king of nowhere

mostborn era 1 demonstrated absolutely nothing. just because a fight went a certain way, doesn't mean it's a foregone conclusion, especially when the protagonist is concerned. a mistborn can absolutely be killed by regular mistings, or even by hazekillers. otherwise, those would not be employed as they would be a waste of resources. put in a firing squad with aluminium bullets, and it only takes a lucky shot to kill one. in fact, mistborn never struck me as too overpowered. knights radiants do, because their healing is so powerful they are basically immortal. mistborn, by comparison, only have mildly increased speed and endurance. take metal manipulation out of the list - which is what happens with aluminium - and a small number of ordinary men is a fair match for one. I'd say mistborn are very well written, because they can't just with a fight with brute power, but have to rely on cleverness instead. to stay on scadrial, i'd put a steelrunner ferring with a decent amount stored as a lot more powerful than a mistborn. increase your speed enough that you can move as a blur, kill a mistborn before he can react. miles is also probably stronger than a mistborn, because the mistborn has virtually no way to kill him until miles can land a lucky shot. it's not a matter of wanting more power. i don't care either way, I only care that we don't get boring invincible heroes (or villains; and I'd qualify paalm there). but I do want the mistborn setting to progress in a consistent manner. if this means technological manipulation of investiture, sure. if it means some people will be mistborn, either by genetics or hemalurgy or whatever, why not? so long as it makes sense. I am not - though it is a staple of fantasy, and it does provide a perfectly good explanation for why the fate of the world rests on this specific guy. i repeat, it's about setting consistency. wax said it better than me: the set is looking for ways to get power, and they will get a mistborn. somehow. indeed. i always liked the badass normal in the special team.

then again, once everyone has access to aluminium guns and powers from medallions, mistborn aren't all that overpowered anymore.

passivation - that is, the reaction forms a patina of an inert substance on the surface of the metal, that isolates and protects the metal from further reactions - is certainly possible. however, if there is no passivation in water, then there can only be passivation with some specific substance added by an acid. vax tried 10 different acids, it would be extremely unlikely that harmonium would form a different passivating compound with each one of them.

was going to say the same. I've wondered about spectroscopy on a god metal myself. though it is bizarre that harmonium explodes with water but does not react with acids. you know, because the main pathway for water reaction is by being a very weak acid, and acids (at least traditional acids like vax has access to) are in water solution anyway. acids are also oxidizers, which is the other possible reaction pathway of water with metal. but they are god metals, so i can accept some stuff that would be impossible for normal chemistry.

to change form, parshendi - listeners, as they call themselves - have to go into a storm and attract the right spren. having the spren into a gem removes the need for finding the spren, but they still need a storm. specifically, they need the investiture that the storm carries. probably it would be possible to find a way to fuel the transformation with just stormlight, but such magitek is way above their tech level.

they can store the weight of an inanimate object? I haven't seen any other instance of souther scadrian technology giving internal powers to inanimate objects. and I haven't seen any explanation like that in the books. do we have some sources on it?

we still don't know how the big airships fly. the small ones, they are very light, and once you remove the mass of the crew they can easily fly like helicopters. but the heavy ships are too heavy to work with just rotors as for allomancy, it is possible that they have very few rare allomantic powers, which they pass down generations with hemalurgy, and they use to charge the primer cubes

I only want to tell you one word. just one word. TRAUMA

it's not "all of a sudden". it's been 5 years or 6. it was a lot more surprising that he didn't mature earlier

real people have a whole range from "someone else should really save the world" to "let's blame the government" to "let's deny that there is any risk" to "we're all screwed anyway, I may as well have some fun before the end". and then there's all the people who want to do something, but they end up doing the wrong things, or they are ineffective. then again, so far the world hasn't ended yet, so it means that someone - many someones - are actually saving the world, and succeeding. books simply are about those people. if shallan hadn't agreed to help jasnah save the world, she wouldn't be a main character.

rest assured, it will happen well before the end of the book. I won't say exactly when because it may count as spoiler.

Syl has that "little sister" vibe hitting my protective instincts in all the right spots. if she was my spren, I'd hug her all the time, no matter that she's incorporeal. I'd probably get along better with pattern, though. i like the kind of conversations he has

iirc, in the next. though you keep getting new details up to book 5

Today I went to a chess tournament and I noticed this on the table Size and shape is pretty clear. This doesn't match with the description of Pattern, but it definitely does look like a cryptic. A chess tournament also looks like a good place for a cryptic to be, give their skill at patterns. I wonder how much of a natural advantage they'd have.

alas, bad news for you. brace yourself for shallan's flashbacks. I consistently skip those on rereads. as usual, though, the payoff is worth it

