Returned

Permanently by losing an object that Breath is stored in, by misplacing it or possibly it being destroyed. Temporarily by having enough Awakened objects at once that you lose that Heightening. At 1,000 Breaths using even one to Awaken something will cost you your life sense until you reclaim it. Otherwise you're right and if you got the Breath gift and chose never to Awaken anything you'd securely have your aura recognition and perfect pitch, color recognition, and life sense indefinitely. A modern person could easily afford to have Vin's buffs available to them, I think. But more broadly I'm not thinking of only combat potential-- I would rather have the ability to do other things besides (or in addition to, if we're imagining an action-packed setting) fighting and killing, so that's not as big a draw for me as the primary value in one of the powers. And even then the metals would be useful in a fight, if not as much as Plate in many situations, and unless you're facing someone in Plate themselves Allomancy is pretty great.

To each their own, but I find this surprising. A few minutes on Amazon (or similar) could get you years' worth of most of the metals to use with your Mistborn powers for very little money and delivered within a day. Some, like cadmium and bendalloy, are going to be harder to come by. But you can't ever get an additional Breath. I certainly didn't think that Vin's Allomancy seemed like a waste! Is it more that you need to explicitly do something regularly (swallow the metals) to have the Allomancy available? I can see that as a downside compared to the other two, which have no requirement like that. Procuring the metals seems trivial so I'm not sure I'm getting the complaint.

Definitely a fair perspective, and I'm not anti-Unoathed Plate and Blade-- I would not say that choosing that option is a bad choice. My concern with it though is that the just-in-time Plate summoning requires you to have the time and reaction speed to do it when it's needed. If you are involved in a high-speed car crash the impact might literally happen before it is physically possible to process the sensory input that indicates it will happen. And even then a high-force impact could overwhelm the Plate, such as Dalinar being buried in the rockslide trap in Oathbringer, though I think it would be a pretty exceptional car crash that would kill someone in Plate. If you're wrong and summon the Plate unnecessarily then you've ruined the car, and possibly caused an accident when there would not otherwise have been one! It would make this sort of reflex summoning expensive, since it's almost guaranteed that a person will be mistaken in determining that they need it right now at least sometimes, but if you don't summon the Plate as soon as you think you might need it then you've lost its life-preserving-in-an-emergency benefits. Obviously there are a lot of situations in which the Plate will protect you really effectively and from a wide variety of things (and better than Allomancy could), but my perspective is that if we're just assuming you'll have the foresight and notice to summon the Plate in time then using pewter + steel + iron to escape instead will be almost as good in an awful lot of situations, plus you get the versatility of full (and extra-powerful) Allomancy in all other situations.

Lerasium for me, all the way. The variety of powers it grants, and the ease of using them, offer lots of potential applications. Even if we're just talking about iron, steel, pewter, tin, zinc, brass, cadmium, bendalloy, duralumin, and aluminum that's a lot of flexibility and options right at my fingertips just by getting metals that are commonly found. Subtle or loud, with tons of choices which radically expand what I can do and how I might do it. Breaths are also very intriguing but are less immediately flexible, and at the 1,000 Breath mark I'd worry about loss to Awakening mishaps. Since, in the real world, I can't just get more Breaths the risk of permanent loss is high, especially as the biggest day-to-day benefits for me require having at least X of them within yourself. The limits of Awakening are poorly defined, though, and the chance to research it and push the limits might really expand what it can do. It would be interesting, if nothing else. Potentially very flexible and variably subtle, but not enough so to edge out lerasium for me. Unoathed Plate and Blade are awesome but limited in what you can do with them. Durable armor and a magic sword are great but outside of direct combat they seem kind of limited. The armor is bulky and weighs ~2,000 lbs which makes it impractical for a lot of things (few cars can accommodate that much weight in the driver's seat, relatively few doorways will be large enough to pass through, you can't sit in a chair to take a break, etc.). It also only delivers its benefits if you're wearing it, so you're either wearing it all the time (which I would not be excited about) or you're counting on your native perception and reaction speed in summoning it to guard your life. Still very cool to find in your Christmas stocking but not very subtle ever and relatively inflexible.

That sounds sensible, though trying to picture some of the specifics is confusing me a bit. I wonder what a Cryptic would be like if they could tap iron, since their substance glides mystically over surfaces, dimpling them with their various fractal patterns. Would they have more trouble moving through the physical world, even as they can more easily affect things like lock pins. Might tapping pewter offer similar abilities, maybe indistinguishable from iron in some varieties of spren? I need to think of this more, it's a whole avenue of Cosmere interaction that I've never thought about before.

We already know that spren can manipulate very small amounts of matter, like Pattern picking a lock or Syl carrying a leaf, so they might be corporeal enough to technically touch and use a metalmind (all other factors permitting). I'm curious about the effects of certain attributes on spren if they could be used, though. What would Pattern be like if heavier, for example?

