ftl

The hard part, I think, isn't creating a new body - it's attaching the Cognitive Shadow to the physical body. My guess is that that is the reason for the hemalurgic spike in Kelsier's new body.

Looking forward to Adolin/Maya bond!

That could be why the perpendicularity is so hard to find. It's *somewhere* in the highstorm. But the highstorm spans all of Roshar as it moves across - so it's hard to find, you don't know where to look. And it moves fast. And when you come out of it, you're in a storming stormwall.

Huh, I think you're right...

I would guess not. Removing the spike seems like it works, so cutting it out should work too.

Oh, wow, that makes so much sense, and I never realized it! They had to pretend "H" is a wildcard so "Honor" would be fake-symmetric! That's such a neat idea.

The "little quips" aren't the part of her character that Shallan wants to or needs to change, though.

Sometime in between those two points, the Honorblade is replaced. Note the description of the blade in the first scene where Taln appears, and compare to the description of the blade that Dalinar bonds and threatens Amaram with. They're different. It's Szeth's honorblade, that's why it gives windrunner powers instead of whatever powers Taln's honorblade would give.

Unclear. Honestly, the thing that makes it more likely for him to stand up to Odium is just practice - he needs to keep trying to push the boundaries and figure out what he is and isn't able to do, and how.

Hm. I'm starting to feel this a lot in Oathbringer. I liked Shallan fine in the previous books, the stupid jokes and quips are my style of humor and I think they're great. But in Oathbringer I'm starting to really not want to read her chapters at all...

Interesting theory; I'm not really seeing much evidence for it yet, though. 1) Kaladin's arc has been about protection - he is devastated by how people die when he's trying to save them. It's not just about random people close to him dying. Funnily enough, I think this makes Syl safer because he's not trying to protect her. (As another example, in the books so far his father and mother weren't the ones in danger of getting killed; they were the ones trying to protect Kal and Tien, not the ones being protected.) 2) Spren being vulnerable hasn't yet been foreshadowed in any way. The biggest danger to Spren is oathbreaking, not external threats that Kaladin would fail to protect Syl from. I think the biggest danger is something like the Recreance where all the knights break their oaths "for the greater good". But the way Kaladin is going, I can't see him ever going along with a "break oaths for the greater good" approach - we had that arc, he's on the other side of it now. I think given Kaladin's story we're gonna see more bad times ahead for him (he really is pretty tragic) but I don't think it'll end up being via Syl dying.

I agree that the purpose of the Diagram was to manipulate everyone, including less-smart Taravangrian. To what end? Unclear. I personally don't think he was banking on a second super-smart day, though.

Makes sense to me!

Could be!

Doing a reread now! I think definitely the first book. The first book had everything. It's got character growth, action, a heist at an impossible task that would also save the world, an epic magic system to explore with hints of even more behind the scenes. Pretty awesome stuff. Basically everything I want. Each of the other two has minor flaws that make them not as excellent. The second book seems like a step down in two ways. First, the stakes - after fighting to end a thousand-year-long tyranny by a god, mundane fights against armies don't seem to matter as much to me, so I never quite got into that conflict as much. The stakes get raised with the Well storyline, but how it mattered and connected just felt more obscure and hard to connect to. And second, of course, is the recurring theme that in times of crisis, democracy fails and you need a strongman ruler to take control of things. Given the decay of democracy going on the past few years in the US, that message seems very topical and not in a good way. In the third book, I didn't like how, in retrospect, it made most of what the characters did in books 1 and 2 feel like not their accomplishments, just Ruin's manipulation. In addition, the direct conflict with Ruin always pinged my suspension of disbelief a bit - when Ruin was released at the end of book 2, it felt like GG, heroes lose, world destroyed. It never quite made sense why Ruin would mess up a winning position that badly. Yes, I got the explanations the book provided, but it didn't feel to me to be as natural as book 1. I greatly enjoyed all three. But the very first one is definitely my favorite.

Yes, on reread the "piercings of the Hero" definitely jumped out at me as potential hemalurgic spikes, like Vin's earring.

Interesting catch! I don't think we have enough clues to know for sure, but it's an interesting idea.

I'm looking forward to it. I think a magitech world could be something that Sanderson can pull off that basically no other writer can, because of the way he's set up his magic system to follow internally consistent rules.

Heck yes. I like this theory.

Because the other purpose of bridgemen was to draw the fire away from the people that actually mattered. Sadeas would rather keep losing expendable bridgemen than defend them and and have the Parshendi attack his actual soldiers. It's why he was so angry when Kaladin's crew did the side-carry. They protected the bridge crew - but then the parshendi just turned their fire on the soldiers, who Sadeas didn't want to lose. So it's deliberate that the bridgemen are entirely unprotected and die a lot.

Yes. There's talk about hemispheres on scadrial (northern/southern being quite different), on Roshar people talk about everstorm and highstorm circling the planet.

Icebergs. The cure for cancer.

Kaladin, "racist"? Nah, of course not. Racism is the combination of prejudice with power and oppressive systems. It's when from your birth you're treated worse and even enslaved because of your heritage. It's systemic disenfranchisement, where at every turn you find yourself treated as lesser, all life long. The fight of the slave against their masters is not the same as the oppression of the slaves by their masters.

Splintering is, from what I understand, not an obvious consequence of killing a shard. It takes special effort. Vin probably didn't know how to Splinter ruin, and it's unknown whether she could have done it even if she knew how, since the powers were evenly matched. Killing the vessel is pretty simple, from what it sounds - take Shardic power, aim at another shard with the Intent of destroying it, keep pushing until either you're dead or they are (or both).

So in the annotation to Mistborn: Well of Ascension chapter 15 (https://www.brandonsanderson.com/annotation-mistborn-2-chapter-fifteen/) Brandon mentions that "there’s a connection between the two people you’ve heard described specifically as dying from the mists". I've tried rereading the sections where the people were killed by mists but I just couldn't figure out the connection. Anyone know what it is? Is it that the people dying are relatives, meaning they have similar allomantic strength? Or is it something else?