Nale himself states the importance of the law above all else. He says the law is not moral, the law is for providing consistence. So nale does not care much about right or wrong. He sees following a code an implicitly good. A similar argument was made regatding the aes sedai first oath

Oh, boy. this barely scratches the surface of all the stuff that shallan hides in her past. like, we have 4 books now, and we keep finding new trauma in shallan's past. and there are hints there may yet be some leftover for book 5 too. stormlight archive is brandon taking kaladin and shallan and asking himself "how miserable I can make those two people?". and the funny stuff is that while shallan killed her father, and she broke up with SPOILER, and she did SPOILER and SPOILER, and she will SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER, she's still a fundamentally good person who did all the SPOILER above either for good reason, or by accident. Sometimes both. BY the way, good job spotting that, i missed it the first time. when you'll get there, it will blow your mind. I didn't care much for the whole shallan plot at first, until I got at the conclusion. was my prediction accurate? was your mind adeqately blown?

I remember a discussion, years ago, when someone was afraid brandon would have a bad time and release a truly bad book. and the answer was that it's basically impossible; brandon does not write alone, but he has a team of editors, alpha and beta readers. so brandon may have a bad month and write a bad book, but then his editors would point out the problems with it, and the alpha readers would point out the problems with it, and brandon would go back and fix the book. or maybe put it aside, apparently it's what happened to apocalypse guard. this system ensures that brandon will keep writing quality fiction. I recalled that discussion as I considered the movie business. Granted, I am not a great expert here, but I keep hearing of long-running franchises being ruined by bad plotting. game of thrones is the first example coming to mind, but I've seen scathing reviews on the jurassick park franchise, and a simple look at the tvtropes page "seasonal rot" will produce dozens of examples. and most of those examples are really stupid. like, glaring plot holes or nonsensical stuff. the kind of problems that any editor or alpha reader would immediately signal as "wait, this doesn't make any sense". well, ok, I can see that there can be no alpha watchers because if you have them then you already made the movie, and then it would be too expensive to go hire the actors again to change scenes and fix problems. But surely they can get editing on the script. And with editing on the script, they could at least ensure they don't make anything too dumb. Why, then, this does not seem to be the case?

I think he just wanted to see dalinar's reaction, to see if he was cosmere aware. but it's just my speculation

regardless, i got no idea what the gameplay is. from the trailer it could have been something like LoL, or a roleplaying game like baldur's gate, or even a fantasy version of civilization. that single line of description in the video you linked tell me instead it is something akin to tabletop warhammer?

so i checked the trailer, and i read this, and i still have't gotten any inkling on what the game is actually about. now, maybe the marketing guys know what they are doing and in average this strategy is more successful. but me, I want to know facts. especially before committing money and/or time to something

he's got some psycological trauma associated with it. i'm not sure if it was already in the book, or it you discover it later

good job spotting that, i missed it the first time. when you'll get there, it will blow your mind. I didn't care much for the whole shallan plot at first, until I got at the conclusion. regarding kaladin, i do think his decision is stupid. right where he was before being enslaved, he wasn't really helping anyone. he was saving a bunch of innocent people by killing a bunch of equally innocent people, in insignificant battles for minor border disputes that mattered nothing. for all his efforts, kaladin't net good was low. take a shard, become someone important, and he can make a difference instead. he would get assigned some land to rule, and he could try to enforce a better system there, improving the lives of thousands and potentially setting precedents. in the immortal words of someone with a better grasp of leadership, you're not going to change the system by raving like a lunatic. however, the decisiion is also very in character for kaladin. it's who he is. if kaladin didn't do something stupid every once in a while, he'd be a boring invincible hero. also, that moment is a key point for brandon's writing. brandon wrote a first version of that book, back when he still hadn't published anything and he doubted he ever would; and in that version (way of kings prime, which brandon shared online somewhere) kaladin took the shards. and he was a generic fantasy hero. brandon thought the idea of the hero taking the wrong decision made for a better story, leading to the current plot. ultimately, though, none of this would have mattered; amaram would have taken the shards anyway.

yes. between the end of this book and better clarified in the next

I just realized there are very strong similarities between Shallan and Haley from the order of the stick. Mostly because they are both based on lies. Both are girly girs who hide a traumatic childhood behind their outward sweetness. both were left scarred and with trust issues. and to get along, they lie to others and to themselves. both have deception as their main power, though in haley's case it's just mundane skill. both end up with a very good, honest guy who help them come to terms with their issues. for both, their story arc is centered around learning to trust. both are afraid that, if others knew their "real" self, they'd leave. both have a moment where they tell everything to their love interest, and they get better for it. both are conflicted between genuine goodness and self-centered egoism, with love tipping the scale. both are redheads. both have a latent bisexuality that the author didn't really plan in advance. is there some character archetype I'm not aware of? are those all coincidences? or perhaps there was some subconscious inspiration?