Harrycrapper

I know it's not very helpful to answer a question with a question. But doesn't this question make a little more sense when you ask "why stops Odium from doing this?" I don't see how destroying planets fits into Honors game plan at all while destroying Roshar like that would definitely benefit Odium. I'm guessing Honor/Cultivation along with the Radiants were too strong and omnipresent for Odium to pull something big like that, he is only one Shard to their two. Technically, it's not how the planet sees itself, it's how its inhabitants view it. Just like the Kholinar palace was one thing Jasnah found in WoR prologue, it wasn't just a collection of walls and doors, it was one cohesive whole because it was viewed that way. Now that doesn't mean the collective inhabitants of Roshar are savvy enough to know they live on a single planet in the vastness of space. There's also the question of how the cognitave aspect of a planet appears in Shadesmar. Is it just another sphere or is the environment itself in Shadesmar the cognitive representation of that planet? I think you're right on the limit in how much investiture a shard can channel through a single person and I also think that that person's will has to be greater than the object they are changing, especially if it doesn't want to, it's why Jasnah is so much better at Soulcasting than Shallan. So, yea I don't think even Jasnah could match wills with a whole planet and that woman is stubborn.

Yea, I'm putting my eggs in the Graphic Audio basket and cancelling my Kindle preorder in favor of the physical copy. If the third volume of the Graphic Audio version comes out a month after volume two just like volume two will a month after volume one, then it will be out sooner(mid October).

There's a WoB somewhere on the inquisitors not all having the same spikes depending on availability of the desired powers. A-Atium and F-Gold were probably the common ones they could be missing, and they'd probably not send those inquisitors on dangerous missions and used them to intimidate nobles and obligators instead. Also, I doubt Ruin used A-Copper spikes on many of his inquisitors, Vin and Elend could easily pierce any coppercloud that a non Mistborn-Inquisitor could put up and possibly even the Mistborn-Inquisitor coppercloud.

Hey guys, I left a comment on a recent White Sand article on Tor and didn't remember to check back till I saw Brandon share the article earlier today, here was my question and response from the guy who wrote the article;

As an accountant, I'd be remiss if I didn't put forward accountantform. Odium could be easily defeated if you bury him in enough paperwork and red tape.

I wonder if Galladon ever got a Seon.

This contradicts what I said but it's the only thing I found that really touches on this. I'm not really picking up on what the editor's note is implying, maybe someone else knows the answer to that or can puzzle it out?

I had a discussion on how I thought the Atium we see in the Mistborn trilogy was an alloy of electrum but someone up high shot it down. I was sure I saw a WoB or something that said the Atium from the pits wasn't the pure form of Atium but there are so may WoBs on Atium that I never finished searching through them to find it. But, yea, Atium does seem to do the opposite of electrum. Electrum allows you to see what you will do in the next few seconds, Atium lets you see what everything around you will do in the next few seconds. The fact that they essentially cancel eachother out always seemed off to me considering Atium is a Godmetal and electrum is not.

I think the excitement has generally been tamped down by the fact that the release date keeps getting pushed back. Now the hardcover is saying October 1st and that makes me really doubt the digital version is being released September 4th as it is currently advertised. We were supposed to get this back in July and now I feel like they'll get all three parts of the graphic audio version out before the graphic novel version, but maybe I'm just being a pessimist at this point. I am significantly more exited for the graphic audio over the graphic novels anyways. I really don't like that art style and I am kinda miffed that they had that chapter at the end of volume 2 that looked so much better but volume 3 is going to try and imitate the original style to make it more cohesive. Hopefully the new artist learned from the mistakes of the old...

With the prose version that Brandon gives out not being cannon/unpolished and the graphic novels being such a disappointment so far, this is welcome news.

I disagree. The "runaway" Kandra has four options; hide among the nobility, hide among the Skaa, hide among the thieving crews, or hide in the wilderness. I'm ruling out the nobility and the wilderness because the nobility would be idiotic due to the small amount of nobles and I doubt a Kandra would give up civilized life just to live as a fish as you said. They seem to be able to retire after a while serving contracts so giving up and living like an animal just seems illogical to me. Hiding among the normal Skaa may be effective for a time but also seems illogical. Skaa have it as bad as the Kandra do, the exception being that nobles are more violent with Kandra because they know they can't die easily so there aren't many consequences to beating them to death. Still, trading life like that for the life of a Skaa seems like a small improvement and at some point they'll do something that merits death as a Skaa and they'll be outed as a Kandra when they don't die. In Era 2, hiding in the populace would be easy, but in Era 1 the only large group of people was the slave class and there's no way a Kandra could hide forever among them. That leaves the thieving crews and we never saw a rouge Kandra among them or any of the other groups which means if this ever did happen, the Kandra was found and captured.

