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Admittedly, it is possible that Sel's technology has advanced significantly by this time, and there are a number of Shardworlds that we don't know anything about yet. I just think that the "material that looks like carapace but not carapace" explanation is less likely than it just being carapace. I would suspect the former explanation a whole lot more if masks were common on Roshar and/or making things from carapace was. But neither is, so Shallan would have really looked at Iyatil's mask. I'm not discounting the exotic material idea, but it seems unlikely.

Jakamav is Adolin's supposed friend. Maxal, don't forget that Adolin doesn't need a POV to show up. He turns up in just about everyone's POVs. I think it actually is a wise decision to delay a POV from him. We'll still see him, hear him talk, probably get some, "Gee, Adolin is acting kind of funny," comments from the other characters. There will likely be an impact on his relationship with Shallan and maybe friction with some of the other characters. When we finally do get a POV and see what's going on inside of his head, there will be more for him to react to.

I wouldn't take that chart to mean that the structure is especially rigid. The Stormlight books all have a number of different storylines going on all at once and are also each structured more like a series than a single volume. Keeping track of it all like that doesn't really indicate rigidity (after all, the structure is loose enough that Brandon could make the third volume Dalinar's flashback book instead of Szeth's, as originally planned). Rather, he has to know where to put the various POVs to maintain the momentum of the story and have everything be cohesive. If, for example, Shallan's part of the story in WoR had gotten ahead of Kaladin's, then his POVs backtracked and described events that had already been spoiled, the book would have been a real mess. I would say that the chart indicates an intricate structure, not a rigid one.

Here's the thing about Adolin: let's say that he's the 4th most important character in both TWoK and WoR. I think he is always going to be in that number 4 slot, for every single book. No, he'll never get to be one of the top 3, but those who will get those slots are also going to drop way below Adolin for some volumes. Most already have. Eshonai? Not even in the first book. Neither was Lift. Szeth? Not even a protagonist. Shalash messed up some art in the first book but wasn't in WoR. Taln (if that's even him) has just acted crazy during his brief cameos. Renarin has been around, but Adolin has been more of a main character than he has, so far. Jasnah has been more in the background than Adolin, for sure. Of the seven flashback characters I just mentioned, five haven't had a single POV chapter yet. So, just for the sake of argument, let's say that Adolin is the 4th most important character in each of the 10 books. At least half of the characters who get to fill the top 3 slots above him will spend much of the rest of the series being the 10th most important character, the 15th most important, not even in the book... He's going to end up being one of the best developed Stormlight characters there is, even if he's always in a supporting role. What I'm saying is, don't get too depressed about Adolin not getting his time in the spotlight, even if you do wish the story was really all about him.

I think a novella about her has a lot of potential. Assuming it takes place after the events of WoR, we'll see the Azish reaction to the Everstorm coming through. Wyndle has a lot of information about what is going on behind the scenes, as he does not seem to have lost his memories from his life in the Cognitive Realm. I bet that he would have some very interesting things to say about the Everstorm. If Lift is sticking around with Gawx, we'll also get some insight into the Azish system of government or at least their culture. Now, whatever one thinks of Lopen's character, a short story about him right now (again, assuming it takes place after WoR) would give us some very useful information. Did he regrow his whole arm? Probably. Is he one of Kaladin's squires, which seems more likely than full Radiancy? Probably, again. We don't really know anything about squires right now. If, on the other hand, the story takes place in Lopen's past, then his character will really be fleshed out. Keep in mind, Lopen is not just a generic joker character. He may spend all of his time joking around, but it is a part of his unflappable optimism that endears him as a character. To say that we haven't seen his depths isn't entirely accurate because we can infer them. Besides his obvious disadvantages (he lost an arm, ended up on a bridgecrew, etc), Herdazians don't exactly have a favored place in Alethi society. So far, we haven't seen any real racism on display, but it is telling that one of Lopen's "cousins" says that he can defect to any warcamp he likes, since the Alethi can't tell one Herdazian from another. Lopen has decided that he is going to live his life as if everything is going to work out for the best, even though it hasn't so many times. That tells you a lot about his character.

You know, I was a bit put off by Lift at first, with the "awesomeness" and everything, but as I was reading the interlude, it hit me that there is nothing at all wrong with a character talking like that in high fantasy. Why not? It's not like any of these characters would really be speaking English, even though it's rendered that way. Her unusual means of expressing herself immediately form an impression of the character. Sure, some people find it annoying, but even if you love Lift, you have to admit that actually spending time with her would probably be very annoying. It's fitting. As for her immaturity, well, she's 12 years old and some of it (refusing to admit that she's older than 10, for example) is rooted in defense mechanisms that she's learned to help deal with her difficult circumstances.