I think that we'll see a lot more of this in future books. Kaladin flirts with the edge of that in RoW (I think), wondering with Syl if she could become medical tools. Her response is that she thinks the limitations on what they can do in those sorts of things are mostly the limits of their imaginations. Not only will expanded understanding of what bonded spren can do when they manifest as metals in the physical realm and greater knowledge of mechanics and engineering help come up with lots of novel ways to make use of manifested spren, I think that the new scarcity of Stormlight will strongly favor these kinds of activities. They allow for magical shortcuts and other assistance while not requiring the fuel that Surgebinding does.

I'm not going to do the digging here, but I suspect that the concept of "journey before destination" existed well before anyone thought to codify it as a guideline for writing fiction, which makes me skeptical that that is "the" interpretation. I've always read it as a stance on one of the major disagreements in Western philosophical traditions, between deontology and consequentialism, coming down firmly on the deontological side. It's also a good thing to bear in mind while writing, but it seems like a stretch to me that the Knights Radiant follow a philosophical tradition which is the core of their lives and activities, plus also this bit of composition advice that they esteem just as highly.

A perspective I imagine is shared by many in this thread.

I won't dispute that here, as far as it goes (I'm unsure of how well responses might fit the scope of the thread). But my position isn't related to trope subversion or normal use, it's that the tropes are essentially the only ways that Kaladin and Jesus overlap. The rest of what they do, how and why they do it, and the contexts in which they determined and committed to their courses of action are really different from each other. Like, if you were to swap the two at age 5 I think that the stories would play out very, very differently even while both would still do things that satisfy the savior archetype and tropes. I'm not looking to convince you or anyone away from the position in the OP (that the two characters are very, very similar). My points are meant only to explain why I don't think that they are very similar and highlight the specific ways in which I think they are similar, with some commentary on the initial arguments presented. My position on the initial list is that many of the items only support the two being very similar if we already assume that they are-- for example, saying that there is a devil character in both stories and that Odium is that character, but not really because the story ultimately doesn't retain or use the archetype for that character and the role ultimately isn't represented. I think that it's at least as reasonable to suggest that, whatever archetypes and narrative roles exist in SA, the devil (in the same sense as that personage is used in the Bible) is not among them. If a devil role is asserted to be in SA only because a particular conclusion requires that such a role be there then that assertion is just begging the question and is not evidence of that conclusion. Other reasons for suggesting the archetype is present (and therefore can lend support to the conclusion) are fine, obviously, but they need their own explication and argumentation, as any argument does. If we're mostly discussing things within the frame of narrative roles, archetypes, and tropes, I think that we're talking about what is already common ground: I think we've both said that the characters are similar in those ways. The portion of the discussion that remains seems like it would address characteristics outside of where we already agree, namely the degree to which the two characters are similar beyond the archetypes and tropes. I maintain that they are not very similar, outside of the savior archetype roles they have, though am interested in arguments that they are substantially more similar than that. If people aren't interested in discussing those items, at all or with me in particular, of course that's fine.

I think I get what you're saying. Given how the Cosmere books are structured and related I'm going to be a hard sell on ignoring the other books, but I think that's a more tangential point. Even looking at SA in isolation doesn't resolve these issues for me. For example, Honor, Cultivation, and Odium don't have different properties in those books than other Shards in those books or others, they are each one of many in SA. Even within SA alone the Shards don't really conform to the figures you present very well as far as I can tell. And the themes and events of the SA books don't divide very neatly into good/evil, virtue/vice, righteousness/sin, and similar, much to the frustration of many readers. Putting Honor and/or Cultivation in the role of a Christianist God seems like a big reach; aside from being "bad" I think that the Odium-as-the-devil idea is not very strong (though common!). I think (generally, not just in the context of this thread) that a lot of people read a role like "the devil" (or more generally, archetypal representations of complete evil) into fantasy stories, and if you are trying to assign someone to that role in SA Odium is probably the best fit. But "best" in the same sense as "least bad"-- it's a top-down evaluation (some character in the story must fit this role, and we choose this one as the best fit) rather than bottom-up (this character is very like the devil in these various ways, enough so that we can think of them similarly). Even the fact that there are three Shards on Roshar causes some problems for an asserted allegory to God and Satan, or Christianity overall. I'm not convinced that Vorinism is meant to be a representation of nor modeled on Christianity of any variety-- the differences are stark and many, and similarities seem few to me. It's hard to evaluate something like "heavily influenced by" in this context, though I'm not saying that isn't true. I find Vorinism to be a very poor representation of any Christian Church or theology I'm familiar with (which is admittedly a very small fraction of them). I'm also not sure the mainstream/other Christianity piece applies. Most importantly, Sanderson has explicitly said that Kaladin and SA are not allegories for Jesus and Christianity and so I'm not certain it matters which particular version of Jesus and Christianity they are not allegories for. When we get back to talking about thematic similarities then we're right back to what I said previously: I think that Kaladin follows the savior archetype, tropes, and themes because he's a savior character, and shares those things with other savior characters because that's how archetypes and tropes are defined. I do not think he's meant to imitate a specific savior character and hits the archetype, tropes, and themes in a way ancillary to that goal. So I'm still not persuaded that the two characters are very similar. They both hit the points of the savior archetype and associated tropes for sure, and there is a ton of overlap between them in those pieces. Outside of the archetype and tropes, though, I think that the characters are very different from each other, much more so than they are similar. So for me the similarities are mostly (if not entirely) localized and do not extend beyond narrative roles into specifics. I might be mistaking your position but it still reads to me like an invalid syllogism: Kaladin -> savior character, Jesus -> savior character, therefore Kaladin = Jesus. That third component does not follow from the first two but is the conclusion I read you as advancing. Many of the items in the list from the OP seem to me to work only if we already assume that conclusion to be true, though again I could probably be convinced on at least some of them. But at present I remain unconvinced. Though I'm still unsure how to best frame an answer to the question of the thread, I'll hesitantly try restating: they are very different characters and each independently is related to a common archetype, but not directly to each other or each others' settings and context.

