robardin

We have seen tangential mention of Ulaam before (it ends in an M, not an N) - but not "on screen" - in The Lost Metal.

Well, let's list the key known events in a relative timeline and see if we can figure this out. [NOTE: I've edited/updated this with text in blue following observations/corrections made by @RedBlue and @Oltux72 after my original post.] After being cursed, Mad Hoid became the "cabin boy" on the Crow's Song - Captain Crow made Fort "trade for him", and in the same conversation, told him about the Sorceress' curses: She heard about his curse and his trip to the Sorceress. Getting him was a poor deal, since his former shipmates were happy to be rid of him. Captain insisted though. When Tress first spotted him after being allowed to stay on the Crow's Song, of all the strangers to her - the captain and its crew - she recognized Hoid as the "cabin boy of the Whistlebow" - evidently the name a ship that had pulled in at The Rock, for her to be familiar with their cabin boy and "his gangly figure and his pure white head of hair". In fact, yes, he was named as the one who gave her the first of the five cups that Charlie sent back to her before being sent off to the Midnight Sea: "a beautiful porcelain cup, without even a single chip in it." At which point he'd still been sane (hadn't yet been cursed), inferred both from the fact that Mad Hoid probably wouldn't be trusted with delivering precious cargo, and that "his former shipmates" on the Whistlebow only wanted to be rid of him after he was cursed. Plus, Tress wouldn't have thought Hoid was acting weirdly if that was how she'd met him in the first place. Ulaam says he came to Lumar and "found him like this [cursed] after I arrived in response to his letter". After which he convinced Captain Crow to take him on as the ship's surgeon after she shot him a few times, to no effect, except for him to say he found it "invigorating". So Hoid was already on the Crow's Song. So I would say the order of events is: Hoid goes to Lumar, intending to upgrade to accessing AonDor via Riina... Apparently, an Elantrian "inviting" or "formally adopting" someone else in a specific way, can transitively extend the necessary Connection to AonDor He had sought her out because he knew her sadistic pastime was Creative Cursing, and would relish the idea of cursing him in particular Hoid writes/sends a letter to Ulaam telling him this, asking Ulaam to come to him (I guess to help him deal with the curse, whatever it is) [Sane] Hoid becomes a "cabin boy" on the Whistlebow The Whistlebow makes a visit to The Rock while Tress is there, waiting for Charlie's cups. Hoid strikes the deal with Riina (curse him, but where undoing the curse results in Connecting him to AonDor) How he gets there is unknown - I doubt he traveled through the Crimson and Midnight Seas on the Whistlebow! But, he does return to the Whistlebow after being cursed. When Capt. Crow hears of the Whistlebow's cabin boy having been cursed by the Sorceress, she makes an effort to acquire him on board. Not sure what the point of that was - her goal was to visit Xisis in the Crimson Sea, and not the Sorceress beyond it? Ulaam (finally) arrives on Lumar, joins Hoid on the Crow's Song, and mostly just watches Hoid with amusement. "That's the problem with immortals - they get used to sitting around waiting for problems to work themselves out." Tress ends up on the Crow's Song, and you know the rest. This means the timeline for Hoid arriving on Lumar and wandering around cursed is pretty tight: it happened after Charlie had already been gone long enough to send back the first cup, and for it to reach Tress (by his own, sane hand).

Bingo on all three points, IMHO! But some insight on the first two are worth thinking about: Hoid implied he'd made the deal with Riina, submitting to a curse he assumed he'd manage to get out of eventually, in exchange for something (a spell with a precondition?) that would result in his gaining access to AonDor (something he already tried to do in the extra post-epilogue scene in Elantris, but comically failed to do). I guess once he returned to the tower and stood on the image of the planet on the floor of her main chamber, he fulfilled the conditions of his curse and gained the boon? As for trafficking in aether spores as a reason for her being on Lumar, well, it may be easier to harvest them directly from the moons, but also more dangerous? I dunno. But it did seem secondary to her pleasure in watching her curses at work.

Is that mentioned? I know Xisis the dragon is mentioned as having taken up residence under the Crimson Sea about 300 years ago, which would indeed coincide with the Iriali "disappearing". ...Ah, here it is. It was in the book that Capt. Crow was making notes in the margins of, regarding cases of being cured of "spore gestation": Xisisrefliel lives beneath the spores in a palace that somehow exists on the bottom of the Crimson Sea. Though his age is unknown, he has lived in that same spot for at least three hundred years. We don't know how old the book is, but we do know (from Hoid) that he was there before the Sorceress arrived to Lumar, who was surprised by the fact that there was a dragon on the planet. Whether that was one year before or more than two hundred years before, I don't think we know?

