SwordNimiForPresident

I was reading an old WoB and stumbled across the name Aslydin. This was the Terriswoman that became Demoux's love interest in Mistborn Era 1 and later, a member of the 17th Shard just like Demoux himself. I was immediately struck by the similarity of her name and Axindweth. Now I can't help but think she is an agent of the 17th Shard, or a double agent working for our personal lord and survivor. I wouldn't put it past Kelsier to send Demoux to the 17th Shard as a spy, and I see no reason that he wouldn't bring his wife along with him as well.

I suppose I worded that badly. I was trying to express the tendency of systems to increase in entropy. I would consider the high entropy state to be more complex since it has more information, but I could see how you could go the other, more macroscopic, way with it. I couldn't agree more that "ruin would be entropy, Cultivation would be organization, and preservation would be stasis". This is exactly how I would define them as well. I would also add Whimsy into the mix as chaos though, just to complete the set.

I don't want to come across as pedantic, but entropy is the tendency of a system to become more complex, it is nature. I can semi agree about Cultivation being a fight against entropy. It's more like guiding than fighting though. It's controlling entropy to achieve the desired end state. I could see revolution being a combo of Autonomy and Odium, but I don't see it for Cultivation though. I've seen people call it freedom as well, but that is literally Autonomy.

That seems to be how many people are choosing to see Cultivation. In my opinion it is the least relevant part of the Shard's Intent. First I just want to point out that Cultivation (at least in the agricultural sense that I assume you're using it) is basically the opposite of nature. You can't build a farm field in a forest without getting rid of the forest (and even if it's an orchard you still need to get rid of everything other than what you're growing). You're also removing all of the natural competition for the plants that your are cultivating which is very unnatural. Nature is chaos (Whimsy IMO) bounded by competition, where Cultivation is organized and goal oriented. Additionally, Cultivation has meaning far beyond farming. It is about controlling conditions or shaping environments to achieve the desired changes. This is a "high level" concept that can be more broadly applied to many parts of the Universe, not just farms. I think reducing Cultivation to some sort of plant god doesn't fit with the other Shards either. You have Universal concepts like entropy and stasis or love and hate, and then you have trees? It's to small to be a Shard. In my opinion Cultivation is about directed change, and agriculture is just one small example of how that concept can be applied.

I see, you're talking about Conservation in the form of forestry or land management. I was thinking of it in terms of physics, since that is a more Universal concept. Conservation, at least in the land management sense, seems a bit limited in scope to be a composite Shard. Here's a copy paste of what conservation means in physics just for reference: "In physics, the term conservation refers to something which doesn't change. This means that the variable in an equation which represents a conserved quantity is constant over time. It has the same value both before and after an event"

That would require a fairly specific interpretation of Mercy. The Shard's intents seem to be more generalized than that.

Just finished the last episode, and I have to say I'm fairly happy with how they handled everything. If I were trying to fit all of the second age into one show I doubt I could do better. The production value is extremely high, and the show at least tries to be faithful to the source material. Overall, good show. Hope they keep up the good work.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. At the time, Leras was Preservation, so any reference I made to either of them was meant to signify the same entity. Im not sure if that was meant for me, but I disagree. I think they will be suffering from major anxiety from constantly needing to find excuses for everything, but I don’t think they’ll be a jerk.

I don’t have the book on me, but I think someone mentions that she is completely obsessed with transformation regardless of its form or function, similar to how Honor became obsessed with oaths, even stupid or pointless ones. I could be remembering incorrectly though.

I see your meaning now. I honestly think that he is just trying to express that there is such a thing as to much of a good thing. Taking Preservation (who I would call a "good" Shard) as an example, if the Shard had total dominion it would effectively end the Universe by freezing everything in place. This isn't to say that I don't think Mercy's vessel will be broken, I think that all of the Vessels are broken. I think Mercy will probably be in an overwhelmed state because it is trying to make excuses for every bad thing that happens. In my personal grouping of Shards I've always paired Honor with Ambition. One is being bound by rules the other is pushing boundaries. There's also the way that Honor is about serving something external to the self while Ambition is basically selfish. I see them as the "good" and "bad" sides of the same coin. A tangentially interesting thing about this pairing is that in German, Honor is "ehre" and Ambition is "ehrgeiz" (translates to honor greed). I think Mercy's partner Shard is one of the two that we are still missing. I expect it to be something along the lines of Justice or Vengeance. It could also be the ultimate extreme of Cruelty, but I think that ones a long shot. That's all head cannon obviously so do with it what you will. Long story short. I think Mercy is a "good" Shard, insofar as any of them are "good", but only time will tell. Thanks for the WoB.

I could see it maybe sharing an atomic number with aluminum, that could possibly explain why the metal is so unique.

Sorry if I'm missing something, but was there supposed to be a link to the WoB in there?

