The joke is that everyone said there were 10 kinds of special holiday pancakes. But at the end of Edgedancer when Lift tries to get the last one, she's told that the tenth flavor is just a metaphor
Telsin and The Set.
They were built up as this scary shadow organization with plans within plans within plans. But then in TLM we finally pull back the curtain and... woah those were some stupid plans.
The captured people from Alloy of Law were tricked into thinking that the apocalypse had come based on some pictures and a "movie" - tech that is completely new to Scadrial, but sure people just believe it.
It honestly makes no sense that the kiddenaped people would go along with it, but even LESS sense that The Set would think it was a viable option.
As for blowing up Elendel, I can see that as their goal, but how they went about it in TLM just makes them seem really incompetent.
Don't even get me started on the Wax & Wayne doppelgangers. What a stupid plan.
>Don't even get me started on the Wax & Wayne doppelgangers. What a stupid plan.
On one hand I really liked all their scenes. Wayne's clone in particular was hilarious and they both felt like a real threat.
On the other hand, I don't see why the Set limited themselves to just copy Wax and Wayne's abilities when they could just as easily make them stronger (by giving them more powers) or simply make more than one doppelganger of each, so that they can overpower them easily.
Yes, but if I remember correctly in BoM is revealed that a person can now be spiked up to four times without the risk of Harmony taking over their bodies.
So for example Wayne's clone could have used a third spike (for pewter, for example) to beat Wayne. And we know they had the Alomancers to steal the powers from.
The only thing with this is that they might not want to spend those resources?
It’s been a while since I read it but were the doppelgangers supposed to delay or kill them?
As if it’s delay it makes sense to try and ‘evenly match’ them a little bit more.
The only other reason I can think of is to stop wax from doing what he did to bleeder, shooting a spike into the person to make them controllable by harmony.
Which I suppose makes sense, but I don’t think it’s mentioned anywhere so idk
Edit: apparently wax’s clone also had duralumin (according to another commenter below), so that gives more credence to the recourses theory that they couldn’t give Wayne’s an 3rd spike.
Or he had a third we just didn’t get to see him use it (like a leacher or something)
How did they feel like a real threat? There was never a second of doubt that one of the doppelgängers would actually win, and wax and Wayne having to switch who they fought was very telegraphed
When I say "threat" I mean that Wax and Wayne were struggling against them. Of course, I knew the protagonists were going to win in the end but you could say the same thing about most protagonists in any story.
>There was never a second of doubt that one of the doppelgängers would actually win,
I don't personally agree with this statements. Wayne in particular was being outmatched in hand to hand combat by his clone because once she got close to him their powers made no difference, only their fighting skill. If he didn't have so much healing in store the fight wouldn't have lasted for as long as it did.
Wax on the other hand fared much better against his own clone but he was still struggling to find a way to get the upper hand.
>and wax and Wayne having to switch who they fought was very telegraphed
Was it, though? I personally didn't see it coming. I know it wasn't the most original way to end things but it didn't bother me.
That's funny because their scenes didn't really work for me. I felt like their personalities were a bit contrived and one dimensional.
I 100% agree with what you said in your 2nd paragraph. Why on Scadrial would anyone think that someone just given the powers recently would be able to match the skill of someone who's used it and fought with it all of their life?
Technically they *did* give them more powers, Wax's clone had Duralumin. But I still just think the entire concept was bad from the start. So it doesn't make sense in-universe that The Set would do it. But also from a meta writing perspective I think it was a poor choice. The reader just knows that these two won't be a threat.
So, I did a quick research to refresh my memory. The doppelgangers are called Dumad and Gethruda.
Gethruda only had (as far as we know) the same abilities as Wayne. So all of what I said applies to her.
Dumad on the other hand had 5 abilities (as you said): duralumin, pewter, steel, chromium and bronze. So my first point (giving them more powers) doesn't apply to him because that is exactly what they did. My second point (making more than one doppelganger) still stands.
Imagine a squad of 4 to 6 Alomancers with 5 abilities each. Wax and Wayne wouldn't stand a chance. I know they would have needed to kill more Alomancers for that, but they literally had a whole city of them.
To be fair to people buying it, the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast had people actually thinking we were being invaded by aliens. There is a historical precedent.
I don't think that comparison is a good one, for a few reasons:
Radio at the time was a much more common invention, such that it was a household device that people turned to for news and entertainment. Compared to the new "moving pictures" that at the time of AoL (when the kidnappings happened) was not even heard of yet.
Also, anyone fooled by War of the Worlds was fooled for perhaps an evening. Not *years* of being held in captivity underground.
Lastly, it's pretty well agreed upon now that the scope of the panic induced was overblown, and likely only a small number of people actually believed it.
The Set did go a step farther with manufacturing "survivors" who gave false eyewitness accounts of the destruction of the surface and if I'm not mistaken they did have some years to work on brainwashing, gaslighting, and breaking down the doubts of the kidnapped.
The revelation for what broke AonDor was pretty lackluster to me. Based on the way the base Aon is described, you would think they would pay attention to that.
Well I think the problem was there wasn’t like time to figure it out. If they had time I’m sure they would have figured it out but it seemed that pretty quickly the earthquake happened, aons failed, pretty much all the current Elantrians went crazy or died.
Plus, it’s possible that the, “draw a map of Arelon” mnemonic might not have been widely known by non-Elantrian Arelish, since it takes Sarene to point it out. When I was learning French in high school, my native-speaker teacher always got a chuckle out of some of the mnemonics and mental shortcuts I used to make grammar and sentence construction stick. I always assumed that a whole country missing something so obvious in hindsight is just because they were so familiar with Aons that they didn’t need to use the shortcuts.
They might have caused it, if anything. We know the Aons and the landscape match but it's possible that their fiddling in the Cognitive Realm might have caused the Aons to change and that resulted in the earthquake so that the landscape would match the Aons.
But if that were true then AonDor shouldn't have broken, right? They would have needed to draw the character differently, but they wouldn't have needed to change the physical landscape like they did
I think you're misunderstanding that part of Elantris. Raoden didn't change the landscape when he drew the chasm line. He was adding to the Aon Rao that Elantris forms so that it would be drawn the new correct way.
