Staenbridge

Why not stick with something simple like "Cut things"? Aluminium will probably still work for a sheath, and you've got a pretty simple Command to visualise that gives you the thing you want in a sword above all else.

Yeah, I remember that one turned out to be true, but there are equally a bunch of false positives: Aon Ati is totally unrelated to Rust's good friend; Kaladin is not named for Kalad's Phantoms, etc. And yet, we always love to take these small connections and assume that, in some Chekov's Gun-esque leap, they must be intentional.

Ah, I see we're taking the "uh oh AGI" approach? More seriously though, "sentient Nalthis spren" kind of already exist, no? Spren are little bundles of investiture, which naturally gains sentience if you give it a while. The only part of Nightblood and other Type IV BioChromatic entities which might not be spren-y is that they don't seem to represent physical forces and stuff, in the way that Rosharan spren do, but we haven't been told that they can't do that.

I have to agree with you here. @Frustration's claim that (e.g.) Allomancy not just "can be" but is derived from a Surge combined with a set of "spiritual attributes" is in my opinion somewhat farcical, given what we know (and more to the point, what we don't know) at the present. Much like electromagnetism and the weak force, it seems perfectly logical to conclude that all of the different magic systems are small-F fundamental, but at their core are just facets of one big-F Fundamental system of mass/energy/investiture usage.

To be sure, Adolin becoming Awesome via Maya is the line of reasoning we're almost expected to take. We're dropped hints throughout Oathbringer that the dead Spren aren't really dead, just broken, and that if something is broken, then it can be fixed using the power of friendship and more importantly huge glutes Storming lighteyes Bondsmith Cohesion. Further, Maya does stuff that we're told dead spren can't do, like forming a Blade within fewer than 10 heartbeats. Brandon isn't really the kind of guy who's going to pull the rug out from under us entirely just to SuBvErT eXpEcTaTiOnS, but equally I don't know how likely it is that we'll get the "obvious" resolution. Perhaps Adolin restores Maya to a functioning Cognitive Realm spren, and they become friends but don't form a Nahel Bond together; perhaps Adolin never quite fulfills the promise and at the end of book 5 we're left with Maya as a "half broken" spren who is a bit better but not fully healed; perhaps Adolin has to sacrifice something in order to bring Mayalaran back and we get some Lightsong-esque character arc for him. All of these are pretty reasonable IMO and they make you go "ooh that's clever I should have seen it coming" without just taking the obvious way out of the setup, but we really don't know yet.

Strictly this isn't true, though at some level you start arguing about the word derived and it all takes on a very different tone. English is classed as a Germanic language (though there are a lot of Latin influences), so it shares a more recent "common ancestor" (to use biological terminology) with any of German, Norwegian, Icelandic, etc. than with any language outside of that. Spanish and French are both Romance languages, descended from Latin with a sprinkle of local flair and a few hundred miles acting over a few thousand years thrown in for good measure. Romance languages don't share a common ancestor with Germanic languages probably until a good few hundred or more likely thousand years before any country claimed to be called Rome or Greece. Unfortunately it's really difficult to say exactly when the different branches of Indo-European languages split though, because we weren't exactly writing much back then, let alone handing out dictionaries designed to last four thousand years.

Ah fair enough.

That's what I was referring to. He killed Denth, Shashara, and Arsteel but the jury's still out on Yesteel, other than that loose end presumably being tied up after Vasher and Vivenna head off at the end of Warbreaker. Uh... I hate to have to tell you like this, but he's a character in the Way of Kings release, as well as Words of Radiance and Oathbringer. Jokes aside though, thanks for the quick answer, even if it's just "we don't really know".

As of the Stormlight books, it seems likely that all four of the other Scholars are dead by Vasher's hand — or at least, he's chipped in and done his bit. Certainly, Shashara, Denth, and Arsteel were killed by him. Regardless of that, all five of them lived for quite a while, especially compared to the other Returned. And yet, none of them (that we know of) gave up their Divine Breath. This begs many questions but I would prefer to start with perhaps the most obvious of them: do they know yet why they took Endowment up on her offer?

Now I'm just imagining Wax writing some "Thirteen Reasons Why"-esque book about him and Paalm.

