Why wasn't TLR more worried about the Pits?

[cometaryorbit]

I kind of think Rashek started with more hateful motives, then turned more good, then more evil again under Ruin's influence.

Rashek pre-Ascension hated Khlennium and the idea of a non-Terris Hero, so while Kwaan got him to kill Alendi to save the world, I think Rashek's motives (as opposed to Kwaan's) were pretty hate driven - thus turning nations he didn't like into skaa, etc.

But understanding the bigger picture turned him more altruistic, thus he started planning to save the world even if he died.

But over time, Ruin's influence plus the "wearing" of time made his rule become bloodier, as he got fixed into one model and using more and more oppressive tactics to enforce it. (It seems that the Terris weren't so oppressed in the first two centuries. There was apparently a big purge of Feruchemists like 200+ years in, and the system we see was set up in IIRC the sixth century.)

I wonder if part of his problem was lack of education/breadth of experience before being thrown into all this.

I feel like he used Hemalurgy too freely. Koloss were a mistake IMO, too useful of a tool for Ruin and he didn't really need them. He could have built an empire just by bribing kings with lerasium and demonstrating his 'divine' powers. (And if pre TLR Scadrial had guns and was ~early 19th century tech, it seems that koloss would have been *less* useful in his early conquests.)

Even the Inquisitors were... questionably necessary. Sure, he used them to hunt skaa Allomancers, and they were motivated to do so since that's how they perpetuated their 'species', but if he'd built his society differently Allomancy among the skaa wouldn't have been a threat.

Personally I think he'd have had a better bet of keeping Ruin imprisoned if he'd told everyone exactly what was going on with the Well - Ruin can change text, but not people's memories, and if TLR had given say a yearly sermon on the topic to the whole population of Luthadel, I don't think the info would have been able to be corrupted.

But I guess TLR expected to live forever... but, he specifically planned for his death, so...

Edited March 30, 2022 by cometaryorbit
typos

[Rashek's PR Manager]

15 hours ago, robardin said:

I mean, could he have done a better job? Certainly to have done it... More nicely? Uh, yeah. But "poor showing", sorry, that's not fair to ol' Rashek.

Arrogant and a little bit dumb (given that he could infinitely compound zinc), OK, maybe; even "sloppy"; but "lazy"? There's good evidence he put his Compounding to use by personally seal those cans under Kredik Shaw!

I, Rashek's PR manager, strongly agree with you on this one. My client had been suffering from extremely serious mental illness, exacerbated by not only a thousand years' isolation and Ruinous whispers, but pressures upon him on a Cosmere scale as well, diagnosed by Mr Sanderson. So while it's totally reasonable to condemn his behaviors, attributing those behaviors to something like pure laziness, dumbness or sloppiness is complacent in itself. Please don't laugh at people's health issues.

(Hopefully I'm not deviating too far from topic)

Quote

EAgamezz

What did The Lord Ruler do all day? He was totally bored right? What would he have done to get his hands on some Cadmium?

Brandon Sanderson

He was bored, but he was also—he was not mentally all completely... sane? I guess? That's a wrong way to say it. He was having trouble simply continuing to exist because of pressures and forces upon him in a cosmere sort of way. Much as the same sort of thing is happening to the Heralds and has happened to the Fused. He was not, let's say, in a stable sort of immortality like Hoid has found. Or I should say, his is unlike what Hoid has found. 

Quote

Bobby2797

You once said that you want to explore in your books how humans change in their behavior and personality when living several hundred or a thousand years. Many of these characters in your books go mad: for example, the Heralds or the Lord Ruler. But still, Hoid seems as "normal" as someone can be after such a long time. Is there any reason why he didn't become "mad"?

Brandon Sanderson

It's more that what happened to the others, something is wrong, if that makes sense. What's going with the Heralds, the supernatural madness of the Heralds is related to their specific situation. With the Lord Ruler, I don't think what happened to the Lord Ruler... His is a really interesting situation. I would say that it is not supernatural; it is his isolationist attitude, the pressures placed upon him, and things like that. It's a very normal type of mental... I don't want to call it mental illness, but you know what I mean. A conventional mental illness, if you will, exacerbated by extreme periods spent alone and isolating self. And that's where you get what happened to him.

 

[cometaryorbit]

1 hour ago, Rashek's PR Manager said:

We don't know who he turned into skaa, but it's unlikely that he turned entire nations he didn't like into skaa because in that scenario all Khlennium would be skaa, yet at least part of Final Empire's nobility had Khlennium inheritance. And he bribed Kings to work for him as nobles who I don't think he liked very much during his Ascension.

TLR based noble fashion, keep architecture,  etc on Khlennium - but I thought the Khlenni probably did become skaa.

The kings he bribed were presumably others, neither Terris nor ones Rashek saw specifically as oppressors like Khlennium.

