Duxredux

Just checking, after beating Tears of the Kingdom did anyone (RoW spoilers):

Don't sweat it, Shallan just really gets people going some times, particularly on the Shard. It just takes watching it blow up a few times to know that Shallan needs special handling. I figured if people wanted to have the chat about Shallan then they might as well read a very well reasoned discussion as well. Since that thread's already closed I figure I'm not even risking necro'ing it. I don't have too much to add to the rest of the thread, most of my friends have already read SA. I've gotten my parents to read Emperor's Soul and my wife to read Elantris, but they don't have the time to commit to SA.

... you know what, I'm not going to write a fourth essay on why Shallan gets such a mixed bag of reactions. Not today. People, if you want to create another thread to air your opinion on Shallan, make your own thread, don't take over this one since this one as it has already hit over 50% posts solely about Shallan. I emphasize this based on the moderator LadyLameness closing down a thread solely about people discussing Shallan's likeability. Please read the post including the encouragement to make your own threads on the topic of Shallan's likeability and the justification for closing the thread.

@Trusk'our, you have been summoned. Start from the top. How much would it break to have the Stormfather physically bound to a single location?

Most of the answers that I was coming up with probably should end up in the conspiracy thread. In fact a lot of them had a lot in common with hypothetical explanations for Fermi's Paradox. Fermi's paradox is basically the question for why we haven't run into other intelligent life assuming that it exists. Are they hiding from us, is the way that they perceive the world so alien to us that what we would consider typical would be nonsensical to them? Have they developed technology to hide from us and we were the ones that missed the equivalent of the wheel? I think Oltux72 asked why so many Cosmere worlds have near mass-extinction events in their history, and maybe Invention's planet with a bunch of mad scientists blew themselves up. Maybe they've way ahead of the curve and have invented cloaking tech and are fascinated at observing all of the other Cosmere life and aren't fussed with colonialism. Because we assume they are not currently detectable, everything I put out just reads like a conspiracy theory to me. Another option is that Invention never settled on a planet so we haven't seen what they've been up to because there isn't a people associated with Invention's power. I don't think we've run into a Shard that fits this description yet, have we?

This isn't a bug so much as an design concern, but while on the forums page, the forum category text (17th Shard, Brandon Sanderson, Spoiler Zone, The Cosmere, Non-Cosmere works, etc.) are smaller and less visually distinct than the board titles (Introduce Yourself, 17th Shard Discussion, Cosmere Discussion, etc.). This just seems like a font size formatting issue and hopefully relatively easy to change, but presumably you want the categories to be more visually distinct than the sub categories. I'm on a PC running Chrome at the moment and confirmed that the relative size of the category and board names are the same regardless of if I was zoomed in or out on the page. Using dark mode, if it wasn't blantantly obvious, which is nice.

@alder24, try this. You're the CEO of a massive global company with a reach into nearly every aspect in life. The applicants to your company all have the prerequisite of being dead. You as the CEO are the only one who can do any of the hiring process. How do you decide who to hire and which application to reject? Presumably sometimes you hire someone just because you need the position filled and they were the only one qualified to do it. Sometimes you need people to work together on a team and by the very nature of you hiring them they'll end up associated with one another. Maybe someone reaaaally wanted to go and say bye to their family briefly. Maybe there's a special project you want someone to work on and you need a very specific skill set (and maybe you pull some strings so people end up dead and you can hire them, who knows). Maybe someone wants the job for a company benefit (i.e. heal their sister) and are willing to do some work for you in a temporary capacity. Sometimes you hire someone and then they quit and walk away (Vasher), but you don't mind because they still did the work you needed them to while they were in your company. This could be totally inaccurate when viewed through the eyes of a Shard and there could be deeper Realmatic workings at play, but this also may not be a bad representation of what the kind of decisions Edgli is currently making. It could be anything from needing a turnover for the God King and the setup for the God Kings to regain control of Hallendren in the hands of Susebron. It could be that Edgli engineered the Manywar to inspire the creation of Nightblood but intended Vasher to stop the war so that Nightblood wouldn't take out the entire continent. There's a lot of possible reasons, but I don't know how far we can go without simply trying to guess at the overarching motives of a Shard with future sight.

