king of nowhere

The one feature of Tress that is eminently described is how she keeps her hair in a tress and braid. Yet all the artwork features her with freely blowing hair. Why?

Does it make much difference? Shallan killed her mother, her father, and her second mentor (tyn). all three of them for legitimate self-defence. her first love interest was an assassin, willing to kill her as collateral in another assassination attempt. poor girl, what a life she had.

it will be explained before the epilogue. not important anyway, and not a spoiler. wasn't it explained, or at least made clear, already? parshmen are parshendi. the parshmen are just another form, one with little intellect. and the voidbringers are also parshendi, in different forms. as for a desolation... it will be clarified in book 3. you'll see in book 4. with a strong hint already in book 3 you will hear about them, but it will take a while they are his squires. they get some power from him. it will be explained soon enough, but it's not really a spoiler. magical healing in the cosmere resets you to your cognitive identity; roughly speaking, the way you think of yourself. so it's very much a case of "your mind - with a generous helping of investiture - makes it real" lopen lost an arm, but he never really accepted the loss; his idea of himself healty includes having two arms, and so his missing arm is regrowing. on the other hand, kaladin feels the scars as part of himself, so they stay. it really depends a lot on an individual, whether an old wound gets magically healed or not. it can get even more strange; a transsexual character (a very minor one, only appears in a couple chapters) changes sex by tapping healing - without meaning to, completely by accident - because deep down she always felt her original body was wrong, and it should have been different.

there are four on the planet. the number increases if we consider others from off-world

Point taken. this could bring lumar to a more normal size

not necessarily. perhaps he did interrogate the 17 witnesses before that, after kaladin came to him the first time, and since all witnesses dismissed kaladin's accusations, dalinar filed it away. when kaladin issued the challenge, dalinar decided to give it another go

don't insult poor elokhar. he is useless. his wife is plain malicious.

I like your reasoning here

I didn't like lift either when she first appeared. i reacted a lot like you, why should i care about her. i got turned around in her own novella i think you already have the tools to figure it out by now. szeth is truthless, some kind of awful criminal for his kind, and he's been sentenced to obey anyone holding his oathstone - even though he'd rather not to. that much is clear as of book 1. then when kaladin surgebinds in front of him, he's very perturbed. if that's not clear enough, i think another piece of the puzzle will be dropped in the next interlude

oh, yes. it's actually kinda fun to look in retrospect at what was really happening in that nameless battlefield. there were big stakes in play. kaladin stumbled and interfered on a secret war between clandestine organizations.

the best way to have unequivocally good publicity - i dare say, the only way - is to have an unequivocally evil foe to oppose. heroes become such because they act in the face of disaster and tragedy. with no disaster or tragedy, there can be no heroes. getting killed in the process also helps. can't speak ill of the dead, and absolutely can't speak ill of those who sacrificed themselves to save others. so, ruin wanted to destroy the world. literally. blow it up in a cloud of cosmic dust. preservation was the only thing standing against that fate. with this premise, it doesn't matter anything else preservation does. he may have been kicking puppies every day before breakfast while turning at the camera and stating "don't mistake me guys, I'm totally not a good guy". wouldn't matter. the people of scadrial would still hail preservation as their savior who sacrificed everything to save them from ruin. Same thing on roshar. Honor is dangerously close to fundamentalism. but odium is trying to destroy humanity (ok, he only wants to enslave them to use as cannon fodder in his next war, not much difference). Cultivation is hiding. honor died fighting odium. therefore, honor is the hero and don't you ever try telling a rosharan otherwise.

I may be wrong, but I recall that xisis lived very close to the lunagree. in any case, to get to the midnight sea tress had to cross all of the crimson

oh, right. more than enough, actually. we only have to figure out where that air comes from...

"in the middle" in this case means "close enough that we can approximate"

yes, but all that correlates to the impossible orbits. ok, the orbits are impossible and require magic, we all agree with it. given that the moons are entirely taken over by heavily invested entities, it is possible. it is certainly intended; brandon knows it's physically impossible and decided to make it that way and make it work with magic. the planet looking way too small bothers me more at this point

this one looks like a justified case, actually. in that tress story was selected specifically because it had hoid in it. I mean, it's clear that lumar has a lot of different people who interacted with the dragon or with the sorceress. those stories usually ended up poorly, hoid went to lumar to get elantrian magic from riina. he spent years on the planet. then he crossed tress, who wanted to reach the sorceress, and helped her achieve her goal. while the story is nbarrated mostly from tress perspective, it's really only noteworthy in the grand scheme of things because it has hoid in it. otherwise tress would have at most figured out in an appendix as yet another victim of the sorceress. As for ulaam, i think he was looking for hoid specifically, and stuck to him. So no, this is not a classic star wars case of "guy lands on a new planet, which apparently has a single city on it, and there he stumbles upon this other main character. also, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale". no, this is a case of "hoid came to lumar for a specific reason, got cursed, then he wandered the planet for years, was eventually found by an old friend who was looking for him and stayed with him, and eventually stumbled on a girl whose quest aligned with hoid, and hoid helped her to succeed" in general, worldhoppers are not too common, and they are looking up for important stuff. marasi did not stumble on shai; shai was on scadrial doing ghostblood business, and she was specifically looking out for marasi. felt did not attach himself to dalinar's retinue by chance; felt has a mission on roshar, and whatever that mission is it involves being close to important events, and dalinar is the most important person on the planet. You do not stumble upon a worldhopper. the worldhopper was there waiting for someone like you to come along.

