Numuhuku

Something I've recently thought about after my latest audiobook re-reading of Way of Kings. Does anybody else find it interesting that there's a similar focus on the status of warriors in both societies being lower? Obviously not to the same extent, with the Shin considering warriors to be debased slaves, while the Horneaters merely consider it a profession for the most junior of sons, but it's something I've come to wonder about in relation to how the Shin and the Horneaters relate to the Parshendi. We know that the Horneaters are blood related to the Parshendi. And they share a similar language tree with the Parshendi and shin. It makes me wonder if this low social ranking of warriors has anything to do with an older shared cultural heritage. This is possibly a more tenuous connection, but I was curious if any other folks had thoughts about it? I wonder if this will be a topic that might come up when we get a chance for a closer look at Shinovar and the Peaks.

The main issue is the bridgemen were only meant to be on the field for a very short part of the battle. They'd run the bridges in the initial assault, provide a distraction, and then run off. And even that brief exposure saw the ranks of bridgemen routinely decimated on even moderately tough battles. Having them stand in ranks without armor or shields for an extended period of time on the front line will see them destroyed before shardbearers can come into place. In practice I think this would be very hard to do. Keep in mind this isn't an RTS where the commander has a top down view of the battlefield, and can transmit orders to all his units instantly (no field spanreeds at the squad level). It takes time to dispatch orders, and for battalions of men to form up and move out. ESPECIALLY if those men aren't very well trained. A man in shardplate, being a one man army almost, can move about the battlefield much faster than regular soldiers, raiding and spearheading various assaults all over the battlefield. I think there's also a matter of morale. Unless they were fanatics, your suicide troops might not be very motivated to chase down a shardbearer on a chaotic battlefield. I think they'd find excuses to lose track of them. You might be able to whip men into doing something suicidal if its straightforward, but its very difficult to get them to take the initiative in it if they're not motivated.

Indeed. So if anything human wave tactics by unarmored suicide troops against a full shardbearer with support would go even worse. Admittedly the same could be said of specilized anti-shardbearer troops. A shardbearer mounted on a horse is in practice going to have much better battlefield mobility than a battalion of specialized anti-shard-bearer troops. Getting those troops to where the Shardbearer is at, and pinning him down, I think is going to be almost as difficult as orchestrating an ambush.

In a fight directly against someone in shardplate this makes sense, but it's probably worth considering that in the context of a battlefield, a shardbearer in plate is unlikely to be fighting unsupported. Plate requires aid to be donned quickly, so I feel it'd be unlikely to be used in context when the shardbearer wouldn't have other soldiers with them. While a mass of unarmored troops with great weapons are theoretically efficient way to defeat shardbeaerers, but said troops would also be incredibly vulnerable against other conventional troops. Look at how vulnerable the bridgemen were in Way of kings were when they had to fight in battles with no shields or armor. A detachment of unarmored troops like this I feel would simply get shredded by arrow-fire, then break upon even a thin spearwall. Especially if these men are supposed to be expendable poorly trained troops. Also worth considering. It's conspicuous that when the regular Parshendi nearly killed Sadeas, that was done skillful, motivated and heavily armored troops. And they lost dozens of men to swarm him. I don't think that poorly trained conscripts would have the morale to put up with the losses you would take fighting a Shardbearer. In practice I think siege weapons or elaborate ambushes are far more likely to be successful against Shardberears.

well I don't know if it's fair to say, without having been able to interact with an axehound in person, that they don't make as good of companions to humans as dogs or cats would. That's a rather subjective claim, and I think a good number of people on Roshar might be quite offended at you disparaging their axehound companions =P More seriously. Given that nearly all the worldhopping groups in the Cosmere seem to be big on keeping these things secret, I don't see them trying to introduce foreign species.

For me live action suffers from how you'd need to green screen almost everything on Roshar in the outdoors, and authentically casting for it would be difficult unless you were willing to primarily cast biracial actors* to represent how the average Rosharan (outside of Shin) doesn't exactly line up with most ethnic groups on earth. Details like the spren might still be a tricky detail in animation, but I feel it'd still be less than having to CGI everything in a live action movie. *Though other people rightly mentioned that for a series of this length, you might have issues of retaining cast members.

I think it's worth considering how oppressed the Pahn Kahl are.Obviously to our modern perceptions, them being conquered and folded into a larger empire without a right to self-rule seems bad. And we do see that some Pahn Khal expat laborers in Hallandren work under bad working conditions. Yet on the other hand, many Pahn Khal hold distinguished (if not the highest) positions in the court of gods despite being heathens. So I don't think it entirely makes sense to think of the Pahn Khal as a ruthlessly subjugated people suffering under endless toil and oppression. In practice I think the Pahn Kahl more had a strong sense of regional identity and independence, and that was almost as big of an issue to them as any minor oppression/exploitation that the Hallandren empire engaged in. There might be legit issues, but I can't help but think the Pahn Kahl people willing to start a manywar at the cost of their own lives were probably more fanatical than the average person. Maybe it's an optimistic attitude, but I like to think that with Ciri's advice, Susebron might have the mindset to recognize and try to right the kind of injustices or inequalities the Pahn Kahl suffer under Hallendren rule. I think while Blue Finger probably wouldn't be happy with anything less but absolute independence, but that most Pahn Kahl people would be happy (or grudgingly) willing to join Hallendren as long as they were treated as equals, or at least were given more respect as their own distinct part of the empire.

