robardin

The spren form Nahel bonds with people based on how that person reaches out to express or capture some Ideal that is attractive to them, not based on exactly how they would use the resulting Surges. Lopen is not just a Windrunner squire but has bonded an honorspren without being a leader like Teft, or a natural warrior like Kaladin. His domain of "protecting" has to do with the emotional and the mental aspects of protection, as we see what it took for him to reach the Second Ideal at the end of Oathbringer - for him to "protect those who cannot protect themselves" meant reaching out and saving a Herdazian amputee from despair. To extend the same strength of emotional core to others that preserved his humanity and sense of humor through whatever happened to him to see him depart his homeland of Herdaz as a child, lose an arm long ago, eventually get branded a slave, and ultimately sent to Sadeas' bridge camps. Personally I think a blind Truthwatcher, depending on what exactly that means as we find out in later books, could be an extremely interesting take. Less distraction from What's Really There to be perceived or understood at a deep level, you know?

Kinda hard as she originally worldhopped in and has just worldhopped out of Roshar... Will we see her in SA again any time soon? Though if her mission was to pursue Nightblood and Vasher/Zahel, both of them are still on Roshar, so I guess we will. I think this may be right. Go back to the flashback scenes from Kaladin's growing up - who were his friends? He didn't seem to have many even then: Tien, and Laral. So it's not seeing Tien get killed, or his branding and enslavement by Amaram, that brutalized him into closing up; he was never exactly an open guy to begin with. The other children in the village seemed to regard him as aloof, which he was. After all, part of being a "protector" mentality is "acting as a guardian to dependents", which he has always exhibited. And as Adolin has observed more than once, he never seems to be "off duty", either. An intense and serious person, is our Kaladin. For that matter, has Kaladin ever told a joke or pulled a prank? What's the lightest we've seen Kaladin be? He bust a gut laughing when Rock told his story of being sent to Bridge Four for cooking chull dung into Sadeas' food and said "This! This is what we've been missing!", but that's him reacting to Rock.

I would think it'd be much harder to do if it DIDN'T come from one's CoG. It'd be like those sippy birds with the weighted head that bob up and down. Plus, it was supposed to be incredible/remarkable that Zane was able to do that (neither Vin nor Kelsier could), and had to do with him also being hemalurgically spiked for A-steel (doubling that Allomantic strength) as well as being very talented in Steelpushing.

What a strangely specific WoB. It felt very mechanically correct to have iron/steel lines be related to one's CoG, but a "cognitive CoG" for an extremely physical effect? Is that just a retcon of sorts for having written Vin's POV with the center of the lines being from what obviously would not be her true CoG (a detail I'd missed or forgotten)? Though the way he answered it, it seems like maybe he did have that in mind already before being presented with the question. Of course that could just mean he'd realized that error before and had the justification at hand.

The way he describes it as a journey [to the for Truths leading to the Fifth Ideal] as "starting negative" maybe implies that it turns to the positive for the later Truths, hey? Interesting.

