Ari

Uh, not necessarily. Hoid has implied that Ati's personality was very different to the motivations of the shard Ruin. That doesn't mean he wasn't connected to it in some way. For instance, a gentle man that understood that the universe was slowly heading towards heat death and that there was nothing to do to stop it, and that accepted that all things ended in their time... well, that would be a kind and decent man with a heavy connection to Ruin, in my books, and very similar to how Sazed ended up connected to both halves of Harmony. Combine that with the fact that a gentle and kind man without any force counterbalancing Ruin might end up heavily exposed to the influence of its Intent, and that adequately explains why Ati's personality changed so much while still accounting for Occam's razor, ie. not requiring us to think the rules for holding a Shard have changed since the Shattering.

I definitely found reference to White Sand being after Elantris in the past, but I don't know if that's canonical.

Being an Elantrian with Feruchemical steel could let you draw symbols really quickly if you were in a pinch, probably giving you a lot of versatility.

Pretty sure he taps Mental Speed (Zincmind) and Luck (Chromiummind) at the same time before deciding where to go. Maybe tapping some Bendalloy too in order to counter the fact that tapping Zinc makes you hungry. The Zinc covers the obvious connections he needs to make from the information he already has. The Chromium will help him out with unknowns and making intuitive decisions. He might also keep a Coppermind of relevant information about other planets, perhaps.

I've got a general image editing tip: All full-featured image editors (even Paint.net, which might be what you're using for a .dds) have a format you can save all the layer info and so on into, such as .psd for Photoshop. Save all your mod images in that format AND the format you need for the mod and you'll easily be able to go back and make changes. You should probably get into the habit of saving a psd (or equivalent) working file and a file for actual publishing whenever you edit an image if you're planning to do it often.

Yep, reading transcripts and watching signing videos is the best way to start getting up to date with the info from WoBs. You only really need to learn to navigate Theoryland if you want a specific reference that you know is archived there. (Not everything is yet) If someone's given a signing report on the events forum that has something relevant to a discussion, you can just link to the thread or cross-quote the post. (Clicking the quote button on one thread, but pasting it into your reply in the other will link people to that specific post as well as quoting it) Most of us that go around quoting WoBs either have a ridiculous memory, or just obsessively keep up with interview answers. You don't need to know everything, just reading a lot of the more recent stuff will get you up to speed on most things, as a lot of the early WoBs are revealed in later books, or are common discussion points on Cosmere theories now anyway. (like the names of Devotion, Dominion, and Endowment, for instance)

Sure, it's relatively simple. You need to use BBCode as the new reply editor doesn't have a dropdown for more complex tags anymore. You use [square brackets] to write BBcode tags, and the appropriate one is <spoiler>(spoilery text, hidden images, etc... goes here)</spoiler>. (I've used angle quotes there so the board doesn't ACTUALLY treat the tags as spoiler tags, but you can figure it out) It looks like this:

Different WoB altogether, asking if Autonomy could possibly be Trell. Brandon confirmed Autonomy is eligible as per his previous quote that Trell is a "known shard." Your interpretation of the WoB earlier in the thread is correct, it means none of the known shards, which probably includes Autonomy, can be the fourth one Odium shattered. edit 2: Here's the relevant WoB from Theoryland. Note it requires a bit of inference to get you to "Trell might be Autonomy," but it's clearly what both parties are implying.

There's a WoB that implies or states that it wasn't accidental who got what Shard, either. So I'm pretty sure once they saw how Adonalsium had split, there would have been some level of agreement as to who picked up what- I've been searching on Theoryland but I think it's either tagged in a non-obvious way or just difficult to search for using the relate terms such as Adonalsium or Shards, so I can't give you the exact wording.

Right, but he's stuck in a catch-22 as far as his Intent is concerned between preserving himself and preserving his creations. So if the Intent functions as a blanket prohibition against destroying things, he shouldn't have been able to hurt himself like that without overriding it. What this means is that we don't know for sure that a Shard's Intent applies to themselves. There have been enough counter-examples that it's difficult to dismiss the hypothesis with Occam's razor, and requires some speculation no matter which side you come down on. Except other quotes have implied that Brandon has been counting Autonomy as a known Shard, particularly ones about whether Autonomy is in consideration for being Trell. (which Brandon referred to as a known shard) We could confirm with a tweet or something similar to be sure because I suppose technically there is some small amount of wiggle room there, but I'm at somewhere like 95% confidence that the answer is that Odium hasn't (yet) Shattered Autonomy. Brandon's previous answers where he's allowed people to misinterpret what he's saying haven't rested on quite so detailed a technicality.

