happyman

There may be such a thing as a powerful stamp, but in my opinion, the first barrier to break down would be the plausibility requirements, not the causality requirements. That is, if you somehow created a stamp that was much more powerful than the run-of-the-mill stamp, you could rewrite a palace into believing it had been sacked three hundred years ago. The key point of my argument is, that the only thing that would be affected is the palace (e.g. the unit people think of as being the palace, and thus how the palace views itself), not the people who live in it or things which are not generally viewed as being part of the palace. When testing a stamp on people, the only thing that is changed is the person stamped. When Shai stamped Gaotona, Shai didn't suddenly start thinking that Gaotona really had been Emperor. Just Gaotona did. The fact that the changes took at all were caused by Gaotona's familiarity with the Emperor, but there is no indication from these that the effects flowed at all beyond the item (person) so stamped.

How you count Aons depends on how you take modifiers into account. I would not be at all surprised if some of the so-called Base Aons are "really" just extremely basic modifications of the true base (the picture of Arelon). In addition, I believe that the list in Elantris is nowhere near exhaustive, even if you only include base Aons, whatever those are. AonDor is quite complex.

My feeling from Shai's discussion was that Forging essentially convinces the object's spiritual aspect that it had a different history, which then changes its cognitive/physical aspect to match. Thus the effect occurs only on the targeted object, and only as long as the stamp holds. There is no paradox because history itself did not actually change; only the Forged objects memory of its own history. Thus there are absolutely no ripple effects at all.

If you actually did know your ancestors and they weren't Aonic, could you imagine the changes that would have to be made to give yourself the right heritage? "Instead of being born to two Jindoeese parents, on that one special night, her father was called away to work and a tall, handsome foreign visitor just happened to be in town..." Pretty sure trying stunts like that would be beyond anything a normal forger could do.

We've got more two-book votes, but it's split pretty well across the series still. Wow.

Baalzamon (e.g. Ishamael) just got the identity of the Hornsounder wrong. That was a major plot point. It was also an early pointer at Baalzamon's true identity. As for the DR being present...well, there are a few mysteries around the horn, still. Since I suspect they are relevant for the last battle, I will gladly wait to know more!

As others have said, lots of fantasy settings have explicit/implicit relationships to "our" world. One relatively prominent example which hasn't been mentioned yet is Shannara, which is essentially a post post-apocalyptic setting. The usual conceit about how it fits depends on the setting. Sometimes science is right but incomplete. Other times it is just the local flavor of magic. Often, the author doesn't address it. Wheel of Time is the last one! If you absolutely must fit it in I would go with "Like our world, except where impossible." This would mean that either in WoT, "our" age had our understanding of the world, and it was badly wrong on key points, or it was an age like our world, but slightly different in those areas where there is real conflict in cosmology. I prefer the latter.

Given even these possibilities, I'm glad forging takes a lot of time and work. It would be so obscenely overpowered otherwise. Of course, most of the magics involve investiture and it's entirely possible forging can't fake that.

Mistwraiths struck me as being remarkably versatile creatures. It's possible they didn't survive HoA, but I find that unlikely. It is also possible Sazed destroyed them while remarking the world, but that is also unlikely in my opinion. Best bet, they are running around wild somewhere.

@Morsk: That's generally what I was thinking. If "space" is nothing, in Shadesmar the "distance" between planets could be very small indeed. Here's waiting for Stormlight 2.

An interesting question! I would imagine that outer space would tend to have rather weak cognitive and spiritual aspects. The question of "nothing" is an interesting one in the real world. In a place where things are defined by what people think of them, I have no idea what would happen.

Oh, absolutely. Somebody studying his books for themes and culture would be grossly negligent if they didn't include his religion as an influence. The problem is simply when people take his books with only vague knowledge of his religion, they can come to some quite odd conclusions trying to force it the other direction. He knows he's writing fiction.

This was answered at the end of tFE. The Lord Ruler wasn't burning Atium to get the age. As Sazed put it, you get far too much far too quickly. There's no easy throttle. Much better to burn all of the new metal in one go, and store the sudden burst of [attribute] directly into your metalminds. That's apparently what TLR did. He had an enormous age charge stored up in the metal-minds Vin pulled off, and apparently no age-stored Atium on him. It's also shown quite clearly in Allow of Law that that is what Miles does as well. He very seldom burns gold for health.

