MrHobbes343

I liked TSM more then Yumi, Emberdark, or Broke Wizard; so I didn't dis-like it, but it had functional prose and a cool if a bit grim-derp premise.

Zellion was a very flat emotionally dead character, intentionally so, but it didn't make it any less hard to bond with him.

Aux was great and I have nothing but respect for him.

The fact that it was an easy solution at the end (Just leave the soul battery out at 20% in the sun and there you go.) and it mostly seemed to exist as a tease for space age does detract a bit from the overall score.

I still give it 4 stars on aesthetic and lore teases.

Loses one star for the unavoidable Not-A-Romance subplot and being kind of silly with the solution.   

I would argue that having Tineye's would probably cause your society to be more likely to bypass redundant technologies like night vision.

If you already can leverage a natural trait then why would you spend the resources and capital to replicate it with Tech?

Southern Scadrian Medallions are a known quantity and The Basin is not likely to respect Southerners Patent claims?

I do look forward to better equipped Lurchers and Camlebak powered Metalborn teams though.

You can make a shardblade clock if you can comprehend the clockwork inside.

So, yes in the future the sky is the limit for creative problem solving. I would argue that beyond the access to surges the universal multi-tool is the primary thing that gives Roshar a major leg up in era 3. Even if they are a bit down the tech tree from scadrial, they will eventually be able to replicate and prototype new creations without the need for advanced fabrication and metallurgy. With malleable shardblade steel and soulcasting, many industrial challenges disappear.    

2 hours ago, ChillPenguin said:

Couldn’t the charging of spheres be linked to intent? If he’s that smart, T-Odium doesn’t need to pay attention, he just sets up a permanent filter. If you put them out and are actually against him your intent blocks the charging.

That works as a quick fix to keep the populous alive while you set up your government, but if you want to exert political control you will need to be able to enforce rules and punish violators. What is to stop a village from having a dedicated T-Odium follower just for the light and everyone else just tolerates them for there service?

It depends on how granular you want your control too be. If T-Odium can't see into the minds of his subjects (Preservation) and immediately dispense his wrath then he is probably going to have to use other signals of loyalty and submission. This would probably be enforced through collective punishment. ie Your village has housed rebels, therefore you will not receive light for a month to starve you into submission etc. etc.  This would have to handled on a case by case basis or risk provoking mass revolt. Thus the spreadsheet.

Edit: added a line about cynical villagers.

As a distant puppet master by dint of having become the archenemy of the shards, T-Odium will only have a few ways to direct his control on Roshar.

The Fused act as his fist, but it is only with logistics and bureaucracy that can organize the millions of people that now fall under his reign. 

As an aside, I would love to see T-Odiums divine spreadsheet he uses to time and organize the distribution of void light, and keep notes on who he is annoyed at.

But having a monopoly on the only widely accepted currency is probably one of the first things you lock down in your tyranny. Assuming he isn't reading the Evil-Overlord list and becoming dangerously genre savvy.

I want to be Background Kandra #7 during the Ten-soon trial.

Vasher may have been made aware by Gavalar and his robed weirdos about the dangers of Odium and his binding and potential escape.

Even is he wasn't going to mass produce the Anti-Light, I can see why being able to render servants of this possible enemy into oblivion could be useful? 

Or unknown to us, Gavalar may have been a more skilled artifabrian then we are aware of with the handful of prologues and the hazy recollection of the family he lied to for years.

Pralla or Battar might be able to figure it out as well and both might be convinced to do it with the right prodding.

I think that Bondsmith Adhesion would be great.

I could speak any language as long as I can shake the hand of someone who can, I could read any book and save so much research time in translation comparison and even stick my car back together.

6 minutes ago, Schizoposting said:

Since you clearly seem to believe that being a criminal makes you subhuman, and worthy of wanton extermination, I don't see any point in continuing this discussion.

