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Years ago(ish), I wrote a lot of Thomas Covenant fan fiction. The idea was to fill in the gaps in the ancientwards legendarium, to explain the origins of the Insequent in general and the Auriference and the Mahdoubt specifically, or the captivity of Kastenessen, or the fall of Kevin. I was superimmersed in Donaldson's style off and on so I got into the swing of it pretty well. Well, I had a mirror-image(ish) Cosmere fan fiction idea just as of yesterday or so. The problem is it runs the risk of being beyond pretentious. Like, it would be an imaginary version of the Cosmere endgame. The emotional logic is that the canonical resolution to the mysteries of the history of the Land are as far away from me as the finale of the Cosmere saga is; I have lived X years since the days of the Land and will have lived an equivalent number of years for the duration of the Cosmere saga, or something. So, why not? Even if it is all falsified completely (not just the wording/names/etc. but even the scenarios or themes), it could be taken as a special prediction. The argument: Sanderson writes in style A, has WoB-wise said things B, books C&D&c. have come out, etc. so from these, I am inferring certain possibilities (at the least possibilities) about how it would all turn out. I actually have scenes written out in my mind for early "chapters" in the "book" but due to time constraints (per today) I am going to just outline it through the climax and its epilogue. Prologue scenario: some rando Shardworld POV character's society has developed space flight, and the POV character is one a ship, heading towards an interesting site, when Hoid's time-bubble falls or some other cloaking mechanism of his fails and he reveals he's on the ship and oh by the way that Spikey-looking ship is this (Scadrian) and that pretty sparkling human-shaped suit of armor is that (Rosharan mecha) and so on, then too-da-loo the POV guy freaks out and leaves back to his world while Hoid boards the Scadrian ship. The Scadrians are meeting up with representatives from (some) other spacefaring societies to investigate the Autonomy situation, among other things. Trell destabilized Harmony in MBE3 enough to cause him to lose control of the two Shards, which instead of long-term peacefully fusing, have abruptly collided and "detonated," extinguishing Scadrial from the Cosmere. Harmony had the Foresight to expect this cataclysm (the Second Catacendre) and helped evacuate as many people as possible from Scadrial. In the aftermath, therefore, the Scadrians are trying to find out what Trell really was and so on. But there is something else going on too... When Hoid interrupts the meeting, he begins to explain something. He starts with, "All of this began with words on a page..." and he proceeds to the story of how there once was a God known as Adonalsium, who created an Invested book, and when the holder or holders of the book would write in it, if enough people read what was written, it would become true. (A fusion of the Bible and the Neverending Story, basically. There's supposed to be some flippancy here in that Hoid says, "Once upon a time, God wrote a book. We know He wrote it because it literally fell out of the sky. Hit my master on the head when it did... He, Hoid, was the first to read from it. The first of those who bore the legends of God in their hearts and minds. The first of the Worldsingers. The one who wrote the story that I was born from," or something like that. Anyway, he also reveals that a lot of the Shardworlds were created before the Shattering, by the use of the book. Ati and Leras were two people who used a similar power to create Scadrial, although Ati didn't read the story that much (his contributions were more tangential on average) so he didn't have as much Foresight as Leras did about how the story would go. (Explanation for how Leras wrote the prophecies and Ati could mess with anything not written in metal: they were copying Adonalsium's "book from the sky" maneuver.) Frost and two Awakened dragons attack the gathering to try to get Hoid. So a space-battle with dragons. Hoid and Co. win the fight and Hoid meets the holders of the Shards of Ruin and Preservation (who are on the Scadrian flagship, variously going crazy/under immense strain from having to try to hold the Shards in the aftermath of the Second Catacendre). Hoid explains about something called the Darkening of Adonalsium. This is based off Answer to Job's talk about the darkness of the shards of God. The idea is that as the Cosmere as a whole evolves towards having a unitary consciousness spanning the entire region of space, Adonalsium's power and its echoes are causing the distinction between the Physical and Cognitive Realms to blur more and more. Eventually, if the evil that was within Adonalsium and now split between the Shards is not cleansed from existence, then when the Shards coalesce back together, this evil will unify itself as a single agent of darkness (the Dark One will be created by the apocalypse of the universe, so to say). This thing will be born from the beliefs/knowledge of evil that people in the Cosmere have, and the increasing intersection of the Realms. Elsewhere, Khriss observes aluminum raining from the skies on Taldain. [This is based on the "ashes from the sky" recurring words in MBE1 and the fact that there is a planet somewhere IRL, I think, where it has rained metal at some point.] Part of the cause of this is that vast swathes of the Cosmere are spontaneously tunneling through perpendicularities that are percolating across the worlds. There is a Ghostblood, Ghrenze (long-term relative of Mraize's or something), who is a Sliver of Ambition, whose goal is to recapitulate the Ghostbloods' original tri-Shard plan by harnessing the fusion of the final three Shards (as it stands, Autonomy has absorbed a lot of the Shards and can mentally handle their power because of her avatar system; but she can feel her own Shard, as such, also being pulled "from" her, by the coalescent tendency of Investiture; and we'll get to why there will only be three Shards in the end, in a little bit). The Lord Fire is a wicked dragon who is the embodiment of the Darkening of Adonalsium. That is, the darkness-essence in the Shards is being distilled from them as the Cosmere evolves, and while Hoid is cultivating the pieces of Adonalsium's goodness and light, Fire is incarnating God's evil. He is when first described a dragon-Inquisitor, basically. Hoid instructs the Scadrians to go to Sel, which is an Ascended planet by this time. Something called the Tide is about to strike Sel and Hoid has a plan for how to deal with this fact. The Tide is the long-term physical shockwave given off at the Shattering and when it strikes a perpendicularity, it aggravates the spatial-Realmatic distortion in question, which can weaken/alter Shards (and if it collides with the Dor, the Tide will have special, devastating consequences). The Scadrian captain/team of course agrees because they're good, sympathetic people who just escaped the explosion of their own planet, after all. Khriss ends up on Sel in the midst of the crisis, too. The interference of Fire prevents the protagonists from saving Sel. While the residue of darkness in Dominion and Devotion is siphoned into the dragon, the Tide catalyzes the shattering of the world. The Scadrians escape on their ship but Hoid, Khriss, and one or more other protagonists escape when Hoid super-uses Feruchemical Fortune to teleport them away, each to where they need to go. To Khriss he gives the Moon Scepter, which because it is an Aon-like image of all Sel itself, will retain the last vestiges of Selish Investiture as such. Now Fire is a dragon with Hemalurgic Spikes going through him, making him look terribly evil and all, but as of his absorption of Dominion's shadow, he now has an aura of Skaze surrounding him also. Khriss ends up in Silverlight, Hoid on Obrodai (where he has to team up with an Aviar POV character), and someone else, elsewhere. Meanwhile Fire goes to Roshar (the system) to gather the darkness of Odium, an event shown in an interlude from a Parshendi POV (the Parshendi is/are on Braize, like tourists almost, and then...). At some point Lift, wielding Nightblood, makes an appearance. Maybe also Taln. Autonomy argues with Hoid, telling him something like "this is exactly why Shards weren't supposed to be reunited." The 17th Shard at some point are shown as helping Fire. The 17S is afraid of the awakening of the Cosmere and the reforging of Adonalsium and is willing to help Fire stop this, although how this being will do so is not necessarily shown at the same time. Fire, in the form of a dragon-Inquisitor with red lightning and dark spheres encompassing him, takes the shadow from Honor and Cultivation and transforms into a giant sword-like being (some Dakhor-monk step being taken in the process). By now, only the Scadrian Shards and one 14-Shard exist (Autonomy has perished or been subsumed into the convergence of the other Shards). Fire transits into some super-dimensional path-space, towards a Cognitive-Realm representation of the final convergence. Essentially, it would look like three vast crystals were converging towards the mystic sun in Shadesmar. He is following the Scadrian ship there, in fact, because they are trying to keep the Vessel of Ruin away from him, since if he inherits the void of Ruin, he will transform into a nova that will destroy the entire Cosmere to prevent it from becoming a unified living thing (the 17S consent to this since they dread that this unified being will destroy the rest of the universe). So a play on the ol' "if Ruin gets the atium" danger. The Scadrians kind of have to go to the convergence-space due to the Spiritual pressure of the Vessels on their ship (if they get too "far away" then the Shards will be ripped from their Spiritwebs, killing them, etc.). Now IDK how to set up how the final battle takes place, but somehow, in the focus of the convergence, the protagonists square off against Fire in himself. The image I have is of Fire drawing in Ruin's darkness and Hoid attaching the First Gem/Topaz to the evil sword-dragon, to convert Fire into a sword that can be bonded and then dismissed. However, Hoid knows he can't bond to the evil that Fire has become because this evil would consume his mind. Luckily, Lift is there with Nightblood, so Hoid inspires Nightblood to bond with Fire and dismiss him. (Nightblood is cynical or wary, now, towards/of claims that this or that is evil; Hoid tells him that of all that anyone has ever told Nightblood to be evil, this thing surely is; and Nightblood remembers a time when in the war with the Shard of God's rage, he was held by Kaladin (for whatever reason), and learned right from wrong in a pure way; and he knows that Fire is evil. So he is driven into the First Gem (crucified into the Fire-sword), bonds with it, and dismisses it (since they're already in the Cognitive Realm, the dismissal is to the Spiritual, which ultimately defeats Fire). The Cosmere awakens and Ascends through the last three Shards, which cannot fuse but are sealed in a tri-spiral around the heart of reality. Khriss helps this happen using the Ire Ascension mechanism. The epilogue...

