Gilphon

To me, the notable thing isn't the Connection hack- they've been multiple signs that such a thing is possible. I'm more curious about how what appears to be a Skybreaker managed to make his Plate function as a spacesuit; I had thought that that would be something only Windrunners could do, since they can use Adhesion to handle any pressure-related problems that crop up.

So Odium doesn't have any more raw power than the others Shards. The common theory is that he beat Devotion and Dominion by turning them against each other. Ambition he beat, with difficulty, in a dramatic 1-on-1 duel. 

And, then, well, there are a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly Odium's interactions with Honor and Cultivation played out. But if he could've won a direct fight against them, he wouldn't have been forced into thousands of years of stalemate before he somehow found a way to kill Honor. Indeed, he's still trying to avoid letting Cultivation get the first strike on him- she's a threat to him even without Honor.

On 2020-11-09 at 11:27 AM, Quantus said:

The real question to ask The Branderson is whether that statement ("one is different") is still the case after the events of Dawnshard.  That would tell us if the Difference is in it's storage state (which changes) or something more fundamental.  

Somebody asked exactly this question on reddit, and got an answer:

Quote

MoriWillow

You once told us that one of the Dawnshards was different from the others. As of the events of this novella, is that still true?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Which tells us that the difference is not the storage state. 

Actually about the Stonewards. Or more, precisely, about the Truthwatchers. The idea was to send Radiants whose spren haven't broken with the rest of their kind- and hence Why Shallan and Godeke, because the Cryptics and Cultivationspren are board with the whole 'bring back the Radiants' idea, whereas the Inkspren and Honorspren largely aren't. 

But then why a Truthwatcher and a Stoneward? Are their spren also largely on board with the Radiants? If so, why do they only have three Truthwatchers? And given the way they haven't been mentioned at all before now, there don't seem to be a large number of Stonewards either. 

Come to think it, there's a pretty simple answer for why they needed aluminium: If they ever fully de-coupled the Fourth Bridge from the lattice at Urithiru, gravity is going to do bad things to the ship. The best scenario is 'a whole lot of force starts pushing the lattice at the Shattered Plains into the ground, making it much harder to move and possibly damaging it'. But you can't keep it fully conjoined either, because then it's going to either grind itself into the mountainside or fly away from the tower.

I'd like to echo the above sentiments, together with the somewhat melancholy acknowledgement that I'm not planning on reading the book immediately, so next week I'm gonna have to start ignoring this subforum for fear of spoilers. Indeed, I'm probably going to have to ignore a good portion of this fandom. Which I can't help but have mixed feelings about. 

So, yes, virtual hugs for everyone, and I'll miss interacting with you all.

Oh, hey, vindication on the 'Fused are using Aluminium' argument from last week. That's nice to have. 

That Shadesmar mission though. 'Let's send two main protagonists and three characters the audience barely knows- two of which don't even have names- on this dangerous mission together! I'm sure that won't work out badly for the non-protagonists!'

The structure of the book is becoming clear, though; Kaladin, Navani and Venli in Urithiru are the A-plot, Shallan and Adolin in Shadesmar are the B-plot, and Dalinar and Jasnah in Emul are the C-plot. And since it's the C-plot, we can probably assume the war in Emul will take most of the book, so won't we get to the Shinovar stuff until book 5.

Brandon made a comment on Reddit on wednesday that somewhat addresses this: 

Quote

Oversleep42

I got a question about this and last week's epigraph.

The metals Fused use. How come nobody knows, guesses or even suspects that aluminium and its alloys are Investiture resistant? They know you can Soulcast something into aluminium, so they should also know it's impossible to Soulcast aluminium into something else.

And once they know about metal that cannot be Soulcast, they start experimenting with fabrials - they used that in construction of Fourth Bridge - and then the logical step is to test it against Shardblades.Probably experimenting with alloys of aluminium, too.

Yet the metal Fused use to make weapons resistant to Shardweapons is a mystery to them?

I feel like I'm missing something here.

Brandon Sanderson

They're getting to answers here. Problem is, metallurgy just isn't a big science on Roshar. I feel it's one of those things that is more easy to see externally than internally--and do remember that there are things like god metals (Shardblades, for example) that also behave strangely around investiture. They have far more experience with those than aluminum, which is more of a little historical oddity to them than a big revolutionary part of science. Add to that the fact that some of the metals the fused are using aren't aluminum, and...well, I don't think it's as obvious a leap as you're making it out to be.