Sure: 1. He's the son of god (Tanavast). This one might work thematically (WoBs aside), but I think there is a pretty sharp divide between the literal and overtly stated child of the creator of everything versus a common lineage between Kaladin and some guy who picked up 1/16 of divinity and then struggled against the very nature of that divinity, and directly in opposition to another 1/16 of that same divinity. The actual Kaladin/Tanavast relationship is a lot more like a friend's friend's fourth cousin twenty times removed than parent/child. I think of it as coincidental more than anything else, while the the Jesus situation is direct and purposeful. Every person on Roshar is similarly related to Tanavast (almost every human in the Cosmere is, except Scadrians) and Kaladin is not special in that regard. I think that this item would be stronger if it were framed as the child of Honor, but still would be a soft similarity. 2. He has supernatural powers. There are some interesting angles on this one with regard to how we consider the magic in the Cosmere (is it divine, supernatural, or just natural?), but those are outside the scope of this specific post. The powers themselves seem opposite to each other in important ways. The supernatural things Jesus showed were primarily signs and not so much practical solutions to problems. Consider the loaves and fishes: it directly fed people at a private event, but it isn't something that Jesus did generally (to end hunger or for any other reason). The miracles were often to show that there was something big and important going on (very broad brush, I know). Kaladin's powers are a consequence of other things happening and are almost exclusively direct solutions to specific problems, and he uses them casually and all the time. But more broadly, this item applies to a massive portion of fantasy novels and is too common for me to think of it as a strong, meaningful similarity between two specific individuals. Every Radiant has supernatural powers like Kaladin's, some greater. 3. He (metaphorically) dies and is reborn multiple times, but most notably, the scene where he's strung up before the highstorm is analogous to crucifixion Too thin for me to sign on to. The "metaphorically" piece undercuts the comparison fatally, as the Jesus story is about literal death (which is itself meaningful) and resurrection (which is also meaningful). Kaladin magically endures damage which would be fatal to a normal person and never actually dies. Kaladin is self-sacrificing enough that I think he definitely would do the full bit, if necessary. Otherwise I agree that being strung up in the Highstorm is very similar to the Crucifixion, but without the same import and effect it is more of a thematic similarity. And, as the WoB posted above suggests, not an intentional reference. 8. He's tempted by the devil (Odium), and the antichrist (Vyre). I feel it's a stretch to call Odium the devil, given the absolute-hard-binary of God vs. Satan. The moral and philosophical alignment of the Shards doesn't mesh well with the Abrahamic frame to begin with. I also don't recall anything Odium does to tempt Kaladin in a manner similar to Jesus in the desert, but maybe I'm just not recalling the event or thinking of it in the right way. I also don't recall the antichrist actually appearing in the Bible at all, outside of mentions of its predicted presence in Revelations, and similarly no instances of tempting anyone (but I may not be recalling that correctly either). I could see his openness to Moash's perspective in Words of Radiance as fitting this item reasonably well, though I still think that the contexts are different enough that it's not fair to lump them together. And, like some of the other items, being tempted by others is very common to fiction. I also think it's too much to pigeonhole Odium as the devil-- it's every bit as divine and just as much a component of Adonalsium as Honor or any of the other Shards. The God/Satan divide is more about free will being used to turn against everything that is good and right, not just a really bad dude. The Honor/Odium relationship is two equal pieces of divinity with very different fundamental properties and fourteen similarly situated siblings. I appreciate why many people associate Odium with Satan but I personally do not think that the comparison is a very strong one. 9. At the end of WAT, he becomes a demigod and ascends directly to heaven (spiritual Alaswha). I'm not confident that this is a fair description of either. Ascending to heaven both God and as an aspect of God, which he always was, to rule and oversee everything in existence, seems very different to me than becoming one of ten immortal ghosts and going to a (hopefully) stable and peaceful, non-heaven place temporarily in order to heal the minds of those ten. 10. Finally, in the back half, he will descend from the heavens to free Roshar from the beasts' tyranny in the final battle. This is all speculative and not something prophesied by anyone in-text, and there is at least some reason to believe that Kaladin will return (when he does) in a similar mode to how the Heralds have always done it: contributing with others against an incredibly difficult struggle rather than personally changing the nature of the world just by the act of returning. Items 4-7 on the list I might quibble with, mostly about finer details and commonness in stories, but none enough so to warrant their own section. If you're looking for more similarities I think that a good one is that Kaladin was anointed by Wind long before anything beyond the mundane happened to him. I was responding more to First in that one. Forums like this one sometimes make it hard to disentangle things.

