Shardlet

Bear with me on this (and cure me of my ignorance if necessary), I am rather new to the Cosmere stuff. I only have a big picture grounding when it comes to Adonalsium. If I am not mistaken the shardholders (less Sazed of course) are from Yolen. Looking back to Mistborn, it has been shown in the books that 'human' life on Scadrial was the result of a joint effort of Preservation (sorry, don't recall off hand his original name) and Ruin (Ati) to create this life. Presumably, all shardworld 'humans' were created in a similar fashion with, again, presumably, Yolen 'humans' being used as the general pattern but with subtle differences from world-to-world. Now, regarding Hoid specifically being able to have multiple magic adeptness (i.e., lightweaving, feruchemy, etc.) in conjunction with the comments above about identity. Hoid is also from Yolen (homeworld) so he embodies the master DNA, if you will, upon which shardworld 'humans' were patterned. Could this be the reason why Hoid is able to use a variety of magic systems from multiple shardworlds? In other words, if the sDNA of a person from Scadrial is required to use Feruchemy, etc. in the same way a key is required to open a lock, then could it be that the sDNA from Yolen is some kind of master key which is able to open the locks from each shardworld? If so, this would go a long way to explaining Hoid's versatility.

This is going a bit off the current line of discussion, but going back to KChan's original posting and his thoughts on Hoid, I have a thought. Bear with me on this (and cure me of my ignorance if necessary), I am rather new to the Cosmere stuff. I only have a big picture grounding when it comes to Adonalsium. If I am not mistaken the shardholders (less Sazed of course) are also from Yolen. Looking back to Mistborn, it has been shown in the books that 'human' life on Scadrial was the result of a joint effort of Preservation (sorry, don't recall off hand his original name) and Ruin (Ati) to create this life. Presumably, all shardworld 'humans' were created in a similar fashion with, again, presumably, Yolen 'humans' being used as the general pattern but with subtle differences from world-to-world. Now, regarding Hoid specifically being able to have multiple magic adeptness (i.e., lightweaving, feruchemy, etc.) in conjunction with the comments above about identity. Hoid is also from Yolen (homeworld) so he embodies the master DNA, if you will, upon which shardworld 'humans' were patterned. Could this not result in somewhat of a flexible 'identity' for anyone having the master DNA? If so, this would go a long way to explaining Hoid's versatility.

@Chaos I appreciate the info on Theoryland. I will definately check it out. Apparently I was writing my post at the same time as yours. As to people saying "I don't have a quote for that" (referring to "I heard/read but can't pin it down"), I haven't run accross any that I haven't believed them yet (in fact most have subsequently produced a link or someone else has for them).

Coppermind I am familiar with but I have not investigated Theoryland yet (though I have heard of it). I can't speak for Theoryland, but Coppermind being a wiki is topic based and therefore inherently cumbersome to do a catch up read of pertinent questions (say, to Cosmere) in order to catch up. Easy to pick up character, event, geography details but the nuances of some of the Q&A's I have read seem to be lost on it. Now, there me be an aspect of the Coppermind I have missed, but it seems that this would be an inherent limitation to a wiki type database. I see that it would be very challenging but there must be somewhat to conduct a broad distillation of these Q&A's in order to at least isolate out non-cosmere (in terms of universe rather than info directly related to Adonalsium issues) stuff. I know that, if given the text of several Q&A's, I would be happy to participate in such a distillation and sorting of the questions and their answers. Obviously, it would need to be headed up by a die hard or two (or three...) in order to establish a format for such a distillation, farm out the grunt labor, and to make the final compilation, but I bet there would be many users here which would also be willing to put effort as far as data mining goes. Many hands make light work . Please recognize that this is truly a question and an offer of help rather than a complaint or a criticism (especially not to be taken as a criticism of your prompt and welcome response PM).

As I have read in the forum comments here and in other Brandon Sanderson related comment sections, I have noticed a number of die hards in the community expressing something on the order of 'I'm pretty sure BS said...but I can't find the quote right now'. It is clear that many of the hardcore sharders sometimes have a difficult time finding definite quotes from BS to support suppositions and theories as well as general commentary. From the point of view of a barely novice sharder, hunting down and reading all of the Q&A's that Brandon has done in the last 8 years is terribly daunting. It seems that everyone concerned could widely benefit from a compendium of BS quotes to read/search/study in the pursuit of better-informed theories and exchange of information. I recognize that this may be challenging, but I suspect there are enough die-hards to crowd source the sifting of all the Q&A's to separate out and categorize (i.e., Mistborn, Stormlight, Cosmere...etc.) the pertinent quotes from the fluff. Is something like this in the works? Because I would sure like to get caught up with everyone else.

Que bueno! Thanks so much Senor Feesh.

Actually, now that you mention it, I heard that there were translations for the text in the illustrations on pages 762 and 856. I tried searching for them to no avail. Do you have a line on how I could find them?

Hi everyone, I have lurked a bit and have enjoyed much of the commentary from everyone. I am an avid Sanderson fan (he's my flavorite) and I'm pretty sure I have read all of his published works (except WoT books, haven't gone there, yet?). I am just getting started on the cosmere stuff and have made a few posts in the comments of a couple of the Tor WoK chapter re-reads. Looking forward to contibuting a bit.