Oh yeah I didn’t say anything while I was reading sunlit man but there’s a quote I wanted to point out
Contemplation nodded as the building he’d met her in, the one that had been her home here on Beacon, broke away and fell off. “I should like,” she whispered, “to live my remaining days in a place where we could afford to tell such stories. A place with no running. A place of peace and… whimsy.”
That’s twice in two books now that Brandon has dropped an emphasized mention of whimsy for no apparent reason. (the other one is in Wind and Truth when May Aladar tells Adolin he has a strong sense of whimsy). All we know about the shard Whimsy is that it exists, it has not been splintered, and when Hoid reached out to it for help dealing with Odium it was not inclined to be helpful. That’s it. We don’t know where it is, who its vessel is, or ANYTHING it has done since the shattering of Adonalsium thousands upon thousands of years ago.
I can’t help but feel nervous that Brandon is setting up a planet under Whimsy’s control that is a surface-level utopia. Worldhoppers get there and go “oh god a nice place to sit down and RELAX for a second, gee this is so nice” only to later get the rug pulled from underneath them in some kind of “child of Omelas” type thing.
I can’t quite articulate why I think this is what’s being set up, other than if there was an actual utopia somewhere in the cosmere it would undermine all of the other planets and their stories so if whimsy is so nice and wonderful there has to be a downside.
Maybe it’s foreshadowing the Threnodites of Canticle leaving Canticle for somewhere better, like their ancestors left Threnody, only to find out that living with Whimsy the Shard is not actually much better than what they left behind. Which, if you take the view that leaving Threnody for Canticle didn’t actually improve anything either, can be commentary on how “the grass is always greener on the other side” or “life is what you make of it, not the circumstances in which you live,” or something. Seems like a roundabout and weird way to make that point, scattering it across a short story, a novel, and whatever the hell else gets written about the Threnodites in the future, but maybe.
If anyone else has thoughts on Whimsy and its role in the future of the cosmere feel free to add on to this. I strongly feel like it’s going somewhere, I just can’t quite work out where that somewhere is.