king of nowhere

yeah, and ferucchemical gold does not affect that. breath does. So does being an elantrian. that's just how those magic systems work.

yeah, I wonder how those names came to be. I suspect booze to be involved.

lighteyes of low status sometimes marry darkeyes of high status. dalinar is way too important to marry a darkeye. assuming, hypotethically, that he did, then such a marriage would have been the scandal of the court, and everybody would have mentioned it. so, sorry, but that theory doesn't hold.

He does to me. He lives in a conservative society where sex outside marriage is very taboo (maybe not all vorin society as a whole, but aristocratic society for sure. those guys care too much about their heritage lines to accept uncertain parentage). meeting with a girl requires a chaperone, and adolin never courted the same girl more than a few weeks. Not only I'd bet good money on him being virgin, there's a fair chance he never even kissed anyone before shallan. Well, you gotta admit that in the case of shallan it wasn't really a random unrelated comment. with adolin wearing heavy armor, it was a perfectly legitimate question. It's like all those people asking how astronauts use the toilet without gravity: it makes sense to ask. Yeah, I wouldn't have liked a random poop joke either. Ok, I can agree with that. And I am the first to say that the romance comes out as genuine in every book. Still, I can't help but seeing a pattern there. Originality in a genre filled with cliches is one of Sanderson's main virtues, so it bugs (that's too strong a word, but i don't know of a lighter one) me a bit when I see some repeating element in the plotting. Sort of like when I pick up a random action novel and the main female character is introduced to the protagonist and I think "oh, they will be making out before the end of the book.". Though on a smaller scale.

yes, reference systems are relative, so you could probably come up with a consistent physical explanation on it. Just the same way that you could say that when you do press-ups you are not lifting yourself, you are lowering the world while you remain perfectly still, and there are ways to make the calculations work. but really, we all know you really are lifting yourself. same with cadmium. it slows time for you, and that's it.

Well, I can see the point, but if brandon started to dedicate more pages to the relationships, some other people would lament "hey, there's too much romance in here. if i wanted to read that, I wouldn't buy fantasy". So, basically it comes to the impossibility of pleasing anyone. personally, i think brandon spends the right amount of times on them. some would like more, some others would like less. I would like more explanations and more worldbuilding (yeah, I know, I'm a fanatic for those stuff), other people are fine with them, others would want less.By the way, my first instinct would have been to also compare favorably brandon's relations with stereotyped hollywood ones, but I quickly realized it would have been a mistake. First thing, "most people do much worse" is not the best reason to appreciate something, and second, there was no clear proof that it was what you would prefer. though favoring the kaladin/shallan and wax/marasi pairings do sort of point towards that, since they would be the couples that bad teenage romance novels would favor.

i'd say the only thing that could stop the cosmere being completes is brandon dieing first. mind you, with the number of books he has to write, he will already be quite old by the time he get to the ending, and it won't help that every once in a while he get some new idea and write some more trilogies (like the reckoners). if worst comes to worst, i suppose there are enough notes, timelines, and half-finished rough draft that somebody else may complete the cosmere, though.

maxal summed it up quite well, i have a few comments to make on my own: - the end of WoR was quite rushed, but that's a matter of editorial pacing; remember, the stomrlight archive is not ten books, it is one single story that got split into ten separate books; and in order to sell, each book needs a convincing start and end, at least at the beginning. it would not do to sell a book that does not stand on its own at the beginning of a series. so, brandon rushed a few things there. I expect that at the beginning of the third book the pace will slow down and maybe we will see some of those scenes you hope to see. - i also find a bit suspicious how quickly shallan and adolin fall for each other, but i got convinced pretty soon that they fit with each other. particularly because they don't care to conform to what is expected from people of their rank. Oh, and the poop question would work for me too; it shows that the girl is genuine and that she is not afraid to appear unfeminine. She is also unlikely to be squeamish, an attribute i find highly annoying. - in the warbreaker annotations, sanderson explicitly said that he had to rush the siri-susebron scenes because he had other things going on. it works better if you consider that they spend together every nigh for several weeks or even months, and we only get to see three or four short times. - hey, there is another book between those two, shadows of self, that you are not mentioning. Did you by chance skipped it? because that would explain stuff. in SoS, wax and steris form what can be probably considered a solid friendship with mutual respect going both ways. I still think he and marasi would have made a better couple, though now that i think about it, what did they have in common besides fighting bad guys? Still, i can understand how wax would want to avoid that, especially since he still wasn't over lessie at the time. Overall, I like sanderson romances. they quite fit with the way I live my feelings. The only complaint I have is that he is overusing the "perfectly arranged marriage" trope; elantris, warbreaker, WoR and BoM, four times out of four, it's growing predictable.

