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Szeth's punishment insists that the voidbringers do not exist. We also know that anyone who picks up a weapon in Shinovar is demoted to the warrior caste.

Elend.

We've gone back and forth on this one a lot. Personally, I don't read too much into the absence of Spren; they aren't always visible and if they were particularly conspicuously absent I expect Dalinar would have noticed. So they may or may not have existed. That said, I think every vision except the last one happened before Honor got shattered.

I think the poison reducing effects are because some of the allomantic metals (especially pewter, an alloy containing lead, but also others) are toxic. Since the primary effect of aluminum is getting rid of allomantic metals, it can prevent poisoning.

It's quite possible to control the strength, although it takes practice to precisely tune it.

As I recall, second nahn came with right of inquest, which was apparently what would let Lirin win a judgement. There are some indications that lower-ranked darkeyes receive some kind of trial, but apparently not a very good one. At a guess, the ranking Brightlord judges and sentences them at his discretion, but there might be some theoretical possibility of appeal, or at least a possibility that their boss will reign them in if they blatantly abuse their powers. Some of Kaladin's scenes imply even the bridgemen can't simply be executed out of hand; I think anyone who wanted to convict a low-rank darkeyes would need to provide about as much evidence as the modern justice system requires to prosecute someone in the first place and the right of inquest guarantees a proper trial before an impartial judge/jury. At the very least, I'm pretty sure Kaladin avoided execution after becoming problematic with bridge four because he'd need to be charged with something first, thus potentially drawing attention. Even if he didn't receive any sort of trial, if the charges were obviously fabricated it would significantly harm the reputation of everyone involved. Also, we actually do see a piece of the legal system after a fashion. Kaladin receives a trial by ordeal when he's tied up in the Highstorm, and we hear about prisoners being chained to rocks for days and let free if the greatshells don't get them elsewhere. I would assume that "facing Stormfather's judgement" is voluntary for people of higher status, and rarely taken because it's essentially a death sentence so it only appeals to people charged with capital crimes. At a guess, prisoners can potentially voluntarily accept a trial by ordeal instead of a standard trial. The social and religious structure would also seem to support trial by combat, since Highprinces are meant to be military commanders and hold religious authority over everyone else; this could potentially be taken to mean that the Almighty shows his favor through victory in battle and so the victor in a fair duel concerning a legal matter is the correct one. Then again, the Alethi might not agree with that logic. If there is a trial by combat option, I expect it has to be invoked by the defendant, and probably there are some rules involving selection of champions by one or both parties, so as to prevent egregious abuse. If Dalinar could potentially represent whichever side he believes is correct, I don't think people who can't win a fair trial would invoke it very often. Now for some unfocused rambling prompted by reading a bunch of medieval law codes for school lately. The Alethi may or may not have state prosecution; that is, if someone is murdered then the local government might or might not be obligated to investigate and punish the perpetrator. Without state prosecution, the victim's family or someone else considered to be an injured party would have to file suit; the local lord might be obligated to assist them in gathering evidence and seeking witnesses or might not. I'm guessing that people don't get public defenders. It's fairly likely that trials of lighteyes, and thus probably second or first nahn, are before a court comprised of some set of brightlords; at a guess, all the vassals of the lowest-ranked person who holds authority over both parties.

I expect that men act as judges while women consult precedents and may act as lawyers.

The ardents are outside of gender roles. It seems like the masculine arts are mostly the things that involve physical labor, plus surgery and being stormwardens. If it involves thinking and is not military, it's usually feminine. So yeah, scientifically-inclined men go into the ardentia.

I think making too much of a distinction between Shards and splinters may be a mistake. If splintering is similar to the Shattering, then it seems unlikely there's a fundamental difference between them beyond degree. If someone gathered enough splinters of Honor, it would be appropriate to start calling the result a Shard, but if they don't have all of them then they haven't fully reconstituted Honor.

Yeah, ideally the voicework would be English to begin with. Some dubs are pretty good, but they're more the exception. Mind, I think that's more a matter of money and interest than inherent difficulty, and an English original with the voice budget of a typical dub would be pretty bad too.

I mostly inferred it from Hoid's later appearance as a beggar who worked with Sarene, and the somewhat odd behavior of the guy Hrathen met.

