Elantrian Population Upper Limits

[Quantus]

I stumbled across this WOB today. "The number of Elantrians had certain thresholds and upper limits."  My question is Why?  No theories come to mind, so Im curious if you all have any.

 

Quote

 

Questioner

In Elantris, you have this array of people who are essentially gods, immortal, but they appear with absurdly high frequency. How come they basically don't take over the planet?

Brandon Sanderson

...There are a couple reasons for this. One is that magic on Sel is very strongly tied to location, and was even back when the Elantrians were at the height of their power. So, this is a big part of it, location-based magic. Meaning, the further you get from Elantris, the less powerful your magic was, and the Elantrians really didn't like going places where they were not super-powerful. And so this is certainly part of it, and I explored this idea in Warbreaker, where the people who happen to be gods are really aggressive and kind of slowly conquering outward and things like that. It felt right for me in Elantris to be doing it that way.

Questioner

Why can't they just increase their numbers. Because their numbers increase over time?

Brandon Sanderson

...The number of Elantrians had certain thresholds and upper limits, that I haven't described in the books yet.

Oathbringer San Francisco signing (Nov. 15, 2017)

 

 

[+Oltux72]

21 minutes ago, Quantus said:

I stumbled across this WOB today. "The number of Elantrians had certain thresholds and upper limits."  My question is Why?  No theories come to mind, so Im curious if you all have any.

The Aon that is Elantris has a certain strength. Once that is exhausted the increase ends.

[Quantus]

3 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

The Aon that is Elantris has a certain strength. Once that is exhausted the increase ends.

But the Elantrians predate the City itself; they had to get access to and begin studying AonDor to be able to design the city as a Dor Amplifier.  I could see the same idea applying instead the whole Arelon map symbol that Aons are based on, and so the Elatris Rao amplifier being entirely able to increase the limit, but it still doesnt explain why there is a limit in the first place.  

For now all I have is "Shenanigans because it's in the Cognitive and not the Spiritual", but that's more of a hand-wave than a real explanation.  

[+Oltux72]

Just now, Quantus said:

But the Elantrians predate the City itself; they had to get access to and begin studying AonDor to be able to design the city as a Dor Amplifier.

For all we know it also concentrates. In other words full blown Elantrians did not predate Elantris. Some proto-Elantrians who could use some Aons formed out of physical materials existed. They couldn't form Aons out of thin air and lacked the physical attributes. They chose to build Elantris. They turned a limited number of themselves into physical demigods and confined them to Arelon. The rest lost out.

Just now, Quantus said:

  I could see the same idea applying instead the whole Arelon map symbol that Aons are based on, and so the Elatris Rao amplifier being entirely able to increase the limit, but it still doesnt explain why there is a limit in the first place.

Why need there have been a limit before Elantris?

 

[GoWibble]

2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Why need there have been a limit before Elantris?

Because then the Elantrians would have taken over the world with multiple centers like Elantris to focus the power all over the planet (this would probably weaken some of their powers)

[Zapata]

4 minutes ago, GoWibble said:

Because then the Elantrians would have taken over the world with multiple centers like Elantris to focus the power all over the planet (this would probably weaken some of their powers)

Probably not, since AonDor would still be location-dependent, just not as extremely as shown. Making multiple Elantris cities would only work if they were still within the Aonic sphere of influence, although that might grow larger over time in that scenario.

[Honorless]

Well, the 'why' could be because Elantrians are immortal so putting a limit on their population sounds quite reasonable. I wonder if such can be taken as indicative of intelligent design, i.e. that Elantrians were created/designed by Devotion rather than coming into existence after her death.

The 'how' could be through two avenues: the city of Elantris and AonDor itself

A.1) the limit could be coded into the city itself. There were other Aons hidden in the city. They might just be stylistic though

A.2) Elantris wasn't coded with a set limit but the coding itself was limited in how many it could reach

This doesn't seem likely however. Elantrians (for lack of a more accurate term) existed before Elantris. The city shouldn't be able to dictate to the Shaod who to initiate into the magic system

B ) "Narrowed down" to the Investiture system itself. Which Hoid couldn't hack to make himself an Elantrian. Yeah.

