yurisses

Speaking of dung. When Syl finds the knobweed for Bridge Four, and leads Rock to dung as a joke.

Oh, man. It never clicked for me that was potentially/probably Hoid. I forgot his hair was white (according to the Purelake worldhoppers, anyway). Thanks for pointing that out! (Argent, can you point us to threads where this is explored in more depth?) Welcome!

I voted "atheist/agnostic", though I call myself a non-believer. Atheism has become strongly associated with a movement more than a (lack of) belief, and I don't like the baggage it sometimes carries. My mother is Catholic (I was baptised), but my family didn't go to church often. A critical point in my gradual loss of faith came around the time public discourse on gay marriage grew omnipresent in France, the opposition stronger than in any of Europe. I heard a bunch of very hateful people, who also claimed the Bible supported their intolerance! This made me ask some serious questions; ultimately, I lost my faith not because of the religious but because I simply no longer found any reason to believe in God (atheism/loss of faith came with very little stigma around me); even if I had, I'd have had no way to know which one. Funnily, the LDS Church isn't a big thing in Europe, and for most of my life I didn't even know it existed. Later on I was exposed to it through the sneers of other people, and the media. It wasn't until I read Brandon's books that I actively looked into what Mormonism was and how Mormons were like, which made me gain a lot of respect for a religion from which I'd never met a member. However, since I'm rather socially liberal and social issues tend to make all sides upset, I am sometimes made uncomfortable by various Churches acting as driving forces of social conservatism, and the LDS Church is one of them. There is more to life than politics, though, and I try to prevent political positions from letting me know great individuals.

Me too.

How is the answer clear? Twitter question: "So it's officially his book and not Szeth's any longer?" Brandon: "I'll know for sure once I finish the sequence, but I'm leaning that way." This news' tone seems way too definitive.

If you can't tell what's wrong yourself with your downvoted post, chances are the downvote reason is so petty you don't need to waste your time reflecting on it. Either the reason is clear, or the downvoter had the courtesy to post a reply explaining what they disagree with/disapprove of, or it's a petty downvote/an accident. What you're asking is not for reasons to be clarified but for petty downvotes to go. Why not, but it's... it's just a downvote. Really.

I don't have many specific examples off the top of my head, but there are things which are errors, and things which are purposely misleading. I've seen people call certain things retcons when, to people in on interview spoilers, they are closer to brilliant cases of characters studying the magic and being wrong about it. The self-critical scholarly approach to Brandon's magics is one my favourite things about Mistborn and SA. The difference between holy texts and BS books is that you can verify whether inconsistencies are errors or foreshadowing, whether through future sequels or WoB. I'd say a lot of small things the common reader might assume to be errors, we here know to be better than that. But things are not black and white, and amid the clever foreshadowing probably hides a few mistakes. For example I always wondered about the instances where we see emotional allomancy performed on Smokers or Mistborn. Obviously this feat is possible--the Lord Ruler does it, the annotations mention Zane using emotional allomancy on Vin, and Vin successfully dazes Yeden's Tineye and Smoker with duralumin and brass--but even though it is used by the protagonist herself, it is never discussed how to achieve it. ("Piercing a coppercloud" is explained in the sense of Seeking allomancy inside a coppercloud, but not in the sense of Soothing/Rioting a Smoker.) So in my opinion, either Brandon sometimes forgot about Smokers' immunity to emotional allomancy (what with Zane soothing Vin, unless her coppercloud was down), or it's a possible feat that he used but forgot to show the characters exploring the modalities.

Feromancy being "all internal" is a red fherring. It's not "internal" like Allomancy has external and internal metals. It's internal in that it uses your own Investiture. It can still affect others: "While filling a duraluminmind, other people's awareness and friendship of the Feruchemist will be reduced. Tapping the metalmind will allow the user to form trust relationships with others much faster". Also, Red Ferring, here are the WoB you asked for. My opinion is that either Wax's sister or his uncle or both probably have allomantic or feruchemical powers, and Spinner and Connector are two very attractive possibilities, considering they are new powers. Perhaps more attractive than realistic, but who knows.

It seems to me the main differences between Parshendi and humans are more supernatural than biological. Also, this thread has many examples of fertile interspecies hybrids.

It's written on the image

If this is suggesting homophobic people have zero attraction to people of their sex, well, I'd dispute that. Most people are on a spectrum of sexual attraction for one thing, and homophobic people are shown by various studies to feel on average more sexual arousal to people of their sex than nonhomophobic people. The sheer number of famous homophobic people outed as bisexual or gay supports the idea of overcompensation.

