Serack

@Frustration, I'm adding to my pro's and con's post that a Stormfaker spoofing an active Stormfather without him noticing is convoluted.

Stormfather vs Stormfaker, the arguments collected: Granted: I don't think anyone is arguing that Gavilar never interacted with Stormfather, and in the Stormfaker theory, it's even possible that the Stormfather is partially responsible for some, but not all of what Gavilar experiences in the Prologue in his name. Arguments for Stormfaker: Stormfather never manifests in the rest of the books except as a face that is nearly infinitely expansive. The being that manifests to Galivar is just too different. And not vast enough. Counter: It's really hard for a mortal to manifest an "avatar" like that. Gavilar claims the Stormfather lied to him about the heralds being dead. Counter: Quote of redditor RoboChrist Gavilar thinks the Stormfather is going to help him become a new, replacement Herald, not a Bondsmith. This seems contradictory to what the Stormfather would have promised with the context of what happened to Dalinar (and WoB) Counter: The being says (heavily paraphrased) at the end that he will approach his future potential bondsmiths very differently, and this might be part of that. The reaction to a Herald dying seems more consistent with the other Heralds knowing one of their memebers died, implying the being was Ishar, which really meshes well with #3 above, in that Ishar may have been trying to manipulate Gavilar into taking his place as a Herald. This is IMO the best argument for Stormfaker. Arguments that it's truly, and only the Stormfather: WoB is that Gavilar had been on the path to becoming a Bondsmith even longer than Dalinar WoB is that the Stormfather couldn't tell that Gavilar was responding to the visions differently from how Dalinar was. With the context of the prologue, this seems to refer to how he didn't understand that Gavilar was trying to exploit him. Gavilar was still accessing the visions from The Stormfather Counter: It's possible the Stormfaker was dovetailing/hacking into a still present Stormfather showing these dreams to him. Alternately, maybe lightweaving is at play (lightweaving isn't convincing for me) There doesn't seem to be any evidence of someone trying to Stormfake Dalinar. I just re-read some of the Stormfather's interactions with Dalinar, and some of his extreme grumpyness makes a lot of sense in the context of him feeling like he got burned by Gavilar and has no tolerance for anything remotely exploitive. This meshes with how the manifestation spoke at the end of the prologue. A theoretical Stormfaker spoofing the Stormfather while he is still active with Gavilar without Stormfather noticing is convoluted and unlikely. Placeholder That was a lot of work. Does anyone have anything to add? Edit: added #'s 4 and 6 for the arguments against a Stormfaker

redditor RoboChrist had some great thoughts on this:

At the beginning of chapter 56 of Oathbringer it says, Later it says:

@teknopathetic, @Nathrangking, see the WoBs quoted in @Frustration’s post above per WoB the Stormfather was granting visions to Galvinar. I’m having a hard time squaring this with some of the stuff portrayed as “The Stormfather” saying and doing too, but much of the “lies” did not occur on screen. I can’t wait until I have a text to comb over to see if maybe Galvinar was making some wrong conclusions about dead Heralds

Between this new info about Galivar presumably being recruited to serve as a new Herald and this line from secret project #4 I suspect some new Oathpact with new Heralds that are sent to Damnation will be formed.

Redirect, moving away from the excitement about the reveal that a Herald dying that night, putting weight behind @teknopathic's theory: I want to talk about what the heck was going on with The Stormfather being so different in how he manifested to Galivar. It was so different that I started suspecting it was an imposter manipulating him in the guise of The Stormfather and went back to the Arcanum and reviewed the WoB which confirmed that yes indeed Galivar had been receiving the same visions as Dalinar, from The Stormfather. So the big differences I can categorize are: The Stormfather would actually sometimes manifest as some shimmering being in the room when talking to Galivar which never happens for Dalinar. There were several things recalled by Galvinar as having been told to him by The Stormfather that are /really/ deviant Apparently was recruiting Galvinar to become a new, replacement Herald, attempting to rebuild a functioning Oathpact. Presumed to have lied about the Heralds dying and going back to Braize. I wish I had the text to review the details of what Galivar recollected of this.

