Ruin responds to Zane's thoughts

[+hwiles]

I was skimming WoA looking for a specific reference, when I noticed the following exchange between Ruin and Zane:

Quote

"Kill him!" God yelled.

"You hate him!  He kept you in squalor, forcing you to fight for your survival as a child."

He made me strong, Zane thought.

"Then use that strength to kill him!"

This occurs while Zane is sitting across from Straff Venture and reporting on his success in getting Vin to trust him.  It really seems like Ruin hears and responds to Zane's thoughts...I'm finding it difficult to believe that Ruin is so intuitive that he can not only precisely predict Zane's exact internal monologue, but also the timing.

I guess it could be argued that Ruin had inserted both the command to kill, as well as Zane's retort, but that seems like an inelegant explanation...

Has anyone come across or discussed this before?  Is there an explanation other than Ruin inexplicably was able to hear a person's thoughts even though that's supposed to be Preservation's thing?

[Scriptorian]

Zane's just crazy and imagined that part? 

In seriousness, that seems like a train of thought Ruin would have been able to guess with ease. It's the kind of thought he would have planted in Zane's mind multiple times himself. His messages to Vin often follow that exact same vein.

After millennium of manipulating unstable people, it would not be difficult for Ruin to make it seem like he can hear their thoughts. He attempted to do so to Vin on at least one occasion that I remember. 

[Kurkistan]

Even if Ruin's not trying to pretend he's reading thoughts, there are a pair of quick alternatives that come to mind:
-Zane's literally crazy. He may have mumbled those words out-loud as he thought them, but the point-of-view didn't know it.
-Ruin didn't actually mean to try to imply he was thought-reading. He could have just gone "You hate him!  He kept you in squalor, forcing you to fight for your survival as a child. <short pause> Then use that strength to kill him!"

[Oversleep]

Possibly that exchange has happened before and Ruin already knew how Zane would react to such words.

[baby]

zane's not actually insane, ruin says so as zane dies, and vin sees that his eyes arent those of an insane person.

[+hwiles]

@Onceler I'm inclined to agree with @Kurkistan that Zane was, at least in some capacity, "insane."  Whether his mental illness came from intervention by ruin, abuse/neglect as a child, natural chemical imbalance, or some superposition of all 3, is beside the point.  He found himself wanting to obey Ruin's commands to kill everyone he looked at, found pleasure in mutilating himself, and attempted to murder Vin when she wouldn't run away with him...

Is it possible that Zane's Connection to Ruin could've allowed Ruin to hear Zane's thoughts?  Sort of like (SH spoilers):

Spoiler

A Kelsier-Spook interaction?

If Ruin couldn't hear Zane and wasn't trying to pretend to be able to hear him, the line "Then use that strength to kill him!" doesn't make any sense to me.  I think it would've been more along the lines, "Use your strength to kill him!"

If Ruin could hear Zane that's super weird and deserves explanation.

If Ruin couldn't hear Zane and was just pretending, either because he's clever or was actually playing both sides of the conversation...I guess I'll buy it simply because we would have to, but I find this explanation unsatisfying for the time being.  Thanks for weighing in though; I've been meaning to order myself a hardcover copy of Mistborn.  If I ever get around to it and can get an answer I'll update this thread.

[The One Who Connects]

This could be a combination of his spike and his madness, putting him into a state that couldn't be reached by madness or spikes alone, where Ruin can read his mind.

[+Extesian]

There have been a few past debates on this. I can't believe Ruin can hear Zane, no matter what combination of magics is involved. It's a limitation in the Intent.

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Ruin is invasive. The power is more "Yell" than "Listen." The philosopher would probably have some interesting things to say about the masculine symbolism of Hemalurgy and its spikes.

Ruin can insert thoughts. That power, however, can't HEAR the reactions. It's about invasion.

