Timewaster's Guide Archive

Why?  It may never appear again, but it is most definitely a real thing and Brandon has explicitly stated that it has alloys and that those alloys have specific effects.  Those effects may never be seen in canon stories, but for some people, myself included, discussing the possible full details of the magic system including those metals is interesting for its own sake even if many of those details never come into play in any book Brandon ever writes.

So you're shipping allomantic metals, then?

I just thought of possible hemalurgic effects of Larasium and the Atium/Larasium alloy.  A Larasium spike could steal all the powers of a full mistborn, while the alloy could steal all the powers of a feruchemist, all with a single spike.  Make a new Lord Ruler from a normal human with just two spikes, one Larasium and one Atium/Larasium.  Simple, logical, and fits well within the established framework.  Of course I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Brandon has come up with something spectacularly different for that and I still have no clue what a feruchemist could do with them, but that's my best guess so far.  If Brandon ever comes back to this thread it we be nice to get a comment or two about this.

I think people here need to stop thinking of larasium as a real thing.  Unlike atium, it was clearly created only once for a single purpose, is now gone, and its creator has no reason (and Brandon has said there would be no mistborn in later times) to do it again.

In terms of broad plot, the two god metals have about the same significance in Mistborn as the One Ring had in Middle Earth: they are the central object of the Big War Against Evil, but at the same time, that war is about the object, so war and object go away at the same time.  It's not like there could be a sequel to The Lord of the Rings in which someone makes another One Ring to use wisely; the whole point of the Ring is that it can't be (also, Tolkien's work is all about a long-term decline in power.  The Ring is a powerful thing from times long gone, and no one would have the ability to create another).  Likewise, in Mistborn, the series viewed from back to front evidently turns around the struggle for the atium, and is driven by people empowered by larasium; this mirrors the conflict between the two divine entities behind the metals.  The two things embody a conflict that has ended; you can't have them back now.  (Also, Brandon has already described his intention to allow allomancy to decline in power, so the god metals become inappropriate for the same reason as the Ring would be in a LotR sequel.)

A corollary of all that talk is that the series looks more like Tolkien than I had thought while reading it.  You can have more fun with this if you like: for example, Marsh plays part of Gollum's role (thankfully, not the gulping, sniveling part).  Of course, the big points all end up different, such as what they actually do with the atium.

Concerning where the empire must be placed on the planet:

We know that the empire is at one of the "poles", but we don't know whether that means magnetic or axial.  Since Rashek moved the planet too close to the sun, the best place to put the people is wherever the least energy from sunlight is incident on the surface, or geometrically, where the surface of the planet is facing as little towards the sun as possible.  The magnetic pole can be more or less anywhere, so it would not really affect this property, and so I'll assume that we are at the axial pole.

The only data we have regarding the climate, aside from the ash which is artificial, are: the mists take over earlier in the third book in the outer dominances; and there are burnlands surrounding the empire, which are obviously due to the sun scorching the earth there.  The burnlands must be in a region that is essentially facing the sun straight-on, whereas the outer dominances should receive less sunlight farther into the day than Luthadel, since sunlight banishes the mists.  Honestly, these two facts are inconsistent, since the outer dominances are adjacent to the burnlands.  However, since the mists are not exactly natural, there might be another factor (like proximity to the Well of Ascension) that repels them from Luthadel, so I will discard this datum.

We also know that the day lengths are normal.  If they weren't, Brandon would have to have told us, because it would have a major effect on how people live: for example, the activities of Mistborn, who are out at night, or Vin's parties in the first book, which span a period of months but always take place at night.  Not to mention that the mists being out "all day" wouldn't be so much of a phenomenon if during the winter, day were essentially absent.  That means that whatever region the Final Empire is in, it doesn't really change its inclination towards the sun over the course of a year (much like where most of us live, which is at a middle latitude that tilts enough to give seasons, but not enough to give really wacky hours).

One solution is for the planet's axial tilt to be zero, with the Final Empire somewhere around Greenland: very high up, less of the sun reaches the surface, but the days are all exactly twelve hours long no matter the season -- of which there wouldn't be any, since there is no tilt.  Oops.  We could give the planet a very small tilt, restoring the seasons a bit; because of the more extreme heat of the sun, the seasons would be exaggerated to a more familiar level, without really affecting the day lengths.  The burnlands are then in a wide band around the equator, which is delimited by some combination of less sunlight and more ash.

A highly eccentric orbit is another way to create seasons: the intensity of sunlight is proportional to the inverse square of the distance to the sun, since that's how the area of a sphere is.  Also proportional to the square of the distance (roughly) is the area inside the planet's orbit.  Kepler's second law says that the time taken to make a certain part of the orbit is proportional to the area swept out during that time, so to get x% more sunlight during the summer, winter has to be x% longer than summer.  For someone at the approximate latitude of the northern US, where the seasons are pronounced, x is about 70, so for Scadrial to have seasons of normal temperature, their summers would be about 5 months long. It would also make the seasons uniform over the whole planet, while we know that Luthadel has milder seasons, and in particular, that the outer Dominances have snow, which seems to rule out the possibility that the ash is modulating the weather around the capital (since without the ash, on a hot planet the outer dominances would bake).

My conclusion: Scadrial has a small axial tilt.  Not really that exciting, but it fits the facts.

(speaking of which, I loved that part where Ruin's like "HA! I killed him! How do you like that?").....