Over a dozen children is quite impressive, and I wonder if it is possible he had multiple wives, at once. It would be amusing, and not the only LDS parallel in Mistborn. I wonder if it's something Sazed would get behind, though...

Well, to be sure sure, "a FTL object" also "violates the principle that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light".

Woah, bronze radars, yo. Automatically identifies the type of magic being used too.

Perhaps the Allomantic effect is the Atium shadows, and the side-effect is the enhanced combat abilities.

The weird thing about this is that readers predicted Atium mistings while the characters assumed they didn't exist, and it turned out that the readers were right and the characters wrong, yet without Preservation's scheme the readers would have been wrong and the characters right. I know it's not implausible, just ironic. I clung to the theory that Atium is actually an alloy of Atium and Electrum and Atium mistings actually Electrum mistings until I saw the WoB gwslow posted. I still prefer it to what Brandon is saying It is more symmetrical, allomantic-table-wise (Gold shows your past self, Malatium (gold+Atium) shows other people's past selves; Electrum shows your future, Atium shows other people's future), and it explains why Mistings of a god metal exist without having God messing with people's sDNA (i.e. if you're a Misting, you can burn your metal and its alloys of Atium). But, sometimes things are simpler than I think they are. Still, certain WoB make me wonder if there's more to the way Atium mistings work, such as these:

Atium mistings probably don't exist in the Alloy of Law era:

I'm disappointed that it seems like the time bubbles' anchors are determined by the cognitive realm rather than acceleration and frames of reference in the special theory of relativity, because the latter would have been a great sci-fi element for the future Mistborn trilogy. I imagined the characters having to calculate optimal speed and acceleration or whatever to make a time bubble stable (just like it is stable relative to Scadrial which moves at great speed since solar systems and galaxies travel very fast).

Speculatively, if you can compound nicrosil Feruchemy, the amount of raw Investiture you can draw from Preservation is only limited by the volume of nicrosil you own. You could potentially tap the stored Investiture to not only brutally fuel Allomancy but also to compound Feruchemy at virtually unlimited rates. I don't, however, think this is how nicrosil is going to work. Another possible way the Lord Ruler might be "compounding" his Allomancy is through Lerasium Feruchemy, whatever ways that would work.

A theory is that you store Investiture with nicrosil (perhaps even compound it), and then tap the Investiture while burning a metal to turn it into a specific Allomantic power. I think this is a simplistic explanation of how nicrosil Feruchemy functions, though. And I'm not too fond of the idea of a compounding feedback loop.

The Lord Ruler's bracers were hemalurgically charged. Remember that Ruin didn't have a strong influence on humans until Vin released him. You don't need your metalminds to pierce your skin to compound. Relevant WoBs: http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=636#4 http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=642#3#3 http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1012#5#5 Consistently with the rumours from Bands of Mourning, I have a theory that the bracers have a part that is either pure Lerasium or an alloy of Lerasium and Atium. That way he used Lerasium for both Feruchemy and Hemalurgy. After all we know the Lord Ruler took a bead of Lerasium but apparently did not ingest it. Another hint here. One of my hypotheses is that alloying Lerasium with other metals, hemalurgically, cancels hemalurgic decay explaining the rumours that someone wearing the bracers would gain the Lord Ruler's powers, but this is just a myth, and to be fair I think any speculation regarding Lerasium's feruchemical and hemalurgic effects is a shot in the dark.

When you wonder about something, search a keyword (e.g. 'hemalurgy') in the theoryland database. (You have to enter it twice for it to work.) You'll find very interesting WoBs and catch up quickly.

Perhaps I give younger users too much credit, but I would think that by 16 rep a user would have understood that the ranks are in-universe references. Racism is a natural part of medieval and high fantasy that is mostly taken for granted; Darkeyes, for example, has at least as much racial and discriminatory weight as Half-breed. I trust a confused user reaching "Half-breed" to look at other people's rank and intuit that they are fantasy role-play winks. Yeah, there's a risk. But it's infinitesimal, and half-breeds are awesome. Cost versus benefit. edit: So apparently, I'm Half-breed now. How fortuitous.

If you could create more than 16 Mistings from enough Lerasium to create a Mistborn, you could save Lerasium by making 16 different alloys. To prevent this kind of cheating the system I think it's likely that the Misting-creating alloys are 1/16 Lerasium and 15/16 other metal, for the same strength relative to bead-size as pure lerasium, or weaker. Also, it should be noted that Lerasium has way more than 16 alloys, so we still don't know the all the effects you can get from Lerasium allomancy...

"Um, Father, I'm a lesbian." "Rust and Ruin! *burns pewter*"