Cosmere Magic: Softer, Harder, or the Same?

[Returned he/him]

Do you think that the hardness of magic in the Cosmere has changed over time? For my part I think that there has been a bifurcation, and the magic is as hard as it ever was in theory but in practice has become much softer. There are rules which apply nearly all of the time but relying on them seems fraught.

The magic definitely seems harder in the sense that we know more about it and its underlying components, but that's a function of us now knowing enough about different systems to appreciate rules that might have always existed. For example, the specific mechanics of Allomancy in Mistborn era 1 weren't all that important and were referenced but rarely important to the plot. We got a bit of conversation around the Lord Ruler and Vin being inherently stronger Allomancers than other people, some examples (explicit and implicit) of savants, but for the most part the stories turned on cleverness rather than technical details of Metallic Arts. We knew little, there was a lot of mystery, and the scope and scale of magic felt undefined (even though we were told and shown that it was very well defined).

The magic felt much more rigid (to me) in early Stormlight and Mistborn era 2, but in a very organic way. We were seeing people with much more limited power sets trying to accomplish similarly spectacular goals and so the particulars of how they used those powers mattered a lot. Szeth showed up and had access to three lashings, all of which he used to great effect in clever and, above all, physically defined ways. When we saw Kaladin learn about the lashings we got even more detail like this as he experimented his way to understanding what his powers let him do. On Scadrial the very fact that Metallic Arts were such an... accessory to society and life that they could hardly have limitless power. So at this phase in the novels the magic is very sharply limited in what it can do, but almost limitless in what a person can do with it. That's this forum's overall favorite situation as we think through interesting applications and wonder about increasing the marginal efficiency of a given system by a few percentage points.

At present, I feel that we are at kind of an odd point. There is a lot of magic that has been pretty thoroughly defined in ways that don't allow for a lot of flexibility (very hard magic) but the books' plots aren't equipped for general mastery of magical knowledge to be available outside of deity-scale characters. That, along with other (good) reasons seem to have led to some meta-softness creeping in. Allomancy used to work some specific way (rigid rules), but now it doesn't (different rigid rules), and a lot of the old rigid rules stopped applying for reasons that feel more like a much softer magic system to me (Sazed just willed the change into existence). That's OK, and at least it gives the Shards something to do other than just talk to people.

But my final item is one which has been creeping into greater prominence for years: intent. What originally seemed like a quirk of Awakening is increasingly a fundamental element of all of the Cosmere magic systems. To my eye, "intent" is now the thing which primarily defines what magic can and cannot do, as opposed to the older (apparently) arbitrary rules-based systems. Things that used to be impossible for magic to do now are achievable, provided that the magic-user wants those things strongly enough and in a precise enough way.

All of this leaves me with the feeling that magic is harder in the Cosmere than it used to be, but that that hardness is not reliable. We can (and here, we do!) obsess over the minutiae of individual magic systems and how they can be applied but those rules themselves seem like we can't count on them to actually limit those systems much in any particular case. Sort of like an inverse of the authority of the Prime Aqasix as it was explained to Yanagawn: your authority is unlimited, right up until you try to use it (at which point it turns out there are a lot of limitations). Some of this is probably planned (like Awakening). Some of it is probably a necessary evil-- with so many magic systems interacting, sometimes there will be a collision which can't be resolved without an arbitrary thing that arbitrarily resolves it (like the infamous atium retcon).

It has left me feeling a bit rudderless, that all my thinking about Cosmere magic is mostly only good for correlating to the various ars arcana in the books. But we're a lot closer to "magic can do whatever you want because you want it" than we used to be, even as the day-to-day details of magic have become more defined. More time and books can shift this feeling in any direction, of course, so I'm not despairing.

I'm curious about others' perceptions of the hardness of Cosmere magic. What do you think?

[Trusk'our he/him]

2 hours ago, Returned said:

Do you think that the hardness of magic in the Cosmere has changed over time? For my part I think that there has been a bifurcation, and the magic is as hard as it ever was in theory but in practice has become much softer. There are rules which apply nearly all of the time but relying on them seems fraught.

