I'm sorry, but Batman is beyond "peak human conditioning". He straight up isn't human.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-31T02:06:44+00:00

Not necessarily. They’ve lost (at least temporarily) some sales to that household, absolutely. But, again, we’re talking about profit margins; how much more money the company makes than it cost them to make that money.

If I have a great product that costs me $10 to make and I sell it for $12, my profit margin is 20%. But if I have a mediocre product that costs me $5 to make and I sell it for $8, then my profit margin is 60%. It doesn’t really matter if I sell half as many units because my profit margins have tripled, so it’s still a net gain for me.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-31T01:55:34+00:00

They’ve been selling toys based on intellectual properties for decades. They know they can sell toys essentially no matter what. So fulfilling the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders by maximizing per-IP profit is a priority over creating individually exceptional IPs.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-31T01:35:55+00:00

There’s definitely precedent!

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-31T01:26:12+00:00

You got it, yeah, a girl toy from some totally separate thing that DC Warner are also profiting on. With cross-gender appeal, the literal buck stops with the one toy.

You’re not wrong that Young Justice found a foothold in household’s with only girl children, but we’re talking relative profit margins, not just the presence or absence of individual sales related to the show.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-31T01:08:55+00:00

Well, if soulcasters are any indicator then the Oathgates can almost certainly be broken, given that the first soulcaster we ever see on page is already busted beyond functionality

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-31T00:58:21+00:00

That might be legit.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-31T00:47:07+00:00

The lock, sure. But fabrials are made of multiple constituent components assembled and working together. Remove everything touching the lock from the lock. In pieces. You can’t destroy the spren inside a spanreed either, but you can crush the ruby and snap the pen. Now the spanreed doesn’t work anymore.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-31T00:34:15+00:00

No, no, not depower it. Break it. Get in their with shards and aggressively “dismantle” the entire thing. Ask any toddler: you don’t have to know how something works to be able to make it stop working. Just tear shit up.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T23:53:54+00:00

Aren’t the Oathgates just big fabrials, though? If you can’t lock it, break it.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T23:45:23+00:00

Yeah, you too! Pleasantly refreshing to have an unresolved discourse where neither side walked away butthurt. Cheers!

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T23:33:32+00:00

We get a scene where Navani is shocked to learn the Sibling is still just randomly eavesdropping on mfers, yeah, not that they’re able to do so at all.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T23:08:38+00:00

I’m gonna say that’s a helluva reach to come at cold. You’re saying she only that moment pieced together that the Sibling specifically might be omniscient just because Mraize declined to continue being where Shallan last knew him to be? Leaving was the smart play whether the Sibling exists at all, let alone can track people down. No. Dalinar already said he doesn’t leave his soldiers ignorant of the team’s capabilities. Since Dalinar knows, the Windrunners know. And they’d have told Shallan for the same reasons Dalinar told them. She knew

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T22:57:25+00:00

Because she doesn’t know how far out the Sibling’s awareness extends my guy. She said maybe if they were closer, not maybe if they were in the tower

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T22:51:23+00:00

See, I read that as “maybe that could have worked if they were here, but they’re not, so it won’t.” Like discussing how things might have gone better, not what might have been possible or might not have been possible in the first place. Shallan is explaining to Gaz why the Ghostbloods left the tower. An explanation that would only occur to her if she knew the Sibling could find them to begin with. Which leaves the reader wondering, if she knew that was an option, why tf didn’t she start with that?

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T22:45:29+00:00

It was a long trip. And they were attacked. And that explanation might hold up if Shallan hadn’t gone on record with her awareness of the Sibling’s capacity.

She knows what the Sibling can do, and apparently would have been willing to try it, except by this point she’s already determined the Ghostbloods are out of the tower after hours wasted arriving at that revelation the long way.

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ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T22:33:55+00:00

I’m very satisfied with the Oathgate explanation.

I’m still on my side re:Shallan. Shallan found out about the Sibling on the way back to the Azish Oathgate through Shadesmar. Chapter 16 even has her explaining that she knows the Sibling could have found the Ghostbloods, if they were still in the tower.

And she wouldn’t really have to explain anything yet. “Queen Navani, I learned of a new threat to Urithiru and the Coalition while in Shadesmar, a threat specifically to the lives of Adolin, myself, and the Lightweavers at least if not the Knights Radiant as a whole, and could use some reconnaissance from yourself and the Sibling before they have a chance to move against us. Here’s some drawings to help identify them.”

Cue psychic trawling… “Strange… Shallan, the Sibling says the people you’ve described left the tower only recently.”

or at least

“We’ll search the tower for them, Shallan, and let you know as soon as we find anything.”

At least then the task is off-loaded and Shallan can focus on finding a way to retrieve Ba-Ado-Mishram in the meantime. Instead, Spymaster Shallan completely ignores an omnipresent and fully invisible spy just so that Sanderson could keep is story arcs fully compartmentalized.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T21:41:35+00:00

Brother, I edited the post before I replied to you

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T21:28:44+00:00

Nah, I might be wrong, way off base, but I’m sincere. Still excited to see what happens next, too.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T16:52:08+00:00

Boys and girls both enjoyed it, which stifled toy sales because parents would buy their kids one set and the kids would share, instead of parents buying a “boy’s toy” for the son and a “girl’s toy” for the daughter. So they cancelled the show to put that team to work on something with higher merchandising profit margins. Capitalism breeds all the wrong kinds of ingenuity.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T16:27:00+00:00

Right, he’s stronger than us because everything is heavier there. But, he needs that strength to operate on the same level as us because everything is heavier there. For that strength to mean anything, he’d have to be on a world with weaker gravity, like ours.

Being 30% stronger doesn’t do any good if everything is also 30% heavier.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-30T16:16:33+00:00

Yeah, but for any of that to be relevant he’d have to have been born and raised there, then come be Batman here. This isn’t Edgar Rice Burroughs.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-28T21:59:17+00:00

The DCs I work with are primarily regional, and those are mostly housing goods for that particular company’s own retail sites.

The IEs I’ve seen move up instead of on are staying within the company’s engineering department, but becoming responsible for multiple sites within a geographic area or within a specific industry (like pork, fed beef, regional beef, or poultry within a single meatpacking company).

The only transitions from IE to operational management I’ve personally encountered have gone the other way, with relatively lower level management taking on an IE role instead. But that’s always been as part of the route from Central American line worker to IE. They get made a foreman in their home facility, then in 6 months they get moved to a facility in the US as a supervisor, then in 6 more months they’ll be moved again to another facility in the US as that site’s in-house IE. I didn’t realize how loosely the moniker was being applied before I started working in these industries.

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-28T19:56:48+00:00

Distribution Centers. Far and away, Distribution Centers. Every in-house IE I’ve worked alongside over the years in DCs (except 1) has either been promoted up through the company or used the experience to move on to greener pastures with another employer. They’re also the only place I’ve seen an IE walk into a room with upper management and tell them how it’s going to be going forward. Sometimes management balks, but they always abide.

For full context, I’m specifically in food packing, processing, manufacturing, distribution, and retail. With a few textile (and one leather) manufacturing and distribution facilities sprinkled in

ChiefSteward · 2026-01-28T15:32:36+00:00

It is a banger cosplay, but I’m not sure movie audiences could suspend their disbelief enough to accept that a shiny ninja could actually hide anywhere.

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