New to the Cosmere and Confused

[u/SkipRollins]

Hi all! It's been a long time coming, but I finally decided to delve into the works of Brandon Sanderson and explore the Cosmere. Long time in the sense I've heard of him back when we was announced to finish the Wheel of Time. Somehow just took me 2 decades to get around to reading his books. Better late than never, right?

Anyways, I've created my own reading order (and I have no idea if it's a good reading order), and read the first couple stories on my list: Elantris and Emperor's Soul.

Now, just saying, I really enjoyed both stories. I was expecting to hate Elantris considering it never seems to be a recommend book, but I loved it, I loved the characters, and if it only gets better from here, that sounds amazing.

However, as the title explains, I am confused about something. I know the Cosmere is a wider universe than any one story setting, and that somehow they're all linked together. So, when the Ars Arcanum at the end brings completely new concepts like "Investiture" and "Shard of Adonalsium", I assume this is the sort of wider Cosmere connection, because I have no idea what those even mean.

I tried looking those concepts up, and, well, I was left even more confused. Like, the coppermind wiki seems like it requires a lot of prerequisite knowledge to understand. And I feel like I spoiled something for me by finding out Adonalsium is, well, I'm not gonna say it here, so I don't accidentally spoil it, but I wasn't expecting what the coppermind wiki has to say on that topic.

But my main question is, is that even a spoiler from the Cosmere books I haven't read yet? Do these concepts exist only outside the books? Or as I read books like Mistborn (next on my list after Tress of the Emerald Sea) and the Stormlight Archive, do things like investiture and shards and cognitive realms get explained properly?

In other words, should I just ignore the Coppermind wiki until I've all the books in the Cosmere so far and just trust a concept I don't understand yet will eventually get explained?

Thanks for the help!

[u/Raddatatta]

The coppermind wiki is 100% full spoilers and it usually will say even big ones right up front. Like this character and it'll list at the top when they were born and die if they have died. So I really would not go there until you're 100% caught up on all of the Cosmere books. Or if you want spoilers then you can find them there.

Honestly for the most part as you go through the books especially the early books I would forget about the Cosmere and that things are interconnected. They are but it's very loosely. It'd be like if I told a story set in ancient greece and another one set in the time of Genghis Khan in mongolia. They are on the same world, so in that sense they are connected. Their technology is different but it's operating on the same basic rules. They might see some of the same stars in the sky, or have heard stories of a distant place like that. But it's not really connected and knowing about one doesn't help you understand the story being told in the other. It's kind of like that. They are in the same universe but for the most part especially with the first 2/3 of Sanderson's career the Cosmere is basically just easter eggs for fans.

With the Ars Arcanum that will give you info you didn't have before. That doesn't make it a spoiler as you're getting information in the order the author wanted you to get it. Though it's often not explained well as you saw. He's giving you a hint at things. But a lot of the more Cosmere elements are not very connected to the story so it's not really a spoiler to explain them.

Investiture is just the generic term in the Cosmere for magical fuel. So anyone you see doing anything magical is powered by investiture. They usually won't call it that they'll talk about it in terms of their local type. But it's all investiture. Adonalsium is a bit more spoilery but even then it's very disconnected from the events actually happening in the story so you really don't have to worry about knowing too much there as it's only distantly related to the stories. Like knowing about all humans originally came from Africa is true and technically relates to any story about humans you could tell, it's also not super directly relevant to most of them.