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The Ice Death [BoM spoilers]


natc

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If I tagged it wrong can someone fix it? Never done this before.

So it seems the Southern guys have . . . strange temperature tolerance. They were meant to be a control group of sorts, as I recall. And to them everything is now cold and was mild before, while to the North everything back then was stuffy hot without the ash and physiology changes and the weather is now nice.

Any thoughts on the matter? Did they just adapt to the temperature naturally before and have trouble readapting, or is something about their continent just weird?

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In order for the Final Empire to be less smoking hot, Scadrial was pulled back/shifted, which made the Final Empire all nice and livable, the southern pole was also cooled, changing from pretty toasty without the Ashmounts, to frozen, like our poles. I don't think that they live on the absolute pole, but close enough that the got some Icy death served to them when Saze decided to return Scadrial to its originale position.

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Allik does seem cold even before they got to the mountains though, so it seems like even at "normal" temperature it's still a bit chilly.

It's probably true that they lived within the Antarctic region to account for the "frozen" imagery, but how were they alive before? The ash would stray to magnetic south instead of geographic south, and that would be opposite to the Well instead of anywhere near the axis, and frankly they can't breathe an ashy atmosphere like Empire-dwellers can anyway. Seems like the Antarctic would still be pretty toasty . . . unless Rashek got lucky and landed an orbital distance for Scadrial that makes the Antarctic feel normal.

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The epilogue specifically mentions that the southerners "had frozen in what most men would consider only mildly cold weather." There was also no mention of snow or ice there. So I don't think the south pole is actually frozen like our poles.

 

I suspect TLR may have genetically altered the southerners to be accustomed to blazing heat. Nope, see edit! I know there's a WoB about how TLR viewed the southerners as kind of a "back-up plan" or something but I can't find it and check exactly what it said because something seems to be wrong with the interview database...

 

EDIT: managed to use google cache to find the WoB I was thinking of:

 

In fact, he placed them there as a reserve. I knew he wanted a 'control' group of people in case his changes to genetics ended with the race being in serious trouble. All I'll say is that he found a way other than changing them genetically to help them survive in the world he created.

 

So it's not genetics but it still sounds to me like they lived in extremely hot temperatures during the millenium of the Final Empire.

Edited by Jess
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The epilogue specifically mentions that the southerners "had frozen in what most men would consider only mildly cold weather." There was also no mention of snow or ice there. So I don't think the south pole is actually frozen like our poles.

I suspect TLR may have genetically altered the southerners to be accustomed to blazing heat. Nope, see edit! I know there's a WoB about how TLR viewed the southerners as kind of a "back-up plan" or something but I can't find it and check exactly what it said because something seems to be wrong with the interview database...

EDIT: managed to use google cache to find the WoB I was thinking of:

So it's not genetics but it still sounds to me like they lived in extremely hot temperatures during the millenium of the Final Empire.

Good point.

So they somehow just . . . got used to the blazing heat over generations, like a people would eventually be fine with high altitude or desert temperature? And the change back to mild was too much to handle for them, so mysterious spike-eyed Sovereign gave them feruchemical brass?

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Didn't the Lord Ruler modify humans for high temperature when he got all divine the first time and accidentally stuck Scadrial too close to the sun?

I thought Sazed changed all humans back to what they were before the Ascension.

 

TLR modified the north Scadrians to be able to survive ashfall, and to be able to subsist on the less-nutritious brown plants (and yes, Sazed reversed these changes), but WoB I quoted explicitly states that TLR never geneticaly modified the south Scadrians in the first place.

 

Good point.

So they somehow just . . . got used to the blazing heat over generations, like a people would eventually be fine with high altitude or desert temperature? And the change back to mild was too much to handle for them, so mysterious spike-eyed Sovereign gave them feruchemical brass?

 

I think there was probably more to it than that. For one thing, a thousand years doesn't seem nearly long enough for that kind of evolution/adaptation. For another, if that was the case, what would stop them from getting used to the mild colder temperatures the same way? And last but not least, the WoB I quoted makes it sounds like TLR actively did something that let them survive. Built underground shelters for them maybe? That could have even been the inspiration for the shelters he built in the Final Empire. But somehow I suspect the answer is not that simple.

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The temperature straight up shifting instantly and they seemed to be dying on the spot. Then for the next three centuries they had brassminds and had no reason to acclimate.

But yes, he probably did something. But not to their bodies, and the temperature seemed to genuinely have been much higher.

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I was wondering if the masks might have something to do with it, it's probably just a cultural thing but the only thing I can think of that TLR could have done is either alter their environment or do something with the masks.

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Urgh, I don't have my book with me otherwise I could pull off the exact quote but I believe Suit said something along the lines of "They are barely human, did he ever tell you what is inside of him...." before being cut off. 

If they weren't changed genetically, perhaps they were changed spiritually? As in with spikes or something else? 

I'm not exactly sure what Suits was referring to but I wouldn't be surprised if it was related to the cold intolerance. 

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Urgh, I don't have my book with me otherwise I could pull off the exact quote but I believe Suit said something along the lines of "They are barely human, did he ever tell you what is inside of him...." before being cut off. 

