Mason Wheeler

Very interesting. Can you see a similar pattern in the Skybreaker oaths?

The thing about redemption arcs is, they don't work particularly well unless the fall that the character needs to be redeemed from happens off-camera. Moash's didn't. We saw every detail of him giving himself over to the enemy, from his own perspective, and it made a significant fraction of the fanbase -- probably a majority -- feel that he was irredeemable. On Writing Excuses, Brandon talks a lot about "promises," about how you set up audience expectations early on in a narrative and then fulfill them later on in the story. It really doesn't feel like he's done anything to promise a Moash redemption, and he's also talked various times about how he's well-aware of the fanbase's utter hatred for the character. He's fully aware that if he does go for it, there's a lot of people who will view it as a betrayal. This makes me doubt that it will happen.

Officially confirmed to have grown more Invested over time.

Azure finally confronts Zahel. There's a tense moment as the two draw their blades, eyeing one another across several feet of open ground. "I've been waiting for you, Vasher. We meet again at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now, I am the master!" "Only a master of Awakening, Vivenna."

True, but then again most of the people capable of actually understanding are the Vessels. Well yeah! When there's a new Shard in town, (theoretically) twice as powerful as any of the others, what reasonable person wouldn't want to watch very carefully from afar and avoid drawing their notice until they had ascertained whether or not this one had malevolent intentions? He would only be in Hoid's way if that is Hoid's intention. You can't use your premise as evidence to support your premise. Yeah, he's what you call a "class traitor." Look at what Endowment had to say to him: you had your chance to be one of us, you turned it down, so stay out of our affairs. Maybe. From a literary perspective that makes sense, but it doesn't appear particularly well supported by the facts of this specific case. Particularly when you consider that his history with a Dawnshard forces him into a life of extreme pacifism. That doesn't seem particularly compatible with an aspiring galactic conqueror.

Oh, now there's an interesting idea! What's your line of reasoning for that?

WoK chapter 54.

This really feels like it's Hoid's ultimate goal, or somehow related to Hoid's goal. Remember his talk with Dalinar, where he name-dropped Adonalsium and just moments later talked about taking a person apart and then putting him back together slightly differently?

Good to hear!

Did we ever end up getting audio from yesterday?

OK, I found and removed the offending spoiler, cleaned up the audio quality a bit (it's still pretty noisy but it's better than what I started with!) and uploaded it to Arcanum. Again, I won't be able to provide a recorder today. Hopefully there are fans in the area who can drop one off!

OK, just got home. My wife and I are both very tired, so I'll get the audio put up tomorrow morning. There was one thing Brandon asked me to scrub from the audio before posting because it's a big spoiler for an unpublished work, and after he said what it is, yeah, I definitely agree! So if you find your question in the transcription but the last few words of the answer are missing, please keep it to yourself. I did manage to get one question out of him, which was after the recorder was turned off, so I'll report it here. Q: Before the Shattering, the original 16 Vessels, how Cosmere-aware were they and were any of them worldhoppers? A: In the current continuity, they were not worldhoppers. Well... the dragons were the most Cosmere-aware. They might have been off-world. Might have. [Emphasizing the uncertainty here. He clearly has not 100% made up his mind on that last point. Also, dragons. Plural.] Also: Q: You've said that in the "back 5," there will be at least one book with Heralds as viewpoint characters, with flashbacks? A: Two. Q: Well, you've gotta have a scene at one point like this. Jezrien and Shallash are flying somewhere, but along the way, they get accosted by the Heavenly Ones. Big chaotic fight ensues. They get separated. Eventually her Stormlight runs out... ... ...and Ash falls from the sky. A: *gro~oan* Q: *cackling at his reaction*

Just dropped it off. Hopefully the sound will be good. Just for the record, I will not be able to do this tomorrow. Can anyone take care of it?

Sorry to hear we didn't have a recorder available yesterday! I'll bring one by after work today. It'll definitely be ready before 6.

If anyone's registration stalls out at a step marked "Checkout" after hitting the Add To Cart button, there's a glitch in the site's coding. It's attempting to send you on to https://minicon.dragonsteelbooks.com/cart and failing. Go to there after the Add To Cart step and you'll be able to check out.

Suddenly I'm thinking back to a year ago, when the Kickstarter for The Way of Kings went live and the page was all but entirely unusable for the first half hour or so as it got swamped with so much traffic. Registration goes live in approximately 1 hour. Anyone care to speculate on how well the server will hold up? EDIT: Yup. The site is slowed to a crawl, with page loads taking over a minute when they don't fail entirely with nginx errors.

Sounds fun! I'll definitely be there!

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!

@robardin On one hand, this explanation fits in so well with the existing themes. But on the other hand, screw Moash. No one wants him to get a redemption story! So I really hope this isn't what ends up happening.

By far the worst sin against physical realism in firearms I've seen in Mistborn comes from the Wax flashback scene, when he fires a bullet out of a naked cartridge to kill the bad guy. Bullets do not work that way. Without a barrel to channel the powder explosion, the bullet won't accelerate up to any serious velocity. To put it simply, you can't get a gunshot without a gun.

On the other hand, they appear to have a massive unfair advantage in said development, as they're implied to be in possession of the only source of Harmony's god-metal.

Wow, I've missed Wayne! It's good to see more of him, even if it's only a bit...

The thing that really bugged me was just that the plot didn't work. We start off with making it really obvious -- and I mean really, painfully obvious even if you hadn't figured it out already from the last book -- how the cytonic hyperdrive works, and then spending the rest of the book treating that whole subject as a huge mystery complete with a Big Reveal at the end. Then we go to the alien place and start doing spying stuff, and we get yet another retread of the "band of misfits underdog sports team" plot we've all seen a zillion times, including in the previous book. We try to create a bunch of tension with the character with the provisional existence, but did anyone believe for a second that they wouldn't make it in the end? And meanwhile, the characters we've actually come to know and love from Skyward are nowhere to be seen. A bunch of shenanigans happen and Spensa confronts the Delver... and I've seen this ending before. From Brandon! It's basically just the climax of Calamity all over again. Gasp! The cytonic hyperdrive is exactly what the entire book has been making it abundantly clear it is, which fact was covered up by those in power for exactly the reason you'd suspect it would be! What a tweeeeest! And then it ends on a cliffhanger, which wouldn't be so bad except that so did Bands of Mourning, and this book held up the resolution of it for an extra two years!

And yet we've gotten two Skyward books (and two Stormlight books!) since Bands of Mourning came out. I just have to wonder, just how broken was Apocalypse Guard that *this* was considered good enough to replace it? Because let's face it. Skyward was pretty good but Starsight... wasn't.