AquaRegia

I have a BS and an MS in chemistry. It was actually my nickname in college... I was a big fan of 3 HCl : HNO3. But I am aware of the Sleep Token song as well.

hahahahaha yes I've been out of school long enough that that never occurred to me.

Nothing super important here, and I'm sure the overlap between Sanderfans and baseball fans may be small (or just me LOL), but I'm watching a Miami Marlins game and their new uniforms are giving some big hion line vibes:

Oh, absolutely. I've never even looked at those forum subsections. I stick to Cosmere, Coppermind, Brandon, and a few General topics that catch my eye, like math/science, puzzles, fountain pens, and this one!

Simply because most "modern" social media involves images, or video. If I - a 58 year-old dude - am on snapchat or instagram engaging with the content posted by (or interacting with) 17 year-old girls, a) that's creepy AF and b) my wife is going to have some opinions. In a text forum like this, we talk about literature, or religion, or philosophy, or fountain pens, and the age/gender/appearance issue is pretty much eliminated. I imagine there might be other social media platforms where people mix freely and it's not weird, but I don't know of any.

Oathbringer, the Battle of Thaylen Field. Dalinar: "Do you have a weapon?" Lift: "Nope. Can't read." I can't explain it, but in a series just chock full of perfect moments, THIS ONE sticks with me more than any other.

I would like to welcome Jult to the 17th Shard and give proper mad respect to this absolute storming masterwork of understatement: I have died, become a cognitive shadow, and passed into the Beyond.

I think perhaps you have already answered your own question lol

I'd really love to participate in this discussion, but it's practically impossible due to it being in the "No WaT" antispoiler forum, and it's hard for me to remember now what parts of Shallan's story I know from WaT and what I knew before. I'm not a system, but my wife is, so I do have some direct experience of how things can go. I don't think any of the following observations are spoilery in terms of plot, but I'll cover them up just in case. **POSSIBLE MINOR SPOILERS REGARDING SHALLAN'S INTERNAL REALITY IN WaT BELOW**

I am not sure I'm qualified to propose a full definition of the concept of "art"... but I do feel strongly that any definition must include EMOTIONAL RESPONSE. Art is something people do to produce an emotional response. Said response may be in an audience, or it may only occur in the creator; it may be pleasant or unpleasant; it may be intentional or accidental. I'd argue any activity which a) entails no emotional investment and b) provokes no emotional response should not be classified as art.

I still only own one pen: I like it a lot; it lives at work, since I have a (mostly) private space and I do most of my writing there. I have found recently that on some office paper, the ink spreads to a disturbing degree, while on other sheets of (as far as I can tell) the same paper, it stays nice and tight. Is it possible that humidity/moisture content will affect how paper takes ink?

I’m venerable in one sense: I graduated from high school in 1985. Not so much in the 17S sense - I joined this forum in 2021. I have enjoyed Sanderson’s works for many years; I think I started looking things up on the Coppermind during the pandemic and eventually that led me here. I immediately loved the feeling of community, the enthusiasm for the Cosmere, and the depth of knowledge demonstrated by the folks here. It’s a very welcoming, positive, and fun ecosystem, reminding me of some of the game forums I was part of during the infancy of online BBSs way back in the late 1900s. I got a chuckle out of because that’s the part of the Shard that I loved the best in the beginning! As a science nerd, I really respect and appreciate Brandon’s worldbuilding and hard magic systems, and I really dig exploring the ways the magic “rules” can interact with real physics to generate cool story mechanics. I also love discussions about characters - motivation, emotional reality/believability, values, and consistency. Like @Treamayne, I much prefer explaining and understanding what's already happened, rather than predicting future events. I enjoyed being a (very small) part of the 17S puzzlehunt team for a few years; unfortunately, the mechanics of using Discord seem to evolve too quickly for me to keep up. Every time I think I have it figured out, something changes and I’m bewildered again. I agree that Discord in general is a bit chaotic and distracting, and I much prefer text. I also appreciate the fountain pen writers topic here! One of the great features of a text-based forum is that the age of the participants doesn’t have to be a natural barrier; anyone can participate in any conversation, at any level, with any other users, regardless of the actual calendar ages involved. I’ve found that I tend to assume anyone I’m interacting with to be a young adult (say, 25), and I’m occasionally surprised to find that someone is instead 15, or 60. Certainly in other kinds of social media, it’s weird or even creepy for old guys like me to be chatting with 17 year olds, and I agree that young people benefit from having their own spaces in which to interact without “old heads” butting in. As the years have passed, my participation in the 17S forums has declined, not so much because of anything here, but because I’ve been somewhat disappointed in the recent books. Other than that, I don’t think my “ways of engaging” with the Shard have changed, mostly due to the fact that I was already old when I joined. I don’t expect to “outgrow” or permanently leave this forum, I simply check in less frequently and spend less time. I think it’s likely that your experience has more to do with just how much a person changes between ages 15 and 30 than with anything else.

