king of nowhere

I think 5 being the lower is the most likely. farmers are the bottom of a feudal socciety, so it don't make much sense to have 5 lower grades under them. beggars and such would still be 5th, but without land assigned to them. slaves would have no rank, they are slaves and that's it. they are property, basically. you dont give ranks to a chair. it also make sense that most of the population is of the lower social extraction, as such was the case in feudal societies. other option is that there are 7 nahns, but 7 don't bring any special ignificance in roshar, so seems unlikely. last option is there's 10 nahns, but I don't think it makes sense 5 ranks below farmer.

the way I understand it, most creatures developed carapaces to survive highstorms. it has nothing to do with water - insects and artropoda have carapace and they live on land - but with the need to survive all the stones that get thrown around during a highstorm.

I like it, and I find it much more likely than 99% of theories that are proposed on forum anyways. I'm trying to think of a good answer for the Syl dilemma, but I can't come up with one. My original idea was that the plate is made to protect, the blade to kill (even if in battle the distinction between protecting and killing is quite blurred), but it don't make sense if they are both spiritual weapons.

heavy crossbows would probably be the most cost effective counter against shardplates, as they could be built in stock and given to a significant portion of the army. much of that effectiveness, however, depends on how much damage they would actually do to a shard, and that is only speculative. halfshards are probably too expensive to fit an army with, and against regular soldiers are no more useful than a normal shield - and heavier. but maybe a regiment of men trained just to fight shardbeares would make sense. elite soldiers armed with halfshards, heavy hammers and stiletto daggers and trained to coordinated fight against a shardbearer, they would be the roshan equivalent of hazekillers on scadrial. Advance under the shield, try to close range with the shardbearer so that he can't swing much his long sword, jump over him countering the shard-enhanced strenght with numers, and when the shardbearer is down try to block his sword and crak him with hammers or put the dagger in his eye. I suppose a dozen such men would be dangerous to a isolated shardbearer. Ballistae would not be effective, I think. the problem is, they cannot be pointed like a crossbow. it is virtually impossible to hit a single running men. if said men is in the middle of your ranks, you'd just kill your own men. they would still be useful against the bulk of an army, tough. against a surgebinder, it is much more difficult to defend. it all depends on how much stormlight he has, really. with enough stormlight, a surgebinder could just lash an object towards the enemy, at 10, 20 or 100 times the acceleration of gravity. szeth did a 20x once, and the result destroied a shardbearer. an item thrown that way would accumulate enough kinetic energy to have the power of an artillery shell. it would be able to breack any obstacle. Maybe i'd go for soldiers armed with pikes (so it will be difficult to just jump on them with a lashing) to keep him at bay, and then pelt him with arrows until he run out of stormlight. another option would be to just swarm him with regular soldiers, so that in melee he can't do much fancy manuevers and can rely "only" on strenght and speed. A third chance may be trying to get a hidden archer to shoot him by surprise. I'm not sure if the surgebinder has to be conscious of an arrow to deflect it, but he at least must have that abbility (don't remember the name) activated, and since it drains stormlight all the time, he probably cannot afford to leave it on all the time just in case of a stray arrow. I feel neither of those would be effective against szeth, but they could probably get a less skilled surgebinder.

I do not like the idea of dragons in the cosmere. A thing I highly appreciate in sanderson's work is that it is not conventional fantasy. there are no dragons, elves, dwarves, wizards, middle-aged uchronias or inexplicably-placed twisted phrophecies (ok, there were some in mistborn, but they were quite justified). I never liked a fantasy featuring those elements, unless it was for parody like in the work of terry pratchett. They feel like a second rate lord of the rings spinoff. If there are dragons in the cosmere, I will appreciate the work of sanderson a bit less. I will still appreciate it enough to buy any book from him, but not as much as before.

since we are nitpicking, we nowadays tend to see all LGBT under one unbrella, but it don't mean it would be the same for other cultures. It is true that discrimination is not the standard in ancient civilizations - I assumed it was by comparing various middle-aged and arabian civilizations, but they all have their culture strongly influenced by the bible. in ancient greece it was perfectly ok, and I have no idea about china or native americans. But, just because gays are accepted, it don't mean lesbians are too. Or maybe the "manly gay" model is accepted, while the "feminine gay" is not. Maybe there is some other kind of subtle distinction. I read a parody play where men having anal sex with other men as well as women was considered absolutely normal and not even homosexual, while a guy who only played the passive role (and not even by his will, but because he was castrated and could only take that role) was heavily derided and called fag. So, there really is no way of telling how fictional cultures may feel in that regard. too many possibilities here

Yes, I can see that, but one thing is seeing a few seconds ahead, another is seeing thousands of years. Even (was endowment the one of warbreaker?) could only see for a few years. And it was uncertain: if i remember correctly, Lightsong was told that "he may have a chance of preventing the war" when he was offered the chance of returning, and I take it that even the shard was not sure. Preservation gave his prophecies hundreds, or maybe thousands, of years before rashek was born. I always thought that future in the cosmere is not set. You can predict the near future based on your knowledge, and a shard has a much greater knowledge and intellect that a person so would be able to make much better predictions, but in the end future is uncertain because there's too much random stuff piling up in the long run. If preservation knew exactly what was going to happen, it means that the future is already written, and I'm not sure I like the implications for the books.

A major plot point of book 2 was that the prophecies were manipulated by ruin. But, at the end of book 3, the phrophecies (the real ones, not the modified version) end up fitting sazed. On the annotations is mentioned that the first prophecies came from preservation, who gave some generic prophecies like "in the end all will go well". As far as I know, no one in the cosmere ccan see the future: Sazed said something about it becoming more blurred the fartes in the future you go. Preservation had schemes in motion, but he certainly had no way of guessing that sazed would have been an eunuch, or that he would bring copperminds on his arms or stuff like that. So how did the prophecies ended up describing saze perfectly? How did they happen to be right? My best explanation so far is a coincidence, but don't seem a good one.

