Lewis Nethur

No, but I can see now how my previous statement was misleading in that way. We haven't received a precise WoB explaining literally what is going on when someone burns atium. I believe Sanderson spoke about Elend's experience duralumining his atium and basically confirmed that he was "looking into," "partially entering," or otherwise "expanding his presence" in the spiritual realm, which then let him see and understand Preservation's ultimate plan. From this, the community has generally extrapolated that burning atium allows a person to "look into," "partially enter," or otherwise "expand their presence," in the spiritual realm, simply to a lesser magnitude than what Elend experienced. We also have it confirmed that, 1) the power granted by atium isn't and never was fully understood by anyone we've seen use it (he said this before BoM and SH came out though I believe, so this may be revised in the future), 2) atium might have a side-effect, similar in nature but distinct in function to lerasium's side-effect, and 3) WoB for clarity: The simplest answer to your original question is that the power received by burning a God metal doesn't have to be related to the Intent of the Shard it came from. This is pretty well confirmed. I, like you, find this to be a relatively unsatisfying answer, however, getting a more rigorous canonical explanation might be unlikely before Sanderson has finalized when, where, how, and which, shards are going to interact with Scadrial, Scadrians, and Ruin/Preservation/Harmony. (though Lost Metal might also shed some light on your inquiry) In the meantime, I think I'm going to adopt @Ferumancer 's explanations. They're simple elegance makes them, IMO, decent candidates to eventually be, if not actively acknowledge as canon, then at least generally accepted. I'm with @The One Who Connects , if you have some further musings on atium and Ruin I'd be interested in giving them a look.

I would refrain from over-thinking this one. Allomancers burning atium, which is a more-or-less crystallized form of Ruin's Investiture, are able to peek into the spiritual realm, which just so happens to grant brief future sight and an expanded mind. I think @Ferumancer 's second explanation is probably about as good as we can hope for at the moment. Plus, didn't Leras basically suckerpunch Ruin in order to rip away the Investiture needed to create The Pits and atium to begin with? I would think that once the Investiture was separated from Ruin, the form it manifested could be determined independent from Ruin's limitations, Intent, and Influences. At least to a degree. SH spoilers:

1. According to one interpretation of current WoB...yes...this may be possible. But, IMO, this would sort of undermine Marasi's entire story arc. If she could suddenly become an unstoppable killing-machine by using a simple gimmick (wrapping herself in aluminum foil) her being regulated to a support role would be sort of weird. Harry Potter hyperbole in spoilers: 2. Not technically impossible, but current WoB is that we haven't seen enough of the physics behind how allomancy and feruchemy work to be able to make educated guesses as to how he will implement FTL travel in Mistborn. IIRC, all he's been willing to say on the subject is that it would take a bizarre combination of highly specialized knowledge or an amazing coincidence for someone to be able to correctly predict how his FTL is going to function. Some more things to consider: I'm not sure if you would need to be fully shielded (meaning fully enclosed by aluminum) or specifically standing on the bubble's border at the time it was erected in order to achieve a useful effect. Pulsers' time-bubble size is limited and their "stability" (not sure if that's a good word or not but I'm going with it) seems to be restricted by whether or not their current surroundings can be reasonably treated as a reference frame. Midnight is a little too late for me to crack open the old orbital dynamics textbook to check more rigorously, but off the top of my head, the situation you're describing wouldn't make for a good reference frame, which would make it difficult for time-bubbles to be erected in a stable manner.

@king of nowhere : Haha, never mind, yeah, I will take that as a valid argument that Trell seems to be planning to destroy Scadrial. @Spoolofwhool : Your arguments as I understand them: Shards are innately Gods Gods are defined by the faith put into them by people Harmony is good because he acts according to how people think he should act My proposed counter-points: Shards are essentially Gods because we don't really have another good word for a being with that much power. This is a matter of semantics in my mind, granted, it does make things a bit confusing. I call Shards "Gods," but at the same time, I don't think they are really in any way "divine." Does that make sense? Shard holders are objectively "good" at holding their Shard(s) if they obey their Intent without losing their personality and can avoid being shattered. Shards that adhere to the morals and ethics upheld by their people are good Gods. Shards that only do one or the other are either crummy Gods, or unsustainable Gods. I'm not sure why we're talking about "faith." Harmony is bad because the way he acts is not in harmony with his Intent.