Oh yea, I forgot about that, have an upvote. It's likely that in some way there were plotting against TLR or maybe just tried to escape the Kandra civilization and blend in with humanity. The Steel Inquisitors would probably have been the ones to hunt them down and bring them in, would be pretty easy with emotional Allomancy and their ability to see the Kandras' spikes.

I think the combination of A-Tin and A-Pewter truly enhances balance, while separate they only partially enhance it. Balance is based on the coordination of the eyes, ears and the body's sense of where it's spatially located. So A-Tin covers the first two and A-Pewter the last one. I'd say they both enhance balance somewhat and together they really enhance it.

I think we agree here but aren't quite on the same page. Game of Thrones isn't exactly a good example of Chekhov's Gun, it's a good example of something that violates it(though not always, see Cats-paw Dagger). Now, Chekhov's gun isn't some sacred law of entertainment, it's a trope. Tropes are tropes for a reason, they have worked in the past. But, when they're overused or obvious, people tend to complain. So, you'll get shows or books that try to violate the tropes to make them different, and that in and of itself is a trope, though one that does succeed(Game of Thrones). As for the white horse, I think it's really an HBO thing. I've seen so many of their dramas have these long scenes with no dialogue where a character is doing something weird. They're always vague and a bunch of people usually find all sorts of symbolic meaning in various things. The white horse supposedly symbolizes death and how Arya can't save lives, only take them(sound familiar anyone?).

"'Chekhov's Gun' is a concept that describes how every element of a story should contribute to the whole. It comes from Anton Chekhov's famous book writing advice: 'If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired." (first thing that comes up on google) Maybe I read it a bit literally but how does the gun get fired if it never leaves the wall? I feel it means that if you make special note of something, it should be relevant later on. What you said is basically the opposite where you make special note of something and it's never relevant to the story. Brandon does make use of both of those, but usually the things that aren't relevant to the story are easter eggs for other Cosmere stories. I don't think the previous guy gave a good explanation of that, go look at how Vin describes her earring in her conversation with Kelsier before she starts her mistborn training. Then go look at how Wax describes the earring that the Kandra gave him to replace the one he shot Bleeder with at ( I can't remember if it's at the end of SoS or the beginning of BoM, those two came out so close to each other). The descriptions are identical. It's not something most people catch, you would have had to remembered exactly how Vin's earring was described in TFE when you read it. I only caught it because I was curious some time ago to see all the hints that Ruin was distracting Vin every time she thought of it so I did a keyword search on "earring" to see all those moments.

I don't want to be that guy but I don't think that's how Chekhov's Gun works. I'd say a more apt representation was Vin's earring, though that one spanned multiple books. Kelsier said it would be a good backup to use for a steel push in the event she needed it and so it was used. A gun was hung on the wall and later the character used it. Now there may be some future argument for Oath-bringer which has litteraly been hung on a wall and will probably be used for something at some point. But the Stormfather line was more of a misdirection and it was later established that he could be used as a sword but very much does not like to be. I'm not sure if there's a term for the concept of something that is written off as impossible but turns out to be possible, but that's what that was.

Had Rashek had his metal minds removed when he was say 150 years old, he would have had a bit of time to recover them. But the older he got, the faster that bounce back occurs and it doesn't even need to fully bounce back to kill him, just to a point where the human body is too old. On a tangent, I'm imagining Rashek screwing up the first time he compunded Atium and accidentally turning himself into a baby. It could be a movie called "Three Steel Inquisitors and a Baby."

I bet there is a way to use AonDor using whatever the equivalent of a God Metal is on Sel. This is a common thing in most of the magic systems we've seen by Brandon, there are multiple ways to access them and the physical manifestation of the Shards seems to be the easiest way to gain access. On Scadrial you can be snapped by the Mists, be a descendant of a Lerasium mistborn, burn Lerasium yourself, or the medallions and the Bands of Mourning. Stormlight has the Honorblades, the Radiant Spren, or fabrials. While God Metals are tough to find, they are usually the easiest way to gain access to a given shards magic system once you find them. I could imagine the proto-Elantirans having access to something like that back before Aona was Shattered.