Well, if the splinters or Investiture are locked up somehow, you'd have to break them loose from the current Invested objects or people before gathering them, much like how forming Harmony required Ruin and Preservation becoming uncontrolled. I suppose that at some threshold point prior to gathering up all the splinters the Shard's Investiture would recognize you as the Shard and revert to your control when removed from whatever is using it. However, it's also possible that each splinter is associated with a specific segment of the total power pool, and you'd only access the portions associated with the ones you actually have, in which case you'd need all of them to control the full power of the original.

In light of Hoid's comments in Gibletish, I suspect you could assemble a Splintered Shard into a cohesive unit, but not necessarily the same one you started out with. As for how, I think you'd have to do it like the creation of Harmony. Someone who has a connection to all of the splinters would need to acquire them simultaneously. Depending on the exact mechanics, it might be possible for anyone who uses the magic system associated with the original Shard to do it. It's also possible that someone who already holds one splinter would be able to gather the others just fine; the only splinters associated with people we know of are Divine Breaths, and it doesn't seem that there are any loose splinters of Endowment.

He wasn't the informant who talked to Vin, but I'm pretty sure he was an informant.

I think Hoid has actually been pretty influential in previous books behind the scenes, actually. In Elantris, he interacts with Hathran, which might or might not have mattered, and later helps smuggle supplies and weapons into the city. In Mistborn, he warns Kelsier that Vin attracted undue attention at the ball, thus letting the team react appropriately to keep from drawing too much attention. He also warns Kel that Shan is a Soother, although since she turned out to actually be a full Mistborn that didn't help too much. In Well Of Ascension, he leads the Terris refugees to the capital, which results in them travelling to the pits, which I think contributed to Demoux and co being there at the critical moment. He's an informant in Hero Of Ages, and may have had some effect on the actions of the defenders He tells Siri the official explanation for the God-King's succession, although I don't think that ended up affecting much He kicks off the entirety of The Emperor's Soul.

All else being equal, more humanoid objects are easier to Awaken. I'd expect this sort of thing to always remain relegated to short-term tactical use or artistic/scientific curiosities, though. They'd be really breath-intensive to set up and not terribly flexible. Let's say you wanted to make one for a factory. At a minimum, you would want to be able to tell it to become inert when the operator is done for the day, and probably you'd want to switch who is controlling it so you can have multiple shifts. You might also want to only allow authorized personnel to use it, but then again modern bulldozers don't have any usage controls. Still, you need at least two conditional statements. You could withdraw the Breath at the end of each shift, but Vasher's Commands are actually rather difficult and very few people would be able to use them. Furthermore, transferring Breath in sub-units is a rather complex and time-consuming process requiring multiple Commands, and finally enough Breath to activate an industrial robot would be valuable, portable, and untraceable, thus tempting workers to walk out the door with it and never come back. That said, they'd be pretty useful for a lot of research and rapid-prototyping applications by allowing people to assemble very small/large objects "by hand", so I would expect to see them around high-end labs.

Uh, not necessarily. Nightwielder was invincible by virtue of not being solid, while Steelheart was invincible by virtue of being invincible. This means that any avenue of attack that does not depend on physical interaction of some form is likely able to harm Nightwielder, but without disabling his powers you could only harm Steelheart with a method that does not depend on inflicting harm and thus is logically impossible. Now, Nightwielder may also not need to breathe, but if he does he would die if there was no oxygen for him to breathe. Of course, any incorporeal Epic either does not need to breathe, is capable of interacting with oxygen, or died very quickly. So there's a roughly 50-50 chance that removing all oxygen from the entire area he could travel to within four minutes from his location would be fatal. But since he can fly at a good clip through solid objects, that's pretty much egregiously impossible unless an Epic with teleportation powers was able to forcibly relocate him to Luna. As Fortuity demonstrates, Epics with Prime Invincibility can be killed without activating their weakness. In general, I'd say an Epic has Prime Invincibility if killing them requires something beyond simply having overwhelming force of some description. Now, powerful illusionists and precogs can likely be killed by large-scale explosions or batteries of machine guns, but if you delivered the same amount of energy with a high-powered laser instead that wouldn't work.

What I worry about with video game adaptions of any Cosmere works is the interface. The magic systems are all complicated and fast, and mostly rather free-form. To properly reproduce the feel of Lashings, for instance, basically everything would need to be a physics object, the player would need to be able to set a Lashing strength from .5 to large and a target point, and this would need to be seamless enough to Lash several items in less than a second. The actual mechanics would be pretty much trivial, although storing everything in an area would eat up memory and probably require sticking in a bunch of loading barriers in particularly large and cluttered buildings, but I don't know how you would even begin designing the control scheme. Mistborn has a similar problem, although since the physicals only work in straight lines it's more manageable.

