 Okay, so we've now reached the final Mistborn book, at least the final Mistborn book that's out right now, The Bands of Morning, and it's probably the best one in Era 2 so far. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So by this point in Era 2, we kind of know the drill, okay? These are gonna be somewhat more episodic than most of Sanderson's other, you know, big series. They're somewhat more episodic than the original Mistborn trilogy. And this one follows Wax and Wayne and Company. There is a candra who apparently discovered the site of the Bands of Morning, which were the Bands that the Lord Ruler wore, which gave him access to all the allomantic and fear chemical powers that he had, and is basically what allowed him to be such a god-like figure. And so obviously, if people got ahold of those, that'd be a big deal. And if the set, who are, remember the bad guys who were planning to overthrow everything, got ahold of it, that would also be really bad. And so Wax and them have to go off and do it. And at the beginning, Wax and Starris are getting married, but their wedding gets kind of ruined, so they, uh, so, you know, they aren't officially married, but then Starris actually winds up coming along with them. What it follows is, you know, twists and turns and adventures, and Wax is still trying to rescue his sister, and he's still going after his evil uncle, and they're still trying to figure out what the set is up to, and that was something I really liked about this book is, like, we found out what the set, or not exactly what they're up to, but we found out a little bit more about them, and who's behind everything, and yada, yada, yada, so, you know, that was fantastic. And uh, I will have a spoiler section at the end for this one, but I'm just gonna say, for most of this book it was a very solid four stars, but literally the last page of the book was phenomenal, so I had to bump it up to five, because it's, the ending of this caught me off guard in more ways than one. So things I liked, like I mentioned, the story is great, it's better than the last two by a, well by a fair margin actually, and I liked the stories of the last two. The main issue I had with it was just the prologue, because it's basically just a flashback to Wax when he was a kid, living among the terrorist people, and well, the entire point of the prologue seems to basically be saying, hey, you should be a narc, like if you're a narc, you're a good guy, if you tattle on people and get the police involved in everything, then you're a good guy, and that's just kind of stupid, but at the same time that seems to play into Wax's view of the world and his view of how things are and how they should be, which this book does also criticize him for, because Marasi in particular, in the previous books as well as in this one, she mentions how crime and poverty and things can be solved if you just alter things about society and about the system that people live in, whereas Wax is basically just, yeah, I'm a lawman, like fight the bad guys, arrest, shoot whoever, and that takes care of the problem, but he's really treating the symptoms rather than the cause, and so this is kind of criticizing him for that, and I thought that was interesting because a pretty big theme of this whole series has basically just been a, how do I put this, the Elendil Basin is a, well I don't want to call it a liberal democracy because it isn't quite there, but we'll say it's liberal democracy adjacent, and it's just looking at all the failures that that brings and how that's causing unrest in various parts of the country and how that's allowing the set to rise, but they're also probably gonna be much worse than the current regime, so this whole series so far at least, the last book might screw things up, is pretty fascinating from that perspective, and obviously all the action scenes are still pretty great, you know, they use Alamance in Furukemi in some really interesting ways, and they also, because you know technology is increasing, or technology is developing, technology is moving forward, whatever you would say about it, they introduce like new things that utilize Alamance in Furukemi in interesting ways that people couldn't do on their own, and they certainly couldn't do in Arrow One, which is really really fascinating, and because the last two medals from Arrow One, like Atium and the other one, I forget, are no longer around and they were replaced with two others, we get to see how those interact with things and how, well, basically just how all the powers work off of one another, and that's been one of the coolest things about Mistborn Arrow One and Arrow Two so far is just how people utilize them in such creative ways, it's really really cool. As for character development, you know, obviously that's great, you know, Wayne goes through a little bit, but you know, not that much, and like I said before, he is genuinely really funny, because for the most part, when Sanderson tries to write funny characters, it doesn't work that well, at least not for me, because obviously humor is extremely subjective, I get that, but it just doesn't work that well for me, whereas Wayne is, yeah, he's actually pretty funny, and then Wax, considering how Shadows of Self ended with him having to accidentally, well, not even accidentally, but with him having to kill his wife again, that's a pretty big deal, and we see in this one, he's a little bit harder and angrier and more determined to get his sister back, which is, you know, still pretty great, but he's more or less the same characters before, and same with Murase, but the main one that changes a lot in this book that I want to mention is Starris, because in the first book, Starris was basically just, you know, Wax was marrying her because he had to, it was you know, contractual reasons, and if he didn't, then his house would go under, his noble house would go under, and so we got this feeling like he was really in love with Murase, and he was torn between duty and desire, whereas in the second one, we see, okay, yeah, he's not really into Murase, and him and Starris are getting along better, so we really feel like they're friends, which was great, whereas in this one, we actually see their relationship develop in a more romantic direction, and it's actually pretty sweet, and well, yeah, no, it's just sweet. It's kind of similar to how Sanderson