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Have to disagree with that one, the original Courting of Death made him a lot less sympathetic and a lot more mustache-twisty insane; he just plain didnt care at all about anything. In this case they just cut out the middle-woman in Death and gave Thanos the motivation that was originally Her's, it was the reason she gave to support his effort back in the comic. Also I think trying to introduce the four Incarnates as actual characters wouldnt have done anything but diminish Thanos himself as the Uber-threat.

Agreed, I tend to think that it's External Aluminum to trigger the mass-burn off, but it's using the target allomancer's Spiritweb to accomplish it (not their own since a Leecher misting's spiritweb only knows Chromium), meaning you couldnt just burn it off outside the aura/physical aspect of an allowmancer. Though that does open up some really interesting tech mining possibilities with Ettmetal... I think the Turned Off part of that is the key, leechers affect kinetic Investure, it has to be actively moving/doing something. I think the popular theory out of some of those broadsheet entries is that there might be some Awakened objected on Scadrial.

While it's not a...small...problem, I dont think physical size would not be your true problem with planet-busting. Shardblades cannot cut overly Invested objects, and there really isnt much that can rival a whole PLANET in terms of blanket Investiture (if the topography of Shadesmare is any indication). Get your giant blade somehow and you might be able to slice an uninhabited world, but I dont see it being able to so fundamentally alter/wound the cognitive aspect/region of an entire Inhabited world, let alone an actual Shardworld with one or more Hexadieties Invested in the planet.

Would there be reasonable ways to empty the Metalmind Investiture before it over-fills, maybe with Aluminum or Nicrosil? If they could flush them out on the run they'd be ok, but if they could channel that energy back into their system as some other useful Investiture they'd have one hell of a Realmic Generator, which might go a long way toward the energy balance of actual FTL. Elsewise, maybe that theory is correct that Lerasium would make a super-high capacity metalmind? Though it sounds like those original 16 beads are all there will be.

My professors also liked to describe the Speed of Light as a Change Propagation Speed to put it in comparison to the Speed of Sound through a given medium. Which is to say breaking it causes a violent Compression wave of whatever medium you are talking about. Imagine for a moment a Space/Time equivalent of a Sonic Boom wave... Anyway, lowering that speed limit would be weird from a normal electromagnetic side of things, but I really wonder how that would interact with Cosmeric Gravity which, while also being a supposed hard Law of the Physics, seems quite subjective to the properly Invested.

I agree they definitely need two to stay sane, but Im still on the fence with the whole -preMatched Pair debate (I want to go back and reread pretty much all of Mistborn soon), but either way it seems significant that any old Invested rod would do that much, if for no other reason that to beg the question What else is going on for with the proper Matched pairs. Tell me more about the Realmic Block, I only vaguely remember the How of the Terris getting turned into mistwraiths. Does that basically mean that it only takes an Invested Object to circumvent the block and regain sentience, so the specific matched Blessings are just to grant those added abilities on top of the base Investment function. Which makes me think that a pair of sufficiently Invested Metalminds could be reasonably expected to wake up a Kandra. Still, what is it about the Block that makes /two/ the requirement specifically? A balance issue? Or two anchor points for the realmic bridge? The Kolos, especially the originals created generations, Id probably lump into with the Inquisitors as spiritual Frankenstein; I suspect their better off than the more frayed Inquisitors because they are a standardized, stable design, whereas I think he used his inquisitors in a more experimental fashion.

Came across this WOB and it got me thinking: So, this makes it sound to me like any old Invested piece of pointy metal would be close enough to an actual Hemaurgic spike (charged with a chunk of Spirit-web) for the purposes of Kandra (and presumably Kolos by extension?). So, Up to that point Id been picturing the Kandra and Kolos to be beings made of various scraps of Soulweb all frankensteined together. But if they dont actually need to hold a Soul-web chunk to work, just general Investiture, what exactly are they doing? The Inquisitors needed one central spike just to hold the other pieces together, is that all that's happening, Investiture providing the cohesive energy? Does the fact that Kandra need two nonspecific spikes inform on that function, some binary interaction?

Ill admit Ive wondered how Cadmium might interact with Breathes or Stormlight that are som directly tied to the act of breathing, if that would be enough Intent to do something. Separately, there is strong evidence you could meddle and/or store with Breaths via Nicrosil, though I have to wonder if it's redundant with Breaths that basically Like to be stored in objects.

You dont have a link to that WOB offhand do you? Ive heard that a bunch of times before and wanted to see the context first hand. Im starting to come around to the theory that his Command forged a connection to another Shard for fuel, (Ruin in his case).