The magic definitely seems harder in the sense that we know more about it and its underlying components, but that's a function of us now knowing enough about different systems to appreciate rules that might have always existed. For example, the specific mechanics of Allomancy in Mistborn era 1 weren't all that important and were referenced but rarely important to the plot. We got a bit of conversation around the Lord Ruler and Vin being inherently stronger Allomancers than other people, some examples (explicit and implicit) of savants, but for the most part the stories turned on cleverness rather than technical details of Metallic Arts. We knew little, there was a lot of mystery, and the scope and scale of magic felt undefined (even though we were told and shown that it was very well defined).

The magic felt much more rigid (to me) in early Stormlight and Mistborn era 2, but in a very organic way. We were seeing people with much more limited power sets trying to accomplish similarly spectacular goals and so the particulars of how they used those powers mattered a lot. Szeth showed up and had access to three lashings, all of which he used to great effect in clever and, above all, physically defined ways. When we saw Kaladin learn about the lashings we got even more detail like this as he experimented his way to understanding what his powers let him do. On Scadrial the very fact that Metallic Arts were such an... accessory to society and life that they could hardly have limitless power. So at this phase in the novels the magic is very sharply limited in what it can do, but almost limitless in what a person can do with it. That's this forum's overall favorite situation as we think through interesting applications and wonder about increasing the marginal efficiency of a given system by a few percentage points.

At present, I feel that we are at kind of an odd point. There is a lot of magic that has been pretty thoroughly defined in ways that don't allow for a lot of flexibility (very hard magic) but the books' plots aren't equipped for general mastery of magical knowledge to be available outside of deity-scale characters. That, along with other (good) reasons seem to have led to some meta-softness creeping in. Allomancy used to work some specific way (rigid rules), but now it doesn't (different rigid rules), and a lot of the old rigid rules stopped applying for reasons that feel more like a much softer magic system to me (Sazed just willed the change into existence). That's OK, and at least it gives the Shards something to do other than just talk to people.

But my final item is one which has been creeping into greater prominence for years: intent. What originally seemed like a quirk of Awakening is increasingly a fundamental element of all of the Cosmere magic systems. To my eye, "intent" is now the thing which primarily defines what magic can and cannot do, as opposed to the older (apparently) arbitrary rules-based systems. Things that used to be impossible for magic to do now are achievable, provided that the magic-user wants those things strongly enough and in a precise enough way.

All of this leaves me with the feeling that magic is harder in the Cosmere than it used to be, but that that hardness is not reliable. We can (and here, we do!) obsess over the minutiae of individual magic systems and how they can be applied but those rules themselves seem like we can't count on them to actually limit those systems much in any particular case. Sort of like an inverse of the authority of the Prime Aqasix as it was explained to Yanagawn: your authority is unlimited, right up until you try to use it (at which point it turns out there are a lot of limitations). Some of this is probably planned (like Awakening). Some of it is probably a necessary evil-- with so many magic systems interacting, sometimes there will be a collision which can't be resolved without an arbitrary thing that arbitrarily resolves it (like the infamous atium retcon).

It has left me feeling a bit rudderless, that all my thinking about Cosmere magic is mostly only good for correlating to the various ars arcana in the books. But we're a lot closer to "magic can do whatever you want because you want it" than we used to be, even as the day-to-day details of magic have become more defined. More time and books can shift this feeling in any direction, of course, so I'm not despairing.

I'm curious about others' perceptions of the hardness of Cosmere magic. What do you think?

You know, I think I get where you're coming from.

Especially with the secret novels (doubly so for the Sunlit Man), the magic technically felt like we were learning more about it and we could go more off of what we learned. . . but I didn't actually see great ways to use the new info we got. It seemed a little arbitrary at times.

So yeah, this definitely bothers me to a large extent. I'm really hoping Ghostbloods sheds more light on the nitty gritty of things like Savantism, Resonances, how Investiture is stored in metals, and how the crap people can jump from purely biological (and Hemalurgic) Metallic Arts to full blown mechanical Investiture.

I have a feeling that there will be a time when the chaotic stuff will become largely definable again, just with a lot more moving parts. But it isn't there yet.

Edited November 8, 2025 by Trusk'our

[Treamayne]

10 hours ago, Returned said:

But my final item is one which has been creeping into greater prominence for years: intent. What originally seemed like a quirk of Awakening is increasingly a fundamental element of all of the Cosmere magic systems. To my eye, "intent" is now the thing which primarily defines what magic can and cannot do, as opposed to the older (apparently) arbitrary rules-based systems. Things that used to be impossible for magic to do now are achievable, provided that the magic-user wants those things strongly enough and in a precise enough way.

