Oltux72

Now that SA#5 is basically written, yet not published, it is time to think about the back half. It will need a basic conflict. What will it be? I can give some scenarios Odium is set loose and has started a war to conquer the Cosmere. They are a series of war novels Ba-Ado-Mishram needs to be restored Cultivation's master plan comes to fruition Odium is facing an uprising of his Fused and Unmade Somebody does something drastic with a Dawnshard in SA#5 and the second half is about the aftermath Strictly speaking these options are not mutually exclusive. What do you think?

Well, no, I am sorry but that contradicts the reporting they already have done. They now have a Seon. Unless Hoid is absolutely uncooperative Dalinar already knows how their mission went. Moreover, additional Windrunners have become a moot point, if the duell is to start in just ten days. Adolin and Shallan are aware of that, unless Hoid is really mean.

Embrace your dark passions! Let Roshar burn to admire the sparks! But on a more general note, what goes wrong for the Radiant side in Wind and Truth? There is supposed to be a second pentology. The next book cannot resolve all questions. (Scadrial) The idea that Odium will be set free in the next book makes sense. Or the Blackthorn will be on a roaring rampage as a fusion of Attilla the Hun and Genghis Khan. A conflict is necessary for the second half. Yes, but they are not stupid. They are absolutely ready to walk over mountains of corpses to get what they want. But they don't do recreational mountaineering on heaps of corpses. What is in it for them? That is the next thing I do absolutely not understand. Why does everybody assume that they'll want to return quickly? They are in contact with Restares. They finally have opened up communication with the Spren that matter. They have a line of real-time communication with their home base. They are in communication with interstellar visitors. On the other hand, one more fighter and one surgebinder is not going to be of any use in Urithiru. If I were Dalinar, I would order them to stay right where they are. In fact I might send them a supply mission. Them returning quickly must mean that something utterly unforseen will have happened. Something on the order of Innovation's fleet of war airships pulled by drakes arriving for support. Or they have found Ba-Ado-Mishram. Something.

Provided of course that Yelig-Nar is operational again. We do not know how long he needs to recover between losing hosts. And provided that Taravangian-Odium wants to win. Otherwise the question may be moot or wrong. It is not certain that he wants the contest to take place. In an ideal world, from his view point the Knights Radiant would break the contract. However, the risk to him is that this is in last consequence not under his control. So he may prefer to avert the contest altogether. Let me ask a simple question: Why? What possible gain is large enough to justify the risk to the Ghostbloods?

It seems to me that you are thinking too minimalist in that regard. You are asking how to build spaceships with a set of technologies. But that makes relatively little sense. The Rosharans do not want to build space ships. They want to get to other planets. Why build a ship if you can build better oath gates? Why cure diseases if you can conjure a new body and transfer the soul? And so on.

At first it seemed to me like you are right. But pondering it seems to me that Autonomy being Autonomy she and her avatars do value ambition, but the protection of that valuation is limited to individual ambition. Why else would she be able to enslave people and not just anybody but members of the elite?

I should have addressed this part. Leshwi has shown us that Fused can outright betray Odium. There seems to be no influence on their character or mind. Moash serves Odium by another mechanism.

I am sorry, but that does not work purely numerically. There are at most 12 systems with Shards in residence. Shadesmar is still their primary means of trade. These numbers preclude perpendicularities to be mostly limited to worlds with Shards. (Sunlit Man)

We must assume that many worlds form perpendicularities just as a part of the natural environment without any special intervention. Yes, a Shard residing on a planet guarantees that a perpendicularity will form, but that's it. Just as many worlds must have very high levels of Investiture without a Shard being present. (Sunlit Man) The Ghostbloods were in contact with a large number of worlds. The economy described in SP#5 will not work with perpendicularities confined to worlds with Shards or Aethers. That seems a bit lke jumping to conclusions. Spores can die without repercussions to the core aether. Why couldn't a full symbiont?

So the one who is against intervention sends out a dragon who has a very good reason to be angry and is driven by relative powerlessness to action?

Allomancy and Feruchemy grant a strictly limited set of abilities The other powers require an external fuel (Stormlight, purified Dor, Breaths) Aethers bound you to a core aether and are not fully usable without extra fuel on many worlds Spren need Stormlight. Without it a spren gives you only a blade and maybe armour, no powers. But in that case she already would have left Yolen.

Frost seems to be quite influential, having a palace, a throne and personal priests. You are raising an important question. Who dared put his niece in shackles? Do dragons have a government powerful enough to do that? If so, what was important enough to antagonize Frost? And we have a lot of open questions: How does the crew know that she is a dragon? Has she told them? How come they have prejudices about dragons? Does that mean that Yolen has come out of seclusion? What has happened on Threnody? Why does Xisis sink low enough to own a ship crewed with misfits? And even more fundamental, why has the avatar not reacted to Scadrians enroaching on the autonomy of First of the Sun?

