Leyrann

The Honor to Spren and Ideals arrow is definitely correct. The one to gems most likely comes from either Honor + Cultivation (like Spren) or directly from Adonalsium and the way he built the world. As for the gemhearts and the Fused, there should again be an arrow directly from Adonalsium, as the gemheart/spren symbiose is something that already existed before; we see that many, if not all, Rosharan creatures use it. Odium did create his own version with the Fused though.

Uh. That sounds kinda random. Not gonna lie.

This might also explain why stormlight is used as currency in Shadesmar.

Do you mean in regards to the Sadeas murder? I feel like that primarily just got lost in everything else in Oathbringer and us only having a handful of viewpoints from Adolin as he's basically always around the three main characters of Dalinar, Shallan and Kaladin. I agree that there should have been a bit more there, though. But with that being said, there is a very important difference between the Recreance and the murder of Sadeas, and that is simply that the Recreance is an extremely important event of which the consequences will show for most of this series, if not all of it, while the murder of Sadeas is clearly more of an Adolin-specific plotline, or maybe (in book 4) a Dalinar-Adolin relationship plotline. Brandon has, without a doubt, spend much, much more time on the Recreance than on how exactly Adolin dealt with murdering a man he hated.

Mistborn is written by the same writer, which makes it a very good comparision. Brandon Sanderson has proven time and time and time again that he's a great writer and world builder with an exceptional ability to figure out what is logical even where most writers wouldn't realize it. I do not believe for a single second he would drop the ball with an event as major as this.

Brandon doesn't do plot holes, most certainly not of that size. Think of (mistborn era 1 spoilers)

Few problems with what you outlined. 1. Pre-Dawnsinger would mean before the First Desolation. As far as I know, we don't have a signle record of that (Eila Steele (sp?), about the First Desolation, was the oldest record). I assume you mean something else? Pre-Hierocracy? 2. Even though the Shardblades would indeed have mainly been looted in the west, Dalinar notes in the Feverstone Keep vision that there are more Shardblades there than even Jah Keved or Alethkar have, I believe he even mentions that he sees more than the world has nowadays. 3. What makes you say that Feverstone Keep was in Iri? I might have missed something, but I haven't seen any indication towards a particular location, though in my head I pictured it in the Unclaimed Hills.

Storm you. I want to dislike this theory and bring in reasons against it, but even the ones I did have did not hold up under some research. I guess the only thing I can rationally say is "you might be on to something." Even if only because, indeed, it is very curious that the Shin invaded once.

The Hybrid Shard Wohooo, we're back with some more additions to the theory! I finally came up with some stuff for Shard 4.4, a.k.a. the Survival Shard for which I could not figure out a good name for the Intent. I'm still not satisfied with what I have, but I feel like I'm edging closer. The Shard is related to life and movement, which could be explained as "life, being everywhere", or "life, from all places", or alternatively "life, as it is and acts". In the first cases, I would go with Unity (not related to Dalinar) and in the last case with "Identity". Both aren't truly satisfying, but I believe this Shard could be the essence of Adonalsium, so to say. The actual being he was, his 'self'. I also think that, in a way, this Shard could be less restrained by Intent than any of the others, though still in a way limited (if it's Intent is more the Unity direction in particular, and I don't really feel the Identity Intent at all even if I prefer it over Life or Existence). Anyways, if someone comes up with something better, I'd love to hear about it.

Gravity effectively affects the center of gravity of objects. In fact that's why it's called the center of gravity. --- Good theory, and one day (not too long ago) I would have agreed with you. As others have pointed out, however, there are a number of flaws. I do have my theory of the fundamental Surges though (see signature), which means I'm convinced that everything is basically an application of the Surges. I just think we shouldn't be looking at Gravitation, the Surge of Gravity, but rather the Surge of Motion (and Realmatic Transition): Transportation. It is what defines movement and distance, and you're directly changing the distance betwene you and the object, rather than using something like gravity. Which object moves depends on which one costs less energy to move, simple as that; that's how nature works. As for why you can only push and pull on metals, this is because metals are the focus on Scadrial. Investiture is a Spiritual thing, and the focus is the way in which it moves to the Cognitive and Physical Realm, which implied that there is a connection between the different parts of a metal that are in the Physical, Cognitive and Spiritual Realm, beyond how any particle or entity has such a connection. This is much in the same way as life has a connection, which shows the other Surge that is used (though rather passively and much less visible) to push and pull: Progression, the Surge that connects the Physical, Cognitive and Spiritual Realm together to create a living object. ...And I think I found out that I might have to write a theory on Focuses before I can continue with Part III of my Surgebinding theory (the Metallic Arts) because refining that second part into a good theory is going to take too much text to do as an aside when I already have 16 8 metals to discuss.