Like I said earlier or elsewhere, this falls under the category of the actual author (Brandon) effectively "translating" Hoid's storytelling into terms from our world, which is not a new storytelling device (JJR Tolkien did this). The problem I have is when that is done on top of Hoid also doing it to his in-world audience, making references to things he clearly knows are beyond/above THEIR heads. It's a little too much, and leads to outright questions about if Hoid is like Deadpool and meta-knows he's a character inside of a story. (Which Brandon has said is not the case, but it really shouldn't even be a question.) I mean, fine, Hoid is familiar with laptops, vending machines, pro sports teams calling time-outs and playing in stadiums, and it's clear he doesn't expect his in-world audience to know what they are, and doesn't care. Which is already an infuriating pattern for Hoid, but I'd prefer that be in-world infuriating, not infurating to me :D. But when I read those terms in English, I can't help but wonder: is that because (say) Scadrial of the time of TotES has all these things by those same names, because Hoid has seen them before long ago on Yolen by those names, or is Hoid referring to them in Scadrialese and Brandon is "translating" to our current English? And wondering in that way breaks me out of the "flow" that is key to enjoying fantasy. Suspension of disbelief, yeah, but also built-world immersion. If we'd already read Mistborn Era 3 novels showing people with laptops, buying things from a vending machine, going to a "pro noseball" game at a stadium, etc., then such language would be in-world. And maybe it will end up being so in the long run, since evidently Tress' story is later in the Cosmere timeline, close to SotD. But as of right now, reading it in published order, it's jarring.

This is indeed the case. Being a gold/gold Compounding Twinborn doesn't make tapping gold super-powerful, it makes it possible to create enormously OP goldminds that otherwise would not be possible for an ordinary Bloodmaker, who would be limited by a low rate of health storage that kept them alive at the same time. And even if that could have worked to save Wayne from a proximate mega-blast of wettmetal (as I'll call it), he didn't have either the time to Compound, nor likely the amount of gold it would take to store the resulting health into. Sure he was super-rich and could afford as much gold as he needed, but unless he anticipated being able to Compound, he'd probably just have a small/lightweight goldmind on himself at the time. (Which he'd also have to be able to break or cut up, to allow him to swallow and burn some of it after Investing it with health.)

More to the point, the gold would be instantly vaporized as well as Wayne’s body. Can’t tap a metalmind that isn’t metal any more. If you consider the impossible insta-heals TLR or Miles was capable of with Compounding, not only had they already prepared enormously full goldminds beforehand, they had those goldminds hidden on in inside their body in a way that still existed during their physical trauma. Burned or flayed alive? Decapitated(!)? Arm blown off? There was enough time to do a mega-tap at the moment of death to get the Investiture ball rolling downhill to immediately heal as the damage was done. All goldminds destroyed along with one’s entire body in fractions of a second, simultaneously? Say goodnight.

You are not wrong there, but what the shipbomb was built around was not just ettmetal + water = boom-boom, it was the same reaction that Wax produced in his lab with a specific way of manipulating very, very small amounts of harmonium and trellium at close range. THAT’S what the “shipbomb” was. A giant floating thing like what Wax had done, but with a lot more of the godmetals. A lot lot lot more. So in effect, yes, the nature of their interaction under those circumstances effectively produced what we know as a nuclear bomb. The explosions near Bilming that were explained as earthquakes were the equivalent of the Set doing atomic bomb test detonations underground.

Right. Furthermore, Xisis states that he’d stay clear of The Sorceress but has no particular fear of Hoid, while she appears to take Hoid’s threatening pose while newly powered for AonDor seriously, which implies the dragon knows about his… limitations with respect to hurting other people, but Riina doesn’t.