The thing is, Intent and Command have always been a part of all of the MoIs - it's just that Brandon specifially made it so that Connection (Focus), Intent (Command), Identity, Fortune, etc. all have a part to play, but do not have an equal part to play. Command, In allomancy comes from the metal itself (very small part) and in Awakening is spoken and plays a very large role; while Surgebinding is Variable - because the Oath seems to be a Command - invoking the Intent of the Oath. Intent can be understanding - knowing and understanding what you are trying to accomplish (compounding) or Command-like (an Elantrian uses Intent to draw an Aon) or more specific, like Kaladin finally understanding how Intent interacts with Reverse Lashings. 

All of the Spiriual Components should be present in each system - but sometimes it's barely 10% of the MoI and sometimes it is 75+% of the MoI. I think of it more like Elements - Pre-Era 1 their understanding of Magic and Investiture was like Classical Greek Elements (water, fire, etc.) - and moving into Era three they are realizing it is more like the Periodic Table. It's not that the rules are less restrictive than before - its that understanding them opens up option they never realized were always there because their pre-conceptions and misunderstanding limited what they thought was possible. 

Spoiler

Quote

Chaos

In Dawnshard we learned that Intent and Command are two different things, whereas in Warbreaker Vasher is clearly conflating these two into just saying it's the Command. What's the difference between Intent and Command?

Brandon Sanderson

Intent encompasses more understanding. Command is specifically narrow. A lot of times, these things are gonna be conflated, because they basically can be. Like, if Vasher creates an awakened thing and says "go get me those keys." The Intent is: "I need the keys to get outta here. I want to be free." The Command is: "Go fetch keys." Those are two different things, but they are working toward the same goal. It is important in cosmere terms that the Intent is understood, even if sometimes the words that can speak 'em are clunky and smaller in scale by nature than the Intent.

Let's say the Intent of a Shard encompasses more than the word that the Shard is described by. It's a similar thing that the Intent of a Command is often vaster than the actual words spoken. And the magic can grasp the Intent, not just the Command, depending on the magic system and how good you are at it, and things like that. The words are there to focus Intent. How about that?

Chaos

Bringing the old word "focus" back into it. Let's talk about body focuses; what's going on there? (That's a joke.)

Brandon Sanderson

I'll throw you a kernel on that one in the fifth book if you watch for it. That old Rosharan philosophy will actually be relevant for a small thing happening in the fifth book.

Shardcast Interview (Jan. 23, 2021)

Quote

Argent

With Intent and Command, I've been thinking about how these things would apply to other worlds. On Nalthis they seem kind of folded together into the same thing, but I can't crack the metals on Scadrial and the Aons in Elantris. Because the Aons seem very Command-y, not very Intent-y, right? What about the metals?

Brandon Sanderson

The Aons, you should be able to eventually figure it out. With the metals, when I wrap this in, it's going to be very slight, and you shouldn't assume that every one of the permutations of the cosmere magics are going to require the same levels of... I need the freedom on each one. So Intent and Command can't be a major feature of every magic, otherwise it's too restrictive. You're going to end up with too many that feel the same. You can imagine, on Scadrial, that different metals would not have had to do what they do in the origin of the magic system. That is not necessarily innate, that is relating to the creation of the magic.

Argent

How it was built manually, almost, by a Shard?

Brandon Sanderson

Does that make sense? You can imagine an in-cosmere magic system that is very similar to Allomancy, where each of the metals do a different thing than is in Allomancy.

Footnote: While the question was being asked, Brandon was nodding the entire time until he first spoke.
JordanCon 2021 (July 16, 2021)

Quote

Moogle

Compounding requires practice, according to The Hero of Age's annotations. And yet, it's apparently as easy as burning a metalmind. What was going on that meant the Inquisitors couldn't figure out how to do it (despite Ruin likely knowing how and undoubtedly wanting them to learn) for over a year? What skill did they need to practice doing, exactly?

And what happened while they were practicing burning metalminds without successfully Compounding? Did they get an Allomantic effect?

Brandon Sanderson

What I think I was getting at in the annotations was a cosmere magic rule that, perhaps, I hadn't completely refined yet. This is the idea that INTENTION is vitally important to the workings of most cosmere magics.

