Poor Metalborn?

[Trusk'our he/him]

At least in Era 2, Metalborn aren't extremely rare, but still very valuable and a small percentage of the total population. 

I think it would be fun to think up of characters and stories for the upcoming RPG that involve the PCs needing cash or being raised in impoverished circumstances. In fact, if I ever get to run a Mistborn campaign I'd like to do one where a handful of low-level newbies try to make a quick note by taking on some kind of sketchy job, which drags them into a bunch of future misadventures. Or, a fun idea for a playable character would be a street urchin Lurcher that uses their Allomancy to steal valuable jewelry and climb buildings. 

But, I find it hard to believe that a person with a useful magic power couldn't just find a lucrative nine to five. A Thug, Slider, or Lurcher wouldn't have to worry about finances so much, because their irreplaceable talents would be guaranteed to get them a number of well compensating jobs.

Is this an incorrect train of thought? Are there ways someone with an Allomantic or Feruchemical power might still find themselves in such positions?

[JustQuestin2004 he/him]

8 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

At least in Era 2, Metalborn aren't extremely rare, but still very valuable and a small percentage of the total population. 

I think it would be fun to think up of characters and stories for the upcoming RPG that involve the PCs needing cash or being raised in impoverished circumstances. In fact, if I ever get to run a Mistborn campaign I'd like to do one where a handful of low-level newbies try to make a quick note by taking on some kind of sketchy job, which drags them into a bunch of future misadventures. Or, a fun idea for a playable character would be a street urchin Lurcher that uses their Allomancy to steal valuable jewelry and climb buildings. 

But, I find it hard to believe that a person with a useful magic power couldn't just find a lucrative nine to five. A Thug, Slider, or Lurcher wouldn't have to worry about finances so much, because their irreplaceable talents would be guaranteed to get them a number of well compensating jobs.

Is this an incorrect train of thought? Are there ways someone with an Allomantic or Feruchemical power might still find themselves in such positions?

Feruchemists won't need to worry as much, they just need to buy a single set of Metalminds and they're set for life.

Allomancers need a constant supply, and some metals like gold and bendalloy are pretty pricey. Sliders would have a pretty easy time finding employment that would come with free bendalloy alongside a paycheck since they really are that useful, it's even in a broadsheet ad for a 'Qucik-Eats' restaurant.

It depends on their powers, Augur's are going to have a hard time due to how useless their power is, but a Slider would have an easy time.

Compounders is where it gets interesting, since they need to burn their metalminds to compound, which effectively doubles their costs. A certain Gold Compounder had to resort to crime in order to keep himself supplied with more gold. Though he also had other reasons for it.

[Treamayne]

On 3/24/2025 at 9:51 PM, Trusk'our said:

Is this an incorrect train of thought? Are there ways someone with an Allomantic or Feruchemical power might still find themselves in such positions?

Two things come to mind:

• Access - maybe it's easy to get a job in Elendel with some powers, but not-so-easy to find work for those abilities in the Roughs. Like real-life - it does not matter much what capability you have if you cannot get to a place where those abilities can be put to use in a way that pays the bills or opens up opportunities.
  • If you both can't find the jobs in your area and can't afford to move to where jobs are, then. . .
• Temperment - maybe the individual has personality/ideologic reasons to not pursue a set of opportunities, but still wants to find a way to use their abilities to make a living

Edited July 16, 2025 by Treamayne
SPAG

[Quantus he/him]

10 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

At least in Era 2, Metalborn aren't extremely rare, but still very valuable and a small percentage of the total population. 

I think it would be fun to think up of characters and stories for the upcoming RPG that involve the PCs needing cash or being raised in impoverished circumstances. In fact, if I ever get to run a Mistborn campaign I'd like to do one where a handful of low-level newbies try to make a quick note by taking on some kind of sketchy job, which drags them into a bunch of future misadventures. Or, a fun idea for a playable character would be a street urchin Lurcher that uses their Allomancy to steal valuable jewelry and climb buildings. 

But, I find it hard to believe that a person with a useful magic power couldn't just find a lucrative nine to five. A Thug, Slider, or Lurcher wouldn't have to worry about finances so much, because their irreplaceable talents would be guaranteed to get them a number of well compensating jobs.

Is this an incorrect train of thought? Are there ways someone with an Allomantic or Feruchemical power might still find themselves in such positions?