But from an off-world perspective she’s not blocking trade. She’s taxing it. Basically setting up a tollbooth. I don’t think she necessarily came to Lumar JUST for the toll collection racket, but it seems to be the most tangible benefit. And the planet may be known but not well known - Hoid’s comment, She’d come to this planet because nothing here could threaten her. Then she’d found a dragon living here, suggests she may have thought she was the first powerful off-world person to arrive (versus ordinary worldhopper migrants, tradesfolk, and curiosity seekers). As for any past ambitions to become a god: she was not the one tabbed to Ascend in M:SH - that was Alonoe. Riina was a presumably junior associate to Alonoe back then (one of the names Alonoe calls out to for help, while Kelsier-faking-Ruin spooked her horse and isolated her in a cognitive forest). And if she was now a senior Ire, whatever they are (operatives? agents? conspirators? cadre?), where are the others? She’s all alone here. Their attitude towards other Cosmere worlds in M:SH - “The powers of Threnody wish to join the main stage!” - imply they view expansion and domination of other worlds as a Great Game of sorts. Maybe they thought just one of them would be enough to capture and to hold a backwater “supply point” like Lumar. What she chose to do to maintain that hold, or to amuse herself while administering her control, was her business.

It's no fun unless they know they're being tormented, eh? But seriously. What do we see her doing on Lumar, that might indicate her reason to be there, other than what she does in doling out curses? Let's assume that's merely her sadistic pastime - what is her proper business? According to Fort, she set up in the Midnight Sea because it's accessible only from the one side (behind the dangerous Crimson Sea), and thereby "controls trade through the passage that connects the planet". Which must mean trade with off-planet partners (through a Perpendicularity on the Midnight Moon, or its Lunagree on Lumar, perhaps?). Only her ships are allowed to sail the Midnight Sea without being attacked by the enormous monsters she's able to bind to her will from the Midnight Essence in the aether spores, and the reason the Verdant King is waging a rather one-sided war with her is because he "doesn't want to pay the tariffs" she levies to work that trade route. So what trade would go off-world from Lumar to elsewhere in the Cosmos? We already see what comes back - Tress is a uniquely naive person on Lumar, from having grown up on the Rock. Many other people are casually aware of other planets and people with strange powers thereby, such as how easily the crew of The Crow's Song accept Dr. Ulaam (he makes no secret of his off-world origin), the fact that the dragon Xisis arrived about 300 years ago from off-world, Fort stating he traded for his writing board from a "wizard from the stars", and so on. My guess is the spores, packed in aluminum containers, are quite valuable as a way to access aethers without having to find or to become an "aetherbound" like Pransanva in TLM.

I saw the Huck reveal coming, though not its specifics. It was never explained how Huck the Talking Rat ended up on the same ship that Tress tried to escape on, though I guess it’s easy enough to imagine that he was trying all this time to get back to Tress on the island (even in rat form, to be close to her) and this happened to be one of the ships going there at all in that timeframe. I did not, however, see the endgame with the dragon coming. That was a nice touch. I’m curious what The Sorceress wanted with her “ransoms” of “royal blood”. Evidently this wasn’t the first time she’d captured someone and asked for that. I guess she’d only take the ransom if it was an upgrade from whoever she’d decided/bothered to capture and curse, instead of just having killed. I guess we have no idea how many people she’s cursed in this way on Lumar. She seems to be on the planet for entertainment purposes.

Nah, just one of those Cosmere coincidences, I’m guessing. I mean, it can’t ALL be tied together underneath, or something, right? Pfft.

This was my immediate reaction upon reading the early released chapter of SP1 - I guess I can call it by its full title now, or at least TatES to separate it from TES as “The Emperor’s Soul”? LOL Not the “Hoid’s voice” thing, as I really liked the Wandersail, Dragon and the Dog, The Girl Who Looked Up, etc., stories that he tells Kaladin and Shallan in The Stormlight Archive, but the second point you make: the rather frequent allusions and references to our “modern” world that to me, break the fourth wall in a jarring (versus fun) way for a fantasy work. Yes, you can make the excuse that “this is set in a future context and Hoid is telling this story to someone who would know these terms”, but really it feels like Hoid is throwing around stuff that is “out of this world” for his in-world audience to amuse himself. The problem is, there is a huge difference between, say, telling Kaladin a story involving a dog (where Kaladin doesn’t know what that even is), to making outright analogies not just to “laptops” or “programming” but “vending machines” and the difference between “a team taking a time out” versus “tearing down a stadium to build a new one”. It feels like one of three things is going on to justify this: The future of the Cosmere converges extremely closely to our present-day world, The far past of Yolen did so (when/where Hoid grew up) - or both, I suppose?, This is Sanderson claiming Tolkien-like “translation rights” in reframing for us a story told by Cosmere-Hoid to Cosmere-Whoever in Cosmere Words, into Modern English words and references we would get. I say “Tolkien-like” because if you ever read the Appendices to The Return of the King, JRRT talks about how he “translated” things for days of the week, the calendar, common names like “Sam”, etc., to be more familiar to English readers, versus their actual Westron terms and Shire contexts… Kind of eye-glazing, LOL. In Tolkien’s case, it was something of a conceit of detailed world-building - but if you need to resort to that to wave away casually breaking the fourth wall in a fantasy work, that’s another level. If Hoid’s telling a story in-world, as with Kaladin and Shallan, it should come off as in-world - not Hoid telling ME the story. Which a few hints in the story make clear he is telling someone like Sixth of the Dusk the story and all these modern day terms/comparisons are Hoid amusing himself with “over their head” references, but that goes back to scenario 1 or 2 then.