You can learn to burn metals instinctively over time, but it does take time--time for your body to figure out what it's doing. If you have instruction and guidance, you can pick it up in an evening, like Vin did. Same goes for most of the magics. This ties into Awakening, with the idea that you have to form a command.

During Warbreaker was where I really refined this aspect of the magic. Logically, since the beginning of the cosmere, I've wanted all three Realms to be important to the way the magics worked. The "Practice" therefore for compounding is mental practice--a barrier to overcome in understanding what is happening, and what it will do to you.

If you already know all of these things by having it explained to you, that barrier is far less high. I think that was what I was talking about in the Annotations, without really having the idea specified yet--though I'd have to look back at the annotation and re-read it to say for certain.

Worldbuilders AMA (Dec. 3, 2015)

 

Hope that helps

[Xanpheon]

On 11/8/2025 at 1:01 AM, Returned said:

But my final item is one which has been creeping into greater prominence for years: intent. What originally seemed like a quirk of Awakening is increasingly a fundamental element of all of the Cosmere magic systems. To my eye, "intent" is now the thing which primarily defines what magic can and cannot do, as opposed to the older (apparently) arbitrary rules-based systems. Things that used to be impossible for magic to do now are achievable, provided that the magic-user wants those things strongly enough and in a precise enough way.

While I do get the complaint and criticism - it's certainly a valid worry - something I feel you may be overlooking is the nature of "intent" as far as it works in (for example) Allomancy.

Yes, intent affects how you can direct the Investiture that is being used if you think about it hard enough. But for example, with Allomancy it doesn't actually let you - for example - use metals in ways that they can't normally be used. Wayne's Bendalloy bubble at the end of TLM was an example of Intent affecting the Magic system, but only within the bounds of how Bendalloy works.

Intent is a part of every magic system, but in many examples it is merely there to grant awareness of what you are trying to do rather than necessarily consciously direct the magic to do "anything". All of the metallic arts, for example, interact with Intent (primarily) insomuch as you need to be aware of what the metal does and the existence of the power repository to use them. Vin with the metals outside of her "luck" to riot people's emotions, for example - she needed to be told what the other metals could do to properly use them. The medallions are another great example - the BoM needed the awareness of what they were before they could be used - i.e. having the "intent" to use them.

So, yes, to an extent Intent allows you to bend the rules, but it doesn't let you break them under normal circumstances. It takes some truly incredible power, along with often things in addition to the intent, to let you break the rules.

[DoctaDajman]

On 11/7/2025 at 6:01 PM, Returned said:

Do you think that the hardness of magic in the Cosmere has changed over time? For my part I think that there has been a bifurcation, and the magic is as hard as it ever was in theory but in practice has become much softer. There are rules which apply nearly all of the time but relying on them seems fraught.

The magic definitely seems harder in the sense that we know more about it and its underlying components, but that's a function of us now knowing enough about different systems to appreciate rules that might have always existed. For example, the specific mechanics of Allomancy in Mistborn era 1 weren't all that important and were referenced but rarely important to the plot. We got a bit of conversation around the Lord Ruler and Vin being inherently stronger Allomancers than other people, some examples (explicit and implicit) of savants, but for the most part the stories turned on cleverness rather than technical details of Metallic Arts. We knew little, there was a lot of mystery, and the scope and scale of magic felt undefined (even though we were told and shown that it was very well defined).

The magic felt much more rigid (to me) in early Stormlight and Mistborn era 2, but in a very organic way. We were seeing people with much more limited power sets trying to accomplish similarly spectacular goals and so the particulars of how they used those powers mattered a lot. Szeth showed up and had access to three lashings, all of which he used to great effect in clever and, above all, physically defined ways. When we saw Kaladin learn about the lashings we got even more detail like this as he experimented his way to understanding what his powers let him do. On Scadrial the very fact that Metallic Arts were such an... accessory to society and life that they could hardly have limitless power. So at this phase in the novels the magic is very sharply limited in what it can do, but almost limitless in what a person can do with it. That's this forum's overall favorite situation as we think through interesting applications and wonder about increasing the marginal efficiency of a given system by a few percentage points.

