u/bredman3370

Renarin is a Truthwatcher - this name makes excellent sense as a name for his abilities, particularly the ability to see possible futures (presumably by tapping Odium's access to Fortune). However, Renarin is presumably the first of his type, having bonded an enlightened/corrupted spren. Other truthwatchers simply have access to Illumination and Progression in the ways other radiants do.

Is this just a convenient fictional convenience? Giving the order an apt name for our main truthwatcher rep Renarin even though his abilities don't match those of others of his order? Or is there a better in-canon explanation for the origin of the order's name. I can't think of another order who's name sticks out so much, except maybe the willshapers.

I've got some questions regarding shadesmar that I'm not 100% sure have been addressed but have always bothered me.

I'll start with 2 assumptions I've made, though I expect one of these to be a little bit wrong -

Assumption 1 - Shadesmar is 2-dimensional in the macro sense. (Edit. Aka it is flat). This one is pretty inarguable as it's directly stated a few times, but it has some weird implications when considering the following:

Assumption 2 - you can physically map points from the physical realm to the cognitive realm and vice versa. Distances don't have to agree, but there is a 1:1 correspondence of locations, and that correspondence is continuous.

Assumption 2 may not be immediately obvious why I would assume it, so here is why I would first presume it true - we know definitely that there *are* individual locations with 1 to 1 correspondence - perpendicularities and oathgates. On the macro scale we also see the inversion of features - oceans and rivers become solid, land becomes the sea. Cities in the physical correspond with locations in shadesmar. I don't see a good reason we should assume this correspondence breaks as we zoom in to smaller and smaller scales, in fact the floating flames that represent souls represent a micro version of this.

Here's me problem - mapping the locations in a 1-to-1 fashion is kinda impossible to do mathematically without breaking the second assumption. In math we'd think of this as a projection and it's a well known problem with mapping the globe - how do you choose to project the 3D surface to 2D? Travel on a globe is continuous but the 2D world must have edges. How is the "center" chosen? How are the edges defined?

This is easier to handwave with Roshar than other planets due to it being a single continent, but most planets do not have a central location that most people would perceive as the center of everything.

Put another way - let's say you drew a map of the world where Alaska and Russia were on opposite sides of the map even though they closely border each other, and let's say Earth had a cognitive realm. What would happen to a theoretical elsecaller who travelled from Alaska to the cognitive realm vs one who took a boat 10 miles or so and did the same from Russia. Would they really end up on opposite sides of the map? Put another way, if you were watching the soul-flame of a traveler going across this imaginary border in shadesmar, would it just immediately teleport to the opposite side of the "world" in shadesmar? Mapping a 3D space onto 2D causes all sorts of these problems, and arbitrary borders like the one described would *have* to exist mathematically.

This gets even harder to think about when expanding from a globe to a star cluster as the cosmere is presumed to be - you're almost certainly going to end up with locations that are close together in the physical realm that get split apart and put back together nonsensically in the cognitive realm.

The first obvious conclusion I come to is that assumption 2 is wrong - there is a loose 1:1 correspondence but not a concrete or a continuous one, and breaks do occur between them. I admit this feels a little unsatisfying, but I can't really see another way to square what we know.

Hopefully this made sense, it's been a bit since my college days so I'm sure my terminology is a bit wrong, but I hope I got the concept across for why those two assumptions are incompatible with each other.

Obviously I'm talking about Taln. I'm also specifically asking about the period of time in between the forming of the Oathpact and Aharietiam/shattering of the pact - I could have sworn I remembered a line from the prologue that stated that each of the heralds had at some point broken but Taln never had, which was part of why they took advantage of Taln being the only one to die since he had the best chance of sticking around the longest on Braize without immediately breaking like many of the others would.

I can't find any actual reference to this in the prologue though, so did I just make up that reasoning on my own? Was this really only confirmed by WOB up until WaT or was there an earlier reference in-text that I'm remembering?

My understanding of breaths from my last reading of Warbreaker was that they are a small bit of investiture bestowed upon every Nalthian by Endowment. The effects of this seem to be subtle, but seem to include most of the things that greater breaths bestow just in small amounts - life sense, color perception, possibly improved disease resistance, etc.

We also know that many people go about their life without a breath - the returned and the god king (at least in Hallendren) must be fed, and the breaths are worth enough that we hear frequently about how it is common to sell your breath, potentially to buy back later when you want it again. We can assume by this that being a drab can't be considered debilitating - we also meet Jewels who we are told by Denth would act exactly the same had she not been a drab.

Now I'm not about to say we should trust Denth on eventually for obvious reasons™, but on my first reading I was very inclined to believe him that losing ones breath is mostly just a minor inconvenience. However, then I read the annotations where Brandon explicitly says that the Idrian beliefs are actually much closer to the truth - that to give up your breath does in fact damage your soul, makes you much more susceptible to disease, more irritable, all those things.

I guess it just made more sense to me if breath was an extra thing added on top - hence why other worldhoppers can easily buy their own breaths. We are also encouraged to see breaths as fairly fungible, evidenced by the BEU units for investiture used in later books in the timeline, along with the ways breath is described in Warbreaker (they are never described as being unique or tied to individuals, they are more or less all equivalent). If it really is damaging to the soul to lose a breath, this almost seems like more of a hindrance than a gift. Does gaining a new breath repair that damage fully?

It also brings up other questions that I'm sure probably have answers but I don't remember them - are the heightenings fully unique to breaths, the same for all being who gain equivalent inherent investiture, or somewhere in the middle? The effects on color perception, perfect pitch, and particularly life sense - are these even gifts from endowment at all or are they just byproducts of investiture? Does the difference even matter?

