king of nowhere

your theory is correct, but unfortunately for you, it is already proven fact, and we have word of brandon for it. so not much of a theory to it. the only thing you got wrong is the scream: the dead blades scream because they are in pain all the time when summoned, but oonly a radiant has enough affinity with spren to sense it.

I always figured that the greatshells being listeners god was an alethi misunderstanding, but yes, maybe there is more to it. maybe they were the factor keeping odium's power out.

I believe the most logical explanation is "yes" to all of your questions. i wonder if, during the weeping, especially in light years, they go through a sort of hybernation to save stormlight. from a biological point of view, i doubt there's much a gemheart can do for the metabolism, however it would be absolutely no problem for a specifically evolved protein to deposit a crystal lattice. compared to dna replication, depositing a diamond out of carbohydrates is fairly easy (we can do the first but not the second only because we use natural-occurring proteins for it. it's sort of like having retroenginered some piece of alien technology). I think it can be compared to our teeth. they also are an inorganic structure growing out of our body and connected to it.

Huh. I promised myself long ago that I wouldn't let myself be concerned with a silly measure of popolarity on an internet forum... but I can't help noticing that, at the time of this writing, I have a bit more rep than you, so if you're still in the top 50, that means... ommmygod, I broke the top 50!! That happened half an hour ago. I spent the next 15 minutes looking for the reputation ranking (after trying any possible option in profile and members list, I started wondering if maybe I scrolled down the page...), and the successive 15 minutes laughing. Of which about 5 minutes I laughed for entering in the top 50, and the next 10 I laughed at my own sillyness. Now I will spend some more time laughing {at the ridiculousness of me laughing at [me laughing at (me entering the top 50)]} Annd thinking I only started lurking, and then posting, in this forum to fight the symptoms of sanderson withdrawal...

well, they recicled all the background, but changed the characters and the light. not suure how much that should be cnsidered "cheating". the tree and rock is hardly a distinctive feature of the book.

one problem with it is that there is no real way to accelerate investiture and smash it into its components. to overcome this obstacle, the cosmere scientists decided to insted accelerate the most invested item they could find in the cosmere. thus enters the cosmere LHC: a vacuum rail in which they are trying to accelerate Hoid to close to the speed of light and then smash him against a wall to see what comes out of it (you guess what LHC is for). That would also allow an answer to the question of how effective hoid's immortality is. unfortunately, the main recipient of the experiment refused to volunteer, keeping the cosmere in darkness and obscurantism.

Well, kaladin had no reason to question his decision to give up the shards, because, as far as he knows, amaram would have taken them anyway. which would probably have happened. at the time he still trusted amaram, i'm sure he would have find a way to lure kaladin into a trap and get the shards from him. yeah, i know, my bad. sometimes i go out on tangents.

