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When will cats enter the Cosmere?


Ripheus23

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Cats existed on Scadrial even during the Final Empire, without needing Sazed's restoration of lost things during his Ascension.

In the original trilogy (Era 1), Vin is described several times as "catlike"; Elend even straight up said to her face in Hero of Ages (Ch. 28) as they decided to crash a ball Yomen was having in Fadrex City, "You’re like some strange mixture of a noblewoman, a street urchin, and a cat."

Later in Era 2, in Ch. 16 of Shadows of Self, we see an actual living cat as Wax reflects on the unrest he's seen while walking the streets of Elendel:

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He’d overheard anger at the government. Vitriol for the Pathians. Those complaints were bad enough, but mixed with them was a more disturbing trend. Anger, but with no focus. General discontent. The grumbling of men over their beers, of youths out on the street throwing rocks at cats. Hiding amid it all was a murderer, like a lion in the grass.

And then in Ch. 18, as Wax flies through the city after confronting his uncle Edwarn:

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He landed on a rooftop overlooking the vast glowing carpet of lights before him. A cat watched him from a nearby flower box, its eyes alight. Below was another row of pubs. Loud, raucous. ...

He leaped away into the night, frightening the cat. He soared high in a long arc, trying to get far enough away that he couldn’t hear the men shouting drunkenly in the row of pubs.

They're common enough for albinism to occur: in Ch. 15 of Bands of Mourning, when Wayne impersonates "Death" to terrorize Templeton Fig, the latter is engaged in his hobby of albino taxidermy, in the form of a white crow, thinking to himself:

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Such a magnificent creature. People always found it striking, as its coloring was the opposite of what they expected. Things like cats and dogs sometimes had white coloring naturally, and so his albino specimens of those weren’t as spectacular.

EDIT: cats evidently exist on Sel, too. In Elantris Ch. 36, Hrathen's inner dialogue likens his recovery from his faked Shaod to being "like a cat allowing its prey to run free one last time before striking a deadly blow." And in The Emperor's Soul, when Shai first enters the room where Frava and Gaotona will commission her work: "Both fell silent as Shai entered. They eyed her as if she were a cat that had just knocked over a fine vase."

Edited by robardin
Added Sel examples
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30 minutes ago, RShara said:

Brandon's said that almost everything that exists on Earth exists on Scadrial, so Scadrial should have cats.

Seems they do?!

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Badger (paraphrased)

Does Marsh like cats?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

He's more of a dog person (but fairly neutral towards cats). Kelsier is a cat person. Brandon himself is a cat person (he has a cat).

source

OMFG someone actually got a WoB about this question :P

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Questioner

Are there cats anywhere in the cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes there are cats in the cosmere. There are lions in Mistborn, and have been mentioned numerous times, so you can assume, extrapolation, that there are also cats in the worlds somewhere. Scadrial, the Mistborn world... is my Earth analogue. When I was designing I'm like, I'm gonna design this one in such a way that I can-- because I knew I was going to be doing 1900's fiction, and 1980's fiction, I wanted it to have some sort of parallel societal evolution and so I put in a lot of parallel cultural things, and things like that. So you can make an assumption that, unless I say otherwise, on Scadrial they have basic Earth ecology, particularly now after events that I can't talk about because they're spoilers.

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Edited by Ripheus23
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Brandon has answered this specific question, as it turns out.

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Questioner

Are there cats anywhere in the cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes there are cats in the cosmere. There are lions in Mistborn, and have been mentioned numerous times, so you can assume, extrapolation, that there are also cats in the worlds somewhere. Scadrial, the Mistborn world... is my Earth analogue. When I was designing I'm like, I'm gonna design this one in such a way that I can-- because I knew I was going to be doing 1900's fiction, and 1980's fiction, I wanted it to have some sort of parallel societal evolution and so I put in a lot of parallel cultural things, and things like that. So you can make an assumption that, unless I say otherwise, on Scadrial they have basic Earth ecology, particularly now after events that I can't talk about because they're spoilers.

Edit: Ninja'd

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