It's pretty straight forward, I think that Mercy's vessel is Senna. The way Leras invokes the name is what makes me suspect this. " Oh, Senna ... I'm losing this place. Losing them all ... " -Preservation It's like he is calling out for mercy, or perhaps, Mercy..

Thank you for sharing your opinion. On a different note. I wonder if this hypothetical metal might be known by another name that we’ve heard, Dragonsteel.

Double post, but worth it IMO. I'm on a Mistborn obsession now. Two are antiverdant, the third is meant to be Era 3 or 4.

I had another thought today about how the shattering of Adonalsium may have been achieved. As I understand it, Hoid was in possession of a Dawnshard in the past, and was at least present for the shattering. Given that he was an OG Lightweaver, it may be possible that he used Lightweaving turned up to 11 by his Dawnshard to generate an anti-rhythm to Adonalsium, causing it to shatter.

We don't know the full extent of the uses of Rayseium, as we have only seen it used on Roshar. Lerasium is also a universal Hemalurgic metal. Presumably it had other uses such as Feruchemy, but we have not seen them. Atium is extremely powerful in Allomancy. When Elend consumed the last of it in HoA he saw far enough into the future to know that it didn't matter that he died, because they won.

I watched a few videos of people making images and just paused it whenever they had their prompts up on the screen. I was able to get a general sense of what to use from that. Something cool I've been playing with is prompting multiple artist at the same time. The other thing I've started doing is making a general image of what I want, then using the img2img feature to make changes to it. The mistborn picture I made started as "female figure tattered cloak trailing behind, city at night in background, dark, black, goth, detailed, 4k, trending on artstation". Then I sent it to img2img and ran it with the prompt "tendrils" twice. That gave me the mistborn look on the cloak. Then I just played around with artists and styles until I found one I liked. The things to look out for when doing img2img stuff is the CFG and denoising. The lower the denoising, the less the image changes. The higher the CFG the more times it will sample the text prompt to make changes. I'll add the image that I started with for the mistborn picture bellow so you can see how drastically different they are. BTW, if you don't have a ton of money to waste on DALL E, you can install Stable Diffusion on your PC and make unlimited images for FREE. It took me like an hour to install using a youtube video. You need a PC that can handle decent settings on a video game in order to run it, no coal powered fossils sadly. I also just finished a few more pics. Link: https://imgur.com/gallery/hGhvl2v

Eugenics actually sounds exactly like the kind of thing Taravangian would gravitate towards. An interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's hateful enough. Eugenics is more pragmatic than hateful. I could certainly see Cultivation being involved, but I feel like Odium would make it more aggressive, that's why I went the way I did. Conservation feels like the same thing as Preservation to me. I've always viewed chaos as the natural opposite of Cultivation (change without reason vs change with purpose) and now that we know Whimsy exists I think it fills that spot nicely. I would still say that a grudge match between Roshar and Scadrial is coming soon though. As a side note, hatred towards those who don't cultivate nature, humanity or personal growth sounds an awful lot like hatred towards lazy people, which I think would make for a pretty funny Intent for a Shard.

The original was "warrior in glowing blue carapace armor with cape, 4k, high fantasy, trending in artstation, oil on steel" in DALL E 2 For the second one I used "style of Michael Whelan" in Stable Diffusion locally installed. I turned the noise down a ton and turned up the sampling in the img2img section. For those that don't know, Michael Whelan is an excellent fantasy and scifi artist who does lots of illustrating for Brandon's (and many others) books. edit: Technically wrong forum, but I assume this will get moved at some point. Mistborn Era 4?

Just to address the thoughts on aluminum, we have seen it burned by an Allomancer and it’s effects are fairly mundane compared to Shard metals. Larasium modifies you spirit web granting you substantial new abilities and Atium connects you to the spirit realm so powerfully that you can see the future. We haven’t seen Rayseium burned yet but we have seen it used as a sort of Investiture superconductor. Compared to aluminum those are some fairly extreme effects. Additionally, aluminum is one of the base 16 metals in the metallic arts. Given that the Shard metals all stand outside of the normal hierarchy, it stands to reason that Adonalsium would as well. edit: grammar

That's why it was my favorite of the batch. edit: I played around with that image a bit more in Stable Diffusion and wanted to share the coolest one IMO. I've been doing nothing but generating images all weekend... send help.

I guess these AI image generators have been around for a while, but I only just learned about them. I tried to make an image of a Windrunner and they came out pretty cool. I figured I would share them here since this is the most likely group to enjoy them. https://imgur.com/gallery/B166xyA I attached my favorite one of the bunch. edit: it occurred to me right after I clicked the post button that there is probably a forum specifically for this. Sorry for posting in the wrong spot.

I could see that as being a possibility, or maybe 16 just happened to be the number if pieces that it broke into. I actually always pictured it as a crystal as well. edit: technically most metals are crystals, at least on a molecular level.