As for being honest about the Well: as long as TLR lives, he controls access. But if he's dead, having the true story out there in a non-Ruin-alterable form has to be better than only having the corrupted versions.

[StanLemon]

18 hours ago, AerionBFII said:

I have to side with this. TLR was complacent, arrogant and lazy. He held incredible power but only used a fraction of it in the confrontation. 

I've never particularly liked this argument about Rashek. 

First off, just about anyone and everyone would likely become complacent and at least to an extent arrogant if they went as long as he did without any real challenge. 

Second, and more importantly. People's argument that he didn't use his full power against Vin and Marsh. My question is why would he? You don't use a bazooka against an ant. He was completely dominating that fight and quite literally the most the two of them could accomplish was ripping off his shirt. The ONLY reason he lost was because of a literal deus ex machina

Basically my point is, when a godly smite is needed to take down a villain, that's not the villain's fault that he lost

Edited March 31, 2022 by StanLemon

[AerionBFII]

2 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

I've never particularly liked this argument about Rashek. 

First off, just about anyone and everyone would likely become complacent and at least to an extent arrogant if they went as long as he did without any real challenge. 

Second, and more importantly. People's argument that he didn't use his full power against Vin and Marsh. My question is why would he? You don't use a bazooka against an ant. He was completely dominating that fight and quite literally the most the two of them could accomplish was ripping off his shirt. The ONLY reason he lost was because of a literal deus ex machina

I am not disagreeing with any of that.

Rashek effectively ruled the world for a 1000+ years virtually unopposed, an immortal with godlike power. Of course he was arrogant and he was complacent. I like Rashek as a character, I think he is probably one of the best and most interesting characters Brandon has ever made. But just because it's understandable why he was that way doesn't mean that's not what got him killed. My point was Rashek could have ended that fight anytime he wanted too. He could have annihilated Vin and Marsh and the entire Skaa army but he chose only used a fraction of his power. He saw Vin and Marsh couldn't hurt him so he chose to monologue and show off and it bit him in the ass. If he'd used his bazooka he'd probably have taken the WOA and used it's power again but he was hardly in control of his full faculties in the end and he'd been mentally twisted by Ruin until all he could do was virtually stare at the wall all day. What got him killed was a combination of his failing mental capacity, personal flaws, Ruins meddling and Vin being Preservations heir. He's still, oddly, one of my top 5 Characters though. 

[Duxredux]

On 3/31/2022 at 2:57 AM, AerionBFII said:

I am not disagreeing with any of that.

Rashek effectively ruled the world for a 1000+ years virtually unopposed, an immortal with godlike power. Of course he was arrogant and he was complacent. I like Rashek as a character, I think he is probably one of the best and most interesting characters Brandon has ever made. But just because it's understandable why he was that way doesn't mean that's not what got him killed. My point was Rashek could have ended that fight anytime he wanted too. He could have annihilated Vin and Marsh and the entire Skaa army but he chose only used a fraction of his power. He saw Vin and Marsh couldn't hurt him so he chose to monologue and show off and it bit him in the ass. If he'd used his bazooka he'd probably have taken the WOA and used it's power again but he was hardly in control of his full faculties in the end and he'd been mentally twisted by Ruin until all he could do was virtually stare at the wall all day. What got him killed was a combination of his failing mental capacity, personal flaws, Ruins meddling and Vin being Preservations heir. He's still, oddly, one of my top 5 Characters though. 

I agree with a lot of this, but I'll throw in a few more things that Rashek had actively done to reduce the odds of him getting killed and the insane odds that led to his death. In order to kill Rashek, you would need to remove his metalminds that granted him healing and/or immortality. To know that you would need to do that, you would need an in-depth understanding of Feruchemy, which he had suppressed for a thousand years with the breeding program, as well as somehow guess that he was Fullborn and figure out compounding. For that matter, Vin and friends only figured it out because they had Sazed as a Feruchemist and the Keepers had managed to preserve a dead language that Alendi's logbook was written in, and they figured out the misdirection that Alendi was not TLR. Figuring out that TLR was Rashek also took someone experimenting with alloys of Atium until they made Malatium, which seems pretty pointless compared to Atium, especially considering the insane research costs to make such a useless metal. Rashek's metalminds were both highly invested and piercing his skin, basically making them nearly impossible to Push/Pull without Duralumin or being fueled by Preservation, and he had suppressed knowledge of Aluminum and Duralumin. That theoretically leaves someone physically pulling his bracers off, and he was prepared for that, even from someone with the abilities of an Inquisitor. Oh, and the only reason that Vin was even alive was because the High Prelan literally didn't do what his job was supposed to prevent having Vin, and even then the Inquisitors figured it out and were actively hunting her down. To us as readers, Brandon did such a good job of setting this up and foreshadowing that it has that feel of "surprising yet inevitable" but in-world Rashek's fall could only have been setup by Ruin and Preservation seemingly working simultaneously to take him down (yes, I know Preservation didn't mean for TLR to die, but his power enabled Vin in the end). 