The biggest problem with Elhokar as a king - one who inherited a newly "united" Alethkar, with twelve highprinces bound under a single ruler above them - is that he lacked the necessary qualities of leadership to continue getting the highprinces to pay more than lip service to the throne. Gavilar had a force of personality which inspired personal devotion, most critically and early from two enormously talented allies in his brother Dalinar (martial ability) and Torol Sadeas (political ruthlessness). Once the other highprinces had submitted to a kingship, it would have been very, very Alethi for there to be a triumvirate power struggle the way it played out multiple times in history: the common goal having been achieved leading to infighting to be the last one standing on top. And in fact, this is more or less what happened once Gavilar died - except that Dalinar stayed firm to his promise to himself never to take the throne, resulting in him defending Elhokar's position on it and making him a proxy for the throne between himself and Sadeas. The Elhokar we see in TWoK and WoR knows and resents the fact that he's essentially a puppet between the two of them, but the only way he could think of to try to change that was his passive-aggressive "frame Dalinar for an assassination attempt and have Sadeas in charge of investigating it" maneuver in TWoK, and then in WoR (after Dalinar forcefully demonstrated to him that he could kill him and take the throne any time he wanted to... but wasn't going to... Which was nice, but also reinforcing just how much of a puppet he was), by wallowing in self-pity. Dalinar and Kaladin have to constantly save the day while he does little but get in their way by periodically having a "but I'M the KING!" type of fit of pique that makes things temporarily worse. He's painfully aware of the qualities he needs, but does not possess, to be more like his father: qualities he sees in Kaladin, of heroism, of inspiring others to follow, of being sensitive to the character of other people. When drunk at the end of WoR, he pleads with Kaladin to "teach him", as if it were something that could be learned by imitation or emulation. What we see of him in Oathbringer is him finally coming to terms with not who he should be, but who he is and who he can be. (This undoubtedly is what attracted Cryptics to him.) He wants to be a good king. He simply had to discover what that meant for him, and not trying to act like someone he wasn't - Gavilar or Kaladin - when at a deep level, he could not emulate them because he wasn't built to work like them. It began with him finally not focusing all the time on how to gain the respect of others or the mere appearance of it, but instead focusing on the well-being of his country and its people and letting the right people do the things they were best at. Unfortunately, we'll never see his transformation progress.

I always love seeing that WOB come up about Odium vs. Harmony, and Brandon's question-for-an-answer being to compare lerasium Elend being "vastly more powerful" as a Mistborn than regular ol' Late-FE Vin. "Who would win in a fight?" "Vin." "Okay, there's your answer." Note that it's not "...Vin?" or "Vin, after a while", or "Vin, if...", just flat "Vin." Nobody doubts this outcome... Not even Elend!

Just in case you haven't finished reading it yet, I'll avoid mentioning any spoiler stuff from the second half of the book. Be aware that there are some GREAT twist reveals by the end of WoA and of course, it all leads into the third book of the Era 1 trilogy which has one of the great reveals of all time. So push through it. However, I agree, there are lulls. Not exactly pacing problems, because as a "planner writer" it's not like Brandon gets bogged down in overly verbose descriptions, or retelling the same scene from multiple POVs, or other reasons I can give for works by other writers I felt "bogged down". These come from four things, in my assessment: Too much discussion of in-world politics and political structures Too much emotional wiffle-waffling (to use a very technical term) from the lead protagonists (Vin, Elend, Sazed) "Cardboard villainy" from the main antagonist of Book 2, Straff Venture Several of the Big Reveals in WoA are "blindsiders" - very different from those in Book 1 and Book 3. The first is kind of necessary - describing the next phase after an enormous power vacuum is created when the God of the Final Empire is suddenly dispatched has to happen, after all. But let's just say that while Brandon Sanderson was successfully tapped to ghostwrite the end books of The Wheel of Time, I would never go to him to finish A Song of Ice and Fire... Plus, Elend being who he is, the idealistic book-learned political theorist who was settled on as King, that has consequences, too. He's not going to be an absolutist King, right? That's not who he is. So he's going to set up a constitutional monarchy representative parliament with two chambers. These chambers are comprised of elected leaders representing the nobility and the skaa, and of course there also needs to be representation of the merchant guilds who form a sort of a "third estate", and... you see, your eyes are glazing a bit already, right? The second thing is that we are getting POVs from Vin and Sazed where they're terribly unsure of themselves, what they're doing, and even emotionally confused or frustrated in their relationships. This is also part of the story arc, and necessary character growth, but as a reader it can be frustrating to see Vin, the bad-chull Mistborn who killed Shan Elariel and ultimately TLR in Book 1, turn into, as Tindwyl puts it, "a moody teenage girl" (while still being a uniquely talented Mistborn who kills teams of Allomancers by herself). Or the wise and calm Sazed agonizing over being a eunuch with a girlfriend, maybe, like, is that even a thing, can this work, do I deserve this? I think these are good things to write for the characters, after having finished the entire trilogy - but at the time you're reading it, it's very much a change in tone. Third, I found Straff Venture actually too unlikeable a character. Again, part of the story arc, but he was already set up to be a domineering and ruthless bad guy from Elend's POVs in book 1 - and when I read his POVs he feels exactly the same. So my reaction is,"Straff Venture, bad guy, I get it, can I flip to the end to see how he gets killed already 'cause it seems like that's all he is, The Bad Guy Everybody Hates Who Gets Killed At The End?" Rule #1 of POV writing is generally "every character is the lead character in their own mind", yet reading Straff's POV is basically like seeing him through Elend's eyes instead of his own. Finally, two of twist reveals of WoA are not particularly set up by the earlier stuff in the books, not the way TLR's true identity and power set mechanics were in TFE. Whereas the questions of "How is TLR so powerful?", "What is the Eleventh Metal?", "How can we ever defeat TLR?" were always present on the minds of the main characters in Book 1. Without spoiling what they are, two of the Big Reveals of WoA are things that completely blindside the main characters: they weren't wondering about or investigating things of that nature in the slightest. It's a reveal of a background "What Was Going On All This Time That You Had No Clue About" versus a reveal of "So This Is How What You Were Wondering About All This Time Really Went".

