Oudeis

As noted above, Awakening drains pigmentation, not the light itself. If it absorbed light, no one would ever know, because at the speed of light the object would go back to looking fully normal.

I'll try to find the link, but I asked him once and he told me that Zane got the spike after he snapped as a Mistborn. Don't know if this is worthy of note, but he also said during an AMA that Zane and Gemmel (Kelsier's trainer) had met, but specified that it might not have been an important meeting.

I'm not certain I agree. There's clearly something with the plate. You use a mental command to release the bits of it, and when you die it starts to fall apart off your body. Now, maybe that's some connection that isn't a "bond". Maybe it's a bond that doesn't change eye color. But there seems to be something there.

@Rasarr: Not sure I agree with a lot of what you say (and might suggest your White Sand spoiler, minor though it might be, be placed behind a cut), I nevertheless upvote you for Pax Scadrialia.

What I find especially fascinating is that in a recent signing line he specifically said that he didn't imagine that a pewterarm could lift a car. Interesting that this is the comparison you make.

Store the contents of a Sanderson novel and read it again for the first time.

On Earth a "stone" is 14 pounds... do we assume a "stoneweight" is the same?

How does the Third Heightening compare to allomantic tin? What, if any, overlap is there in the powers? Would a tineye have been able to notice the subtly different colors of the trap door in Mercystar's palace? Is there any real benefit to being a tineye at the Third Heightening? Obviously it's an improvement over just the Third Heightening, since you could also see things farther away, but does tin already give you the ability to distinguish shades the way BioChroma does? One possible advantage; while a tineye might be able to tell that the two reds in front of him aren't identical, he might not automatically know which is the "pure" hue the way an Awakener could. Thoughts?

In order to burn a spike, it has to be one that killed you and took your own power. You cannot burn someone else's. Bands of Mourning spoilers.

Also, it would only be good armor against Shardblades. It is described as soft and pliable. It didn't sound like it would stop a swordblow.

1. It's unlikely the guards are aluminum. Zahel expressly says, "No one knows what this metal is," yet people clearly know what aluminum is. 2. I have a further question no one seems to be posing. If it can only be made via soulcasting, how did people on Roshar know to Soulcast it? Jasnah couldn't Soulcast jam because she'd heard it described but never experienced it. How was someone on Roshar able to Soulcast something into aluminum without knowing aluminum was possible? I expect simple world-hopping is the answer, but who knows.

Firefly has a good board game. The slogan says it all. Get a crew. Get a job. Keep flying. It's the only game I've ever seen people totally willing to play as "day in the life". I once played it with some friends and we were ninety minutes in, enjoying every minute of it, before someone looked up and said, "Oh, right, victory conditions, we should be trying to win." (Note: Games don't have to take that long, we literally just lost ourselves in the enjoyment of completing jobs and building up our crews and didn't notice how long we'd spent.) It's not perfect. There's almost no interaction between players. But it goes quickly, you spend the other players' turns figuring out what you plan to do, then rapidly execute it on your turn. I concur that this game will not be good, but I've explained my reasoning already, not a lot of point in going in to it again. In short, their marketing is flagrantly wolverine marketing. Between that and the incredibly steep price, this strikes me as a game they know no one but superfans will buy just because it has Vin on the cover, so they're just trying to make as much off it as possible before the horrible reviews roll in.

Bard: Silver is not allomantically inert, you just cannot burn it. You can Push and Pull on it fine, and no one makes knives out of it. It would be functionally worse than many other metals, and have no allomantic benefits.

Quick note: It is bronze, not brass, that Seeks.

Regarding the personal musings (not gonna spoil this cuz I'm just gonna be super vague). Every thought I've had has already been stated. I think I concur with the general sense that we honestly don't know yet enough in-universe to say what would actually happen. However, I hope someone asks this question someday. I expect an answer would end up telling us a great deal about healing in the cosmere.

Um, you should be aware, if you find the original source of that Paladin Brewer quote, it's immediately rescinded. He wrote it down from memory, and Peter showed up almost immediately to confirm that it's not true. EDIT: Source.

Y'know what, I totally know where I got confused. The knife didn't seem able to pass through the tree on the Ire journey before they got to Scadrial, but that wasn't a misty cognitive aspect of a tree from the Physical Realm, that was a tree growing natively in the Cognitive Realm way out in "space". Considering that Hoid needed a trick to treat the ground like ground at the Perpendicularity, you're right. Actual mist walls... Kelsier would have had more trouble getting the knife to cut a wall, rather than pass through it. Mea culpa!

But he's trying to pull a grown man who is prolly on the ground. His hypothetical references the fraction of a second that a person might be off the ground while jumping, but this theoretical person both has momentum away from the Blade, and will be touching the ground any moment, so he'll be just as resistant as a horse. If you're really gonna pull him, you have to pull EVERYTHING. If a battle is going on, that especially means arrows and knives in the air.