They certainly could, but they'd be in extremely high demand for both honest and corrupt work.  So it would essentially be all the different tropes for why a talented young person might fall in with Organized Crime instead of the honest job their grandmother always wanted.  

[+robardin he/him]

Don't we see Wayne and his father as examples of Metalborn -- even Twinborn -- who fall to or grow up in somewhat desperate financial situations?

IIRC, Wayne told Marasi early on in Alloy of Law that he grew up knowing his metals, but with no access to them because gold was expensive, and bendalloy was both rare and expensive. He said that one of the reasons he had turned to robbery, accidentally killing the man in the incident that haunted him for life, was to be able to buy some metals. And that he got his Feruchemy from his father, who had also been a Feruchemist (of unknown metal).

Then in The Lost Metal, we see that his father did dangerous work at a mining operation in the Roughs, which ultimately resulted in a fatal accident of some kind. So whatever his father's metal was, it wasn't valuable enough a power to be hired for it, like pewter for a bodyguard, nor did he have enough attributes stored in a metalmind to prevent/save/recover from the accident (or else if he were a Bloodmaker too, that he had been forced to sell his goldminds for cash at some point).

It does seem surprising for almost any Metalborn to end up living in a shack and working in a tin mine out in the Roughs, and being not just a Terrisman but a rare Feruchemist, you'd think the Terris Village would have given him a home. But maybe he was on the run from something.

[DoctaDajman]

13 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

At least in Era 2, Metalborn aren't extremely rare, but still very valuable and a small percentage of the total population. 

I think it would be fun to think up of characters and stories for the upcoming RPG that involve the PCs needing cash or being raised in impoverished circumstances. In fact, if I ever get to run a Mistborn campaign I'd like to do one where a handful of low-level newbies try to make a quick note by taking on some kind of sketchy job, which drags them into a bunch of future misadventures. Or, a fun idea for a playable character would be a street urchin Lurcher that uses their Allomancy to steal valuable jewelry and climb buildings. 

But, I find it hard to believe that a person with a useful magic power couldn't just find a lucrative nine to five. A Thug, Slider, or Lurcher wouldn't have to worry about finances so much, because their irreplaceable talents would be guaranteed to get them a number of well compensating jobs.

Is this an incorrect train of thought? Are there ways someone with an Allomantic or Feruchemical power might still find themselves in such positions?

I was thinking of (and posted in another thread I will @ you in) an iron compounder who gets paid to destroy buildings. With the proper training I envision him as a trained engineer to avoid the whole getting crushed to death thing. I assume the proper cuts into support beams could allow a building to stay standing long enough for him to pull one massive pull at the base of it before it all crumbles in a nice direction. 

He gets to escape the added costs of explosives for his business but it comes with considerable risk to his own life... 

How he started up to get to this point? Who knows. Perhaps he has some gnarly scar or something from an earlier failed attempt which prompted him to go to school and get the training needed to do it safer? 

[Quantus he/him]

1 hour ago, DoctaDajman said:

I was thinking of (and posted in another thread I will @ you in) an iron compounder who gets paid to destroy buildings. With the proper training I envision him as a trained engineer to avoid the whole getting crushed to death thing. I assume the proper cuts into support beams could allow a building to stay standing long enough for him to pull one massive pull at the base of it before it all crumbles in a nice direction. 

He gets to escape the added costs of explosives for his business but it comes with considerable risk to his own life... 

How he started up to get to this point? Who knows. Perhaps he has some gnarly scar or something from an earlier failed attempt which prompted him to go to school and get the training needed to do it safer? 

"Your Building is Crushed."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTlwZxqKvY0

[DoctaDajman]

38 minutes ago, Quantus said:

"Your Building is Crushed."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTlwZxqKvY0

Exactly. I was even thinking about the potential of other contractors being irritated by this character because he would be able to undercut them due to having so much lower costs. 

If he could save on all of those explosives and man hours to tear down the building its all pocket money. Really nice return rates for that. I'm sure it would make him some enemies. 

[Isilel]

I was always  disappointed that we saw so little of normal Metalborn citizens using their powers constructively  in Era 2 and benefitting from them in everyday life.

Just a little bit in SoS + Ranette.

And also that we didn't see how snapping and it's equivalent for Feruchemy works after the Catacendre from someone's PoV.

I agree that getting certain powers should have been life-changing for most people, but particularly poor ones. 