So, my theory is that the limit imposed on the number of AonDor users was put there by Devotion herself 

[Quantus]

15 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

For all we know it also concentrates. In other words full blown Elantrians did not predate Elantris. Some proto-Elantrians who could use some Aons formed out of physical materials existed. They couldn't form Aons out of thin air and lacked the physical attributes. They chose to build Elantris. They turned a limited number of themselves into physical demigods and confined them to Arelon. The rest lost out.

Hmm, hadnt considered that, lets chase it for a moment.  As far as we know currently, being an Elantrian is the only way to access AonDor at all. We know from the Annotations that it was built by "the original Elantrians" (so at the very leas the name doesnt come from the City itself).  Now, if the "original Elantrians" that he mentioned as the builders were not Elantrians as we know now (some weaker Proto-elantrian instead), and the modern Elatrians were an Imposed transformation made by the city iteself, I dont really see how it could coopt the entire thing:  The question becomes "Why did the rest lose out", why would that prevent the original template from still manifesting?

Quote

Why need there have been a limit before Elantris?

Best answer I can come up with is for the same reasons that Aons still worked even though the City was broken, or the reason that Aons "tied to ELANTRIS and Arelon, yet would work without them".  If the City is not necessary for Aons or it's users, then shouldnt there still be the occasional Proto-Elantrian?  How would the Amplifier/concentrator of the city make an unlimited thing become a Limited thing? And if they were Limited all along, why?  Because it's the only such example I know of where there is a hard Max of how many users the Magic/shard can support at any given time.  

 

10 hours ago, Honorless said:

Well, the 'why' could be because Elantrians are immortal so putting a limit on their population sounds quite reasonable. I wonder if such can be taken as indicative of intelligent design, i.e. that Elantrians were created/designed by Devotion rather than coming into existence after her death.

[...]

So, my theory is that the limit imposed on the number of AonDor users was put there by Devotion herself 

Not impossible, I dont really see how that could work.  The AonDor is fundamentally based on Aons&Seons, which were literally created by the act of Devotion being Shattered.  For her to have designed the system, she would have had to anticipate Odium, her death and Shattering, AND the fact that he'd shove it all into the Cognitive Realm.  That seems like a whole lot of Foresight to have still been killed.  

Edited February 4, 2020 by Quantus

[+Oltux72]

6 minutes ago, Quantus said:

Hmm, hadnt considered that, lets chase it for a moment.  As far as we know currently, being an Elantrian is the only way to access AonDor at all.

That cannot be the original state. It would have ruled out starting Elantris.

6 minutes ago, Quantus said:

We know from the Annotations that it was built by "the original Elantrians" (so at the very leas the name doesnt come from the City itself).  Now, if the "original Elantrians" that he mentioned as the builders were not Elantrians as we know now (some weaker Proto-elantrian instead), and the modern Elatrians were an Imposed transformation made by the city iteself,

Possibly the group that build Elantris was totally converted into Elantrians.

6 minutes ago, Quantus said:

I dont really see how it could coopt the entire thing:  The question becomes "Why did the rest lose out", why would that prevent the original template from still manifesting?

Elantris changes the way you can access the Dor. At a minimum it gives vitality and immortality. Why, if it can change proto-AonDor couldn't it also break proto-AonDor or its users?

6 minutes ago, Quantus said:

Best answer I can come up with is for the same reasons that Aons still worked even though the City was broken, or the reason that Aons "tied to ELANTRIS and Arelon, yet would work without them".  If the City is not necessary for Aons or it's users, then shouldnt there still be the occasional Proto-Elantrian?

Presumably if you really destroyed Elantris totally they would arise again. Elantris was broken and stopped functioning correctly, but not altogether. It very much still had an undesirable effect.

6 minutes ago, Quantus said:

  How would the Amplifier/concentrator of the city make an unlimited thing become a Limited thing?

Strictly speaking it didn't. It changed the access mode. Proto-AonDor stopped working. And the transformation into Elantrians was nummerically limited from the very start by the effectiveness of Elantris. I suppose if you enlarged the city, you could make more Elantrians.