ImBuGs

So the Fused's fabrials are not 100% aluminum based? Or they are and they are struggling to reach that conclusion?

Brandon Sanderson

I think what you're asking will be answered in the book, so I'll RAFO for now.

I think what's going on here is that they figured out that the Fused were using Aluminium at some point between the start of the book and when the lecture was given. 

I jumped to thinking that Ambition was one of the Shards in the Change grouping- with would make the full group Ruin, Cultivation, Endowment and Ambition. 

13 hours ago, Truthwatcher Artifabrian said:

Now we have a way to automate the hardest step of the fabrial creation process. Sucking the Stormlight out of the gemstone.

Huh. Navani did say that some guilds have methods of doing that she's not aware of. Do you think that those guilds have known about Duralumin all along?

Makes me wonder why it was a thing. It's a plot thread that got brought up a few times, but didn't really go anywhere, and now the cat's throughly out of the bag.

I wonder if Odium has some anti-illusion measures up his sleeve, and the plot thread is there to explain why he didn't think he'd need them at Thaylen City?

Brandon weighted in on this issue on reddit: 

Quote

Oversleep42

I got a question about this and last week's epigraph.

The metals Fused use. How come nobody knows, guesses or even suspects that aluminium and its alloys are Investiture resistant? They know you can Soulcast something into aluminium, so they should also know it's impossible to Soulcast aluminium into something else.

And once they know about metal that cannot be Soulcast, they start experimenting with fabrials - they used that in construction of Fourth Bridge - and then the logical step is to test it against Shardblades.Probably experimenting with alloys of aluminium, too.

Yet the metal Fused use to make weapons resistant to Shardweapons is a mystery to them?

I feel like I'm missing something here.

Brandon Sanderson

They're getting to answers here. Problem is, metallurgy just isn't a big science on Roshar. I feel it's one of those things that is more easy to see externally than internally--and do remember that there are things like god metals (Shardblades, for example) that also behave strangely around investiture. They have far more experience with those than aluminum, which is more of a little historical oddity to them than a big revolutionary part of science. Add to that the fact that some of the metals the fused are using aren't aluminum, and...well, I don't think it's as obvious a leap as you're making it out to be.

ImBuGs

So the Fused's fabrials are not 100% aluminum based? Or they are and they are struggling to reach that conclusion?

Brandon Sanderson

I think what you're asking will be answered in the book, so I'll RAFO for now.

He stops short of actually confirming whether or not it's aluminium, but says that it's absolutely possibly for it to simply not have occurred to them that they're looking at aluminium.   Which, y'know, knocks out the only argument I've seen against it being aluminium. But, perhaps more importantly, he says that issue will be clarified later in the book.

1 hour ago, Karger said:

I would agree except we really don't know what aluminum does.  Sure it it touted by us as investiture kryptonite but that can't be it otherwise you could not use it to store identity.  Lets imagine a scenario.  You are doing an experiment with chromium where for some reason you have someone push on it and this pulls mists into one end and out the other.  Would this be noteworthy to a layperson on scadrial?  I am guessing no.

You're responding to the wrong point here. Like yeah, there might not have noticed any metals conducting the mist, but that's not the claim I was responding to. We're talking about  a metal that 'can withstand the blows of a Shardblade, resists being Soulcast, and interferes with a great number of Radiant powers'. Surely a metal that does all that would have some kind of noticeable effect if you tried to use Allomancy on it, right? Because, y'know, we're almost 100% certain that aluminium does those things, and one would expect a metal that, as far as we can tell, interacts with the Rosharan magics identically to aluminium, would also have pretty similar interactions with the metallics arts. At very least, one would certainly expect it to be similar enough that it would've been noteworthy, considering how prized aluminium weapons are on Scadrial.

Unless what you're arguing is that aluminium doesn't block Shardblades or interfere with Radiant powers. Which is, uh... well, the burden on proof lies quite firmly on your shoulders at that point, and you'd definitely need an argument a lot stronger than 'Navani hadn't figured out what it was when she was giving the lecture'. Since, y'know, that's easily explainable by the fact that aluminium is a rare curiosity that doesn't live at the forefront of everyone's minds on Roshar, and so it could take a little while for somebody to remember that they'd heard of a Soulcasting-resistant metal in a different context.

3 minutes ago, jamskinner said:

Why not just copper?  It conducts electricity.  Maybe investiture is similar. 

Copper's the wrong colour. We know from Kaladin's POV the the conductor metal is a silvery colour.

