king of nowhere

would actually be a pretty good theory. except for the "Above silence, the illuminating storms—dying storms—illuminate the silence above." which is noted to be particularly relevant. if the gatherers give special attention to this one, it means most are similar. the one given by taravangian's mother was passable, though

yes indeed. no country every fought to the last man. in a real war, "how much are you willing to sacrifice before you give up" is a lot more important than the strict "how powerful you are". which is why all the hypoteticals "could X win a war against Y" are silly. they posit scenarios in a vacuum, without the political and economical context that would actually make all the difference. sure, you can theorize that if you put together the army of X and the army of Y and pitch them in an open battle, X would win. but then X would just learn that it can't win a direct engagement, disperse its remaining forces and start guerrilla operations. then victory would go to whomever can outlast the enemy. with that said, i'll say that america cannot conquer roshar - because the american population has no interest in the war to conquer a planet with a hostile environment and no strategic interest that did nothing to them, and would never agree to the war, while the rosharans would resist fanatically because they are a warlike people led by warlike leaders. on the other hand, a dictatorship may manage to conquer roshar. a dictatorship may have the willingness to deploy millions of men and carry out campaigns of extermination against the natives - which eventually work at quelling resistance; they just require carrying out destruction on such large scale that very few real world nations would be willing to do it.

people near death saw glimpses of the future. the silent gatherers collected thousands such death rattles for the purpose of informing the diagram. and yet, none of those rattles were in any way clear. even us, with the benefit of knowing all the plots, can only figure out the meaning after the fact happened. much less try to use the rattle to influence the events in an informed way. so, besides the general vague feeling of dread and imminent catastrophe pushing for the need to act, was there any actually useful information that the death rattles did provide to the diagram?

I have no doubt that a modern military, backed with the political will to pursue the occupation, would make short work of rosharan armies. radiants are strong enough to be dangerous to modern armies, but there's not many of them, while weapon production can be scaled up almost indefinitely. and all their powers work from close range. sure, a windrunner can potentially deflect a missile, but in practice the missile flies so fast, it most likely will hit before anyone sees it coming or has time to react. it also packs enough explosive to blow shardplate to bits and leave the radiant in pieces too small to regenerate. miniguns would clear the skies very easily, and kamikaza drones would work against most radiants. on the other hand, the problem is logistics. how do you deal with them? I assume a modern military ship can survive a highstorm (though all fighter jets on the deck of a carrier would be blown to the sea, forcing to carry only a small contingent that can be stored inside), but it can't be a pleasant experience. but the moment you move on land? you need to keep your troops supplied, and highstorms - plus complete lack of modern roads - would be a huge pain. like, how can you make a supply depot? how do you store airplanes and helicopters on the ground? how do you justify to your public opinion the enormous costs of an operation that basically amounts to imperialism and will surely entail a large amount of war crimes, plus using modern weaponry against people with swords? so no, in a practical sense the invasion wouldn't go anywhere.

I am concerned. But,given the choice to never have dragonsteel and mistborn 4 see the light, but to have good adaptations, and having full cosmere, but crappy or mediocre adaptations or no adaptations, i'd take the first. We already have dozens of cosmere books. We don't have any good cosmere tv show, and in fact we have very few good fantasy shows at all

i only have the third book in electronic form. but i checked the first appearance of the kitsen in book two, and it says 15. so it seems it's book 3 that got it wrong.

I'm rereading the whole saga right now, and i see a discrepancy. in book 2 and 3, kitsen are consistently described as 25 centimeters tall in book 4, they are consistently described instead as 15 centimeters tall which one is correct? how did such a discrepancy made it past the editors and beta readers anyway?

