Wandering Shade

On 10/3/2023 at 9:03 AM, therunner said:

It kinda is, you can achieve the same effect with weighted shoes.
Far cheaper option than using God Metal.

Maybe its a fancy Ironmind that doesn't increase your own personal mass but instead your clothing and the air around you. That would make you feel heavier without any strength increase.

Ambition or Invention are my personal theories.

Even if the planet's Investiture isn't Ambition, I think the Cinderhearts are Ambition-based Investiture.

16 minutes ago, Firesong said:

Fair, sometimes people misread things based on other things they heard. 

I can see how you would see it that way, either could be right. This feels like one of the things Brandon would actively refuse to answer, he likes avoiding giving a definitive answer to the nature of Cognitive Shadows in terms of "are they actually the person", and on the nature of souls and the Beyond and all of that. He doesn't want to ever answer a lot of those questions, so that characters in-world can have whatever interpretation they want on "is there an afterlife" and "are cognitive shadows copies or the actual person", and not be inherently wrong about it. 

Yeah, he might not give an answer if asked. Then again, if you try to leave out the idea of "is the Cognitive Shadow actually the person or not" and just ask "Did Yumi's Cognitive Shadow fully break down and Nikaro remade it from the leftover Investiture, or did he interrupt that process and the Yumi at the end of the book is the same Yumi Cognitive Shadow at the start?" then we might get an answer.

I suppose the answer sorta depends on your definition of a Cognitive Shadow dissolving/dying. Do you mean that the Investiture is no longer clumped together into a single form, or do you mean the Investiture fully lost the Shadow's Memory and Identity? If the first one is what defines a Cognitive Shadow's death, then it depends on the timeline of events, how fast Nikaro got there. If its the second, then according to your own explanation of what Nikaro did, Yumi's Cognitive Shadow never died at the end of the book.

20 hours ago, Stormform said:

I think it was like what shallan did in the battle of thaylen field where she gave her lightweavings weight, but more complex. Remember when shallan attached the lightweaving to pattern? Hoid probably did that to design but attaching different pieces to differentangles so when design moves slightly on the ground it moves the body in different ways.

I think that's exactly it.

2 minutes ago, Firesong said:

How is it cynical at all? I am not saying she is a puppet, where did you get that idea? She is still definitely Yumi. I am actually kinda confused. 

I was saying that she dissolved, but her Investiture still had remaining Identity and Connection, and due to the nature of the Shroud, and his Connection to her, he was able to use his painting to call forth the Investiture that used to be her, and reformed it back into the same shape. I say she died as we had her dissolving away and losing awareness described to us and we saw it.

 And a Cognitive Shadow is essentially defined by that, Investiture taking the same shape as a soul in order to keep someone alive. 

That is how I made that interpretation.  

Goootcha gotcha. Sorry, I was projecting some opinions that I strongly disagree with that I heard elsewhere onto you. My apologies.

Then our biggest point of disagreement is that you think Yumi's Cognitive Shadow fully dissolved. I think her physical form dissolved and her Cognitive Shadow was beginning to get unraveled but that process never finished. The other Nightmares dissolved faster because they weren't nearly as Invested as she was, so it would take longer for her to fully unravel. Nikaro got to her first and the moment he started painting her that process was stopped and being reversed.

So, he didn't recreate her Cognitive Shadow, her Cognitive Shadow was never gone in the first place.

On 7/2/2023 at 5:15 PM, Firesong said:

Essentially, she still *did* die, and this is essentially a copy. A Cognitive Shadow of a Cognitive Shadow, in a sense. Something allowed only by the very specific circumstances that they found themselves in. 

I agreed with everything up until you said this lmao

I don't think Nikaro created a copy of Yumi out of the freefloating Investiture of the Shroud and his memory/Perception of Yumi. An Investiture Puppet, as I've heard it described elsewhere. I think that's a deeply cynical way of looking at things which is not supported by the text.

What Nikaro did was, I think, basically the same thing that Ishar did in his Spren experiments. Using his Connection to her and his Perception skills, he pulled her from the Cognitive to the Physical and there was enough freefloating nearby Investiture in the Shroud to make a body for her. The difference was that the bodies of the Spren pulled by Ishar had no functional biology, so they died seconds after entering the PR. But Yumi's body is human, so once its in the Physical Realm, it just works.

I don't think that he created a new Cognitive Shadow (Nikaro is not that Invested lmao), I think her Cognitive Shadow (which hadn't faded away yet, thus the timelimit) was pulled into the Physical Realm and given a body.

I feel like Radiant Soulcasting requiring specific gemstones for the different essences is just a leftover bit of lore from WoK Prime that Brandon forgot wasn't true anymore, and/or changed his mind about.