My assumption is the relative strength needed to pull a spirit from the machine. A general analogy is the difference between taking over a Koloss as a powerful Soother compared to wresting a Koloss from the control of an Inquisitor or Ruin. The machine didn't draw the spirits because they were interested in rock stacking, somehow it drew them without their consent, against their will to imprison them, otherwise they would never have come to Yumi begging to be freed. What the yoki-hijo and the Machine did is probably a heavily Invested version of what any artist could do - with the caveat that huge amounts of Investiture let you break a lot of rules.

Weeeelll, there's the issue then. You're using statistics to judge the decisions of a being known to be erratic. If you're not looking at what the people have done previously, then look at the future-sight side and just assume that the Five Scholars were Returned to become the Five Scholars. The answer is going to be some combination of past data, future sight, and whatever Edgli feels like doing that day. Take your pick what you want to focus on.

Perhaps they were working on the same project or something similarly significant that would allow Endowment to raise them as Returned? It seems statistically unlikely, but to me it seems similar to how the majority of Brandon's writing group ended up getting careers in the writing industry and many of them now work at Dragonsteel. They broke out as writers together and encouraged each other to succeed. In the case of the Returned, it's not that being associated with each other (being in the writing group) makes them more likely to Return, it's that the heroic or noble deeds that they performed in life (becoming accomplished authors and editors by supporting each other) made them more likely to Return. For example if both Arsteel and Yesteel were in the military, spurred each other to greater accomplishments and died heroically in the same battle, then it may not be surprising that they both Returned.

So... on a thread in the YatNP board I realized that there's groundwork in place for Yumi as the immortal yoki-hijo in the distant future training a new batch of yoki-hijo to participate in the grand Cosmere War. The thing is, the yoki-hijo have to be girls, and they have to follow specific rituals (maybe not even being seen, not sure how important that one was for Yumi). A decent number of magics in the future will directly be tied to what are basically cognitive beings of Investiture including the Night Brigade's army of Shades and the spren of Radiants. Maybe add in the Fused, who knows. The yoki-hijo have the potential to be incredibly Invested beings aaaand... they might end up being important to the war. The oh-no part for me was realizing that they genuinely have a decent reason to magically transform into ornate outfits - if they command hijo to do so and use hijo as their own equivalent of Shardblade and Shardplate. Invested clothing is actually reasonable. Sigh. If magical girl anime isn't your thing, that's okay. My favorite is Puella Magi Madoka Magica and I am not watching the new movie that's been announced until someone else does and tells me if it's going to be a kick to the teeth or not. I do kind of have to ask: @Frustration, if this is the way the Komashi's fire power index gets raised how would you feel about it? I seem to recall that you were disappointed with how low power it currently is.