Well, if amaram had acted solely because he assumed kaladin was crazy and giving him power over armies would be dangerous (mind you, I do not believe that is the case, I'm just being hypotetical) then he would regard the murder of kaladin and his four men as akin to murdering hitler and some of his cronies the moment they are gaining too much influence. which i'm pretty sure the vast majority of people would find perfectly acceptable, even if at the time they hadn't really done anything wrong yet. So, yes, I am arguing that an honorable man can kill 5 innocents, if he believes it necessary, if he has good reason to believe that disaster would struck otherwise. and believing a totally crazy guy was going to get shards can qualify (again, that's not amaram's motivation). Yeah, you missed my point. I'm arguing that it could have been honorable if amaram had acted to keep the sword from a madman, not if he had acted to take the sword for himself. And the part about admitting the error would not be about pleading guilty of murder, neither about a reduced sentence. it is about recognizing that you made a wrong judgment, and being willing to take responsibility for it. in this purely hypotetical scenario, amaram had never acted out of greed for the shards but only out of concern for the men who would end up ruled by a madman, he would claim guilty upon realizing that kaladin was in fact sane, and would never argue to get a reduced sentence. BUt hey, you can compare it to warbreaker. would you say vasher is a honorless monster deserving only reproach? I don't think so. And yet he did something wworse than amaram did. he started a war, and a big one. mostly accidentally, but he certainly did something bad in it. and then he killed shashara only because she wanted to spread knowledge. You want to argue that shashara would have caused worse mayhem had she lived? well, and how's that different from killing a suspected madman who may misuse armies if allowed to keep shards? only because in one cause the killer turned out to be right and in the other he turned out to be wrong? how could they know, at the time they did the deed? So, why isn't vasher a bad guy? because, after that, he's spent his life trying to fix his mistakes. I do believe that, when one makes a mistake, the honorable (or responsible, or good, or civic-minded) action is to try and fix them. But sometimes some error cannot be fixed. killing people is a case. In this case, I do believe that one who is willing to live his life in an attempt to fix his mistake can still retain his honor (or responsibility, or goodness), as long as he is carrying on. you can't empty the sea with a bucket, but as long as you are carrying bucketfuls over and over, you are doing what you can, and that's enough for me. If you believe otherwise, then you should agree that vasher is a horrible individual; that elend, upon finding out that vin assaulted cett, should have her executed; that elend himself is a loathsome murder, for he killed an enemy king during a parlay; and that perrin (that one from wheel of time) should have been hanged. For the billionth time, to avoid misunderstnading: this does not refer to amaram. it is a theoretical situation.

yeah, that's why i'm saying it is not a practical system: we don't know enough to apply it to most situations. EDIT: also, if there are powers that allow one's soul to leave the body temporarily and then come back, my whole definition get messed up and cannot be fixed. one attempt would be to define it as "the soul trapped in the afterlife", but then, if it resurrected, it means that it never was really trapped after all. or it could be "the soul leaves the body and cannot come back except by magical means", bit then, the means used to leave the body were pretty magical by themselves. or "the soul cannot come back to the body except by a magic system different from the one it used to leave", but I'm pretty sure there is some power combo that would screw up that definition too. or "the soul cannot leave except by the help of someone else", but then hoid could die, stay dead for centuries, then come back with some trick of magic, and he would have been not dead all along. although maybe that's the better definition i came up with so far; if someone, after his body has been utterly destroied and his soul is already in the afterlife, can still come back as he wills, then he is not a person, he is a different kind of entity, and not tied to the body like regular humans are. maybe. In the end, when it comes to people with as much investiture power like hoid, the concept of "alive" and "dead" aren't appropriate any more. it's like trying to stick to "time" and "space" when discussing relativistic physics. So, just like the physics had to develop a new set of concepts to deal with time and mass depending on the observer, so we would need to develop new concepts to discuss hoid's mortality appropriately.

personally, in-cosmere, I would adopt as a definition of death "the soul has left the body and is disjoined from the physical realm", so if the soul then goes back to the body or in a new body, I call that resurrection. however, in most cases we wouldn't know what happens with the soul, so it won't help much with the practice.

Actually, there is quite a debate about what "being dead" means. your heart can stop, but your brain can stilll be working. does it count? your brain stops working, but then start working again. did you die and got resurrected,, or you were never dead in the first placce? The bigger problem on that is that we don't even really know for sure what it means to be "alive". Ok, we can all see any living thing, but if we try to go down, to see what makes them "alive", we fail. Science don't have a definition of life, as every attempt to give one proved flawed. I remember reading some really insightful posts about it a few weeks ago, but I want to go to sleep so I won't try to search. Anyway, that ambiguity on what means to be alive and what means to be dead allows hoid's remark to be interpreted in a very broad sense. It can mean that he has a way to come back to life after being killed. it can mean that he will take ridiculous amount of punishment, be left for dead, then he'll got up a bit later feeling well. where is, exactly, the difference? That's why I don't see that sentence as important. we already know hoid is virtually impossible to kill. whether we call it super-regeneration-from-almost-death, or resurrection, at the levels needed to inconvenience hoid the difference is merely of semantics.

I'm sure there are several words of brandon confirming that hoid can survive full decapitation. hoid has more than just compounded gold.

