Why are there so few Kandra ?

[Friendshipspren]

Ok so the spikes required for making Kandra are easy to make right. I mean the metals are plentiful and u need to ordinary humans to get them. Not allomancers or feruchemists. Then why are there so few Kandra. I mean , yes they are nonviolent and might have a stigma towards hemalurgy but still I'm sure u could find thousands of poor or unfortunate ppl on the verge of dying  due to trauma , disease ,etc ,who could be euthanized , even as a service to them. Also u could just steal some koloss spikes. Things would have been even easier in era1 following the Lord rulers death and the chaos unleashed in it's wake , I mean ok tlr's death was unexpected and deeply grievous to them and then ruin got released so they had a lot to think about. But even in era2 , where couples like tensoon and MeLaan , gave been in a relationship for centuries u don't see them hankering after children. Seems strange to me . Can anyone give a good reason why this is so ?

Edit : wait MeLaan and tensoon have a dad daughter dynamic. damnation , I didn't know that. I thought they were a couple. But still if tensoon  the gruff old dog could adopt a new Kandra , why don't the other more pg13 ones ? 

Edited July 26, 2019 by PrinceGenocide

[RShara]

Because it still takes two lives to make one kandra. Sazed and the kandra both aren't particularly interested in doing that in order to make more kandra.

[The Sovereign]

@PrinceGenocide in addition to what @RShara said, the Kandra do not want to paint a target on their backs. In their current iteration they are demigods serving Harmony and are revered by the common people. If they started killing people left and right to make new Kandra that goodwill would disappear. I don't think the specifics are there, but the words of founding reference Allomancy controlling the Kandra. If their air of mysticism evaporated and people started viewing them as a detriment I don't think it would be too long before they were being hunted again like they were before the First Contract.

[Quantus]

In Era 1 the Lord Ruler made new generations relatively often, so he had all the Kandra he wanted to have.  Since then, I think a lot of it comes down to Harmony not being a huge fan of Hemalurgy in general.  It's not particualrly hard to make a Kandra, but it take two hemalurgic victims to create the needed blessings, plus the initial Human Victim that needs to be first turned into a Mistwraith with another act of Hemalurgy.  

For what it's worth, any pointy Invested piece of metal can work in place of actual Hemalurgic spikes for a Blessing, so in theory a sufficiently Invested Metalmind should do just as well, but it would still take the initial hemalurgic mutilation of a human to create the required Mistwraith.  

 

 

Quote

 

Questioner

Could Nightblood theoretically be turned into a Hemalurgic spike?

Brandon Sanderson

The problem with that is that Nightblood is already invested, so it depends on your version of ' Hemalurgic spikes'. Piercing someone's body with Invested metal can have weird effects all through the Cosmere, but ripping off a piece of a person's soul using an un-Invested spike to Invest it and create one is different... we're talking about two different things, right. So there's the.... so what is a Hemalurgic spike? For instance if you've got a spike that's Invested and you stick it into a Kandra on Scadrial it will still work as an Invested Hemalurgic spike. Making a new Invested spike by ripping off a person's soul, that's a different process and a little more difficult to accomplish and requires some specialized knowledge.

Barnes & Noble B-Fest 2016 (June 11, 2016)

 

 

[+robardin]

On 7/26/2019 at 10:49 AM, Quantus said:

In Era 1 the Lord Ruler made new generations relatively often, so he had all the Kandra he wanted to have.  Since then, I think a lot of it comes down to Harmony not being a huge fan of Hemalurgy in general.  It's not particualrly hard to make a Kandra, but it take two hemalurgic victims to create the needed blessings, plus the initial Human Victim that needs to be first turned into a Mistwraith with another act of Hemalurgy.  

For what it's worth, any pointy Invested piece of metal can work in place of actual Hemalurgic spikes for a Blessing, so in theory a sufficiently Invested Metalmind should do just as well, but it would still take the initial hemalurgic mutilation of a human to create the required Mistwraith.  

I don't know that he made kandra "often" - once every 100 years, wasn't it? That's why the 11th generation were "babies" TenSoon returned to the Homeland in The Hero of Ages.

Mistwraiths were not created from humans via hemalurgy, though; mistwraiths were originally created by the Ascendant Rashek with the power of Preservation, as he transformed all living Feruchemists. I've wondered how he was able to do this, as it seems to be "Ruining" them, and he wasn't able to destroy Kwaan when he refused his offer of immortal kandra-ness like his friends accepted, because it was opposite to the intent of the power - though a WoB states he could have "turned him into a mistwraith anyway", his failed attempt to destroy him left Kwaan as a human, forcing him to hunt him down and kill him the old fashioned away after he de-Ascended.

The hemalurgic "Blessings" restore the missing Connection "blockage" that keep mistwraiths insensate, which is similar to the blockage that kept parshmen in a zombie-like state for generations in Stormlight Archive. (And like those zombie parshmen, mistwraiths were a true-breeding species.) One Blessing gives sentience, and the second one gives one of the four Blessings. (Though in rare cases, a kandra could "stack" another Blessing from another kandra, as TenSoon did with OreSeur's.)