I'll break down a few assumptions being made within the context of the book. Yumi was "chosen" to become a yoki-hijo by an auspicious star seen at her birth. The question remains on if this has actual Realmatic significance or is the equivalent of the lottery by selecting which ever girl was born closest to the start sighting to become the next yoki-hijo. Undeniably yoki-hijo have power and are highly Invested. Something is causing them to gain tremendous amounts of Investiture likely tied to the Shard Virtuosity. My take is that the rituals and strictures followed by the yoki-hijo do indeed allow them to gather Investiture and become more powerful to draw and bind entities of Investiture, the hijo. Now not every yoki-hijo has to follow the patterns that Liyun had Yumi follow so strictly to gain power, but I think there's decent evidence to point towards Yumi as the strongest of all the yoki-hijo not just in rock-stacking but in sheer Investiture. When comparing the smaller rock stacking machine to Yumi's binding, yes, the rock stacking machine did work but the objects formed started to degrade with days or weeks while the objects formed by Yumi lasted far far longer. Again, evidence that while the yoki-hijo aren't strictly necessary to bind spirits, for the ancient society of Komashi they were almost certainly the most reliable source up until the Father Machine ate nearly everyone's souls and gained access to a similarly huge amount of Investiture I think a comparison the Awakening isn't out of the question. At the start of Warbreaker, Vasher has to use a lot of work arounds to get the Awakening to do the job well. He needs to carefully shape the straw into little men and use his own hair to get the Breath to stick to the straw to work the small amount of Investiture he had. Give him a lot of Investiture and he can brute force the process without needing to worry about the finer details even though those finer details could still make his Awakening more powerful and efficient. Continue up the Heightenings to Instinctive Awakening and Command Breaking. Instinctive Awakening has to do with knowing what Commands to use and being able to properly visualize the Command - and this likely ties to how strong the Command is and how hard the Command is to break as seen with Lightsong's priests work to break Vasher's squirrel. It wouldn't surprise me if the yoki-hijo with their tremendous amount of Investiture gain the ability to impose incredibly strong Commands on the spirits to have them retain the various tools and objects for a very long time, and what Yumi did in defeating the Father Machine looked like Command Breaking on a gigantic scale. But then why do the yoki-hijo not draw the spirits that are currently serving as lifters or fliers in each town they visit? Probably Intent on the part of the yoki-hijo. The spirits that escaped to Yumi were probably able to do so because they wanted to escape and be drawn to Yumi. So why would no more yoki-hijo be created? I think they almost certainly could, and perhaps in a future day when the rest of the Cosmere comes knocking on Komashi's door Yumi will have to train yoki-hijo to be magical girl fighters to defend Komashi. With all of the other tropes Brandon borrowed from Japanese anime, this isn't even a stretch, but certainly isn't guaranteed. Right now though, the yoki-hijo aren't vital to the infrastructure of Komashi, so I'd assume that there aren't any girls living the ritualistic life of the yoki-hijo to gain sufficient Investiture to really qualify as a yoki-hijo. The Sunlit Man spoilers: One option for the TV dramas drawing the hijo is that they aren't actually drawn to the TV but to the performers in their film studios. It would be kind of odd if they were drawn to the very thing that they were powering and introduces a small chicken - egg problem.

That could work but it sounds disturbingly like a AoN spoiler: Ruin and Preservation can work together, we see this in the creation of Scadrial, but their raw Investiture can literally cause explosions when crashed into each other. This still doesn't address the issue of Ruin being more powerful - either the spren are imbalanced or Harmony still is. If the Spren are imbalanced and Saze is at true equilibrium, that may make his paralysis even worse. These are some of the possible downsides to your godspren idea, but it's possible I'm not grasping all of the benefits you see. I may have a preconceived bias that for the first while you rarely have more time and attention when it comes to parenting or onboarding new employees- and that's without fundamentally opposed concepts of nature. With time yes, you can have more time to yourself but not for the first while. What did you have in mind with how this could help things?

Maybe, maybe not. If she had a good anchor on her opposite side she could have stabilized herself with an opposing Steelpush when she threw Sigzil same as most Coinshots. You don't have to be a Crasher like Wax to do that trick. Currently, the Southern Scadrian medallions can only grant 2 abilities and rarely 3. Adding more powers or more medallions and they begin to interfere with each other so it wasn't an option in Era 2. Wax specifically suggesting strapping 16 medallions on to get all the powers and Allik said it wouldn't work. Whether or not this limitation has been solved by the time of TSM remains to be seen, but this scene wouldn't indicate that.

