HSuperLee

I would argue that one of the themes in Stormlight Archive is that there are no common people. Is Kal destined for greatness? Yes. But does that mean most other people aren't? I don't think so. The fact everyone has a spiritual ideal which is illuminated to them in different circumstances (truthwatcher healing and lighterweaver art) seems to indicate that everyone in the Cosmere is destined for greatness. Many people simply fail to achieve it. Possibly because don't or can't believe it about themselves. There's a reason why spren seek out everyday people in addition to soldiers and kings. There's a reason why characters change in the Stormlight Archive. Heck, look at Gaz or Elhokar. Both started out as terrible people but then Shallan showed them drawing of who they could be, which I believe was their spiritual ideals. Just seeing a piece of what they could have been was enough motivation to push them both to becoming Knight Radiant. I don't think Kaladin is lucky, I think he just never compromised who he was where as most people, in-story and out, at some point do compromise their character for one reason or another. I'm not going to inherently fault people for that, Heaven knows I've done it, but I think one the main messages we're supposed to take away from the Stormlight Archive is that everyone is broken and messed up but everyone can be better than they currently are. Everyone has the capability to be great. Its just hard work getting there.

I mean I would advise against seeing this as a binary. Remember in WoR that Kaladin complained that Syl helping him be better with a spear was cheating, and Syl responded that even if he had some advantage, he still worked himself half to death getting good with it and perfecting his technique. Kal's leadership and ingenuity did save the bridge men. Stormlight certainly didn't give him the idea of feeding them stew and exercising even on their days off. Yes, the stormlight helped, but so subtly that no one even noticed. But even with that in mind, we can't separate Kaladin the Radiant from Kaladin the man, they're the same person and, based on Syl's comments about knowing him before they met, he always has been Kaladin the Radiant, even before Syl woke up. His use of stormlight is part of his ingenuity and leadership skills, even when he didn't know it. I think this might be where the idea of Kaladin being destined to be good with a spear and then resonating backwards kind of comes in play. In the Cosmere, the idea of who you could be isn't really a thing. Yeah, futuresight shows a bunch of different possibilities, but I also don't think alternate timelines actually exist. Future sight shows what could be, but that doesn't mean there's a difference between that and what is. I apologize because I'm about to go into philosophical semi-nonsense, but in the Cosmere everyone has someone they're meant to be, this is their ideal self. People see glimpses of it when they view the Spirit Realm, such as when healed by an enlightened Truthwatcher. Personally, I disagree with Sanderson about how much influence a cognitive aspect should have over the manifestation of that ideal, but Sanderson and I probably disagree on the fundamental philosophy of that decision anyway, so its not particularly relevant. My point is, there is a man Kaladin is supposed to be and all his life has either been moving towards or away from that. Becoming a Knight Radiant acted as a major stepping stone to becoming that man, in part because being invested helps draw the three aspects of a person closer together. Kaladin's luck, skill, and circumstances are probably all manifestations of moving closer or further to that ideal of the man he could be. This is what I think destiny means in the Cosmere: who you're supposed to be. Maybe you don't necessarily become that person. Maybe its not even possible for a person to totally fulfill their destiny, and a partial success is all one can hope for. Am I saying Kaladin is personally responsible for the circumstances that have led to his losses and pains? No, of course not. But there is something to be said about them all happening because Kaladin is who he is. He attempted and failed ten escape attempts because He's Kaladin freaking Stormblessed, and he can't tolerate oppression and restriction. He's so good with a spear and has survived where no one else did because he's Kaladin freaking Stormblessed, and he's a survivor and a fighter. He succeeded in saving Bridge Four because he's Kaladin freaking Stormblessed, and he protects those who cannot protect themselves. In every situation he made the decision he would make because he is him. We can't take credit away from him for making those decision any more than we can fault him for the circumstances in which he made them. So what am I really saying, in non-rambling terms about Kaladin's luck? I guess I'd just have to say that Kaladin's life is more than a summation of the good and bad things that he's experienced and to condense all those down to luck is unfair considering everything Kaladin has done to change his life, and everything other people have done to change it. Kaladin's life is the result of the decisions he and those around him made, plus a tiny element of chance. I don't really like calling that luck, or even saying that he made his own luck. But anyway, that's my one permitted nonsense rambling on this forum per day, so I guess I'll end there.

