Shardlet

Basically, what needs to be recognized is that there are, apparently, spren which have the capacity to bond with other entities and spren which so far don't seem to have that capacity. It is largely understood that all spren that have the capacity to bond are found within a spectrum of fully of Honor (assumed to be honorspren), various mixtures of Cultivation (not Conservation) and Honor, and fully Cultivation. These spren (particularly the mixed ones) are very likely voluntarily created splinters of Honor and Cultivation. Both of which continued to live after the creation of such spren. Among these spren are the spren which bond with people to give the people surgebinding ability. The spren in turn gets a stronger foothold in the physical realm and as the bond progresses, gains full awareness of their cognitive personality. When Honor was killed and the shard splintered, apparently, the more mundane non-bonding spren were formed. Since these spren resulted from the splintering of Honor, they would be 100% of Honor. The nature of these spren are not well understood and we will be getting a greater understanding of the spren in WoR in March. Note: various theories may conflict with the above, but I think it provides much of the information that will make things clearer for you, Malcolm.

While I am not terribly interested in a thorough examination of the epigraphs, in my infinite ignorance, establishing a sub-forum doesn't seem like it would be particularly challenging. The only danger I would see is, would such a thing evoke more requests for subforums to the point where now each forum has 3 or 4 subforums. Is that undesirable? IDK. As to the topics within the forum, I don't see the need to establish 60+ specific threads or any threads really. It seems like it would make more sense to build the sub-forum and then let the community add threads as they desire.

I personally have no real idea on it. I was just going by what Brandon said when he said that repairing shardblade damage required repair to the soul.

Glad to have you out of the shadows, blackbird. Welcome.

You will find the answer you seek by clicking here.

FYI, Life. It is generally preferred to use the edit function on your previous post if is related material and there has not been an intervening post. The moderators tend to discourage double-posting.

Well, unless Amaram is a dueler, it would be unlikely that Shallan would ever see Amaram's blade except in the event of some emergency situation. As to the plate, I think it unlikely for Amaram to leave it in its previous appearance given the Alethi penchant for personalizing and adorning their plate. As to Amaram and Kaladin and Amaram and Shallan, Amamram would have to be very careful about how he proceeded in both cases. He would not be able to safely play Shallan against Kaladin since the premise fo Amaram having the plate and blade is that Amaram killed the shardbearer. Amaram's possession of the plate and blade and the fact that Kaladin is still alive would belie any insinuation against Kaladin to Shallan regarding Helaran.

From the Lift interlude when she uses regrowth. From the Szeth interlude in WoK where his former bosses head gets rolled accross the floor and he is given the hitlist.

I agree, it is hard to take that (chunk of soul ripped out and tacked on) into account when the result is so far a matter of speculation. Although, doesn't the WoB say spiritweb? Does this equal soul? IDK. If it does, then would not shardblades be just as evil since a shardblade wound (and presumably death damages the soul? Source:

Happy birthday Peter! We love you very very very very very much! (Has anyone else seen that video? At the Bottom of Everything by Bright Eyes)

The notable thing about this case was that it was a Veden (whom I shall call Darth from this day forth ) who came to fight in an internal Alethi border skirmsh (i.e., an Alethi-on-Alethi fight).

I completely disagree. Morality exists as either a social construct or as an ethic introduced by a creative entity (i.e., God). I can't get behind morality existing independant of anything. If that were the case, it would hardly be so subjective. Even in the most basic and most universal moral thought (i.e., killing people is bad) there is vast differences in what is considered bad killing from culture to culture. While I personally believe that there is an absolute morality sourced from a creative entity (prescribed but not necessarily directly enforced), such beliefs don't necessarily apply to a fictional construct.

We don't know. But one thing is for sure, they are not only functionally immortal, they are somewhere between functionally immortal and absolutely immortal. Also, no apparent indication of a power does not equal absence of a power. Especially considering how very scant the screen time has been for the Heralds so far and the distinct lack of any apparent need to use an ability.

One word: Heralds

Except that TLR was never considered a Shard and Vin wasn't until the end of HoA. Yet both were slivers.

I don't see much more than a barrier between Shallan and Kaladin if Helaran was the shardbearer. It was a battle in a foreign country. Somewhere Helaran would have had no business being. Helaran would have been in shardplate with a shardblade and already killed half of Kaladin's squad. If Kaladin had not killed the shardbearer, then Kaladin would be dead. Helaran had every advatage in the fight. Hard to develop a believable revenge plot out of that. A barrier that prevented closeness, perhaps even straight up dislike, sure. Jasnah would look at the situation fairly rationally and be a tempering influence. The real conflict will be be between Dalinar, Kaladin, and Amaram (with an Adolin sideshow).

