The Goals of "The Set"

[king of nowhere]

the question, at this point, is why they don't kidnap the women in their homes. it would me much easier, and they could reach all of them.  but then, faking a hostage taking during a robbery is better for misdirecting the police

[Kaymyth]

the question, at this point, is why they don't kidnap the women in their homes. it would me much easier, and they could reach all of them.  but then, faking a hostage taking during a robbery is better for misdirecting the police

 

Exactly; they don't want people to know what they're up to.  If they started blatantly kidnapping highborn women from their homes, the pattern would be obvious very quickly.

 

I suspect that we're eventually going to find that there are actually a lot more women missing; I'm sure there are plenty of "ordinary" folks whose family lines can be traced back to Spook, and their disappearances aren't going to generating as much notice.

Edited August 31, 2015 by Kaymyth

[Titan Arum]

the question, at this point, is why they don't kidnap the women in their homes. it would me much easier, and they could reach all of them.  but then, faking a hostage taking during a robbery is better for misdirecting the police

The robbery is a good cover for the Set's true motives: the kidnapping. Up until this heist, all of the robberies were on the train tracks. I imagine, given how they robbed the trains, having a very large crew is critical. At this point, they had a few people on their list they wanted to kidnap and robbing the wedding was a way to a)] cover their actions and b] pay the very large crew who got to keep the spoils of the heist (assuming, you know, Wax doesn't kill them all), if I recall correctly. 

 

[Edit: turning by b smiley into an actual b]

Edited September 1, 2015 by Titan Arum

[The Sovereign]

The robbery is a good cover for the Set's true motives: the kidnapping. Up until this heist, all of the robberies were on the train tracks. I imagine, given how they robbed the trains, having a very large crew is critical. At this point, they had a few people on their list they wanted to kidnap and robbing the wedding was a way to a) cover their actions and pay the very large crew who got to keep the spoils of the heist (assuming, you know, Wax doesn't kill them all), if i recall correctly. 

I think it is also important to note that while the robberies were a cover, they were also important. The money and valuables being stolen were needed, it was not simply a front.

[Titan Arum]

I think it is also important to note that while the robberies were a cover, they were also important. The money and valuables being stolen were needed, it was not simply a front.

Yep, that's what I was implying with my sunglasses smiley guy, which was supposed to be a b]. Paying such a large group of thieves must be difficult, so let them keep the spoils of the heist while the Set gets what it wants with the kidnappings. 

[Islington]

I figured they were trying to breed a mistborn. Play the longer game. 

[Titan Arum]

I figured they were trying to breed a mistborn. Play the longer game. 

The problem with breeding a mistborn is that it could take generations to do so since there haven't been any for quite some time. It seems that the power has been diluted and, if I recall correctly, The Lord Mistborn was the last one. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) 

 

Thus, it may be easier to "build" a mistborn, the same way TLR did with his Inquisitors. You breed enough misting babies=>spike them=>spike their power into someone else=>mistborn. You could do this in one generation, no problem, if you have enough women of the strongest allomantic lines (aka the line of The Lord Mistborn) paired with a male lineage with strong allomantic history: the Ladrians. 

 

This all assumes that hemalurgy has been rediscovered by The Set, of course, which I'd speculate is the case given the information in the "book" that we already know about. 

[Oudeis]

Well... keep in mind that Inquisitor =/= Mistborn. But yeah, they could make an Inquisitor.

 

I'm not sure that specifically is their goal, so much as just, "get two or three metallic traits ourselves." Maybe a few of them want it all.

[Moogle]

You might be able to speed up the breeding process with Hemalurgy. A child of an Inquisitor has a chance of being an Allomancer, albeit less of a chance than a naturally born Allomancer. Get the father and mother filled with spikes, and you might be able to get a baby Mistborn within a few generations.

 

A breeding program seems like a really long-term plan, though. It seems like the goals of those in the Set would be more selfish, so I find the idea them trying to breed a Mistborn to be somewhat contradictory. You'd think they'd want more of a short-term payoff (hence why I lean towards the Hemalurgy idea - Set members want spikes from a breeding farm or something). Perhaps they plan to raise the Mistborn as a tool? Might explain the third era of Mistborn novels, where apparently there's a Mistborn serial killer. Could be the serial killer escaped from the Set. If they had a Mistborn child, it's unlikely they'd raise it particularly normally...

[Oudeis]

I agree with Moogle.