 

[Honorless]

How much could a magic change at their Shard's death? As per Brandon the answer varies widely depending on the circumstances (see eg of Allomancy & Returning for two very different Investiture phenomena that would remain relatively unchanged). I'm suggesting a proto AonDor, since the Selish magics seem to be focused on forms & coding, without the element of region lock. The proto Aons might not have been in the shape they are now either (i.e. the shape of Arelon)

[Quantus]

33 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

That cannot be the original state. It would have ruled out starting Elantris.

Possibly the group that build Elantris was totally converted into Elantrians.

I think you getting stuck on a semantic issue. Regardless of what they may have been called, per WOB there existed "Original Elantrians" that predate the city and who built it, who were actively using and studying AonDor, and thus who did not require the city for their access to the magic.  At some point the city was abandoned by it's builders and rediscovered by the more modern Aonic peoples (my best guess is that the Originals all migrated to Ire).

33 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

Elantris changes the way you can access the Dor. At a minimum it gives vitality and immortality. Why, if it can change proto-AonDor couldn't it also break proto-AonDor or its users?

That's precisely my point, all Elantris the City does is amplify the effect of AonDor by virtue of all the spells cast there big in close proximity to a massive Rao amplifier Aon.  It's not supposed to be th

33 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

Presumably if you really destroyed Elantris totally they would arise again. Elantris was broken and stopped functioning correctly, but not altogether. It very much still had an undesirable effect.

Elantris didnt break, Arelon (literally) broke, which made Elantris no longer longer functional as it should have.  But that's just another side of the same "What" without a "Why" that I am looking for: When the city become a Non-Aon, why did that prevent things from going back to the way they apparently were before the city was Built?  Once it stopped being a correctly drawn Aon, the city should have returned to just being Architecture, rather than causing the...blockage issue (for lack of a better description) that caused the Reod.

33 minutes ago, Oltux72 said:

Strictly speaking it didn't. It changed the access mode. Proto-AonDor stopped working. And the transformation into Elantrians was nummerically limited from the very start by the effectiveness of Elantris. I suppose if you enlarged the city, you could make more Elantrians.

So you are saying that the creation of the city Fundamentally Altered the Magic System?  That is still a big ol' Why?  So far even the Vessels Death (itself) doesnt accomplish that, the only thing that will is a conscious Change imposed by the vessel, and being that Preservation/Harmony has done it a few times at least but cant think of other examples, it might be something only the planet's Creator(s) can do, not just a resident Shard.  

13 minutes ago, Honorless said:

How much could a magic change at their Shard's death? As per Brandon the answer varies widely depending on the circumstances (see eg of Allomancy & Returning for two very different Investiture phenomena that would remain relatively unchanged). I'm suggesting a proto AonDor, since the Selish magics seem to be focused on forms & coding, without the element of region lock. The proto Aons might not have been in the shape they are now either (i.e. the shape of Arelon)

The vessel Dying doesnt necessarily change it, but the Shards Investiture being yanked out of the Spiritual Realm and shoved into the Cognitive Realm does; Sel is specifically the other end of the bell curve you are talking about. 

[+Oltux72]

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

I think you getting stuck on a semantic issue. Regardless of what they may have been called, per WOB there existed "Original Elantrians" that predate the city and who built it, who were actively using and studying AonDor, and thus who did not require the city for their access to the magic.

Yes. But they lacked the abilities of Elantrians. (Immortality, vitality, immaterial Aons). All other Selish magic is open to everybody of the right nationality and requires physical patterns.

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

That's precisely my point, all Elantris the City does is amplify the effect of AonDor by virtue of all the spells cast there big in close proximity to a massive Rao amplifier Aon.  It's not supposed to be th

That I consider a dubious assumption. Clearly Elantris amplifies. But that is no proof that that is all it does.

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

Elantris didnt break, Arelon (literally) broke, which made Elantris no longer longer functional as it should have.

But it did not make it wholly unfunctional. It still caused the Reod. The original state did not return because Elantris was not returned to the original state of not existing. It was in between.

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

  But that's just another side of the same "What" without a "Why" that I am looking for: When the city become a Non-Aon,

It didn't. It became a malfunctioning Aon.

