Brandon Sanderson

Didn't Elend also mercilessly behead one of his own friends for causing the whole Koloss situation? Even though his friend was clearly traumatized from trying to follow Elend's own naive model for creating an ideal world and was all but trapped by the Koloss himself.

I don't think his friend was a saint or anything. He probably did deserve death. He was responsible for a lot of what happened, but for Elend to callously slaughter him without a single note of compassion while also defending the Lord Ruler feels really wrong.

Edited by GNinja on Apr 9th 2020 at 6:17:08 PM

That's why Elend was empathizing with the Lord Ruler — because he, as emperor, had to do distasteful, morally ambiguous things for the sake of expediency in order to hold the empire together and thus be able to use its combined power to address bigger problems (like the end of the world). The scale isn't nearly the same (Elend had to kill one dude who maybe didn't deserve it, the Lord Ruler created a civilization of horrific oppression that lasted a thousand years), but the ultimate motivation is, which is what Elend is sympathizing with.

I know some people speculate Hoid might end up being a villain but it seems to me, as I reread Mistborn, that he was the only good one of the group that killed the God and split it up.

They were all arrogant fools who thought that it be a grand idea to combine a limited concept with unfathomable power I brought up Sprenn and DA Spirits earlier on but Shards are even worse. What do you think will happen when your entire being is nothing but Hatred or Ruin? Even Harmony, a combination of Preservation and Ruin, is impotent and doubly bound. There is no way for a human to wield a Shard correctly because it's a goddam shard, a piece, a fragment, a thing that is incomplete and flawed.

No, I don't know how Hoid's powers work or if it's explained anywhere. He seems to indicate he has no control over some of said powers. But he still seems like the only smart one of the original group.

Assuming the breaking of Adonalsium was a unique event, odds are no one involved really new what picking up a Shard would do until after they'd already done it.

We don´t know enough yet to make a judgement about the original 16 and their allies. Khriss said that their were a diverse bunch with equally diverse motivations, but of course her judgement comes from sources which were milenia old.

I think Adonalsium did something which the Shatterers (yes that is what i will call all beings involved in the Shattering [except Adonalsium because of course] from now on) could not tolerate, my money is the humans, dragons and other species were only His test run of the cosmere and when he was happy with how everything worked he wanted to wipe out all beings and seed His universe with a new species, so that everything would be as He imagined it. Shattering Him was a desperation move and taking up the Shards was done as a sacrifice and not a ticket to godhood. Investiture left alone will develop sentience of its own. So what is better a mortal vessel giving the concept of Ruin or Hatred at least a little context and direction or sentient Ruin which knows absolutly nothing but itself?

Also I don't understand how Preservation broke his pact with Ruin. That is explicitly supposed to be something the Shards can't do. They wield godlike power but they are bound by promises and oaths.

He did not break his pact, he inserted a loophole to be exploited later into the pact from the start.

That's not the way Harmony describes it:

"This, then, was their bargain. Preservation got mankind, the only creations that had more Preservation than Ruin in them, rather than a balance. Independent life that could think and feel. In exchange, Ruin was given a promise—and proof—that he could bring an end to all they had created together. It was the pact.

And Preservation eventually broke it.

By sacrificing most of his consciousness, Preservation created Ruin's prison, breaking their deal and trying to keep Ruin from destroying what they had created. This event left their powers again nearly balanced—Ruin imprisoned, only a trace of himself capable of leaking out. Preservation reduced to a mere wisp of what he once was, barely capable of thought and action."

And this is how Preservation describes it: "I was able to trick Ruin before, lock him away, by fooling him with our agreement. But that wasn´t a breach of contract, more leaving a hole in the Agreement to be exploited. This time there are no holes."

My guess is their pact was the Leras (as in the conciousness of the Shard) wouldn´t prevent Ruin from destroying mankind. By giving up his conciousness the Shard itself prevented the destruction without the involvement of Leras.

Edited by Samaldin on Apr 10th 2020 at 9:59:48 PM

We're never told the Exact Words of Ruin and Preservation's agreement, what was explicitly promised and what was only implied.

One possible way Preservation made it work was by putting Ruin in a prison that it knew Ruin would eventually be able to subvert for its own ends. So it was still fulfilling the promise that eventually Ruin would get to destroy the world; just delaying it for a while and making Ruin very uncomfortable in the interim. Now, if some humans come along and jam Ruin back in its prison, or find a way to destroy it entirely? Well, by then Preservation has lost almost all conscious thought, so it can't really be responsible for anything that happens at that point.

