Mistdork

Could it be that the star that Scadrial is orbiting might have a different mass than our sun anyways and be a different size? I'm not sure we know exactly how big the planet itself is anyways, and as PorridgeBrick said, magic is as magic does. Or rather, sometimes we don't have all the answers and we have to live with it.

Tolkien's magic though is very...wild, mystical, untamed. Like that you find in myths and legends, it's really the sign of the era he was writing in and his background that led to it too. Magic's not use that solve that many problems, in fact, it usually creates more problems than it solves and most of the time, people without magic are fighting against evil that has a bit too much of it...

I would call this recent movement towards a harder, more scientific magic system the hardening of magic in general. The OP is right in that regard. It's not necessarily bad or good, but it's probably somewhat linked to how science influences our society in general. We expect more scientific fantasy as the result of a society that seems to have less mystery (in a way), it's just...well, it fits with historical trends...*shrugs*

Meh!

 

Renarin isn't physically handicapped. Renarin isn't physically neurologically handicapped. Renarin is a Surgebinder. Any physical ailments would have been corrected when he started breathing in stormlight. This would have been when he stopped wearing his glasses. What Renarin is, is emotionally handicapped. He spends most of the book quietly coming to terms with what he is, and since we don't get a POV, we don't see it. Renarin didn't have a seizure in the arena, because this was at a point after he stopped wearing his glasses, he may have suffered a panic attack, but that is a completely different animal.

 

Renarin is like someone who was born with one leg who just grew a second and now has to learn to walk rather than hop around. He just needs time to adjust to being balanced, to seeing the world through a new lens. He is cracked of course, if he weren't, he would never have managed to bond with a spren.

 

There are so many potential reasons for his actions, but none of them are the result of a permanent condition of the mind or body. Stormlight would have fixed those.

Doesn't Stormlight heal according to how one views themselves in the cognitive/spiritual since? If Renarin views himself as ASD and having seizures, but yet wants to see himself as a warrior (a warrior doesn't wear glasses) then that explains why only those things would heal. Saying ASD doesn't have a physical cause is somewhat silly, it has a lot to do with brain "wiring" and nerves and such...

If Stormlight healed him of it, Renarin would still have to deal with years of not being about to interact with people on a neurotypical level. You can heal the physical cause, but healing/changing someone like that wouldn't change his years of experience as a person on the spectrum. That's quite unrealistic. It's called a developmental disorder for a reason, even though Renarin seems more typical now (like an extremely shy introvert with some awkward quirks), we haven't seen what he was like as a kid and without that, there's no way to know how 'severe' he actually is. You can be moderately autistic as a child, but be high-functioning, have the 'old form' of PDD-NOS, or Aspergers as an adult. Given the right environment (such as a supportive family, aka, the Kholins) and even without therapy, (though ardents might be able to give some, I guess) he would seem basically normal despite being technically on the spectrum (though, I imagine that he it's more likely he would've been lower on the high-functioning side of things than moderately or severely disabled). It's part of how this disorder sometimes works...

Anyway, what really bothers me about this thread is how certain people praise Renarin for every 'normal' or 'brave' thing he does as though he is some saint for doing them. The thing is, it comes off more as babying than kindness. Is it believable that Renarin jumped down into the arena to help his brother? Yes. Was it incredibly stupid? Yes it was, it's alright to admit that Renarin can do stupid, irrational things. He's human after all, and that's what's great about his character. Not that he's overcoming a disability or is 'so brave' to face every day life because it, but that Sanderson respects this character enough to allow Renarin to grow and make stupid mistakes, he seems human, not like a paper cutout of someone on the spectrum...or a special snowflake.

It's admirable. Since I have a sibling on the spectrum in the same area Renarin's in, I felt like I had to say that Sanderson's done an excellent job, not only with this, but with how he writes Adolin's relationship with Renarin. I can relate to him in this even though he mostly gets on my nerves (actually, everyone in SA does so at one point or another, except the spren and Dalinar)...

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speaking of Renarin's seizures, here's an interesting question: are we certain that Renarin's seizures have a convention medical cause behind then?

Shallan has apparently had her spren all her life. What if Renarin has too?  is it possible that his seizures are actually an inefficient form of foretelling the future? something he will have more control over as he progresses in the oaths? 

