Mason Wheeler

56:04: Argent: "I guess Hoid just... got better? "

Have you read the ending scene of Dragonsteel Prime?  While it's of dubious canonicity, it does show that Hoid's ability to "just get better" is for all intents and purposes limitless.

Fun podcast!  But I have to say, when it comes to "vexatious troll" WTCC submissions, can anyone beat mine from last year?

1:04:24: "Even if [Moonbreaker] is the best possible game [of the type] that it is, I probably wouldn't be interested."

This.  100% this.  Watching the video where Brandon introduced it, I just kept thinking over and over "how is this a Brandon Sanderson project?"  Maybe it's just my biases or perceptions showing, but I'd kind of imagined that the story would be central (not just some tacked-on audio script) to any video game bearing Brandon's name.

16:02: "Brandon's spoken about, the front five are more focused on the Radiants, and the back five ... on the Heralds."

This is true.

It's also true that Brandon has been known to troll the fanbase in his answers from time to time.  And if there's any truth to the conversation we got in the book 5 prologue, an important part of the Stormfather's plan is to establish new Heralds and not just new Radiants.  So I can't help but wonder, will the Heralds that it focuses on in the back 5 necessarily be the old Heralds?

WRT the "Brandon is trolling people about the Stormfather" bit, I think it will likely be explained somewhere in the book itself.

When Words of Radiance came out, I got the book in the morning and went to a signing event that evening.  I spent the whole day reading through it and got a fair ways in, but didn't finish it.  When I was there, I asked Brandon, "there's a guy in here, I don't remember what he's called but I'll just call him Inspector Javert.  Goes around killing people using their crimes as an excuse."

"OK, that guy.  I know who you mean."

"Well, in the first book, you've confirmed that the woman destroying artwork -- perverting beauty -- is the Herald of Beauty, Shallash.  This guy perverting justice, is that Nalan, the Herald of Justice?"

He just smiled and said that's an interesting theory.

Q: What does Stormlight Mario use to power up?

A: Ba-Ado Mushrooms.

All this talk about Sigzil and Hoid and the Dawnshard makes me think that Hoid will find out about Rysn. I like the idea that he's hidden his away on Roshar somewhere, but once he learns that a different one is active and taken up residence in Rysn, he goes, "It is not wise to keep two Dawnshards so close together."

So he sends Sigzil off to take the other Dawnshard to someone else for safekeeping. " I can assure you, it will be absolutely safe here in my collection," the guy says. But of course everything goes wrong, and before he knows it poor Sigzil is on the run from someone who wants to get his hands on the whole set so he can remake the entire Cosmere with just a snap of his fingers...

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55:54: "And like, Brandon already pushed Words of Radiance back.  Words of Radiance was 'supposed to' be November 2023, he pushed it back to March."

 

Umm? 

The obvious problem with the Chana theory is that the Stormfather's visions have shown our heroes accurate depictions of what the Heralds look like.  If Shallan had seen her mom there, she would have mentioned it!

9:33: "The rest of the letter was completely irrelevant after that drop."

Are you sure? Everyone talks about all the shards, but... OH WOW THE FORESHADOWING! Brandon really pulled a fast one on us here, distracting everyone with shard names but then quietly, subtly doing something no Letter has ever done before: throwing in something that turns out to be incredibly relevant to the book itself!

50:25: "Other aspects of [Brandon's] religion have also shown up in his writing and in the Cosmere specifically."

Far less so than other prominent LDS authors such as Orson Scott Card or David Farland, but one thing does really stand out: I don't think it's possible for anyone but a Mormon to create the ending we got for The Hero of Ages. 

I'm a little bit surprised at how low the main goal and the stretch goal thresholds were set.  Initially, the signed and numbered tier alone was (almost) 1000 copies at $500 each.   Dragonsteel had to know that would sell out almost immediately, and that's (almost) $500,000, double the main goal on that alone!  But now they're like "oh noes! We blew through all the stretch goals on the first few hours of day 1 and need to invent more! Who could have ever imagined it?!?" 