Aww, thank you! I've thought up another dastardly plan, based on how us 17th Shard people like to spend hours theorycrafting over throwaway lines. This is thus more to mess with the worldhoppers than with the natives. Find some random organization, myth, or other group on Nalthis; say, the Five Scholars, or Huth/Kuth. Travel to Scadrial, at the same point in time. Don't pick Roshar otherwise the two groups of Scholars might interact, which is bad. Found a new group with a similar purpose and a similar name. Provide no context for why you chose this name and purpose. Given how much people have been talking about the Worldbringers and the Worldsingers being related because their names sound similar, imagine how much people would flip at 2 separate groups of Five Scholars existing at the same time on different Shardworlds, both devoted to researching the magic systems on their planet, and who apparently never met each other.

Okay I know you're being serious here but I'm struggling not to laugh right now... Lyft is the ridesharing company that competes with Uber. Lift is the Edgedancer who hates starving — er, starvin'. And tbh I think Adolin would be a really fantastic Edgedancer. I feel like he often undersells his own abilities with Shardblade and -plate because of his father, but Adolin has the sort of grace and elegance which would let him make amazing use of Abrasion, and he has a solid Edgedancer spirit, too.

I'd totally go around introducing random idiosyncrasies to planets; stuff like taking some breeding pairs of Ryshadium to Scadrial, installing a few of Kalad's Phantoms in a random Rosharan palace as "Herald statues" with a complex series of Commands to make them attack everything around them in some one-in-a-billion situation. Oh yeah, also race Hoid in playing Pokemon with the magic systems. I've already got a gameplan sorted. The Metallic Arts are by far the easiest, as for about a thousand years we know where some lerasium beads are, and then for quite a while after that we have the Bands of Mourning sitting around (terribly sorry there Wax). Probably your next easiest will be BioChroma, because you can buy breaths in the Cognitive Realm. After that, you're a full Mistborn, full Feruchemist, and a well-endowed (heh) Awakener, so you now are difficult to kill™. This gives you the freedom to go and try to pick up the more labour-intensive magic systems, such as convincing a spren to like you or nabbing one of the Shin's national treasures. Oh, and most importantly I'd invent instant noodles on Scadrial, and plant some myth about how it's bad luck to serve them to anyone who looks like Hoid.

In an upcoming Stormlight book it's going to be revealed that Odium likes to manifest his connection to the more mindless members of the Fused as a sort of rope-like lead, which he pulls on when he needs to stop them from departing to the Beyond on death. Odium reigns Odium rains Odium reins.

Threnody's Legal Recourse: the damage caused to the planet and its ecosystem by the crash landing of the Evil (probably a Splinter of Ambition?) results in a class action lawsuit by the homesteaders and fortdwellers against Odium for a litany of crimes so long that even the lawyers, whether Shade or Fused, don't know their number.

@the cardinal of death ...I quoted that WoB in the original post.

Oh, sure, just one problem. Either we're allowed to make armour that mimics shardplate or we aren't, but you can't criticise our ideas both ways. I chose the Shardplate direction, and I'm sorry, but when have we ever seen flame throwers on Roshar? In terms of abilities so far, Plate has basically just been supercharged medieval armour with some added fun features, like appearing to serve like something akin to a powered exoskeleton, turning translucent to aid in the user's visibility, and so on. Thus, for the actual armour plating, you don't need to give it the ability to dissipate vast quantities of heat, serve as an airtight seal against gases, allow for lightning to be conducted safely around the wearer, etc. Really, all you need to do for the majority of the armour pieces is get it to stop you from having a bad case of stabbed. For the rest, we already have Commands which go a long way for this, such as Vasher's trousers to which he says, 'become as my legs and give them strength'. For shock absorption, another feature of Rosharan Shards, if that isn't sorted by the way the plates themselves resist deformation, then you can Awaken a padded suit underneath with Commands relating to mimicking your skin and reducing force; you could even combine this with the powered exoskeleton part, and as your third/fourth Commands add something like "be as a body and accept my commands". This would let you leave the suit of armour and tell it to run off and deal with other stuff while you do something. Your overall suit of armour would then be composed of dozens of small armour plates (which could probably just be some organic textile, based on what Vivenna does) each individually given purely damage-resisting Commands, affixed to a bodyglove-like underlayer which has all of the ancillary features we want. For a helmet you might be able to give it a Command to "aid in my sight" in addition to the normal protective ones, but I'd have to think about that one some more because I don't know how easy it would be to transfer your Intent to a fabric hat-turn-helmet with that Command.

