Weltall

Here's a relevant WoB where Brandon talks about how many of the LDS parallels are unintentional (but by that same token some of them are) and his interest in all aspects of faith generally: Now here, a lot of his Asian influences are intentional, in part because of his religion and the LDS' missionary program.

The earliest time we learned this (I believe) was this WoB from before the deleted Prologue was publicly released, there are a few others where he also confirmed the Imperial Fool to be Hoid.

I've got a Japanese copy of the The Way of Kings and there's an interesting mix of approaches to translating various terms, not all of them what I'd have expected going in. Some proper terms are simply transliterated into katakana such as Stormlight (ストームライト) and Sphere, along with personal names of course. Stormlight Archive however got rendered literally into Japanese, as 嵐光録. Other terms are referred to with an equivalent Japanese term, such as the Knights Radiant becoming 光の騎士 ('Shining Knights'). The term Shard(bearer/blade/plate) also get the direct treatment (破片) and the Windrunners were translated literally into Japanese as 風走り団, drop the last character to get Windrunning. Still other terms split the difference and used a mix of katakana and kanji. Surgebinding became サージ結束, with Surge being transliterated into katakana and 'binding' rendered with an equivalent Japanese word. That same word also got used to translate Lashing, with appropriate Japanese words before to designate the three types. Spren are similarly split, with that term transliterated into katakana while the adjective is literally translated, so windspren are 風スプレン, honorspren are 名誉スプレン etc. Then there's the direct mention of Shards by name and they're rendered in kanji (養成/憎悪) but with furigana written on top of it (カルティヴェイション/オディウム) indicating that they're meant to be read as 'Cultivation' and 'Odium'. It's a way to have the non-Japanese word and indicate that it's important while still providing the meaning for the readers who may not know them. I would have expected a lot more of these terms to have been transliterated into katakana and as a result I have no idea how future volumes would have handled the other Orders, though I could probably guess at them for fun. But they never translated beyond WoK so there's no official word on them. Oh, and the Immortal Words were translated into Japanese and set off in bold. 死の前に生、弱さの前に強さ、行き先の前に旅

The things that Bleeder says about freeing Scadrial from Harmony's influence sound a lot more like someone who was influenced by Autonomy rather than Odium and we already know that Bavadin is interfering in many other worlds while Odium has been bound to the Rosharan System, so it's not like she needs a special reason to do to Scadrial what she's already done elsewhere. Meanwhile Odium is known to be very conservative in his expenditure of power and splitting his attention in multiple directions would be a pretty bad idea when he's still got one Shard in the same system who would like to kill him and at least one other Shard (Endowment) is willing to act if it looks like he's going to become a threat to the wider Cosmere again. As for a connection between Odium and Trell, the question was so vague as to be meaningless. Brandon has given answers like that before and then admitted that he was messing with us, as a question using an expression like 'any connection' is broad enough that a yes answer could be as meaningless as 'One's a Shard, the other is an avatar of a Shard, connection!'. It really doesn't tell us anything useful.

You're conflating two unrelated things, access to magic and a Shard making a special effort. Broadly speaking a Shard doesn't get to choose who can or can't use their magic in the same way that they don't get to directly control the form their magic takes; it's an interaction of their Intent and the natural pathways that Adonalsium set up. Everyone on Nalthis gets one Breath at birth and from there can engage in the whole system of BioChroma, the Returned are something special. Likewise, Honor didn't directly choose who became a Surgebinder, the spren did but that's because magic on Roshar is based around bonds. You get access to the magic by acting in some way in alignment with the Intent of the empowering Shard (intending to Ruin someone for hemalurgy, acting Honorably by following oaths for Surgebinding) but it requires no special effort on the part of the Shard. Also, other Shards select mortals to be their agents and can specially empower them. Honor created the ten Heralds, Preservation set up a plan that eventually put Vin in the position to kill Ati and Sazed to take both Shards, Harmony has set Wax up as his agent and provides power from the mists on occasion and so on. It's not confined to just Cultivation and Endowment. Odium does not seem to be particularly good at futuresight, with Honor and Cultivation having managed to trap him in the Rosharan System (exactly the sort of thing he never wanted to have happen) and the latter pulls one over on him at the end of Oathbringer with Dalinar and the memory gambit. Amusingly Odium seems to have contributed to his own failure there, however indirectly, since we know Renarin's own futuresight interfered with Odium's own and Renarin only had that power because Glys was touched by one of Odium's own Splinters. Clashing futuresight can obscure the future of people in the vicinity depending on the power. We see this happen at Thaylen City where Odium got completely blindsided and afterwards when he's having his chat with Taravangian he says out loud that Dalinar was never supposed to Ascend, at the exact same moment that T notices that Odium's vision somehow can't 'see' anything related to Renarin.

