king of nowhere

I think it's relatively easy for hoid, since we can assume hoid has all the knowledge we do and a lot more on how investiture works. HE just need to surprise tlr, but i doubt it's that difficult: i don't think he can burn atium all the time in his own palace. and hoid can easily disguise himself as a servant with lightweaving and tap luck at the right moments. Then, shot tlr in the heart with an atium bullet (i think? maybe some other metal is actually needed). the bullet would act as an hemalurgic spike, removing tlr fatium and condemning him to die of old age, suddenly incapable of drawing from his own metalminds. easy. and remember, hoid can tap luck to make the perfect shot. Another option is to awaken tlr bed sheets to rremove his atium bracers while he's sleeping (with compounding he don't need to sleep, but i figure he'd stil want to take a nap every once in a while for the pleasure of it) Also a shardblade through the brain should kill him before he can regenerate. hoid would have to disguise as a servant, then summon the blade to be exactly inside tlr brain. that would probably be riskier. Or, if hoid for some reason could not use any of those plans, he could have just sent a note to kelsier like Actually, I would give some money just to see how kell would have reacted upon receiving such a letter. As for killing tlr with modern means, a well-aimed explosive round from a cannon would tear him into a puddle of goo, i doubt he could regenerate from that. even a minigun would probably be enough. if not, you have to use something bigger, like a high-explosive air-dropped bomb. I'm pretty sure there's no regeneration that helps against one ton of explosive. And if he can avoid it with atium and superspeed, as a last resort you can launch a nuke to his location. seeing the nuke hitting a few seconds before may give him a few hundred meters to duraluminium/steelpush away, but it will matter little against a nuke with the power of making a fireball with one kilometer of radius and knocking down concrete buildings twenty kilometers away.

I don't buy the argument that they have bigger things to be involved in; if that was the case, they would spend their times doing those things, and not subtly influencing events around. hoid spent much time acting as a beggar, after all. I also don't think the "they fear a power vacuum" argument is solid; hoid is willing to let roshar burn, by his own admission. if he wanted the lord ruler to die, odium to be freed and then reunited with preservation, he would not have cared about the state of anarchy that would have left behind. the argument that they are afraid to interfere with some shardic plan is more sound, but double-edged: yes, the shards have precognition and can make long-term plans that humans cannot, and interfering, even with the best intentions, risk making things worse. But, aren't hoid and the others interfering already? they are still pushing events to their goals, and are just as likely to disrupt a plan as they would be if they acted with their full power. the arguments that they need to keep a low profile because there are other worldhoppers that disagree with them is a good one and a satisfying answer. that would mean that worldhoppers politics are even more complicated than we assume.

All the worldhoppers we see have uberpowerful combinations of magic powers that dwarfs any main character, and they clearly have goals and want the world to develop in specific ways; yet they never unnleash their mighty potential, preferring to give slight (and possibly ineffective) nudges here and there. I'm thinking mostly of a minor words of radiance character (which I try not to hint who he is cause of spoiler policies) of whom we are told he is from nalthis and can use stormlight as breaths. it's like having unlimited amount of breaths. he could easily make an army to make the kalad's phantoms look like a pushover. just take all the bodies that the plateau battles leave behind, soulcast them to stone, and awaken them (or viceversa). the only problem would be that stormlight would leak over time, but embedding gems into the lifeless would give them an autonomy of at least a few days. that character could easily take down the whole listener army by himself, yet he prefers to give a few hints to the other main characters. Not to mention hoid. he could have easily killed the lord ruler, convinced vin to free ruin, take preservation and make the heroic sacrifice to destroy ruin, and got someone fit to take the shards as he didn't want them himself. he could have solved the plot in 20 pages. Instead, he posed as a beggar informant and many many things almost went wrong. We don''t know enough about other worldhoppers, but most of them are guaranteed to be very powerful and more knowleadgeable in realmatics than any native. I know the reason they remain in the background is "because otherwise the stories would be really boring", but I was wondering about the in-world answers.

