Did sazed kills millions of PPL while remaking Scadrial ?

[Friendshipspren he/him]

So like the sun was just rising over the pits of hathsin . That means that the half the  Western Dominance and all of the southern and farmost  Dominances as well as the southern isles were still in the night . Millions of PPL must have lived there . Did sazed accidentally kill them all while remaking the world. I'm pretty sure it's mentioned somewhere, may e in a wob that only the PPL in the caverns survived.

[JustQuestin2004 he/him]

Chances are most people outside of the Caverns were either already dead or dying from the natural disasters that Ruin was causing all over the damn place. Plus the constant ash fall choking crops and you can add starvation to the toll, it was not a good time to be alive on Scadrial.

[alder24]

7 minutes ago, Friendshipspren said:

So like the sun was just rising over the pits of hathsin . That means that the half the  Western Dominance and all of the southern and farmost  Dominances as well as the southern isles were still in the night . Millions of PPL must have lived there . Did sazed accidentally kill them all while remaking the world. I'm pretty sure it's mentioned somewhere, may e in a wob that only the PPL in the caverns survived.

Most of the people of Scadrial were already dead because of Ruin's influence. He created 300 000 Koloss, which required him to use 1.5 mil people alone - and they kept killing more people and more of each other thus more Koloss were created. Those are crazy numbers. Then you have civil wars spawning everywhere, because of spiked people, volcanoes erupting, ash falling and destroying crops, farm animals burying towns and villages beneath it. Not to mention Vin clearing the skies and turning the planet which created a massive tsunami, killing everyone near the shoreline. By the time Sazed Ascended I'm pretty sure most of Scadrial's northern population was already dead. It's even described in SH, ch 6-1:

Quote

Kelsier ran across a broken world. The trouble had been apparent the moment he left the ocean, stepping back onto the misty ground that made up the Final Empire. Here he’d found the wreckage of a coastal city. Smashed buildings, shattered streets. The entire city seemed to have slid into the ocean, a fact he wasn’t able to fully piece together until he stood above the town and noticed the shadowy remains of buildings sticking from the ocean island farther up the coast.
From there it only grew worse. Empty towns. Vast piles of ash, which manifested on this side as rolling hills that he ran across for a time before realizing what they were.
Several days into his run home, he passed a small village where a few glowing souls huddled together in a building. As he watched, horrified, the roof collapsed, dumping ash on them. Three glows winked out immediately, and the souls of three ashen skaa appeared in the Cognitive Realm, their strings to the physical world cut.

 

Ch 6-5:

Quote

He wished that view were more encouraging. Endless seas of ash. Very few cities, dug out like craters. Burning mountains that spewed not only ash, but lava and brimstone. The land had cracked, creating rifts.
[...]
Ruin ripped open the tops of ashmounts, holding them pried apart, letting death spew forth. He touched koloss all across the empire, driving them to murderous frenzies. When they ran out of people to kill, he gleefully turned them against one another.
He had hold of multiple people in every remaining city. His machinations were incredible—complex, subtle. Kelsier couldn’t even follow all the threads, but the result was obvious: chaos.

Before HoA Elend was trying to centralize his empire and forced everyone within its borders to move to the Central Dominance, as it was the only one which would have enough sunlight to yield crops next year. We can therefore assume that half of the Final Empire's population was already living near Luthadel and many of those died because of mount Tyrian eruption and the second House War in Luthadel. 

Additionally, while the HoA stated that Sazed first "restore the continents and oceans, the islands and coastlines, the mountains and rivers", by the look of the map in Era 2 it looks like he didn't do much, he didn't even shift planet's crust back to its original place (or if he did that, he restore the look of the Final Empire where it was). All he did happened in the miniscule moment, so no matter what he did, people didn't really feel it or had time to die.

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Seventy-Six

The North Pole

One of my big challenges in the geography of this world was figuring out how we could have a kingdom set at the pole of the world while at the same time maintaining a normal day/night cycle. My original plan was for the Well of Ascension to be located a distance to the north of Luthadel, up at the geographic north pole of the planet. When I was revising the second book, I realized that wouldn't work for various reasons. (More on this on the MISTBORN 2 Alternate Ending deleted scene page.) I changed things so that when the Lord Ruler held the power in the Well, he decoupled the geographic north pole and the magnetic north pole.

