Oudeis

That makes far more objective sense than her benefiting from her own credibility. I still try to pretend that one day we'll find out that forgery is based on an underlying principle far more objective and sense-making than 'plausibility,' but I fully confess that it's a pipedream.

By that reasoning, shouldn't the best forgers be idiots, or the insane, or people frighteningly good at self-delusion? Wouldn't some nitwit who thinks glass can burn be able to forge a functioning torch made out of glass? This has ever been my issue with Forgery. Plausibility is a preposterous metric, inherently subjective and impossible to measure. It strikes me as below the standard of most of Mr. Sanderson's work. And how on earth are any of these things plausible, by anyone's standard? The Grands deliberately and specifically put her in one of the worst rooms, with some of the worst furniture. I could understand it being plausible that they'd overlook a nice table, or if the chair wasn't as splintery as they had ordered. But by the time it's the nicest room in the palace, the Grands would have specifically ordered that she be put somewhere else. This isn't chance, or random happenstance, or a bizarre series of coincidences. The people in charge made a conscious decision, and if the window was beautiful and the wall was glorious and the bed was luxurious, there is a 0% chance they would have decided to put her in that room. It is literally the limit of how implausible something can be.

Regardless, it's prolly still better than hemalurgy. I'd be interested to see what we eventually learn. I might put it on my person list of questions.

Eh, I concede we don't have a full answer yet, but I don't believe spren are like animals. Or rather, I think that saying "spren" only narrows it down to the degree of saying "physical matter". Saying you're controlling physical matter, when you mean you're exhaling atmosphere in a directed attempt to extinguish your birthday candles, is very different from controlling physical matter when you mean you're enslaving a race of people in order to build the pyramids. I would be very surprised if all spren were "people", the way not all objects are people. I suspect, for example, that you make a heat augmenting fabrial by trapping a flamespren. I do not believe flamespren are sentient, or even capable of sapience to the level of a horse. It's like worrying if you'll hurt gravity's feelings by not falling off a couch. A flamspren simply is; it does not want or desire, it needs no food or rest, it's just "what people think fire is". Trap it in a gem in a specific way, and it will stick around instead of fading back to enter the cognitive realm, where it will stop being an individual flamespren and will rejoin the singular Ideal of Fire. Feed that gem stormlight, and instead of simply being attracted to fire, it will emulate fire and produce heat. I see it less like "force a horse to walk on a treadmill" (which honestly if you're nice to the horse isn't the worst life a horse can have) and more like "have a fire burning in your hearth." Does the fire mind being stuck in a fireplace? Would it rather travel to Aruba? Would it prefer to burn your house down? Does it want to visit the exotic frozen north? Though I grant you, I don't have WoB, it's just the sense I get from the text. If you're right... then Roshar must be Damnation for spren. Aren't they being enslaved just as much when they hang out around a fire? They don't choose to show up when you light a torch, they have to. Do Rainspren loathe the Weeping, when they get four weeks of work with no rest? Should all people of Roshar refrain from ever experiencing a sense of accomplishment, so as not to enslave gloryspren against their will? Jasnah does state that there are spren as dumb as fish, at least. I would have no objecting to trapping a fish-minded spren like a goldfish in a fishbowl and feeding it stormlight in exchange for heat. I would also not be surprised if we learn there are spren even dumber than fish, spren with minds like rocks.

The W's-o-B are slightly conflicting. In one, he implies that she can turn into Shardanything she can take the form of as a spren. In another WoB, he very clearly says that spren cannot appear as anything with multiple parts (so Wax doesn't become a Windrunner with a Shardsterrion).

The WoB to which you refer indicates that each individual Surge acts basically the same, but that each order gets additional quirks from the venn-diagram overlap of Surges. For example, both Renarin and Shallan will be able to Lightweave illusions. However, due to her access to the Transformation Surge, Shallan has the ability to actually convince people that they are less like how they really are and more like she imagines them.

Text from the actual R.A.F.O. card: "You received this for asking the right question at the wrong time. It might mean the answer spoils too much; it might mean that the answer would make people focus on the wrong things; or it might just be intended to keep you guessing. Regardless, it has been a pleasure to not answer you." Emphasis mine. So, yeah. As a general rule, a RAFO doesn't trump a flat-out no.

We know that if a Radiant simply dies, the spren will go on. One possible simple explanation is that Sylphrena was Bonded to a man or woman, that Radiant died, and before Syl had the chance to bond another (either she had a mourning period or she simply didn't find someone honorable in time) the Recreance happened. I don't know if this is what happened, but it fits the data as we currently know it. I'd personally accept this answer, but it would of course be awesome if Mr. Sanderson writes some fascinating story which explains what happened in a far more awesome, unique way. Of course, another option is the whole "all spren are one" thing. Maybe she never personally bonded a Knight, but she shares the collective memory, and there's no proper Alethi word to convey the idea of "a thing which i never personally experienced but which i have direct knowledge of because it happened to one part of a collective consciousness of which I am a part."

NOTHING. I misread and replied to a point no one had made.

This has always bothered me. Shallan, who should be exhibiting the eyes of her Order by now, has blue eyes. The one time in all the books i've been able to see where they mention the color of a garnet, it's azure. Technically, azure is a very rare but possible natural color for something chemically a garnet to be. yet, the surgebinding chart has the lightweaver order in the color we'd expect a typical earth garnet to be. And garnet spheres are called "bloodmarks" which could just refer to their soulcasting property. Skymarks make air. Firemarks make fire. Clearmarks make quartz. These are also all the color of those things. What's coincidence, and what's underlying principle? Was the azure garnet a typo, a rarity, or the color all garnets are? So... what color are garnets on Roshar? What color are Shallan's eyes? Are they the right color, should they change, will they change?

