king of nowhere

Lash it one hundred times instead, and watch as it accelerates to such ludicrous speed that it chatches fire by attrition with the air, burning with merely a trace of ash. Also doubles as room heating system.

According to Occam's razor, the Checkov's gun is hanging there for purely ornamental purposes, and will never be needed. and anyway, it's likely unloaded for safety reasons. and probably not functional for not being taken care of in a long time. Yeah, Occam's razor is not a good way to predict books. But that won't stop me from using it wherever possible.

I'd ask her to retroactively remove the curse she would bestow upon me. Sometimes all you can do is grabbing a chance at a draw.

So, what's the canon continuity now? did Alcatraz mother got to keep a lent, or did alcatraz recover both?

the way other races in fantasy or science fiction are generally portrayed as stereotyped and all alike, with humans being the most varied culture around, is both accurate and inaccurate at the same time. It is inaccurate because I would expect any inhuman race to have as much variety as we do, possibly more. in the sci-fi videogame Mass Effect, mordin (a scientist) say that individual differences among humans are greater than with other races: quoting from memory, something like "in all societies there are geniuses and idiots, but you see a krogan, or an elcor, you can draw conclusions on all the race; with humans you can't. too much individual difference". At least genetically, it is false. humans had a bottleneck somewhere a few tens of thousands years ago, when only 1000 to 10000 individuals survived. as a result, we have less genetic differences between us than most other races on the planet. Unless those aliens suffered similar, even harsher near-extinctions, i expect them to be more differentiated. Still, we have huge cultural differences. But it is also accurate, in that we would not perceive those differences. let's see it with a practical example. I am italian. I went to work in finland. At the beginning, all finnish people looked the same to me, because of their different culture. With time, I began better noticing the individual differences. But still, even after four years there, I perceive the finns as an homogeneous mass that is substantially different from me, and over that stereotype are pasted individual differences. Every time I say "this guy is particularly talkative, for a finn", I am aknowledging the stereotype of quiet finns and putting a modifier to it. I myself am not an average italian, and fit pretty poorly in my country; but in finland, I fit better with other italians, or even with spanish - who have a similar culture. I have nothing but respect and goodwill towards the finnish people, but I still see them as different from me and mostly uniform among them. And that's taking in two european cultures. When I went to usa I felt an even greater difference, and I felt more strongly my european identity. If I traveled outside of europe or north america, I'd surely feel the people even more different from me, and I'd feel my broader western cultural heritage. And if we were to met some aliens, I'd likely feel human in the face of something different. And that has nothing to do with hate or racism or trust or stuff. I respect the finns, I believe their country is the best in the world for general wellfare and quality of life, but I still feel them as different. It's roughly what kobold king said. if something is different enough from you, you won't be able to perceive the individual differences because they will be overshadowed by the bigger differences with your culture. So, the fantasy tope is quite justified. To humans, all elves look the same. to the elves, all humans look the same. to the orks, there is no difference between humans and elves beside the pointy ears. Notice also that most of those stereotypes are actually true. Not all italians are extroverted and talkative, and not all finns are quiet, but go to a restaurant in finland and in italy, and you see the difference in the amount of conversations going on. Not all americans love to keep their air conditioning at freezing levels during the summer, but in no other country I had the need to put on extra clothes when entering a museum or train station. Now, that brings us to the problem of racism: is it racist to apply stereotypes to other people? I say no, as long as you leave room for individual judgment. Racism is a form of prejudice. From pre (before) judice (judgment), meaning to judge before knowing. Are you judging before knowing if there are plenty of statistics to back up the idea that a certain people is, on average, more inclined to behave in a certain way? No. But then, one must never confuse the people with the individual. regardless of the stereotypes of a people, and how true they may be, you have to judge any single person for his actions alone, and not blindly assume that said stereotypes would apply to him. That, I think, is the line between knowing your stuff and being racist. And, while that applied to the real world, it applies also in fantasy. On this, sanderson is doing a good, realistic job. while his races and cultures show some uniformity, they are clearly composed of individuals, and we see many who do not fit the stereotype. Jordan made a worse job of it, imho. all aes sedai of a same ajah were virtually undistinguishable from each other, and the domani and ebou dari, and especially the aiel, felt too homogeneous to me. BUt while I found many cultures lacking individuality, it was still handled reasonably well. I'm sure there are many who makes a worse job out there.

