Lewis Nethur

That's fair pushback and I understand your point, but i don't have a source. I do however believe the etymology of the word "excisor" considered alongside the fact that Kelsier gifted the excisors to the southerners, who seem to regard him as a christ-like figure who saved their society, alongside the fact that they use these mysterious devices to somehow bestow power unto others (itself a symbolic operation) makes the process that they are using fairly self-evident. I...don't think it's fair to classify it as a legitimate spoiler, but I also don't totally agree that it legitimately counts as mere supposition (although authors can and have changed the meaning of words before to suit their narrative...). I'll try to think of an appropriate caveat to add in those situations, point taken.

This was a really good summary and critique in my opinion. First, to the issue of Intent and specificity: Recall: a general in an army who understands nothing around himself specifically outranks and may freely override the Intent and wishes of any specification officer under him, so I think that WoB has to be treated as only being generally true (all puns intended). Second, to the question of correctness: this is purely subjective and a matter of opinion. (Edit: not-yet-canon bits underlined). The southerners seem to use hemalurgy to ritualistically sacrifice people for the betterment and improvement of society at large technologically in a ruthlessly utilitarian, possibly religious, sense of the word. The northerners have gangsters and mobsters who use it to murder wealthy children of nobles and conduct nazi-esque experiments trying to consolidate and/or breed a more powerful strain of human to support their ambitions for interplanetary trade, exploration, and continued evolution...I'm not sure either sides of that spectrum can be called "correct," but they've been doing it for a long time now and it's getting baked into the cake at this point. Third, to the point of systemic weakness in hemalurgy as an artform: I 100% agree. A normal person is just not mentally capable of conducting hemalurgic operations with the level of awareness and precision needed to artifice a novel creature out of test subjects. It's like scadrians are playing kickball with a pile of unexploded nuclear bombs left for them by an evil god because...well...that's pretty much what was given to them and by whom. even the lord ruler struggled with hemalurgy and he had all the time and money in the world to try whatever he could imagine with it.

Honestly, if it helps, I would liken F-nicrosil usage on allomancy to being functionally similar to being able to moderate and modulate A-nicrosil on allomancy. Feruchemy typically comes with more guardrails against accidental death though, so F-nicroing a steel push shouldn't be able to kill a man the same way as A-nicrobursting a steel user can.

That's...a whole lot of questions Mr. Or Mrs. Muphinz... Hijacking: possible? Yes. Easy? Eh...not really. Comes with consequences? You betcha! Theoretically, any emotion or feeling which can be codified descriptively with words, embodied in the musical pure tones of the planet, and then believed in strongly enough by enough people should be able to cause the manifesting of a novel type of spren who's rarity is proportional to the rarity of the feeling. You don't meet gloryspren walking around on the street everyday for a reason. These spren should absolutely be able to be harnessed for singer transformations; this process is normally extremely slow, but Shardic Intervention has radically accelerated it on at least two (probably 3) separate occasions in the past, so it's reasonable to assume that the widespread birth of new novel spren could be artificially induced by killing, replacing, recombining, or just powerfully pressuring/leveraging any of Roshar's shards adequately. War kinda makes this easy and difficult at the same time in a weird way... The tones from other planets would likely be extremely alien to them, but...yes, singers should absolutely be able to hear other Shard's tones. Even in pure form though, they're not completely universal or translateable, so transplanting singers to new worlds is still going to be a traumatic process that generates unpredictable non-sequitors. I would liken this to trying to teach a cat to like Taylor Swift music. Do cats like music? Artists generally agree that, yeah, they're smart so they must!...And also, Scientists agree that measurements thus far show that they only like musical tones that humans find extremely harsh and noisy. (True story) Singers leaving Roshar with their spren in tow should be totally possible. It's just going to be difficult for lots of reasons...poor direct access to the cognitive realm, a general inclination to resist technology, Extreme Connection to Roshar, high probability for aggressively bad treatment by other-worlders for being radically and visibly different with no capacity for assimilation (Sorry, but that's a thing most places...), and loss of access to the Rosharn Investiture that literally keeps their people fed daily just to name a few. Any given Dragons' power is demonstrated to be rather significant at baseline with a capacity for growth. At the least, it would be very foolish to attack one with a shardblade, but you might be able to kill a baby if you really thought it was worth it. They might honestly be able to catch the darn things though, so...that could very well turn into an extremely foolish situation very fast.