Treamayne and alder24 have covered most of this pretty well I feel. I'm going to address just two of these concepts. Same with this, because Preservation isn't actively doing evil things. The one evil thing Sanderson could've pinned completely on him - the Deepness - turned out to have been somewhat hijacked by Ruin. Not a fan of that writing decision. Depends on whether or not you think Preservation's choice to stall and hope for the best was a wise move. His decision to sacrifice his mind to create the Well of Ascension left him cognitively crippled and largely inactive for thousands of years. Depends on whether you think inaction in the face of all other atrocities as the god of Stasis is evil or not. I wouldn't go too hard on the decisions of the mentally crippled Preservation - that's kind of a low blow - but his lobotomization was self-inflicted. That said, even without Preservation playing an active role, the concepts and consequence of preservation and stability vs ruin are woven throughout the books and I'll address this in the next concept. That's fair, he's meant to be conflicting - he did many evil things, committed numerous unforgettable atrocities and yet he had the good of his people in his mind, he protected them from Ruin and searched for a way to save them from the end - all while Ruin was constantly whispering in his mind. But that doesn't mean he was a good guy - he had the good of humanity in his mind, but does the end justify the means? That's why he was portrayed in that way, to make you question him more, to make him more interesting. There was no denying he was a bad person, but when faced with Ruin and his plan of total destruction, you need to answer if Rashek's tyrannical actions were justified or not. Personally he's one of my favorite villains. Here's an alternative take on Rashek if you would like, though I may be bringing up a hot topic. In high school we had a foreign exchange student come from Germany. At one point, I'm not sure how the topic came up, he talked about what it was like having the Nazi party as a component of his heritage - including living relatives who still supported the Nazi party. He hated the Nazi party and I think it was his dad who told him that the German people were suffering economically prior Hitler's rise to power. People were destitute and desperate to survive - and the war that Hitler led them to saved the German economy. For that matter, it was WWII that pulled the United States out of their Great Depression and revived their economy. Understanding that Hitler's actions genuinely improved the living conditions for his people provides a context for how he gained support at all, and why some people may still long for those days. All this said, I've been to the Holocaust memorial at Washington D.C. and I don't think the balances support what Hitler did. History has a way of demonizing Hitler likely so that no one even thinks of doing a repeat of what he did to the Jewish people which I understand and support, but it doesn't always paint a complete picture. Also, I reaaaally don't want to get into a debate on Hitler's morality, but I think it puts the next paragraph into a greater context. I have no idea if Brandon took any inspiration from Hitler, but it's not hard to draw connections between Rashek and Hitler with the obsession with a superior race, eugenics, and secret police (Steel Inquisitors). I don't think it would be too hard to frame Rashek as "what if Hitler took over the world - now what?" Even then, you can see the war of Preservation and Ruin within Rashek as a Sliver of Preservation, changed by the Well of Ascension, with Ruin whispering in his ear for a thousand years. In an attempt to preserve his people, Rashek nearly destroyed the world while moving it with the Well of Ascension. By creating a stable society with strict enforcement, he enslaved the majority of his people and slaughtered dozens if not hundreds of rebellions. To maintain control of the magics in his empire, he instituted brutal policing and breeding programs for his own race. Through it all, Rashek was trying to save his people from the destructive force known as Ruin. Elend attempted to create a equitable society and was deposed for it, and resorted to becoming an emperor and tyrant to save his people. Push and pull, ruin and preserve. It wouldn't surprise me if The Lord Ruler maintained stability for most of those thousand years with a relatively low mortality rate overall. Remove him and his empire dissolved into full out civil war with Luthadel almost annihilated - even before Ruin was released from the Well of Ascension. Era 2 spoilers up through Lost Metal: The balances of stability, economy, control, freedom, oppression, quality of life, etc. are not easy things to manage. I'm also not going to go into IRL politics by the way, nope, not doing it here, but I think these concepts in Mistborn are explorations of real world issues. I won't debate on whether or not Rashek was too evil, but the concepts he employed are not found only in fiction.

With Hoid and Sigzil's relationship, can I just point out that Sigzil calls him Wit? Hoid goes and just flat out tells Dalinar that he can call him Hoid way back in WoK, but apparently despite taking Sigzil on as an apprentice and trusting him with a Dawnshard, they never moved past Wit. No, I don't think Sigzil trusts Hoid to do any favors for him. With regards to thinking Hoid was Kaladin, Sig himself questions if he's going mad, so... case of unreliable narrator in terms of what he thought was possible. I'd say that scene is inconclusive for extrapolating Kaladin's fate.