I do like your super hero analogy but I can't recall offhand if we've really had any serious indications that Trell is trying to "destroy the planet," so I'm not prepared to agree on that point. Don't get me wrong, I fully believe Trell is a self-serving entity, and maybe evil, but I'm not sure yet whether liberating Scadrians is a "front" that he (she?) is promoting, or if it actually is something that he (she?) is legitimately interested in. If Trell is Autonomy (this speculation probably doesn't belong in this thread...sorry...) then ousting Sazed on the grounds that he is interfering too much with individuals, sort of makes sense. I like Sazed, and I hope things work out for him. I'd like to see him straighten his priorities out and obey his Intent a little better. If he can't do this, then maybe he just isn't a good God and he deserves to be taken down by Trell. I'm not 100% convinced that Trell's presence on Scadrial is a bad thing for the planets people in the long-term. Yes, he's starting a revolution and getting innocent people killed, which in principle is a bad thing, but that's not that much different from what Kelsier and Marsh did in era 1, and people seem to like them.

Agreed, as far as we know, one lurcher could charge 10,000 cubes of harmonium no problem, which could sort of circumvent the limitations created by having a finite number of mistings. Obviously this is dependent on how Harmonium works.

Questions regarding the operation of Nicrosil are being rafo'd for the time being unfortunately so we don't know for sure how it works. People have some very interesting and complicated theories but I'm not well-versed enough to delve too deep into that rabbit hole. In general, I like your approach. There is one glaring problem though and that is the fact that tapping a metalmind at high speeds grants diminishing returns IE: there is some inefficiency and non-linearity to metalmind tapping. To use your example, tapping 100 Fps would give you a theoretical maximum increase of 11x in an attribute, but in reality, the increase you experienced would be somewhat less than this. The specifics of this phenomenon haven't been canonized yet. I suspect that future generations of ferrings will be subject to greater inefficiency similar to how mistings are becoming weaker, but this is speculative. The reason for this mechanism, as I understand it, is primarily to keep feruchemy from being unreasonably powerful (though it is still a potent magic system). Sadly, without access to the equations or relationships relating feruchemical storage rate, tapping rate, and efficiency, defining a useful unit system may be beyond our reach. To create spoiler tags click on the "eye" icon above the post box.

True, soulbearers don't seem particularly useful by themselves (except to serve as targets for hemalurgic spiking ). Your second point is very interesting. I could definitely see a Trueself tapping Identity being harder to soulcast into smoke than another kind of ferring (all other things being equal). I wonder, would that would make them more resistant to soothing and rioting too?

To clarify, I meant redundant as in: if it's the only power you have, there's not a lot you can do with it. IE: storing and tapping Identity, by itself, isn't particularly useful. I've heard speculation that one Trueself could store their own Identity in a metalmind and be able to tap Identity stored by another Trueself in another metalmind. And there's a scene in BoM that seems to promote this idea, so I'll concede that it could have some potential use that isn't readily obvious at the moment. Hadn't ever heard that about Stormlight Archive, but. it does make a certain kind of sense, so good point.