We need to talk about the silver plating on Vin's earring! Somewhere between the moment Vin's mother drove this little bronze spike through Vin's sister into Vin's ear, and the moment we first see Vin in Book 1, this bronze earring became plated in "silver" (which must negate its Hemalurgic effects for reasons I'll explain) and then locked away inside of a box. Even ignoring the larger implications of Silver throughout the Cosmere, and isolating our attention only at Scadrial's magic system... We know that silver on Scadrial has no known Allomantic, Feruchemical, or (most importantly) Hemalurgic properties at all. If the earring were silver-plated before spiking through Vin's sister, then that silver would have nullified the spike's ability to behave as a hemalurgic spike and accept a hemalurgic charge. In contrast, if the earring was silver-plated after receiving a hemalurgic charge, then the silver would have blocked the earring's effects on the wearer (much like Nightblood's sheath blocks his power). If this bronze earring was plated in silver, then it's logical to infer that even if Vin wore it like that (fully silver-plated), then Ruin wouldn't have been able to reach her, nor would she have been able to tap into the extra seeker properties with which the spike was charged. Interestingly enough, that silver plating was notably wearing away throughout Vin's story. From Well of Ascension - Chapter 33: "Vin stood quietly. Absently, she pulled out her bronze earring—her mother’s earring—and worked it between her fingers, watching it reflect light. It had once been gilded with silver, but that had worn off in most places." From Hero of Ages – Chapter 54: "Silver. Useless, unburnable silver. Like lead, it was one of the metals that provided no Allomantic powers at all. “An unpopular metal indeed . . .” Yomen said, nodding to the side. A servant approached Vin, bearing something on a small platter. Her mother’s earring. It was a dull thing, Allomantically, made of bronze with some silver plating. Much of the silver had worn off years ago, and the brownish bronze showed through, making the earring look to be the cheap bauble it was. “Which is why,” Yomen continued, “I am so curious as to why you would bother with an ornament such as this. I have had it tested. Silver on the outside, bronze on the inside. Why those metals?" I figure that neither Reen nor Vin could've done this silver-plating to the bronze earring. They wouldn't have been concerned in the least with having it silver-plated while they were poor and had a hard enough time staying [relatively] safe and fed. I think someone who was cosmere-aware or, at the very least, was "Ruin-aware" was responsible for having the earring silver plated. I doubt Hoid would have done this, as well. My imagination says that he would have sooner destroyed or stolen the earring if he really wanted to interfere with Ruin's plans. Hoid wouldn't have preserved the earring so carefully. The fact that the earring was neutralized/silver-plated rather than destroyed... and the fact that it was placed in a box and that box was kept rather than disposed of... well, I would guess Preservation was behind this silver-plating. I think he did what he could to influence people and events around Vin to protect her while keeping in line with his own will to 'preserve' above all else. From Hero of Ages – Sazed's final Epigraph (just before the epilogue): "Vin was special. Preservation chose her from a very young age, as I have mentioned. I believe that he was grooming her to take his power... I believe that she must have drawn some of the mist into her when she was still a child, in those brief times when she wasn’t wearing the earring. Preservation had mostly gotten her to stop wearing it by the time Kelsier recruited her, though she put it back in for a moment before joining the crew. Then, she’d left it there at his suggestion." If the earring had been placed while Vin was an infant and left in her ear, then it's a safe assumption that Ruin would have had her entire lifetime to work his influence... if, of course, it hadn't been for the presumed efforts of Preservation to buy her as much time as he could. I asked Brandon Sanderson "Who was responsible for getting Vin's bronze earring plated in 'silver'?" and apparently that question was good enough to award me an RAFO card. :-) I will be framing it. Don't judge me. Who plated Vin's bronze earring in "silver"? When did they do it? Why? Is the plating on Vin's earring really silver (or just perceived to be Silver by the Scadrians)? ...is it the same metal as Nightblood's sheath? It seems to me that the silver plating on Vin's earring and Nightblood's famous "silver sheath" were essentially there to perform the same job. What do you think?

