Returned

In the duel with Ruthar, Adolin was specifically damaging the Plate in a way that would be slow, distributed across different sections of the armor, and hard to notice overtly, especially avoiding blows that would cause it to break. He wanted to humiliate Ruthar by dragging the fight out in a boring way and showing his contempt for his opponent; it was death by a thousand cuts while showing that Ruthar couldn't touch him. It was a particular circumstance and a particular approach meant to be slow, so I don't think that it's a good measure of the rate of Stormlight loss for Plate generally. Anyways, I'm not suggesting that the Plate would lose Stormlight at any particular rate, only that it has a weakness related to its supply of fuel and so a strategy for beating it doesn't need to rely on shattering it directly and immediately. I don't see any reason to think that a pewterarm could only land 2-3 good blows, nor why they couldn't drag the fight out as long as it took for the Stormlight to be consumed or lost (provided they had enough pewter, which is obviously an important consideration). Draining Stormlight is clearly a viable tactic when dealing with Plate in at least some circumstances (Alethi soldiers and Singers know about it), if not an ideal one, and it might be the best one available to a pewterarm. The focus on "a pewter Misting can't necessarily shatter a section of Plate very easily" may or may not be true, but doesn't cover the whole array of options available to them, and to the extent that it is true it's obviously not a good strategy to pursue and so not one that a successful combatant would use. It's a reason the fight would be harder for the Misting than for other Invested people but not a reason they would necessarily lose.

Good lines like this seem like they'd tie to motivations and perspectives on the world more than the tools available, can you give a bit more background on the character?

Pewterarms specifically are, though most pewter mistings lean hard into the strength aspect of the metal by bulking up. Ham talks about this explicitly as a choice many make (and a foolish one). Pewter enhances strength, durability, speed, dexterity, endurance, balance, and poise. The last two are what we would probably be talking about when we mention grace. I don't think there is a single, named pewter-burner in Mistborn who doesn't make excellent use of the enhanced grace of pewter, but I also don't think that there is a single nameless pewter Misting who does. So maybe we should qualify pewter Misting a bit to indicate a person who already can make good use of those aspects of pewter. It's easy to focus on the magic of Allomancy and not pay as much attention to the fact that it enhances the user, and pay less attention to the user's actual abilities and traits. The issue is that dead Plate heals by drawing extra Stormlight from the gems that power it. The Plate is already almost entirely dependent on the Stormlight fueling it to function, so forcing it to consume its fuel more quickly to fix cracks is almost as much of a problem as damaging sections enough to break them. Once the Plate is drained it becomes a liability because it stops the wearer from doing much of anything, and it's a progressive problem until then (it becomes sluggish when the Stormlight reserves get low enough). That's the biggest element of Adolin's full disadvantaged duel. That's where I think that a pewter Misting has an opportunity. I still might not bet on one to beat a Shardbearer but their enhanced mobility gives them the opportunity to avoid being hit, their enhanced strength gives them an opportunity to damage Plate by throwing things or hitting it with a melee weapon (or similar), and they don't need to overwhelm the Plate at its peak power. They just need to outlast its Stormlight reserves, speeding up its loss with opportunistic strikes, until the Plate becomes slow enough that the Misting's extra mobility becomes dominant. Once the Plate locks up, the fight is over. Pewterarm vs. Shardbearer isn't an overwhelming force contest, it's an endurance contest, and with a skilled Misting that has a decent pewter reserve the contest isn't a foregone conclusion. I'd still hate to be the Misting forced into that situation though-- even if they can win it's still a difficult and incredibly dangerous scenario for them.

It doesn't even have to be that expensive. We see in an Adolin chapter that dedicated rope attacks to trip a Shardbearer are effective enough to be worth attempting. A self-moving rope could do the same, perhaps more effectively, even potentially dodging strikes from a Blade (though that sounds like a tricky Command). A strong enough material might even be able to crack the Plate. But any Awakened object that can compress or shape itself to fit through the eye slit could potentially get inside the armor and kill or blind the Shardbearer, or possibly find and pry out the gemstones that power the armor. You could probably get most of the Breaths back afterwards in that case.