WEll, in my experience some people are more gifted at specific areas than others, and language is one of those. it took me fifteen years before I could really sustain a conversation in english, while my father studied english, french and german for less than two years each and can speak fluently the first two and sustain conversation in the third. As for accents, some people pick them up, some don't. Living in finland I met a teacher of italian, she could speak italian very well, but she had a strong accent, no one would have ever taken her for an italian. then i spoke with a woman in a pizza house and I decided to eat there because i could hear her accent and I could swear she was roman. turned out she was finnish, but her husband was roman and she only lived in italy for one year. And yet, every time i speak to her I could swear she's from rome. Notice that italian is a indoeuropean language, while finnish is not, so learning one language while being motherlanguage in the other is extra difficult. So, I'm just going to assume that hoid is one of those few gifted individuals. either that, or he worked hard to overcome his limitation and do what gifted people can do easily. anyway, it can be done with mundane means, and hoid certainly has the time.

was just kell's nickmname for the lord ruler

I started reading them on sanderson's books, but now I always read them. I feel that if the author felt important to thank those people, then I owe them reading their names. Bonus point if they contain easter eggs (like all the improbable adjectives for peter halstrom)

I am very diffident over everything that I don't know, and as such I tend to only buy books/watch movies if someone whose judgment I trust recommends them to me. Only rarely I try something new on my own. it normally happens because i see something in the title or cover that catches my attention (but without being too obvious: if i get the feeling that something is done intentionally to provoke that kind of answer I turn away); in that case, I read the blurb, and if it makes me curious enough, then I try the book. but that happens very rarely. So, to answer the original question, personally I'm not, but I could be indirecty: it depends on whether the people who recommend books to me are influenced by the gender of the author.

Or, we could already do it right now with low budget and a little drop of expectancies on quality. We take a camel and put some cardboard onto it and pretend it's a chull. and since we only can afford one camel, we say something like "gancho, we'll march in a single file to fool the hated enemy" and have the same camel walk over the camera over and over. To mimic the spren we can throw some glitter of the appropriate color in front of the camera. When szeth is walking on walls, we turn the camera around. you may think, but then the soldiers would be the ones on the wall and we still would have the same problem; well, we use cardboard figures for soldiers and szeth will say "with stormlight i can move so fast the soldiers seem to be standing still". When someone is drawing stormlight, we put a neon lamp under his shirt. I'm sure a few chumps with a limited budget could produce something like that. Fans of the stormlight archive will still go to watch it, and hey, you only need to sell a dozen tikets to repay the production cost. And if it really is so horribly even diehard fans won't pay, then it's pretty much guaranteed it will become a cult movie among trash estimators. there are plenty of horrible movies that people watch just to laugh at how bad they are. So, it's a win-win scenario.

Now I'm picturing a delegation of fans asking sanderson to include more sex in the sa to increase chances of it being turned into a tv show

Well, in a society like that i would really prefer to give my breath before my death, but it's not a given. when we die, we give our riches to our heir, but in many societies people got buried with them. maybe for halllandren it is distasteful to gift breath before dieing. we don't know. Also, I'm a little surprised, if a breath cost around 10000 dollars equivalent, and 3000 breaths give immortality, why we don''t see any immortal rich person. 30 million dollars means being really rich, but there are people with those.and in the ancient world the income inequality was even greater than today; crassus, a political opponent of jullius caesar, was estimated to have been three timesas rich as bill gates in his best moments. mansa musa, emperor of mali, was estimated to have 250 billion dollars. I'd totally expect that in a place like hallandren there should be at least half a dozen immortals-by-breath. we never see anyone not-returned having more than 600.

ah, the breath get spent eventually? then i agree, there's not much practical you can do with those. maybe use animated clothes to work in dangerous environment, but the cost is a limitation. i was hoping i could get limitless and free water supply for a big city forever with my awakened water pump...

i think rendering roshar as an anime would take away all the beauty of it. really, i woould like to see the environment in a realisticc portrayal, not cartoon-style. If I have to choose between having a lower surrogate or nothing at all, I'd pick nothing. Yes, I am fully aware that the sa will never be in live television because of budget. doing it as an anime would not fix the issue in my opinion.

in order to court each other, adolin and shallan would need to ask permission to their parents, the village wisdom, the women council, the major, and who knows who else, then they could get permission to be engaged for one year, then to get married they would have to repeat it all, only slowly and while singing. At the same time, adolin will try to send shallan away because his life is too dangerous for her. and he would also complain a lot about being a lord when he just wanted to be a duelist.

