Returned

I think that there is too much focus on compounding per se. In the Cosmere we're right at the cusp of reliably known, interconvertible Investiture forms. At least some of those seem likely to be capable of accomplishing what Metallic Arts compounding does, and in a likely more straightforward way than dealing with whatever difficulties Identity Contamination imposes (or that figuring out the one solves the other).

I like the idea a lot! Let's flesh it out a bit more. 1. Knowledge of Hemalurgy would be a unique advantage, but I would be curious as to how they gained that knowledge. Even the Lord Ruler struggled to make more than his three types of construct, and he personally Ascended, lived for a thousand years, and had access to compounded F-zinc as well as F-copper. The Set has done some amazingly fast work learning about Hemalurgy in a short period of time, but hasn't made any new constructs. I think that the best avenue for this is to think about Bleeder, who produced the only new constructs we see in-text. Could a Shard other than Harmony or Ruin have that kind of expertise, and be active on Scadrial alongside Autonomy? 2. How and when might they have split from the rest of the Southerners, and how much "Metallic Arts essence" could they have taken with them? It seems like in the early days the Malwish just barely survived the Ice Death, but we don't really know how many Excisors they have nor how they work. Could there have been enough to support a second population? How many Metalborn were there, and how many could the Maskless (or their forebears) have taken away from the rest without dooming them? 3. How dangerous are they, really? It seems hard to think that they would be a major threat to the Malwish, who are so organized and technologically capable, especially since their society seems relatively stable (and certainly not yet conquered or known to be engaged in a consuming war, the latter of which seems unlikely if they were preparing for war with the Northerners). I wonder if the Maskless are just strong enough to not really be conquerable by the Malwish, and their Maskless-ness is more culturally dangerous to the Malwish. Rejecting masks altogether seems like it would be pretty subversive. 4. If they do not have many Metalborn, and never did, then how much Hemalurgy could they have engaged in, and how well could their reserves of Metallic Arts power survive centuries of Hemalurgic degradation? What features could new types of construct have that would be worth the cost? 5. There were eleven Lerasium beads at the Well (nine for Rashek's favored friends, one for Hoid, and one for Elend). But Preservation's numerical jam is 16. So were there five more? If so, what happened to them? If the Maskless had a lot of Metalborn the Malwish would probably know and not be able to deal with them well in a conflict, at least in the early days before their technological developments took off. So perhaps the Maskless are dangerous but not hostile to the Malwish? Or maybe they've used the Lerasium in a different way than eating it and gaining Mistborn, as Sanderson has stated is possible with the right knowledge... tantalizing, but I don't know how to even guess at what those different ways might be.

That's a great catch that honestly never occurred to me to check. I just searched the text of all of the Mistborn books, including Secret History, and the term isn't there even once! As a fan term it's likely created by fans like us on 17th Shard, and we're a detail-oriented enough lot to have chosen a more properly descriptive name. It's probably too late to change it, especially since "Fullborn" has a nice sound to it and resonates well with "Metalborn", which is commonly used at least in era 2. But I think that the best angle (and one which follows the reasoning you laid out above) would be to highlight Rashek's innate Feruchemy along with the divinity he held at the Well, which is what he used to become Mistborn. "Divinely Metallic", "Maxmetaled", "Preservacious", "Pinnacle Scadrian"... none of them have the same cachet. But I'm not really good at naming things, so that shouldn't be surprising in my glib first draft ideas

"Fullborn" is just the word for the thing it represents. I don't think it's meant to be etymologically decomposed any more than "Mistborn" is-- they were never borne of the mists! And Mistings would have the same claim to the word. I do agree that it gives the impression of something that it isn't (full of all of two sets of powers by birth), but I treat it more as an idiomatic word than a deceptive affront.

If we're sticking with things we've seen in the Cosmere already, you have lots of choices. Refugees (as from Ashyn), conquerors (as from Autonomy), scholars (like Khriss), explorers (like from Nalthis), people with specific personal goals (like Vivenna), meddlers with various unclear goals (like Hoid), and zealots under someone's direction for some specific task (like Ishar's Tukari) are all reasonable motivations for worldhopping (or worldhopping-adjacent) groups that have been used to good effect in Cosmere books you've read. If your planet has just recently been discovered in the Cosmere setting then an intriguing (to me) possibility would be people looking to escape the influence of Shards (specific ones, or possibly any). You could also work with an idea like the planet having vestiges of previous Shardic interference but having been abandoned by such beings for some reason-- lots of potential to work in unique magics or information about the Cosmere and Investiture that would otherwise be impossible to get.