Meh, we've probably hit inescapable power saturation already (Radiants hooked up to a firehose of Investiture seemed dominant to me until we got Forged Elantrians and jars of Dor), so I don't know that Allomantic pewter is unworkably powerful. Everyone that counts on Roshar is over 9,000 already and it seems a bit late to worry that pewter is too good. It wasn't enough to save Shan! The power curve has been spiking up so steadily that I think the structure of future works will change rather than the in-world details. It seems like future conflicts will involve restricted access to usable Investiture (so Cosmere demigods have to ration it and/or have reduced capacity to use what is still outrageous power), or we'll just see fewer people with the really impressive powers. I could see the latter being especially relevant to Scadrial since the Allomancy-based technology will be both easy to mass produce and monitor, while individuals with powers will be less so. Ettmetal already provides a handy limitation in this direction. I will be interested to see how the stories develop in this regard as the various Cosmere settings converge more and more.

I don't know if I'd be so absolute about it. I'll agree about the specific advantages of Shardplate over most people, but it does happen that more ordinary people kill Shardbearers. Dalinar defeats soldiers in Plate without any of his own twice (though he does have to use gimmicks to do so, it remains an option; a "fair fight" is not one of the conditions in the OP). I mean, I still know which way I'd bet in a fight between a Shardbearer and a Forger, for example, but the advantages of Plate aren't quite insurmountable.

I think that it wouldn't work for two reasons: Kandra can't have Allomantic powers (absent Hemalurgic spikes), as per Well of Ascension and Shadows of Self. This suggests that they can't just adopt them by imitating an Allomancer or Feruchemist Kandra reproduction, such as it is, only produces Kandra/Mistwraiths as far as we know. I have no idea if reproduction while imitating would be possible, but even if so I would have to think that the offspring would still be Kandra and so could not be Metalborn It seems that Kandra retain their Kandra nature even while imitating (they can still do Kandra things like moving organs around), so they aren't just the person they're imitating despite perfectly reproducing them. Maybe sufficiently skilled Kandra could mimic people well enough to allow for standard, human-style reproduction to get around this? That would have some pretty interesting implications, if so. Now I'm imagining Kandra operating as sentient biolabs, producing all sorts of biologic compounds like insulin and replacement organs, working to help repair people suffering from radiation damage, and even isolating whatever parts of DNA are associated with Metalborn abilities. It's probably for the best they're mostly working for Harmony even without all of that, but even more so with it! Metalborn powers definitely have a spiritual component, given how Hemalurgy works, so even though it's clearly associated with regular DNA (Allomancy and Feruchemy are known to be heritable, reinforced throughout all of the Mistborn books) I don't think that that would be enough to "trick" the powers into returning at full strength.

For a physical disease, it sounds tricky (though I'm sure someone could engineer it, as magic allows for a lot). But a spiritual disease? I think that that could happen. Arguably it did happen to the Parshendi and Heralds, though I would probably not classify it as a disease as much as a single, catastrophic event based on what we currently know. Manipulating Connection to disseminate problems among communities and groups would be incredibly dangerous.

Vasher is interesting in how versatile a character he can be in plot and narrative terms. I feel that he's one of the smartest people active in the Cosmere, one of the most knowledgeable about Investiture (in at least some applications, but it seems like those applications shed a lot of light on other aspects of Investiture and its uses), and he also is willing to go into the field. So I think that he's valuable as, essentially, a consultant that could turbocharge the work of scholars and engineers who are newer to working with Investiture, like Navani and the Terris community on Scadrial. He's also an excellent planner and capable of subtlety, even if that isn't his main mode of action, so he could end up being someone who is pulling strings all over the place on Roshar (or start doing so). He's also really, really good in the field as a fantastic swordsman and all-around fighter, plus his deep experience with Awakening has given him some amazing lateral thinking abilities both in preparation and spontaneously. His biggest issue is that he seems to have withdrawn so much from the world. I'm not sure he knows what he wants very clearly, or why, and is consumed with various regrets that have stacked up over the course of his long existence. The biggest question, to me, about what role he'll play in future stories is what (if anything) spurs him to act instead of languishing in his withdrawal. I feel like when he becomes more active (which is what I expect for him) he's going to return more to his Five Scholars mode: engaging in advanced, applied research to push the boundaries of what Investiture can do in its various manifestations. I think he'll work with Navani in a well-defended place (since he'll be a major and irreplaceable asset to anyone he's working with) to produce knowledge but probably won't pursue things like understanding the nature of the Oathpact or dealing with individuals' traumas and other maladies. Vasher is one of my favorite Cosmere characters and I'm definitely excited to see more of him and how he fits into other storylines. But I think that his biggest contribution to the future is going to be realizing that he is wrong about certain aspects of Nightblood's nature as an Awakened, sentient entity, and that that realization is going to run alongside his death, which will be caused by Nightblood one way or another.