If they weren't changed genetically, perhaps they were changed spiritually? As in with spikes or something else? 

I'm not exactly sure what Suits was referring to but I wouldn't be surprised if it was related to the cold intolerance.

" They're barely men. They must hide their-"

I think he was just talking about their masks. Saying they weren't really men because they hide their faces behind masks. But it could just be trying to throw us off the trail that they were spiritually altered.

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Do we even know if the Basin is where the FInal Empire was, geographically? We knew that during the thousand years of ash only the poles were habitable because everything else was too hot. Then during the Final Ascension Harmony put the planet back in its old place. Maybe that meant the poles became frigid again and Harmony moved all the people in TLR's caches to the temperate zones and created the Elendel Basin there, but he didn't move the Southerners (for whatever reason) and that's why they started freezing?

 

This doesn't explain the "froze in temperatures a normal person would find mildly cold" line at all though but it does explain the "340 years ago everything froze" thing: the south pole instantly reverted from being that of a close-sun planet to one in a more habitable zone and ironically became LESS habitable as a result.  

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Luthadel was the magnetic north pole, because the Well was the magnetic north pole of the planet, and the ash was drawn to that. Actual north was a complete different direction entirely. With that said, the southern people shouldn't be able to survive in a similar World of Ash without some sort aid, which is odd. But away from the magnetic poles everything should literally be dead.

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" They're barely men. They must hide their-"

I think he was just talking about their masks. Saying they weren't really men because they hide their faces behind masks. But it could just be trying to throw us off the trail that they were spiritually altered.

I'm actually under the impression they're half, or at least, part machine. It would explain their dependence on the heat discs in the cold..

Or not

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Do we even know if the Basin is where the FInal Empire was, geographically? We knew that during the thousand years of ash only the poles were habitable because everything else was too hot. Then during the Final Ascension Harmony put the planet back in its old place. Maybe that meant the poles became frigid again and Harmony moved all the people in TLR's caches to the temperate zones and created the Elendel Basin there, but he didn't move the Southerners (for whatever reason) and that's why they started freezing?

 

This doesn't explain the "froze in temperatures a normal person would find mildly cold" line at all though but it does explain the "340 years ago everything froze" thing: the south pole instantly reverted from being that of a close-sun planet to one in a more habitable zone and ironically became LESS habitable as a result.  

 

 I still don't understand why Sazed left them there to freeze but gave everyone else the cushy Basin to live in. Maybe he copied TLR's plan of a backup but I find it unlikely.

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Here's my current theory about why Southern Scadrial froze when Sazed remade the world, why he didn't unfreeze it, and why Southerners have trouble with heat even in "normal" temperatures.

I think that during his Ascension, Rashek learned about the nature of ettmetal. When he moved Scadrial too close to the sun, he knew that one possible solution was to use all the ettmetal in Scadrial to mimic Feruchemical heat storage (ettmetal's behavior when interacting with Feruchemy was not explored in BoM, but I'm speculating that a Feruchemist could make ettmetal store a specific attribute). However, I think Rashek saw major issues with implementing a planet-wide ettmetal-based Heat-absorbing system. For one, Investing the planet to become supernaturally colder than it should be might affect the people Connected to it in adverse ways, e.g. they might be less capable of feeling Heat than normal people if placed in a normal environment. Or perhaps Investing the whole planet with so much Feruchemical Heat for more than a thousand years just wasn't a good idea.

So Rashek chose his Ashmount-based heat control system instead, complete with the genetic modifications he made on the Northerners. But as Brandon said before, Rashek wanted a backup plan, and that was the Southerners:
 

No, they're not dead. Yes, Rashek was aware of them. In fact, he placed them there as a reserve. I knew he wanted a 'control' group of people in case his changes to genetics ended with the race being in serious trouble. All I'll say is that he found a way other than changing them genetically to help them survive in the world he created.


My theory is that Rashek's way of helping the Southerners survive was by utilizing the ettmetal in that small part of the planet the way I described above, storing the extra heat from the sun. Even if Scadrial's orbit was never fixed, the Southerners would at least be able to live comfortably until the ettmetal stores in their part of the world eventually stops absorbing Heat.

The problem was that they were only ever meant to be backup. Rashek fully intended to take up the power of the Well again after 1024 years and fix Scadrial's orbit one way or another. After that, the Southerners would slowly freeze to death due to their land's heat-absorbing nature, but that was a sacrifice The Lord Ruler was willing to make.

And so when Sazed Ascended and fixed everything for his fellow Northerners, he found to his consternation that the Southern Continent, now "free" from the extreme heat of the sun, was starting to freeze. The ettmetal sources in their lands were still siphoning off Heat even when it was no longer needed. And the Southerners, being less capable of adapting to the cold as the Northerners, began their ten year population decline until the Sovereign arrived to help them survive.




But why didn't Sazed save them himself? Here's the next part of my theory: Ettmetal is the one Scadrian substance that Sazed cannot manipulate, because ettmetal is the physical representation of the very force that prevents Sazed from being too active, the force that binds Harmony's hands, the force that is Harmony itself. In other words, ettmetal is harmonium.

