Espella

Still not entirely clear on the why he left it there, but the multiple layers of traps and secrets only to have it actually be the spearhead outside sure sounds like the kind of defense plan Kelsier would come up with. There's always another secret, after all. I'd be willing to believe Harmony talked him into putting it somewhere where nobody could misuse it back when they were on better terms and now that they've already been taken out he set up a plan to get his people in the South to get their hands on it, so that he can to work on using them while still not breaking whatever agreement he and Harmony had set up when he hid it in the first place. It would explain why he was hanging out in the South at the beginning of Lost Metal, he went down there to hatch the plan with Daal and whoever else he was working with, since he knew Autonomy was going to be an issue at some point soon (thus giving an opportunity for a crisis that would result in the Bands getting pulled out) but underestimated how quickly the Set was going to act. On the how of the stealing/draining my first guess when I read initially that they had an allomantic grenade with aluminum set up for Daal to use that would make it impossible to use investiture in range and thus would make it seem like the Bands were drained because nobody could use them in range, though thinking back I'm not actually sure if anything has confirmed exactly how the grenades work with aluminum. Chromium could probably do the trick as well but my thinking was it would be better to prevent people from drawing on the bands than to leech them once they had, both to make it less obvious and to preserve whatever is still stored in them.

Bands of Mourning has the most focus on Steris, ergo it is the best cosmere book. But in all seriousness it is my favorite of the Wax and Wayne books because I feel like it really is the climax of most of the character development, and Lost Metal has the cast mostly static in their character development outside of Wayne in my opinion. I do still like Lost Metal quite a bit but without all of the character development it feels less like a satisfying end and more like setup for Era 3 and Ghostbloods stuff. The scene with the bands in Lost Metal in particular feels like things are being moved out of the book because they need to be saved for the next trilogy. Maybe it will feel better once we can read the whole series straight though.

According to WoB Thaidakar doesn't actually have an avatar, he's stuck in Scadrial and just pretending to have an avatar using some method that hasn't been made canon yet (source: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/460/#e14641). Also of note is reading through the Kelsier WoBs on Arcanum he never explicitly says "Thaidakar is Kelsier" so I suppose there's room for some exact words shenanigans where the two are different, though all of the WoBs involving the two of them seem to pretty heavily imply that Thaidakar and Kelsier are the same (and there might be an explicit confirmation I missed somewhere), and along with the fact that Thaidakar calls himself the Lord of Scars and Hoid mentions he's hit him in the past, which isn't something he can do to most people, I would say we're pretty clearly supposed to make the connection that Thaidakar is Kelsier.

I've started to assume that most of the time when a metal is described as silvery but not given a name it's actually aluminum, so that's what I was thinking of when I read through this part, and it would make sense that aluminum is really expensive. Though it being a "Super-big RAFO" makes it seem like it might be more than that.

Seems to me that in a world that definitely has some sort of afterlife, there would be concerns over the fact that hemalurgy literally rips a piece of someone's soul out. I don't think we've really had any information on how much of the soul of a spiked person is left, aside from (SH spoilers) but donating organs (which are presumably no longer of any use once your soul is separated from the body and goes to the Beyond) is a lot different than ripping off a piece of your soul (which seems like it would impact you even in the Beyond). Even if it turns out it doesn't have an impact on the afterlife, I doubt the Scadrians would be able to figure that out without Harmony telling them (if he is even able to figure it out), and since he is not fond of hemalurgy I doubt he would do that.

Obviously we need to alloy ettmetal to all the current allomantic metals and go around spiking everyone to see what happens.

Why stop at Threnody when you can just hop over to Braize and toss Nightblood at Odium?

I've always thought it would be kind of cool to have some giant coppermind with no identity to save space in the library (though you'd have to find a way to make sure everyone put the archived memories back completely)

10 shows up in Nalthis with the number of Heightenings. Or at least the number of Heightenings we know of. Dang it, now I want Susebron to go around getting more Breath to see if he can hit something higher than that.

I was reading the original trilogy earlier and looked for some ideas when they talked about religions, the original Trelagism involved sort of a conflict between night and day (the followers didn't like the day and thought it was Trell's evil brother or something), which might be derived from the Darkside and Dayside on Taldain (sorry guys I haven't actually read White Sand yet). Of course that would mean that Bavadin had been hanging around on Scadrial way before the Final Empire if he was in a position to influence religions, or a whole bunch of Darkside worldhoppers decided to take residence on Scadrial and their teachings sort of evolved into it, neither of which seems very likely to me. Oh well. Nothing else really stood out to me, unless want to go crazy conspiracy mode and say it was actually founded by Darkside worldhoppers to get a whole bunch of people to chart the stars for them so they could figure out where Scadrial was relative to Taldain and the rest of the Cosmere in the physical realm.

Obviously Kaladin just needs ask Syl how she feels about double-bladed lightsabers Shardsabers. (Yes I know that's not really dual wielding, but I'm not sure if a Spren can actually pull off two seperate swords) Actually, thinking about Star Wars now makes me want to see a Shardwhip.

Yeah, I was thinking more of it being what they would have before the non-magic technology hits the point where they can pull off the internet. Alternatively, I suppose it could be used on a smaller scale as a sort of "private server" by a group that doesn't want to have their stuff on the actual internet.

I've always wondered if when we get to more modern Scadrial there will be some kind of very primitive internet involving a very large coppermind, where people could store documents and other people would be able to pull them up and read them, then put them back, sort of like putting a web page on the internet (though obviously it would require everyone to actually physically go to wherever the coppermind was being kept and it would be really easy for the "websites" to get corrupted or lost if people don't transfer the whole thing back or keep it for themselves).

This seems to fit with an idea that I've been thinking about for a little while, the idea that all the Cosmere magic relies on you being Connected to a Shard or something else in the Cognitive Realm (I think the Shardholders hang around in the cognitive realm mostly? That's the impression SH gave me at least.). Spren are the obvious Connection on Roshar, we know now that at least some of the Selish magic requires you to be Connected to certain places (maybe the ones that have the strongest reflections in the cognitive realm or have large chunks of the Dor or something?), and we know that Connection has at least some effects in Scadrial because of (Secret History spoilers) Still trying to figure out exactly how some of it would work but this was some nice info, good find.

For the record I suggested Hoid=Felt as a joke thinking it was too crazy to be real, but apparently that was the exact right amount of crazy for this forum? Anyway, Hoid was hanging out with the Terris refugees during Well of Ascension (originally because he didn't know where the Well was, that's been retconned but I don't remember to what), and in Fadrex City during Hero of Ages. Felt was definitely hanging around in Luthadel during Well of Ascension though, so he can't be Hoid. .