Sometimes I think we need to remember that ter'angreal where not special. (or why the arches might just have been a way to go on holiday).

[Scarloc99]

A thread on the TV forum about the arches got me thinking about the nature of ter'angreal and how they relate, in particular as a type of magic item in other fantasy. I think we as readers get caught up in the mystique of them, mainly because the characters do, and so that means we mis something fairly obvious. Ter'angreal where not special in the age of legends, everyone had them and 99.9% of those that where made where created to do fairly mundane everyday things. You want to brush your teeth without moving your hand, there is a ter'angreal that does that, you want to call or text a friend to meet up, a ter'angreal does that, when you meet up you want a hot coffee or a hot chocolate, the barrista has a ter'angreal to make the water or milk piping hot for you and another ter'angreal keeps the 30 different types of milk cold. Aviendha finds a kindle amongst the Kin's horde, I like to imagine the reason it has taken the aes sedai so long to get through all the books on that is because whoever is studying it is wrapped up in trying to find out what happens to Anastasia and Christian, or does Bella get with her vampire, or, in a meta meta verse, is reading a book by this guy called robert jordan hoping that all his volumes are present (or even worse a series called Game Of Thrones, which was never completed). But I digress. 

Mesaana even tells us that many ter'angreal could be used by non channellers, the way I look at it is the power replaced electricity, TV's, the internet, something as mundane as lighting a house, all done using the power. 

Then the war happens and most ter'angreal made are weapons, but thats a different conversation. 

 

This means that the odds are that any ter'angreal found doesn't just, as we already know, have a different purpose to the one it is used for, but it's purpose in the age of legends was totally mundane, no hidden depth or deeper meaning. 

And so we come to the arches. I have seen many ideas postulated online as to what these are, but my own idea is that they are as simple as a form of entertainment. A form of VR, someone can come along, say what they want to experience, pop in and have the time of a lifetime, maybe, like that VR suite in minority report, pop in and kill there boss, or live out some deep dark fantasy, or maybe just escape from the hum drum existence of a dull life and go on holiday. Now the Aes Sedai channel into them to create a novices darkest fears, and maybe that was a setting, or maybe that was the weave they found that works when really, if they just tweaked the settings a little you can get a better picture. 

I like the idea that we attribute this huge significance to items that, in there day, may have been as mundane and pointless to everyday life as a segway is in our world. 

[Samt]

On 9/3/2023 at 4:07 PM, Scarloc99 said:

A thread on the TV forum about the arches got me thinking about the nature of ter'angreal and how they relate, in particular as a type of magic item in other fantasy. I think we as readers get caught up in the mystique of them, mainly because the characters do, and so that means we mis something fairly obvious. Ter'angreal where not special in the age of legends, everyone had them and 99.9% of those that where made where created to do fairly mundane everyday things. You want to brush your teeth without moving your hand, there is a ter'angreal that does that, you want to call or text a friend to meet up, a ter'angreal does that, when you meet up you want a hot coffee or a hot chocolate, the barrista has a ter'angreal to make the water or milk piping hot for you and another ter'angreal keeps the 30 different types of milk cold. Aviendha finds a kindle amongst the Kin's horde, I like to imagine the reason it has taken the aes sedai so long to get through all the books on that is because whoever is studying it is wrapped up in trying to find out what happens to Anastasia and Christian, or does Bella get with her vampire, or, in a meta meta verse, is reading a book by this guy called robert jordan hoping that all his volumes are present (or even worse a series called Game Of Thrones, which was never completed). But I digress. 

Mesaana even tells us that many ter'angreal could be used by non channellers, the way I look at it is the power replaced electricity, TV's, the internet, something as mundane as lighting a house, all done using the power. 

Then the war happens and most ter'angreal made are weapons, but thats a different conversation. 

 

This means that the odds are that any ter'angreal found doesn't just, as we already know, have a different purpose to the one it is used for, but it's purpose in the age of legends was totally mundane, no hidden depth or deeper meaning. 

