Timewaster's Guide Archive

Some of the non-WoT topics currently on the front page were started primarily in response to this topic, too.  e.g. Bastille's "Let's get giggly about Alcatraz!!" topic.

Oh, sorry.  I'm being a meanie again. 

I don't think it was coincidence on the part of Raoden, neither. In fact I was wondering if Raoden would be the one to be bound with the Dor's Shard, but then I read from BS that the children are going to be the sequel protagonists, so maybe one of them (the Elantrian, I suppose) is the Chosen One.

Too obvious.  Vin was the main protagonist in the Mistborn series, but Sazed was chosen there.  It'll probably be a "supporting" character, but one that becomes fully developed as the plot moves on.

Probably the Chasm was caused by Jaddeth, but I'm thinking that Jaddeth and the Dor come from the same Shard, and that the Dor wis attuned to the land because it is kind of imprisoned, as Ruin was. So, Jaddeth = Dor.

If they're the same Shard, though, what does the second Shard do?

There is no proof of this, but just that it would be original and ironic that the "good" and "bad" guys had the same God, and that it makes as sense as them being 2 Shards, because we have so little information.

I'm more inclined to believe this is true for Warbreaker than Elantris.

Also, Aons don't get something from nothing. They really work as Allomancy, fueling something from burning the Dor.
Am I dreaming or was it written that Allomancy pure gain came from the Body of Preservation itself?

Sazed explains that Allomancy gives more than it takes because its power is fueled by Preservation's body.  He also explains that when Hemalurgy is used, net power is lost because Ruin takes some of it, and Feruchemy is somewhere between the two because net power is neither lost nor gained (this is not necessarily true in all cases, unless the Enhancement metals do something other than "enhance" things in Feruchemy).
Anyway, what I meant was that writing Aons draws from the power of the Dor, which seems to closely parallel Allomancy.

Yeah, that's what I mean - any type of spike can, apparently, steal life-force from a victim and transfer it to a corpse (making Koloss) or a mistwraith (making Kandra).  It's possible that other sentient beings can also be created in this manner.  What would happen, for instance, if you put a Hemalurgic charge on a spike and impaled a horse with it?  Would he turn into Mr. Ed?

I like what you have done with this.  Interesting ideas.

As for the bolded, that, unfortunately, is incorrect.  I think it was in the end of WoA, someone was talking about Sazed regarding how large he grew when tapping strength, unlike a Mistborn, who stays the same general size.  I believe it was stated that as long as Sazed had the strength stored up, there was no limit to the amount of strength he could drain.  It seemed to be the same thing with everything else as well (like weight...he can become as heavy as he wants, as long as he has enough stored.

Perhaps it could affect Feruchemical storage, then.  That is, if you "fill" the Nicrosil while filling another metalmind, you don't store as much of an attribute as you lose.  But if you then tap Nicrosil while storing something else, you store more than you would have lost.  This comes close to breaking the "rules" (because it means you can store weight and get strength, basically), but I don't really see any other "enhancement"-type function available that isn't even weirder.

A thought on Atium hemalurgy: As pirsquared suggested, a spike that steals "life" seems appropriate.  However, all spikes steal "life" in a sense: the victim must die for the hemalurgy to work, and if the spikes are put into a certain type of creature (or corpse), they grant sentience.  But perhaps an atium spike could steal either Health or Youth (most logical, of course, would be for atium to "grant hemalurgy" the way lerasium grants allomancy, but everyone can already use hemalurgy, so there'd be no point).  The reason the Lord Ruler didn't do this could be that he didn't want to spike himself much more than he needed to, to prevent Ruin from taking over completely (although Ruin seemed to have a lot of control anyway) and that it would look too suspicious (and decidedly un-divine) if he had to kill a small child every 75 years or so to stay young.  Much better to do the feruchemy/allomancy trick, so people don't start catching on.

Meh, my point was just that calling stupid ideas like this "theories" affords them too much credibility already.  There's no such thing as a stupid theory; if an idea is stupid, then it's not a theory.

Quote from: Cosmic_AC on March 20, 2009, 02:04:47 AM

All I can think of for Hemalurgy is that Lerasium would be an "all-purpose" spike, stealing all of a Feruchemist/Allomancer/Hemalurgist's acquired powers.  So while a Tin Spike can only steal one physical power at a time, even if you kill a Mistborn with it, a Lerasium spike would grant the Hemalurgist Mistborn powers.

That seems kind of pointless given that you could just swallow and burn the Lerasium instead, gaining Mistborn powers probably quite a bit greater than those of whoever you would have killed to steal from, and without any of the drawbacks of a spike.

Then again, that itself could be the point - that Preservation's power is virtually useless for Ruin's Art.

Not necessarily; if you hit a Feruchemist with a Lerasium spike you could become a Feruchemist yourself - seems like that'd be kind of a big deal.  I dunno.

But a lot of the backstory of Alendi's time wasn't talked about in Final Empire. There were references to the Deepness and the Well of Ascension, but it was integrated into the story well without flashbacks, and they didn't really reveal what happened. I also don't think you'd need the narrator to say "Ash fell from the sky". The advantage with films is that we get the visual cues. We would not need a narrator telling me this when we can see quite clearly the ash, the sun, the dead planet. It's far better seen than told.

I'm more concerned if Allomancy can be accurately displayed in a way that makes sense to viewers--all of the powers and such.

Meh, that's the difference between a movie and a book.  But IMHO the trailer needs to quote that line.  Not the movie itself, I guess.  I was thinking weird that day.  But here's what I would have said, I think, had I not been distracted.  The film needs to somehow convey the story of Alendi in a way that makes sense - otherwise the "main" plot kind of falls apart.  They do have to appeal to those who haven't read the libretto yet, after all.  And it's either 10-second flashbacks at the beginning of every scene (to drop little epigram-esque tidbits) or a miniature exposition at the start of the film.  And to keep it interesting, it'd need to go into more detail than the book did - not less.  When we're only seeing a little bit of it every five pages or so, it's fine to just have a general idea of what's going on, and it's enough to just "hear" Alendi's voice.  But if we're getting it all at once (and I really think it'd have to be done in one go, to keep the plot moving), it's got to stand on its own as a full story, which means we need background and detail for the background story itself.

And then I remember that there's a bit where Vin steals the book that has the epigrams in it and I realize that's the perfect time to tell the story, and it still doesn't have to go into much detail, because then it'd make sense to just let Alendi's voice narrate while 10-second flashbacks are played with special-effects borders, and I think how stupid it is that I just wrote two paragraphs about how well it'd work to do something different.  Self-facepalmed.

I'm of the opinion that a film based on a book has to deviate slightly from the written details in order to better convey the essence of the plot.  In an entirely different medium, what matters is not whether they got the color of Vin's hair right; what matters is whether they portrayed her character accurately and told the basic story successfully.  I actually don't mind added content, as long as it's good content, and I don't really care if they have to cut out a few things from the source material, as long as the things they cut are unimportant.  I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy did this very successfully.

So, no, it's not necessary to explicitly say, "Ash fell from the sky." at the beginning of the movie, but it'd still be a pretty good line for the preview, IMO.  Then again, Brandon didn't need to say it in his book, either; in fact, he did a pretty good job of "showing" that ash was falling indirectly immediately afterward anyway.  But (!) it's a great opening line; while it generally hurts any medium (writing, film, etc) to explicitly tell the audience about...things... that line in particular was a pretty good exception - at least for the book.  Which is why I think it'd work in a preview.  Anyway.  I'm gonna stop flapping my, uh, fingers.

No, I believe he's saying Brandon wouldn't write anything like that.  It's epic fantasy, not a soap opera.