SheepAreFluffy

My assumption was that feruchemical zinc for mental speed would be more useful, for things like reaction time and being able to quickly calculate or judge the trajectories needed. That said, I don't remember what the exact abilities of f-steel and f-zinc are or if we've ever had them explained to us in full, so maybe you are right and steel would be the more useful one. But either way, I want to use feruchemy to improve reaction times.

Pair it up with feruchemical zinc in a twinborn, then.

I may be misinterpreting here, but from the way he spoke on his most recent weekly update on YouTube, it sounds like he thinks he'll be able to get the Ghostbloods books out by the dates he originally intended but contrary to what he'd previously said, he won't be writing them all before any of them are published and won't be building up a buffer like he wanted to. Which is a bit of a downer, honestly. I liked the idea of him being able to spend more time on these books and fully work out the continuity of the trilogy before any of it became set in stone metal. This is exactly my feeling as well. An oft-quote aphorism in the video game world applies equally as well to books: a delayed book is eventually good, but a rushed book is forever bad.

One thing I've wanted to see pretty much since I first read The Final Empire is an exploration of how the direction of motion isn't the same as the direction of force. Think orbital mechanics. The earth is always being pulled towards the sun by gravity, but that doesn't mean that we go flying straight into the sun. Rather, we have enough sideways velocity that the gravity is only enough to bend our path and put us in an orbital path. Imagine a highly-skilled lurcher who can do similarly with projectiles. She fights alongside her friends and colleagues, pulling any bullets or steelpushed projectiles that are aimed at them, but instead of pulling them hard enough to hit her (or her shield), she instead deflects them, has them slingshot around her, and then stops pulling with exact timing to fire them off in a direction of her choosing.

Purely going off the reviews/ratings (out of 5) I left on StoryGraph when I initially read them: With the benefit of hindsight, I think those are mostly about right. Alloy of Law is definitely my least favourite and The Emperor's Soul is definitely my favourite. Neither of those are in any doubt. The single book that I think I'd change the rating of the most is probably The Sunlit Man. I liked it, but I don't think I liked it that much. Somewhere around 3.75-4.0 is probably a more realistic take on how I feel about it now. Others might get nudged up or down a little bit, but not by that much.

My two most anticipated/hoped for are The Grand Apparatus and the not-mentioned-here potential story from the Dark Side of Taldain. In general, I'm more interested in seeing the random stand-alones than the big multi-part epics that tie into the Deep Lore. We're already going to be getting plenty of the latter with Mistborn and Stormlight, so I'm excited for the books that aren't like that. With the stand-alones, Sanderson is free to come up with interesting worlds, magic systems, and characters without havign to worry overly about how things fit into continuity. The Grand Apparatus specifically seems like such a cool and interesting concept to me, and could have been tailored to meet my own tastes and preferences. The tiny hints of it that we got in Isles of the Emberdark only served to whet my appetite further. The Dark Side book does go somewhat against this desire, since it's more entwined with the core of the Cosmere, but I really want to see more Khriss, and am interested to see how Star Marks work too. My two least anticipated are Night Brigade and Dragonsteel. Dragonsteel because it's just too far in the future for me to care about it yet. It feels like it's almost certain to get written but almost certainly not for over a decade, so it doesn't seem worth my while to have any particular thoughts or feelings about it yet. Night Brigade is right at the bottom of my list because I didn't really enjoy Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell and don't really care about seeing more Threnody. The general aesthetic of dark fantasy and horror just isn't my jam.

Realistic answer: nobody; I'm not particularly good at acting, nor do I think that I would enjoy being a part of a big Hollywood production. Fun answer: Design, Raboniel, or the Sibling would all be good options for me. The non-human characters are much more appealing to me. Partly just because it removes any of the concerns of matching up ethnicity, age, and gender. But beyond that, I'm just attracted to the idea of inhabiting these more eccentric and esoteric characters. If I'm Design then I get to be as weird as I want to be, and who's to tell me that I'm wrong? Design is just weird, after all. Getting full Hollywood makeup and prosthetics to turn me into Raboniel is definitely appealing, and I'd definitely love to have the photographs of that, but overall, I think I'd probably prefer to be one of the spren.