I'd add that, if I were Brandon, I would try to figure out a way of including light in the Cosmere that is self-consistent but has little to do with the real world description. We've already dealt with the problems with time bubbles and frequency; awakening is liable to fall into the same trap in different ways. The way our world has really been observed to be is so different from the way we perceive it, fun and cool magical systems really don't fit. So don't force them.

If Brandon can't come up with his own type of afterlife for his own universe, he is nowhere near being the author I know him to be.

As an actual Mormon, I would add to this conversation that most Mormon's view God as being much more powerful than any of the shards or gods shown in Brandon's fiction. Although there are and will probably continue to be philosophical discussions about how powerful He is, the debate floats around the definition of what Omnipotent means, exactly. Although Humans being deified means being given "all that the Father hath," the assumption is that anyone who gets to that point will be exactly as in control as God is, and will be beholden to Him. But that's speculation. In short, the Cosmere is fiction even for a Mormon. Some themes are related, but they are different as well. People read too much into his religion to find out about his cosmology.

I still haven't seen people address the simple fact that Returned amnesia quite clearly isn't complete, nor is it typical of head injuries in normal humans. Muscle memory and emotional elements seem to remain completely untouched, even while the episodic memory is unavailable. Also, episodic memory can all come back in a rush and be more or less complete. None of this is typical of natural amnesia. Whatever the Returned experience, it isn't typical. As an example, even after he Returned, Lightsong still felt the emotional bond with his niece. He didn't know why---the episodic memory of the relationship was difficult to access---but the spiritual relationship was obviously still there. For Returned siblings, lets assume that the same holds---at some emotional or spiritual level, they are still connected. If they know they are siblings, post-return, in analogy to Lightsong and his niece, I would expect them to almost instantly fall into the same emotional relationship, even if the explicit memories of why they have it are not consciously available.

I think that in the Cosmere, there are worse things than death. Just ask the Heralds. In short, Ruin may kill us all in the blink of an eye. Odium would drag it out because he can. In fact, he may not destroy everything completely. He may just torture everything indefinitely. You think that's an improvement?

They aren't so much being denied civil liberties as much as they are being held responsible for their decisions. If they decide to go to war, they had better darn well do it properly, with the intent to win, but not by any means possible. "Civil liberties" just means that decisions that aren't immediately and obviously catastrophic to other people are allowed to stand without interference. The Alethi are so far from a point where that is possible, it isn't even funny.

Well, duh!

Whether Rand lives or dies has been a hot topic for discussion for a long time. I managed to get into some serious arguments about it back in the day. Funny thing is, I'm not strongly attached to either idea, knowing full well that a decent story could go either way with it. Bad times, bad times. However, given the obvious symbolic mythological analogies with Rand (Jesus and King Arthur, most notably), I doubt his death will be straightforward, permanent or no.

I actually have a different approach to this. Although I agree that the exact nature of the murder is still a big question mark, the "thief" and "liar" bits are definitely true. On the other hand, it seems wildly unlikely that the symbol-headed spren she sees are the same type as Syl. They seem to be attracted to Honesty rather than Honor. This may seem odd, given the "thief and liar" bits, but I suspect that it is an intellectual honesty, rather than honesty with other people, that attracts them. That is, by her nature and actions, she is a scholar who tries to find the truth no matter where it leads. Thus her behavior is consistent with attracting these very different kind of Spren. After all, not all Spren are as discerning as Honorspren.

That's a very good find on the relationship between the two sets of symbols. I don't know what it means, exactly, but I have no doubt whatsoever that you have found a real symmetry in the magic systems. Not surprising that it's there, really, but congratulations on finding it.

The "There are Shadows" comment is why I think the Astalsi may have stumbled on something real in the Cosmere, but reflected only weakly in their own world compared with Warbreaker. Part of why I say this is because there are other shadows in the other books as well. For instance, in Warbreaker, Vasher contemplates the dual nature of creation and destruction: to create a beautiful building, you must destroy the flowers sitting where the building will be. Shadows of Ruin and Preservation's roles.