What was the original reason why Vin decided to not meet the informant?

[yurisses]

Hello! Been a while.

I've been wondering lately... There was a post Brandon made that suggested SH was where he finally disclosed why Hoid spooked Vin. In the book we find out that Kelsier was shouting at her not to see him from the cognitive realm. But in past WoBs (I think there was an annotation and something else) Brandon said that something Hoid does spooks Vin and that she is too observant for her own good. My conclusion is that the original reason for Vin not meeting Hoid was "retconned" (to the extent that WoBs can be considered canon). Has anyone asked Brandon about this? I'm curious what the original reason was. Some of the theories were that she picked up pulses from his lightweaving or other magics, or that his humming was eerily skillful (perfect pitch).

Edited October 12, 2016 by yurisses

[DeTess]

I actually believe Brandon said that Vin "was too observant for her own good", not that she specifically noticed something about hoid, though that was a logical conclusion at the time.

In other words, I don't think anything  changed.

[Pagerunner]

22 minutes ago, randuir said:

I actually believe Brandon said that Vin "was too observant for her own good", not that she specifically noticed something about hoid, though that was a logical conclusion at the time.

In other words, I don't think anything  changed.

Here are relevant WoBs: [1] [2] [3]

He does specifically say that Hoid did something to spook her, and implies that it had to do with his behind-the-scene actions in WoA, getting the lerasium bead. It does look like what Brandon originally doesn't match what we saw in Secret History, but it is a very old quote (a note in Theoryland says it's the first time Brandon mentioned Hoid), so he might have 'lied' simply because the truth would have been far too off-the-walls for his fans to get at the time. But it's also possible that he changed his original plan; in the same topic, he mentions he hadn't determined what had happened to Vin and Elend after their deaths, and fans were welcome to imagine them returning at a later date, something else we see contradicted in Secret History.

 

[Oversleep]

Brandon also retconned Hoid searching for Well of Ascension. Back in the day, that's what Hoid was doing until he eavesdropped our protagonists while leading Terris refugees. Then he worldhopped to the Well.

Of course, this was changed as now Hoid came to Scarial through the Well.

[yurisses]

Quote

I went back and forth on this one, honestly. I knew Keslier would be involved, but one thing I was really worried about with Secret History was undermining Vin's story or her agency. While I liked Ender's Shadow, the closest parallel I knew of to a story like this, I didn't like how it weakened a lot of what Ender accomplished and gave it to Bean instead. (I think I've mentioned this in conjunction with Secret History before.)

So I wanted something to have stopped Vin, regardless of whether or not I ever wrote Kelsier's behind-the-scenes story or not. The official answer in my head is not that it was anything specific, but that the whole package that Hoid was presenting was WRONG to her. Her instincts picked up a dozen subtle cues that he was more dangerous than he seemed, and that made her freeze and assess. And that gave Kelsier the chance to nudge her away.

I wasn't trying to lead people to figure out a specific answer, with those comments. I was trying to hint that something was wrong, and Vin didn't quite know what set her off--because it wasn't one thing, but many. So I don't have a smoking gun, so to speak, of things Hoid was doing to drive her off.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormlight_Archive/comments/51u8qu/oathbringer_spoilers_stormlight_three_update_4/d8pix6q?context=3

[Landis963]

I wonder what all the clues might have been.  Vin wasn't close enough to smell him, so it couldn't have been the cologne slip like he did in BoM (besides, if he'd been called on it in HoA, chances are he would have remembered that for BoM).  She might have been burning bronze (always a good precaution in a mostly hostile city which may or may not have had an Allomantic population) so she could have picked up some weirdness that way.  However, careful consideration leads me to recall that Hoid was disguised as a blind beggar who was whistling.  Maybe he slipped on the blindness, as he did subtly with Kelsier and more blatantly with Wax later, but I suspect that if you are blind, homeless, and destitute in the World of Ash, you don't go around whistling a jaunty tune.  That was probably the first tell, which led her to stop and assess, at which point she noticed the rest of the weirdness and Kelsier got a chance to warn her off.  

[HoidvsVoid]

Either way, we don't have any confirmation from secret history that Vin actually fled due to Kelsier's interference.