I liked the next sentence even better: "I Ruined everything!".  The capitalization was in the book.

Anyway. I hope Sazed somehow figures out a way to put souls back in bodies. I can't imagine Mistborn without them either, but I think if I get some kind of closure with the characters, it'll be better. The after-life thing just didn't quite do it for me.

For me, resurrection would be deeply unsatisfying.  Death is not just a narrative state; if you kill a character and then allow them to come back, you subtract from whatever was presumably the goal of their ultimate sacrifice.  If they chose death as a way of advancing their cause, it was because anything less than death would not have had enough effect; take away their demise, and suddenly it seems like just another hoop to jump through.

This is exactly the case with Vin.  Throughout the series, she had come up against skilled, dedicated opponents whose defeat strengthened and expanded her character: Shan, the Lord Ruler, Zane, the Inquisitors.  After acquiring the power and intellect of a god, there really was no further enhancement she could acquire; it would have denied the premise of the entire cosmology for her to have been able to defeat Ruin without giving up herself as well, since her power was exactly balanced with his and there was none greater.  Yet without defeating him, the world would die.  So she had to do it; letting Sazed bring her back would basically make her second life a sort of heaven-on-earth, and I think Brandon was angling for the new world to be something more of a washed canvas than a still-life of the reward for mortal suffering.  Because after killing a god, just what is left for her on earth?  It would be gratuitous to bring her back.

[ I guess I'd better add **SPOILERS** to this; I haven't given out any plot twists or even plot points in this, just a very brief, vague summary of the first half of the book, but since you are reading it I thought I should. ]

As far as the originality thing, I don't really care that Rand is the typical shepherd boy who supposedly (hopefully? maybe? unlikely) saves the world. What really gets me is that every time I read Eye of the World, I can't help but notice the first half is almost exactly like the beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring. Ok, the town has a big party. With fireworks. Plus black riders. Then we go on from escaping from the black riders. Then the wizard/witch and the next in command (Gandalf, Aragorn) have an argument over what to do next. One wants to take a shortcut through an unnamed "place" (Moria/Shadar Logoth) while the wizard/witch thinks its too dangerous.
From there we branch out. Its just the first half of the book that drives me crazy.

Chess games often look pretty much the same for the first few moves, depending only on what general opening the players choose (which in turn is determined by their first moves).  If you want to go the peasant vs. dark lord route, you'd better include the terrifying evil agents to put him on his way, and if he escapes those, he'll either be in a position of temporary security or have to take a terrible risk to throw them off.  Granted, Jordan's choice of realization of these ideas was deliberately Tolkienish (he admits to giving "homage" to LotR at the beginning of EotW), but actually, the plot he builds around them is not especially derivative.  Among the major points you didn't (and can't) compare to Tolkien are: the town being raided by Trollocs; the early development of channeling powers (or foreshadowing thereof) in multiple characters; and the inclusion of women.  Also the absence of a council of Elrond between leaving Emond's Field and arriving at Shadar Logoth, and with it the attendant doubling of the party; Jordan's core group remained small throughout the book.

Based on my experience with this question (and other questions about the inviolacy of Tolkien's work, such as whether Arwen replacing Glorfindel in the movie was acceptable), it seems to me to be a question of whether you think of Tolkien as being a good read or the foundation of all epic fantasy (roughly).  Not so much in the presuppositions you bring to the discussion, but in how you tend to argue it: for some, the tropes featured in Tolkien's work were actually introduced by him to literature along with the concept of high fantasy (and this is true for some things, for sure); for others, his world is "merely" an astonishingly detailed original flesh hung on the frame of what is (when you get down to it) a relatively common idea.  You boil down EotW pretty far, but I can boil it down farther: boy meets fate, is pulled both ways by competing moral interests.

To take the second perspective, it helps to have an embarrassingly incomplete education in all kinds of classics; not being told about the gods gives you free rein to find your own.  I couldn't finish LotR until college (specifically, I couldn't get past the break in book two), by which time I was sophisticated enough to appreciate him at a less visceral level.

P.S. What AvalonCreamCorn said.

Just fyi, GoryCat, my actual username is Chaos2651, this is just my holiday name change. I like to be confusing that way.

Ah, thanks.  I recognized your picture and your writing style, but was thrown off by the name.  I'm new to posting but I've been reading a while longer.

I really liked FE, but everything it was for me, HoA was more.  FE was brilliantly creative and gripping, but to me it was palpably an early work of a young writer and I could see the rough edges.  Something about the descriptions was unfinished; too much tell, not enough show, maybe?  I found the writing to improve in large, quantum leaps as the series progressed, and HoA was as good as anything Robert Jordan ever wrote.  WoA was, for me, slow; I didn't find the politics that exciting and the machinations seemed stretched (there, Jordan still has something on Brandon).  And I agree with Dracula; Zane was not the Kelsier he was intended to be for Vin (apropos of that: Brandon said that Zane was written to represent the Kelsier way of life for Vin, in contast with Elend; does it seem to anyone else that this dichotomy was just slightly weakened by Elend's being made Mistborn anyway, in the end?  Vin sort of got to have her cake and eat it too, there).  So I rate them 3, 1, 2 in order of preference, but don't get me wrong: I read them all in one obsessive sitting each, so they all worked.  For others, of course, what I found marginal they might find central.