Vin detecting a Kandra

[ScarletSabre he/him]

Hi all! Finally became a member of this site after ghosting for months ^-^ And I thought I'd start off my posts here with a quick theory/ramble/note that jumped out at me when I was relistening to the audio book of the Well of Ascension for about the sixth time.

 

So something that jumped out at me was Vin struggling to identify the Kandra spy on the crew, specifically when she's first interrogating Tensoon about how to detect Kandra. When she's told a Kandra is immune to emotional Allomancy and cannot use Allomancy or Feruchemy, should have been able to eliminate the members of the main crew that night as not being the spy, at least if what I propose would work.

 

The crew knows Vin has been experimenting with new metals, Ham and Elend certainly do at least. All she would have to do is get each of them alone one by one, and say she thought she had found a new metal for Emotional Allomancy, and ask them to test it with her. Burn Brass and Zinc, and soothe/riot their emotions, telling them she should be making them feel sadness when she's really rioting happiness, and ask them to say what they're feeling. 

 

A Kandra would have to guess at the emotions, and if Vin switched which ones she was soothing/rioting and they kept guessing wrong, she'd have her Kandra. That combined with sensing the burning of the other Allomancers on the crew would let her eliminate all of them in one night, then let them in on an impostor being there and have them on the lookout themselves. 

 

Of course this wouldn't fit in with Vin not wanting to suspect them at all, especially Elend, but it's a simple solution that I would have thought would come to an experienced Allomancer/streetwise scammer like Vin.

 

Thoughts? I'm certain there can be arguments made either way, such as Vin not being THAT experienced with Allomancy yet, but I'm curious what you all think. And if we can come up with other simple solutions to problems in Brandon's books ^^

 

Thanks for reading!

[xxcyv he/him]

I had similar thoughts. As soon as Vin was told that Kandras can't be affected by emotional Allomancy I thought "man, this is going to be easy to find out who the Kandra is. Just go and speak to every member of the crew alone while soothing or rioting their emotions very hard so it's obvious that she is manipulating them. If they react to the Allomancy the person is not the Kandra and if they don't react, congratulations, you exposed a Kandra!" But no, Vin wanted the search to be more difficult than that  

[RYANHOME he/him]

I think its Vins personality that keeps her from doing this. She finally has a family and doesn't want to find out that one has been killed then eaten by a kandra. 

 

Welcome to the Shard Rawrbert

[CalebK2]

The entire time Vin was searching for the spy, I kept thinking she would Duralumin soothe each of the suspected crew members to see if they were affected. She didn't know yet that duralumin soothing would take control of a Kandra, but it certainly would have easily let her tell if the crew members were affected by allomancy or not since they would have been visibly affected if it could have affected them.  She could even have warned each of them what was going and that she was about to do it as a test.  If they agreed to it, then they were clear. If they refused to do it, then she would have known something was wrong. 

The only reason I can see that she didn't do a test like this was because like RYANHOME says, she just really doesn't want to confront the possibility of her friend being the spy. 

When she suspected Demoux and she was following him, I kept wishing she would just duralumin soothe him while he was in a dark alley and been done with it.

Edited August 11, 2016 by CalebK2

[StormyQueen she/her]

I personally think that a major reason may be Vin's almost paranoid behaviour and finally having some new friends. Even if we don't see a lot of her thought process about this, I personally think that there's a niggling fear that if she uses emotional allomancy on the crew, she'll loose the only friends she has. By testing them, she could think that it would ruin relations with them.

I think that paired with the fact that she doesn't want to believe that somebody she loves is dead could be a part of the answer to the question.