I concur, @Frustration is quite patently trying to frame Jasnah in a specific moral lens rather then trying to have an open discussion on the nature of an complex and often flawed individual.

I'm leaving this thread, not because you have made me agree with any of your points, but because you clearly started this thread to try to justify your warped perspective on responsibility and guilt. This is just not a thread where I feel I can have a good faith conversation, and we very obviously can't agree on simple definitions or terminology. So, I don't really see a point.

At this point I just think you have picked a target and are just decided to find them evil and dismiss greater evil as irrelevant and all arguments you don't agree with as spurious.

If you are going to call Jasnah a monster for not killing people except criminals and enemy combatants in an apocalyptic war for survival; while dismissing Dalanar's real and brutal mass killings in a time of overall peace then I don't have a word for your morals other then Hypocrite.

I find your expectations of moral purity even in extreme circumstances and your refusal to acknowledge that sometimes harsh methods are required for survival as extremely willfully naive and I hope that you may at some point in the future may better come to understand nuance and necessity.  

If it is a choice between Virtue and Survival, Survival must always win.

One of the prerequisites of Virtue is being alive to proclaim and perform said Virtue.

I find it quite distasteful that you would judge someone who from our perspective is more historical figure then living person, by the standards of a time and social context that they don't know of and will never reasonably know of. This is more a 15 minute hate, then a reasoned discussion and is why I despise the pop history trope of judging people from radically different times and places by modern standards. 

I hope one day to have the charmed life you all seem to judge from.

Jasnah is not a Utilatarian as she claims and is a hypocrite at almost every turn, but so are all people I have met. Ideals are rarefied pure things that no person I've ever met can claim to be worthy of.

She hires assassins to defend her family from enemies and infiltration, she kills bandits and plans to kill disloyal allies. I hate to inform you, but our society does this now, we have powerful agencies to watch and take information from our allies and enemies. And occasionally those agencies do kill people for the safety and benefit of the state you live in. 

There is not and has never been a morally pure state. All State power is derived from the threat or use of violence. A State is defined by it's monopoly on violence in it's territory.

Jasnah as a member of the ruling family of a Monarchy is thus by dint of berth exposed not to ideal intellectual political philosophy, but to realpolitik. In a world were your father killed his way to the top less then a lifetime ago you are going to have a rather brutal view of the political machine and the example set for you is that violence works and is rewarded if used correctly. When Renarin was possibly controlled by an enemy god you might want to cut off the limb before it rots the tree, even if some of the original man is left for now.

We are examining and judging from a perspective of lore-masters from a great distance and with much more information then any of the characters. To judge them from our safety and with all our well organized data is to expect that everyone should act as we do now, even without the social structures or institutions that provide a foundation of  great distance and safety that allow most of us to avoid hard moral questions in our lives now.

Edit: An S

For me the far and away best moment was...

Also I thought Tanner was a bit of a blowhard, but I was genuinely sad to watch him go.

Also Retribution realizing that "all eyes were on him" was amazing and I loved it.

I'm going to be incredibly generic and say that I'd like double Gold. 

I enjoy pondering alternate version of me, had I made different decisions.

And I get to pull a Deadpool if I ever get into an accident.

Also I imagine Double G pretty much guaranties you live to a ripe old age if you don't annoy the state.  

4 minutes ago, bmcclure7 said:

Hasn’t she already admitted that she believes that there are gods (she just doesn’t believe in God) that seems to me that she has already compromised on her atheism. I’m not sure we can even call her that anymore.

What are we defining Atheism as?

If we are defining it in the strictest terms possible, as a full and complete denial of the supernatural.

Then Jasnah is not an Athiest. She can slide through dimensions and alter matter at the axion level. She has spoken to a shard and known to some extent it's power. She has seen the SR and experienced it.

If we define Athiest in a more moderate ways, as refusal to worship any higher entity. Atheists who say that the shards don't deserve to be called god, because of their manifest and numerous flaws.     

