Absolutely no relation to NLK
Not so much asexual as... mating season-y?
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
Given these
two WoB's, I think we can be pretty certain that they're asexual. It even extends to Rosharan races descended from Listeners, after all.
It's just a little weird with the mateform thing. I'm thinking that maybe people who stay in mateform longer than strictly necessary would be allosexuals, and relatively rare in Listener populations the way us asexuals are in human populations.
Raven Wilder
The sexuality connection could be that convincing someone to become a Radiant and making them stick to their Vows can be difficult, so if all other efforts to make their humans stay on the right path fail, the spren want to be able to try using seduction as sort of a Hail Mary pass.
"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko
World's Cutest Direwolf
I'm just imagining the Stormfather trying to seduce Dalinar now.
Giant, seductive, stormy cloud man.
World's Cutest Direwolf
Hey, it worked for Zeus.
I'm sure that Tanavast would be utterly scandalised to hear you compare his cognitive shadow to someone with Zeus' inability to keep it in his pants.
EDIT: ![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Just caught that you replied to something I said.
edited 28th Sep '16 11:36:10 PM by RenegadeShroom
World's Cutest Direwolf
Just because storm gods all have it doesn't mean they all go around flaunting it.
Anyway, my earlier point was that asexuals or whatever don't have to worry about following some rule that requires them to have a gender they're into, because plenty of gays and straights don't follow the rule in the first place. So they can just have randomly gendered spren and there's nothing screwy going on.
I wonder if it's that spren are at heart an idealised form. Like, it's supposed to be a personification of an abstract concept you value very highly or have some kind of connection to, so I can see a tenuous connection forming between that and the gender you're predisposed to falling in love with. Kind of.
Like how our (generally patriarchal and male-gazey) culture has personified many concepts that aren't necessarily gendered as attractive women. Lady Luck. Lady Liberty. Many country anthropomorphic personifications.
edited 29th Sep '16 3:32:46 AM by LoniJay
Be not afraid...
Jupiterian Local
Came across a video that explains the real-life physics behind Kabsal's cymatics demonstration:
Not super relevant to anything, but kinda neat.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Absolutely no relation to NLK
Kabsal kinda had potential as a character. Shame he turned out to be a murderous asshole.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
Syl said something like that in the second book.
"Spren have genders?" Sigzil asked, amazed.
"Of course," she said. "Though, technically, it probably has something to do with the way people view us. Personification of the forces of nature or some similar gobbletyblarthy."
An assassin, sure, and one using a poorly-thought out method, but he did like Shallan, and he had a better reason for trying to kill Jasnah than "blagh, I hate heretics."
It's always so hard to pick things to quote. Nevertheless...
There are clear indications from the start that Nightblood is unusual in several ways. Having just observed the aura of a person with extra Breath, when the clasp of Nightblood's sheath is undone,
A bit later:
Vahr refers to Nightblood as "That.. thing you bear." On first reading, one may or may not link this with the sword, but by the end of the chapter I'd say it's pretty clear. As Vasher leaves, stopping to retrieve his belongings,
And foreshadowing that is kinda blatant later.
Without going into the analysis, this wording suggests that Vasher has been around for a long time, that he was very powerful, and that if it was hard for him to Awaken metal, it would be nearly impossible for almost anyone else. Though it's only in retrospect that we'll realize just how long past that time is, or how high "the height of his power" was, this implies that both are Significant. The discerning first-time reader might also make the connection to Nightblood by the end of the Prologue, but I almost certainly didn't.
Again, this will only become noteworthy when we read more of the gods, and learn that the Divine Breath grants the Returned the fifth Heightening. When we do find out, and connect it to this thought, we'll eventually figure out that Vasher has learned to suppress the effect of the Divine Breath.
Absolutely no relation to NLK
Oh yesss. I reread Warbreaker a while back, this time with the annotated version. Until Stormlight gets underway, WB is the most rewarding book to reread with all the plot twists and foreshadowing it has.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
Awesome! I love the tor rereads. I learn so much from them.
"But if that happened, Melia might actually be happy. We can't have that." - Handsome Rob
What works, however, is that it perfectly hides it's foreshadowing stuff for Stormlight Archive. Like sentient, cut-anything swords and storing magic in inanimate objects.
Which brings up something: why does biochroma, when stored in nearly literally anything, not degenerate or lose power, but Stormlight, when put in the only things it seems to be able to store it in (gems and the human body) it starts vanishing like dry ice, admittedly at a much slower pace? With humans, it makes sense since they need to breath out eventually, but gemstones don't breath.
Absolutely no relation to NLK
Breaths seem in general to be a much more precious resource than Stormlight.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
But it's reusable and recoverable, except when used for making Lifeless. I'm just trying to find a correlation between shelf life and powerlevel. Atium is ridiculously overpowered with a grand total of ONE person in history managing to have beaten it. It also passes though a human body like water through a digestive system. The rest of the alomantic metals have a correlation with how long they last versus how extreme their effect on the world is. Time metals last barely longer than atium, physical external lasts longer than physical internal, pull seems to last longer than push (though I'm basing this on the relative difference between how long tin lasts versus pewter), emotional and investiture-sensory metals seem to be about middle ground. Strangely, the only metals that burn faster than atium are Aluminum and Duralumin. I suspect this is because they're the metals that most directly mess with investiture, and would theoretically have the greatest power output in the time they're burned. Then there's whatever metal the southerners use for their Allomantech...