The Quick-Eats ad makes no sense, BTW - Sliders are rare enough that it would have been quite a coincidence if one of them  was a decent professional cook as well. And Steel Ferrings are  very rare too and need to spend huge amounts of time storing, so also not practical for delivery service. 

Additionally, I'd imagine that expensive lawyers, banks, brokers at the stock exchange, etc. should have been prepared to pay Sliders very well indeed just to sit around and burn bendalloy during crucial times. Kept them on generous retainer just in case, actually.

Given Wayne's peculiarities it was  believable that he would have been struggling despite his powers, though. And his father may have had a not particularly beneficial Feruchemical power and had clearly chosen to leave the Terris society behind. Even something generally useful like F-Brass wouldn't necessarily lend itself to a lucrative employment, though it would make working some jobs easier and allow one to save on warm clothing.

 

[Returned he/him]

I think that there is a huge difference between having a potentially valuable ability and actually making something lucrative of it. Plenty of skilled and talented artists struggle to make a living. Being a pewterarm is great and could make you an effective bodyguard, but bodyguards aren't known for getting rich or living for a long time (especially not in adventure stories), so how awesome and lucrative an opportunity is that, really? We see coinshots working as couriers, another relatively low-paying job. Soothing parlors seem like a good opportunity but the only one we see has a kind of opium den vibe. Idashwy worked as a clerk, which steelrunning might help in some marginal way but also might not.

Additionally, powers on their own may not be easy to apply without other skills. You're a steelrunner, and that's awesome. But is moving faster than others going to generate much money all by itself? See the coinshot couriers, again, to see that it may not. If you have other skills that can make use of your power, that's a different story: imagine a carpenter, like Clubs, who can make something great in a fraction of the time it would take another master carpenter. But this requires the carpentry skills first, and the Feruchemy gives an edge but is not itself all that helpful.

I thought that this was one of the big setting details and commentary items in the era 2 books. Powers are amazing but the opportunity to make use of them in a self-enriching way is unrelated to having those powers, especially within the bounds of the law. Wealth was concentrated in those who were able to organize activity, and that organization did a lot to create the opportunities in which metalborn powers could be easily applied for money. But then the bulk of the money went to those organizers who paid their underlings as little as they could manage, similar to real-life industrialist robber-barons. Mechanization and technological development further dilutes the unique abilities of many metalborn, reducing their ability to command good pay and other deference, which is valuable to everyone else for exactly that reason.

[Isilel]

36 minutes ago, Returned said:

I think that there is a huge difference between having a potentially valuable ability and actually making something lucrative of it.

 

True, but it also depends on how obviously valuable and rare an ability is in given circumstances. Sure, most useful Metallic Arts would work best when combined with complimentary mundane skills. But a number of Metal arts in question would have provided enough of an enhancement in the eyes of a prospective employer that it should have been possible to obtain relevant training from them, at the cost of a long-term work obligation, etc.

Working as guards/security to rich and powerful tended to be a much better prospect historically iRL than being a factory worker or an agricultural labourer and also usually safer, so why wouldn't you? And since certain types of Metalborn are demonstrably unbeatably superior to mundane guards in the Second Era books, why wouldn't you, as a rich and powerful person/organisation scout them, snap them up young, provide them with training and lock them into long-term employment for yourself?

It felt incredibly contrived and implausible to me that in AoL Tekiels, whose business was insurance(!) and security(!!!) had no Metalborn working for them as guards and investigators. 

However, Bendalloy and Cadmium Allomancy, for example, should be good enough for a decent living by themselves. The first to provide extra decision time for people in high stakes, high pressure situations, the second to preserve expensive perishables that shouldn't be frozen, or so that they needn't be frozen, for example. 

Also, regarding Metalborn couriers, you are looking at it too much from a modern PoV. Before the modern means of communication and transport, trusted couriers working for powerful/rich people and organisations were payed quite well. Couriers, who can move across the city with supernatural speed, vault buildings, don't require horses, etc. would have been even more valuable. In SoS Wax even thought in his PoV, when he saw that one Coinshot that employing her must have been expensive for the carriage business. 

[Returned he/him]

1 hour ago, Isilel said:

[1] Working as guards/security to rich and powerful tended to be a much better prospect historically iRL than being a factory worker or an agricultural labourer and also usually safer, so why wouldn't you? And since certain types of Metalborn are demonstrably unbeatably superior to mundane guards in the Second Era books, why wouldn't you, as a rich and powerful person/organisation scout them, snap them up young, provide them with training and lock them into long-term employment for yourself?