And so we come to the arches. I have seen many ideas postulated online as to what these are, but my own idea is that they are as simple as a form of entertainment. A form of VR, someone can come along, say what they want to experience, pop in and have the time of a lifetime, maybe, like that VR suite in minority report, pop in and kill there boss, or live out some deep dark fantasy, or maybe just escape from the hum drum existence of a dull life and go on holiday. Now the Aes Sedai channel into them to create a novices darkest fears, and maybe that was a setting, or maybe that was the weave they found that works when really, if they just tweaked the settings a little you can get a better picture. 

I like the idea that we attribute this huge significance to items that, in there day, may have been as mundane and pointless to everyday life as a segway is in our world. 

As I said in the other thread, you might be right about a lot of the Terangreal being far more mundane than suspected.  But I don't think this really applies to the arches.  Sheriam explains what the arches are testing (commitment to the White Tower over all other loyalties and goals), and the tests that we get to see in the book are consistent with this.  

 

It's likely that the arches had other purposes initially and there are probably other ways to use them.  But it just doesn't make sense for the Aes Sedai to base entry into the ranks of the accepted on such a dangerous test if they don't think it tests anything useful.  That would be equivalent to making the novices play Russian roulette for the chance to be accepted.  That doesn't really make sense and it isn't what we are shown or told in the books.  

[Scarloc99]

2 hours ago, Samt said:

As I said in the other thread, you might be right about a lot of the Terangreal being far more mundane than suspected.  But I don't think this really applies to the arches.  Sheriam explains what the arches are testing (commitment to the White Tower over all other loyalties and goals), and the tests that we get to see in the book are consistent with this.  

 

It's likely that the arches had other purposes initially and there are probably other ways to use them.  But it just doesn't make sense for the Aes Sedai to base entry into the ranks of the accepted on such a dangerous test if they don't think it tests anything useful.  That would be equivalent to making the novices play Russian roulette for the chance to be accepted.  That doesn't really make sense and it isn't what we are shown or told in the books.  

The Aes Sedai can think the test is useful while also totally misusing the ter angeral in a way that makes it dangerous because it is in no way its intended original use. It’s like the oath rod, it actively makes the Aes Sedai as an organisation weaker because it shortens their life and so means research and learning and progression is shortened. But they don’t understand or know that and carry on regardless because “tradition”. 
 

In the books we are told nothing about the arches really other than what the Aes Sedai know, which is next to nothing, and a hint that it is linked to the world of dreams in some way when egwene goes through. Any meaning or deeper understanding about the test is created in the readers head and the test has worth and teaches a lesson, but, the fact remains the foresaken could be laughing between themselves at one of their socials. 
 

“And they use the holiday arches for a test, I mean they don’t even know how to turn on the safety protocols, and none of them have found the ‘living in a musical setting’” 

 

For all we know a black ajah “found how” to turn on the arches in the wrong way so that ishy could keep the Aes Sedai weak by winnowing our members. Maybe not leaving the arches is not a sign of weakness but a sign that no one has the faintest idea how they really work. 

[Samt]

7 hours ago, Scarloc99 said:

The Aes Sedai can think the test is useful while also totally misusing the ter angeral in a way that makes it dangerous because it is in no way its intended original use. It’s like the oath rod, it actively makes the Aes Sedai as an organisation weaker because it shortens their life and so means research and learning and progression is shortened. But they don’t understand or know that and carry on regardless because “tradition”. 
 

In the books we are told nothing about the arches really other than what the Aes Sedai know, which is next to nothing, and a hint that it is linked to the world of dreams in some way when egwene goes through. Any meaning or deeper understanding about the test is created in the readers head and the test has worth and teaches a lesson, but, the fact remains the foresaken could be laughing between themselves at one of their socials. 
 

“And they use the holiday arches for a test, I mean they don’t even know how to turn on the safety protocols, and none of them have found the ‘living in a musical setting’” 

 

For all we know a black ajah “found how” to turn on the arches in the wrong way so that ishy could keep the Aes Sedai weak by winnowing our members. Maybe not leaving the arches is not a sign of weakness but a sign that no one has the faintest idea how they really work. 

And maybe the whole story is a dream that Marin al’Vere has after drinking too much from the barrels Tam brought up.  It’s all well and good to speculate and we know that the arches are not fully understood. But a lot of the time we just have to accept the face value explanation when it works and makes sense and is supported by multiple parts of the story.  
 