At present, I feel that we are at kind of an odd point. There is a lot of magic that has been pretty thoroughly defined in ways that don't allow for a lot of flexibility (very hard magic) but the books' plots aren't equipped for general mastery of magical knowledge to be available outside of deity-scale characters. That, along with other (good) reasons seem to have led to some meta-softness creeping in. Allomancy used to work some specific way (rigid rules), but now it doesn't (different rigid rules), and a lot of the old rigid rules stopped applying for reasons that feel more like a much softer magic system to me (Sazed just willed the change into existence). That's OK, and at least it gives the Shards something to do other than just talk to people.

But my final item is one which has been creeping into greater prominence for years: intent. What originally seemed like a quirk of Awakening is increasingly a fundamental element of all of the Cosmere magic systems. To my eye, "intent" is now the thing which primarily defines what magic can and cannot do, as opposed to the older (apparently) arbitrary rules-based systems. Things that used to be impossible for magic to do now are achievable, provided that the magic-user wants those things strongly enough and in a precise enough way.

All of this leaves me with the feeling that magic is harder in the Cosmere than it used to be, but that that hardness is not reliable. We can (and here, we do!) obsess over the minutiae of individual magic systems and how they can be applied but those rules themselves seem like we can't count on them to actually limit those systems much in any particular case. Sort of like an inverse of the authority of the Prime Aqasix as it was explained to Yanagawn: your authority is unlimited, right up until you try to use it (at which point it turns out there are a lot of limitations). Some of this is probably planned (like Awakening). Some of it is probably a necessary evil-- with so many magic systems interacting, sometimes there will be a collision which can't be resolved without an arbitrary thing that arbitrarily resolves it (like the infamous atium retcon).

It has left me feeling a bit rudderless, that all my thinking about Cosmere magic is mostly only good for correlating to the various ars arcana in the books. But we're a lot closer to "magic can do whatever you want because you want it" than we used to be, even as the day-to-day details of magic have become more defined. More time and books can shift this feeling in any direction, of course, so I'm not despairing.

I'm curious about others' perceptions of the hardness of Cosmere magic. What do you think?

I'm gonna vote softer. I feel the intent worries and argument but I just want to toss out there that the thing that makes it feel the most soft to me is the healing aspect.  

Seeing a Returned get their throat slit was an intense moment highlighting the dangers of existance. 

Watching Vin get battered and slashed up every book barely escaping througg means other than healing made me really appreciate the system and its limits. 

Even Miles made the healing look awesome as it was his only power. 

The Stormlight Archives butchered it for me. Took all of the magic of the books away. I dont buy the mental illness selling point and dangers. Adolin is the GOAT in that series becuase he is the only POV character working without stormlight to insta heal him from one shot kills. I really dont care what anti investiture systems have been introduced. All of the rules of a system matter very little when those rules arent tied to palpable danger. But who am I to critique it. I cant bring myself to read RoW or WaT because of how much I loath the passive healing of stormlight. All of the rules, intent, connection, get lost in the lack of danger for me. 

I dig the Raysium dagger though. Although after hearing how the heralds conduct themselves in battle I struggle to believe Moash could stab Jezrien outside of the herald being suicidal and not wanting to live anyways. But that is my same argument for how Vin beat TLR. In the end, I think those immortal beings welcome death. 

[Returned he/him]

On 11/10/2025 at 7:48 AM, Xanpheon said:

While I do get the complaint and criticism - it's certainly a valid worry - something I feel you may be overlooking is the nature of "intent" as far as it works in (for example) Allomancy.

Yes, intent affects how you can direct the Investiture that is being used if you think about it hard enough. But for example, with Allomancy it doesn't actually let you - for example - use metals in ways that they can't normally be used. Wayne's Bendalloy bubble at the end of TLM was an example of Intent affecting the Magic system, but only within the bounds of how Bendalloy works.

Intent was just the most acute example I had of the magic being closer to "whatever you want" rather than "your power is a hammer, only good for nails". I'm not intending to suggest that there are no rules whatsoever, only that the hardness of the magic systems as they were originally presented seems to have eroded a lot. Intent as one of the key elements of magic doing what you want is striking both because it suggests the limitations we've been told of are not necessarily the ones that matter and also because it perfectly suits the "magic does whatever I will it to" form of the softest magic systems.