Or he's just being cheeky about the fact that Shallan is limited in Soulcasting with her bond to Testament, and that has to operate with gemstones in the same way that "fabrial" Soulcasters (calling them that because they really dont seem like traditional fabrials at all) need specific gemstones to make specific essences.

On 2/23/2023 at 5:18 PM, alder24 said:

Well, big Mistborn spoiler:

  Reveal hidden contents

Chaos (paraphrased)

What would have happened if Ruin did get the atium? Yeah, the world is destroyed, but how does Ruin "absorb" the atium so he can utilize the power?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

He would metabolize it, just like the normal people have to do. However, if he did get it he would then be able to destroy the world.

Ancient 17S Q&A (May 1, 2010)

 

Another Mistborn spoiler:

The name of the Sibling seriously does feel like its just to add mystery and confusion, to make it harder to guess the truth.

5 hours ago, Argenti said:

All Rosharians presumably view themselves as Cultivation and Honor's children. "The Sibling" is from our point of view, not the shards.

This is not an idea I've heard before and I really like it! Don't know if I agree, but I like it a lot

2 hours ago, Marabout said:

Probably just a wording mistake but he says “most” of the Knight Radiant Spren are from Honor and Cultivation.

It would be … interesting if that isn’t just a slip of the tongue.

I'd say its not a wording mistake but a word emphasis mistake.

I read it as a "Most of the Knight Radiant Spren are from Honor and Cultivation," meaning that most of the spren are made of both Honor and Cultivation, with the Stormfather and Nightwatcher being the obvious exceptions as they are only Honor and Cultivation respectively. But yeah, as @alder24 said, he could also be referring to the Enlightened Spren.

On 2/28/2023 at 5:59 PM, Harrycrapper said:

I'm not completely sure how they behave when they're unbonded, but the fact that Szeth was able to train on all the ones the Shin had seems to indicate they give Surgebinding abilities regardless of whether they're bonded or not. Either that, or there was some sort of rotation where they switched off, though I can't fathom why they would do that. I suspect bonding it is a similar process to bonding one of the deadeye Shardblades, just speculation on my part though. As for Bridge 4, none of them bonded the thing, that's why it was able to be stolen like it was. Simply holding it granted the Windrunner Surges and the ability to draw in Stormlight

We know this is not true. You have to be bonded to the Honorblade to use its powers. Simply holding it does nothing, its just a Blade.

We even know that Bridge 4 was bonded to the blade, because they were hiding it by having it de-summoned. That requires being bonded to it. Bonding to an Honorblade is not hard at all, from what we've seen. We watched Rock do it, it took him seconds. It was stolen by killing the person who was had been bonded to it, Eth btw, and then taking it off his corpse.

On 3/3/2023 at 10:05 AM, Quantus said:

It's not that Heralds "Dont Where Plate" (necessarily), it's that Honorblades dont Grant Plate.  Or Squires, but that's another topic.

To quickly divert to this topic, I think that's relatively simple.

The Honorblades were made before Plate and Squires were thought of, and they weren't altered to provide them after Plate and Squires were around.

On 3/3/2023 at 1:43 PM, Heilven said:

I never even thought about it, but I think you are right. However, I imagine that the whole emotional allomancy part comes with a caveat, that being that someone sufficiently powerful could *probably* push through it. I think this would be a ludicrous amount of power, similar to what would be needed to push or pull on shardplate, but still, I think honor would qualify. Meaning I don't think they would stop being connected to Honor while wearing shardplate, but maybe the connection weakens? It could be painful or otherwise uncomfortable, which would certainly push them away from it.

Oh actually I though about it and I think this is unlikely. If shardplate actively resists all investiture, radiants would have a hard time using it since they wouldn't be able to breath in stormlight from outside of the plate. And they wouldn't be able to lash things, or use just about any of their powers while wearing plate, since they would need to get stormlight from in them into something else. I'm not saying I'm definitely right, but I think it's worth a consideration that perhaps the wearer can control what investiture can get through and what can't. So an allomancer couldn't push on them with emotional allomancy, but honor could give investiture through plate. Or maybe not, since radiants clearly don't have active control, we know a windrunner can't lash a fellow radiant through plate. So maybe I just don't know.

Shardplate resists all foreign Investiture, even Stormlight if its coming from someone else. They can still breathe in Stormlight, but that seems like a purposefully engineered exception that wouldn't apply to the way that Heralds gain Investiture from Honor. So a Herald wearing Plate would partially resist their Investiture gain from Honor, and that's not worth it when physical wounds mean literally nothing to them already. Plate isn't giving them any benefits they don't already have, aside from a resistance to Lashings and such which they might have just from being a Herald, we don't know.

3 minutes ago, in Truth,watcher of tv said:

On a side note, I don’t know if Jasnah has GPS abilities, if you’re referring to the WoR epilogue, she was just in the Cognitive Realm where she would have been able to see a group of souls in the distance indicating a village.

