happyman

Upvote, not for the quote, but for that amazing signature.

I have to partially agree with kaellok here. As a native English speaker, the "real" definition of pious (without more context) is the first definition on that list. When the word appears without context or emotion, that's what it means. The second definition is a form of sarcasm or mockery which relies on the first definition to make its point. The term pious is often used to mock people who are seen as being hypocritical or holier-than-though by pretending to follow definition one. It's saying that they aren't really living up to the first definition. It doesn't have that meaning without the appropriate context, though. It depends on the relationship between the people involved. (This is why dictionaries always lie. Context is everything. Online dictionaries are particularly bad about not giving context.) The third definition is probably out of use nowadays. Either that, or it's even more context-sensitive than the second definition. Either way, I doubt it has anything to do with Dalinar.

Because their name is probably a deliberate shout-out by Brandon to the Misty Mountains from the Hobbit/LoTR?

I would note that Galladon's father, an Elantrian, died of a heart attack. (Well, he died because he was depressed and didn't go to get help when he noticed he was having a heart attack, but that's not what they put on the death warrant.) I suspect that Elantrian's are probably the least immortal of the groups discussed. In fact, most are probably mortal by the strict definition.

I thought this was actually explained pretty well in Hero of Ages. At the beginning of the book, Marsh notes that something is still blocking Ruin; this is strongly implied to be the mindless power of Preservation instinctively stopping Ruin from exercising his power unconstrained. Ruin was doing everything he could, but it was almost completely blocked by what was left of Preservation and so proceeded very slowly. The "almost" from above means that Ruin did make progress, getting the Ashmounts to erupt, causing Earthquakes, and so on. Those were all direct manifestations of his power and show what he would have done if he had been truly free from Preservation. He wasn't just spiking people. Spiking people was essentially the secret ops he used on people to figure out where the Atium was.

It would probably take you literally, and that's not real spam, that's an actual business.

Yoda: If a stick you are, the a stick remain you must.

Sounds far too useful to be on this list.

From perverse curiosity, I googled the "worst books ever written list" after seeing this. I didn't find them. All you get is a bunch of really stupid sites listing books, mostly by their political or ideological enemies. Seriously, there are plenty of books out there that I don't like but which I am perfectly willing to admit were written competently, or even well. They may even qualify as evil (a term I don't use lightly) but that has nothing strictly to do with quality. (After all, to be really evil, you have to have influenced people; at worst the writing is usually mediocre with themes that resonated with people). However, I suspect that even they don't compare with the truly bad books that have been written in our history.

maxal, why are you so determined to dislike Renarin? I'll gladly cop to being one of the people who overlooked him until Feather opened my eyes, but he did some amazing things in WoR. And I find it amazing that you base some of your dislike on where you think his character is going to go. As someone who strongly empathizes with Renarin, I can tell you that being put in to the spotlight and being made an important character is probably one of the hardest things that could have happened to him (even if he would have claimed otherwise before it happened). There are people for whom nothing is scarier than success. That alone could crack your rosy view of how things are going to go forward.

I would say that most problems need to be scaled by how easily the character thinks they could fix them. By that standard, there problems are roughly equal. They are equally deluded into thinking themselves helpless.

I'm pretty sure that you would need two actors, at most, to get this effect right. Make-up and effects, long since known, can fill a lot of gaps.

