[Spoiler] Isn't Dark Knight using Akasa ?

[Veloran]

I'm not sure how you can say dynamis "solved problems" when it was quite literally the cause of the final days. If anything it was an antagonistic force that our aether-based characters had to find ways to counteract.

It explained the Final Days and it explained how we stop the Final Days. Narratively that's solving the two biggest problems in the plot with one element.

Also, in the context of Endwalker, it was introduced very early on through the Elpis flowers and in Thavnair, and explored more throughout the Elpis questline before being central to the ending. And even prior to Endwalker, there was a looming question of what unknown force caused the Final Days; and then Endwalker goes on to introduce and explain a previously-unknown force that caused the Final Days; seems like decent enough set up and payoff to me.

Dynamis doesn't get introduced in the eleventh hour, in this story, however.

Endwalker is merely the last chapter in a story that's been running since 1.0. In that context it's only insistently hinted at 85% of the way through the plot, then only formally introduced in Elpis at level 87, at like the 95% point. To tie back to what I linked before, even though Sanderson had hinted at the existence of another magic throughout Mistborn, he recognized that introducing it in the final chapters of the book to resolve the climax was faulty writing.

As Theodric pointed out, it's very easy for people to get too comfortable with the idea of retroactive continuity, and allow themselves to fill in the blanks and explain things away that the writers aren't bothering with. This sort of thing can ultimately end up seriously undermining long-running narratives.

I'm genuinely interested in seeing how Dynamis is a retroactive change that contradicts established fact. If someone has written a post on this subject and I've missed it, I would love to be directed to it.

Attendant to what I was just referring to, consider Ryu's explanation that A12 was our first canonical use of LB3, and thus explained by a use of Dynamis. But consider then that Dynamis is stated to be suppressed and negated by aether - How, then, did we use Dynamis while inside of a Primal, a being composed entirely of aether? Or, consider the idea that sundered peoples' aetherially thin beings are partly composed of Dynamis. If that is so how does anybody teleport, when that is undertaken by transforming an individual into their composite aether, and whisking them through the (obviously incredibly aetherially dense) aetherial sea? And if there is a massive veil of aetherial energy enshrouding the world coming from Zodiark, then how could anybody ever have been able to use Dynamis prior to his destruction? And of course - If LBs are Dynamis, why can the Ancients in Elpis and Elidibus in SoS use LBs?

To be clear here, with this I'm not intending to state that these questions are definitively plot holes. Only that they are unanswered questions raised by the introduction of Dynamis. The issue is, I'm not confident that any such questions will be answered. Because I've previously seen writers get too carried away with utilizing retroactive continuity to the point that questions continue to be raised only for layers and layers of retcons for the sake of "cool writing" to be added over time without clarification ever coming down the line. I'm very nervous about XIV going down such a path, and Dynamis does the opposite of assuaging such concerns.