[...]

[2] However, Bendalloy and Cadmium Allomancy, for example, should be good enough for a decent living by themselves. The first to provide extra decision time for people in high stakes, high pressure situations, the second to preserve expensive perishables that shouldn't be frozen, or so that they needn't be frozen, for example. 

[...]

[3] Also, regarding Metalborn couriers, you are looking at it too much from a modern PoV. Before the modern means of communication and transport, trusted couriers working for powerful/rich people and organisations were payed quite well. Couriers, who can move across the city with supernatural speed, vault buildings, don't require horses, etc. would have been even more valuable. In SoS Wax even thought in his PoV, when he saw that one Coinshot that employing her must have been expensive for the carriage business. 

(I'm trying a new format for replying to items in a quote box, please let me know if you don't like it). Some questions:

I'm not saying that there are never situations in which a metalborn could command a premium income, but rather that those situations aren't necessarily common enough, lucrative enough, and give the metalborn enough of an advantage that we should be surprised to see a metalborn that is not wealthy or that prefers a different job. We definitely shouldn't be surprised to see metalborn who earn a lot and are wealthy! But neither should we be surprised to see metalborn who do poorly, even with a "valuable" power.

1. How would one snap up guards and guarantee their long-term employment? Even if a metalborn would make a better-than-mundane guard, is that your most attractive option? The comparison to only factory work or farming seems unreasonable. And, crucially, how much more could you earn as a guard than something else? Even if you're paid a premium over regular guards the work might still pay poorly. Is there enough wealth among those who want bodyguards to pay all metalborn prospects well? Probably not, though there will definitely be a high-powered elite who do. And while I agree that metalborn are generally going to be better guards than regular people it's a mistake to assume that you're hiring Kelsier, Vin, Wax, or Wayne instead of one of the countless metalborn they mowed down in exactly that job.

2. Is this profitable, though? Bendalloy and cadmium are expensive, so even a pulser/slider who sells their services at cost will also be expensive (and broke!). A pulser or slider who demands moderate compensation will be more expensive still. For the pulser, how many goods are there for which freshness is so valuable that it's worth the extra expense, even in cases where it's objectively better to use one than to refrigerate? How much commerce is there around those goods, and how many pulsers can be employed in their shipping? For a slider, how would your examples work? Would someone hire a slider to tail them all the time in case such a situation arose? Could someone get enough value out of an extra two minutes' worth of thinking time to pay for the bendalloy and also pay the slider enough that the job would be worth their time? Again, there will almost certainly be some cases where these things hold true but I'm skeptical that there would be enough that any given metalborn, or even very many of them at all, would be reliably able to make an impressive amount of money.

3. Was the courier in SoS wealthy? Or was she just expensive to employ for the business that hired her? A coinshot courier is undoubtedly better than an otherwise identical mundane courier, but how much better, and how much extra money is that worth? Some messages are definitely important enough that delivering it in ten minutes rather than an hour matters. How many such messages do you imagine Elendel has per day, and how many coinshots can make a living delivering them? If there are more coinshots than courier jobs where they can command a premium, we'd expect the pay to be pressured downwards which further makes couriering less attractive compared to other jobs.

1 hour ago, Isilel said:

It felt incredibly contrived and implausible to me that in AoL Tekiels, whose business was insurance(!) and security(!!!) had no Metalborn working for them as guards and investigators. 

I'm not sure it would have made a difference-- the Vanishers overwhelmed everyone but Wax's crew anyways. The Tekiels invested heavily in something they thought would work and were simply mistaken about the nature of the threat. I don't see much reason to think that handful of pewterarms and tineyes would have been any more insurmountable for the Vanishers' scheming, or even made a difference in the heist. But the reason I quoted this item is because it made me chuckle a little bit. You don't have to answer, of course, but I'll venture a guess that you are relatively young. Young enough to not remember 2008-2010 in much detail?

Edited June 18, 2025 by Returned

[Isilel]

21 hours ago, Returned said:

give the metalborn enough of an advantage that we should be surprised to see a metalborn that is not wealthy

 

I never said that Metallic Arts should make them wealthy, but that they should allow  them to climb from poverty into the (lower?) middle class. 