Edited by RavenWilder on Apr 10th 2020 at 10:11:55 AM

I still think Preservation's nigh clairvoyant planning ability is more annoying than impressive.

It was clairvoyant planning ability not nigh-clairvoyant, of all the Shards we´ve seen so far Preservation seems to be the reigning champion of futuresight. But i´m wondering what exactly his plan even was on a step-by-step basis, or if his planning was more general.

When i think about it Preservations plan did most likely not go exactly as he had hoped (even if the endresult was what he wanted). Lets go all the way back to the start of the conflict between Ruin and Preservation. Preservations plan 1 was tricking Ruin and trapping him, to ensure Ruins continued imprisonment Preservation had to rely on the selfishness of humans or their corruptability to power (i´m actually seeing a kind of twisted parallel to Sauron and the one Ring). Ruin tried foiling plan 1 by getting a selfless and altruistic person in position to resist the coruption of power (we see Alendi and Vin). Now comes the interesting part in Preservations plan 2, getting a new person to take up his Shard so that they still have their human personality to be able to murder-suicide Ruin. This needed to be a person willing to sacrifice themself to protect humanity with a strong Connection to Preservation, but how could he be sure there would be such a person around? Easy, Ruin needed to cultivate exactly that type of person to ensure his release in the first place! But in Vins case Ruin prevented this by spiking her. Without Kelsiers involvement Ruin would have out-tought Preservation and won their contest! Of course we don´t know exactly how perfect Preservations futuresight was and he might have known Kelsier would save his plan, but i don´t think so. We will most likely never know if Kelsier actuall ysaved to plan or was part of it from the start, so every reader can choose their own interpretation.

As a sidenote: I see the problem with Vin being chosen by both Preservation and Ruin as a child already. Could be because of her being an incredibly strong Mistborn (ergo a strong Connection to Preservations from the start) putting her on the radar of both gods (a spiked Mistborn would always be something Ruin would be looking for). Now i would be interested to know if Ruin had also spiked Alendi...

Edited by Samaldin on Apr 11th 2020 at 2:34:48 PM

I guess I'm just curious about this then.

What does it add, narratively, thematically, conceptually, for Preservation's planning abilities to be that perfect?

It's up to interpretation, but I'm not sure why Sanderson would leave it up to that. I'm someone who would rather believe Preservation's planning wasn't perfect. I'm free to think that, true, but now and forever there'll always be this lingering doubt that, maybe, just maybe, Preservation's plan was always destined to work. And I don't understand what that adds to the story.

At best, it's completely neutral, at worst, it undermines the agency of every character in the entire series except for him.

Edited by GNinja on Apr 12th 2020 at 5:55:21 PM

That doubt is on you, nothing anyone can do about it. Preservations perfect planing ablity (which i don´t believe he had) gives a legitimate reason for the heros to win the conflict against Ruin. A God who can be the next best thing to omnipresent, read and change everything written down, has the largest army on the planet, and had milenia to prepare against some people with allomancy? Without something to equal the playing field i call bullshit on the heros winning, the best they would have been able to hope for was annoy him for a few years and even then not much. Why did the plan need to be left vague, because if the reader knows everything is going according to plan, there is no build up of tension and the book just drifts along.

I agree with you that a prophecy (which is perfect planning under a different name) robs most characters of their agency (which is the reason im debating with myself whether or not i should even start Wheel of Time...) but in the end i still think Preservation did not have the perfect plan. He had a general plan which relied on personality traits he could be reasonably sure would exist in central figures, but even that plan came so close to failing so often and was only saved by other people (best example Kelsier who Preservation tried to convince to go into the beyond, which would have fucked up everyone) that i find it highly unlikely to have been planed that way. But to make that completly clear Preservation would have needed to tell someone before he died, which would have been absolutly idiotic with the risk of Ruin listening in.

About your first paragraph, I don't think Preservation having some kind of plan was a problem at all. (I'm sorry if I gave off that impression) My problem is solely with the possibility that Preservation knew everything when he came up with it.

Of course the heroes needed something to even the fight against Ruin.