I know, hence the smiley. Also, the same holds true for me for the most part.

Don't act so surprised. Also, disagreeing is a good thing, as it's the best way to test theories and ideas.

Basically, all spren had to be in on it, because if some had not been, then word would have gotten out. And if no spren were in on it... Well this theory argues why that is not likely, and I also just don't see it happen that hundreds or even thousands of Radiants decide this together without a single spren finding out about it, let alone a Radiant disagreeing with the plan (which I don't doubt happened) and telling his spren.

Brandon has done enough things that we cannot assume a dodged question to have a positive answer (or a negative answer, for that matter). That being said, I think it is.

I'm rereading WoR at the moment, just two days ago I came across the first scene where he loses his powers, which is his first time on the sparring grounds, where he's sparring with Zahel to learn to fight against Shardblade and then attacks Adolin. He basically lost them whenever he had the wrong goals in mind.

Great post. I felt like it was unavoidable that the spren knew (it's just too hard to hide things from your spren, and how are you going to avoid even a single spren hearing you discuss it with another Radiant?), but you put it into words and reasoning in a great way.

That's quite a complicated command...

What about creating olympic sports specifically for different kinds of surgebinders, allomancers and feruchemists? For example, for Truthwatchers and Edgedancers, who can grow the highest tree in X minutes? (of course, a requirement is that the tree should be able to hold itself without any Surgebinding or anything to keep it in place)

It's a hard choice between Kaladin and Dalinar. I'd have chosen Kaladin for the first book, but man, Dalinar is just too awesome. Absolutely amazing story arc in Oathbringer, particularly the finale. Him standing up against Odium... That's something for the ages, both in-universe and out-of-universe.

I'm just gonna throw something else in the mix: Are the moons spherical or irregularly formed? According to this thread I found on the question, icy objects need to be about 400 km in diameter while rocky objects need to be about 600 km in diameter. We haven't seen any comments on this, but it seems unlikely to me that they would be round, though we do of course know they were placed there by either Adonalsium or a Shard.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "limited to a single realmatic function". If you mean it as in "being responsible for a single part of realmatics", then I'd argue that's how Shards work, but I guess that's not what you wish to say. As for "how would it be anything other than Spiritual", this is primarily a classification of the Shards, attempting to figure out the Intents from a basic system which I believe the WoB I linked implies exists. I may have the basic system wrong, but I personally believe I have it right. And just because Shards have Physical or Cognitive or whatever Surges doesn't mean, as I mentioned in the original post as well, that they're limited to that Realm or something like that. The classification is originally for the Surges, which for them as well just means that their primary (not necessarily all) effects are seen in this Realm or that. I then used the ordering I had for the Surges to come up with a pattern for non-arbitrarily assigned Surges, as arbitrary would mean there's no pattern. This classification does not then interfere with what the Shards actually are like or which Realms they're in (it's all three and mainly Spiritual of course), only what the limits of their powers (according to Intent) are. (additional note, I've actually also been fidgeting around a bit with the future sight stuff, but I'm not certain if that's related at all to this theory, and even if it is I could see it being very complicated. It might simply be more of a "so what does the Intent do? Okay then the Shard is this good or bad at future sight") Either way I very much disagree with the classification being arbitrary. Yes, I have nothing hard to back up the classification of the Surges (though I do have a number of arguments why certain Surges belong in certain groups), but the Shards I extrapolated from that come directly from this classification, with every possibility in this pattern (thereby satisfying the WoB that Adonalsium could have shattered differently) exhausted. Additionally, though you might disagree with my train of thought at some points (where?), I derived the Intents of all ten known Shards from this, as well as two, arguably three Shards that may or may not have been hinted at (Wisdom, Ingenuity, maybe the Life/Existence Shard of which I am severely dissatisfied with the best name I could come up with). --- Okay, with that out of the way, I wanted to continue a discussion I had with @RShara about Odium vs Passion. Basically, and I actually don't really like going here because it means tinkering, no matter how subtly, with past ideas for the theory (thereby weakining the "I wrote it in one go and got everything out of it" argument), but I figured that I might have slightly misjudged the Intents of the Physical and Spiritual Shard with the Cognitive Surges, which I identified as Devotion and Odium/Passion. With the minor discussion on the OB spoiler board, where the old meaning of "passion" as suffering got mentioned, I figured that the true Intents might lie somewhere in between of what we disagreed about. For Odium, it would be about emotions becoming more - and eventually too - extreme. Most extreme emotions are negative (hate, fury, severe loss -> anger at the one that caused it, hence the other part of Odium, etc) and even those that aren't (extreme joy, etc, which by the way seem to at least partly be represented by some Unmade) can cause a lot of trouble or even death (I could see people getting a heart attack from something like extreme joy). As Shards have no balance, this Shard would just keep feeding the emotions until they would become too much. And at that point, there's only one possible consequence - hate or being hated, which would make Odium a fitting name for the Shard, even though technically it's all emotions. On the other hand, there is Devotion (aka "Love" according to Brandon). I would argue that, as I mentioned originally as well, this Shard is related to soothing emotions. This is a really hard point to argue for anyone, as love is considered wildly different by differing people, but to me love is being at peace because you're with someone, or because someone is caring for you, and I think that is in large part also due to my Christian upbringing, which we know Brandon shares (though of course we are different denominations and stuff). The extremely intensive feeling that is maybe mostly related to what happens beneath the sheets I would rather classify as lust (which, let it be clear, does not necessarily make it a bad thing).

