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Hello! This is my first post (other than my introductory one), so i hope it's alright. I did find the answers to quite a few of my questions already, so i only have a few of them left. I still haven't fully searched the wiki and the forums, so some of these questions may already have threads/answers, so feel free to link me the page as well as answer it again, and i apologise in advance. So, without further ado: MISTBORN 1) I looked up about compounding. It said you store a feruchemical attribute, then burn the metalmind allomantically to release a multiplied amount of the same attribute. After some searching, I found you can also apparently restore some of that same attribute after receiving it from the burn, answering my questions about Miles 100Lives. My question therefore, is this: If you have to burn the metal Allomantically to receive the attribute, why is that when Vin removes the Lord Ruler's EX-ternal Metalminds in TFE, he then turns old? Shouldn't he be burning a metalmind to achieve youthfulness, e.g. it should be in his stomach? 2)I found out that the Lord Ruler knew about all the Allomantic metals, and therefore could make Metalminds out of them all. Given this, he should be able to store his Identity in one of them (i forget which metal). I'm not sure, but wouldn't this allow him to utilise other people's metalminds? And therefore, he could have had teams of Feruchemists storing up age for him and then using them to stay young via compounding. ( I also found out that The Lord Ruler would have died eventually anyhow even if Vin didn't kill him) 3) I noticed there are a few koloss blooded humans in the Wax/Wayne books. Does this mean someone did the deed with a koloss? I'm all for each to their own, but dang. Or is it due to the third part of pillaging and plundering? 4) I'm currently halfway through Shadows of Self (but i have read it before and i have read BoM as well), but after the collapse of House Tekiel in AoL, what happens to Tekiel Tower, or doesn't it tell you? Warbreaker Just the one question here: I know it's either all or nothing with giving away breaths, but I'm sure I remember Vasher giving a few breaths to the Priests daughter that he and Vivienna rescue. I thought that this may be due to Vasher's experience, or due to storing most breaths in an object, giving away the few left, then restoring the rest after, but any official reason/better reason than mine? Stormlight Archive 1) When Syl turns into Kaladin's Shardblade/spear/weapons, and she gets hit by another weapon, does she feel pain? I think that is it for now, if i remember an urgent one I'll add it in an edit. From now on I will be summing up some of the notes I have lying around and try to get them post-ready for the theories forum. Also, just spotted Hoid again - coachdriver this time (SoS, for Wax). Thanks!

Please note: I consider Sanderson to be one of my favourite authors. What I'm about to say here I consider a minor irk, in the same way that I've seen complaints about people 'raising an eyebrow' too often. I'll still be waiting eagerly for Brandon's next book. Also, please note that there are spoilers for Mistborn, the Stormlight Archives, the Reckoners, and most Sanderson novels in this post. One thing I've been thinking about recently is this: If there were one thing I disliked about Sanderson's writings, what would it be? In the end, I've settled on one slight theme that I politically disagree with. Some of you might actually disagree with me and my political views, which is perfectly OK. Some of you might have a different take on how I see things, which is also OK. But, if I were to point at one thing about Sanderson's writings, and say "I disagree with that.", I would talk about the theme of redemption. Throughout Sandersons novels, there are many examples of the theme of "Once a villain, always a villain." And, usually, the resolution of the story ends with murdering the 'bad guy'. The only exception to the rule that I can see is when you have an Unreliable Narrator, and we don't see the full picture, or else there are external influences in causing the character to be evil, while deep down, they're pure of heart after all. But, in real life, people can and do change. If you do something wrong, that doesn't automatically make you a horrible person, irredeemably, for the rest of your life. In fact, it is partly through are mistakes that we learn, develop and adapt to become better. This is one of the reasons I personally strongly oppose the death penalty. I genuinely believe that virtually anyone can change, to become better people than whoever they were before when they committed the crime. But, I don't see this in Sanderson's works. You almost never get a genuinely remorseful villain who wishes that they hadn't done something horrible. For example, the Lord Ruler and Sadeas, when confronted about the horrible things they'd done, respond in a similar way. "I did what I had to do", or else actually provoke the people confronting them. Shortly afterwards, both of them get murdered. Now, imagine how we, the readers, would have reacted differently if The Lord Ruler had been remorseful. If The Lord Ruler, quietly, had turned back to look out the window, silently thinking of all those he'd murdered, all those who were now dead because of him. Then, he looks back at Vin, with deep, haunted eyes, and talked of how he'd tried to do the best thing, the only thing, he thought possible. Would you, the reader, still have sympathized with Vin when she tore Alendi's bracers off and stabbed him through with a spear? But, Sanderson didn't do this. And, so, we cheer Vin on as she throws off the yolk of oppression that the Lord Ruler has kept the skaa under for the past 1000 years. The same story goes for most 'villain' deaths in Sanderson's canon. Whether or not it's intentional, this enforces the message that nobody who has done something for a purely selfish reason in the past can ever work past their flaw in their nature, or become a better person in the future. A few of you may ask me about the Reckoners, in which Prof, after briefly becoming and Epic, overcomes his evil side to join David and the Reckoners once again. However, in this case, his evil side never actually belonged to him, but instead was forced upon him by Larcener. If it hadn't been for that, he would never have become evil. So, if I were asked what issue I had with Sanderson's works, that is what I'd say. I, personally, believe that no matter what one's done in the past, one can move beyond that. Alfred Nobel created the Nobel Peace Prize because he was so horrified at the damage and carnage he'd created by inventing dynamite. Oppenheimer, too, helped to create the Atomic Bomb, and only later did he regret what he'd done after seeing the carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, quoting from a Hindu text: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." In this way, people learn from their mistakes and regrets, to become their better selves, something I feel is lacking in Sanderson's works.

