousand years and the rosharan humans have a right to live. yet the fused were alive at that point when it all started and that would make for a more interesting conflict yet it’s good vs bad, Honour & Cultivation vs Hatred the argument isn’t helped in that the fused we see are a) the pursuer, a fucking asshole b) raboniel, a ruthless scientist absolutely down with genocide yet made sympathetic through her willingness to cooperate with a human and c) leshwi, a honourable warrior who is also sympathetic to humans. raboniel, leshwi and venli end up breaking from odium in various ways, which denotes them as the “good” listeners/fused and, like, the humans lobotomized most of the singers and then enslaved their entire race? also not a good look. are the un-lobotomized parshmen entitled to payback? they’re the descendants of descendants against the descendants of descendants, where do you draw the line and even odium’s rhythms are named along bad lines i just. this is so heavy handed
i think my point here is that honour (humans) vs cultivation (singers) would make for a better, more nuanced conflict. you can have odium exaggerating it and fanning the flames by manipulating fringe groups on both sides and end up with the humans and singers allying against a common foe, an equally transspecies army led by odium. but right now the fused are Bad and the radiants are Good and that makes the entire conflict a bit...too clean-cut