 

"Give birth to a Mistborn" is one of those comic book, "don't think about it too hard" plans. Logically, it's a goal composed almost entirely of variables. It's a phenomenal amount of effort for like a 10% chance of getting a superhero who will actually do what you say in about 20 years. And that's the best-case scenario which has, like 4% chance of happening.

 

Given what we know, I'm still saying hemalurgy. Or, something we don't yet know. I'm trying to think if there are any clues from any Scadrial (or beyond) book that would make this make ANY more sense. The only thing I can think of is, there's another Inquisitor who wants to be the next Lord Ruler. Suppose that in the Terris Enclaves some full feruchemists are still being born, so he's got a spike for feruchemical atium. Maybe he wants to breed a mistborn, because there are no more seers, and he wants to live forever, AND the Pits of Hathsin are producing atium again, so a mistborn is the only way to get the other half of compounded atium he'll need to live for the next few thousand years.

 

This seems WAY speculative and somewhat derivative, so I don't actually think it's happening. I am open to alternate suggestions.

 

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not saying Inquisitor as in, still around from the Steel Ministry. I'm saying, a person with hemalurgic spikes for most feruchemical and allomantic metals.

Edited September 6, 2015 by Oudeis

[Kaymyth]

I think it's reasonable to point at this juncture that we know a lot more about how Allomancy and Allomantic family lines work than the people in-world.  We know that the power has faded to the point where natural-born Mistborn are all but impossible now, but it doesn't automatically follow that they do.

 

To the Set, it might be perfectly reasonable to assume that if they try and combine the bloodlines descended straight from the Lord Mistborn then there's a shot at getting a Mistborn out of it in a few generations.  Or they could be planning on spiking some of the women/using their offspring for spiking to try and increase the chances of a natural Allomantic line producing a Mistborn.

 

And on the flip side, we don't know why they're trying to do whatever it is they're doing.  Judging by Miles's rant at the end of the book, I think that they might know/believe that something is coming.  Maybe they're aware of the existence of the Southern Scadrians and are preparing for a potential war.  Maybe they're being fed paranoid misinformation from whatever was influencing Miles and/or drove Bloody Tam mad.  Maybe they're just greedy jerks, or even a combination of all of these.

 

We do know one thing about Brandon - his villains are never cut-and-dried evil.  I think that this leaves the door open on Edwarn's motives - what if he believes that he's doing what's necessary to protect the Elendel Basin at large?  He strikes me as an "ends justify the means" sort of person.

[Moogle]

Oh, one thing I just thought of, which is really sort of awful:

 

A Feruchemical atium spike would let the wearer store youth, becoming older. You could really speed up a breeding program with that and some Allomantic bendalloy. I doubt that's the Set's plan in any way (and atium's not generally available), but man there's a lot of things you could do with the Metallic Arts and a lack of moral scruples.

Edited September 6, 2015 by Moogle
f<metal> filter made "an fMetal" into "an Feruchemical"

[Oudeis]

To the Set, it might be perfectly reasonable to assume that if they try and combine the bloodlines descended straight from the Lord Mistborn then there's a shot at getting a Mistborn out of it in a few generations.

 

I mean, sure? But this is a phenomenal investment of resources, and time, and energy, and risk. From people who have shown shrewdness, intelligence, and calculation. I don't personally see (from what admittedly little we know of them) these men going forward with a plan based on assumption and hope. Of course, this doesn't rule out that somehow, someone they trust is lying to them, convincing them of things which will turn out not to be true, or some sort of miscalculation on their part.

 

And again... what good does it do even if they manage to raise a Mistborn? One single operative based on the assumption they can "train" him from birth and control him? To do what exactly? It seems like an enormous risk for not very much gain.

 

We do know one thing about Brandon - his villains are never cut-and-dried evil..

 

Ah... so wouldn't it be shocking if this time, they were?!?!

 

Mostly just kidding. But I hop off the hate-wagon for unapologetically evil bad guys, used in moderation. In the Broadway version of the Little Mermaid, there's a song called "Good Times Back" where Ursula sings and it's... glorious. She's evil. She knows it. She owns it. She's not some crazy person deluded into doing bad for a greater good, she's not dispassionately convinced that people have the moral authority of whatever power they can take for themselves, she's not a woman who has been hurt and scorned in the past and now has power and has turned lashing out into a lifestyle (omigod Regina from Once Upon a Time, looking right at you, girl). As far as villains go, she's a pretty decent female role model. Own it. Don't accept the underlying assumption that you must have some kind of excuse or have there be something wrong with you to be evil. Let your villain flag fly.