I have. Though as far as I can recall, they don't elaborate as much about certain things in the early chapters as much latter on after certain things were revealed. It's partly what made me curious.

Sort of an odd thing to dwell over possibly, but did anyone else wonder about the specifics about some of the stuff going on behind the scenes at the palace for the first couple of weeks of Siri's arrival? Especially as far as the relationship between Siri and the god kings priests go? With the initial reading it's so easy to get caught up with all of Siri's fears, isolation and humiliation it's easy to not think about the particulars about what was going on, but after I thought it over after the end of the book, I started to reevaluate the ealier sections of the novel, though wasn't entirely sure given that it didn't get explicitly outlined in the text or the authors notes. But there were a few things (perhaps obvious to most other people, though I've not seen it mentioned much) that seem fairly probable to me. 1. Bluefinger sabotaged Siri's wedding night instructions -Siri spending her honeymoon kowtowing in the nude, waiting for her husband to make the first move, was not the priests plan. They really did want a legitimate heir, so not even prudes like them would have planned around that. It seems probable that Blue-finger (befitting his status as the highest ranked non-believer) was supposed to give Siri wedding night instructions that would have compensated for Susebron's own innocent nature. Such as her taking the initiative to couple with him. But Bluefinger gave Siri the "don't do nothing on pain of death" as part of his own agenda that he was plotting. 2. The priests think Siri is a wannabe martyr -Working under the assumption that Bluefinger WASN'T giving Siri counterproductive instructions, the priests assume that Siri is refusing to couple with the god king, and is making a spectacle of protesting her marriage to him by melodramatically kow-towing to him all night. This assumption is framed by their intelligence about about Vienna being a devout Austrist who hates Hallandren, and guilt over their part in making Susebron so powerless and naive that he can't deal with a rebel princess insulting him to his face. 3.Bluefinger plays everyone like a fiddle -Bluefinger needs to slow things down in order for his plot to succeed, and his position as head steward acting as go between Siri and the Priests gives him ample opportunity to pit them against each-other, that makes each party think the other an unreasonable cremhole. Treledees's threats to Siri for not performing her wifely duties come from being mislead into thinking Siri is making acts of outrageous defiance, while Siri imagines him to be one of many over the top forces arranged against her in the palace as opposed to potentially being a merely unsympathetic individual. I suppose this might be a line of thinking that other people already considered, but since I didn't see it discussed often, I was curious if anyone else made this evaluation?

Elend almost certainly had uncles and male cousins. After the final Ascension, at least one of them could have survived and taken claim to being head of the house.

I assumed he was interested in getting his hands on the Bands of Mourning, so he could tap the incredible deposits of compounded healing in them. Him being made a hemulurgical blood maker wouldn't really help considering his terminal degenerative illness. Storing up enough health to cure himself of his condition would probably get him killed given his weak state. Zero sum game and all that. It's the same reason why a normal Feuruchemist couldn't make themselves immortal using Atium metal minds.

I started getting really fond of Steris in book 2, and this just cemented it. It's really interesting how Sanderson gradually expanded on a character who at first seemed to be a stock stuffy society lady, only for it to gradually be revealed a much more delicate and intelligient person underneath that initial impression.

That was my understanding to. It just seemed a bit odd for so many of the characters to refer to a kidnapping/forced breeding program soley as an abstract long term problem. Especially Steris and Marsai nearly ended up as victims of it as well. At bare minimum, it seems like it'd be something worth mentioning to the Southerners (the extremely technologically advanced Southerners who don't currently have a very good opinion about the Northerners) to impress upon them that plenty of the Northern mask-less barbarians have just as much cause to hate the Cett as they do.

I wasn't under the impression that most of the women who got kidnapped in that plot were actually powerful allomancers themselves. Just noblewomen related to the Lord Mistborn spook under the pretense of them being convenient hostages for a get-away. It honestly would have been rather incredibly dangerous to aim that kind of theatrical kidnapping against actual allomancers (the curbstomp that Wax and Wayne inflicted on them being self-evident). Hafthór Júlíus Björnsson would be a safer hostage than a even a female thug for example. I'd think number of candidates to be spiked among that pool of people would be relatively small. I'd guess victims for spike experiments were likely procured by other means.