In our world, the magnetic north pole is located about eleven degrees of latitude south of the geographic north pole. On Scadrial, the two poles were originally in the same location. When the Lord Ruler moved the planet too close to its sun and realized he didn't have the control to place the planet in the proper orbit, he created the ashmounts to cool the atmosphere. He also wanted to keep access to the Well under his control, so he decided to build his capital city right above it. However, he realized that on a planet with a tilted axis, a city at the north pole would have seasonal daylight variation so extreme that at the height of summer the sun would never set and during the dead of winter the sun would never rise. He could remove the axis's tilt, but that would just make the sun perpetually skirt the horizon all year round.

What Rashek decided to do (and he had to make split-second decisions in the brief time he held the power) was to shift the crust of the whole planet so that the Well was at a latitude that would have more standard seasonal variation, and to re-create the Terris mountains in the new North (to maintain the rumors that the Well was located there). He worried that the new location of Luthadel would be too hot due to the latitude, but it turned out that moving the Well created an unexpected effect. The planet's magnetic pole followed the Well as he relocated it—and the ash from the ashmounts was slightly ferromagnetic. (Ferromagnetic volcanic ash has some precedent in our world.) So the interaction of the ash with the planet's magnetic field's new alignment meant that its protective cloak over the area of the Final Empire caused it to be cooler than the now unprotected geographic north pole.

One side effect of this is that all compasses point toward Luthadel. Since it's been that way for a thousand years, no one finds it odd–in fact, it's used as evidence of the Lord Ruler's divinity. It also makes it mathematically very easy to pinpoint one's exact location in the Final Empire using a combination of the compass reading and noon observations. Not that it's easy to get lost in the Final Empire in the first place—the geographical area of the planet's surface that the Final Empire covers is actually quite small.

Ultimately, when it comes down to sophisticated geography and astrophysics, I'm out of my element. If there are mistakes in my reasoning above, that is why I write fantasy and not hard sf.

And I still haven't said anything about what happened at the south pole.

The Hero of Ages Annotations (May 4, 2010)

[Returned he/him]

Hard to say for certain, but the only element I can think of that suggests an answer suggests no. I acknowledge that the element is weak with respect to the specific question asked, but here it is: at least some Koloss survived the Catacendre, were only present in Northern Scadrial (as far as we know), and certainly they weren't hiding in the storage caverns/bunkers along with the Northern Scadrian humans and Kandra. Since we know that at least some survived (and were changed by Harmony) to exist in era 2, it stands to reason that Sazed could protect them during the event because it appears that he did.

I'm not counting the Southern Scadrians as evidence because we have no idea how they lived or how many died before the Catacendre, but it's notable that the Ice Death seems like it killed a lot of them (at least from the history we've gotten on it so far).

Sazed probably had the power to preserve people whether they were in caverns or not (he wasn't actively blocked by Ruin, which is what frustrated Vin with the coastal city wiped out by a tidal wave), and also the interest in doing so. But I'll agree with previous posters that large-scale death was the fate of most people in Northern Scadrial, and it's not clear how many there were outside of the caverns to save or doom.

[Treamayne]

36 minutes ago, Returned said:

Hard to say for certain, but the only element I can think of that suggests an answer suggests no. I acknowledge that the element is weak with respect to the specific question asked, but here it is: at least some Koloss survived the Catacendre, were only present in Northern Scadrial (as far as we know), and certainly they weren't hiding in the storage caverns/bunkers along with the Northern Scadrian humans and Kandra. Since we know that at least some survived (and were changed by Harmony) to exist in era 2, it stands to reason that Sazed could protect them during the event because it appears that he did.

Actually, the Koloss who survived were in the Kandra Homeland Caverns. WoB:

Spoiler

Melhay

In Mistborn #3 Hero of Ages: It isn't mentioned where all the Steel Inquisitors, Kandra, and Koloss went in the end. Do you feel that they were removed from the world and Sazed took all the lost souls to his better place?

Brandon Sanderson

Marsh survived. (He'll show up in the Mistborn sequel series.) The Kandra were restored, and have taken a vow to live only in animal bodies. There will never be any more of them, but they are functionally immortal. So you'll see them again. The Koloss who were in the cavern at the time survived, and were changed to become a race that breeds true, rather than Hemalurgic monsters. More below.

Barnes and Noble Book Club Q&A (July 8, 2009)

Remember, the last we hear from Human was him arriving at the Trust and finding it empty. . . 