No no, I think you're hitting on the point here exactly: there is no good reason. The shards are like scientists looking down (the opposite of "the girl who looked up") into the petridish of their world with a microscope. They could kill any section with the barest flick of their finger or a droplet of disinfectant or feed it to explosive and chaotic growth by dropping a single grain of sugar wherever they want with the edge of a knife. They can and do play favorites, but, just like for real-life scientists, whenever they do it potentially opens them up to ridicule by their patrons, exploitation by their magic system users, loss of control over their work, and creates chaotic, unpredictable, and non-repeatable outputs.

I actually don't find that weird at all to be honest. Real life groups of people who have engaged in and espoused public ethnically-based blood-purity cultural imperatives have usually (when listened to) stunted or crippled their society relative to those that just don't care or agree to obey them. I wouldn't go so far as to imply Vwafendal to be a racist, but she is ignorant (not her fault, she's on the cutting edge of researching and understanding the system that she's contained in) and it's not uncommon for people like that to be poor providers. It's implied that all living ferrings share a single common ancestor at this point, and it's only been a couple generations. The era-2 Terris were not dumb as a people, and one doesn't need to have a robust understanding of human genetics to have a natural aversion to incest; that's been baked into the cake a lot longer than it has been scientifically verified to be well-founded and intelligent. So...I'd say, she probably tried to practice what she preached, but it was just a very sick and doomed ideology that she was betting on. Power can be cascaded intergenerationally by birth, sure definitely, but thinking, believing, and codifying that that's the only way to sustain and evolve a culture is how you end up in the dark ages with a king and queen who are brother-cousins and riddled with severe brain disorders like in game of thrones.

I think that's correct, yes, with the caveat that I don't expect the scaling to work as neatly, cleanly, and linearly as for most forms of feruchemy in actual practice just because of how absurdly overpowered that would be with virtually zero effort involved. Meaning that, one might only be able to accelerate their abilities as a pewterarm by a certain maximum scale factor before their allomancy just can't keep up and burn faster or hotter no matter how much soulbearing they engage in and this should be different for every alloy. So like...for example, Pewter being a physical power and one of the fastest allomantically burning metals, you're going to run into a physiological wall on a functional level relatively quickly; tapping 100x on a nicrosilmind may still only get you to 5x power and 5x burn speed capacity (not a full 100x) for your Pewter allomancy because otherwise the flux of kinetic Investiture going through one's soul could reach the magnitude of being immediately and permanently damaging with cascading effects (instant-irreversible-super-savanthood, or more likely just death) while simultaneously every movement of one's body damages all objects around it (or more likely just death from being rocketed into space by one's own footsteps).

This type of technique would, I think run into a very tangled web of Keying and Intent problems, but in general is possible. I don't suspect that Hemalurgy is going to be a particularly useful facilitator though, at least not directly... This type of hacking is usually going to require very targeted synergy creation in order to function as intended; harvest an entire soul for a single one-time burst of any power is not just wasteful, it'd make even an Inquisitor cringe! In most cases, no, I don't expect plugging unkeyed (or self-keyed) investiture (even once when figures out how to get it) from one Shard's system into another's is going to be "learnable," not in any way resembling the traditional sense of the word anyhow. It's going to require naturally available compatibility that makes intuitive sense (IE: Breath and Stormlight), or a specifically developed technique arrived at via devoted personal experimentation with manipulating multiple systems simultaneously (which implies that one is not simply being taught, they are being actively fueled with resources by sponsors, followers, or benefactors by my perspective; sorry if those semantics are difficult to parse, but I think the distinction is technically important. Some people consider that a form of "teaching" and some people do not). Let's focus on Scadrian magics per your example. Hemalurgic spikes contain finite amounts of specifically coded Investiture and burning them is...radically controversial by my understanding. It requires murdering a person and then also permanently damaging the user's soul in ways that are probably never going to be explained outright or demonstrated on page; for gaming purposes, I would suggest simply having a spirited debate with your game master and being flexible to the idea that they may simply say: "no, you'll die or your mind will be erased if you do that because it violates the spirit of the game and Shards have decision making authority when they choose to," if you wanna play with that mechanic." That said...unkeyed Investiture of Harmony can be used to fuel any of the Metallic arts (I believe that there actually even are very old WoB's from around 2010-2014 implying but never confirming that an artifical hemalurgic spike could be created with pure unkeyed Investiture and/or Divine Intervention from Ruin-and-Preservation or Harmony but you'll need to fact check me there to be sure cause even if I'm right and I was able to re-find them it'd still be very debatable). So, for the question of hacking scadrian magic, the ultimate question is: how does one acquire access to unlimited (or vast amounts) of unkeyed Harmony Investiture? Well...burning Harmonium seems to do just that; the problem is, that's lethal and borderline nuclear to do. So then, the question becomes: how does one covert Harmonium into into a digestible and storable form like Breath, or otherwise harness energy from the material in a way that allows it to fuel a specific form of Investiure? Well...that's sort of what Southern mechanical allomancy has been doing for 10 years, just on a limited and controlled scale. I could imagine a scadrian equivalent to a nuclear Fission Reactor power plant eventually being developed that took bricks of Harmonium and essentially converted them into pure magical electricity for the purpose of supplying an arbitrary network of devices and constructs throughout a city, country, or society. Doing it inside one's own body though? That might simply never work without simply being chosen and granted access to drawing upon the power of the mists directly. Who knows though? If Harmony really does transition to Discord, the properties of Harmonium could (maybe...) change to allow it to be harnessed directly. Hopefully some part of that helps, it was certainly fun to muse over. =)