For Awakening individual pieces a good bet would be "maintain your form" or something to that effect. Given the style of armour that we're looking at, that's basically what we want. Armour which, no matter what happens to it, does not change shape, corrode, decay, weaken, or otherwise fail. In other words, once we've formed the armour, we want it to stay the same. You'd need a more complex set of Commands if you wanted to Awaken a whole suit of armour all at once, and more complex still if you wanted protection from harder impacts that would hurt you even without deforming the suit itself, but for something like Plate, that should suffice.

Yep, I pretty much agree with both points. Oh he got "*all the words*"? I'm wounded... I mean, we haven't really gotten it with Brandon; the closest we've come is some of his comments regarding Shallan. I do take your point though and I'll phrase it better next time. On the stereotypes, my tongue-in-cheek comment there was that you see so few ace characters that there is barely enough material to produce a cliché. You know, amusingly enough I actually thought about how I wanted to approach that one. Unfortunately, I decided to cut a paragraph talking about potential ace but romantic couplings, because I couldn't work out where to fit it in and the comment was reaching absurd lengths anyway. I thought that was the better way around than focusing on ace romantic characters, because Brandon likes to leave a lot of plausible deniability on that front, so it's much easier for me at least to headcanon some of his hetero couples as ace/heteroro (heterorororo), but it's difficult to imagine that Shallan and Adolin are just good friends. I'm intrigued though; I'm not exactly active in ace circles, but I have definitely heard an aro person... not quite complaining per se, but not thrilled at ace activists taking the approach of "I still 'like' people, I just don't really care about having sex with them", which they saw as ignoring ace/aro identities to present an 'easier' message. Is this really just a minority view, with most people still thinking ace = ace/aro?

It's nature's pocket!

A Scadrian would have an absolute field day on Roshar. Partnering with a metallurgist Elsecaller/Lightweaver (or just Jasnah) would let them produce all the metals they could ever need incredibly cheaply. Imagine an iron compounder going on a cultural exchange to Urithiru. They'd probably give the Windrunners a, well, run for their money, through all of the weight manipulating and Ironpulling shenanigans which they could, uh, pull. Meanwhile a steel compounder would love the Edgedancers. I wonder if it would be an actually viable way of powering Nightblood for an extended period of time while on Roshar. You get your Elsecaller friend to whip you up a kilo of metal shavings trivially, and then keep chugging while you run around with Nightblood.

As I understand it, no one has ever asked that. Everyone's just said "black". Brandon calls it black, questioners call it black (and are not corrected), etc. That'd be a very interesting question to ask him if you ever get the chance. Given that Nightblood is from Nalthis, where people have a very good understanding of colour, I think it's probably actually black?