What Jon said, also, this isn't a safe assumption to make. Mistborn So even if there has to be some honor to Shallan's powers, it could be incredibly tangential. According to Syl, an honorspren, honor on Roshar is about oaths, about binding things. Shallan's bond to Pattern, then, might be all that is required. They are bound, bindings are honorable, here is power. There's no precedent I know of to suggest that Shallan herself must act with honor.

Interesting you use "technically a race"; the definition of what makes people a race or not is actually somewhat fluid. In the Final Empire, the Nobles probably would be a distinct race, because "race" is simply a social construct. By Era 2, I don't think most people consider the Nobility to be physically different from commoners, though the case could be made because such a big deal is made of Aradel's lack of noble blood. A simple difference doesn't seem to be enough; in America, deaf people are not considered a separate race. It has to be a difference that is believed by society to make you an entirely distinct group. Allomancy might travel by blood, but my impression from the books is that people in the Elendel Basin don't really consider allomantic bloodlines to be a wholly separate race. I admit, however, that I have never read the books with an eye specifically towards that, so at least in part this is simply my impression. It's entirely possible there are passages from the book supporting the idea which have escaped me at the moment. Kell didn't let that stop him. Just kidding!

Interesting conjecture, that it might be relevant to broader AonDor because of the meaning. Not every Aon, used as a modifier in an Aonic equation, relates directly to its own meaning, but that could be interesting flavor if it did.

My programming friends say there's a similarity to programming, in a general sense... but it's as if you had to re-write the BIOS code every time you wanted to turn on your computer.

Except Dox. Yeah. The Crew would prolly be against the Nobility, but not to Kelsier and Dox levels. Elend was a full Noble, as was Breeze, as has been pointed out almost everyone has Noble blood, Kel himself was even raised Noble. And beyond their skills in bureaucracy, remember what the term Nobility means. It implies a literal divine right of rule. It's not just the Nobles who want to be in charge; skaa like Philen are very rare. Most of them that Sazed visited wanted someone to be in charge, even wanted the Lord Ruler back. Spook might have been able to force the skaa to accept the complete dissolution of the nobility... but he'd do so just as he was about to marry a full-blooded Noble, raised Noble, and make himself emperor of the known world. Going from "skaa have no rights" to "the Nobles are in charge of half the senate, but the philosophy is to protect the rights of those working for them" is already an almost impossible change. Considering how slowly cultures change on earth, even with the Catacendre, I'm not wholly surprised that this was the extent of the immediate change. And considering how static the culture has grown since, it's also not shocking that it's taken them another 300 years to acquire the mindset of, hey, it's a good thing our Governor isn't noble. Well, less time, technically. If the Senate existed during Spook's reign, I have to imagine it was a relatively perfunctory affair. Who is going to argue with the Chosen of Harmony, Lord Mistborn, Survivor of Flames? He's not just the only Mistborn still around and curiously long-lived, he's a major figure in two or three of the most prominent religions, and one of the few remaining members of the team that literally saved the world. He once courted the Ascendant Warrior. So really, the Senate as we know it can be, at most, 200 years old. In conclusion, to answer the original question: 1. The Nobility wasn't actually as bad as the first book implied. 2. The Nobility had skills necessary to the survival of mankind. 3. Cultures as a whole are resistant to change. Gradual changes, from a sociological perspective, are more likely to "stick".

It's also worth noting, when Kelsier speaks to Spook, he's expressly... trying to think of how to phrase it. He's baring his soul, letting the power of Preservation slip a little bit away from himself. It's more like a thing Kelsier-the-Cognitive-Shadow could have done, and he's deliberately trying to reduce the interference from Preservation's power.

The issue is that there's an actual, real definition for psychopath, which includes diminished empathy. He does truly care about a very small number of people, but if he opposes someone, that person isn't a real person to him. He feels nothing when he kills them, is not at all concerned about their life or the people they leave behind. Most people can't just turn off empathy like that, whereas Kelsier struggles to care about just a few people. Like most psychological conditions, it exists as a spectrum, not a switch. A psychopath is often portrayed in the media as an extreme, but in reality most of them will be like Kelsier. Additionally, in real life, most psychopaths learn to blend in. Mimic behaviors of the average person, even if the impetus for that behavior is missing. Again, like how Kelsier smiles, not because he's happy, but as a form of protest against the Lord Ruler, or a way to manipulate those around him. I don't know if you've seen a show called Dexter, but the idea is that he's a "nice" psychopath. He's not actually evil, but he doesn't understand real life. Nevertheless, he finds life to be pleasant if he picks a few people to "care" for and if he imitates the behavior of those around him, even when he doesn't get it.