[alder24]

40 minutes ago, Returned said:

at least some Koloss survived the Catacendre, were only present in Northern Scadrial (as far as we know), and certainly they weren't hiding in the storage caverns/bunkers along with the Northern Scadrian humans and Kandra.

Actually that's the reason they've survived. Some Koloss, like the Human, entered Kandra Homeland and were underground when the sun rose. Ruin rushed every Koloss of his first towards Luthadel to stop Vin from Ascending, then towards the Pits after one Kandra left the Homeland with a bag of Atium.

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, and as bonus aside, let me point something out to you. Human and his group of koloss were inside the Homeland when the sun came out, destroying everything on the surface. They were still there when Sazed rearranged the world and fixed things. TenSoon and the kandra were also inside, though they had been turned into mistwraiths. Hum . . . Wonder what happened to them. . . .

The Hero of Ages Annotations (June 3, 2010)

From the HoA epilogue we see that there were 6 places which people used to hide - 5 storage caverns, including undergrounds of Kredik Shaw, and Kandra Homeland with the Pits nearby. All 6 locations were shifted by Sazed to be next to each other, at the very center of the future Elendel city. If there was any other larger place where humans hid during Catacendre, I see no reason why Sazed wouldn't move them as well - however nothing in the epilogue suggests that there were more than 6 of them.

Quote

He shook his head. Then, however, he heard something. He turned, thinking he saw motion on the horizon. He walked forward, Beldre at his side, Breeze calling down for Allrianne to come up and see what had happened.
"Are those . . . people?" Beldre asked, finally seeing what Spook had. The people in the distance saw them, too, and as soon as they drew close, Spook smiled and waved at one.
[...]
Ham nodded, turning as one of the soldiers pointed. Another batch of people was emerging from a hole a short distance away.
[...]
Spook made his way from hole to hole. There appeared to be six of them, some well populated, others not so much. One stood out. It wasn't a trapdoor, like the others, but a slanted cave entrance. Here, he found General Demoux speaking with a small group of people, a pretty Terriswoman holding his arm.
[...]
I think you'll be surprised at the number of people who fled to the storage caverns. Rashek planned very well for this day.

Edit: @Treamayne 

Edited November 27, 2023 by alder24

[Returned he/him]

1 hour ago, Returned said:

[Suspiciously tidy argument]

Almost immediately after:

19 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

Actually, the Koloss who survived were in the Kandra Homeland Caverns.

17 minutes ago, alder24 said:

Actually that's the reason they've survived.

Bah, and here I thought I'd found a tidy, natural example. I've even read that WoB before!

Then I guess my only surviving (and not from being in a bunker!) idea is that without Ruin's active opposition it might have been easily within Sazed's power to save, or at least not kill, those not able to make it into a bunker. Though we only hear of the bunkered Founders as people surviving the event on the one continent, that's hardly conclusive. It does make the Southerners' situation more mysterious, as if they weren't mysterious enough already. I've been increasingly getting some Sixth of Dusk vibes from their history and current state on Scadrial.

[alder24]

2 minutes ago, Returned said:

Then I guess my only surviving (and not from being in a bunker!) idea is that without Ruin's active opposition it might have been easily within Sazed's power to save, or at least not kill, those not able to make it into a bunker.

True, Sazed changed human DNA to fix Rashek's changes, buuuuuuut:

Quote

Sazed hovered over the world, changing things as he felt he must. He cradled the hiding places of mankind, keeping the caverns safe—even if he did move them about—as he reworked the world's tectonics.

The book said he was keeping only the caverns safe, not for ever humans on Scadrial. It's still possible, but there wouldn't be many people left anyways.

5 minutes ago, Returned said:

It does make the Southerners' situation more mysterious, as if they weren't mysterious enough already.

I don't think they had a large layer of ash shielding them from the sky - Catacendre in Southern Scadrial would therefore start after Sazed Ascension, because before conditions didn't change that much. No volcanoes, no ash, no deadly sun (as it already was as intense as it used to be). My personal guess is that they lived in high altitudes. They've adapted to warmer temperatures over time but Rashek did leave them something that helped them survive, whatever it was. Maybe Rashek placed them directly on the geographic south pole, then they would experience polar night and day and the sun would always stay very low over the horizon, not delivering as much heat as up north. That's the best I can think of.

