robardin

Whoa! #7 blew my mind!!!

Exactly. And he'd be like the Stormfather, in any case. "I am the Survivor! I will not be bound in such a way as to kill me!" I think it would involve dancing. And afterward, you could infer the bonding by the way they use their walk, and if they have no time to talk.

The religions in my portfolio weren't useless after all... None of them were. They weren't all true. But they all had truth. As someone who is presently agnostic but has spent a lot of time researching most of the world's major religions, dead and alive, in a search for meaning, this really hit home. I didn't think Sanderson could turn up the volume on the feel-o-meter with the Immortal Words, past Teft's summary of it in the chasms: "Journey before destination. ... In the end, all men die. How you lived will be far more important to the Almighty than what you accomplished." And then Dalinar had to go there: "YOU CANNOT HAVE MY PAIN! ... If I pretend I didn't do those things, it means I can't have grown to become someone else. Journey before destination. It cannot be a journey if it doesn't have a beginning."

Well, Suit straight up said he'd left Wax for dead when he got back to the airships via Steelpush, right before Marasi figured out about the spearhead being the real BoM. Inasmuch as Harmony gave Marasi a hint, it would probably be to remind her what she knew already from dealing firsthand with Miles Hundredlives, that a goldmind could heal even deadly wounds if enough consciousness remained in a person to tap it and the goldmind were Invested enough, which the Bands would allow... If she got it to Wax as quickly as possible.

I don't think the soul of a child in the Cosmere is a combination from the souls of its parents - I doubt the parents are losing pieces of their souls when they have children! Whatever the "spark of life" is, Cosmere-speaking of course, it's (a) related to or composed of Investiture and (b) something related to the Spiritual Realm, Identity, consciousness, and the Beyond. Most people in the Cosmere are descended from pre-Shattering populations, so whatever mechanism is in place to implant that spark into people as they're born was already there when various Shards began tinkering or linking up with it for their local populations. The deepest Connection would be from Preservation to Scadrians, who were created from nothing by the concerted action of him and Ruin, and to who he "gave more of himself" to kickstart the Spark of Life engine.

Yabbut Brandon doesn't have to know. It's the kandra who have to know, and they have had plenty of time to practice! Maybe this is why they're not allowed to go out on missions until they're over 300 years old!

Opened opened, or after-the-prologue opened? Because every Stormlight book in the first five-book arc, at least, has opened with another person's POV from the banquet when Szeth killed Gavilar. Not counting the prologue prologue to TWoK which was the breaking of the Oathpact.

naaaah.

I was going to jump in to say something like this: perhaps "original Elantrians" would better be termed "proto-Elantrians", or "Early Arelonians". Remember, to the people of Arelon, before the Reod which caused the disruption in how new Elantrians taken by the Shaod were now formed, an "Elantrian" was someone (a) invariably born in or very near to Arelon, (b) taken by the Shaod, a transformation into a silvery being, who (c) could then draw Aons and channel AonDor through them to do powerful magics that (d) were centered around, and amplified by, being done in or near the city of Elantris (and correspondingly weakened by being done at a distance from Elantris). But the people who are now the native population of Arelon, such as Raoden, arrived from elsewhere, finding an empty and abandoned city. This included the four "gate cities" around Elantris. Only after a generation of living in and near Elantris did the Aonic newcomers begin to have some of their now-natively-born children taken by the Shaod. Who built Elantris? It's formed as a giant Aon Ela ("center"), which is obviously no accident given that AonDor represents channeling the Dor through an Aon. One of Brandon's annotations to Elantris states that the city was built by people who knew and used Aons and AonDor to do so: "The Aons had to exist before Elantris – otherwise, the original Elantrians wouldn’t have known the shape to make the city. Their study of AonDor taught them a method for amplifying Aon power". But if those builders were Elantrians the way that Raoden and friends are now - deathless, silvery, extremely powerful while in Arelon, and even more so after constructing the giant Aon Ela of Elantris and dwelling therein - and seeing how such Elantrians led and ruled over Arelon in the years leading up to the Reod, what happened to them? Could whatever happened to them, happen to Raoden's cast of Elantrians? To address the OP, maybe this is what happens when the celiing on the number of "Elantrians" his been hit... Some kind of an en masse "leveling up" or a reset? (That latter sounds bad... Like a computer program overflowing an integer counter's capacity?) Further questions I have about Elantrians in general: Are the "Ire" we see in Mistborn: Secret History Elantrians "Early Arelonians"? We have a WoB that they pre-date the Reod, but by how much? Not everyone is taken by the Shaod - so what happened to the non-Shaoded people of Early Arelon, such that the entire land was empty when they arrived? Or did the Shaod work differently back then, and everybody WAS an "Elantrian"? How did the Aonic newcomers learn the Aons and their functions and meanings, if they are linked to Arelon but they arrived from elsewhere to an empty city/land? Their ethnonym, the name they now call themselves, is "Aonic", so is that something they adopted only after arriving to Elantris/in Arelon and learning about Aons and AonDor?

