I'm confused

[bmcclure7]

Ok according to the northerners Kelsier was able to make the bands because of his full born powers yet in his POV he doesn't have any powers?

[Returned]

I was a bit annoyed by this, since we'll likely have to wait so long to get more information. Our (assumed) understanding was wrong in any or all of the following ways:

• Kelsier isn't the Sovereign
• Kelsier didn't make the Bands
• Kelsier didn't make the Bands alone
• Kelsier did make the Bands, but his condition has changed since then
• The Bands aren't what we thought

It seems like the details were put in just to invalidate, or at least sow doubt about, the most popular ideas surrounding the Sovereign and especially Scadrian Metallic Art technology. I was really expecting to get more information about both in this book, but instead we only learned that we've always had less than we thought.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Returned

[+Oltux72]

2 hours ago, Returned said:

I was a bit annoyed by this, since we'll likely have to wait so long to get more information. Our (assumed) understanding was wrong in any or all of the following ways:

• Kelsier isn't the Sovereign
• Kelsier didn't make the Bands
• Kelsier didn't make the Bands alone
• Kelsier's did make the Bands, but his condition has changed since then
• The Bands aren't what we thought

It seems like the details were put in just to invalidate, or at least sow doubt about, the most popular ideas surrounding the Sovereign and especially Scadrian Metallic Art technology. I was really expecting to get more information about both in this book, but instead we only learned that we've always had less than we thought.

You left out an option:

• Kelsier is no longer an allomancer because he made the Bands

[Returned]

7 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

You left out an option:

• Kelsier is no longer an allomancer because he made the Bands

I'd have grouped that under "Kelsier's did make the Bands, but his condition has changed since then", but the distinction might be important since we don't really know anything about the process of making them (or the medallions).

[Tglassy]

Or the Bands aren't what we thought they were.  Wax drained them completely.  That's insane to think about.  They mention at the end of Bands of Mourning that they'd be able to refill everything with Compounding, but they didn't mention trying to refill it in The Last Metal.  

We assume the Bands give someone the powers of a Fullborn, the same way the Medallions do, but maybe that's wrong. Obviously it gave them that power at first, but maybe they're just a one time use item.  Maybe tapping the investiture "uses it up", so that it's just gone.  Then there's nothing to tap, and all the other metals that it is made out of are now Metalminds linked to someone who isn't you.  

 

This would actually answer why Wax and Marasi were such strong Allomancers while tapping.  Feruchemists can store a year's worth of strength, and then pull it all out all at once for a huge burst.  They were drawing the Investiture out faster than it had been put in, draining it with less than an hour of work.  

 

Though, I believe they were drained cause the Malwish guy used a Leaching grenade to whip out the investiture, but there are other possibilities.  

[KandraAllomancer]

On 19.11.2022 at 9:28 AM, Returned said:

• Kelsier didn't make the Bands alone

I would assume one would need a Mistborn or a full Feruchemist, as well as some spikes, to create the Bands. Given that Hemalurgy no longer allows Compounding, the person and/or spikes would need to be pre-Catacendre - which leaves Spook as the most viable option

[King-A-Train]

On 21/11/2022 at 6:11 PM, KandraAllomancer said:

I would assume one would need a Mistborn or a full Feruchemist, as well as some spikes, to create the Bands. Given that Hemalurgy no longer allows Compounding, the person and/or spikes would need to be pre-Catacendre - which leaves Spook as the most viable option

Yeah, Spook is definitely the most likely option. 

Still requires him or another person or people having full feruchemical power set between them to combine. As all natural full feruchemists are dead post-catacendre then it presumably has some hemalurgy involved as well. Maybe from inquisitor spikes instead of newly made spikes?  We know they got a lot of feruchemical power from killing the Synod. 

[+Oltux72]

On 24.11.2022 at 10:51 PM, King-A-Train said:

Yeah, Spook is definitely the most likely option. 

Still requires him or another person or people having full feruchemical power set between them to combine. As all natural full feruchemists are dead post-catacendre then it presumably has some hemalurgy involved as well. Maybe from inquisitor spikes instead of newly made spikes?  We know they got a lot of feruchemical power from killing the Synod. 

I am afraid that does not add up. How and why would the Lord Ruler or Ruin make spikes for metals unavailable at the that time, in particular Nicrosil?

[King-A-Train]

38 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

I am afraid that does not add up. How and why would the Lord Ruler or Ruin make spikes for metals unavailable at the that time, in particular Nicrosil?

Very good point. So that indicates either a collection of ferrings or hemalurgic spikes made post-catacendre, at least for the newer metals. 