Here's a list and here's a more comprehensive discussion. Warning, there is a major spoiler in current version of the latter link if you haven't finished Rhythm of War yet so use the Time Machine option.

Artemis' Tear is easily one of the most powerful spells and since it doesn't depend on ATS you can throw it on anyone with the right elemental slots. That extra HP really helps with boss fights. Even the offensive Lost Arts have their uses since they come with the All Cancel property (ie they'll wipe all the enemies' buffs including bypassing barriers) and have some nice debuffs to inflict on top of that. The damage is pretty much icing on the cake.

There might be a Shard of Indecision as well but I'm not willing to commit to that

Welcome to the Shard! Perpendicularity is the 'scientific' term; it's what Khriss uses to describe them and she's the most authoritative voice on this sort of thing in the Cosmere. The fan term 'Shardpool' got used a lot before we had a proper term and still crops up on occasion but it's misleading in the sense that not all Perpendicularities appear as liquid, even if most of the known ones do. EDIT: Regarding the question you slipped into the tag (PS you really don't want to do that in the future, It's hard to read and very easy to overlook) Perpendicularities generally work by being a massive concentration of Investiture that warps the three Realms in a way that makes transitioning between them very easy. A Shard spending enough time on a planet will create one by default but there are other ways it can happen. Shards can also divest from a system but leave an existing Perpendicularity intact. By extension we know that a Perpendicularity can be willingly destroyed by the Shard that created it (and possibly interfered with in other ways, since we know Autonomy was able to bar passage to Taldain in some way) and we also have Word of Brandon that if you were to draw Nightblood within a Perpendicularity there's a pretty good chance the thing would collapse.

Yeah, limbs rendered inert by shardblade wounds don't rot and the whole thing works because of Cosmere metaphysics.

Yeah, a fair chunk of what you're missing lies squarely in the 'we released this after Crossbell so we expect you to get the details from those games' camp but you'll eventually be filled in on the most directly relevant details of what you're seeing.

Relevant WoBs:

There's one massive thing you're forgetting which kills your idea: The Stormfather existed long before humans arrived on Roshar. He's the spren of the highstorm and the storm has existed as long as Roshar has. In his current form the Stormfather 'awakened' because of what Tanavast did and is a fusion of the original spren and the latter's Cognitive Shadow. See above: The Stormfather is a Sliver because he's merged with Tanavast's Cognitive Shadow, the latter being a Sliver by definition as someone who held a Shard and had their soul expanded as a result. The proper term for the holder of a Shard is Vessel and all of them were originally human, sho del or dragons since they all came from Yolen. Any Shard can make avatars like Autonomy does but she's the only one who seems to do it so regularly. Bavadin is still alive and Autonomy intact, so it's not the same thing as the Stormfather where he's a Sliver and the largest Splinter of a splintered Shard whose original Vessel is dead. There appear to be few if any limits on what form an avatar can take, as Brandon has said that Autonomy's can be of any gender, any race and they don't have to be humanoid.

While we don't have any canonized information about fainlife yet (aside from Khriss confirming that it exists in Arcanum Unbounded) what we've seen in the released Dragonsteel Prime/Liar of Partinel excerpts and what Brandon has said about fainlife being a competing ecology suggest that the two systems simply do not play nicely together and there's no indication that exposure to it can cause non-fain life to start taking on fain coloration. Which is why I don't think the coloring necessarily has to do with anything fain, especially as there are plenty of other examples of white hair in the Cosmere that have nothing to do with it either. Fainlife does still exist, as Khriss' comment about Scadrial resembling the non-fain parts of Yolen is in the present tense, the short piece The Traveler takes place on Yolen right after the end of Hero of Ages and takes place in a fain region and we know that at least one of the Vessels was Sho Del and I'd be willing to wager money Uli Da wasn't the only one if I could find anyone willing to take a sucker's bet.

I'm in the 'read the hardbounds once' camp (and I take the covers off when I do) and then do my rereading either digitally or in paperback form, so the copies I care about are in good condition while my paperbacks for Stormlight in particular are looking a bit... worn. And my Warbreaker paperback is probably due for a replacement too.

While a lot of things on Yolen are pale white, it's because they're fainlife; Hoid is (or was originally) human, so the color could be entirely unrelated We have several forms of white hair seen in the Cosmere with both natural and supernatural origins so we can't pin it down to one thing specifically. Elantrians have white hair when they're not disguising their appearance and it's one of the colors the Royal Locks can turn. Tanavast also seems to have had white hair pre-Ascension (Rayse too, but he looks old so it might not have started that color) and white hair seems to be typical among the Natan people. We really don't have enough to say one way or another on Hoid.