Every time you ask about a power comparison on this forum, Elantrian fans will assume that the Elantrian knows everything about AonDor and therefore has Shard-level capacity to do things-- it's always, always, always an Elantrian who is perfectly expert in the AonDor, or at least perfectly expert in accomplishing whatever is beind asked about. Similar to Feruchemy fans assuming that a Feruchemist always has enough attributes stored to do whatever needs doing with no consideration for how difficult that would be to do. They're hard assumptions to justify in a general way, but you'll always see them here regardless For the record I do agree that even mediocre Elantrians would wipe the floor with a Shardbearer like you describe, as they don't need that much skill or expertise to overwhelm a Shardbearer's advantages. Any Mistborn could also do it (iron/steel + duralumin could potentially crack or fully break Plate, and if Leeching or Nicrobursting could drain the gems then the armor becomes a serious liability for the Shardbearer, but even pewter + duralumin could potentially destroy a breastplate as long as the Mistborn didn't mind liquifying some of their bones in the process). The right Twinborn, like Wax, could do it pretty easily (enhance mass + push metals to shatter Plate). Any Radiant at least potentially has the tools to do it, one way or another. Most Fused could do it. A good Awakener could do it, as described in other posts. Honestly, while dead Plate and Blades are amazingly powerful, in the Cosmere they're really only an edge against common soldiers (though a devastating edge, if not quite insurmountable). They're not very flexible in how they can be used and the advantages they grant are fixed and not that hard to overcome when you've got Cosmere magic to draw on. Unless the Shardbearer can win pretty quickly they'll have a hard time keeping up.