I'd argue its actually the reverse for identity. Storing identity probably makes you a lot easier to control as, while its not the exact same thing as determination, identity is going to include a lot of the things you care about in order to have something to resist control for. Connection might make it easier to avoid being controlled, but in general I worry about the effects of dampening connection. I know feruchemical powers have some inbuilt safeguards to keep the feruchemist safe from the effects of lowering their attributes too much, but connection is really important to the functions of the soul as far as we can tell.

Scadrians were created directly by Ruin and Preservation and have no Yolish ancestry, differentiating them from most other humans in the Cosmere.

I've always been really confused by this quote. It doesn't make it clear whether or not silver acts like a non-allomantically viable metal or not. Is it that mistborn just can't burn it? Or they can and it doesn't have any effect including not making them sick? Or is that when they burn it they do become sick just like any other non-viable metal? I understand Sanderson hasn't completely figured silver out yet (at least not that he's told us), but I'm overall just very confused about silver's interaction with allomancy and I don't think I'm the only one considering how many times I've seen that WoB used to defend mutually exclusive conclusions about silver. But that's all less related to the topic of this thread. I personally would not be a huge fan of Adonalsiumium being a real-world metal. I know that also throws out the aluminum idea, and I can't exactly explain why it would bother me, but it would. I like the fact that in the Cosmere metals aren't just metal but have some level of supernatural properties, but going as far as one real-world metal being considered the body of a cosmic creator is very weird to me. Thinking about it, I guess it would bother me because I assume that natural formation of the metals still occurs in the Cosmere. If that's taken away suddenly and you have a situation where Cosmere silver or aluminum isn't real life's version of the metal but some magic thing that replaces our metals place in the periodic table I'd prefer to just have new magical metal rather than mess with chemistry.

While I understand the hype of this potentially immensely powerful godmetal, a large part of me believes its possible that Adonalsiumium wouldn't be so much powerful as fundamental. We are led to believe that Adonalsium is the source of all investiture in the Cosmere, which is equivalent to saying he was functionally united with all matter and energy, due to investiture being another form of those. If I were a betting man, and I'm not, I would say that Adonalsium's godmetal could in many ways be said to be the spiritual realm itself. That is, it is the reason why all metal is weird in the Cosmere and has unique investiture interactions. In some sense, every metal might be Adonalsium's godmetal. Or perhaps all matter itself is the physical manifestation of Adonalsium's investiture, aka. his godmetal. Or perhaps the material souls are composed of is his godmetal. Wax did see with the Bands of Mourning that metal and souls are made of the same stuff after all. My ultimate point being, I'm not certain we should be looking for a specific material to be Adonalsiumium. It might be something a lot more common yet significant than that.

My question was me attempting to understand what exactly it is we're comparing here, because the word power can mean many things. Mind control and super-strength would both be considered powerful, but for different reasons. One gives you the ability to influence people, the other to change your environment. I'm trying to determine whether we're comparing apples or oranges, because otherwise this conversation will proceed where everyone is making different arguments based on the assumptions they're reading into it the question rather than the intent behind the question. If you're saying this is a discussion of what ability has the greatest power for any given definition of power, there is no answer. Its like asking who is the best athlete out of a bunch of gold medalist Olympians. They're all undeniably great athletes, but because they specialize in different things you can't create this broad category of "athlete" and assume everyone has the same list of criteria they're comparing against. I asked what exactly do we mean by power in this discussion and you said power. That's not a meaningful answer.

Is the question which magic system has the highest power in the physics sense of power being "ability to do work," or is this another of those, "who would win in a fight" threads?