(Well, I've never read Scythe (YA dystopias aren't really my thing), but hopefully that isn't necessary to understanding your main point.) I understand what you are saying, but it doesn't change the way that I feel. It's not the "what" of heaven that I have a problem with, it's the "how long". Eternity is just a horrifying idea to me. Heaven sounds like it would be a pretty great place to spend a few million years, but a few million years is 0% of eternity. Billions of trillions of years is 0% of eternity. The Poincaré recursion time of the human brain is 0% of eternity. The Poincaré recursion time of the observable universe repeated Graham's number times over is 0% of eternity. Heaven for as long as I want it and then I get to stop existing when I'm done? That sounds great. That is something that I would want to believe in. Not something that I would believe in, but something that I would wish were true. But heaven that lasts for eternity and I have no choice? That still horrifies me.

[Context: I was raised as a loose and minimally-practicing Catholic, but these days would describe myself as an atheist and a secular humanist, though with some wrinkles and nuances to those descriptions.] So, the first thing to say here is that whether I want to believe in God and whether I do believe in God are entirely different things. There are plenty of things that I desperately want to be true and want to believe in, but for many of them, I don't. I want to believe that widespread acceptance of transgender people is going to happen any time now, but I don't. I want to believe that my aging father's health is fine and I have decades left with him, but I don't. I want to believe that humans will make contact with intelligent alien species in my lifetime, but I don't. And so on and so forth. If I thought that God existed, I would believe in him regardless of whether I wanted to; since I do not think he exists, I disbelieve regardless of what I want. As for why I don't believe, I think that the most concise summary would be to say that I don't believe because I have never experienced anything that would cause me to believe. I think that disbelief (in anything; not just God) is my default state and that I will only change that when I have sufficient evidence or personal experience and I just don't have that for God. For instance: I have never seen anything attributed to God that cannot adequately be explained by other causes. I can happily and easily explain everything I have experienced without having to resort to divinity. God is unparsimonious. He goes against Occam's razor. He is an entity multiplied beyond necessity. There are, of course, written accounts in the Bible that -- if taken at face value -- are hard to account for through naturalistic explanations. However, given the age of the Bible there's a whole lot of room for interpretations there. There's been more than enough time for misinterpretation, transcription errors, biased reporting, and so on and so forth. If the Bible is literally true then there are plenty of events that my philosophy cannot adequately explain and that would require the addition of some sort of supernatural actor. But I would treat all historical texts of that antiquity with a healthy amount of scepticism. From experience, this is the sort of thing where both sides are going to think that the other is engaging in circular reasoning, and it mostly comes down to what we take as the null hypothesis. I take the null hypothesis to be that God does not exist. Does the Bible contain evidence to disprove this? No, of course not. Based on my null hypothesis, I don't have any reason to believe that the depicted miracles are historical fact, so I'm not faced with anything that can't be explained without God. And if you tell me otherwise, then you are engaging in circular reasoning: you believe in God which means you believe in the accuracy of the bible which means you need to explain the miracles which you can only do so by believing in God. But I equally recognise that the same accusation of circular reasoning could be leveled at me: I don't believe in God, therefore I see the Bible as not being divinely inspired, therefore I don't see the miracles as requiring any explanation, therefore I don't believe in God. Both positions are internally consistent but neither is going to convince many people who don't already hold them. It all depends on your starting point. As another for instance: I have never had what I would describe as a spiritual experience. Even back during my Catholic upbringing, nothing there ever felt sacred or numinous to me. The church was always just an old building, the Bible was just a book of interesting stories, the communion host was just a wafer. Never once did I feel moved. Never once did I feel the Holy Spirit, either during religious practice or outside of it. There has, admittedly, been a single moment of my life where I experienced something somewhat close. I was out walking in the rain and my mind was wandering and I thought about the raindrops and the fundamental forces holding together the molecules and fundamental particles; and I thought of the water cycle and what those particular water molecules had been through to get to the point where they were raining down on me, through rivers, seas, erosion, plants and animals, over millions of years; and I thought of the universe and nucleosynthesis within stars that formed the oxygen in the water molecules; for a moment, I held all of this in my mind at once, and being rained on was the most glorious thing. Now, personally, I would be inclined to describe this as a moment of wonder at the scale and intricacy of nature, but even if I were to consider it a spiritual experience, it definitely wasn't one that pointed me towards the personal God of the Abrahamic religions. If it was anything, it was a pantheistic experience, and could only lead me away from a Church that derides pantheism. But! With all of that said, it would also be intellectually dishonest of me if I didn't also admit that I don't want to believe in God. I don't believe that this desire is strong enough to prevent me from believing if the evidence were there, but I can't truthfully say that I'm entirely unbiased. There are certainly aspects of Christian doctrine and theology that I find personally distasteful. I don't want to dwell too much on this because there's a danger that it can come across as bashing on other people's religions and that is absolutely not my intention. But to give some quick examples: I cannot imagine eternal existence to be anything other than ennui and stagnation and do not want to exist forever; I find the concept of a hell in which people receive eternal infinite punishment for finite transgressions is fundamentally at odds with my own sense of justice; I don't like the abrogation of personal responsibility that is inherent in having an ultimate moral authority. And so on and so forth. But once again, the fact that I don't believe is very distinct from the fact that I don't want to believe. If I thought the evidence was there, then I absolutely would believe, no matter how much I didn't want to.

