cleric Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I have been rereading the mistborn trilogy the past week and there seems to be a flaw in the third book. Mainly with the rule of 16. According to the book the sickness the mists bring is caused by snapping and it correlates to the 16 allomantic metals. however there are not 16 metals. by my last count there are at least 19. If you remove the god metals from the equation then there are indeed 16 known metals. However this also does not work as 1/16th of those who got the mist sickness become Atium mistings, which is a god metal. The other bump is that they did not know of all the metals. yet they imply that all of those who were snapped by the mists became mistings and thus would have only been from known metals. I believe at that point in the story 14 metals were known including atium but not including lerasium. I was just wondering if anyone had ever explained the seeming discrepancy with this whole thing as I thought the rule of 16 to be a very cool thing that worked really well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phantom Monstrosity Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 This question comes up fairly frequently. Sanderson's answered it a couple of times - it boils down to 'Preservation was screwing with the system to make a point'. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Millennium Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 The discrepancy is deliberate, as Phantom pointed out. Come to think of it, didn't Brandon say at one point that the true number of Allomantic metals was somewhere around 50? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cleric Posted February 7, 2013 Author Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 If he was screwing with the system to make a point... why 16? would not 14 or 19 been better numbers with the knowledge the characters had? If it was preservation trying to help out Vin and Elland would it not have been better to use a number they would instantly associate with allomancy? And yes Brandon has implied the existence of many more metals, but we only know of around 19 right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lightflame Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 He did the screwing about 1000 years back, so he really wouldn't have been thinking of helping Elend and Vin. Besides, they knew because Yomen figured it out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Satsuoni Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 There is a lot of sixteen in there. Vin was 16, and “Sixteen is a powerful number, Venture,” Yomen said, looking over some reports. “It was the number of days it took the Lord Ruler to reach the Well of Ascension, for instance. It figures prominently in Church doctrine.” Also, there are still sixteen base metals (kinda), with Bendalloy and its opposite (Cadmium?) being switched to atium and malatium in the temporal group, even if they didn't know two of them at the time... In general, 16 seems like a base number for Preservation (or Scadrial, to be precise), like 10 for Roshar. Also, they did know that two were missing: “The number of original Inquisitors,” Yomen said. “The number of Precepts in each Canton charter. The number of Allomantic metals. The—”“Wait,” Elend said, looking up. “What?” “Allomantic metals,” Yomen said. “There are only fourteen of those.” Yomen shook his head. “Fourteen we know of, assuming your lady was right about the metal paired to aluminum. However, fourteen is not a number of power. Allomantic metals come in sets of two, with groupings of four. It seems likely that there are two more we haven’t discovered, bringing the number to sixteen. Two by two by two by two. Four physical metals, four mental metals, four enhancement metals, and four temporal metals.” 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eri Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 (edited) The number 16 is important metaplot-wise, regardless of number of metals. That's why Preservation used it as a sign. I think it was in the annotations on the website or somewhere. Edited February 7, 2013 by Eri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phantom Monstrosity Posted February 8, 2013 Report Share Posted February 8, 2013 As is, they knew of fifteen. And Lerasium looks like an enhancement metal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cracknut Posted February 8, 2013 Report Share Posted February 8, 2013 16 and 10 aren't special only on Scadrial and Roshar. There are 16 shards and if I'm not mistaken 10 planets. There can be more metals but 16 and 10 will still be special. + Ruin could've been '16th shard'. Sixteen is a powerful number, Venture,” Yomen said, looking over some reports. “It was the number of days it took the Lord Ruler to reach the Well of Ascension, for instance. It figures prominently in Church doctrine.” Ruin was leading him to Well of Ascension. Ruin had plans for Vin as well and having exactly 16 year old girl on 1024th year can't be coincidence. Maybe shard itself has some kind of irrational inclination to its number. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abevan Posted February 9, 2013 Report Share Posted February 9, 2013 The discrepancy is deliberate, as Phantom pointed out. Come to think of it, didn't Brandon say at one point that the true number of Allomantic metals was somewhere around 50? As far as I'm aware the number of metals would be exactly 50, possibly 51. 