The Mad Reader

Is there only one of it?

When you are having a conversation with your mom (who has read sanderson) and your brother (who has not), and it goes something like this: Brother: Thats not the point! Mom: Knives. Sharp knives are pointy. Me: Pencils are pointy. Me: You know what else is pointy? Hemalurgic spikes. Mom: *laughs*

When someone is talking about branches of an organization and you start wondering, if I am part of a branch, and a part of a branch is a stick, does that mean I am a stick?

I'm pretty sure that only someone from Scadrial has the spiritual DNA required for allomantic powers. So you'd need someone from Scadrial to become a Drab first, if that's even possible. I've actually been wondering for a while if someone from another planet could give up a Breath on Nalthis, or if you'd need to be from Nalthis originally to use Breaths. And I agree that Nightblood would kill a drab who unsheathed him, probably faster than he'd kill a regular person since he wouldn't have a breath to use up first.

Maybe Radiants have the same color as the gemstone, but lighter, so a Skybreaker would have grey eyes for a black stone. I think that they looked at the actual lightness of the eyes to determine rank, so there are darkeyes with green eyes, and lighteyes with green eyes, but the lighteyes's eyes would be a lighter shade of green. Its the same as tan eyes = lighteyes, but brown eyes = darkeyes. I wonder how they determine what shade exactly is considered lighteyed. I guess they'd go by what your parents are, but what if your mother was lighteyed and your father was darkeyed, and you had medium green eyes?

Dalinar's book was only going to be called Highprince of War when it was going to be the second book. Whichever book ends up being Dalinar's now will have a different title.

I wonder what Kaladin's parents think has happened to him. What was the official story after he refused the shards? Do they know he's a slave, or think he's dead? Did anyone ever send them a message when he was promoted?

Yeah, my sense of what's a normal book length has totally shifted. I used to think 500+ pages was really long, and now most of the books I read are over 500 pages. And instead of thinking 1000 pages is totally insane, my favorite book is over 1000 pages. What can I say, I like big books and I cannot lie.

When you regularly say "I am offend" to people when they upset you, even when you know they won't get the reference. And then have to stop yourself from adding "No apology. Boots!" because that part sounds weird to people who don't understand.

If I recall correctly, Snapping is still required, but the threshold is lower, so nothing quite as traumatic is required in order to snap.

When you're watching Avatar and you realize that Airbending powers and windrunning powers sorta do the same thing, and really want to see a fight between Kaladin and Aang. And then later have an in depth conversation about who would win in a fight, a mistborn or the avatar (Assuming no atium or avatar state).

Ah. I hadn't seen that one before. I was thinking of a different one altogether.

Or when you look at your family and are very disappointed to realize that your older sister would outrank you, since she has blue eyes and you have brown.

My bad. I think I just misinterpreted your mathematical notation. If I'm thinking of the same WoB you are, I interpreted it differently. I thought it said that an allomancer outside the train who created a bubble, would have the bubble relative to the planet even if a train went through it. Therefore, if the allomancer is inside the train, the bubble could be relative to the train. I actually discussed this with my mom last night, and she suggested the lower limit might come from the shape of the bubble and what you want to include in it. So if Wayne wants himself and Wax, he needs as much empty space behind him as the distance Wax is away from him. So when Wayne is making a bubble around himself, he's limited by his own height. Also, if the bubbles are perfect circles, I wonder if they stick out underground. So if someone was on the floor below Marasi when she makes a bubble (because her bubbles are bigger), would they also be caught in it? Maybe the bubbles are just dome shaped, instead of sphere shaped, and this isn't an issue. When you leave a bubble you create, it bursts the bubble. I don't think one person can create more than one bubble at a time, but you could theoretically have multiple people overlapping their bubbles.

I think you have Wayne and Marasi backwards here. It sounds like you're saying (and forgive me if I'm wrong and just confusing myself, because anything twisting time around twists my head around as well) that Wayne is experiencing less time than everyone around him, and Marasi is experiencing more, while in actuality, Wayne gets to experience extra time relative to those around him, and Marasi just sits there while everyone else moves faster. In regards to the train questions, I think your problem is solved if you simply have the bubbles relative to the train, not the planet. After all, the allomancer is currently relative to the train, so why wouldn't the bubble have the same frame of reference as their creator? I'm a little confused about what you're saying in the second example. I think it would depend on what happens to someone entering a bubble, which we don't really know anything about yet. I think that a bubble on that scale would see the entire planet as one unified whole, so an individual wouldn't notice anything at all. If a train can be enough to block its passengers from noticing a bubble, why wouldn't a planet do the same thing? Another thing we know about bubbles is that they can't be too small either. There are times when Wayne can't create a bubble around him and Wax because other people are too close and would be included. I wonder if he has any control over the size of the bubbles at all. It would also be interesting to see if people ended up aging at different rates due to time spent in bubbles. Although the metals are so expensive, I don't suppose anyone could afford to have one going nearly long enough to have a noticeable effect on their age.

Oh. I see that we're talking about the nahel bond/live spren shardblades, not the dead shardblades, which was how I was initially thinking about it. So nevermind my last comment.

Aren't Honorblades beyond Shardblades because they grant surges? Requiring extra energy to do provide something so powerful doesn't seem less efficient to me.

I think that once you're using aluminum and something else there is no point to the aluminum anymore. the purpose of the aluminum is to be undetectable, but the second metal could still be detected by allomancers. If you want it to be immune to allomancy, you're stuck with the whole thing being aluminum. Otherwise it's like giving someone an aluminum gun and then still wearing a regular belt buckle.

It would seem reasonable if a shardholder was granted understanding of how the magic works without finding out about what else is out there or how things came to be the way they are. So Harmony would be able to understand Realmatic Theory, but no cosmere knowledge beyond that.

You referenced some ideas here that I hadn't heard before. Could you link to your sources about the Unmade? Also, what do you mean about the splinters of Preservation and Ruin? And I'm pretty sure Returned feed on a breath weekly, not daily.

I think there is some indication that Nightblood is beginning to learn. He suggested that Vasher throw him into a group of people and if they're evil they'd destroy themselves, which was new thinking. I believe there was more on this in the annotations. While Nightblood is predominantly shaped by his first moments of life, he does seem capable of learning some new tricks. I am unsure if this could extend to learning morality or personality growth, but it does show that he's not entirely static. I don't think that being used for evil things would teach Nightblood what evil was.He seems to base his judgments on Vasher's judgment, so being used for evil would probably just warp his understanding of evil. It's also likely that he has seen true evil at some point in his long life, so I don't see why being used by Szeth would be so different.

For the timelines, you might want to consider when each book takes place. I'm pretty sure Brandon has said something about this, but I'm not sure where to find it. I believe that Hoid has been around for more years than he's lived through. I'm not really sure how it works, but I recall reading a WOB about it.

I am a (broom)stick!

I think the Hemalurgic spike causes enough damage to the spirit web to grant them the power from the spike, which could be separate from the experience of the spiking being traumatic enough to cause the person to snap and allowing them to access whatever powers they were born with. So someone who was spiked in a similar manner to how Spook was spiked might not also snap, but someone who was attacked in an alley might. Of course, it's also possible that there's something inherently traumatic about being spiked that would make anyone snap, regardless of how the traumatic the experience seemed. I don't think we've ever seen anyone gain extra powers after being spiked (beyond what the spike grants them, of course) so it's hard to say. I thought that Returned having to die in a virtuous way was the Nalthians' misconception, and what actually happened is that when they died, Endowment showed them what would happen and gave them the choice to go back.

Don't worry- I'm working on converting her. It's the ones who resist conversion that we need to worry about.