Landis963

*mutters* Colors-cursed topics...

Oh, I don't know. Two-bit b list fantasy movies are all D&D clones (or if we're being charitable, Tolkien clones), right down to the peasant boy coming into his power as heir to some forgotten magic or other. E.g. exactly the sort of story that bored Brandon to tears while writing Mythwalker. Besides, a lot of the selling power of many of Brandon's books is the fact that they don't fit the standard mold. The Stormlight Archive, while having a lot of the trappings of a "standard" fantasy, would not be mistaken for New Zealand by a long shot, and in many cases the "Knight" characters are designed to not fit the shining armor stereotype, despite, you know, the glowing armor. (See also: foul-mouthed, childish, and good hearted Lift, who would look like a kid playing dress-up in Shardplate) Elantris and Mistborn have the distinction of being focused on specific cities, as opposed to standard fantasy which, by inevitable dint of the plot, must involve a grand world tour somewhere. On those two examples, Mistborn's magic system is heavily geared toward thieves and assassins, a deviation in and of itself, and Elantris has a zombie as a protagonist. So if any future distributor wants to sell any of these properties as a movie or anything like that, they'll need to branch out a bit.

Stamp magics will also fail to work a certain distance away from MaiPon - hence why we didn't see any stamps in Elantris.

I'm fairly certain no one had noticed that yet. Kudos! Now for wild speculation on what exactly Aon Ela did during Elantris' heyday.

Hemalurgy's dependency on "bind points" suggests that there are different points for each metal. However, these points are demonstrably different between taking the powers ("Most commonly attributes are stolen through the heart.") and bestowing the powers (the list of known successful spike/bind point combinations and the powers they bestow is too great to list here).

Hence my confusion. I know the evidence for Bavadin mucking around on Scadrial, but him doing so on Sel? I haven't heard that before.

How do we know that Bavadin was ever on Sel in the first place?

How are you going to make the dot?

I suspect it is a property of anyone with a so-called "Divine" Breath. Notably, this extends to the Idrian royal family as well - note the Royal Locks, which can change length and color on their wearer's whim.

Re: the LED trick: LED lights are too regular to be mistaken for Stormlight, which means that anyone smart enough to actually take a good look at the "sphere" you handed them would instantly notice it was fake. That includes Shallan and Renarin at least.

Honestly, there's no real hints beyond "hey, didn't we have a world war or two when we were their age?"

Pft. They're not going to go to war with the southerners. Not at first. I suspect that eventually, the southerners will declare war on them, and they will be woefully underprepared.

I think that one's on Nalthis. No, Santa's Shard would probably be Kindness, or something of the sort. As for the north pole/south pole thing, that requires a lot of 1st trilogy backstory. You've mentioned, mattig, that you don't particularly care about being spoiled, so here goes: The Lord Ruler (the, um, ruler of the Final Empire) took up Ruin's power temporarily to counteract the "Deepness," an effect where the mists of Scadrial were thick enough to block the sun (an early gambit of Ruin's, it must be said). In so doing, however, he messed up the world royally. As a part of this royal screw-up, he moved Scadrial closer to its sun (to burn away the mists, you see). This had all sorts of effects, up to including "OMG why is my everything on fire?!" So naturally, he needed something to block the sun, hence ashmounts, great, constantly smoking volcanos designed to block the majority of the sun's rays. Therefore, he needed something to break down the ash so that it wouldn't choke everything, so he created microorganisms to take care of that, and he needed plants that could survive in the red light caused by the now too-close sun, so he altered those, and he needed the people to not die of starvation, so he altered them so they could eat the altered plants and derive nutrition from them. This population lived close to magnetic north, which was at the Shardpool where Ruin was imprisoned, but he shifted everything further south for purposes of misdirection (didn't trust anyone else to not storm up Ruin's continued incarceration, after all). However, after his alterations to the people who would become the nobles, skaa, and Terris, he needed a control group, just in case he'd messed something up with the people that he wouldn't be able to fix before the population got too low. Hence, the people at the south pole, who were left unaltered.

There's something in WoK that exemplifies this. I think Kaladin says something about 40 days of spring being unprecedented. One only imagines the zingers Hoid thinks up when he hears things like that.

If sprenblades can't root themselves to the ground somehow, I'll eat my hat. This goes double for honor- and highspren, who can make gravity their plaything on a whim. (provided, of course, that Stormlight is involved)

Yeah, I'm certain that Harmony would be more than willing to apologize personally, but that requires that Wax put his earring back in. And I don't see that happening for 90% of Bands of Mourning. In the meantime, Harmony'll probably try and keep things out of Wax's way as best he can. As for Harmony's future sight, this is sort of how it works: Harmony sees every path going forward, and their consequences. However, I don't believe it's been stated whether he can see the choices that stem from those consequences. Once he makes a move, the paths change to match.

Except when the next two people Hoid talks to react suspiciously well to what he's saying/doing. (Specifically, Shallan's father doesn't punch Hoid, and Shallan herself doesn't run from Hoid)

Ooh, you're new here. I have an urge to post a Willy Wonka meme. Anyway, Sazed is a character from the 1st Mistborn trilogy (which you really should read to get the full impact). The Shards are... complicated to describe. Suffice it to say that millennia ago there was only one God, then something Really Bad happened and He got split into a bunch of pieces. The Shards are the largest of these pieces, and any one of them can turn a person into a lower-case god. Mistborn spoilers: (don't read until you've read the first Mistborn trilogy, or if you don't care about being spoiled)

1. Possibly. Upon further reflection, Honor's death didn't stop the Highstorms or the distribution of Stormlight, so there's no reason to assume that Devotion and Dominion's deaths turned the Dor into a finite resource. It'd just be good to nail down for certain. 2. It might be good to get a number, though. Just for purposes of counting how many we haven't seen yet.

This isn't a question, but I may have hit upon a way to eliminate much of the ambiguity he hides behind when asked about magic systems. "At the level of detail that recognizes the Metallic Arts as 3 separate systems..." How many does [x person] know how to use? How many exist in [y place]/on [z planet]?

Two other ones I just thought of: Is the Dor a renewable resource? (May be RAFO bait) You've commented before on the difficulty of quantifying the number of magic systems there are in various places in the cosmere, as on one hand they're all the same magic system (Investiture) but on the other they're a whole mess of different magic systems (there are 16 different Allomantic metals, for instance, all with their own imparted power). At the level of focus that recognizes the Metallic Arts as 3 separate systems, how many magics can Hoid use? (Definitely RAFO bait, but hey, it's worth a shot.)

In both cases, it pushes them away from lethargy. I suspect that it does that for every Knight, seems perfectly fitting for Stormlight in almost every respect.

Ah, but Daleks (as of the Ninth Doctor's tenure at least) are fleshy bits encased in metallic pepperpots. It wouldn't be any more difficult than an armored human.

The problem is that lerasium is shockingly out of character for Hemalurgy, by which I mean that stealing any single power, no matter how broken (perhaps especially the broken powers), wouldn't fit Preservation in the slightest. In the spirit of atium and clairvoyance, however, it could be that lerasium steals personality traits. We haven't seen anything do that yet.

They totally could, Daleks aren't nearly Invested enough to interfere with the Push.