zaqwer

Yeah, I briefly forgot that only Inquisitors with the specific spike could burn duralumin, and none of those existed before TLR's death.

Yeah, I was joking when I said that. TLR certainly made many mistakes throughout his reign. It does seem plausible that the breeding program was a policy that only evolved after centuries of rule. With so little information about the history of the Final Empire, it's tough to say when exactly it was first started and in what form. I can definitely see it not starting out as bad as it got, and only getting worse as time went on and TLR's mental state deteriorated. It's possible that he started out with sentimental intentions of not wanting to see the Terris people wiped out and ended up subjecting them to something arguably even worse. And that's not even mentioning that Inquisitors probably knew about duralumin (since TLR definitely did).

Do we know for a fact that Inquisitors can see metal inside the body? I could be misremembering, but I thought that the reason Inquisitors could detect kandra was because of their vulnerability to emotional allomancy. However, it would be hypocritical given my theory to argue that because something isn't directly in the text, it can't be true. It is certainly plausible that Inquisitors could see invested metals inside the body, but I imagine that it would be more difficult, and if you weren't looking closely, you might easily miss it. If whoever searched Sazed wasn't expecting there to be metalminds in his stomach, they might have just overlooked it. Besides, regardless of the actual purpose of the breeding program, the Inquisitors should absolutely have known that Sazed was a Feruchemist at the end of TFE. He had earlier saved Vin from an Inquisitor at Kredik Shaw using feruchemy. It seems likely to me that the Inquisitors thought they'd neutralized Sazed as a threat, and were just very, very wrong. While it is entirely possible that the Lord Ruler just made a mistake (despite his insistence that he never makes mistakes), I just don't think that the breeding program actually makes sense if his goal was to eliminate feruchemy. He knew that the potential for feruchemy still existed even with all the Feruchemists gone, and thus knew that the power was somehow in the bloodline (even if he didn't exactly understand the genetics). If I were a tyrannical god-emperor who feared the power of feruchemy and wanted to stamp it out, I wouldn't waste time with a complicated breeding program. I would just kill all the people who might have the potential to pass the trait on to future generations. No need to wait decades or even centuries to see results, if there are no Terris, then there are no feruchemists. The fact that he didn't pursue this policy suggests to me that it was never about eliminating feruchemy entirely, it was just about controlling it.

So, we know from the Hero of Ages epigraphs (as well as from the text of the book) that the Steel Inquisitors of Era 1 had hemalurgic spikes that granted them the use of Feruchemical gold. But this raises the question, how were the Inquisitors getting Feruchemical gold spikes before the death of the Lord Ruler? We know that after his death, the Inquisitors went to Terris and spiked a bunch of the Keepers there, but before the fall of the empire, all the Keepers were in hiding, and supposedly the Lord Ruler thought he'd eliminated feruchemy. And we know that the pre-Collapse Inquisitors definitely had healing powers because we see it in Book 1. I suppose it's possible that those Inquisitors could all have been made before the Lord Ruler believed he'd gotten rid of the Feruchemists, or that the Inquisitors were reusing old spikes, but I have another theory. In Well of Ascension, it is stated that Tindwyl was made a breeding mother, which was a big coup for the Synod since it meant that feruchemy could be passed on to more generations of Terrispeople. Supposedly this was done because the Lord Ruler believed that feruchemy had been eliminated from the bloodline and was trying to make the Terris more docile and temperate. But what if that was just a cover story? What if the Lord Ruler and those in charge of the Terris breeding program knew Tindwyl was a feruchemist and chose her anyway. What if instead of trying to eliminate feruchemy from the population, the real purpose of the breeding program was to carefully manage feruchemy, so that there would always be a few Feruchemists around who could be spiked to make new Inquisitors? The more I think about this, the more it fits for me. We know that the Lord Ruler considered feruchemy dangerous because if it ever mixed with allomancy, then someone might arise with his powers and could potentially overthrow him. But if he were to carefully control feruchemy by selective breeding, he could know with a high degree of certainty where all the Feruchemists were and ensure that none of them were in a position to produce a Fullborn. This would explain the forced sterilization for all Terris stewards — no chance of feruchemy getting into the general population if the only Terrispeople who interact outside of Terris are unable to have children. But why not get rid of feruchemy altogether? Well, feruchemy is pretty useful in the hands of loyal allies, and the Lord Ruler could ensure this by having a supply of Feruchemists on hand to be spiked and their power given to loyal Inquisitors. Also, in order to actually eliminate feruchemy forever, it would be necessary to eliminate every single Terrisperson, and I'm pretty sure the Lord Ruler probably knew this, given his experience with making the first kandra. However, as far as we know, he never took any steps to actually go out and kill every last Terrisperson. Perhaps this is because he didn't want to commit genocide on his own people (though I find this hard to believe, seeing as he was perfectly willing to commit cultural genocide by wiping out their heritage/religion and to submit them to a centuries long forced breeding program) or maybe it seemed like too much work. But if the Lord Ruler effectively controlled the reproduction of the entire Terris people (and there is no evidence to the contrary), then it would be trivial to just kill them all (or at least make it so no new Terris people are ever born). And yet, he never did. Instead, he constructed an elaborate program which ensured that while most of Terris was without feruchemical power, there would always be at least a few Feruchemists. In fact, it's likely that even the institution of the Keepers was known and tacitly accepted by the Lord Ruler. Without someone to teach the next generation, the new Feruchemists wouldn't know how to use their powers, and that would mean that the Lord Ruler wouldn't know which particular members of the Terris population actually had feruchemy (and according to this theory, he would need to know so that he would know who to spike to make new Inquisitors). Now, I'm sure that the Keepers were probably persecuted and closely surveilled to make sure they didn't do anything that the Lord Ruler thought too dangerous to the empire (not to mention occasionally some Keepers getting spiked to make Inquisitors), but on the whole they were allowed to exist. After all, the Keepers hardly posed a threat, so long as their bloodline was properly managed, and even their collection of forgotten knowledge was mostly kept secret from the general population. (If you want to go full tin-foil hat here, you could imagine that potentially a few members of the Synod were in on the plot and were purposefully steering Keeper policy away from open rebellion against the Final Empire.) And indeed, for hundreds of years the Keepers were no threat to the Lord Ruler or his Empire — until one of their members went rogue. Now, is there any concrete, indisputable evidence for this theory in the text? No. But I think that with everything I've laid out, the pieces just fit together too well. Do I think that this was intended by Brandon? Probably not, but like I said, nothing in the text explicitly contradicts it. And I think that with everything we know, it actually makes more sense than the Lord Ruler just assuming he'd wiped out feruchemy. TL;DR: The Terris Breeding Program was not actually intended to eliminate feruchemy, but instead to create a steady supply of Feruchemists that the Lord Ruler could use to turn into Inquisitors.