Daggon Forescout

On 4/8/2021 at 2:03 PM, earthexile said:

The Shattered Plains have been the way they are for a long time, and lived in. I suspect that the spren of the region are used to the way things are now, which means healing them together with surges is probably out of the question.

Not to mention that the east side has been eroded for millenia. It's one thing for a large force to crack the ground. It strikes me as far more difficult to somehow create mass to fill in all the holes

On 1/21/2021 at 9:43 PM, StanLemon said:

As with many in universe beliefs regarding the limits of magic systems, the belief that Breaths can't be forcibly taken may very well be wrong. I'm almost positive Hemalurgy could be used to take them for instance. Also, for a Shard it might be trivial to remove Breaths.

And we know that nightblood can forcefully take breaths. I totally buy that a Shard could do it

On 2/20/2021 at 7:21 PM, Kolo_Lono said:

I'd imagine it would only be relevant if we actually do get Elantris 2 and 3. Yes, the Glory Faction made the attempt but what I was saying was that Hoid or a 17th shard member may have been influential in the decision to make the attempt. Just the vibe I got from the conversation between Hoid and Shai in the deleted scene's conversation. 

I'm afraid I'm not getting the same vibe that Hoid had something to do with the assassination. He was probably more involved than he was on Naalthis, but this seems to me like more of a "pop in, grab the item, and pop out" scenario.

On 2/22/2021 at 7:29 AM, LewsTherinTelescope said:

(It also surprises me that even after the abandonment of Elantris, there was enough of a concept of an Arelon for Aons to remain as they are. This is an issue either way, but extending Elantris's creation back gives a lot more time that the concept of the nation has to remain around.)

Arelon has some very well-defined natural borders (coast, river, mountains), so I buy that people would perceive Arelon as a single entity long before the "modern-day" nation emerged. I mean it's a slight stretch, but for comparison, the nation of Hungry has existed in one form or another for 1200 years despite having less well-defined borders then Arelon

On 11/19/2020 at 6:08 PM, Frustration said:

Where are you getting a skeleton that size?

Pretty sure you can cobble together random bones from large animals. As long as they're all organic you should be fine.

58 minutes ago, Aspiring Writer said:

So, we know that Kandra spikes are unique to them and that they can't accept another Kandra's spikes. This is probably because of Identity, similar to how metalminds only work with their user. However, we see Bleeder use two new spikes that were not her original, made out of trellium, a god metal. So how is she able to do this, despite the problem with identity?

They have a conversation about this at the start of Bands of Mourning when talking about trying to help Reluur.

I'm going to accept when ReLuur says at face value: that Bleeder didn't need any identity shenanigans to pull off what she did. She only ever used spikes specifically designed for her.

On 3/21/2021 at 1:25 PM, Elend Venture said:

Wax's aim is not superhuman, it is merely well cultivated.

While I'm willing to accept repeatedly shooting a gun out of someone's hand as due to (fictional levels of) skill, I think shooting a bullet out of midair falls squarely in the realm of "superhuman." As @Lesser spren said, that could have been with Harmony's help, but I'm inclined to think there must be some magical shenanigans affecting Wax's abilities

1 hour ago, mathiau said:

I did not, how do you put your Divine Breath in a nicrosilmind if you couldn't leave without it?

In that WoB Brandon doesn't say it would be a good idea to store a returned breath, just that it's possible. As long as generic breaths can be stored in nicrosil, he probably has to respond "yes" to that question.

1 hour ago, mathiau said:

A divine breath is an insane amount of investiture, similar to the investiture contained in a Truespren. There's no way a Larkin will be able to eat one before being fully sapient and even then they won't be able to eat many (by the way, Returned probably don't need their Divine Breath to live, it's just a gift to help them because that's what Endowment (sic) does )

I was thinking more about the many officials with a number of regular breaths. A single larkin could destroy a vast amount of wealth in a very short period of time. Or in the case of Vasher, presumably he's hanging on to a few breaths for awakening purposes, and using stormlight to survive each week. I don't think I want a larkin to be able to take away his awakening ability until he returns to Naalthis.