 

"I want to taste their tears. I want to hear their screams. I want that special rush you get from crushing hopes and dreams."

Edited September 6, 2015 by Oudeis

[Islington]

Honestly, the breeding idea was mostly because of how they're taking no men hostages. I feel if they were trying to build a Mistborn, they'd take whatever mistings and ferrings they could get. Of course there could be another reason they only took women; the ransoms could be higher, given the gender roles of the society for instance. But only women made me think a way more sinister direction, I guess, than Hemalurgy. And that's saying something.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Islington

[king of nowhere]

after reading the available chapters of shadows of self, I think

the hemalurgy theory is becoming more likely. it would also make most sense to give powers to one of them. brandon said the present day trilogy would deal with a swat team of allomancers fighting a mistborn assassin, but that mistborn may as well be an hemalurgic construct for all we know.

(P.S. Nothing major in the spoiler, just a name that gets dropped a few times in those chapters)

Edited September 16, 2015 by king of nowhere

[Oudeis]

Nowhere: I have not read past the first half of the first sentence: While I do appreciate that you (just barely) warn of spoilers before saying them, I would appreciate it even more if you could edit your post to put it behind a spoiler tag.

[king of nowhere]

Nowhere: I have not read past the first half of the first sentence: While I do appreciate that you (just barely) warn of spoilers before saying them, I would appreciate it even more if you could edit your post to put it behind a spoiler tag.

sorry, edited.

Although there was nothing really spoilery; i wasn't referencing to anything happening in those chapters, just to some things that were hinted. if I thought I was going to spoiler something  major, I'd have used a spoiler.

[Rockbud]

Given how much I got twisted around reading the first Mistborn books, I'm going to be sceptical of any assumptions I have after just Alloy...

I'm fully expecting plot points to be turned on their heads and wild cards throwing our theories way off.

[Oudeis]

Throwing this out there for the sake of completeness: Miles refers to Marasi as the bastard Lady Harms. This rules out the possibility that they knew she had allomancy but didn't realize she was Lord Harms's daughter, as her official last name is Colms.

 

I fully understand that if they wanted to find out, they could have learned. But again... why bother? There were plenty of women to choose from. Why put the effort into studying this woman's background and learning her secrets, just on the off-chance that it happens to be information you can use? My question isn't how did they find out. My question is, why did they bother? However easy it is, if they didn't already know, did they go through the geneaology of literally every woman in Elendel noble society to see which ones were secretly the by-blows of more allomantically-powerful lines? Learning one woman's secrets is easy. Learning the secret lives of enough women to find out the very, very few pertinent to your own interests, when you're already in a target-rich environment is... why do it, when there's no real gain? Picking a different woman would have been about a million times easier than learning about Marasi alone, however easy that was, let alone the amount of research you'd have to do on random Noble women before even finding the few hiding their blood, and Marasi is no better for their cause than any of a dozen other women at the party.

[Kaymyth]

Throwing this out there for the sake of completeness: Miles refers to Marasi as the bastard Lady Harms. This rules out the possibility that they knew she had allomancy but didn't realize she was Lord Harms's daughter, as her official last name is Colms.

 

I fully understand that if they wanted to find out, they could have learned. But again... why bother? There were plenty of women to choose from. Why put the effort into studying this woman's background and learning her secrets, just on the off-chance that it happens to be information you can use? My question isn't how did they find out. My question is, why did they bother? However easy it is, if they didn't already know, did they go through the geneaology of literally every woman in Elendel noble society to see which ones were secretly the by-blows of more allomantically-powerful lines? Learning one woman's secrets is easy. Learning the secret lives of enough women to find out the very, very few pertinent to your own interests, when you're already in a target-rich environment is... why do it, when there's no real gain? Picking a different woman would have been about a million times easier than learning about Marasi alone, however easy that was, let alone the amount of research you'd have to do on random Noble women before even finding the few hiding their blood, and Marasi is no better for their cause than any of a dozen other women at the party.

 

Unless they were specifically trying to filter for the best targets - women that they believe wouldn't be sought as hard as others.  Marasi's illegitimacy may have actually made her a juicier target, as they might have assumed that she would be "less important" than other women on the list.

 

That wouldn't explain why they went for Steris, but it would explain Marasi.