Can one bond multiple spren? Yes. Should one? Well...it's a self-limiting system on purpose. Theoretically, a single proto-Radiant with a completely vapid and blank personality should theoretically be able to swear the first ideal to one spren of each order and gain access to (almost) all of the surges fair and square pretty much upfront (some, like Division, seem to be specifically hard locked, so one might only get "most" of the surges doing this). That said...Spren can talk to eachother and would likely have some serious concerns about arbitrarily piling extra superpowers onto a person who is openly exploiting them or has no legitimate hope of progressing to greater Oaths/Ideals (every one of which is permanently binding!); also, any one of them could break the bond at any time, which could result in a cascade collapse and total loss of power once initiated since the first Ideal is common between all of them. Swearing up to the second and third Ideal between two Spren might Theoretically be easier than swearing up to the 5th ideal with one, buuuuuut...one is going to start running into interpersonal dynamics that functionally look a lot like what one would encounter for maintaining multiple spouses would be my guess, and that doesn't play out the way most folks think... I think It has been implied thus far by WoB that Radiants simultaneously bonded to two different orders are just never going to be shown on screen. They could happen, but they just aren't going to because it would get too weird. Radiants changing orders deliberately, losing a spren by accident and getting a new one of the same or a different class, or bonding two spren of the same order are all still fair game as far as I'm aware though.

100% yes. Further, this principle is, I suspect, going to be instrumental in the establishment of Investiture conversion and interplanetary trade operations in the Cosmere's Act-2, wherein book plot connectivity is relatively commonplace rather than limited to small Easter eggs like in the very first novels. Weighing, measuring, and converting Investiture between systems is, and has been, a vexing problem with very few reliable solutions for worldhoppers; their typical solution thus far has been to apply overwhelming force so they don't have to worry about details, or avoid conversion completely and carry what they need with them between locations with only a handful of uniquely clever and skilled individuals like Vasher and Hoid creating exceptions. My prediction? The amount of Stormlight which is eventually determined to be "equal" in Investiture value to a BEU (breath equivalent unit from Sunlit Man) will have the exact same mass as a single Breath when contained in a vessel that doesn't leak.

