Oltux72

the rest of his conversation with Nale. Szeth is not the type who would want to slaughter proto-Radiants at that point. He must be given a reason the incident that made him believe that the Voidbringers are returning. That is a big taboo and Szeth was pretty level-headed. No voice, however persuasive, will make him believe something outrageous. This needs evidence, that he dared bring up in public. Szeth is, however, convinced by Kaladin. So it cannot be irrefutable. We have never seen why they are trained with Honorblades. Do the shamans know that the heralds lied after Aharietiam?

10 mm is a gigantic spearpoint. In fact ridiculously huge. A blade in terms of physics is to concentrate force on a small area. It needs to be thin.

Yes, but she was alone. So he blew his ideological cover with the first hit. The two against one strategy with direct resistance and combat had been tried. It failed, fatally so. Trying it against the one who learned most out of it was unwise. That is the problem when you ally with Honor. He won't join you as you take logical expidiency over honor. You can run, but then you'll be alone. And you will have to live with leaving behind somebody dear to yourself. And somebody with what it takes to kill a Shard's vessel would just agree to that? I have my doubts. Littering her backyard with a toxic corpse whose parts will become sentient in the best case. In the worst case she'd be wounded herself and some other Shard would take advantage of her weakness.

I am afraid I have to beg to differ. Without his bunkers few would have been left when Vin took up the Shard. And the one carrying out the plan had to get her to the Shard. So while she eventually executed a part of the plan, her role was as a fighter only. A plan that Leras hoped to postpone for as long as possible doubting its chances of success.

Ambition? If Honor would have fought anyway, what would have been her other options? Letting him, who was dear to her, be destroyed and then face Rayse-Odium alone? Run? She needs him to stay in control for some time. Her motivation for teaching him could be quite base.

In a certain sense for sure. But he is an antagonist. An evil villain does not make a bold book. Contrast that to The Lord Ruler who was almost a cartoon evil overlord to the point of even spilling blood in rivers. Yet his plan B saved Scadrian mankind. Yet Vin's selfless act set them on a path of doom.

Yes, you can indeed see it as questionable means. However, you can make the case that it was a good thing in itself by irregular means. There can be little doubt that Sadeas was a traitor and an impartial court would have found him guilty. So you can make a very good case that while that murder was a case of vigilantism, it still was justice. While you hopefully will not make the case that Kelsier wiping out whole noble families including children, barely sparing the pregnant women was a good thing. You might call it a necessary evil and hence justified, but still an evil. I hope that distinction is clear and shows what I meant by being bolder.

A good eastern Rosharan viewpoint. Cultivation is disregarded. Isn't valor just courage in warfare without regard to the aspect of integrity, that is you can be a valorous traitor, but with Honor that is a no-go?

We have seen cities. How many inhabitants do they have? Lasting Integrity has so many people that they can fill an arena, but not so many that it would overflow. So I would think in the thousands. If the other kinds of spren are similar and we have a few dozen cities, they should be numbering in the tens of thousands, them having no agriculture, hence little reason to have a farming population. But why are the Shardblades numbered in the hundreds? Were so many lost or has Shadesmar undergone an increase in population after the Recreance?

Can she, though? There seems to be disagreement among the Shards on the binding nature of the agreement to not interfere with one another. Valour may be required for Odium to fire the first shot. You are assuming that Odium is not forming a coalition of his own. Why wouldn't he? Not really. Cultivation has no interest at all in bringing war to Roshar. I believe her strategy to be the simplest of all. She wants Odium to be someone else's problem. She had a personal vendetta against Rayse, but that is finished. She wants to free him. Taravangian is no fool. Why risk himself in a fight against somebody not hostile? I am afraid, you need to look at their respective strategies to understand how the Shards will intervene. Hoid's strategy did not sound to me like he wanted an intervention on Roshar. He is seeing Roshar as a way to delay Odium while the coaltion he is forming would arm itself. And Cultivation has other interests as well. Odium's main weapon in a way is Roshar. Now, what do you do to your enemy's main weapon, especially while it is not finished and what does Cultivation think about that?

5. they are waiting to strike. The Set hasn't done much damage as yet and by observing an enemy you'll learn. And it may be much harder to infiltrate the next attempt. Though I admit that that suggests that Thaidakar has a way to remotely disable the Bands of Mourning.

We are running out of time. If you had a weapon like Nazrilof used in the Ghastly Gondola isn't the death of a Shard the occasion you'd wear it rather than a knife? Hence there has to be a time for it to be developed. When? After the Evill took over or always? Well, neither is evacuating a whole continent with sailing vessels feasible. Most people died then.

Yes. That conclusions seems neigh inevitable. Though the control may have been social, implying sapience of those shadows. Well, no. The Shades were new and horrifying at least to the Forescouts Unless the Shades look drastically different in the Cognitive Realm, you could not mistake Kelsier for one. There is a problem. Catacendre to Wax & Wayne is 341 years. Between Silence and the Forescouts we roughly a century. That means that between the Catacendre and the evacuation you have less than 250 years at most. That raises a point. The Threnodites had access to the Cognitive Realm at the time of Secret History. I cannot imagine evacuating to hell only while you can go to or through the CR. So where are the refugees on other worlds? Yet Nazrilof cannot be one of those refugees. Not in the essay. But Secret History has Threnodite armed forces in the CR, so, as Threnody has no perpendicularity, they must have an Invested Art.

