Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
The Mistborn analogy doesn't apply well here. The central problem is 'main villain is immortal, nobody can defeat him.' When the resolution to that conflict is 'The protagonist was secretly more powerful than she realized', then there never was a conflict to begin with. It doesn't really matter when you introduce that fact. Deus Ex Machina eliminates the central conflict by sidestepping it. Sanderson's point about having a 'victory condition' is important. He contrasts Helm's Deep and Pelennor Fields in that the solution to both problems is similar (big army shows up, we win), but one has a foreshadowed victory condition (survive for five days) and the other does not. Without that victory condition, there is no dramatic tension, because you can just win at any point that you feel like. You can, however, distract the audience from that condition, which is why its to your advantage to introduce the rules of the game earlier rather than later.
But all of that does apply to Dynamis? All of the pieces are only set on the table in the final 90% of the story, and then are only moved into position in the final zone, equivalent to like the last page of the book. In terms of "victory condition", Dynamis is like if Aragorn was getting ready to charge out of the hall at the end of Helm's Deep when a bird flies in through the window with a note saying "you've survived five days of suffering, the Elves could never have done this, look to the East!" It's an element introduced at the very end that provides both the impetus and resolution to the central conflict. Beforehand we could not have even guessed that this would be the central conflict because neither Meteion nor Dynamis had been revealed to the audience.

The main conflict is an ideological one. Stand up to Meteion, and show her your will to live.
But it isn't an ideological conflict, not strictly speaking. The conflict, indeed the entire history of the world up until this point, revolves around the physical capability to utilize Dynamis. Simply showing Meteion a will to live means nothing because she is perfectly willing to suffocate such a will with her overwhelming power. And that overwhelming power can only be counteracted with Dynamis. The main conflict is that the villain is undefeatable without this deus ex machina entered into the plot in the final moments of the story.

When you have limited information to go on, you have to be careful not to infer more than you actually can.
The issue here is that we are being asked to look in on critical plot elements, character motivations, and decisions/actions that exist, effectively, within a void of knowledge. As Sanderson notes, a magic's integration into the story is reliant on how well the reader understands it. As it is we don't understand it at all, and neither do the characters in the story, so a very large part of the narrative is reliant on the reader not thinking critically about something that we have very limited information about.

I'm sure that we'll learn more as we go. For one, there is a lot about Void Magic and the Voidsent that we still yet don't know, and this is probably the one thing that I'm the most curious about. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a referential tie in here somewhere, especially given that Diabolos was the creator of Dynamis in FFXI.
This is currently the most interesting aspect of Dynamis to me as well, as it could potentially explain various things about the Voidsent or why the Void reads as having no aether despite clearly containing matter and energy. To clarify, the reason why I have no issue with this is because the Void and Voidsent are mostly unexplained or at least have some clear contradictory workings at the moment, while numerous other elements (certain jobs, Omega situation, LBs, etc) already had various other explanations that were at least as sufficiently explained as being one type of energy versus a new one. That, and unlike the Void many of these other elements were already thought to be well understood beforehand, in the sense that characters had recognized them to be aetherical in nature. The Void, however, has much more mystery to it and therefore more room for new explanations.