As for not whipping out the full extent of his powers whenever he needed to, he had been squashing Skaa rebellions for literally millennia. He had been twisted by Ruin, but ultimately I don't think he really wanted to kill as often as he did, he just wanted stability and from his perspective executing a percentage of people was better than just slaughtering them and starting from scratch (though we all agree that Rashek was terrible at considering quality of life for his people). Consider that when he built his storage supplies he didn't just plan for the nobility, but also for the Skaa, otherwise Vin and Elend would never have had enough supplies for the population they were trying to support. We see it as monologuing, but spending a bit of time trying to convince the leaders of the rebellion that their goal was literally impossible would have saved him a lot of trouble if they had actually stopped the revolt. This gets more into the theoretical, but Rashek was very, very good at reading people. I wonder if he would have let Vin go and leave to stop the rebellion if he had seen her give up, but nope, the girl was stubborn even though he was literally crushing the life out of her by pushing on the trace metals in her body. If she had given up, then he wouldn't have had to spend the next couple of centuries rebuilding the social structure that he had found the most stable and the least likely to create large scale problems for the city as a whole, and then the story of how not even The Survivor and a Mistborn had been able to kill him would have come out. If that story had stopped rebellion for several more centuries, then it would have been worth monologuing from his perspective, I think.

And as a last idea that I haven't heard yet, and no idea if this played into his rationale at all, but the more he used his Feruchemy the more likely that someone could make the connection that he was Fullborn, considering Sazed was pretty much just around the corner when Rashek's last battle happened. Maybe that's why he used Allomancy far more than any overt Feruchemy. The more he revealed his Feruchemical abilities the closer they would get to the secret of his immortality and compounding.

[teknopathetic]

On 2/26/2022 at 0:11 PM, StanLemon said:

While true, we don't actually know how bad those diminishing returns actually are. Brandon has said that both that a single bead of Atium is very efficient, and he was able to store enough youth in his armbands, which Vin described as not having much Atium in them, to remain young and offset a millennium of age for several days at least. Between the Trust and what the Steel Inquisitors had on hand he probably had much more than enough to wait out the Pits reforming. But, as stated earlier in this thread, the Well was almost refilled and he almost certainly expected to simply make himself truly young again with its power.

TLR may have also been able to change the game once he had remade the planet, so maybe TLR just didnt really need to worry about the old status-quo of the pits. Surely he had enough atium to get him to Well Refilling Day. Come to think of it, do we know what TLR would have done at the well had he made it there? Revitalize downtown? Solve global ashing? Attack Ruin in some meaningful way?

Edited April 14, 2022 by teknopathetic

[Returned]

I think that the points made in this thread about complacency are accurate. But one of the under-emphasized points is that TLR's plan against Ruin depends on attention not settling on the Pits too much. Only TLR and Ruin even know that atium matters for more than the imperial economy, whether it's for pseudo-immortality or keeping Ruin's power in check. Even among the most knowledgeable people in the Final Empire, the destruction of the Pits would have indicated an inconvenience for TLR for a couple of centuries. Economic control of the nobility was convenient for him, but far from the only way he could control his people.

TLR almost certainly had enough atium around to sustain him for a couple of centuries if needed (his plans for Ruin were so deep and careful, a couple caches of atium only he knew about would be trivial to arrange). He could also have probably gotten some from the Trust if he really, really needed it. And, as others have pointed out, he was both expecting to gain access to the Well of Ascension again very shortly, and who knows what he could accomplish regarding the Pits and his own mortality then? And even with that, he was still planning for his own death.

Ruin knew as much as there was to know about atium and its significance to the world, as well as knowing TLR very well. A reaction to the Pits being destroyed that was stronger than the above suggest would have accomplished nothing besides to give Ruin clues about the one thing TLR wanted most to keep secret from him.

[cometaryorbit]

On 4/13/2022 at 9:53 PM, teknopathetic said:

TLR may have also been able to change the game once he had remade the planet, so maybe TLR just didnt really need to worry about the old status-quo of the pits. Surely he had enough atium to get him to Well Refilling Day. Come to think of it, do we know what TLR would have done at the well had he made it there? Revitalize downtown? Solve global ashing? Attack Ruin in some meaningful way?

I believe there's WOB that he would have tried to fix the planet, but by then he was warped enough that it might not have actually improved anything.

EDIT: hmm, I wonder if he would have tried to alter people more thoroughly to cement his rule/social system- delete Feruchemy genes from the Terris population, make skaa less aggressive/more docile, mess with Spiritual DNA to make it harder for skaa to develop Allomancy, stuff like that.

Edited May 3, 2022 by cometaryorbit