Dying Breath and its Implications

[Trusk'our he/him]

I found this WoB, and it's got me asking some questions:

Spoiler

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/9-calamity-philadelphia-signing/#e7593

Questioner

I teach economics at Rutgers and in general I love the books but *inaudible* I like to tease him because he loves them, and say it doesn’t really make sense to have a fixed price for Breaths and it doesn’t make sense that if you give it away when you’re young, and his claim was that somewhere in the book it talks about how the Breath actually gets weaker as you get older.

Brandon Sanderson

So, dying Breaths can be much weaker, but not middle aged ones. So, you have a legitimate thing, my counter to you is, having listened to a ton of Freakonomics, economic people do not do what is logically economic, particularly in a closed system. You might find that Breaths sell for different things, or are treated differently, in other countries.

Questioner

In the Warbreaker world.

Brandon Sanderson

But I do think about these things.

Questioner

Oh no, it’s obvious you do. It’s pretty clear when you start looking at it, and that's not something...

Brandon Sanderson

Here’s the thing, there are fantasy writers who are actually economists, L.E. Modesit is the most famous one, and he-- I’ve been on panels where he’s complained about how writers, fantasy writers ignore economics, basic economics, all the time. So I try to listen at his feet a bit.

So, a Breath coming from a dying person is supposed to be weaker than normal, or at least it can be.

What about Lemex's Breaths though? He was dying and gave it to Vivenna right before he passed away, so would that make her Breaths weaker?

And why would the Breath be weaker? Is it that some of it escapes to the SR upon death, or maybe it transfers to and is trapped in the Awakener's Spiritweb?

[Treamayne]

1 hour ago, Trusk'our said:

What about Lemex's Breaths though? He was dying and gave it to Vivenna right before he passed away

Not quite - Lemmex was being murdered (not quite the same). 

Warbreaker Annotations to Ch 3:

Spoiler

Lightsong Feeds on the Child

Why a child? It doesn’t much matter, truthfully. An adult, or even someone elderly, could provide a Breath that would keep a god alive.

But the Breaths of those who are aged aren’t as vigorous as those who are young. If Lightsong was given one of those to feed on, he’d survive for another week—but he wouldn’t feel as vibrant or alive as he does after feeding on the Child’s Breath.

The people of Hallandren are faithful. Even if Lightsong himself doesn’t believe, they do; and they want to provide the best for him. Hence, they use children. Old enough to know what they are doing, yet young enough to give a powerful, vibrant Breath to their god.

It's more about the age of the breath, with a small side of healthiness (e.g. it's likely the breath of a person with a terminal or congenital illness would be weaker than a normal breath (all other factors being equal). I'm guessing it's a descending S curve graph, with Vibrancy on the Y axis and Age on the X axis, there would be a steady drop the first few years, a near-steady through adulthood, and a slow decline once elderly; and the healthiness of the individual would influence the sharpness of those declines.

Edited May 25 by Treamayne
SPAG/Example

[Bugglesley]

On 5/25/2024 at 1:55 PM, Trusk'our said:

What about Lemex's Breaths though? He was dying and gave it to Vivenna right before he passed away, so would that make her Breaths weaker?

I think this is a broader misunderstanding of how Breath works--Lemex's breath might have been weaker, but the hundreds of others wouldn't be. Viv is getting hundreds of primo breaths and one slightly weaker one. It's pretty clear that, while Returned use breaths at a steady rate, whatever breaths they don't use don't decay over time. Susebron proves this pretty conclusively. Maybe the implication is that whatever Breath does for non-drabs also consumes the Breath, but at a very slow rate?

[Trusk'our he/him]

3 hours ago, Bugglesley said:

Lemex's breath might have been weaker, but the hundreds of others wouldn't be. Viv is getting hundreds of primo breaths and one slightly weaker one.

Yeah, that could make sense.

I actually hypothesized at one point that you first, natural Breath is more tied to your Spiritual Aspect while others are more tied to the Physical, so your own Breath growing weaker with age/death (since it's still hooked up to your Spiritweb) while a separated Breath from someone else not getting weaker would make some sense for that.

On 5/25/2024 at 2:14 PM, Treamayne said:

 

It's more about the age of the breath, with a small side of healthiness (e.g. it's likely the breath of a person with a terminal or congenital illness would be weaker than a normal breath (all other factors being equal). I'm guessing it's a descending S curve graph, with Vibrancy on the Y axis and Age on the X axis, there would be a steady drop the first few years, a near-steady through adulthood, and a slow decline once elderly; and the healthiness of the individual would influence the sharpness of those declines.

I guess the question I'd mostly like to know is whether vibrancy equates to raw power. Basically, does a weaker Breath Awaken less easily?

