listerfeend

It's almost like you don't understand the indoctrination and mental status of Szeth...

I suspect that messing with the Identity AND Connection would be required, and you'd have to have some pretty Shard level amounts of Investiture to make that happen (I would think). You're basically forcing a Connection to another Shard at that point, and that could have some pretty disastrous consequences, especially if you are trying to Connect to one of the more hostile Shards (Odium and Ruin come to mind). I think you're second theory is much more interesting though. I'm not sure if this would work, at least not exactly as described, but I highly suspect there is something here, and it's probably what Ghostbloods are using to "unkey" the Dor. So, the reason I think there is another step: Storing your Identity doesn't change the Identity of the Investiture you are getting back. It just blanks the "This Investiture can be used only by this Identity" safeguard. So, storing Investiture this way is essentially how we have the Allomantic grenades and the Medallions. However, finding some way to blank the Identity of the Investiture itself, then storing that in a nicrosil mind, while also storing your own Identity, would definitely provide a completely unkeyed source of Investiture.

I'm sure it's possible, I wonder if Brando will go there though. With the right spirit web modifications, and a bit of inspiration, I'm sure that there is a way to 'build' a Mistborn that could use metals to power Radiant Surges or something along those lines. Possibly, anyway. This is 100% accurate and is told to us in Mistborn Era 2. Shai basically directly tells Marasi that the unkeyed Dor they are using would power her, but it wouldn't be super duper useful because Marasi can only use Cadmium.

Honestly I suspect that time bubbles would absolutely be another way to achieve FTL travel though... Maybe even a better way, though the metals for it are extremely expensive and rare...that may end up not being the case later on though. I'm willing to bet that Soulcasting doesn't stay a Roshar restricted thing for too much longer (someone will figure out a way to make more Soulcasters of the 'fabrial' variety soon enough), and that would make obtaining Cadmium and Bendalloy trivial for Scadrians of means...

This is actually I viable secondary option for FTL, rather than something that would be needed for the Feruchemical version I hastily thought up above. I think. See, the beauty of something like an Alcubierre Drive is that the vessel itself is not traveling faster than light, therefor there would be no time dilation to deal with. You see, by contracting space in front of, and expanding it behind, the vessel, space itself is doing the traveling. The vessel, for all intents and purposes, is actually just sitting still while spacetime flows around it.

And also the caveat that, sometimes, a WoB retcons things and that then becomes canon... Honestly, it's extremely confusing sometimes, trying to keep up with everything.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, it seems we are trying to achieve FTL travel using Feruchemy alone? Or are you specifically attempting to create Teleportation without the use of the Surge of Transportation? I am fairly certain you could use Feruchemy to achieve FTL travel in a "warp drive" kind of sense, but I doubt that you could manipulate it in such a way as to teleport something across any kind of distance. There are just too many things that make up an object or person to transport, and no real way to combine them again at the end. Remember, Identity is really only one aspect of a thing in the Cosmere. I think a much more realistic use of Feruchemy to achieve FTL travel would be to essentially create an Alcubierre adjacent drive of some kind, by storing weight (mass, hopefully, Brandon has been super cagey about whether mass==weight in the context of Feruchemy) and tapping it on either end of a ship, thereby contracting spacetime at the front, and expanding it in the rear, to achieve FTL. This would PROBABLY require compounding, in some way, so you'd need a Misting and Ferring of iron and steel.

I don't have much of an idea on what Valor's magic system would look like, but we already have a viking-adjacent culture on Sel, so I sort of doubt Brando would go that route...That's not to say he wouldn't, but it seems, to me, like he'd have something different. Maybe something closer to Feudal Japan/Samurai culture

I suspect something along those lines is exactly what happened. And, don't get me wrong, I'm gonna read the crap out of this book, it's gonna be fine. This has all just been me pointing out a trend that I disagree with in his work

Possibly IotE

And exclusively that shard, which could have far ranging impacts, probably sending him to Discord, as has been foretold

This doesn't quite work for me, as Brandon has chosen to put those words in Hoid's mouth. If he had said something along the lines of And just left it at that, we could assume that the standard Sci-Fi/Fantasy translation convention is in play. Immersion breaking, still, but less so than having Hoid literally say "I'm translating this to December". I'm not overthinking anything here, Brandon himself specifically called out this thing, and then drew more attention to it in the text. It's not overthinking something to think about the thing that is explicitly being called out. Funny, seems like doing a serious analysis about the work in question would involve analyzing important things like: World building, setting, consistency, and the deliberate choices of the author for the work in question. Thing is, this is a trend that has been happening since RoW, and I see many posts on this forum discussing this very topic. "Dating" being a word in Stormlight, or therapy/therapist, etc... have been called out by many, not just me, enough that Brandon has said he'd go back and choose different words to convey the same meaning. This doesn't "Ruin" (ha) the story for me, it's just a continuation of a trend that I'm concerned about. Let's see, my definition of a Fourth Wall Break would be something like: when a work acknowledges the existence of the audience, or the work's fictional nature in a way the breaks the illusion that the work is a self contained world. I'd argue this absolutely does do that, in an explicit way that we haven't seen before in the Cosmere. Brandon likes to use Tolkein as an example of this. He's called out that Sam's name wasn't actually Sam in TLotR, but actually "Banazîr Galpsi", which is then translated to us. But that is done entirely consistently, it's never called out in the text as a translation, no one even acknowledges that this translation convention is actually taking place. It's one thing to name your characters easy to pronounce and read names that probably shouldn't exist for that world. I'm not sure if it was you or someone else that mentioned the name Charlie in Tress. Obviously an english language, common name, true. It's also true that Hoid never acknowledges the translation going on, and it's just taken at face value and the story progresses without a hitch. Naming Charlie Tuesday would be just as bad as this though, as there is no real translation from some alien language that would make any sense. Same thing here. Not to mention that Hoid specifically calls out he is translating, which, as I said above, takes away pretty much any suspension of disbelief that you could have that Hoid himself does not know the words he is using.

This is a fair point, and I'm hoping this is kind of like normal video game logic (eg. many games start you as OP to get you into it, and then nerf the heck out of you so you can build back up again). Once Radiants got some light in them, they pretty much became un-killable, until basic RoW when we started getting the anti-light/Raysium weapons. Now they can't even get Light outside the Tower. Exactly. Taln, with no Honorblade, took on enough Fused and Singers to create a literal hill to die on. How did he ever actually die during the Desolations? Especially given that they were connected directly to Honor, and therefore had unlimited Stormlight... Still, it feels like the nerfs went way too far, especially in W&W. That felt to me like batman in the old west more than Mistborn anything.... And I think that is the main issue I'm running into with all the nerfs and the era changes in general. I love Epic Fantasy, specifically set in Pre-Modern times. Now we are getting more to kind of generic fantasy, set in essentially modern times, and turning everything that is cool about magic into "science".

So this basically is changing the entire frame of the narrative in a way that he (Brando) has never done before in the cosmere. He's never broken the fourth wall this hard. He's barely even knocked on it in ALL of his other books, and I honestly can't remember any specific instance of a fourth wall break, though I'm sure there are a few. Yet, this is taking a sledge hammer to it, and it starts on the cover. He could have named her "Winter" and I would have been super ok with that, or some other sufficiently descriptive name to indicate a "really really cold time of year".

Yeah, that was what I thought as well. Glad I'm not absolutely crazy