I don’t think the 2 have to be mutually exclusive. The everstorm probably was enough, but Chararch might have greased the skids

More evidence @teknopathetichad it on the money

I’m on an OB reread and noticed that the chapter 77 epigraph indicates the BAM capture hadn’t happened yet, and thus the tower was failing beforehand

So the star means it's a topic you've been posting in. Thanks

Similarly, what flags some original posts in a topic with a heart banner at the top right? (like this one) I've noticed some of my favorite posts have these features, but just now a new topic I made that had only 1 reply and 1 up arrow heart had a Star in front of it's link Which has me really wondering what mechanic flags these posts this way

Wow, I was proud of my Khriss idea, but you really brought a lot to the discussion! Thanks in particular for sharing the WoB's about Shai I had forgotten that the original Kandra were pre TLR ascension. Did they make it through the catacandre? They seem too disengaged for the role. edit to add: @Pagerunner I just saw your edit, thanks for the additional WoBs. I'll add that "one you know best" may refer to knowing the apprenticeship the best. We may know Shai better than Sigzil, but not what happened between her and Hoid after she tracked him down. So I don't consider her disqualified.

So in the commentary for SP4 Brandon drops that Hoid had 3 apprentices, "of which Sigzil is the one you know the best." He also says "...I started working on what is the story of Wit’s apprentices and their explorations of the Cosmere." I want to do some speculation on the nature of the other 2 apprentices. I think the above 2 quotes potentially imply 2 important things. "Know best" implies that we know something about and have probably even seen on screen, one or both of the others, just nowhere near as much as for Sig. "Their explorations" imply that more than one of them are worldhoppers that influence more than one cosmere world. I.E. they are still kicking around and relevant. Here are my guesses Worldbringers It has long been speculated that the Wordbringers were founded by Hoid much like the Worldsingers. Some even theorize Feruchemy was a result of his influence on the Terris people when he founded them. I don't think it's much of a leap from this supposition to theorize that one of Hoid's apprentices was a Worldbringer. However, it's realllly difficult to come up with someone from pre-The-Lord-Ruler times who is still kicking around. Khriss It dawned on me that Bandon has said that Khriss knows more about the Cosmere than Hoid, which resonates with the "their explorations" part of #2 above, and meshes really well with why Hoid says he recruited Sigzil: Speculative possibilities: Hoid has been around in pretty much all our stories so it's remotely possible he mucked around in any of those worlds and made an apprentice.

I tend to use Google search to go to websites, including the Brandon Sanderson main page. Googling for “Brandon Sanderson” gives the below top result. The link is titled “The Biggest Kickstarter Ever - A Year of Sanderson” on my PC, but I used my phone for the screenshot.

Hold up... In another physics/science heavy post @G2F4E6E7E8 said: Check this out. Earphones can't reproduce true base sounds because their resonator/speaker isn't physically big enough to produce sound waves that are that long. However, they do produce all the harmonics in such a way that your brain/complex perception mechanisms go, "the only way these harmonics would be here is if the fundamental harmonic were there too" and fills in that gap so that you actually "hear" the long wavelength fundamental harmonic that isn't actually physically present. So if you have a set of frequencies of a certain sequence that fits the harmonics of a lower frequency just right, you can extrapolate what that frequency is. And since we have one data point for the "7th harmonic" as red, which a quick google search defines as from 620nm to 750nm, we could make some guesses/ranges for all the harmonics. I got pretty excited about this thinking there might be a subset of harmonics of this hypothetical set of harmonics that is 16 within the visible range giving us hypothetical wavelengths for all 16 shards. Unfortunately my math gives us a best case of only 9 harmonics in the "visible" spectrum if you fudge a few things. So if we crank some math to find "hidden symmetries" using the information that the "7th harmonic" is red, that doesn't give us enough "harmonics" in the visible spectrum to represent all 16 shards.

