Scriptorian

I’m probably getting too hung up on the comparison to actual gravity, but I ran some numbers, and to get time dilation at a x1/7 factor across a planet would take hundreds of solar masses. Billions of times the mass of an earth-like planet.  Probably not coincidently, this is because we’re talking about billions of times more time dilation than you’d normally experience on the earth’s surface. So I think any meaningful time dilation on this scale would have to be the result of Investiture being magic (i.e. like a Cadmium bubble), rather than it behaving like a black hole’s time dilation in any meaningful physics sense. 

Also the idea of different rates of time dilation across a planet’s surface just hurts me brain.

To rewind back to the possibility of time dilation for a moment: I’d have to dust of my astrophysics minor to say with any precision, but it takes a lot of mass in one place to cause time dilation that would be meaningful on human time scales. Granted, the rules are probably different for Investiture—like allomantic time bubbles don’t require singularities to function— but I get the impression when Brandon is talking about Investiture warping time like a black hole, he’s talking about the raw density of Investiture in a small area causing a similar effect, not Investiture being put to that specific purpose. And if the quantities of Investiture needed for this are remotely comparable to those needed with mass, I just don’t see that happening on a planetary scale. Like, we’d be talking the planet’s mass in Investiture several times over.  At that point the whole thing would just be a perpendicularity, I think. 

Me: *hears the title of chapter one*
*frowns*
“Alcatraz, what are you doing in medieval England?”

I’m rather satisfied with the fact that I spied Hoid’s lemony narration for what it was, well before he was name-dropped. 

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“Did I hear you asking for Zahel?” [Syl] asked.

So, Zahel wasn't on Syl's list of people Kaladin can't intimidate. Theory confirmed!

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Zahel whipped a sheet off the line and tossed it toward Kaladin.

I legitimately feared for Kaladin in this moment. Fighting a master Awakener amidst the laundry is like fighting a Mistborn in a minting facility.

Transporting Investiture off-world...my first thought was a Bondsmith power to sever the Connection somehow (Has Sja-anat corrupted the Sibling and that's why the Ghostbloods want an alliance with her?! ). My next idea was to encase the cargo in aluminum, like they're able to temporarily cut the connection between conjoined fabirals. Though I suppose this might cause problems once you take the Investiture out of the aluminum.

With all the times Shallan was catching flaws in Mraize's disguise...did anyone else get the feeling she is going to end up underestimating him at some crucial point? I mean, Shallan has gotten pretty good at this, but my money is still on the probably-immortal creepy worldhopper.

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“I needed someone you couldn’t intimidate,” she replied. “That list at best includes three people. And the queen was likely to transform you into a crystal goblet or something.”

My initial reaction was that Syl had made the perfect choice in fetching Adolin...but then Jasnah "Storming" Kohlin was mentioned as an option and now I really want that scene for some reason.

Also "at best" there are three people that aren't intimated by Kaladin? Come on, Syl. You can do better than that. Off the top of my head, there's also: Dalinar, Lift, Hoid, Zahel, Mraize, Gallant, Taln, Nightblood, the Nightwatcher, Odium...The Stormfather doesn't make the list because he's a wuss. I'm just saying, we have more than three options here.

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She could use either of the two types of Light: the strange Voidlight Odium provided, or the old Stormlight of Honor. From what Timbre said, this was new—whatever Venli was doing, it hadn’t been done before.

Ah...mixing Investiture from different Shards. The 17th Shard isn't going to be happy with this...

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Shumin’s soul was as Venli expected: a common singer soul bonded to a small gravitationspren to take workform.

Shumin's, shall we say, "spunk" and willingness to join a violent revolt is all the more notable when you remember that one of workforms quirks is a tendency to avoid conflict.

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And above them? Mysterious creatures like the thunderclasts and the Unmade. Souls more like spren than people.

So it's been hinted at before, but this line seems to indicate pretty strongly that the Unmade were originally cognitive shadows.

6 hours ago, Iarwainiel said:

Theory 1 (& FYI I am wrong 99.9% of the time on these): The Sons of Honor are/were being hunted & killed, not by the Ghostbloods, but by the Seventeenth Shard (not us!! - the in-universe secret society).

