The Androl Thread

[Mario Cole]

Well once Androl started being inventive with gateways I figured it was Brandon's deal since in his own series he usually gets inventive with the rather limited magic. WoT magic always seemed rather direct. It did annoy me a bit that the Androl lava firehouse wasn't used more but it probably would have meant the armies wouldn't have much to do. I  kind of had to forget they could be clever with the one power and go back to accepting that they were brute force dirt shoveling/flame throwing.

[Trevor Wilson]

When androl was first involved i thought 'NO i dont want to hear about this, stop stealing screen time' but i have to be honest in that he grew on me.

[Jak o' the Shadows]

Androl+Pevara was a good storyline, enjoyable to read.   Luckers said Pevara wasn't Pevara...my memory is not that good I'd have to go back and read how she was pre-BT mission.   But face value, they were a good duo.

 

 

However I did think that Andol was a bit too epic.  I don't like how he was introduced in ToM and then becomes an integral part of victory.  I'd rather have had a combo of known Asha'man finally step up and into the spotlight.

Nitpicking really.  Androl was a good character, just a bit overpowered and out of the blue.

[Vardar]

Ok maybe it's me, but Androls character made perfect sense to me. He proved the adage used in the Age of Legends, that pure power wasn't everything. Skill mattered. His backstory makes sense when you consider his family, born into a family known for male channelers? Damn right you're gonna wanna get the heck out of dodge. He never felt like he belonged so he travelled the world. Hell, Tam had time to leave and become a fregging blademaster and Captain of the Companions? And he went back home. If Androl never went home, he could have easily done all that

 

As to the usage of gateways, lets be real, if they hadn't learned all those new things, I for one would have been pissed. I saw the advantage and usages the moment they introduced them. Hell, Avi was the frost to attack thru it right? Then she showed how you can attack from behind it where they can't get you. I'm mad they didn't do more to honest. .

[Suttree]

Sandrolson.

[Knivy]

The uses of  the gateways  feels so much like portal game . Redirecting bullets/balefire with portals/gateways .

 

I hated how people didnt think of gateway shields before.  Youre facing a shadowspawn army? Put a gateway infront of it, tie it off, and sit back.  The uses for cutting with the edges as well have been obvious to me as soon as we got details about gateways in the early books.

[esvath]

Androl?

 

1) I like that he is weak in One Power but having leadership in BT. While Logain is the 'structural leader', he is the one 'cultural leader' of new BT. Kind of like Perrin with his Two River folks.

 

2) I like his interactions with Pevara.

 

3) I like that his father commited suicide after realizing he could channel. Any other background is overkill.

 

4) I like his BT scenes, creative use of gateway (using regular weave in creative ways is something that should be done long, long time ago...), but his stealing of the Seals is overkill.

[Trevor Wilson]

Well im doing a slower reread now...

 

I dont know if the fact i know the ending is affecting me, in fact knowing the end might affect me for good now and the yearly 'series rereads' may stop.

 

But despite his story being well done, i am finding again that he takes too much of the story so far for a new character...

 

[sleepinghour]

Signing report from Reddit:

 

When I was getting some books personalized, I told him how much I really liked the characterization of Androl and Perava.

 

He told me that Androl was a fun character for him to write, because it was his "own" Asha'man.

 

When he agreed to finish WoT, as he was looking over his notes, he asked if he could create an Asha'man to do with what he wanted. Thus, Androl.

 

He also talked about how Perava was his idea of how the Red Ajah would make their way in the world after the Tain was gone from saidin.

 

[Suttree]

Seriously reading the comments on Reddit sometimes I feel like it's some strange alternate reality.

 

As for the quote above as I said earlier...Sandrolson. Thanks for these sleeping!

[flinn]

 

Not sure if this is the correct thread but I just started my second read through and noticed something I was unsure of.

 

During the sequence where they had knocked out the turned Asha'Man and were tricking him into revealing where Logain is, he asks Pevara "can he hear me", and she replies "no", even though she know's he can. How is she able to lie, is she not bound by the three oaths?

 

The Theoryland people listed this as an error.

 Well as the above poster just pointed out, Theoryland is wrong..

 

 He purposefully used a double negative. It was actually quite good.

[flinn]

 

The uses of  the gateways  feels so much like portal game . Redirecting bullets/balefire with portals/gateways .

 

I hated how people didnt think of gateway shields before.  Youre facing a shadowspawn army? Put a gateway infront of it, tie it off, and sit back.  The uses for cutting with the edges as well have been obvious to me as soon as we got details about gateways in the early books.

 The gateways were always a conundrum I didnt see how could be fixed believably.

