Ari

I think Brandon often RAFOs things like this at first but decides they're either obvious enough or that they're non-crucial enough that they can be answered after later questioning. Between that and critical re-wording of questions, it's often a good idea to repeat good questions after some time! As usual Argent is on the right track hahaha

Vasher as a Christmas Reindeer- confirmed.

Is Aether still a thing? I know if it is it'll need significant re-writing as the shard in Aether was moved into Mistborn. W&W is Era 2 of Mistborn in the new terminology, and the 1980s analogue mistborn is Era 3. Era 4 may end up being a cyberpunk series instead of the space trilogy, depending on whether Brandon decides he wants to do moar Mistborn. Isn't Dragonsteel divided into two eras as well? With the first one being where it's been indicated in that choronology, and the second one being after Mistborn In Space? Or did I imagine that?

You all seem to be forgetting that fabrials are constructed by trapping Spren in gemstones, which seems rather important and an indication that they MAY be the world focus for Roshar. (or at least a specific focus for Surgebinding) In general the more useful something ends up on a planet the more suspicious I am that it's that planet's focus. I'm not wedded to this theory, but it seems the best one to date. We know for instance that some metals, in addition to being focii on Scadrial, are inert to investiture in general, (the special properties of silver in Shadows for Silence are likely a result of the general rules for silver and the fact that it's inert to investiture, and possibly also relate to the properties of aluminum) and it may be that certain focii are similarly universal in nature. The reason Stormlight itself can't be a focus is that Stormlight is the local form of investiture. Weather in general also can't be a focus as there are interesting weather manifestations because of investiture galaxy-wide. It would be like describing Breaths as the focus on Nalthis. It makes no sense, as a focus is a method by which one utilises investiture. The two things you'd look to on Nalthis would be colours and commands, although colours seem to make the most sense. I would highly suspect that anything that has been gathered by Mraize is a local focus or related to the local focus somehow, for instance, suggesting that bone is either itself a focus on Sel, or it acts as a focus with the symbols etched into it.

Emperor's Soul is a standalone. I don't see how it's a "starting point," as it has no direct ties with Elantris narratively. It simply happens on the same planet. You could wrap it into the same series, but I'd consider it a peripheral work rather than a launching point. Yeah there are certainly arguments about personal taste that can be made among the earlier books, but I think it's fair to say that Warbreaker and Stormlight Archive are from a technical and craft perspective, better books than Elantris and Mistborn. Elantris is very definitely a "first book" with a lot of technical mistakes, and reading it after Mistborn 1 sold me on the rest of the trilogy quite effectively seeing how much Brandon leaped forward as an author after Elantris.

Um... That highly depends on how fast your FTL is. It's totally possible to achieve FTL at a speed which makes it impractical to visit anything but the nearest stars without generation ships. (You have to reach enormous speeds before a trip accross even a dwarf galaxy like the Cosmere is not a significant thing- and you need to be going hundreds of times the speed of light at minimum to make interstellar trips a functional means of connecting worlds together) In Star Trek they have reasonably fast FTL but charting the rest of the galaxy is still a big issue for them, and they frequently find unfamiliar interstellar empires when visiting a new quarter of the galaxy. If FTL is still relatively new to Scadrial during the Cosmere sequence, then it's likely they will have a limited range in a sphere around Scadrial until they start establishing colony worlds or outposts to refuel at. Yep. Or he could create one at a certain point in the timeline of the Ars Arcana author, and have her mark out only planets she's visited. Especially if the "starchart" is actually a map of Cognitive travelways.

Yeah he's much more responsive via twitter. Sending him emails is sort of like dropping him a letter versus actually talking to him. It's @BrandSanderson, and @PeterAhlstrom for Peter, fyi.