*surreptitiously puts away a large metal spike*
 

I am very curious to know what the 17th Shard is up to right now. It would definitely be interesting to find out they’re behind one of the ongoing mysteries. 

15 minutes ago, Rainier said:

Or, to put it another way, she smiles anyway.

Specifically, she created Shallan a year and a half before the events of WoR, and narratively, she creates Shallan immediately after she shows the vision of the broken child. The next chapter, the flashback, starts with "Shallan became the perfect daughter." Brandon comes out and tells us that she's fake, that Shallan was created to serve a purpose, just like Veil and Radiant.

If you re-read the flashbacks in WoR, she definitely changed her personality. That was the whole point, wasn't it? She had to become someone else to protect herself, her brothers, and her stepmother. She became a perfect daughter. The person she became still answered to Shallan, but that doesn't mean she didn't change. She changed greatly, which is exactly what the flashback chapters are meant to show us. This was the first alter, and Brandon showed us the very moment she was created.

Yes, you're right here, you're just not starting far enough back. She started this after her mother died, and her father started to go off the rails. She partitioned her 'perfect daughter' aspect into a persona, named Shallan, which is most of what we see throughout WoK. It takes her as far as it can, which is when she creates Veil, which, again, takes her as far as it can, before she needs Radiant. All three partitions were created when the existing person was insufficient for the tasks at hand, first when she killed her mother, next when she was separated from Jasnah and completely alone, and finally when she was expected to lead others and publicly embody the Knights Radiant. 

My argument though is that these changes in personality don't constitute a separate "persona" in the same way that Veil and Radiant do. Chronologically, there is a shift in her persoanlity, starting with the flashbacks, through WoK, and then WoR, but it's gradual overtime. She doesn't slip in and out of entirely different outlooks like she does in Oathbringer. Veil thinks like Veil; she's tough, gritty, and revels in her difference from Shallan. When Shallan is being the "perfect daughter", she's constantly torn up inside. She's behaving differently sure, but her internal narrative doesn't suddenly switch to respecting her father and have all the sensibilities of proper lighteyed lady. Yes, she tries to be a different person, and acts accordingly, but there is a difference between that and literally thinking she is a different person with different skills and backstory. The former fits perfectly with someone whose suffered that kind of trauma and abuse, and doesn't require it being the result of a new "persona". (Though, granted that real-world dissociative identity problems are often the result of abuse and trauma. We might just be splitting hairs here.)

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She was a person made of an inscrutable mix of truth and lies long before OB disassociation. The whole problem is, in order to be an 'unbroken' person Shallan took a shortcut and buried her memories. What she truly needs to do is to be a person who remembers her whole trauma and then still keeps going. Whoever that person turns out be, needs to be a mix of both how she's been influenced by the darkness inside her and how she would stand up to it. It won't be the same sassy girl from WoK - and she doesn't necessarily even want to be that:

Her humor and wit was a coping mechanism destined to keep her family together and keep her safe in the first place. I can imagine deep down she somewhat hates it for that.

So I can see an argument that Shallan is a persona in the sense that "I am broken and traumatized inside, but I smile and crack jokes so people don't see it" is her deliberately putting on a false face. But she's often aware that this is what she is doing. There is a notable difference, in my mind, between the above and "I am now Veil, a gruff darkeyes that really likes knives". To be reductive, Veil never questions who she is, but Shallan does. To me, this suggests a qualitative difference in the way that "Shallan" is a lie versus Veil.

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I... don't understand. Of course, it is all Shallan. Some alters got in the split more of her 'core' personality and some more of her coping mechanisms but 'Shallan', Veil, Radiant and Formless are all Shallan. That's exactly why she can't just take back her abilities from them and run. They are not separate people:

I think we're on the same page here. I was just reacting against an idea I've seen intimated a few times, that Veil and Radiant are individuals in their own right, and that re-integrating them would be like killing them.

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So no, she didn't just create Veil and Radiant - she split into 'Shallan', Veil and Radiant. How good we can finally rely on real-world DID to settle things like that.