You actually would, if you could get enough Investiture into a saxophone. Like Nightblood, it needs an intentional command to really be sentient. Of course, spren don't seem to have that, nor do seons or skaze. I think that over time, the intent can develop. Just like a fire "knows" it is a fire because it has existed that way for so long. Something like a metalmind (which I don't think can ever pick up enough Investiture, anyway, unless compounding does something to enable additional storage space) lacks the intent because it is just a passive space that Investiture is put into, then drawn out of. But if some Invested metal was fashioned into, say, a hammer and was used as such for a long time, it should start to pick up some degree of sentience. Now, I'm not talking about a smart hammer, here. It would be just "smart" enough to whisper the same inane "I am a hammer"-type stuff a regular hammer does in the Cognitive Realm, into the minds of particularly susceptible people.

You know, I hadn't really thought it through completely, but there probably will be a ton of unresolved stuff from the Wax and Wayne series, since the next Era is only going to be like 60-80 years later. Heck, I bet we'll even get a cameo from some old codger who turns out to be a character who was young in W&W.

For zinc and brass, I would say usually nothing, but in cases where we know emotional allomancy is happening, you could do something like a less dramatic version of the tin, just showing the subject's reactions. Maybe some kind of subtle visual distortion to indicate power being used, too (which could work for copper, as well--in that case, something like a wave of fuzzy distortion briefly flowing out around the allomancer to show the cloud going up).

Khriss tells Wax that there have only been 3 recorded cases of Crashers in history. She suggests that this is a low number, but it isn't clear whether she means that Crashers are particularly rare examples of twinborn or if they're just rare in general. Assuming that 3 is the average number, and there have been about that many for all 256 combinations, then there have only ever been 768 twinborn. That just doesn't seem like enough to me. There would be maybe 150-200 twinborn alive at any given time. It sounds insane to say that the team of Wax and Wayne represents 1% of all living twinborn--that Wax has personally killed a significant percentage of all twinborn who have ever lived. I don't know. What do you guys think?

But that suggests that extra information is being put in from outside. I guess it's not completely unreasonable to assume that it's being pulled from Preservation's objective memories of the event, but that just doesn't seem right to me. What it should do, considering what happens with other Compounding, is just create a ton of copies of the memory. That, of course, is lame, if it's like a computer, where you would just suddenly have 500 copies of the same file. But I think that copper is actually storing brain activity. Compounding it creates something like a neural net, even though it's all the same information, and you can sort of create a magical AI with it.

Well, considering that Bands of Mourning I think The Lost Metal will give us more Cosmere tidbits. I doubt, however, that it will be anything like Secret History. I agree that Elantris 2 is the most likely candidate. I very much doubt that we'll get much out of Oathbringer. I think that Stormlight is going to be the last great epic series that can stand alone (albeit with a whole lot of Cosmere references). My guess is that, even in the back 5, most Cosmere info will be directly related to the Stormlight plot, even though there will be implications for the overarching Cosmere story. Now, Brandon has really opened up Pandora/s Box/let the cat out of the bag/whatever other metaphor you like, so he's going to have to keep delivering more like Secret History. I bet you anything that the next novella, after the Stormlight one, is full of Cosmere connections.

They're probably former metalminds. If a feruchemist dies, and they leave any full ones behind, they're useless to other feruchemists. I imagine that the Terris culture encourages feruchemists to make an effort to empty their metalminds, if they know that they're dying, but I'm sure accidents happen. What do you do with perfectly good metal that can't be used for storage anymore? I imagine it finds its way into circulation to be used for other stuff. Now, if you stuff anything full of Investiture, it should gain a measure of sentience, but the fullest of metalminds probably wouldn't ever start talking to you because its Cognitive Identity is that of a passive storage device. If, however, an Invested item spent some time as a tool, it would develop a different Identity. Yes, like Nightblood, but only to the extent that a calculator is like a supercomputer. It probably wouldn't really interact with anyone, but the slightly cracked types--the sort who were susceptible to Ruin's influence in the first trilogy--would probably hear stuff along the lines of, "I am a stick." Why would Khriss and Nazh want these? Either they're trying to get the Investiture out again, or they want to study the precursor to what will be a Scadrian version of seons/skaze/spren.

These are some looooong books, though. By the end of the series, even tertiary characters will have their own book's worth of POVs.

The symbol for Part Five is the aon ire, in the style of the Steel Alphabet. And ire means time or age, so I think the best translation for the name of the group is the Ancients, or something along those lines. That makes more sense than an acronym.