Random thought that occurs to me: some way down the road, this opens up the possibility that we get yet another edition of White Sand, because three prose versions and two comics versions just isn't enough. For maximum cursedness, I'm just going to assume that there will be a movie and then a director's cut of the movie, and a screenplay, and then maybe a video game... Fandom will change, for sure. In addition to what others have already said, I foresee a change to fanfiction and fanart, to conventions and other in-person events, to the sort of questions Sanderson gets asked at Q&As, etc. But even as someone who doesn't care much for screen adaptations, I'm not really worried. People will still be out there engaging in fan activity that is specific to the books. They might be a bit harder to find, but they aren't going to go away entirely.

Unless this just quickly blows up and nothing comes from it, I do think it's pretty much inevitable that this is going to mean that Sanderson releases fewer books. There are only so many hours in a day and Sanderson is already something of a workaholic so I can't imagine that he could squeeze in writing screenplays and overseeing adaptations and still do all the work on books that he was doing before. It just doesn't seem possible. The question here is what ends up getting sacrificed. I think that we will still get the big important central Cosmere books. Mistborn eras 3 and 4 and the Stormlight back half both seem sure things. They may end up happening more slowly than they would have otherwise, but they will probably still happen. I think that Sanderson is just too committed to seeing his work through to a conclusion that he won't be willing to drop these. I also think we'll still get stand-alones and secret projects popping up here and there. These seem like they'd be the easiest (least hard?) books for him to find time for in the middle of other projects, and Sanderson is always going to keep on having cool ideas for stories that he's just itching to tell. What I really worry for are the books in the middle ground between these two. The ones that are said on the major shard worlds but aren't as integral to the main plot lines of the Cosmere. I'm thinking things like the potential cyberpunk Mistborn books, Nightblood, The Night Brigade, Horneater, maybe the Elantris sequels, and so on. To me, these feel like the corners that are most likely to end up getting cut. And honestly, I'm a little bit sad about this. I'm not really that much of a watcher of either films or television, and if I had to choose between any of those books or these screen adaptations, I would choose the books, easily. Brand new stories excite me more than retreading old ground, and I just prefer books as a medium to the screen. I may still end up watching and enjoying the adaptations, but they definitely don't excite me as much as new books would... ...but that's OK. Sanderson does not owe me anything. He should spend his time how he chooses to, not how I want him to. I mean, this is an incredibly obvious thing to say, but given some of the online discourse around certain other authors, it is apparently something that needs to be said. Regardless of how we all individually feel about this news, I mostly just hope that we can all be respectful of people with differing opinions and of Sanderson himself.

I didn't outright hate the debate, but I would say that it didn't really work for me, and I've been trying to figure out why. I think that, ultimately, my problem is that it's trying to do too much in too little space. On the one hand, it's supposed to show Jasnah as a genius level intellect who valiantly argued with a god and only narrowly lost; on the other hand it's suppose to show a crushing humiliation that makes her question the very core of her philosophical outlook. In trying to do both things, it failed to properly demonstrate either of them to me. Part of the problem is that we just haven't seen much of Jasnah's scholarship previously. We've been told that she's an amazing historian and philosopher, but we've not seen it. Compare Jasnah's arc in this book with Adolin's. With Adolin, we've seen multiple examples of his martial prowess over the past five books and been able to follow his own personal journey in coming to terms with the idea that shardbearers were no longer the be-all and end-all on the battlefield. So when he gets stomped on by a thunderclast, it's fine for him to just get resoundingly beaten by something that's bigger and scarier than he is. It doesn't hurt his character because we've seen his bravery, technique and strength countless times before. But with Jasnah, I think that the idea here was for her to be knocked down so that she could come back even stronger, having rebuilt herself with a different, stronger philosophical core. And this is fine and good, except that it felt to me that she was knocked down without having ever been properly built up previously. So we're trying to both build her up and then knock her down in the same conversation. I don't have the book at hand this second to go and check details, but from memory I believe that we're told that she nearly won and it was a slip of just one wrong word at the end that changed Fen's mind. And I believe as well that Taravangian complimented her on being such a strong opponent. And if this is the case, why is she so down on herself afterwards? If I got into a debate with someone who is effectively a god and came within millimetres of winning, I wouldn't come away thinking that I needed to re-evaluate my life. I'd be proud of doing so well in an impossible scenario. But at the same time, I don't think that I agree that she actually did do well. She went about the entire argument the wrong way, failed to come up with rebuttals that I (definitely not a genius) could think of, and generally wasn't particularly impressive. To summarise, my problem is with the dissonance and dichotomy that I was left with. It's difficult for me to pull everything together to form a coherent whole. Unless I'm supposed to believe that Jasnah has always been overhyped and has never been particularly smart to begin with? But I'm fairly sure that that is absolutely not the authorial intent here.

