[OB] Resistance

[Calderis he/him]

To start, there was a recent WoB that says that the surges of the Stonewards are exceptionally difficult to use on a living thing. 

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Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

So far there hasn't been a lot of the Stonewards in the books. Are they going to come forward in the next few?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Yes. One of the reasons I built the structure of the Stormlight Archive the way that I did is I knew it would be easy to overwhelm with the number of magical abilities, and to let myself get distracted by some of them and not do them justice. So I've been very careful, perhaps more careful than I need to be, and when I show like a Fused using a power, I focus more on the ones you know about and things like this, intentionally to keep the reader's attention on what they know as I expand. 

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

Can they shape stone? In one of the flashbacks they kind of melt it and it becomes sand.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Basically, my original pitch to myself on Stonewards, one of their main powers, I mean, everybody has two, but this ability you're talking about was the ability to grab matter and just kind of, like what if the whole world were clay to you. Not just stone, not just rock, but if you could just pick something up and stretch it, whatever it was, that was my original pitch on that order.

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

So architects or combat engineers fill that order?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

Yeah, stuff like that, but also, like you need to get out of a room? Well, let's mash ourselves a doorway here and step through, or just all kinds of stuff. 

Questioner 2 [PENDING REVIEW]

Can they do that to living flesh?

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

No. That's the general, the more invested something is the more it resists, and Stoneward powers are highly resisted by things. Even a small amount of extra investiture is gonna prevent them. Like if you stuck stormlight in [an object], say a Windrunner did, a Stoneward wouldn't be able to change that.

source

I have an idea for why this is true. 

This idea hinges on the idea of a Realmatic hierarchy, which I think is fairly accepted generally. If you don't understand what I mean, I'll let Leras explain. 

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Men—all things, truly—are like a ray of light. The floor is the Physical Realm, where that light pools. The sun is the Spiritual Realm, where it begins. This Realm, the Cognitive Realm, is the space between where that beam stretches.

The Koloss show this hierarchy well. Hemalurgy changes their Spiritual Aspect, which alters both their Cognitive functions and their Physical form. The Spiritual takes precedent over everything. The Physical is where things are truly made manifest. The Cognitive is... complicated.

Because of this, I think that the surges are fighting more than just Investiture. I think that the Cognitive and Spiritual are also providing a resistance that can be equal or greater than the resistance provided by Investiture alone. 

So let's look at the surges themselves and see the way that they effect things, and I think we'll be able to determine which are going to have the highest amount of resistance. 

First, and least resistance I think, is Progression. With this surge, in the case of healing, you are not actually attempting to change the state of something, but repair it. You are using the hierarchy of the Realms themselves to create the desired effect, by using the things that normally cause resistance. You pour Investiture into the Spiritual Aspect of something, which then flows outward, filtered through and limited by the Cognitive, to restore itself. 

Next, and just slightly more difficult, I see as Illumination and division. These ones are creating arbitrary effects. With Illumination this is just manipulating waveforms to create sound/images. With Division it is probably slightly more expensive, because it's creating an effect that disrupts matter, but the cost is spent into that effect, and not directly altering the target. Because of this I think that in a living thing the wounds created through Division would be treated no different than a wound from a mundane cause. The Investiture itself is not altering the matter it hits, just creating an effect that itself causes damage. 

Next would be Abrasion, Adhesion, and Gravitation. These ones are creating an effect on an object, but they are not fundamentally altering the object itself. Instead they are indirectly effecting it, by altering a force that acts upon it.

Next would be Transformation. The initial resistance here is extreme. You have the Investiture resistance to take into account, as well as the Cognitive and Spiritual resistance, but after the Cognitive has been either convinced to accept the change, or overpowered through a more massive expenditure, all three Aspects of the item are changed, and the resistance ends. So it is an exceptionally difficult task, that once completed negates the resistance and is able to persist. 

A step further, and you have both Tension, and Cohesion. With these two surges, you are attempting to create a physical change only. The target is still whole Cognitively, and Spiritually. Even in an inanimate object this going to be difficult, but I think it would be less so with something that is thought of simply as "stone" or "wood" than something that has a distinct identity as say... A table. Apply this to a living being and it ramps up the difficulty significantly. The spiritual of this thing has a distinct form that it should be held as, and the Cognitive perception is aware of it's own shape. So when something is altered here it's in direct opposition to its higher aspects. Any Investiture poured into it, whether it's from its own nature as a living being or an addition from an external source, reinforces the strength of resistance from its higher Aspects. (in discussion of these surges with @WireSegal, they also made the point that in the case of both of these surges you are also manipulating millions, if not billions of individual connections between the internal atoms of the target)

Of note here, I've left out Transportation. I see it as something of an outlier because as with the lower difficulty groups of Illumination/Division and Abrasion/Adhesion/Gravitation, you aren't directly effecting an objects form or composition, but bridging the barrier between the realms themselves. This seems like a very different type of resistance then what I'm trying to discuss, and while I think that targeting anything with it is going to be effected by the level of investiture it contains, I don't know how to compare that to the others as the base resistance of realmatic transition seems to be higher generally.

I brought this up in another thread yesterday, but wanted to get it down on its own, with more detail and the possibility for more focused discussion. 

Edited June 21, 2018 by Calderis

[Oversleep]

I like it. It makes sense.

Good theory.

[MountainKing]

I never thought to classify the surges by the hierarchy of realms.

[Philomath she/her]

I like it. It makes me think of trying to work against a current in a river. Start at the top (spiritual) and it is easy. Start in the middle (cognitive) and it requires more work but not nearly as much as starting at the bottom (physical).