Fanghur Rahl
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What exactly did Preservation do to restrain Ruin?
Fanghur Rahl replied to Fanghur Rahl's topic in Mistborn
But he was doing that anyway though; Ruin even said as much. That neither of them were free to act because the other would always oppose them. -
Actually, really the only potential problem I see is with Preservation, who because there are two opposing Shards of change (Ruin and Cultivation) can’t really have an opposite. All the others are still fair game though. For instance: Devotion vs Odium Endowment vs Avarice Ambition vs Contentment Dominion vs Autonomy Honour vs Pragmatism Prudence (Survival Shard) vs Daring Just to name a few hypotheticals. At this point, Preservation is the only odd man out.
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So I just finished listening to the first era of Mistborn last week, and I’m a little confused about something, namely what exactly did Preservation do to keep Ruin ‘imprisoned’ for so long? Because the way it’s described in Secret History makes it seem like he ‘physically’ locked Ruin away in the Well (at least that’s how Kelsier perceives it). But when Kelsier says that to Fuzz he basically calls him an ignorant fool for saying something so silly. So what exactly did Fuzz do? Was it just that he essentially ‘enveloped’ Ruin with his own power such that Ruin wasn’t really able to affect anything because Preservation’s own power would counter it? If so then how did the Well figure into it? Clearly the Well was only a fraction of Preservation’s total power. Even after listening to Secret History a second time I’m still confused about this. Note: I understand the Atium part.
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In principle you could make bullets out of aluminum, but it would be both more difficult and potentially more likely to damage the gun because aluminum is almost two times harder than lead, meaning that if there were even the slightest size discrepancy between the diameter of the bullet and the barrel, it runs the potential to destroy the barrel; because lead is so soft, this is less of a problem because it has more give to it. At least that’s my understanding of it. Lead is also much denser than aluminum, meaning that a bullet made of aluminum would be significantly lighter than one of the same size made of lead, which can lead to aerodynamic problems.
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Okay, I’m officially an idiot. At any rate though, don’t we see the Returned Awakening at one point though? Didn’t one of them awaken a rope to ‘levitate’ him at Siri’s ‘wedding’? Or was that just a normal Awakener?
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I’m just curious, do we know if Awakeners are still able to recall their Breaths even if they invest all of them into an object? Or would they have to keep at least one? If the former, then I can’t help but wonder why the Returned would have to essentially parasitize people to stay alive; couldn’t an Awakener with, say, 1000 Breaths just transfer 999 of them into some inanimate object like Vivenna did, gift the last one to the Returned to keep them alive, and then just reabsorb the remaining 999, then rinse and repeat every week? That would seem like a fairly obvious loophole if it’s possible.
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I guess that would make the force opposing Adonalsium the Invisible Pink Unicorn then. After all, how else would we have horses and horse-like creatures on pretty much every world of the Cosmere?
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Like I said, Detachment or Objectivity work too. Though honestly, I don’t think Adonalsium would have viewed itself as being wholly separate from everything else; honestly, given what we know about the nature of Investiture and the Spiritual Realm, I’m guessing it would probably be a kind of pantheistic deity, not the sort of “I’m better than all you and you exist only by my caprice” type of deity typically found in monotheistic religions. If Adonalsium truly is/was the big G God, I strongly suspect that its creation would in some sense exist as part of it, not separate from it.
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Oh Covenant was very rarely ‘insane’ in a clinical sense; to the contrary, he was brilliant. The problem was he was also extraordinarily broken and cynical as well, which lead to his early status as an extremely unlikable antihero. But no, I never once got the impression that the Haruchai were indifferent; the complete opposite in fact. Everything they ever did was because of how much they truly did care. They just masked it with a facade of extreme stoicism and unparalleled self-control, even though they weren’t really fooling anyone. As for the Elohim, yeah, they were in some abstract sense tied to the Creator in at least a metaphorical sense. But what makes Donaldson such a brilliant author is his uncanny ability to write things in extremely beautiful and poetic ways with clear underlying symbolism and yet also maintain a complete aura of mystery at the same time. I’ve yet to see any fantasy author that I consider his equal, though Brandon makes a mighty fine attempt. (Please don’t crucify me, guys. lol).
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Indifference probably wasn’t even in the Land; remember, the Creator wasn’t. The Creator trapped Despite (who is for all intents and purposes the same as Odium) within time, but Despite betrayed and dragged Love down with him, basically transforming her into ‘Wrath’ until the end of the very last book. But there’s no indication that Indifference had anything to do with the creation of the Earth or anything else for that matter. Plus, Thomas Covenant wasn’t exactly fully sane at the time that he mentioned it, so who knows?
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Don’t forget though that that was shortly after they acquired their Shards, so the intents likely hadn’t become all-consuming in them yet. At that point, Preservation probably would have essentially been like Vin, and even Ruin clearly wasn’t nearly as destructive back then either. It still doesn’t explain how they somehow managed to acquire a completely new ability neither of them possessed though, and Brandon never explains it in the books.
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Do Lightweavers actually create light though? Or do they just manipulate it. Because if it’s the latter then they’d probably have a hard time doing anything with spectrums of light other than visible, ultraviolet and infrared, just because that makes up the overwhelming majority of solar radiation if I remember correctly. They certainly wouldn’t be shooting X-rays or gammas around.