Does anyone else feel this detail ended up getting effectively dropped over the last couple of books? The abductions of the Allomantic blooded noblewomen was such a big part in Alloy of Law in kicking off Wax's adventures in Elendel, and establishing the Cett's perverse ruthlessness. It seems odd that the fate of the still captive women and the Cett's presumed plan to breed more Allomancers with them has been mostly reduced to off handed references to the Cett's general long term plans (even by Steris and Marsai, who had cousins among the kidnapped women). Obviously there were a few rather more immediate concerns, but it still felt a bit strange. Especially now that the Cett's "benefactors" have turned on them, rendering any long term plans seemingly moot. I'm wondering how the kidnap victims and the breeding program will factor into the last book. While it certainly could have resulted in children by this point, it seems that not enough time would have passed for it to accomplish anything substantial (besides serious trauma on the victims part that is). Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Well that depends on whether you view emotional allomancy as being merely a boost to ones persuasive powers, or a more insidious form of mind control. Most of what we see in the series suggests the former, since it's extremely hard to covertly make someone do something that they didn't already have some inclination towards. As an Allomancer himself (albeit not an emotional one, but very good at psychological manipulation), Wayne might not be so likely to ascribe to popular hysteria of rioting/soothing being like mind control that absolves him of responsibility. Then there's the fact he'd still remember being the one who pulled the trigger. A conscious rationalization wouldn't really do anything to put an inherently moral person like Wayne at ease, and I think he'd consider playing up the manipulation angle cowardly. Admittedly I don't know if this would be the best way to have had it happened. I'm just not sure that I picture the law in the roughs as being "quite" so informal that lawmen would sentence known murderers to community service.

Except there was a trial conducted by the lawman who wanted to hang Wayne. They even brought the family of the book keeper, who was a very well regarded figure in the community. There also wasn't really any ambiguity over whether or not Wayne had physically performed the act in question. Naturally this is just speculation on my part, but I'm not seeing a whole lot of ways that Wax could have gotten Wayne out of that situation while still operating in the boundaries of a lawman. I can't see Wax, with his initially limited reputation, being very successful in persuading the very irritated community they shouldn't hang a 'punk murderer'.

One of the things about Wayne's backstory that always seemed amiss to me was how Wax saved him from hanging for the murder of the bookkeeper. As remorseful and broken by the crime as Wayne obviously was, it doesn't seem like that would save someone from punishment in a place like the Roughs. But the Shadow's of self prologue clearly shows Wayne traveling with Wax as a free man not too long after they met, and obviously not outlaws on the run. Obviously, there must have been some *greatly* mitigating circumstances to get Wayne off the hook (at least legally) for murder. The mentions in Shadows of Self of how serious a crime abuse of emotional allomancy got me thinking. And something to that extent is about the only way I could see Wayne off for murder the way he did. He clearly had the criminal intent to commit armed robbery, so by most reasoning he should be held responsible for any deaths that occurred due to that criminal act. The only way I could see Wax 'rescuing' Wayne from the gallows in that situation would be if he could somehow prove that a 3rd party were the ones who had planted the criminal intent in Wayne's mind by unnatural means. This might not entirely make Wayne faultless, but it might just have been enough to keep him from being hanged. Naturally this is mostly just speculation of course, until we get a new information about the specific incident.

Almost certainly. She was one of the only full feruchemists who had the opportunity to have a large number of children.

I think it's the latter. Wayne is still anguished about not being able to make amends for the murder he committed as a teenager. While in a sense I think it's a subconscious desire for forgiveness (even though he might say he doesn't deserve to be forgiven), I think it's also a straight desire to want to support the family and make them happy. Something he feels he hasn't been able to do, which is what makes it so painful for him to go to the daughter at the university. So I can easily see why Wayne might latch onto a stranger into a similar situation, and vicariously live off being able to make them happier. I think Wayne has too much of a paternal/big brother instinct to girls in this kind of situation to ever consider a relationship though.

Yeah. I think Steris being supportive of Wax in this situation is going to be something that really solidifies their relationship. I don't think it was ever going to be a witty romantic fling (in spite of Steris's surprising interest in playing Loise Lane flown through the air in superman's arms), but I think by Bands of Mourning they're going to be closer. I think it depends on what extent of "recovery" we're talking about. Wax eventually came to terms with Lessie's death on his own, so even though this is arguably even more of a psychological blow, I think with Steris he can partially come to terms with the melancholy and depression (squaring things away with Saz is an entirely other story). Frankly I figure she IS fond of both Wax and Wayne in a platonic sense. Wayne is just the annoying little brother whose tough enough that you can get away with shooting him to get him to stop bothering you. And I don't think she quite feels Wayne's puppy love necessitates her disclosing her orientation. A thousand years of the steel ministry generally not caring about such things (they only cared about skaa/noble interbreeding) might make it, if not openly accepted, privately tolerated behavior in many circles. I'm sure some of the new religions have invented doctrine on the matter of course.

Well most of that conversation was her old man swearing to high heaven that he had her killed.

I'm sure they'd be quite proud to bring it up. Though I don't think Vin would have been remotely impressed by the supposed familiar relation she had.

Well since we know the set was working with Bleeder, it's actually possible they might have *some* idea about what's going on with hemalurgy and harmony. So they might have *some* notion about how to possibly counter Harmony's influence/wrath.

Well this might not be a terrible thing if you're seeking to spread peace and understanding through the cosmere.