I have to think they'd be horrified by the Final Empire, or at least most of them would be. Whatever else it was it was almost totally indifferent to the lives of the skaa and also very focused around specific end results while kind of indifferent to the specific methods. That's in conflict with two of the three sentiments in the oath common to all Radiants, the life before death piece and the journey before destination piece. Windrunners, Edgedancers, and Willshapers seem like they would have serious and inescapable opposition to the skaas' plight in particular. They'd oppose the Lord Ruler for sure, probably with basic methods similar to Kelsier's. As for the rest I'm not as sure they would be as fundamentally opposed, even if their interpretations of the first Radiant oath didn't drive them to try to bring it down. Skybreakers could probably find their peace with it. At the same time I don't think that Rashek would be OK with people as powerful as Radiants operating on Scadrial even if they were ostensibly cooperating with him. He very much consolidated power in himself and kept his underlings weaker than they otherwise would have been with things like house wars and competition among the cantons of the Steel Ministry. I think that he would try to drive off or destroy the Radiants which would end up forcing them into conflict anyways.

No worries, just clarifying the intent from the text as that's been more of an issue in this thread than some other times.

What engagement are you hoping for, and what arguments are you referring to? Absolutely Kaladin is Jesus-like, in his savior-trope arc. I don't think that's an unusual perspective, and it's not one that I would argue against. On reading the OP I was legitimately uncertain about what sort of discussion you wanted here-- how many degrees of similarity there are between the two? Discussion of how well the items on your list match each character, or which ones people find less sound? More similarities between the two? I did try to answer directly and clearly: no, they aren't really the same though they do share many similarities, roles, and archetypes. I think that the differences between them tell more about them than the similarities and that they are more different than similar despite the list, and said so. If that's not what you were looking for then I suppose that's on me for misunderstanding your post, but I do think that my interpretation of the OP is a fair and reasonable one even if not accurate. If you're interested in specific critiques of the list I think that items 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, and 10 are not very sound, though some are definitely debatable. If you are interested in characteristics that differ between the two I think that their contexts, challenges, and goals are radically different, enough that similarities in things they did and how they did them are more coincidental or convergent than strong similarities between two people. Kaladin's embrace of violence is also a pretty important differentiator between them, though his renunciation of violence does eventually align them better. I'll hold off on any more detail in case this, too, is off-target or simply not something you are interested in. I'll agree that alleging bad faith is a valid claim when someone thinks it's true, but I do not agree that my post was made in bad faith.

My point was more that there are other features to both which really distinguish them from one another, and a list of only similarities doesn't capture that. I used an exaggerated example to highlight that, and even if the details were integral to the character the three similarities fall pretty far short of "literally just". Hence my response, which seems like a fair answer to the question (and which you agree with, apparently). Kelsier did too, right? He didn't know that he would have a chance to exist indefinitely as a cognitive shadow. The book seems clear enough that Kelsier's plan to free the skaa and overthrow the Final Empire (backup plan, which is probably a fair consideration too-- he'd hoped to survive the normal way) required the religious trappings he set up (though they also flattered his ego). There isn't an obvious substitute for that if Kelsier dies, which obviously he did, but I don't know how things would have shaken out had Kelsier survived that encounter. I doubt he'd have played up the I'm-a-deity angle since he doesn't seem to have done that, generally, as a cognitive shadow (Sovereign aside, if it was truly him, but it's a pretty relevant event). But how else could you handle the mysticism and legend he set up? Kaladin also hadn't exactly planned to sacrifice himself, but did when was necessary, but knew that his sacrifice would accomplish what he wanted and that he'd continue to exist afterwards. I definitely would agree that Kaladin's sacrifice was more selfless, I just don't get the argument that Kelsier's sacrifice doesn't count.

No? I mean, the list seems mostly OK so far as it goes (with some liberties taken), but it's a pretty sparse one for capturing either personality or for defining their lives and works. There is a lot of thematic overlap but with savior tropes being so well-worn I tend to say that characters from contemporary fiction are playing to the trope rather than a specific story (unless the author states otherwise, which is not the case as alder24 demonstrated with the WoBs). To say that Kaladin is literally just Jesus sounds about as reasonable to me as saying that he's literally just a Crip (he wears blue, is part of an organization of people that wear blue, and kills people associated with the color red in a self-perpetuating violent conflict). "Literally just" overstates similarities in most cases.