Edited by GNinja on Apr 13th 2020 at 8:05:24 AM

So it´s a general dislike of perfect futuresight (futuresight in a setting with destiny set in stone)? In that case i can think of one interaction which implied imperfection on Preservations futuresight "The ribbons of the future are never as useful as...as the should be,[...] I rode them much, in the past. It´s too hard to see what is actually likely, and what is just a fragile...fragile, distant maybe..." (Preservation to Kelsier). So in Preservations interpretation it seems there are no 100% certain events, only likely events and events that may be. At this point it just becomes the question whether certain events (e.g. Kelsier becoming a cognitive shadow) were likely events or or not (and even if they were their likelyhood of occuring would decrease the further one goes into the future just because of math)

Preservation didn't have perfect planning. The best he could arrange was a stalemate via the Lord Ruler, and even that was unreliable because it gave Ruin a thousand years to whisper in the Lord Ruler's ear. Then everything went to hell with first Vin killing the Lord Ruler and then releasing Ruin's power, neither of which was actually part of the original plan. It was only in the final act that they worked out how to salvage the situation, and that was more the protagonists' doing than Preservation's.

Vin was part of Preservation's plan, though. She was "chosen" by him somehow (we still don't know exactly how that worked), and Preservation's prophecy was carefully worded so that Sazed would get the right message even after Ruin's meddling.

In Secret History Preservation doesn't really remember the plan because he's been dying for centuries, but he says he's sure that there was a plan at some point.

Vin was chosen by Ruin — she was a mistborn, her sister was a seeker, and their mother was insane. This allowed Ruin to drive their mother to form a hemalurgic spike with the power of a seeker by killing the sister, and then give that spike (her earring) to Vin. With double the normal power, Vin could "hear" the Well of Eternity with her seeker senses, and left her open to Ruin's influence through hemalurgy.

As far as I'm aware, Preservation wasn't really taking Vin into account until after the Lord Ruler's death, which at that point mostly just meant making appearances as the mist spirit and trying to get her to use the power from the Well of Eternity rather than give it up.

Harmony says in an HOA epigraph:

"Vin was special. Preservation chose her from a very young age, as I have mentioned. I believe that he was grooming her to take his power. Yet, the mind of Preservation was very weak at that point, reduced only to the fragment that we knew as the mist spirit.

What made him choose this girl? Was it because she was a Mistborn? Was it because she had Snapped so early in life, coming to her powers even as she went through the pains of the unusually difficult labor her mother went through to bear her?"

As Sazed says, in the end, Vin was the most worthy to be Preservation. Ruin was just reacting to what Preservation had started into motion.

Edited by Nikkolas on Apr 13th 2020 at 3:56:59 AM

As Nik quotes, Preservation chose Vin. Ruin decided to interfere with this (it's not clear if he made her The Chosen One in the same way, or if that's even really a thing), accidentally allowing Preservation's plan to come to fruition.

Vin had a number of important roles to play, but one of the big ones was Red Herring. Ruin assumed she was intended as the final inheritor of Preservation's power, and so corrupted her to his own purposes. But she was only supposed to hold the power long enough to kill Ruin, and then leave both behind for Sazed.

I wouldn't say Vin is a Red Herring, per se. Because her role wasn't really to distract Ruin from noticing something else.

At least, not entirely.

Sazed wasn't going to become Harmony until Vin killed Ruin, which required her to become the new Preservation, and that step of the plan was thoroughly stymied until Marsh pulled out her earing. If Ruin hadn't noticed her, that wouldn't have happened.

Edited by GNinja on Apr 14th 2020 at 7:13:22 PM

It's interesting, my impression was always that the Mistborn Trilogy was much more popular than Era 2. That was what I was told by the various Sanderson fans who got me into his work, anyway.

Now I'm meeting some folks who say Era 2 is obviously much better written.

I know, people have different opinions, news at 11. Also Sanderson has indeed clearly gotten better as a writer as seen by TSA vs. Mistborn Trilogy.

But I dunno, writing quality or not, I find the characters and setting of Era 1 much more compelling. After this reread, The Final Empire is most assuredly my favorite Mistborn novel.

Questions of quality aside, you have to read Era 1 first. I guess you could read Era 2 first and get the gist, but you'd be missing a lot.

Particularly because the people in Era 2 having a distorted idea of what happened in Era 1 is one of the recurring elements.