Brandon Sanderson/Cosmere Thread!

THAT IS EVEN BETTER

 

im screaming i looked up brandon sanderson on ao3 and a group made a bunch of "i lik the bred" inspired poems for the cosmere

"Inspired bi
Our favrite toems
we start to write
So many pomes

We went to war
Cosmere's the theem
Wyth crafti wurds
We mayke the meme"

spoilers for like all the books though (each chapter seems to cover one book) i would paste my faves but they are all my faves

 

i realized nightblood didnt get a poem and so:

Spoiler: warbreaker spoiler

destruy evil
is my comand
and here i am
in vasher's hand
i send men
to certayn deth
he draws my blade
i take his breth

 

God dammit Yeden you stupid piece of shit.

Also on part four of the book now. Will probably start carrying around the second book in my bag tomorrow. Just in case I get through Mistborn while I'm out and about.

 

I recently saw an article about hair dye that changes colour according to your surroundings, I think it was by temperature. So Full Idris hair could be possible one day, I think.

 

GIMME

 

Here's an article about it.

 

But does it give you the ability to just chop it off and regrow the whole mess from scratch instantly? Because that's the Royal Locks power I want. :::PPP

 

Ok so I am on the last 150 pages or so of Mistborn and as I continue to close that gap I realize something: Luthadel doesn't feel like a city to me. It feels like some sort of vague location in which plot happens as opposed to a living breathing entity in its own right. It's just kind of a stage as opposed to a character in its own right. Also, I've no idea what it looks like or how its laid out? I guess there's the map but I'm fuck awful at those. I am somewhat disappointed. Or more than somewhat really since this continues to bother me.

Tai-tastigon from the first Kencyrath book remains my favorite setting in that series and one of my favorite just in general. This is due to Tai-tastigon feeling like an actual city. The city itself is something of a character and Hodgell took pains to describe it. It has a Boston-esque feel to how the city is laid out and how it developed and I could sit down and draw you a basic layout of the place. Here's Judgment Square, here's the Puzzlebox/Temple District, here's Penari's Lair and so on and so forth. A lot of work wasn't just spent describing things that Jame saw, but also how Jame got to these places. Some of which she traveled to via multiple paths. Tai-tastigon is kind of a fucking mess in terms of its streets but you do have a sense of how exactly Jame is getting to the places she does. There's also the city culture. Tastigon culture is very urban in how it works and we get to see a lot of it. Which makes sense given that the focus of the book was Jame playing anthropologist and detective in the city. The author didn't just have time to waste on that, she absolutely had to do it or the story wouldn't work. Hodgell also described things like the sewage system, which is just kind of a nice bonus to me. The end result is a city that has a very real feel to it to me. Like it is its own distinct and horrifying form of life, filled with countless other lives within it.

Luthadel just kind of lacks that feeling to me. It's not really the center of the story as Tai-tastigon was, but at the same time I can't help but feel very let down by this fact. My favorite bits of Ulysses and The Big Sleep, or one of them anyway, is how they capture the essence of Dublin and L.A. of the time period. They feel like cities and like ones you can see. You can in fact take both those books and actually go on "tours" of the city by following the flow of events in the book due to stores and street names. It's actually something of a thing with Ulysses and some of Joyce's other words. I'm not sure of Chandler, but let's face it there probably is. There's hundreds of thousands of tours in L.A. That's just how that city works now. People going on pilgrimages to it. That feel means a lot to me and to have found it in God Stalk with a city that doesn't even exist was wonderful.

I will just stare sadly at the Luthadel map and think of what could have been. Clearly my frustration with this will be the answer to what Mistbornyrath needs to focus on.

 

JAME IS GOING TO LEARN THE WONDERS OF THE LUTHADEL SEWAGE SYSTEM GOD DAMMIT.

 

And the eternal question of "how much of a pain is it to keep the canals flowing with tons and tons of ash dumped in them every day."

 

Clearly this will play into her learning about some sort of corruption somewhere entirely by fucking accident.

 

(There are canonically specialized microbes that break down the ash, but they work slowly enough that there's still going to be heaps of it if anyone's been clearing the streets and buildings at all, which they at least would in the richer areas, and unless there are laws against it, the most efficient method of waste disposal would be "dump it in a canal." The other most likely possibility would be that there are dump sites where there are gigantic, steadily-replenished heaps of ash- probably either outside the city walls or on the edge of slums, where the rich people don't have to look at it. Human waste and garbage could also end up in either of those places, but ash would be the biggest component, and would shape where all the rest of the waste went. I don't think there's any indication that there's an enclosed underground sewage network, so my guess is there's a pretty major system of street cleaners and night soil men and in the slums a lot of it ends up in the street.)

 

she'll find corruption in there somehow

those microbes look fucking suspicious

 

Hey, I mean, you need a big government bureaucracy to run that garbage service, who knows what corruption and embezzlement and whatnot could be happening there because the obligator in charge of that department got the job via political cronyism and doesn't want to risk getting his expensive shoes dirty?

 

exactly

Tori meanwhile can whine about having to wine and dine so much due to being a noble. And just whine a lot in general. Why aren't you dead Jame I thought dad killed you. Why am I always so heckled. Why do people keep trying to kill me. Why does Burr try to force me to do shit. WHY JAME ARE YOU HERE.

it is his super power

Away from that, feruchemy is neato. I also like how Vin is just like let me eat your shit Sazed we have to science.

 

(And I mean, it's not like the Lord Ruler really gives a damn about the day-to-day functional governance of the country. Doesn't matter to him if the streets are full of poop as long as he gets to sit around doing whatever the hell he does in Kredik Shaw and everyone else has something to do. He has successfully produced a system where he can spend all his time spinning in circles on his swivel chair while everyone fights among themselves and he still stays neatly at the top of the heap, and that's all he cares about here.)

 

I still love that Vin's assessment on him is "He sounds like a whiny fucking baby".

 

That's actually even funnier with spoilers.

Spoiler: End of book spoilers

Spoiler

'cause I'm pretty sure he'd 100% agree with her opinion of Alendi.

 

re: "what do they do with the ash"

As a lowly Reckoners fan, lurking on the periphery of the vast Empire of Sanderson, I feel compelled to point out that he turned the entire city of Chicago into an undifferentiated mass of steel and he didn't really explain the logistics of that either.

(I don't mean any disrespect to Sanderson, but it seems that his interest in creating cool, dramatic imagery in his settings may outweigh his interest in working out the nitty-gritty details.)