Is it possible?

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

I was watching some threaded cane action from bloodborne and got curious about awakening.  

Awakened objects can only really move if they are already able to move.  

 

If instead of a normal sword, nightbood were created from the threaded cane do you think he would be able to self transform and whip around to destroy the evil he sees or do you think he would simply destroy everything at that point user included?  

What if you used a tamer command?  Do you think you could have a sentient bladed whip turned unbreakable cane when needed?  Perhaps one that can transform at your whim and move itself in a similarly dexterous way to awakened ropes and cloth? Only with the added benefits of being soul cutting metal? 

[Tea Leaf]

4 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

I was watching some threaded cane action from bloodborne and got curious about awakening.  

Awakened objects can only really move if they are already able to move.  

 

If instead of a normal sword, nightbood were created from the threaded cane do you think he would be able to self transform and whip around to destroy the evil he sees or do you think he would simply destroy everything at that point user included?  

What if you used a tamer command?  Do you think you could have a sentient bladed whip turned unbreakable cane when needed?  Perhaps one that can transform at your whim and move itself in a similarly dexterous way to awakened ropes and cloth? Only with the added benefits of being soul cutting metal? 

From what I know this sounds plausible, though difficult... 
Nightbloods command would be lethal to the user. A tamer command may work, I am not too versed in commands so I might not be correct.

Edited April 19, 2023 by The Last Fæ

[alder24]

9 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

I was watching some threaded cane action from bloodborne and got curious about awakening.  

Awakened objects can only really move if they are already able to move.  

 

If instead of a normal sword, nightbood were created from the threaded cane do you think he would be able to self transform and whip around to destroy the evil he sees or do you think he would simply destroy everything at that point user included?  

What if you used a tamer command?  Do you think you could have a sentient bladed whip turned unbreakable cane when needed?  Perhaps one that can transform at your whim and move itself in a similarly dexterous way to awakened ropes and cloth? Only with the added benefits of being soul cutting metal? 

Intent and visualization. If you imagine "the thing" to move, change shapes and strike your opponents without touching you, you're "safe". But please, don't create Nightblood that can move on its own.

[Trusk'our he/him]

On 4/19/2023 at 0:36 PM, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

I was watching some threaded cane action from bloodborne and got curious about awakening.  

Awakened objects can only really move if they are already able to move.  

 

If instead of a normal sword, nightbood were created from the threaded cane do you think he would be able to self transform and whip around to destroy the evil he sees or do you think he would simply destroy everything at that point user included?  

What if you used a tamer command?  Do you think you could have a sentient bladed whip turned unbreakable cane when needed?  Perhaps one that can transform at your whim and move itself in a similarly dexterous way to awakened ropes and cloth? Only with the added benefits of being soul cutting metal? 

I think that you could get some objects to move even if they didn't originally have the ability to move.

Consider Kalad's Phantoms, for example; they're skeletons encased inside of stone (concrete, most likely), and therefore don't have flexible parts. Them having joints and enough Bio-Chromatic Breath combined with the Intent of their creator seems to be enough to allow for locomotion though.

Quote

Goodreads Fantasy Book Discussion Warbreaker Q&A - Arcanum (coppermind.net)

DylanHuebner

I was wondering how the animation of the lifeless statues worked, in regard to the use of Susebron's Breath. If they were lifeless, then vasher wouldn't have been able to take his Breath back out of them, nor would susebron have needed such a great deal of breath to revive them—he just would have needed a password. But if they were simply Awakened, no password would have been necessary to animate the statues, just Breath and Command.

It seems like the statues could be neither lifeless nor awakened. Are they unique, because of the use of bone, or am I missing something? The only other explanation I could think of was that they were lifeless, but Susebron's breath wasn't used to activate the statues, he simply had it passed down from vasher, in addition to the statues. If that's the case(and then I've simply been confusing myself with unnecessary, convoluted logic), why was it necessary to keep the breath safe for all these years?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, there are a lot of questions in there. If you follow the drafts, I think you can see the evolution of what became of the Lifeless army. Originally I had planned for the statues to simply have been placed there so that you could Awaken them—just in my original concepts, before I started the writing—and then that became the army.

I eventually decided that didn't work for various reasons. Number one, as I developed the magic system, Awakening stone doesn't work very well. You've got to have limberness, you've got to have motion to something for it to actually be stronger. So a soldier made out of cloth would be more useful to you than a soldier made out of stone, if you were just Awakening something. At that point, as I was developing this, I went back to the drawing board and said okay, I need to leave him a whole group of really cool Lifeless as the army. But that had problems in that the ichor would not have stayed good long enough. Plus they already had a pretty big Lifeless army, so what was special about this one? Remember, I'm revising concepts like this as the book is going along. You can see where in the story I could see what needed to be there. So I went back to the drawing board again.

