Necessary Eagle

"Me!" -Drifter

I just came across this on Arcanum, and I'm really intrigued. I can't wait to see the general in action again.

*Immediately steals this to tell her Sanderfan friends*

Well, I guess we know now.

Davriel reminded me of Lightsong's persona. And Highwater made me think of Blushweaver- not just the sea appeal thing, but also in the tone of her banter.

I am loving the idea of Rlain as a Bondsmith. If this happens I will be so happy.

I was just wondering why the questioner would be making such an assumption in the first place. Oh, so you're saying the person was trying to trick Brandon into a spoiler? Weird way to go about it, and there's no point unless you already have strong reason to believe he might die then in the first place, but I can't think of any other explanation.

I haven't been paying as much attention to Cosmere stuff lately... but Kaladin is supposed to DIE in book five? When did Brandon say this? Since when does Brandon "RAFO" Sanderson spoil things like that anyway? Is this some sort of fandom in-joke I'm missing?

I never noticed the first time around that Kelsier is blond. Or the second time. In fact, I think I didn't realize it until I looked closely at the illustrations in AU. In any case, in my head he's got dark hair. Renarin has entirely black hair, that's just common sense. At best I can picture tiny wisps of blond. For the longest time, my mental image of Nale was... well, like Szeth, really. White skin and a hood. When I'd come across one of the many, many passages that described him as really dark with a crescent-shaped birthmark, his picture would shift back to canon- and then revert as soon as my mind focused on the next bit. I never even noticed the conflict- if you asked me what he looked like, I would have said "Dark skin and birthmark, it's right in the text"- until I had a dream about him, and then was remembering the dream later.

(minor spoilers for both series, I guess) For those of you who haven't read AEitA, it's a fantasy YA series. One of the main characters is named Elias Veturius, and of course, me being a Sanderfanatic, I kept misreading it as "Elend Venture". Then I started to think about it... and I'm beginning to suspect Elias is actually a shout-out to Elend. He's the only son (that he knows of, he has a secret half-brother) of one of the most powerful noble families in the Evil Empire. He meets his love interest, a leader in the slave-class rebellion, when she is undercover in the place where he lives. And he has a parent who is a complete monster, cruel even by Evil Empire standards, who tries to kill him when he rebels. What do you think? Shout-out or coincidence?

When you do a double take upon seeing a librarian wearing a shirt that says "Alcatraz".

Might as well have someone update this thread, there's a heckuva lotta easter eggs in OB...

WoB to the rescue: it's possible.

For some reason I only saw Llaramar's post when I was replying- anyway, that's very interesting, especially about Szeth.

Honestly, I'd been pronouncing Ialai as I-al-ay without thinking about it, then I actually took a moment to think, and I figured that if it was supposed to be symmetrical, then the "ai" was probably supposed to be the same as the initial "I". So, i-al-i. Or ee-al-ee. Which is not symmetrical in pronunciation, because if you read it backwards it would be i-la-i. But the rules only get broken so far. There may be different legitimate ways to read "Ialai", but no one is going to be saying it as "aw loo ee" or "ooh la la" or "kaladin". English is chaotic, not anarchic. But he's writing in English. It should be something within the standard pronunciations of English, not "I'm going to jam two vowels next to each other that are always pronounced as a unit, but let's pretend that this one time it isn't." That's like saying that j-a-s-n-a-h is meant to be said with a Y even though there's no reason in the text at all that we should think this one consonant is supposed to said like a completely different consonant, it's not like Alethi looks Scandinavian or something, THAT'S NOT HOW SEMITIC LANGUAGES WORK, BRANDON Anyway, like I said, I'm curious how it's written in other real-world languages. And if you speak a language that pronounces every syllable separately, then it works as a four-syllable symmetric word. But in English, "ai" would usually be said as one sound, whereas "ia" is genrally two sounds. So Ialai's name would be three syllables.