I think that a broader issue is that we often have to make assessments of things, and some assessments require, or at least imply, subsequent action, and that failure to act reads as (or is) tacit acceptance, which is (in at least some cases) unacceptable. If action is required and inaction unacceptable then it becomes very important to determine if something is a transgression, and if so how and why, and how much the transgression should be considered an isolated incident, a personal characteristic of the transgressor, and/or a societal failure. These are all important to determining what actions, behaviors, and people need a response from others and what that response should be. And it's a feature of reality that we never have complete information on much of anything, but sometimes we have to make a call. If some things Wayne does seem sexist then it may be important to determine if they are sexist (including our functional definition of what constitutes sexism). If we determine, to the best of our ability, that those things are sexist, then we should not accept those actions as OK. I think that this is mostly uncontroversial (though I admit that "mostly" is doing a lot of work in that statement). Where people seem to become more incensed, from what I have seen, is when we move beyond describing an action or situation as sexist to describing a person as sexist as a consequence of that action or situation. I, personally, feel that real people are complex enough that labelling one as anything with a moral valence or a summary judgment is often, at best, incomplete or premature, but I acknowledge that I am both in the minority on holding that opinion and also quite guilty of doing it anyways (it's often expedient, useful, and even correct, but that's not the same as it being right or appropriate; sometimes it is appropriate, but making that determination gets dicey pretty quickly). This is especially the case when the description is applied based on relatively little information-- how reliable is observing a single, one-minute conversation involving a person in providing a picture of that person that earns them a label? Sometimes it's enough (I'd be comfortable concluding that someone who says "women are fundamentally worse than men in every way" as a sexist, even though it's not impossible that person might be joking or quoting a line from something), but the less observation/information we have the more humble I think we should be in assigning those sorts of judgments and open to revising our opinions. Especially if there are consequences that could develop from labelling them or if we use it as a lens through which we consider everything else we learn about them. Fictional characters are not that complex, since they exist only and exactly within the confines of their descriptions and actions on the page. We as readers mentally and emotionally fill in some gaps to interpret what we read, but that's a projection. An author explicitly describing something about their character is definitive, but otherwise I have a hard time concluding that a fictional character is anything other than precisely what they seem in the text. With some wiggle room for how the author tried to portray them, which may not be received by the reader as the author intended. One final point that I think is relevant is the question of what we should do with someone who does sexist things or that we conclude is a sexist. The current American zeitgeist seems, to me, to be kind of all-or-nothing. I realize that a lot of people don't feel that way, but I get the impression that frequently the social consensus is something like: sexism is pretty bad (for example), and so if a person is sexist they can't be good, and so we can't or shouldn't like them or anything they do, etc. On the flip side, if we think that someone is good, or we like them or things they do, people can go to great lengths to deny a descriptor like "sexist". I often see discussions which break down to one group saying "[X] is a bad thing, this person did it, and we shouldn't excuse it or pretend it never happened" while another group hears "[X] is a bad thing, this person did it, and so this person is bad and must be condemned in such a way that no one can ever miss it". The second group then responds with something like "this person is more than having done [X] and so it's wrong to make that the only thing anyone ever knows about them", and the first group hears "[X] isn't important enough to talk about, so we should let it slide without comment for this person and not really talk about it ever". I appreciate at least some of how and why this has come about but I think that it is a mistake. People, real or fictional, aren't necessarily defined entirely by the very worst thing about them. Some descriptors can never change, and sometimes people can change so that they no longer apply. Sticking with Wayne, he's a murderer because he murdered someone (he was killed in the course of Wayne robbing him, which is felony murder if I remember my Law & Order episodes correctly). Wayne will always be a murderer because of that. Most readers will consider that a tragic mistake, and while a better Wayne wouldn't have done it he can still be OK to like and support even so. I think that the sexism charge is similar, even if we grant the strongest assertions of it from this thread: he's not necessarily anathema because of it, we can still like him overall despite that negative trait, and we can do those things while acknowledging that it's not great. All that said, I do not see much in this thread so far to support agreeing with the claim "Wayne is sexist". Mostly people have just posited that "it's there", and that he harasses Ranette (which is undeniably bad of him). I'm not looking to change anyone's mind here (my first post in this thread was just my take on the text, and I have no complaint if people disagree), but if the support is generally "Wayne is self-centered with Ranette, has lots of flaws, and the whole vibe is sexist as is Northern Scadrian society" without more explication then I think that few people will be convinced, and that discussion will stagnate quickly. (This post came out really long! I'll lean back in the thread from here, I don't want to monopolize or stifle discussion)

I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth (specifically, I'm not attributing this view to Koloss17) but there is also a common perspective that social context is relevant to whether or not something is sexist or otherwise discriminatory. For example, if Wayne were interested in men and treated a man the same way he treated Ranette, it wouldn't be sexist (though it would still be an imposition on that man, and would derive from Wayne's preferences on gender in a partner). If Wayne were bisexual and treated Ranette and a man both exactly the same way that he treats Ranette in-text, it would be harder to make the case that Wayne's behavior had the same gender-based motivation. But in a social context where there is sexist behavior generally (such as Koloss17 describes, though not limited to that), the effects of this hypothetical Wayne's treatment of Ranette would (or could) be different for her than his treatment of the man-- it would have (at least potentially) the same gender-based consequences for her as if Wayne had internalized sexist tendencies while those consequences wouldn't exist for the man either way. So even though (hypothetical) Wayne might have no gender bias at all, classifying his actions or behaviors can be (some say should be) based at least in part on the consequences of what he does, and if those fall unequally across genders then there is a gender-based aspect to characterizing him (and/or his actions) in terms of discrimination. This is a different conception of sexism from "active or passive unequal treatment of others based on their gender", which is the other common description of sexism that I've seen. They aren't incompatible but aren't the same either, so it's easy for people to talk past each other when they focus on one versus the other. Some people strongly disagree on where the line is for "this thing someone did is sexist" compared with "this person is sexist because they did that thing". I was a bit hesitant to post this but thought it might be worthwhile as I perceived (maybe wrongly) some of that aspect here. I won't be offended or upset if people choose to ignore this post .