How could Harmony's god metal exist even before Sazed Ascended? Allik gave us a clue:
 

“Ruin and Preservation,” she said. “The old Terris gods. They’re one now. Harmony.”
No, they were always one,” Allik said. “And always apart. Very odd, very complex...

 

The Shards of Ruin and Preservation have often been described as perfect opposites, and harmony is the balance of opposites. I wouldn't be surprised if ettmetal/harmonium existed even before the Shattering, as a manifestation of the balance of opposites within Adonalsium.

Just like aluminum, I believe ettmetal is another "natural" substance (perhaps lithium, as others have said) that has a special relationship with Investiture. Ettmetal even has the opposite effect as aluminum: whereas aluminum blocks Allomancy (among other things), ettmetal copies it (among other things, I bet).

More than a year ago I speculated about harmonium being a real world metal that interacts with the Metallic Arts, works in the opposite way as aluminum, and is used by the Southerners to power their technology. I'm glad to find such a metal in BoM, even though I was wrong about that hypothetical metal's composition and how it is used to activate Allomantic technology.

Edited by skaa
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We really need before-and-after maps of Scadrial.

 

Anyways, we know Luthadel was the magnetic north pole, but my impression is that the Malwish actually did find a way to live toward the equator during the Final Empire's existence and adapted to that.  If Harmony then basically spun the planet's crust to put Luthadel inside the temperate zone, that could shove the Malwish people down toward the geographic south pole, thus freezing them.  A thousand years of heat adaptation wouldn't go away over night unless Sazed deliberately got rid of it, but it doesn't seem that he did.  Did he not recognize them as humans or something?

 

EDIT: ninja'd by Skaa whose theory explains things quite well.

Edited by VoltCruelerz
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Do we even know if the Basin is where the FInal Empire was, geographically?

 

Yes. The location of the Basin can be spotted on the Final Empire map. There is a distinctive peninsula south of Luthadel on the edge of the ocean. Sazed did not do any terraforming.

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We really need before-and-after maps of Scadrial.

 

Anyways, we know Luthadel was the magnetic north pole, but my impression is that the Malwish actually did find a way to live toward the equator during the Final Empire's existence and adapted to that. 

 

Now that air travel is a thing we might get a full map of Scadrial, complete with the South Pole maps.

 

But I do not think that the Malwish and other people of the South live next to the equator.  From what Allik said during his conversation with Marasi, it appeared that during the years of the Final Empire, the South Pole was warm and pleasant.  Now, given their perception of temperature, I am willing to shift it to "extremely hot, but survivable for humans and plants".  

 

 I do not have as an elaborate explanation as skaa does (and I am not certain that ettmetal, whatever it was, was known to them before Sovereign), but I think that the conditions on South Pole was more tolerable than on North Pole due to planetary movement cycles. It must have been cooler there than it would've been on North Pole w/o the ashmounts.  

 

When Sazed shifted Scadrial to a more temperate zone for North Pole, South Pole cooled off by the appropriate number of degrees as well. But w/o ashmounts, this change wound up being more drastic.  I see their climate as now being around -10 - -20 Celcius.  First and foremost, this is an ecological catastrophe - edible plants won't grow at those temperatures, and you can only survive so far on pine nuts. Their only other source of food would've been animals, but animals would also be affected by a sudden shift in climate by 30 or so degrees Celcius.

 

What Sazed was thinking about them at the moment is not clear. I suspect that when Southerners find out about the Catacendre, they are not going to be happy with Lord Harmony.

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emailanimal, on 01 Feb 2016 - 03:03 AM, said:

I do not have as an elaborate explanation as skaa does (and I am not certain that ettmetal, whatever it was, was known to them before Sovereign), but I think that the conditions on South Pole was more tolerable than on North Pole due to planetary movement cycles. It must have been cooler there than it would've been on North Pole w/o the ashmounts.

If the Southern Scadrians were simply in a better position to adapt to Scadrial's new orbit due to their location being favored by planetary movement cycles, there would have been nothing to stop Rashek from moving everyone to that location and establishing his Final Empire there. That's why I think that there was no naturally favorable location at the time, and that the Southerner's survival involved an imperfect magical solution that Rashek was not content with (hence the Ashmounts up north).

Also, the Southerners did not have to know about ettmetal pre-Sovereign for my theory to work; as long as Rashek knew about ettmetal and as long as ettmetal can mimic Feruchemical storage, he could have used that knowledge to keep the Southerners from baking under the hotter sun for a thousand years.

Edited by skaa
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I am with Skaa on this. I believe ettmetal is the solution designed or found  by rashek for southerners to survive. Even if they knew about it, they could not use it in anyway because they did not have allomancers to manipulate it for different uses.

Edited by yafeshan
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Could the Northern Scandrials have a lot more innate investiture in general?  

 

Investiture keeps people healthy and protected from the elements. Since the southern Scadrialites don't have much investiture in their bloodlines, they'd have less innate protection from the elements, i think. 

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