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[SH Spoilers] Identity and Soulcasting


sciren

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A relatively simple question - are objects with a stronger Identity more difficult to Soulcast?

This comes from the part in chapter 4 of Secret History that is spent talking about the Identity of objects and implies that the stronger an Identity any given object has, the stronger it's presence in the Cognitive realm. This lead me to thinking if that would also be a factor in Soulcasting. Would an object that is known and beloved by a great number of people be harder to Soulcast than an object that is identical in the Physical realm but is hardly thought of at all by anyone?

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I was thinking about this too. It does seem that objects have some sort of inherent will about them, about what they /want/ to be. I think it makes sense to say that people's perceptions of these objects influence these wills, as evidenced both in SH and in SA (I can't remember exactly where, but I believe there was a trip into Shadesmar at some point with a ship that defined itself by how people relied on it or something like that). Anyway, both the ship and the log Kell found had some sort of identity in connection with how people perceived them. So yes, I think that if there were some specific object, say a special rock, and if many people had a very specific belief about this rock and the way it was, it would be harder to soulcast than another similar rock would be. If you tried to soulcast the well known rock, it would resist because so many people believed in or were familiar with the specific way this particular rock existed. Sorry if that didn't make much sense.

 

Basically I'm saying yes, a well known object is /probably/ harder to soulcast than an unknown object.

 

Also, I would like to take this opportunity to note the fact that I giggled a bit when Kelsier succeeded in turning the log into a fire. It was a bit too reminiscent of a particular scene in WoR...

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Also, I would like to take this opportunity to note the fact that I giggled a bit when Kelsier succeeded in turning the log into a fire. It was a bit too reminiscent of a particular scene in WoR...

 

It was *not* The Stick which Kelsier discovered.  The Stick is still one with his stickness.

 

(I think I'm legally obligated to include that here.)

 

As for the first question, I think that you are absolutely correct.  Kelsier says that the best things to have in Scadesmar are things which were owned, but have been lost or abandoned.  They have a strong Identity, but aren't going to auto-teleport away when somebody in the real world claims them and changes their Identity.

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I think it's very plausible that the identity of an object would make it harder to soulcast.

It makes me wonder if one could protect themselves from being soulcast like Jasnah did to the muggers in WoR by tapping feruchemical Identity.

Yeah probably it will work very fine.

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