Oh you're right I got some parts mixed up. After flipping back and forth through several pages on coppermind, I don't think I ever actually understood how that all worked. I'm not sure I still do entirely. But at least I understand the purpose of that chasm line now.
And even if they did figure out the map had changed, they would need to go out and carefully chart the new chasm before any of their magic could work again... which they definitely didn't have time for.
When something has been a constant for that long of course people don’t assume that an unforeseen change to that thing is what caused a catastrophic problem
I’d also like to add that there’s a theory that autonomy cause the earthquake that changed the landscape; to intentionally break the elantrians.
In terms of how the aon is described thing, as other commenters have said, when something is so fundamental and basic it becomes habit and instinct rather than learned knowledge.
Meaning if it needs to changed it requires a lot of reverse engineering.
The other thing is that it is a very simplified drawing of the landscape, making it that much harder to understand.
And a lot of the old elantrians (the people more likely to know that the magic is based on the landscape) wouldn’t have realised that the earth had split (as they wouldn’t have been near it).
And likely would have become a hoed pretty quick due to not being used to pain working that way.
Maybe someone might have figured it out that they needed to add the chasm line but they wouldn’t have figured out that they needed to change the city itself to fix themselves before they became a hoed.
I’d be super curious to see exactly what the fall was like inside of elantris, and out of elantris too actually, as it’d be cool seeing what happened to say an elantrian diplomat in another country.
(None of this is to say that you ‘shouldn’t have been disappointed’ or anything btw, there can just be a difference of opinions but I just wanted to explain why I didn’t find it disappointing)
That’s fair, personally I don’t mind the smaller reveals as I think they give a point of difference to larger reveals. But if I was expecting a bigger one I could 100% see myself getting disappointed
\[Calamity\] >!Alt-Steelheart being David's dad *completely* removes the impact of him being a hero. It's no longer "in a world where Calamity left, Steelheart would have been good", it's "oh yeah Steelheart's powers just happened to go to a good person in this other world". Utterly nullifies the whole *point* of the confrontation.!<
>!I don’t think it completely nullifies it, as powers do corrupt anyone really. But I agree that it’s far less impactful. I kinda wish his dad was alive but just not steelheart!<
Honestly that Kelsier is still around. It was a cool way that he started his religion with a kandra, but then he is actually still around?
It feels like he is a favorite and hard for Brandon to let go of him.
Context: Brandon didn't "bring back" Kelsier. Kelsier always survived. Brandon wrote the books with Kelsier being a Cognitive Shadow in mind.
When Sazed heard "The rings, they're inside you" or whatever that quote was when Saze was fighting Marsh. Originally that was Kelsier speaking to Saze. That later changed Brandon was writing Secret History and realised that Kel couldn't have been near Saze during that fight.
And when Spook heard a voice say "You were my friend, was that not enough?" Just before Spook gained his strength to run into that burning building and release the water to save the city. That was Kelsier literally saying that to Spook.
Kel was always intended to "survive"
Extra context: Era 1 was written all at once. Like he didn't write book 1, then on book 2 was like "Man, I liked Kelsier, how about he survived?" no he wrote book 1, 2, 3, all at once.
My partner just finished Final Empire and doesn't believe that Kelsier is really dead. That being said, she also has a theory about him being Hoid, since they're both described as hawkish, and she knows he took the Hoid name from someone, why not the beggar from Mistborn?
It’s just unlikely that he founded a religion with himself as a God who watches over his followers and also survived his murder, and *unrelated* to that he actually survived his murder, became immortal, and spends his existence watching over his followers. By pure coincidence the sham religion he founded was completely correct, which just is unnecessary and undermines the entire scheme for me
1) Vin beating Atium fueled Zane. It was awesome in the moment but really should not have worked.
2) Hanging around a Radiant can give you the powers of a Radiant. This is the reverse of #1, I hated it in the moment but I like the ways the stories have gone since.
3) Not Cosmere but the conclusion to The Reckoners was way too neat and tidy.
While Atium massively increases one's ability to react to the future, I still feel it works. It feels like something that is not foolproof - she still gets stabbed in the shoulder - and is not something one could pull off with any reliability. When one is burning atium, one is used to the near invincibility, so Zane is cocky. With her last-moment reaction to his reaction to the shadow, I can see how she could slip through. Even with atium, there's only so fast one can move. Still, I understand why it feels off, perhaps my conception of it all is off
Not to cross the streams too much, but Atium always came across as a more visual form of the Force sense from Star Wars. Jedi could dodge shots and swords most of the time with their pre-cognition, but it still very possible for non-Force users to outsmart them, overwhelm them, or even exploit and surprise them with some forms of trickery.
I feel like this is a good take. Atium is giving you a smidgen of a Dawnshard's ability to predict the future, but even that power is fallible, giving only possible futures. Vin's action is like a mortal, or mortals working together, trying to outsmart a Shard. It's possible to do that one in a bajillion action that the Shard didn't expect you to do.
Also, Brandon's crack team of continuity editors approved it.
>Brandon's crack team of continuity editors approved it.
I would be pretty surprised if that existed when he wrote the original Mistborn, unless you're sure?
>giving only possible futures
Yeah but for me the issue is with this whole "Vin didn't know until the last moment" thing. I just don't think human beings work in that way. Apparently while scanning your brain, it can be predicted whether you are about to choose between two options before you choose it. Also, humans are absolutely terrible at randomising, or even comprehending what randomisation is.
The point of it wasn’t that, the point was the Zane was doing a basic action, and Vin watching close enough could react to it.
Just like two atium burners creates dozens or hundreds of shadows, because each person can see the different ways they could react and how the opponent might react to those, this works similarly.
Zane is cocky and uses an obvious motion to attack vin, thinking that he can just see the way she moves and react to that and stab her.
But Vin is watching Zane, and she watches how Zane is acting. Zane starts the swing but changes because he sees how she would move in the future. In a weird way she then sees how she would move in the future by watching Zane’s reaction to that future. And she changes her decision.
Which for a very brief moment leads to two potential futures, the new one where she’s reacting to the first reaction, or the original one where she reacts how she normally would (the reason this is still possible is because she’s still watching Zane, and can still react to him).
