HavoKinetic

Reading Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut and this caught my eye, figured I'd share: "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side." This made me think of Odium. If Rayse didn't explicitly seek out the Odium shard, he's certainly taken to it well. Howard Campbell (the narrator of Mother Night) would call Rayse's unlimited hatred, his hope for god-justified hatred, a sign of his evil.

So Preservation is the shard of keeping things other than yourself the same, and Autonomy is the shard of keeping yourself the same? Does this mean Autonomy is naturally resilient to the machinations of destructive shards like Ruin or Odium? If the red haze is Autonomy and it is the shard of self-Preservation, that interplay of Autonomy, Preservation, and Ruin could get messy. Relationship status: it's complicated.

I thought we had WoB or WoSomeone that the uniformity in size and distance was only in representation on the map, not actual true uniformity. Doesn't refute the theory, of course.

Brandon might just like how little we understand Bavadin. There's always another secret - Brandon knows them all already, so the one he plans to reveal 99th out of 100 is his favorite. ( I say out of 100 because it's not like he was going to answer "oh my favorite is Havokin, the anthropomorphic squirrel who picked up the Honesty shard. You haven't met him yet")

I've said this elsewhere, but if the Division surge works as some have theorized and allows you to make things combust, give me Division and brass Feruchemy. Set your whole area ablaze, brass to store that warmth. If I'm choosing an order with Division, I'd rather slide around in the fire than fly up in its smoke, so I'd pick Dustbringer over Skybreaker.

When we discuss which one type of ferring we'd like to be, my wife chooses steel or cadmium (she's a runner). I like the ones where storing and tapping both have benefits, like Wax with his iron. My preferred would be brass. Reading some posts here, it seems feelings are similar : pick a metal where tapping is useful enough or storing at certain times isn't too detrimental, or one where storing and tapping both have uses. So that got me thinking about how being a Firesoul works. Human bodies naturally regulate temperature - sweat to cool down, shiver to warm up, etc. So is a Firesoul just a little better at that? Or do they only store their own feeling of warmth, but not actual degrees? Brandon has said that storing has failsafes, so if we're storing actual thermal energy from our own body, we can't (or maybe won't) freeze ourselves to death. Presumably we could combust while tapping though. OR can I actually store ambient thermal energy from around me? Even if I just cooled myself and then naturally took in some heat transfer, storing warmth is going to have some effect on your surroundings. But if we take this to the extreme, every Firesoul is basically Iceman, able to manipulate thermal energy in a range. Which would be awesome. Can I store warmth just at one part of my body, by many degrees, or is it my whole body only? If it's one part, could I effectively be immune to burns by storing from wherever fire was touching me? If I'm a brass compounder, can I break the laws of physics and create energy that didn't exist before? This is hardly the only metallic art that could do it - Coinshots are creating kinetic energy that wasn't there before. Or I guess maybe they're pulling it from some shard's Investiture? One of those physics-breaking matter/energy-creating combos has got to be how the Scadrians get FTL...

I mean, we don't really know if the canon 17th are good guys... Hi everyone. I started posting super minor theories without introducing myself. Improper, as ever. I am father of many, mover of entropy, and so HavoKinetic. Hav for short, if you like. Big fan of Sanderson, Rothfuss, Lynch, Martin, and Abraham. Happy to be aboard.

Isn't this essentially what Honor is? You've made a decision to live a certain way, probably for some perceived benefit to you, but of course that way limits you from living other ways. You are Honorbound - bound having adhesive but also restrictive meaning. You retain the free will to break your nahel bond, oathpact, if you decide the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Doesn't seem like the spren, or even Honor, are insidious in that case. They're just doing what they do, following their intent.

I think we make a bit too much of Preservation and Ruin as a pair. Obviously their proximity and our familiarity with MB colors that, but I believe Brandon has said that a trio of Cultivation, Preservation, and Ruin is more natural. I could be making that up, but we do see Sazed questioning his nonintervention because it's not allowing the Scadrians to struggle and Cultivate new tech as quickly as they should. I prefer the yin and yang analogy for DnD to the biblical one. Our author is naturally impacted by his own beliefs, but he is also one of the most belief-conscious authors I've ever read. We've seen religions spring up around several characters whose flaws we are familiar with in MB. Also Brandon is openly and purposely setting Sel up with many Earth-Eastern influences. I'm hardly a theologian, but I believe several religions regard marriage as a spiritual joining also. I'm of the opinion that Odium was concerned with DnD's possible conjoining on at least the CR and SR levels, if not also the PR level. Pressing the majority of their power in to the CR might not be working out so well as far as that goes... The Investitures still have Physical outlets, don't seem weaker apart from not having Vessels, and it's not like there aren't sentient being prowling about the CR looking to get some power/physical form...

I'm leaning more towards Cadmium ferring (Gasper, storing/tapping breath) than Cadmium misting (Pulser, slow bubbles). I just always find myself trying to think of how twinborns with the same metal might be able to make the "lesser" power useful because of the combo. Gasper seems more useful and more likely here, but I imagine plenty of the metallic arts could fake death to a lower tech society. Though we don't know how much the Ones Above know about the planet. Now I have a short story in my head where the Homeislanders give a Gasper a floating burial at sea, he waits until they're far enough away to call for a pickup, but didn't account for the mindsense of one of the sea monsters... If Sanderson wrote Jaws...

Feels like the kind of thing that would have been said before, but I didn't see anything on it: the member of the Ones Above who dies to leave all of the Homeislanders access to some tech... He chokes to death. Could he be a cadmium ferring? Seems like a pretty easy death to fake when you can avoid breathing for a good long while. I don't think it's mentioned what they do with the body, but if they return it to the Ones Above, or send it out to sea or something, they wouldn't even have to hold the charade for long. Might even be dual-cadmium twinborn to compound and to speed up time outside his bubble (relatively) to hold out longer. Thoughts?