Jump to content

Did Sazed cause the downfall of allomantic prowess?


GrumpyGuru

Recommended Posts

Ok, here' s my question. Just started checking the forum for reasons why allomancy is so much weaker in Alloy of law. I recall that allomancy had been on the decline for the last thousand years and that the actual strength of the allomantic abilities were weaker than the first Mistborns and mistings. After Sazed ascended to godhood he lowered the requred level of trauma for snapping to occur. Ive read that The reason snapping is necessary is because it wounds the soul and that makes it easier for allomantic powers to manifest. My question is. Is it possible that by sazed lowering the threshold for pain, he inadvertently lessened the chance to become a misting and all but eliminated the chance for someone to become a mistborn. Spook was made into a full mistborn at the end of Hero of ages and became known as the lord Mistborn. It was also stated that he went on to have many children. Its hard to believe that in merely a hundread years, there are no known mistborn (or feruchemists for that matter, despite the fact that feruchemy didn't diminish nearly as much as allomancy) considering that mistborn were still being born 1000 years after they appeared. 

I believe that when sazed altered the snapping process, he lessened the chance of people becoming mistborn at all. With the large influx of EXACTLY 16 percent of the population becoming mistings because of the mist, (Pure preservation just like the beads of Lerasium) shouldn't allomancy have had an influx of mistborn and misting children just based on the 16 percent alone??

Anyway, its 10.15 and i need to go to bed. 
Please voice your thoughts as I'm open to anyone else's views

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This was a natural process. The people of North Scadrial are essentially back to baseline, though Allomancy is still more prevalent than prior to Rashek’s Asension.  Baseline seems to be much, much, much weaker than Lerasium Allomancy with next to no natural Mistborn. So this had nothing to with Sazed.

Edited by Kingsdaughter613
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Welcome to the Shard!

Mistborn didn't exist before Rashek handed out the lerasium beads (Brandon has mentioned that Allomancy first came with the Mists snapping people during Alendi's time) and the bloodlines with the necessary 'Mistborn sDNA' were largely if not entirely wiped out prior to the Catacendre, with the most powerful two (Vin and Elend) leaving no descendants at all. And Spook was made to be a less powerful Mistborn so the sDNA he could have passed onto his children was weaker and consequently less likely to express itself. So, less of the necessary sDNA for Mistborn to exist at all and what there was, wasn't as strong as it had been during the Final Empire.

So to the extent that Sazed deliberately made Spook a weaker Mistborn you can say that the lack of them in Era 2 is sort of Sazed's fault, but it's got nothing to do with the changes to the snapping process and most of it just boils down to there being very little 'Mistborn sDNA' left in the population that could express itself.

Edited by Weltall
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I believe it was 1/16 people became mistings, not 16 percent(EDIT: Apparently this is wrong, my bad). Brandon explained that those people wouldn't have been able to manifest powers normally, due to not having enough Connection to Preservation and/or possibly innate Investiture. It's actually a little over my head, but the main take away was that the people snapped by the mists before the catacendre we're not normal mistings, they were, for the most part, super weak mistings that wouldnt normally have ever manifested any powers and were therefore still unlikely to be able to pass their powers on genetically.

It's indicated that many, if not most, modern mistings are direct descendants of Spook, as all other mistborn appear to have been killed off, along with the vast majority of natural mistings. Pretty sure Ruin killed all of the feruchemists in Northern Scadrial as well...

One could argue that Sazed is actually responsible for strengthening the available mistings rather than causing them to be weaker.

Edited by hwiles
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree that it is definitely portrayed in the books as a natural dilution. But the Lord Ruler had ruled for hundreds of years right? (It's been a year or two since I last read HoA so I'm a little rusty) My first thought was that if TLR had ruled for hundreds of years (again, not sure exactly how long), shouldn't the effect have been the same? Meaning that in Era 1 there wouldn't be many Mistborn, BUT, I think the Era 2 dilution is natural, simply because there are way less Mistborn at the end of Era 1 then there were when TLR handed out Lerasium beads.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The weakening of Feruchemy is a natural result of mixing with Allomantic DNA. The odds of a natural Mistborn (not from residual Lerasium influence) is tiny. I suspect the length of time it takes for Letasium’s residual influence to wear off is the same length of time it take for the Well to refill: 1024 years, if I’m remembering right.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

It seems likely that Harmony influenced several thing, such as weakening Furchemy to only one power and blocking more Mistborn on purpose, in addition to the weaker snapping. However the weakening of Allomancers is more likely caused by the dilution through generations than from Harmony's influence.