Hi guys, this might bore some (most) of you but this is my take on why the plants on Scadrial were turned brown after the Lord Ruler's Ascension. So basically, heres a bit of plant biology: Plants absorb light during the first phase of photosynthesis , converting specific waves lengths into high energy electrons, which are then used to create NADPH, ATP and Oxygen. Some of these molecules are then used in the second phase to make carbon molecules, which we break down into energy. However, only specific light waves are used by plants, namely the red, blue, purple and to a lesser degree yellow waves. The green light waves are not absorbed and are actually reflected - the reason why chloroplasts and plant cells containing chloroplasts are in our eyes, green. Because of the ash in the sky, plants were not able to get enough light, and thus were unable to survive. To combat this, the Lord Ruler altered many plants to have a new pigment (say chlorophyll-C) which allowed them to absorb green light waves and therefore get more energy - stopping them from dying. Thus, green light was no longer reflected by plants and they were brown instead (probably because light absorption isn't 100% effective and so the small resulting meld of colours looked brown to the people of Scadrial - like how paint eventually just turns brown when you mix too many different colours). Although this makes sense to me, I'm sure I've overlooked something, and I'm not sure why this would result in plants that were less nutritious to man kind. Maybe because of the ash? I'm pretty sure that at some point Sazed mentions that the plants help breakdown the ash so maybe this made them less nutritious? But yeah, there you go, the science behind the brown plants on Scadrial!

When I recently reread the Mistborn books, during the part with the atium stash, I wondered how much it would acutally have containted. After all, the Lord Ruler would have to burn it literally all the time in order to compound age storing, and not die of old age. Even if the Lord Ruler kept it on a very low burn most of the time (higher when there is anybody to see him) the speed at which atium burns means that he couldn't possibly need less than 10 beads per day. The prisoners in the pits of hathsin get one bead a week. This means that, simply to keep the Lord Ruler alive, there would have to be more than 70 prisoners on average. When Kelsier takes over the pits, he mentions that there are only a couple dozen guards [citation needed]. This means that there could not have been all that many prisoners. Combined with the fact that being sent there is extremely rare (the old guy in the first book had only seen it happen once), I'm thinking that the pits have an average of 100 prisoners at a time, each getting an average of one atium geode a week. With the Lord Ruler using ~70 of those beads and 10 going to the nobility, that leaves 20 going to the kandra each week. Remember, a lot of the atum the nobility gets goes to the kandra, so let's say that the kandra get 25 a week. With some quick math (and assuming that Scadrial has the same length year as Earth) we can conclude that the kandra's cache should have contained (roughly) 1.3 million atium beads. With that number, we no longer have to worry about it being too small an amount, but it could be too large. In the fight against the colos where the atium got burned up, there were about 200 atium mistings, plus Eland, and that they were fighting for roughly 3-5 hours straight. With each misting having to burn a total of 65000 beads, this means that each geode worth of atium would have to take roughly 3.6-6 minutes to burn. Sounds about right. And with that, we can conclude that if I was correct with my calculations, Brandon Sanderson likely was too.

Hey guys this is my first post.. Now TLR was a full Metalborn and so he had access to Double Zinc intelligence (how did he ever lose?!?!). So even if he was confident he wouldn't ever be defeated, he should have realized that his time was running out as his Atium Compounding for youth would soon be too impractical to continue (he needs too tap more and more youth as he got older). My question is: why wasn't he planning for this and preparing a successor to take his place? He should have thought of it, with the Zinc compounding..