We’ve seen Riina named as one of the Ire plotting to acquire the Shard of Preservation for the Ire in Mistborn: Secret History, but she appears to be on Lumar here by herself. At the end, a restored Hoid thinks to himself as he makes to threaten her with a “zapping” (I guess she doesn’t know about his Dawnshardic curse that makes him unable to “harm” another person): She’d come to this planet because nothing here could threaten her. Then she’d found a dragon living here. Then I’d arrived. She wasn’t hiding here, really, as she wasn’t keeping a low profile or working under a disguise or an alias. She comments about how “unimportant” this planet is, while taunting Tress about her hair. And by Ulaam’s assessment, Hoid is the only person on the entire planet other than the dragon who could challenge her powers. She then hightails it outta there right quickly and easily when Restored Hoid shows up to do just that. What does this mean for her purpose in being on Lumar? Sadly, it appears to be no more than an epic scale of bullying.

That would fall under the RAFO category, IMHO, being as we have yet to see what tapping a chromiummind would be like!

Well, here's the thing. We all sort of agree (I think) that Daal's true goal - with or without the GBs involvement - was to wait for a moment when the Elendel government would be in a crisis deep enough to persuade the kandra to put the Bands into play, and then to demand alternating possession to avert war with the Malwish. So, how would he have known the "bombship" was going to be that crisis? One that would happen in the near future? He'd only just arrived to Elendel a little while earlier. The timing of it all is quite suspicious to me. For such a plan to work, it feels like he'd have to have an ally, or at least a tip, from a number of groups or people involved who might be in the know beforehand; who was it? Kelsier/The Sovereign and the Ghostbloods Kandra/"TenSoon" (on his own) Kandra/"TenSoon" (under direction of Harmony) Trell and the Set (but why?) Yet Another Secret To RAFO Adawathwyn seems like a likely ally, whatever her group alliance may have been. Or maybe she was just a fairly easily manipulated patsy. TenSoon actually being TenSoon seems legit, but could also be called into question - mainly because presumably only TenSoon would know how/where to get the Bands from storage. Furthermore, the fact that the Bands were drained didn't seem to surprise Daal. He wasn't furious, only sarcastic ("perhaps it is piety that makes them work, yah?"); his initial accusation that the Basinfolk had been using the Bands all this time seemed more perfunctory than genuine.

This is my #1 beef with TLM. Sure, confirming a second Shardic antagonist in the Cosmere was neat, and all the cosmere-wide, off-planet character cameos were fun, including the official, canonical introduction of "aethers" - as well as the strong suggestion that, taking place as it does between SA5 and SA6, Something Big Went Down On Roshar In SA5 that we don't yet know about at the time of TLM's publishing... ...but that latter angle isn't going to age well past the actual publication of SA5. Meanwhile, I'm left with feeling like the Era 2 cycle is missing a LOT of loose end tie-ups. Who created the Bands and how? What is the deal with Kelsier's eye spike and physical (?) presence, but no Allomancy? What are the Excisors and how do they work to create medallions? How do/did the Southerners have Metalborn? Heck, just how do those airships fly?! I guess the whole "Wonderful World of the Malwish Consortium" deep dive was always intended for Mistborn Era 3 (originally to be Era 2) and he didn't want to jog that too hard, as their Metallic Arts based tech is going to drive a lot of stuff in the future. I get it, but I'd say this is the first time I've felt as much (or more) frustrated as awed by the end of a Sanderson novel that ostensibly capped a series. EDIT: and this hot-off-the-presses (from Dec 2022) WoB says as much!