With the problems shadowspawn has with gateways, they had to do something to restict their uses.

 

I still dont understand why as soon as they moved and had all the shadowspawn in one place to just open a gateway to a river and let it roll right over the shadowspawn.

Game over.

[Tsukibana]

@Flinn:

 Two Gateways, one into a river, washes the Shadowspawn into the second, which opens into Dragonmount's caldera.Overkill?

[Richmond]

I don't know why everyone feels like Androl was such an asspull ability. We've known from jump that there are Talents, we know that traveling was not a weave that people knew since the Forsaken. So nobody would have had the chance to discover it. Further look at the wonders from the age of legends, showings and standing weaves and windows that looked out on wherever you wanted them to. These kinds of weaves obviously existed during the AoL and using the power to do mundane things was status quo back then.

 

Pretty much using the OP effectively has been the one thing RJ was terrible at, or rather he made everyone in the Third Age terrible at it. The War of Power and the breaking made people much less likely to try new things or to deviate from the way things were done for fear of burning out or severing themselves or killing themselves. The differences between the Wise One's weaves, the Sea folk's weaves and the Aes Sedai's  weaves show that not only are there more than one way to achieve a similar affect, but potentially infinite weaves of the power that are totally undiscovered and have NEVER been discovered. Even the Forsaken are surprised they found a way to heal severing.

 

To me Androl served to show change, the fact a Red could work with a man that channeled, the fact that he wasn't strong in the power but could do great things. The fact that he took what power he had and examined it and explored it and tried new things. All of this shows the fact that the third age was one of perservation and trying to hold on, the Fourth Age is one of innovation and trying to become better.

 

Agreed on all counts.  We've seen glimpses of the types of things that the AoL Aes Sedai were able to manage with weaves, and for the first time in the Third Age channeling isn't being heavily restricted by the various leadership groups.  Not only did Nynaeve discover how to Heal a Severed channeler, but she also was the first person in recorded history (at least according to Rand/LTT) to Heal insanity.  Clever uses of Gateways pale in comparison to that type of discovery, yet no one seems to complain about that.

 

 

Androl+Pevara was a good storyline, enjoyable to read.   Luckers said Pevara wasn't Pevara...my memory is not that good I'd have to go back and read how she was pre-BT mission.   But face value, they were a good duo.

 

Yeah, I don't get the whole "Pevara wasn't Pevara" complaint.  If it's that her voice was weird (a la Mat in TGS and TOM), then okay.  But she'd been living among male channelers for months.  She bonded herself to a male channeler and understood that the taint was gone.  Of course her way of thinking changed a LOT during that period--and we saw a good portion of that internal struggle.  And, most importantly, we had access to her thoughts to an unprecedented degree (for the first time? I can't remember her as a POV character) during such a crucial period.

[Guest grrbear]

A couple of posters have alluded to this already, but gateways are so powerful as to be nearly game-breaking. The trick with the lava was great, but then you're wondering why you never see it again.  The trick with viewing the battlefield from on high was great, but then you should wonder what you could drop through that gateway.  I mean, who needs dragons if you could drop those explosives from a gateway?  Then there's the edges of a gateway, which are infinitely sharp.  Why didn't anyone try and open a gateway that would have cut somebody in half?  Androl demonstrated he could create micro-gateways - what if he had created a gateway an inch high and a mile wide as the Trolloc hordes ran straight into it?

 

Forget balefire - gateways are the real danger, and a problem Sanderson had to dodge as he wrote up the Last Battle.  He threw a couple of Portal-inspired bits like directing Dragon fire through gateways, but otherwise had to pretend like they didn't exist.  It's nice for BS that he got to create his own little avatar, but with a little thought, Androl could have been the most powerful weapon on the battlefield.

[Richmond]

A couple of posters have alluded to this already, but gateways are so powerful as to be nearly game-breaking. The trick with the lava was great, but then you're wondering why you never see it again.  The trick with viewing the battlefield from on high was great, but then you should wonder what you could drop through that gateway.  I mean, who needs dragons if you could drop those explosives from a gateway?  Then there's the edges of a gateway, which are infinitely sharp.  Why didn't anyone try and open a gateway that would have cut somebody in half?  Androl demonstrated he could create micro-gateways - what if he had created a gateway an inch high and a mile wide as the Trolloc hordes ran straight into it?

 

Forget balefire - gateways are the real danger, and a problem Sanderson had to dodge as he wrote up the Last Battle.  He threw a couple of Portal-inspired bits like directing Dragon fire through gateways, but otherwise had to pretend like they didn't exist.  It's nice for BS that he got to create his own little avatar, but with a little thought, Androl could have been the most powerful weapon on the battlefield.