Jury's still out on the whole passion thing. I do believe that most of the forum veterans, so to say, don't buy it, but there's also plenty of people around that do (me included). I don't think there's enough to conclusively rule out one or the other (I actually discussed this with R'Shara just yesterday, though I'm pretty sure we do agree on this point as well ). That makes me think... I'm gonna move this over to the thread of my Shard theory as it's a more appropriate place to discuss this.

Another view on the ordering While working on the Metallic Arts in relation to this theory, I realized that there is a second way to order the Shards, which draws attention to different aspects than the original ordering did. Therefore, I figured I'd make this post to order the Shards based on their Cognitive and Hybrid Surges first, rather than their Physical and Spiritual Surges. Primarily, this emphasizes the duality of Shards. I do want to mention, however, that even though this duality exists, this does not mean the Shards on different sides of the duality are opposites. They can be, but they need not be. In fact, they still share two Surges. Even for the Shards that do not share a single Surge, however, this does not mean they are opposites. For example, think of Honor and Ambition. Though they probably won't get along well - or at all - they're not opposites exactly. Just wildly different. (note on the numbering, when referencing to Shards I'll continue using the numbering in the opening post rather than the numbering I create in this post) Group 1: The base Shards. The four Shards that only have Surges from one Realm. The fourth group in the original ordering, though the first discussed. Group 2: The Cognitive and Hybrid Shards. These are the Shards that have the Surges from two Realms only. In the orignal ordering, they were in the first group. Group 3: The Mixed Shards. These are the eight Shards that have both a Cognitive and a Hybrid Surge. I have decided to put them together into one group, as a distinction can be made both on sharing a Cognitive Surge or on sharing a Hybrid Surge, which would create two different groups with Shards that share as much with one another as they do with the other group.

Wasn't Shallan's mother in league with the Skybreakers?

I don't think the pattern is necissarily the same as the Metallic Arts, but this was simply more or less a pattern that appeared simply because of the possibilities and my human mind's inclination to group what I find into easy tidbits. I've been thinking a little bit about how the Shards would translate to the Metallic Arts (not a lot yet), but I doubt that we'll see the quadrants of the Metallic Arts being made up by the quadrants of Shards I described here. And yes, the Shards could potentionally acces any of the Surges, it's just that their Intent is defined only by some of them. Getting to the Metallic Arts will be part III of the theory. Anyways, I think Brandon more or less has the Shards in his mind already, and might have had for quite a while, but he doesn't want to pin down the exact Intent (of course, in this theory there's still more variation possible than the "changing between synonyms" that is all possible change once a Shard changes holder). Oh, and he likes watching us squirm.