Spoiler

Comatose

So here's my last question. If there ARE people on the other side of the world, did Vin kill them all by placing the sun on their side, or do they have they're own Ruin/Preservation battle going on over there as well? Do they also have allomancy feruchemy and hemalurgy?

Brandon Sanderson

No, they're not dead. Yes, Rashek was aware of them. In fact, he placed them there as a reserve. I knew he wanted a 'control' group of people in case his changes to genetics ended with the race being in serious trouble. All I'll say is that he found a way other than changing them genetically to help them survive in the world he created. And since they were created by Ruin and Preservation, they have the seeds of the Three Metallic Arts in them—though without anyone among them having burned Lerasium, Allomancers would have been very rare in their population and full Mistborn unheard of.

Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

[Returned he/him]

32 minutes ago, alder24 said:

The book said he was keeping only the caverns safe, not for ever humans on Scadrial. It's still possible, but there wouldn't be many people left anyways.

Almost agreed; the book only said he was keeping the caverns safe. It did not say that he only kept the caverns safe. From what's been written since we know that Sazed was doing more than just what was explicitly stated in the passage you cite (see re-making the Koloss, fiddling with DNA, etc.).

At that time he's got unfettered divine power. It seems inconsistent with what we know so far of Shards to suggest that he could only protect people if they were in big stone bunkers. But certainly the plot explicitly focuses on efforts to get as many people as possible into the bunkers during the final cataclysm. It seems safe to suggest that the people undertaking those efforts couldn't know that Sazed was about to ascend, so the caverns were the best option they knew of to survive. So I find your second clause more persuasive: there were few-to-no people left outside the caverns by that time.

 

31 minutes ago, alder24 said:

I don't think they had a large layer of ash shielding them from the sky - Catacendre in Southern Scadrial would therefore start after Sazed Ascension, because before conditions didn't change that much. No volcanoes, no ash, no deadly sun (as it already was as intense as it used to be). My personal guess is that they lived in high altitudes. They've adapted to warmer temperatures over time but Rashek did leave them something that helped them survive, whatever it was. Maybe Rashek placed them directly on the geographic south pole, then they would experience polar night and day and the sun would always stay very low over the horizon, not delivering as much heat as up north. That's the best I can think of.

It could work either way with the ash, I suppose. It seems difficult to contrive a constantly shifting mass of ash in the sky that would not disperse over the entire planet (I think it was Grímsvötn in 2011 that definitely did not keep its erupting ash only over Iceland), but Shard-magic, etc., so I wouldn't bet much on it. I'm very curious about how the Southerners survived Rashek's world of ash-- didn't the seas around their continent boil due to heat in their region? That seems severe enough to need a non-mundane fix, whatever it was that he gave them, but maybe not.

The scale of changes Sazed made seem like they would have had consequences similarly severe and proximate for the Southerners as for the Northerners- tsunamis, the Ice Death, and who knows what else? A Shard can fix those with magic too, but then we're right back to Sazed being able to protect people anywhere they might happen to have been when the Catacendre started.

The lack of information on Southern Scadrians makes it impossible to draw specific conclusions, so your guess seems as reasonable as any given that we know they did live, somehow. My main point in mentioning them was that we have no reason to think they were huddling in bunkers but would still have been at risk of consequences of Sazed's actions, not unlike the Northerners, and still survived.

But that's all pretty in-the-weeds and tangential. Given his temperament and values, I think it's safe to say that if Sazed could protect people from dying during the Catacendre, he would and did. His unopposed divine power seems sufficient to do that regardless of other factors, so I would lean towards thinking that he could do it. I agree that, given the lack of any mention at all of Northerners besides the Founders (and any Scadrians besides Northerners and Southerners), it's most likely that there were either no people living during the Catacendre outside of the caverns and Southern continent, or so few as to be irrelevant to the population became re-established. I don't see any reason to think that people outside the caverns both existed and were or sacrificed by Sazed/beyond his ability to save.

[alder24]

25 minutes ago, Returned said:

It could work either way with the ash, I suppose. It seems difficult to contrive a constantly shifting mass of ash in the sky that would not disperse over the entire planet (I think it was Grímsvötn in 2011 that definitely did not keep its erupting ash only over Iceland), but Shard-magic, etc., so I wouldn't bet much on it.