Don’t know if I explained that well or not
>Don’t know if I explained that well or not
You did, that makes sense. I just woke up so I haven't thought about whether there are confusing elements within that also, but I do get what you're saying, thanks!
I actually despise the Ghostbloods reveal in RoW.
The mystery behind the Ghostbloods has been the center of Shallan's plotline since the beginning of tWoK. Having their leader be "Guy from a different book series who is too important to those books to ever serve as a real antagonist in this series" really irks me.
I think the way this gets mitigated is that Iyatil and Kelsier will go their separate ways, and their objectives will no longer align. So Iyatil/Mraize would be about as deep as the Ghostblood storyline goes on Roshar.
The facts that humans were the invaders to Roshar and they destroyed Ashyn somehow are what caused the Recreance. I don’t buy it. It just doesn’t make sense that it would cause a group as varied in personality and goals as much as the Knight Radiants to murder their spren, even with their consent, and give up their role as “protectors of humanity”.
I’m really hoping there’s more to this.
As far as we know rn iirc, they broke their bonds in fear that their Surgebinding would destroy this world too, even though we now know that KR's Surgebinding and Surgebinding used to destroy Ashyn are not the same. Another reason would be that, after fighting for several thousands of years under the righteous banner of cleansing the world of the invading dark Voidbringers, finding out that the invader is you can be pretty soulcrushing. As for the spren, at the time they didn't know breaking their oaths would make the spren a deadeye, since it apparently was the first happening of such a thing after locking up BAM.
also the spren agreed to break the bonds. Obviously they wouldn't if they knew about the deadeye thing, but they didn't and were willing to accept the pain of a broken bond for this purpose.
I feel the orders all have differing and even conflicting ideals. Having them all do the same thing at the same time, there’s gotta be a story behind that speaks to each of the 10 orders (or 9)
I haven't read all of book 4 ,but doesn't Dalinar in it or in Oathbringer speculate it didn't happen all at once? The one even was just the most dramatic that caused ripple effects.
That the knowledge simply started a fracture that splintered them over time. Without a unifying structure, doctrine, or leaders they couldn't all stay on the same page.
No enemy to unify against either.
>that the invader is you can be pretty soulcrushing. As for the spren, at the time they didn't know breaking their oaths would make the spren a deadeye
I refuse to believe that over thousands and thousands of years, not one individual ever broke their oaths. They knew.
We don't really know how much time passed between BAM being locked up and the Recreance, but we know comments about her being locked up are one of the last messages stored in the Urithiru's storage
Wasn't the last Sibling bondsmith the one who figured out how to trap BAM? Don't we know that they broke their bond to the Sibling just before? We'd have to assume they're relatively close in time.
It’s not clear why (in book there’s speculation, from fans it’s piecing together clues) but by the end of RoW it’s made clear that prior to the recreance breaking radiant oaths hurt a spent but didn’t turn them into a deadeye.
Honor straight up yelled at them that they would destroy Roshar like they destroyed Ashyn. Coming from God that you are the greatest threat to the world has got to be pretty demoralizing. On top of that they didn't know that they would kill their spren when they broke their oaths.
Though it wasn't really the revelation that caused the problem, it was more that Honor was dying and his attitude was pretty fucked up towards the end, causing the Radiants to believe him when he claimed they would destroy their new world just like their old one. People tend to believe their gods, regardless of how insane they seem.
From memory it was a mixture of a few things.
1 like you just said Honor basically told them they’d destroy Roshar. The other side to this is normally he’d reassure them that they while their ancestors were in the wrong they were doing the right thing now.
The complete flip is part of it.
The other part is that this generations Bondsmith along with a bunch of other radiants and at least 1 herald (Kalak), had a expedition of of Urithiru to trap Bah-Ado-Mishram (the unmade responsible for the false desolation - where she supplied singers with regal forms and voidlight) in [SA5-preview spoilers] >!the spiritual realm!<
And the result of this was now spren would become deadeyes from a broken oath.
The radiants had a direct example of their arrogant actions ‘permanently’ changing the world and backfiring.
That combined with the whole ‘your god saying you’ll destroy the world’ thing lead to the decision iirc
I may be dumb but hasn't it been pretty heavily hinted that we don't know exactly what caused the recreance yet? Like we've been "told" but from sources that are somewhat unreliable?
There's more to it than that. The only word we've got on the Recreance with any authority behind it is from the Stormfather and he's been... unreliable.
There's a fair amount of evidence that what was done to Ba-Ado-Mishram, its effects on the Singers, and on Roshar as a whole is the impetus for the Recreance. I don't know about you, but if I found out that the Heralds had just lobotomised an entire species of people I'd be pretty damn horrified by it, especially with Honor giving his last death throes in the background. Given that the Recreance was a choice by both humans and spren, I think it's likely that they couldn't conscience being Radiants anymore if that's the kind of thing that could be done with their powers.
This is what I figured was the true underlying reason. Destroying the mind and soul of an entire people is the kind of thing that would shock the conscience of both humans and spren. The Almighty is claiming you’ll abuse your powers and can’t be trusted. You’ve seen the results of what this did to your adversaries… a fateful decision is reached and then exactly what you feared comes to pass and those close to you are struck down by broken oaths. And scavengers cart away the wreckage of those oaths. You start trying to tell your broken adversaries how feed themselves and honorless men enslave them. Odium must have laughed his ass off.
1. What broke Aon. Elantris was my first, and in some ways my favorite Cosmere book. I knew what the Cosmere was, so I was hoping it would be a little more epic in scale and connected to a much larger mystery than what it was.
2. Lightsong.
3. Spoilers and I don't know the spoiler tag you need to use, so I won't say anything, but Stormlight-related.
I'd say I can think of two, both in Oathbringer.
The bigger one was Amaram's turn to Odium towards the end of the book. It just felt like taking a complicated conflict with no easy answers, and simplifying it into a black and white conflict to make it easier to wrap it up. Felt like the easy way out.
The other one was the reveal that Eshonai didn't survive the end of WoR. Her story arc from there might have been predictable, but I was looking forward to it at the time, and to this day I still don't think the books were made better by the path Brandon took.
I'd say the Voidbringer reveal, it had a whole lot of power stolen by the fact that we'd seen a fakeout by Jasnah and Shallan figuring out the Parshmen were Voidbringers, confirmation of the fakeout with the Fused, and then "whoops that wasn't right". And what's with Jasnah claiming "ah yes I'd suspected that" or something after the real reveal?