For that matter, what about a Naalthian who only has the single breath they were born with? Could a larkin steal that breath? I think breath needs to be too "sticky" for a Larkin to steal, otherwise there needs to be a very good reason why no one ever takes one to Naalthis.

20 hours ago, AirsickAviar said:

With a full knight radiant, it is almost described as being almost an instant transition, not even waiting for heart beats, with the spren forming to custom shapes near instantly, this could be done so easily to be so very hard to dodge from simply by manipulating the shape to just abstract pointy object that bear no semblance of a normal weapon at all, that would have a point part inside your opponents body's location rn, through any gaps in armor, with it's handle where your hand is already.

I got the impression that when Ishar "skips" his blade, ie vanishes then resumons his blade to bypass Teft's blade, that's a super advanced technique that most people can't duplicate without extensive practice. That and I think there's some serious perception shenanigans which explain why so far everyone has only ever summoned real world objects. With the exception of Lift and her fork, people only summon real weapons, probably because it is orders of magnitude harder to imagine something new as opposed to asking for "a sword"

6 hours ago, mdross81 said:

Knowing the tone might, in fact, be necessary because I don't know that a gem would work as a vacuum to pull in the Breaths otherwise, or even whether Breaths can be stored in a gem at all.

Except that Moash was able to use the knife, so we know that being able to produce the tones can't be a requirement.

1 hour ago, AirsickAviar said:

Does Raysium take the stormlight away via the method, or similar enough, as the Larken does? I know the Larken could suck in and absorb both Stormlight and Voidlight, and they seem to be able to be multifunctional in what types of investiture they can feed upon.

If Larkins can steal breath, then Vasher needs to avoid that thing like the plague. That seems incredibly op that someone could just release a single larkin in the hallandren royal court and ruin everyone's day

On 1/11/2021 at 10:35 AM, Shob the Voidbringer said:

i ran out of upvotes on page 3. me: crying in background

I've been coming back each day and scrolling through until I run out of upvotes, then continuing again the next day.

On 1/4/2021 at 5:46 PM, Chinkoln said:

Teft, Marsh, Galladon, Clubs. Those are four of my favorite characters. TEFT IS DEAD

Someone likes his Lancers.

11 hours ago, The Unknown Order said:

My point was that that was a massive weakspot and therefore unrealistic. 

Massive weakspot? Unrealistic? You do realize that most suits of armour throughout history had far less coverage than shardplate, right? I don't know how granular the individual pieces are, but leaving the inside of the left elbow exposed (maybe you could put a conventional piece of armour there?) doesn't strike me as that great a sacrifice

On 3/4/2021 at 11:32 AM, The Unknown Order said:

Actually, this makes me wonder. What if a plate was completely broken, so the was literally nothing left. Would the spren appear in the cognitive realm? Or would the plate just be lost forever?

I assume that the windspren (as an example) would be released and return to being normal windspren.

On 2/28/2021 at 4:32 PM, mathiau said:

I still think it should be more imbalanced, like, imbalanced enough that people point out plates are rarer. But we know the number of blades decreased over the millennia maybe the number of plate didn't or was slower to decrease.

It makes sense to me that a full set of shardplate would be pretty hard to lose, especially considering you can grow the set back from a single piece. Goin on a super dangerous quest? Leave a small piece behind so that even if you die, the plate isn't lost.

1 hour ago, Lccaseiro58 said:

I disagree, if you react in a violent manner like pulling a weapon every time your angry, that's an issue even if your anger is justified. We see Adolin do this multiple times, in the scenes you mentioned he starts summoning his weapon subconsciously and is later stopped by Renarin and Dalinar in some off those. We know what happened when nobody was there to stop him.

Adolin is a great person and I think this issue adds more to his character than retracts, and it could be something to explore in the future.