The Scadrian ash was ferromagnetic, it was stuck in the magnetic north pole while the geographic north pole was said to be unprotected and warmer - WoB in my first post here. Therefore the majority of ash would be only above the Final Empire, only a small amount of it would travel south (because ash from large volcanic eruptions generally spreads over the entire world). It wouldn't be visible, but it would still be there.

29 minutes ago, Returned said:

didn't the seas around their continent boil due to heat in their region?

Yes, BoM ch 21:

Quote

“Harmony…” Marasi whispered. “Allik’s from the South, Waxillium. Haven’t you read the old books? The people from the Final Empire never went in that direction. The oceans boiled, supposedly, if you got too close to the equator.”
“The people who lived down south adapted,” Waxillium said softly. “No Ashmounts to fill the sky with ash, to cool it…”

 

31 minutes ago, Returned said:

The lack of information on Southern Scadrians makes it impossible to draw specific conclusions

Yes, I wish TLM gave us more about Malwish. 

31 minutes ago, Returned said:

My main point in mentioning them was that we have no reason to think they were huddling in bunkers but would still have been at risk of consequences of Sazed's actions, not unlike the Northerners, and still survived.

That's for sure, moreover they had wooden towns and buildings on rocky, windy ground (per BoM epilogue) which suggest they didn't live in caves but out in the open. Rocky ground and winds suggests high altitude. They had some "bunkerlike stone dwellings" but that would not protect them from the heat of the sun.

40 minutes ago, Returned said:

But that's all pretty in-the-weeds and tangential. Given his temperament and values, I think it's safe to say that if Sazed could protect people from dying during the Catacendre, he would and did. His unopposed divine power seems sufficient to do that regardless of other factors, so I would lean towards thinking that he could do it. I agree that, given the lack of any mention at all of Northerners besides the Founders (and any Scadrians besides Northerners and Southerners), it's most likely that there were either no people living during the Catacendre outside of the caverns and Southern continent, or so few as to be irrelevant to the population became re-established. I don't see any reason to think that people outside the caverns both existed and were or sacrificed by Sazed/beyond his ability to save.

Ture. It could be that he didn't even need to protect them at all - the book said he first returned the shape of continents to their original state then he changed the orbit, but he might just throw his power which would slowly shift the land, while in the meantime he move the entire planet back to its correct place - the sun would not kill anyone outside of those who died right before his Ascension. Moreover the time perception is another aspect worth considering. For Sazed it might seem like a long time, while mere seconds passed on Scadrial. Shards experience time differently.

[Returned he/him]

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

The Scadrian ash was ferromagnetic, it was stuck in the magnetic north pole while the geographic north pole was said to be unprotected and warmer - WoB in my first post here.

That's a nice find, somehow I've not come across that one. I'll be digging through the archive later! Unless I'm missing something concrete about the geography of Scadrial (scadrogoraphy?), I'm still not sold that that effect is necessarily enough to make such a huge difference (compared with the extreme, but survivable heat they experienced, free movement of air, convection in the oceans, and so on), or would apply so meaningfully to the Southern continent. But please don't think I'm demanding that you throw out further evidence-- it's clearly possible, with magic everything, to get the final result you're describing whether that's the specific mechanism or not. I like the theory, in any case.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

Ture. It could be that he didn't even need to protect them at all - the book said he first returned the shape of continents to their original state then he changed the orbit, but he might just throw his power which would slowly shift the land, while in the meantime he move the entire planet back to its correct place - the sun would not kill anyone outside of those who died right before his Ascension. Moreover the time perception is another aspect worth considering. For Sazed it might seem like a long time, while mere seconds passed on Scadrial. Shards experience time differently.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure we ever got much idea of how long the survivors huddled in the caverns. Surely they'd have some way to estimate it if it were longer than a day, as they'd have lots of regular tasks to accomplish regarding food distribution and waste disposal. That seems like information that would have been recorded in the Founders' books. Rashek certainly did a lot very quickly, a few minutes (I think? It's been too long since I've done a re-read of the original trilogy), including moving continents and flattening and raising mountains. No one needed sheltering during any of that, or at least an empire's worth of people survived anyways.

I am curious if there was a Shardic tension that Sazed had to deal with during the Catacendre. I've never been able to develop it quite well enough to justify a thread about it, and I'm sure it's not so novel anyhow. But preserving the Northern section of the world and its people seems to have gone alongside more or less ruining the Southern section and its people. The Southern experience seems unnecessary, or at least seems so so far. And Shards do have an unusual relationship with time...