First off, I really need to check this forum more often because I apparently missed this one appearing. Second, thank you @Dreamer for making the thread and everyone else who jumped in; incessant cishet coupling has been really my only true problem with Sanderson's work for quite a while now, and the nebulous Potteresque "trust me this character is gay" things that we are told, but never shown grinds my gears. I'm going to take perhaps a strange-seeming approach for a GSRM person talking about GSRM representation in media: I think Brandon would be best served by starting with an ace-spectrum character. Obviously I'd love it if he had gay (in any flavour), bi, pan, genderqueer, etc. characters, however, I am going to make a case for ace representation to be the first thing. I quoted the text above for a reason, which is that my argument ties directly in with Brandon's reasoning here. 1. It's 'easier' to get an ace character 'right'. To begin, the problem with Sanderson and GSRM representation in his books, at least as he explains it: Brandon does not want to write a gay character, and then have them not be a healthy or realistic representation of a gay character. This is a valid concern for him to have, given that he has explicitly stated that part of writing Steris and Renarin was to make up for writing Adien as something of a stereotype, as his then-only autistic character. Using this same example, I think it's also fair to take it at face value as being, if not his only reason for sticking to hetero couples, certainly a strong one — Brandon does seem to care about giving minorities their proper representation and not just going with what seems "normal" to a white, western, cishet audience (see also: the presentation of race on Roshar, with Caucasian-ish Shin looking 'weird' to many of the Easterners). An asexual-spectrum character is easier for an author without much (read: barely any) experience writing GSRM characters to do in a healthy manner in part because it just requires less stretching on Brandon's part, while still definitively putting him outside of his comfort zone so he is forced to grow as an author. Further, the array of characters in many of his flagship series is such that an ace character slots in very seamlessly; there are some very stereotypical (if indeed you can have a cliché for ace representation at the moment...) places, such as making an ace character an ardent or someone with ties to the ardentia, but it would be totally reasonable for, say, an ace couple to run the orphanages we know exist, further, I do not think this is necessarily as bad as some other more Hollywoodesque representations of minorities. We are told that Ellista (aka 'that Dawnchant expert ardent from that one interlude in Oathbringer who was reading Pride and Prejudice') has had jokes from her parents that the only reason she joined the ardentia is so that she could justifiably shave her head because she didn't like dealing with her hair. This works as a humourous moment for the audience because we understand that she wouldn't join the priesthood for such a trivial reason, and people don't then assume that any woman who dislikes her hair would become an ardent. It should be clear where this is going, but to be explicit, an ace character is (relatively) easy to introduce as explicitly ace, without suggesting that being ace is just a collection of stereotypes, and without devaluing that identity. An offhand recollection of a joke from family around the idea of "X joined the ardentia to escape the boys and girls in town who misinterpreted X wanting to be friends" establishes a character as unambiguously not attracted to men or women, while also making it clear that this is not the sole feature of their character. We could obviously go on discussing how to easily add in ace characters (honestly, if a WoB came out tomorrow saying Jasnah was ace you'd be hard pressed to call that an 'annoying retcon'), but before moving on to the next section I'd just like to expand upon why I value the characters being easy for Brandon to write. In short, Brandon is constantly writing new books. If we wish for him to jump in the deep end, and have something on the level of a Shallan-Adolin-Kaladin-Sylphrena (Shakadoliphrena, @ me) super queer poly network, then yeah, it's going to take a while for him to be able to do that. In the mean time, Sanderson probably will just continue writing books starring hetero couples and their love triangles, so now we've got an even bigger number of works of his being heteronormative. However, given that Sanderson does want to try, then having him begin with an explicitly ace character can help him build the confidence and skill to write other identities, without having to wait. For example, Skyward 3 is probably going to be released in 2021, having been written in the back half of this year. In the process of writing a strong ace character into Skyward 3, Brandon will likely have a lot of opportunity to better learn how to represent people who do not share his sexual or romantic orientation, and be able to begin writing those characters in early 2021 with some confidence. It helps our dear authorial overlord get some practice and learning in, without having to wait for total confidence before he starts in a publishable work, helping everyone else receive that representation we desire sooner. 2. Who even writes ace characters, anyway? I would hope that the above argument is fairly compelling as it stands, but then, I also hoped that the current pandemic's impact on our lives would be minimal, so I'm having to learn to temper my hopes. Big claims also require equally large justifications, so, in addition to that, I am going to make a point from a more intra-GSRM angle as well. To put it bluntly, ace people often get erased even by other members of the community, as do bi people. Most of the posts on the Reddit subreddit /r/SuddenlyGay are more likely SuddenlyBi, but the assumption is that if a wife leaves a husband for a woman, then she was gay the whole time, because those are the only two options. Similarly, many queer folk love the idea of having the princess get wooed by a woman rather than a man as a subversion of heteronormativity; for an ace person, this still could be seen to say that "you're weird because you don't want to get wooed by anyone". How many plots have you seen where the main character doesn't have any romantic partner at all? No love interest, male or female, straight, bi, or gay? Even among "LGBT literature" (which I agree can be a problematic term itself) the majority focuses on MLM and WLW couples, the vast majority of whom are either implicitly or explicitly sexual. Thus, I propose that one of Brandon Sanderson's first major GSRM characters be on the asexual spectrum not just out of convenience, or in order to push the message more swiftly, but to help provide representation to a group who may otherwise be ignored even by authors who are trying to represent romantic minorities. 3. Asexuality presents an opportunity. Brandon has said a number of times in the past that he really enjoys looking at how religions impact the world, and how they can be abused. Further, if we take Roshar as a case study, Brandon really has not shied away from looking at social norms in society and creating novel cultures which can seem crazy to us: the delineation of jobs to men and women, modesty and safehands (gasp!), discussions of masculinity (it's unmanly to read), PDA and other displays of emotion (cf: Listener Rhythms compared to the humans' facial expressions), and even vague subtexts that ardents are considered on some level to be outside the normal gender binary (IIRC one of the characters comments on it being weird for a man to read, unless they become an ardent, but then they don't really count anyway). Rosharan society, especially that of the Alethi who we have been most exposed to so far, is incredibly militarized, and Vorin theology stresses heavily the idea of "callings" which please the Almighty. Ace characters provide Brandon with the ability to look at the intersection of sexuality and religion at the most fundamental level: what happens if you don't want to start a family? Even Drehy and Ranette are making moves to start a family, even if they are same-sex couples. Vorinism and Pathism/Survivorism respectively can still rationalize that on the basis of looking after orphans perhaps, and having the same-sex couple serve as surrogate parents for children who otherwise wouldn't have that ideal nuclear family. If you introduce a character who explicitly has no desire for a relationship then you can't hide behind acceptance on the grounds of the minority implementing your norms, but in their own way; you must actually confront your norms at their core. Must everyone want to form a family? Must you require exceptional justification for a character to not pursue a relationship at all? "Why has Y stayed single for the entire series?" "Oh, Y had a traumatic experience with their last relationship and they can't deal with the pain of going through that again." "Oh, Y lost their best friend and their life fell apart as a result of it." Hang on, why can't Y just... want to be single? You don't need a problematic childhood to be gay so why do you need a problematic adulthood to lack romantic drive?