First, I'd like to point out that he only ever acts like this around Sadeas. Second, I'd like to refer you to the first bit I quoted: he's not thinking about killing Sadeas right there and then, he's thinking about challenging Sadeas to a duel. The one time he actually does attack Sadeas he doesn't go for his Blade; he pulls out a dagger because that's more effective in a grapple.

Is it a character flaw that he's impulsive and hot headed? Yes, and it makes him that much more compelling. Does it significantly impact his life? Does it make him a danger to the people or things around him? No.

2 hours ago, Frustration said:

There is zero evidence to support it.

2 hours ago, Quick Ben said:

but wouldnt say was was toxic masculinity

I mean Alethi society does put a lot of pressure on men to be aggressive and violent. You saw how much people mock Renarin for not charging headfirst into battle along with everyone else. While Dalinar obviously takes it to an extreme, it's possible he never would have developed his bloodlust if he'd been raised in a less militaristic society. To bring it back to Adolin, I think people assume that since Adolin is reaching for his sword that means he can't control his anger, when in reality he's no more frustrated than we've all been. He's just been trained from a young age that address social problems with duels or by displaying prowess on the field of battle.

1)      would like to be friends with most

          I need an extrovert to drag my introverted self along to everything, because I'll have fun once I get there. So jut like everybody else my answer is Adolin.

2)      feel is most believable in terms of motivation

         I empathize the most with Jasnah's motivations. She's the only character who cares as much about the lore as I do.

3)      enjoy reading about most

          Dalinar

4)      find most confusing/intriguing

          Confusing: Mraize. Intriguing: Azure/Zahel/Nightblood.

5)      find makes you laugh the most

          The Lopen. With a close runner-up being:

6)      would like to punch in the face

          This post has been reported for attempting to skirt the rules you Moash!

7)      personally relate to most

          Using bits and pieces of Adolin, Jasnah, and Renarin I can assemble pretty much my entire personality.

8)      feel is emotionally most realistic

          Navani

9)      shamelessly crush on the hardest

          I'm not much for shameless crushes, but if I could get a mix of Shallan and Veil, well... let's just say I'm eager to see what things are like in book five.

10)    is most like someone you know IRL

          Replace Adolin's athletic ability with smarts and you've pretty much got my best friend.

On 2/27/2021 at 2:14 PM, Lccaseiro58 said:

In WoK and WoR, there are various instances where Adolin starts summoning his blade when he is arguing with someone

I did a word search in WoK of the word "summon," and this was all I could find of Adolin losing his temper. There's the scene where they are riding to the greatshell hunt:

And again immediately after:

And lastly right after they get back from that fateful bridgerun:

In WoR, all I could find was when Sadeas gave up the title of highprince of information:

In every cases it's Sadeas intentionally goading him. Obviously a calmer person could resist the provocation, but I don't think it should be shocking that Sadeas managed to get under his skin. It's also telling that Adolin repeatedly mentions dueling, so it's entirely possible that he never considered murdering Sadeas until that time in the tower. And I think it's equally important to note that once Sadeas is gone, we never see Adolin react like this to anyone else. If he does have anger management problems, he sure doesn't have a hard time managing them.

On 2/10/2021 at 2:51 PM, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Considering all the Alethi should sound Arabic/Israeli... probably not, no. It’s not THAT hard to find Semitic language speakers, is it?

On 2/10/2021 at 3:53 PM, Harrycrapper said:

That may be a bridge too far in terms of portraying the authors vision. Graphic Audio isn't very big and seems to cater mostly to people from the United States. It makes good business sense to make the people of the nation that is represented the most have an American accent. I'm not saying it would be any worse, but I have a feeling an Arabic/Israeli accent would be received worse than the rural American accent. Anyways, we're definitely off the original topic, so we should probably take this to another thread or something if you want to discuss further. 