I think the kandra Blessings must need to be created with special Intent to "awaken" a mistwraith, as normally the key to hemalurgy is the knowledge of where to place the spikes at bind points on the target, and what "bind points" are there on a blobby mistwraith? It can't be that any old invested metal counts for hemalurgy, and it can't even be that any old hemalurgic spike could count as a Blessing, otherwise the kandra could re-use old Inquisitor spikes (which they must have a number of) to create new kandra.

That is, if mistwraiths survived the Catacendre. (Though I guess if mistwraiths "bred true" that means so would kandra, except their offspring would be mindless mistwraiths without additional Blessings, which probably seems pretty horrible to them.)

[+Harrycrapper]

On 7/26/2019 at 0:58 AM, PrinceGenocide said:

Ok so the spikes required for making Kandra are easy to make right. I mean the metals are plentiful and u need to ordinary humans to get them. Not allomancers or feruchemists. Then why are there so few Kandra. I mean , yes they are nonviolent and might have a stigma towards hemalurgy but still I'm sure u could find thousands of poor or unfortunate ppl on the verge of dying  due to trauma , disease ,etc ,who could be euthanized , even as a service to them. Also u could just steal some koloss spikes. Things would have been even easier in era1 following the Lord rulers death and the chaos unleashed in it's wake , I mean ok tlr's death was unexpected and deeply grievous to them and then ruin got released so they had a lot to think about. But even in era2 , where couples like tensoon and MeLaan , gave been in a relationship for centuries u don't see them hankering after children. Seems strange to me . Can anyone give a good reason why this is so ?

Edit : wait MeLaan and tensoon have a dad daughter dynamic. damnation , I didn't know that. I thought they were a couple. But still if tensoon  the gruff old dog could adopt a new Kandra , why don't the other more pg13 ones ? 

Koloss spikes are not the same as Kandra spikes. They are both made using normal humans but remember seeing somewhere that Kandra can't use Koloss spikes and vice versa. Also, I believe MeLaan says that even if they wanted to make new spikes, TLR never showed them how to make them. 

[HeyLookItz]

Quote

33 minutes ago, robardin said:

 

That is, if mistwraiths survived the Catacendre. 

 

This seems like the most likely explanation to me. Mistwraiths just died out in the Catacendre, so the kandra don't have anything to transform to make more of themselves.

(Sorry about the double quotes above; I'm on my phone and couldn't figure them out)

[Wandering Investor]

On 7/30/2019 at 0:54 PM, robardin said:

I've wondered how he was able to do this, as it seems to be "Ruining" them, and he wasn't able to destroy Kwaan when he refused his offer of immortal kandra-ness like his friends accepted

It could be argued that this was more changing than ruining. Definitely toeing the line, but by that point he was more skilled in the power, and there was less of it.

Also, I'm unaware of any evidence of Kwaan not becoming a mistwraith, where did you read this? Never mind, I found it, not sure how I didn't know that.

Edited August 1, 2019 by Wandering Investor

[+robardin]

12 hours ago, Wandering Investor said:

It could be argued that this was more changing than ruining. Definitely toeing the line, but by that point he was more skilled in the power, and there was less of it.

Also, I'm unaware of any evidence of Kwaan not becoming a mistwraith, where did you read this? Never mind, I found it, not sure how I didn't know that.

One way it counts as "Preservation" is based on the fact that mistwraiths are functionally immortal. (I assume they are, just like kandra are, being as they're physically the same, the Blessings functioning as cognitive unblockers). And you can't get more "Preservation" than that.

[Quantus]

On 7/30/2019 at 1:54 PM, robardin said:

I don't know that he made kandra "often" - once every 100 years, wasn't it? That's why the 11th generation were "babies" TenSoon returned to the Homeland in The Hero of Ages.

Mistwraiths were not created from humans via hemalurgy, though; mistwraiths were originally created by the Ascendant Rashek with the power of Preservation, as he transformed all living Feruchemists. I've wondered how he was able to do this, as it seems to be "Ruining" them, and he wasn't able to destroy Kwaan when he refused his offer of immortal kandra-ness like his friends accepted, because it was opposite to the intent of the power - though a WoB states he could have "turned him into a mistwraith anyway", his failed attempt to destroy him left Kwaan as a human, forcing him to hunt him down and kill him the old fashioned away after he de-Ascended.

I think the assumption that was most influncing my stance was the belief that the Mistwraiths were entirely finite in number, created by the Lord Ruler.  If they can actually breed it would 

On 7/30/2019 at 1:54 PM, robardin said:

I think the kandra Blessings must need to be created with special Intent to "awaken" a mistwraith, as normally the key to hemalurgy is the knowledge of where to place the spikes at bind points on the target, and what "bind points" are there on a blobby mistwraith? It can't be that any old invested metal counts for hemalurgy, and it can't even be that any old hemalurgic spike could count as a Blessing, otherwise the kandra could re-use old Inquisitor spikes (which they must have a number of) to create new kandra.

 

"Any old piece of Invested Metal" doesnt count for Hemalurgy, but per the WOB I posted it does count specifically for Blessings, and would be sufficient for a Kandra.  I know it doesnt seem to entirely match Scadrial's in-world lore, but there you have it.  Best guess is that this is just another example of the Lord Ruler's misinformation campaign.