Either method would need fuel That they are able to do so does not mean that they are willing to do so Nor does it mean that such people exist on a backwater world Nor do we know the side effects of losing your perpendicularity, respectively the means this happened by

If two Shards found no better way than the cycle of Desolations and one of them was splintered thereby, we must take the possibility that Hoid is correct and only those two alternatives exist, seriously. Yet that does not change the fact that we do not actually know his goals, let alone his plans to achieve them. Exactly. Yet, frankly, to create an uncontrolable power you need a very good reason. It isn't stable. Odium is going to break lose sooner or later. It is just a matter of time. Autonomy is expanding and duplicating herself while acting as the technological police. Harmony is going insane. Cultivation and Mercy are on very dubious paths. The current era of stability is doomed. One might see Shards as warping the mind to follow a narrow Intent without other considerations. Basically taking up a Shard is kind of accepting brain damage in exchange for divine powers. The problem with that is obvious. It seems to me that the better solution, if it came to that, would be to splinter all Shards. Personally, if I had to join anybody, it would be Kelsier, because his motivations are rational and understandable, albeit not very nice.

It seems to me that Hoid, being one of the original 16, ought to know the answer to that question. This sounds more like wondering what the consequences would be and, thereby, whether this should be done. Looking at Hoid I would tend to dismiss the idea that they shattered Adonalsium only for the power. If they had a good reason, undoing what they did isa bad idea all things being equal. Or alternatively, he is talking about Honor.

I'd see it as stupid to create your own overlord. If I may speculate I think the fundamental conflict of the Cosmere will be between Reuniters and Shatterers, the latter wanting to bring the Shattering to its logical conclusion.

It depends on how specific the Intent has to be. Possible sequence You stab somebody who has a healing power with an aluminium weapon or you use your healing fabrial on somebody wounded with an aluminium spike The power or fabrial fails You conclude from that that you want to systematically research the interaction of metals and Investiture You want to find out whether any effects are changing the metal. So you reuse a spike.

(Yumi)

Brandon was forced to limit himself. The main protagonists were not cosmere aware (one exception of course). The far future stories were set on remote planets without permanent connections to other worlds. Will Honor be reforged? - A dragon or a core aether must know. Will Discord be defeated? - A dragon or a core aether must know. Will Odium be free of the Rosharan system? - A dragon or a core aether must know. Is Autonomy waging war? - A dragon or a core aether must know. It is the same issue as having Jasnah PoV chapters. If you have a dragon protagonist running a big corporation, they need to consider these things.

Because SA#6 to SA#10 haven't been written. Neither have the next eras of Mistborn and countless other things. Whenever he writes something in the far future, he risks contradicting himself or having to abandon cool new ideas for those books, because they would contradict SP#5. He would avoid much of that trouble by writing a book roughly contemporary to SA#5 or TLM. In addition, whenever he writes something in the future Cosmere, he risks spoiling future books he will still write. (Sunlit Man) If he wants to write about dragons, he can set a book at the same time as TLM and avoid those risks, respectively the work to minimize them, at no cost. Unless you want to propose that he wants to write specifically about dragons in space ships, which is very specific, hence unlikely (and without evidence), why, if he wants to write about dragons, not set the book in Silverlight at the time of TLM, just to give an example? "Gain" in this context is an interesting story. Dragons are cool. Yet they are almost equally cool at any time. So why set a story into a time period that is harder to write about? I see no reason. Now, I would like to see a book about dragons. And you can find evidence that Brandon will write about dragons. It is just the combination of dragons and far future that makes less sense. Hence I would conclude that he wrote about something that has to be far future. For example, MeLaan rediscovering Yolen. It intrinsically has to be a future setting.

Because it would mean that Brandon is causing himself extra work for no gain. That is exactly the point. Why go to that trouble to write about dragons?

That was not a story set in the far future. Allomancer Jak in the pits of Partinel A tineye and his trusty slugthrower revealing the secrets of the dastardly ShoDel.

Let me quote Endowment: As for Uli Da, it was obvious from the outset that she was going to be a problem. Good riddance. Considering it better for everybody for her to be dead seems to be the likelier attitude to me. As for Mercy's choice, if you have two problems, will you refuse to take out the one you can take out, just because the other one may be even worse?

Then why future Cosmere with many connections? That is most trouble in terms of spoilers and getting things coordinated. Now, it is possible that Brandon just wanted to write some SF. But it seems to me that future and highly connected would be complications he'd seek only if necessary for the story, respectively are inherent to the topic. Aethers are preshattering and interesting stuff had already happened to them in Lost Metal. Why future? That at least explains why the book is future Cosmere. At the risk of repeating myself: The information we have is that three Shards were present at the battle: Odium, Ambition and Mercy. The idea that Mercy was on Ambition's side is derived from assumptions about Shardic intent, not known facts. It seems to me that Odium had a point when he concluded that Ambition was dangerous. And Mercy may have shared his view and done the Cosmere a mercy taking Ambition out. Not necessarily by that time. That depends on how far in the future YatNP is. In fact, technically we might get the reason for Virtuosity's selfsplintering. It seems to me that Cultivation is thoroughly fed up with the rest of the Shards. Her attitude seems like that if the rest think that Odium needs to be stopped, well, then they ought to fight him themselves and she is not going to risk herself and sacrifice her world to contain him. That was Honor's thing, but Honor is dead.

Debatable. Windspren can glue things together. Whence comes the Investiture to do so? You can use Investiture right as you acquire it. (Scadrial)