No need for anything so complicated. have you ever noticed how all foreigners of a different ethnic group look similar if you are unfamiliar with them? or how about all mountains look the same to people grown on the plains? can you distinguish two cows from each other? if you were to see two forgotten shadows, would you be able to tell them apart? the simples explanation is that, being something so different from us, nalizar sees humans as all alike because he don't know us enough to tell the difference. the rithmatists stand out to him for some reason linked to their power.

speaking of dystopia, what if the warhammer 40k fandom were to write mistborn? the final empire would not exist in a vacuum, but it would be hard pressed to fight off a half dozen factions of invaders from outside, all those wanting nothing but the total annihilation of humankind. a small empire would be willing to accept them as b-list citizens if they agree to be brainwashed by a nazi-style propaganda machine, and those are probably the lesser evil of all factions. the lord ruler would require the sacrifice of ten thousands people to stay alive every day, but his death would be the end of the only way men can travel to the farthest reaches of the empire, and since the empire can only survive against its enemies by being united, there would really be no alternatives to it. kelsier would fight for the final empire; as much as he hated it, it's either fight for it, or watch as one of the opther factions kill you and anyone you loved. he would recruit vin from a group of heretics. the steel inquisition would then proceed to kill all the luthadel population, to make sure the heresy is contained. the imperial guard would have for motto "we have more people than you bullets", and would fight accordingly. general demoux would execute a bunch of soldiers to use their bodies as construction material, and will be awarded for it. the soldiers will cheer it, as they are glad to lay down their lives for the lord ruler. all the main characters will need pharmaceutics made with dead children to stay alive. the books will end with millions of people dead in pointless battles that don't really change anything. kelsier would die a heroic sacrifice that would ultimately lead to no good. vin could die too, or she could become corrupted by demons and become an antagonist for further books. rashek would still be in suspended animation, the machines keeping him alive slowly breaking down without anyone knowing how to fix them.

Terry goodkind: kaladin would have had no moral qualms about assassinating elokar, and would have done so immediately, all the while ranting some self-righteous monologue where he suppposedly proves he was right by easily rejecting strawman arguments. In fact, dalinar would have probably killed elokar first. or sadeas would have done it. or navani. dalinar's method of unifing alethkar would have been to declare war on everyone who would not join him. and it would have worked too. and then, after becoming absolute ruler of the alethi, he would have retired into the woods to tend his sick wife, telling his people that "they have to find their way". kaladin will regularly disregard all the advices of zahel, and would turn out to be right every time for some strange twist. every time the bad guy appear on screen, they are raping or torturing someone. and they will look vaguely like strawman communists. The protagonists will be in the right. always. without doubt. even when they are doing plenty of questionable stuff (like, murdering an ambassador, torturing a prisoner because he killed a guy with a name, jeopardizing the only hope of the free world the moment their loved ones will be taken hostages) no one will ever complain, and if someone does, he does it in a flawed way that make him look like a moron and make the protagonists seem even more right. every book will introduce a new random character that will be a nobody with a very traumatic past and the protagonists will pet the dog. Tolkien: even the soldiers would never curse. the fights would be described in much less detail. the extra space would be filled with songs and poems. the magic would never be explained, and it would rarely appear. a powerful mage would be among the main characters, but he will almost never do anything magic. the songs of the listeners would be in their original language. the dawnchant would be in its original language. lopen would speak herdazian. those languages would have been created for fun by the author, who then created the whole setting just to give them a story. Robert jordan: there is already a whole thread about it. (only for the stormlight archive, but it can be applied to anything else) Clive Cussler (i know, he''s not afantasy writer, but no one said we have to limit ourselves to those) to save the world the protagonists would have to find some ancient lost ship. In EVERY book. the biggest and most funded institution in the final empire would be the imperial underwater and marine canton.

