Interesting tidbits from signing in San Jose

[WeiryWriter he/him]

While I do think there is at least one Shard on Yolen, that quote could be interpreted in number of ways.  One being that Yolen doesn't have an extant Shard.  It is location of the Shattering, and is the birthplace of all the Shards, which I think counts as "significant shardic influence."

 

It probably does have a Shard though.

[Windrunner he/him]

That's why I said, "implies," not, "says definitively". With a five book series set on Yolen, I'd be shocked if there isn't at least two Shards there.

[Kurkistan he/him]

That's why I said, "implies," not, "says definitively". With a five book series set on Yolen, I'd be shocked if there isn't at least two Shards there.

 

Not necessarily. Even discounting the Wax & Wayne books, we're going to have 6 books on Scadrial with only one (technically) Shard.

[Windrunner he/him]

That's not a compelling argument for me at all. Scadrial started out with two Shards and they remain there, even if they have begun to fuse. Elantris is a single loose trilogy with only three planned full novels and it gets two Shards, with a third in its past. I think that it's not terribly far fetched to believe that there are multiple Shards on the world where the Shattering occurred, one of the three main pillars of Brandon's cosmere sequence.

[Kurkistan he/him]

My point is that you don't need Shardic conflict and/or interaction to be able to tell a good and/or long story. The Dor being comprised to two Shards had little to do with the story in Elantris or TES; Harmony is functionally one Shard at this point, in terms of both consistency of behavior and singularity of Intent. Nalthis is doing perfectly fine, dramatically, with Endowment sitting pretty by his/her self.

I don't have a problem with multiple Shards sticking around on Yolen, but the length and/or importance of any planned series set there has nothing to do with it. It's not a question of "getting" Shards like you're trying to win a game: Brandon will give each Shardworld the Shard(s) that best contribute to its story; Yolen could be best served with just a Splinter, for all we know.

Edited May 24, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Windrunner he/him]

I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree then. I never claimed it was like a game... I think that as a general rule, stories and worlds with fewer or no Shards are less significant than stories with more Shards. They're at the core of the overarching story. I find it unlikely that one of the stories we've been told is at the heart of the behind the scenes story we've been told would have no Shards.

[Meg]

*secretly throwing in* There are 16 Shards of Adonalsium (ShofAds) and "ten core worlds" (IIRC), so wouldn't that imply that not every world/plant has two ShofAds (at least not permanently)? 

[Windrunner he/him]

Mmhmm, we already knew that not every one of the core ten had multiple Shards. Nalthis doesn't, and it wouldn't surprise me if Silence Divine had a single Shard as well, along with others we don't know about yet. The only thing I was saying was that I personally find it hard to believe that Yolen specifically would have one or no Shards.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

*secretly throwing in* There are 16 Shards of Adonalsium (ShofAds) and "ten core worlds" (IIRC), so wouldn't that imply that not every world/plant has two ShofAds (at least not permanently)? 

Yeah, but we count Odium for Stormlight Archive, and it's possible he used to just go hang out in Yolen back in the day.

[ROSHtafARian]

Wasn't there a quote from Brandon that said all the Shardholders were characters we'd see in the main Dragonsteel series?  Maybe he just said Dragonsteel, period, which means he could have meant the Liar of Partinel duology, pre-Shattering, but I could of sworn he was talking about the five book sequence.  Which I always took to mean that series would be set vastly before the rest of the cosmere books, and was the main basis for me thinking the Shards were all still present on Yolen post-Shattering, and they only left for other Shardworlds later, most likely at the end of that series.

[Nepene he/him]

My point is that you don't need Shardic conflict and/or interaction to be able to tell a good and/or long story. The Dor being comprised to two Shards had little to do with the story in Elantris or TES; Harmony is functionally one Shard at this point, in terms of both consistency of behavior and singularity of Intent. Nalthis is doing perfectly fine, dramatically, with Endowment sitting pretty by his/her self.

I don't have a problem with multiple Shards sticking around on Yolen, but the length and/or importance of any planned series set there has nothing to do with it. It's not a question of "getting" Shards like you're trying to win a game: Brandon will give each Shardworld the Shard(s) that best contribute to its story; Yolen could be best served with just a Splinter, for all we know.

 

The Dor being two was used to make the Brandon Avalanche (with the evil monks and probably the Bloodsealers) and was very important to both stories.  Harmony is one shard, and as such the most recent Mistborn book was non epic. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a new Shard to fight in Mistborn trilogy 2 given that we will apparently be seeing some new final metal from the men of gold and red. Nalthis is not doing fine since Sanderson is doing single books in that world, not epic series.

 

Multiple gods is massively important for making an epic fantasy series. Wheel of Time has the creator and the Dark One. David Eddings books almost all have good and evil gods. Runelord has the Earth and the Master.

 

Multiple magic systems help a lot too, in books like the Dragon Prince series with the two types of magic, the Shannara book with the druid magic and the demon magic.

 

It's the norm for an epic fantasy series. You have some big magical bad with immense power, the heroes have to power up to fight him or have to find his weakness, and there are vast armies of normal humans and other races intriguing and fighting too.

Edited May 26, 2013 by Nepene

[Phantom Monstrosity]

I'm willing to bet that no new shards will come to mistborn; mistborn will go to other shards.

[Meg]

Harmony is one shard, and as such the most recent Mistborn book was non epic. 

 

 

Is Harmony "one shard"? I didn't understand BS that way. 

 

 

Question

Were Ruin and Preservation two shards or one?

Brandon Sanderson

They were two shards. Harmony is considered a shard, although it’s really two, in the same way that a king of two countries would still be considered a king.

source

 

 

I'll stand with this definition even though a newer statement could be read in the other way and sounds sort of contradicting the older one: 

 

Mason Wheeler

And shard holders tend to take the name of the shard they hold. So you've got Sazed, who goes by "Harmony" now, after taking up Ruin and Preservation. That makes me wonder, does he hold two shards... or one?

Brandon Sanderson

You could really answer that either way. The distinction is a really subjective one, and you could say that he's holding both shards, or that he holds one single Harmony.

source

 

 

So I think there is one person (Sazed) holding two Shards (Ruin and Preservation). 

[Kurkistan he/him]

But the Shards are starting to merge to the point where they would "take effort to split apart", to the point where Sazed would drop Harmony if he died. The "subjectivity" can come in in that, with effort, you can still separate the two halves, and either way you can recognize them as distinct entities, but that doesn't stop them from having been super-glued together.

Edited May 26, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

"You could really answer that either way."  Stop arguing.

[Leuthie]

The question about whether Splinters are to Shards as Shards are to Adonalsium becomes important. Does each Splinter carry only a piece of the intent of its parent Shard (how does one break up the concept.of Honor into independent pieces?) or is the Intent of each Splinter the same as its parent?

[Kurkistan he/him]

We know that Splinters can have their own Intents, so that implies that those Intents are unique, i.e. not copies of their parent's.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

We know that Splinters can have their own Intents, so that implies that those Intents are unique, i.e. not copies of their parent's.

Well, they could be subsets.  Like Preservation -> Canning Vegetables or something.

 

 

But yeah I think Nightblood is probably at the point where his intent is 'Destroy Evil'.

[Kurkistan he/him]

Quite.

[Leuthie]

So its confirmed that they're subsets of their parent Shard?