I have to say, the part about amaram taking kaladin for crazy makes a lot of sense. I mean, all he said to any of the questions asked was "i don't know". and then he turned off a set of shards, giving them to another soldier. I understand amaram much more with that. considering that with the shards comes nobility and the power to command armies, you certainly don't want a madman to get them. Although, if that had been amaram's motivation, the honorable thing to do, when challenged by kaladin in the arena, would have been - after seeing that, far from being a madman, he's a highly skilled individual who managed to get back to the top and save dalinar's army, command the king's guards with little resources, and defeat in duel several shardbearers armed with a pointy stick - to recognize the mistake, admit guilt, explain that he did it because he assumed kaladin was crazy, give up the shards, and submit to judgment. If amaram had done that, I'd be willing to completely clean his record. Small offtopic: Me and my fellows researchers in chemistry also joke that our next job will likely be flipping burgers, and we come from all across europe. So, the idea of people getting prestigious degrees and then going to flip burgers (or ometimes become waiters) is widely spread internationally as a metaphor for how the crysis messed up the job marked.

I think you are reading too much in that sentence. especially a sentence coming from hoid, I wouldn't read it literally. I would see it more as "even if they behead me and feed my body to the greatshells, I'll be back anyway".

the fact that this is part 3 means that i missed part 2. I0m sure i can find it on facebook, but i don't have a facebook account (and not intending to get one) and so can't go look for it. can someone post a link to it? thanks. as for the rest, great job. takes real dedication to do it.

sword of truth wasn't that bad. the first book is actually good. and then, most of the characters are likable, the writing style is good (ok, I'm sure I used the wrong word there. but the concept is that the guy can write in a way that keeps you intersted. when he don't screw up plotwise, at least). there are plenty of good stuff there. And that's why I like to use it so much for comparisons. Because it shows what a potentially good series can become if executed poorly. the sword of truth goes against everything that brandon is teaching. he absolutely don't follow the first law of sanderson: the reader knows next to nothing on what the characters can do with magic, but magic usually solves the plot. it goes against the second law of sanderson; it is absolutely unclear what limitation richard's magic has. it probably has none, just his knowledge on its use - which is unconsistent itself. his magic is driven by need, which basically means that every time the plot demands it, he'll pull out some new flashy power that conveniently solves it, conveniently forgetting it the next time he needs it. notice how the situation is quite similar to the wheel of time on many aspectes, because also the wot had a relatively soft magic system; however, in that case it was well executed, because the reader had a good idea of what the characters could accomplish. it goes heavily against the third law of sanderson; that one said to go deep before going wide. instead, in the sword of truth, there are many elements that are introduced in a book, then forgotten. virtually nothing is shown on the interaction between magic and society. even in cities with lots of magic users, people live as if magic didn't exist. then there is the part about politics. sanderson mentioned somewhere that different points of view should be treated fairly in a book, because it's irritating to see someone thinking like you depicted as a moron. cue the sword of truth. people trying to help the poor are either giving them money for free, or they are hiring them for jobs for which they are not qualified. no one ever mentions the possibility that it can be done in better ways. personally, i find it highly irritating even when i happen to agree with the author - which is not the case here. So, in the sword of truth you get to see why sanderson's laws are correct, and how good are sanderson's teachings, and how a potentially good book can be ruined by going against them. there are many lessons that can be learned about writing from the sword of truth. Oh, and to not go completely offtopic about amaram's honor: if sa was the sword of truth, amaram would be totally justified and no one would question his honor, except some dumb strawman pacifists. the fact that he never raped women puts him strongly in good guy territory. And the plot would go out of its way to present him with a contrived situation where he has to kick a puppy - which he wil do, and then deliver a moral lesson on how it was good and right. kaladin would be an idealist (and therefore dumb) and die a karmic death for it. dalinar would probably be assassinated in cold blood by one of the protagonists when on a diplomatic mission to try to change the protagonist's mind, and no one will say anything about it.