The Aes Sedai don’t fully understand the arches and there are almost certainly other ways to use and control them. That doesn’t mean that the straightforward, consistent explanation that we get for what is known is completely incorrect.

[Scarloc99]

23 minutes ago, Samt said:

And maybe the whole story is a dream that Marin al’Vere has after drinking too much from the barrels Tam brought up.  It’s all well and good to speculate and we know that the arches are not fully understood. But a lot of the time we just have to accept the face value explanation when it works and makes sense and is supported by multiple parts of the story.  
 

The Aes Sedai don’t fully understand the arches and there are almost certainly other ways to use and control them. That doesn’t mean that the straightforward, consistent explanation that we get for what is known is completely incorrect.

Not at all but I have long liked to think that almost all the fantastical ter'angeral that are found that pre date the war with the shadow are just items of whimsey created because people where lazy. You see the decadance of the forsaken and I don't think that is far from what the Age of Legends was like, no war, no poverty, Aes Sedai ruling over those that can't channel like lords over there servants. Coming up with more and more elaborate power created items to make every day life easier and easier. No one to stop and ask if what they are doing is right until hubris destroys them. 

It parallels in a lot of ways with the fall of the Eldar in the 40K universe, there an entire species (space elves) fell into corruption because there long lives and the lack of any real problems in society led them to become more and more decadent, seeking out ways to entertain. Eventually this led to the creation of pleasure cults and then the creation, in a massive burst of psychic energy, of a chaos god who went hunting for eldar souls to gobble up.
 

[Bugglesley]

On 9/5/2023 at 9:38 AM, Samt said:

And maybe the whole story is a dream that Marin al’Vere has after drinking too much from the barrels Tam brought up.  It’s all well and good to speculate and we know that the arches are not fully understood. But a lot of the time we just have to accept the face value explanation when it works and makes sense and is supported by multiple parts of the story.  
 

The Aes Sedai don’t fully understand the arches and there are almost certainly other ways to use and control them. That doesn’t mean that the straightforward, consistent explanation that we get for what is known is completely incorrect.

 

I don't know, the argument here isn't that the explanation is incorrect it's that it's incomplete, which is a huge theme that RJ delves into over and over again throughout the books. The "present" day inhabitants of Randland are living in a post-apocolypse, this is a very explicitly cargo cult/Canticle for Liebowitz situation. OP did a great job of summarizing other textual evidence for this theme shown via other ter'angreal.

 

And that said, we can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that 1) the arches were made before the breaking, and with a slightly lower degree that 2) AoL Aes Sedai did not go through any testing like this.

 

So I'm all-in on the "what if we set the holodeck to "personalized temptation" and only gave them one chance to leave to make sure these kids are mentally tough enough" becomes "these are the mystical mysterious testing arches" theory. And yeah, it's also fairly confirmed canon that Ishy actively manipulated White Tower tradition to create long-term structural weaknesses, so he might have had a hand in tweaking the settings here and there for sure.

 

On 9/5/2023 at 10:11 AM, Scarloc99 said:

Not at all but I have long liked to think that almost all the fantastical ter'angeral that are found that pre date the war with the shadow are just items of whimsey created because people where lazy. You see the decadance of the forsaken and I don't think that is far from what the Age of Legends was like, no war, no poverty, Aes Sedai ruling over those that can't channel like lords over there servants. Coming up with more and more elaborate power created items to make every day life easier and easier. No one to stop and ask if what they are doing is right until hubris destroys them. 

It parallels in a lot of ways with the fall of the Eldar in the 40K universe, there an entire species (space elves) fell into corruption because there long lives and the lack of any real problems in society led them to become more and more decadent, seeking out ways to entertain. Eventually this led to the creation of pleasure cults and then the creation, in a massive burst of psychic energy, of a chaos god who went hunting for eldar souls to gobble up.
 

I find this to be a little wild. Imagine believing that a place with no war or poverty is bad. The Aiel were definitely in service to Aes Sedai, but it's never implied that Chanellers were an oppressive class in general; again, quite the opposite is evidenced by all the ter'angreal made for the sole reason of bestowing the benefits of channeling on non-channelers. If you compare the AoL to present-day Randland (hell, present day Earth!), can you really say there are fewer people ruling over others like their servants?