Don't forget to breathe.... And Stormlight Archive greatly rewards re-reading. Take some time to digest each book. I would even recommend re-reading each book before reading the next one (i.e., read The Way of Kings, get a day or two of sleep, then read it again before reading Words of Radiance), but I know that's probably not going to happen

I wonder how this will translate to the screen, especially if compressed down to movie length run time instead of some long serialized show format. More than the screenplay aspect, I'd worry about the directorial aspect in terms of this being pulled off successfully. So much of how Allomancy is used is internal to the character and described with POV passages in the books and would not easily be "demonstrated" visually and externally, and constant voiceovers would be awful. It's a big part of what made the Dune movie from the 1980s incomprehensible to people watching it who had never read the books - it made no sense without the expository POV thoughts from the characters.

Well there's no need to interfere or invade Roshar at all, if that were the goal, as Honor himself seemed to think that's where things were headed there anyway!

Well, yes. If you're saying the Roman Legions, without magical powerups, invade a surprised Final Empire, of course there will be koloss held in reserve. I don't think a phalanx formation helps so much with koloss. And you forget the biggest reserve weapon the Final Empire has got, in any pinch: The Lord Ruler. Who could kill tirelessly and endlessly, if he wanted to. He could decimate, then re-decimate and re-re-decimate, entire legions by himself. Per the Alethi maxim, of course, he couldn't hold ground by dint of his awesome power alone in terms of being a conquering or ruling force, but he certainly could destroy an invading force as a defensive power of territory he already controlled. And unlike with Roshar, the Romans wouldn't be able to benefit from the local magic system, unless they managed to recruit Metalborn to their cause after arriving. Which in the Final Empire would likely mean finding the quite rare skaa Mistings and Keepers, as the nobility would probably align with TLR as they already form the ruling class. Most skaa Mistings seem to have hidden out in Luthadel, where the large number of legit Allomancers in the city shielded them from easy detection by the Steel Ministry, and that's going to be the LAST place that would fall in the Final Empire. Well we need to set the goals here. Nukes are the proverbial (and literal) "nuclear option" - it's the scorched and salted earth option. Is the goal here to subdue and conquer, to leave the region and the people already there usable as resources afterward, or to eliminate as a threat, i.e., creating a barren buffer zone of death is an acceptable outcome? Also, are we positing an invasion of Roshar by our modern conventional military, with the goal of occupation and conquest rather than destruction, with or without the Parshendi as an element? Because it would be pretty interesting if in the middle of the Final Desolation, there was a reason for the Fused and the Radiants to temporarily band together to repel an even more foreign invasion. "You think we cannot 'hear Roshar'? These guys aren't even FROM Roshar!"

