Can an Awakener Dominate a Spren?

[Trusk'our]

An Awakener can override a Command given to an Awakened object or a Lifeless. Could something like that be done for spren?

[NameIess]

1 hour ago, Trusk'our said:

An Awakener can override a Command given to an Awakened object or a Lifeless. Could something like that be done for spren?

Probably. You might need millions of breaths or something ridiculous like that, but it is probably "possible". It would be insanely difficult because of the vastly higher levels of investment (1,000 times the average lifeless at absolute mininum) and the fact that spren aren't investiture specifically programmed to be robots like Lifeless are. It would probably be a lot easier for lesser spren. And if you could "break" a spren, you could probably do the same with a human.

[Trusk'our]

Just now, Nameless said:

Probably. You might need millions of breaths or something ridiculous like that, but it is probably "possible". It would be insanely difficult because of the vastly higher levels of investment (1,000 times the average lifeless at absolute mininum) and the fact that spren aren't investiture specifically programmed to be robots like Lifeless are. It would probably be a lot easier for lesser spren. And if you could "break" a spren, you could probably do the same with a human.

If you can mentally dominate humans with Awakening...well, that would be a scary thing in the cosmere.

[NameIess]

1 minute ago, Trusk'our said:

If you can mentally dominate humans with Awakening...well, that would be a scary thing in the cosmere.

Good thing that it's almost certainly impossible to pull off in reality.

[Trusk'our]

 

Just now, Nameless said:

Good thing that it's almost certainly impossible to pull off in reality.

Yeah, it probably would be pretty hard to mind control a human who didn't somehow have an "open" soul, like when someone pierces themselves with Hemalurgic spikes.

Also, if it was possible, would it really take millions of Breaths to have that kind of power? Because a radiant spren is very, very invested, but it isn't nearly as invested as Nightblood, and Nightblood (Before RoW, anyway, when the comparison was given) had a comparable amount of investiture to Susebron, who "only" has around 50,000 Breaths.

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Questioner

I've got a list of various Cosmere bits of metal and I was wondering if you would rank them from like one to ten or just easy to difficult on how hard it would be to steelpush on them. So with one being just a regular coin, ten being like when the Lord Ruler was moving bits of glass on the floor, so like metal inside a person's body.

Brandon Sanderson

It depends on how strong the Investiture in them is.

Questioner

Is that gonna be the answer for all of these?

Brandon Sanderson

Probably!

Questioner

How about a spike charged with Hemalurgy?

Brandon Sanderson

A spike charged with Hemalurgy... that depends on...

Questioner

Not in a person.

Brandon Sanderson

Depends on how strong, yeah, a spike is moderately, (in the realm of these kinds of things) moderately easy to push on because a spike does not rip off very much Investiture. Only enough to short circuit the soul, and less it over time. I would put that at the bottom, with the top being very hard, to be one of the easier things.

Questioner

How about a metalmind that is full?

Brandon Sanderson

That is full? That is going to be middle of the realm of the, yeah. Generally easier than, for instance, a Shardblade which is going to be very hard.

Questioner #2

A Shardblade is [inaudible] actually metal? [metal]-ish?

Brandon Sanderson

Ish. Is Lerasium a metal? Yeah.

Questioner

So that'd be the same for Shardplate too?

Brandon Sanderson

Shardplate and Blade are very hard. Blade is probably gonna be a little harder.

Questioner

A Half-shard?

Brandon Sanderson

A Half-shard shield? That's gonna be moderate.

Questioner

Nightblood? I imagine that being hard.

Brandon Sanderson

Hard, of all the things you've listed, that is going to be the hardest. Far beyond even a Sharblade.

Questioner

Far beyond metal inside a person? 

Brandon Sanderson

Uh, yes. Depending on how invested the person is.

Questioner

If somebody was invested as much as Nightblood?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, for instance the God King, right. At the end with all those Breaths. Pushing something inside of him, getting through all of that? Gonna be real hard. Average person on Scadrial? You've seen how hard that is. A drab? Much easier.

Questioner

That was my next one, or no, sorry not a drab. A lifeless?

Brandon Sanderson

A Lifeless, yeah. Even... yeah. Lifeless are kind of weird because they've had their soul leave but then they've had a replacement stuck in in the form of Breath which leaves them in a very weird position compared to a drab which has had part of their Investiture ripped away but a majority remains, so, anyways. I'm going to give you one more. Pick your favorite.

Questioner

A soulstamped piece of metal?

Brandon Sanderson

A soulstamped piece of metal is going to be on the lower, easier side. Not a lot of Investiture going on in a soulstamp.

 

[NameIess]

10 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

 

Yeah, it probably would be pretty hard to mind control a human who didn't somehow have an "open" soul, like when someone pierces themselves with Hemalurgic spikes.

