The Kings Raven

I think Brandon failed on giving us a convincing debate between a celebrated genius and a god. It definitely felt very utilitarianism 101, with a really basic argument - not far of people are imperfect - being treated as a devastating counter blow. I think a better debate would be for them to agree with each other in principle and then get into the details on weather conquering the universe can or will not lead to the greatest good. But I'm not sure if that would work better for the story than Jasnah being devastated to learn she is flawed. I still find it a bit hard to imagine she hasn't considered that point before; but it is likely key to her whole arc.

I actually really liked the debate, but I actually agree with the criticisms you posted to rebut. It felt like... digs for example... the Battle for Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity War. It was really cool to watch, but if you think about it for five seconds you start asking questions like "why did two armies with advanced technology charge at each other using tactics made obsolete by the Ancient Greek phalanx?". The problem with this is that we've seen Jasnah do bad things for the greater good, Odium brought up examples. But we've never seen Jasnah actually do anything truly bad because she prioritised her own family over the coalition. This means from the perspective of a story it feels unearned for Odium to win by pointing out this flaw. We all do have blind spots, but Jasnah should have been aware of this specific blind spot without a doubt. Its so basic to the debate about utilitarianism that her not having encountered it before and being able to recite counter arguments stretches belief. I find it completely plausible that in the moment Fen would make the deal. I also think that its reasonable to think she's an idiot for it. Fen is mortal, Odium is a god, Honour is a god. And the contest of champions is Honour's grand plan. Fen should conclude that a god's master plan has a better chance of winning than her skills as a mortal negotiator. This is very true. I think Brandon should have focused on this as the very crux of the debate, not the philosophy 101 arguments against utilitarianism. Unlike bias towards her family, Jasnah has shown on screen a bias to working with monarchies and ignoring the little people, but its so subtly done, and so justifiable because the middle of a war is the wrong time to institute democratic reforms and the monarchs make the decisions; that to suddenly ambush her five books later that working with monarchies has become a reflexive habit that even when there is a democratic council she ignores it would be a brilliant way to get the same outcome of this city changing sides and Jasnah taking a blow to the ego.

One thing I don't understand about Lessie. She's incredibly in love with Wax, her whole motivation is protecting Wax from Harmony. So why did she abandon Wax and let Harmony have him the moment she "died", not to mention the pain of loosing her. Was she terrified that Wax would reject her if she revealed she was a Kandra? Did Harmony take control of her to stop her talking to Wax, that seems unlikely since Harmony is big on free will and didn't stop her going against his plans earlier but I can't rule it out.

Remember that Hoid could trick people into killing themselves intentionally, he attempted to do so by trying to get himself "murdered" as Wit. Given that, I'm sure he could kill someone by pure accident.

My first thought is that it's a case of seer vs seer. If Odium sees Renarin do X and acts to push him to Y instead. Renarin will see the new future and do Z instead. Thus rendering Odium's original vision false and blocking his sight. But lately I've been thinking that explanation is unsatisfying. Firstly Odium is a god and Renarin is not. I would expect Odium's foresight to work on deeper levels. Odium could see that if he did X Renarin would get visions of the future finally leading to outcome A, but if he did Y Renarin's visions would lead to Z. This might go more than two layers deep, but Odium could go deeper than Renarin. The second reason is that we know from Renarin's visions that visions can simply be wrong, without that leading to visions of black nothingness. The third reason is that Renarin cannot be predicted by the Diagram either. And that works on an entirely different underlying mechanism. "Why specifically can’t the Diagram see Renarin Kholin? the notes read. Why is he invisible?". Given that the diagram is created without Fortune, by simply extrapolating from the present via genius intelligence there is no way a seer vs seer conflict should make anyone invisible. It could make the diagram wrong about Renarin, but he should be in there. So now I'm thinking that Renarin might have some specific ability to be invisible to foresight. This could be from a corrupted spren, though I'm wondering if Cultivation is behind it simply because it's strong enough to block a god.