The difference is one of transparency. If the Pope advocates a specific social agenda item among his followers, that's just religious business as usual; his followers look to him to help interpret doctrine, provide some manner of wisdom and insight, and a bunch of other things. If, however, he uses his position and influence to privately sway, intimidate, or unfairly influence public policy and law without the public's knowledge or general consent, I believe that many people would have a problem with that, particularly those who don't subscribe as strongly to his belief system. Religious leaders have to maintain a delicate balance between nurturing the needs of their followers and not sowing animosity and hatred among non-believers. Harmony's favor for the basin could very well be the kindling to initiate a holy war between Northern and Southern Scadrial. We're venturing into the dangerous subjects of religion and politics and I don't wish to offend readers with my musings so I'll wrap this up thusly: I believe Harmony's influence among politicians in Elendel is unfair and problematic, however, this is absolutely an opinion and not an objective fact. It's probably equally valid to argue that, as their working God, Harmony has a divine mandate to influence events in some way

Rioting and soothing allow for the mind-controlling of hemalurgic constructs. What little we know of this process when it is accomplished by Ruin indicates that it is accomplished by directing Investiture into holes in a construct's spirit web. Now, it's possible that hemalurgy causes holes in the Cognitive manifestation of hemalurgic constructs as well, I believe Khriss mentions that she doesn't understand what, if any, effect hemalurgy has in the cognitive realm in one of the Ars Arcanum. I hadn't really considered this before, but if you're right then this might be how emotional allomancy allows for mind-control. I feel like Identity would be largely redundant if it functioned only as you say. That by no means is an indication that you're wrong, heck, aluminum mistings get a raw deal so why not aluminum ferrings? Thanks for the feedback.

Wow, some great responses right off the bat. I guess to clarify, when I started this thread my initial definition of "good" in relation to godhood (at least insofar as the term can be applied to Shards like Harmony), was primarily focused on: Adherence to one's Intent The sustainability of one's interactions with their followers In this sense, yes, I would say Shards like Cultivation and Autonomy are "good" and Shards like Ruin, Odium, and Harmony are "bad." Odium appears to be desolating worlds and then leaving once he's killed any nearby Shards, which strikes me as dumb and unsustainable, even if he does seem to take joy in it (if a Shard named Odium can truly be said to experience joy...) If he succeeds he's going to be pretty bored and lonely I would imagine. Sazed has gifted the people of the Basin with land that never spoils while accidentally damning the Southern Scadrians to lives of hardship and struggle. Southerners are already poorly adapted to their own environment (physiologically speaking), so I can definitely see them wanting to move into the Basin, either peacefully or otherwise. They have some legitimate grievances against Harmony and some reasons to want to oust him; he screwed them. He didn't mean to, but that's not really the point is it? @Spoolofwhool Well, the Set and Trellists seem aware of Harmony's meddling, and I expect that information to spread. Harmony uses his position as God to issue a direct request to Wax to be nicer to Marasi because he's worked really hard to get her into a position of power in the constabulary. Prior to this, we have no indication that he ever had any direct contact with Marasi or her associates, meaning he appears to have been pulling strings in her life in secret; I speculate that the easiest way for him to do this would be through his kandra operatives. This isn't conclusive evidence that he manipulates non-main characters in a similar fashion, but, given his cavalier attitude about manipulating and cultivating people to fit his desired roles, I think it's reasonable to speculate that he does this off-screen as well. You're right to cast doubt on it, it's not a foregone conclusion. I think kandra, Harmony's agents, speaking with world leaders to influence their decisions is a very troubling ethics and integrity issue. It would be like the Pope calling a senator in private and asking them to vote "no" on a specific bill. Even if he doesn't threaten them or argue that not doing as he says would be against God's will, his position as a religious leader gives his words weight; it would deeply undermine the spirit of most forms of government in most circumstances. Harmony attempted to hide knowledge of hemalurgy. Yes, he relented when Spook put his foot down and wrote a book about it, but he also made his displeasure on the subject clear. He gives people of the Basin hints and guesses about new technologies to try and motivate them to grow, presumably to give them protection from the Southerners since Sanderson is generally hesitant about cross-overs in the Cosmere, making off-world invaders in era 3 somewhat unlikely for the time being (speculation). Unfortunately, I feel like this is more likely to increase the animosity and tension between Northern and Southern Scadrians, as Sazed's continued favoritism for the North is going to become pretty obvious when Southerners see how well-off they've been. Strictly speaking, I can't say I disagree with the logic, earnestness, or good intentions behind Sazed's actions. He does seem to try hard. His approach thus far is a valid one, but I feel like contradicts his Intent, which makes it unsustainable. My claim that Sazed is a bad God comes from this point; if he doesn't find a way of interacting with his people that is in-line with his Intent and doesn't sow greater animosity toward him among the Southerners and Trellists, he's going to find himself either cast down and replaced, or mindless and impotent. TLDR; Sazed should probably seek employment opportunities in sectors unrelated to divinity. He made a decent steward and historian, maybe he should go back to that.

