happyman

Brandon being Brandon, I would prefer to say that Nightblood is not yet well understood. Also, we know that Nightblood isn't going to stay unique.

Which makes me wonder what the security precautions they take at Nebrask are. IIRC, the chalkings hid inside Harding.

I am not remotely surprised, and frankly was hoping this was true. It would add a lot to the story, IMO. I'm guessing that someday Brandon is going to have to rewrite and publish Dragonsteel so that the BYU librarians won't declare him anathema and start hunting him down.

This is off topic, but I wanted to add that Orson Scott Card fought for literally years to stop them from ruining his story (assuming they didn't). Proving that the main character didn't need a romantic interest is something that takes some serious doing in Hollywood, apparently. Which means that they could so easily mess up Vin and Elend's relationship. So I guess it is relevant after all.

Gut feelings don't come from nowhere. They are still based on things we sense. They are actually a very important survival mechanism, most of the time. Our rationalizations and descriptions of them are often wrong, however. Thus looking for a reason why Vin left is sensible. It doesn't have to be a fully developed rational reason, it just has to be something that she sensed. For instance, if she somehow sensed that Hoid was a planet-hopper, I doubt she would know what that meant. It certainly isn't a logical reason not to talk to somebody. Far from. But it would make sense for Vin to respond that way, especially if she didn't know what it meant.

The only things I could imagine being worse is having either

I actually think the death visions are related to (Warbreaker spoilers) It seems like a general rule that dying people can see more than those who are alive.

This one alone earned my upvote.

Why not go with some of the synthetics? Some synthetics, like plastics, are made out of very-long-dead organic material that has been changed quite a bit (IIRC, they can be made as side-products from regular oil). The "memory of life" has probably faded, but they are not anywhere near as distant as rock or metal, which have far less potential to be alive in any form we know of.

Ah, the wonderful sight of people getting their feet wet in the wonderful world of quantum indeterminacy. It's the debate that just keeps on giving, no matter how much you learn about the subject. And I'm speaking as a professional physicist here. So to avoid a really boring and technical discussion, I'll just say that the ideas seem related, but not if you push too hard into the details. This isn't helped in the slightest by the fact that nobody's quite sure how the quantum world actually works. There is no better way to start a group of physicists arguing than to drop the questions into a discussion.

Yes, the parallel for TLR's ascension was Vin's experience at the Well of Ascension, baring the "not using it" bit. While Vin gained enormous powers for a brief time, at no point does it appear that her body was in danger of disappearing.

Supply and demand is a useful rule for economics, but it's not absolute. New technologies and social changes can also affect it. Especially new technologies. They can change both the effective supply (by making things more accessible) and the demand (by making things more useful). When the demand for X increases for some reason, the price spikes for a bit, but it's not uncommon for this to lead people to find better ways of getting X as a way of getting wealthy quickly. This in turns drives up the supply, and the whole thing establishes a new equilibrium somewhere in between the prior value and the spike. Also, the existence of creatures which actually grow gemstones would throw the whole argument in an interesting direction. It's not like we don't have experience with this, though; lots of things we need are produced by animals and plants. It does mean, though, that Roshar's gem market it almost entirely unlike ours.

He also said, at least once that I've seen, that the protagonists of the first book will be a swat team for dealing with rogue Allomancers, and they would begin by investigating what appears to be the actions of a rogue Mistborn. Other people in this thread have mentioned it as well. So I don't think it's that there are no Mistborn or that they are metaphysically impossible; it's that they will have faded into legend due to circumstances. We already see that process in Alloy of Law. I doubt it is absolute, though.

This is an interesting question. Especially because I heard Brandon once say that there was a character in the first version of Way of Kings which made a very different choice at the beginning than the one they make in the current version, and that it changed everything about the development of the book, especially their character arc. I've always assumed that was Kaladin and the Shards. I can totally see how making a different decision there would have changed everything. Including the entirety of the arc in Way of Kings. But this also suggests that becoming a Knight Radiant may have been in the offing, even so. Which isn't to say that Brandon can't decide "That was a terrible idea. Kaladin should never have taken the Shards. Let's do some world-building around it." I'm just not certain how central the conceit is to the book.