How young Metalborn could be scouted? Well, didn't you wonder how Wayne even learned about his powers? Given that both of them require expensive metals? I did and found this WoB;

 

Quote

 

Storm Cellar

We know Snapping is not the same in Mistborn Era 2.  We know Wayne knew he was a slider, but could not afford bendalloy for his early life. How do the poor skaa know they can burn rare metals?  Is there a ceremony, or a formal process of testing skaa for metal powers?

(The assumption is that nobles can just give their children a mix of metals to see if any of them are reactive.)  

Brandon Sanderson

There are lots of ways--remember that lots of groups are seeing Allomancy as valuable to them, and are actively recruiting.  There's no formal process, at least not for everyone, though some houses do have them. But there are events, even at fairs and the like, where you can get a vial and see if you feel anything--in exchange for promises of service if you do turn out to have abilities.  Beyond that, just like getting gold foil to put on food is not horribly expensive in our world, getting little bits of many of these metals is not THAT expensive. It may not give you enough power to do anything useful, but it can be enough to tell.

Miscellaneous 2018 (Oct. 14, 2018)

 

 

I would have preferred to see this mentioned in an actual book, though and to have seen Metalborn doing their jobs normally.

It also occurred to me that they shouldn't even have proper refrigeration at this point, just iceboxes and such,with ice being imported from the mountains. So, yes, having Pulsers help keep most expensive and exquisite foodstuffs fresh should have been very much worth it. 

Re: Sliders, yes, have them on retainer following their patron around during a business day, in case they are needed to provide some extra time for critical decision-making. Would likely lead to them eventually picking up other useful complimentary skills along the way. 

Re: Coinshot couriers, well we know from SoS that there were no Coinshot constables in Elendel, only a couple of couriers contracted to the police, which could only mean that being a courier pays better than being a police officer. 

Even if  run-of-the-mill Metalborn are less capable than the protagonists, Metalborn antagonists, even bit and minor ones, have  been consistently shown to be far superior to non-powered security and police. So, why would rich and powerful leave themselves wide open to any powered criminal, who decides to target them?

It just feels like an idiot plot, so that Our Heroes are always the _only_ Metalborn on the scene other than the opposition... even though in a setting like Era 2 this really shouldn't have been the case.

 

21 hours ago, Returned said:

I'm not sure it would have made a difference-- the Vanishers overwhelmed everyone but Wax's crew anyways.

 

Then Sanderson should have shown other Metalborn attempting it and failing. 

Of course the protagonists would have been the only ones able to win. That's why the books are about them. But it feels like nobody else was even trying, even when it was an existential matter for them. 

And no, I am not at all young, but a major insurance and security company in the Era 2 not having Tin Metalborn as claims  investigators and Thugs/Coinshots as security personnel is just unbelievably stupid, IMHO. Literature has to make more sense than real life .

[Returned he/him]

1 hour ago, Isilel said:

How young Metalborn could be scouted? Well, didn't you wonder how Wayne even learned about his powers? Given that both of them require expensive metals?

I wasn't referring to identifying metalborn in the first place, I was referring to a given employer identifying and attracting metalborn suitable to specific employment and then locking them into it. I'm also not suggesting that there isn't an answer to that question, only that identifying a six year old pewterarm -> long-term employment of that child as a bodyguard has some missing steps which are important to their actually staying in the job. I can imagine inducements that would do the trick, though I question if they would be attractive enough to reliably work while also being affordable enough to scoop up a sufficient portion of the metalborn population.

1 hour ago, Isilel said:

I would have preferred to see this mentioned in an actual book, though and to have seen Metalborn doing their jobs normally.

Me too! This is the kind of worldbuilding detail that really makes Sanderson shine compared to a lot of other authors, when he does it. I was disappointed to that we didn't get more detail in era 2. Hopefully era 3 includes a lot more, and I feel like it should (with expanded medallion production).

1 hour ago, Isilel said:

It also occurred to me that they shouldn't even have proper refrigeration at this point, just iceboxes and such,with ice being imported from the mountains. So, yes, having Pulsers help keep most expensive and exquisite foodstuffs fresh should have been very much worth it. 

I don't see why they couldn't have refrigeration now that they have electricity (though Wayne's funding of Sophi Tarcsel seems to have caused an irregular jump in technology, which makes it hard to judge). Even still, the issue isn't whether or not fresh food is better than frozen, it's whether or not it is enough better to justify the cost of a pulser (cadmium + their time) with an economy that can (and will) support that additional cost. Fresh strawberries are much better than frozen ones, but I wouldn't pay $60 for a pint of them when frozen ones are $3, to use an example with made-up numbers. There's always an upper end of the market for luxury items but the size of that market in Northern Scadrial is unclear-- how much money is available to chase luxury goods like ultra-fresh food, and is it enough to sustain many pulsers? Maybe, but it's not obvious to me that it definitely would be.

