Oudeis

It's been considered, and confirmed not. However, as the man says, good question.

Dunno if this is fully on topic... She claims to know everyone in the city with "feruchemical blood." Interesting phrasing; not simply actual feruchemy, but the blood. So, if Wayne has kids, whether or not they inherit feruchemy, will she watch their children? It was said in the Final Empire that you could only have allomancy if a Noble ancestor was in the past five generations. Is there a point at which it's assume the recessive trait has been bred out of your line if you don't have a feruchemist for a certain length of time? Are your chances worse if your partner lacks Terris blood at all? Or am I reading too much into this, and she only makes note of the children with actual feruchemy? Also, keeping an entire people's lineage in her head? Coppermind, anyone? Though truthfully I guess she could just be using a book.

Yes; I was on my phone last night and my thumbs were not up to writing out my complete thoughts; If this is silver with red, perhaps it has an alloy that is gold with red?

Food is applied to you from external sources, yet you can store that in a bendalloymind. How is allomancy any different? Steel itself isn't pushing on metal. Steel changes something within you, so you have the trait "I push on metal now". This trait is what is stored.

Are Elantrians actually immortal? The one reference we get to this is rather apocryphal. Do any credible sources assure us that they do not age? I mean, Elantrians would almost certainly outlive their human children, but not necessarily by much. If you wait to have a child until you're 50 or so you might reach old age at the same time. I mean, we know they succumb to heart conditions. They can live longer with their heightened regenerative capabilities, but how many decades does it extend your life by? If they never died, wouldn't Elantris suffer horrible overpopulation? For that matter, with a pair of Elantrian parents, I suspect any kid would get pretty much all the healing he requires to live nearly as long as his parents. Oh, you've developed a heart condition? Not anymore! Bad cholesterol? Gone! Fell and broke your leg? Fixed!

Mind blown. The men of red and gold, bearers of the final metal. A metal of two colors... I sorta wondered though. Can a single homogenous metal be two colors? Or is that just a God metal thing?

The crux comes from, the phrasing sorta implies that he jumps straight up, then starts whirling, which is like a diver doing one flip and then halfway through reversing direction. If you accept that the phrasing was loose, then yes, it's literally exactly like a player spinning as he dunks.

MeLaan touches on this at the end of SoS. When you can do everything, when you know all, even your inaction is a decision. If you watch a man falling off a cliff and don't save him when you could, isn't that a decision?

What Moogle said, also, she talks about how Wax has more-pure Terris blood than her Brute guards. I suspect she's full-blooded Terris, with no diluting allomantic genes, and a full feruchemist. I wish I'd made note of it (lemme check and see if I highlit it...) but I feel like there was a sentence someone said that made it sound like full feruchemists were still sometimes a thing. Nope, did not highlight it. Argent: I have to suspect most feruchemists are, these days. She's sorta the feruchemical Eve, now. Yay, population bottlenecks...

One will hopefully be along shortly. The title doesn't spoil anything, really, but if you can throw the spoiler tags around the text of your first post, that'd be great. And mark it by first saying "Shadows of Self spoiler". When it gets moved, you can remove the tags.

...don't forget a "stop" Command, or else once it does one of those things, it'll have to do one or the other forever.

No one's saying it's right, but it upsets me that this is how it is. Magic is all upside, with no downside. Power with no trade-off. The worst power on Scadrial is allomantic aluminum... which simply means you're otherwise normal. Yes, people with advantages in our world tend to rise to positions of power... but no one is simply born better. They might have been born to the right parents, or in the right country, but they're not genetically inferior. Yes, there are a small group of people who have the misfortune to be born with a regrettable disability, but that's not the same as an equal percentage of people born with inherent super ability. It bothers me that across the Cosmere, "magic" is universally a plus with no minus. Even on the Splinterworlds, Investiture is always something trying to kill humans... but that's because the "bad guys" have all the magic, and humans have zero. Hunters of First of the Sun are able to survive the islands, mostly due to the fact that they have found a way to work with the Invested Aviar. I mean, it's too late now, but it would have been nice if there were something universal in the cosmere that meant anyone with magic had some kind of exploitable disadvantage, some weakness, and that the masses without powers had this one way that they would always be superior. Some way to balance it out. "Ability to be a warm body in a huge organization" is not the same thing as, "I can kill dozens of men without breaking a sweat." And "the bad guy/destiny won't single me out/target me because I don't have powers" is cancelled out by "an Inquisitor might randomly behead me to motivate the hero" or "if I love a powered person, I am now his weakness." Even Vivenna and Marasi; kidnapped/held hostage. Vivenna frees herself with her first ever use of her powers, and Marasi it turns out getting taken was part of the plan so she could use her power on Miles. It's the way the cosmere works. I foresee a future where non-powered people grow more and more resentful. In the Final Empire, it was against the Nobles, who had the lion's share of powers anyway. One day, the common man is going to be fed up with allomantic privilege. EDIT: Rithmatist and Steelheart: Joel beats the Scribbler with the help of two Rithmatists, and the fact that he figures out his kryptonite. And a bucket of acid, I guess. Also, who knows what's up with the stick figure he saw; I'm not positive he doesn't have powers. In Steelheart, there are already two Epics on the team killing Epics, and the rest of them use donated powers. When they're not using donated powers, they're using crazy super tech derived from the corpses of Epics. They're not ordinary people beating Epics, they're Epics (sometimes using Epic-tech) to beat Epics.

...So apparently I'm the only one who just figured he jumped off the ground like he was gonna spin in place, and supplemented that with a steelpush.