Since we know Sigzil ends up being (and then subsequently not being) the Dawnshard that Hoid had once been, I think whatever is So Very Bad about someone having a Nahel Bond becoming a Dawnshard is what happened to him... Perhaps that's what "ended" his oaths? Perhaps also transformed his spren into "Auxiliary"? He does seem to think about summoning Auxiliary as a sword in the past, not just having summoned "a (different) spren" as one, and even succesfully does so at one point. The one prior WoB in that collection (preceding the deliberate mention of Sigzil having at one point held, past tense, the same Dawnshard as Hoid, as of SP4) is far more ominous... Nobody... What? Nobody from Bridge Four has their tattoos any more? They all Stormlight healed them off as their Identity no longer includes those Ideals? That would make me quite sad.

I kept wondering if there was an analog for the movie Raising Arizona on Sel when I realized that who Codenames Are Stupid it was. Especially when she was addressed directly as "Kaise" shortly afterwards. LOL

I don't think it's supposed to be true, but it'd be entirely consistent with what we saw in Mistborn: Secret History with the koloss and nothing in the Era 2 books have contradicted it. By mentioning the koloss, I mean how Ghost Kelsier learns about hemalurgy: he sees koloss dying and appearing in the Cognitive Realm as humans again, including an obligator who had been a koloss overseer, who told him they were created with "spikes" before passing Beyond. If people twisted by hemalurgy still have an underlying human base of soul or identity, then why would the kandra not experience something similar? At least the First Generation, who had been born human and changed into kandra, versus subsequent ones born as mistwraiths? And, if Metalborn powers are associated with the soul, a Spiritweb component - would these restored-to-human compatriots of Rashek possibly have their Feruchemy restored as well? And if THAT were the case, then even if blocked by the mistwraith conversion performed during Rashek's Ascension, could their latent Feruchemical powers be spiked out with some extremely advanced knowledge of Hemalurgy? The catch there, of course, is that the koloss of the Final Empire were all twisted FROM human INTO koloss VIA hemalurgy, while the kandra were twisted FROM human INTO mistwraiths VIA the power of Preservation in a one-time act, into a "species that bred true" (which the FE koloss were not)... And then had their "sapience restored" via hemalurgy. So the parallel is not exact.

I am pretty sure this is something he grew/changed into. His overriding concern for his "legacy", his egomaniacal lust for power, his cold and calculated cruelty... Sounds like what Shallan's father Lin Davar devolved into, Yeah? Which has been hinted at being the influence of one of the Unmade, both by the mention of Shallan seeing that his eyes seemed to have a red glow at some point, plus this WoB:

I put that forth quite a few years ago, but specifically theorized that it'd need the First Generation of kandra to count as blocked Feruchemists - all subsequent generations of kandra having mistwraith origins, not human ones, as a race that "breeds true" unto itself and are not Metalborn by nature. But as we saw in Secret History, koloss who died appeared to Kelsier as humans again in the CR, so it stands to reason that perhaps there remained a spiritual component of Feruchemy in Haddek and the others remaining of the Firsts. Besides, where are the First and Second Generations of kandra in Era 2? MeLaan mentions that TenSoon and other Thirds are the oldest among them. Have they died of old age, committed suicide out of boredom, or did they fulfill some other purpose? I kind of would like to see a KanPaar redemption arc, LOL!

How would you force someone to tap the tinmind though? Even if you made an unsealed tinmind medallion with the "pain store" in it (like the coppermind coin that Wax gets from Hoid, but with tin, and instead of someone else's memory, you get someone else's pain), you'd still have to tap it... There's no mechanism in the Metallic Arts to "push out" a metalmind's store. And sure, if you thought the tinmind stored something else - or was just curious to see what it held - just one zip of pain and you'd be like, nah, no more of this.

That's what I would have assumed, without going back to re-read it to see if it was explicitly mentioned - that Wax had already been using, or prepared to use, the gun in battle. If indeed it was a continuity error in the writing, it's a very easy one to explain away! EDIT: Yes, I went back to re-read it and Wax tells Wayne they should switch opponents on the rooftop at the end of Chapter 62... After speedrunning their way up the building through the Set's people and talking the last resistance, the building's ordinary non-Set guards, into fleeing instead of fighting. Wax was using Vindication throughout that speedrun (along with the Steel Survivor and The Big Gun), so yeah it all checks out.