You guys are dipping your toes into a topic which is pretty prominent in the historical community. It's generally accepted that's it makes sense to localize accents to the target audience, but you inevitably lose a great deal of historical context. Let's say for example that you're making a tv show about classical Rome for an American audience. If you give everyone an Italian accent, Americans probably aren't going to be able to tell if someone is noble or not based on their speech. If they use upper/lower class accents that Americans are familiar with (British being the go-to), then it helps people get more immersed in the story. Of course in reality, most Roman nobility would have spoken Greek amongst themselves, which would have been completely unintelligible to their mostly Latin-speaking servants. Is there any way to convey that without having them speak different languages on screen and subtitle everything?

I keep on seeing people mention how Adolin has anger management problems, but apart from that one time he snapped and killed Sadeas (and come on, it was Sadeas), I can't think of anything that really demonstrates that. Is he impulsive? Yeah. Easily provoked? For sure, but every example I can think of the other person was actively trying to get a rise out of him.

Does anyone have any scenes they can point to that demonstrate Adolin's anger management problems?

On 1/22/2021 at 10:04 AM, KSub said:

Knowing that, I have to believe Ghostblood HQ won't be happy with Mraizes actions.

One has to imagine that an interplanetary organization like the ghostbloods would have to be comfortable with delegating to subordinates, given the lack of fast travel. Kelsier had no problem hiring out a random group of thugs to do some of the team's dirty work, and it didn't seem like he was too concerned about the methods they used. He strikes me as a very results oriented person. I doubt he would be paying too much attention to the minutia of what Mraize and the other Ghostbloods on Roshar are doing.

1 hour ago, Dracnor said:

Yeah, Ichor is just a way to make it cheaper. The question is how much it costs without Ichor ?

Unless I'm mistaken, a lifeless with ichor costs the same number of breaths as a lifeless with regular blood. It was the discovery of new commands that enabled one-breath lifeless. The problem with regular blood is that the lifeless muscles stop working after a period of time (days? weeks?), whereas with ichor you can keep the lifeless going indefinitely, barring injury.   Edit: From memory I'm pretty sure that using the old commands, a lifeless took about 50 breaths to make.

The best argument I can think of against creating lifeless mid battle is that Vasher doesn't do it when he's storming the palace at the end of Warbreaker. Instead he animates the clothes and has those fight alongside him, presumably at a significant (recoverable) cost of breath. I could see potential local applications on a battlefield, but that's too expensive to scale up. Why didn't Vasher animate the bodies? Maybe the commands for one breath lifeless take a minute? Maybe there's a little prep work needed? It's still entirely possible that creating lifeless would be a viable strat during an hours long battle where you can safely work behind the front line, but that it's not viable in the 1v10 brawl Vasher found himself in. Until we see the actual process of making a lifeless, we don't know.

9 hours ago, PewterAGoldF said:

So a deepest one gets a stone soulcaster and turns a person to stone and then communes with that stone. Do you think that they would have access to that persons memories?

I think @Serack did a good job explaining why you probably couldn't access a person's memories through their soulcast corpse, but I'm curious about what other "memories" a deepest one might be able to get from once-living stone. When Venli communes with the floor of Urithiru she's able to see almost visions of the people who once inhabited the tower, because the stone itself remembers them. Do deepest ones have this same ability, and if so, what memories does a soulcast statue possess? Does it's memory start the moment it was soulcast or does it retain some of the memories of the corpse? Does Gavilar's statue remember what happened to Gavilar corpse after he died? Does it still retain some vague impressions of the people he spent a lot of time with, kinda like the floor in his office would?

9 hours ago, AquaRegia said:

I also have a ton of questions in my head about Leshwi and her current malen body.  I love that she remains "she" to literally everyone, not only other fused who have known her for centuries, but also her servants, who can see the body is malen, and people who have ONLY EVER SEEN HER in that malen body, e.g., Kaladin.  How did THAT play out, exactly?  Do fused as disembodied souls exercise control over which singer body they take?  If so, do some care more about gender than others?  Would, say, Lezian the Pursuer Defeated One (were he to come back again) be equally satisfied with a femalen body to inhabit?  And what are the limits to which their soul can re-mold that new body?  But I really love how Brandon very naturally worked into the story a character inhabiting a malen body - which needs to be shaved - yet is still unquestionably SHE to everyone.