oh my, that's actually the ultimate weapon. time bubbles make it difficult to fire from inside to outside, but nothing prevents firing from outside to inside (when Pull shot wax and wayne activated the bubble, the bullet passed exactly where wax was, it wasn't deflected by the time bubble). So get your lifeless allomantic squirrel, tell it to go near your enemies and ativate cadmium, then you can kill them from afar with extreme ease. the only defense against it is to have your own lifeless squirrels, so that you'll all be on equal footing with the enemy. and maybe some lifeless foxes to hunt the squirrels. Forget nukes. squirrels are the ultimate weapon of the future.

well, perrin comes back next book. i think you already saw him if you started it. then there is one book where mat do not appear at all (many people were disappointed, especially because the last we saw of mat was a big cliffhanger, and then nothig for one book). After that, all the three main characters appear in every book at least a few chapters. As for asmodean, I was initially very curious, but I then forgot about it a few books later. it's just not important to the story, since everyone had a good reason to do it.

sorry, i'm not sure i get your point. i assume you mean "he possessed the inspector", which is different from absorbing. as far as i understood, there were two tower entities involved: one possessed the inspector, the other possessed nalizar. no one did anything to the other policeman. they could absorb rithmatists, turning them into wild chalklings. regular people they could kill, but not make the bodies disappear. and they could not possess other people, as they were only two. as for saving joel, we know joel is the protagonist. nalizar knew that joel was a regular student that was helping fitch with some work, and while he was involved in the investigation, he was no more so than the lowest policeman. joel suspected nalizar, but just because he didn't like him and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time a couple times. joel had no proof, and in fact was only making himself ridicule with his accusations. so, as far as nalizar knew, joel was no treath whatsoever. still, why spare him? simple. he needed to save someone to play the part of the hero. so, by making look like he "saved" joel, he was helping his reputation, which we know is important to his plans.

I would see better jasnah to hold the shards. for once, it would be hilarious. I can totally see her teachings leading to the formation of the church association to worship respect in a "first among equal" fashion the godlike very powerful, but definitely not holy being. then, she is the better person suited to it. she is hard but compassionate, stern but fair. she is willing to dabble in assassination and lay waste on robbers and murderers, but when shallan said "i made a mistake. i will make more without you. i need your help. please" she took her in, she helped her brothers despite having no interest whatsoever in them, and in the spoilery unpublished material that sanderson released a few weeks ago she goes out of her way, taking personal danger, to help people she barely knew and that didn't matter at all in the big picture. she is somewhat dismissive - almost inevitable when one is so smart that everyone else seem an idiot by comparison - but she still respects everyone. In short, she is the best kind of person to entrust with shardic power. I would trust her much more than kaladin with it, barring huge character development. Dalinar, on the other hand, would be almost as good. third point, she is by far the most knowleadgable in realmatics among rosharans, barring worldhoppers. so she is best suited to put herself in the right place at the right time to take a shard. As for the argument "brandon cannot use it again after mistborn" or "brandon must use it again or mistborn will be a deus ex machina", i think both have merit. so I would guess the end would involve people taking shards, but in quite a different way than in mistborn. or maybe odium will be defeated and then someone will take the shards as an epilogue.

Stop saying "no it's not her", or he will just ask for every female character until the time we finally don't say anything. It's the reason aes sedai speak the way the do even when a simple answer will do. the reason secret services say "no comment" even when there is really nothing to hide. The reason sanderson gives some rafo to perfectly innocent questions every once in a while.

i don't think worldhopping is based on aons, as there is no similar power with other magical systems - allomancy, awakening, forging - and yet we have users of all those systems able to become worldhoppers. So I don't think it requires specific powers. I think more likely it requires raw investiture that has to be manipulated in some other way

well, not such a good comparison. kaladin was already a soldier, he already killed scores of people in battle and he wanted to go to the shattered plains. It's like you refuse a machine gun cause you don't want to kill people with it, then go back to killing people with a sling.

really nice. I've always wanted to see a jasnah pow, seeing what's inside her head. unfortunately that except didn't give much more information about her, but still better than nothing. and i'm glad there's a good chance some of the sailors survived. I loved the "you will change" line, nice comparison to the famous "i am a stick". I also think we can probably consider as canon the power of stormlight healing now. I wonder if holding enough stormlight would mean that in case of decapitation your head would regrow a new body.

