Talk:Hemalurgy

Death Requirement

In the Mechanics section, I believe the contradiction between the WoB in source 12 and the quote from the Hero of Ages indicates that the person being spiked doesn't necessarily have to die, but rather that's always historically been the result and Harmony is misinformed (or generalizing, or misleading on purpose). In this WoB, Brandon indicates that a person would need to be healed after being spiked in order to remove the spike safely, as it's holding their spiritweb together at that point. So in essence: unless a specific effort is made to keep the spiked person alive they die once the spike is charged and removed, and that's what Harmony is referencing; however, if a person were to be healed before the spike was taken out, they would survive but as a very different person. Presumably with a scarred/incomplete/tattered but functional spiritweb.

Not sure if this is enough to rewrite the paragraph, but it would explain the apparent conflict between the WoB and book. I know that WoBs aren't necessarily canon, but the fact that Brandon confirmed twice that a person could live after being spiked seems meaningful.

--Magykmancer (talk) 21:07, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I think getting into how a person could possibly survive being spiked isn't really suited for the Coppermind, but the way the paragraph was written wasn't really appropriate either, since we keep to an in-world tone (i.e., avoid making reference to out-of-world things like book titles), so I've reworded it in a way that also presents it as more of an unknown, which I think is more in keeping with how we generally handle things like this.

--Stargazer (talk) 05:18, 5 November 2022 (UTC)