happyman

Actually, this brings up other things about the Shard's Intents. The minds of the Shardholders might get molded to their Intent, but the Intents have a certain amount of vagueness to them. While it may have been impossible for Preservation to Ruin something in order to Preserve it, surely there must have been some leeway in how the Intent was interpreted? The Shards apparently need a cognitive aspect, and even while they expand and shape that consciousness, surely the consciousness itself has some influence, within its Intent? Thus they may become the embodiment of their power, but the interpretation (or at the least, effectiveness) may still depend on what is left of the individual. Essentially, their original state may not be completely destroyed, insomuch as it does not conflict with the power they hold. In this case, the sex of the original holder might be relevant in some way.

The term Coinshot could be essentially an anachronism in the new world, carried over from the old one without considering the change in context. It wouldn't be the first time that happened. Far from it. It sounds like they have a central bank, though. Not too surprising, given how tightly clustered the civilized settlements are.

Imagine that you are 25. You could spend a year one year older than you "really" are, and then turn yourself back twenty years for about a week and a half. It'd be work trying at least once, and given how little difference a year makes at that age, it wouldn't even be a real sacrifice. Heck, if you were a Feruchemical spy in a potentially dangerous situation, adding on a couple of decades while being undercover, and then slipping out by going the other direction, could be very useful. I'd be hard-pressed to say that nobody had ever tried it. I suspect they had.

It's an interesting idea, but almost certainly false. Firstly, we've never seen any other boon or curse that directly affected people other than the supplicant themself. This would have to be a massive overhaul of half the Alethi court's memories---not very likely. Also, Dalinar and Navani herself talk about his wife at one point, and Navani tells him just how perfect his wife was for him. Plus, Dalinar remembers events including both his wife and Navani, although he just infers that his wife was present from the odd gaps. It just doesn't seem likely, all things considered.

Hence I listed those things that determined which power you get, not the prerequisites required to use them. The reason you can access it at all also varies from world to world, but that's now what we're talking about here.

On Sel, it's the shape of the Aons that determine what the magic does. In Mistborn (can't remember the world name) it's the atomic shape of the metals which determines what the magic does. In Warbreaker, it's the mental command that tells the magic what to do. In each case, the thing that determines what the magic does is the shape of something in one of the Realms. A spiritual Focus would then be something in the spiritual realm which determines what magic the person has access to. On Roshar, you get access to the power based on the key moral decisions you make in your life. If we assume that such moral decisions are determined in the Spiritual realm, then a spiritual focus would be the soul of a person whose life embodies a specific set of morals. Hence the Radiants and their Ideals.

If I'm correct that it's the say/hear feedback loop which does part of the trick of establishing the Cognitive filter, then slurring or mumbling (even by accident) will not provide the correct feedback and thus weaken the Cognitive shape. Apparently, having the wrong shape ends up with the command doing nothing or doing the wrong thing, much like getting an Aon wrong does nothing/the wrong thing, with "nothing" being far more likely.

Because we need a pronoun to reference the Shards, and picking the one that corresponds to their physical body makes things so much simpler than getting into an argument about sexism in the English language? Edited to add: Doesn't Honor refer to Cultivation as "she"? The shards may consider basic physical needs to be beneath them (hard to say), but they certainly remember their physical sex. They need pronouns too, after all. At least when talking with mere mortals.

You could always go with the run-away keeper who gets involved with the party for personal reasons. Say, a Keeper who kept his powers to himself after his family was killed during some intrigue with the Noble Houses, but then discovers that one of the party members is a scion of said house. It's too late/too dangerous for him to go after the whole house, but if one of them puts themselves in harms way...

I'm assuming that by and large, Feruchemists had very little access to Atium throughout the Final Empire. On the other hand, neither did Allomancers. However, given the long history of the Final Empire, the fact that Feruchemy doesn't actually use up the Atium, and the power that Feruchemists can use when it suits them, I'm assuming they got their hands on some and started experimenting.

If he did it on purpose, I would have expected him to say as much in his viewpoint. The term for doing it on purpose (or even instinctively) is "Regaining your balance," or similar usage. In the quote, it gives the distinct impression of something that happened without Dalinar meaning it to. In fact, the exact wording suggests he did not do it at all---his Shardplate did. And Dalinar apparently didn't know that Shardplate could do that; otherwise he would have said that his Shardplate managed to right itself, just like usual.

This. We know a lot more about Shallan and her internal struggles and character than we do about Jasnah, whom we see through Shallan's eyes. Shallan comes in with a lot of baggage, and while she drops some of it, she definitely doesn't drop all. However, it also means that our understanding of Shallan is somewhat more detailed, and she fits Artistic/Honest to a T. That really should be that.

