happyman

Actually, Nightblood is a little bit better than that. He uses the wielder's conscience to try to determine if they people are evil or not. Still far from fool-proof, but Vasher uses it as a first easy way to test people. Don't forget: Nightblood's form is not remotely human, and that hurts, but the breaths were once part of living people. That helps. Edited to add: This might well carry over to other awakened objects, especially if they are suited for something rather more literal than "Destroy Evil." If you say "Protect Children" to a shield, it would probably be somewhat more predictable. The biggest ambiguity would be the definition of "children" and resolving conflicts. Whether it would be proactive is another question.

Depends on your metabolism. I'd have to sell them if I wanted it to not be a curse. On the other hand, free money. So, yeah, my curse was lots better.

Granted. You now spend your extra time with the Heralds. In Damnation. I wish for nothing; I can get by. I wish for others who are worse off than I. Just kidding. I wish to be irresistible to women who I find attractive.

I like the list. A lot. Of course, Mistborn also explains why these things are done by evil overlords in some circumstances... In the case of the feasts, for instance, that's as much the nobility's doing as TLR. Lording over other people seems to be built in to us at a deep level. Stopping it is like stopping the tide: even TLR couldn't do that once the power of the well left him.

Holy thread necromancy, Batman.

That is so 1940's. Nowadays, it needs to have been a genetically modified spider.

If you are looking for something canonical, I agree with the folks above who called it the post-Collapse.

I find it extremely unlikely that the Hemalurgic metals are at all different from the other two arts. That seems like an unlikely hole in a set of very nice, very compatible magic systems.

Count me in the camp which thinks that hybrids of the various Hemalurgic creations would be extremely difficult to make, due to the reasons listed above. The spikes probably interact with each other in complex ways, and 1024 years wasn't enough time for TLR to find other viable ones..

My guess is that if it isn't just foreshadowing I would wager that a bit of Shardic influence has leaked out and given people a tiny bit of foresight, especially for really big issues. After all, all Allomancer's must have a bit more Preservation in them than the typical person, and that could give them just the faintest hint of the ability to see the future like Preservation could. Very focused, very specialized, but still there.

Funnily enough, we have Hoid's take on this pairing. It comes when Adolin tells Hoid to flirt with a girl more his age. Hoid comments something like "There's only one of those about, and she doesn't like me much." (Sorry I can't quote it; no book.) Since Hoid knew Tanavast personally, it seems likely he knows Cultivation personally as well. She's by far the most likely target of that comment. So, yeah.

I'd totally watch a reality show around this idea.

Yep. The "sin" is having Allomancy without permission from TLR. The absolution is giving that power to an authorized recipient, i.e. the Inquisitor. The side effect of death is unfortunate but enjoyable. (From the Inquisitors point of view, of course.)

It's Lopen the Lopen. Or just The Lopen, for short. Who needs last names when the first name says it all?

I thought it was extremely likely to be Axies, partly because it fit his personality (just so calm while being held captive) and partly because conservation of detail is a thing. Most important (textual) reason was that he had been investigating the island's spren before being captured.

I suspect that the effects of increased connection are in many ways like emotional allomancy. According to Breeze, the emotions stop being affected when the Soother/Rioter stops pushing/pulling, but the memories of the emotions are still there, as are the results of the actions taken. Why should Feruchemical connection be any different? As for a supercharged (years of storage) connection, lI rather suspect it would be analagous to Straff Venture's response to a duralumin soothing. A sudden, overwhelming change that affects everything, and then is gone. And yet the memory remains. Also, the trampoline analogy is a good one, because, while moderate uses of the powers can leave no lasting effect, you can, as it were, stretch the trampoline beyond its stretching point and do permanent damage. Such as ripping the fabric of the trampoline in half. That is rather how I view dumping large amounts of any Feruchemical charge quickly.

Nah, they only spike the sin out of you if you admit to having blasphemed against Allomancy by having used it. Or unless their hemalurgical experiments are running short of victimsvolunteers. OK, that was less comforting than I thought it would be.

The Higgs boson is probably the best analogy, then. Even if we had found super-symmetry at the LHC, that wouldn't have proven String Theory.

I think that the quote from Brandon makes it pretty clear how things stand. I would use the anti-matter analogy rather than string theory. Physicists who weren't in the field, and even some who were, have been skeptical of string theory for some time. Anti-matter, on the other hand, is well established as existing, but it's wildly impractical to make in any quantity. I suspect that in AoL, they have made a little bit of Chromium, but that the techniques were expensive, technical and not worth scaling up. That way, they know what it does, confirmed the theory, but can't do much about it yet.

It's possible that the medium is the same, but the sound and source is wildly different.

Well said, and this is one of the ways magic consistently seems to work in the Cosmere. A similar thing happened with the Lord Ruler when he held Preservations power: destroying to undo his mistakes wasn't in his mindset, even though he had barely taken the power.

I really like this theory. I have seen the catch-phrase tossed around a few times, but this is the most comprehensive honest-to-goodness theory thread I've properly seen. Well done. It's easily the best description I've seen of how the two would work, while still raising interesting questions.

Since we have word of God (or at least, word of Honor) that Cultivation is better at seeing the future than Honor is, Cultivation does seem like a likely source of Mr. T's powers. As if coming from the Nightwatcher wasn't already a hint.

There's no need for it to be rude. (For those not in the know, the phrase "I am groot" is just what Groot's language sounds like to us lesser beings. He's actually saying intelligent things, but we miss all of the subtlety. Apparently.)