Then Jasnah may define herself as an Atheist not because there are not powers that call themselves gods, but because no power currently manifest in the Cosmere has any moral claim to leadership and respect. I don't care if a tyrant king calls himself god, If he is not omnipotent and omniscient then he is just a powerful dirtbag, shard or no shard. 

It all depends on degrees and context. 

On 2/9/2026 at 5:03 PM, Ripheus23 said:

"at the end of the second half of the Archive, should she abandon her atheism and confess that a di-Shard is sufficiently close to being a "true deity""

So.......Burn down the character and have her compromise everything she believes and has worked for....for an unsatisfying ending?

If T-Odium is talked down from his megalomania I will feel cheated out of the series climax for a "lets all hug it out ending". T-Odium must die and it must be awesome, no alternative would be broadly palatable.

Also I don't think changing the intent of a shard is a easy as you make it out to be. I'm sure Ati would have loved to pivot Ruin away from destruction, the best he could do after thousands of years was shift Ruin from "Everything must be destroyed now" to "Everything must be destroyed...eventually" and even then Ruin was not a kind or gentle embodiment of entropy and got 99.9% of the way through chewing up Scadrial.

I hadn't thought of it before, but I could see it...I still want Dockson to sound like a scottish matron like in the audiobooks.

I want to be random Shin farmer #3 in the Szeth flashbacks.

14 hours ago, Akimikoisthecutest said:

I feel like highstorm would be like a special card that would make it so you can place down an extra mana per turn or something, let you untap mana during your turn or something like that

With the destructive potential of the Highstorms I think they should be a UB Boardwipe.

Do you guys think the orders would be guild pairs or would they all be universally White/Green and Something?

Would the Parsh be more Red for freedom or Black for conquest?

Edit: Added Green in post.

3 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Now that is still a quick jump by modern standards of Europe or North America. But not everybody moves that slow. "Look at China".

Umm...China had a brutal civil war followed by prolonged  famine where 20-30 million people died. Yes at the end of that they had the telephone and the transistor, but I wouldn't say that it was bloodless or quick.

Japan modernized in twenty years and became so hungry for resources that it invaded all it's neighbors and committed crimes  so horrible that they are still mentioned today.

I'm just trying to point out that when you out-mode a large portion of the work force suddenly, there tends to be significant social and civil consequences.    

I have changed my secret project rankings because of the power of this story...

1. Tress

2. Sunlit Man

3. Yumi and Painter

4. Emberdark

5. That one book about the broke wizard

Dusk was super passe about the complete erasure of his lifestyle and ecological devastation of Patji.

Also 5 years? I get that a sixty or seventy year old Dusk would not match the pace of the story, but I've seen sewer extensions sit on a city waterboard's docket for longer then 5 years. It takes generations to adapt to new tech if your own culture builds it, the idea that in five years all the people of first-of-the-sun could adapt and easily transition out of a primarily agrarian lifestyle and into a urbanized post industrial culture in less then a decade is to me, frankly bizarre to the point of madness. I love the idea that people are not less intelligent just because they don't have the high tech gadgets, but this is light years of new tech to adapt to.

For example, to jump from outriggers to "modern" fishing boats necessitates; a new naval culture around not being bound by the wind or tide, a new logistics chain for fuel and spare parts anywhere you want to take these boats, new infrastructure for the care and maintenance of the new equipment, a new skill set for small engine maintenance and the mechanics to perform said maintenance, and that's just one fairly narrow application of one technology.

And Starling...Well I've already mentioned her more then I care too. Her "I manifest a image of my dragon self" power just was to Otherkin-y for me to do anything but roll my eyes and say "Whatever Brandon...Sure, your dragons are super special". Her crew being a walking list of Cosmere lore teases didn't help the "I'm so special and different!" allegations. (RIP Nazh, long live Nazh?)

The Malwish were present... Dejer was interesting as a antagonist in a British talking-down-to-his-sepoy-guide kind of way. The secret police were not interesting at all in the like two scenes they got. The change and adaption of Malwish Mask culture was interesting, but not super revealing.

