#sanderlanche

I did stop to read The Lost Metal. I struggled with this one. From the very beginning I had a bad feeling about what was going to happen (which I was right about) and I really didn't want to listen to it happening. But I did. I'm devastated. Wish I had a little statue of my own to commemorate the event.

I remember a lot of fantastic plots & characters & actions but book 2 has basically just been politics (until the Sanderlanche ofc) but my boyfriend’s getting a bit bored. The 3rd book is more exciting, right? The whole Spook plotline is great, and I *think* the hemalurgy gets introduced soon enough?? I feel bad if I’m leading him on something he’s not that all that into and I really want him to love the cosmere like I do.

(Well okay there's a little bit of one in Oathbringer but we aren't talking about that)

It could have been so easy for the death of Gavilar Kholin to have been a murder mystery. Let's look at the scenario, shall we? There's a big meeting and party, where peace is supposed to be declared, and then the King dies. Say we DIDN'T know whodunnit. Gavilar's death haunts the narrative, and every subplot in the story soon ties back to that single driving question of "Who Killed Gavilar Kholin?". Over the course of the story, we've seen the layers slowly peeled off, one by one, revealing a whole bunch of suspects.

There's Dalinar, the King's brother, seemingly a depressed drunkard but was once known a deadly warrior and general.

There's Sadeas, the highprince who is seemingly loyal to the king but is otherwise a backstabbing slimeball.

And there's another highprince, Amaram, who was talking with Gavilar for quite a while earlier in the day.

Jasnah, the King's heretical and highly intelligent daughter, and...

Also the person who hired Liss, an actual assassin, to spy on the event and possibly kill someone else.

Then there's Elhokar, the King's incompetent son who is nonetheless next in line for the throne.

And Elhokar's hedonistic wife, Aesudan, who was apparently enough of a problem that Jasnah was planning on killing her.

Speaking of wives, the King's own wife Navani is soon revealed to be cunning in her own right... and angry with her husband.

Dalinar's sons, Adolin and Renarin, don't seem to have been in attendance, but considering everyone else in the family was there there's no reason they couldn't've been around as well and nobody mentioned it.

There's Eshonai and the other Parshendi drummers, a.k.a. the opposing faction. Eshonai in particular seems to be dangerous.

And her sister, Venli, is also dangerous, was also present, and probably wasn't supposed to be.

At least four of the legendary Heralds are soon revealed to be present as well. The King was planning on betraying Kalak and Nale, Jezrien was drinking with Dalinar, and Shalash was defacing the artwork.

Taravangian, the seemingly weak and compassionate King of Kharbranth who secretly is planning on orchestrating a LOT of murdering.

There's the mysterious "Thaidakar", leader of the Ghostbloods who Gavilar himself thought was the one responsible for killing him.

Since it's a Cosmere work and we didn't yet know Hoid couldn't hurt people, it would be easy to assume he's an available suspect as well.

Gavilar could have even committed suicide, as some part of an elaborate scheme.

A huge assortment of servants and partygoers, all of which could have been the killer. Not to mention the spren (and a seon!), who are soon revealed to not necessarily be as mindless as they seem.

Literally anyone else in the story becomes fair game at first glance. Even though she definitely wasn't there at all, Shallan Davar is revealed to have history with that particular night as well. You can keep going and connect everyone to the murder somehow, at least at first.

And lastly Szeth-son-son-Vallano, a mysterious Shin man in white, seen roaming the halls with a very bizarre sword.

Of course, we all know what happened. It was Szeth, in the King's chambers, with the honorblade. And he did it on the orders of the Parshendi. There's no whodunnit, or even a howdunnit (and even the whydunnit is only partially hidden from the reader, Jasnah's POV reveals Eshonai and the other Parshendi were pretty upfront about why they did it). There's no ambiguity, the death is merely a spark that kicks off the plot into motion.

"The Mysterious Murder of Gavilar Kholin" would have been a crutch. It would have been so easy for Sanderson to use it as a backup sideplot, supporting the other stories and keeping things tied together. There's an AU out there where Kaladin ends up being the amateur detective who puts the last piece together and confronts Szeth in an epic battle in the sky. That could have happened. But it didn't.

Brandon Sanderson does not need to rely on a murder mystery to keep his story standing. Regardless of whether it was intentional or not, he had enough faith in his narratives to make them stand on their own, moving forward beyond the death of one pathetic man. The Stormlight Archive is not about how people die, it's about how people choose to live. So it cast aside its crutch, walked forward on its own legs, and became one of the best dang fantasy sagas in history.

And then, in the ultimate "psych!" moment, things went back around and kept connecting to that night anyway. Like a bizarre episode of Columbo, where everything else around the extremely upfront murder gets revealed instead. Instead of using the murder mystery as a device to support the plot, the entire rest of the story is used as a device to support the account of the murder. So that even though it WASN'T a murder mystery we're thrown by the plot twists anyway.

And then, of course, while we're still reeling from those reveals, the rest of the plot hits us with some more Sanderlanches, because this story is still going. And it was never really about Gavilar, anyway.