I think that Leechers and Nicrobursts are going to be a pretty big problem for Rosharans in any conflict with Scadrians. Radiants need a good amount of accessible Investiture to execute their most impressive feats, and their biggest advantage (near immortality) falls apart without the same. Allomancers who can negate Radiants' Investiture, and especially drain their stores, represent a pretty extreme risk to deploying Radiants. Not to mention that Allomantic grenades and Hemalurgic spikes make such powers easy to scale up and widely distribute for an army while high-Oath Radiants are really, really hard to replace. Radiants are more versatile and near deific in their powers but Scadrians are going to have numbers and materiel that Rosharans will be hard-pressed to deal with.

Hmm, I don't know. Dalinar suggests moving a lot of farmers ("mass homesteading" was the phrase, I think) to the Shattered Plains to farm them. Sebarial actually does farm them, at industrial or near-industrial scale. And we do see efforts to farm in areas that are not well suited for it, like Urithiru, so it probably could be done. But I think you're right that it's too hard, in the sense that it would take too much investment to achieve when they don't have any particular need to colonize the area prior to the Vengeance Pact moving the Highprinces there. And when the large-scale gemheart harvesting gets underway the need for farming is lessened a lot because grain can be soulcast with far less effort. Technology or related practices might have made farming more suitable in the far past. We see something similar in how farming is approached in Urithiru (faster crop maturation in poor conditions). And during the Heraldic Epochs there was a strong interest in growing human populations as quickly as possible between Desolations so I can imagine any conceivable investment to support that would be worthwhile, especially in areas that were already populated (even if depopulated through war). And starving human populations, or forcing them to spend more Stormlight and gemstones to Soulcast food, is definitely something the Singers would be interested in pursuing. I still don't know enough about the Scouring to feel confident about a connection but I wouldn't rule it out.

I never regarded it as being a part of his character or personality, since he never seems to base any decisions or actions on those attitudes or incorporate them into his behavior in any way. Instead I think that Wayne is purposefully provocative towards others and seizes on anything that he thinks will get a reaction or that he sees people react to. So some of the things he says to people read (or at least can be read) as sexist but they're shallow because the content is irrelevant to him and his thought process-- he wants a response, full stop. I always considered it to be similar to things he says to Wax, some of which are classist or otherwise dismissive of Wax because of his wealth, Steris for being inflexible, the banker in BoM for (Wayne presumes) being too uptight, the scientist he fools with technical-sounding gobbledygook for not being able to admit someone else knows something he does not (I don't remember, was that Irich or a nameless engineer?), etc. Unless he's playing a specific character he typically makes an effort to needle and offend where he can. It's 100% on point for his character since everything Wayne does in his work (aside from absorbing physical abuse, I guess) is based on getting people to react in certain ways or putting them off balance to make them less effective in things they do. He's a provocateur and does anything to push peoples' buttons, but he's not really invested in any of the things he says to accomplish that, and he may not even notice or consider features like that. I also wonder if he has a more clinical, professional detachment about considerations like that: he's very, very observant of specific traits about people and their backgrounds and lives when he decomposes accents and assembles new ones to suit his needs, but he doesn't seem to care about any of those details very much in any values-based sense. Whether or not those provocations evaluate to "Wayne is a sexist" (or any other descriptor of his attitudes) is a value judgment. For some people, saying a sexist or sexist-adjacent thing is a transgression in itself no matter the context and necessarily applies the "sexist" descriptor to a character. For others there can be a separation between saying a sexist thing and being a sexist. For still others it's a matter of degree between affirmatively doing bad things and failing to do good things such that specific instances aren't enough to judge, alone. And lots of other items. Any writer looking to have their writing be universally considered unimpeachable is likely to be disappointed, though someone who wants to write a sexist character will find success to be a very attainable goal.