Yeah no problem, it helps to have been around since the TWG forums when a lot of Brandon's fans were either super-nerds like me from out of country or out of state, or locals who often attended BYU, so you picked up the occasional thing about Dragonsteel, (like people checking it out the thesis version at BYU) Liar, Aether of Night, or White Sands, even though I haven't read any of the early draft versions myself.

Yata and Landis have adequately covered point #1, so yeah, it doesn't burn all at once unless your metalmind is tiny or you're being touched by an active Nicroburst. I'll stick to detailing what's going on with #2. There are two aspects to what happens when a compounder burns a metalmind. Firstly, you swallow a fully charged metalmind, and your Allomancy, recognising a metal you have the spiritual capability to burn, shows up a reserve that feels like the appropriate metal. If it's not your metalmind, what Vin experiences when she asks to burn one of Sazed's metalminds happens. If it is, you have access to a new allomantic reserve. When you normally burn a metal, the metal acts like the key to a floodgate, and whichever of the sixteen (plus) keys you turned, that's the type of power you get out from Preservation. Atium is a bit of a special case that relates to what's going on with compounding, as you're burning a piece of Ruin's power to access Allomancy, so in that case the metal actually unlocks a power flow from the solid Ruin you've ingested, rather than from Preservation. But when you burn a metalmind, your Allomancy is overwritten with a feruchemical charge, so you end up accessing the feruchemical ability in using the metal to do Allomancy, but utilising both the stored feruchemical charge and Preservation's allomantic power flow to fuel it. Which is why you get more health out of burning a full gold metalmind than you do from tapping it- because you're getting the feruchemical charge multiplied through by the power released by the allomantic burn rate. And you can then store this compounded attribute back into a new metalmind, effectively giving you as much of a feruchemical attribute as you want so long as you have access to small, swallowable metalminds. (although you are limited by the rate you can ingest and burn the power, so there are limits to the rate you can get the attribute at, which is why Atium compounding only makes you ridiculously long-lived as opposed to immortal)

Survival instinct doesn't address how Preservation could sacrifice himself- the two ways we can read that are that he defied his own Intent to save humans, or that for some reason preserving others is more important than preserving himself. Either way it means that Shards don't necessarily have to treat themselves according to their intents. As for the term Intent itself, it's another fan term that was coined to discuss a concept Brandon hadn't (at the time) made clear. Some people prefer the term Mandate, which Sazed talks about in the Hero of Ages chapter epigraphs. Intent is, however, the term everyone knows, and it's a concept that Brandon has implied is to some degree correct, as even he uses the word in Q&As. (you can check out the Coppermind on Intent for some relevant WoBs)

Aaah. I see where you're going with that, although are we sure you wouldn't need to hack some magic to become an awakener to benefit from the heightenings? IIRC all we have confirmed is that people not native to Nalthis can receive the breaths but can't Awaken with them. I can see it making sense either way tbh.

Again though, did we ever get that confirmed? edit: Found it while looking for something else on theoryland. Mistborn Era 2 definitely happens after Stormlight Archive book 5, but it might be even later, like after SA6 or SA7, and it's one of the challenges in giving us a timeline of the books, as he might need to write that far into Stormlight before he knows for sure where it slots in.

Feldi- yes and no. For very new releases, threads containing spoilers, even in spoiler tags, are "quarantined" to the specific spoiler sub-forum for the particular book, and that forum is also reasonably aggressively moderated to ensure thread titles aren't spoilers. So on BoM's release, you couldn't spoil either it or Secret History. If Strigoi was lurking around during that time, it's completely reasonable for him to ask if that aggressive anti-spoiler moderation policy is still in place- and no, it isn't, as it's been long enough that it's now reasonable to assume that all the Cosmere Theories superfans have read Secret History and Bands of Mourning. (Edit: you should still be careful about posting to the Mistborn forums though, there'll be a spoiler policy on those until the Bands of Mourning and Secret History forums have been merged back into the general Mistborn discussion. Check out the stickies there for the exact details) Likewise, when Oathbringer is newly released next year, there'll be a similar policy requiring you to post threads with spoilers to a subforum in the Stormlight Archive discussion.

Indeed. I don't see why you wouldn't see some indication that the touch would be a big distraction from your own Atium (or even Electrum!) shadow.