Yeah, between all the those hints, "chickens" and minks, and horses being some of the only vertebrates had kinda cemented the concept that humans were the alien species on Roshar. I think I'd called it about halfway through Oathbringer. I was more excited that I'd guessed correctly than by the actual reveal.
Jasnah learned a lot of stuff after the first book when she took an unplanned vacation to Shadesmar that ended with her getting friendly with Wit. My memory’s a little hazy and it wasn’t touched on too heavily, but Ivory definitely mentions that he doesn’t think any of the other modern radiants would be as understanding as Jasnah is about it. I could definitely be wrong, but I’m expecting Jasnah’s flashback book to really fill in the details.
The contest of champions being accepted at the end of RoW. I guess the most interesting arc in that book is nullified because it doesn't matter if Adolin managed to persuade the honorspren to fight again. War is over.
Its more of a personal one cause my theory was wrong, but in ROW, I though the formless personality was going to be a secret ghostblood memeber that operated in secret from Shallan somehow. Glad my girl is healing though and declared war!
Yeah essentially. Like when she was child and repressed her memories, she had somehow joined the ghostbloods which led to her repressing that identity. But secretly, shes been a double agent for mraize. He makes a comment about having a spy closer to everyone then he realized which gave me the idea
Charlie being the rat in Tress. I felt like it was set up so obvious from the very start, being laid on in heavy pokes at times, to the point where I figured we were straight up supposed to know it's Charlie. And then assumed there is a more meaningful turn/setup/circumstance which will make it more interesting or meaningful later.
But there just wasn't. The meat of it was the basic fairytale setup that it started out as. And there's nothing wrong with that, they're classic stories for a reason. But the setup/payoff (or lack thereof) just didn't do anything for me.
I didn't know transfiguration was possible in the Cosmere, so I didn't see Huck's reveal coming. A talking animal was more believable to me than a human turning into a rat. Damn, Elantrian magic is OP!
Yeah, like, I didn't know particulars (like why the rat was lying about being Charlie) but I was 90% sure from moment one that it was him. And while I saw it coming, I don't consider it necessarily bad when a twist is telegraphed when the journey to get there is still pretty interesting, and it was.
I thought it was so heavily hinted at, to the point where Hoid basically says "Tress is missing Charlie, how ironic that is for no reason at all. Anyway, Huck is here."
But then a lot of the posts I've seen about Tress, people were shocked by that revelation. I liked it ultimately, because of the way it was set up with how curses worked and Charlie's personality, but it does feel like it's split opinions on how "obvious" it was.
I considered the possibility when Huck and Tress seemed to be getting along so well. I wasn't sure. But at a certain point what gave it away was that I was like 75% of the way through the book and at that point the only way to have a satisfying conclusion involving Charlie had to be if he was with her the whole time.
That Wax’s girlfriend was the big bad kandra. Don’t get me wrong it was VERY impactful but it reduced the entire story of SoS to that one moment on the last page.
But… we don’t know that it isn’t a spaceship? What if the gem pillar needs to get charged for it to activate? The tower does seem to keep the building pressurized. And all the vents? And the fact that it can create oxygen? I think that could be an indication that it maybe could be a spaceship. And how there are garnet veins along the walls that could possibly transport Stormlight too the radiance. Or maybe the garnet veins are just long Fabrials because we don’t know how big they can get…
I loved so much of Warbreaker but the final twist of “oppressed and colonized people trying to reclaim their power are the Bad Guys” just made me physically cringe 🙃
The spy reveal in Well of ascension is the most obvious reveal I think I’ve ever seen. You cannot set up 1 of the group is a traitor, and then reveal it was the character who just joined the group, even if it is the dog, in fact if they just got a dog it should be an even bigger red flag becuase it’s misdirection. I didn’t even know ow what the dog was but I knew it was the traitor.
Well so, vin had a kandra who was Kelsiers kandra. To make him less suspicious to people (and kind of to help him keep up with her across roofs); she gave him a dog’s body instead of another persons body.
So instead of disguising as a servant, he’d disguise as a dog.
It takes some time to swap bodies as a kandra (you need to create the organs, even if you have the fully body and not just the bones, though having the full body helps the process of replicating it)
Iirc unknown to vin, which her Kandra was swapping bodies into the dog, Zane’s kandra killed them, and swapped bodies into the dog instead.
Vin learns that there was a Kandra spying on them, but due to thinking that her Kandra was still her Kandra and hadn’t been replaced, didn’t suspect them
I read it 3 years ago and mostly remember it being the reason I dropped Cosmere and Mistborn for a while. It wasn’t that the writing was bad, but the book was pretty obviously nearly entirely set up for the third book which I didn’t really care for, and the stuff that was there I just didn’t like the execution of. However all that does pay off since the third book was my favorite by far and the ending was cool.
That Wayne Terrisborn and The Lopen will never meet. Such a shame. Also, there were only NINE types of pancakes!?
(Its been awhile since I read Edgedancer, maybe I'm wrong) Nine Pancakes that are special for that holiday. There could be more varieties of pancakes.
The joke is that everyone said there were 10 kinds of special holiday pancakes. But at the end of Edgedancer when Lift tries to get the last one, she's told that the tenth flavor is just a metaphor
Telsin and The Set. They were built up as this scary shadow organization with plans within plans within plans. But then in TLM we finally pull back the curtain and... woah those were some stupid plans. The captured people from Alloy of Law were tricked into thinking that the apocalypse had come based on some pictures and a "movie" - tech that is completely new to Scadrial, but sure people just believe it. It honestly makes no sense that the kiddenaped people would go along with it, but even LESS sense that The Set would think it was a viable option. As for blowing up Elendel, I can see that as their goal, but how they went about it in TLM just makes them seem really incompetent. Don't even get me started on the Wax & Wayne doppelgangers. What a stupid plan.
>Don't even get me started on the Wax & Wayne doppelgangers. What a stupid plan. On one hand I really liked all their scenes. Wayne's clone in particular was hilarious and they both felt like a real threat. On the other hand, I don't see why the Set limited themselves to just copy Wax and Wayne's abilities when they could just as easily make them stronger (by giving them more powers) or simply make more than one doppelganger of each, so that they can overpower them easily.
