#well we have venli but shes only 2nd ideal i think so I'm not sure where willshapers are going just yet

[mossmanthemossman]

@highly-invested ok I've decided to make a seperate post for this

So I'm not sure if coping mechanisms is quite the right term for it but i don't know what else to call it so I'll just describe it. They're all different ways of tying your happiness and self worth to something else, and specifically not dealing with your trauma (which is something that gets resolved as you go through the ideals). I feel like lightweavers are the most obvious example , with their thing being "I can be happy so long as I never ever think about what happened". You also have windrunners (and possibly also edgedancers in a way but I've not read the novella so idk) where it's "I can be happy so long as I can stop the thing that happened to me from happening again to me or to anyone else"

Which brings us to the skybreakers, who I think are really interesting if analyzed like this, because they would be either "I have faced injustice and I have to rise above that" and them sort of overcomitting to that at forst, or even more interestingly "I myself have done some extremely fucked up shit so I cannot be trusted to make subjective judgements about morality."

#cosmere #the stormlight archive #I do not know yet how truthwatchers and bondsmiths fit into this #nor any of the others but we don't really have major characters for those yet #well we have venli but shes only 2nd ideal i think so I'm not sure where willshapers are going just yet