Sazed didn't nothing to make those, He simply didn't avoid those events.

The Feruchemy's weakening is the result of the mixing with Allomantic genes and the quite nothing odd to have a Mistborn is the result of both the natural decreasing in Allomantic Strenght and again the mixing with Feruchemical genes (that interfere with Allomantic ones).

Probably without Sazed messing with Snapping, the amount of Allomancers during Era 2 will be probably extremely rare. 

Edited by Yata
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Yata said:

Sazed didn't nothing to make those, He simply didn't avoid those events.

The Feruchemy's weakening is the result of the mixing with Allomantic genes and the quite nothing odd to have a Mistborn is the result of both the natural decreasing in Allomantic Strenght and again the mixing with Feruchemical genes (that interfere with Allomantic ones).

Probably without Sazed messing with Snapping, the amount of Allomancers during Era 2 will be probably extremely rare. 

I would have to reread to be sure, but I thought it was mentioned at some point that after Harmony's ascension, aside from Spook, there was no more Mistborn or Full Feruchemist. I could understand if they were extremely rare do to natural weakening, but for no Mistborn at all, to me, signifies divine intervention. On top of that, there was never a mention of single metal Feruchemist before the Ascension. This too seems more likely to be due to Harmony as a balance to no Mistborn. It seems unlikely to me that the Terris bloodline could be so thoroughly changed to prevent ANY full feruchemist from being born. If they were rare, with mostly single metal users, that would be one thing, but it seems there are no more, giving me the impression that the rules were changed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can't give you the exact quote, but early in The Bands of Mourning when they're learning about identity, they comment that you would need 2 feruchemical abilities to create a metalmind that was stripped of identity and come to the conclusion that you would need to use hemalurgy or wait for a full feruchemist to be born. The conversation was that it had been a long time but it sounded like there were still some born after the catacendre and that the synod were actively working on getting the right people together to breed a full feruchemist. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

I would have to reread to be sure, but I thought it was mentioned at some point that after Harmony's ascension, aside from Spook, there was no more Mistborn or Full Feruchemist. I could understand if they were extremely rare do to natural weakening, but for no Mistborn at all, to me, signifies divine intervention. On top of that, there was never a mention of single metal Feruchemist before the Ascension. This too seems more likely to be due to Harmony as a balance to no Mistborn. It seems unlikely to me that the Terris bloodline could be so thoroughly changed to prevent ANY full feruchemist from being born. If they were rare, with mostly single metal users, that would be one thing, but it seems there are no more, giving me the impression that the rules were changed.

Every living Feruchist was murdered by Ruin and many of the people with a good Allomantic Heritage died too.

Spook was for example a Mistborn by Harmony's interception but It was a really weak One.

The remaining Ones interbreed with people Who further diluite the magic potential (Skaa) and with people Who actually interfered with the Magic at all (interbreed between Terris and not Terris).

With the exception of some "relative strong" bloodline. People are mostly return to the pre-Lerasium era...we see a lot of Allomancer around only because Harmony made the Snapping more Easy to attain. A great fraction of the current Allomancers would not be Magic users without this change.

Mistborn and Full Feruchemists are still possible, Just extremely unlikely to happen

In a some way, we could argue that Harmony made the Metallic Arts to survive in a some mesure rather than return them into the myths

 

Edited by Yata
Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, Yata said:

Every living Feruchist was murdering by Ruin and many of the people with a good Allomantic Heritage dies too.

Spook was for example a Mistborn by Harmony's interception by It was a really weak One.

The remaining One interbreed woh people Who further diluite the magic potential (Skaa) and with people Who actually interfered with the Magic at all (interbreed between Terris and not Terris).