Kelsier is the Survivor of Hathsin, not just the Survivor, so the title isn't quite in contention. I think the parallel details are probably intentional but the situation is not anything special-- they're both savior characters in fantasy settings. Kaladin isn't more of a survivor than the original Heralds, and they were worshipped but not (specifically) for their immortality. The potential for blending the stories seems lessened by the fact that both characters still exist, but the obvious counterpoint to that is how much Rosharan religions diverged from the actual Heralds. It does seem unlikely to me, given the records of the specific deeds and circumstances are pretty distinctive, that there is much chance of the stories blending in peoples' minds unless there is substantial blending of the populations from each planet and then a lot of time passing. I haven't thought much about substantial expatriate populations across Cosmere worlds, since so far we've only seen specialists traveling for work and maybe a couple of tourists. Do people here think that that kind of migration is likely to happen during the Cosmere books? By Mistborn era 4 I guess I don't see why not.

I think that ultimately the emphases you describe are more symptoms than causes of those feelings, at least for me. My perspective is that the legalism (as described in this thread) in the Cosmere sets up stories but doesn't resolve them. That can feel like a too-convenient, just-so scenario to make story conclusions possible but I would not say that those conclusions are, themselves, the result of those legalities being interpreted, executed, or extended. They definitely can lead to stories feeling less satisfying for a variety of reasons. My own evaluation is that the hard rule, contract side of things only really came up in a meaningful way in Rhythm of War and Wind and Truth. I think it was inescapable there because the plot was written into a corner: it was necessary for Odium to have been really effective in the past (splintering Shards, everyone afraid of him), but then frequently present on-screen and regularly very ineffective while there despite being in a conflict he himself had devised and spent millennia preparing to decisively win. The key elements of the contract plot device address that as well as anything else (the circumstances were different then, and so what we see happen will be different too) while allowing Odium to still be a character in the story. But we still saw too much of Odium to satisfyingly resolve the contradictory description of his power and efficacy with his persistent, in-text failures. I also think that people overinterpret the SA contract and how binding and meaningful it really was. We're plainly told that Shards can violate promises all they want, provided that they are willing to pay the cost (some not-at-all-defined vulnerability), and we have seen Shards do that in several cases with varying consequences. The major factor in keeping Odium adherent to the contract was basically just a statement from the Stormfather that Odium "could be hurt, as he has been before" if he were to violate it, with the implication that he wouldn't want to risk that. Even with how the story played out everything was reduced to a self-described loophole, which is hardly the mark of an inviolable contract. My personal feeling about the first SA arc's conclusion is that a lot of it was pretty weak (definitely not all of it, though), and not due to anything about contracts or legalism. Odium's big plans for conquest were mostly straightforward, unoriginal, and dull. The parallel timing of the plot lines in WaT required some of those plans to be stretched out well beyond whatever plot they could supply, highlighting things I found unsatisfactory. The need to set up another dozen (at least) Cosmere novels through the setting's flagship series meant that relatively few of the conflicts in SA actually got resolved at all but instead got bridges to being in future books. I got very strong "the princess is in another castle" feelings when I finished it. Crucially, the contract barely even mattered-- Odium was poised to conquer the world, and now he's conquered... almost the whole world. It makes sense that the characters spent a couple thousand pages fretting about the contract, because that's what they were dealing with, but that also overstated what the contract actually was to the plot. So, in conclusion after my ramblings, no, I do not think that increasing emphasis on legalism and contracts (if it happens) poses a lot of risk for making the stories feel more mechanical or unsatisfying. I think that the factors which might push the stories in those directions already exist independent of that and are already cropping up for unrelated reasons. I tend to feel that bad or ineffective plot devices are more likely the result of weaker writing than they are things which make otherwise strong writing worse. At the end of SA's first arc there was weak plotting, weak pacing, and weak focus on the story at hand for reasons totally separate from the contract or any legalism. I think that we could swap out the contract entirely and still easily end up with the same outcomes and flaws/struggles that were actually published.

I happened across this thread again and hadn't realized my post had been removed (I'm not complaining, just saying I wasn't aware). I'm not intending to shift the conversation away from where it is but wanted to clarify one thing: my comparison to Moash was specifically and only about refusing to critically think about one's own conclusions and their obvious rightness. I feel that describes Moash accurately (but not entirely, there is clearly more to him than that) as he refuses to consider any of the arguments or questions Kaladin poses to him about his moral positions, instead believing himself to be right due to his observation of how right he feels about those positions. When a poster in this thread described an aversion to critical review and introspection of their own moral positions and the bases which informed them, as well as a very strong dislike for Moash, I thought that the (very limited) overlap was worth mentioning. The aim was "if this isn't good enough to justify Moash's positions, is it good enough to justify yours, and if so what is the difference? What are the reasons beyond "feeling right" for those positions, and can we talk about those?", and not to suggest any additional similarities. I think it is a fair statement that Moash is a bad person and is also (largely) morally uncomplicated. Lack of complication is not the same as good and I felt that (at that spot in the thread) that distinction would be helpful for discussion. Maybe I was mistaken, post removal aside. I hope you don't leave, @Aliroz-The-Confused, or even take a hiatus from the site. I truly apologize if that post or any of my posts were upsetting to you. That wasn't my intent at all.