I don't think so. It's really easy to look up the post history of a user by clicking their name and looking at their profile, so in practice it's better if a specific post is reported. Whenever anyone, user or spam bot, has posted something that is a violation of 17S Code of Conduct it saves a lot of time for the moderators if the report is tied to the violation. Since this is a forum, nearly every violation of the code of conduct is either a post or a DM, and both can be reported. If you feel that a user has violations across multiple posts that are not immediately evident, then just include that in the report with links. Spamming is often pretty visible on a user's history so don't worry about tagging multiple posts for a spam bot, their posts all get deleted with the account. If the user's profile page, banner, or picture has a violation of the code of conduct, I'd report whatever post led me to their profile page and explain the violation I found. If the report is one step removed from the profile, that still easier on the moderators than asking for specifics for every other violation. If for whatever reason you do not have access to a post you wanted to report, the only reason I can think of is if the user or a moderator took down the post, so problem solved unless the post was harassment. If you feel like you or another person has been the victim of harassment, here's a relevant quote from the code of conduct:

Let's run these strategies through an alternate test I just devised! This list is pretty good for not succumbing to the Flaw from your own setup, BUT what happens if some crazy Hemalurgist with A-Duralumin and A-Brass comes at you with a minigun firing bullets made from broken down Hemalurgic spikes? Years and years working this dead end job at a slaughterhouse killing thousands of cows just to feed the Elendel lion, oh, yes, I'll show them...(you get the picture) If someone nails you with dozens or hundreds of randomly fired hemalurgic spikes can you resist the Flaw if it's imposed upon you? I'll give the list 7/10 since we have 1 N/A and four probable cases. Not bad at all, could even be 9/10 if the edge cases still work, though Determination and Blessing of Presence seem the least likely of working anyway to me. I've wondered if plating the exposed sections of your spikes with Aluminum could work to negate the Flaw, kind as a more permanent version wearing an Aluminum hat.

YatNP Ending Spoiler

Agreed. If @dannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnex you want to look over what you're criticizing then peruse Brandon's Writing Process, Brandon's Process of Drafting a Book, or The Hardest Part of Writing for Brandon. (if anyone feels that this is out of line for me calling this out, let me know), considering you know you made a clickbait title, the title of the thread feels like flamebait when you acknowledge at the end of your initial post that Brandon is generally good at writing grief, it's just this particular case that didn't land for you (flamebait defintion I'm using: a message or post intended to arouse controversy). This just might explain why so many people feel the need to defend Brandon's portrayal of grief and why it feels like you've had to make the same argument 9 times. To give a nod to many of your points, Brandon's statement on the hardest part of writing for him is often getting a character's internal conflicts right. If he did genuinely drop the ball, then you're right and you've got it from the man himself, this is hard for him. He knows. He tries really hard by involving a lot of people, a lot of revisions, and a tremendous amount of work on his end to compensate. If you want to talk about the principles of writing and have a frank discussion among other storytellers who are seeking to improve their craft on what worked and what didn't and how you might have tried to portray this moment, that definitely has merit. It might be hard to do that on this thread though, since it's now charged with how people process grief and others defending Brandon's writing process. Moving past the writerly portion of the conversation, I stepped away from Realmatics and really thought about my perception of this event and I have a possible take. Sig has been mourning Aux's death since Aux's first death. Sig blamed himself for that, horrified that his friend got almost totally consumed until he was practically just a personality overlay. We learned to love Aux, but this Aux is a mere shadow of who he used to be and is a constant reminder to Sigzil of how he killed his friend, made worse by how frequently Aux reminds Sig that he's dead. I kind of imagine it like having a friend chatting with you while you're driving in a car, getting into a car accident, then finding that your buddy 90% died and that their monotone voice and fragments of their personality is now an overlay for the voice assistant in the car. It's reasonable to feel like they're dead and that it's all your fault, they're just still around to complain about it, require your services as a valet to go anywhere, and criticize your driving habits which makes the guilt even worse. In Aux's final death, it's Aux's choice to feed himself to Sigzil's Torment, removing any chance for further self-recrimination. Sig didn't lose his friend at the end, he lost the 10% acting as voice assistant, Aux the Highspren died a long time ago. The difference now is that Sig's grief isn't wrapped up with guilt and hate and blame for himself, Aux took that away. Perhaps there would be a reduction of pain, not an avalanche of more, and Sig isn't even aware of why that is the case. I don't know, it's just one possible take, but for me at least, Sig's pain was emphasized over and over at how little Aux resembled his former self, so losing the last 10%, heroic and sad though it was, felt more like a paralyzed and emotionally crippled friend finally laid to rest than a sucker punch to the gut. Terrible as it might sound, I think losing Aux in this way may end up being healthier for Sigzil in the long run than constantly carrying around guilt for killing his friend or being devastated by Aux's protracted passing, particularly if he turned a corner to try to salvage his trampled morality and empathy (as an aside, kind of like how Vasher seems a lot more content and has less anger issues now that he isn't carrying around the sword he used to kill his wife that was constantly encouraging him to kill evil people - now Szeth is the one having anger problems and is going around killing people he perceives to be evil. Oh boy!). Here's one possible in-world explanation, though to acknowledge what was said in terms of omission, I had to work a bit to construct this take and it isn't explicitly confirmed in the text. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, your experience is your experience and totally valid. I'm just offering another possible interpretation of the text that hopefully may improve someone's experience with reading TSM if the current reading feels incomplete or flawed. How Zellion perceives his grief and culpability may have major implications in shaping who he is by the time he shows up again, so this seems important to understand for his larger story if he's a ticking time bomb of repression or if he's been able to let go and move on in a small measure.

