Lewis Nethur

https://brandonsanderson.com/shadows-of-self-and-the-mistborn-mega-series/ My interpretation from his post is that he reviewed the fan-feedback and best-seller results before committing to making a Wax-series because he regarded AoL as a slightly risky experiment. However, to your credit, these types of explanations and justifications are always given in retrospect and should, by my observation, themselves be taken with a grain of salt as the saying goes. It would not shock me if a source exists that better supports your interpretation or denies mine; this is outside canon has has more to do with publishing politics than the Cosmere as I understand it. I just wanted to give OP a little background on why we might never get truly satisfying explanations for Wax's abilities.

Wax, at one point, shoots a bullet out of a speed bubble, watches how it gets deflected, then dives out of the speed bubble to shoot the moving bullet and bank-shot it into the head of a guy holding Marasi (or was it Steris...?) hostage around a corner or some other obstacle. (Caveat, he was wearing a pathian earring theorized to be slightly charged with pewter and I can't recall if he was touching Mist...) He routinely exceeds, by a significant margin, the design-precision/accuracy of even the most advanced modern conventional weapons, and does so on the fly and under duress. He also has super-human reflexes, though I suppose we can chalk this up as a spirtual-spidey-sense born of having sensory information about all surrounding metal objects flooded into his brain constantly. The point is, Wax is super weird. My understanding is that Sanderson built Wax as a prototype gen-1.5 character for a short story that, due to overwhelmingly positive fan feedback, turned into a full-blown series. My opinion is that Wax has some serious character design flaws that usually aren't present in the Cosmere. Hes too good at too many things and there's insufficient reasoning as to why. (IMO anyway, though I admit I still love his books...)

Forgot to add, another important consequence of the second option would be that, as the metallic arts are diluted and spread throughout the general population, the rare powers will gradually become even rarer unless steps are taken in world to breed and recombine family lines that branched from Spook and the Terris survivors. The Terris and Set actually might already be doing this...

Pretty certain we have quotes from Wax in SoS that claim steel is disproportionately common in allomancers and disproportionately rare in ferrings, but I'm not aware of any in-world speculation regarding the cause for that split. Considering that the distribution is different for either magic system, we can at least rule out that it isn't based on atomic number or rarity of the metal/additives and is more likely a purely an issue of people's natural sDNA or Connection at birth/conception. I see two possibilities: 1. The powers are assigned to potential magic users based on a weighted distribution, ie: 1% get gold, 10% get copper, 16% get steel, ect. This would allow for fluctuations in the apparent generation to generation ratios of powers due to the rarity of the metallic arts manifesting in the general population, but overall would be a stable split. 2. Some powers could require a more powerful Connection to Harmony at birth, ie: allomantic steel could theoretically require less innate Connection (Investiture?) To manifest as a usable power than allomantic gold. This would mean that there might be just as many people with the potential for gold allomancy in their spirit web as steel allomancy, but fewer of then can manifest the power because the threshold to do so is higher for some reason. This would open the possibility of Harmony forcibly snapping them in a pinch, like Preservation did in the first trilogy.

It has been bothering me lately that the singers, who are beings with natural spren bonds and are naturally closer to the CR than humans, don't hear the screams of dead shardblades when picking them up or summoning them. Do we have an explanation for why only Radiants and proto-radiants hear the screams? It seems to me that anyone bonded to a spren or otherwise partially able to see into the CR should be subject to the screams when wielding a dead shardblade but this is apparently just not so.

According to the Rosharn definition, my understanding is that everything either has a spren, or is itself a spren. That includes both abstract concepts, states of mind, fundamental forces acting on objects, and literal pieces of matter and living beings. Considering the amount of Investiture dumped into them, if the honorblades were spren my instinct is that they would be much more talkative with their user. I posit then that they are not spren however, common understanding would then dictate that they have a spren which may or may not itself be intelligent. Whether spren have spren is a topic best left to the scholars. For those still reading, the whole concept of spren falls apart when examined closely...

We actually know very little about the cubes. They also appear to control the flow of Investiture through the cube with switches as a weird electrical analog (see also the etmetal powered fluorescent lights in the temple of the Sovereign). We have WoB that strongly imply contact is necessary for leechers, but I don't think we have it stated outright that action-at-a-distance leeching is definitely impossible...I'm skeptical though, as that would be very bizarre.

