Charting Hemalurgy

[Oudeis]

It is, in fact, not. The metals revealed are electrum, malatium, and aluminum, I believe. Malatium is revealed in Vetitan city, and the other two were in Urteau and Statlin, though I can't recall if we're told which is which. Neither Luthadel nor Fadrex had metals. (EDIT: To clarify, I mean that they did not explain the secrets of metals.)

 

I agree that Rashek would have largely surpressed knowledge, but I also suspect that the artist arcana (and maybe Nazh) are good at what they do and would likely have found a way to find it out, if it was known by anyone in the Ministry. (We know he wanted the knowledge suppressed, but he let people within the Ministry know about electrum, for example, which posed enormous risk.

 

In other words, maybe they knew, maybe they didn't. There are plausible, even likely scenarios supporting either argument.

Edited September 28, 2015 by Oudeis

[Yata]

 

I agree that Rashek would have largely surpressed knowledge, but I also suspect that the artist arcana (and maybe Nazh) are good at what they do and would likely have found a way to find it out, if it was known by anyone in the Ministry. (We know he wanted the knowledge suppressed, but he let people within the Ministry know about electrum, for example, which posed enormous risk.

 

Sure but one think is "we know about the Durallumin" and another is "we know what a Durallumin Spike stole" there isn't any way to discover unless you already know.

It's possible that at the time of the HoA, without any other metal of the right "Quadrant" the Ars's Author speculated that Durallumin was the key to stole Spirirual Feruchemy.

There isn't the "steal Temporal Allomantic power" for the same reason, the Author though that was the Atium the right metal to do this (and it's "quite" true).

 

I can be wrong, but there is a possibility (Mr. Sanderson is no stranger to such tricks)

Edited April 13, 2016 by Yata

[Oudeis]

Eh. Rashek could have known what it stole; recall that from Marsh's POV, at one point, we learn that Rashek held something back, the Inquisitors were never complete. It's possible, maybe even likely, that Ruin provided him with the information and that the knowledge was stored somewhere in the Steel Ministry, but that Rashek chose not to make his Inquisitors compounders.

 

We do have evidence of the ars arcanum being wrong at times, but the author does seem to obey some basic rigor. She (most people believe the author is a woman) might sometimes write things which prove to be wrong, but she rarely comes to a conclusion based on assumption or speculation and puts it in a chart as fact; such speculative work tends to be reserved for notes on the powers.

[Yata]

I have an Idea.
May one of the "Spiritual Human's Attribute" that can be stolen be "the bonds" ?

Something that allows to steal Shardblade (yes i know, it's more easy to kill the owner), Seon and maybe the Divine Breath (there aren't other "simple bond" in my mind)?

[Moogle]

Rashek was surely intelligent enough to know Allomantic metals all have an alloy with which to pair. I would be shocked, utterly shocked, if he didn't know of duralumin when he know of aluminum and electrum.

[Oudeis]

He absolutely did. Though I do not share your confidence in his intelligence. Still, perhaps you meant that even Rashek was smart enough to realize there must be an alloy.

[Moogle]

Thanks for the WoB!

Off-topic, but:

Very few Inquisitors could burn duralumin (and most who did it gained the ability through the use of spikes reused from previous, dead Inquisitors—and those spikes were therefore much weaker.)

More evidence on Hemalurgy! Hadn't read this one. Re-used spikes lose power.

I do consider Rashek clever - he managed to trick a god, hide the Well, etc. It may be due mostly to Feruchemy, but I consider those things strong evidence of above average intelligence.

[Oudeis]

He didn't hide it very... well.

 

 

Haha no but for real. Within two weeks of legitimately searching for it, Vin found it. However 'well' he hid the well, the thumps were gonna lead her right to it. Besides her, in a thousand years, who else was looking for it? What would they have done, before the millenial power re-gathered?

 

As for tricking Ruin... that, I grant you, was a good plan. Simple, but good. I'm still not sure one good idea in a thousand years makes one especially clever. I dunno. I have nothing really to support it... I just see Rashek as sorta a brute. A ton of power, and maybe plenty of determination, but not the sharpest marble in the cookie jar. Just my own head!canon, I guess.