So this is a thing that just happened: http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2ytg2h/im_novelist_brandon_sanderson_ama/crpb8mn?context=3 I'm in shock. I don't know what to think. It's crazy though. Weiry had an idea that perhaps Lutha was one of his kids. I always thought Lutha was a romantic interest, but this would also make sense. Discuss!

Alright, obviously copper compounding can't give you information that you didn't already have, but it could increase their clarity. I refer to this (imperfectly quoted) line from Breeze: "I can't go anywhere where the Lord Ruler will be, because he's seen me before, and you know he has a flawless memory" Therefore, copper compounding allows you to enhance memories to the point where you can remember everything you've ever seen perfectly. In the AoL, a copper compounder could skim every book ever published, and be able to recite any of them word-for-word. Sorry if this was a bit obvious, just wanted to put it out there.

How exactly did the Lord Ruler's compounding system work? I didn't fully understand it after reading Sazed's explanation at the end of The Final Empire. Supposedly his atium compounding was stopped after Vin removed his bracers, but doesn't he have to burn Feruchemically charged atium for it to work? Wouldn't that mean he would be perfectly fine without the bracers, so long as he didn't run out of his metal reserve? If that is the case, do the bracers only serve the function of storing age, then being filed into ingestible metal to be burned? Perhaps I just don't understand the logistics of compounding well enough. Please, relieve me of my ignorance.

So, my friend has this theory: he thinks that the Lord Ruler, during his fight with Vin, used a Duralumin burst with Atium that he had compounded, letting him see several years into the future. He decided that Vin could handle Ruin better than he, and, since he was sick of living (I mean, who wants to live for a thousand years where your noblemen hate and fear you and your vassals hate you), he let Vin win. Tell me what you think.

In WoR, when Szeth attempted to kill Dalinar, both Dalinar and Kaladin had stabbed Szeth with their spears, but Szeth shrugged them off like they were no big deal, also taking their weapons away from them. This is very similar to the Lord Ruler, in the first Mistborn, being stabbed twice with spears by two soldiers, but hardly even flinched. I find this to be a very nice parallel between two books between the Cosmere.

For the longest time, prior to stumbling upon this forum, I had a theory that Elantris and the Mistborn series were set on the same planet. The reason being, the mention of people on another continent that the main characters did not know about in Mistborn. I thought that these people were the people in Elantris, and furthermore, that the chasm that suddenly appeared and ruined everything in Elantris was caused by the Lord Ruler moving and reshaping the world. I now know this is wrong, but I still think that the two could be related. The way I see it, when the Lord Ruler was moving the planet itself around the solar system, this would have had effects on other planets, and if Scadrial and Sel are in the same solar system, then Sel could have been affected. By moving Scadrial past Sel, its gravitational pull could have affected the other planet, causing an earthquake, and therefore the creation of the chasm. It couldn't be caused by Sazed or Vin from when they held the power, because the Mistborn series takes place after Elantris, but the Lord Ruler would have effected the world one thousand years before, which could put it, chronologically, when the chasm was formed. We also know that Odium did not cause the chasm, and that it did not occur naturally. This might be easily disproved, however, if Sel and Scadrial aren't in the same solar system, but I haven't found anything to against this being a possibility. Thoughts?

I have a question for you all. Suppose a Worldhopper traded the Lord Ruler enough Biochromatic-breath to reach the Fifth heightening, in exchange for some Lerasium (or whatever... the nature of the trade is not important). Sidestepping any issues some of you may have with whether it would work for the Lord Ruler, and just assume that if it isn't a simple matter of giving the breath to the Lord Ruler, that the Worldhopper and Rashek work it out between them how to make it work using Hemalurgy (or whatever... once again, this isn't important. The important bit is that the Lord Ruler reaches the Fifth heightening). The crux of the matter is this: if someone who has lived long beyond his natural lifespan through Atium compounding, and who depends on continually tapping an Atium-mind to remain alive, were to receive the Fifth Heightening (Agelessness, Immortality and so forth), would they be able to stop tapping youth? If they discontinued tapping their Atium-mind, would they die, or would the Biochromatic-breath be sufficient to sustain them? And if it is sufficient to sustain them, would they be immortal, but impossibly aged, or would they remain at whatever age they had tapped to, or would they be fixed in the prime of life? Thoughts?