Agreed. Furthermore: The "el" morpheme is present in multiple names, such as Elhokar and Raboniel. It shows up across cultures in the Cosmere, not just on Roshar. As two extremely prominent examples, it's also in Elantris and Elend. We know that Elantris was originally going to be called Adonis; that is containing part of the name of Adonalsium. Theophoric ("god bearing") names are pretty common in the real world, including many that contain "el" (Daniel, Elizabeth, Nathaniel, etc.) Aon Ela means "focus, center", which to me seems closer in meaning to "god" than to "bond".

My "it probably won't happen but what if it does?" idea from reading this: What if Shallan ascends to Honor? Would her dissociation help her to resist the corrupting influence of holding a shard in the same way that Taravangian's dual nature is (at least somewhat) helping him resist Odium? Radiant certainly has a strong Connection to Honor. And she is now stuck in the Spiritual Realm, so she's in (sort of) the right place for it.

The repeating motif of walking away from things is coming across especially strongly now. Most obviously in Nohadon's words in the epigraphs and in Kaladin walking away from his role as a soldier. It's always been a big Stormlight Archive thing, though, being the basic idea behind both Aharietiam and the Recreance, as well as more minor instances like Raboniel wanting an end to the war, Hoid giving up his Dawnshard, etc. This is also related to Honor as a shard, which is largely opposed to this sort of walking away from things. Honor is about being bound to things, choosing to stay the course, never walking away. Which is being presented to us as a harmful way to look at things. I believe that a big part of the ending will see our characters choosing to walk away from something, or otherwise reframe the question they are asking. I am getting progressively more speculative as I go on, but my guess is that this will involve the fight against Odium. Rather than winning or losing, they will realise that they need to walk away from the fight. Which, yes, will unleash Odium on the rest of the Cosmere, but for how long can he be the problem and responsibility of Roshar and Roshar alone? After all, "I accept that there will be those I cannot protect". Both Jasnah and now Lift have brought up the possibility only to be shot down by Hoid, but what if they're right? What if keeping him trapped longer just means that he'd have more time to consolidate and his eventual victory would be more complete? Basically, what if Roshar as a whole needs to repeat on a larger scale what Kaladin is doing, and take some time to just recover from the trauma?

I can't shake the thought that Kaladin's promise to Shallan is going to come back to bite him in the end. I'm imagining that some sort of Honor-connected spiritual investiture doohickey is going to happen to him that means that he can't break a promise without facing severe negative consequences, but circumstances will transpire such that keeping the promise will also endanger him somehow, like making him reveal himself at a time when he really needs to keep a low profile. I hope I am wrong.

I don't think we can read too much into that. Brandon has spoken of how his works can be effectively be thought of as "in translation", and Tress especially is presented as Hoid narating it for a specific audience. Even if the word that Charlie originally spoke was something different, after it's been interpreted by Hoid and then by Brandon then it might easily end up being rendered as Iriali by the time we see it. Which isn't to say that I think this is necessearily the case, more that I think it should be viewed as inconclusive.