"Contrived" is a bit of a harsh description in my opinion, but I think I agree with your overarching sentiment... Somethings that are vitally important to keep in mind though are: 1. In war, you use the soldiers that you have available, and those are very rarely the soldiers that you "wish" that you had available; the ranks of the Radiants are made up of a lot of really good and fine people...and also recovering drug-addicts, people with what would normally be considsred disqualifying mental illnesses, and barely-reformed criminals working together out of necessity. From this perspective, it makes total sense to me that Shallan, being the first lightweaver, was just defacto field-promoted to the rank of super-spy by the winds of necessity. 2. Shallan's targets for espionage are, themselves, usually putting in tremendous effort to remain hidden and off-screen as much as possible, and also are very interested from a long-term incentive standpoint in recruiting her. The circumstances that she's placed in throughout the books creates a sort of natural plot-armor for her. If she did what she routinely does in a world at peace, where Lightweavers were common, against established Rosharn nobles/princes who already can't remain hidden, she would probably be hunted and killed very quickly and easily in retaliation in my opinion. You gotta take the whole picture into account for Shallan to make any kind of sense. 3. She pretty much is just winging it the whole time I think, yeah. That makes it very difficult to counter her meaningfully; chaos is a very powerful weapon or tool in the right hands. Everybody is pretty much always on their backfoot trying to deal with her shenanigans and experimenting live when trying to address her. This makes her feats subject to poor repeatability, but also creates a big believability allowance for her getting away with them alive in context. Also, I'm just vert biased and sympathetic to her character, so take it with a grain of salt.

I suspect that what we're going to find is that the surge of transportation is absurdly powerful, but requires extreme amounts of preparation and precision to use for multiple people over long distances. Blinking a half-dozen people straight into Shadesmar? Easypeasy, no thought or planning required, just a little raw Investiture needed. Teleporting one person 300 feet to a place where the transporter has unbroken line-of-sight? Again, trivially easy. Teleporting to a point over the horizon or across the globe or on the other side of a wall? This might be so super hard and essentially require so much math or raw focusing of Intent (big "I") that we just never see it happen on screen except via fabrials like the oathgates that are hyper-engineered for that specific purpose. For example (minor elantris spoiler) I could maybe imagine masters of the surge of transportation to eventually learn to blink to a small number of distant locations reliably more-or-less on demand, (especially if they have a bondsmith helping them with real-time mapping), but blinking 5 people 36 miles to the west from an arbitrary starting position on a whim will, I suspect, just be too prohibitively difficult for even the best of the best to ever achieve (though, by my understanding, cosmere physics do technically allow this to be "possible").

Huh...reading through someone else mentioning it, I'm realizing that "Rust" is not a very Alethi name; it doesn't obey their typical linguistic patterns. It's in no way definitive but you may have inadvertently discovered a character with a previously unidentified worldhopper ancestor. This has happened before; I don't recall the character's exact name, but I think there's somebody in Words of Radiance with a Surname (roughly) along the lines of 'Hogfarmer' or 'Pigmaster' who was eventually confirmed by a WoB to have off-world father/grandfather (because they don't have or eat pigs on Roshar). I'm only like...63% confident on this one, so you'll need to forgive me in advance if I'm misremembering or if that dude was just from Shinovar where names and customs are markedly different; your comment struck a cord in my memory though.

The current Odium demonstrably has a different outlook regarding the concept of "winning" when it comes to contests as the Odium who set the problem up to begin with. Literally anything could happen... That said, Dalinar is named after the author's first-born son irl...without totally breaking the 4th (possibly 5th...) wall, I'm expecting him to, at the very least, still technically be alive at the end of book 5 for symbolic purposes...lol.

There are...very serious and aggregious metaphysical problems with syl becoming a viable romantic interest for Kaladin, both for her and himself. You should think of them as colleagues with, at worst, minor unresolved sexual tension and, at best, a deep platonic love that transcends typical human coupling. There is very literally no way to make their relationship work romantically and that isn't a joke or an insult...

Goodness doesn't need to be forgiven, it is it's own reward. And no, I shamelessly and unabashedly judge by feel.

Eh. Agree to disagree. I cannot (will not) fault a character like Moash for behaving badly in response to stimuli that were technically out of his control and would reasonably drive most men to insanity or violence.

I suspect that it will always be taboo to be a hemalurgist since, for all practical purposes, it is roughly equivalent to walking around in public carrying a sign declaring oneself to be (or be best good friends with) a raging serial killer with a chosen type. That said...real life humans have gotten around this problem many times historically... The processes for executing livestock for food production are taboo. The process for making sausage is commonly regarded as extremely profane (one grinds up animal parts and then inject them inside their own intestine tissue...) . MANY forensic science techniques which are upheld by the most powerful courts in the world are completely indistinguishable from literal witchcraft to all but the most esoterically versed. And the simple process of just maintaining a nuclear arsenal is essentially a formal declaration that a state is ready, willing, and able to harm innocent if provoked or made upset, as such weapons are primarily for killing civillians... The solution? There will simply have to be a procedural step between the person leveraging a Hemalurgic spike and the spike itself...like the medallions, for example. This will allow people to pretend to forget that their power comes from ritualistic sacrifice.