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True, in that much I agree. It just sounds a lot weirder to use ‘Objectivity’ as someone’s name than it does to use ‘Apathy’. I think if we’re going to go that route then a near-synonym like ‘Equity’ or ‘Detachment’ would work better; but that’s just my personal preference.
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Technically, change would be of both Ruin and Cultivation, but Preservation opposes all change. Vin was able to change things only because she either interpreted the intent differently or else because she hadn’t held the power long enough for it to affect her. Incidentally, that’s one thing I can’t for the life of me understand. If neither Ruin or Preservation are capable of creating anything, then how exactly do they somehow magically gain the ability by working together? Honestly, I’ve always thought that that’s a plot hole, because it’s explicitly said that neither of them possess that ability in Hero of Ages.
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Fair enough, I just picked ‘Apathy’ because I think it has a better ring to it. But ‘Objectivity’ would work just as well conceptually, I think, if we view Odium and Devotion through the lens of mindsets that determine how you act rather than purely as emotions. Since a person driven by either fanatical love or fanatical hatred simply cannot be objective, only someone who either has no emotional investment either way or who is able to detach their personal feelings can. Honestly, I think that would be a perfect Shard for a scholar or philosophy to take.
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‘Mindless’ in the sense of being without any kind of rational basis underlying it not in the sense of being non-personal. Odium simply is the concept of hatred; not hatred for this reason or that reason, just hatred in a vacuum. Sure, Rayse probably imposes his own subjective features on it, but the Shard itself is merely the concept. The point I was trying to make is that I have a very hard time seeing how the Shard of pure hatred stripped from all context couldn’t inevitably result in a being which any rational person would denounce as malevolent, and in that limited service I think that we can say that the Shard itself is also malevolent.
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It’s also possible, I think, that Odium truly does embody all the passions, but only their negative sides. Maybe Devotion also embodied the passions as well but only their positive sides (i.e. love vs hate, affection vs lust, etc.). Regardless, I do like your line of thought here though. The only caveat I have is that the Shards are supposed to transcend the three realms in someway, so I’m not sure that the “perception shapes reality” thing would really apply to them, at least for any perception save that of their vessels. But I could be wrong about that, and I do think that this is something that deserves to be taken seriously.
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You don’t think it makes sense for a God to be able to set all emotional attachment to the side and evaluate things in an objective, detached way? Like I said, indifference/Objectivity absolutely has its place.
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I was just referring to the Shard itself being a-rational and mindless, not necessarily the combination of the Shard and its vessel. And as for the whole ‘Odium v. Passion’ debate that you alluded to, my personal take on it is that Odium does embody all the passions, but only their negative sides. My opinion is that Odium and Devotion are polar opposites; they both embody the passions, but in completely polarized ways. Love and hate, compassion and sadism, empathy and psychopathy, etc. BTW, I completely agree with the Ruin vs Cultivation point; they have polar opposite intents.
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Well, I think it’s also fairly safe to assume that whatever they are they aren’t just Splinters or Slivers, otherwise I don’t think that Brandon would’ve made up a completely new word for it; not unless he is deliberately trying to screw with us anyway. Then again, as Chaos said on the podcast, just using the word ‘avatar’ in this context doesn’t make much sense anyway, so who knows?
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@Calderis This one’s all yours. You know way more about this than I do.
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Irrational, mindless hatred is almost universally considered to be a very bad thing, and that’s basically what the Shard or Odium is.
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That very well might be the case; like I said, I’m not convinced that it’s not. And for all of the other Shards (Honor, Ambition, Endowment, etc.) I actually don’t think that anything like this should apply to them because they’re more stand-alone than the ‘change trinity’ and a potential ‘emotion trinity’ (although, we do have both Dominion and Autonomy, which arguably form a pair of opposites, but I’ll leave that to the side for now). It’s not just for thematic reasons that I think a Shard bridging the gap between Devotion and Odium makes sense, but rather because I personally think that the mere presence of Devotion and Odium as separate Shards rather than a single ‘emotion’ Shard should necessitate one, because without it, Adonalsium would seem incomplete. So something like Apathy, or maybe Objectivity or some near-synonym of it, just makes a lot of sense to me and certainly seems like something that would be crucial for Adonalsium to have to make an effective deity.
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I didn’t disagree with him. But mathematically, it is the zero-point on the spectrum. At least if we view it in reference to the other two. Or at the very least it’s directly in between them if you don’t want to look at it that way. Destruction/Regression ———Preservation———Growth/Progression. Similarly: Hatred———Apathy/Detachment———Love Like I said, I’m not convinced that making a Shard of Apathy would be a good idea, but I do disagree that the reason Calderis gave was a good one. Because I do tend to view it as a thing in its own right conceptually speaking, and something Adonalsium almost certainly experienced; I think it would be incomplete if it didn’t/couldn’t. Maybe ‘Objectivity’ would be a better word for it.
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I just used ‘null’ for lack of a better term for it; conceptually, preservation is its own thing. As is apathy. It’s only when viewed in relation with the things on either side of the spectrum that they can be considered ‘null’. Sometimes, change is good, sometimes not. Likewise, sometimes having a strong emotional investment is good, but other times it’s better to be detached and objective. That’s why I don’t view ‘apathy’ as being either a null concept by its own nature or one that’s unimportant; it has its place. Presumably Adonalsium would be indifferent about a great many things. But just like with the other Shards, if stripped from all context and made all-encompassing, it’s a different story. That’s why I think it could at least make for an interesting Shard if Brandon could find a way to make it work. I’m just not entirely convinced that he can.