 

In both situations it only ends up being bad because there's spooky evil magic! The tragedy is that none of them knew that the Bore would unleash the Dark One, it was out of left-field.

 

And even then, there were moral systems in place to ask which research was worth doing and not. That's the whole reason Semirhage and Aginor fell to the shadow; both wanted freedom to experiment without any ethical boundaries, and both got it.

 

Everything that happens after is the Fall of Man, people be petty stuff, but the AoL is pretty firmly established as a good time for everyone. If you could recreate the AoL right now, it would be a morally incomprehensible position to refuse it because it would be "decadent." If your moral system requires there to be spooky evil magic to punish the "hubris" of trying to make other people's lives materially better, it's not a good moral system!

Edited October 4, 2023 by Bugglesley

[Samt]

4 minutes ago, Bugglesley said:

 

I don't know, the argument here isn't that the explanation is incorrect it's that it's incomplete, which is a huge theme that RJ delves into over and over again throughout the books.

I said, "not completely incorrect."  You said, "incomplete."  In this context, those are basically the same thing.  The point is, at least some (and probably much) of what the Aes Sedai know and believe is true.  But there is much they know they don't know, and probably even more that they don't know they don't know.  

[Gypsum]

4 hours ago, Bugglesley said:

That's the whole reason Semirhage and Aginor fell to the shadow; both wanted freedom to experiment without any ethical boundaries, and both got it.

 

Yes, that's what I got out of it. "The university ethics committee wouldn't let me do my study so I turned to the Dark One." Having spent far too much time in universities (and no longer in academia), I always thought it was very funny that most of the Forsaken were high-up academics frustrated with their career progression. Sounds about right. I'm pretty sure I had one of them as my first PhD supervisor.

Edited October 4, 2023 by Gypsum

[Finnssss22]

On 9/5/2023 at 3:06 AM, Scarloc99 said:

The Aes Sedai can think the test is useful while also totally misusing the ter angeral in a way that makes it dangerous because it is in no way its intended original use. It’s like the oath rod, it actively makes the Aes Sedai as an organisation weaker because it shortens their life and so means research and learning and progression is shortened. But they don’t understand or know that and carry on regardless because “tradition”. 
 

 

 

What is called the Oath Rod now was actually for dealing with Channelers that broke the law in the AoL. One of the Forsaken referred to it as a Binder or Binding Rod if I'm not mistaken.

 

The "tradition" of swearing on the Oath Rod is only about 1000 years old and it wasn't voluntary. The 3 Oaths were forced on the Aes Sedai by Hawkwing when he surrounded and sieged Tar Valon. It was basically a Treaty they agreed to so Hawkwing would leave.

Of course this was actually Ishamael pulling the strings as Hawkwing's top advisor during one of his 40/1000 parole times. He knew they had a Binder and what would happen once they swore on it (halving their lifetimes).

 

But yeah, they don't even know what most ter'angreal do and even some of the ones they figure out how to use weren't used the way they are now. The Oath Rod as mentioned or the ter'angreal that makes Warder's cloaks that was simply used to make fashionable clothing in the AoL.

Others of course are straight forward like the Finn's door frames or the one Rand has that hides him from the Dark One's gaze or of course Mat's Foxhead Medallion. 

Edited October 5, 2023 by Finnssss22

[Jsbrads2]

Total Recall? Yeah I’ve seen that movie.

 

While not knowing what terangreal are originally for and occasionally finding a terangreal that might be a key part of the fusion ignition of the global null wave generator, means that when they try to find out what something does, sometimes they spend, hours, days or more with no new information at the end, sometimes they figure how it works but can find no way of using it, and sometimes everyone dies.

 

The Accepted test machine however, they know how it works, or more precisely, how they use it. They never use a terangreal in a room with another terangreal, basic safety. No rational person would presume an Accepted would have a terangreal hidden in her clothes. The way out only appearing once sounds less like a tourist trip, similarly no rational operator would presume a secret agent would hide as a potential tourist 🤔

unrelated to those unexpected accidents, the system still has the possibility of a death and I can’t think of any system today where the potential death of a subject is an acceptable outcome even if rare. Edit: creating a system with a switch that kills people, is poor design, even safety third wouldn’t include this.