Thank you, that's one way I can see this going: Trell capitalizing on average citizens' fear and uncertainty to get them to push Sazed out of their lives. There could actually be some serious Realmatic consequences for Sazed if his Connection (or rather, people's Connection to him) is eroded in this manner in a widespread and concerted way. It's hard to fathom how anything other than a fellow Shard could directly challenge Harmony, but, this is Sanderson we're talking about. I wouldn't mind reading about Harmony being cast down by the common man.

A good question. The easy answer is, "certainly no mortal man." I can tell you with absolutely no shame that I'd be rubbish at it as well. You're right that he hasn't killed everyone everywhere or installed a tyrannical psychopath, which is a darn good start considering his predecessors. But he makes mistakes, and, worse, he admits them. I'm not sure if people would be terribly keen to trust a God with the powers of creation if they couldn't confidently state that said God was at least mostly omniscient; Sazed is just a little too free with announcing the fact that he's super powerful, doing his best, but not all knowing. I would be deeply troubled by Sazed's words and actions if I were in the Scadrians' shoes; individually, they don't have a lot of options, but together...well, I can see why the idea of Trell coming in and getting rid of Sazed might seriously appeal to the working class.

So I'm re-rereading era 2, and I was wondering if anyone else got the impression that Sazed just isn't very good at his job? Now I fully appreciate that he never asked for or sought out the position of God-of-Scadrial, and the pressure exerted on him by his two opposing Shardic Intents prevents him from doing a lot of what he would like to do, but...that's sort of the problem. I really don't mean to be harsh, I loved Sazed in FE and I still appreciate his personality, but when Wax questions him about why he isn't protecting the people of Elendel better his reply is: He then goes on to struggle against his Shardic Intent, pick sides, and help tip the scales in Wax's favor at every chance he gets. Basically, what I'm getting at is that Sazed is not well-suited for holding the Shard of Harmony. He doesn't get along with it well and it doesn't suit his personality. Between the Set, Trell, and his own struggling against the Intent of his powers, I feel like Sazed is almost certainly doomed to be killed, shattered, or suffer the complete erosion of his persona. He did a better job as God than anyone else at the time of his ascension possibly could have, but now people are starting to realize that he: Isn't afraid to play favorites and directly intervene in people's lives. He pretty much admits to deliberately cultivating Wax from a young age... Uses kandra to communicate directly with world leaders (in times of emergency, but still...) Actively hides and suppresses information to suit his own agenda I imagine Trell's motives for rallying support against Harmony are ultimately self-serving. That said, I think he (she?) has a lot of good ground to stand on in doing so; I feel like people are bound to get fed up with Harmony's interference in their lives sooner or later. I know he's only doing what he thinks is best (and maybe he's even doing a decent job from a moral standpoint), but from the perspective of a typical downtrodden citizen, Harmony is literally communicating with and sheltering individual nobles (who themselves have what seem like Godlike powers and vast wealth) while factory workers put in 80 hour work weeks and struggle to feed their kids. If Sazed doesn't work on his image with the common-man proactively (IE: before Trell starts seriously pushing to convert people), I feel like he's going to find himself hated and possibly replaced. Sazed intervenes as little as possible, and in principle I respect that. But, in order to achieve the most results from the littlest interaction, this inadvertently means he's intervening by directing wealthy, powerful, magic-wielding citizens. In a time of economic strife and rampant problems with income-distribution, I imagine people would be pretty shocked and irritated to find out that God was getting chummy with the upper-class; particularly once they realize that their God is a guy who didn't want the job in the first place, doesn't have a real claim to divinity, and is operating on a best-effort basis with no accountability. Anyway, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading my rant; what do you think? Am I just making mountains out of moles hills or could there be something to this?

