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Is Fortune and Future Sight the same thing?


Oltux72

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This may be a very theoretical question. So let me phrase it another way. Does the Cosmere have coexistance of destiny and indeterminism? Future Sight can be wrong. Hence the Cosmere cannot have full predetermination. And we know that the information you get out of Fortune is radically incomplete. You know that you need to be somewhere, but not why and other things. That is really incompatible with actually seeing stuff. You know somehow.

That looks to me like the Cosmere features destiny for a minority of events and the rest is indeterministic and imperfectly visible with access to the Spiritual Realm with Future Sight, while the destiny part is accessible with Fortune. What do you think?

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I personally think Fortune is the ability to draw on knowledge from the Spiritual Realm and futuresight is just an application of it. Our biggest on screen use of it is in Secret History when Preservation shows Kel the Spiritual Realm and he's able to see all the ways things are Connected and the path he needs to follow. But as soon as he's not seeing it anymore it feels like a distant memory to him. If futuresight isn't a function of Fortune then at least it seems to be parallel to it.

Edit: After a review of WoB, he does seem to equate futuresight as a use of Fortune

Questioner

So, in Allomancy, most of the metals are in pairs, they're equal and opposite, pushing and pulling, Rioting, Soothing, that kind of thing. The god metals have always-- lerasium and atium, have always struck me as kind of unbalanced in a way. Like, lerasium gives you the power to use all these metals, plus atium being one of them. Is there a reason for that?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, there is, and it kinda has to do with Snapping and some of the fundamental rules of the Mistborn world and the fact that people have Preservation and Ruin inside of them and all these sorts of things. So, the answer is yes.

Partially, narratively, I built that in partially just 'cause I wanted atium to seem odd in the placement, right, when people got to it it's like "What? Why is this one-- This one doesn't match the others. This doesn't really work." When I was building Mistborn, one of the big things I wanted was this idea of a periodic table that was, kind of a flawed construct, that, as you read the books, you came to understand better and better. And that was something I executed-- I don't think I executed that 100% right, but I'm pleased with the general concept and how it plays out. And so I wanted atium to stick out like a sore thumb.

The other thing is, I knew I needed some good foreshadowing for Fortune, for people being able to kinda see the future or versions of the future, for the whole cosmere to work. And, so, I built in atium specifically to do those things. And I built in lerasium to have, kind of, the ultimate sort of benevolent endowment sort of thing. (Not Endowment the Shard, you know what I mean.) But I also wanted to show these two magics were intrinsically tied together on Scadrial because the way that humankind was created. We're getting into some deep stuff, I'll just leave it there. But that was what was going through my mind as I was building those things all out. 

Oathbringer Chicago signing (Nov. 21, 2017)
Edited by StanLemon
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I interpreted said destined events as powerful movers and shakers nudging things along, and certain things becoming more and more likely, nigh inevitable, with certain choices. So I would say the Cosmere is not deterministic. It just has powerful beings with access to pseudo-probability manipulation

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