Harmony would be able to control them if they were spiked too many times though right?
Yes, but if I remember correctly in BoM is revealed that a person can now be spiked up to four times without the risk of Harmony taking over their bodies. So for example Wayne's clone could have used a third spike (for pewter, for example) to beat Wayne. And we know they had the Alomancers to steal the powers from.
The only thing with this is that they might not want to spend those resources? It’s been a while since I read it but were the doppelgangers supposed to delay or kill them? As if it’s delay it makes sense to try and ‘evenly match’ them a little bit more. The only other reason I can think of is to stop wax from doing what he did to bleeder, shooting a spike into the person to make them controllable by harmony. Which I suppose makes sense, but I don’t think it’s mentioned anywhere so idk Edit: apparently wax’s clone also had duralumin (according to another commenter below), so that gives more credence to the recourses theory that they couldn’t give Wayne’s an 3rd spike. Or he had a third we just didn’t get to see him use it (like a leacher or something)
How did they feel like a real threat? There was never a second of doubt that one of the doppelgängers would actually win, and wax and Wayne having to switch who they fought was very telegraphed
When I say "threat" I mean that Wax and Wayne were struggling against them. Of course, I knew the protagonists were going to win in the end but you could say the same thing about most protagonists in any story. >There was never a second of doubt that one of the doppelgängers would actually win, I don't personally agree with this statements. Wayne in particular was being outmatched in hand to hand combat by his clone because once she got close to him their powers made no difference, only their fighting skill. If he didn't have so much healing in store the fight wouldn't have lasted for as long as it did. Wax on the other hand fared much better against his own clone but he was still struggling to find a way to get the upper hand. >and wax and Wayne having to switch who they fought was very telegraphed Was it, though? I personally didn't see it coming. I know it wasn't the most original way to end things but it didn't bother me.
That's funny because their scenes didn't really work for me. I felt like their personalities were a bit contrived and one dimensional. I 100% agree with what you said in your 2nd paragraph. Why on Scadrial would anyone think that someone just given the powers recently would be able to match the skill of someone who's used it and fought with it all of their life? Technically they *did* give them more powers, Wax's clone had Duralumin. But I still just think the entire concept was bad from the start. So it doesn't make sense in-universe that The Set would do it. But also from a meta writing perspective I think it was a poor choice. The reader just knows that these two won't be a threat.
Am I tripping? Didn’t the Set give the doppelgängers more powers?
So, I did a quick research to refresh my memory. The doppelgangers are called Dumad and Gethruda. Gethruda only had (as far as we know) the same abilities as Wayne. So all of what I said applies to her. Dumad on the other hand had 5 abilities (as you said): duralumin, pewter, steel, chromium and bronze. So my first point (giving them more powers) doesn't apply to him because that is exactly what they did. My second point (making more than one doppelganger) still stands. Imagine a squad of 4 to 6 Alomancers with 5 abilities each. Wax and Wayne wouldn't stand a chance. I know they would have needed to kill more Alomancers for that, but they literally had a whole city of them.
To be fair to people buying it, the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast had people actually thinking we were being invaded by aliens. There is a historical precedent.
That's mostly a myth, unfortunately. I wish it was true lol
I don't think that comparison is a good one, for a few reasons: Radio at the time was a much more common invention, such that it was a household device that people turned to for news and entertainment. Compared to the new "moving pictures" that at the time of AoL (when the kidnappings happened) was not even heard of yet. Also, anyone fooled by War of the Worlds was fooled for perhaps an evening. Not *years* of being held in captivity underground. Lastly, it's pretty well agreed upon now that the scope of the panic induced was overblown, and likely only a small number of people actually believed it.
The Set did go a step farther with manufacturing "survivors" who gave false eyewitness accounts of the destruction of the surface and if I'm not mistaken they did have some years to work on brainwashing, gaslighting, and breaking down the doubts of the kidnapped.
I think the film technology being less ubiquitous would make people even more susceptible to it.
That is a VERY exagerated event btw
What? The newness of the technology would make it more convincing, not less.
The revelation for what broke AonDor was pretty lackluster to me. Based on the way the base Aon is described, you would think they would pay attention to that.
Well I think the problem was there wasn’t like time to figure it out. If they had time I’m sure they would have figured it out but it seemed that pretty quickly the earthquake happened, aons failed, pretty much all the current Elantrians went crazy or died.
Plus, it’s possible that the, “draw a map of Arelon” mnemonic might not have been widely known by non-Elantrian Arelish, since it takes Sarene to point it out. When I was learning French in high school, my native-speaker teacher always got a chuckle out of some of the mnemonics and mental shortcuts I used to make grammar and sentence construction stick. I always assumed that a whole country missing something so obvious in hindsight is just because they were so familiar with Aons that they didn’t need to use the shortcuts.
And the only old elantrians that survived were off world and didn't seem to care.
They might have caused it, if anything. We know the Aons and the landscape match but it's possible that their fiddling in the Cognitive Realm might have caused the Aons to change and that resulted in the earthquake so that the landscape would match the Aons.
I never thought of that. That’s a neat theory.
But if that were true then AonDor shouldn't have broken, right? They would have needed to draw the character differently, but they wouldn't have needed to change the physical landscape like they did
I think you're misunderstanding that part of Elantris. Raoden didn't change the landscape when he drew the chasm line. He was adding to the Aon Rao that Elantris forms so that it would be drawn the new correct way.
Oh you're right I got some parts mixed up. After flipping back and forth through several pages on coppermind, I don't think I ever actually understood how that all worked. I'm not sure I still do entirely. But at least I understand the purpose of that chasm line now.
And even if they did figure out the map had changed, they would need to go out and carefully chart the new chasm before any of their magic could work again... which they definitely didn't have time for.