[Oudeis]

Eh... that feels like a huge stretch. And again, that's a TON of effort. You don't start knowing that there are these four women and if you research them you will discover that they are the people you want. You are told: Here is the pool of literally hundreds of women who are all within the nobility, major or minor (you can't narrow it down by family, of course, because the whole point is you're searching for paternity being other than as reported; you must search literally every woman in all of Noble society). And you have to search them all, to learn which have hidden bloodlines. All so... you can take a woman you assume won't be as actively sought? Despite the fact that her biological father at least dotes on her enough to pay for her eductation and have her live with him? On the same night you're taking a legitimate daughter? Mr. Suit comments that he almost took Steris of the list, implying there were alternates available. They had other options, and they apparently put INSANE effort into finding even more. Why? Marasi was, if anything, a MARGINALLY better option, and even that's questionable.

[Kaymyth]

Eh... that feels like a huge stretch. And again, that's a TON of effort. You don't start knowing that there are these four women and if you research them you will discover that they are the people you want. You are told: Here is the pool of literally hundreds of women who are all within the nobility, major or minor (you can't narrow it down by family, of course, because the whole point is you're searching for paternity being other than as reported; you must search literally every woman in all of Noble society). And you have to search them all, to learn which have hidden bloodlines. All so... you can take a woman you assume won't be as actively sought? Despite the fact that her biological father at least dotes on her enough to pay for her eductation and have her live with him? On the same night you're taking a legitimate daughter? Mr. Suit comments that he almost took Steris of the list, implying there were alternates available. They had other options, and they apparently put INSANE effort into finding even more. Why? Marasi was, if anything, a MARGINALLY better option, and even that's questionable.

 

It's just one option, and assuming that they had to research to know that Marasi was illegitimate.  In a society like that, it's quite conceivable that it was more of an open secret than a real secret.  Scandals like that are juicy; people love to pass on that sort of detail.  Basically, everybody knows, but nobody will say it in front of any of the family, because that would be rude.  Wax didn't know because he was out of the society loop for two decades.

 

So there's also the alternate theory that I put forth earlier, that they had a full list that they were working off of, and the sisters were just the first two on the list that they stumbled onto at the reception.  They were working off of sketches of the women; I can't imagine that each Vanisher had more than two or three pictures that they were looking for.  It might be that they just grabbed the first two matches that they found.  This would go along with the notion that maybe Marasi's parentage isn't as tight a secret as Lord Harms would have preferred.

[Oudeis]

I suppose. I get the impression from the Harms that they, at least, believe the secret has actually been kept, but if the only Noble who doesn't know Marasi's true parentage is Wax, then no other explanation is needed.

 

It just feels more "Sanderson" that there's something there. This is exactly the kind of twist he throws at us. Something that makes sense to us, as the readers, so we don't really question when we see it on the page, but if you stop and think about it, you realize it shouldn't be as widely known as it seems to be... Just a guess, however. Your explanation would plug all the holes.

[Kaymyth]

I suppose. I get the impression from the Harms that they, at least, believe the secret has actually been kept, but if the only Noble who doesn't know Marasi's true parentage is Wax, then no other explanation is needed.

 

It just feels more "Sanderson" that there's something there. This is exactly the kind of twist he throws at us. Something that makes sense to us, as the readers, so we don't really question when we see it on the page, but if you stop and think about it, you realize it shouldn't be as widely known as it seems to be... Just a guess, however. Your explanation would plug all the holes.

 

You could well be right.   But I try not to anticipate the twisty brain of the Sanderson too hard, because I know I'll get it wrong.  So I just try and speculate based on available data.

 

There are a few other obvious factors in there.  Like, why are they taking women and not men?  I'd hazard a guess that it's because the Set perceives women as being easier to overpower.  By the same token, they've probably stricken some names off the list under the auspices of being "too dangerous".  You wouldn't want to kidnap someone who's likely to have pewter in their system and go all Hulk Smash on your people.

[Oudeis]

I guess I was spoiled by the Hero of Ages; that very first epigraph, "I am, unfortunately, the Hero of Ages," just sounded so utterly like Sazed's voice to me, I spent the whole book assuming it was him. I shouldn't be so confident, likely.

 

Common assumption is that the Set are planning to use the women to breed metalborn. Otherwise, if you're only picking them because they'll be easier to overpower than men, what are you actually kidnapping them for? None of them have been ransomed back yet, and there are better ways to make money.