Awakened cheese golems

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

So the cheese wheel thing to slow down shardblades always gave me a giggle. What about large golems awakened formed of primarily cheese?  

Does cheese count as organic enough?  What type of cheese do you think would function best?  

I wonder if large waxy candles would work as well with large wick like skeletons made of ropes.  

Would embedding a bunch of aluminum rods as longbones stop the Golem from being able to function? Perhaps it can be awakened and invested heavily enough to not need aluminum bones to further protect it from shards. 

[Longshot97 he/him]

Related Idea: Awakened Wax Walls. Command them to re-form into a specific shape, no matter what. So when a Shardbearer tries to hack through, they are defeated. Foolproof plan, absolutely nothing could go wrong.

[alder24]

1 hour ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

So the cheese wheel thing to slow down shardblades always gave me a giggle. What about large golems awakened formed of primarily cheese?  

Does cheese count as organic enough?  What type of cheese do you think would function best?  

I wonder if large waxy candles would work as well with large wick like skeletons made of ropes.  

Khalad's Phantoms worked because it wasn't just bones in stone that were Awakened, but the stone itself was Awakened and Breaths served as sinew that enabled movement. You need a lot of Breaths to Awaken something that can't move, that is stiff like stone or cheese. Cheese is organic.

Spoiler

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.

Goodreads Fantasy Book Discussion Warbreaker Q&A (Jan. 18, 2010)

 

1 hour ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

Would embedding a bunch of aluminum rods as longbones stop the Golem from being able to function? Perhaps it can be awakened and invested heavily enough to not need aluminum bones to further protect it from shards. 

We don't know. We only know aluminum can't be Awakened, but it's possible that aluminum's field effect would disturb the entire Awakened object.

 

43 minutes ago, Longshot97 said:

Related Idea: Awakened Wax Walls. Command them to re-form into a specific shape, no matter what. So when a Shardbearer tries to hack through, they are defeated. Foolproof plan, absolutely nothing could go wrong.

Not really. Breaths are damaged when cut by a Shardblade. An object that was cut in half will usually cease to function partially or entirely, depending on the damage it took. Not to mention that wax is like stone, it can't move on its own, Breaths won't help here unless you create a specific shape that enables movement and push lots of Breaths into it - but that wouldn't be a wall anymore, would it? 

 

Instead of some weird cheese or wax ideas, how about a simple Awakened shield? Not even type 4, just enough Breaths to resist Shardblade cuts. Much cheaper, much simpler and more reasonable.

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

36 minutes ago, alder24 said:

Khalad's Phantoms worked because it wasn't just bones in stone that were Awakened, but the stone itself was Awakened and Breaths served as sinew that enabled movement. You need a lot of Breaths to Awaken something that can't move, that is stiff like stone or cheese. Cheese is organic.

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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.

Goodreads Fantasy Book Discussion Warbreaker Q&A (Jan. 18, 2010)

 

We don't know. We only know aluminum can't be Awakened, but it's possible that aluminum's field effect would disturb the entire Awakened object.

 

Not really. Breaths are damaged when cut by a Shardblade. An object that was cut in half will usually cease to function partially or entirely, depending on the damage it took. Not to mention that wax is like stone, it can't move on its own, Breaths won't help here unless you create a specific shape that enables movement and push lots of Breaths into it - but that wouldn't be a wall anymore, would it? 

 

Instead of some weird cheese or wax ideas, how about a simple Awakened shield? Not even type 4, just enough Breaths to resist Shardblade cuts. Much cheaper, much simpler and more reasonable.

It's not just about stopping the shardblade. Yes a shield would work well with a bunch of investiture. Maybe you could outfit some soldiers with awakened bamboo armor?  I just like the idea of awakened constructs and golems to fight.  Kalads phantoms are awesome. Just thinking of other materials that could be used as well. 

[alder24]

18 minutes ago, Tamriel Wolfsbaine said:

It's not just about stopping the shardblade. Yes a shield would work well with a bunch of investiture. Maybe you could outfit some soldiers with awakened bamboo armor?  I just like the idea of awakened constructs and golems to fight.  Kalads phantoms are awesome. Just thinking of other materials that could be used as well. 

Bamboo? Really??? It can be cut by a sword... Why would you want this as armor? Awakened metal armor. Just putting Breaths in a piece of metal with "my Breath to yours" should be enough to resist a Shardblade.

There isn't any better material than stone or metal. It's mostly invulnerable to normal attacks and with proper investment it would resist Shardblade attacks. Thick wooden shield would work well too.