Do you mean Rose? The lady who turns down everyone who tries out for their agency and was in the first season as a fake phone operator? That wasn't who he was kissing. It was Violet.

I think Szeth will represent the Skybreakers, but that doesn't mean he's going to become one of the "good guys." I think that his bond will be with Nightblood, so he's going to be very different from the other Radiants. Now, as to having characters in there besides the main flashback characters, I think it could happen pretty easily. Look at Book 2: it's Shallan's book, but Kaladin is a close runner-up for pages dedicated to him. Book 3 is Dalinar's, but it looks like we're not going to get exactly what we got in WoR. Rather, Kaladin and Shallan will probably split that secondary slot. So, a little different but still all main flashback characters taking the secondary spot. I don't think that is necessarily going to continue to be the case. There are a number of characters who get occasional POVs but are never going to have their own book. They could easily be positioned in the narrative in such a way that they would fill the slot that Kaladin does in WoR. I could see Adolin there as early as book 4. Who knows?

If there is one for each order, and Taln represents the Stonewards, then the only possibility is that Shalash, no longer being a Herald, will become a Radiant and join an Order that is not the Lightweavers. She would be the most likely candidate for Dustbringer, since Eshonai seems likely to become a Willshaper.

I think that is most likely. We need more information about Lift because she will become important, but right now, she has to just be an interlude character. Anything more than that, and the main storyline suffers because what she's doing doesn't have much to do with it. A separate novella is the perfect solution, then, because it gives us the information we need without derailing the pacing of something as huge as a Stormlight book. On the other hand, if this ends up being about her past--information that we would expect to wait for her flashbacks--then that will be very interesting. That would suggest that the flashbacks are going to work differently in the back 5. If so, I expect that the back 5 flashbacks are going to deal with the characters during the first 5 books, in a way that completely changes our understanding of the events. I mentioned this in another thread, the one about the Oathbringer update, because Brandon said something very cryptic on Reddit that suggests that the back 5 are going to have something very unusual about them.

Yep, that's him.

The possibility that Shallan only interpreted Iyatil's mask material as carapace has occurred to me, but after giving it some thought, I doubt that it is something else. For one thing, we know that it's not a case of Shallan just seeing what she's expecting to see. Despite most Rosharan animals being covered in carapace, we don't see it being used to build much of anything there. At the same time, she knows what carapace looks like better than you or I likely do. She is unlikely to mistake any old thing for carapace. It would have to be something that she had never seen before but looked much more like carapace than wood, metal, glass, etc. So maybe plastic? Is there even a society anywhere in the Cosmere that is advanced enough to produce plastics? I think that the simplest explanation is that it is indeed carapace, and it comes from a Shardworld with creatures similar to those on Roshar but where making things from carapace is more common...

That's probably true, but the Steel Alphabet version of the Aon could still be part of the hack. The alphabet may not have any intrinsic power, but it would have Connection to Scadrial. I'm sure that they would need that, if they were to hack the system such that they could channel Preservation and/or Ruin's power through Aons. Honestly, though, I don't think that's what the Steel Aon is, here. I think it's just an artistic thing.

So it is: http://coppermind.net/w/images/Luthadel.png

I'm sure that his copperminds were keyed to him, so they'd be useless. I believe that Elend and Vin sold his original metalminds to keep the kingdom running. The most likely outcome is that they were ground down for allomancers to use. They wouldn't be useful as metalminds because they'd already be stuffed full of Investiture that was keyed to a dead man. I doubt that he made any universal-access metalminds. If his benevolence for his people after his death extended that far, one would imagine that he would have mentioned them in one of the vaults.

The Hunter culture doesn't seem like something an immigrant would be likely to pick up. It's just too extreme. If they were going to start wearing masks to fit in, they would probably just assimilate into one of the more moderate cultures there. The opposite, moving somewhere but maintaining the mask wearing, seems more likely. Yes, it would be really weird in most cultures, but they are hardcore about their masks. The Hunters grow into their masks. This suggests that they don't change masks much, and that they get their permanent mask before they're finished growing (but probably not when they're extremely young). Because of that, Iyatil must have gotten her carapace mask on the planet that she grew up on. That would not be Scadrial. There doesn't seem to be anything on the planet that would yield such a material. Roshar does have the necessary fauna to provide the carapace, but that doesn't work. By the time she came to Roshar, she would certainly already have had her permanent mask. My conclusion, therefore, is that her people are Scadrian Hunters, she grew up (and perhaps was born) on a different world--one that has creatures similar to those on Roshar, insofar as they have carapace--and now she is on Roshar.