[Moogle]

Hiding the well is a curious thing - as far as I can tell, Zane never heard the thumping, so maybe TLR didn't expect anyone to hear them? (Alendi did, so I guess that 'hiding' it was unlikely to be that effective.) Yes, Vin was particularly strong with bronze, but even so... I'm not so sure it was easy to find. Even if other Allomancers heard the thumping, TLR could just claim it was him. Compare that to Allomancers hearing a strange thumping coming from the mountains, and heading to check it out.

 

Vin specifically had Ruin manipulating her into finding it, and if she had not been born to absolutely bizarre, coincidental circumstances (mother was crazy enough to spike her Seeker sister and give it to Vin), the Well very well may have stayed hidden, nobody able to hear its thumping.

 

TLR's trick also kept the Well much more defensible, as he had thick steel walls that basically only he or someone with duralumin (knowledge of which he had kept hidden) could have gotten at it. ... Unless they knew how to manipulate Shadesmar - but he could hardly be expected to know of that.

 

His defenses diverted Hoid until Vin and co. literally discussed where it was in front of him, so that's pretty impressive and the misdirection worked. Clearly Hoid could not hear the thumping.

 

As to what they would have done... I'm not sure, did the Well partially re-fill over a thousand years, or did a bunch of liquid just suddenly dump itself down into the hole in the ground at the end of the 1024 years?

 

Other things I thought showed some intelligence:

• Had the mind of a powergamer, and became a savant in all of the metals. He also focused himself on learning tricks like detecting whether people were lying - not sure if, as a dumb brute, I'd focus on that sort of thing. I sort of see self-improvement as a sign of intelligence.
• Carefully controlled technological progress, as it would have resulted in things which could be dangerous to him. For example, he got rid of gunpowder because he preferred bows - bows needing training meant that rebellions were much less dangerous. I see there being some intelligence in realizing that rather than saying "hey guns would make my soldiers much more powerful!".
• I want to say a bunch of things he did while using the Well, but given the expanded mind thing, I'm not sure calling them proof of intelligence is particularly compelling.

I don't know, I guess my assumption that he was clever isn't particularly well-founded. It's just the impression I got from the books. We don't have enough evidence either way, really... the things he did worked, obviously, and his downfall was not really stupidity but emotional exhaustion/underestimating his enemy/arrogance. (As far as I'm concerned, he never should have lost anyways, no matter how stupid he was. He didn't even try to Pull his bracers back, or superspeed and crush Vin's head after she took the mists in.)

 

I'm really curious as to what TLR would have done if he had used the Well again. Would he have fixed anything?

[Oudeis]

Eh, I could respond to your argument, but we're both admitting that it's mostly head!canon at this point. Though I do take exception to your suggestion that powergaming makes someone clever.

 

I have to confess, it might just be bias on my part. We know that before he ever got to the Well, he was a racist, genocidal, megalomaniacal hate-monger, and I would simply like the world better if such people were stupid.

[Moogle]

Fair enough. I went a little overboard in writing a big response.

 

The powergaming thing I'd quibble... thinking more on it, I think I understand what you're thinking when you say it's not a sign of cleverness. For the sake of not getting into an argument on semantics, I think I'll stop there. I do tend to mistakenly conflate ambition with cleverness.

[Oudeis]

Your post was fine, and if someone wants to start a thread, "Rashek: Dumb or Clever?" I would respond more fully. But we're both agreeing that our arguments are speculative at best, and we've pointed to arguments we've each interpreted different ways.

 

Part of it, I feel like people conflate a lot of things and call it all "clever" or "intelligent". There's no more one "smart" than there is one "athletic". Two people can both be very athletic, and yet be physically incredibly different, depending on what sport you're talking about. Do you want to have large, bulky muscles? A more wiry frame? The ability to hold your breath a long time? Hand-eye coordination? Excellent sight for distances? A sense of balance? Each of these are unique, and you can have a single person with all of them, but that doesn't mean a basketball player will have the qualities required for distance archery or water polo.

 

I'm not trying to argue that I think Rashek was the dumbest, just that he wasn't necessarily all that clever.

 

But yeah. Power-gaming. Power gaming is what I do when I'm tired of thinking and my brain needs a rest. It's the mental equivalent of... I dunno. Warming up? Something very simple, very repetitive, something very narrow in scope that doesn't require much vision. Power-gaming is what I do when I'm too tired to do something actually engaging.