Yes. So it reverts to the old state when the spike are pulled out. And that is indeed what physical death should trigger. The body which by being spiked permits the spikes to alter the spiritweb no longer exists in a functional state.

Yes. That by itself is not a problem. The question is whether this has happened at the expense of other qualities. I see no logical necessity for that. It is possible that it has happened, but as far as I can see those two developments, while I am also observing them, are independent. Indeed. And in the interest of honesty I have to say that this makes for books worse than they could be. Yes. And this has led to glaring shortcomings. Meridas Amaram in the latter half of Oathbringer - I am sorry to put it bluntly - is not a believable character. No, definitrely no. You cannot get more heroic than calmly planning to use your own death as a tool. In that regard the later books are an improvement. They include characters like Vasher and Venli who show a realistic sense of selfpreservation. Nale's spren is well. As is Malata's and the Stormfather looked at Gavilar. Those people are still in the books. Straight evil people are boring. But that the main characters portraited as the good side have gone more mainstream and mellow is also true. The best examples are actually Moash and Venli. Moash had his reasons. Now he is straight up evil. Likewise Venli could have been the one who saw her people's fate realistically and did what she felt she had to do, yet failed, but Rhythm of War portrayed her as a tool of a voidspren. You will find extreme counterexamples in other unpublished works. (I don't want to say too much in this forum) Even in later works you do. Vasher can be seen as somebody who is ready to stiffle science and free speech for the greater good. I disagree with him, in fact I hate the character, but he was a bold choice. In a certain sense Lirin is such a choice in the other direction, but you are supposed to be disgusted by the way he treats his eldest son. And it would have been easy to vindicate him. Just have the invaders execute some hostages in reprisal for what Kaladin did. Indeed, that is the popularity of Adolin. He stands with Maya no matter what and solves a problem with cold steel. Has anybody ever seen his similarity to Kelsier?

Animals, even plants, have a spiritweb. So, yes, a mistwraith for sure has one. While that is true, how does that tell us that a Kandra has a spiritweb distinct from the Mistwraith that it is?

Is it just me or has the Bear of Partinel turned into Jasnah Kholin? absolute readiness to do vile things when needed a modernizer using his/her carefully controlled personal combat as a political tool ready to work with any ally Making her a woman is icing on the cake, avoiding the trope of yet another tough guy.

The Lord Ruler made as many spikes as they requested. He did not tell them that they are hemalurgic constructs. He was careful. He learned from moving the sun. To Rashek being careful meant not doing irreversable things and always having a plan B. He even kept a bead of lerasium around, just in case. He has a certain need for feruchemy. Without feruchemy he cannot fully equip his new Steel Inquisitors. He needs to keep the breeding populations apart, but totally eradicating feruchemy would create other problems. Yes. No more Skaa corpses just dumped somewhere. And Sazed has recreated the verdant ecology with its own scavangers. All bad news for other scavangers. Marasi noted in Bands of Mourning that no Mistwraith has been seen in a long time. Granted, Scadrians are not avid explorers, but Mistwraiths are at least rare.

An animal basically. When you perform hemalurgy on a Mistwraith in the way to make a Kandra, you do not add intelligence in the conventional hemalurgic method. Pulling the spikes out of a Kandra does not wipe out their mind. It makes it unusable. But even if you put in an alien spike, the mind is still there. Paalm has demonstrated that. Also the first generation was not brain wiped. They got their human memories back. You unblock something that Rashek blocked. So what do we get if we undo Rashek's blockage in full? If you did it on a member of the first generation you get a human being back. In fact you'd get a Terrisperson. And that is crucial. You'd get a potential Feruchemist. There we have the basically cheapest way to become a Feruchemist. Spike a Mistwraith not into a Kandra, but fully back into human.

Yes. The problem is that bones alone are not enough for a Kandra to recreate a body. They need to eat it, too. Hence we can rule out that Kelsier had a Kandra recreate his body and then snatched it. Hence the problem of explaining why Kelsier still looks like Kelsier is unsolved and without an obvious solution. Neither can Kelsier just have snatched somebody, even a Feruchemist, as the result would not look like Kelsier. We do not just have to explain why Kelsier has a body, but why he has a body why that body looks like him why he is a Feruchemist why he is physically immortal Now, it is possible that Kelsier solved all those issues subsequently. But it is also quite inelegant. Hence I think he spiked himself into a Mistwraith.

Most of them are animals and that works perfectly fine. Very good question.

Yes. Had I just written sapience this would have been clearer. My apologies. True. My point was that sapience is not a special category in the Cosmere. Either life or sentience is, with the difference small or just semantic. Hence a soul is associated with the living being. Hence realmatically a Kandra is a Mistwraith and vice versa. They differ in mental faculties, but the difference is not qualitative.

This is an extremely heretical question, but are we sure of source and destination here? How old is the Ire? That assumption is almost unavoidable. They have other magotechnical items that cannot be powered by a Seon, so that is unlikely to be the case. The Dor is the simplest explanatio, as they have that pipeline running.

Daring, highy daring. Saying that Dalinar (or Jasnah for that matter) would not have done what Kaladin has done to protect Scadrial is an extremely debatable proposition.

Seons can do it and Seons are most likely cognitive entities. Well, you may extrapolate from Singers, which have it fused to their sternum and from there only being one such bone per Sho Del that it is their equivalent of a sternum. No other bone in a mammalian body is unpaired and long and pointy. That it appears in all Sho Del rules out that it is a baculum, which would also fit the criteria.