At this point, I feel that they got the actual release date updated for the physical copy and never did for the digital and the systems just keep pushing it forward pending someone inputting the correct information. The surprising thing here is the lack of info from Brandon or his people, this is very unlike them. I'd definitely be a bit more peeved if they did this with a Stormlight or Mistborn book but I guess the graphic novels aren't as high on the priority list for us or them.

I had wondered about this recently and went on a bit of a deep dive to figure it out, but didn't really have enough to put together a cohesive theory post. I had arrived at the same conclusion that Rashek could not have created the spikes while holding the power at the Well. I had wondered if maybe the First Generation didn't have spikes because Rashek purposefully made them mistwraiths without the spiritual blockage but upon researching it they do indeed have spikes, so yea he had to of killed a bunch of people shortly after his Ascension. Another missing piece is exactly when did the First Contract get written, how many generations of Kandra grew up without it? From the way Ten-Soon talked about it, it seemed like it was an event that happened in his lifetime but there's no way to be sure. While he was being relatively honest with Vin he was also intentionally leaving certain things out. I'm also insanely curious about the other Kandra "criminals" that were imprisoned for eternity. What did they do to deserve that? What happened to them when Sazed remade the world? So, yea I got more questions than answers but I do like a good question. Though, the OP should note that mistwraiths are not immortal, they do breed and live for about 50 years(or else every mistwraith would be one of the original Terrismen that Rashek turned into mistwraiths). It's only when they're given spikes that they are given a longer lifespan(I don't think they live forever or at the very least they have to deal with consequences for living as long as they do).

Koloss spikes are not the same as Kandra spikes. They are both made using normal humans but remember seeing somewhere that Kandra can't use Koloss spikes and vice versa. Also, I believe MeLaan says that even if they wanted to make new spikes, TLR never showed them how to make them.

I'd like to interject another possibility. The way I read what the creature was at the end of BoM was that the Set had found mistwraiths and gave them Hemalurgic spikes made of that metal that was in Bleeder(be it Trellium or whatever). If Sazed couldn't find Bleeder when she had one, then he probably can't see or influence another "Kandra" with just one of those spikes(possibly more too). And he wouldn't know about it because the method of hiding from Ruin and Preservation was probably well documented - caverns surrounded by metal like the ones from the end of HoA - and they were probably created in a place like that. That's how I read it at least.

I'd like to add this, addressing the OP. It could be said that Taravangian's efforts to undermine Dalinar put him in the exact situation that he was in where he was able to resist Odium. I think had Dalinar just gotten the memories but still retained his place of power in Urithiru he might not have been in the same place or situation and we can't really know what would happen then. Also, the attempts to have Dalinar executed actually brought Szeth to Dalinar and therefore Kaladin and changed his path towards helping our favorite protagonists. I guess the question is; are events happening because of or in spite of the Diagram?

Vin's extra strength was stated by Sazed in the epigraphs of HoA to have likely been caused by her inhaling some mist before she got her earring and other times she managed to do that. However, I feel like the fact that she never used the power in WoA makes her a poor example for proving or disproving whether have held Preservation's power makes one a stronger allomancer. Honesty, I would have bought that just using the power like Rashek did made him stronger that other Mistborn, but the WOB seems to indicate that Rashek did that on purpose, it wasn't incidental. The Nicrosil Feruchemy is definitely a possibility explaining why the Bands were so powerful though, I hadn't thought of that. On the last point, the Steel/Iron sight that the eye spikes grant seem to have much more strength than normal Steel/Iron sight. The Steel Inquisitor that we got a viewpoint from in Final Empire could read peoples' emotions just by the way the metal moved in their bodies. It's also kinda like a weird X-ray vision and you can identify things that are obscured by a wall or some sort of other visual obstruction. Also, if there were any power that Kelsier would want more strength in, it's A-Steel. We saw the stuff Zane could do with his extra strength, Kelsier would be even scarier.

Yes they were, that was also my favorite part. When Kelsier haunts those Elantrians and gets them to give up their device is probably one of the funniest scenes Brandon has written in my opinion.