[natc]

Why does the thumping always get pinpointed to the mountains anyway? Why is the detected direction pointing to geographic north pole, while the intensity is relative to the distance from the magnetic one (where the real source is)?

The Well is weird.

[Yata]

Why does the thumping always get pinpointed to the mountains anyway? Why is the detected direction pointing to geographic north pole, while the intensity is relative to the distance from the magnetic one (where the real source is)?

The Well is weird.

If i remember right, the thumping in the City was so strong that Vin actually don't understand where it come from. Only when she go away and the "power was less chaotic" she could understand that it came from the city.

 

Probably the "go to the montains" was a suggestion (through the Story of the Well in the Norh Montain maybe).

 

PS: any pro or contros about my "bonds" idea of some previous post ?

Edited October 2, 2015 by Yata

[BeskarKomrk]

I'm a little late to this party, but I hope you won't mind if I join in on the speculation about Hemalurgic effects. I posted this last night after doing some thinking:

 

 

Okay, here's a follow up for you. I'm not entirely sure if this is the place to discuss this, so feel free to suggest a better forum for this topic if there is one.

 

It seems like there's something strange going on with the way the metals work Hemalurgically (obviously there's a lot of information we don't have at this time, which complicates things). Here's what I've been looking at:

 

For basic metals, all the Pulling metals steal human attributes and all the Pushing metals steal the Allomantic/Feruchemical powers of that quadrant (e.g. Physical metal steals Physical Allomancy/Feruchemy while the other basic metals steal Mental Allomancy/Cognitive Feruchemy). Now, what got me started looking at this was that gold also steals Physical Feruchemy, and I thought it was weird that Physical Feruchemy would be doubled up. After a bit of research (read: I looked at the sources on The Coppermind), I found this WoB:

 

Quote

 

Are the usual quadrants (Physical, Mental, Temporal, Enhancement) preserved in Feruchemy and Hemalurgy?

 

BRANDON SANDERSON.

No. In Ferchemy, it is based Realmatically. There is a quadrant of Spiritual, a quadrant of Cognitive and two quadrants of Physical.

 

So that's easily reconciled by saying that gold steals only the second quadrant of Physical Feruchemy (referred to as the Hybrid Quadrant on the wiki page), which comprises gold, electrum, cadmium, and bendalloy. All good here, right?

 

Not quite. I found the answer to one question, but came up with a few more in the process. Gold steals the other quadrant of Physical Feruchemy; great. But gold is a pulling metal, whereas all the basic metals that stole Metallic Arts were pushing metals. Same thing for Aluminum: pulling metal, but it steals Enhancement Allomancy. I had managed to convince myself that the information about Hemalurgic Gold came from the RPG, so it may not have been correct. But the information about Hemalurgic Aluminum comes from Hero of Ages! So the pattern of pushing metals stealing Metallic Arts may not hold for higher metals.

 

I'll cut to my point here. It really seems to me like the table of Hemalurgic attributes doesn't make a lot of sense. There is a pattern to the way that it works for the basic metals, but not only does that pattern not hold for the higher metals, there doesn't seem to be any kind of pattern at all. I don't know how much I believe the listings for Gold and Duralumin, but the attribute for Aluminum I can't dispute. What it seems like it should be, to me, is that the pattern is switched for higher metals and the attribute for Duralumin is just wrong. It seems to me that they should read like the following:

 

Gold - Steals Physical (II) Feruchemy

Aluminum - Steals Enhancement Allomancy

 

Extrapolating from this, I would guess that we also have:

Cadmium - Steals Temporal Allomancy

Chromium - Steals Spiritual Feruchemy

 

Then the other four higher metals steal human attributes.

 

Is this something that has been discussed before? Any relevant Words of Brandon that I've missed? I'm relatively new to the forums here, so it feels more than likely that this has already been answered somewhere. I checked my books once I got home tonight, but there hasn't been an updated list of Hemalurgic abilities including the metals discovered since Hero of Ages.

 

Thoughts?

 

I think the pattern you have extrapolated also could be very possible. It personally seems more organized to me to follow the pattern of "one metal in each base-alloy pair takes human abilities, the other takes Metallic Arts", but I think that's just a personal bias. I have no evidence to support this over your pattern.

 

It's unfortunate that Shadows of Self didn't tell us anything new about this table, but only added in a whole new realm of Hemalurgic ability to try and figure out.