Fatling

That's true, that's true. Like Lopen is a popular character, but Brandon has indicated that he will probably never play anything more than a minor role. As for removing major viewpoint characters, I agree it wouldn't make sense to get rid of them because of the role they do/don't play in the story. But that doesn't rule out getting rid of major viewpoint characters altogether- for instance, losing that character could turn out to be a major part of another character's arc. Most of the time authors write minor roles for characters like that, but writing them as major viewpoint characters allows the reader to feel a sense of loss along with the other characters (and personally I like it when authors do this). As I said, I doubt this for Adolin's case, especially hearing now that Brandon intends for him to live on, but back when I didn't know that seemed plausible that Adolin could fill that role of a likeable character dying as part of the other major characters' arcs. But I guess Adolin has moved up in the world

Huh, I hadn't heard that before, about Adolin's arc being bigger than Szeth's. It's true I guess that Adolin is more compelling than Szeth (in my opinion). Also, I didn't realize PoD was so unpopular, I actually really liked what Jordan did. I guess I just have a weird taste. Anyway, my strategy is to roll with whatever the author wrote. I like speculating about what's going to happen, but it's never occured to me to protest what the author has written. Given Aether's comments, maybe I should be more of an activist instead of sitting back and just watching what happens

Sorry this is a little late but I was scrolling through and this caught my attention- What compelling evidence is there that Adolin isn't going to die? Personally I din't really expect him to die, I'm just curious. I do think he could disappear for a while, though, like he could (accurately) be accused of killing Sadeas and run away and not be seen for a while. It would be like WOT spoilers

Look watch now in Oathbringer that will be the big plot twist- a bunch of the parshendi will end up with shardblades and form a giant shard-chasmfiend (since they're already naturally good at fighting together)... *fondly imagining large figure appearing on the horizon much to the surprise of several viewpoint characters*

Maybe Nightblood takes investiture to be evil, so consuming investiture is how he fulfills his original charge to "destroy evil". If that were the case then he would indeed need to destroy it. And yeah I would agree that Nightblood is destroying investiture by breaking it down so it isn't investiture any more... though I don't know what it would be after it has been broken down. It seems like Nightblood has a turns matter into creepy smoke. Near the end of chapter 56 of Warbreaker: Maybe investiture is transformed into the nasty liquid mentioned in the same chapter: Sorry, I just realized that's kind of a lot of quote boxes

Yeah, I'm coming to feel like this graphic novel was kind of akin to like a movie adaption of a book, which are usually mediocre at best. There's a great deal of detail, mainly about what's going on in the characters' minds, that I didn't catch until I read the prose. In fact, if you had asked me, I wouldn't have even been able to really summarize the plot after the first time I read the graphic novel. On the other hand I want to give the artists some credit, as they clearly made a valiant effort to do justice to the coolness of Brandon's world. I actually kind of liked the way sand mastery looked in the graphic novel. Also, I try to approach graphic novels with a grain of salt, because I haven't really read that many. Maybe someone who is more familiar with the medium would appreciate White Sand more than me. I do feel that a graphic novel would have turned out better if Brandon had written it with the intention of it becoming a graphic novel to begin with. To go back to the movie analogy, take J. K. Rowling. She wrote Harry Potter as books (which were generally well liked) and the movies were (in my humble opinion) not that great. Then she wrote Fantastic Beasts with the intention of it being a movie and I liked it a lot more than I did the Harry Potter movies. So if Brandon had written this, knowing it would be a graphic novel, it might have been recieved better. But he wrote it as a book and then some artists tried to turn it into a graphic novel. Like, the minds of artists and the minds of writers work differently, just like the minds of movie directors are different from the minds of writers (and artists). Some things that are really intense in books look real lame in a movie, and some things that look really neat in a movie are super cheesy in a book. So I guess it's the same with graphic novels.

Yeah that was exactly what I thought. And yes that's in the graphic novel. I'm really worried it's an error that the artists made for dramatic flair and then it slipped past the editors

I've been perplexed by this for some time and then it occured to me that maybe here was the right place to get an answer. There's plenty of White Sand spoilers here. So early in the book our good man Kenton overmasters where the Kerztians attack the sand masters. Then a while later while being attacked by another Kerztian he discovers, much to his alarm, that he has lost his sand mastery. Later on he regains his sand mastery. So I always assumed that he temporarily lost the ability to master sand as a consequence of overmastering. But then I discovered something really weird: Kenton masters sand once after he overmasters but before he regains his powers. The scene occurs in the middle of chapter 3. Khriss asks Kenton how he knows where to travel and he says "magic!" while mastering a little bit of sand in his hand, then explains that he navigates by the position of the sun in the sky. So... did he not lose his power when he overmastered? And if so, what other explanation is there for his losing his power? Hopefully someone has a good answer for this, because I've been thinking about it for a while and come to no conclusions