It has come up before

Yeah, the internal enhancement Mistings get a raw deal. Mistborn often flare many metals at once. I don't think anyone has used more than six at once, but there's never been a situation that called for that.

Abandoning their post wasn't the right thing to do, but enduring thousands of years of torture is more than anyone can expect of a human. They did what was right for far longer than could be expected, and I for one cannot condemn them for eventually breaking. The Heralds ultimately failed as heroes, but that just makes them ordinary, not vile, despite the cost of their failure. We praise heroes because they aren't ordinary, they do what we can't. As for why Honor would create the Oathpact if it put such a burden on the Heralds, I believe he wasn't exactly spoiled for choice. My theory is that Honor, thanks to his Intent, was too weak to match Odium directly but able to force Odium to be bound by an agreement. He declared that control of Roshar and possibly Odium's freedom to move about the Cosmere as a whole would be decided by proxy; if the Heralds endured and won for enough Desolations Honor would be the victor. The Oathpact was the deal he could force and the alternative was that Odium would kill him and everyone.

That is simply not universally true. Behold, a fight scene from a rather popular anime containing two female characters who are quite well-dressed, have entirely reasonable body types, and do not over-express emotions. I will grant that it was a rather dramatic plot device and the guy present did express a great deal of emotion, but he was under rather a lot of stress at the time. It's also a pretty good example of the sort of scene that makes the pro-anime crowd think it'd be a perfect fit for much of the Cosmere. One of the problems with adapting high fantasy and the like to live action is special effects. You might say that there are plenty of great movies and TV shows that don't use much in the way of special effects, but the thing with those is that the scripts do not call for very many effects. An adaption of The Way of Kings would demand CGI plants and creatures and Stormlight in basically every scene, and preferably not terrible ones. Likewise, the fight scenes have a lot going on in them. Now, there are a bunch of huge blockbusters that have very large quantities of good special effects, but they have rather huge budgets as well. Doing it for a TV show is simply not happening. Anime, however, has no such problem. I will grant that an adaptation of TWoK would call for a more subdued than average tone, at least most of the time, but it's certainly not outside of the bounds of what the medium can do.

Hm, so apparently Radiants charged with Stormlight become lighteyed with or without Shardblades. I don't really know what to make of that, especially since Szeth's temporary eye color change is tied to his sword regardless of Stormlight charge.

Also, compulsion isn't actually that quick and easy. It cannot simply flip someone's loyalties without totally crippling their ability to think. The Forsaken did make extremely heavy use of it to seize a kingdom each, but had to stay around and micromanage. Only Graendal was skilled enough with it to completely overwrite someone's personality and get a result that could pass the Turing test, and even she couldn't get proper human intelligence from someone she did that to. And the people who are most valuable as mindless shock troops are channelers, who apparently have some limited degree of resistance to it by default.

I expect they're immune to their direct heat but not backflow, so if they heat and then touch metal it burns them. However, two things come to the rescue. First, thermodynamics. If we assume they're unharmed up to the temperature they're tapping up to instead of the actual units of heat, they're pretty much totally safe. The net flow of heat absent exotic high-tech methods using lasers or converting it to other forms of energy is always from hot to cold. If the starting temperature of their surrounds is colder than what they tap up to, it is not possible for them to heat up beyond that point. Things get messier if it's based on the actual "packets" of heat, because they move unpredictably. More move towards the colder end, but some do move back. Second, they can store as well as tap, so they can transfer excess heat to their metalminds if the surrounds are warmer, possibly because they just stopped tapping. As far as I know, the only limit on storage rate is that lowering an attribute too much kills the user. Storing to retain a 98.6 body temp should be entirely possible for any amount of heat as long as the metalminds have enough spare capacity. Also, overtapping wastes energy. Therefore, in theory you could store heat, tap it too fast, and pour it back into the metalminds to end up with less than you started with. Might be a bit tricky, though, especially if the surroundings are too hot. As for not burning themselves with the heat in their metalminds, that's because strictly speaking the metalminds do not contain the stored heat. To use CompSci terms, metalminds store pointers to the stored attribute, which is in some abstract non-localized storage.