 

Definitely a great point.  I think some of that can be (conveniently) explained by the simple notion that technology has been stagnant for ~3000 years.  Innovation, for many reasons (DO, wars, White Tower, fear of men who can channel), has been completely stamped out in the post-Breaking world.  E.g., they've had fireworks for centuries, but no one thought about applying the Illuminators' technology to destroying a rival king's city walls.  So just because they think of a few new clever ideas, that doesn't mean they're immediately going to think of ALL of them in a matter of a few weeks/months. 

 

But yeah, there's a huge problem with the fact that they used a lava gateway then didn't use it again until Logain's fight.  BS could've helped explain that by simply having the lava flow kill a large number of the Army of Light too, so it would've been seen as too dangerous to use that idea again.  And it seemed to be common knowledge that Trollocs couldn't go through gateways... even if you concede that maybe he didn't have the energy to throw up one large one to swallow the entire army, why wouldn't Androl throw up random gateways during Trolloc charges?  Why didn't we see more asha'men using Deathgates?

[fertileground]

I for one thought that Androl and Pevara turned out to be one of the better parts in the book when the Black Tower plot finally got rolling (when they assaulted the Turning chambers).

 

It could come off as Brandon imprinting his own thing there, and I understand if that may put people off, but for me - no matter what reason - it turned out to be one of the most interesting arcs in aMoL. 

I agree, and remember these two characters are dealing with a 3000 year period of distrust of each other (male channelers and Aes Sedai). The progression seems fast, but that is because of the unexpected results from the double bonding, which I thought was a very interesting turn of events, and was essential to not only the BT arc, but also the last battle, and even the future of Ashaman and Aes Sedai, and how they will relate to one another. It won't change overnight, but Androl and Pevara could be "ushers" of this new age of channelers.

[fertileground]

I liked him.  Yeah, I definitely got the impression that Androl was "Brandon's" character, but I found that he was my favorite Asha'man, behind Logain.  Of course, not many of the Asha'man were developed, so Brandon got to really seize upon this opportunity.  I'm glad he did, since the Black Tower was lacking in presence in the story up to that point.

 

 

 

 

 

You mean Brandrol the Incredible Marty Stu? That guy can die in a fire

 

I really feel like people don't understand the literary meaning of "Mary Sue".  Sometime his Talent did prove more useful than it probably should have, but he's no more a Sue than some other characters.

I think that his talent was needed by the pattern, as the rest of the books seem to show the pattern needs balance, and the BT was certainly out of balance (along with the rest of the land as well). A lot of unbelievably "miraculous" things have happened right from EOTW, all pointing to the need for balance in the pattern. Although, I have had a hard time that RJ actually believed that the Creator has no intervention in the pattern, what with all of the "just at the right time" saves all throughout the series...but that is a different topic!

[TNine]

A couple of posters have alluded to this already, but gateways are so powerful as to be nearly game-breaking. The trick with the lava was great, but then you're wondering why you never see it again.  The trick with viewing the battlefield from on high was great, but then you should wonder what you could drop through that gateway.  I mean, who needs dragons if you could drop those explosives from a gateway?  Then there's the edges of a gateway, which are infinitely sharp.  Why didn't anyone try and open a gateway that would have cut somebody in half?  Androl demonstrated he could create micro-gateways - what if he had created a gateway an inch high and a mile wide as the Trolloc hordes ran straight into it?

 

Forget balefire - gateways are the real danger, and a problem Sanderson had to dodge as he wrote up the Last Battle.  He threw a couple of Portal-inspired bits like directing Dragon fire through gateways, but otherwise had to pretend like they didn't exist.  It's nice for BS that he got to create his own little avatar, but with a little thought, Androl could have been the most powerful weapon on the battlefield.

A gateway is a weave on both ends, and can be seen pretty quickly. The quick, catch-all answer would be "if they tried that, enemy channelers would simply chop the weave". I think we see Demandred do that to some gateway weave.

 

Of course, that doesn't really answer all the questions, but it's better.

[Richmond]

 

I liked him.  Yeah, I definitely got the impression that Androl was "Brandon's" character, but I found that he was my favorite Asha'man, behind Logain.  Of course, not many of the Asha'man were developed, so Brandon got to really seize upon this opportunity.  I'm glad he did, since the Black Tower was lacking in presence in the story up to that point.

 

 

 

 

 

You mean Brandrol the Incredible Marty Stu? That guy can die in a fire

 

I really feel like people don't understand the literary meaning of "Mary Sue".  Sometime his Talent did prove more useful than it probably should have, but he's no more a Sue than some other characters.