With the exception of some "relative strong" bloodline. People are mostly return to the pre-Lerasium era...we see a lot of Allomancer around only because Harmony made the Snapping more Easy to attain. A great fraction of the current Allomancers would not be Magic users without this change.

Mistborn and Full Feruchemists are still possible, Just extremely unlikely to happen

In a some way, we could argue that Harmony made the Metallic Arts to survive in a some mesure rather than return them into the myths

 

The weakening of the bloodlines causing no Mistborn at all seems highly unlikely. Not impossible due to simple chance, but for none to be born during a three hundred year period in which at least some of the bloodlines survived seems improbable. And as for the single power Feruchemy, it was mentioned that overseers had control of the Terris breeding with the specific intent of ruining the bloodlines, yet during this time there was never a known single power feruchemist. This points to direct modification of how the powers work by Harmony. The Terris people think a full Feruchemist is possible, but I have not seen anything to indicate that that's guaranteed, and seems more likely to simply be in world beliefs. 

While it does seem like Harmony made single power allomancy and feruchemy more available, I think he has blocked the ability for anyone to be born with a full power set. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's important to remember that the Catacendre was a massive population bottleneck for North Scadrial. The limited gene pool by necessity led to a lot of mixing of ethnicities; there simply weren't enough Terrisfolk left for them to not interbreed with the rest of the population.

As stated above, Allomantic and Feruchemical genes interfere with each other. They get into little sDNA arguments that severely limit the amount of power one particular set of genes can bestow. It was the entering of Allomantic descendants into the Terris gene pool that led to the birth of Ferrings; by the same token, Feruchemical genes floating around will prevent a Mistborn from being born. There might possibly still be the potential for the occasional full Feruchemist popping up now and then, but Mistborn are pretty well done without genetic (be it scientific or Shardic) interference.

On the up side, you get Twinborn, which are just cool. So there's that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

no Mistborn at all, to me, signifies divine intervention.

You have it backwards, actually. The existence of Mistborn was the divine intervention(or semi-Divine, since the Lord Ruler did it with the Lerasium Beads). Mistings are the natural state of Allomancy.

Quote

Questioner

What's lerasium?

Brandon Sanderson

That is the bead of metal that Elend finds at the end of Book 2, that Vin finds and gives to Elend.

Questioner

Oh so there were only two and the Lord Ruler kind of left it there?

Brandon Sanderson

There actually were a bunch of them, and the first Mistborn came from people who ate that. The Lord Ruler took one for himself and he left others there to use if he needed them.


12 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

It seems unlikely to me that the Terris bloodline could be so thoroughly changed to prevent ANY full feruchemist from being born.

Yata is correct about this. It's the intermixing of Allomancy/Feruchemy that messes with the powersets on a Spiritual Level.

Quote

Travyl (paraphrased)

Why do the Twinborn in Alloy of Law have only one feruchemical power, when all previous feruchemists, in spite of breeding programs, could use all the metals? 

WetlanderNW (paraphrased)

Or were Ferrings always part of the system and we just didn't meet them in Mistborn?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

The Ferrings are a new development, as the Feruchemists have been interbreeding with the Allomancers. Basically, the Allomancy genes interfere with the Feruchemistry genes, breaking it down and creating the limitations we see in Alloy of Law.

It screws with the Spiritual DNA, which makes a much bigger impact than messing with normal DNA.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As @Kaymythsaid, it was a massive population bottleneck. You also have to take a couple other things into account though.

Feruchemy the inquisitors slaughtered the Synod, Sazed was the last living feruchemist. The genes still existed in the population, but there were none who actually had them strongly enough to exhibit the powers. 

Same with Mistborn. Vin and Elend are gone and all of the  others had been previously taken out. Spook was made Mistborn... But just barely enough to actually be Mistborn. 

So your left with a severely diminished population of people who have only enough Allomancy to be mistings, and no one with a strong enough feruchemical heritage to have anything show. 

Then these bloodlines intermingle, further weakening themselves, but at the same time the genes that allow mistings created ferrings. 

So if you combine the natural degradation of the powers through dilution, the removal of the strongest of both powers, and the mixing of the two separate pools of genetics for the powers... It's all completely natural. 