doesn't write humor all that well. I don't think he writes romances all that well. I think they're better than a humor, and the closest one that I would say it comes to being good, or the one that comes closest to being good is Vin and Ellen from the original trilogy, and even then they were just kind of okay, but anyways, so Starris and Wax, yeah, we really do feel them start to connect more, and we start to feel like, yeah, they complete each other, and they like each other, and Starris, I'm pretty sure she's written to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, which would explain her behavior up until this point, and how she has to have everything in the list, and how everything has to be very ordered and put together for her, which is actually pretty interesting. I didn't realize that in the first two books, but in this one, oh, yeah, and there is a scene in here where she's reading a book about how to have sex, because she's almost 30 and has never done it, and she's about to be married, and Wax finds out about it, and she's kind of embarrassed, and it's a very humanizing moment for her, and as the story goes on, she's going on these adventures, and she doesn't become some major badass out of nowhere, but she is useful to them. I went on about Starris longer than I intended, but yeah, she really steps up in this book, and I really enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to seeing what she does in the final book in Era 2, and obviously I'm looking forward to Era 3 as well, but that's for another day. But yes, Starris, all the other characters are great, and I think I'm going to go into the spoiler section now, so obviously, if you've read this far and missed one, keep reading. Okay, Bands of Morning. If you weren't super into Era 2 so far, Bands of Morning, I think will change your mind, because a lot of crazy shit happens on this one, and it's really great, and yeah, that's it. So spoiler time. Okay, so there are three really big spoiler things I need to talk about here. So the first one being that Wax finally finds his sister, Telsin, well, where she's being held captive and rescues her, and they get away for a little while, but then later she betrays them to the sets, and it turns out that actually Telsin had been in charge, not his uncle Ed Warren, and she was the one that brought Ed Warren over, and was the one behind faking their deaths and everything, and that's, oh, okay, I genuinely didn't see that coming. That's a really good twist, because yeah, I didn't see it coming, and it makes total sense in retrospect. That was a great twist, I liked that. And that's just another way in which Wax has been kind of betrayed and beaten down, but he still gets up and continues doing what needs to be done, so he's, like that makes him kind of a better character. So I really liked that, that one was short, but you know, I liked it. The second one being that we finally figure out a little bit more about what's going on with the sets, and we don't know exactly what their plans are, but they definitely appear to be run by, or at least influenced by, let's say, people from other parts of the Cosmere, or powers from other parts of the Cosmere, powers from other planets, or other realms possibly. We can't say for certain, but that appears to be the case, and I'm thinking of some theories for that right now. My going theory is that, based on Sixth of Dusk, we can kind of see in that one that there are people who are more technologically advanced in various parts of the Cosmere that go into less technologically advanced parts and sort of try to colonize them to get access to whatever magical abilities they have there, whereas, and I'm pretty sure that's what's going on here in Schedule, and I can't say for certain, at least not yet, but that is my going theory, and when I figured that out, I was like, oh, shit, that's really cool, but it's also really bad for the people of Schedule. And finally, the big reveal that comes on the last page, which made me bump this up to five stars, is Kelcear. So, if you've read Mistborn's Secret History, then you know that Kelcear is still sort of alive. He's a, I believe it's a cognitive shadow would be the term, he's basically a ghost if you're unfamiliar, and so we knew that he was still wandering around somewhere. But in this one, we find out that there are also people on Schedule who live further south than the people from the original trilogy, like the Final Empire, that, um, they live farther south than that, and apparently the Final Empire could never go that far south because the oceans started boiling after certain points, and they figured, okay, no humans could live down there, but people did find a way to live down there. They just adapted to the heat and everything. And apparently when the planet was moved back to where it's supposed to be, everything froze for them, and they just were unable to deal with that, and they almost all died, and we see some characters from that, that, from that area, that sort of explain this and explain how they were able to survive using Fierrochemie, and they all, he says that the Lord Ruler apparently came down and saved them, and waxing them are thinking, okay, well that's kind of stupid, like the Lord Ruler's dead, that doesn't make any sense, and at the end we see that memory of the Lord Ruler coming in, except it's not actually the Lord Ruler, it's Kelsier. And we don't know exactly what he's doing or how he's doing it. I don't know if he's gotten a shard or anything like that, but damn, that was crazy. That was a crazy, crazy reveal, and if you have not read this and you just got that spoiled, I weep for you, because that was awesome. And I think this might actually be the last Cosmere book that is out right now, I would need to double check that, but I think I've read all of them now, so yeah, if you're a fan of Mistborn, obviously keep going, and this was great. Thanks to everybody watching, and also thanks to my patrons, especially Oppo-Savalene and Brother Santotys, Charles Gull, Christopher Hawkins, Christopher Quinten, Joel, Joseph Pendergraf, Taylor Briggs, and Tobacco Crow, and all the other names, you know, you guys are all pretty cool. You just give me money to hear me talk. I never thought I'd be able to do that, but here I am. And if you haven't liked this video, commented on it, and subscribed to my channel, do that. Bye.