I probably have the most convoluted path imaginable. I was reading on Wikipedia about King Arthur, when I saw a link to a webcomic about King Arthur. (Don't worry about which one; it's not important.) This comic, in turn, mentioned Schlock Mercenary in the strip itself, which made me curious. I dropped the King Arthur strip eventually, but kept following Schlock Mercenary and turned to Writing Excuses. I then listened to Writing Excuses for a bit, and finally saw the announcement that Brandon Sanderson had been chosen to finish Wheel of Time. That's what triggered my first read of Elantris. Mind, I would have heard about Brandon Sanderson some other way, eventually. I'm in all the right communities for that to happen. I had heard his name and seen his books well before I finally decided to pick one up and read it.

Returning to Defending Elysium would be depressing, in my opinion. Just a bunch of Realpolitik once the veil had been lifted.

I don't know how much spoilery stuff you want, but I'll warn you that we know a lot more about what is happening on Sel than you would learn from Mistborn and Elantris. Some of it is from Way of Kings, and a lot is word of Brandon. What are you willing to know?

That we know of. After all, Atium's prime effect is similar to that of Electrum in many ways. If people in-world had known about Electrum and Atium, but not all the other nifty things Atium could do (which are mostly Word of Brandon; I don't think we have seen any in the books), they would not have necessarily realized just how special it was. It seems at least 50/50 chance that Tears of Edgli have Awakening properties that just haven't been discovered yet.

Gallodon's identity is made rather more complicated by the fact that his father was an Elantrian. He may have thought of himself, deep down, as an Elantrian who moved to Duladel, changed religion, and tried to ignore his roots. Given that we know practically nothing about the religion of the Elantrian's themselves and that the Elentrian's also drew on the Dor, I don't think this is that far-fetched.

To King of Nowhere's answer, I would add that Breeze didn't start by fighting against the nobility. He became a thief, and one that could live with a relatively high standard of living, at that. Joining Kelsier to overthrow the final empire came much, much later in life. In short, it wasn't one decision. It was a series of decisions that led to an odd outcome for someone from his background. He's hardly the first person to have that happen to them.

IIRC, the Tears of Edgli have, at a bare minimum, the property that they can be used to make any color dye, and that the dyes made from them hold perfectly. In a world where magic needs color to function, this sounds kinda special and magical.

I would say that any faster-than-light theory which doesn't address why things change direction when they leave/enter time bubbles is guaranteed incomplete. No, I don't know how to use it to do anything, but that's the one obvious missing piece that I think would need to be filled by any sensible theory.

I actually have read that Asimov short story, but I don't see what it has to do with anything. He was just speculating, like the rest of us. Among other things, no one has found a way to use electromagnetism to counter the curvature of space due to gravity.

But why should it be nothing more than a novelty? Here's an example of a sensible way it could work. It's speculation, but it fits the evidence we do have. If you have one straw man and try to awaken him at a lower heightening, you would drain a handkerchief of some size of color. A bright red handkerchief would become gray, for instance. If you were at the tenth heightening and did the exact same awakening, it's reasonable that it would drain the same amount of color---but because the awakening is more efficient, it drains half the handkerchief to white, leaving the other half untouched. You could then use the other half of the same handkerchief to awaken another straw man---more efficient use of color. This seems like the most sensible interpretation of the description of the tenth Heightening's effect from the Ars Arcanum. Do you have any evidence that this isn't how it works, given the evidence we have? Because barring more evidence, this seems like the most likely way to interpret the evidence we do have.

I'm guessing that at least partly, it's "Knowledge is power." Also, Brandon likes educated and smart protagonists.