This is just a bit of musing I've seen, we don't have direct evidence for it. But it seems to me that Taravangian's curse would be a perfect restraining bolt to place on Odium's shard holder, if Cultivation could make it stick even through ascension. The more Taravangian resists is shard's intent he better he is at planning ahead-and we've seen from Rayse's reaction to the Diagram that smart Taravangian is impressive on a shardic scale. But if the intent ever starts to dominate Taravangian he'll become stupid and less of a threat. Alternatively the rule that he can't have both intelligence and emotion at once might serve to put a wall between Taravangian and his power, which protects him from becoming consumed by his intent while weakening Odium. The result is a more reliable ally whose less of a threat. I admit there's little evidence of this so far. Post ascension Taravangian doesn't mention his curse. But it feels fitting. I don't like the theory that Cultivation screwed up here, creating Taravangian is the very centre of her power, so if she created him to take Odium I imagine she got exactly what she wanted out of a new Shardholder. And it's probably not Taravangian at his most megalomaniacal since she's allied to Honour.

I imagine it would be permanent. Gold healing is permanent where as youth Feruchemy is not. Can you store muscle memory with copper? If not then I don't think you could store body image either. That said, if it's just your self-image then you could probably do it with a combination of Alumnim for identity, mental exercises, and Electrum to supercharge those mental exercises. Even if you don't get it perfect since Feruchmeical gold is permanent you could get part way and do it in stages.

Lets say a full Feruchemist has an unlocked aluminium mind filled with somebody else's Identity and a gold mind overflowing with health. If they drew from the aluminium mind and then drew from the gold mind while their identity was different, would they "heal" into a physical copy of that other person? (If necessary they can seriously damage their body first). I think there's a Word of Brandon somewhere saying that Investiture healing works by drawing from the platonic idea of health in the spiritual realm; but since people retain their individual appearance and body after healing there must be something that personalises the definition of a healthy body. I'm wondering if that something might be part of your identity and if so, could you hack it if you wanted a different body.

That's actually a very plausible possibility.

I was rereading the Epigraphs from The Final Empire and I saw this one: The mist creature sounds a lot like Leras and we know that Leras carries a knife but Leras cannot attack anyone. Is this just an error? Or something very important and suspicious?

Something's been bugging me about the portrayal of femininity in the Alloy of Law era books, and I think I put my finger on it while rereading Shadows of Self. There's a moment in chapter 19 (if you have an ebook you could find it easily by searching for the word Allrianne) where Marasi thinks about the difficulties of doing her job and remaining feminine at the same time. I can understand where she's coming from. Vin was graceful in both the ballroom and battle, she's a lot to live up to. But at the same time, it seems odd that Marasi thinks of it as a conflict between her role as a constable and femininity. If Vin is the ideal Scadrial woman I would expect say, a dressmaker, to worry that she doesn't have enough opportunities to get into a fight to be properly feminine instead of a constable worrying about getting her hair right. A constable has the opportunity to be Vin-in-the-ballroom when dealing with witnesses and Vin-in-battle when dealing with criminals. A dressmaker doesn't have any opportunity to be Vin-in-battle at all. So while the constable might find it hard to live up to both sides of Vin, she's still ahead of most other professions. I guess deep down, what I'm trying to say is, it feels like Scadrial defines femininity the same way we do but has less restrictions on women than we did in the comparable era. But I think that if Vin is the iconic women than, even with Allrianne's influence, Scadrial should have a fundamentally different definition of femininity to Earth. Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

Remember though that Bleeder was not working with the Set. Edwarn says so explicitly in Shadows of Self, it's possible he was lying but Bleeder's motives are so different from the Set's that I'm inclined to believe him. I think it's likely that both Autonomy and Dominion's agents are active on Scadrial. The Set is Dominion's, Bleeder was Autonomy's.