Weltall

Voicework is an even bigger giveaway since you can tell someone is extra-important if Falcom paid to have them voiced. This wound up beautifully twisted in Azure where a character didn't get any voiced lines in Zero or the first half of Azure and the reveal that there was Something More to them coincided with their first voiced line. The Evo/Kai versions did away with that little meta element since the main story had full voicework. I'd say it also helped obscure the 'voice=important' twist, if I thought that anyone actually played the latter version at least without already knowing all the details via Cold Steel. On the idea of portrait art, if Falcom did return to using it it would be interesting to see if they also went the Brandish 4 route and had alternate art for the playable cast based on their Alignment Frame. Elaine doesn't really think of herself as 'the hero(ine)' but that doesn't mean she can't be one, it just means she's not part of the group of three important characters that were the first to get revealed. Meanwhile Kloe was never the heroine of the Sky games so I'm not sure what that comparison was for.

One thing to bear in mind is that no special trick is needed for Nightblood to absorb Stormlight, we see that he just does it as long as the person holding him has some light conveniently available, before starting on the wielder's soul. Vasher may need something a bit more active to get access to the Stormlight but it's unlikely to be terribly difficult. We know that Taldain would have been another very good option for him (had it been possible to get there) which means that whatever method he uses doesn't have to rely on superficial similarities between Breath and Stormlight but could be used with forms of Investiture that are accessed in other ways, like sunlight.

They are... except that it's very clearly stated that Susebron gets more than one Breath per week. This means that the God Kings' store of Breath has grown over time.

You mean the Heroes of the Horn? Because I don't think we get any names for the Companions. And yeah, most of the heroes have fairly clear parallels: Off the top of my head: Amaresu: Amaterasu Birgitte: Various figures, when she talks about various past incarnations of hers she mentions names derived from Jeanne d'Arc and Maid Marian, while her most famous name is probably derived from Brigid. Also indirectly she's a parallel to Artemis or her Roman equivalent Diana, with the silver bow. Calian and Shivan: Kali and Shiva Mikel: Archangel Michael

If you think that's something, this listing is going to blow your mind. And yeah, as you can tell by the dates in there, Jordan slipping in references like this has been known for a long time with the first version of that FAQ dating back to 1993.

The word you're looking for is postlude, to contrast with the prelude at the start of WoK. I could see something like that happening intended as a teaser for the Big Cosmere Crossover that is MB4 and set somewhat before those events are meant to take place, whether that's some number of centuries in the future, a thousand or more years or what have you. It would be a nice way to hint at things to come before he yanks us back many thousands of years to Dragonsteel which he intents to start after SA10. That said, Brandon hasn't said anything that I'm aware of or can find with a quick search.

If so that would conclusively prove that Brandon is Odium.

Oh, more info is starting to come out from the leak and there's a lot in there. Spoil-tagging for anyone who doesn't want to know and there are some inherent (though minor) spoilers for late CS/Hajimari. There was also an amusing aside in the announcement of the Nayuta port. EDIT: A bit more news has come from the release of the full article. A (minor) Hajimari postgame spoiler is in here and by implication a midgame one.

It's true, several of the usual (and very reliable) sources have confirmed it, including an image showing the logo which gives us the reading (actually 'Kuro no Kiseki'). So yeah, the Calvard Arc now has a name. And it's one hell of a name too, with the surface meaning of 'Black/Dark' or 'Many' (the reading strongly biases one to the former) and the character is an element of words meaning 'dawn of a new age' and 'the masses'. Oh, and there's also a screenshot showing off a character in the new engine.

Just for reference, here's another that mentions that Hoid is a major character in MB4. And one more on the general tone we can expect out of MB4 So yeah, it's a very safe assumption that we'll be bouncing between a number of different viewpoints even if Hoid is one of them and Scadrians get a bit more focus by virtue of it being, well, a Mistborn series.

Since the Shardblade is the spren made manifest in the Physical Realm and we know that the reason they have to be in one piece is because division would mean splitting their soul, I think it's safe to say that yes, they would experience some form of pain from that. We also see Wyndle-as-a-'blade' reacting with pain in Edgedancer when he's hit by Nale's own Shardblade, though that could just be dramatics on his part. But assuming it's not, burning the metal would obviously be a lot more painful.

I mean, he's allowed to mentally injure people or cause harm through inaction but even thinking about causing physical trauma will make him nauseous. I don't think convincing a pig to jump off a cliff is gonna get around it because he'd have to contemplate essentially convincing a living thing to commit suicide. Plus, he clearly isn't the one killing and preparing the food at various feasts we see him at so it's not just a block on killing the animal himself but other people killing animals for meat that triggers whatever his prohibition is. Unless we get a firm answer about a Radiant able to Soulcast bacon, Hoid's best bet is probably for somewhere in the Cosmere to have soybeans or similar that can be made into a passable bacon substitute. Randomly, Barbossa's whole thing with apples in Pirates of the Caribbean just popped into my head. I find myself wondering if in MB4 Hoid will find some way to eat bacon again at the cost of his immortality and decide: Worth it.

Yeah, Hoid wasn't born with whatever has left him immortal and unable to harm others, so he had some unknown amount of time to enjoy bacon before being deprived of his ability to eat it. One wonders if a properly skilled Lightweaver or Elsecaller could accurately Soulcast bacon without having to kill an animal for its meat and if that would allow Hoid to eat it; someone asked but aside from a comment that there's a Cognitive aspect to it we didn't really get an answer.