In short, Hoid is the character that is currently most central to the connective tissue of the wider Cosmere

You know, that's a pretty interesting interpretation of Malatium, and of atium alloys in general. I think I like it; it opens up some fun speculation about the nature of the other Atium alloys (though it may be mostly moot post-era 1). Also makes an interesting analog to Ettmetal. If the truth about Atium alloys is that they allow you to project normally internal abilities onto others, I find it interesting next to Ettmental that lets you project all abilities from an external source (via a temporarily pseudo-soulweb projection, I personally think)

Barring other evidence, Id buy it. It fits the naming conventions, the both the Shin and Mr T have ways to know some of the lost knowledge, and we really dont know what the third spren's role is so it could easily fit that Mr T might think he had some sort of means or motive to aid him, and/or some reason to think they'd have compatible goals.

Honestly so had I. Thanks @Calderis, and thanks @BitBitio for looking out.

One other possibility occurred to me, and I cant believe it didnt come up while we were talking about it (unless it did and I just missed the point). A very strong motivator to develop FTL tech could be as simple and horrifying as the idea that Harmony will be the Big Bad of Era 4, that he'll loose control of his warring shards and become Discord as many fear he might. With that sort of hostile Double-Shard, they'd need to find a way off the planet and likely not want to risk a raid on whatever Perpendicularities might exist by then.

Depends on how you are viewing the Intent. Id see those as different, personally, since Aptitude is more of an internal quality (something you possess) and is very general, while Ingenuity has a little more implied Outward Action and is also more specifically a Creative ideal

Unless the whole Living vs Non-Living thing is not an intrinsic limit of Breaths but rather a matter of technique (maybe it's hard for people because they are alive and so relate to non-living things less?). I mention this possibility only because they were able to a breakthrough with the Lifeless such that they were no longer difficult and/or costly to animate.

Thats not how I was picturing the maxchine in the general case, but the more I think about it the more I realize my image didnt consider medallions much, so Im intrigued. Im not sure I see why Allomancy flows Metal in the body (metal to Investiture conversion that then forges a bond to usually Preservation, right?) to the Spiritual then back to manifest in the Physical, but the metalminds go metal straight to physical and bypass the spiritual? And may be a more enlightening question for me, how would burning an unkeyed or unsealed metalmind behave? I was picturing most of the 'nuts and bolts of the effect' being on the spiritual, largely because it is something that can be Spiked out and given whole to another. So I had the burned metal becoming the investiture of the conduit to the shard and under normal circumstances getting plugged into the part of the spirit-web that knows how to turn Investiture into a given effect, something that requires both a genetically comparable spiritweb and whatever extra bit of machinery needs Snapping to attach. Feruchemists I pictured as having a similar (if reversible) spiritweb machine that produces an effect via investiture, and the had the ability to slosh their own natural investiture back and forth from the spiritual to the physical*, with the In vs Out direction of Investiture flow determining the nature of that effect by the nature of said spiritweb machine. In both cases the actual Metal is the mechanism that governs and regulates the transfer from the Physical to the Spiritual and determines which effect the spiritweb machine is going to produce (this is frequency-based in my head, if that helps). Feruchemy is much messier in the sense that a bunch of the rest of the spiritweb, the users Identity and whatnot, echoes and/or gets imprinted on the Investiture ("Preserved"?) unless steps get taken. In Compounding the fact that the metal gets burned establishes the end-positive conduit to Preservation, but the fact that it had already been Pre-Invested and "Tuned" to the feruchemical effect, that that end-positive conduit get steered to the Feruchemical string of the Spirit-web rather than the normal one, if only the Positive-flow effect (so potentially super-heavy but never super-light). ...Thats about as far as Ive gotten with that theory, and I havent delved how nicrosil and medalions fit; I think Unkeyed work but Im not so sure about Unsealed. Im starting to think Ettmetal just creates a sort of temporary hologram spiritweb that mimics the spiritweb machine it's exposed to. *Im going to have to delve more into the cosmetic theory of Gravity, but one rabbit hole at a time.