not sure if i already raised the point somewhere before, but i do believe you are misreading them because of a single sentence (amaram saying his actions were necessary) into representing "ends before means" people. they are not. they are just that, religious zealots, not representing any particular life philosophy. they are supposed to be villain, but have enough of a motivation to make them realistic. in fact, you should give sanderson better credit for representing people with different views: he is strongly religious but jasnah is a very well made figure; people with real life depression problems wrote to compliment on how well he wrote depressed kaladin; after jasnah soulcast the four brigands, and she and shallan discuss the morality of the action, no clear conclusion is presented to the reader, and in fact all points of view are fairly expressed; jewel in warbreaker defending her religion very well. Many other examples. So, sanderson is never going to express other philosophies with strawman. if some people are portrayed as strawmen, then they are not supposed to represent that phylosophy. You should read the sword of truth to see what real strawman arguments are. the antagonists are a poor parody of communists, and the protagonists keep ranting about the moral superiority of liberism and the futility of trying to help the poor. No, you actually should read a few books of it. I apprecciated sanderson much more afterwards.

kaladin don't strike me as the "social media" kind of guy. in fact, every time someone will try to have him join somewhere, he'd be more set in not doing it. he's quite the loner, and he tends to become the leader of every group of people he hangs with, which also contributes to set him apart - at least in his mind. in fact, he won't have much in the way of hobbies, as he will feel the responsibility of his command positions and spend all his time trying to make them better. adolin would be very active on many social media and have plenty of friends. but he would eventually have to shut down his facebook because of the insults of all the girls he dated. Also, for all his thousands of virtual friends and the dozens of drinking buddies, he'd have very few, or none, real friends. But at some point, after being denied help for something he felt was important, he'd gradually decide to change life and seek more stable connections. dalinar would be an ex-general turned politician. his slogan would be "unite them", and he would always seek mediation with everyone. As such, he'd be active on the internet all around. However, because of his willingness to compromise with everyone, he'd eventually be considered a guy without any ideal and who's just trying to get a chair for himself no matter who's at the government (don't know how t works in your places, but in italy every politician who tried to overcome the "us against them" quickly developed a reputation for being only after the money and benefits. it don't help that in many cases the reputation is actually deserved). So he'd eventually fade out of influence. But then there would be a great crysis, and the parliament would be unable to act, with a stalemate between the different wings preventing any action, and a coalition government would be needed, and he would be the guy no one really likes, but no one would veto either. he'd take charge and fix the crysis, with mixxed results. at the end, his popularity would be even lower than at the beginning, cause he would be the one to take all the impopular decisions that are needed, and everyone else will be all too happy to let him take the blame for them. he'd have to close his internet pages for all the insults that he'd receive. In the end, however, history would remember him as someone who did what could be reasonably done in the circumstances. Jasnah would be a highly respected member of the scientific community, a brilliant young professor who caused a minor scientific revolution in her field. She would devote all her time to work, and although she would be very involved in scientific debates at the highest levels, those do not happen in internet forums. Although she may be a contributor to wikipedia, since she likes spreading knowledge. However, her students would consider her a slaver who overworks them, expecting them to keep up with her. One in ten of her students would go on to become a great name in science, and a couple would also win the nobel prize (she herself would, at a later age). the other nine in ten would have a nervous breakdown and leave academics forever. szeth would be an inflexible policeman, fixated with respecting the rules in every detail. he's the kind of guy who, if you pick him up after a car crash and race him to the hospital, will fine you for excess speed. on the internet, he'd be a moderator in many boards, banning people for minor offences.

1) he had no interest in lighteyes. I'm prone to believe that after events at the end of words of radiance, he'll overcome his prejudice. 2) veil is certainly not the persona shallan wears around normally. she only goes around as veil when she needs to meet ghostbloods, and she don't give confidence to other people at the time. it would be hard for her to interact with kaladin that way. 3) veil is a deceptive con artist. not someone kaladin would like. 4) no, it would no be great. the "fall in love with the secret identity" has been done to death already. we don't need more of it 4b) when the "fall in love with the secret identity" is done, generally it's the hero trying to woo the girl who loves his secret identity, trying to make her love also his mundane self. shallan is already with adolin, and i don't really want to see a love triangle. especially that one; it would feel overly forced. So, no, I don't think it will happen.

