Eki

The bonding Listeners do with normal spren to achieve forms seems different from the bond sentient spren form with humans, so it's possible that Listeners used to bond to sentient spren, just in a different way that didn't give surges. So I really like @MoS03's theory there. If it's true, I don't think those Listeners could be thought of as Knights Radiant - instead they would be something different. A special form.

Yes, but as Brandon says, he swapped them out in his sign to his followers. That doesn't mean that he literally changed Allomancy. There could still have been cadmium and bendalloy Mistings, in addition to the atium (and possibly malatium) ones.

It was 16% who were forced snapped, not 1/16. I don't think we ever find out which types of Mistings they are, except the Seers. When Yomen gives Elend the final clue, he says he doesn't know about the last metals either (and of course, he's assuming atium is one of them), he's just assuming the total to be 16 because it's an important number.

I don't think he changed Allomancy to allow for that. He put the patterns there in order to give people a clue, but that doesn't mean the other types of Mistings didn't exist as well. You're assuming that every type of Misting was 1%, adding up to 16% in total, which we don't know, and that ALL Mistings were force snapped by the mists, which we don't know either. It's much more likely that there were more than 16% Mistings in those groups, but the mists only force snapped 16% of them, and made sure exactly 1/16 of those were Seers. Otherwise, Preservation must have done some serious manipulation to make sure the numbers of a whole army were exact.

I literally just realized the background of the website is Shadesmar.

I doubt it. He's using Connection magic to do it, and I don't think similarity between languages would help with that. Location is the important thing, as far as we know. Maybe it would make it easier to avoid accidentally saying a few things that don't translate (which we recently had confirmation that Hoid sometimes does, despite his experience). but I doubt it would be a major deal.

Stormlight definitely helps people keep healthier, even if they don't have a Nahel bond. I'm not sure if we know if it, or a Nahel bond, slows down aging. Rosharan years are slightly longer than "standard" years, so that would make him even older than his Rosharan age would imply. I think the main characters (the ones who survive) might take a backseat role, maybe dealing more with administration and stuff. Or they will be on some mysterious mission we readers are not supposed to know about until the last few books (kind of like that time Rand disappears for a while in WoT). Assuming the climax of book five is widely known to the people, they would be living (or, you know, dead) legends. There are plenty of interesting things they could do without being main characters.

There is a WoB on this: By the way, you accidentally made two threads. Not sure if it's possible to delete your own threads, but still.

To be fair, all of these things could change - I think I've seen Brandon describe the main character as male before, as well. I think that was long ago though, so the protagonist being a woman is the latest information.

Also

The Order of the Dustbringer is another one that's a bit of an outsider. They don't seem to fit very much with Shin culture though.

Well... it seems like the Stormfather is a merging of the spren that controls the highstorms (who we tend to call the Rider of the Storm), and the Cognitive Shadow (pretty much the Cosmere version of a ghost) of Tanavast. I think that's what the Stormfather meant when he said he's the memory of Honor - he's the ghost of the one who held the shard. As to your actual question, I guess it's possible, but I think there would need to be Investiture available, as you mention at the end. Maybe spren can convert to other types, and stuff? When double checking the information above, I noticed that during Eshonai's interlude, when she goes into the storm, it says that the Rider was not always in the storm. (I don't know the literal quote, just what the Coppermind says.) How the Rider was created, we don't know. Maybe as you say, or he was just created by Honor or Adonalsium, or something. But if something on Roshar could gather a critical amount of Cognitive mass to create a spren (if that is indeed possible), it would be the highstorms.

Has the pool from SoS really been confirmed not to be a shardpool? And has the Southern Scadrian been confirmed not to be a worldhopper?

Is there any book where the current story arch wraps up in a nice way? In either case, I'm glad I read the book. As I said, the worldbuilding was great, and it's nice to finally get all the "walk without rhythm" references!

Finished Dune. I have mixed feelings. The worldbuilding is great, but it's very... Great-Men-History-ish, you know? People who are better bred are better people (not necessarily morally so, but in terms of cleverness, strength, and stuff like that), and if they are bred "to perfection" you end up with a Messiah. Herbert certainly isn't the only one to write like that, but with all the future sight, "race memory", and prophecies (and actual selective breeding of humans), it becomes much more obvious. There were also issues with representation, but you can't really expect much in that regard from such an old book I guess... :/ The jumping between viewpoints wasn't as jarring as I thought it would be though. And the book seemed much more fantasy-esque than sci-fi to me. Obviously it's both, and the line between them can be blurry regardless, but still. We'll see if I decide to continue the series... I have a lot of other series to finish up (and I still haven't gotten to Elantris yet!).

There is also an upper limit to his age, because there were (presumably) no Returned before Vo. I'm not sure if we know how long before the Manywar Vo died, but I don't think it was that long, considering.

Good points. I still feel like wars must have been rare, and that this was a very unusual time, even before the Knights abandoned the oaths.

I think all we know is that the Recreance was a long time ago. The Knights were always much more than fighters. I'm pretty sure there was very little need for fighting outside of Desolations. Windrunners, Skybreakers and perhaps a few other orders probably acted as police in different (and sometimes opposing) ways.

Slowly but surely getting through Dune. I just arrived around where the text on the back ends. A little over half of the book, in other words.

I think Brandon counts the Heralds as part of the orders. He still seems to be very much aligned with the mentality of a Stoneward (other than the torture affecting him, of course, but he hasn't completely turned around like the other Heralds seem to have done). I think it's very likely he will actually bond to a Stonewardspren (and escape the Sons of Honor).

The Southerners (as far as we know) got the medallions after the Final Ascension, and since Sazed moved everything around, we have no idea where either the Well or the Pits are since then, if they even exist. In one of the newspaper articles in SoS, an explorer of the mountains south of the Southern Roughs describes something that seems to be a shardpool, as well as someone who is probably a masked Southern Scadrian. We don't know how far away from the Southern lands this is. It's likely they have migrated north since their lands froze, so they might not live near the actual pole anymore. We also know that there are Southern Scadrians who at some point migrated off-world (since we've met one of their decendents in the Stormlight Archives), which means they had access to a perpendicularity, or some other way of worldhopping. But if Hoid used Connection magic during the events on Sel, he must have had access to it before the Final Ascension. If he used medallions to do it, the idea is that medallions were known back in classical Scadrial, before the Lord Ruler remade the world. That knowledge then spread to worldhoppers, who set up production and distribution off-world. Both shardpools were in Terris, where of course the most Feruchemists lived as well. Only a theory of course, but I think it's either this, or Hoid uses a completely different magic system to achieve something similar. Yeah, I don't think they were very far away. I just realized though, I don't see why there couldn't be medallions (or whatever he's using) filled with Connection to Alethkar in particular, rather than the blank Connection the Southerners use in BoM. It might require some messing around with other medallions, or an actual Alethi Feruchemist, but I think it should be possible.

I think the warcamps really have "connected" enough with the people living there for Hoid to be able to use it to speak Alethi. Great point though, I didn't even think of the limitations of only being able to speak languages native to the area where you are.

There could be a whole industry for blank location connection medallions. In theory, it could have existed long before (and throughout) the world of ash. We already know there is a big cross-planet trading network. But there could definitely be other ways to do it.

Also a very likely possibility. That would mean he could have had (in fact, probably must have had) access to it long before Elantris.

Yeah, very interesting. Makes me wonder if you can use Connection translation in order to actually learn a language. Do we know when he gained Feruchemy? He's likely using medallions, but we don't know if those existed before the world of Ash, or even on another planet before then.