Oh, that's good, now I'm feeling hopeful. I'm also embarrassed that it took me this long to notice the post

I'll post it here too, since this is another popular place for sharders to be looking In the "unpublished works" tab there's now a thread where you can post and Brandon's staff will pm you Aether of Night (they say within a day, but I don't know if that will be the case with the zillion zillion people that have requested). Anyway, I looked through all 34 pages and noticed most of the people posting were new members but it seemed like there weren't many regular members posting, so I felt like it was my moral obligation to announce this in a more well trafficked place. Maybe this is old news to you, but hopefully it's helpful for some people

In the "unpublished works" tab there's now a thread where you can post and Brandon's staff will pm you Aether of Night (they say within a day, but I don't know if that will be the case with the zillion zillion people that have requested). Anyway, I looked through all 34 pages and noticed most of the people posting were new members but it seemed like there weren't many regular members posting, so I felt like it was my moral obligation to announce this in a more well trafficked place. Maybe this is old news to you, but hopefully it's helpful for some people

So since the nature of the discussion is about what determines the nature of investiture and its variety in the cosmere, the question in my mind is- why one week? Such a convenient period of time seems indicative to me that the nature of investure must be somewhat related to the belief of its wielder (because otherwise the period of time would be arbitrarily random). But since the belief of the wielder is in the domain of the cognitive realm (probably), I would agree that the 'physical realm stapling' thing isn't a thing, it just depends on the Shard and the invested individual, like Endowment's the one that decided you have to pay breath to stay alive and collective humanity decided on the going rate of one breath per week. Now that I'm writing this it sounds a lot more absurd than it did in my head, but hey, if you never guess you will never come closer to getting it right (as if the cosmere's true nature is now one of those great truths of life that we can attain to if we are so diligent as to think about it for long enough)

I will concede that the word mistake could be viewed as a gross understatement- in fact I will concede that it is a gross understatement to avoid a battle of semantics. In my prior post I explored the undesirable consequences of what would happen if Adolin carries on in a "business as usual" sort of way. It would consume him. In your post you explored the undesirable consequences of his confessing, or owning the problem. I guess to me the question of Adolin's morality really comes down to a question of "what will he do next?" And the moral argument is "what should Adolin do?" He could continue to pretend he has nothing to do with Sadeas' murder and try to justify his actions to himself (which would end poorly in the long run, I think we can agree). He could confess his actions and suffer whatever penalty the law inflicts upon him, which would most likely be execution. Both of these kind of leave a bad taste in my mouth. You're right that there isn't much honor in dying because of Sadeas. We could propose any number of fantastic alternative solutions that would fall between these two, a sort of compromise. Something where he wouldn't have to endure a lengthy and political trial that would kill many of the readers before he met his demise. Something where he could show himself that he is no longer the same man as the one that killed Sadeas, so he can leave that behind him. I'll leave it up to Brandon to come up with something clever, but I feel like it has to be something like that. On the matter of Adolin cracking under pressure, you're totally right. He's in a situation where there's too much being asked of him and really nothing to show for his efforts. He needs a situation where it is rewarding to do hard things, and right now it isn't very rewarding. I think that's why he allowed himself to kill Sadeas, because there had been this question in his head of "does it matter what I do?" and by killing Sadeas he was doing something that made a difference. I mean, he wasn't thinking that while he killed him, but that was kind of the thought process that led to this situation.

So this isn't really so much of a typo as what just seems like a sequential error to me. It's in the middle of chapter three where Khriss asks Kenton how he knows what direction to go in and he answers "magic!" and then proceeds to explain navigation using the sun. In that panel he holds up his hand and masters sand. I always assumed he overmastered during the battle with the Kerztians, right? But then he sand masters here and then like ten pages later a few Kerztians attack him and suddenly he doesn't have sand mastery because he overmastered. Am I missing some special thing here that Brandon would RAFO or is this just an error?

Granted, but of course naturally this deflates the entire economy and all your money becomes worthless. And that's not your bane, that's just the natural consequence of gaining your boon. Your bane is that you become so unpleasant that you can't find anyone who is willing to sell anything to you. Another money related wish, I wish I always had exact change for whatever I needed to pay for (and enough for tax too). edit: spelling

So this isn't from Roshar, but there's a similar idea among the Kerztians in Taldain. From White Sand, Kenton says this right after he and Khriss & company are attacked by the Kerztians (chapter 4) This could also be more evidence of a migration from Taldain to Roshar too

Hard to say, hard to say... as of right now I don't know if we really know much of anything from before the shattering. Were I given to speculate I would say that the number sixteen was important even before Adonalsium shattered, but that's literally completely baseless guessing

