D'naa as a seed character.

[Turin Turambar]

Does anyone else see parts of D'naa in both Shallan and even more in Vin? (Especially in Vin - they both are described similarly.)

[Weltall]

Her influencing Vin seems fairly likely since she's a Magical Ninja while Vin's a Magical Assassin (more or less) and they are described similarly. And we know that various bits of Aether were cannibalized into Mistborn already so it wouldn't surprise me if Brandon consciously or unconsciously drew on D'Naa after he'd decided to make the switch from Vin being a boy to Vin being a girl.

I'm not sure about Shallan so much but Wyndle and the Cultivationspren generally do seem like they might have taken a few cues from Verdant and by extension Lift and other Edgedancers have some slight similarities in what they can do.

[+Oltux72]

On 5/27/2019 at 3:55 AM, Turin Turambar said:

Does anyone else see parts of D'naa in both Shallan and even more in Vin? (Especially in Vin - they both are described similarly.)

Siri & Vivenna even more. The country girls going into the big city. A very close copy.
The young female protagonist going onto a journey to discover power looks like a repeated trope.

[dbulick]

This was something that Sanderson tried multiple times before it was good enough for his expectations.  This trope was in Aether, Warbreaker, and another unpublished book Mythwalker.  He probably did it best in Warbreaker, but I didn't hate D'Naa as a character.

[Weltall]

Given that Vivenna and Siri were transplanted from Mythwalker, I'm not terribly surprised that he reused the trope. He just shuffled things around a bit and in the process made the former a much better character. Well, we don't know how Mythwalker!Vivenna would have ultimately developed but given how things were moving before Brandon called it quits, it probably wasn't going to be anywhere near as good and the whole 'coming into her power' thing didn't really work with her Mythwalker magic anyways.

This makes me wonder, given that Brandon wants to rewrite Aether of Night now, what would he do with D'Naa now that a lot of her traits were recycled into other characters? I could see him changing her aether so that she's less similar to Vin and Lift. We know he was working on another work either set in the same world or at least using the same underpinnings and Syl originally came from it, so he had plans for more than the six aethers that we saw. Making her non-Invested at first and discovering on her own that it's possible for non-Aedin to bond could be another way of making things more interesting.