HSuperLee

We are led to believe that Preservation could see into the future enough to know about Vin and that Ruin would try to use her as his agent, so Preservation decided to fight back against Ruin by Connecting her to the mists so that she could succeed Preservation. So its not just that he closed his eyes and randomly selected, so much as he knew Vin would be born and said, "She will be my successor." At least as far as I understand it.

Do what I do and refuse to commit, using whatever name confuses the people you're with the most.

I honestly think heightenings wouldn't diminish enjoyment of music simply because their effect seems to heighten the perception of beauty rather than diminish it. You'd think having perfect color perception would make most colors they see be garish and ugly by comparison, but instead they seem to see the world as more beautiful as a result of the heightenings. I can only assume the same would apply for their hearing.

I did really enjoy Lux. I thought it was an excellent expansion to the Reckoners universe, and I loved seeing another Reckoner's cell and how they fought Epics without access to Prof's abilities. I will say though, it seemed like there were a few subtle retcons and distinctions from the original series (which I reread in preparation for Lux) that did kind of bother me. For example, in the originial trilogy motivators were pretty much black box technology that only a few really knew how they worked. Yet in Lux, Zeff seemed to act as though them being incubators for epic cells was common knowledge. And then Firefight has a whole subplot of David being the first one to really piece together that Epic's weaknesses come from things they feared before getting their powers, yet in Lux they figure out all the weaknesses by thinking about and analyzing the Epics' pasts. And finally, there's a whole in universe debate before Steelheart over whether or not its the powers that make an Epic go evil, or if only evil people get powers, and in Lux we have Languish pretty quickly confirm the former. Now, that said, I understand that these were done to provide a reader who may have never read the original trilogy with important information about the world, but it was still a little jarring to see right after a big reread. However, it is pretty much my only complaint. Other than that I think the story was very well written, and it definitely kept me guessing. I predicted pretty early on that page was still alive, but I also thought before we actually got to Lux that Lifeforce would be a decoy villain, and that Wingflare would be the real big bad, since she was the one the audience was really set up to hate, and I didn't think there was time to make us hate Lifeforce more than her. I was wrong about that. As for the Steelheart origin, I honestly didn't make the connection until he fired off an energy blast. I figured the line about having a heart made of steel was just a shout out, and somehow despite my reread I forgot that Steelheart's actual last name was Jackson. In my defense, I was remembering when Tia described him as basically an average joe pre-calamity, and wasn't expecting him to be a spec ops solider. That was definitely a surprise. But after the energy blast, I recognized the powerset and the name clicked, which led to me blurting outloud (luckily I wasn't in public,) "Wait a minute HE'S FREAKING STEELHEART!" I'm now really excited to see where this story goes from here. I didn't realize there would be multiple books when I started Lux, so the cliffhanger ending really got me, and now I need more. I've wanted to see the world post-Calamity's departure for years, and now that the Deathrise mystery is in play I want it even more.

Yeah, I had a similar thought pretty early on in the book, and as it went on it became way more clear how much Lifeforce didn't follow the established rule. But at the same time, his power is really weird. I kept waiting for an explanation of the ravens getting regular injections of other people's blood in order to have lives they could send their injuries to, but they never seemed to need that, instead, he seemed to be able to act as a relay for them. This makes me wonder if he's maybe a different kind of gifter than the others. In many ways Prof and Conflux seem more like batteries, giving away the "energy" of their powers which others could then use for a while. My main reason for this analogy is that David makes comments in Firefight about needing to "recharge" his gifted shield power by having Prof give it to him again, whereas if he just got a weaker ability to create force fields then he should be able to regenerate his own as long as he had the power. The fact that Lifeforce didn't give a number of extra lives, but rather the ability to draw on his own supply, suggests that rather than acting like a power supply that could give others some charge he instead was able to create a connection to them that they could draw on for a constant supply of power. For this reason alone, we might be able to conclude that there are different kinds of gifters, and thus they might not all share the same limits. But as I said, Lifeforce's powers are weird. Deathrise only complicates the matter, as its unclear how much of Lifeforce's powers were his own abilities, and how much was from Deathrise. Part of this mystery is the events around Lifeforce's first attempted suicide after being rejected by Lovestruck. When we first heard the story, I was wondering who was around to touch him and activate his power, since at that point he didn't have the strategy of injecting blood into himself. I have to wonder if Deathrise possessed him then, and somehow provided a burst of healing, saving him from the suicide, like how Page was saved from her raven wounds. But as I said, I'm not sure if the injury transfer was Lifeforce's own power, or if he was never an epic at all, and it was always Deathrise inside of him providing the power. One thing that will help make this clear is whether or not Page manifests the injury transfering, or if she develops her own abilities. The only reason I hold back from thinking that Lifeforce might have not been an epic at all is that he had an epic weakness. Otherwise I'd wonder if he was something different that came about through Deathrise. But that might be a discussion for another thread. My point just being here that Lifeforce was very much not a normal epic, and his ability to gift his powers to other epics is only one piece of that.