[Treamayne]

3 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Basically, does a weaker Breath Awaken less easily?

All I have been able to find is not conclusive, but implies that weakened breath is less able to follow Commands as well (which only matters if all the breath used inthe awakening is weak, or the awakening uses few enough breaths that 1-2 weak ones is a significant percentage of the Awakening). Most references were the lifeless squirrel chapters and annotations to those chapters (I'll update later, if needed). 

[Duxredux he/him]

On 6/6/2024 at 1:06 PM, Trusk'our said:

I guess the question I'd mostly like to know is whether vibrancy equates to raw power. Basically, does a weaker Breath Awaken less easily?

My guess is that yes, it does affect Awakening, but that it would take fringe scenarios or a true master of the art to really tell the difference. Let's see if I explain my reasoning.

First off, at the larger scale starting at the First or Second Heightening, it likely doesn't matter because Heightening is calculated based on Aura Recognition which is a summation of total BioChromatic aura in the first place. A cup of rice is a cup of rice, even if the individual grains are varying sizes and will have similarly varying totals. Per the Law of Comparability, the number of Breaths used to Awaken an object is not indicative of power since a cloth cut in a square and a cloth cut in the shape of person will serve basically the same function even with vastly different amounts of Investiture. So long as you have sufficient Breaths to Awaken it in the first place, the "health of the Breath" likely will introduce relatively little variance when compared to the target of Awakening and its adjacency to life.

That said, Breath quality may matter more at small scales. We know that a Lifeless Awakened with their own Breath will have differences compared to a random Breath used on a random corpse, so even an older less vibrant Breath of the previous owner may be preferrable to a random child's Breath. We also learn from Vasher teaching Nanrovah's daughter how to modify her own memory that a person can manipulate their own Breath for Invested Arts and if Brandon expands on this then personal health and individual Breath quality may be more important.

Beyond that, it's hard to nail down specifics because so many aspects of Awakening operate on sliding scales. The color of the object used to Awaken, if the dye was Invested like the Tears of Edgli or not, the life-adjacency of the object to be Awakened, the complexity of the Command, Visualization, Heightening of the Awakener, and any factors I've missed all affect the result of Awakening - and yet if you're desperate you can make do by ripping out chunks of your own hair and using being very careful with wording. Quality of Breath matters... but so does everything else and most other variables are easier to control than a person's life experiences. I think it may matter in fringe cases or when a virtuoso of the art is at work, but for the vast majority of Awakeners, I don't think it would be particularly relevant. The nature of accruing Breaths generally means that either you received the Breaths from unknown individuals, or you have individually convinced dozens if not hundreds of people to give up their original Breath to you in a non-repeatable fashion. Beyond that, I suspect that for any of the really remarkable feats of Awakening where the specific source of Breath matters, you really need a master. I've been told that if you hand a decent violin to both a master and a decent violinist, you'll get decent sound quality because that's the extent of the capability of the instrument. If you have a high quality violin, then a decent violinist will produce decent sound quality while a master can produce high quality sound because it takes a master to use the instrument to the full extent. A decent musician just won't be able to adequately account for the factors that affect their art, temperature, humidity, the extent that the tuning pegs shift while under pressure, friction heating up strings, etc.. I once saw a performance where a song was played so forcefully that the orchestra had to pause to retune instruments because the very act of playing their instruments made them go out of tune. The factors to supreme musical performance to me at least seem similarly complicated and multifaceted as the aspects of Awakening I listed at the start of this paragraph.

 

On a side note, it's worth noting that Lightsong's aura responds to his heightened emotions when he throws a tantrum and shouts at his priests. Lemex's aura was flaring sporadically. Vibrancy isn't only about health apparently. Perhaps its related to  Other tangential thought is that we know that the Returned of Hallendren are shaped by the populace's view of perfection. I think the current idea is that this distortion is caused simply by Cognitive Realm power of thought and Connection with relatively little understanding of the mechanism. What if it is caused by the Returned consuming the Breaths of the Hallendren people and literally taking pieces of their soul including their perceptions and beliefs into themselves to sustain themselves? Larger Cosmere spoilers:

Spoiler

Basically, other Cognitive Shadow religious figures in the Cosmere may not be altered by local belief systems to nearly the same degree as they don't literally partake of the minds of the local populace's Investiture - if at all. From SA, I think it's Ash who notes that someone has very good sketches of the Heralds and is looking for them - and not just the versions created by the various cultures but sketches that could be used to accurately identify them. Either the multiple conflicting depictions of the Heralds messed that up, or they didn't change dramatically enough based on public perception. On the other hand... Ash did identify Taln by his hands, not necessarily his face, and she has been systematically destroying depictions of herself. Something to think about for theory crafters.

 

Edited Thursday at 01:24 PM by Duxredux