I think it's extremely likely that the "golden-haired" people described in TLM are the Iriali. The appearance of chouta in the novel clearly supports the idea of increasing numbers of people moving from Roshar to Scadrial. I suggest not getting overly analytical about the detailed timing of events; keep in mind that what we have here is MAGICAL FANTASY. There is an almost endless number of ways BS can handwave a supernatural explanation for things being the way he wants them to be for narrative purposes. Everything we know of the Iriali indicates that they have, each time, moved en masse from one land to the next when the time came.

I assume that what @Nitpicking means is that once his physical body was dead, Rashek didn't attempt to cling to Cognitive-Shadowhood like Kelsier did. He showed no inclination to stick around any further, no desire to continue influencing events. He asked neither mercy nor forgiveness. He simply accepted his time was done and went to the Beyond like a civilized person.

I admit that I interpreted this entire topic through the lens of real-world social context, which may have been irrelevant and/or unfair. Sanderson has stated on multiple occasions that his stories are, in fact, intended to explore real-life human social choices, so I hope you can understand my position... however, the OP did explicitly try to rule out race and gender discrimination from the discussion from the beginning. I should have respected that. It's also true that what I saw as an implicit moral argument may not have been intended as such by the OP. I'm sorry for any discomfort or hurt feelings my strong words may have caused. That is definitely not in keeping with the spirit of the 17th Shard. @bmcclure7, none of your points are unreasonable. I lost sight of the fact that the topic title is "How do you feel...", and all of us are undeniably entitled to our feelings. I let my strong feelings about certain things overrule my ability to accept that other people can feel differently. I apologize. I don't think it will be useful for me to continue participating in this topic. More importantly, I'll be leaving tomorrow for a vacation (somewhere WARMER, thank the gods) and probably won't be around much for the next month, anyway. Peace, fellow Sharders!

Thanks for asking. I'm happy to try. First of all, I feel it's important to point out (as others correctly have) that in real life, Homo Sapiens is, at present, the only known sentient species. The only kind of "dating" we've ever had to consider is between people. Good so far? I firmly believe that in the vast majority of fiction, nonhuman characters are intended by the writers to be seen as "people", at least on some level. I'd argue it's impossible for a human audience to empathize or relate to a character that's completely nonhuman in every way. There may be examples of this, but they are the exception. In the Cosmere specifically, I'm 100% certain that kandra, singers, dragons, etc. are absolutely intended by Sanderson to be PEOPLE. If you think this is a point that's debatable, I'd love to hear your arguments. Morality, in its simplest form, is an attempt to label specific things "right" or "wrong". Many people derive their morality from religious teachings or other external authority, and strongly believe that certain acts are inherently "right" or "wrong" because god says so. Such feelings about the morality of sexual acts are especially pervasive... but they are neither consistent nor universal, nor, in many cases, are they particularly rational. Many human cultures have had taboos against specific sexual behaviors; I live in the U.S., I'll draw from the history I know best. For much of U.S. history, sex between black people and white people was considered "perversion" (in other words, "morally wrong" or "sick"); in 1960, interracial marriage was still forbidden by law in 31 U.S. states. As recently as 2015, states had laws forbidding sex between people of the same gender. Many here still believe same-sex marriage is "immoral", and it's common to hear such people use the word "sick" to describe their feelings about such relationships. There is only one reason I can think of for an individual to describe someone else's consensual sexual or romantic behavior as "sick": that individual holds that behavior to be immoral. This is the backdrop against which I view the initial post in this topic. Despite the OP's insistence that it's not about race or gender, every reader is invited to agree that a human-singer romance makes them "feel sick". We are further encouraged to imagine "dating a sapient ape" to support the idea that this is something we should find to be "sick". (I guess the OP never saw Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston does indeed kiss a sapient orangutan - a scene which was clearly intended to be touching, not sick-making.) The OP seemed to assume, at least initially, that a majority of readers would share their morality and agree with the sick-feeling and the implied immorality, and was surprised and confused when basically no one did. I admit I might be wrong about the OP making a moral judgement... but it sure seems to fit everything they said. Again, why else would loving behavior between two people make anyone feel sick?

