Jackson Dickert
We learn [Yumi]'s repeated this day for 1700 years, and her memory is patched over by the father machine. If memory and Investiture are so closely tied together, is the father machine also taking her Investiture? How does that work, because she's such a highly Invested individual, it seems like if it could take any Investiture from her, it would take all of it, like the nightmares did.
Brandon Sanderson
When I play with this, with tweaking memory and things like that, my go-to in the cosmere, in the three cases where you've seen it happen, is that those excising memories have to be really, really careful, or the body will reject what you're doing. So, all three times you've seen it happen, it's been one little sliver of memory is getting changed. The father machine might even just be overwriting it each day, basically blanking that Investiture, but not stealing any of it. Vasher does pull a little bit out when he takes the memory, and the same thing happens with Wit when it happened to him. But I think the father machine's doing it in a slightly different way, and it has to be really careful, or it'll be too obvious, and the whole illusion, the facade, will collapse.
Jackson Dickert
There's a drama, and it has a hion sword in it. Is it just for the drama? Or can hion sword be real, please?
Brandon Sanderson
Uh... we'll make you one.
Jackson Dickert
What Awakened the father machine? Was it the same system that we've seen with Breaths? Or was it something else? If it is Breaths, how did some one who can use that magic system, how did they get here?
Brandon Sanderson
These all work on the same fundamental mechanics. You should not be looking for someone from outside to have done this.
Bethany Taylor
There's this scene where there was a nightmare, and Painter didn't have a paintbrush, and he just reached out to the side and a paintbrush appeared, and there was a flash of light. I need details, 'cause that seems so much like a Shardblade!
Brandon Sanderson
This is also working under the exact same mechanics, so yes, Investiture that he is Connected to is indeed being manifest as something physical.
Questioner
So was the parallel to AI art - which has of course created a storm over the last year or so - intentional in this book with the scholars and their father machine that was built to stack rocks?
Brandon
So it's really interesting having written this years before this became a really big deal.
This was here, though. People were talking about what is art, what's the nature of mass producing art - people have talked about that since, y'know, the days that art began.
And indeed - can AI create art, what is art - you know, there's the famous monkey photo where the monkey took a picture of itself, is this art?
All of that has all been there in my brain and I think what's emerged as we've all started talking about it in the last year happened because it hit kind of a critical mass where suddenly we, number one had all these programs get released, but it's a thing that I think has been building for many, many years.
And so it was there in my head, it just wasn't as focused as it is now. But it was definitely something I was thinking about- what makes art, art - and I think human connection is an essential part of what makes art, art, and that came out deliberately in the story. Not that I sat down to write the story about that, but as I was writing it that became a theme, and so I gave voice to some of those thoughts.
Questioner 1
So Brandon, did you originally want to do complete body swap, or did you have this idea from the very beginning?
Questioner 2
Yeah, body swap with the ghosts next to each other. Because they end up working slightly differently.
Brandon
So, the idea for this was always to be able to have them see each other as themselves. I love Your Name, it's an amazing film, but I didn't want to just make Your Name again, right? And if there's a place that Your Name didn't explore, it's the interactions between these two characters as they live one another's lives.
Watching someone else live your life is really interesting! And this is something that many of my models hadn't really done. And so from the get-go, they would see each other as themselves, but everyone else would see the body and what was happening with the body. And it was designed this way from the get-go to let me have that romance of the two people interacting, but also to force them to watch the other one in the context of their life, which is kind of how both of them grow, right?
Like, Yumi watches Painter have to deal with all the stuff that's going on with Liyun and everything like that, and that helps her change - seeing someone else go through it. He has to watch his friends interact with Yumi, and really start to see life through their eyes so that he can grow beyond his hang-ups. And without them being able to do that, I couldn't have had the character growth in the way that I wanted.
The version Emily read got really confusing at the ending, and I did a lot of tweaks to play with that. The beat-by-beat of what actually happened in the story was pretty similar. This was one where the first draft and the last draft match pretty well, it's just how to execute on my ideas a little bit better to make sure that it was making sense.