If it was a solid vertical sheet of metal (that wasn't aluminum), a Mistborn or Lurcher could burn iron and Pull against any point on that sheet from their COG, right? So I would think it's possible to pull just enough to be clinging to the wall (pressed against it) along any point. The trick would be in moving around, since Pulling comes from one's center of gravity. Imagine walking while balancing a cup of water on your head without spilling it. It'd be like that. You'd have to pull straight down through your body while standing straight, and also constantly shift your Pull target on the wall to be directly below you. If you leaned forward in any way, especially if you are an adult man whose COG is typically around the sternum and not the middle of your body, the Pulling from COG would make you want to fall over. Long ago, I got a very interesting physical demonstration of what one's COG means in a HS gym class. The teacher had the mixed assembly of boys and girls kneel on both knees in the gym, on the hardwood, with hands clasped behind their backs. "Now lean forward until your forehead touches the ground... And then try to get up without using your hands or rolling to the side." The girls could mostly do this without much problem, because their COG was around their waist. As this was in junior or senior year, most boys (except for one or two very scrawny ones) could not: their COGs were high enough that it was all but impossible due to insufficient leverage. And even the one or two very thin guys who could do so, only did so with very great difficulty. Meanwhile, the most muscled and lean/fit guys of all, like the football players, had it the absolute worst. I still remember one of them in particular, a friend of mine named Sean - as soon as he was near to a 45 degree angle at the waist, THUNK, he head all but smacked into the ground where he was fixed as surely as if he were held by a wrestling pin hold. Pinned down by his own chest and shoulders! So yeah. An Allomancer could easily and naturally "stand" in a stationary way on a vertical metal wall with an Ironpull; it's the walking on that vertical surface that would take a lot of care, and you certainly would not be able to spar with a Windrunner who'd Lashed "down" to be the wall and could now run, jump, and move about on that vertical surface as if it were flat. A full Mistborn who could both Push and Pull on metal, well that'd be a different story, but then you're basically able to fly as long as there were a heavy enough metal anchor with a large surface to work off of, with nigh-infinite anchor points along it, with simultaneous Pushing and Pulling to different points.

Whoa... Really? (How's that?) Breath doesn't even need to be personally acquired on Nalthis, too. Anyone with Breath can give it to anyone else, anywhere, any time.

Yeah, Breath is described as being openly traded in Hallendren in Warbreaker, and it's been mentioned in WoBs that Nalthis is easy to get to and commonly visited among worldhoppers, to the extent that they even "have customs that you can go through". (More accurately, I assume, Brandon means have to go through - nobody eagerly goes through customs, looking forward to having their stuff rifled through and then to have taxes potentially assessed, or contraband seized!) Besides, if Riino looked "Shin" to Kaladin, then surely he looked equally "Alethi" to Riino, so his being in the CR and also being Invested enough to make the globe work would only come from him either having visited Nalthis and making a purchase, or being one of the first Radiants to enter Shadesmar in hundreds of years. He eventually thinks of option #2 ("Merciful Domi... A Surgebinder?") but clearly option #1 seemed much more likely to him.