Eh...I disagree. There are multiple times where she consciously develops and assigns traits to the other personas, traits she doesn't normally have, like she's writing characters. Though there are cases of things we'd normally attribute to Shallan splitting into Veil or Radiant, her attraction to Kaladin being notable. In any case, I'd hesitate to use every particular of a real-world diagnosis here because the magic-system involved is almost certainly complicating things. The completeness to which the personas developed in such a short span of time suggests to me that something more is going on here than vanilla dissociative personality problems.

2 hours ago, Ailvara said:

She did have a reason. She knew, even if deep, deep down, that she already created the first (or, as we call it here, 4th) alter long ago as a child. That she buried the part of her identity and personality that had anything to do with her mother's murder. There are hints of that in WoR already e.g. WRT to her drawing. She always knew.

As for her being unreliable narrator, sure. She is unreliable, for example, when she says that she's accepted her pain and that she doesn't deserve it (see chapter 8; chapter 9 makes it clear she accepted neither). The problem with 'Shallan' being fakest is that it's been hinted at numerous times and not only through Shallan's words:

...

You're still assuming here 'Shallan' is some main and true persona and the rest of alters are made-up. This is not how DID works. This would all be just right if not for this assumption. But as it is, yes, she absolutely needs to accept that 'Shallan' is a lie but it doesn't mean she'll go looking for her true personality somewhere. It's all there in her fractured self already. 'Shallan' on her own doesn't even need redemption - without accepting Formless, the 'frenzied child who had murdered her mother' as part of herself, there is nothing there to redeem.

This really is were we disagree. Although I believe the text is deliberately ambiguous on this point, so your's is a valid interpretation. As I indicated above, I think there is a distinct difference between the Shallan personality and the two added in Oathbrigner. Though I will grant that there are definitely aspects to her personality that are the result of trauma and maladaptive coping strategies, I don't think her current personality was created as a response to her early trauma. I think rather that she began to internalize the lie that "I can't be this optimistic quirky person because such a person would never kill their parents". She tells herself that she must deep down be a monster, and so "Shallan" must be a lie, despite the fact that she's been "Shallan" for most of her life with no major discrepancies in her personality, other than what could be accounted for by her deliberately masking her trauma, and her natural character growth. There doesn't have to be a secret, dark and murderous aspect to her, she was just a confused child who reacted in self-defense. That's where I think she's an unreliable narrator: she's not secretly a monster, but that she's been telling herself that for so long that she believes it.

But there is room for interpretation here, this is just where I see her arc going.

In any case, free-willed human beings are able to shape themselves over time, so regardless of where Shallan started, she is capable of becoming whoever she wants to be. But her current mindset has her partitioning aspects of herself into predefined personas, so she won't be able to develop into a better version of herself so long as she doesn't accept herself as one complete, flawed individual.

5 minutes ago, Karger said:

Your armchair physiological assessment is inaccurate but your understanding of Shallan as a character is spot on.  Kudos.

*squints* "Physiological"? I claim even fewer armchair-credentials with physiology than psychology, so I'm not surprised that I would be wrong in such an assessment, I just didn't think I'd made one .

So Renarin's "allomancy": 

It's probably most accurate to say that he's accessing the same underlying spiritual/temporal mechanics of the Allomantic Temporal Metals, without necessarily replicating the particular effects of any of them. In essence, he's drawing on an alternate-spiritual version of Moash, and then projecting via Illumination so it's visible to more than just him. We can't say whether this projection is a past, future, or simply alternate version of Moash, but given Renarin's capacity to see future possibles, intuitively you'd expect the projection to be based on the future. This is probably why some people (including myself) immediately compared it to Electrum (seeing possible futures), even though the effect is most similar to Malatium.

In any case, here's my theory on how Renarin's psuedo-Illumination works. We know that normally Lightweaving requires a Spiritual connection (Connection?) between the surgebinder and the thing they are creating an illusion of. My guess is that Reanarin's power works like the Malatium to a normal Lightweaver/Truthwatcher's gold: rather than projecting images that he himself is connected to, he can project things that others are connected to. Like alternate past/future selves.

*Navani sees Moash*

Thumbs up for selling your enemies a fake illusion detector. Brilliant shenaniganry. 
 

Those stormlight draining weapons could be a game changer. Though, to be honest, my mind immediately went to whether a Mistborn could use one to get the edge over a radiant.  The big question though is whether they can drain the stormlight from Plate...

