Metals and investiture

[Uliinkhatan]

My partner is reading mistborn for the first time and stumped me with this question, thought I'd ask the experts:
 

"Are there inherent properties to metals within our natural world that caused them to be assigned certain allomantic/feruchemical (and I'll add hemallurgic - he hasn't finished era 1 yet) properties?"

[alder24]

2 hours ago, Uliinkhatan said:

My partner is reading mistborn for the first time and stumped me with this question, thought I'd ask the experts:
 

"Are there inherent properties to metals within our natural world that caused them to be assigned certain allomantic/feruchemical (and I'll add hemallurgic - he hasn't finished era 1 yet) properties?"

Hello, welcome to the Shard.  

You're asking, if properties of real metals from Earth influenced magical properties of metals on Scadrial? I don't think so. Brandon said that metals in Cosmere have a spiritual component to them that gives them those similar magical properties across different magic systems, so it's all contained within Cosmere. Moreover, at first Brandon planned to have silver instead of tin, not because of some specific chemical properties, but simply because he liked the name "Silvereye." In the end he couldn't find a good alloy pair to it once he realized pewter is not an alloy of silver and Brandon decided to change it into tin. This shows that Bradon likely did not take into consideration real properties of metals when building Metallic Arts, but rather accessibility (he wanted to have some metals that are either rare or don't exist naturally), have a good alloy pair, cool names etc.  

Spoiler

Questioner

Quick question on aluminum. Why does it affect other forms of Investiture?

Brandon Sanderson

When I was building the cosmere, I just had to build certain themes into it, and metal was one of those. And the metals have kind of a Spiritual integrity, and Spiritual component, that if I can get into Dragonsteel explaining why, you'll get your kind of origins.

Questioner

And that's why, in Warbreaker, metals are different with Awakening, and stuff.

Brandon Sanderson

And even in Roshar, the cages that you're building for fabrials, once you start to figure out how those metals affect it, you'll be like, "Oh wait, that makes sense!" And these are just across the cosmere.

And if you want an in-world answer, it has to do with stuff in Dragonsteel. But really, the answer is, I was building this and I'm like, "I just want this to be a theme. So I'm just going to give this Spiritual component to metals." So it works in Mistborn, and it works all across everything.

LTUE 2020 (Feb. 15, 2020)

 

Spoiler

Brandon Sanderson

One interesting aspect of the book that I haven't mentioned yet comes with the metal of tin. Originally, tin wasn't one of the Allomantic metals—I used silver instead. You see, I originally paired silver and pewter together, thinking that pewter had a significant amount of silver in it. Well, turns out that isn't the case. (Remember, each set of paired metals is a metal and an alloy made from it.)

My false impression on the belief that pewter is a silver/lead alloy goes back to my childhood. I remember when I used to paint lead fantasy figures that I bought at the local hobby store. One of the employees told me that they would be going up in price because the manufacturers wanted the figures to be safer. They were going to cast them out of pewter instead of lead, because pewter is much less toxic. I asked what the difference between pewter and lead was, and the employee told me that pewter is lead PLUS silver, and that's why the figures cost more.

He meant tin, I guess. Either way, that's stayed with me for quite a long time. I soundly resisted changing silver to tin during the first drafts of the book, even when I found out the truth. The problem is, I really liked the name "Silvereye" for those who burn silver/tin. It sounds far slicker than "Tineye."

I eventually came around, however. Consistency in the magic system is more important than a single cool-sounding name. I blame Hobby Town in Lincoln Nebraska for my pains.

Mistborn: The Final Empire Annotations (Feb. 12, 2007)