fruit

[Kestrel she/her]

A question that's been brewing in my head for a long time.

Towards the end of part one of Mistborn, Vin is eating fruit.

None of the plants have flowers.

All fruits have flowers.

If a plant reproduces by flowers, its a fruit.

But they don't have flowers.

Then how the heck do we get fruit?

[Guest]

None of the plants have flowers.

 

If the plants are reproducing, they either have cones, flowers, or the entire Final Empire is supported by plant cloning (I doubt this last one, as it requires a significant amount of technical knowledge). Note they may not have VISIBLE flowers.

It is also possible that TLR seriously messed with the basics of plant reproduction, though I have the feeling that the intricacies of that would have been beyond him.

 

All fruits have flowers.

 

You've got it backwards, all flowers produce fruit. Fruit is defined as a part of a flower, but not necessarily an edible part of a flower. For evample, in corn the "fruit" is the husk but we eat the seeds.

[Arook he/him]

The Lord Ruler may have made just enough plants able to survive the ash and one may have had something like a fruit but flowers could not survive in that environment and just because Vin thought of it as fruit does not mean it was.

[natc]

I'd reckon TLR isn't too bad at genetics at that point in time if he can modify humans into having noble/skaa tendencies in physical build, create mistwraiths, ash-destroying microbes, etc.

He probably wasn't very good at it, but he seems to have done something right in all that. Unlike his astrophysics exploits.

[kroen]

probably tlr

Edited June 13, 2015 by kroen

[Kestrel she/her]

Okay I can live with that.

I was thinking that but I had no idea.

[IAmTheBeard]

If I remember correctly, the fruit is mentioned as being from the isles, so far away and from a slightly different ecosystem. It's probable that there are plants that produce more traditional fruit there, and that they get imported at great expense to Luthadel. After all, TLR did try to keep control copies of humanity, so he may well have done so with plants, too. 

 

Also, yes, a plant is going to need to have flowers, fruit, and seeds in order to function. But as LabRat pointed out, those things don't have to look (or taste) anything like what we would associate with flowers or fruit. Many flowers are barely distinguishable from leaves, so if they weren't a different color, people wouldn't notice them and assume the plant had no flowers. This is actually true for most plants that people don't think of as flowering plants. 

 

In the case of the Final Empire, the use of the word fruit is probably meant to imply the exotic ones that are (more) similar to our fruit. They recognize fruit exists; they just don't think of it as a normal thing. They've probably never seen it on a plant. Note that they know the words for fruit and flower. It's not like the moon, which they never mention.

[skaa he/him]

Era 1 Scadrians may have a broad culinary definition of "fruit", maybe something like "any sweet part of a plant", or possibly "any sweet and/or juicy part of a plant that could be eaten raw". Right now I could only think of the jicama root as an example of something that's not a fruit in the botanical sense but is sometimes considered a culinary fruit.

Edited June 15, 2015 by skaa

[InstantWalrus]

well fruit doesnt necassarily mean flowers in the conventional sense. A world full of ash falls is unlikely to produce flowers like daisies but fruit would still be an excellent method of seed dispersal.

 

Then again i dont remember a singal mention of any animal in those books other than horses and possibly rats.oh and dogs.

 

are there even birds on skaadrial?

[Oudeis he/him]

Animals are mentioned constantly in art; apparently there's a huge fashion for wall murals of animals among the nobility, and Keep Lekal, with its tiny intricate windows has several with "exotic animals." What actual animals these are is never made clear.

[skaa he/him]

are there even birds on skaadrial?

 

What an interesting typo.

 

There are several mentions of birds in the Mistborn trilogy, including birds of prey and carrion birds,

[Kestrel she/her]

They must have had cats as well, due to the cat metaphors/similies used to describe Vin.

Sheep, the Terris farms had sheep.

Also the Mistwraith in the first book was described as having the head of a deer I think? So they must have deer.