[+Oltux72]

On 25.11.2022 at 11:50 PM, King-A-Train said:

Very good point. So that indicates either a collection of ferrings or hemalurgic spikes made post-catacendre, at least for the newer metals. 

Again, I am afraid the timing precludes that. The Bands show Survivorist symbolism so they were made after the Catacendre. But by all accounts they were made quite soon after the Catacendre. That is at a time when the new metals were either still unknown or ridiculously expensive, so expensive that testing somebody for abilities with them was unusual.

[Returned]

On 11/25/2022 at 4:09 PM, Oltux72 said:

I am afraid that does not add up. How and why would the Lord Ruler or Ruin make spikes for metals unavailable at the that time, in particular Nicrosil?

It's not impossible that Rashek would have created a cache of relevant metals, otherwise unavailable, for his own use during his time with Preservation's power at the Well. He may well have used those metals Feruchemically, even if he didn't want to use them for compounding. There isn't any particular reason to think that this is what did happen, but we shouldn't just rule it out. The ultimate cheat is that he could have accessed Fortune during his brief Ascension, causing him to do things with no relevance to him or surrounding events and for no clear or immediate reason.

The powers used in making the Bands came from somewhere. While we obviously don't have the details on what happened, questions like "how and why would [x] do [y]" fall into the same category: for some reason we don't know, via some mechanism we don't know about. With what little we thought we know about medallion technology being undone in Lost Metal, I don't think we can brush aside any explanation which is at least technically plausible.

We also have to account for our own imperfect knowledge of how the Metallic Arts can be applied. Maybe a clever use of malatium, gold, bronze, or chromium (via Hemalurgic spikes, as necessary) and a well-trained, experienced Metalborn possessing the right knowledge could elide the practical issues we have with finding Mistings and Ferrings who can make use of the rare metals. Sanderson's coyness about medallion-style technology, declining to give us essentially any new information at all, suggests to me that for answering these types of questions we're looking at something fundamental to the magic system ("with the right knowledge, any Allomancer could use their metal to do [x]") rather than some arbitrarily insurmountable hurdle ("nicrosil is virtually impossible to find!"). In the same way that making someone into a Mistborn is only one of, and the most basic of, many possible applications of lerasium.

[King-A-Train]

21 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Again, I am afraid the timing precludes that. The Bands show Survivorist symbolism so they were made after the Catacendre. But by all accounts they were made quite soon after the Catacendre. That is at a time when the new metals were either still unknown or ridiculously expensive, so expensive that testing somebody for abilities with them was unusual.

What are you thoughts on the timeline of it?  

While I agree with what you’re saying, about new metals and how quickly it all came about. We know the bands existed and seemed to have all 16 allomantic and feruchemical powers.
 

How do they get them all with no full feruchemists? At least that we know about. 

[+Oltux72]

12 hours ago, Returned said:

It's not impossible that Rashek would have created a cache of relevant metals, otherwise unavailable, for his own use during his time with Preservation's power at the Well. He may well have used those metals Feruchemically, even if he didn't want to use them for compounding. There isn't any particular reason to think that this is what did happen, but we shouldn't just rule it out. The ultimate cheat is that he could have accessed Fortune during his brief Ascension, causing him to do things with no relevance to him or surrounding events and for no clear or immediate reason.

But why create amounts necessary for testing many people?

12 hours ago, Returned said:

The powers used in making the Bands came from somewhere. While we obviously don't have the details on what happened, questions like "how and why would [x] do [y]" fall into the same category: for some reason we don't know, via some mechanism we don't know about. With what little we thought we know about medallion technology being undone in Lost Metal, I don't think we can brush aside any explanation which is at least technically plausible.

And now I am afraid we are entering circular reasoning. You cannot really argue that what we know about medaillions is far less than we though and then see as certain that they were created hemalurgically.

All we can really tell for sure is that they have the physical form of a spear head, that is whoever made them was aware of Survivorism. Given Fortune that does not even strictly speaking rule out Rashek.

 

[+Oltux72]

6 minutes ago, King-A-Train said:

What are you thoughts on the timeline of it?

I think the Bands were made during the first century after the Catacendre. Nicrosil needs elementary silicon. Making that without electricity is fantastically expensive. You use aluminium as a reductive agent.

6 minutes ago, King-A-Train said:

How do they get them all with no full feruchemists? At least that we know about. 

I'd say that you do not. Yet Scadrial of course does have a full feruchemist: Sazed
And do we know that Kelsier is not a feruchemist? We know that he cannot do Allomancy strictly speaking.

[King-A-Train]

2 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

I think the Bands were made during the first century after the Catacendre. Nicrosil needs elementary silicon. Making that without electricity is fantastically expensive. You use aluminium as a reductive agent.