I mostly agree, but I think it's more of a spiritual realm (spirit web) change that inadvertently drives a physiological change. Like, Spook flared tin so much that the area of his spirit web that defines how his physical body is able to receive sensory input from external stimuli was, due to a constant firehose of Tin-flavored sensory enhancement Investiture, stretched out/ripped open/cracked. As a result, he can't properly manifest a working set of senses under normal conditions, but on the flip side, his spirit web can hold more tin-flavored investiture in the cracks in his soul, so when he burns tin he gets a boosted effect. Back to the original question, savantism for powers that don't directly modify a natural characteristic of the user which is common to non-magic users, like bronze, could very well have relatively negligible effects on the user's daily life. On the flipside, they could also have devastating and unpredictable consequences, as a ripped up spirit web has been correlated with mental illness (no causal relation proven yet that I'm aware of). It also opens the door for greater susceptibility to foreign Investiture, IE mind control by shards and weakness to emotional allomancy. Another possiblity is that savantism in an allomantic metal could damage the same part of the spirit web associated with the feruchemical metal of the same type. This is purely speculative. This model would have the flaw of not being common to non-Scadrian systems, but could be an elegant in world solution in future trilogies.

Flared bendalloy has demonstrated ludicrous range. Wayne speeds up time by a factor of something like 10,000-100,000x when Wax's butler tries to kill them with a basket of explosives (the basket is several meters away, Wayne speeds up time right as the explosion starts, the blast propagates at approx. 5-10K m/s, and I think I clocked their dialogue at roughly 2 minutes of normal speech, so maybe as low as 1 minute with panic speed-talking and no pauses for breath. Other times he struggles to hit 100x (screwing with Steris) or 1000x (slowing bullets), and Wax implied once, incorrectly in my opinion, that the default speed-up factor was 8x, which might still be on coppermind (it's the closest we have to canon so I'm not arguing for its removal). I never did a scene analysis of bleeder's steel speed shenanigans but I think someone else did with more or less the same conclusion: she went outrageously fast. Like, an actual whole number percentage of the speed of light.

See: etmetal

I feel like Honor + Cultivation + Odium is still a plausible combo and could be something along the lines of Order. Basically a combination of the Intent to facilitate growth that is bounded by oaths/rules (Honor+Cultivation) and the Intent to proactively enforce oaths/rules via retribution to deviants (Honor+Odium). Not sure how the balance between the three would actually work so that's pretty speculative.

The whole positive, negative, and neutral thing is more confusing than helpful I think. Hemalurgy is end-negative because Investiture is "lost," in creating a hemalurgic spike in the sense that the Investiture in the spike is at least slightly less than what was ripped off of the victim's spirit web, but in actuality, the Investiture that doesn't get stored in the spike isn't destroyed, it is just diffused and presumably returned Harmony or left to do whatever free-Investiture does. In a way, Hemalurgy is the most end-positive of all systems in the Cosmere because the spikes can be reused after the bearer dies, which gradually increases the number of possible magic users, whereas the other metallic arts gradually are becoming less common.

You just broke my brain. I don't remember the mention of anyone flipping a sphere across their knuckles, but that is absolutely a stereotypical habit of con artists, thieves, and masters of sleight-of-hand in fantasy novels (except with a coin, which should be much easier). Not to question your recollection, but can you supply a quote? I feel like this could have serious merit as an indication of a, to the best of my knowledge, previously unidentified worldhopper. I don't mind the revived traffic through my old topic, but if you have further evidence it's probably worthy of it's own dedicated thread.

Possibly he swallowed some metal minds. Alternatively, it was suggested in an old, possibly unreliable, WoB that Ruin or Preservation could theoretically have powered a person's feruchemy directly if they had chosen to (like Preservation did for Vin's allomancy). It's theoretically possible at this point that what we saw here could later be revealed to have been a "miracle" by Trell. Totally speculative though, the simple answer is he embedded a metal mind in his torso. I believe gold is one of the few totally biologically inert metals (feel free to fact check that though), so this wouldn't even cause discomfort or infection if he picked a decent spot to shove it I think. Any medical professionals in the house that want to weigh in?

No chance in my opinion as things stand right now. Kelsier isn't just a mistborn, he seems to he a fullborn with the knowledge and ability to create artifacts that turn other people into temporary fullborns. If he turned serial killer the odds of anyone other than Hoid catching or stopping him seems slim, they'd probably be better off ignoring him and letting him have his fun than throwing mistings into the meat-grinder by pursuing him. It's like why police don't chase fugitives through residential areas, the damage to society by attempting pursuit is, on average, worse than risking the criminal escaping and repeating their offense.

@Quantus I feel like if storing health makes a person get sick more easily, storing nutrition causes hunger, and storing liquid causes dehydration, then storing heat should result in the natural consequences of low body temperature, namely, reduced biochemical efficiency and, if pushed to the extreme, hypothermia; I expect the magic user would probably faint before they could die, just like a person can't kill themself just by holding their breath, so they would still technically be protected. If you tap too much iron you will crush the ground beneath you and, despite Wax being insanely lucky in this regard, that could reasonably result in being impaled on the shards. Touche on the fact that I can't prove my point, but I argue that, on penalty of extreme inconsistency with the rest of Feruchemy, it would be very silly for brass ferrings to be able to tap an arbitrary amount of heat without suffering both the positive and negative effects of fever, including hallucinations, and destruction of both good and bad bacteria in their body.

