So I Saw @ultimateinferno Theorizing About This, And I Want Spoilers Hidden Under A Cut On My Blog, So

Ohhh... this looks like fun...

Cinderella's fairy godmother is a lightweaver who sent her spren to the ball with Cinderella to maintain the illusion.  The midnight curfew is there because she could only infuse her spren with so much stormlight and the illusion will fail when it runs out.  Maybe the spren stays with the glass slipper and uses the little bit of stormlight it still has to continue maintaining just that part of the illusion...

Princess and the Pea is an easy one, relatively speaking. The princess in question is a tin-compounding Twinborn who got stuck in a touch loop at an early age. The easiest way I can think of for that to work is that she doesn’t know she’s doing it - perhaps she fundamentally doesn’t understand...

Pattern pumpkin

It blows my mind that Brandon Sanderson managed to create a character that fits seamlessly into the stormlight world despite basically being a sentient fractal.  It also makes me really absurdly happy.  I love Pattern so much.  Here is my jack-o-lantern for this year :-)

Hey guys, let's think about bendalloy ferrings, aka Subsumers, for a minute.

We know they can store nutrition and calories in a metalmind which means they can eat as much as they want when there is lots of food and then tap it later.  

Think about a Subsumer at a Scadrial eating competition.  "Sure, I can scarf away as many hot-dogs as you want. No problem."

Think about a Subsumer at an all-you-can-eat buffet.  They get to try everything and then go back for as much more as they want of everything they like. Such restaurants would have to have special rules for subsumers...maybe a pay by the hour thing?

Imagine if Lift gets a hemalurgic spike that lets her become a bendalloy ferring. She would have the best stormlight storage system.   She could eat loads, store most of it in her metalmind(s), and then tap into it whenever she needs stormlight.  Unlike spheres, it wouldn't leak away and if she is tapping it from the metalmind she isn't sucking the energy out of her body.

On the darker side of things, you probably also get the occasional Subsumer who is desperately afraid of gaining weight and always stores everything they eat in their metal minds and never taps them.  Most people don't know that they are a ferring and everyone sees them eating, so people don't realize there is a problem until it has gotten really bad.

Inspired by a conversation with Ashiok in the chat :-)

I just finished part 4 of The Final Empire and I need to rage for a bit before I can keep reading.  Don't mind me. Ranting and wild theorizing under the cut.

"I represent the thing you've never been able to kill, no matter how hard you try. I am hope."

 speech and presented yourself as a STORMING IDIOT MARTYR and LET THE LORD RULER KILL YOU WITHOUT FIGHTING BACK. DAMMIT KELL.

This is why you spent all of that time building your reputation among the skaa and getting them to practically worship you. This is why you were asking Sazed about the Valla. You were reassuring yourself that the movement would continue even stronger after you sacrificed yourself. You hoped it wouldn't come to this, but you knew it would. You've trained Vin as your replacement.  She proved her competence in her fight against Shan and her power by seeing through your copper cloud. In the process she helped you understand what happened with Mare so that you could let it rest. SHE JUST ASKED YOU A COUPLE NIGHTS WHEN YOU WERE GOING TO LEAVE HER and you hedged. You didn't know exactly when, but you knew this was coming. You knew it would probably be soon. Dammit Kell.  

Elend, you lovable naive fool of a nobleman, you need to find Vin and help her hold herself together so she can take over. Or maybe so the pair of you can take the lead if you can rally your friends and make them actually care enough to act. She has just had her brother's training that everyone will abandon her reinforced though, so she's probably going to try to push you away in a form of emotional self defense. I hope you don't let her. She is unbelievably strong, but there is power in having people you truly care about that she doesn't fully understand yet (The very last thing Kelsier said to Vin was "You still have some things to learn about friendship, Vin. I hope someday you realize what they are."  Dammit Kell. That sounds like you knew you weren't going to be there. Maybe you had already decided that today was the day to get yourself martyred afterall.)

Other Thoughts:

* IF there really is an 11th metal (which I'm skeptical of), then there needs to be a 12th.  They come in pairs.  

* There is more to gold that Vin currently understands. Gold is disturbing and creepy and no one wants to burn it which also means no one has fully explored it.  

* Feruchemisty is going to become important.  Vin's experiment with Sazed's metal is going to come back.  It could have just happened to answer the question of whether the two can interact (because I was definitely questioning it before it happened) but I will be surprised if it never surfaces again. 

* In fact, some combination of Feruchemistry and Allomancy could very well be what lets the Lord Ruler survive things like having a spear run through his chest.  Oh Storms.  What if the reason he has been so intent on killing Keepers is because there is a way to store their life force in a metal (Gold? If I had to guess it would be gold) and then he can steal that life force by burning the metal.  It would be like Allomancy meets Feruchemistry meets Chromatic Breath and the immortality of the Returned in Warbreaker.  

So I just started reading Mistborn...

and I really, really want to introduce Vin, as we meet her right at the beginning of the story, to Lift. They wouldn't trust each other at all at first and for quite a while, but they would cautiously work together because it is better than the alternatives. It's possible they would see each other as rivals, but I want Vin to eventually take Lift under her wing like a little sister and they can be awesome magic scrawny teenage girl street thieves together. They could get up to so many ridiculous shenanigans and steal *everyone's* dinner... 