Who knows? Beware of anyone who claims to be able to see the future. Hypothetically, from the perspective of Kelsier trying to decide whether to share his plan, I think there would be reasonable arguments that doing so could either increase or decrease the likelihood of success. On the one hand, by not telling them, they couldn't try to talk him out of it, they had a more authentic reaction to his death, there was no chance of the plan being revealed if any of them were compromised. On the other hand, if he had told them then they could have worked together to refine the plan and spot any flaws that he as a single individual might have missed, and if they knew the plan then they'd definitely be ready to do what was needed in the aftermath to move it along. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. From an out-of-universe perspective, I also think there's no reason why it couldn't have worked. If Brandon had chosen to have Kelsier share his plan to the crew and then have them all develop it together before it eventually worked out, then I don't think I'd have been left thinking "oh, how absurd, that plan could only have worked if nobody else knew about it". I don't think it would have been as dramatically satisfying if things had played out that way, but I don't think that it would have been unrealistic or unbelievable. So in short: I absolutely think that it could have worked. I guess the question is, what were Kelsier's motivations for keeping the secret rather than telling everyone else? It's certainly possible that he did a very careful and considered cost-benefit analysis and determined that the plan was more likely to succeed if he kept it secret than if he didn't, that it was an entirely pragmatic decision. But for me and my interpretation of the character, that rings a bit false. I suspect it was more of an emotional decision than a calculated one. Some combination of a flare for the dramatic and a sense that he alone is the one who has to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. That's an interesting comparison with the siege of Luthadel. Because in that case, trying to send Vin and Elend away seems like it didn't work out at all. You can never say for sure what would have happened if they hadn't been sent away, and maybe things would have played out in such a way that Vin never figured out how to control the Koloss. But by and large, it seems that sending them away was absolutely the wrong choice and that it ended up costing lives. So we have one instance where the secretive self-sacrifice worked and one case where ti didn't, so it would be easy to say that Kelsier made the right call and then the others made the wrong call, but that's very results-oriented thinking. Yes, with hindsight this is the case, but at the time when the decisions were made? I don't think that either decision was made with enough information to really predict how they would turn out. So, personally speaking, I'm more inclined to forgive the crew for sending Vin and Elend away, because at least in that case it was a decision made by consensus of multiple people rather than one made unilaterally by a single individual. Individuals are more prone to making really bone-headed decisions, because all humans are flawed and we all have our blind spots. Yeah, Kelsier's decision worked out, but I mostly see that as him getting lucky more than anything else.

I agree with most of what you're saying here, but do want to dive a bit deeper into a couple of specific parts. First, I'm not sure what you mean by "things that can't reasonably be explored through more main-line fiction"? That seems like a strange way of phrasing things. Because of course, transgender and non-binary identities can be and are explored in fiction of all genres. If the goal is just to explore trans identity then there are a lot of much easier ways to do so than to imagine a swarm of invertebrates with an emergent collective consciousness attempting to pass as human. That said, there are things that you can do in SF&F that you can't do in other genres. One that's obvious to me is to explore what the social ramifications would be if it were significantly easier for people to change their bodies to match their identities through the use of magic or tech? There's a lot of fertile ground to explore there. But that isn't what's happening here. I don't think there's anything going on here that is saying anything about trans people and identites that wouldn't be said better by including a trans character. I also think that it's worthwhile to differentiate between trans-coded characters and characters who are an allegory for trans experience. A trans-coded character would be one who isn't directly stated to be trans, but where it is implied through tropes, stereotypes, mannerism, and so on. It's all a bit nudge and a wink, plausible deniability, and "if you know you know". (See also: the Wikipedia entry for queer coding.) On the other hand, if this were intended as allegory, then we wouldn't at any point be supposed to ask if Masaka is trans. Rather, we're supposed to notice that there are similarities and parallels between her experience and trans experience. It's something of a subtle distinction, for sure, but I think a meaningful one. I was curious enough to go and look up the WoB for myself, so I'll share it here to save anyone else the effort: And while looking for it, I also found this one: (Bolding mine.) I think that suggests that Masaka was probably not intended to be trans. If that had been his intention, he probably would likely have been much more unambiguous about it. Whether she was intended as an allegory for trans experience is more up in the air, I think. But even if she wasn't intended that way, it's still a fine thing for us readers to be able to draw those parallels ourselves (or make our own head-canons).

Yeah, he is ultimately the one who has to make the final call on everything, but that doesn't mean that he has to make decisions without even consulting anyone else. There's plenty of room for something along the lines of "OK, we'll talk this through, brainstorm it together, come up with different ideas, but then if we can't agree then we'll do it my way". And (from memory; it's been a while) that's generally how the crew operate through The Final Empire. Kelsier is vrey open to ideas and suggestions from others... up until the point where he isn't. For his final plan of martyrdom, he didn't involve anyone else at all. It wasn't just that he was the one making the command decision. He made the command decision and didn't tell anyone else about it. That's the part that really stuck with me.