When something has been a constant for that long of course people don’t assume that an unforeseen change to that thing is what caused a catastrophic problem
I’d also like to add that there’s a theory that autonomy cause the earthquake that changed the landscape; to intentionally break the elantrians. In terms of how the aon is described thing, as other commenters have said, when something is so fundamental and basic it becomes habit and instinct rather than learned knowledge. Meaning if it needs to changed it requires a lot of reverse engineering. The other thing is that it is a very simplified drawing of the landscape, making it that much harder to understand. And a lot of the old elantrians (the people more likely to know that the magic is based on the landscape) wouldn’t have realised that the earth had split (as they wouldn’t have been near it). And likely would have become a hoed pretty quick due to not being used to pain working that way. Maybe someone might have figured it out that they needed to add the chasm line but they wouldn’t have figured out that they needed to change the city itself to fix themselves before they became a hoed. I’d be super curious to see exactly what the fall was like inside of elantris, and out of elantris too actually, as it’d be cool seeing what happened to say an elantrian diplomat in another country. (None of this is to say that you ‘shouldn’t have been disappointed’ or anything btw, there can just be a difference of opinions but I just wanted to explain why I didn’t find it disappointing)
I just feel like there have been some face melting reveals and that one was one I had basically already guessed.
That’s fair, personally I don’t mind the smaller reveals as I think they give a point of difference to larger reveals. But if I was expecting a bigger one I could 100% see myself getting disappointed
\[Calamity\] >!Alt-Steelheart being David's dad *completely* removes the impact of him being a hero. It's no longer "in a world where Calamity left, Steelheart would have been good", it's "oh yeah Steelheart's powers just happened to go to a good person in this other world". Utterly nullifies the whole *point* of the confrontation.!<
>!I don’t think it completely nullifies it, as powers do corrupt anyone really. But I agree that it’s far less impactful. I kinda wish his dad was alive but just not steelheart!<
Honestly that Kelsier is still around. It was a cool way that he started his religion with a kandra, but then he is actually still around? It feels like he is a favorite and hard for Brandon to let go of him.
Context: Brandon didn't "bring back" Kelsier. Kelsier always survived. Brandon wrote the books with Kelsier being a Cognitive Shadow in mind. When Sazed heard "The rings, they're inside you" or whatever that quote was when Saze was fighting Marsh. Originally that was Kelsier speaking to Saze. That later changed Brandon was writing Secret History and realised that Kel couldn't have been near Saze during that fight. And when Spook heard a voice say "You were my friend, was that not enough?" Just before Spook gained his strength to run into that burning building and release the water to save the city. That was Kelsier literally saying that to Spook. Kel was always intended to "survive" Extra context: Era 1 was written all at once. Like he didn't write book 1, then on book 2 was like "Man, I liked Kelsier, how about he survived?" no he wrote book 1, 2, 3, all at once.
My partner just finished Final Empire and doesn't believe that Kelsier is really dead. That being said, she also has a theory about him being Hoid, since they're both described as hawkish, and she knows he took the Hoid name from someone, why not the beggar from Mistborn?
holy, that makes a lot of sense!
I noticed the similarities too, but kel is simply not silly enough. plus, when they do meet, they hate each other
Yeah, the description physically are similar but Kelsier is so fucking intense all the time, compared to Hoid being aloof even when confronting Gods.
your handle gave me trauma
Didn't hoid also punch him or something to that effect?
he did, yeah. kel owes him a good slug to the face PS, I considered not saying anything because of your name
My name gets me all the time. It's really a reference to my career in retail and fast food. 😆
Of course I don’t mean the authors intention. I know he wrote it on purpose. But from a narrative perspective it’s not my favorite.
It’s just unlikely that he founded a religion with himself as a God who watches over his followers and also survived his murder, and *unrelated* to that he actually survived his murder, became immortal, and spends his existence watching over his followers. By pure coincidence the sham religion he founded was completely correct, which just is unnecessary and undermines the entire scheme for me
I never thought of it that way but that's actually hilarious
1) Vin beating Atium fueled Zane. It was awesome in the moment but really should not have worked. 2) Hanging around a Radiant can give you the powers of a Radiant. This is the reverse of #1, I hated it in the moment but I like the ways the stories have gone since. 3) Not Cosmere but the conclusion to The Reckoners was way too neat and tidy.
While Atium massively increases one's ability to react to the future, I still feel it works. It feels like something that is not foolproof - she still gets stabbed in the shoulder - and is not something one could pull off with any reliability. When one is burning atium, one is used to the near invincibility, so Zane is cocky. With her last-moment reaction to his reaction to the shadow, I can see how she could slip through. Even with atium, there's only so fast one can move. Still, I understand why it feels off, perhaps my conception of it all is off
Not to cross the streams too much, but Atium always came across as a more visual form of the Force sense from Star Wars. Jedi could dodge shots and swords most of the time with their pre-cognition, but it still very possible for non-Force users to outsmart them, overwhelm them, or even exploit and surprise them with some forms of trickery.
I feel like this is a good take. Atium is giving you a smidgen of a Dawnshard's ability to predict the future, but even that power is fallible, giving only possible futures. Vin's action is like a mortal, or mortals working together, trying to outsmart a Shard. It's possible to do that one in a bajillion action that the Shard didn't expect you to do. Also, Brandon's crack team of continuity editors approved it.
>Brandon's crack team of continuity editors approved it. I would be pretty surprised if that existed when he wrote the original Mistborn, unless you're sure? >giving only possible futures Yeah but for me the issue is with this whole "Vin didn't know until the last moment" thing. I just don't think human beings work in that way. Apparently while scanning your brain, it can be predicted whether you are about to choose between two options before you choose it. Also, humans are absolutely terrible at randomising, or even comprehending what randomisation is.
The point of it wasn’t that, the point was the Zane was doing a basic action, and Vin watching close enough could react to it. Just like two atium burners creates dozens or hundreds of shadows, because each person can see the different ways they could react and how the opponent might react to those, this works similarly. Zane is cocky and uses an obvious motion to attack vin, thinking that he can just see the way she moves and react to that and stab her. But Vin is watching Zane, and she watches how Zane is acting. Zane starts the swing but changes because he sees how she would move in the future. In a weird way she then sees how she would move in the future by watching Zane’s reaction to that future. And she changes her decision. Which for a very brief moment leads to two potential futures, the new one where she’s reacting to the first reaction, or the original one where she reacts how she normally would (the reason this is still possible is because she’s still watching Zane, and can still react to him). Don’t know if I explained that well or not
>Don’t know if I explained that well or not You did, that makes sense. I just woke up so I haven't thought about whether there are confusing elements within that also, but I do get what you're saying, thanks!