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

why did that prevent things from going back to the way they apparently were before the city was Built?  Once it stopped being a correctly drawn Aon, the city should have returned to just being Architecture, rather than causing the...blockage issue (for lack of a better description) that caused the Reod.

There is a small tolerance between perfectly working, badly working, wrongly working and failing Aons.

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

So you are saying that the creation of the city Fundamentally Altered the Magic System?

Altered yes. Fundamentally is a matter of opinion. The Aons stayed the same. The conditions of access to the Dor changed. Every other Selish magic is open to everybody of the right nationality.

 

[Honorless]

On 2/4/2020 at 8:49 PM, Quantus said:

The vessel Dying doesnt necessarily change it, but the Shards Investiture being yanked out of the Spiritual Realm and shoved into the Cognitive Realm does; Sel is specifically the other end of the bell curve you are talking about. 

Agreed that it should change with such a drastic event but why would it need to change the part where the magic is utilized via symbols? The change caused by shoving Devotion & Dominion into the Cognitive Realm is that the magics got region-locked due to the Cognitive Realm distinguishing between such. Even so, Selish magics being unavailable outside of Sel seems much more a direct result of that than region-focused magic, which was probably based on the Cognitive Realm itself being affected by people's perception of being different from other groups than anything fundamental about having a Shard hanging around in the Cognitive. I'm arguing that the problem got exacerbated with their Splintering rather than being created with it

Edited February 9, 2020 by Honorless
italicized for clarity

[Quantus]

1 hour ago, Oltux72 said:

Yes. But they lacked the abilities of Elantrians. (Immortality, vitality, immaterial Aons). All other Selish magic is open to everybody of the right nationality and requires physical patterns.

That I consider a dubious assumption. Clearly Elantris amplifies. But that is no proof that that is all it does.

You keep coming back to this, whichis more the dubious assumpion in my eyes.  As far as I know we have zero information about them beyond confirmation that they used Aons and that they built the City, and that "Elantrians" is a label that applies to them.  What evidence is there that they were any different than modern Elantrians, let alone lacking in those specific ways?

 

 

[+Oltux72]

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

You keep coming back to this, whichis more the dubious assumpion in my eyes.

We know:

1. A botched Aon can cause something very like the Reod
2. The Reod took toddlers even a decade after Elantris fell
3. Fixing Elantris turned the Reod into the Shaod immediately
4. Breaking Elantris turned the Shaod into the Reod immediately, but only if you were close enough

Assuming that Elantris totally ceased to function, what turned people into zombies? A natural consequence of AonDor? That sounds like quite extraordinary a proposal, as pre-Elantris Arelon would have been full of zombies. (2) seems to rule out that we are dealing with a delayed action. If it is something else, why does it keep working?

If that is not the case, what other options exists but a malfunctioning Elantris causing the transformation?

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

  As far as I know we have zero information about them beyond confirmation that they used Aons and that they built the City,

Well, they did not build the city for fun, so it must have enanced them in some way. If they were immortal, where are they?

 

[Quantus]

1 hour ago, Oltux72 said:

We know:

1. A botched Aon can cause something very like the Reod
2. The Reod took toddlers even a decade after Elantris fell
3. Fixing Elantris turned the Reod into the Shaod immediately
4. Breaking Elantris turned the Shaod into the Reod immediately, but only if you were close enough

Assuming that Elantris totally ceased to function, what turned people into zombies? A natural consequence of AonDor? That sounds like quite extraordinary a proposal, as pre-Elantris Arelon would have been full of zombies. (2) seems to rule out that we are dealing with a delayed action. If it is something else, why does it keep working?

If that is not the case, what other options exists but a malfunctioning Elantris causing the transformation?

Well, they did not build the city for fun, so it must have enanced them in some way. If they were immortal, where are they?

 

I still dont have an answer for why a broken city broke all Elantrians if Elantrians predate the city, which they do per WOB.  That's another puzzle that doesnt make sense to me, which I hope this discussion will inform on. 