We know you don't actually need Breaths to maintain the Returned immortality, but it does also seem that Initiation into being a Returned is a bit tricky to pull off, not least of which because testing if you've gotten it right requires you to die. There's counter-evidence against all of the known immortality tricks so far for Hoid, as he's lived too long for Atium compounding, he's been seen failing to become an Elantrian, and it's highly unlikely that he would risk dying to become a Returned without solid evidence on how to make sure Endowment selects you. He probably has some other full- or lesser-immortality trick from a Shardworld we haven't seen yet, although I suppose he could be combining some form of time dilation with Atium compounding, we haven't seen conspicuously omnipresent use of metalminds from him yet. I expect to be honest that he got his immortality on Yolen. It would be a good first step to becoming a Worldhopper.

There's been some speculation that all the Era 2 mistborn stories are essentially happening in the "break time" between the first and second halves of the Stormlight Archive, but I haven't seen that confirmed by WoB yet.

The problem with over-analysing a Shard's intent is simply how little we see or hear from the Vessels. The most we've ever known about a Vessel is from Sazed, and he's pretty enigmatic since he's Ascended. (probably for good reasons, both in-world and authorial) We have so little data that it's definitely easy to twist in a lot of ways and make assumptions about motivations, but there are some solid counter-examples to a few assumptions people had about Intents, so while I agree with you in general that speculating heavily upon Intents is useless without more info and knowing in general how to interpret each Intent, you simply stumbled into one of the areas where we actually know enough to make a call that the Vessels can at least use their powers in ways that contradict their intents where the Vessel themselves are concerned, although we don't know all the details of why just yet.

Yeah, Hoid being human is probably complicated in similar ways to questions like "was TLR human?" or "are inquisitors human?" though, as opposed to him turning into a part-dragon suddenly. All the stuff on Dragons is either in Brandon's unpublished version of Dragonsteel, which is a thesis available (at least theoretically) at the Brigham Young University library, or directly from WoB. It only became relevant that the Recipient of the first letter was a Dragon because Hoid explicitly calls him an old reptile, which of course resulted in a question about whether he meant that term literally or not.

And now I have to disagree a bit, heh. You're making the mistake of applying the Shard's Intent to itself. For example, Preservation didn't want to preserve himself, in fact he committed an act of profound self-sacrifice in order to safeguard humanity on Scadrial from Ruin. (And likewise, Ruin didn't want to try and destroy Vin-as-Preservation before he had at least ruined Scadrial) A shard's intent seems to apply more to their attitude to people in general, as opposed to themselves or cosmere-wide events. Likewise, even if Autonomy is interpreted as the definition of being self-sufficient as opposed to something more akin to "free the people!" kind of Autonomy, it doesn't mean that Bavadin is necessarily neutral as a matter of course in every dispute between other shards, it might just mean he believes that people who aren't Vessels deserve a chance to be free and make their own decisions. So, in essence, we could be looking at an attitude anywhere between Hoid and Frost from that shard- we really don't know unless we get to hear a bit more behind-the-scenes stuff relating to White Sand than is apparently known to date.

Except having a bunch of Preservation's power plugged into you isn't enough to stop you being connected to Ruin, or even to give your personality any basic compatibility with Preservation. Kelsier is an agent of chaos, wanting to change things, and has neither the serenity of Sazed that allowed him to connect to both shards, nor did he have Vin's instinct to protect and her ability to see past the way people had wronged her and see, for instance, that nobles were a necessary part of Scadrian society as it was. Think of it like someone cheating on a partner they really love. Their connection to the person they love is still there, despite the fact that they've done some ostensibly might connect them to the person they cheated with. Kelsier needed the Ire's device because he would need to get over all his beliefs that tie into Ruin and start appreciating changelessness or at least conserving the good about how things are now before he developed any connection to Preservation.

Ah, sorry. I expect there's no way for him to get a body in the Cognitive realm, so that the perpendicularity would be an irrelevance.

If all he needed to get out of the Cognitive were a perpendicularity, he could have done so in M:SH. The issue is he doesn't have a connection to a body anymore- he'd be like a Spren or a Shade if he came to Scadrial in the physicial without doing anything else first. There is significance to the spike. It's entirely possible Kelsier, with the help of Spook, imbued a spike with his cognitive shadow, and spiked someone braindead or similar to highjack a body, and then used some highjinks to gain access to feruchemy (we might maybe get some answers on that in the Lost Metal?) and "heal" the body back to being Kelsier. That's my rough guess on what they did.