Kaurne: I'm a bit curious as to one bit of your logic. You use the fact that Brandon has stated that there will (essentially) be cross-overs between the books and the magic systems. This is perfectly reasonable to me; in fact, if you pay attention, it has already happened. However, this has nothing to do with where the magic systems come from or how they exist. It seems likely that magic systems either come from the Shards that created the worlds or from the Shards which have been present for a long time. It's also possible that "combination" magic systems only occur when the Shards are properly opposed. The fact that,at some point, people created by different Shards with different magics will run into each other doesn't seem to weigh in on the argument one way or the other.

This is true, and I guess we are in agreement on this one. Having to translate a command in the middle of saying it would distract your mind from the command itself and force you to focus on the translation instead. This would almost certainly disrupt any Cognitive shape you are forming enough for the command to not work.

I was one of the first people to propose that each Shard interaction created a new magic system, but that was a purely theoretical calculation. I'm not stuck to it, and I don't think it has to be that way. It's entirely possible that Ruin and Preservation interacted that way only because they were such clean opposites. In other places or with other combinations of Shards, it's entirely possible that the magics would be entirely separate or interact in other ways. Thus I can easily support the notion that with three relatively different Shards on a single planet, they could each produce ten magic systems, interleaved in odd ways but not using simple combinatorics.

This is a good point. What's special about Dalinar's perspective is that he doesn't expect it to happen. Shardbearers have more control, and if the one we saw meant to pull the stunt he did, well, that's not that surprising. We know, however, that Dalinar didn't know what he was doing when he (or his Shardplate) pulled himself upright. So, somewhat ambiguous, but definitely a point that shouldn't be neglected.

OK, I can get behind that. Dalinar is definitely doing something different. I would also add to this list of oddities, that he is seeing visions from the Almighty and hearing a voice in his head drawing him closer to the ideals of the Radiants.

Since no physical command at all is needed in cases of large amounts of breath (with practice), why should we believe that the physical and mental commands have to match up at all? I still like my idea that hearing what you are thinking stabilizes the cognitive aspect enough for it to work.

One of these two makes the most sense to me. I tend towards the idea that you can go as young as you want---as long as you are still capable of tapping age. As soon as you can't, wham, you're back where you were. Incidentally, if the attribute being stored really was vitality, don't you think the Feruchemists would have noticed it? "Not being able to go past your prime" seems like something that would decrease it's effectiveness as a disguise-creating ability, which is something the Feruchemists did know about and presumably tested.

I can't remember anything that would either say or deny that they have the telegraph/phone. For most of the book, they are looking at physical evidence, so maybe not.

The first quote is relevant, and I understand, but how does the second relate at all to the issue of balance?

I think it's worth pointing out that Kaladin refers back to memories from his time as a slave that seems to include a woman who was special to him. From this and other interactions with women, I'd say he's probably interested only in women. It's a perfectly reasonable default assumption. As for main characters getting married---I'd like to point out that the only Sanderson book I've read that really played that straight was Elantris. In Mistborn, Elend became a main character largely because he was in a relationship with Vin. That he was idealistic and open-minded probably wasn't an accident; Vin would never have been interested in any other type. Warbreaker had an arranged marriage that turned out OK, but Susebron was never a viewpoint character. As for Way of Kings---there are too many options and too much social confusion for it to be simple. And, as noted, Alloy of Law took that trope and ground it into fine dust.

I would theorize, from that quote, that Dalinar isn't fully drawing on whatever powers he has access to, yet. "Almost" seeming to glow suggests that he isn't quite there, yet, but people are beginning to sense it. Especially interesting is that Adolin attributes his father's ability to just being his father. It provides a decent cover for what is happening, if anything is.

Spanreeds are, alas, almost nothing like Quantum Entanglement. It may seems like such to those who don't know the details, but in practice they have nothing in common. I'm going to describe Quantum Entanglement technically here. It's a tricky subject, so be warned. In Quantum Mechanics, everything is described by a wavefunction, which obeys a wave equation. The tricky part is that wavefunctions don't have to describe a single particle; often, they describe a whole system. Quantum entanglement is simply when a multi-particle system described by a wavefunction cannot be decomposed into independent single-particle wavefunctions. With care, these multi-particle wavefunctions can span macroscopic distances and often do; for instance, the description of electrons inside a metal is a classical entangled system. However, Entanglement does not make two electrons "the same electron," or any such thing. It just causes statistical correlations that drive our macroscopic minds batty.

Yeah, that's why many people support the notion of him being some order of Knights Radiant. Of course, as soon as some people become too confident in that fact, others feel they must oppose them out of some sense of justice/caution/perverse joy. Hence this discussion. It seems to me that the rational arguments have been mostly tapped out by now, and for the rest, well, RAFO.