Anything from the planet of the Elantrians has a nigh-infinite power source to draw from, the limiting factor there is proximity. The only exception is the Dahkor monks and their sacrifice magic. Their the only magic system with on the planet with a material consumable explicitly in the magic (blood forging uses blood as a targeting medium and as a programming tool, NOT as a power source), but the book gives no Ars Arcanum for the monks, so we can't really guess of the relative powerlevel the sacrifice produces. They've only used them in a teleport, but the distance does not seem to be a factor in number of sacrifices. Storage and shelf life is not an issue. Until we know more we can eliminate them as a point of comparison with systems outside the planet. Same for the Mysteries, which we never saw produce a concrete result. Lots of corpses though. If it IS also a magic system, it's a very inefficient one compared to the one the monks use.
Breaths are a power source that is theoretically ever increasing. Assuming every one on the planet gets one, and it plays no role in fertility, the planet could end up with literally billions of breaths. The last nearly forever, are reusable and recoverable (barring physically losing what you imbued it in), have a strong anti-theft feature, and have very nice passive benefits compared to other systems. The Returned, the creation of Lifeless and death of the one with the breaths are the ONLY mechanisms on the planet that we know of that causes net loss of Breaths from the system, and the third can be mitigated by the longevity granted by having a lot of the stuff. So it's a high power output, with nigh-infinite shelf life.
Stormlight. It's a free (no human sacrifices!) resource, theoretically infinite in the long term if finite in the short, since refills depend on the weather. Convenient storage but perishable when stored. Power output significantly beyond Allomancy, though it lasts for a shorter time then even pewter. Also taken orally, strangely enough. So far, it is also the only magic system outside Elantris' planet that has teleporting, though we don't know yet exactly how much power that consumes. Significantly less than one human sacrifice, though.
Am I missing anything in this little list of comparative energy storage? Besides White Sand, I mean. I haven't read it yet, so I'm not including it due to lack of familiarity.
edited 16th Oct '16 6:45:13 PM by SCMof2814
Absolutely no relation to NLK
Feruchemy/Hemalurgy? There's also the theory that duralumin burns so quick because it does a compund effect of burning itself exponentially as well as the target metal.
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
Oh, right! Well, Feruchemy has perfect shelf life, but power output of almost zero, since it merely lets you horde something you'd normally be constantly using. Hemulergy... We haven't exactly been shown the correlation between hemulurgic charge and effectiveness. I'm still a bit iffy on HOW you get a hemulurgic charge. I have the vague sense you need to use the metal in question to kill someone when it's on Roshar while passing it through a specific point in the body.
A horrified part of my mind is wondering about the interplanetary economics of someone exporting breaths from Warbreaker, and Hemalurgically charged metal off Scadrial.
Huh... That's something to watch out for in future: Someone on Roshar owning Hemalurgical metal or identity-broken metalminds. Have we seen anyone wearing jewelry made of Metallic Art metals? Anyone with significantly mentioned piercings?
Absolutely no relation to NLK
Wit?
Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.
We already know he's has allomancy.
Plus there's WoB that he doesn't have any Hemalurgic spikes because he doesn't want to leave himself open to external influences in that manner. Oh, and he also has Feruchemy, though I was kind of under the impression that he might have some kind of weird, pre-Shattering, Yolish version of it rather than actual Scadrian Feruchemy.
As far as I'm aware, the only explanation we've been given about Breath not leaking like stormlight is that Breath is just an inherently more 'sticky' form of investiture. I guess that makes sense, since a Breath is part of a person's soul, whereas Stormlight is just, uh... loose investiture left to do it's own thing? Not typically attached to any particular intelligences? Then again, if that's the case, then the Dor on Sel should also be less sticky. Hmm.
And as for the acquisition of a Hemalurgic charge, the bind points (and as the name implies, blood) are the essential parts to that. The charge comes from the spike tearing off a part of the target's spiritual aspect. And that power decays until the spike is coated in blood or placed in someone else.
edited 16th Oct '16 11:25:57 PM by RenegadeShroom
World's Cutest Direwolf
That one's got two magic systems, Forging and Bloodsealing. Forging lets you change the characteristics of objects - including souls, which lets you alter people - by altering their backstory. You could improve your shitty car by having its past owners not treat it like crap, or make yourself more knowledgeable by changing your own backstory so that you finished college instead of dropping out to learn Forging. (This only affects the object being Forged; if you're arrested for Forgery you can't use the finished-college stamp on yourself to be out of jail because your scholar-self wouldn't break the law or anything like that.) How long the changes last is dependent on how plausible the backstory is.
Bloodsealing isn't gone into as much, and the main use of it seen in the novella is keeping a prisoner from leaving her room. For that, you need to refresh the seal every day with some fresh blood from the prisoner.
For White Sands, to do sand mastery the sand needs to be titularly white, which takes exposure from the sun. There's no real way to tell if it decays, since Taldain does not have your Earth solar cycle where the sun ever sets. Maybe if someone takes some sand back to Darkside...
To me, spren gender being related to the surgebinder's sexuality doesn't make any sense. I don't see how those two things could even be connected. Plus, that would be kinda screwy when it comes to bisexual/pansexual and asexual surgebinders' spren, no? Like, that could just be written off as ignorance of sexuality on the author's part, but Brandon is pretty clearly aware of bisexuality as a Thing, and he deliberately wrote Listeners as an asexual species, so he has to have accounted for these things. Spren seem to have their own gender which they had before their current surgebinders, after all.
edited 28th Sep '16 10:57:15 AM by RenegadeShroom