In these circumstances, @Yata is correct, if not for the lowered snapping threshold, there would be significantly fewer allomancers, most likely similar to Alendi's time, in which mistings were rare. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A couple quick points that I didn't see mentioned above:

  • Mistborn can definitely still occur naturally, they're just super rare, like 1 in several 10's of millions (like Steven Hawking level intelligence quotients actually); I believe the last few state-of-the-sandersons indicate that the plot of book 1 of era 3 will be a mistborn-serial-killer mystery novel.
  • Harmony didn't change the people snapped by the mists prior to the catacendre; it's indicated in the annotations that he intervened somehow to allow them to manifest powers that they wouldn't normally have been able to achieve rather than manipulating their spiritwebs like Sazed did with Spook.  This means that those people were no more likely to be able to pass on allomantic powers genetically than they would have been prior to being forcibly snapped by the mists, which is to say, they were very unlikely to pass on powers.
  • With some linear algebra and a basic understanding of the statistics of genetics I think you could make a reliably endless supply of mistborns (or mistings or feruchemists) if you had a starting pool of about 100-500 adult magic users that were allowed to inter-breed naturally.  The size of the pool is necessary to prevent inbreeding and excessive birth-defects.  With breeding programs, you could probably get away with an even smaller pool but that would require some severe human rights violations...
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, The One Who Connects said:

You have it backwards, actually. The existence of Mistborn was the divine intervention(or semi-Divine, since the Lord Ruler did it with the Lerasium Beads). Mistings are the natural state of Allomancy.


Yata is correct about this. It's the intermixing of Allomancy/Feruchemy that messes with the powersets on a Spiritual Level.

It screws with the Spiritual DNA, which makes a much bigger impact than messing with normal DNA.

My point was the immediate cut off of the Mistborn seemed unlikely. In one generation we had at least 3(and perhaps unknown others) naturally born mistborn. Then over the next three hundred years, roughly several generations per hundred years, and no mistborn? I agree it would taper off eventually, but I find the immediate cut off of mistborn births over the next generations to be suspect. I agree its possible statistically and it may just be chance, but I find Harmony's intervention more likely. 

I was not aware of the that particular WoB. That does change some thing. But again, no Full feruchemist being born is odd. None of the Terris bloodlines remained pure at all? I would understand some of the population mixing to form the twinborn, but not all of them. Having all the full ones killed does make it less likely for one to be born, but I still find none being born over a 300 year period to be suspect. I still suspect Harmony preventing any full Mistborn or Fuerchemist in order to level the playing field, but admit its possibly just chance none were born. We'll have to see in future books.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

My point was the immediate cut off of the Mistborn seemed unlikely. In one generation we had at least 3(and perhaps unknown others) naturally born mistborn.

You'd be surprised what unique circumstances bring to the table.

  1. Vin was the daughter of High Prelan Tevidian. He's one of the purest lineages in the empire, and the purer the line, the better your odds of a Mistborn.
    This circumstance is largely not replicable due to the deaths of Tevidian and a decent number of Obligators/Nobles during the chaos of TLR's death, Ruin's escape and Harmony's ascension. The purer bloodlines made up a monumentally small portion of the total population to begin with, and it only got worse from there.
  2. Zane was fathered by Straff Venture. Straff fathered somewhere around 2/3rds of House Venture's Allomancers in search of a Mistborn.
    Replicating this circumstance was only really attempted by Spook, who didn't produce nearly as many children as Straff did. On an scientific level, Straff tried the experiment several dozen more times than Spook, and still only succeeded once. It's not that unthinkable.

Kelsier is the only one I can't deny, but that's down to only one naturally born Mistborn that generation, which is entirely reasonable.

8 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

but I find Harmony's intervention more likely.

Normally I'd agree, except that Harmony's interference is the only reason there were any Mistborn at all during that period: Spook. He turned Spook into a reduced power Mistborn(meaning around Kell/Zane's strength, rather than Elend's). As far as I'm aware, he didn't bear any Mistborn of his own, despite how many children he had.

8 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

None of the Terris bloodlines remained pure at all? I would understand some of the population mixing to form the twinborn, but not all of them.

One or two may have tried to remain pure, but as Kaymyth mentioned, the interbred out of necessity. When the choices are sully your pure bloodline or risk extinction, the choice is pretty obvious.