I think that his talent was needed by the pattern, as the rest of the books seem to show the pattern needs balance, and the BT was certainly out of balance (along with the rest of the land as well). A lot of unbelievably "miraculous" things have happened right from EOTW, all pointing to the need for balance in the pattern. Although, I have had a hard time that RJ actually believed that the Creator has no intervention in the pattern, what with all of the "just at the right time" saves all throughout the series...but that is a different topic!

 

Not to hijack from Androl, but I thought that the idea of ta'veren is that the Wheel spins out occasional threads that bring the Pattern back into balance?  Doesn't that inherently prove that the Creator either designed the Wheel to actively intervene or the Creator itself actively intervenes with the Wheel to keep it going properly? 

 

Or, given the fact that we never saw evidence of a Creator despite being outside of the Wheel with Rand and the DO, is the Pattern itself the force of creation?  After all, there is no beginning or end, so how could anyone/thing have created it?  (Maybe RJ gave answers/hints that dismisses that concept--I don't know because I only started reading these books a couple of years ago and haven't read many of the secondary things out there.)

[Hotncold]

The whole Androl thing seemed like Sanderson responding to fan mail.  Really?

 

Never figured out why Androl being so incredible with the waygates did not use them as death gates like Rand.  I kept waiting for it, the waygates that open and close and pass through the horde of Trollocs, but then the cheesy trick with the lava instead.

 

Really?  Maybe Brandon should have spent more time on this book than churning out pulp fan fantasy.

[flinn]

The whole Androl thing seemed like Sanderson responding to fan mail.  Really?

 

Never figured out why Androl being so incredible with the waygates did not use them as death gates like Rand.  I kept waiting for it, the waygates that open and close and pass through the horde of Trollocs, but then the cheesy trick with the lava instead.

 

Really?  Maybe Brandon should have spent more time on this book than churning out pulp fan fantasy.

 Actually he commented on it. Androl said something about they had shown him the deathgates weave but it didnt work the same as a gateway and his talent didnt work with them.

[balefireruinssteaks]

Everyone is so hateful to Androl!!  haha, I liked his character.  I liked that he wasn't phased by the ridicule of Asha'man bullies in the Black Tower and that even though he was the weakest male channeler he really utilized a Talent that he has.  Gateways always struck me as potentially dangerous while also incredibly useful.  In the Age of Legends, Restorers would zip across the world Healing with the use of gateways.  I think they are very useful for transportation (food, messages, orders during war, etc.)

 

I also, early on when Rand remembered gateways at Al'Cair Dal, thought how dangerous gateways could be.  I don't think it's outside reality to assume that if I can make up uses for gateways...like opening them up underneath someone leading to an open sky (or space!)...opening a gateway in the middle of a river of lava leading it directly into the path of an army...these are things that a channeler might also think of.  Slicing someone in half with a gateway...Deathgates, etc.  The Talent can be used for bad as much as it can be used for good.  I liked Androl and I think he was written just fine.  I always thought he was a nobleman...I didn't get his hundred and four jobs before becoming an Asha'man.  But...whatever.  I enjoyed his fight scenes and interaction with Pevara enough that the other stuff didn't really matter.

[Richmond]

The whole Androl thing seemed like Sanderson responding to fan mail.  Really?

 

Never figured out why Androl being so incredible with the waygates did not use them as death gates like Rand.  I kept waiting for it, the waygates that open and close and pass through the horde of Trollocs, but then the cheesy trick with the lava instead.

 

Really?  Maybe Brandon should have spent more time on this book than churning out pulp fan fantasy.

 Actually he commented on it. Androl said something about they had shown him the deathgates weave but it didnt work the same as a gateway and his talent didnt work with them.

 

Yeah they explicitly addressed that question. It stood out because I had been wondering the same thing.

 

I'm new to this board, but I'm amazed by the level of viciousness against BS, especially from people who didn't read the text carefully enough to pick up details or understand plot lines for which they are criticizing him.

[Tsukibana]

Androl, in my opinion, went too far, and then not far enough.

After all those wicked cool gateway tricks, especially the HUGE one he shows off (forget when), destroying the DO's army is stupid simple:

Huge circle, Androl in charge, horizontal gate under army, opens 500' in the air over a different section of the army. Harkens back to throwing

bodies over castle walls, but without the trebuchet.

And I know it was a woman (Yukiri??) that figured the horizintal trick out, but come on... this was his TALENT. If Androl hadn't thought of it, I'll

eat Mat's hat (then run, 'cause he'd try to kill me!).

 

Gateways = Broken, Over-Powered, and Twinked, and both RJ and BS had to nerf the hell out of them. (BS, less effectively)