[alder24]

14 hours ago, Returned said:

Come to think of it, I'm not sure we ever got much idea of how long the survivors huddled in the caverns. Surely they'd have some way to estimate it if it were longer than a day, as they'd have lots of regular tasks to accomplish regarding food distribution and waste disposal.

Well, Urteau and Fadrex caverns were filled much earlier than the final hour of Ascension - Urteau hid in the cavern when Vin Ascended, while Fadrex shortly after the night of Vin's Ascension. In Luthadel people hid in Kredik Shaw cavern after the House War, which means they hid there a few days earlier. The time between Vin and Sazed Ascension was less than a day, around 14-16 hours (my estimates discussed here), so they definitely spent hours in caverns waiting and from the epilogue we know they felt nothing what was happening above, no indication that it was save now or not - they just decided to walked out (maybe Sazed encouraged them to do that). Spook got healed and that picked up the attention of people. For all we know they left as soon as Sazed finished his work.

14 hours ago, Returned said:

Rashek certainly did a lot very quickly, a few minutes (I think? It's been too long since I've done a re-read of the original trilogy), including moving continents and flattening and raising mountains. No one needed sheltering during any of that, or at least an empire's worth of people survived anyways.

He did a lot, probably much quicker than a few minutes - he moved the planet several times, he moved people as well, he talked to his friends and Kwaan (but Shardic time dilation might have made this conversation much faster).

14 hours ago, Returned said:

I am curious if there was a Shardic tension that Sazed had to deal with during the Catacendre. I've never been able to develop it quite well enough to justify a thread about it, and I'm sure it's not so novel anyhow. But preserving the Northern section of the world and its people seems to have gone alongside more or less ruining the Southern section and its people. The Southern experience seems unnecessary, or at least seems so so far. And Shards do have an unusual relationship with time...

Judging from descriptions of Sazed Ascension, I doubt there was any tension during or shortly after Catacendre, Sazed was able to combine both Shards but keep them separated, he was able to use both powers seemingly with no problems. I think he didn't realize how changes to the world, made to recreate pre-Rashek Scadrial, would affect Southern Scadrial, and how big was genetic adaptation of those people - something that wouldn't be obvious immediately after Catacendre, it might have take several years for the Ice Death to fully unfold. Knowing how Rashak's sudden changes created an avalanche of problems and how Vin's actions worsen the end of the world, he very likely came up with the conclusion that it's better not to use his Shardic powers to fix Southern Scadrian problems, as that would inevitably cause a butterfly effect and create more disasters somewhere else - it's better to help them in more classical way, sending a person to help them adapt.

[Returned he/him]

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

Judging from descriptions of Sazed Ascension, I doubt there was any tension during or shortly after Catacendre, Sazed was able to combine both Shards but keep them separated, he was able to use both powers seemingly with no problems.

That's been my impression too. My doubts have mostly come from the most recent Mistborn novels, in which we see that the tension seems to be greater and different than what the earlier books implied. The original theme had an element of "together, they can do anything, like create a planet and people and balance is less important than choosing to cooperate". More recently the limitations on Sazed seem much more constraining. Either something has changed or our original impressions are off in some way.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

I think he didn't realize how changes to the world, made to recreate pre-Rashek Scadrial, would affect Southern Scadrial, and how big was genetic adaptation of those people - something that wouldn't be obvious immediately after Catacendre, it might have take several years for the Ice Death to fully unfold.

This I find less convincing. The changes Rashek and Sazed made involved knowledge they definitely didn't have before ascending, and were also pretty far-reaching (as was the knowledge). They'd need to have at least some capacity to predict the changes their meddling would cause to even consider undertaking them. Plus we know that Preservation is fairly good at peering into the future, which would be helpful when making decisions, and Shards provide a complete knowledge of their own historical use (so Sazed would have known what Rashek did with the Southerners to survive the heat).

We've seen Shards be ignorant of things they might have known, or at least deduced, and knowledge of the unintended consequences of Rashek's meddling were apparent to Sazed. Ignorance seems clearly possible here too, but moving the Southern continent to somewhere warmer, or plopping it on top of a geothermal hot spot wouldn't have caused the same type of physical butterfly effects that changing their genomes would. And it's not like Sazed didn't fiddle with the world-- the question is why he stopped here, and I'm not satisfied that we have enough information to approach it with any confidence yet.