8 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

Having all the full ones killed does make it less likely for one to be born, but I still find none being born over a 300 year period to be suspect.

I'm a little surprised nobody's brought this up yet. Feruchemy wasn't exactly the most prevalent of magic systems during TLR's reign. The Synod tried to keep it alive, and all of them got killed off(barring Sazed, who didn't father any children). The flipside of the equation was the Lord Ruler's Breeding Programs, made with the specific intent of selective breeding the Feruchemy Genes out of the Terris Population.

Meaning that the vast majority of the Terris people Hoid led from the Terris Dominance to the Pits were products of the Breeding Program, and thus, the likelihood of inheriting Feruchemy was greatly reduced before it got reduced further by intermixing with Allomancers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, The One Who Connects said:

...

Meaning that the vast majority of the Terris people Hoid led from the Terris Dominance to the Pits were products of the Breeding Program, and thus, the likelihood of inheriting Feruchemy was greatly reduced before it got reduced further by intermixing with Allomancers.

My headcannon has been that all of the feruchemists were probably the descendants of Tindwyl's offspring.

Her participation in the breeding programs was the glorious crowning achievement of decades of subterfuge by the Synod, and every member of the Synod was killed off, probably along with any of her children who were full-feruchemists.  However, her children who weren't feruchemists, of which there ought to have been several and probably closer to 10, would have had no idea who their mother was, shown no signs of being able to produce feruchemist offspring, and been completely undetectable by Ruin or anyone else.  The fact that feruchemy survived the Catacendre was probably a surprise to everyone in Scadrial, because as far as all of them knew, every feruchemist had been killed off.  Even the Terris didn't know about Tindwyl's children IIRC.

Forget trying to keep the bloodlines pure, the Terris probably gave up on that when they realized all of their feruchemists were dead and no living Terris person had any knowledge of, or reason to believe they had, a feruchemist in their last few family generations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Kelsier may not be a natural Mistborn either; SH implies that Preservation was personally involved in that one.  Even if it was natural, he had to have a hard life, go through hell, watch his wife be killed horribly in front of him, feel responsible for said death, and be beaten half to death himself before snapping. Under normal circumstances he would never have realized he had that potential.

That leaves three: Shan Elarial, Vin and Zane. All three come from unusually pure bloodlines. Zane was the result of many, many attempts as stated above. Of the noble lines that survived we have four certain ones: Ladrian, Cett, Tekial and Yomen. The Cett’s had had almost no allomancers; Alriane was notable for being a rioter. She marries Breeze. Her brother has no allomantic abilities and his descendants are probably not either.

We don’t know much about the Yomen family, but they appear to have some world hoppers and we don’t know what happens when you mix Nalthian and Scadrian DNA. So they get taken out.

The Ladrian line has Breeze and Alriane. They seem to have a fairly high incidence of Allomantic potential, which we would expect. Wax has now married Steris, who is descended from Spook. Spook was not only changed to a Mistborn, but he likely married Beldre who was a Misting. Their line also has numerous allomancers. 

(Theory: our Mistborn serial killer is the descendant of Wax and Steris. They are the ones most likely to conceive a Mistborn at some point.)

Of all our lines Yomen’s is the most likely to be pure, and they don’t seem to be a big family. We also don’t know who Yomen married.

Tekial is an interesting one, as Vin is from that house. I suspect they intermarried though and the line is no longer quite as pure. 

House Hasting may have survived as well, but I don’t know enough about how pure they are to theorize on the likelihood of having a Mistborn descendant.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

(Theory: our Mistborn serial killer is the descendant of Wax and Steris. They are the ones most likely to conceive a Mistborn at some point.)

I would actually dispute this theory - Wax's Feruchemy would actually make it much less likely that one of his descendants could be a Mistborn. The genes really don't like each other.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/2/2018 at 4:13 PM, hwiles said:

I believe it was 1/16 people became mistings, not 16 percent.

In the Hero of Ages it was exactly 16%. Nuorden (the former obligator) researches this at Vin's insistence and discovers that exactly 16% of the army that hadn't been exposed to the mists fell sick.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...