Morsk

Oh gross. Someone crying "1st Amendment" when they shouldn't is not an excuse for that XKCD, which is completely wrong from the first panel. Freedom of speech is a moral and social principle, not just a legal right. It's fine to say there are limits to speech in private communities, but not that the 1st Amendment = Free Speech, nor that we should never fear the social consequences of limiting speech. As well say religious tolerance, or racial and gender equality, are only laws and not moral principles. It's sad the amount of traffic that XKCD gets, simply because it's convenient.

I can't get excited about a ship unless it's somehow subversive in fandom, so I'm not sure how I feel about this one yet. Does it annoy anyone?

Some Mistborn characters have it, but it would be spoilery if I made a list. I don't think it necessarily has to be male characters either, just that once a world has flying magic, there are always going to be PoV characters using it. Maybe Szeth is enough! If he doesn't die. But even he's set as a PoV character more for the first half, than the second half. I'm not expecting to see more of Szeth and Kaladin in Stromlight 6-10 than we see Jasnah now, if they live at all.

I used to expect Kaladin to die, until I realized how many of Brandon's male protagonists can fly. If he kills Kaladin, he's going to have to spend many pages replacing him with another man who can fly. It sounds like too much bother. Maybe Taln will get the other Honorblade instead of his original, and use it to fly. Any hint of that though, and we know Kaladin is toast.

I don't follow the connection between Kant's inability to imagine a perceptual category other than space and time, and the inability to have third categories between mass and energy. Is it just an analogy? Mass and matter are not the same thing. Matter is anything that takes up space and has inertia. It isn't a fundamental quantity, only a useful description of some things. Maybe in the past some people only matter had mass, and energy never had mass, but no one thinks that anymore. I'd say solving this problem is as simple as saying investiture only has mass in the Physical realm, and not the others. Maybe Brandon has another solution, but that should work.

Gloryspren don't make sense to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've been retconned. So Syl is saying they're actually pridespren, and people call them gloryspren because they usually appear when someone is feeling proud of themselves. That makes them just another emotion spren. But Oathbringer plays them up so much that I was starting to think they were splinters of Honor from his death.

It could be the God Beyond. If the vision were obviously real, I'd think it couldn't be, because the God Beyond is never canon. The suspicious part for me is that Nohadon says he thinks life is fair, even if people can't always see why. I find this amazingly stupid for anyone to say, unless they're an omnibenevolent God who fixes everything eventually. I changed my mind. I think it's more likely the Spiritual Realm's "copy" of Nohadon. I can forgive silly ideas about life being fair, since this version of Nohadon is connected to everything, and it's not a real person. The Aimian in the Interlude says some people have magic to draw knowledge from the dead. Dalinar must be one of those people. I don't like the idea of the God Beyond showing up for multiple pages, anyway. I expect it to maybe have manipulated one thing per book, or maybe not have. Appearing is a bit much.

Thanks for pointing this out. I only know LDS from mormon.org and Wikipedia, but the idea that Jesus is a demiurge who created the Earth is not something I'd ever heard; it sounds completely made up. Many fantasy authors do copypaste their religion's theology into their fiction. Tolkein is famous not only for doing it, but for believing it was a sin not to. And sometimes they lie; Robert Jordan claimed not to be doing it, but fandom eventually found out he was a Freemason and held organized religion in disdain, which is what we see in his books. So I understand the impulse to go assuming Brandon is doing it too, but I believe Brandon is actually different and isn't doing it. edit: I regret writing this. I dislike theories that claim Brandon's cosmology is from LDS, as I think it's stereotyping, and we shouldn't stereotype people by their religion, or anything else. But I shouldn't talk about religion because nothing good comes of talking about it.

https://coppermind.net/wiki/Spheres#Value Sapphire and Amethyst are tied for second-most valuable, after Emerald. Emerald makes food, and Amethyst makes metal. Very useful. But Sapphire makes air, and only if air Soulcasters even exist, which I'm not sure they do. Lacking any other explanation, I'd guess the air Soulcasters exist and are used widely for sanitation. Strange that we've seen smoke multiple times though, and never air.

I like the theory in a fun way, but I see Quote #2 as evidence against, because if Kelsier were running the Ghostbloods, Brandon would have treated it as a secret to keep, not a fun question to throw away a fun answer to. The Ghostbloods treating everything as a hunt, and respecting members' rights to kill each other within limits, sound more like they're associated with remnants of Ambition.

Brandon hasn't said this, but Feruchemy at least approaches being end-negative if you tap extra for a larger effect, and I see this as Ruin's influence over the system. Preservation would enable gently storing power to use later, while Ruin would like you to store a lot of power only to use it very quickly. It also relates to Ruin's theme of time-related powers. Large uses wasting some of the power is canon, but the rest I'm just imagining.

He also has Monody and Elegy, which are also planets in the Threnody system. They're all songs of mourning. Monody is the best one. Unbelievably good. Some music makes me feel like I can fly, or stop the world and be everywhere at once. Monody makes me feel like I'm unfurling wings of golden light.

Spoiler because I think the names of which religions exist in Era 2 is is a spoiler for Era 1

I was surprised Vorin didn't make a fuss out of it, since they're so obsessively conformist about other things. Not only the gender roles, but the prudishness, social stratification, and war culture... all of it makes me think they'd hate anything "different" because different. Maybe Brandon already had the Christian analog religion in Mistborn Era 2 be against gay marriage, and he didn't want to do the same thing twice. Or maybe it's deliberately paradoxical and defying our expectations?

I really like this, but I'm going to disagree with the "not from Ati" part since I'm thinking it's literally the atium from the Battle of Hathsin. The investiture is unaccounted for. I think the default theory was that it would eventually return to Harmony, unbalancing him, and forcing him to create atium again, or creating plot hooks about the imbalance. But none of that seems to be happening. The investiture is just gone. Maybe you're right that some little bit of "unaffiliated" Ruin was called into the new mind of Nightblood, but I'd say it immediately found a Connection to a ton of other investiture wanting to be alive, and taking the outlet it was given. The Manywar is 300 years before Warbreaker. Hero of Ages is also before Warbreaker, but we don't know exactly how much. It could fit.