Wow, I'm away for a few days and the thread moves on so far! It's like a lesser version of what TheFlatScadrian experienced a couple of pages ago. Most of my best and/or most relevant ideas are already here so I don't have much fresh stuff to add. This is dependent on a core issue which I've referenced but haven't laid out very clearly. We don't have any real idea of how non-Cosmere people and things would be represented in the Cosmere itself. Most important is the humans. Invaders lack spiritwebs and the Investiture that is a fundamental component of all matter in the Cosmere, so they should be inherently unable to do things like use Investiture, access Shadesmar independently, or bond spren. This also strongly implies that they would not have cognitive representations (no flames in Shadesmar). Less clear is whether or not Investiture can directly affect them, such as being soulcast from flesh to flames or participate in manipulations of Connection. The same should also be true of their equipment: without being composed of matter, energy, and Investiture it's not clear why or how they would have beads in Shadesmar, for example. Sanderson hasn't been clear on this (which seems fair, as the real world is specifically distinct from the Cosmere and so crossovers are inherently impossible). The best WoB I could find on the subject states that a Shardblade would cut an Earth-derived human like a Cosmere-derived human rather than like an inanimate object, but the details are not really defined and so we should not feel comfortable with a specific conclusion in any specific case. I don't think that this is all that huge a handicap because it would be pretty quick and simple for Rosharans to learn whether or not they can affect invaders and their equipment directly, and they can affect them indirectly with almost as much ease and effect. Overall I think that the lines of the conflict are pretty well drawn, even with the uncertainties we can't eliminate due to unclear information or the need for arbitrary assumptions. My view of the overall situation: The invaders probably have an advantage on their first strike because it seems unlikely that the Rosharans would understand their capabilities. For example, until they've seen a long range missile strike I don't know how they'd be able to surmise that such a thing is possible nor how destructive it could be. The invaders would have plenty of missiles, so the devastation of one specific type of missile isn't so important (because they can just rain down a salvo of hundreds if they need the extra destructive power). This can also offset the loss of precision guidance to at least some degree in at least some situations. The invaders have some capacity to adapt to Rosharan conditions, and will do so as they are able. For example, they can set up temporary airstrips between storms or move carrier groups around to enable sorties. We have to grant some foreknowledge of Roshar for the scenario to be considered at all, and what specific knowledge they have (and when) will obviously matter a lot. But they will certainly be able to do some things with some efficacy even though their real-world capabilities will not all be available to them. Rosharans' ability to counter or defend against the invaders is dependent on their understanding of what, specifically, they need to counter or address. It's easy to say "burrow under X miles of rock" (I found it easy to say upthread, at least ), but the appropriate value of X is pretty important and it's not clear how the Rosharans would determine it in advance. They can and will learn those sorts of details eventually but will suffer greatly until they do. The Rosharans are, in broad terms, more vulnerable to attrition than the invaders. There are fewer of them and they are difficult to replace. Being able to bond new Radiants takes time, and development of their abilities takes time and insight which can't be rushed nor forced. It's a category difference between Shallan in Words of Radiance and Shallan at the end of Oathbringer. New Skybreakers flatly cannot use Division. Personal qualities also matter here: Jasnah is simply not replaceable, because how many polymath geniuses does Roshar have that are also Radiant bond-compatible and also into an Order that is appropriately versatile? The ability of Roshar to resist the invading military is based not only in access to magic but also in ability to use that magic in effective ways. Losing key people, or enough "rank and file" Radiants, would degrade their ability to operate against the invaders. For that reason the Rosharans' specific losses in strikes for which they are not fully prepared, and any attrition they suffer, are pretty important. These features lead me to the overall conclusion that the invaders will lose a protracted invasion but might be able to do enough damage early in the conflict to remove effective opposition. None of this gets into the dynamics between Rosharan groups (like, would the Fused take opportunities to strike at the Radiants while they are dealing with the invaders, or would they strike at the invaders too?), which could also be relevant. But it gets really hard to game those sorts of things out unless we just assert things, and those assertions will tend to define outcomes all by themselves.