Speculative musing: I wonder if lerasium alloys would create exceptionally strong or gifted mistings of their specific power. So, for instance, let's say I have two pieces of lerasium of the same size, alloy one of them with copper and then give them to two different people. This would give us one mistborn and one smoker. But would the coppercloud created by the smoker be stronger than the one created by the mistborn (bigger radius, harder to pierce, etc.)? Inherently so, that is, rather than just a case of a specialist learning their skills better than a generalist. Would the raw potential of the lerasium being concentrated into a single allomantic ability make it supercharged?

As a thought experiment, how do you think she'd react if someone read her as being a human male? Would it be "hooray, I am a convincing human!", "oh dear, have I made some mistake with cultural assumptions?" or "no! that's not who I am! I'm a human woman!"? There's no right answer to this, of course, since we don't ever actually see this happen, but I think that how you imagine that scenario playing out is pertinent to whether one can think of her as a trans character. If you think the third one is how she'd probably react, then I think it's more than fair to think of her as trans; if one of the first two, then she's at best an allegory for trans experience. It's an odd one, for sure. Any (respectful) trans rep is better than no trans rep, I agree. But just because getting table scraps is better than going hungry doesn't mean that I'm going to celebrating table scraps. Especially because there are other authors out there who are doing amazing things with trans and non-binary characters. And to be clear, it's not as if Brandon "owes" us a trans main character or any other nonsense like that. He doesn't. I would love it if he does write one, but I will still love his books even if he never does. But at the same time, I'm not going to give him credit for the table scraps. Which is fine, because he's already pretty heavily in credit for other things... You get what I'm saying. *nods furiously* I'll add Morriumur to the "I love the character, buuuuuut" list. And I'd completely forgotten who Ral-na was and had to go look him up, which definitely does give weight to the "he sure is a character who exists" position.

There's one thing that's really stuck with me about Kelsier right from the start. He always talked up the importance of his crew and working together and all that stuff, but when it came down to his final plan in The Final Empire to get himself killed and then stage his resurection, he worked alone (except for OreSeur, who was integral to the plan). So that's who I think he is at heart: someone who is only going to trust himself when the chips are really down. Nothing I've seen of him since has changed that opinion that I've had from the start.

I didn't read Masaka as trans at all when I initially read the book. Going back and rereading relevant scenes now, I can certainly see how she can come across that way, though, even if it's not really a viewpoint that I share. For me, she mostly came across as a parallel to Yumi as Yumi learns how to be a person. From chapter 16 (Masaka's introduction chapter): This is right alongside Yumi interacting with not one but two non-human characters who are themselves learning how to be people. Then in chapter 33 (in which Yumi learns Masaka's identity): Again, it's about the parallels between Masaka and Yumi and about learning to be a person, rather than learning to be any particular subset of person. At least, that's how it came across to me. And while I recognise that trans people are not a monolith and all trans experiences are different, Masaka just didn't resonate with me personally. For me, the experience of transition and gender expression was a heady mixture of confusion ("wait, I'm supposed to do what?") and familiarity ("oh, yes, this feels completely natural"), whereas for Masaka I got the impression that pretty much all of her attempts to appear human were closer to the former. It felt more like "I have learned how humans work" and less like "I have always wanted to behave this way and now I have a place where I can". Even that is very much open to interpretation, though. Ultimately, we just don't get enough characterisation for Masaka to be able to definitively say one way or another, so a lot of it is just going to come down to vibes and personal interpretation. Did he also include an acknowledgement for anyone helping him out with Steris in Era 2? I don't remember one, but I don't even remotely trust my memory for things like that. And in fairness, it's not hard to imagine that he might have talked to someone who prefered to remain anonymous. A professional sensitivity reader probably wouldn't have wanted that, but if he just spoke with a friend, they might very well not have wanted to out themself to the world. Strongly agree with this, especially the part about the importance of human trans rep. Aliens and fantasy creatures as trans-allegory are all well and good, but I've seen enough of them by this point and I want more.

I'm going to say Forgery. Partly just because we've seen so little of it, and that sense of mystery always makes something seem just that little bit cooler to me. But it also matches up well with a lot of my personal tastes. I love magic that is more studied, detailed and nuanced, rather than the more intuitive, primal raw power of magic like Allomancy. I'm also really drawn to being able to change something's fundamental nature by rewriting its history, especially the ability of a Soulforger to change themself. There's definitely parts of myself that I'd rewrite if I had the chance. I also really liked that it had just barely enough in common with AonDor to feel that it was drawing off the same source and that the two formed part of a coherent whole, but that it was also different enough to feel like something totally new and fresh.