Since at least some Inquisitors (made from Seekers or Mistborn like Marsh) were extra-strong when burning bronze and could break through equal-era copperclouds, it probably wasn't a matter of strength or range but opportunity and familiarity. Vin had to train to distinguish Allomantic pulses from each other, so perhaps the pulsing from tapping a metalmind is similar enough to an Allomantic pulse that it's difficult to pick out. Plus, I'd assume a Seeker could only really detect tapping, not filling a metalmind - or at least much more easily, since you can tap a metalmind at a multiple but can only fill at a relatively low base rate. Allomancers tend to burn their metals for a far longer period of time than a Feruchemist would tap their metalmind (especially a Keeper trying to avoid the attention of the Inquisitors, as opposed to an open use of Feruchemy as Sazed and Tindwyl do after TLR's fall, in the defense of Elendel against the koloss). We see Sazed spending far more time filling his metalminds than he does tapping them, since the biggest advantages generally come from a brief but heavy tap (pewter, steel, gold, iron, zincminds) than a low, steady draw (probably of a brassmind or bronzemind, maybe tinmind). Put that all together and even if certain Inquisitors were magically equipped to Seek out Feruchemists, they were untrained as to how their pulses would sound or feel, their targets were far fewer in number than Allomancers, and the Keepers were actively working to minimize noticeable use of their Metalborn powers by everybody, not just Seekers and Inquisitors. I mean, if TLR really cared to have them find Feruchemists, like it was Priority #1, he'd let them train by Seeking on him while he tapped various metalminds in sequence. But that would mean revealing the nature of his "divine" power. Besides, I have the feeling that he didn't really want to exterminate Feruchemy in the Terris population, just suppress and control it to a large degree. The kandra knew about the Keepers, so if they truly served the Father as their first loyalty, per the First Contract, then couldn't they have been required to snitch out whatever Keepers they learned of? Like OreSeur as Renoux serving a Contract for Kelsier, who knew about Sazed's nature. It was already skirting the limits of the First Contract to work for someone whose goal was to destroy their Father, but as KanPaar noted, they had no expectation that "this one" would actually succeed in such a seemingly ridiculous and impossible a goal "where other's hadn't" (implying others had employed kandra for similar reasons in the past, and hey, their atium's as good as anybody else's). But if TLR had had a standing order to all kandra on assignment to report back to him on any Feruchemists they found while working under cover (without blowing their cover), they'd have had to do it. And "Lord Renoux" could certainly have written an anonymous tip to the Steel Ministry that "Steward Sazed is a Keeper". So it stands to reason Rashek never went that far in his pursuit of identifying Feruchemists, because he didn't feel like he had to, and didn't really want to. He could have trained his Inquisitors better, but he didn't; he could have had all the kandra serving as spies with a constant background mission to find them, but didn't. Heck, the "Terris breeding program" wasn't even his idea. It was in the 5th or 6th century of his rule that the Steel Ministry conceived of it. Per Sazed, the Keepers were founded in the second or third century after Rashek's Ascension, as his "purges" of the Terris were growing "quite violent", before the breeding programs were begun; and then in Yomen's talk with Elend when he crashes his ball at Fadrex City, the subject of the history and the treatmen of the Terris in the Final Empire comes up as a topic: As we often saw with Rashek/TLR, his cruel and dominating side could still war with another side that wanted to shelter and preserve people, especially his own Terris people who held an "honored" if subjugated role in the Final Empire, so long as they obeyed and would submit. Also part of his megalomania was that he didn't do as much as he could do all the time, because undying omnipotence is boring, I guess, and limiting himself for fun became a habit. Like how he could have immediately squashed Marsh, Sazed, and Vin a zillion different ways in his throne room, but took the time to beat them up and monologue at them long enough for Vin to figure things out and draw on the mists (not to mention being the reason she got her earring Pushed out).

I would guess that a Mistborn boosting their A-bronze Seeker sense with A-tin might elevate the range of their power (you still get the same input, but with much greater sensitivity to subtle signals within it) but not its actual level of power (needed to overcome an Investiture barrier like a coppercloud, which would come from something like flaring the metal). So, no breaking copperclouds with that trick (which Mistborn surely would have noticed over a thousand years, especially Kelsier), but in terms of Vin being able to flare-and-double-Seek around Shan Elariel's coppercloud from across a fair distance, several roofs away, her already flaring tin when she did so (to try to spot them visually ) might well have helped.