Examples of what I'm talking about include the following -

Red vs Orange Habaneros

Yellow vs red Scotch bonnets

Red vs peach vs stripey Sugar Rush

Red vs Chocolate Reapers

I get how pepper breeding works, colors are determined by genetics and by crossing parents you can hope to get favorable combinations of those genetics (where possible). What I'm not fully getting is why the results of those crosses aren't considered as different types of peppers.

For example, let's say you made a new unique cross we'll call pepper P. Pepper P is red, has a cool shape to it, and you like it a lot and so start sharing it around. Now you decide you want to make pepper P, but a yellow version. You could cross P with some other yellow pepper in the hopes of creating a stable yellow offspring, but now can you still really call it pepper P? Is it not now a hybrid of P and the yellow parent, with equal genes from both?

I can think of some strategies off the top of my head if you wanted to try approximating the traits of Pepper P in it's resulting yellow crosses:

- You might choose a yellow parent with overall similar traits to Pepper P

- You might take the above strategy even further, *only* crossing P with other variants of P that already exist (like how there already exist many colors of habanero out there, you would only crossbreed existing varieties of habanero together to ensure the product of the cross is still a habanero

- You might back cross the resulting yellow offspring of a P x Yellow cross back with P to introduce more of the original P genes, therefore making the traits of the resulting cross more similar to the original P.

These strategies make more sense for the more common classes of pepper like jalepeno, habanero, cayenne, etc where many distinct sub-varieties(?) already exist within those classes, but they make less sense for the more novel and unique crosses created by enthusiasts. And how did all those sub-varieties come to be in the first place? They must have been the result of crosses themselves, is there any way to decide what even makes something a "true" habanero or jalepeno besides it having at least one parent that was called the same?

Is this really all there is to it? I guess what I struggle with is why for instance "Sugar Rush Red" and "Sugar Rush Stripey" both get to be called Sugar Rush - shouldnt the crosses made to create those different colors also have introduced new traits? Why is it still called Sugar Rush then? Is it just up to whoever made the crosses in the first place and there actually is no guarantee that a yellow vs orange vs red variety of the same pepper will be anything like each other besides vague appearances?

I'll start off the bat I'm not trying to be adversarial, and there's a lot of how Brandon handles the community and fandom aspect of his work which I really appreciate. Sometimes though I wish he were just a little less willing to reveal glances behind the curtain, as it were.

When it comes to literary analysis I've always called closer to the side of "death of the author." Author commentary is often revealing and fascinating, but in the end audience is what remains and works should stand on their own merits (obviously this is an opinion of mine if it needs to be stated, but also one I stand by pretty firmly).

This also ties in to a lot of my thoughts on "lore" - I don't give a rats ass how cool the magic system is or the history of the god or any of that works if those things aren't secondary to telling a good story. Thankfully, Brandon is generally pretty good at this. He's quite open about how he writes his magic in order to create interesting problems for characters to solve, etc. But, this is where Word of Brandon starts to become an issue for me - sure its cool to have an idea of the history of the cosmere, to know most of the identities of the shards and which gods govern which planets, and to know the ins and outs of the mechanics of investiture and the various invested arts. BUT - why am I more often than not finding out about this in places other than the stories themselves?

It's not that the world building is handled poorly in-universe during the process of reading the books - as a rule it's generally handled very well! But once I've read the book and then start reading subreddits and whatnot, more often than not the source of the material of discussion is not the books themselves, but rather the "word of Brandon."

And it's not *just* a personal taste thing, it has real impacts on my experiences with reading his books, especially recently. It's much more satisfying to make connections and theories on my own or with the community vs just having them confirmed because Brandon said so. Taln turning out to have not been broken, appearances of Hoid in books where he wasn't as heavily featured, identities of potential sleepless, kandra, and lesser powered worldhoppers out and about in the cosmere. These things just feel so much less impactful to me to read on a wiki somewhere that Brandon said "yup here's what's going on" than to participate in communal theorizing and analysis and coming up with those ideas and connections independently.

I'm aware a lot of this is just a "me problem" - I seem to be surrounded on all sides of my life by loreheads, minmaxers, and powerscalers, and far be it from me to tell people they are enjoying media the wrong way - obviously there are people out there who find this sort of thing engaging. Some days I even myself in the same camp from time to time. I'm curious though if anyone else here feels these same frustrations as me, and wishes there were just a *little* more effort put into maintaining the wall between the author and their creative works.

I'm thinking of trying to graft some citrus types together to save space in my garden and because it sounds like a fun project, and in most of the videos I've seen of people grafting citrus they tend to make the joint closer to the perimeter of the (usually much thicker) rootstock vs in the center.

My intuition says a joint closer to the center of each variety would result in a stronger joint, but im not so sure that intuition is good. Is it about exposing more cambium layer between the two plants? The cambium to my knowledge is closer to the edge than the middle so this makes some sense to me, but I'm not sure about the logic.

If anyone has any good resources comparing the types of grafts and good rules for citrus grafting in general that would be appreciated!

This is apparently a highly regarded and delicious fruit from Japan with tangerine/orange heritage, but I can find almost no information about growing it in America. Is it export controlled in some way or just not very heard of out here? I can find one website claiming to sell trees (hardtofindtrees.com) but I've seen mixed reviews online of the site so I'm not sure how legit it is.

Obviously *some* degree of hardening off is required, but I swear people give their plants more attention than they would they own children with the schedules I've seen. 2 weeks of every day taking things inside and outside with increasing duration?

I just put my starters on my shaded porch for 1-2 days, and then maybe I give it another day if it's lucky in a slightly more sunny spot before it ends up in its forever home. No sun damage to be seen on any of my peppers or tomatoes, though maybe slight sun scalding on my passionfruit funnily enough.

Anyone else have supporting evidence for the "don't overthink it" school of hardening off your plants?