[InstantWalrus]

Ah lol looks like there are tons of animals When i read through the books i must have glossed over those, had this mental image of an increadably baren land with very very few animals. I always pictured all the jobs normaly done by labour animals like horses or cows/yaks being done by Skaa instead, so carriages and carts and river barges are pulled by Skaa.

 

(although there probably arnt many animals what with the flora being sparse due to the ashfalls and lack of herbivors means lack of predators)

[Kestrel she/her]

Compared to our world or other Shardworlds there aren't many, but for a landscape like that there's more than we think it seems. Now I'm tempted to reread it just to see what animals are mentioned.

[Oudeis he/him]

Vin buys a wolfhound body for OreSeur and is also offered a type of dog called a "bobbie". I don't know if there's a dog breed in real life called that. TenSoon later eats the flesh of a hog in order to imitate a horse (and there are a few horses throughout Final Empire). The Terris herd goats.

 

Those are the only ones I know for sure. At the end of Well of Ascension, when Vin and Elend and Spook are traveling through the woods, is birdsong mentioned?

[Guest]

Did an ebook search for the word "bird". There's a bunch of bird imagery, but no mention of actual birds.

[Guest]

"Animals" is generally used in a vague sense as well, or refers to things like Horses, Goats, Wolfhounds, and such. The Mistwraith that Vin sees in book 1 is the only real mention of a non-domesticated animal.

And heads—she counted six. Despite the translucent skin, she could make out a horse head sitting beside that of a deer. Another head turned toward her, and she could see its human skull. The head sat atop a long spinal cord attached to some kind of animal torso, which was in turn attached to a jumble of strange bones.

So at the least, there's wild deer out there.

Edited June 22, 2015 by LabRat

[phantasmagorically she/her]

I've heard that Scadrial is like Earth, just with allomancy and the Lord Ruler's modifications.

[Guest]

I've heard that Scadrial is like Earth, just with allomancy and the Lord Ruler's modifications.

Pre-TLR and post-Harmony.

The 1,000 years in between were very different.

[phantasmagorically she/her]

True, that's what I meant.

[soulcastJam he/him]

Not to clutter up the thread, but have an upvote phantasmagorically just for your icon. 

Edited June 24, 2015 by soulcastJam

[Arondell]

I've heard that Scadrial is like Earth, just with allomancy and the Lord Ruler's modifications.

 

Only in a vague kind of way.  The continents aren't the same so far as we know.  The only habitable regions are the far northern and southern hemispheres.  All the space between those are apparently inimical to long term habitation.  So much so that the two regions don't even know of the existence of a civilization in the other region because no one has been able to make the journey.

[phantasmagorically she/her]

Not to clutter up the thread, but have an upvote phantasmagorically just for your icon. 

ty!   Red Mages are the best (and undoubtedly the coolest looking).

[Mistdork she/her]

I'm not sure it's so much as barren, as it is that wildlife was adapted to the ash landscape by TLR. I imagine that something like a deer might be smaller and they probably don't produce like crazy like they do in Michigan or other places (there numbers are lower because there's less food but not as low as we would think. Given that Luthadel is a huge city, I think that we would be surprised at how well animals, like humans, did in this period...)

 

Anyway, considering that many skaa lived on plantations (which, as I realize don't have flowering plants...), and it seems that many people ate things like bread (comes from wheat, which, is a kind of grass and has "flowers", though not pretty ones) and vegetables. They also drank things like wine! (Hmmm, what kind of wine were they drinking? Where did the grapes come from? Was it actually honey wine [mead]? Was it some other kind of non-grape based wine?) Perhaps, we have something weirder going on, or the flowers are just not that colorful when they blossom and/or the flowers are pretty small (like the aforementioned grapes) and non-showy...

 

And perhaps, the real kicker, I doubt that Vin or any of the main characters really knew all that much about botany (at the time, Sazed, of course being a special exception later on).