Funny that, Vivenna is one of my favorite characters. Another one of my favorites is Kenton. I like Vivenna because she is able to be honest with herself without getting confused. I like Kenton because of his ingenuity and his habitual pestering of Khriss. Least favorite characters... hmm... well, I have a low opinion of Shallan too, who is self-aware, but shallow in her self-perception. And she's really big into being an artist. One thing I do like about her though is that she is good at interacting pleasantly with other people without giving too much information about herself. I'm having a hard time putting characters in different stories. It would be neat to see Hoid in some of these different worlds... oh wait. Haha, sorry, I couldn't resist. I do think it will be cool if Vivenna shows up on Roshar, though, so I'm happy about that being plausible

So to me killing Sadeas was a mistake. Interestingly, I think Adolin believes it was a mistake, because what does he do after he kills Sadeas? He hides the evidence and pretends like it didn't happen. If he really believed that what he had done was right, he should have owned it. Hiding leads to shame, shame leads to blame, blame leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side. Just imagine I said that in a Yoda voice. But anyway, I think that if Adolin doesn't own his actions, he's making an even worse mistake than that of murdering Sadeas, because by doing so he's killing someome much better than Sadeas- himself. Brandon is good about making his characters dynamic, not static, so even if Adolin has done good things in the past (and he has), that won't prevent this mistake from consuming him if he can't move on (and from what I've seen of Adolin there might be hope for him to move on. If it were Kaladin, maybe not so much)

I listened to elantris as an audiobook and Sarene had the most annoyingest voice ever. It was perfect for her personality. So yeah, don't love elantris, especially because I read it after reading a lot of the really good cosmere books. I would point out that the question is about the least favorite story, not book. Because my least favorite book would be white sand, but assuming the graphic novels at least mostly follow the prose story, I like the story, just not book's graphic-novelhood. And I'm trying to like the graphic novel better, though it is kind of hard

So the most tenuous parts to me are about what's going on with the heralds when they go off to be tortured. I mean, it makes sense on a lot of levels and I haven't really thought about it much, but I've always assumed that the heralds being tortured was actually a messed up way to break the heralds again and again and thereby increase their power ("breaking" or "snapping" due to some trauma, and then suddenly gaining powers is obviously a common theme in the Cosmere). As to who would be doing such a thing, I have no idea (as I said, not very well thought out, just kind of the explanation I had always gone with). It also rings a little bit off for Brandon to cast Odium as "bad guy torturing heroes" just because he tends to write less traditional villains or at least qualifies the things they do to some degree. If Odium was trying to get the heralds to leave, it seems weird to me that he woulf have power to torture them but wouldn't have power to expel them. On the other hand, this is actually a great explanation of what's going on with Damnation, and I really like it because of that. I also like the thoughts on Honor and Cultivation and what's going on with them, most of that makes a lot of sense to me. And even if none of the theory turns out to be true, good job on compiling all those WoB and quotes

Hi all, I know a lot of people on this forum know more about computers than me and I've been having questions about privacy on computers. It seems to me that both Macs and Windows are taking in more and more information about pretty much everything that is done on them, and it doesn't really seem like that trend will change any time soon. I'm philosophically opposed to that, so I was thinking of switching to linux or maybe buying an old laptop and trying out a few different linux distros to see how that was. So that's my first question, is linux really that much more private than mac or windows? It's open source, but I don't know whether or not it collects data on users. My second question is about internet security and privacy. As far as I can tell there's no way to really use the internet without having some data collected on you. Are there browsers that are better about that than others, or are they all pretty much the same? Also, are vpns really all that helpful? I know there are varying levels of vpn quality, but I'm still kind of trying to wrap my head around what vpn actually does. Is vpn more for security, like protection against viruses and malware, or is it more to prevent sites from taking in data about you? Also if you have any other useful information about protecting privacy (and also security) put it here. To me privacy is more important than performance or ease of use, and it's kind of hard to find helpful information that doesn't go over my head. I don't feel super safe using the internet or using computers in general, it's like that constant question of whether or not the computer is gathering/sending information about me that I'm not aware of Thanks in advance for your help!

Hmm maybe shards can be used in other ways, like it could be a shard tuning fork... and then when you sound it it kills people! Or it just has perfect pitch

With any of those, though you would have to have a good aim (last I checked, the spren can't control its trajectory in shard form, right?). Also, I personally like the idea of a shard-lasso. I'm not sure how it would kill anyone, though

Actually you can have two separate liquid phases in equilibrium, like you pour one chemical into another and it separates into two phases, one that's like 10% the one chemical and the other that's like 80% that same chemical. Kinda cool. Sorry, that's like a chem-e thing, it caught my eye while I was reading through this. Maybe that's what the Stormfather-Tanavast is like, like if they separate one will be 10% Tavanast and 90% Stormfather and the other one will be 95% Tavanast and 5% Stormfather (I don't know if Tavanast or Stormfather has a bigger will). But yeah I agree with most everyone else that this merging isn't the same as someone bonding a spren