I think the original draft of WARBREAKER you can download off my website has them just as statues, though at the time when I was writing that I already knew it would need to change. I was just sticking to my outline because I needed to have the whole thing complete on the page before I could work with it. A lot of times that's how I do things as a writer—I get the rough draft down, and then I begin to sculpt.

I eventually developed essentially what you've just outlined in the first part, before you started worrying if you were too convoluted. I said, well, what if there's a hybrid? What happens if you Awaken bones? Can you create something? The reason that you can't draw the Breath back from a Lifeless is because the Breath clings to it. If the Lifeless were sentient enough, it could give up its own Breath, but you can't take it, just like you can't take a Breath from a person by force. You have to get them to give it up willingly. So it sticks to the Lifeless. A Lifeless is, let's say, 90% of a sentient being. The Breath doesn't manifest in them, because they aren't alive, yet they're almost there. A stone statue brought to life would be way down on the bottom rung.

Is there something in between? That's the advancement I had Vasher discover—what if we build something out of bone, but then encase it in stone to make it strong, and build it in ways that the bone is held together by the force of the Breaths? That's really what you're getting at there, that you need a lot of Breath, a lot of power, to hold all that stone together. There are seams at the joints. What the Breath is doing is clinging there like magical sinew, and it's holding all of that together.

Vasher left the Phantoms Invested with enough Breath to hold them together but not to move. You needed another big, substantial influx of Breath in order to actually make them have motion, to bring them enough strength to move and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a hybrid.

So in short, yes, I think that your idea of creating a more autonomous and/or Awakened blade could probably work if handled correctly.

As for the tamer Command, yeah, I think that would be possible to achieve. Azure's blade seems to exemplify this, in fact.

Edited April 24, 2023 by Trusk'our

[Duxredux he/him]

I think this is theoretically possible, but there might be a lot of little details that haven't been fully explored from the books that could majorly complicate this (as far as I know, if there are WoBs, please throw them in).

First, as far as I know, we don't actually see what happens when Nightblood is left to his own devices unsheathed - Warbreaker has a little time skip between Vasher drawing Nightblood, killing a bunch of soldiers, throwing Nightblood so he doesn't get consumed, fighting Denth, and then a jump to when Vasher gets Vivenna and already has a sheathed Nightblood. We know that Nightblood was retrievable and didn't just eat his way into the planet or immediately consume Vasher on contact, but not much besides that.

There also may be limitations or complications to the extent that such a mobile weapon can learn or grow in terms of movement. Nightblood vividly remembers the moment of his creation and when drawn his Command overrides his higher level thinking. An Awakened threaded cane when operating in the throes of its Command may end up only being able to draw on the movements visualized at its Awakening - momentarily forgetting everything else. Nightblood doesn't have the advantage that Lifeless do of having an existing brain to draw knowledge and skill from.

There would be other complications that would need to be addressed. Not insurmountable ones, but having a weapon with moving parts that can cut on all three realms with minimal resistance (likely using those same moving parts to both move and cut) may have issues moving without just cutting through whatever surface it was using for locomotion. I'm sure a weapon like this could be devised, but I imagine the movement of such a weapon to give it self-locomotion would be intricate and precise - further complicating the visualization component of the Command.

There's also the issue of the targeting mechanism for a Type 4 BioChromatic weapon. Nightblood forms a bond with the wielder and uses the wielder's perspective to determine who is evil. Building a weapon that has to decide who to kill and who to let live while separate from a wielder without the experience of life to help it to decide is verrrry tricky as we've seen.

I'll also note that indirectly, Nightblood can already do a lot of these things if not carried by someone who can resist his influence. He can already kill his user and force the user to move and kill others. He can already travel a bit - including getting himself fished out of the dock area of Hallendren and moving towards the palace - up until evil people showed up that needed to be taken out. Granted, this is once Nightblood has consumed armies in the Manywar and hundreds if not thousands of Breaths, so the ability to manipulate others probably comes with that much Investiture.

tl;dr, I think this is possible, but I also think there are complications that would have to be addressed to not have major issues and still achieve the core goal of the OP, namely a Type 4 weapon that can move on its own and kill others on its own.

Edited April 24, 2023 by Duxredux
clarity