I have to wonder if its kind of like surge of gravitation, where somehow the magic is tricking the person's body into thinking gravity is in a different strength and direction than it really is. Its not creating a gravitational pull in a different direction, but actually altering the way normal gravity works. Somehow, feruchemical iron isn't actually changing the person's mass, but seems to be changing how their mass works. Though frankly, that gives the physicist part of my brain a bit of a headache, but it might be one of the best explanations.

See, if iron-feruchemy was in any way consistent with how it messes with physics, that would be easier to answer. Unfortunately, its really not. Since we know momentum is conserved, you'd actually lose energy by tapping just before you hit the door, as you'd slow down quite a bit when you tapped. Theoretically if tapping gives you the strength to move your tapped weight around as if it was your normal weight Wax really should have super strength while tapping, which we know he doesn't, but it does at least mean you should be able to sprint normally. In which case, charging at the door while tapping, lets say up to twice your normal weight, you should have twice the normal energy, and thus that would be the better option. But at the same time, the lack of an increase in durability means rather than crashing through it, your more likely to just splat against it. As for the last question, kind of. The main reason it would have more of an effect in the air is because there's no way for a normal person to apply force in the air that would help them maintain a constant speed like you could on the ground. Crashers kind of throw that off because they can push off metal while still in the air, which makes it more similar to them to being on the ground.

The friction-less state would not affect the odd speed up slow down effect created by changing weight (technically mass) while moving. We actually use that shifting effect as part of moving things around in space, as when two crafts dock together they both slow down and if they undock they both speed up due to the conversation of momentum, which requires no friction.

Savantism is a lot like if doctors fused the bones in your wrists. Generally, that's going to have a lot of negative effects. But, on the bright side, you'd be better at firing handguns since your wrist wouldn't automatically bend when it recoils (I actually know a cop who's in this exact situation, which inspired the comparison). To be clear, savantism is a type of damage to your spiritweb. It is bad. It just happens to have some side-effects that are useful in a few situations.

It would be extremely difficult to use investiture to destroy a shardblade. We actually have reason to believe that a shardblade is more invested than shardplate (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/217/#e7299), and considering that shardplate is apparently effective enough to block lashings from an honorblade, its probably fair to say that none of the surges are going to really be able to directly affect a shardblade.

Not exactly something we have a definitive answer to, plus insanity is a really hard, if not impossible thing to quantify. Now, if you were to ask which Hearld's insanity has the most effect on them, probably Talenel. Beyond that, we're not aware of what all of the Heralds' madnesses are, so we can't really rank them all, and even then it starts getting really subjective.

I wonder if the Scadrian equivalent of marathon would be that battle where Elend ran across the country to find a town occupied by Koloss and then fought a ton to take control of them before marching back to his army. I can't remember what the name of the town he saved was, but that could be the name they use instead of marathon. If anyone is going to look it up, its where he gets asked if he's the Lord Ruler and he just says, "Close enough."

Yeah, that's annoying. I really like the double iron twinborn idea, because they can flip cars and pull planes out of the sky and basically just tear anything made of metal apart by making themselves heavier than it and then pulling. Iron-iron is a very powerful combination and this suggests they're just known for doing stupid stuff that hurts them!?