There's a part of me that wonders if they're connected to the whole Nightwatcher-episode, but other than that possibility, I don't think so. Glys has only been in the physical realm for a short time since Renarin just recently healed his eyes.

Renarin could have very mild PKU (nope, not defining it, I wrote an essay already today, its up above, that's why it's more formal than this). His seizures fit that to some extent, but it would be rather shocking (to me) if he had that instead of the more specific diagnosis of ASD and epilepsy...*shrug*

I don't think modern Tv/Cinema has the capacity to capture the pure awesomeness of this series.

Seriously though, the Stormlight Archive has less of a chance than Wheel of Time to be made into an actual film/tv adaption (that little project has been in development heck for years) because of the intricacies in shardplate/blade, the wildlife, Highstorms, weird city-scapes, and even things like the presence of Spren (fire-spren, gravity-spren, wind-spren, etc) would make it hard and expensive to produce. It's just plain difficult, and really, if and when someone buys the rights it's a daunting ten book project that has no easy cutoff for five books (maybe, with any luck, book five will have the biggest cliffhanger ever...hehe) and to do something like SA well seems near impossible...

1) Does anyone know if, if you have a robotic arm or something (and assuming you had hundreds of thousands of Breaths) which would consist of many pieces, would you have to Awaken each piece, or the mechanical arm as a whole?

It might be possible, but we are dealing with complex, though human shaped, metal objects (because they've never been alive). It would be easier to encase something organic (like bones) in a quasi-mechanical arm though and make use of Breathes that way... As WeiryWriter mentioned, one of the problems would be cognitive, and I think the easiest way to overcome that issue might be by making this kind of thing by encasing a skeletal arm in bones. It probably also would work for an Iron Man like suite, though that would still take a lot of breathes to accomplish...

 

 

It was a nice spin on a typical Western motif—instead of being the quiet gunman of Western cliché, he was a screwball hatmaker. And his horse was sentient and grumbling about having to carry him around; she wanted to get back into a human body as soon as possible.

 

I want to read this book so much!

Pfft. really, I was thinking of Mr. Ed...even though the horse would've been female and a kandra, but then I was like, Sazed as a hatmaker riding TenSoon! (Perhaps I can make myself look like more of an idiot today...)

As far as I understand, it the Stormfather isn't Jezrien at all, that's just a name associated with him - which granted will affect his Cognitive aspect.

He's a Splinter of Honor, in his own words both spren and god (Proof of spren is that he bonded Dalinar). I'm not entirely sure how the splinter thing works, but I would also say that the Stormfather is unlike any being we have yet seen in the Cosmere (Though I wonder if the Stormfather is the same type of 'being' (for lack of a better word) as Cultivation/The Nightwatcher. Do we know if she's still alive?).

Technically, there should be nine different bondable spren-categories other than the three god-spren bonded by Bondsmiths. While we don't know the names of these different groups of spren, we can infer that they exist and that the spren different orders of KR bond are from these groups...You could even say there are ten if you want to count god-spren as another group, but I think it might be possible that a god-spren could be a 'super' spren of one of the other groups. Stormfather being a...super Honor spren and Nightwatcher [if she is just a spren] being another example, probably a 'super' spren of whatever Wyndle is (mini-cultivation spren, maybe?) And yeah, if there are cultivation spren bonding people and making them KR, that might mean that not all KR bondable spren are splinters of Honor, maybe there's even a spren that combines their two intents...

I guess, since he is a cognitive aspect of Honor himself in many ways, that he is the father of all the Nahel spren (with Cultivation the mother). I would guess that his seeming affinity for the honorspren is due to the fact that they are (speculatively) almost purely of honor and very little to none of cultivation.

 

At the end of the book, though, I noticed that...Stormfather calls himself the Sliver of Honor  (1071, Kindle Edition, when he's talking to Dalinar on top of that tower in Urithiru), not just a Splinter, this seemed a little odd. The Splinter thing seemed obvious, but being a Sliver means he is the remnant of the person called Tanavast, kind of like another entity in Mistborn, though in this case, god is dead. It's not just kind of, he is the Sliver of Honor's cognitive aspect, he admits it himself

It's sad though, all Honor has left is a storming, half-mad coward (yeah, I don't think much of Stormfather...)