Ah, kandra, one of my biggest Cosmere beefs. Well, time to put on my mad scientist hat here, which means I in no way endorse the strategy I am about to suggest. Sanderson has waffled on how deep the transformation abilities of kandra go, though he's generally been consistent on the idea that they could replicate human reproductive organs. Relevant WoB spoiler-ed for length: I'm not a biologist, but its always seemed to me that if kandra can create reproductive organs, they should be able to create bones. Let me go through the logic here. Even if kandra can't directly and immediately create stem cells for themselves (though I suspect they probably could) they could always create both male and female reproductive organs within themselves and then fertilize their own eggs, leading to stem cell creation via the same route human do it. From there, they should be able to assimilate those cells and begin to control their differentiation until they begin producing bone. This is assuming that kandra can't just replicate human DNA and then make bones the way we do (you're doing it right now, by the way. Its just a slow process). But either way, if kandra can make bones, it just takes a long time, then the main thing holding back kandra shapeshifting is the time it takes to grow bones (hair, nails, etc.) in which case, they might only need one spiked ability; Progression. We've seen from the Fused that Singers can use progression to accelerate their carapace growth, so perhaps a kandra could use the same ability to accelerate the natural processes of bone growth. The other major limiting factor for kandra is mass. I assume they can shed it quickly if they need to (though it would be gross) but gaining mass requires that they eat enough flesh to replicate a form. This may not be a problem, however, as we know that the Magnified Ones are some of the largest and bulkiest of the Fused, suggesting that progression might also be able to generate muscle mass, aka. flesh. So spiking a kandra with progression might solve that problem as well. But if not, we know of another rosharan ability that allows for the creation of flesh, and that's soulcasting. Now that we have a kandra with the ability to generate bone and mass, the final thing we need is a power source, as these abilities will likely consume a massive amount of investiture. Since we're using progression and maybe soulcasting, the rosharan lights are the most obvious power source, as they wouldn't require an hacks to power the abilities. While stormlight tends to be the go-to, I actually think lifelight may be the best option here. The best source of lifelight we've seen is Lift, so there's always the potential of spiking her ability to convert food to lifelight, but this kandra is already going to have three or four spikes, so it would be better if we could avoid using more. The other potential source of lifelight we've seen comes from the Listener tradition of using a specific rhythm to accelerate plant growth. If using that rhythm always works to generate small amounts of lifelight, then the kandra could simply build organs that create that rhythm constantly, much like the beating of a heart, and be always creating lifelight for themself. There are a few other strategies that might work for powering this super-kandra's abilities, but they all involve more spikes and tricks like compounding or perpendicularities into the Spiritual Realm, so I'm going to propose the lifelight rhythm idea for now, as it seems the best way to keep the super-kandra as sane as possible. And as a side-effect of the kandra having progression and lifelight, they'd connect even more to your idea of a druid by being able to rapidly grow plants. Of course all this is highly theoretical and dependent on the idea that a kandra's natural abilities are beyond anything we've actually seen from them.

I agree Szeth needs more support, but here's my probably popular opinion: Stormlight Archives is the story of extremely broken people, and their attempts to piece themselves back together. In fact, you could summarize this series in saying that its Sanderson telling his audience, "You can be better than you are now."

I could be misunderstanding, but I'm fairly certain when people are talking about spanreed radios, they mean what we'd generally call telephones. What we call radios are really more of radio receivers, where as a telephone is a radio transceiver, capable of both transmission and reception.

Though we're not certain of this, what you're describing could be fairly similar to how Autonomy is creating their avatars. In which case the answer would be yes, what you're saying is possible. But we're not sure exactly what Autonomy is doing or how it works, so the process might be completely different. But I would imagine what you're describing is possible. After all, the Cosmere is saturated with a lot more Shardic investiture than any Shard is completely aware of, so if the Splinter just goes to a planet where a lot of their Shard's investiture is being unused and starts collecting it, the Shard probably wouldn't even miss it.

With advanced enough aons you could make this work, but it would require programming skills to do it. You'd need a whole bunch of "always on" linked aons that are detecting various things, such as hand genstures, and then have those aons act as triggers for other aons which then create the established effect. And even then, because the aons would have specific end results plugged into them, you probably couldn't do anything complex like transformation, healing, or teleportation, all of which require being configured for the specific target and circumstances. Instead you'd have to have an array of relatively simple effects, such as specifically sized bursts of fire or force. And because you'd be working with tattoos, you'd have to make sure to get it right the first time, as changing it would be fairly difficult (unless aons can be used for tattoo removal, which I suppose they probably can be.) Frankly, it would be easier just to make a suit of armor with all this stuff built into it, as with that you could at least take it on and off and do test runs of it.

The line about flaring steel is a mistake in the text. I don't know what edition book you have, but I believe I have a 13th edition book and it says he flared his iron, which would be the accurate one for this situation. You might have an older edition where that mistake wasn't corrected.

No. Steel is repulsion, iron is attraction. Steel pushes, iron pulls. When Kel does his big super jumps, he's just pushing with the coin not perfectly below him so that rather than being pushed at a straight up, 90 degree angle, he's being pushed at a somewhat acute angle, probably somewhere between 60-80 degrees, though the specific angle is not certain or super relevant.