Wow that's a doozy. I just checked the text in my Kindle version of Mistborn Era 1 (my HB books being at home), and it reads: "She had asked one of Elend's seekers to burn bronze, and he had claimed to hear nothing from the north." So it was detected and fixed later, but after the audiobook was recorded, and I suspect my HB book might have the error as well (depending on what print run it had). I have noticed a few other "wrong metal burned" types of errors in Mistborn in previous read-throughs. Most memorably, in my version of Alloy of Law, both my print and Kindle copies actually (I just checked the latter one on my phone), cadmium got mixed up with chromium in a key place: Marasi mentions how chromium burned much more slowly than bendalloy in comparing her Allomantic ability with Wayne's, who also says she could "burn some chromium and poof!" skip over some boring time. Since both chromium and cadmium are "new" Allomantic metals in Alloy of Law (we never saw them used in the original Misborn trilogy), and because this was literally the first time in AoL that she mentions what metal it is she burns to be a Pulser (in Chapter 12), it confused me a ton later when I kept reading - in later books, years later, not even in Alloy of Law - about how chromium Allomancers were Leechers, and Marasi talking about having cadmium around to burn. ("But, but, but dosn't Marasi burn chromium? -- *flip flip* Yeah, she totally does! And Wayne says it too! I guess that was a typo?!") The only clues that something was amiss was (a) the notes in the back, in the Ars Arcana, have it right, and (b) Wayne commenting how "bismuth and cadmium aren't the kinds of metals you find in a corner store" out in the Roughs, and of course if I looked up bendalloy IRL I'd find it was an alloy including cadmium, not chromium.

There's one more clue about Helaran that we have, though it is only a suspicion: in the scene in WoR when Szeth comes up to Taravangian in Jah Keved to tell him that he had failed to kill Dalinar because of someone who was a Surgebinder and seemed Radiant (i.e., that the reason he had been made Truthless might have been wrong), Mr. T first thinks it was Jasnah. Then, when Szeth says "I fought him", he double-takes, as he had not known about any male Surgebinders at the Alethi warcamps. Later, conferring with Adrotagia as to who this Surgebinder with Kholin might be, she asks, "Jasnah's ward?" to which Taravangian responds, "no, a male," after reflecting: "They had been startled when that one arrived on the Shattered Plains. Already they hypothesized that the girl had been trained. If not by Jasnah, then by the girl's brother, before his death." So the Diagram knew Jasnah and Shallan had bonded spren, were surprised about Kaladin, and at least suspected if not outright believed or knew that Helaran had been one as well.

What a way to kick off his quest for his Fourth Ideal: to be ordered by Dalinar, whose will he swore to follow for his Third Ideal, to remain in prison. I guess it's equivalent to what he said to Kaladin after Elhokar set him to prison for challenging Amaram. "If I'd ordered you to guard a room for a week, would you have done it? Then consider this your duty. Guard this room." And yes, the most likely reason Szeth would be imprisoned would be for murder. Of like, lots and lots of people. How the whole Taravangian-had-my-Oathstone, but-I-was-made-Truthless-under-false-pretenses thing would play out is completely up in the air.

This, plus the occasionally reference the multiple times that there were "Shin invasions" when they attempted to conquer all of Roshar, during the "Era of Solitude" (which according to "modern" Vorinism, was after Aharietam but before the Recreance and the fall of the Knights Radiant). During which invasions, the Shin wielded the Honorblades and the Surges they granted - which is doubly interesting, because if the Vorinism timeline is at least that accurate about the "Era of Solitude", that implies the Radiants fought Surgebinder to Surgebinder against Shin Honorblade wielders, i.e., had irrefutable evidence that the Heralds had abandoned the Oathpact even though the spren were still bonding humans with the Five Ideals for each Order, and as they fought Voidbinders (wouldn't that have caused some head-scratching?). It could be something like that that fed into the Recreance. The Stormfather recalls it as Honor already dying, and "instead of supporting that generation of Knights" he "raved about the Dawnshards" - but something like "hey, Jezrien and the other Heralds told us we'd won for good, yet here we are fighting Voidbringers and Unmade in another Desolation anyway, what is going on exactly?" could have contributed as well.