@Spoolofwhool I do not have a source for skimmers not be able to walk on water, sorry, I should've marked that as an assumption; I covered the idea in a post a while back using a thought experiment, but it wasn't conclusive. Wax get's thrown into water a handful of times, but I don't believe he ever taps or stores weight while submerged. Anyway, it's not a foregone conclusion at this point as far as I'm aware. There are some really weird things going on behind the scenes with weight storage. I believe WoB has it that Peter does have legitimate math and physics describing how it works, but they aren't going to be released any time soon (if ever.)

Recall: This is an explanation of Realmatics from a Cosmere resident so it's fundamentally imperfect, however, I still find it to be useful. Probably the easiest explanation is that soothing directly manipulates the a person's Physical presence. I don't like this explanation because the Physical presence is subject to physical laws and limitations, meaning that for a soother to manipulate a target's emotions they would have to be triggering chemical reactions in that person's brain at a distance (which is weird). Soothing the same person over and over would therefore run the serious risk of screwing up their brain chemistry (probably temporarily, but possibly permanently) triggering mood-swings, depression, suicidal thoughts, and potentially even cancer. A reasonable argument can be made that soothing operates at the cognitive level. I'd be willing to accept that emotions fall under the umbrella of "How [an object] views itself." But this fails to explain how hemalurgic constructs can be mind controlled via powerful emotional allomancy. The last explanation is that soothing operates on the Spiritual level. Kandra have holes in their spirit web. Ruin can funnel power into these holes somehow to control them. Therefore, I would speculate that emotional allomancy operates via a more-or-less similar mechanism, IE: it is a manipulation of a target's Spiritual manifestation. I feel like the emotional changes could be affected most elegantly through manipulation of the target's Identity, though this isn't necessarily the only possible explanation. I would argue that his horror at the experience was due to the fact that while his Identity was suppressed, his Spirtitual Connection and Cognitive aspects were not. He still had full access to and awareness of the relationships and attachments he maintains with the world and people around him as well as all of his knowledge, but was forcibly made to view these these things without any of his sense of self. I would speculate that the reason he was so traumatized by the experience was because he's such a crummy person; experiencing and viewing his own life, with all his intimate knowledge of it, without any of the bias conferred by his Spiritual Identity, left him repulsed.

Touche, have an upvote for ending this madness.

I'll be the first to admit I haven't presented a conclusive argument, merely some speculation to build off of. But by your own words, "emotions are what you feel based on your Identity." I agree with this statement, manipulation of someone's Identity would be a manipulation of that person's emotions. My question is whether it would be Realmatically plausible and consistent with other forms of the metallic arts, for emotional allomancy to be operating at the Spiritual level, and I'm starting to think it might be. My hypothesis is primarily based around a thought experiment regarding the extreme case where a person is targeted by extremely powerful soothing (either from one very powerful source or many individuals working together): If they become completely numb to all emotions, losing all feeling about their circumstances, could that be equivalent to having zero Spiritual Identity?