The amount of heat a person radiates (approximately 100 watts for a healthy adult) is proportional to their body temperature, in Kelvin, to the 4th power. It strikes me as reasonable to assume that a brass ferring would suffer hallucinations, decreased consciousness, and progressive organ damage at extreme body temperatures (>105F) just like anyone else. I won't get into the deep thermodynamics because they are a little counterintuitive, but if the previous assumption wasn't true to an extent, a brass ferring could more easily survive being in an oven by raising their temperature rather than trying to lower it, which I believe we have a WoB saying that wouldn't work because it's silly and confusing. With all that in mind, we're talking about roughly a 5 to 10% maximum increase in heat output at the risk of death or permanent brain damage. On the flipside, mechanical feruchemy, which is loosely hinted at by the Southerners, could potentially mean that machines might eventually be created that are able to store and tap heat. This has infinite applications, but the simplest that comes to mind is a supercharged feruchemic heatgun, which, based on real-life heat guns, could absolutely start fires.

I believe there are WoB specifying that Breaths don't last forever, IE: they degrade over time and (speculative) possibly with repeated use. This prevents the creation of infinite free-energy machines (like awakening a windmill). An awakener of the 5th heightening should eventually need to replenish their Breaths with fresh ones, though probably tremendously less frequently than a Returned. I would posit that their filling an atium mind would just degrade and age their Breaths, IE, they would be converting Breath-Investiture into Feruchemic charge-Investiture. Investiture is (mostly) conservative in the Cosmere.

Highly speculative, but unless this experiment was conducted in a vacuum or at low speeds I would sort of expect the flux of air through the bubble's boundary to cause it to pop. Bubble's have an enormous effect on the momentum of things passing through them and I would hypothesize that too much flow through would cause the bubble to rupture. I don't have references to back that up, it's just my personal understanding. I invite you to burst my bubble on the matter...

Agreed, some kind of check will probably need to be placed on nicrosil ferrings that hasn't been revealed yet. Based on what has been implied in-world already, they may not even even need medallions to effectively become fullborns. I'm sure you're well aware of the speculation, but for other readers: it is commonly hypothesized that a nicrosil ferring spiked with allomantic steel could store their allomancy in nicrosil mind, remove the spike (and replace with another if they wanted) then tap their metal mind later to get the power back on demand. Unless something profound changes, all that separates a nicrosil ferrings from become the next Lord ruler is 31 metal born murders (once you have double steel, and double bronze the rest should be trivial in my opinion), a secret lair, and a jar of blood to keep their spikes in when not being used... If the above were true it begs the question of why no one among the Southerners, who seem to have a good grasp on the metallic arts, has figured it out. If they had, it would be difficult for authorities to find and stop them before the first couple killings, and then it would be too late to stop them at all and they probably would've conquered the planet already (speculative.)

It's also speculated that instinctive control over the power would be improved. IE: they could more precisely control their store/tap rate to meet their needs with less focus. Another theory, that has been RAFO'd as I recall, is that selective storing/tapping could become possible with great enough skill/power in feruchemy. For example, storing sight from only one eye or tapping strength in only one arm.

Edit: retracted, apparently I was mistaken.

So what's going on here is that I think Sanderson is leaning on the fact that there have been real world succesaful experiments with aluminum alloy guns/bullets, but they have really bad properties compared to more conventional materials so engineers and metalurgists don't really bother pursuing the concept. Loosely documented hobbyist experimentation indicates, yes, it is possible some type of aluminum alloy and tempering process could theoretically eventually produce aluminum alloy guns and bullets with almost as good of properties as conventional methods. It's highly unlikely anyone IRL will ever find them because it's not economically viable or beneficial to invest huge amounts of R&D into making a fundamentally inferior product. It's not a completely satisfying answer, but I think it is perfectly reasonable and at least loosely supported by real world testing and analysis, so it could be much worse.

I feel like the technology is too new to the north for exploitation and social stratification to reasonably be an apparent consequence within the presumably short time span between BoM and Lost Metal. That said, the politics of oppression sort of dominate the basin already. In my opinion, the whole plot screams with parallels to several real life civil wars which started with trade routing and taxation disputes before escalating into conflicts over social stratification and fundamental human rights questions. I think the basin is well-positioned for a rebellion against Elendel. I'll leave it to the Cosmere philosophers to decide whether that would be justified though.

The technique Ham teaches Vin, practicing conserving your quick burning metals, is integral to her first solo fight with another mistborn who had more atium than her. Vin's unparalleled skill as a mistborn is a key element of the series and the key to that is that she was trained by a experts with each metal.