I've never heard this theory about Jasnah being able to just see where the souls were in the Cognitive. Everyone's always assumed it was a Resonance, but that makes so much sense, I can't believe I hadn't heard about or thought about it myself before.

27 minutes ago, in Truth,watcher of tv said:

I figure the Truthwatchers can see the past. Illumination being the Surge of revelation, Progression suggesting time, and prediction being “of the enemy”, it makes sense that they would be able look into the past as a way to gather and verify information, especially since they don’t seem to have literal truth powers.
Renarin does something like this when he creates an allomantic gold style shadow of Moash. I imagine a Truthwatcher could create illusions that play out past events (yes, I want an Urithiru noir detective novella).

I like that. That the gold-shadow-thing that Renarin did to Moash wasn't a totally weird and out of the blue thing, it was an expansion on the natural past-seeing Resonance of Truthwatchers. To be honest, though, I don't agree that Truthwatchers have a past-sight Resonance, I agree with Longshot that they have, in a much more minor way, a form of Future-Sight.

This is a theory I've been kicking around in the back of my head for a little while. It takes the WoBs about Nightblood's creation (Endowment's involvement and Ruin's Investiture) and mixes them with some timeline analysis to get a final result and hopefully partially answers the question of Nightblood's creation.

To summarize in a single sentence: Nightblood was made as Ruin died.

I think that Endowment waited until she knew that Ruin was about to die, then pushed Shashara to make Nightblood. She took some of Ruin's Investiture, momentarily free of any Vessel's control, and mixed it into the Breaths used to make Nightblood, resulting in the sword we all know and love, rather than a normal Awakened Sword like Vivenna's Blade.

How do I know these events line up? Info from Warbreaker, Stormlight, and Mistborn Era 2. We know that Era 2 starts 341 years after the Catacendre. Era 2 takes place between Stormlight 5 and 6. Warbreaker takes place before SA, probably between 10 and 20 Rosharan years (extrapolated from the fact that Vasher trained Adolin) though we don't have an exact date. The Manywar was ~300 years before Warbreaker, though again we don't have an exact date. Adding the extra 10% from Rosharan years and given that we also don't know how long a Nalthian year is, its possible that the Manywar was happening during Mistborn Era 1. Especially if the Nightblood book adds some extra years in there or if the Manywar over 300 years before Warbreaker.

What do you all think? Reasonable? Crazy?

On 7/18/2019 at 8:21 AM, The Sovereign said:

53.) Denth says that Vasher's use of the name 'Vasher' is a joke on his part. What is the joke?

According to a WoB that I'll link when I find it again, "Vasher" is the name of someone they both knew.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/41/#e7138

Quote

Herowannabe's wife

How come it's a joke that he goes by Vasher?

Brandon Sanderson

Umm, heh. That's-- So Denth says it’s a joke because the name Vasher is someone they knew whose name he has appropriated.

Herowannabe's wife

Will we find out who that was?

Brandon Sanderson

Maybe, we'll see if I can work it in. But it is a joke because-- yeah. Denth is not amused.

Firefight release party (Jan. 5, 2015)

Wax being made into a Mini-Mistborn by inhaling Lerasium during his experiment is something that has almost no impact on the plot of TLM. All it really did was provide an avenue for Harmony to make Wayne a Mistborn to use Duralumin in the climax. Sure you could say that it made things easier for Wax before that point, but the cases where his Mistborn abilities showed up felt more like Brandon engineering minor difficulties where being a Mini-Mistborn helped and almost all of those could have been avoided.

So why do it at all? Just to inject some extra Allomantic potential into the gene-pool? Just because it's a likely result of the experiment?

I think I have an idea and it relates to the fact that Wax wasn't the only injection of extra Allomancy in TLM. The Community also existed.

The Community didn't technically add more Investiture in the way that Wax becoming a Mini-Mistborn did, but it was designed to concentrate the Allomancy from all those people. And we know, for a fact, that kids were born in the Community. If a number is given, I don't remember it. So that's two different ways to increase the Allomantic potential which both arrived during TLM, and don't forget the conversation between Sazed and Kelsier about needing stronger Allomancers in the future. I don't think all that's a coincidence.

I think that there will be a character in Era 3 who is a natural Mistborn, rather than one made via Hemalurgy like an Inquisitor. And that if we follow their family tree back, they're descended from Wax and the Community. Would this be a Mistborn with equal strength to Final Empire Mistborn? No, but the character would still be a Mistborn.

Now, could this just be to offset the lower Allomantic potential in the Southern Continent and make it so that in Era 3 or 4 we've reached an Allomantic equilibrium across all of Scadrial that is roughly the same as Era 2's equilibrium? Maybe, but Kel's epilogue seems like its setting up for Kel and maybe Saze to do something about that across the planet, rather than the more personal nature of Wax and the Community.

