Conflicting Identity is why Investiture Resists Invesititure

[Trusk'our he/him]

I found this quote, and I find the ramifications exciting:

Quote

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/181/#e3830

Argent

We know that you can't Lash people in Shardplate, but can you Lash the person inside the Plate? If they had their helm off, for example. At that point Plate should be just dead weight, right? 

Brandon Sanderson

There's a bit of an interference envelope. Wearing plate, the person has this big ball of investiture around them, and so pushing any through it--even by touching a person without a helm--is going to be tough. Easier than with the helm on though, I suppose.

Investiture acts (roughly) like a saturated solution in these cases. Sticking more power into something like a Feruchemical storage or a hyper-invested object like Plate is increasingly hard. The other part is that Investiture tends to interfere with other Investiture, unless there's a familiar resonance. (This is part of what philosophers call Identity.) Slapping your hand through a sand master's stream of sand will cause interference, and make them start to drop. It's not that the sand is supporting them, it's that the investiture holding them up gets scrambled for a moment because of your own investiture.

Investiture pushed toward someone inside a hyper-invested (supersaturated) system like a person in Shardplate is going to get hard push-back.

This is similar to the reason that it's harder to Push on invested coins. Depends on how invested they are, in that case. It's generally not as hard as doing something like Lashing a person in plate. (This is more about the interference than the saturation of investiture.) But the two principles are what I use to guide the physics in these areas.

quietandproud

Can we take that as a hint that the Investiture in the Plates and the Investiture that the Surge of [Adhesion] uses come from different Shards? Or do they interfere because they "belong" to different spren?

Brandon Sanderson

You know, I should have realized this one would bring out the follow up questions. Let's leave it at what I posted for now. This is a deep, deep rabbit hole, and I do need to try to get some more writing done tonight. So...RAFO. (Sorry.)

This explicitly states that conflict of Identity is what makes Investiture resist Investiture. Okay, well, that and the fact that if something is saturated with a lot of Investiture it would be harder to Invest it simply because there is no room left in it to take that Investiture, but the first point about Identity is huge.

This actually explains why a Mistborn has no trouble using their powers all together; they all belong to the same Identity, so there is no conflict between them.

This also would help explain why Radiants don't have difficulty using their Surges while wearing their own Plate, such as why a Windrunner can fly with their Plate on while their allies must doff it in order to be sent hurtling through the sky (as seen in Dalinar's visions).

It also makes me wonder about some other things. For example, could a Twinborn with A-steel or iron more easily push or pull on their own Metalminds? Could they have a suit of armor made of Invested Metalminds and still Steelpush or Ironpull without too much interference (I know that those get weaker due to physical obstruction, but armor wouldn't be that thick)? Maybe they could use this method to have ammo to Steelpush that only they can affect with any decent ability (unless their opponent is a really powerful Allomancer).

This also would make it easier to do things like Awaken Invested objects (such as Metalminds or Hemalurgic spikes).

[Duxredux he/him]

I immediately thought of Twinborn Metalminds. This makes sense, but it also feels like some aspects of this should have intuitively been discovered or noticed by people. Wax at least should have noticed that his Ironminds never get any harder to push on the regardless of his storage level, but it never comes up. Maybe he noticed but didn't think anything of it? Maybe Khriss asked the wrong questions when she had access to one of the few Crashers ever born, but there have to be more Twinborn Coinshots out there right? Maybe they all never said anything?

On the flipside if it does work this way, if Ranette had a small bit of iron that Wax saturated with weight, she could make a gun safety that only Wax could push on, and not even another Coinshot. You could do some interesting applications of Twinborn Identity locked metal.

[Trusk'our he/him]

9 minutes ago, Duxredux said:

I immediately thought of Twinborn Metalminds. This makes sense, but it also feels like some aspects of this should have intuitively been discovered or noticed by people. Wax at least should have noticed that his Ironminds never get any harder to push on the regardless of his storage level, but it never comes up. Maybe he noticed but didn't think anything of it? Maybe Khriss asked the wrong questions when she had access to one of the few Crashers ever born, but there have to be more Twinborn Coinshots out there right? Maybe they all never said anything?

I think that the Investiture would still resist other Investiture somewhat as there is less storage for the new Investitrure to affect the Metalmind, but it just isn't as strong a resistance. This could be why Twinborn would have a harder time noticing the difference between their Metalminds and others. Or, perhaps the Twinborn who had the right powers to let them both create and push/pull on said Metalminds just didn't fill them up enough to create a difference big enough to notice. Or perhaps some of them did know, but decided to just not share that knowledge so that they could get an edge.

There are a number of things that could  be the case.

[Rorzikel]

Or Steelpushing is (like certain others) better at getting around the resistance effects of investiture and identity such that it isn't ever noticed. For example, Stoneshaping can't be used on human flesh, but Division and Soulcasting certainly can be.

[trav]

Metal minds might just not be that invested. So it goes unnoticed.