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Progression toward insanity?
That would explain it
Somehow, I have four stars and now Coma only has one...
I think that it's Rashek after having ruled the world for like 500 years. He'd be pretty tired of things by then, giving cause for the "I am, unfortunately, the Hero of Ages."
And stating chaos' opinion for him is not cheating. He actually does think that. I think. That's what I remember anyway. I seem to remember a post from him that said he thought it was Rashek and would until offered proof otherwise. So it's not cheating. Besides, if I'm wrong, he'll come back and tell everyone I'm an idiot, and I'll get what I deserve.
It's definitely not cheating. That was my opinion, and Andrew got it spot-on. Since he gave me credit for it, I have no problems with it at all
.
However, I'm now thinking that it's not as true as before. The "unfortunately" doesn't seem like the tyrannical Lord Ruler we all know and love--er, I mean, hate. It sounds a LOT more reminiscent of Alendi's logbook writing than an angry overlord.
The epigraphs don't
need to be written by Rashek. In fact, it seems slightly anticlimactic for it to be Rashek now. Anybody can figure out that Rashek
thinks that he is the Hero--that is not especially surprising. I believe MB3 will be so chock-full of surprises we will look at these topics and feel very, very silly. It could be that Brandon wants us to think that the epigraphs are written by Rashek, when in fact it is all an illusion. And then in some miraculously awesome plot twist, we figure out who the real Hero is. It could all be smoke and mirrors...
Of course, I have no idea who else it
could be, so I'm going with Rashek, even though nowadays its looking like my theories all have major, major flaws in them. I'm just going to stick with them because they haven't been proven otherwise, and I want to
try to remain grounded with the facts we know and not go too far off into never-never land.
For future reference, though... I hereby declare Andrew as the Executor of my Opinions when I am gone. You know, like an executor of someone's last will, only with fan theories.
Oh don't worry. I'll be happy to debate with you the next time you're not clearly right. I just happen to agree completely with you on that issue.
And the only problem I have with the mist spirit writing the bumps is that, quite frankly, we know nothing about the mist spirit. I tend to shy away from theories that involve making everything up, unless they make a whole lot of sense to me. I have a (in my opinion) plausible alternative to your mist spirit theory, that I feel is more likely, so I go with that. Until I see something I like more. For instance, if someone were to come up with a way that made sense for some random character like OreSuer to write the bumps, I'd have to go with that just for coolness.
It's funny, I'm going through the pages and quoting-commenting on the ones that come up first, so I didn't see this until just now. Yup, Andrew and I think very similarly about these out-there theories.
I think it's Rashek, because it makes the most sense. As Brandon recently pointed out in the blog, it's a "story within a story" and we've heard from two of the three main characters in that story--Kwaan and Alendi--so it makes sense for Rashek to be the third. Not to mention that we need to know what Rashek did at the Well in order to figure out how Vin and Elend put the world back right.
However, I think Rashek's been misled. In WoA, Kwaan tells us that his last hope is to convince Rashek to kill Alendi to prevent Alendi from giving up the power. From Rashek's point of view, he believes he is the Hero (at least at the point in time he writes the bump) because that's what Kwaan tells him. I think Kwaan's strategy is to tell Rashek he's the Hero of Ages, as well as what to do at the Well (even more than just "don't give up the power plzkthx"). But either something goes wrong, or there's something Rashek can't do because he's not a hemalurgist, and ended up with the world of the Final Empire. For the "unfortunately"? Rashek was jealous of Alendi, but having the fate of the world on your back can put things into perspective, particularly if, as I believe, part of Kwaan's instructions included that Rashek might die/would have to constantly maintain the fight against Ruin or the Deepness for a thousand years/something similarly bleak.
I'm definitely liking that idea. If Kwaan told Rashek he was the Hero, Rashek would not have questioned it because it would have strengthened his own views.
I'm still not sold on the bracers being both feruchemical AND hemalurgic (what fun words, did we make those up?).
I thought the word of the day (and apparently, every day) was "Hemalurgical" when I used that word in nearly every single sentence in an early post. "Hemalurgical" sounds cooler than just "hemalurgic".
That's with a feruchemy allomancy mix, I'm wondiring what happens if you burn something that has hemalurgic power in it.
That's not--at least, under my model (and Andrew's model, too! His model is virtually the same, only less insane!). Hemalurgy doesn't inherently give the metal a power reserve: that's what Feruchemy does, and Feruchemy alone. I prefer to think of Hemalurgy as using the metals as lightning-rods to "burn" the latent energy inside the body, making it something of an opposite to Allomancy.
If you burned something that had hemalurgical properties (term coined by Chaos, since coma was wondering), I wonder if it may not give you the ability to use hemalurgy like...all the time... passively?
Oh! Now I get it. Burning a metal that was hemalurgically imbued via a sacrificed. For the sake of consistency, let's just call that variety of metal an "Infused" metal (so we don't get it confused with metalminds [the reserves of Feruchemy], which was what I thought Comatose was talking about. Silly me.).
That... could explain a lot. It could explain how Hemalurgy seems so similar to Allomancy, because in fact, whenever someone uses Hemalurgy (like an Inquisitor), it could really be that they are burning an imbued metal. Much like how the Lord Ruler fused Feruchemy and Allomancy--which gave him a colossally expanded repetoire of abilities--Hemalurgy plus Allomancy could be what we've been seeing all this time! It's always appeared like Inquisitors had a form of enhanced Allomancy... and wouldn't that be exactly what burning an imbued metal would do?
For this theory to work, Inquisitors would need to be Allomancers (and Allomancers who were not formed by some bizarre Hemalurgical ritual that we don't know about yet) separately from Hemalurgists. The sacrifices imbue the metal, which the Inquisitors then can burn.
The interesting part of this idea is that while it shows how Inquisitors use Allomancy in an enhanced way, it doesn't really show the basic properties of Hemalurgy, which is the thing we are having the most trouble with discovered at the moment. It makes a ton of sense!
And this theory should absolutely be talked about in the Hemalurgy thread.