Was anyone else expecting Harmony to offer Wayne...

[Kranse]

Was anyone else expecting Harmony to offer Wayne reincarnation / immortality as a kandra? Wayne's death felt pretty heavily foreshadowed, so I was not surprised when it happened. But I was anticipating Harmony would say something like "Since you died while heavily invested and in the presence of a large quantity of Harmonium, I can offer you the same choice Rashek offered to the first kandra. You are already more talented than many who have had centuries of practice, and I believe MeLaan could use a partner on her mission. Will you join my faceless immortals?"

It certainly would have been interesting; I can only imagine the shenanigans Wayne would get up to with a kandra's abilities. And giving Harmony the ability to create new kandra, if only in very unique circumstances, would address the concern that they are going extinct.

[alder24]

Kandra aren't cognitive shadows. Harmony doesn't like the idea of using hemalurgy, and this is required to make new kandra. Plus Harmony already gave that choice to Wax, but this was when he could use Bands, Wayne's body was destroyed. And to add more, Harmony is binded by inaction, by doing this he would once again oppose Ruin intent in favor of Preservation, which likely wouldn't pass. Personally I would be disappointed if another character avoided death. That's getting too common.

Spoiler

Questioner

My favorite god, Sazed/Harmony, in my recent reread I got a bit angry at him because he didn’t let kandra be able to reproduce, but he let the koloss be able to do it. And I’m wondering if there’s a way he could have allowed that, but he chose not to? And also if there’s a way that it could happen in the future, so that two of my favorite people could have a baby?

Brandon Sanderson

There are a couple things that he was facing, and let me walk you through his philosophy on this, which you are allowed to disagree with. I want, for every character I write, there to be things they do that you disagree with, because otherwise I’m writing all characters to be the same person, if that makes sense.

The kandra have immortality and are able to perpetuate their culture by being immortal for as long as the individuals live. The koloss don’t have that, meaning that if he didn’t make koloss able to breed true, the entire people vanish in one generation and all culture associated with them. And so because of that, he took the extra effort to change the koloss to allow for this sort of thing. But he did it in such a way that they would not have to have hemalurgic spikes, because the idea of making new hemalurgic spikes is extremely distasteful to Harmony. Reusing old ones is a thing he was willing to allow, but new ones he didn’t.

Could he have changed the kandra to be similar? Well, the answer is kind of a fairly... yes, but they would no longer have been the kandra, they would have been rolled back to being what they were before the Lord Ruler. And so they basically would stop being what they are that makes them unique as a culture. And he decided not to do that.

You can disagree with that, and I think there are some pretty valid arguments against the choice he made, but that is the choice he made.

Is there a way going forward? Yes, this is theoretically possible.

Dragonsteel 2022 (Nov. 14, 2022)