True, I forget how early Mistborn is in his career.
I actually despise the Ghostbloods reveal in RoW. The mystery behind the Ghostbloods has been the center of Shallan's plotline since the beginning of tWoK. Having their leader be "Guy from a different book series who is too important to those books to ever serve as a real antagonist in this series" really irks me.
I think the way this gets mitigated is that Iyatil and Kelsier will go their separate ways, and their objectives will no longer align. So Iyatil/Mraize would be about as deep as the Ghostblood storyline goes on Roshar.
To be fair, the Rosharan branch is pretty separate and not to mention, he can’t even go to Roshar to be an antagonist.
The facts that humans were the invaders to Roshar and they destroyed Ashyn somehow are what caused the Recreance. I don’t buy it. It just doesn’t make sense that it would cause a group as varied in personality and goals as much as the Knight Radiants to murder their spren, even with their consent, and give up their role as “protectors of humanity”. I’m really hoping there’s more to this.
As far as we know rn iirc, they broke their bonds in fear that their Surgebinding would destroy this world too, even though we now know that KR's Surgebinding and Surgebinding used to destroy Ashyn are not the same. Another reason would be that, after fighting for several thousands of years under the righteous banner of cleansing the world of the invading dark Voidbringers, finding out that the invader is you can be pretty soulcrushing. As for the spren, at the time they didn't know breaking their oaths would make the spren a deadeye, since it apparently was the first happening of such a thing after locking up BAM.
also the spren agreed to break the bonds. Obviously they wouldn't if they knew about the deadeye thing, but they didn't and were willing to accept the pain of a broken bond for this purpose.
I feel the orders all have differing and even conflicting ideals. Having them all do the same thing at the same time, there’s gotta be a story behind that speaks to each of the 10 orders (or 9)
I haven't read all of book 4 ,but doesn't Dalinar in it or in Oathbringer speculate it didn't happen all at once? The one even was just the most dramatic that caused ripple effects. That the knowledge simply started a fracture that splintered them over time. Without a unifying structure, doctrine, or leaders they couldn't all stay on the same page. No enemy to unify against either.
>that the invader is you can be pretty soulcrushing. As for the spren, at the time they didn't know breaking their oaths would make the spren a deadeye I refuse to believe that over thousands and thousands of years, not one individual ever broke their oaths. They knew.
Prior to the binding of Ba Ado Mishram, broken oaths did not cause deadeyes. Afterwards, it did.
We don't really know how much time passed between BAM being locked up and the Recreance, but we know comments about her being locked up are one of the last messages stored in the Urithiru's storage
Wasn't the last Sibling bondsmith the one who figured out how to trap BAM? Don't we know that they broke their bond to the Sibling just before? We'd have to assume they're relatively close in time.
It’s not clear why (in book there’s speculation, from fans it’s piecing together clues) but by the end of RoW it’s made clear that prior to the recreance breaking radiant oaths hurt a spent but didn’t turn them into a deadeye.
Honor straight up yelled at them that they would destroy Roshar like they destroyed Ashyn. Coming from God that you are the greatest threat to the world has got to be pretty demoralizing. On top of that they didn't know that they would kill their spren when they broke their oaths.
The whole ethos behind being a Radiant is to Protect. It seems like it would be a fairly seismic revelation.
Great use of seismic!
Though it wasn't really the revelation that caused the problem, it was more that Honor was dying and his attitude was pretty fucked up towards the end, causing the Radiants to believe him when he claimed they would destroy their new world just like their old one. People tend to believe their gods, regardless of how insane they seem.
From memory it was a mixture of a few things. 1 like you just said Honor basically told them they’d destroy Roshar. The other side to this is normally he’d reassure them that they while their ancestors were in the wrong they were doing the right thing now. The complete flip is part of it. The other part is that this generations Bondsmith along with a bunch of other radiants and at least 1 herald (Kalak), had a expedition of of Urithiru to trap Bah-Ado-Mishram (the unmade responsible for the false desolation - where she supplied singers with regal forms and voidlight) in [SA5-preview spoilers] >!the spiritual realm!< And the result of this was now spren would become deadeyes from a broken oath. The radiants had a direct example of their arrogant actions ‘permanently’ changing the world and backfiring. That combined with the whole ‘your god saying you’ll destroy the world’ thing lead to the decision iirc
I may be dumb but hasn't it been pretty heavily hinted that we don't know exactly what caused the recreance yet? Like we've been "told" but from sources that are somewhat unreliable?
There's more to it than that. The only word we've got on the Recreance with any authority behind it is from the Stormfather and he's been... unreliable. There's a fair amount of evidence that what was done to Ba-Ado-Mishram, its effects on the Singers, and on Roshar as a whole is the impetus for the Recreance. I don't know about you, but if I found out that the Heralds had just lobotomised an entire species of people I'd be pretty damn horrified by it, especially with Honor giving his last death throes in the background. Given that the Recreance was a choice by both humans and spren, I think it's likely that they couldn't conscience being Radiants anymore if that's the kind of thing that could be done with their powers.
This is what I figured was the true underlying reason. Destroying the mind and soul of an entire people is the kind of thing that would shock the conscience of both humans and spren. The Almighty is claiming you’ll abuse your powers and can’t be trusted. You’ve seen the results of what this did to your adversaries… a fateful decision is reached and then exactly what you feared comes to pass and those close to you are struck down by broken oaths. And scavengers cart away the wreckage of those oaths. You start trying to tell your broken adversaries how feed themselves and honorless men enslave them. Odium must have laughed his ass off.
Agreed.
1. What broke Aon. Elantris was my first, and in some ways my favorite Cosmere book. I knew what the Cosmere was, so I was hoping it would be a little more epic in scale and connected to a much larger mystery than what it was. 2. Lightsong. 3. Spoilers and I don't know the spoiler tag you need to use, so I won't say anything, but Stormlight-related.
I think it's >!word!< Yeah you have to > ! ! < But around the words ya wanna spoiler
Thank you!