Preservation, however, is the opposite. Preservation listens, Preservation protects. (Perhaps to a fault—if there were no Ruin, there would be no change to the world, and life could not exist.) Because of this, Preservation can hear what is inside people's minds. It cannot, however, INSERT thoughts. (This is important to the plot of Hero of Ages.)

This is from the annotations, it's not 100% clear, Brandon could be talking just about the appearance to the reader, but it's something.

Quote

Making him insane like this was a gamble on my part. I worry that, at first, it seems cliche. There’s a whole lot more going on with Zane than you might assume, but your introduction to him is that of a schizophrenic villain who likes to cut himself. This might just seem like a grab-bag of psychosis, but I ask you to stick with me on this one. Zane has been many of my alpha-readers favorite character.

 

[Kingsdaughter613]

Kell could speak to some people by using his personal connection to them. The bigger question is if RUIN is capable of doing so. But Zane does seem to have an unusually strong connection to Ruin. So, maybe?

[+hwiles]

I'm now absolutely convinced that this ought to be my question to Brandon.  I just need to work out how best to concisely and cogently word it...The implications aren't that far reaching one way or the other as I see it, but this is now bugging the heck out of me.

[Nathrangking]

Ruin seemed to know a great deal about the people who are bearing hemalurgic spikes. I believe that he was able to detect their thoughts to a certain extent. Part of it might also have been intuited by ruin. 

[Calderis]

20 minutes ago, Nethrangking said:

Ruin seemed to know a great deal about the people who are bearing hemalurgic spikes. I believe that he was able to detect their thoughts to a certain extent. Part of it might also have been intuited by ruin. 

The powers of speaking to minds and hearing thoughts are firmly split between Ruin and Preservation. 

This is true even in Era two. It's why Harmony could hear Wax, but wax could not hear or see Harmony unless he was wearing his (hemalurgic) earring. 

[ccstat]

To add another example, look at the scene where Zane dies (coppermind says it is in ch 47 but I don't have my book to find the exact quote). Zane thinks something like "She's the only person God never told me to kill." To which Ruin responds, "Of course you're not supposed to kill her." Unless I forgot something and he speaks out loud, it really makes it seem like Ruin understands his thoughts. 

[+hwiles]

I found this somewhere but I can't recall where offhand, probably the annotations...Zane was psychotic before receiving his spike, which implies that Ruin was able to speak to and influence him, possibly from a very young age; he actually spiked himself deliberately, although the person he killed for his spike and the exact time/circumstances of the spiking have not been revealed or canonized.

My recent revelation: Sanderson was something of a Robert Jordan and WoT fan.  Jordan had an interesting approach to narrating scenes by characters who were actively experiencing psychotic episodes, in that, he usually just wrote the scenes as if what the characters weren't insane or overtly acting strangely at all.  On several occasions, a scene would play out once from the POV of a mentally unstable character and would seem pretty ordinary and rational (minus some voices in that characters head that they usually responded to in a relatively calm manner), and then later the scene would be played out from the POV of an onlooker, who would note that the original narrator had been actively talking to the voices in their heads, screaming, laughing, crying, or staring off into space for several minutes at a time.

I now believe that Kurkistan's explanation that Zane literally said the words out loud (even though he thinks he didn't, which is why they're italicized) is probably the best theory to explain this.  People respond to Zane during his POV's in a way that clearly expresses that they regard him as absolutely bonkers, which, judging just from what Zane thinks he says and does during those scenes, is actually a little strange; he acts crazy and sounds threatening, but I don't think he does nearly enough to have earned the crystal clear reputation as a madman that he seems to possess.  I'd guess that most, if not all, of his conversations with Ruin happen out loud.  It's a style Sanderson was very familiar with, not widely utilized by many authors, and allows a very irrational (and difficult to write) character to be followed in a rational and interesting manner.  I just wish we could've had a couple lines of Straff's POV of the scene showing Zane literally mumbling to himself so this could have been confirmed in-book.