I felt that the Malwish lacked the malice of real bastards, and that if you are willing to subjugate people and steal whole planets worth of resources then you should be less banal about it. Where is the stoking of religious conflict, the arming of dissident groups, the supporting of rival claimants to leadership? So much more can and was done by real colonial empires.  Overall It read as a Fix-Fic for actual colonialism that made the colonizers like ten degrees nicer then was believable.

6/10 only finished it for the lore.

Hello,

My name is R. G. Hobbes, formerly of the Society of the Noble Endeavor. 

I am seeking others of our number who have answered the head's riddle and passed the Stag Gate, to discus the progression of the current state of affairs concerning The Golden Incorporates and The Star-touched Ministries.

I call all my peers Bird and Worm, Illuminate and Sensate, Aspirant and Long, in these times we must join together so that we may still have a wake to quibble over.

I will speak more when we meet. Though I fear it may be late August before I return to London, when I am in the city I will be rooming with my dear associate a Mr. Fraser Strathcoyne.

Yours Sincerely,

Robert Godfrey Hobbes

P.S. Those of a feather will kindly not inform the Names

05/02/1947 - Written to the Evening Post's classified advertisement page in the antechamber of Invisible Serapeum shortly before departure to Candia-Heraklion    

Another point is that while Hoid likes to scavenge invested arts and artifacts.

Until BAM was released recently, it was heavily implied that none of the "dead" blades or plate could be taken off world.  

No Spren were bonding any new Knights.

For Hoid it was an event without much upside to his cause. While he did have plans for Roshar, I don't think he would like to test his survival powers by being hacked appart by power seeking Rosharens with soul-cutting swords without some kind of long term upside. He can make his way to Roshar at any point he wants, why go for the fall?

26 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

But yeah, we don't use cars as units of economic trade. They are too big and have too many particular attributes for that.

I think this is the main barrier to this threads premise.

How do you buy bread? Currency is useless if it's too big to buy any normal good, especially if it can't be divided into useful denominations.

One only has to look to Nalthis to see the Mundane Horror of the trading of pieces of souls, but there are not enough metal-born to make enough spikes to have a denomination small enough to trade for normal goods. (Not to mention that many of said metal-born would be able to fight back if you tried to spike them, and even old and dying metal-born might very well choose not to go gently into that good night on the end of a spike.)

20 hours ago, Bel Oh said:

unless they broke the slaves like they did in Scadrial I believe for the people in the pits they don't have any feeling like they can revolt...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Kelsier says hello, case in point.

The second the Kandra thought they could, they screwed the lord ruler and swapped sides. While the Koloss were meat puppets for Soothers or Rioters that just meant that after you knew there vulnerability, both sides could control them. The Terris People were planning secretly to revolt at the first opportunity.

Super powered slave rebellion could reasonably serve as a subtitle for the first Mistborne book.

Like dude, why are you trying to push an idea thats frankly psycho, "In the future we will trade harvested soul spikes, embedded in slaves as currency". Like read your posts in this thread and tell me that you sound sane and well adjusted with this as your pet topic...

Edit: Grammar

28 minutes ago, Bel Oh said:

"Ya I guess so, maybe people will have like slaves or something in which they store their spikes..."

That's...

A: Monstrous

and B: Likely to kick off a slave rebellion, except that the slaves have super-powers.

I think your a bit too married to the idea that the Evil Murder Spikes that contain Bits of the Souls of Other People could act as a currency.

The closest you get is probably the Malwish medallions and those are also less useful as currency then as commodity.

To have a currency it must ideally be produce-able in volume and if its a "hard" currency or specie then it need's to be standardized for ease of transactions.

You can't really break a spike to make change or pull one out to act as collateral for a loan without reducing its value.

I think instead of saying currency you might be able to say that they act as valuable commodities, but would fail as a currency.