For your consideration: Adolin, Evi, and Fashion

Consider: Evi moving from Rira to Alethkar and learning to cope with the new culture and all of the safehand nonsense. Then marrying the blackthorn and collecting and analyzing fashion folios to figure out how she can be a Good Vorin Wife while still trying to be true to herself.

Consider:  Smol Adolin sitting with her, only half understanding, as she talks half to him and half to herself about balancing traditions and current fashion. And then when he shows interest - because if mom cares then so should he - she starts also getting the fashion folios for boys and young men and altering Adolin's clothes with ideas he likes from the folios.

Consider: Evi encouraging Adolin when he starts fashioning himself play armor out of the rockbud shells he finds laying around. Evi teaching smol Adolin knots and the very basics of sewing.

Consider: An older Adolin trying to follow his father’s example and getting into dueling. Adolin coming home with tears in his clothes from roughhousing and fighting his friends/rivals and Evi sitting him down and teaching him how to mend his clothes. Not just how to mend them, but how to do it in ways that make the mending look intentional and fashionable.

Consider: Evi at the war camps feeling like she is losing control of everything and her life is falling apart, but still making sure she is put together and trying to make sure her boy has his jacket because that's one of the few things she CAN still control .

Consider: After Evi’s death, Adolin seeking out the folios himself and growing closer to his tailor while he continues to improve his sewing skills because it's a connection he has to his mom that he doesn't want to lose.

Consider: Adolin taking the group to his tailor, not just because he is into fashion but because she filled something of a surrogate mother role for him after Evi died and he truly does trust her completely. And THEN in Shadesmar when he is feeling useless and helpless on the ship he sits down and sews himself a halfway decent outfit because, storm it, even if he can't control anything else, he can still control THIS and the process of the sewing reminds him of his mother's strength even when she felt helpless and that helps him keep holding himself together and doing what he can.

Rithmatics: Part 8, Intro to Lines of Vigor

Let's start with what we know for sure from the books:

Lines of Vigor can only affect chalk creations

You have to draw at least two waveforms to shoot a Line of Vigor

Lines of Vigor can damage or move Lines of Warding (and other chalk creations)

"smaller curves" are stronger [1]

A "large arc" lets them move other lines [2]

Lines of Vigor can bounce off of Lines of Forbiddance

We have previously established that the source of the illustrations in the book is playing fast and loose with the definition of curvature, so the notions of "smaller" and "larger" in the above are not entirely clear.  I know what I want them to mean though...

Theory Time

You know what this sounds like to me?  This sounds like electromagnetic waves.  EM waves are often modeled with transverse waves (the sine curves all of our examples of LoV look like are transverse waves). Higher frequency radiation, such as UV rays is better at penetration than lower frequency radiation, like infrared.  Infrared, on the other hand, is much better at transferring energy, which could very reasonably lead to a transfer of momentum here and thus lead to things moving.  As long as velocity is constant, frequency and wavelength are inversely proportional.  This means that the tighter the curve is the higher the frequency. Theory: Lines of Vigor are based on EM waves.

Possible Implications:

A EM wave with a larger amplitude has more energy.  This would suggest that a Line of Vigor with a short wave length and high amplitude would be better at punching through things and one with the same wavelength and small amplitude.  The effect could be even more pronounced with high amplitude long wave length waves that are trying to push things around

EM waves follow the law of superposition - if you stack two on top of each other you can add them at every point to get a new wave.  This would suggest that there might be more interesting LoV. Instead of just sin(x), we could get things like sin(x)+sin(x/2).  The more complicated ones could be tricky to get right, but might be able to do interesting things.

Related to the previous point, you could get interesting effects if LoV could have interference patterns like EM waves do...

EM waves travel with different speeds through different materials and you get refraction when they move between materials.  Since LoV only affect chalk, it is possible they are only affected by chalk, but if the material they move across affects their velocity, you could get refracted LoV when they move from the sidewalk to the asphalt.

Lines of Forbiddance would be playing the role of mirrors. I have lots of ideas here, but those are for a future post or this one will end up ridiculous.

Hey Cosmere fandom, it’s book rec time.

The book series in question is the Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie. In order, the books are Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy.

It’s a space opera with significant focus on character and relationships. The POV character is Breq, an aro-ace space warship AI in a human body who sets out on an impossible journey to kill the Lord of the Radch (the local 3000 year old space emperor) to revenge her beloved Lieutenant. Along the way she (unintentionally and reluctantly) collects people (humans, ships, aliens,…) in a gloriously messy found family.

* It’s super queer 

* Characters actively struggle with depression, anxiety, addiction, etc.

* Almost everyone is a PoC

* For the sake of Propriety everyone wears gloves and bare hands are super scandalous. 

These books are amazing and you should strongly consider reading them. The audio book versions are also fabulous.

If you’ve already read them, I’ve been Radch posting on my other blog (RithmatistKalyna) and I would love to talk with people both about the books/characters/tea sets/etc and all of the Cosmere crossover potential.