Tthis is a good point. When Paalm had her stopover in the CR and encountered Harmony after dying, we don't know what she "looked like" cognitively. It's not impossible that she looked like Lessie, as the "cognitive" form of herself she strongly identified with at the time of her passing (the identity she assumed that loved Wax). But that was always just a physical form - her real, inner identity was probably essentially that of a mistwraith (when it comes to what her form "looked like" to herself), given how quickly and frequently she adopted other physical forms.

Can you use hemalurgy to steal something that was itself hemalurgically stolen? Of course, generally and practically speaking, it'd be easier just to steal the spike itself. Like the spike for A-pewter that Spook had been using for a while in Urteau, then removed and cast aside: someone could have picked that up and jabbed it into the right spot in their shoulder to gain A-pewter at a slightly reduced level of potency (for as long as it had been outside of blood). So if you wanted A-pewter and knew where to put the spike and knew Spook was carrying one, you could also have targeted him for a spike heist while he was asleep instead of killing yourself a Pewterarm, which could prove more challenging... Or waiting to run up quick and retrieve it when Spook ditched it. But let's say someone were to hemalurgically kill Spook with a spike through the heart while he was carrying that spike. Would that hemalurgist have a choice of stealing either his A-tin or "his" A-pewter, as that ability was "stapled" onto his soul, and you were in the act of tearing it apart with hemalurgy? If not - if it would only work to steal what was "original" to a soul, as distinct from any "added on bits" of soul via hemalurgy, as the bit was actually resident in the "staple" - what does that imply then for a kandra, whose sapience, consciousness, and identity are derived from spikes made from two other people? I mean, recall in Mistborn: Secret History when Kelsier talks to an obligator who had been turned into a koloss. He was human again in the CR, implying the "added on" bits had fallen away upon his death. Well then, what happens to a kandra when they die and go to the Cognitive Realm? (And doesn't Harmony say to Wax that he spoke to Paalm after she killed herself, and that she said to look after him (Wax)? I guess the "elevation" of the mistwraith to sapience builds on the "soul" of the mistwraith.) Oh, and one more thought -- could you take four Inquisitors and make a Inkolossitor? Or four koloss and make a kokolossloss?

Yeah, if you read closely, Wax is calling him a "metalborn" in Ch. 4 of Bands of Mourning after VenDell had given his little lecture about the Metallic Arts, including hemalurgy, and discussing the nature of kandra Blessings as an expression of hemalurgy. And he includes MeLaan in that reckoning, who is already going with them ("we could use another Metalborn"). In a kandra's case it really is being "metalborn", because they consider the Blessings as conferring sapience and identity to a mistwraith, i.e., being born. And VenDell's reaction is not upset at being called one, he is objecting to "going into the field" the way MeLaan is. That's not his bag, baby!

Indeed. You obviously need sixteen kittens and cats, and a ferret or something named Hoid!

So, a chicken that was larger, stronger, driven to kill, yet dumber than an ordinary chicken... What I've always wondered about that comment, that hemalurgy works with animals, is if that meant creating chimeric koloss was possible. Instead of four people => koloss, what about using three people and a horse? A centaur koloss? And is that what we see in the kandra Homeland in Shadows of Self?

Ahh... I forgot that. We know Dalinar got his boon directly from Cultivation, as did Taravangian, yeah? So if it's the direct touch of Cultivation that makes one "smell" like the Nightwatcher to Lift, that would indeed be something that could happen.

What do you mean here?

Well, in the Christianity parallel, Kelsier the Survivor of Death did in fact have a Second Coming where he went to the Southern Hemisphere and got all Savior-like all over again. So... Sovereignism? Whatever the Southern Scadrians call "the Jaggenmire" and their reverence for Metalborn as having "little slivers of God"?