To be clear (which I admit I was not at the start) I do not know and I did not mean to claim to know what if any difference there is in a shard-severed limb (apart from WoB which says that a Shardblade severs the soul or spiritweb of your arm first). I'm simply trying to state the facts as I see them. Both Taravangian and Szeth, two people I'd suspect would know, both seem to be under the impression that a person inhaling Stormlight through the graces of an Honorblade cannot directly use that Stormlight to heal shardsevered limbs. Kaladin, evidently, can. You had posited that it might be a matter of simply requiring more Stormlight than Szeth can hold at once. I don't know that this is false, but I pointed out relevant facts from the text. There are several possible reasons Kaladin can heal what Szeth (apparently) cannot. Barely apropos, is it worth noting that both the Regrowth fabrial (presumably what Nale had) and the Regrowth Surge as granted by the Honorblades can heal Shardsevered limbs. (Again, we simply have Taravangian and Szeth's words on it, but I personally credit them as people who would know).

Um... not sure what to say now. You've told me things are my opinion when I believe they are fact. You're stating facts which I believe are incorrect. So, I'm not going to apologize for those things because I would be lying. However, I've clearly upset you as we tried to talk about this. I'm sorry that I made you feel this way. I don't concede that I've been zeroing in on unimportant details, so I'm not going to apologize for that or promise to stop doing it, but I will promise to be more careful to take people's feelings into consideration as I discuss topics.

This is an excellent question which will need to be answered at some point. EDIT: Recall that when Kaladin healed his limb, he had barely any Stormlight, and he still had some left over. Certainly not the "near to bursting" Szeth had before he did all the Lashings. So it doesn't seem like the ability to heal shardsevered limbs is a matter of raw power so much as a specific ability granted by the Nahel bond but not by however Szeth was joined to his Honorblade.

He mentions at one point that a bunch of sentences had been written on top of one another. To Diagram-Taravangian, it was so obvious how to parse them that it didn't occur to him others might have trouble translating. It's possible that it was simply this. perhaps there was some reason within his own mind why the information would benefit from being written in code, and like the other part, it simply never occurred to him that he was making it harder to understand. Another thought. Taravangian clearly believed the secret was something that could be used to destroy the refounded Knights Radiant. If it were simply, "You're causing the desolation..." well, the desolation is already here. Sticking around will help survive it, and giving up now will only hurt humanity. So, if that is the secret, it's a useless one. Source.

One of the Visions... Starfalls, I believe?

Sorry, Pathfinder. I know our responses aren't what you want to hear. I wish I could offer more constructive criticism... but honestly, there will be so many random factors we either can't control, can't measure, or would need thousands of points of data to figure out what they mean that your margin of error could be something like 50%. Obviously, you can forge ahead with your plan anyway, and you're right. Odds are, you'll end up with something slightly more accurate than our general guesses. Don't forget to figure out the surface area of Full Lashings, and the mass of Basic Lashings. Would a larger illusion use up more stormlight than a smaller one? A more intricate illusion? One that moves? Does a stronger spiritual connection require less stormlight? Also, how do illusions work with spheres? Do they suck the stormlight right out of spheres, or does she just inhale them unconsciously as she maintains the illusion? Regardless, if you want to come up with an accurate depiction of how much stormlight an illusion takes, you'll have to know how many spheres are nearby and their comparative luminosity before an after the illusion they powered. I wish I could think of a fact I could provide that would encourage you. If you want to compile all of the data, that'd be awesome. Once there's a breakthrough in the books that gives us a yardstick to actually judge this stuff, your notes might help with that. I hope you're not disappointed if you collect it all and find out that there's nothing to learn yet. Please make note of at least the chapter of every example you find, and try to pick out a few specific words that people can ctrl+F their copies for, so that later on when we want to review the data it'll be easy to find them all.

Where is it said that the blessing and curse are related? Remember one guy got a bunch of nice cloth, and his curse was to see the world upside down. Also, there's WoB that Curses are all neurological conditions. Having your brother stabbed through the chest with a two-by-four isn't a neurological condition.

Hrm. That's not how I've ever seen stormlight as working. In your model, you think Stormlight is a substance which emits, but is not, light. Thus, "the light coming off of something" isn't escaping stormlight itself, it's the glow of the stormlight, like how light coming from a torch isn't the actual process of oxidation. I had always assumed that the light was the stormlight. Now I wonder which it is.

I was disagreeing with the underlying sentiment of your post; I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. I mean, you're vaguing it up to the point where you say "the protagonist is in a setting where conflict exists" and at that point it's pretty much the same as every story. There are almost no similarities between the fortfolk and the trading company, apart from an extremely generic "wilderness versus civilization". (By the way, the Trading Company absolutely comes from the same islands as Sixth.)

And then of course there's attrition, which Kaladin says is a parabolic curve, the changing slope of which we know not. So even if there were a way to determine to the second how long every action takes so we can factor in attrition, we'd have nothing but the basest speculation what the curve is, or at which point the Surgebinder was at that given time.

Eh... the Fortfolk don't want to cut down the forests, that I know of. They want to tax the people, but that's it. And Sixth is no more indigenous than anyone else. He comes from the exact same islands as the Trading Company. They've just moved with the times while he hasn't. For that matter it's hard to consider Silence "indigenous" when her grandparents came from Homeland.

I don't believe this is true. Doesn't Shallan comment in Words of Radiance that several of her gemstones have missed the past Highstorm or two, and are putting out less light?

I had initially assumed they were, but on my last re-read of the Way of Kings Kaladin comments on air bubbles trapped in the glass of a chip. That doesn't sound like something Soulcasting would do.

Mistborn

It's strongly implied that most Edgedancers cannot instantly metabolize food into Stormlight; that appears to be her Boon from the Nightwatcher.