I think that the broadest issues are ultimately going to be social, not practical. The problem with unsealed metalmind supply so far is related to the Excisors: they are the bottleneck in production, though not so much so that Malwish seem to be lacking them to any meaningful degree. Power on Scadrial has not been widely shared, and those who have it tend to make use of it for their own benefit. There are a lot of good applications of unsealed metalmind technology that would make Scadrian society better in any number of ways, but I doubt that the elite few who can produce them would be so dedicated to the common good that they would make them freely available like that. Nor would there necessarily be enough people who would spend their time filling them in exchange for nothing. So I imagine a dual supply problem, both with metalminds and with the attributes they can store. So the applications that will impact society the most will likely be discrete: you can buy a functional metalmind for the trait you want and then do your own Feruchemy with it, just like the Malwish storing their own weight to suit their own needs while on an airship. Still cool, and we'll see people doing emergency preparation (like storing a ton of nutrition in a bendalloymind) both for themselves and to sell as a commodity. But I would be surprised to see Scadrial end up with an Elantris-like public spirit.

That theory did not occur to me, though after reading your description I see the connections. During my reading I was sure that Dust was Hoid, which would make it difficult (though not impossible) for Lightsong to also be the same person. I'd assumed that the characters were just similar in their (seemingly) unserious, almost lackadaisical attitude towards the world around them-- convergent personalities, essentially. I think Wayne is in the same category, sans the memory issues that would make the theory compelling.

We might see more Fullborn, one way or another; the Bands still exist, as far as we know, and that they definitely can exist suggests that they can be duplicated. But not many and I doubt it will matter much. Power inflation has reached absurd levels as it is, and with so many books yet to be written it seems like it can only continue. We'll see more situations in which raw power won't help (there's a bomb at the core of Scadrial but your love interest is on Roshar and will be executed exactly when the bomb goes off, so you can only pick one!), direct countermeasures (you're in some sort of Leeching field, so your amazing compounded power is gone as soon as you prepare it), and standoffs ("I'm a 6th Oath Radiant, Rashek Jr., and even you can't handle that, so stay out of my business!"). Besides, it's not like Rashek was undefeatable despite his awesome might. We've even seen multiple Shards go down, and they're even more potent than Fullborn. It's just as well, for my tastes, since Fullborn are cool but don't exactly lend themselves to interesting plots very easily.

The point I was trying to make, maybe unclearly, is that the Shardbearer's enhancements to speed eventually hit a point where they degrade with every passing second. Shardplate isn't really operable without at least some Stormlight to power it, it leaks Stormlight through cracks, and any damage to the armor consumes additional Stormlight to repair, while the pewterarm's capacities are enhanced to about the same level as long as they have more than zero pewter in their stomach (leaving aside flaring). The pewter also does a lot of the work for the Misting, even when physically exhausted (such as during a pewter drag), while the Shardbearer's abilities are enhanced but not replaced by the armor (I think it's Dalinar who notes this when digging the latrine trench: the armor lets you do more work, but you don't get less weary from it). So, if we're assuming enough pewter to last for the duration (which I know is pretty contrived, but for the sake of argument), the core strategy for the Misting is to not get hit, at any cost, because (as you note) being hit could be devastating. The Misting won't tire as quickly, and so won't slow or become sloppy due to fatigue, while the Shardbearer will tire at a normal rate. The Shardbearer is also on a clock no matter what they do, as the Stormlight inexorably is consumed just to keep the armor functioning. A matchup between a Shardbearer with dead Plate and Blade versus a pewter Misting is most favorable to the Shardbearer at the very beginning and inevitably becomes less favorable for them as the fight goes on. The pewter Misting's performance only degrades if they are hit (though, in that case, the degradation is likely to be very severe). So for every second that passes in which the Shardbearer has not already won, the fight increasingly favors the Misting. Once the Stormlight is drained away sufficiently that the Plate is an impediment to the Shardbearer rather than an advantage the shift may be decisive. Meh. As above, the only winning play for a pewter Misting is to not get hit by a sharp edge of the Blade for a long enough period. Probably not easy, but dodging blows from a single weapon is exactly the kind of thing pewter allows even better than being filled with Stormlight does (if I remember correctly). We see quite a few people with lesser benefits than pewter grants dodging Shardblades, including Kaladin, Szeth, Dalinar, and various Fused. We're also handwaving away the quality of the Misting (Ham gets less out of pewter than Vin, who gets less out of it than Elend), but I don't know any way to account for that. A pewterarm's best strategy is just to wait out the Shardbearer, and if they can wait long enough (which can be defined in a few different ways) then victory becomes all but guaranteed. I don't know that I would bet on the Misting, nor would I suggest that the Shardbearer doesn't have the advantage overall, but one in every hundred attempts seems way off to me given this.