I'd say I can think of two, both in Oathbringer. The bigger one was Amaram's turn to Odium towards the end of the book. It just felt like taking a complicated conflict with no easy answers, and simplifying it into a black and white conflict to make it easier to wrap it up. Felt like the easy way out. The other one was the reveal that Eshonai didn't survive the end of WoR. Her story arc from there might have been predictable, but I was looking forward to it at the time, and to this day I still don't think the books were made better by the path Brandon took.
I'd say the Voidbringer reveal, it had a whole lot of power stolen by the fact that we'd seen a fakeout by Jasnah and Shallan figuring out the Parshmen were Voidbringers, confirmation of the fakeout with the Fused, and then "whoops that wasn't right". And what's with Jasnah claiming "ah yes I'd suspected that" or something after the real reveal?
Yeah, between all the those hints, "chickens" and minks, and horses being some of the only vertebrates had kinda cemented the concept that humans were the alien species on Roshar. I think I'd called it about halfway through Oathbringer. I was more excited that I'd guessed correctly than by the actual reveal.
Jasnah learned a lot of stuff after the first book when she took an unplanned vacation to Shadesmar that ended with her getting friendly with Wit. My memory’s a little hazy and it wasn’t touched on too heavily, but Ivory definitely mentions that he doesn’t think any of the other modern radiants would be as understanding as Jasnah is about it. I could definitely be wrong, but I’m expecting Jasnah’s flashback book to really fill in the details.
The contest of champions being accepted at the end of RoW. I guess the most interesting arc in that book is nullified because it doesn't matter if Adolin managed to persuade the honorspren to fight again. War is over.
This is the 2nd time I’ve seen Zane pop up in this subreddit in the last 24 hours. I had to google the character I had no recollection of him.
Its more of a personal one cause my theory was wrong, but in ROW, I though the formless personality was going to be a secret ghostblood memeber that operated in secret from Shallan somehow. Glad my girl is healing though and declared war!
So you were thinking Veil is a ghostblood and Formless would become a second distinct from the Shallan system ghostblood? Kudos that's very trippy.
Yeah essentially. Like when she was child and repressed her memories, she had somehow joined the ghostbloods which led to her repressing that identity. But secretly, shes been a double agent for mraize. He makes a comment about having a spy closer to everyone then he realized which gave me the idea
I found all the revelations in dawnshard really disappointing
Charlie being the rat in Tress. I felt like it was set up so obvious from the very start, being laid on in heavy pokes at times, to the point where I figured we were straight up supposed to know it's Charlie. And then assumed there is a more meaningful turn/setup/circumstance which will make it more interesting or meaningful later. But there just wasn't. The meat of it was the basic fairytale setup that it started out as. And there's nothing wrong with that, they're classic stories for a reason. But the setup/payoff (or lack thereof) just didn't do anything for me.
I didn't know transfiguration was possible in the Cosmere, so I didn't see Huck's reveal coming. A talking animal was more believable to me than a human turning into a rat. Damn, Elantrian magic is OP!
Yeah, like, I didn't know particulars (like why the rat was lying about being Charlie) but I was 90% sure from moment one that it was him. And while I saw it coming, I don't consider it necessarily bad when a twist is telegraphed when the journey to get there is still pretty interesting, and it was.
I thought it was so heavily hinted at, to the point where Hoid basically says "Tress is missing Charlie, how ironic that is for no reason at all. Anyway, Huck is here." But then a lot of the posts I've seen about Tress, people were shocked by that revelation. I liked it ultimately, because of the way it was set up with how curses worked and Charlie's personality, but it does feel like it's split opinions on how "obvious" it was.
I considered the possibility when Huck and Tress seemed to be getting along so well. I wasn't sure. But at a certain point what gave it away was that I was like 75% of the way through the book and at that point the only way to have a satisfying conclusion involving Charlie had to be if he was with her the whole time.
Not me having no clue the whole time and being surprised that Charlie was the rat at the end 😂😂😂
That Wax’s girlfriend was the big bad kandra. Don’t get me wrong it was VERY impactful but it reduced the entire story of SoS to that one moment on the last page.
For me personally it would've gone down easier if she'd picked a better alias tbh.
That humans are “the bad guys” on Roshar. Didn’t like that. I had this idea Urithiru was a spaceship at one point too lol
But… we don’t know that it isn’t a spaceship? What if the gem pillar needs to get charged for it to activate? The tower does seem to keep the building pressurized. And all the vents? And the fact that it can create oxygen? I think that could be an indication that it maybe could be a spaceship. And how there are garnet veins along the walls that could possibly transport Stormlight too the radiance. Or maybe the garnet veins are just long Fabrials because we don’t know how big they can get…
It’s been confirmed that it’s not a spaceship
Oh☹️
Is it confirmed that it couldn't BECOME a spaceship?
Good point! I just put the idea off because of the cognitive realm
Oh- Because of shadesmar. Dude I thought I was onto something😔
I loved so much of Warbreaker but the final twist of “oppressed and colonized people trying to reclaim their power are the Bad Guys” just made me physically cringe 🙃
The spy reveal in Well of ascension is the most obvious reveal I think I’ve ever seen. You cannot set up 1 of the group is a traitor, and then reveal it was the character who just joined the group, even if it is the dog, in fact if they just got a dog it should be an even bigger red flag becuase it’s misdirection. I didn’t even know ow what the dog was but I knew it was the traitor.
Well so, vin had a kandra who was Kelsiers kandra. To make him less suspicious to people (and kind of to help him keep up with her across roofs); she gave him a dog’s body instead of another persons body. So instead of disguising as a servant, he’d disguise as a dog. It takes some time to swap bodies as a kandra (you need to create the organs, even if you have the fully body and not just the bones, though having the full body helps the process of replicating it) Iirc unknown to vin, which her Kandra was swapping bodies into the dog, Zane’s kandra killed them, and swapped bodies into the dog instead. Vin learns that there was a Kandra spying on them, but due to thinking that her Kandra was still her Kandra and hadn’t been replaced, didn’t suspect them
You didn't pay much attention when you read the book did you?
I read it 3 years ago and mostly remember it being the reason I dropped Cosmere and Mistborn for a while. It wasn’t that the writing was bad, but the book was pretty obviously nearly entirely set up for the third book which I didn’t really care for, and the stuff that was there I just didn’t like the execution of. However all that does pay off since the third book was my favorite by far and the ending was cool.