To echo this, there are several reasons in-world for someone to choose to obscure their name, particularly when being hunted by a planet depopulating group that tortures bystanders for information. Retaining a name from your home world can also tip your hand regarding what Invested Arts you may have access to, and that can become more and more important as the worlds and conflicts become more interconnected. The word "nomad" probably has an equivalent in nearly every language and will translate well via Connection.

YKYASFW you take breaks from homework to write essays on Realmatic theory and deep Rosharan history. It's becoming a problem, especially when I stop to look up a specific passage...

If I were Taln what would I want? I'm not sure. My initial thought was normalcy, but then Taln hasn't been a normal soldier doing his job for thousands and thousands of years. Percentage wise, 99% of his life has been spent in war or torture. Based on what he's said... 1. He deserves to know that he didn't let anyone down. He never broke or forsook his friends or his world. It hurts knowing that he thinks he failed and that this Desolation is his fault. 2. I wish he could see each of the kingdoms he preserved for 4500 years when they were not at war. I wish he could see the gift he gave Roshar. I wish he could see little Alethi kids running around with swords pretending to be Taln Stonesinew, Herdazian chouta vendors, Thaylen teenagers being excited at their first trading deal, little girls stealing pancakes, everything joyous that is possible when the world isn't torn between 2-3 Shards. I hope by the end he gets to see that. 3. After that, whatever he wanted to do when he wasn't bound by a terrible responsibility to save a world almost entirely by himself. Who knows, maybe he would take up painting or gardening, but leave him free to choose, this man who gave everything.

Clearly Kelsier knows about Essence Marks and that they can grant powers that the individual was not born with. We also know that Moonlight has been experimenting with general use stamps. Is this one of the core reasons that Kelsier recruited Moonlight to see if Essence Marks could be a method of democratizing powers? If so, then there's a question on if Kelsier has commissioned a Mistborn Essence Mark and if so, why we haven't seen him use it? Has a Mistborn Essence Mark If Kelsier does have an Essence Mark that can change him into a Mistborn which seems like it should be more plausible than Moonlight becoming an Elantrian, then why he doesn't use it that much? Most likely answer I can think of is that it takes a shot of unkeyed Dor and that the transformation is either temporary or still has issues to work out. During the ramp to the climax of TLM, Kelsier implies that he's too far out to Steelpush to get back in time - and if he genuinely can't make it back in time, then it's not worth the expenditure of Dor. There's resource constraints that make Essence Marks impractical to offer as a solution for Scadrian democratization of power and may partially explain why he's trying so hard to get his own source of portable Investiture. If the transformation is temporary, then it also totally explains why he asks Harmony if he can ever be a Mistborn again while still implying that he can Steelpush. Doesn't have a Mistborn Essence Mark If this is the case then there's a few options I can think of: Something about Kelsier's nature as a Cognitive Shadow stapled via Hemalurgy on a Kandra (or so has been heavily implied and we assume) interferes with the Essence Mark and it doesn't take. Perhaps it can't overwrite his death and his time as a Shard that warped his Cognitive Shadow. This seems quite possible, even with a shot of Dor to brute-force it, though I'm guessing at the Realmatics. He hasn't told his crew that he isn't a Mistborn - though since a lot of them aren't native and would have to be told the significance, that seems weird. He hasn't been willing to divulge enough of his personal history to Moonlight for her to make a workable Essence Mark. This seems possible, but I'm not sure if it's enough of a deterrent for him to not have access to Mistborn, Feruchemist, or Fullborn abilities. It's a work in process and Moonlight has been recruited recently enough that she hasn't been able to carve one for him yet. Moonlight is unwilling to hand someone else that much power under whatever current agreement she has as a member of the Ghostbloods. Nonetheless, if we see Kelsier show up and start flying around with Steel and Duralumin, it doesn't necessarily mean that he cracked Lerasium. Thoughts?