Conveniently leaving out a rather long stretch of more recent military conflicts which have been... less successful for the U.S. than WWII. And supply lines and logistic chains absolutely provided vulnerabilities the U.S. had to worry about, which the portal obviates. But this point is related to the scenario: the monomaniacal focus on conquest, for no reason and with no objectives, with no other financial, economic, industrial, social, or political goals to consider or complicate the campaign leaves little room to operationally define "victory" for the Rosharans. We've got destruction of the ability to project force on Roshar and that's about it. If the invaders appear at supersonic speeds, strike, and then retreat into another dimension we're not talking about a situation that allows anything for Roshar to accomplish at all. If you want to define victory out of the scenario that's fine but then there also is no discussion to be had. It doesn't matter. They would 100% care that a totally new group, with radically different capabilities, is suddenly present from nowhere and operating on Roshar. At minimum they will surveil those new installations and vehicles, constantly learning more. They will also almost certainly think through the military implications of aircraft that fly at higher altitudes than they can reach or even observe, along with any other observations they are able to make. You don't think they would be interested in having an aircraft of their own like those? They'd be desperately interested. I don't think there is any scenario in which they do not exert a lot of effort to know about the invaders' technology and equipment in every detail they could gather. They also have some excellent engineers and chemists and will be able to extrapolate a lot from seeing that something is possible, and being able to observe those things in action can save them a lot of R&D time. With access to magic they can design and execute experiments and tests with an ease and precision that reality cannot match and advance their knowledge rapidly. Let's not forget that war is what Alethkar does, both in the depths of Rosharan history all the way through to the contemporary Roshar of the novels. They're good at it and not stupid. Go ahead and toss in Herdaz and Azimir and Vedenar too, as they are specifically described in the books as having capable militaries. Especially when they're already on high alert due to being in an existential war with the Fused. They adapted their military doctrines quickly and effectively (if not as much as they would have preferred, I'm sure) to the radical changes the Fused brought to warfare. The idea that the Rosharans would just not care nor respond in any way, even to imagine how warfare might change with these new observations, seems beyond unreasonable to me. It's just another way of asserting that Roshar can't win (in this case because they are arbitrarily careless and stupid) which, as above, makes all discussion pointless. This is a regression in the discussion. Being underground is not being "locked in" for the Radiants in any way. Being underground perfectly protects them from the invaders and does not limit their ability to move around very much (certainly less so than trying to operate on the surface), and "heavy watch" is meaningless in that context. They are not limited in their ability to get and use resources (it's easy for them to carve a small opening in the side of a random mountain before a Highstorm and then seal it up again afterwards). It's very easy for the Radiants to be there and they can persist indefinitely while also developing their military capabilities. It negates all of the invaders' advantages and permits the Radiants to strike when and how they like while also permitting rapid, on-demand retreats. The quantity of explosives also seems irrelevant-- the invaders already have an abundance of the best ordinance they can make and can deliver it (arguably) anywhere on the surface of Roshar at any time, and it's already not enough to deal with the deep tunnel strategy. If anything the ease of getting cheap chemical explosives advantages Roshar, since they can fundamentally get more of them immediately and essentially for free. They just have to know such explosives are possible, and every day of observing the invaders makes that more likely. You keep mentioning it as though it's relevant, though: Aluminum just isn't that meaningful in this conflict, unless you can point me to some way that it would matter. It's prohibitively expensive to Invest and interferes with (but does not inherently block) some direct applications of Investiture, and that's about it. That the invaders' deodorant probably has aluminum in it really doesn't do anything for them (outside of making them smell better, which is worth something). It doesn't strike me as any different than just fighting a large army, since the Fused need to consume one Singer each time they are killed. Their lack of infrastructure, knowledge, industry, and sanity are big drawbacks but they don't have more benefits than the Radiants that I can see beyond personally gaining experience with the invaders even when killed. Your whole argument depends on the invaders having overwhelming and insurmountable destructive potential (i.e., the Radiants need to learn that they can't stand against infantry with rapid-fire high-caliber rounds delivered by radar-tracking-capable turrets), and being personally felled by those a few times would not seem to impart any additional, useful knowledge than seeing it happen to someone else.

It was sad, especially because Lost Metal is where I started to like Wayne. But I also thought that it was a really, really satisfying conclusion to his character development arc.