1 hour ago, Isilel said:

Re: Sliders, yes, have them on retainer following their patron around during a business day, in case they are needed to provide some extra time for critical decision-making. Would likely lead to them eventually picking up other useful complimentary skills along the way. 

Re: Coinshot couriers, well we know from SoS that there were no Coinshot constables in Elendel, only a couple of couriers contracted to the police, which could only mean that being a courier pays better than being a police officer. 

Even if  run-of-the-mill Metalborn are less capable than the protagonists, Metalborn antagonists, even bit and minor ones, have  been consistently shown to be far superior to non-powered security and police. So, why would rich and powerful leave themselves wide open to any powered criminal, who decides to target them?

It just feels like an idiot plot, so that Our Heroes are always the _only_ Metalborn on the scene other than the opposition... even though in a setting like Era 2 this really shouldn't have been the case.

This sounds crazily expensive if it's the best opportunity for a slider, especially to get a two-minute edge. Again, I'm not saying that no one would want the service or that no one would want to pay for it, but rather that the economy is only going to be able to support so many sliders doing it. Lots of people would love to have a personal concierge doctor on-call for them, at all times but very few can afford that, so relatively few doctors can make their living that way at some arbitrary level of income.

As for the coinshot couriers empirically being paid more than the police I'm not following your logic (I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I'm missing the argument).

Regarding the desirability of metalborn staff, again I agree that they are better. The questions are: are they sufficiently better to justify a enough of a wage premium that pushes them into the middle class for what are ultimately low-skill (though hard to replace) service jobs (which is an interesting question in itself: how much of a middle class is there in the Basin, and how "middle" is it? I haven't gotten a good read on that, but it doesn't seem robust), and is there enough wealth accrued to employ enough metalborn such that seeing a poor metalborn should be surprising or noteworthy? Defining "poor" more precisely would be helpful but I'm not sure it's necessary to discuss the broad idea.

The economics and wealth-and-power hoarding of the 19th-century-U.S.-style capitalism that dominates the Elendel Basin sucks up a lot of opportunities for personal advancement and class mobility that would allow anyone to rise, including metalborn (even if they'd have an easier time of it than others). The wealthy and powerful don't really want others to gain in wealth or power, which was a major plot point in SoS. I'd expect any metalborn to have a lot more social cachet than we see, though-- why wouldn't you want Metallic Arts in your family line, especially if you're wealthy and connected enough to marry strategically in the first place? That should be enough that none have to labor as miners, or do whatever a Bloodmaker might leverage their power to make into a career.

2 hours ago, Isilel said:

Then Sanderson should have shown other Metalborn attempting it and failing. 

Of course the protagonists would have been the only ones able to win. That's why the books are about them. But it feels like nobody else was even trying, even when it was an existential matter for them. 

I'd like to see more of this, too. The world is smaller when nothing of note happens unless the protagonists are there, and the Basin seems like it would be different than it is shown to be if metalborn were more than an afterthought (or even rose to the level of afterthought). Era 2 suffered a lot from narrow focus in a way that era 1 didn't, and while it made for interesting Batman/Indiana Jones-style stories I don't value those as much as a richer setting.

2 hours ago, Isilel said:

And no, I am not at all young, but a major insurance and security company in the Era 2 not having Tin Metalborn as claims  investigators and Thugs/Coinshots as security personnel is just unbelievably stupid, IMHO. Literature has to make more sense than real life .

If only!

[+robardin he/him]

On 6/19/2025 at 3:15 PM, Returned said:

I wasn't referring to identifying metalborn in the first place, I was referring to a given employer identifying and attracting metalborn suitable to specific employment and then locking them into it. ...

This is the kind of worldbuilding detail that really makes Sanderson shine compared to a lot of other authors, when he does it. I was disappointed to that we didn't get more detail in era 2. ...

Regarding the desirability of metalborn staff, again I agree that they are better. The questions are: are they sufficiently better to justify a enough of a wage premium that pushes them into the middle class for what are ultimately low-skill (though hard to replace) service jobs ...