I don't think lungs can athrophize, even if they are never used. muscles do because the body is made to save energy and dismantles them if it feels it won't need them, but there is no mechanism to lose the lungs. the lungs muscles could be lost, though. maybe. but it's unlikely one would never breath, even with cadmium, because breathing is done unconsciously.

I can agree in principle, but it's generally not enough of a bother to do something about it. Plus, sometimes you need some recap just because people forget things. Take the wheel of time, where sometimes you had to google up a minor character to figure out who the hell was that guy and what he was doing

yeah, that's something that has been discussed before a lot of times. i think there's even a wob somewhere saying they are the same.

ok, so brandon said that there is a way, but i doubt it's that simple, or tlr would have used it instead.

ah, the ultimate card, if only you could get ahold of some of that brown mana... but, it could be an artifact with indestructible and hexproof and no other abilities. useless on its own, but if you found a way to enchant it somehow...

i think you'd get the same benefit, plus you'd also have stored strenght. as far as i know, a workout works because when the muscles are used a lot, the body decides that more of them are needed. if they are not used, then the body reabsorbs them because they consume food, and we evolved in a food-poor environment. so, the fact that the muscles are used to their limits is what is important.

I'm... not sure that would work. And we know too little of how connection works to be sure. but i'd be surprised if tapping connection to a place you lived in when you were younger would actually make you young.

wait a moment, that just got me thinking: could melaan even use a medallion? kandras aren't alllomancers, but maybe medallions can work for them too...

actually not. the healing power of gold would be enough to keep the brain fully active even with a bullet in it - plus, a bullet is fairly small compared to the brain; a bullet creates a shockwave that deals huge damage to all the brain, and that's why it's generally fatal, but as far as i know just removing an amount of brain matter as small as a bullet is unlikely to do much at all. so, miles could have survived, though it would have costed him more gold to heal such a wound. he'd probably had to put his own hand inside his brain to get the bullet out if it stayed lodged in, too. but he didn't consider it ssomething too bad. consider than during the shootout miles wandered around unconcerned. he knew everybody was shooting aluminium bullets around and he could have been taken in the crossfire, but clearly he assumed that be not a big deal to him. And earlier in the book he stabbed himself with an aluminium knife (simply because he had no other convenient place to store it), so he probably knew enough of how much aluminium interfered.

store determination, becoming depressed while doing so. as you become depressed, decide that nothing matters anymore, and throw away the metalmind you've been filling.

if i understood correctly how it works, tapping investiture from a nicrosilmind would not allow you to refill other metalminds. nor would it allow you to tap more power from a metalmind than was previously stored in it; though it may let you fill the same metalmind with more investiture, it does not alter the amount of power you can get from the full metalmind.

i don't have the ebooks of those, so i cannot contribute. yeah, the part about wayne "sleeping it off" is one of the quotes i remembered, though that's ambiguous. And when i read that the first time, i wondered "is he meaning he's just laying sick in bed, or sazed was wrong in the original trilogy?". So I paid attention to the topic, and i remember finding in the sequels precise words stating that wayne was filling metalminds while sleeping. of course, i may be wrong, but i distinctly remember seeking this line of inquiry myself.

also, steris has an attitude about herself that makes her seem older.

i remember clearly mentioning that he slept, since it already was a point of contentious since sazed stated it was impossible. maybe it is in one of the other books? i think the first mention of it was in aol, and it was confirmed in sos.

there are several oots fans in this board. i'm sure there was even a topic for it, but it must be several years old by now.

sometimes, losing sleep is a price worth paying.

sazed said that he only could store wakefulness while sleeping. but in aol era, wayne say he can store healt while sleeping. So, that clearly points to the answer being "yes, it is possible to store other attributes while sleeping, but it's difficult and it takes practice to do. practice that sazed, as someone who never really tried to use his feruchemy except for his copperminds, lacked, but that wayne has."