The thing is that we can conclusively eliminate everything you just mentioned except aluminium for the first one, because the epigraph was just talking about what the metals does by itself. If any of the other metals had aluminium-esque properties, they definitely would've noticed that on Scadrial. Unless a godmetal is involved, as you mentioned.

It's also worth noting that Bendalloy is the wrong colour to be the one used in the Fused's spears, as is Odium's godmetal. Not that I think any of us are seriously considering Cadmium or Bendalloy in this context. 

I don't think you'd need to alloy the aluminium, just coat your weapon in it. Like a pure aluminum weapon isn't going to block a Shardblade because it's not strong enough to withstand the physical force of the blow. But putting an aluminium coat over a steel weapon should work just fine. 

Like using the same alloy as Miles' guns is theoretically possible, but more complicated than you'd need, and the Fused seem to have a worse understanding of Fabrials than the humans do, so I don't think they'd getting into special alloys that are still new and exciting innovations over on Scadrial. Like Scadrial has got to have more advanced metalworking techniques than the Fused do. 

12 minutes ago, Karger said:

If someone says aluminum spears then I will of course change my position.  However I find it odd that aluminum is being kept as a mystery.  What possible reason would Brandon have for not just saying it? 

To let us piece it together ourselves so we can feel smart, and to emphasize the fact that their knowledge of Fabrial stuff is still very much incomplete. Just like when he didn't confirm that Steel is used in repulsers, even though that's obviously what it would be. And, to get slightly more speculative, having something that's a mystery in the lecture being understood in the present day shows us how quickly they're advancing; a lecture from just a few months ago is already outdated. 

And I would further argue that the description is too perfect a match for aluminium for any other explanation to make much sense- If any of the other 15 'normals' metals had similar Investiture-resisting properties, we definitely would've heard about at some point in the Mistborn books, so it can't be any of them. And the detail of it being an extremely light fits right in as well. I suppose it's vaguely possible that it could've been Odium's god metal, but that would be a bizarre bit of misdirection on Brandon's part, given that we could easily tell the difference between the two from colour. 

But anyway. I believe that this epigraph tells us that the spears are not Aluminium or any of the metals Navani has previously mentioned. Gold, Copper, Bendalloy, Electrum and Odium's Godmetal are the wrong colour, so we can eliminate those as well. Which leaves Chromium, Nicrosil, Duralumin and Cadmium as possibilities. Cadmium I think is obviously the least likely of those. I do not think that there's a smoking gun we can use to narrow it down conclusively from the three we have left, but I believe that the effect described fits Duralumin the best, and that moving into talking about Duralumin right after talking about Aluminium makes sense from a flow perspective. 

8 minutes ago, Karger said:

I agree that seems obvious but it is not confirmed.  Given how many people can recognize aluminum I would not base anything on that as an underlying assumption.

Not confirmed, sure. But what you've been doing is taking 'it's not aluminium' as underlying assumption, which given the obviousness we both just agreed is present, seems like a shaker idea. If you can find me some strong piece of evidence that it's not aluminium, I'd be willing to reconsider my stance, but I am, in fact, comfortable using that as a working assumption in the absence of such evidence.

And I would say that the conclusive thing is that they're two different metals- and hence we can probably be confident that the spears are not aluminium, despite the fact that that's probably the conclusion most us jumped to when we first saw them. Two unrelated metals is a stronger conclusion than I think we can conclusively state- she didn't specifically call out any of the other metals as alloys of each other, after all. Going into the chemical composition of metals that she doesn't have a name for is a bit beyond the scope of the lecture.

11 minutes ago, Karger said:

You are using circular reasoning based on a false premise.  It may block shardblades but we have a pretty clear indication that said metal is not aluminum.

I invite you to share your reasoning, then. What is this clear indication that the mysterious investiture-blocking metal that the Fused have large quantities of is not aluminium? Because from where I'm standing, it pretty obviously is. 

At the absolute minimum, last week's epigraph was certainly written with the intention of making us think she was talking about aluminium. 

Because the only thing I see is the 'Navani could ID aluminium' argument, and if that's all you have, well, I would suggest that you're the one reasoning from a false premise there. 

The Fourth Bridge, which uses Aluminium, was built after this lecture, using techniques learned from the Azish. The lecture which included a plea to the other nations to share techniques that she wasn't aware of. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that Navani knows more in the present than she did when giving this lecture.

8 minutes ago, Weux082690 said:

Real world castles were often built with dead ends, secret passages, elevated entrances, and traps all as a way to confuse anyone trying to invade the castle.