Ah, I think I'm getting your meaning now. The dangers of Surgebinding are not a moral or practical argument favoring authoritarianism, but rather a circumstance which would make people more accepting of such a government out of fear and a hope/belief that it would be able to protect them from the potential threat. Or even demand one! On that I definitely agree; people turn towards that type of government over much, much less.

In the abstract we can justify pretty much anything, and authoritarian governments always make an argument for why they should exist. So do all governments, for that matter, but authoritarian governments are a special case because their authority is ultimately tautological to their claimed justifications (authoritarianism by nature doesn't need to convince anyone of anything). But my main point is that the only non-arbitrary justification for authoritarian governance advanced in this thread is the assumption that it will be effective in controlling magic users. If we're going to assume effectiveness then it doesn't really matter what else we are describing because the success is baked in from the start, and so there isn't really much to discuss. An open array of anarcho-syndicalist unions focused on mutually assured destruction and individual utilitarianism seems to me like it would have similar goals regarding preventing mass destruction as would an authoritarian government, though very different approaches and problems. But assuming that the logic of wanting the planet where they all live to not blow up is enough to solve the problems and therefore that the specifics of their approach don't matter, then the case is just as strong for that system as for the authoritarians. I'm not suggesting that this is true for you in particular, but in my observation most people presume that a hypothetical authoritarian government will be supremely effective, as in 1984, but that that presumption generally doesn't have much behind it. I would even go so far as to argue that authoritarian regimes are specifically ineffective in this dimension because we've seen them try and fail at the very task we've set. How successful was Honor in getting people to behave in prescribed ways, and how consequential were departures from those behaviors? And as for the Oaths being reliable in keeping people from engaging in mass destruction, tell that to Natanatan or the Recreance. Even keeping people nominally within boundaries seems like too much to ask, empirically speaking. See Testament or Malata. Perhaps the spontaneous and hard-to-predict nature of individuals developing Surgebinding abilities would be a problem that an authoritarian government are particularly ill-suited to address. I'll bow out soon as I don't want to distract the thread too much from what I think is your main interest in starting it, which is to discuss the theoretical physics implications of Investiture (specifically Surges) amplifying threats. I just wanted to pipe in about the scale and nature of the threats perhaps not relating so much to specifics about organizing systems to oppose those threats. Organizations can fail for organizational reasons, but when they're made of humans they tend to fail for human reasons-- it's hard for a problem to be its own solution. Even an enlightened authoritarian government seems to me likely to fail at preventing these threats, and an unenlightened one would also fail and would suck quite a bit along the way.

I mean, the magic is powerful and its potential consequences are terrifying. But how much protection is a government going to be in the face of that-- any type of government? Even if they can monitor and corral people with magic, a super-powered villain is at least as likely to come from the ranks of the authoritarian government as from outside of it, so I wouldn't feel that much more secure. And even then, how effective would they really be? The Lord Ruler was an authoritarian, but not quite effective enough. Nale was pretty ruthless in prosecuting his approach, but he eventually failed too. If we're taking an "ends justify the means" stance, but there is no reason to think such a government will achieve the ends, then the means are not justifiable either (on those terms). Even if we were to grant that an authoritarian government could be effective this way, I wouldn't trust them not to do the very same destructive things you are charging them with preventing. They have often been... less than awesome in real-world human history. I think that the Shards themselves are both the problem and the means of control. The magic comes from them and they have far more scope to perceive and deal with magical threats than other organizations generally do, though so far they, too, have not been too effective in exerting that kind of control. But in the end it's not so different from stories like superhero comics-- there is always a functionally sufficient group of do-gooders around that foil the doomsday plots, and total-annihilation-doomsday is a relatively uncommon goal for the villains. Those do-gooders tend to be extra-governmental though, at least in effect, since their powers make them hard to control.