1 hour ago, cometaryorbit said:

Stormlight as a light source

While Surgebinding might be end-positive, using Stormlight in spheres/gems for illumination seems end-neutral (ish: it's not exactly a 'magic system'). As pointed out on the Perfect Gemstones thread, while generally the Stormlight leaks out of the gemstone, it isn't really being "used up" or converted to energy. The loss of Stormlight is just leakage due to flaws in the gemstone - since perfect gems don't lose Stormlight but still glow.

A mark glows 'almost as bright as a candle' and a broam 'with the light of several candles'. As Stormlight lighting doesn't emit heat, unlike actual candles which output most of their energy as heat, this is much less than 1 watt per broam of Stormlight.

That's a good number to have, but its also not exactly helpful. It doesn't tell us how much energy is really in a broam at all, just how much energy that stormlight is producing as light.

4 hours ago, Amira said:

Huh, pretty cool.

Interlude 4:

Turns out Roshar does have Earth-like areas, and that's where the horses and chickens come from. We also learned a bit about Szeth's history. So wait, are Shin and Parshendi the same? I thought the point of sending Szeth to kill Gavilar was to make it clear that the Parshendi killed him, but Szeth is Shin... I feel like I missed something.

Shin and Parshendi are not the same. They're actually from opposite sides of the continent. Shin are from Shinovar which is far to the West, while the Parshendi are from the Shattered Plains which is the far East, though not the farthest east.

19 hours ago, Amira said:

Am I close?

I liked the part where Kaladin realized just giving the bridgemen their lives wasn't enough; they also needed something to live *for*.

You're definitely close with some of it! lol

Yeah, that's something that really speaks to me too. You don't just need to be alive, you need some reason to be alive. For some people, just being alive is reason enough, but others need more.

On 6/2/2022 at 6:32 AM, Treamayne said:

I don't think Savantism is involved. As Raboniel explains - humans (not native to Roshar) leak light. However Singers (native to Roshar) do not leak - so as long as the investiture stays inside the body (Lashing yourself to float, Melding Axi to the floor), it isn't consumed - except when spent to "change" such as healing. That's why the Pursuer uses so much light he can only use the Surge of Transportation three times before needing more light (light consumed to leave a husk and move elsewhere). Same with the Masked ones, where light is consumed in the illusion; but for a Heavenly One, light is only consumed when lashing something/someone else, using a reverse lashing, or healing.

Heavenly Ones can't use Reverse Lashings, but otherwise yes I 100% agree that its mostly a thing of Singers being better Light holders.

On 6/8/2022 at 7:31 AM, Jofwu said:

But as far as I could find in a quick search, this is the ONLY time that "desert" has been used in Stormlight Archive.

Hmmm. That's very true. I don't think its a typo though, if only because I'm not sure what other word would be used in that place.

4 hours ago, Jofwu said:

Oathbringer chapter 68

Do they have deserts on Roshar? I would think highstorms mean they don't have true deserts. Is it a word in their vocabulary? This is a Shallan PoV.

Though maybe they would just use the term in a relative sense, kind of like the seasons are used. And she is getting a trippy visions looking into Wit's eyes here so maybe some weirdness is reasonable.

 

They totally have deserts on Roshar. Its just not deserts as per our world's definition, which relates to the amount of rainfall. On Roshar, a desert is just an area of land which doesn't stay wet for very long after a highstorm is over. I think most of the Makabak region counts for that.

6 hours ago, Duxredux said:

I think after I read Emperor's Soul, it made me wonder more and more what it was like for Brandon to finish The Wheel of Time. Shai delving into Ashravan's past, figuring out why he did what he did, reading his personal notes, then trying to recreate Ashravan as best she could and then tweaking things here and there to make her work into a better whole... that seems pretty similar to what Brandon did by looking through Robert Jordan's notes and trying to recreate an entire cast and world to match how people remembered The Wheel of Time. He probably took character sketches or snippets to Jordan's associates to see if what he wrote was familiar to the original work. For me, that added layer made Emperor's Soul a remarkable book. It's also ironically a commentary for the writer attempting to create realistic characters, but we probably don't think about that because Shai and Gaotona feel real. There's so many layers to how you can look at the book, and even down to the way that Shai perceives the world and considers the ramifications of everything happening outside of her little room to genuine wisdom in how you treat people or think of people, all of those make it an amazing book in my opinion. 

Wow. I never noticed that before, but you're totally right.

Of course you'd say this Sadeas lol

But yeah, you're not wrong at all. Jasnah thinks she's hot rust, and so does everyone else, but she makes mistakes and has issues, especially with emotional things.

Hmmm. Based on the number of "My feelings are complicated" I feel like I should've taken that choice out to get a more accurate picture of who likes and does like.