My theory is that when Urithiru was alive, the walls and rooms could be rearranged for a similar purpose. Perhaps as the Sibling withdrew the tower got frozen in one these unnatural configurations.

This is what probably makes the most sense, but I'm hoping that's not it; that there really is a practical reason for the Tower to be like that. Just because of amazing the pay-off for all these weird details would be if this was all how it was supposed to be.

@Schneeente That's a really good idea. And exactly the kind of explanation I want for the weird Urithiru things.

Hoid is an archetype where pan is just makes more sense than not. Like you've been travelling the Cosmere for ten thousands years and met all kinds of people from all kinds of difference cultures who all have different ideas about gender, it starts making sense to care less and less about it.

And yeah, confirmation that he is intentionally writing Shallan as bi now. Like he's always written Shallan as bi, but it felt like he was doing it accidentally in WoK and WoR.

But anyway. This makes it less likely that Jasnah and Hoid are a thing, but doesn't actually prove it's not a thing. 

5 minutes ago, Karger said:

Navani works with aluminum on an almost daily basis.  She(or at least someone who works for her) can clearly ID it.  Duralumin would be easy to ID.  Just heat it until copper's melting point.

Yeah, well. Obviously she hasn't done this at the point in time when the lecture was given. Because if she had, she would've said 'aluminium' last week instead of 'some mysterious metal that blocks investiture'. 

Also claiming she works with it almost daily is a strong claim, given that we've heard her mention it all of once, and that was in context of 'new techniques we've recently learned from Azish artefabrians'.

I don't think Navani would be able to ID duralumin- remember, last week she couldn't ID aluminium, which should be easier for her. (Although I would guess she's ID'd the aluminium at some point between when the lecture was given and when the Fourth Bridge was made). And in a meta sense, it works for her to bring up duralumin directly after talking about aluminium. 

And really conducting Investiture sounds like a pretty exact match for how duralumin works in Allomancy. 

So. Since the metal Navani was talking about last week was clearly aluminium, we can now say the Fused's spears are not aluminium. We do, however, know that it's silvery, which can narrow it down nicely.

I had been thinking that they were Chromium, because the overall function of the spears is so similar to a Leecher, but hearing Navani say that really what the metal does is conduct Investiture makes me thinks that Duralumin is a better fit- the draining part is handled by the gem; the metal's just a conductor. Because really that's what that does in Allomancy, it pulls in more Investiture that you'd otherwise get for the reaction. And it would also nicely parallel how Aluminium can be used as an insulator. 

So between the two of them, you get a lot of potential for circuitry. Man, now that I say it like that, using it just to make those spears is really wasting its potential. Just goes to show how far ahead the humans are at understand Fabrials, I suppose. 

12 minutes ago, agrabes said:

I think her choice makes a certain amount of sense - make the change while everyone's already off kilter and don't allow them to re-entrench themselves into a new norm that doesn't fit what you want.  But I agree - rapid, widespread social reforms are generally a recipe for disaster.  They're usually the cause (or result) of civil war and revolution.

I can't see the slave owners (aka all or most members of the middle and upper classes) of Alethkar just sitting idly by while they are economically ruined by the loss of their slaves.  There are really only three options for freeing slaves:

1) Set slaves free, no money changes hands, resulting in the economic ruin of slaveholders who had invested large amounts of money into purchasing the slaves.  If you've got a certain political inclination, that probably sounds pretty good - raise up the common man and bring down the rich and powerful.  On the other hand, the destabilization of your economy collapsing when most major businesses simultaneously fail is a pretty big downside.

2) Set the slaves free, but require them to pay back a slave debt to their former masters.  This would prevent complete economic collapse, but would result in those slaves still being effectively slaves as they work to escape a debt they can never truly repay.  At least their children would be free.

3) Set the slaves free, with the former slave owners reimbursed by the government.  This could work, but probably depends on the financial state of the Alethkar kingdom.

I will be interested to see how Sanderson handles this one.  Even though freeing slaves is objectively a good thing, it's not an easy thing and crass as it may seem to say it does have serious negative societal effects in the short term which is why it took years and years to do in real history.  I guess the easy way out would be for Navani to invent fabrials to take the place of the slaves and allow economies to continue by using machines to replace human labor.  But I hope it doesn't go that way.  I'd rather see Jasnah struggle with backlash to this - or cleverly defeat potential backlash.

The thing to remember is that the slave economy has probably already had a major crash- they just lost the Parshmen, after all. It probably needs major restructuring now anyway, so it makes sense for Jasnah to see an opportunity to here.