natc

People in armies also tend to, well, die. And new ones are hired and trained. Plus, not all are guaranteed to be in fighting condition so active troop count differs from the total number basically all the time. Different highprinces also have differently sized armies which confuses the total number of Alethi troops further.

Well, the names are probably religious constructs to a certain extent. You can call them whatever you want and magic A will still be magic A.

. . . a what twinborn? It says twin for a reason. You have two powers, one of each art.

All Damnation will break loose if someone manages to weaponize, say, division fabrials.

It occurs to me, one thing about blood: there is a possibility that soulcast blood lacks white blood cells, which I can imagine them not realizing the existence of, and red blood cells . . . well they lack a nucleus. Or most organelles for that matter. They mostly function as sacks for putting hemoglobin into, and blood type is pretty easy to standardize because there isn't much room for variation. Same with the cell membrane which should more or less be the same among carbon based cellular life. Grain is a lot more complex compared to the bare essentials needed in human blood. All the microscopic features aside you have to soulcast the DNA into existence. All several meters of it per cell. You're basically leaving it to the soulcasting fodder you're making grain from to figure out any details you missed, the chance of error is high. In fact they may even be referencing some ancient form of lavis grain untouched by artificial selection for flavor for the fine components and it only looks normal because the soulcaster expected it to look that way outwardly. Soulcast meat . . . let's not go there, I don't want to know what it actually is . . . Someone needs to ask Brandon what cells soulcast blood actually contains.

I'm under the impression that even men somewhat literate outside of the ardentia can only read glyphs, which do convey meaning but are of limited use as a proper script, while the script women use is still the only proper written language in Vorin territories. Whether you could call that literacy by Jasnah standards is somewhat debatable; it's like standardized pictures.

Which raises the question: what is going on with Renarin? Crazy half-serious theory time: all of the Knights Radiant exhibit unintended voidbinding abilities that the honorblades did not possess.

Well how do they know what non-air things are? O_O

Sazed's personality has also definitely changed from what we can see, so the intents will be interfering by now. Harmony can't really do too much while "hate" is so general and unrestrictive it's not even funny.

Well if you can understand antimatter then probably? Dark matter is a different story entirely, but antimatter isn't very different besides being . . . "anti-"

I mean all it really takes to create Scadrial is a lot of scientific knowhow on godlike levels to figure out how it all goes together in the first place, then dedicating a lot of investiture to provide the mass. Even normal invested healing seems to create flesh out of nothing, turning investiture into matter is definitely doable.

Well, no axial tilt, so any "seasons" are mostly just a translation quirk regarding fluctuations in climate. Outside of the Weeping and highstorms weather sounds like it's mostly random, though temperature variance occurs since the continent is huge (Frostlands)

Even some insects have incomplete metamorphosis, IIRC. Like, the grasshopper or whatever (I just chose a random name, they may not do this) just looks bigger with some more developed parts. Not all insects deconstruct the majority of their organs and rebuild, that'd be weird. Evolution isn't that clean cut.

I feel medallions are more important to society than that. Airships, for example, would not be possible at the scale we've witnessed. Your entire crew would have to be iron ferrings (I think the term was Skimmer?), with one being a coinshot to kickstart the propulsion. There are, what, three Crashers in Elendel history including Wax himself? I suppose you can set it up so a full weighted coinshot can just jump off afterwards and have the crew brace for lurching, but if something happened to your coinshots on staff you're not going anywhere. It's a rusting pain in the rear. With medallions and the Southern society, you can just be careful to keep the stock of charged medallions maintained (using whatever method they use to charge them) at the airship ports or next to whatever other ettmetal devices they may have, and as long as they have the manpower the device can be operated regardless of who the people are. You don't need to search for one specific rare trait from among millions of people, convince them to take the job, and train them to do it. But that's kind of off topic I guess. But in the grand scheme of things the influence of natural metalborn are somewhat at risk here. Having them is good and all, but not necessary. And it's finally not completely useless to be a duralumin gnat or Soulbearer! Demand is gonna go up for those.

Especially since a large percentage of what would've been his power is what apparently currently composes the planet's mass.

Shards are seemingly omnipotent no matter which you look at, their intent only limits what actions they are as to take due to corruption of their personalities. I mean what do Ruin and Preservation have anything to do with genetic/biological modification and terraforming?

IIRC doesn't WoB say he's partly there because stormlight is just easier to come by?

The painting is made of matter, so it'd be investiture. Pretty simple. Natural ability, fundamentals? That's just technique to use the materials (the stuff after that) and arrange them into the form of a painting. Take a sword. You can say what you want about the effort, technique, and resources in the form of equipment that went into forging the sword, but by the end of the day whether you had a blacksmith bust it out or had someone soulcast a wood carving, it's made of steel, or whatever material you used. The steel is made from atoms, which is made from subatomic particles down to the fuzzy base that we don't quite understand. When you say something is a building block of all things it's pretty straightforward.

Well, the electrum only affects one person (the allomancer himself), so atium shadows presumably function properly for everything in the world other than the guy burning atium. So it's not a complete loss of advantage . . .

He's just ruthlessly classist to be honest. He does care about some people. Not as much as he cares about himself obviously but hey.

Well corpses don't really have souls like humans do. But shardblade severed limbs have no color, and maybe that prevents making it Lifeless. Lifeless drain color from themselves yes? Also, the limb is likely still attached which would be weird.

Well when he intentionally teleports he needs to have seen the destination or know where it is in some way. When it's his danger sense teleportations though they probably happen before he could even react or it'd be useless. So I don't think you can even trick it.

Well, I feel the main reason Blain knows more uses for it than we as readers would is because Blain was hero!Steelheart, while David only knew of it being used by evil!Steelheart. Evil!Steelheart doesn't really need the power for cover, to disable mechanical devices like guns, or for weaponry; he has energy blasts and is literally invincible. After transmuting the city and underground he was probably done for the most part. Steel transmutation is more useful if you're working with other people and aren't a self-centered jerk. So David's dad has had ample opportunity to experiment. It's actually pretty useful as we've already concluded by now, but not so much for the epic himself.

He also basically tanks an epic nuke in Firefight. He intentionally redirected it of course, but the barrier is by no means easy to break. Nukes might not even hurt him, since he only has to protect himself instead of a whole city.

Well, they do swear by "I will put the law above all else", or something along those lines. I think the spirit of the Skybreaker philosophy is that the law is the most consistent and objective way to judge whether you have done the right thing. Windrunner righteousness is completely open to individual interpretation and will probably differ from one Windrunner to the next in the grey areas. They can't all be doing the right thing if they give different responses in the same situation yes? The same is with how every country treats their laws, of course, but there's only so many kingdoms, and in ancient times hundreds of Windrunners. The law is more stable of a frame of reference, as to some extent it reflects the will of the people (or it's meant to anyway) with regards to what is wrong and should be condemned. Not a flawless perspective of course, as the Windrunner will often have a pretty good point about something while the law may trip over itself. But every Order has glaring issues in their creeds, I would imagine. Lightweavers appear to tend towards bending the facts in order to emphasize a hidden side to things, which treads the thin line between good intentions and fraud. Edgedancers never put the bigger picture first. That's why there's ten of these groups, in the end.