I have no idea what the effect might be. But I think it fairly certain that the bendalloy would be consumed instantaneously from the perspective of the burner. I personally think that this would not give the burner an opportunity to take any action. I expect that there will be some pretty special effect. Consider the case of Elends duralumin enhanced atium. Did he see the movements of his opponent for the next five minutes? Did it overcome his opponents own atium burn? No, the effect was unexpected and rather profound. I would anticipate something similar being the case for duralumin enhanced bendalloy. It might actually bump the burner forward (or back) in time? Who knows? I just think that it would be unlikely to give the burner time to take an action or a series of actions.

weep with tears

To consider whether or not the use of hemalurgy in any way is evil, the first thing that needs to be considered is the moral authority in the world in which it exists. It would be innappropriate to absolutely declare something set in an alternate universe to be evil based upon our own personal, social, and/or religious concepts of morality. There does not appear to be an overarching moral authority in the cosmere. We don't know enough about Adonalsium to know if it exerted a moral ethic upon the cosmere. So, we must then focus in on Scadrial. The closest to an overarching moral ethic for Scadrial is Harmony. I'll discuss him in a bit. Then we should focus in on the Elendel basin (the apparent center of human activity on the northern continent and the location of the people of whom we are speaking of). So, does Harmony think that hemalurgy is evil in all its forms and uses? If we say yes, then we must accept that Harmony views himself to be evil or at the least commiting evil actions. He uses Kandra who must necessarily be spiked to function. He distributes, via said Kandra, hemalurgic spikes to people who either may benefit from those spikes or are of a mindset to follow after the ideals that Harmony holds. An example of this is the case of MeLaan giving a spike to Wax (we'll discuss the ethics some other time of encouraging someone to unwittingly spike themselves thereby unwittingly give a measure of control and influence of themselves over to another being). As to the people of the Elendel Basin, if they (hypothetically) don't have a problem with using legacy spikes, there doesn't appear to be any other moral authority to state that such actions are "evil". If they (hypothetically) don't have a problem with inheritance spikings (where the future decedent instructs others to spike the future decedent prior to death in order to bequeath an ability to an heir) and harmony (also hyposthetically) doesn't have a problem with such practices, how can we say that it is an evil practice. There are cultures which would consider cremation to be indecent or even evil. The same goes for burial. The same goes for many many other practices that are considered by one culture to be right and other cultures to be wrong. Without an overarching source of morality, how can an internal practice of a culture be considered evil?

Well, I guess my next questions would be: How many people can update Theoryland content? How backlogged is Theoryland on un-entered WoB? What changes are the Theoryland admins interested in making to make Theoryland more welcoming to sharders in addition to WoT? I ask the last question because when a non-WoT person goes to Theoryland, they are met by a site which revolves around WoT and the only area of interest for such a person (like myself) is a portion of the search page. It feels like an add-on rather than a feature. Perhaps this has colored some of my perceptions of the completeness of Theoryland for cosmere WoB. Edit: I know for my part, when I got started, I was pointed to Theoryland and found it too cumbersome for me just starting out. I didn't know what to search for, so a search page seemed at the time rather useless to me. Consequently, I largely abandoned going to Theoryland for anything. Yet, there is some really fantastic info there that I have recently come accross. I hate thinking about other new sharders who have similarly largely ignored Theoryland or are not even really aware of its existence.

Theoryland is great for a topical search or looking for a quote you are already aware of. One question I have is, is substantially all the cosmere quotes tagged with at least one of the Sanderson tags? It seems on first glance that the list of tags is a bit thin. I may be wrong. Also, to apply a "cosmere relevant" tag to each pertinent quote after the fact seems like a rather substantial endeavor in and of itself. If the effort is going to be undertaken one way or the other, why not use that effort to create a comprehensive cosmere database, than to adapt a piggyback resource? Also, when clicking on a tag in Theoryland you get a single page of everything under that tag. There are few people in this world which would have the time and the ability to read all the WoB in one sitting. The natural page divisions that occur here every twenty posts would make it much easier to get up from your machine and then come back at another time and easily and quickly resume reading from where one left off. I would never suggest scrapping Theoryland. Like I said, it is very good for certain uses. Also, it would do a great disservice to WoT fans. The biggest goal for me in this is to have everything in one location, easily readable, easily searchable, and unadulterated by WoT info, writing tips, general inquiries, etc. The WoB is vast enough without having to sift through everything else. All that extra stuff makes getting caught up on WoB a chore rather than a joy. Basically we have a number of sources out there. Each of those sources has a particular way that must be discovered on how to get what you are looking for. Rather than directing people to 4-6 different sources (which they would then hav to figure out how to effectively use), we keep them on 17th Shard. I think the best way to use the Coppermind in conjunction with the compendium is that the Compendium could be a general compilation of all the WoB while a sister Coppermind page could have all the WoB in the compendium organized by book (simlar to the organization of the Brandonothology).

I am not very Wiki Savvy, but can a wiki page even functionally handle that volume of info? I mean, with just the Events, Signings, and Stalking forum I will have a word document that is about 60-75 pages. There is a lot of WoB out there.

Welcome, skavoovee. Glad to have you with us.

Why not lobby for an expansion of permissions for Theoryland? Because Theoryland is not really amenable to a new sharder just pulling it up and reading through the WoB that is there. That was the biggest weakness I found with it. When I started, I wanted to click and read rather than hunt and search. You AMA thread was helpful to me (although I thinned a lot out of it in my compilation). Though it was a bit of a pain because of the individual quote boxes. But that was only a pain for copying and pasting. A thread of links is tedious to work through and the reader must then filter through everything that is there. Thus, it would not solve the need I perceive.

We assume it can, but really we have no clue about whether it can or what it can do.