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

Knowing how Rashak's sudden changes created an avalanche of problems and how Vin's actions worsen the end of the world, he very likely came up with the conclusion that it's better not to use his Shardic powers to fix Southern Scadrian problems, as that would inevitably cause a butterfly effect and create more disasters somewhere else - it's better to help them in more classical way, sending a person to help them adapt.

Rashek's interference wasn't bad because it was rapid, it was bad because it was sloppy. And, to a lesser extent, because he became more prone to preserving things on Scadrial, including his changes, due to the Shard's influence. But more broadly I think that Sazed's stated situation is probably true: the balance of Ruin and Preservation in him makes it hard to do much, and being compelled to maintain a parity between them leads to many actions being a zero-sum situation. At least, I see no reason not to believe that explicitly stated item. Sending a person is much easier, since it doesn't demand so much of that balancing property, and humans explicitly can choose to preserve or ruin even in unequal measure.

But we still know that Sazed is up to something unclear, and perhaps not as balanced on the Ruin side of things. That's where I've been thinking that he's effectively stuffing ruin into the future to get a bit more edge for preserving now, and (maybe) hoping for people to be able to resolve that balance in a way that he cannot.

[alder24]

Just now, Returned said:

That's been my impression too. My doubts have mostly come from the most recent Mistborn novels, in which we see that the tension seems to be greater and different than what the earlier books implied. The original theme had an element of "together, they can do anything, like create a planet and people and balance is less important than choosing to cooperate". More recently the limitations on Sazed seem much more constraining. Either something has changed or our original impressions are off in some way.

There are many theories on that. One is that Ruin's power, which earlier was trapped in the Atium cycle, is returning after the Pits were destroyed by Kelsier. Kelsier said that destruction of the Pits will cease the Atium production for around 300 years, which fits with the timeline. Another one is that Sazed didn't truly merged both Shards, because he kept them separate, thus they both are pressing on him more and more, combining it with favoring Preservation over Ruin and Ruin's subservient position compared to Preservation, you have Sazed that is unable to keep his Shard as Harmony, and is switching to Discord. Or other theories. Lots of things are happening but years have passed slowly worsening his ability to act. It didn’t happen in a single day.

6 minutes ago, Returned said:

This I find less convincing. The changes Rashek and Sazed made involved knowledge they definitely didn't have before ascending, and were also pretty far-reaching (as was the knowledge). They'd need to have at least some capacity to predict the changes their meddling would cause to even consider undertaking them. Plus we know that Preservation is fairly good at peering into the future, which would be helpful when making decisions, and Shards provide a complete knowledge of their own historical use (so Sazed would have known what Rashek did with the Southerners to survive the heat).

Rashek was making very bad decisions one after another. Each of his actions caused several problems to arise, which he had to fix only to make several other smaller problems. Even with some Shardic knowledge, Rashek didn't do well. Sazed might have been too fresh to get a full grasp of his future vision, he still didn't get the full knowledge both Shards had - it takes some time, he was overwhelmed by all of it, he could easily miss the long term consequences for the South.

11 minutes ago, Returned said:

Ignorance seems clearly possible here too, but moving the Southern continent to somewhere warmer, or plopping it on top of a geothermal hot spot wouldn't have caused the same type of physical butterfly effects that changing their genomes would.

Rashek didn't change their DNA.

Really? Shifting the location of their continent might have changed the global climate, local climate, wind direction, rain intensity, humidity, weather patterns, heat exchange, ocean currents and so on and so on. The scale of changes is incomprehensible. Malwish suffer from cold even in warm Basin temperature and the equator runs very close to Elendel (WoB). There is no geographical position on the planet where Malwish would feel comfortably warm.

Geothermal hotspots don't provide much heat (look at Iceland temperatures) and are really small. Not to mention the danger of tectonic and volcanic activities - which would also affect bigger regions.

23 minutes ago, Returned said:

But more broadly I think that Sazed's stated situation is probably true: the balance of Ruin and Preservation in him makes it hard to do much, and being compelled to maintain a parity between them leads to many actions being a zero-sum situation.

That is true now. Immediately after Catacendre it might not be that big of a problem. That's why Leras needed Vin to kill Ruin, because she was fresh and she could act against Shard's intent. Sazed should have been able to act back then as well. But he didn’t for some reason. 

