Mistborn Liveblog 17

Chapter 16

I've been thinking recently about urgency in stories. It goes along the same lines as the risk of danger, but it's the sense of a ticking clock, like at the end of '24'. It's an important element to make a story interesting-- the idea that if things take too long, all is lost anyway. Urgency creates a separate condition for the heroes of the story to lose the battle. Sure, we know they could all die or they could not perform well and their plans would fail. Those are good reasons, but the idea of urgency puts an additional pressure to make sure things get done quickly.

On to the more specifics (spoilers):

So far, Brandon hasn't done much with urgency. Sure, the heist is planned for a vague "one year" in the future, but the deadline hasn't been mentioned since. The skaa have been in stages of rebellion for nearly a thousand years, so it almost feels like if this plan fails, they'll just wait for the next plan to come up. There's very little "point of no return" yet. I'm hoping there will be. Urgency is the thing that's missing for me right now.

I mean, Vin is recovering. It's taking her some time, which works for the story. But she was out for several weeks, and no one seems to care about the effect that has on the timeline. There's some pressure in the rumors of her condition among the nobles, but that's it. I don't know exactly hoe many months are left before the deadline they originally set, but I get the impression that we're down to like 4 or 5 months. I can't tell if that's plenty of time or very little. I don't know if they're on track for training the soldiers and other preparations.

I hope at some point the deadline will start creeping up, the pressure of completing things on time will start to get at the people. Personally, though, I doubt the heist will happen on the sceduled day. I'm thinking some kind of circumstance will occur that will bump the date. It's my guess that it'll get bumped up by a week or two and the last-minute scrambling will be a good story element.

Vin gets a small chance to ask Sazed about his powers. He deflects it, saying that he burns metals to create memories-- or something like that. Its an interesting aside for Allomancy, and I wish he'd have said more, but with Vin in her weakened state, it makes a lot of sense for him to put her off until she's stronger. It makes me wonder what metals he burns, or if the process is really that similar. Also, perhaps the eleventh metal isn't really useful for Kelsier to burn, but does something really great when Sazed does it. Not likely, I realize, but it could be an interesting turn of events. Or maybe Vin has some Keeper blood in her as well-- that would explain the Inquisitors focusing on her over Kelsier.

More tomorrow. Happy reading.

Jameson