Some things don't add up about it. First of all, I assumed that the 12 moons, being in geostationary orbit, would all be on the equator. yes, they cannot be in geostationary orbit that close to the surface unless the planet rotates really, really fast, or it has extremely low gravity, there's clearly magic at work here. Still, a geostationary orbit away from the equator would be even harder to achieve - it would basically require the moon to be standing still in freefall all the time. Still, 12 pentagons cover a sphere, so while there is no specific mention on how the moons are disposed, it seems more likely the idea that they cover all the planet evenly and not only the equator. And in that case, one would have to go through 6 pentagons to circle the whole planet. Anyway, when tress becomes captain, salay says it would take "one week" to reach the midnight sea. They were currently in the middle of the crimson sea, so half a pentagon away from the border. We also don't know how long a "week" lasts on Lumar; we could go by our 7-day week, but given how important moons are on Lumar, a 12-day week seems appropriate. I couldn't find any reference in the text as to which is correct. I also looked at how long a sail boat can travel in a day, and I found 100 nautic miles as a good average with favorable wind. So, 185 km. Going with the most likely explanations - 12 days for a week, 6 seas to circle the planet - one would get a circumference of 185*12*6*2=26640 km, for a radius of 4240 km. Earth has a radius of 6370 km. Lumar would be much closer to the size of Mars (3390 km of radius, one third of Earth gravity) than to that of Earth. That would be small enough that the planet would not be able to retain its atmosphere over astronomical timespans. And that's assuming Tress could sail with favorable winds all the time, or the planet would be even smaller. On the plus side, a small planet with low gravity would help tress resist 15 minutes hanging from the ship. The only way to get an estimate consistent with Earth-like size would be to have the moons around the equator, in which case it would take 12 seas to circle the planet, and the previous estimate would double - but it could be brought down to Earth level by assuming the wind wasn't always favorable. Of course, assuming a 7-days week would be even worse, resulting in a "planet" slightly bigger than our Moon. Another assumption that could bridge the gap would be that Lumar has a longer day. With a 40-hours day, we'd get the estimate just right. Most likely, Brandon and his assistants didn't make an exact calculation here. But assuming the numbers are good, what do you think it implies for Lumar's size and/or calendar?

I'd be curious, before spoilers happen, to have your unbiased opinion on moash so far. there have been... quite hot debates of his actions in the rest of this book. before you see them, what's your opinion on moash according to what you've seen so far?

I never considered it, but not for taking clues; I did figure out most mistborn surprises early on. the reason I never realized huck could be charles is that it seemed impossible under cosmere magic. when i saw a talking rat, I was very confused. there are no forms of cosmere magic that I know that can make talking animals. I immediately thought of vendell saying that a kandra needs to be at least as big as a rabbit to retain sentience, so that was ruled out. then I was all wtf, how do we get a talking rat in the cosmere? for a while I even suspected it was design, hoid's spren, with a lightweaving. then came the explanation of familiars, and since it was the only explanation that made sense, i bought it. I just would have never thought it was possible to turn a man into a rat - while retaining sentience - with cosmere magic. I was thinking in wider cosmere terms, and not in fairy tales terms.

It is possible that silver has effects on other worlds too, just not as noticeable. maybe allomantic pushes around silver are 20% weaker, that's a small enough difference that it is conceivable nobody would have noticed. Or maybe a silver blade would have been extra effective against koloss, but nobody noticed because normal swords are effective anyway. in the past, steel made in different places was different, because of different contaminants in the ores. this resulted occasionally in ancient societies getting an advanced steel entirely by chance, because they had the right mix of impurities in their iron ores. with modern smelting, all the process is standardized so that there are no significant differences

obsidian alone is too fragile to make good weapons. a knife is the biggest you can get, even that is a stretch and would shatter very easily. in fact, i would say that even the knife would be better off built as a macauitl - with a wooden body and obsidian shards around it.

consider that brandon set up the whole scene of kaladin learning to ride just to lead to the encounter with shallan posing as horneater. eventually kaladin will learn to use his powers, and there would be no point in riding. so much work, just to make him and shallan preemptively dislike each other.

in addition to that, there's a thug in urteau that fights spook with a stave with obsidian shards embedded, with is basically the same thing.

and frankly, I'd call foul on brandon otherwise. his magic is well grounded in reality, the powers have reasonable effects and consequences. an explosion like that indeed vaporized vayne instantly, gold and everything else. tapping healt is just not enough. now, after he was dead but before he left the cognitive realm, it is perhaps possible that giving him healing at that moment (somehow) could have caused his "soul" to regenerate a new body from nothing and live again, but i would not count on it.

investiture is the general cosmere name for magic fuel. it's the energy that powers magic. so on roshar investiture is carried in the storms, from there it goes into spheres, and from there a radiant can suck it to do radiant stuff. or a fabrial can use it to function. investiture is basically the magical equivalent of electricity. as for zahel, it's not hard to spot. as for recognizing him, depends on which other books you read. there are actually quite a lot of worldhoppers on roshar surrounding the main events - belonging to different factions, with different goals. the thing is, roshar has several things of interest for the cosmere at large. i don't think it's really a spoiler, but just in case you consider it spoilery I won't go in more detail.