You seem to be a fluent native English speaker... I'm shocked you did not get the "wax and wane" pun immediately! My guess is that Nohadon did indeed "do something" - hid some stowaway aspect of himself, with memories, in Honor's visions somehow. I agree Brandon is never going to part the curtain on the Beyond. I'm confident there has never been, nor will there ever be, any communication or Connection which crosses the barrier between the Three Realms and the Beyond.

Rust and Ruin, you storming nailed it! *bows down in reverence*

I just want to thank you for your well-thought, well-written post. I wish I could give it more than one like. I'm straight, but STORMS am I tired of hearing complaints about "woke" this and "shoehorned" that and "shoving it in our faces" the other. We swim, every minute of every day, in cis/het romance and sexuality... but include the tiniest smattering of queerness in our entertainment and civilization as we know it is collapsing? Among the many things Brandon is trying to teach us: grow up and just let people be themselves for a change. Interesting. What contributions would you say Rock's marriage, or Sebarial's girlfriend, made to the actual story? Yes, but my point was that we got not enough viewpoint from Dalinar and Szeth, two of the most important characters for the whole 5-book arc, even as they were in the midst of making literally world-shattering decisions. I agree with @Leuthie, @MagicMaggot and others who suggest that 1) their character arcs were basically already done, and that 2) there was too much ground to cover in this one book, such that "the outline" just didn't get fleshed out as well as it had in previous novels. Both excellent points. I got so used to riding around inside the main character's heads, seeing everything through their eyes and hearing every detail of their (tormented) thoughts, I felt shut out for much of WaT.

We are told (by Ishar, not a super reliable witness) that Jezrien's Honorblade has been "corrupted" by Odium. Not clear what exactly that means, but I agree with you that as far as we know, Vyre (formerly Moash) has it, and likely still will in future SA novels. Side note: it's "Oathpact", not "pack".

I don't see how one can argue this in good faith. The topic started with the OP saying "You can’t tell me that didn’t make you feel sick." This is clearly an appeal to some hoped-for universal human morality, in which some acts are morally right, and others are (to all "right" thinking people) obviously morally wrong. We're not talking about illness or food poisoning... under what banner other than morality would someone else's sexual behavior make you feel sick? This is literally the very argument you give in your next statement! Appeal to the norm is a common logical fallacy. https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-Normality The attempt to equate "normal" with "good" (or "abnormal" with "bad") is a typical attempt to support some hoped-for morality. The pre-Catacendre koloss are an interesting case which slipped my mind. We know they are “human” in the sense that they are made from human souls. Are they sentient? After WoA I’d have said no, but Vin’s interactions with Human in HoA make it less clear. They seem, like the slaveform singers, to be in a state of magically-induced semidisability, unable to fully experience their sentience, plus, there's the fact that a Mistborn can take mental control of them...? Seems very unlikely for them to participate in an ethical relationship. Post-Catacendre, however, the existence of Tarson and other "koloss-blooded" people certainly indicates interspecies mixing and, presumably, ethical romantic relationships.

Totally fair, I'm sorry for including you in the "trying to decide for everyone" group. My apologies.

My opinion is that anything which spoils the big reveal at the end of The Bands of Mourning should be avoided. That scene - Wax accessing the metalmind containing Kelsier's memories - was the single coolest moment in the Cosmere so far. For that reason, I would never suggest anyone read Secret History before Mistborn Era 2. That said, it is undeniably true that things are getting messy in terms of spoilers. I don't think there is any way to avoid them except strict publication order.

Without spoilering too much (despite this being the Cosmere Spoiler forum LOL), everything we have seen indicates that even after giving up a Dawnshard, one retains this "feature", what Nomad refers to as his Torment.

I like it. Brandon has declined in the past (storm him) to do the things that I like, so I'm not prepared to bet money on it, but you make a good sensible argument. Not sure they qualify, given what we know of Sliverdom. Kelsier is a Sliver of Preservation, yes? I think you have to hold all (or a majority) of the Power for a time.. just sipping from a Perpendicularity may not be enough.