Oh, I definitely never thought the passcodes were worth noticing. I thought of a half dozen ways around it, not the least of which was, the person already having been replaced. I actually figured at some point Wayne was gonna forget his passcodes.

"In the old days, Inquisitors had driven the spike right through the body of the one to be killed into the body of the person to gain the powers. That prevented any power from being lost. Apparently, coating the newly made spike in blood could achieve a similar effect." It does not suggest that this is what Bleeder is doing. It's merely commenting that this is a possibility. Maybe Bleeder is doing it, but it's not suggested by this line, any more than "burgers exist" suggests I'm having a burger for lunch today. If Bleeder were coating spikes in bloody, I would have expected the crime scene to be messier. The body exsanguinated, maybe. I mean, if you want to just decide that she did it, you can justify the lack of clues however you want. But there aren't really any clues to suggest that she did.

This belongs in the Shadows of Self thread. Until a mod moves it there, please put it behind a spoiler tag. You can do so by putting [ spoiler ][ /spoiler ] around it. (eliminate the spaces)

I briefly suspected MeLaan, but figured he wouldn't pull the same trick twice. I found myself in the habit of suspecting everyone; I did suspect Innate, but only because, again, I was just in the habit of assuming it was everyone we didn't have as POV. The first time I suspected him was when he gave the first inciteful speech, and I wish I'd stuck to those particular guns. I had actually settled on Aradel, going into the last stretch. I thought I had it clinched when Wayne came back from one of his last POVs and heard someone talking at the manor, and suddenly knew who Bleeder was. This scene was right after Marasi and Aradel arrived at the manor. I totally thought I had it. I can't recall who else I thought... no one really remarkable. I briefly wondered about Steris but dismissed her.

That isn't actually how alloying works. Bronze isn't copper with patches of tin; it's a new metal formed by the two metals "baked" together. That's sorta like saying you should be able to see splotches of egg in your finished cake. Is this confirmed somewhere? The only reference I recall is Spook saying that coating the spikes in blood would work. Does it say anywhere that this is what Bleeder does?

Oh no, I didn't mean that what happened to the Howlers was temporary. Maybe she was planning on just killing them when she was done, but they were no more going back to normal than Innate's guards were after she killed them. I meant, making some tools to use was a temporary measure on her path to 'freeing' the city from Harmony's control. Again... insane. Even fully sane people often find ways/reasons to justify small things in pursuit of a larger goal. I suspect she assumed Wax would find a way to kill them.

Eh. The MO of a surgeon is to heal someone. From that perspective, cutting into them, on the surface, seems counter-intuititve. The Hero of Ages tells us in an epigraph that Ruin was fully capable of building something if he could use it to knock down two more. There's no reason she couldn't temporarily take control of a few people, if it means in the end, freeing everyone. By your definition, taking on the form of Innate and manipulating people sounds like it's against her MO of 'freeing' them, but in the cause of her ultimate goal, it's a necessary evil. Still. Your point remains valid. I think logic dictates that the Set had something to do with the Howlers. It's entirely plausible they just had more to do than I thought.

I had a long response mostly written and then I came across this line and almost cried. This is basically what I mean. This unthinking classism. If you're Invested, you have all the advantages. If you're not Invested, on most worlds, you might as well give up. You can be the best at what you do. You can have as much political power as you want. You can be wealthy and clever and beloved. And someone else will be not quite as good as you... but they have magic. And so they win. And everyone accepts that this is true, because it so self-evidently is. And that's what makes me cry. I just wish he'd written a cosmere where we, as the fans, didn't learn from it that Invested people categorically have the advantage over unInvested.

Except, they did exist to slow him down. As we see, they don't even slow him that long. She had enough faith in his ability that she figured he'd be fine. Also, she's insane. I still have a lot of questions about the Howlers. It's possibly a mix of them; I expect she brought a lot of hemalurgy to the table, so I'd be surprised if she wasn't behind most of their design. That said, a few members of the Set there to let the Howlers loose at the right time would fill in some of the holes in the logic of what happened. Also, her MO might be freeing, but she's clearly willing to kill a LOT of people to do so, and as she puts it, anyone she kills is now out of Harmony's control. She clearly sees death as a preferable alternative, so I don't see how it's against her MO.

...as opposed to the infinitely-burning atium? Also, a steelrunner has the option to flee against a huge crowd.

Vin was insanely skilled and more than a little lucky. Zane was toying with her. He could have won a dozen times during the fight, and chose not to. Even that last blow he struck wasn't killing. She didn't win because the system was broken; she won because Zane was Casey at the bat. Vin was a one-time thing, due to a great many factors. It didn't change the way all the Metallic Arts worked. If there's a lesson, it's that if you really want to win, kill your opponent, don't just toy with them. Steel breaks the system because regardless of circumstance, steel beats atium. Steel beats everything. Atium was pretty cheating, but at least it ran out insanely fast, and was crazy difficult to get, to boot, and in fact its very existence proved to be a major turning point in the conflict of the Gods. I never said something was broken because one time, a steelrunner managed to beat impossible odds and trick a Seer. I said it's broken because it makes a God Metal take a distant second place.

Okay, but, it's plausible, whereas you're basing your idea off a trope. Medicine is a science. Science doesn't care how much you "like" electrons or pulsars. People can be both brilliant and distant. And it's irrelevant anyway, because this came up when you claimed Wayne must act in a manner consistent with someone who heals other people, when he expressly doesn't.