That makes more sense, and yeah, I agree with you that Kaladin didn't mean to kill him by severing his arm, and couldn't be expected to know that doing so would put him in danger. That's not the part of the new ending that bugs me, though. The problem those of us who prefer the original ending tend to cite, is that in that ending, Kaladin doesn't make a decision that deliberately puts Szeth in danger. He simply fights to the best of his ability and is surprised when Szeth decides to allow himself to die. Based on the criteria Brandon brought up for his change, (it not feeling heroic that Kaladin "killed" Szeth) his decision to fetch the Honourblade in the new version is much LESS heroic than his accidental killing of Szeth in the original. Brandon might have taken away the killing blow, but he's actually made Kaladin directly decide to allow Szeth to die, which is, at least in my opinion, far less heroic. If you're gonna edit the ending, it should really meet your objectives. The best way to have handled this would have simply been for Szeth's body to get obscured by the storm after he dropped the honourblade, but have the blade still in view. Then Kaladin is in no way responsible for Szeth's (very short) death.

Hoid said Rayse was a good match for Odium. Ati became Ruin unrestrained because his personality wasn't strong and he was a bad match for Ruin, which overwhelmed his kind personality. This makes it much more likely that Rayse has some or even significant influence on his current personality. Hoid made it sound like the reason he's doing what he's doing is as much because he's afraid of Rayse as he is afraid of Odium.

Oathbringer will work with either ending, and you can read the differences online, so it's kinda up to your own headcanon whether you like Kaladin abandoning Szeth to fall to his death, or Kaladin accidentally assisting Szeth's suicide. (Kaladin never actually makes the choice in either narrative, so I'm kinda confused by Brandon's justification for the change- you have to be really odd about assigning blame to feel that Kaladin deliberately killed Szeth in the original ending) For electronic versions you may be able to update them, although I don't know if the audiobook will be re-recorded for that scene any time soon. I have to disagree with Yata that Kaladin didn't know Szeth was in mortal danger in the new version. It's very clear that he does, (he just doesn't realise yet that it's due to dropping the honourblade) and that Syl persaudes him to save the sword rather than Szeth.

We know Shardblades are made of god metals, being the solid form of Splinters of Honour and Cultivation, (presumably Tanavastium is involved, with some of them alloyed with or composed purely of whatever Cultivation's metal is called, when we find out her name) so if you managed to tear a piece off one, it would burn like any other god metal. (In the case of Shardblades, however, the hemalurgical application are probably the more interesting part) If Shardplate is made of Spren in any way, they presumably burn just the same, which might be an easier way to get your hands on tanavastium. Unsure whether it would regrow under those circumstances though.

Wouldn't a Returned who awakened an object with their Divine Breath die the same way they do when giving it away for healing? I think it was WoB or the annotations, but Brandon has referred to Nightblood's creator wielding it, so I don't think it's possible that Nightblood would be Invested with a divine breath if his creator survived his creation. I'm not 100% that you could retain a Divine Breath the way you propose, to be honest, given the nature of how they're used to achieve the resurrection. Do we have a WoB on this or something? I may have missed it if so. It doesn't seem unreasonable or anything, but it's always better to read these things first-hand to get the implications right.

Yeah, I'm not really on-board yet with the idea that base metals are aligned with specific shards, especially as the fits you've proposed here seem rather contrived. IIRC, however, there is text from Sazed in HoA that refers to Preservation picking the number 16 for his hints (and possibly for the number of base metals, it's unclear on that front) due to the broader significance of that number. There's no evidence that there's any relevance of 16 to Preservation in particular the way that 10 is relevant to Honour- (ie. his ten purposes) rather, he put it in as a pointer to the number of base metals and the number of shards, and the ratio of the mistfallen to the general population, and the Atium mistings in particular. I honestly came into this topic expecting a rather different discussion given how much implication we have on the nature of 16 base metals in the text. As for Roshar- I'd provisionally say gemstones look like the focus there, especially when you consider how Jasnah uses them for Soulcasting, and their ability to retain Stormlight, which leaks out of anything else. The bonds on Roshar seem to be the method of Initiation rather than the focus that channels the investiture, but whether this is correct is hard to tell as neither gemstones or bonds seem to cleanly follow the pattern other books have set for Initiation and foci.

Pretty sure you mean compound Zinc. Writing is generally more about how fast you can think than about how fast you can type.