I think that Sazed's knowledge upon ascending was inadequate for what he actually wanted to accomplish and so he missed his window to make it happen in anything like an easy, smooth way. Now he's bound by a variety of things, including Preservation's undiluted influence against things changing (especially itself) and Ruin damaging his own plans and hopes. His personal issues are probably also a factor but I hadn't thought about them so much. Have you elaborated on this elsewhere on the forum, or would you be willing to?

F-zinc and A-pewter for me as well, I think. F-zinc seems incredibly useful and not that bad to store, compared to other Feruchemical powers (I could just veg out watching cartoons or something). A-pewter is just so versatile for so many things since it grants strength, balance, dexterity, durability, and poise I think I'd be able to get a lot of value out of it all the time, leading it to beat out my other favorite Allomantic metal, brass. I wonder if A-pewter could make storing speed in F-steel more efficient or effective, even though it obviously wouldn't be compounding. I also wouldn't mind F-steel since super-speed seems really useful and also not necessarily too bad to store, but I just think I'd get more out of F-zinc. Maybe if I actually did have F-zinc I'd receive a burst of inspiration that would tip the scales towards F-steel! I really wish we had a better sense of what the storage rate, storage density, and tapping efficiency of Feruchemical attributes are though. I think that a lot of my (and probably all 17th Shard members) preferences with respect to Feruchemy are based on rosy assumptions about those.

When did you feel the story turned around from the boring part? I read the first book and never felt into it enough to continue (with so many other books to consider), but if it picked up after the first volume I might move it up in the queue and give it another try.

He's talked a bit about some things that touch on this, though I don't want to throw anything that might be spoiler-y into your thread. Your observation on the juxtaposition of Preservation and Ruin is a good one. I also really like Bleeder as a villain, and I thought that her motivations and internal crises were interesting and well thought-out. That those elements were filtered through the lens of her madness was affectingly tragic but also emphasized how strongly she felt about the core pieces of her identity she retained. I feel like it's rare for a villain to be so well drawn. I had some similar feelings about the nobility in SoS, though not quite as strongly as you. What struck me was how detached the Metallic Arts became from not just nobility but also from wealth and power. Especially with the Terris receding from society as they did. I also like Steris' turn in this book compared with AoL. Thanks for sharing your impressions, I liked reading them!