The usual answer is, he hadn't figured out how to do it yet...? Though Ruin should have known all about it, being a god and all and connected enough to Feruchemy to be able to corrupt copperminds, and after having about a thousand years to observe how Rashek did it. In the end, I think there is an element to Ruin that we saw in Rashek as TLR, who didn't just "compound his way to immediate victory" against Vin and Marsh in his throne room. Why not? He wanted to savor the experience, and to monologue and gloat while doing so. He didn't just want to destroy Scadrial, he wanted to rub it in Vin and Elend's faces that they'd tried so, so hard to stop him, but he had played them all from the beginning. Not just to defeat them, but to ruin them.

I suppose Soothing/Rioting an NPC would be doable, but not for another human controlled player in the VR (I'm just thinking ahead). It would be funny if the game had built-in blocks on certain actions, or automatic actions, on the part of a human controlled player due to Soothing/Rioting. It'd be a little like a throwback to the old text-based Infocom games.

Indeed, and that's not to mention the free-form nature of Commands - some element of the phrasing, plus mental imagery and Intent, are all part of it. To be playable there would have to be some kind of menu or list of supported Commands, right? Which would be fun, but not really the "feel" of what Awakening is like. Anything involving more subtle and less visible/tangible things, like Soothing/Rioting, would be hard to do in VR as well.

I think they're Odium's equivalent to the Heralds: limited in number, perhaps even fixed by the Oathpact, or whatever made it so that there were ten Heralds and not more. Like the Heralds, they are especially powerful lieutenants who were originally mortal (peering into the Cognitive Realm, Venli sees their enormous spirits are "barely recognizable as singers" - which means they are still recognizable as singers, but heavily modified), and who can be destroyed physically but then can later resume physical form again. Odium referred to two of them by name at Thaylen Fields. One of them was killed by Szeth with Nightblood, short-circuiting the cycle of its returning to the CR and being able to form again later, which shocks Team Odium. Perhaps this factors into how Moash was given that golden-white dagger to kill Jezrien? The obvious question has always been, if Odium could procure such a weapon that could short-circuit a Herald's rebirth cycle for a "final death", why only then when there have been so many Desolations before? Perhaps it was only possible with the removal of a Thunderclast spirit from the board. And requiring a human to do it (instead of a singer) could also be part of the "fine print" of the Oathpact, i.e., the Fused all have voidspren in them and as such, are not allowed to do something that would fully destroy a Herald (just as the Heralds and Radiants could not truly destroy the Thunderclasts in the past).

I agree that the most likely Option #1 is just that: Option #2: She's faking mental illness to get out of something unpleasant, which is attractive to a Cryptic and she'll be another Lightweaver who somewhere way, way down the line gets outed by Pattern on that point, to her deep embarrassment (like Shallan getting outed by Kaladin as a "Horneater princess" when she first arrived to Dalinar's camp).

Well they would have lots of time to see/identify stuff, because from their perspective everybody and everything else just kind of freezes while they move at normal speed. That's why Wayne's speed bubble was able to mostly cancel out Bleeder's steelrunning (with her outside the bubble); she was tapping at a rate equal or not much faster than however high Wayne was flaring his bendalloy. The problem, physics-wise, would be in how a Steelrunner can touch or grab things at high speed without releasing the metalmind. A "speed bubble" makes the physics of it all easier, because it separates the frames of reference; you're either in the bubble or outside of it, and crossing the frame's boundary does weird stuff. The easy, "c'mon this is fiction so don't think so hard about it" answer would be is a kind of tactile speed field - since anything they're wearing or carrying on their person is obviously going with them at the same speed, or their clothes would have strange things happen, the same gets extended to anything they reach out and touch. That's why Marasi tapping speed from the BoM in the airship was able to move so fast she produced a sonic boom, yet also be able to grab metal vials from the belts or hands of Telsin and the various Allomancer guards around her. Otherwise it should have been similar to standing still and trying to grab a vial flying past you at over Mach 1 - your hand would probably get damaged.