Let me back up real quick and say that I dont knwo of anything specific with Miles that i would point to as a Savantistic ability, or anything specific about Gold Compounding (aside from the motivation to burn it constantly). My only point is that, in a more general sense, I fully believe that a Compounding can potentially result in a Savant in the way that Allowmancy can but Feruchemy cannot. To your point about Warping, I dont know because Im looking at one WOB that says Savantism cannot be Spiked (so not a Spiritweb feature) but another saying Savantism is all about "using Investiture a lot, and it's starting to permeate your soul", but there are several otehrs where he specifi8cally uses words like Warp and Change your soul. And several that are saying he is not happy with the direction that Savantism is taking in the books and so he might be going back to the drawing board on it some. Hell, there is one that outright says Wax's savantism is an example of him blending his Allowmancy and Feruchemy, and several talking about the possibility. So Im not sure how consistent our data is going to be at the moment. But at it's coreit's still all about extended over-exposure to the investiture, which is precisely the line that Savantism carries things across. Also worth noting that, at least how Brandon is using the term, savantism is a cosmere-wide effect, not specific to Allowmancy. I dont really get your point about Feruchemy not normally changing your spiritual aspect; that's true, but it's the same for Allomancy so I dont see how that's relevant? I disagree entirely with that read of the WOB. Brandon is clarifying that Savantism and compounding are mechanically wildly different things (I dont think that was actually the question, but that was the answer he gave). None of this has yet touched on the fact that all the WOB state that p[prolonged exposure to kinetic investiture causes changes. And since Compounding results in just that sort of prolonged exposure, there is no realmic reason that it should not eventually result in the same. For what it's worth I also dont really care in the slightest what his future plans are for this conversation; Im only talking world mechanics, not likelihood of plots.

Based on the fact that Kolos became a self-reproducing race with the emergence of Kolos-blooded, Id say it is entirely likely. If that hemalurgical change to the Spiritweb is something that can carry through to offspring, it possible that other hemalurgical changes could do so as well. The only reason I hesitate is that Kolos became a self-reproducing race only in the post-Catacendre era, and like Snapping this might have been a conscious Change that Harmony chose to do (seems fitting with his gereraly kind heart)

In normal feruchemy Id agree since you'd have to spend the (probable) literal Years storing up enough of a given trait cause savantism to emerge. But Savantism is all about having over-exposed yourself to that trait/Investiture, so would the compounding "hack" move feruchemy (which is normally naturally limiting) back into the field where overexposure is possible, since it's back to tapping huge amounts of power directly? Put another way, isnt the whole Compounding Hack more or less that you are able to Use Allomancy to Feruchemical effects.

Any shardpool or Ruin's specifically? I think a lot of the reason I lean toward it doing relatively little is that presumably it can be used for perpendicularity travel, and even though I understand the Intents would be wildly different I still find it hard to hink that you could essentially bath in them without getting even a little of the liquid in your mouth. Maybe if we concede that trace amounts wouldnt do much, you'd need a sizable volume/percentage?

Im not sure I understand, youre thinking they'd have pre-planned and recorded the Recreance? I was thinking of it as more of an event, a mass decision (that may or may not have been entirely voluntary on all parts) than a political movement.

The Recreance couldnt be part of the Gem archive right? I mean, there'd have been no Radiants left to record it, the archive would have to predate it, no? I could see whatever actions that hobbled the parshman being the step over the line that changed Honor's mind, if he was indeed all about Bonds and they started using their surges to directly Break Bonds on that scale, I could see that being a dangerous perversion of Honor's Intent (from said Intent's POV).

Good point. It makes me wonder how much it is changed by the process though. Anything else that absorbes enough investiture just ascends to become the Shard it came from, but does that mean that if Nightblood, say, get stabbed into the Dor he would ascend and become one of those shards, or would he just be a more invested version of himself with...Unflavored(?) Investiture. I hadnt really considered the significance of the black Smoke, thats interesting. In functional terms I was was seeing the Odium blade as similar to Nightblood via the mechanism that it's converting the attacked entity directly into Investiture. It's less comprehensive than Nightblood, Im guessing it's not attacking all three realms. I took the Hemalurgy bit to be that it's affecting the Spirit-web directly the way Hemalurgy does, but where Hemalurgy is Frankenstein Surgery this thing was more of shotgun blast (and Nightblood is a multi-realm explosive); all are manipulating the spirit-web, and violently.

The only particularly useful thing for Odium that Nightblood would grant is, seemingly, the unique ability to actually Destroy Investiture across all three realms. If he could do that I dont think he'd have needed to stash D&D's in the CR, and we wouldnt have the Dor to deal with. As to why he'd need to see Nightblood in action, the best (and it's not great, admittedly) argument I could make is the fallback that while the Shards are infinite their Hosts are not, so he might have needed his attention drawn to it specifically first. Or he may have needed to actually experinece Nightblood's process first-hand (in the form of having his Invested Thundercast destroyed) before he could mimic the process himself; at the end of the day Nightblood is sourced in a different Shard and I have no problems with the idea that they'd need to experience a different shard's patterns/workings/magics before he'd be able to mimic them. He has access to the Spiritual Realm, but arguably only 1/16th of it and the Type IV awakening recipe might simply be elsewhere.