The economics and wealth-and-power hoarding of the 19th-century-U.S.-style capitalism that dominates the Elendel Basin sucks up a lot of opportunities for personal advancement and class mobility that would allow anyone to rise, including metalborn (even if they'd have an easier time of it than others). The wealthy and powerful don't really want others to gain in wealth or power, which was a major plot point in SoS.

So here's the thing to remember: even 300 years since the Catacendre, the overwhelming majority of Allomancers derive their abilities from noble descent. Despite skaa Allomancers dominating the major character set of Mistborn Era 1, they were actually very rare relative to the number of noble Allomancers, thanks to the dedicated efforts of the Steel Inquisitors.

Why do you suppose some of the Great Houses of Final Empire were evidently still prominent in Elendel, like Tekiel and Hasting, or other lesser noble houses like Entrone (which Marsh comments on having disliked "when I was mortal" to intimidate Gave Entrone, the mayor of Bilming, in TLM)?

Not because they carried over noble claims to wealth, power, or prestige from the Final Empire into the rebuilding of the world under The Lord Mistborn. There would be little reason to respect such claims when everybody is climbing out of storage caverns.

It was because they, as nobles, had the most Allomancers among them -- plus the bloodstock from which most natural born Allomancers would arise in the subsequent generations.

Yes, there were a sudden number of "mistsnapped" skaa Allomancers created right before the Catacendre; about 16% of them, in fact. But however many of them survived the koloss and then the Catacendre, they may not have been "upgraded" in a way that passed on a higher probability for Allomancy in their descendants at the sDNA level in the way that the noble houses were, by virtue of being descended by blood from lerasium ingestors from the time of Rashek's original Ascension.

In addition, the nobles would probably have been experienced Allomancers, versus the mistsnapped skaa ones who'd only realized their powers a short while ago, and better able to leverage their abilities into positions of power and influence in the rebuilding. And then any "mistsnapped skaa Allomancers" would have been very attractive to recruit into their noble houses via intermarriage.

So even in Era 2, I would think most Allomancers would be like Wax, Marasi, etc., and far fewer like Wayne, in terms of coming from at least middle class backgrounds already. They probably don't HAVE to work as couriers, porters, bodyguards, etc., unless they want to, like as a summer job or side gig.

Really, the more remarkable thing would be that Wax was the only Allomancer in the crowd at the dinner party at Yomen Manor where Wax "came out of retirement" against the Vanishers. He probably was NOT, and was simply the only one who dared to stand up to them. After all, one of the reasons the Vanishers targeted the party was the density of people with "strong lines of descent" for Allomancy, including to The Lord Mistborn, so it stands to reason there WERE multiple Allomancers in the crowd, just... Unarmed, unprepared, and/or unwilling for action in the field.

Edited June 24, 2025 by robardin

[Isilel]

On 6/19/2025 at 9:15 PM, Returned said:

identifying a six year old pewterarm -> long-term employment of that child as a bodyguard has some missing steps

 

Do we even know how common it is for people to snap this early in Era 2? I was thinking more in terms of identifying teenagers and training them for jobs where being a Metalborn is a big  advantage, then employing them. Apprenticeships and the like. Indeed, from what we have seen, Metallic Arts should have conferred pretty much unbeatable advantages in some areas. Like we never see unpowered people in Era 2 going against Metalborn with combat-relevant powers and winning. 

Likewise, Tin powers would have been extremely valuable in a number of areas where heightened perception couldn't yet be replaced by technology.

Re: Pulsers and Sliders, they are very rare, so there shouldn't be that much competition between them.

Concerning the Coinshot couriers, there is an implausible lack of Metalborn as officers in the Elendel police in the books. And yet, it has been repeatedly shown how helpless they are against Metalborn criminals. One can only assume that the police doesn't pay enough to attract Metalborn with relevant powers. So, couriers presumably earn more than they would have as constables.

I have to say that I find it generally frustrating that we have no idea how normal people live in Era 2, since our cast consists of nobles and a maverick ex-urchin orphan. Do children usually go to school? In comparable time periods elementary education was compulsory in a lot of places iRL, but Wayne apparently never has gone, even when his parents had been alive. At what age do they start working? Etc.

Though there was a bit of a gaffe there in The Final Empire too, when Vin pretended to be "too young for the mills" at 16 and Spook was "too young for the mines" at 14, when iRL in comparable circumstances they'd have to have been under 7 or so to be too young for either, or some other kind of labour.