I’ll bow to your knowledge on metallurgy as mine is basically none existent. Hadn’t really thought about the production of the newer metals, except aluminum as it is a plot point. 
 

5 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

I'd say that you do not. Yet Scadrial of course does have a full feruchemist: Sazed
And do we know that Kelsier is not a feruchemist? We know that he cannot do Allomancy strictly speaking.

Sazed is a possibility, although unlikely, as he does not seem to have any interest in acting. If he had helped produce the bands you would have thought Kelsier might have brought up the fact he had helped previously in their Lost Metal epilogue discussion. 
 

Doesn’t Kelsier becoming a full feruchemist require hemalurgy? which has already been discussed as difficult with the new metals especially within 100 years of the catacendre. Or Kelsier was turned into a full feruchemist by Sazed, but again that requires Sazed helping more than Kelsier implies that he has done. 

[+Oltux72]

26 minutes ago, King-A-Train said:

I’ll bow to your knowledge on metallurgy as mine is basically none existent. Hadn’t really thought about the production of the newer metals, except aluminum as it is a plot point.

It just needs a bit of history. There must be a reason eras that produced Galileo, Kepler, Newton or Leibnitz did not discover most metals. The technology  required is more demanding.

26 minutes ago, King-A-Train said:

Doesn’t Kelsier becoming a full feruchemist require hemalurgy? which has already been discussed as difficult with the new metals especially within 100 years of the catacendre. Or Kelsier was turned into a full feruchemist by Sazed, but again that requires Sazed helping more than Kelsier implies that he has done. 

There is the theory of Mistwraiths being blocked Feruchemists. That Kelsier does indeed contain his own original bones strongly suggests that the rest of his body is a Mistwraith by origin.

[King-A-Train]

30 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

There is the theory of Mistwraiths being blocked Feruchemists. That Kelsier does indeed contain his own original bones strongly suggests that the rest of his body is a Mistwraith by origin.

Yeah, I can see that. Interesting theory. 

[Returned]

7 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

But why create amounts necessary for testing many people?

No reason to think that he did. As I said above, there may have been some alternative to testing everyone with the hardest-to-get metals. Indeed, if we stick to the premises that those metals are not accessible in the amounts needed to test for those Mistings, but those Mistings were found anyways, then some other method was used. And, of course, we don't even know that that happened.

The relevant metals existed in functional quantities in the Bands, which means they came from somewhere. They wouldn't be easier to produce immediately following the Catacendre than later-- Elendel just recently got access to electricity. "Rashek made them exist with divine power" is at least as plausible an explanation as any, as is "Sazed made them exist with divine power". There isn't a reason to think that either definitely did happen, but there is a relative dearth of alternatives

7 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

And now I am afraid we are entering circular reasoning. You cannot really argue that what we know about medaillions is far less than we though and then see as certain that they were created hemalurgically.

All we can really tell for sure is that they have the physical form of a spear head, that is whoever made them was aware of Survivorism. Given Fortune that does not even strictly speaking rule out Rashek.

It's not circular at all. The Bands exist, therefore they were created via some means that would work to cause them to exist. Prior to Lost Metal we thought we had an idea how they might have been created, based on how we thought the medallions might be made, but Lost Metal suggests that those ideas were almost certainly mistaken. I don't mention Hemalurgy as the method, even as a possibility, (was the comment to that effect intended for me?), nor any method for creating the Bands at all.

[+robardin]

On 11/28/2022 at 4:11 AM, Oltux72 said:

It just needs a bit of history. There must be a reason eras that produced Galileo, Kepler, Newton or Leibnitz did not discover most metals. The technology  required is more demanding.

There is the theory of Mistwraiths being blocked Feruchemists. That Kelsier does indeed contain his own original bones strongly suggests that the rest of his body is a Mistwraith by origin.

I put that forth quite a few years ago, but specifically theorized that it'd need the First Generation of kandra to count as blocked Feruchemists - all subsequent generations of kandra having mistwraith origins, not human ones, as a race that "breeds true" unto itself and are not Metalborn by nature.

But as we saw in Secret History, koloss who died appeared to Kelsier as humans again in the CR, so it stands to reason that perhaps there remained a spiritual component of Feruchemy in Haddek and the others remaining of the Firsts.

Besides, where are the First and Second Generations of kandra in Era 2? MeLaan mentions that TenSoon and other Thirds are the oldest among them. Have they died of old age, committed suicide out of boredom, or did they fulfill some other purpose?

I kind of would like to see a KanPaar redemption arc, LOL!