 

But that's not what I was asking you about. I was asking what evidence you have that the original Elantrians that built the city were lacking in the specific traits you ststed. If we had evidence that they were different in any way than the modern ones that would go a long way to answering my question and proving your theory, so I am very curious; that would be fantastic new information.

[Honorless]

15 hours ago, Quantus said:

Quote

The Surges were very much a part of the Rosharan system before the Shards' arrival, weren't they?

Not that we know of.  The Highstorm, the investiture Cycle, and Stormlight in Gems all predate the Shards (and the Shattering of Adonalsium, for that matter).  But also, Roshar is its own corner case, since it was intensionally created by adonalsium for some purpose, and currently has unnatural processes that will eventually wind down (fractal continent, unnatural planetary orbits).  If I recall correctly the Ashyn magic was supposed to be based on some form of Surges, but I was pretty sure they werent the same 10

Hmm, the last part, why?

Edited February 5, 2020 by Honorless

[NameIess]

4 hours ago, Quantus said:

I still dont have an answer for why a broken city broke all Elantrians if Elantrians predate the city, which they do per WOB.  That's another puzzle that doesnt make sense to me, which I hope this discussion will inform on. 

We know that the city of Elantris acted as an amplifier for the Elantrians, that it breaking caused the Reod, that a messed up Aon could cause a similar Reod-like effect, and that there were Elantrians before Elantris. So a simple solution would be that the pre-Elantris Elantrians built Elantris to give themselves power, amplifying all who become Elantrians, creating a much more marked change in them (IE glowing silver-haired practically unkillable gods). Then when the Reod happened, Elantris still attempted to boost the Elantrians, but it lacked the energy to do so, and thus created the incomplete transformation we saw in the book.

[ftl]

It could be that a new elantrian only appears when a previous one dies. As if there's some bit of investiture that leaves on death and finds a new host.

It's possible that while Devotion and Dominion were alive they manually chose Elantrians, but once they were killed the number remained static at whatever it was when the splintering was done.

(By analogy to other magic systems... in Stormlight Archive, you could easily achieve a limit on a radiant order by only having a limited number of Spren of that type exist. Like Bondsmiths. In Warbreaker, returned are those with Divine Breaths; if there were a fixed number of Divine Breaths, that would limit number of Returned. Maybe the mechanism is something like one of those.)

The limit makes Post-Reod Elantris even more horrifying - if Arelon had only treated the Elantrians well and kept them comfortable, instead of leaving them to brutally murder each other in a walled hellhole, they would have lost far fewer to the Shaod, because fewer would have died!

[+Oltux72]

13 hours ago, Quantus said:

I still dont have an answer for why a broken city broke all Elantrians if Elantrians predate the city, which they do per WOB.  That's another puzzle that doesnt make sense to me, which I hope this discussion will inform on.

I think you are misinterpreting Brandon. The "original Elantrians" predate Elantris. But they became Elantrians in the modern sense by building Elantris.

[Honorless]

@Quantus?

[Quantus]

On 2/4/2020 at 8:31 PM, Honorless said:

Hmm, the last part, why?

28 minutes ago, Honorless said:

@Quantus?

I remember replying to this, but the conversation has been scrambled across multiple threads so I have know idea where it landed. 

 

To your question, in looking for it I wasnt able to find anything to support the idea, so scrap that idea.  I think it came from how the Stormfather said that the heralds where the first of their powers and all the names and organizations came later.  But that's buried in the spren/radiant perspective, and those early Dawnshard scraps sure imply that the Singers were already aware of Surges when the Humans arrived.  

 

[Weltall]

It's probably significant that per the 10A Ars Arcanum Khriss can't figure out how one gets Initiated into AonDor and thus becomes an Elantrian, though she knows far more about the underlying mechanics than anyone in the novel. Given what we know of Initiation it's almost certain that there's some requirement to be attuned to Devotion, probably with a bit of Dominion since all Selish magics are a mix, but AonDor seems to be 'more Devotion' like Dakhor magic is 'more Dominion'. In any case, since there's some mechanism in place that chooses who becomes an Elantrian this same mechanism might be the reason that there's a hard limit on how many there can be at once. It's possible that Devotion put the foundations in place intentionally to be triggered after her death, via Spiritual Realm futuresight.