About aluminium, it wass more expensive than gold before the heroult process was invented. then it became very cheap; it's one of the most copmmon elements on heart, after all. in the real world, that process was discovered around 1870, so I would really have expected for scaadrrial to have it before automobiles, since they are good on metallurgy. But I can understand it not having been conceived. there could be plenty of reasons, from the simple "no one got the idea yet" to the more complex "the heroult process requires aluminium fluoride, and on scadrial civilization had not spread much, and maybe they never found many fluorine containing minerals, and getting it out of seawater is beyond them, so maybe they never invented that process because they don't have much access to fluorine". Anyway, I expect aluminium to be cheap shortly after AoL. Also, I'm not sure saze is speeding up tech development. the technology under the lord ruler was much more than middle age. limelights were known and they were only devised a few centuries ago. the canal system is something we can expect to see in a 19th century society. I seem to recall peopel using spyglasses, and those required also some advanced technology. Rashek suppressed knowledge of gunpowder, but aside from that scadrial was more advanced than your average fantasy. I think after the rebirth it advanced more or less at the smae pace as the real world. Probably the informations left in the words of founding were enough to compensate for the lower population and resources.

I hadn't thought about it. with copper you can decide to forget about something. That has several good uses

I am italian but live in finland. I come to italy during summer, thus getting the worst off the cclimate of both countries. if I could use bronze, i would fill it during the italian summer and use it during the finnish winter, so I would always be comfortable. If I need extra warmth, I could fill it into a sauna. Or, I could just store a lot of heat, and then take a sauna without needing an actual sauna, just by tapping the metalmind hard. Steel, I never understood if it gives ultra speed superman-style, or just running speed. Or if your mind accelerates enough to let you still see what you are doing. For example, will I be able to write faster, or my brain won't be able to give the commands to my hand fast enough? Anyway, there's plenty of stuff to do with it. Pewter can be useful for moving furniture, but I won't have much use for it. I think the main use, since tapping it makes your muscles swell too, would be to impress girls by getting a perfect physique without any excercices Copper is the most useful to sazed, but today it won't do anything an electronic data sheet can't do better, so not much use for it. maybe cheat in some test, but I would not like the idea. Bronze would be very useful to me. I never get enough sleep, so I always feel groggy in the morning. with bronze, I would spend a sunday once in a while sleeping all the time, then every morning I would tap that hour of extra sleep that would make me feel good. Actually, I already try to do that, sincce i normally sleep 6 hours per night during the week and 10 during rthe weekend, but it don't work as well as it would with feruchemy. Bendalloy could be my favourite, since I like eating good food and good food tend to make you fat. No more dieting, no more control: just sink my whole salary on ice creams, fill the metalmind while I eat, then melt the metalmind down and start again. I may want to keep a full one for emergencies maybe. gold is overall useful, but nothing too fancy there. I may feel them during pauses at work, it's not like there's much to do. keeping some healt stored may be life saving in case of a bad illness or car accident. Atium, I suppose I could fill it all the time, making me 1-2 years older should not be a problem (actually, I''m still young, I could easily get 30 extra years while doing sedentary stuff and not noticing it, or take 10 extra years all the time except under physical excercices). I would get a huge cache for my old age at this point. I would be able to do any physical stuff by becoming young for long enough. I may tap a few years all the time to reduce all age-related diseases. And I could get an active sexual life well into my eighties without need for viagra. EDIT: just thought, I could also fill an atium metalmind to travel for free on public transportation or get reduction on museums and such. Now I feel evil just for having conceived such an idea...

I agree that even in the most conservative societies there's always someoene who manages to sneack around - and often the hing is well covered exactly because it is so scandalous that people don't want to talk about it. But we were talking about perception in the society, i understood. So, there's probably still the 5-10% of gays among the nobles, and some of them probably found ways to meet in secret, but I don't expect any of them to do outing.

As a chemist, I can't help but feeling that an alloy of atium and lerasium should not be possible. not all molten metals mixes with each other. some just stay apart, like water and oil. And a rule of thumb in chemistry says "the similar dissolves the similar": similar stuff gets dissolved in each other, and dissimilar stuff do not get dissolved. I expect there would be nothing more dissimilar than atium and lerasium, so they should not mix (by the way, now I would be curious to know what kind of atoms are they). However there could be some ways to go around that, for example heat enough to get your atium/lerasium mixture into a supercritical state, where they would be perfectly solublle in each other, and then coold it down quickly enough to trap the system into that state, forming a metastable alloy. Well, enough chemical nerdishness for today, I better stop here before I write a threaty on the properties of imaginary metals.

When Wax said that ranette wasn't intersted in men, I got the impression that she was the nerdy tipe who is only focused in her passion (guns, in her case) and is not intersted in social relatioships at all. the secluded way she lived got me this impression. But, if brandon said there was a lesbian character in alloy, it's probably her. Altough I would think steris could be. the way she act so disdainful of any men, I'm tempted to fit her into the lesbian feminist stereotype. For other worlds, I would think that hallandren would be open on the topic, while idrians would be very strict. In elantris I expect gays would be ok, under the fjordell empire I'm not sure - we see nothing on it in the book, but strict religions generally tend to be against homosexuality. I expect the vorin culture to be the most homophibic of all: with the way the gender roles are so defined, men trying to read is already seen as an abomination. a man liking other man would probably rank far worse for them. Other cultures would probably be different, but we do not see much of them.