Sorry, I probably responded too fast on this one; mostly just meant to convey that the early relics that were left behind for Rosharns to discover are legitimately based on some alien principles that should never be expected to fully be definable and conforming with their existing frameworks and systems. They're like...weird deviant legacy products, but not in a disparaging way. I'm reaching for metaphors here that don't exist for a very good reason.

Awww... =( Sorry friend, this sounds like a full project development question. I've never heard of anyone exploring this topic seriously, but references and benchmarks should exist in Dragonsteel's deep internal reference materials. Those are materials are very specifically restricted and most authors/artists usually RAFO (or handwave away) any questions about them, so getting the information will specifically be difficult unless you intrigue them. Best advice I can give? Identify a collection of Rosharn landmarks and start trying to identify, confirm, and cannonize their height above sealevel for the coppermind by asking repeatedly, transparently, and candidly during live forums. At baseline, we can probably treat the entire purelake as approximately being at sea-level, and some max estimates about the height of the horneater peaks could be developed by calculating the maximum comfortable height for breathing on a planet with 0.7g's of earth gravity. Goodluck!!!

Not the planet as a whole, but our general understanding is that Darkside specifically is hyper-advanced technogically due to the unique pressures and stresses placed in its inhabitants. There is good reason to believe that they are literal centuries ahead of the next leading contender and have been under shardic quarantine by Autonomy in part to prevent them from hunting and killing shards who's worlds are still early in development... everyone should be afraid of, or embracing, the darksiders...

I think there might be a point of confusion regarding terminology and technological distinction here maybe...? =/ My general understanding is that what we typically consider "ashyn" styles of "surgebinding" is the creation of artifacts that operate by harnessing the power of an intelligently consenting imprisoned spren, and what we consider to be a Rosharn form of surgebinding is any kind which either draws directly from a bonded Radiant-Spren, or from an "involuntary" spren which has been specifically imprisoned inside of a gemstone. If it helps, my understanding is that the Heralds specifically operated outside of some of the normal rules during the transition between worlds while converting between and exploring the various magic systems, and that the governing rules of the forces in question may have changed themselves during that process as well. Assigning specific orders of events is likely only ever going to be "possible" by direct specific heraldic confirmation at this point I suspect, as these types of questions operated on a large enough historical scale that the subtle changes in overarching human perception regarding the forces of nature comes into play in full force... Hopefully that helps! (At least a tiny bit)

Intent matters with Godmetals when performing hemalurgic operations, definitely. Buuuut...a shardblade is a shardblade no matter who holds it. Connection "exists" at the SR level, which is not a place a Shardblade can normally ever reach or cut into. Nightblood has...sort of...demonstrated an ability to cut a person or object that deeply, but the process comes with severe consequences that would undermine what you're going for here (IE: induced annihilation events). I expect that one could leverage the power of the surges mechanically (literally, just the Cosmere's physics) to induce specific forms of nuclear decay events in order to produce exotic atoms (which, if I understand correctly, is all that's really going on in lerasium production experiments), but shardblades just are not specialized the way that is being asked for. Whether it would take a machine on the scale of a Large Hadron Collider or a simple desktop piece of equipment to perform the operation is up to your imagination to decide though.

Wow. This thread took a radically hard right turn from the last time I read it... Buuut...We all still agree that there will be another mistborn created eventually, they will probably be a deviant or criminal by simple virtue of the fact that mistborn typically operate extra-judiciously (because they can reliably get away with it), and 100% of the information that we have which is reportedly from before Rashek's ascension is (and always shall be) subject to an unveriable degree of disinformation though...right...? Like...The ancient allomancers are rumored to have had knowledge of hemalurgy and been able to hear Ruin's commands and offer prayers directly to Preservation. This could just as easily be an outright lie as a clear indicator that they understood their magic systems better than era1 scadrians if you ask me...

I've never thought about it, but 100% Ishikk for sure. His life is perfect. What an absolute monster of a person...lol