I don't necessarily mean an increase in physical strength...Steelrunning is tricky, and I don't mean to bog this thread down with needless semantics. So like, if a person were to run fast enough, regardless of how they did it, the strain on their leg muscles would cause them to detach from their bones. As it turns out, the estimated speed at which this would happen is not all that much faster than Usain Bolt's (widely recognized as the world's greatest sprinter) fastest speed. When Wax taps his ironminds rapidly, his bones don't shatter under his increased weight, but if he get's punched while storing (see fight with Miles), his chest doesn't cave in and his ribs don't shatter. The apparent increase in bone strength is a side-effect skimmers enjoy to make their power functional. Wax literally crushes a car with his weight at one point, and his legs don't explode. Some ferrings get weird "bonus" or "side-effect" powers because if they didn't their powers would totally suck and be stupid. Let's just leave it at this: if you take more steps per second without increasing the friction between your feet and the ground, hitting the ground harder, or increasing the elasticity/strength of your bones and muscles, you run into some physics violations (pun intended ). "Speed" is a weird thing to store. It's not alone in this, storing mass/weight has some serious problems too, like, "why can't skimmers walk on water if they're light enough to gently float to the ground from dangerous heights (which Sazed does at one point)?" My point, which I have apparently thoroughly failed at making (and for this I apologize), is that we shouldn't get too hung up on these oddities, as they have already been pointed out, and given vague hand-wavy explanations. We might get a firm answer eventually, but probably not till at least the beginning of era 4.

Right, but a steelrunner's feet don't slip on the ground, their shoes don't melt, and their leg bones don't explode from the impact of their steps. I don't believe Sanderson has completely canonized all of the extra benefits ferrings like steelrunners get so that their power can be used effectively without being completely broken (IE: steelrunners apparently have proportionally increased tensile strength in their femurs while tapping but...they don't necessarily have weaker leg bones while storing...) This isn't just an oversight or laziness on his part, some of the powers are just really complicated, computationally intensive to analyze, or, more realistically, he hasn't fully hammered out every detail of how he wants characters to utilize the powers in the future and doesn't want to limit himself prematurely. I was trying to explain away this mysterious phenomenon without being pedantic or derailing the thread's topic (though I've probably failed in that pursuit now...) I'll absolutely concede though that they would essentially be the Flash and that the combination of those three powers would be a ridiculously potent combination.

Well, I guess he could be using a fake spike for the same reason people who have lost an eye, ear, breast, or nose often wear prosthetics. I can see plenty of valid reasons why he wouldn't want to walk around with a gaping hole in his face, ranging from hygiene to not freaking people out worse than he already does. Huh...Thanks for the clarification, I'll bear that in mind.

Rereading SoS, I noticed that when Wax enters a soothing parlor, he describes the sensation as, "[tearing away] the core of his self." My question is: is it Realmatically plausible that brass and zinc allomancy function through manipulation of a target's Spiritual Identity? Meaning, does a rioter or soother influence the emotional state of their target by selectively enhancing/suppressing aspects of that target's Identity? What I'm basically getting at is: Could a powerful soother, or group of soothers, concentrate their power on a ferring, and thereby allow that ferring to create unkeyed metalminds? Is there any reason that this would be silly, inconsistent with what we know about the metallic arts, or broken? I'm trying to reconcile this with the little we know about the southerners' medallion manufacturing and the Set's unkeyed metalminds (namely, the goldmind with vast stores that I assume required a compounder)

I've heard other people indicate that Marsh may only have one eye-spike, but in AoL, Marasi specifically comments on Marsh having a "pair" of eye spikes several times during her one brief scene with him...I only have the original edition of the book; do you know if this scene has been changed?

Well, they still couldn't get rid of the friction between themselves and the ground, so assuming they had an arbitrarily large store of speed build up, then they could run just fast enough so that the impact of their steps caused the ground the compact or shatter beneath their feet. I believe steelrunners are subject to some sort of magical shenanigans that prevent their feet from being burned or damaged as a direct result of friction with the ground. It might seem unintuitive at first, but I think they could actually achieve faster speeds running across a large body of water, which is essentially incompressible, rather than a surface like dirt or pavement, which would crumble or be smashed downward given a significant enough impact. On well maintained roads they could probably break the sound-barrier, assuming they didn't mind destroying the roads in the process...