Which makes the idea of a Shard of Captivation... redundant. Honor already covers binding things (by choice), Preservation covers keeping things as they are, the idea of bonding things and making use of them (whether it's spren in fabrials or in gemhearts) is natural to Roshar and most of it predates the Shattering. Fabrials are a post-Shattering thing, but only because Adonalsium would have to specifically allow it. It's not a bad theory but it rests on two incorrect premisees and everything built from them is equally flawed. Because not all Shards have pairs, we can't infer things about unknown Shards from the known ones, which means that the entire foundation of your idea that a Shard called Captivation exists is unsupported. Yes, incorrect premises can lead to a valid result but when everything you're basing the nature of Captivation on relies on those false premises, it's not nearly so likely. Stuff we're not allowed to talk about in the main boards just yet also makes the idea less likely. A few more points from your initial formulation: I think it's rather more likely that Devotion and Dominion were complimentary, while their closest opposites would be Odium and Autonomy respectively. Devotion is a synonym for Love and we know it and Odium could be thought of as opposites. Meanwhile Dominion seems to be focused on hierarchy and putting things in a strict order while Autonomy seems pretty opposed to that and (acknowledged ambiguities in the name aside) the root word autonomia has a very specific meaning in Ancient Greek of self-determination and having one's own laws. That's rather the opposite of what we see the heavily Dominion-leaning Fjorden doing. The Parshmen were singers who had their Connection and Identity badly damaged as an accidental consequence of the imprisoning of Ba-Ado-Mishram. These are fundamental Spiritual properties in the Cosmere that have nothing to do with any individual Shards. No new Shard is needed to explain why they behaved as we saw them and no new Shard is needed to explain the process that inadvertently created them since the process is entirely within the purview of the Honor-associated Bondsmiths. We know the plan relied on Melishi, who belonged to that Order. Odium did not have 'a planet' before Roshar. He very deliberately avoided spending enough time anywhere to Invest in a world because of the consequences that would have for him and never intended to, until Honor managed to trap him in the Rosharan System for thousands of years. They were a romantic couple, you don't need anything else to explain why they settled together. See previous responses on the Captivation/imprisoning thing. Also, there's no particular reason to think that the humans who became the Rosharans were ever directly associated with any other Shard than the ones already present in the system. Per Khriss, most of the worlds in the Cosmere were already populated before the Shards showed up on the scene and one of the only exceptions is Scadrial which literally didn't exist beforehand. The entire Rosharan System however has a known history: Adonalsium made it all. It's much more likely that the Ashynites were there from before the Shattering and Odium was their first encounter with a Shard.

The closest to an opposite Shard for Cultivation is probably Preservation for the same reason that the latter and Ruin are opposing. Brandon has mentioned that Ruin and Cultivation are very compatible, because they're both about change (albeit with different focuses) while Preservation is about stasis. Brandon has described them as complimentary opposites, polar opposites and in one (paraphrased) case as perfect opposites.

There's no known mechanism in BioChroma to make the kind of Spiritual alterations that are the essence of Soulcasting and Forgery, so I very much doubt that stuffing something full of Breaths and experimenting with Commands will enable you to change that thing more radically than Awakening already allows for.

Unless there's some new WoB I missed, lerasium alloys make the user a misting of the alloyed metal with no indication of other effects.

Scadrial being made of Ruin made a big difference. Not every Shard can do it, Preservation likely couldn't because of his Intent making that kind of action hard for him.

Dragonsteel is many years away, get comfy.

Well, Brandon's original pitch for what's now Mistborn Era 3 was 'Allomantic SWAT team hunting a Mistborn serial killer' and while some of that's known to have shifted with time, there's a pretty good bet that we're getting mistborn again since it's the title of the whole franchise and there's a good chance it'll include the killer mistborn.

The allomantic sDNA is heavily diluted as a result of no mistborn other than Spook (who was weak) surviving the Catacendre and the heavy interbreeding with the Terris people with their 'feruchemy sDNA'. 'Hemalurgic mistborn' would be utterly counterproductive to the Set's goals because anyone with that many spikes would be 1) immediately obvious due to them being more pincushioned than a Steel Inquisitor and 2) open to full control by Harmony. There's a reason the Set restricts themselves to only three spikes. Given what the inclusion of Terris sDNA did with the allomantic sDNA (ie, it diluted everything) the odds of a 'natural fullborn' ever arising is... pretty much nil.

Alas for the visual metaphor, I'm pretty sure the One True Diagram exists in mainly electronic form, resting in cloud storage somewhere though I presume he's got some offline backups too. And it's probably not as insane-looking as the hints we've gotten on the Diagram but... never having seen any of Brandon's outlines or frantic jottings-down of ideas when he doesn't have a computer handy, I won't bet my last sphere on that. xD