I say, the best candidate for being king (leader) is the man who is capable of the role, but has not actively sought it out. That means... Rock!

I'm with her, too! A Radiant of at least the Fourth Ideal, or go home! Wait, that logic might mean having to vote for Nalan. Er... Fully living human Radiant of at least the Fourth Ideal?

Yes, it makes sense that A-pewter healing "is stopped" by aluminum in a similar way as F-gold healing is, inasmuch as aluminum is acting as a disruptor for the flow of Investiture to that physical area. That doesn't mean that the two would be producing the same result, as they operate on different mechanics (which it seems you agree with). Vin "heals faster" than she should, yes. But the key word there is "healing". "Regeneration" of a limb is not healing, since nobody regrows missing body parts naturally. You are right in that we have not seen any definitive action or scene in any Mistborn book that would confirm or absolutely refute the idea of "A-pewter regeneration", so there's no point in arguing about it except to say, that's how I think it "should" work (only Brandon's word here would be canon, and even then, he could change his mind up until the time he put it in a published work). There is certainly room for a middle ground, though, for the effect of A-pewter as I conceive of it. For example, per my conception, if you gouged out a Pewterarm's eyes they'd be blind with no way to recover, unless they could possibly re-insert their eyeballs soon enough that some kind of "healing" could take place. But what about someone getting their eyes burned with a hot iron? I'd accept that the eyes could "heal" from the burning with A-pewter, in a way that would go beyond the ordinary ability of a person to heal from it.

Hey hey, I've said it before and I'll say it again: Allomantic electrum is underrated! One of my preferred non-Compounding Twinborn pairings would be A-electrum with F-zinc! And Brandon agrees: "While the scope of an electrum shadow is very limited, it could be useful in many situations. Like if you were playing tennis, you’d be able to look at your shadow and tell if you managed to hit the ball or not, and adjust accordingly. That would still take a lot of practice to master, but it could be very effective." That's not quite the same as burning atium, but a skilled Electrum burner could learn to optimize the results of their own actions based on potential outcomes (though not to predict/react to someone else's future actions).

Magical Cosmere "Healing" a la F-gold, the Surge of Progression, or (presumably) SuperBreath healing from a Returned or the appropriate Aon in Elantris, are a kind of syncing up of the Physical body based on the Spiritual and Cognitive ideal templates held by the person. That's not what pewter is described and see as doing, in terms of healing. It's consistently seen and shown to be an increase in the body's natural function, but to "top of human ability" and with an accelerated healing factor. So Vin, with a pewter flare, can punch like Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (the guy who plays The Mountain on Game of Thrones), or walk a tightrope like Philippe Petit, and so on. And she can recover from a wound that would be recoverable from in time, in a shorter amount of time. So she could recover from multiple broken bones and a gut slash from an Inquisitor after a week or two of resting with pewter, and Elend could survive and then recover from a gut slash with pewter, but Shan Elariel and Tarson still died from lethal wounds that pewter could not overcome (two stabs through the heart and a bullet through the brain, respectively), but either Stormlight or tapping a large enough goldmind would have done.

That's true... Allomantic pewter accelerates one's physical healing in a similar way as it increases one's stamina, agility, and strength. So recovering from very serious injuries, including gut slashes or broken bones at the hands of an Inquisitor, only takes Vin a week or two, with access to pewter. You recover to the top of your ability, and at a faster rate. But it's not like you become Wolverine, who has a regeneration factor, not just a healing factor. No amount of pewter flaring would cause Ham to regrow a severed arm. Though I wonder if reattachment surgery would work a lot better for a Pewterarm, in terms of fully or maximally recovering use of a severed limb that was sewn back on quickly enough.