The issue of how she could set that up but not anticipate what Odium would do could be explained by a couple of factors. We know that even Shards that are very good at seeing the future have a very hard time sorting out what will happen from what might happen and between that and the idea that Rayse would try attacking other Shards and manage to win a two-on-one fight might have seemed too unlikely for D&D to devote a lot of work to countering that, but Devotion set up some mechanism for Elantrian-ness 'just in case'. Or for all we know, the two did see Odium coming and like Honor and Cultivation had A Plan, but one that didn't work out as effectively as they'd hoped. Or maybe it did and it's such a long-term deal that we haven't seen it bear fruit yet, like if they wanted Sel's land to become Invested in the way it has and the process simply isn't far enough along yet to grasp its purpose. Think 'Earth as supercomputer' from HHGTTG.

And one more handwave-y option is that enough of Aona's Cognitive aspect remains intact that it's imposing the limitation because for one reason or another, Aona wanted/wants it that way now, but didn't set it up before her death. The evidence for this being that Raoden hears a voice when he's in the Perpendicularity which could be a Cognitive Shadow, though Brandon's RAFO'd it.

Equally handwave-y for now in another direction: The Aon Rao that makes modern Elantrians what they are itself is the limiting factor. To use the programming analogy since that's how Brandon describes Selish magic, it's like a computer program. Setting aside language, how well it's coded and simplifying things greatly, the size of a program establishes the maximum amount of code it can contain. Say an Aon Rao the size of a small room has enough capacity to make one Elantrian with a range of fifty meters from its location before it starts to drop off, then one the size of a house can empower five Elantrians and has a range of two hundred meters etc... once you get to Elantris itself you have a 'program' that can empower whatever the maximum number of Elantrians is, to within the range that exists in the books. So it might be a function of the Aon itself and the number could be increased, but only by making a new and larger Aon. Though aside from the difficulties of making it and switching from the existing one to the larger one, you'd still eventually hit the hard geographical limit that is the Cognitive 'region' of the Aonic people themselves.

[Honorless]

On 2/7/2020 at 10:21 PM, Quantus said:

I remember replying to this, but the conversation has been scrambled across multiple threads so I have know idea where it landed. 

 

To your question, in looking for it I wasnt able to find anything to support the idea, so scrap that idea.  I think it came from how the Stormfather said that the heralds where the first of their powers and all the names and organizations came later.  But that's buried in the spren/radiant perspective, and those early Dawnshard scraps sure imply that the Singers were already aware of Surges when the Humans arrived.

Nope you didn't, I checked, you must've forgotten

 

The biggest indicator for me was the Pool and the apparent religious connotations associated with it. Like, the Elantrians getting old enough to want release going there to die but finding a new world. Devotion's Perpendicularity just gave the feel from both where it was physically located, to how it was narratively situated and the way it was described... it seemed as though it was placed there specifically for this purpose.

Forget AonDor, it could very well be that the city of Elantris predates Devotion & Dominion's Splintering. After all, when the people who would become the Arelish first settled in what would become Arelon, they found Elantris already there, empty.

Plus, in Mistborn: Secret History, the Ire mention Devotion in way as though they had actually met her.

And like I said before, I've always wondered if the Ire might've been the original Elantrians.

Also, did Devotion and Dominion just die to Odium? Ambition fought, Honor fought, Cultivation is still fighting. Devotion and Dominion must've fought as well, Elantris could have been a staging ground for the conflict between the Shards, which might've been why it was empty when it was found, having been on the side that lost

Edited February 9, 2020 by Honorless

[+Oltux72]

31 minutes ago, Honorless said:

The biggest indicator for me was the Pool and the apparent religious connotations associated with it. Like, the Elantrians getting old enough to want release going there to die but finding a new world. Devotion's Perpendicularity just gave the feel from both where it was physically located, to how it was narratively located and the way it was described... it seemed as though it was placed there specifically for this purpose.

It can just as well be the other way round. Elantris was built where the perpendicularity is located. That would also explain why there is only one Elantris. It needs to be at the perpendicularity to work.