the rate of allomantic metal consumption is negligible. let's takke for example the most rare of them, gold. Gold is nowadays extracted at the rate of 2700 tons per year. the earth crust contains a few hundreds to a few thousands billions tons of it (couldn't find an exact reference), however only a small amount of it is economicaly viable. Anyway, allomancers would consume what, a few kilograms per year? given that burning gold is only useful to a compounder, and that a very small amount of metal can provide a helluva lot of power, gold consumption for allomancy is unllikely to reach 10 kilos per year. But let's be ccrazy and say it's one ton. it's still 0.04% of total gold consumption. But hey, most gold can be recycled, unlike the one burned. So, assuming 95% of gold is recycled (which is not), we see that allomantic consumption would cause less than 1% of total gold depletion. And that after making extremely high assumptions. One hundredth of that figure is much more likely. So, sooner or later scadrial will have to conquer space to look for rare metals. We ourselves will have to. But allomanticc consumption won't have any influence on it. They will need the metal for totally mundane means. That is, unlesss they manage to make a technological allomancy, where machines are capable of burning metals. in which case, metal consumption would be much higher. I can see, like, a crane working with steel and iron; instead of consuming electricity it consumes metal, and it's more eco-friendly because it don't produce carbon dioxide. And uses like those could take millions of tons worldwide. Still unlikely to make much of an impact. the only metals whose burning produce a useful industrial effect are iron and steel. current steel production is a few billion tons/year, I doubt even a technological allomancy could consume anywhere comparable to it. and iron makes up, like, 5% of the earth crust. it is pretty much the only metal that cannot run out.

Something like that would undermine all the character development Kaladin had so far. He can't be petty and vengeful like that, I hope he had learned it by now. I'm not saying that he should just simply forgive but at the very least be civil about it. I for one really hope Kaladin exacts justice on Roshone after a fair trial. But I doubt they have the time for that kind of things right now.

For all the other metals known, feruchemy is purely internal. it only changes yourself. So I'd say that's the most likely scenario. Of course, it is possible that the spiritual metals will work in a different way. No, we definitely do not have enough information about it. we don't know what ccauses you to establish better connections. Also, I upvoted you for the sole idea of using fduraluminium to get more upvotes. that would fit well both within the "you know you're a sanderfan when" and the "most useless uses for totally useful powers"

there are ssome readings from book 3 already revealed. SPOILER FROM THEM I wonder if his father has become an alcholist for losing his sons. Somehow I doubt a happy family reunion will ensue. fate seems to hate kaladin for some reason.

there are plenty of phylosophycal influences on the work of sanderson. for example, the spren are physical manifestations of plato's hyperuranium. And when shallan and jasnah are discussing the morality of the latter soulcasting people, most of those phylosophies mentioned have clear in-world equivalents. And there are also plenty of things inspired from the bible, although I'm not the most qualified to talk about those. That said, some could be genuine coincidences. It's been 5000 years since the invention of writing, sometimes it's difficult to come up with something that hasn't been done before.

Oh, no problem, I have a deep personal interest for most stuff concerning space, and I'm enjoying the chance of discussing about it. Now, if you want them to blow up the planet, keep in mind a few details 1) a planet exploding would generate a huge amount of debris and result in vast meteor fall on its moons. However, if they have the technology to blow up a whole planet (which requires blowing it so hard that the pieces won't just fall back into place because of gravity) then they must have the technology to set up a space shield to also destroy or deflect any incoming fragment of the planet that may hit them. 2) the star would still exert its gravitational influence on the two moons. however, the angolar momentum they had when rotating around the planet would be converted into kinetical energy, causing them to settle on another orbit or to be expelled from the system (if that energy is higher than the star's escape energy). there is also a difficult to predict effect after destroying the planet, because its fragments will still be generating gravity that will influence the moons for at least a few days - until they are far away enough. So, it is predictable enough that a very advanced civilization may try it as a last resort to get away from the path of a colliding gas giant, but messy enough that it could still go wrong. I like it.