Well, it is stated in plenty of places that a single breath will feed a poor family for a year, so, considering that in a preindustrial society people lived with much less money than today, but also that families were bigger, I'd pin the value of a breath as somewhere between 5000 and 10000 current day dollars, at purchasing power parity. exact price fluctuates with how desperate is the guy trying to sell it, but it can't cost much less or it wouldn't be worth selling. and it can't cost much more, or many poor people would immediately sell their. Those mechanisms should keep the price stabilized. On that account, lifeless servants/laborers should be pretty convenient, but probably there are reasons they are not. maybe they require plenty of maintenance - I mean, every time a lifeless scratches their finger, they need to be sewed or they start leaking alcohol. they don't heal wounds by themselves, so all the little wear and tear would add up, and a lifeless devoted to hard labor would need to be replaced fairly often, making a living worker a better option. Possibly is that. being employed in the army is therefore a perfect job for lifeless, as the army don't really need to get used that often - generally, the threat of using it is more effective, but it don't wear down the lifeless. And ironically, while it is more difficult to repair a lifeless from small cuts and bruises, it's relatively easy to fix war wounds. Awaken something to make a water pump work. Or a mill.

It's possible that chalklings are strong only if the person drawing them have an artistic mind, so tracing them won't work. Also, is your mental idea of the chalkling important? I could draw a chalkling supersoldier with power armor (including jetpack) and a flamethrower-like plasma rifle, would it have superior resistance, superstrenght, superspeed, and the capability to fire a cone of bidimensional chalk flames just because I envision it that way? I don't know, the tech level of the rithmatist is pretty strange. On one hand, they have rail bridges spanning tens of kilometers over the ocean, connecting each and every island, and they're even talking of making one that would go all the way to europe. in the real world, a bridge spanning a few kilometers of water costs billions of dollars even today. there's no way an early 20th centurry society has the resources to build such a network. and I don't even want to know what it would take to make a working clockwork horse. On the other hand, ice cream cost a huge sum, so they lack refrigerating machines. and I've never seen electricity mentioned, either. they're not at any tech level definable with real-world equivalent. there's no telling what they can or cannot do.

I would love to see the sa as a tv show, and i would even buy a tv for it. and i would love to see mistborn as a movie. And given the amount of people reading those books, it should make good money. SA would probably have insurmuntable problems as a tv show for budget reasons. But I really can't see why no one wanted to produce the mistborn movie. Anyway, I quite lost hope. I will believe they make a mistborn movie when I'll be sitting in the cinema looking at the end credits.

there are several traits in girls that triggers in me strong protective instincts and instant fondness. Shallan has most of them. Do you know the kind of reaction people who loves animals have when they see a kitty or a doggie? I have that for shallan. And for a few real-life friends too. But that's just the way I react naturally to girls like her. it has little to do with her actions.

You gave me an idea: maybe the creation of nightblood took several years, as many scientific experiment do when they're new stuff and the people doing it are still stumbling on their way. So maybe vasher first choose to make a sword because he wanted to use it in the war. But then the years passed, and vasher had a change of mind. by then, nightblood was almost ready, and vasher didn't want to botch the whole project; so, he gave the sword the best command he could think of. Yes, it's not perfect, but I don't see any better command. theorderknight made a few good points on how other commands would be worse. THis is corroborated by vasher atoner attitude; he feel guilty for starting the war, so he was probably closer to a ruthless warlord at the beginning, and gradually changed attitude during the war.

it is possible that, if the people doing the soulcasting aren't paying attention to making a specific kind of meat, it will be human meat. What's wrong with it? IT's not like it comes from actually butchered humans. from am molecular point of view, there isn't much difference anyway.