I agree, The Emperor's Soul is well worthy of the Hugo and changed the way I perceive people and interpret primary and secondhand descriptions of a person. There's something incredibly daring about directly pointing out how difficult it is to really get a portrayal of another human being to really feel right as described and explored by a fictional character. Shai feels more real to me than some of the biographies I've read, ironically. The way she views the world and people is a way that I sometimes try to view them, trying to understand why people do what they do. I'm sure other people do this all the time, but I think TES is what had me start doing it far more deliberately. I dunno... a few years ago I might have thought something similar, but that was before Brandon wrote 4 books secretly because he needed a break from writing and the stress of COVID-19. That seems like a similar degree of impossibility, and yet some people found new favorite books from the Secret Projects. No one should do this, but apparently if you lock Brandon in his house with his writing desk his productivity skyrockets (like seriously, no one get any funny ideas about chaining Brandon to his desk, he's got plenty of people to check on him, his weekly updates, and Intentionally Blank so we would know and come and find you. You can be patient and wait for Stormlight 5-10 like the rest of us). Brandon's own life as a hugely prolific and speedy writer to me gives more credibility to Shai's output as a hugely prolific and speedy Forger when locked in her carving room. I also think that Shai may have misrepresented the actual scope of the project because what she did for Ashravan was at the onset fundamentally different than any of her previous projects. Ask any contractor to do work for you and they will almost always overestimate their time table because it's easier for people to adjust to getting their stuff earlier than expected than later than expected - it also gives flexibility for complications that almost always happen, doubly so if it's a special project of a variety that they've never worked on before despite owning all of the tools that would let them do it. In Shai's case, every single time she verbally talks about the incredible difficulty of the project, she's reinforcing the 100-day deadline they gave her and the tone of impossibility necessary to keep her own execution at bay or the other Forger from picking up her work. Assuming she wasn't lying, she had never made an Essence Mark to be used on another person, so she's also breaking new ground for herself. It's the equivalent of asking the person who writes extremely detailed and convoluted D&D backgrounds for their characters that all happen to be based on themselves to turn around and write the biography of a high profile leader that people personally know. A major difference from this and Shai's usual work is that she merely needed to capture the authentic Ashravan. She didn't need to come up with plausible explanations for a falsified background or personally generate anything fictional about Ashravan for this to work. In Shai carving stamps to test her model of Ashravan on Gaotona there's also an echo of Brandon taking up the end of The Wheel of Time after Robert Jordan passed away and offering up sections of prose to the editor, Jordan's late wife Harriet. Once Shai had her model and understood who Ashravan was at his core, then she could write the groundwork for the sequel after his death, changing nothing about his history, simply using his "near-death" experience to alter future behavior by kicking off a period of retrospection, Ashravan likely reading from the very journal that Shai had worked extensively from, before he would decide to become a great leader. So much of this is fundamentally different from Shai changing the present nature of her own soul, and perhaps it was easier than she expected even given the monumental nature of the project. Shai had very good reasons for emphasizing the impossibility of her task and not having a good personal estimate on the timeframe. I'm not trying to change your mind or say that you're wrong, I'm just offering the reason it works for me. I tend to focus on reasons to improve other peoples' appreciation of a book, though I acknowledge that there can be genuinely bad storytelling that no amount of positive spin will salvage.