Timewaster's Guide Archive

I suppose this is pretty terrible for a reader of fiction, but the only thing worse than love triangles for me is love triangles involving siblings.

Among the Elantrians' numbers is a math savant and an idea man.  Also: if they ARE Elantrians (in the interlude), perhaps they're hunting Hoid because he's their ride home!

As for the nature of the Aons and the Elantrians, my understanding: the city is constantly affected Elantrians, every moment, with constant superbuffs.  Screw up the main Aon, and you're buffing everyone incorrectly (like the woman who was healed improperly in the story whose aftereffects sounded exactly like the Zombie-elantrians).

I dunno about you, but that seems like a critical weakness to the Elantrians.  One Raoden would be trying hard to close up.  If his fix also makes the Dor easily accessible on other planets, I won't be surprised.

Hm, that just made me think. Perhaps this has been suggested, but what if Hoid is actually the villain, the cause for the shattering? obviously he wouldn't think of himself being evil, so it follows that some of his actions seem to be helping people. But I think it would be very sandersonian to play him out as a hero throughout all these series, and then at the end show his true colors.

I'm not even sure it's safe to say the splitting of Adonalsium was an evil act.  Perhaps Hoid (or more likely, Adonalsium itself) is responsible for the split and saw the necessity of it.  It's my belief that reconstructing Adonalsium will likely result in the destruction of all of the shard planets.  Unmaking their work.  So thank Rayse for splintering shards, making the reconstruction even more impossible.

Hey people! So I was wondering if anyone recognized the language Dalinar spoke during his episodes, particularly when he said that line from that poem? I talked to Brandon at a signing a couple of days ago and he mentioned we had seen that language before and if we were careful, should recognize it. Any thoughts as to where? My only guess is it was somewhere in Elantris (haven't read it in years) but i'm not sure. Any thoughts?

Any chance he meant "you've seen it before in this book"?  Some of those words are very close to palindromatic.  They don't seem Aonic to me, and they'd need more stuttering to look like proper Warbreaker words (though that probably only applies to proper nouns).

Anyone have Elantris handy?  I'd be interested in seeing if we ever hear the Dahkor monks or Dilaf speak in their tongue from an outside perspective (probably the very end, when the crew is held up at Kiin's house).

Read the Prelude again.  Heralds' blades behave the opposite.  They only disappear when their bearer dies.   Something else I find worthy of note: Taln leaned on his sword with the point into the ground, and it only cut a finger's breadth in.  A  normal shardblade would've, in theory, dropped clear to the hilt.

Of course, if it were his dawnshard or dawnblade or whatever you wanna call it, I would've expected it to be described more as more ornate than it was (see the Prelude again, on the beautiful flowing designs on all the other weapons).

Pg 15

    The monstrosity was vaguely skeletal in shape, with unnaturally long limbs that sprouted from granite shoulders. The eyes were deep red spots on the arrowhead face, as if created by a fire burning deep within the stone.



Pg 850

    Massive creatures, easily five or six times the seize of a person, their skin dull and grey like granite. They had long limbs and skeletal bodies, the forelegs-or were they arms?-set into wide shoulders. The faces were lean, narrow. Arrowlike.

I guess 5-6 man-sizes didn't seem like enough to warrant a 6-foot-long hand (also stated on page 15).  But I suppose that's over 30' tall.

That makes a lot of sense about them making their own humans that are based off what they know (and were) as opposed to inventing humans fresh. 

Though I was still led to believe through the Mistborn trilogy that Ruin and Preservation were responsible for the circle of life of the planet.  In a very mythology-like "and that's why this happens" sort of way, I thought things were born and lived because of Preservation and decayed and withered due to Ruin's touch, with the certain knowledge that without Ruin, Preservation would eventually become self-defeating.  If this is true, it means the other worlds need a reason to have a cohesive physics structure.

Shards don't always come in pairs. For instance, Roshar had 3 shards, (2 now that the Almighty is dead) and as far as we know Warbreaker features only Endowment.

While I'm going to readily embrace what we know (what you said above) as the easiest and most straightforward solution, I'm not going to discount the possibility that we don't know everything.  For example, 2 could've been responsible for establishing Roshar, and then Odium could've swooped in and said "I want this one!"  Likewise, Endowment could have a counterpart whose simply been absent for one reason or another since the founding of the Warbreaker planet (I can never remember the name!).  Of course, if Endowment had a counterpart, it would likely be something that gives nothing -- not even destruction.  So perhaps it simply has no magic system to share or even influence on the land -- a dud shard.