first, i'm just a university researcher. nothing particularly fancy, but i understand the mindset, and i have it myself. you don't start a project thinking it's useful or important, you do it mostly because you want to see what happens. and sometimes it turns oout to be useful or important, but that's just an added bonus. by talking with others, i'd say this is the mindset of over half university researchers, at least in projects without obvious potential applications. i guess those that cares more about applications go to applied rather than pure research. so, if vasher was acting on this mindset, he never did consider "why am i trying to awaken this sword?". no, he wondered "can a sword be awakened?" and once he managed it, he thought "oh, cool, i can do it. i wonder what kind of command i should give it?" and took what seemed a safe choice. yeah, he could have chosen to awaken something that was ot a weapon, but he didn't. maybe he just picked a sword because it was simpler to awaken for some reason. there are plenty of analogous examples in academic research. ok, probably that wasn't his motivation. it don't fit much with his character, and don't fit much with what sanderson has written so far. more likely it was supposed to be a weapon in the manywar, and the command was just to ensure it would be used to fight for the right side, because vasher wasn't a bad man. however, the right and wrong are highly subjective. Still, i like more the idea that he made nightblood without many grand plans, mostly as an experiment that went horribly right. i just find it less likely in brandon's writing style.

You're not thinking like a scientist. most of the times, we make stuff just to see whether it can be done or not. We generally worry about moral implications later. and even then, as people with a positive-oriented mind, we tend to think of the good that can be done with it and decide that the possible bad applications can be avoided with some good regulation. we tend to think that utility outwheights the risk. and by the way, regardless of what they show in movies, it generally works. for example, we made huge progress on fighting virus and tumors thanks to genetic enginering, which we would have never done if the original inventors of it had decided to burn all his notes because that the toool was too dangerous as it allowed to create bioweaponsor or mutants.

Well, you have taravangian for that role. not every villain can be a deeply conflicted individual; nor can they be a card-carrying villain. in fact, i'd say amaram is an in-between the two extremes: conflicted enough that he is not just a villain, not enough to make him sympatetic. on the discussion about skill with shards, szeth comments that most shardbearer only rely oon the weapons, but between gavilar and dalinar, he never worked in alethkar. it is possible that shardbearers elsewhere lacks the same level of training. it certainly seems most alethi shardbearers are at least competent. also, I think when he faced dalinar seth was more dangerous than when he faced gavilar. he had lots of training slaining shardbearers or plowing through bodyguards and traps. By the way, i was mildly disappointed by dalinar's comment that even if he had been with dalinar, he could have done nothing. in the first book, i was under the impression that gavilar was a credible threat to szeth, and two like him would have definitely been dangerous.

I don't think you can call amaram a strawman because he's not supposed to impersonate some phylosophycal point of view. he is not. he do not incarnate a side in an ancient debate. he is just a villain with some rationalization for his decisions. To my knowledge, we say a character is a strawman when the author wants to deliver a moral lesson with his book and uses some character to express the opposite viewpoint and making him look very stupid or cruel or hypocrite. but that do not make a strawmman out of any character that is stupid, or cruel, or hypocrite, and have some rationalization for his actions. By the way, if I were him I'd have offered a huge sum for the shards, enough that whoever got them could quit the army and live in luxury and without worries the rest of his life, before resorting to violence. About gavilar, amaram managed to deceive dalinar and kaladin and convince them he was honorable he may as well. he may have deceived gavilar too. and T seems to really be a compassionate man, except for the diagram. so, before he had the day that would eventually lead to the diagram, he was likely a good man. the hospitals were probably set up before, it takes time to create a free healtcare like that; also, karbranth was renowned for its surgeons from well before (lirin studied with a man who studied there). And even after he started the plot of the diagram, T had lots of interaction with Jasnah, and she never sensed anything wrong from him; if jasnah did not see through his ruse, then dalinar is unlikely to. So, we can't use the people he was friend with to make judgments on him.

I would have never tought it wass a serious problem, but by the number of people replying to that it is, so i guess it would be a good idea. It reminds me on why i nevver wanted internet on mobile or a tablet. now matter how much comfort i can have by having internet always with me, it is more than made up for by the discomfort of trying to use it on such a device.

if stormlight leaked, that would explain why (wor spoiler cause this is not the subforum)