As much as I'm inclined to agree with this because I love the idea of science coming unexpectedly from Cultivation and Honor, it really is worth noting that the perceptions of one person listening to the rhythms isn't going to be definitive on Shardic combinations. Each Shard's intent is so much more than a single word. I mean, imagine trying to describe a sunset with a single word. Most people will probably default to "beauty", but you'll also get lots of "wonder", or even "dream". Then realize that each Shard is much more complex than a single sunset. The words we use to describe the Shards barely scratch the surface of what they actually are. The result is that we'd really need more than just Navani to go off of. Though I do think that its reasonable to say that freedom would be an aspect of Cultivation and Odium mixing. Though I'm not willing to say it would be the whole or even dominant aspect of said merging.

I think its probably fairly easy for Cultivation to kill. She just has to have a justification for it. But that justification can be a slim as, "You have the potential to hinder my plans to prosper" and then she is completely free to kill.

So perhaps this is not what anyone wants to hear, but it is a good thing to have bad people in books. And I'm not even talking about having villains. The truth is that no person has ever or will ever be truly good. We all hold each other to impossible standards. One of the main advantages books give us is the ability to practice liking people despite their faults. For example, as has been said in this thread, Dalinar has made a ton of mistakes and if you look at his past, he was a terrible person. Some threads have seen people saying he's unforgivably bad. Maybe he is. But people, myself included, like him. We can get to a point in life where because we don't know anything about people beyond how they treat us, we act as though their interactions with us are their whole life. Books let us see the whole lives of unlikable characters, and thus give us the opportunity to like them despite their faults. Its good practice. Anyway, I'm not saying you have to like Lirin, or even that you should like RoW. That's all subjective. I think objectively its a good book, but that's a different and somewhat irrelevant matter. The point I'm trying to get to is, yeah, Lirin sucks. Kaladin repeating the same mistakes over and over again sucks. But those things might be more bearable if you consider what they mean about you and the people you interact with. If it doesn't help, feel free to forget everything I've said.

The actual energy conversion of investiture gets really weird with the lights, as its suggested that they draw energy (though not investiture) from the spiritual realm, which is why the gaseous investiture glows. So there's a limited amount of investiture, but its creating a doorway for a constant supply of energy, which means its not a closed system.

If we're going to judge Kelsier based on his intents rather than his actions, which I personally think is only half the picture as you have to judge people on both, then we have to acknowledge that Kelsier isn't even fully aware of his motivations. In the end of Secret History, when Vin's cognitive shadow directly asks him about his motivations, Kel can't tell her whether he did everything he did to overthrow the Lord Ruler and the nobility for his crew and the skaa, or if he did it all in revenge for Mare. I know many people will quickly jump onto the idea that he did it for both, but the point is, we don't know because he doesn't know. This is one of my favorite aspects of the original Mistborn trilogy, in that you have three leaders each having to shift in their morality. Rashek was a selfish and rotten man, but he had to move towards order and preservation (generic word, not the shard) so that he'd have an empire to rule. Elend was a selfless and noble man, but he had to become a tyrant to protect people incapable of ruling themselves. And then you have Kelsier, a man whose motivation we don't know who did both noble and terrible things. You can say that what Kelsier did is justified, and I would agree with you, but justified is not the same as right. Morality is more than the binary good and bad (though its certainly not less than that), in that sometimes good can be divided into good, better, and best. Perhaps Kelsier's actions were good, but I would not call them better, and certainly not best. All that to say, I don't think I'm willing to call Kelisier a good or an bad man. Though I believe he has great potential to become either one.

This question seems to be something like asking if the Sun's heat can be separated from its light. The Sun's light is its heat, in that it is that heat interacting with the materials that carry it and generating light as a biproduct. Yeah, you can transform investiture from one form to another, but just because both electrons and positions exist doesn't mean there's a such thing as a neutral electron (at least to my knowledge. I'm admittedly not a physicist.)

Clearly she has the blessing of awesomeness.

Both her and Edwarn had hemalurgic spikes that, among other things, made them bloodmakers. From there they just needed gold to store health in. But its also implied that the Set have ways to either compound health or a lot of bloodmakers at their disposal, and that whatever bloodmakers they have (compounders or not) are also trueselves, presumably also through hemalurgy. The result is that they have the ability to completely fill massive goldminds that can be used by any bloodmaker. Wayne himself benefits from one of these through the second half of the book.

Oh yeah, I totally agree. Unless they're compounding to get insane levels of heat feruchemical brass is not a good way to fight a shardbearer. I'm just pointing out that there is a theoretical way to make it work by exploiting dead plate's lack of sealing.