6 minutes ago, Karger said:

I don't know.  The best way to cope with metal illness is just fining a way to live with it.

Well, that really depends on the mental illness, and at what level you define “coping”. In this particular case, the split personalities isn’t Shallan’s root problem: it’s the combination of trauma, feelings of inadequacy, and maladaptive coping mechanisms. And those are the kinds of things that can be worked through, at least to some extent. Add Invesiture into the mix and everything gets wonky though. My own theory is that it’s the interaction between the powers she’s using and her own vulnerable psychology that got her the current situation. That should mean a combination of correctly applied investiture and therapy can get her out of it. Even if her underlying tendency towards repression and disassociative thinking can’t be resolved, she could certainly be in a better headspace than what we just read.

The way I read it, her problem started with the idea that “Shallan” was broken, so she needed to be someone else to be successful. What she needs to realize is that the capabilities of Veil and Radiant are all hers, that she can be all of them at once. Actually getting to that point is far easier said than done,  obviously. 

I would say Shallan is more stable, but not really any “better”. Someone get that girl a therapist...

Personally, I’m paranoid about a bit of flying fused attacking the chull teams that move the airship. Having the propulsion mechanism of the ship be so distributed makes me very nervous. 

Also, where did all of those Edgedancers come from?! There is too much power creep going on here! 

The fact that the teleporting fused creates an entirely new body is interesting to me. Is it perhaps being soulcast from the air, or some related mechanism? Secret History spoilers:

Such a lame place to end this week’s preview though 

My dislike of Gavilar grew throughout the prologue, but the part about forcing Jasnah to marry Amaram made me feel particularly inclined to stab him for some reason.

Also, this line from Gavilar made me think...

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I have discovered the entrance to the realm of gods and legends, and once I join them, my kingdom will never end. I will never end.

specifically of what Gavilar said right before he died in the WoK proloque:

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You can tell ..Thaidakar .. that's he's too late...

So, um, how sure are we that Gavilar is staying dead?

On 7/9/2020 at 1:15 AM, Frustration said:

Hemalurgists can basically become Fullborn, but at the cost of a huge vulnerability, that being that Allomancers and Harmony could seize control of them. I find this flaw too big for this magic system to be of real consideration.

Re-hemalurgy:

Another factor to consider is prior knowledge. If both Mistborn and Radiant are ignorant of each other's abilities, the Radiant's defensive abilities are going to allow for a lot more mistakes than the Mistborn can afford.

So yeah. In just about any combat scenario the Radiant has a significant edge. Doesn't mean they'd always win, just that the Mistborn will need to to be rather skilled and/or lucky (or pull off excessive kiting).

I bet a Mistborn could avoid being soulcast by burning aluminum.  But, well that would require burning aluminum...

Good discussion here.
I’m currently writing a book where the magic system is directly linked to the characters’ disabilities. So, needless to say, I am very interested in discussions of disabilities in fiction, especially when they mingle with magic systems.
The basic premise of my magic system is that every character with a power has some kind of associated psychological/neurological disability. In-universe, they aren’t sure if the powers cause the disability, or if a preexisting disability is what let’s you develope powers (read and find out  ). Regardless, all powers have the built-in drawback of supernaturally aggravating one’s disability when overused. Also, the powers and disabilities tend to be thematically linked. This leads to interesting interactions.
The general rule I’m operating under is that while some characters can sidestep their disability through use of their power, it’s usually short-term and there’s always a cost. For example, one character can manipulate sound but has aural hypersensitivity. He can theoretically avoid his usual problems with sensory overload by lowering the volume of all sound around him, but doing so leaves him even more sensitive afterwards.
Things get even more sticky when different people’s powers start interacting with each other (like, for example, someone who can manipulate emotions meets someone with depression). So I’m having a fun time trying to allow characters to develop organically, and the magic system to interact realistically with their disabilities, all while maintaining sensitivity to real peoples’ experiences.
I’m also planning a deconstruction of what happens when a character's life-long disability does get essentially resolved by the magic system. (Spoiler alert: there will be angst)

TLDR: if my book ever gets close to publishing, I’m going to need all the sensitivity readers. (I'm almost halfway through the first draft. Woot.)