I haven't read all the four pages, that's a lot, but from what I skimmed I saw nobody point out a few things that paint jasnah in a better light. first, about seeing others as tools. remember in the first book, when shallan tries repeatedly to become her ward and is repeatedly turned down? when did shallan succeed? "i am uneducated through no fault of my own. please help me get an education" and after jasnah discovers she stole the soulcaster, what gets her to mellow? "I made a mistake. i will make others. i need your guidance" jasnah doesn't care about shallan the social climber. she doesn't care about using her for some schemes. what persuades jasnah, both time, is a plea for help from a person in need. Jasnah cares about helping others. deeply. some of her actions may be off, but i never saw her entertain any selfish thought. and what she did with her political power? she freed slaves. she democratized the government. she turned the highprinces from warring warlord into state functionaries. she always had the good of the people in mind. that fact cannot be denied. as for her acting like she's everyone's intellectual superior, everything in the story seem to point that she actually is. no mortal could match her wit, except taravangian in his best days. how much being smarter than those around you gives you a right to boss over them is debatable, but i linked it to a weaker form of omniscent morality license: in a fantasy story with prophecies, people can be forgiven for doing terrible things because they knew for certain all the consequences and knew it was the best outcome. jasnah doesn't know all the consequences as she's not omniscent, but she does know better than anyone else, which gives her some leeway. I will not discuss the main point about plotting murders of your rivals because it's been done a lot. I'll only add my bit here, saying that in an environment filled with the likes of sadeas, planning countermeasures in case your allies betray you is not cruel, it's basic survival instinct. she didn't carry out any of those assassinations that i'm aware of.

no need to be so cynical. it is often the case that without proof of the worst happening, public opinion - or at least the media and the government spokespeople - must assume the worst didn't happen. just like the hostages are just disappeared, so are the guards

if the guards inside simply disappeared, it's possible they were not counted as "being hurt" because their wereabouts were still unknown. nobody was hurt as far as the public knew. just in the same way that the hostages were disappeared

to my knowledge, we don't have explanations. but i can guess that maybe the locked car was locked and the guards were on adjacent wagons. maybe the vanishers picked their targets specifically based on which trains wouldn't have guards actually inside the locked wagon - and they also needed to have an actual replica of the wagon

I think you need intent, saying words at random doesn't normally work for cosmere magic. Not sure if awakening is an exception

yes, i am well aware of that, but here we're discussing specifically their use for war on nalthis. vasher didn't kill shashara because she wanted to use nightblood to kill highly invested beings. vasher probably didn't even knew what highly invested beings were at the time. no, vasher did kill shashara because she wanted to give the secret of nightblood to the armies. besides, all that stuff under WaT spoiler wasn't possible at the time of warbreaker, and vasher had no idea it would be possible - in fact, both the book and annotations show he has a blind spot in that regard, thinking nightblood can't learn. so yes, take szeth or kaladin or someone like that, give them nightblood, they could absolutely turn a war on nalthis in the time of the book. but that's completely irrelevant for vasher's reasoning. if someone had the ability to mass produce weapons that cost 1000 breath to make, they'd be a serious threat simply because of how many breath they'd have. sure, with modern technology and investiture sources you can mass produce that. but on nalthis during the time of the five scholars? no chance. you can't mass produce something that expensive because you can't lower cost.

the whole tragedy between denth and vasher started when she made nightblood and wanted to make more. vasher decided the sword is too destructive to use, and killed her. my question is, is nightblood really a good weapon? because what i know of weapons says, not at all. of course, it's very effective. but the cost is ludicrous. remember, every breath is one lifless. nightblood costs 1000 breath. additionally, nightblood drains breath from the user, at a pretty fast rate of a breath every few seconds. So, let's say you need 1000 breath to make a copy of nightblood, and another 1000 for someone to use it. with that much breath, you could make 2000 lifeless. what's more useful? my money is the lifeless getting a lucky hit well before the guy with nightblood can kill all of them. nightblood is, in the best case, the equivalent of hypersonic missiles: they have some niche use, but they are too rare and expensive to have a major impact on the war. in the worst case, it's the equivalent of the yamato or the p-1000 ratte: ludicrously expensive superweapons that end up actually crippling your war effort before either being scrapped for their sheer impracticality, or dealing way too little damage to justify their cost before being overwhelmed by numbers. so, vasher overreacted. shashara sharing the construction of nightblood with the armies wouldn't have affected the war much, there was no need to kill her. the one-breath command for the creation of lifless, that one is the real breakthrough. the one thing nightblood actually does well is to counter kalad's phantoms: those things each cost as much as 50 regular lifeless, but they pay themselves by being virtually impervious to regular weapons. but to nightblood, it doesn't matter. 2000 breath spent on a nightblood clone may actually beat 2000 breath spent on kalad's phantoms. though killing 40 without getting hit is still not easy.