Allomancy may well be the most limited invested art we know about (though I'll note also that you can create new allomantic/feruchemical metals if you have the godmetals to work with, so the limitations of "what a metal does" seem somewhat overstated to me), and I think that most of its development in the books is related to skill and knowledge. We have good examples in Kelsier's ability during his showdown with the Lord Ruler (he's radically better at pushing and pulling than pretty much everyone else). Wax is even more skilled, able to push on specific parts of a bullet and using his steel bubble. We've got WoBs indicating that a skilled Allomancer could even push and pull from different parts of their bodies rather than just their center of mass. Conceivably, contrary to Kelsier's explanation an appropriately prepared Scadrian might be able to actually levitate a metal object around at will (A-iron, A-steel, and F-duralumin might be sufficient to do it), or perhaps not even need something to be "a metal" to influence it at all.

Even if you think that's impossible because "the metals don't work that way" we've already seen things which break our previous understandings of the metallic arts, such as the medallions. The only reason people are sure the limitations exist is because we haven't seen anyone exceed them. Yet. The limitations we've already discarded were once at least as rigid-seeming and the only conclusion we should feel comfortable reaching about the "bounds of how [metals work]" is that we don't know what the limits really are. That's the sort of thing that I meant by being able to do more by learning more about the powers-- our understanding is limited, which imposes practical limitations on the powers. As readers who cannot experiment with the magics that's an especially acute issue for us.

I'm increasingly thinking that the standard for AonDor (it can do literally anything, you just have to be able to code it) is not unique to it. Metallic arts are beyond what we were told they could be, Forgery has accomplished some pretty wild stuff, Surgebinding seems to have few if any limitations (especially for Bondsmiths). The limitations as per Sanderson's laws of magic seem to be fading even as magic directly solves ever more problems.

Edited November 11, 2025 by Returned

[Treamayne]

19 hours ago, Returned said:

Conceivably, contrary to Kelsier's explanation an appropriately prepared Scadrian might be able to actually levitate a metal object around at will

Kelsier does this (briefly) in TFE when he pushes and pulls on opposite ends of the metal cage bars to make spinning shields to block the arrows being fired at the escaped prisoners (right before the Inquisitor fight). It's not pushing and pulling from other-than-center-mass; but it is the same skill Wax showed when he pushed on different parts of the bullet. 

19 hours ago, Returned said:

I'm not intending to suggest that there are no rules whatsoever, only that the hardness of the magic systems as they were originally presented seems to have eroded a lot.

This likely depends on how you are defining Hardness in the magic. We are getting more rules, not less - just a better understanding of those rules that open up new options not previously considered. By the definitions I am aware of (Mohs scale - hard fantasy section, Magic A is Magic A) I would say Era 3 is Harder magic than Era 1 was. Broader understanding increases COA options, but the magic isn't "Softer" (less defined) at all, to me. Intent is not likely to allow BioChromatic Breath to Steelpush, or Stormlight to Soothe - but Intent did allow a Reverse Lashing to have effects similar to an Ironpull (within the bounds of how Reverse Lashings already function). 

Could you please define what you consider the separation from Hard and Soft to be? Maybe we are talking about different axes of consideration, but trying to use the same terms (and therefore talking past each other)?

19 hours ago, Returned said:

The only reason people are sure the limitations exist is because we haven't seen anyone exceed them. Yet. The limitations we've already discarded were once at least as rigid-seeming and the only conclusion we should feel comfortable reaching about the "bounds of how [metals work]" is that we don't know what the limits really are.

Is this what you are using for the delineation between Hard and Soft? Quantity and type of Limitations - rather than number and understanding of rules?

Edited November 12, 2025 by Treamayne
SPAG

[Returned he/him]

16 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Could you please define what you consider the separation from Hard and Soft to be? Maybe we are talking about different axes of consideration, but trying to use the same terms (and therefore talking past each other)?

[...]

Is this what you are using for the delineation between Hard and Soft? Quantity and type of Limitations - rather than number and understanding of rules?

I'm speaking  mostly about what magic can be used to do (the problems it can solve on-screen). The mechanism is also important, but a bit less so (fictitious magic will always be arbitrary at some point), especially given the amount of hacks available which allow different magic systems to achieve the same effects or allow one system to exceed its alleged limitations. The proliferation of rules (which you are right to point out) nails down more of the mechanisms (overriding some) but also expands what can be done, which can ultimately be counterproductive to keeping the hardness.