It's an interesting angle but as you note is totally separate from the discussion here. If we're just talking about a classic "versus" thread, then the recovery is less important: if your powers are sufficient to defeat a Shardbearer once, then they will be again (presumably-- matchups that can go either way might not be so sanguine about it). Shards are kind of limited in their flexibility. Regardless, once the Shardbearer is dead and the Blade available it should be easier to destroy more of the Plate because you can just bash the one with the other. I think that assuming an honor guard, or any other people on the field aligned with one participant, radically changes the nature of the question. If the Shardbearer gets a dozen extra soldiers, why does the other combatant get nothing? What is the context of the broader conflict in which the Shards will be re-deployed, by either side? if we're talking about something like an extended conflict of traditional military engagements (like the wars on Roshar) between Shardbearers and other Cosmere magic users then the main value of Shardbearers becomes that they can tie up the most versatile and effective fighters their opponents can field. This is also the way that Shardbearers get used in battles on Roshar as well: Shardbearers deal with other Shardbearers because no one else can reliably prevent them from dominating the field. And since it's hard to use the Shards without nontrivial training, I would imagine that depriving opponents of them is by far the most important goal-- well beyond trying to use them yourself. If we're opening the discussion up in that direction, I think that Shards become a lot less valuable in nearly every way. It's like Adolin notes in RoW: he used to be one of the, if not absolutely the, most important figures on any battlefield. Millennia of war persistently saw full Shardbearers as the apex of battlefield performance, and entire battles turned on his presence or absence. But with the advent of Radiants and Fused all over the place he becomes somewhat outclassed. The nature of battle simply changes when slaughtering hundreds of mundane soldiers is no longer sufficient to gain a durable edge, and other combatants can do more things than he can, more easily, and with more flexibility. In a world of soldiers wielding Breaths and Metallic Arts and AonDor and Sand Mastery and more, a Shardbearer is a lot more like a regular soldier than an overwhelming force. Still dangerous, still important, and sometimes very much so, but not pivotal.

I always liked Edwarn's line in BoM about distracting Wax with dead-end leads to keep him out of the Set's hair: It stuck with me because Edwarn is such a manipulator (as is the Set more broadly), and the line expresses both that he needs to keep Wax out of his business but also that Wax is little more than a nuisance. Those two ideas are in contrast to each other, but Edwarn's character and thought process come through in his dismissive attitude. And his scheme worked really well! Right up until it didn't, which is how so many TTRPG antagonist plots end up. It would need some tweaking to fit your specific plot and environment (specifically, the villainous organization would need to be actively diverting and deceiving the PCs with cutouts and other distractions), but probably wouldn't need too drastic of an overhaul.

I think that you could use modern technology to get a boost out of a couple of traits. Cadmium could be offset somewhat by being in a hyper-oxygenated environment, and gold by being in a sterile cleanroom. People with certain autoimmune disorders might even benefit from storing health all the time, depending on how exactly that works, especially if they could do it in an unsealed metalmind which they could then sell. I like the approaches you've outlined, but I think that the biggest variable is really how often you want to tap the attributes. Using them to any practical effect seems like you'll just burn through attributes so much more quickly than you could ever store them, especially if you use one of the lower-impact methods to store. With that in mind, how and when do you think it would be most efficient/effective to tap the attributes? I imagine there is a lot of scope for tapping just a bit at key times, like Ham burning just a bit of pewter here and there where it counts the most (like just for a moment to recover balance). My top pick would be to tap a generous amount of zinc to come up with approaches for that. But otherwise my mind always slides over to dramatic superhero-esque feats, which is kind of the opposite of tapping just a bit when you can leverage it the best.

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.