I concede that investiture/fake physics makes the physiology of rods and cones and the vast complexity of processing their information into an actual perceived color something hand waved into the realm of magically special for those with enough breath. The same for the dyes made from the Tears of Edgli which are explicitly invested by Endowment Per WoB (referenced in the linked coppermind article). Neither of which overcome the fact that human vision is so narrow a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that it barely encompasses a single harmonic of its lowest perceived frequency. A red "7th harmonic" would put the reference fundamental frequency's wavelength somewhere between 4.3 and 5.2 μm which would only be perceivable by humans as heat.

the You are Not So Smart (YANSS) podcast has a fantastic episode about how some researchers replicated the visual/social phenomenon that was "the dress" using croc's and socks. It has a lot of interesting information about what @AquaRegia describes as "sending signals to our squishy brains to be coded somehow into perceived 'color'" I highly recommend YANSS in its entirety (I went through their entire back catalogue over the course of 2 years while mowing the lawn), but that one is relevant to this particular discussion

this seems to miss @cometaryorbit's point that reflected light is almost never monochromatic. The "exact wavelength" is actually a spread out spectrum of wavelengths with a peak at a particular frequency. In optics, we call this frequency coherence, with the tighter the spread, the more it is said to be coherent. Even most LED's are spread out compared to a laser or an emission line from an excited gas. I can accept that Stormlight is pure monochromatic light source, and even that the Tears of Edgli are a source of dyes that in the right conditions will provide monochromatic reflections allowing for the perfect color shadings characteristic to the court of the gods in Warbreaker. But paint them on someone's lip, and that coherence is probably degraded significantly. Edit: See this post for a better treatment on light coherence (both frequency and spacial), particularly how it can be achieved using low tech like what's available in the stories. Edit2: Cool, I just noticed that @cometaryorbit was participating in that discussion too!

@Oltux72 I am not sure what relationship that equation is supposed to represent (or even what all the variables represent other than frequency) The Wikipedia article I linked in the post you quoted probably does a better job of explaining it than I can, but laser frequency doubling fundamentally comes from tuning to a harmonic of the laser’s fundamental frequency. Harmonic frequencies are always an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, the second always being 2*fundamental. And harmonics are the term used in the book. Speaking of then in terms of octaves just just serves as a ruler that allows us to compare the range of “harmonics” we can see compared to the range of harmonics we can hear. The conclusion that the visual frequency range is too small for the term “harmonics” to be a useful term is independent of the term octave

@Zincmind, thanks for your addition to the discussion! These are things that were taught in my Sound Engineering class over a decade ago that I no longer know well enough to have explained nearly as well as you did. I do remember being told that a good acapella barbershop quartet style ensemble will typically sound much more harmonious than something played on instruments with standard tuning because the singers are trained to adjust to perfect harmony with each other whereas the instruments are stuck in their strict tunings. edit to add: Also, if I understood/remember correctly, in a pure intonation tuning, the dissonances that can come from it not being perfect makes for dissonances that can sometimes be the goal of picking certain note combinations that you can't get if tuned with just intonation. But I'm not confident of that claim.

Hey thanks for liking my theory. I've put a bit of effort into several other posts that can be found with the link in my signature. I think you may be remembering some WoB about how Rayse didn't want to take up additional shards as they would change him, but I'm not sure. Although I just found these 2 WoB after searching more directly for something more like what you say.

I think the article was already a couple days old when it was shared yesterday

They reported on it rather early. Also, considering the NYT best selling list, they have a particular interest on publishing news which this is.

You got me thinking. If Chanarach's soul were trapped in a box, it probably would have unraveled like Jezrien's did and as Kalak feared his would. No, her "soul" went back to Braize as the OP theory goes.