Awakening as we know it requires color as a rule and limitation. If the color requirement goes away but Awakening is otherwise the same then the magic is softer than it was: one limiting rule fewer, capabilities unchanged. A coinshot can only push on metal. If it turns out that a coinshot can push on anything at all, provided they are wearing blue pants, then the magic is softer than it was: more rules but expanded capabilities, both arbitrary to the prior understanding, with the expansion of ability being far more impactful than the new rule is limiting. If we want to stay focused on Sanderson's laws, what I'm talking about would be the second one, that limitations > powers. The effective limitations (second law) are receding even as magic directly solves problems at least as often as ever (first law), sometimes via new rules which arbitrarily revise our understanding (as opposed to being direct extrapolations of old rules, which is addressed by the third law).

Magic that can do literally anything in one step, provided that you make the right precise hand gestures and intone the right mystical words, has elements of softness (it can do anything, at will) and hardness (the way to get magic to do any specific thing is very rigidly defined). The limitations are only in what the user (or reader) knows, and if a story problem is set up and then solved directly with magic by introducing an as-yet unknown gesture-and-word combination it can be (but isn't necessarily) indistinguishable from an ultra-soft system. It's Calvinball, if anyone still gets that reference.

We already have some power-inflation related softness: Jasnah can Soulcast pretty much anything into pretty much anything, and excluding gems from that isn't much of a limitation. Bondsmiths can do some pretty wild stuff, including getting around limitations which otherwise exist. Other softness simply undoes older supposed rules: Shai being able to become an Elantrian is a big deal, but that plus purified Dor means that fewer of the constraints on Elantrian magic truly exist any more (though I concede that Forgery is a special case due to what it is and how it works). It's true that there are new rules surrounding this new understanding but the level and accessibility of magic are higher now than they were before via the new rules-ex-machina arbitrarily changing things, and those new rules just appeared in order to make a couple of plot elements work, overriding the old rules in the process.

16 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Kelsier does this (briefly) in TFE when he pushes and pulls on opposite ends of the metal cage bars to make spinning shields to block the arrows being fired at teh escaped prisoners (right before the Inquisitor fight). It's not pushing and pulling from other-than-center-mass; but it is the same skill Wax showed when he pushed on different parts of the bullet. 

The reason I brought up Kelsier as an example is that he specifically tells Vin she cannot levitate an object freely, that she can only push and pull relative to her center of mass, which is accurate to his knowledge and experience. But that limitation is already known to be false-- a skilled and knowledgeable enough Allomancer could push or pull relative to their hand, or foot, or whatever. And even more might be possible (though I'm making up the specifics): if the Allomancer could form a Connection to different spots in the area they could perhaps push and pull relative to those spots, which makes the free levitation potentially achievable. For that matter, forming a Connection with the thing to be levitated might allow the Allomancer to push and pull from that thing to everything else, allowing for direct and consistent levitation. At some level of power or mastery they might not even need "metals" to push and pull against. 

We already know that "magic" is in everything in the Cosmere: things have energy, mass, and investiture as fundamental components, with investiture being as manipulable as the others. We've seen a lot which suggests that specific magic systems are more like interfaces overlaid on that reality than they are standalone systems. We've also seen that it is increasingly possible to directly interact with the magic (i.e., purified Dor) as well as use hacks to exceed what a particular system "properly" can do. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me that these trends will continue, and each magic system is going to be capable of doing more and more beyond what we used to think of as its limitations. Given that many of the limitations we've been presented with have turned out to not actually limit anything I see no reason to think that the rules as we currently understand them will be any more durable or constraining.

I think that all of that is built into the Cosmere in the sense that a Shard can do almost anything, and accumulating power and knowledge until one is Shard-like will bring a person close to that same capability, being nearly limitless. Magic doesn't even need to be exercised through the Shards at all, as Hoid and dragons demonstrate. My contention is that the magic systems are becoming less distinctive and more unified, albeit slowly, the scope of what magic can achieve is steadily expanding (regardless of system), and the limitations which used to define Cosmere magic are falling away or otherwise becoming less limiting. It may well be that this was always the plan and we are seeing characters correct misconceptions as they approach the true and always-consistent rules of Cosmere magic. But then my position would be that the true Cosmere magic is softer than what was originally presented.

In summary, more scope and fewer limitations = softer magic than otherwise. It's like The Expanse turning into Star Trek. Nothing at all wrong with either but very different from each other in this regard.

Edited November 12, 2025 by Returned