 

On 6/24/2025 at 5:13 PM, robardin said:

even in Era 2, I would think most Allomancers would be like Wax, Marasi, etc., and far fewer like Wayne, in terms of coming from at least middle class backgrounds already. They probably don't HAVE to work as couriers, porters, bodyguards, etc., unless they want to, like as a summer job or side gig.

 

I don't think so. Couriers exist in numbers, they are repeatedly mentioned in the newspapers and are briefly glimpsed in SoS. As are emotional Allomancers. Soothing parlours were presented as something reasonably wide-spread. Metalborn working for a living were implied to be something very normal and integral to Era 2 Basin society... But almost never seen on-page, unfortunately. Which hurt the worldbuilding aspect somewhat, IMHO.

I mean, settings with super-heroes and super-villains, while everyone else is normal are a dime a dozen. But how often do we see worlds where a noticeable chunk of the population has powers and the effect this should have on their society and life on every level? 

I'd like to point out that most of the people in the Refuge in TLM were common-born Allomancers from the Roughs and children of the same. So, there must have been be plenty of those. In addition there was Miles, his right-hand man Tarsin, the Coinshot bank robber, Ranette, the copper-clouds whom she paid to smoke her, etc. It is reasonable to assume that the Set's spikes also came from such people, or the wave of murders and disappearances would have been noticed much sooner.

Yes, complete lack of Metalborn (noble or otherwise), or, indeed, any security at the wedding in AoL was mind-boggling and not in a good way.

 

I also don't agree that the nobles managed to come out of Catacendre still largely on top mainly because of their Allomancy. They were the ones who were literate, numerate, had organizational and management experience. This likely played more of a role in their pre-eminence during the re-building, though of course Metallic Arts would have been helpful too.

 

Edited June 25, 2025 by Isilel

[TacoBellChoutaMeal]

On 6/18/2025 at 11:06 AM, Isilel said:

 The Quick-Eats ad makes no sense, BTW - Sliders are rare enough that it would have been quite a coincidence if one of them  was a decent professional cook as well. 

Totally unrelated to thread, but I'd argue that the Quick-Eats ad makes no sense from an economics standpoint, not a circumstance-of-birth standpoint. 

In America at the very least, restaurants survive by paying their staff pretty stinky wages in order to make ends meet. A restaurant's gotta worry about staff pay, building rent, cleaning supplies, the food and other stuff like that. And they've gotta keep prices low because nobody wants to pay $18 for a burger. FiveGuys gets away with it because they know they can and have gaslit the American people into thinking their burgers are worth the price. 

You can teach anyone to cook. The "Quick" part of the ad makes me think that this establishment is more of a McDonald's than it is a fancy steakhouse. And you can teach anyone to flip burgers or pancakes or what have you. And yeah, you could probably save money by hiring less staff if you had a small enough menu and one person could manage doing all the cooking at once. But if Wayne is an accurate indication, bendalloy seems like a pretty fast burning metal. If your restaurant is open for only lunch rush or dinner rush, you're still gonna need a few hours worth of expensive metal. The ad also mentions a bendalloy stipen as part of the payment. But if I'm a slider, a rare metal born, I'm haggling over my wages. Quick-Eats sounds like the worst job you could work on Scadrial. You're gonna be standing over a grill for hours and hours and hours while time passes much much slower for everyone else outside. You're gonna be in hell, dude. And you're probably gonna be lonely, too. Maybe you've got one other person in the bubble working with you, but who knows. You're gonna be working long, long hours regardless. And if management is more stingy with the bendalloy than the ad initially claimed, and you can only burn it here and there to get caught up on orders, you're still gonna be in the rust behind on orders most days, if the restaurant was popular enough. I imagine it would be. "Whoa, instant food, I just have to wait in a line going around the block? Sure, I've got time." People would wait for that, even if the line still amounted to the same amount of wait time.

The ad is looking for a Slider to work 6 days a week, instead of hiring multiple Sliders. Even if they paid top-boxing, that's still one of those "go rust yourself" job postings. Quick-eats is bound to fail. There's no way they could pay their staff enough to keep up with demand all the while keeping prices low enough to be consumer friendly. You could be a slider doing literally any other job and it wouldn't be as bad as that one.  

[Nitpicking]

If Quick-Eats really worked as implied, with someone using bendalloy all day 6 days a week, you'd be making savants out of your cooks. That's a serious OSHA violation, I would think.