16 base metals, Atium+16 alloys, Lerasium+16 alloys, then possibly an Atium/Lerasium alloy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Windrunner Posted February 9, 2013 Report Share Posted February 9, 2013 There's no way that we can figure out an exact count of possible Allomantic metals. 17TH SHARDAre there a limited amount of atium and lerasium alloys for each metal? BRANDON SANDERSON Hmm, yes…I suppose there would be but there are… 17TH SHARD More than sixteen? BRANDON SANDERSON Yeah, way more than sixteen. 17TH SHARD Oh wow. Okay. That's fascinating. More than sixteen and less than infinite. BRANDON SANDERSON Yes. Source 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happyman Posted February 12, 2013 Report Share Posted February 12, 2013 (edited) I would say a couple of things: (1) There are hints in Alloy of Law that the characters in-universe still haven't figured out everything there is to know about Allomancy, (2) The Law of Sixteen is referenced in Alloy of Law as a law of nature, so whatever the relationship is, it's not just the metals, and, (3) There are sixteen base metals, e.g. metals which are found in the real world with Allomantic power, (4) Because of this deep nature of 16, Ruin wasn't able to mess with Preservation's hint to humanity. These aren't complete answers (as per point 1), but they suggest that ( a ) 16 is important for more than just its relationship to the base metals in Allomancy, ( b ) it is related to the number of base metals in Allomancy and ( c ) even if Preservation was able to swap out metals in the snapping system, he was probably constrained by a more fundamental law of sixteen in how he could do the swapping. Edited February 12, 2013 by happyman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
retzely Posted March 10, 2013 Report Share Posted March 10, 2013 The thing that I found odd is that 16% of people fell to the mist sickness. However, shouldn't that have been 17%? One for each of the 16 misting possibilities and one more for the mistborn. As soon as Elend and Yomen figured out the meaning of the 16%, I immediately came to the conclusion that Demoux and the other soliders that were sick the longest were probably mistborn rather than mistings. It made less sense to me for them to be atium mistings... I just finished reading the Mistborn Trilogy and have not yet read Alloy of Law. I have read many of the chapter annotations though. So, please excuse my ignorance if I said something that has already been discussed or explained. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phantom Monstrosity Posted March 10, 2013 Report Share Posted March 10, 2013 The thing that I found odd is that 16% of people fell to the mist sickness. However, shouldn't that have been 17%? One for each of the 16 misting possibilities and one more for the mistborn. As soon as Elend and Yomen figured out the meaning of the 16%, I immediately came to the conclusion that Demoux and the other soliders that were sick the longest were probably mistborn rather than mistings. It made less sense to me for them to be atium mistings... I just finished reading the Mistborn Trilogy and have not yet read Alloy of Law. I have read many of the chapter annotations though. So, please excuse my ignorance if I said something that has already been discussed or explained. The annotation says that the mists are snapping people who have lower-than-normal allomantic potential. Mistborn all have strong allomancy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
retzely Posted March 11, 2013 Report Share Posted March 11, 2013 The annotation says that the mists are snapping people who have lower-than-normal allomantic potential. Mistborn all have strong allomancy. I agree that the annotation said that the mist would snap people who had lower-than-normal allomantic potential. However, I don't think it JUST snaps those people. I found a place in the annotation where it mentions that it would snap people with normal potential as well: http://brandonsanderson.com/annotation/345/Mistborn-3-Chapter-Seventy I suppose the 16/100 would still be better than 17/100 since part of the point was for Preservation to leave the number 16 as a clue. In which case, the 1/16 people who stayed sick longer could have still been mistborn (16 people each with an alloy * 15 groups, 1 group of 16 mistborns). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phantom Monstrosity Posted March 11, 2013 Report Share Posted March 11, 2013 I doubt there are enough skaa with mistborn-level potential to make any difference in the statistics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
retzely Posted March 11, 2013 Report Share Posted March 11, 2013 Ahhh. Very good point. Okay, I can accept that explanation. Thanks, Phantom Monstrosity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Djando Je Posted March 13, 2013 Report Share Posted March 13, 2013 16 isn't important because of allomancy, it is important because of the 16 shards. Also Vin is 18 in the 1024th year, not 16. She is 16 at the beginning of the first book, and WoA takes place two years later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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