Vin and Elend almost certainly were not intimate before marriage. I base this partly on comments in the annotations about Elantris (where Brandon makes it clear that Raoden and Sarene were not intimate before marriage and calls himself an admitted prude for doing it that way), and the fact that Vin and Elend were so very obviously honeymooning on their trip north before they turn around. The arguments "for" seem to be mostly of the variety "But I want them to have!", which is not logically very compelling and in addition does not appreciate Brandon's background. On top of that, it sounds like a seriously big decision for Vin to make, all things considered. She's not a casual person, know what I mean? I think we would have seen more of it, especially for somebody with trust issues and a lifetime being (quite rationally) afraid of rape. (And don't say we didn't see it. Her decision to marry Elend was the scene where we saw her commit, with all that comes with it.) Combine this Elend's first sexual experience and I can see both of them being rationally gun-shy. None of which says that this was ignored in the books. Vin's mother was a prostitute. Elend's first experience with sex was with a prostitute arranged by his father; said prostitute was then executed to avoid even the chance of children. Straff Venture essentially kept a harem of illegal wives to produce allomantic children, and he had very high standards. Those aren't particularly good examples of extramarital affairs, but they all exist in Mistborn, let alone later books. Allriene and Breeze and Jewel's and Clod, on the other hand, were confirmed to be in sexual relationships in the annotations. Those are canon by most standards. I'm not sold on Dalinar and Navani. That would make a right mess of things, politically, if she got pregnant. I'll have to reread Words of Radiance to see if I can spot it.

That's pretty close to what it is in the real world. Just add a touch of magic, and who knows? It makes sense to me.

Yep! If he lashes it a few billion times, he might make a credible imitation of a very small black hole.

You are forgiven, my son. (Nod's sagely.)

No, no, no, no no! The proper phrase for that situation is "I am a stick." Stick by itself doesn't mean anything! Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 387973120 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 421742896 bytes) in Unknown on line 0

It wasn't the action itself. It was the emotional distance she felt from them while she sized them up. I doubt Kaladin would have been so clinical when he saw how they looked and acted. In other words, the action itself was fine. It was the right action. No argument there; that's kind of my last point in my original post. It was more the nuance of the scene that bugged me.

I view this in a complicated light. I think Shallan was doing the right thing, both by her lights and from a practical point of view. The slaves will be grateful to her, and I see no reason they shouldn't be. On the other hand, there was definitely some classism in the way she viewed the slaves. She, the powerful lighteyes, was doing them, the enslaved darkeyes, a favor. That made me uncomfortable. In the end though, I thought: which would I rather have? A paternalistic aristocrat who does the right thing, or anybody else who does the wrong thing?

Y'know, reading this thread, I was reminded of a small investigation I did a few weeks ago into the meaning of the word normal. I don't think there is any such thing. There are far too many variables in the world in general, and in us in particular, for anybody to be normal, or typical. It's not a trivial thing to prove, but the math is well-established: the more variables there are, the fewer examples there are at the mean. Most of us have never met an average person. I find it much more useful, in practice, to classify behaviors as adaptive or not adaptive, as helpful or unhelpful, as moral or immoral. We can make broad categories of the kinds of behavior we run into, with special focus on the maladaptive extremes, but that is all we are doing. Classifying, yes, and judging, but the judging will hopefully be as separate from the classifying as can be made useful.

Since nutrition, health, senses, heat, and age are all canonically things that Feruchemists can store, I would have to agree with you not only that the general principle is sound, but that many of the specifics you list are in fact the essence of Feruchemcy, canonically.

I can suggest at least one reason why TLR wasn't as overpowered as he could have been: Getting access to the other metals meant revealing those powers to some of his subordinates, either the Inquisitors or the obligators, and potentially to others via spies or other forms of espionage. If he let that information get a little bit loose, it could eventually get all the way lose. At some point, the risks of letting the information go and losing control of the populace was bigger than the risk of somebody taking him out with the powers he had already revealed. Or in other words, TLR was already absurdly overpowered with what he had. Possibly he considered the other powers a threat to him. Obviously, both Aluminum and Atium were exceptions, but there are good in-story reasons for those exception, Atium to keep Ruin in check and Aluminum because its power is so useless on its own.

In the circumstances, I suspect that people who had been spiked were the primary ones Kelsier couldn't speak to while he was holding the power. Even while holding the power, it is strongly implied that he was able to affect only those who had real faith in him (as a god, at least).

It depends largely on what he was seeing. Most importantly it depends on how much detail he saw. If all he saw was that the two storms were about to run into each other and what it would do to the neighborhood it ran into, but didn't see other details (like we are in a fabrial which can transport us to a safe haven), that may have been a sensible reaction.

How would you tell if it was working?