Also, if it was possible, would it really take millions of Breaths to have that kind of power? Because a radiant spren is very, very invested, but it isn't nearly as invested as Nightblood, and Nightblood (Before RoW, anyway, when the comparison was given) had a comparable amount of investiture to Susebron, who "only" has around 50,000 Breaths.

You need 10,000 breaths (8th heightening) minimum to break lifeless commands. Modern lifeless have 1 breath, ancient lifeless had at mininum a dozen, and Kalad's phantom's probably had more. Assuming that the old lifeless had 20 breaths, and assuming that an awakened metal weapon (which requires 1 thousand breaths) is exactly equal to a shardblade in terms of investiture, that makes spren about 50 times more invested. That's not even taking into account the fact that higher spren are the same level of sapience as humans, while lifeless are less sentient than humans, ranging from very low levels to almost human:

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DylanHuebner

I was wondering how the animation of the lifeless statues worked, in regard to the use of Susebron's Breath. If they were lifeless, then vasher wouldn't have been able to take his Breath back out of them, nor would susebron have needed such a great deal of breath to revive them—he just would have needed a password. But if they were simply Awakened, no password would have been necessary to animate the statues, just Breath and Command.

It seems like the statues could be neither lifeless nor awakened. Are they unique, because of the use of bone, or am I missing something? The only other explanation I could think of was that they were lifeless, but Susebron's breath wasn't used to activate the statues, he simply had it passed down from vasher, in addition to the statues. If that's the case(and then I've simply been confusing myself with unnecessary, convoluted logic), why was it necessary to keep the breath safe for all these years?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, there are a lot of questions in there. If you follow the drafts, I think you can see the evolution of what became of the Lifeless army. Originally I had planned for the statues to simply have been placed there so that you could Awaken them—just in my original concepts, before I started the writing—and then that became the army.

I eventually decided that didn't work for various reasons. Number one, as I developed the magic system, Awakening stone doesn't work very well. You've got to have limberness, you've got to have motion to something for it to actually be stronger. So a soldier made out of cloth would be more useful to you than a soldier made out of stone, if you were just Awakening something. At that point, as I was developing this, I went back to the drawing board and said okay, I need to leave him a whole group of really cool Lifeless as the army. But that had problems in that the ichor would not have stayed good long enough. Plus they already had a pretty big Lifeless army, so what was special about this one? Remember, I'm revising concepts like this as the book is going along. You can see where in the story I could see what needed to be there. So I went back to the drawing board again.

I think the original draft of WARBREAKER you can download off my website has them just as statues, though at the time when I was writing that I already knew it would need to change. I was just sticking to my outline because I needed to have the whole thing complete on the page before I could work with it. A lot of times that's how I do things as a writer—I get the rough draft down, and then I begin to sculpt.

I eventually developed essentially what you've just outlined in the first part, before you started worrying if you were too convoluted. I said, well, what if there's a hybrid? What happens if you Awaken bones? Can you create something? The reason that you can't draw the Breath back from a Lifeless is because the Breath clings to it. If the Lifeless were sentient enough, it could give up its own Breath, but you can't take it, just like you can't take a Breath from a person by force. You have to get them to give it up willingly. So it sticks to the Lifeless. A Lifeless is, let's say, 90% of a sentient being. The Breath doesn't manifest in them, because they aren't alive, yet they're almost there. A stone statue brought to life would be way down on the bottom rung.

Is there something in between? That's the advancement I had Vasher discover—what if we build something out of bone, but then encase it in stone to make it strong, and build it in ways that the bone is held together by the force of the Breaths? That's really what you're getting at there, that you need a lot of Breath, a lot of power, to hold all that stone together. There are seams at the joints. What the Breath is doing is clinging there like magical sinew, and it's holding all of that together.

Vasher left the Phantoms Invested with enough Breath to hold them together but not to move. You needed another big, substantial influx of Breath in order to actually make them have motion, to bring them enough strength to move and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a hybrid.

Goodreads Fantasy Book Discussion Warbreaker Q&A (Jan. 18, 2010)

Add to that the fact that the breath given to a Lifeless is literally programed to make the Lifeless a mindless slave that follows the orders of whoever has their command phrase, and you get them being vastly easier to "hack" into with breaths. It's like the difference between breaking a flimsy lock in an abandoned house and installing a new one so that you can enter whenever you want and smashing through a solid steel wall, murdering the person living inside, and installing a door on the wall complete with flimsy lock.

It would honestly probably be easier to just drag spren into the physical realm like Ishar, then awaken them as a lifeless:

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MangoMongo

Those spren bodies that were brought into the Physical Realm by Ishar. Could an Awakener make it Lifeless?

Brandon Sanderson

This is within the realm of possibility. 

MangoMongo

What about Forgery?

Brandon Sanderson

Forgery would be a little harder. Because you'd need to know what went wrong to make it go well. I'd say Forgery could accomplish this.

FanX 2021 (Sept. 16, 2021)