I'll take a slightly different angle in pointing out a couple of things I've observed in 5e and thought about Feruchemy: 1. D&D 5e is just not well balanced in any number of ways. Many options are simply better than others, and the relevant design imperative seems to be that the less-good options shouldn't be fatally worse-- players can still succeed with a non-optimal build. 2. Due to (1), among other factors, power gamers will always radically outshine non-power gamers. This is unavoidable without some rigid, top-down, arbitrary limitations. 3. D&D has historically (and very much in 5e) emphasized combat over everything else. If you're playing anything like the way the core books suggest then a combat-related ability is probably going to have more utility and be more effective more often than one that is geared towards non-combat situations. That's not to say that non-combat abilities and non-combat builds are useless, but they won't shine as consistently as combat-oriented abilities and builds will. This is very relevant for Feruchemy. Because of these features, aiming for tight balance in 5e (and mods for it) is usually a design mistake. Mechanical balance, even if you can achieve it, is likely to leave some players disappointed while others have more potential with their powers than they know what to do with. My personal experience is that it's much more valuable to design and manage the plot and narrative situations in ways that give lots of opportunities for the "less good" choices to shine even though mechanical balance doesn't favor them. Situations the characters can't bull through with pewter-fueled strength or absorbing damage via gold will do vastly more than asserting rules that make pewter or gold Feruchemy less useful than they "should" be, no matter what powers the other characters have. As for Feruchemy (and the Metallic Arts generally, and superpowers more broadly still), a key element is the limitations of those abilities and how characters might deal with them. It's the same reason that D&D characters don't just start at level 20: dealing with limitations and looking forward to when you'll be strong enough to not have to worry about them any more is engaging. I appreciate the expedience of abstracting some of this away, like assuming that the characters have enough metalminds to store as much as they want, having discrete "charges" of Feruchemy to draw on, etc. But having resources which replenish costlessly and on a fixed, predictable schedule tends to produce indiscriminate superhero-ing punctuated by leisurely breaks, and the breaks' only purpose is to ensure that the next bout of superheroics will happen. I, personally, don't like that for Feruchemy, as the Art is about tradeoffs and having extreme benefits be costly to prepare. Getting a big boost of power on demand is more what Allomancy does. Having easy-to-replace Feruchemical charges is fun but also makes the powers kind of bland and inflexible. Feruchemists get to choose how debilitated they are as they store attributes and how much they need to draw in a given situation; that's really what distinguishes it from Allomancy. As a player I would prefer having to choose tradeoffs for my powers, and Feruchemical tradeoffs aren't linear. When Wayne has to spend weeks feeling sick and miserable to store health it makes his choice to attempt Spoiled Tomato a big deal. When he's low on stored health and in a dangerous situation he has to really change how he approaches things. Otherwise he's just functionally immortal, or tough like a Koloss-blooded person. So a Bloodmaker can store X HP in their goldmind at a rate of their choosing, being mildly inconvenienced at a slow rate and nearly debilitated at the high end. And then when injured they could heal some fixed HP per round (or six-second period) with perfect efficiency. Or they could heal more in a round, but at the cost of "losing" some of their stored HP to gain that speed. That provides a lot of the flavor of Feruchemy for me: I can choose how prepared I want to be with the amount of prep time I have available, how well I can bear the cost of that preparation, and I can choose how much of that prep should be burned based on how badly I need the healing. If I'm just getting a flat bonus (or stacked bonus) to my AC or HP, then how is my Bloodmaking different from a worse version of A-pewter? That's the context in which I think about Metallic Arts and 5e, and without those sorts of limitations and options I, personally, would probably not feel like I was playing a Feruchemist. There are also issues around character progression: a Ferring should not be as capable at level 1 as they are at level 10. The way that I would approach interpreting Feruchemy in 5e would require time tracking during play and little riskless downtime during specific parts of storylines. The best analogue for that is probably the idea of the Adventuring Day, though it's not perfect. Maybe with some random events that break up downtime (otherwise players will always abuse downtime to maximize attribute storage without dealing with the attendant penalties). But a defined timespan in which there isn't a reliable break in potential action makes the storage/tapping tradeoff a part of the game. The rules provide a few things which can simulate storage, like attribute/skill penalties, disadvantage, or exhaustion, and of course the details in how and when they apply will matter. But without players needing to spend more time storing than they get to spend tapping, the flavor of Feruchemy is in danger of being lost. Getting more out of Feruchemy, or getting better at it, seems like a natural fit for gaining class and/or character levels, specific class features, and feats relevant to each type of Ferring. Those represent practicing and improving Feruchemy, and I would much prefer to have things to strive for and develop towards than a flat system which attempts "balance" right out of the box. Being able to store a trait more quickly, or tap a lot of it more efficiently, or use it more skillfully are all things that would appeal to a developing Feruchemist and would make them think differently about how to use their powers at different points in the game. Other options to control abuse of Feruchemy could include rarity of high-quality metals for metalminds (iron swords are everywhere, but is it iron that's good for holding a Feruchemical charge?), risk of the metalminds being taken away, specific situations where storing attributes is a dangerous or risky option, and other narrative (rather than mechanical) elements that influence how Feruchemy can be used, and how well.

Things certainly did change! Though I think most of those details and setups wound up in Shadows of Self.

Not on the list specifically, but Sazed vs. Marsh is my favorite. Cool uses of separate magical systems, clever tactics, dramatic moments, back-and-forth advantages, and doesn't overstay its welcome. My runner-up is Adolin's full disadvantaged duel. Action-packed and exciting, it showed the best of Adolin and Kaladin both. The fallout always bugs me though (like it's supposed to, I'm sure). I also liked the current top-voted scene, the Battle of Thaylen City, because it had lots of awesome individual sequences that I loved. But it went on too long for me, splitting my attention too often and breaking up the flow of events with repetition more than I enjoyed. I get why people love it, though. So many of the individual pieces are amazing and top-form Sanderson.