Scion of the Mists

Shards are bound by Oaths. The not-settling-together thing wasn't an Oath.

Here's Brandon's take on it (and his argument for Game of Thrones maybe being YA).

Thanks! I've been missing out on the live streams. I'm pretty sure this is just internal, Dragonsteel canonization. I would not combine this statement with the earlier clarification that "published works are the true canon" to mean that all 6 new Shards will appear in RoW.

This seems like a massive jump. I find it very unlikely that Brandon would name-drop 6 brand new Shards in Rhythm of War, even if their names have been finalized. What exactly did he say on the live stream?

Did he say that they would appear in RoW or just that he'd have finalized them himself?

We have had a few resurrections in the cosmere, but none that would apply to Gavilar. Jasnah Was actually a fake out, as she jumped to Shadesmar. She didn't leave a body behind. Gavilar's body/death was seen by many people, including relatives (Jasnah, Navani) who recognized him. Szeth Szeth was revived by Nale almost immediately after his "death" using a special fabrial. We don't see anything of the sort happening. Kelsier Kelsier was able to survive because he was infused with Preservation's Investiture in the Well of Ascension. Had that not happened, he would have gone Beyond after a relatively short time. For something similar to have happened to Gavilar, someone would have needed to have found him in the Cognitive Realm and gotten him to a large source of Investiture quickly. No Shardpools were nearby, and his assassination was unplanned. Returned Returned are directly revived by Endowment blessing them with a divine Breath. We have no indication that any of the Rosharan Shards are doing something similar. Returned also wake up relatively quickly after their death, which Gavilar did not do.

He didn't even name Kaladin - he said "the Windrunner who is the main character." Kaladin's revealed to be a Windrunner in book 1.

If you look at the full text of that WoB, it’s pretty clear that Brandon is avoiding spoilers by not naming the characters.

That's what I thought too. I always side-eyed the "Upvote for you sir!" posts. They seem like they're fishing for a reciprocal upvote.

I really like it. My main complaint was that it felt like half of a season. It didn't seem like enough happened to justify all of the set up.

I have digital copies of most of the Cosmere books, but can't for the life of me figure out to copy-paste from Amazon Cloud Reader.

You can access the pages directly by appending the page number, e.g. https://www.17thshard.com/news/shardcast/?page=2

Definitely not. Dragonsteel is a prequel series. Brandon’s clearly lumping the various trilogies/series together.

It’s my favorite of the non-Cosmere books. It is self contained, although there’s a clear set up for a sequel, which has been long delayed. I really like the premise - it’s basically Harry Potter, except the protagonist doesn’t have magic. The magic system is fascinating. After reading, I immediately started thinking about how amazing it would be as a video game. It’s simplistic enough that it could actually be realistically implemented (vs Mistborn or Stormlight), but would also be a ton of fun. The other thing that sets it apart from most of Brandon’s other books is that it’s truly a Young Adult book. And I don’t mean that in the negative way that most people use the term YA. The book only has a single protagonist and is only told from his POV. It’s focused on one person at one school. You don’t have to learn about 10 different nationalities and cultures and politics. I love the complexity and epicness of Stormlight, but sometimes you just want a single, normal-sized book. But really, what do you need to know except that it’s a Brandon Sanderson book?

There are a number of threads dealing with this topic. The general consensus was that shard weapons are inflexible and can’t be split into multiple parts.