I was thinking the reason for that was the many instances of the word "magic" in this forum, but you are probably right, "lifeless sex slave" would be a more fitting match for it. "hypnotized" or "mindless" in place of lifeless would be even better, but that's close enough, the spambots aren't picky about it.

I think it's mostly an inconscious thing. even when the society emancipated, there are still concepts that people keep believing, unless they stop to think about it. for example even now lots of people think that women should care for the children more than males, that men have no interest for romance and females have no interest for sex, or many other things that are plain wrong. so, i gueess to writers it just come more natural to write male villains. on the other hand, there's also the fact that fantasy soocieties tend to be at a middle age level, and societies then tended to be very sexist, with men having power and women being relegated to caring for children - or, in a few exceptions, the opposite roles, but still roles were gender-defined. so in those societies it is normal that men would be in a dominating position, and that extends to the big bad hierarchy.

Well, I think tsr was my favourite of the original 11. bad news for you. the pacing keeps like that for several books. books 6 to 10 are the worst, and most people consider them the worst of the series. me, Iìve always enjoied the ride, and even if the plot felt like it was going nowhere, i still liked seeing the worls and the characters. yeah, quite a common criticism. but it's not like men are much different, after all. aes sedai have quite different personalities; however, they all behave according to the ideal of aes sedai, and so they seem carbon copies of each others until you get to know them better. once you see them individually (moiraine, siuan, verin, and i don't remember who else was already characterized by that time) you see that they are very different people. just as all foreigners from a country look the same stereotype, until you get to know them individually. well, her rationale for it was that they were the only 3 channelers in the tower she was sure were not black ajah. she states so somewhere. not sure it was a good idea, but at least it makes sense Well, yes. this is a common comment to the wheel of time. all the protagonists are acting like a bunch of kids. but, hey, that's what most of them are, after all. if i remember correctly, at the beginning rand is 18, egwene is 16. that's what the pattern gets from picking such people to save the world. if only, onstead of rand mat and perrin, the pattern had picked ther respective fathers to be the heroes, the saga would have ended in a couple books. Anyway, if you look at the real world, it's full of bad decisions and powerful people acting like children (also less powerful people act like children plenty of times, but they don''t cause the same large scale damage). for example, gengis kahn had lots of respect for china, and tried to get good diplomatic relations, but he decided to invade it after the chinese emperor had his ambassador killed because he didn't like the idea of "a savage in a tent" daring to address him. or serbia refusing to offer diplomatic excuses after the archduke was assassinated in their country, triggering the first world war; they had absolutely no reason for not offering excuses, except that it made them feel good to stand up to the austroungarian empire, and they felt safe in their defensive alliances. As for the whole "people scheming in the face of imminent danger", even when rome was invaded by the barbarians, any general with an army tried to conquer the throne for himself. even in recent times, about not talking to each other: usa and russia never wanted to nuke each other, and both would have been content to stay in their emisphere. but they didn't trust each other, hence the cold war, the weapons race, etc. so, it's quite discomforting to admit, but wot is probably more realistic than most books in that regard.

his purpose could also simply be to add depth to the woorldbuilding by putting in some explanations about spren, and provide some comical relief.