4 minutes ago, MysticLotus said:

I already got today’s issue.

So much fun stuff in the Rhythm of War excerpt.  One disappointing detail, though: apparently The Lost Metal is not next in line after Rhythm of War is finished anymore; it's been pushed back YET AGAIN to after the 3rd Skyward book! 

Wow!  The numbered copies sold out within 10 minutes!  Glad I got one right away before they vanished!

The Elsecaller lore seems a bit odd to me.

Thoughtful, careful, and cautious, the Elsecallers are generally regarded as the wisest of the Radiants.

This line intrigues me, because the one Elsecaller we've seen so far could be best described as a prosocial psychopath. (ie. the charismatic type who ends up as cult leaders or CEOs in our world. On Roshar... well... yeah. Close enough!) This is someone whose response to learning about a failed genocide was disgust at its failure, who used a vigilante murder spree of a handful of criminals as a philosophical object lesson for her apprentice, whose first reaction to learning about the way the Desolation cycle really worked was "we should find some Heralds and kill them to fix this," and whose first thought on learning something was weird about her own brother's spren was to reach for a Shardblade.  Murder appears to be her go-to solution to every problem!

Thoughtful, careful, cautious and wise does not fit Jasnah particularly well at all!  Is this just another case of "you're so different from what your order is supposed to be as to be a mockery of it" a la Nale's derisive dismissal of Lift?  Because not all of the Radiants we've seen so far are bad matches for their orders.  Kaladin isn't, and Dalinar definitely isn't!  (Malata may or may not be; we'd have to see more of her...)  But I fear for the future of Alethkar with Jasnah in charge!

7 hours ago, Wyndlerunner said:

now I'm craving more Nalthis stuff...

Me too! I'm surprised we haven't seen a preorder form for Warbreaker 10th Anniversary Leatherbound Edition yet.

You know what would make for a really great Shardcast episode?

Adonalsium.

For all that we've learned about the Shards and their origin, the most central question remains maddeningly vague: why?  What was the problem to which the original Vessels believed that the best/only solution was to destroy God and scatter its pieces far and wide across the Cosmere?  I'd love to see what sort of juicy speculation you guys manage to come up with on the subject...

WRT form-fitting Plate, I learned from Shadiversity (which was recently featured on the other Brandon Sanderson podcast, though I was watching it before then) that historical breastplates were actually domed, for the same basic reason that modern car bodies have crumple zones.

WRT the question of which world will get into space first, Brandon has said that the next Mistborn era will have a technology level analogous to our 1980s time period.  By that time, we'd been going into space for a couple decades... but Earth and Scadrial have one crucially important difference in this regard.  A major motivation for the American space program was specifically to get to the moon, and Scadrial doesn't have any moons!

I wonder how that will affect their development...

Sure. We know that happened once in the past.  The question is whether the "more directed ways" includes anything less extreme than a Sword of Adonalsium Shattering.  (Which is unofficially officially what the original Vessels used, until we find out how it actually happened.)

WRT the question of how enmeshed Sazed's two Shards are, I asked Brandon several years back at a signing event whether, if Sazed were to be killed, he would drop the two Shards Ruin and Preservation, or one single Harmony, and Brandon said he would drop Harmony.

So people were asking questions about the Sleepless... in Seattle? 

Also... what happened to the ending?  In both the SoundCloud and YouTube versions, it abruptly cuts off during clue #1 of the second Cosmere Character.

Argent said Hoid is a person of interest.

Victim or perpetrator? 

Also, the next question (about telepathy) was one of mine, and you glossed over what I intended to be the central point of the question when I asked it: is telepathy only something Shards can do--as what we've seen so far--or is it available to ordinary mortals as well?

"Do corrupted spren act differently in fabrials?"  Isn't that kind of implicit in the whole mess we saw with the Oathgate?

Yay!  You used my Cosmere Character and it didn't get randomly guessed on the first round!  I was half-expecting that it would, just by someone automatically guessing "Hoid" as a stock first-round response.