When I ordered my leatherbound Mistborn (just came today) I asked Brandon whether Aagal Uch and Aagal Nod — the two gas giants in the Scadrian system — ever came into the story. He RAFOed it. How can you RAFO a question like that? It makes no sense. RAFOing can imply that something interesting is going on with what you are asking about. But if something interesting is going on with the planets, that would mean that the planets do come into the story. So why didn't he just say yes? Do they only partially come into the story? Does he not want people to focus on it? Is he unsure of the answer? If the answer had been "no", he would probably have just said no. So I think the RAFO means a yes. But if that's what he meant, then why didn't he say it? I don't get it!

*sigh* Ok... so, forgive my extreme ignorance but... I was just reading the Q&A with Brandon Sanderson and I realized that I have no idea what "RAFO" stands for.... somebody please tell me! This thread is for people like me who occasionally have to ask some painfully obvious questions regarding anything Brandon Sanderson related! (I'm kind of hoping other people will post here as well so that I don't feel like a complete idiot...)

So, I recently (read: 5 minutes ago) discovered this website and promptly jumped in the deep end. I have no regrets, just one question: what is RAFO and why does it appear everywhere in Sanderson interviews?

I guess I have been on here long enough to start of of these now. So ask me anything.

So, this is from the 2014 Omaha book signing: From the specific wording of the answer, I have deduced that this question is somehow important in a way we don't currently understand. This is the sort of brilliant intellectual work I am capable of. So what I'm wondering is, why is this question such a big RAFO? We know Hoid isn't one of the Heralds, so that answer is out. Why does it matter whether Hoid's taken a stroll down Damnation Avenue at some point? Personally, I'm not good with this sort of guesswork. I've been toying with the idea of Braize being the current state of Yolen, but I have little evidence to support this. So, discuss, maybe?

I was pondering RAFOs, and wondering if and how it might be possible to derive useful information from them. I realized a few things, which are pretty obvious. 1. It's significantly easier to derive information from RAFOd yes/no questions than from RAFOd questions with more than two answers. 2. If the answer to a question has no/very little significance, Brandon is unlikely to RAFO it, no matter what the answer, because it won't affect the plot and is less likely to be revealed in a book. 3. If the answer to a question is extremely significant, Brandon is extremely likely to RAFO it, no matter what the answer, because it will affect the plot and is more likely to be revealed in a book. 4. If a question is confirming/denying only one theory from a large pool of theories, Brandon is less likely to RAFO it. 5. If the answer to such a question is no, Brandon is less likely to RAFO it than if the answer is yes. This is because removing one theory from a pool is less significant than removing all theories from a pool. So, using only this information, on average more questions that are RAFOd will turn out to be true than false. The margin expands when we narrow the parameters to "yes/no questions that refer only to one theory out of a pool". However, it's likely that Brandon knows this, and RAFOs more questions than he might otherwise, in order to make it more difficult to analyze. As such, more information is needed to fully analyze RAFOs. I haven't been around here that long, so I don't know much about which questions were RAFOd. So I need help. If anyone remembers any questions that were originally RAFOd, but were later answered by some means, could you post them? If all goes well, I hope to be able to find a pattern among the data which will help determine the quality of evidence provided by RAFOs.