Part of it is probably just that Kelsier seems to provoke Discord in everything he does — think about it; in half of a lifetime he managed to engineer the downfall of an empire that lasted a thousand years, and helped cause the death of two Shards, and held the Shard of Preservation for a little while, and erected a cult-of-faith–turn–religion dedicated to him and Vin, and got in a fight with Hoid. Maaaaybe Harmony doesn't want to give Kelsier more opportunities to drive a tank through his neat and organised Elendel garden. Especially given that he's still happily creating religions down in the Scadrian South, so being a Cognitive Shadow is not exactly stopping him from acting.

We know that Nightblood is significantly more powerful than when it was created. Also fun fact, Nightblood wasn't originally black, though there's enough wiggle room left on the WoBs that that might just be referring to all of the Breaths/Stormlight/assorted other sources of Investiture leaking out (rather than actually having a black blade), and I can't remember Nightblood descriptions in enough detail to call it, myself. The Investiture leaking out of Nightblood is described as "corrupted" by Brandon, though he later clarified about this that it's really just changing the Investiture rather than strictly corrupting it, though he refuses to expound what that means. Regardless, Nightblood's black smoke is presumably of Endowment, as the sword is an Awakened object, so it probably wouldn't be a good fit in terms of Shards for the spren; if you mixed them, presumably it would produce corrupted spren à la Sja-anat. It seems to? Brandon's exact quote was "grew in power over time", and though the questioner was asking in the context of pure Investiture, I can't see why it wouldn't become more destructive — that's what the word "power" connotes; power isn't really power if it's not able to be used for anything, and Nightblood's abilities aren't just a function of convincing a piece of metal to vaporize folks, but rather due to the Investiture and Command which it were given. The Cosmere isn't quite an Eli Monpress book, where Jasnah can make swords become Shardblade-levels of deadly by just talking to them and seeing that the target is a bad dude. As I said before, Brandon's refused to commit on whether sapient Investiture is capable of bonding spren, so it's all up in the air at the moment. Personally, I think there's no good reason why they shouldn't be able to bond spren; you don't need to be a living creature to learn and develop, as this is part of what spren gain from the Nahel bond, and Nightblood has been stated to grow as a person? character? sword? despite what Vasher thinks, even if parts of its personality are essentially fixed. On the other hand, from a narrative perspective there are strong arguments against it, because suddenly you have questions about spren bonding spren, and that gets very crazy very quickly.