Kaladin has seen Leshwi in multiple different bodies. I think the first time we see her in this book Kal comments that he can always recognize her regardless of which new body she inhabits. (The implication being that he's killed her multiple times?) Makes me wonder if just the first time he saw Leshwi she were female, or if she had to stop mid-fight and explain to him that she is in fact femalen, regardless of whatever body she happens to occupy

On 12/31/2020 at 5:22 AM, Proletariat said:

It's worth noting that they don't need mateform in order to reproduce or form interpersonal bonds. Even as enslaved Parshmen they had children, and there were bonded pairs. The forms allow for specific forms of specialisation, but it doesn't mean that other forms aren't capable of similar functions. Also we don't know what other forms have been brought into being for the Listeners now - there could even be something specific like loveform, tbh.

Apparently, the ability to have children is limited to dullform and mateform. In one of the Venli flashbacks she says "Hiding in one of these shelters wouldn't allow her to adopt mateform, which was the sole transformation they did regularly. No one wanted to go back to dullform, after all." In another flashback it's explained that "Children needed no form, and were vibrant without one - but if they didn't adopt a form upon puberty in their seventh or eighth year, they would be trapped in dullform instead. That form was, essentially, an inferior version of mateform."

On 12/30/2020 at 7:08 PM, Lunu’anaki said:

I never got the vibe that singers didn't have romantic feelings outside of mate form. In fact, I think Venli specifies that she was kind of the odd-one-out for being aromantic in a RoW flashback. I could have misinterpreted it though...

"[Venli's] mother had smiled when she'd asked, explaining that few ever intended to adopt mateform. She acted as if it were simply something that happened, that an urge overtook you, or you sat too close to the exit during a storm -  then poof, the next thing you knew, you'd become a silly idiot looking to breed."

Eshonai also describes mateform as "silly," so I don't think it's fair to say as of yet that Venli was particularly the odd one out.

On 12/31/2020 at 1:48 PM, mathiau said:

And where is it implied Rlain is gay in mateform? I remember he said weird thing happened when he was in mateform, but he also felt weird in when he first got into warform (and was the only one to) so I'd be extremely disappointed if it was just "I find males hot"

When Rlain considers "rebuilding" the listener race with Venli: "The idea nauseated him for multiple reasons. For one, the times he'd tried mateform himself, things hadn't gone the way he - or anyone really - had expected." Seems to me like the implication is that he was attracted to other men.

I couldn't find anything about Rlain feeling weird in warform, apart from him feeling uncomfortable wearing it around humans as it made him "look like the enemy." Do you remember which book/chapter that was?

1 hour ago, Scout_Fox said:

Yess tru, tru. If you look on Google the earlier spelling in French was "coronel" so I can see "kernel" a tiny bit better from that but who's the genius who decided the R should be swapped for an L? English be mad confuzzling sometimes

R and L are actually more similar than most people think, at least when it comes to pronunciation. Here's a 3 minute video by Tom Scott on a similar topic. His Language Files videos are pretty good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld3A3QCpXd4

57 minutes ago, Knight of Iron said:

It wasn’t announced or anything, but using the internet wayback machine we can see that very recently the Oxford Dictionary on their website changed the word “bigot” from something like “someone who is intolerant of other peoples opinions” to “someone who is unreasonably or obstinately attached to a belief.” And many feel that’s targeting Christians, among others, because to them religion is unreasonable and people who believe in such things are stubborn. 

As someone who doesn't consider religion to be unreasonable, really? I agree that the new definition is not quite as good of a match for how I use the term, but Oxford has to describe how a planet's worth of people are using a particular word. For that matter, I'd probably change the old definition myself if given the chance. Language is fuzzy, and I can't help but feel that you're reaching a little