[Returned he/him]

Edited in: My post is already really long (I am trying to cut them down, I promise), so I thought it might be good to add a more concise summary of what I'm trying to get at: all that we know about Sazed's divine actions with gross effects are what he did and didn't do, at least at a very broad scale. We don't know that, for the latter, he didn't do things because he couldn't (whatever the mechanism for "couldn't"). Assuming that the reason he didn't was because he generically couldn't strikes me as a very strong assumption with very weak support, especially when "magic with more or less infinite power" is the explanation for so much that we know he did do.

I don't think that it works very well to chop up discrete elements of his (non)interventions and then throw around "didn'ts" and "couldn'ts" for each, then roll them back up into a generalized theory of didn't/couldn't. Especially at this point in the publication schedule, as a lot of what's going on with Sazed and Shards in general is explicitly undefined and mysterious.

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

There are many theories on that. [...] Lots of things are happening but years have passed slowly worsening his ability to act. It didn’t happen in a single day.

As ever! That's the fun of the discussion forum. I'll only say (since we're already a bit off topic to the thread) that people tend to favor theories they like by strengthening assumptions because they support the theories they like. My position, outside of my pet theories, is that something changed between his ascension and Sazed's current state, or that we are simply incorrect in our assumptions about conditions during/immediately after the ascension. I don't want to shut down discussion of any theories, but I think that people are generally overinterpreting their assumptions while also not examining them very closely. We don't know precisely how or why Sazed is so inactive in the most recent Mistborn era, how much of a departure that is from earlier periods of his divinity, etc. Theorizing is great, and fun, but generates possible answers, not answers (at this stage in the Cosmere books' publication). For example, it seems likely that the final statements in the quote above is true, but I'm not sure that the scale and conclusion are necessarily correct. Even though I broadly expect them to be.

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

Rashek was making very bad decisions one after another. Each of his actions caused several problems to arise, which he had to fix only to make several other smaller problems. Even with some Shardic knowledge, Rashek didn't do well. Sazed might have been too fresh to get a full grasp of his future vision, he still didn't get the full knowledge both Shards had - it takes some time, he was overwhelmed by all of it, he could easily miss the long term consequences for the South.

All possible, of course. But I'd argue that the reason this was such an issue for Rashek is that his divinity had a severe time limit. Sazed's power didn't disperse, and it's unclear how much his capacity to act so dramatically changed between the first five minutes after ascending vs. the next five. We simply don't know. "He could have missed the long term consequences" is true, but that does not equate to it being true that he did miss them. Plausible, but as above, overinterpreted as an explanation rather than a possibility.

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

Rashek didn't change their DNA.

I was referring to the scale and intensity of changes Rashek made, not what he did to that group-- he did change the DNA of Northerners. Sazed made similar changes where he thought them good, such as re-working the Koloss.

2 hours ago, alder24 said:

Really? Shifting the location of their continent might have changed the global climate, local climate, wind direction, rain intensity, humidity, weather patterns, heat exchange, ocean currents and so on and so on. The scale of changes is incomprehensible. Malwish suffer from cold even in warm Basin temperature and the equator runs very close to Elendel (WoB). There is no geographical position on the planet where Malwish would feel comfortably warm.

Geothermal hotspots don't provide much heat (look at Iceland temperatures) and are really small. Not to mention the danger of tectonic and volcanic activities - which would also affect bigger regions.

He was doing all of that stuff anyways. Either we presume that he could do so with knowledge of the likely results, or we don't. Sazed nailed all of those details with respect to the Elendel Basin, producing something unusual and stable but nevertheless exactly what he envisioned. It's hard to square that with the fact that the Southerners got a catastrophe and nothing good. I'll believe that there was a reason the results were what they were, but not that we know what that reason is (for now!), nor that the reason is automatically a lack of power, knowledge, or precisely placed limitations on what uncertainty in future events is acceptable.

The specific items I listed were just examples of possibilities, every bit as achievable as all of the other things Sazed did successfully when we throw in Shardic powers and knowledge. Constructing a just-so story about how he achieved the absolute maximum that he could, and then throwing in varying arbitrary details to explain why that maximum level was what it was, is the death of discussion and theorycrafting, not the beginning of it. I mean, if that's the theory you like and find convincing then great, I don't want to dissuade you. But I still don't see a reason that the position of "Sazed could radically remake one continent but couldn't move another" should be persuasive to anyone.

Edited November 28, 2023 by Returned