The Diagram anticipated the events several years before they happened, and while Taravangian clearly had help seeing these things, the points he raises make it clear that there were signs obvious to the spren that a Desolation was on the horizon. You don't need any kind of Fortune-manipulation to explain things. Taln was beginning to break, Odium was getting ready to act once he did and the spren noticed the signs and some of them decided it was time to start bonding humans again.

We've seen other instances of a spren already being in the Physical Realm before they interact with the person they're going to bond; Timbre is hanging around looking for her future bond partner (and then jumps to Venli after Eshonai's death) and we see multiple highspren observing the Skybreaker squires in OB.

Welcome to the Shard! Your question has been asked and answered: Mateform isn't the only singer form that's able to reproduce, it's just the one specialized for it.

Shards can reclaim the power they've Invested in a planet, it's just 'difficult'. Since he was involved in some way with Ashyn and seems to have used the cataclysm there as Step One in his plans to go after Honor and Cultivation, it's possible he'd see it as worth the effort and deliberately Invested a small amount of his power for the purpose of giving humanity the means to cause an Ashyn-shattering kaboom, but not enough that it would be prohibitively difficult to take that power back later. Alternatively it's entirely possible that humans had sufficient means of interacting with the magic already and Odium just... encouraged them to do things with it that they probably shouldn't have. Dawnshards were apparently involved per the Stormfather in OB. It could go either way really.

Doubtful, as we're told that the dilution of magical power that we see in Era 2 is about as weak as it's going to get and that everyone on Scadrial has the seeds of the Metallic Arts in them innately because they were created by Preservation and Ruin. Note that last sentence, even without any Mistborn sDNA from lerasium-burners, allomancers can still exist. That tracks perfectly with Brandon's annotation on Alendi.

The Surges are natural to the greater Rosharan System, which is why all the magics there manipulate them in some way. We don't know exactly how the humans of Ashyn accessed them but they obviously had some means of doing so. We also know that the reason Surgebinding via spren bond couldn't happen before the Shattering is because Adonalsium didn't allow it. Basically, the Surges are fundamental forces (or the perception of them) which exist in the system and that means that they've always been there. Post-Shattering the restriction that Adonalsium had imposed was gone so there were probably more avenues to experiment with them than before. Also, not to put too fine a point on it but... Odium was involved with the cataclysm on Ashyn in some way. It's quite likely that the humans were able to access the Surges through some mechanism he set up. Ashyn's disease-based magic is still manipulating the Surges (the cities are being held aloft with gravity manipulation for example) but they being accessed differently now than they were before. It's likely that the shift is due to Ashyn not having a Shard 'in residence' meaning that access to magic has shifted to something more indirect/environmental. Strength of and access to magic is one of the big dividing lines between a 'major shardworld' like Roshar and a 'minor' one like Ashyn or First of the Sun.

I suppose you could argue that all Selish magics being a mix of Devotion and Dominion (albeit sometimes weighted more heavily to one) is similar to how the Investiture of all sixteen Shards permeates the Cosmere, though some Shards are much more influential in some locations than others. On the other hand, the region-locking of Selish magic is pretty much the opposite of the rest of the Cosmere where magic generally doesn't care about location. Thanks for that, Odium.

Preservation was dying even before Ruin was freed, that just hastened the process; He lasted a thousand years and some change beforehand. It's not unreasonable that Honor could die over the course of several thousand years. Word of Brandon even says that both Shards' deaths were long events.

Sand Mastery was male-exclusive in the prose version and I doubt that the artists got a deep mechanics dump on how Taldaini Initiation works. More likely the directive was just 'add some females in there'. This is why all the named members of the Diem are male. Now, some things that have been said about the omnibus release make it sound like we might be getting some more information (Isaac mentions adding pages written by Khriss) but how much they might tell us on any given topic depends on whether they're contemporary notes or some sort of later annotations and if so, when she writes them.

It's entirely possible that some method of immortality exists via Darkside magic which we just don't know about yet. The prose version has some possible hints that didn't make it into the graphic novel but it's vague. My guess is that if it's not an unknown application of Darkside Investiture he's probably getting his agelessness straight from Autonomy (as an avatar of hers or something else) rather than making use of outside methods. But it seems nobody has asked Brandon about this and it would probably get a RAFO anyways because he has plans for sequel stories and they'd almost certainly cover the topic.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that's where Brandon got the idea from, or part of it at any rate. Here's one WoB (of quite a few) where he mentions the linguistic connections including using elements from the alphabet.

We know that sometimes it's not just the user's perceptions but the perceptions of the entire thinking population that matters. Brandon talks about this in relation to Rithmatist's chalklings which started out as a Cosmere work and the mechanics carried over. It's likely that Awakening's notion of what constitutes 'lifelike' is largely shaped by human perceptions since they're the ones performing most of it. In this case it doesn't make too much difference since kandra think of themselves as generally humanoid. Most sapient species that could use Awakening would probably have the same general sets of perceptions and it shouldn't matter much for the magic; singers are humanoid, while not canonized the Sho Del are humanoid in the Dragonsteel Prime excerpts we see, dragons can assume human form... but I think if you had enough of a non-humanoid population that had Breath, over a long enough period of time, things might shift a bit.