Ooohhhhhh My God The One Of Husks Not Believing Kaladin Could Have Possibly Not Used Any Stormlight.

Wayne looks like Junkrat send post

Eeeeeee!!!!! She’s doing the awakened cloak thing to wrap around and strengthen herself!!! Heck yeah heck yeah so COOL!!!!

Oh that’s Vivenna.

.

.

.

Okay Googled her to see what she looked like again and got confirmation on accident lmfao. Hellllllll yes, so she managed to awaken a sword fully? Proud of her! Suuuuper curious what her command was!!! Aaaaa this is so exciting.

Rhythm of War/Mistborn Era One Spoilers

I- wait. Is. Is the Shard in the Interludes. Is that. Is that fuckin SAZED.

Ahhhh, Nightblood, it’s been a bit since I’ve read Warbreaker. I’ve missed you, buddy. The absolute lunatic that you are.

Oh that’s Vivenna.

.

.

.

Okay Googled her to see what she looked like again and got confirmation on accident lmfao. Hellllllll yes, so she managed to awaken a sword fully? Proud of her! Suuuuper curious what her command was!!! Aaaaa this is so exciting.

BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA I FORGOT HE TOTALLY ATE SHIT THE FIRST TIME HE TRIED TO USE HIS RADIANT POWERS AHAHAHAHAH

your heart is a muscle the size of a rat

Mistborn Era 2/Stormlight spoilers

Just gonna go out on a limb here, but I think the big bad organization Wax’s uncle is working with is preparing for some sort of Cosmic war thing. The things they are doing are utterly reprehensible and the only way I can fathom them doing it with a good conscience is believing it’s for the “greater good”. So with the knowledge that the government is… well, made of these men, and Harmony isn’t corrupt, the only thing big enough to make this make sense (obviously to a demented, immoral mind) would be an out-of-world threat like Odium or another Shard.

I imagine their justification is something like “You see what you did to that building, Wax? With these children we can selectively breed allomancers and feruchemists of whichever type we want, then combine their powers with Hemalurgy to create impossibly powerful soldiers. Imagine an army of 100 Miles Hundredlives! We’d be unstoppable.” With knowledge of hemalurgy and compounding and all that, I imagine they’d independently arrive at the concept of making another Lord Ruler, which like… would be extremely difficult to deal with for anyone we’ve seen in the Cosmere. But yeah, they’d feel they were doing the right thing, “making the hard choice for the greater good”

Then Wax would be all like “but the cost in lives is ridiculous! This is not worth it, man, can’t you see that?” Blahblahblah blah. This is a stretch, so I’d not be surprised if it’s something totally unrelated, but a lot of Rhythm of War is spent ranting about an impending God War, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately: Cradle

Fundamentally, every work of art, every story, is an attempt at communication. The author chooses to ask us a question, and we find the answer in the dialogue between the author and ourselves.

Cradle is a series that asks the question “If one dude did magic kung-fu to another dude so hard he exploded, would that be sick or what?”

And we, the readers, answer “Absolutely the FUCK yes.”

Cradle is a world where everybody has the capacity to practice the Sacred Arts, which are primarily the discipline of using mystical energy to be as bullshit awesome as possible. You aren’t allowed to be a major character in this series until you have committed at least one (1) act that would look sweet as hell if it was airbrushed onto the side of a stoner’s van. 

At one point we meet a member of a king’s landscaping staff. Her job is to mow the lawn, trim the hedges, and keep those damn slugs out of the vegetable garden. She can also command trees to rip you apart and devour your life force for herself, because fuck you, it’s Cradle. People just do that here. 

The main character is a young man by the name of Wei Shi Lindon, who has a natural deficiency that makes him extremely weak in the Sacred Arts, and is therefore banned from studying them. He responds “respectfully, no” and proceeds to spend the following ten books learning Sacred Arts and punching everything. 

It’s a little rough around the edges, but I had fun reading it and the author clearly had fun writing it, so I think it succeeds as a series. Would absolutely recommend if you just want to have a good time reading something. 

(Naturally, I got deeply attached to the biggest bastard in the main cast, because he’s hilarious. This man is a bitch and I like him so much.) 

As a delightful bonus, unlike most action series, the treatment of the female characters is genuinely excellent. The author is not here for fanservice, he is here for FIGHTSERVICE, which is when EVERYONE FIGHTS SO HARD THE LAWS OF PHYSICS GIVE UP. We’re ten books in to a twelve book series and I have yet to see a single woman’s boobs described on-page. 

In Cradle, when a teenage girl is worried about her body changing, what she means is that she’s unsatisfied with the amount of swords she can use at one time, so she’s going to grow six extra arms to hold six extra swords. Surprise! THE NEW ARMS ARE ALSO SWORDS, because the time spent picking up a sword to fight with it is time you didn’t spend swordfighting, and that is unacceptable to her. Now she and her eight swords are going to suplex a dragon, because on Cradle we know no gender politics, only THE BLADE.

Also, there’s a turtle.

I adore the way Stormlight handles war. Everyone believes earnestly that what they do is right. Fervently correct. They would and do die for their beliefs. The Listeners were correct to kill Gavilar, but the Alethi were correct to seek retaliation as well. It captures the experience of conflict better than most media I’ve ever seen.