Good argument for why Paalm is speaking to "Trell". Your theory on the Splinter is certainly possible, but it does have a bit of a thorn in its side- how would a Splinter of Ruin get access to a God Metal that's neither Lerasium, Atium, nor Harmonium? Occam's razor really does make our best candidates for "Trell" either Autonomy or Odium.

So the way Miles and Harmony refer to "Trell" suggests we are looking for an active Shard that is interfering in other worlds' business. Given we also know that "Trell" is a known Shard, that pretty much restricts us to either Odium or Autonomy. The rest goes into spoilers, for very minor commentary on events in Warbreaker, Stormlight Archive, and Elantris, which are more cosmere spoilers than plot spoilers.

As of WoR, Odium is still, as far as we know, trapped and can't relocate any power that's still attached to his mind outside of the greater Rosharan system. That doesn't stop him from disconnecting some of his power from his consciousness, and making some solid investiture into Raysium to send it with an agent to Scadrial, but then again, Autonomy could also have done the exact same thing with Bavadinium, so the fact that it's possible Odium sent metal to Scadrial still doesn't mean it's the most likely explanation. Brandon has referred to the creatures in the Kandra homeland as hemalurgical Chimeras. There have been some interesting speculation that they've been spiked with animal essence which lead to their dramatic change from a single spike. We don't really know enough about these creatures to come to a solid conclusion, but if there needed to be a godmetal involved to pull off this type of transformation, this is the area I'd be most sympathetic to invoking Raysium, as it seems really inconsistent with Autonomy's Intent to spike living creatures into something so dramatically changed without their consent, so I can't imagine any loyal agent of his taking such an action. I actually think Paalm's behaviour is a much better argument for Autonomy as "Trell" and/or the donor of the alien God metal. Sazed's inability to detect her spike, and Paalm's sudden and over-riding desire to free Scadrial from Harmony seems like the sort of thing Autonomy would go for as a shard, and unlike her venture into liberation, Paalm's anger has a thoroughly simple and non-magical explanation: Harmony manipulated her and the man she loved, tried to take over her body, and is still using Wax as a tool, and to control her again nonetheless. She has every reason to be naturally angry and no influence from Odium is required to explain this.

Yep... in fact probably a better name for them is rotated glyphs, as they rely on rotational symmetry rather than reflective symmetry. We really don't have any good basis on which to speculate what those glyphs represent.

Sure, there's probably some reflection of location in the spiritual realm. Being Rosharan or Scadrian is probably relevant on some small level. There's probably also some analogue of space in the spiritual realm. But I expect unlike the cognitive, it's unlikely to match up with space in the physical realm in any way. It's probably going to be related to spiritual similarity in some way- so I expect that for instance all the human spiritwebs would be in the same place, the various Shard's spiritual power near each other, etc...

Brandon doesn't actually write particularly fast. He does write consistently, which helps a lot, but much of his advantage comes down to that and two other things: Brandon had a LOT of trunk novels that simply needed revising to be released. Almost everything (with the notable exceptions of Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages) up until the short stories and Words of Radiance was basically heavily revised or re-written trunk novels, and he hasn't yet exhausted all of those. It's a lot easier to finish a novel when you've already drafted it once, and you're coming back a lot more skilled at writing than you were the first time so you can see all of your mistakes. Brandon takes a vacation from his writing projects... by writing something that's a change of pace, which he then usually also publishes. Most other writers take a vacation from their projects by doing something that's not writing for a month or more.

Have my upvote, it's dangerous to go alone. Yeah, we need more opportunities for people to talk about misjagyny

Yeah, the thing a lot of people who are relatively new to Brandon don't get is that all his blurbs about him understanding leadership and having insight into emotions? Those are talking about Elantris, not Mistborn, lol.

I think to attribute Paalm's lack of sanity to a Shard kinda requires you to make a good argument as to why [a] having just one spike and the events she'd lived eg. with Wax wouldn't individually or both make her insane.

Which is even funnier, as there are some of us who think the Diagram contains a large amount of accurate information, but has been influenced subtly by one of the Unmade to have him help Odium in his plans.

Why would Parshendi carry gems in their beards etc... if they had an actual gemheart to absorb Stormlight with?