Aight, fast answers. 1. The spirit web adapts around the constant flow of power and becomes dependent on it. 2. It is the flow of Preservation's power that does the warping of the spiritweb. 3. We don't know.

This is mostly true, but its complicated by the fact that we have reasons to believe that Shards don't necessarily have to deal with entropy, but rather, any investiture they expend will eventually return to them in a usable form. There is no inaccessible "energy" for Shards. That throws things off a bit, but otherwise yeah, Frustration is right. Also, Disclaimer: I could be completely wrong about that, its not been specifically addressed and I'm making this claim based on a few inferences. If Sanderson eventually says that there is investiture completely (rather than temporarily) inaccessible to Shards, then I am wrong.

Are we so certain that they would eventually have to figure that out? Isn't it possible that will just be a limit to them all the way to Era 4, like how Scadrians don't have any ability that we know of to traverse realms without a natural perpendicularity? We've been told there will be a lot of cross-pollination with tech later on, so I could see Rosharans having to use mundane tech in the Cognitive Realm simply because their fabrials don't work there.

Luckwielder. An appropriate name, because they clearly have access to a lot of fortune.

It would be interesting to see the Sibling unmanifest at some point and then re-manifest themself into components of a spaceship. I feel like that wouldn't happen in the Stormlight series itself, but it would be awesome to see in Era 4. The Rosharan Flagship: Urithuru, the living ship. Though honestly, at that scale its more like a space station than a spaceship, but it would still be awesome.

This reminds me how much I hate the idea of Hoid being in romantic relationships. Its one thing if there were when he was still mortal, and another if they were with other immortals, but good gosh I'm not comfortable with immortal/mortal romances. I can accept fairly large age gaps, but thousands of years is way too big. If Hoid can even look at people a century old and see them as anything but children, then I greatly question how much wisdom he's actually developed over his extended lifespan. What I'm saying is, ROW indicates Hoid could have children, and I am not down for it, so I'd be somewhat bothered is Felt ends up being related to him.

They would get a burst of the feruchemical attribute as long as they were burning the metal.

Thing is, Shadesmar is flat. Sure, they've measured space compression within the vertical dimension, but they've no reason to think that it doesn't horizontally represent their planet, especially in shape.

Coppermind suggests that burning aluminum doesn't affect aluminum, with a reference to chapter 36 of Final Empire. Unfortunately, I can't check, so someone else would need to confirm it. In my opinion though, if the allomantic effect of aluminum affected aluminum I'd have a lot of realmatic questions (granted, I still have a lot of questions as to how aluminum is allomantically viable in the first place) so it makes sense to me that it doesn't instantly erase itself.

Ah, Mistborn, my first love of the Cosmere. It will be excellent to have back. Really though, what I'm most excited for is just seeing Mistborn written with Sanderson's heightened skills. I think its safe to say that writing Stormlight and then managing other projects around it has really been power-leveling for his abilities as a writer, and so I just want to see what he can do with the Mistborn setting and characters now that he's better than he was when he last visited the series.

I mean kind of. I know you know this, Frustration, so for those that don't remember, the Fused could return during the desolations until at least one of the Heralds either died or voluntarily went back to Braize to hold them back.

I want to point out, humans did win every desolation. Yeah, with every desolation the Singers got closer to victory, but they still lost every time. The Heralds went to Braize by choice at the end of each of them and then had to fight alone, and its only then that their weaknesses can more easily be exploited. For example, we don't know if the Heralds have bodies on Braize. Maybe the do, maybe they remain just cognitive entities like spren, and in which case, they might be a lot less capable. Or, they could keep their bodies, but the environment on Braize is so hostile that their regenerative abilities are pushed to their limit just to survive their, and their strength and skill degrades the longer they're on the planet. Or after so many times of the Fused getting lucky and capturing them, maybe the later desolations didn't even require them to be tortured, but they gave in merely upon being captured. There are just too many variables, and no matter how invincible the heralds may seem they are still just people who make mistakes and have fears and vulnerabilities. Plus, we can't ignore the power of sheer numbers. There's a huge difference between fighting one person less skilled than you and two people less skilled than you. When it comes to the Heralds, even if they can fight a thousand soldiers it might be the one-thousand-first person that turns the tide.