But not indefinitely. The rules of the spawn point haven't said anything about going back to Earth. If the invaders can casually go back at their leisure then I think this thought experiment becomes pointless-- they have a nearly continent-sized redoubt that the Rosharans can't access, affect, or observe in any way, and if they will never stop attacking then this is the same as just declaring that the Rosharans cannot win. But if they can't go back then each aircraft the moves through the portal is either on a suicide mission or brings enough infrastructure and support with them to be noticeable by the Stormfather. That's what I meant about his ability to observe. We already know that he can see individual people beneath the storm (no idea if he can see above, but let's grant that he can't spot the high-altitude fliers), so he will see any airstrip, vehicle, encampment, or ship. Drones become difficult for similar reasons but with the added wrinkle that they require some amount of manual guidance (impossible at range, without the infrastructure to send and receive signals from them globally). In either case we are talking about an extended intelligence-gathering mission to learn things like who the important people are and where they typically go, or what physically impossible abilities people have, at least in a rounded enough way to enable the devastating first strike to be targeted with the specificity you describe. And I am not convinced that they can build all that from scratch before a refueling plane (at least) needs to touch down somewhere. Any notice they draw runs the risk of undermining the invaders' initial, surprise attack, which (again) is their key operation. What? No! I definitely don't sign on to that statement. If anything I believe it less than I did at the start of the thread. Also (this more covers points below but is still relevant in the Radiant section), I think that you are radically overestimating what aluminum will do for the invaders. It's not the hard counter for Investiture that you seem to be suggesting and I really don't understand why you are so confident that the invaders will learn about its most valuable (to them) uses, nor its relationship to dealing with Rosharans, at all. The circumstances in which they would be exposed to that kind of information seem unlikely, rare, and difficult to interpret at all correctly. As before I'm going to say that access to aluminum is not a meaningful edge for the invaders, though it would frustrate some Rosharan efforts even so. Very problematic for the invaders in some ways different from the Radiants but mostly the same considerations should apply. The edges the Fused enjoy include "immortal" super-veterans, more consistently accessible Voidlight, more types of power (such as Regals in addition to the Fused), and some more capable spren (the secretspren can use the screaming strategy I described above), but I don't know that these are really enough to give them a very different scenario than the Radiants face. It's also true that some of the Fused are... less impressive than their Radiant counterparts. The Fused that are really good at throwing big stones are not very exciting nor versatile, and are probably not going to be much use here. They've been honed over millennia to excel in a specific type of conflict and even the differences between the modern Rosharans and what the Fused are used to facing was really problematic for them. The invaders are even more different than that. They do have the Unmade, which are probably unbeatable to the invaders but it's not 100% clear what they could in turn do to the invaders. Not knowing their realmatic properties makes it really hard to estimate but anything that relies on directly affecting individual invaders seems shaky and that's most of what we've seen the Unmade do. It's also hard to account for them because in the books they are directly backed and supported by Odium, which violates the rules of the scenario. For example, the Everstorm goes where Odium wants whenever he wants, so he could just park it over one fleet at a time until it's ruined and they'll be helpless to do anything about it or operate through it. Though that does remind me that the Everstorm exists, and even if we are not accounting for the Fused when considering the Radiants' chances the Everstorm certainly still counts. Given the violence of both storms, and their opposite directions, it may not be possible for the invaders to maintain their ocean fleets at all: eventually they're going to be caught unsheltered, possibly in one of the violent collisions of both storms. The Stormfather also has at least some ability to toss out Highstorms when and where he feels like it, so maybe that's a tactic the Radiants could also use. Inadequate, I think. There are too few, their powers not different from the Radiants, and without a lot of infrastructure and support they are just ten supersoldiers with swords. The advantages they might have seem to me like they would all be based in their vast knowledge of the world and the nature of reality in the Cosmere. We can't really estimate that knowledge or what it's worth in this conflict, but given that the Heralds alone were not sufficient to stop the Desolations I think it's fair to say they cannot destroy the invaders on their own, either. Though working together with the Radiants the might have some incredible advantages (Ishar could really mess things up for the invaders in shocking ways, potentially). In my estimation, even worse than all of the other groups. The Honorblades don't confer unlimited Stormlight (I think that was only while Honor was intact, and maybe only for the Heralds who were bound to him)-- we see Szeth constantly needing Stormlight to fuel his activities. Outside of that they have even less to protect them: no real industry, a pretty unfocused social organization, and barely even Highstorms to work with. I would not count on Nightblood to be worth much against the invaders. Most of what he does is realmatic in nature, so it might not work on the invaders and their equipment at all. We do have a couple of wildcards but they're so unpredictable that I wouldn't rely on them. For example, if the invaders are observed to any degree, Taravangian has that information, and then hits a super-brilliant day he could probably deduce pretty much everything about the invaders and their capabilities, predict their strategies and tactics, and out-plan them by virtue of being radically smarter than anything the invaders could ever offer up.

I've had fun too! This seems tricky to me. We've been operating under the assumption that the invaders just have some baseline intelligence before transiting the spawn point (otherwise it's a lot harder for their invasion to be viable), without worrying too much about how they obtained it. If we're talking about the invaders being on Roshar and conducting more surveillance I start to question their ability to be hidden. The Stormfather sees nearly everything, and given the Singer invasion (impending or in-progress) I have to think that something large and mysterious is going to draw attention and comment. An aircraft carrier seems impossible to hide to me, and something like an airstrip more hide-able but still difficult. Each reconnaissance flight increases the chances of some Rosharan observing the aircraft, though if the invaders already know enough of the geography they could probably mitigate this a lot. But, as my view of the invasion is that it depends heavily on the surprise of the first attack, any observation of the invaders starts to jeopardize that. Seeing an aircraft carrier would greatly disturb any Rosharan, being almost unimaginably large for a vessel but not having most of the things they expect a ship to have (like sails or oars). Seeing something move as quickly as an airplane through the air would be mind-blowing. I have to think that those would prompt changes that would lessen the initial strike's impact and/or accelerate the Rosharans' ability to deal with some of the formerly unimaginable abilities the invaders have. The intelligence the invaders gain is important too, but much harder for me to parse out in my imagination. I don't know that they would be able to track key, individual Rosharans or learn much about the mechanics of how Surgebinding works or about what spren are. But they probably could learn about the Oathgates and other things that would be useful to them. After posting this bit I thought more about it and I don't think that the Rosharans would be able to use Radiant spren for this, at least not very easily. They can only move so far away from their Radiants which would require the Radiants to be pretty close to the fleet for the duration of the operation. I'm not confident that they could do that well. The secretspren we see in Kholinar could do it, but they're not likely to work with the Radiants. Outside of those I don't know if there are actually spren available to do it at all!