outis, i upvoted you just for inventing the term "worldhopped" the difficulties of worldhopping are to travel to or from sel, but it tells nothing about how difficult it is to learn to worldhop there. it would be like seeing the conditions of the roads and judging from those how difficult it is for the locals to buy a car. We have been told that the difficulties of worldhopping on sel are because the shards there are shattered. So I suppose the presence of a shard is like a beacon in shadesmar. As for actually becoming a worldhopper, if my theory that you need to have a lot of investiture on you is correct, then it would be easier for rosharans and nalthians, since they can get huge amounts of investiture on them with stormlight or by accumulating breaths. It would be very difficult for allomancers, cause they are not invested normally and only becomes invested when burning metals. however, demoux being a worldhopper makes my theory quite shaky. he is an atium misting, so no way he could have found enough atium to burn to accumulate that kind of investiture on him. unless his finnal battle in the pits left him changed in some way from burning all that atium at once. but still, it doesn't seem very likely. On the other hand, I would bet something that at least worldhopping has nothing to do with the specific magic systems of the planets and requires manipulation of raw investiture. how that is accomplished, i have no idea. EDIT: wait a moment, I just noticed mraize is stated by several people to be a worldhopper. I never noticed it. what are the clues? what is known about him?

i think he was downvoted for the harsh tone he used in making the criticism. I choose to have faith in humankind and believe that sanderfans would not downvote someone only for expressing negative opinions on sanderson or his work (I'm pretty naive, am I?). However, I think 6 downvotes were too much, especially for a newcomer who was probably used to posting on other forums with lower standards. Actually, this is a surprisingly respectful community; and while it is not the only respectful community I found, in all the other cases I always got the feeling that the posts were respectful only because of harsh modding policy. This is the only place where I feel people really care about not being jerks. I don't know of any other place on the internet where a thread like the one about transgenders in the cosmere we had a few months ago could exist without degenerating into a flame war or being preemptively locked. Back to topic, if I wanted to read those five chapters without buying the whole anthology, is there a chance it could happen? Like, they get posted on the site somewhere like the deleted prologue to the emperor's soul? I really don't like the idea of buying a whole book I'm not intersted in just for five chapters.

well, yes, refusing the sword was a dumb decision. people make them from time to time especially when strong emotions are involved, and kaladin was in a state of shock for losing his comrades. he was alsoo subconsciously infuecned by his bond with syl, that was starting to form already. also amaram's decision of sparing him was bad, but again, amaram is not a complete monster, and could not bring himself to kill the man who saved his life. anyway, i don't think kaladin's decision to turn down the blade made any difference. in all likelyhood, amaram would have taken it either way.

well, of course having a power is better than not having it. however, i feel it's quite underused on the occasional jar. which is mostly the point of all the examples i made: not useless, but still wasted. it's like having a holiday home in the mountains or seaside and going there one weekend per year (with the difference that on allomantic powers you don't use you at least don't have to pay a real estate tax). or getting a PhD and then finding a job flipping burger (actually, that happens pretty often in the current economic climate; i wonder if a similar thing can happen on scadrial, with allomancers having no job and having to apply on flipping burgers? I'm imagining wayne as a waiter at a restaurant, using his bendalloy bubbles to set tables faster, while marasi near him activates cadmium bubbles for the clinets who are waiting their food) However, in the specific case of pewter and a sedentary person, there is an additional trap: we all know lack of excercise is dangerous for your healt, and excercising while burning pewter equals to no excercice. so while even a very sedentary person will have to climb stairs or walk around every once in a while, keeping a minimum of muscles, the sedentary pewterarm will do those things with pewter, resulting in even lower muscle tone than even real sedentary people. which has a good chance to lead to hear disease by age 40, with the guy having to burn pewter all the time just to avoid a heart attack or, in a milder case, being unable to walk without pewter. EDIT: but I forgot the "you need less sleep" part; having a couple more hours of free time every day would actuallly be pretty good. resisting illness can also be useful, but must be done with caution or it will depress your immune system. so, all in all, not that bad. still, a huge waste compared to someone who actually make a professional use of his pewter.

by the way, that make me think: why did he publish alcatraz with scholastic instead of with tor like everything else he ever wrote? was it maybe a time when tor was having financial troubles?