 

Edited October 15, 2023 by Jsbrads2

[Jsbrads2]

On 10/4/2023 at 7:58 PM, Bugglesley said:

 

I don't know, the argument here isn't that the explanation is incorrect it's that it's incomplete, which is a huge theme that RJ delves into over and over again throughout the books. The "present" day inhabitants of Randland are living in a post-apocolypse, this is a very explicitly cargo cult/Canticle for Liebowitz situation. OP did a great job of summarizing other textual evidence for this theme shown via other ter'angreal.

 

And that said, we can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that 1) the arches were made before the breaking, and with a slightly lower degree that 2) AoL Aes Sedai did not go through any testing like this.

 

So I'm all-in on the "what if we set the holodeck to "personalized temptation" and only gave them one chance to leave to make sure these kids are mentally tough enough" becomes "these are the mystical mysterious testing arches" theory. And yeah, it's also fairly confirmed canon that Ishy actively manipulated White Tower tradition to create long-term structural weaknesses, so he might have had a hand in tweaking the settings here and there for sure.

 

I find this to be a little wild. Imagine believing that a place with no war or poverty is bad. The Aiel were definitely in service to Aes Sedai, but it's never implied that Chanellers were an oppressive class in general; again, quite the opposite is evidenced by all the ter'angreal made for the sole reason of bestowing the benefits of channeling on non-channelers. If you compare the AoL to present-day Randland (hell, present day Earth!), can you really say there are fewer people ruling over others like their servants?

 

In both situations it only ends up being bad because there's spooky evil magic! The tragedy is that none of them knew that the Bore would unleash the Dark One, it was out of left-field.

 

And even then, there were moral systems in place to ask which research was worth doing and not. That's the whole reason Semirhage and Aginor fell to the shadow; both wanted freedom to experiment without any ethical boundaries, and both got it.

 

Everything that happens after is the Fall of Man, people be petty stuff, but the AoL is pretty firmly established as a good time for everyone. If you could recreate the AoL right now, it would be a morally incomprehensible position to refuse it because it would be "decadent." If your moral system requires there to be spooky evil magic to punish the "hubris" of trying to make other people's lives materially better, it's not a good moral system!

It is hard to comment on the troubles of the Age of Legends, and while there was no war, there are other systems of tyranny that can feel very oppressive.

 

A patronizing government based on age/power solely in the hands of the channelers, the most powerful channelers getting almost anything they want (excepting directly harming someone else). NonChannelers with little access to much more than Bread, Circuses and universal medical care.

Extras: No speaking against Aes Sedai. Assigned careers (ie not chosen by the worker). Assumption of guilt when an Aes Sedai testifies against someone. None of the Rights listed in the US Bill of Rights, freedom of association, privacy…

we don’t presume any of these problems because we are first told how great everything was, and maybe it was in comparison to the Breaking when people had nothing and most of the same problems on a larger scale, but that doesn’t mean it was perfect and Lews noting vaguely that they had real problems in society, means we can only guess. 

[Jsbrads2]

On 10/5/2023 at 12:20 AM, Gypsum said:

 

Yes, that's what I got out of it. "The university ethics committee wouldn't let me do my study so I turned to the Dark One." Having spent far too much time in universities (and no longer in academia), I always thought it was very funny that most of the Forsaken were high-up academics frustrated with their career progression. Sounds about right. I'm pretty sure I had one of them as my first PhD supervisor.

And Bug:

I thought it was Messana who was kicked out of Research and was told she was suitable for teaching. Semirhage was torturing people she was supposed to be healing.

I have no idea what Aginor did before the Bore, genetic splicing, not sure why he turned, but yes, then he did those awful experiments.

But Sammael was always given the second place award in everything, sat at the head dais a couple chairs from the center of the table, was always asked to speak when Lews wasn’t available and told how he was so great, almost as great Lews!

[Scarloc99]

On 10/4/2023 at 10:20 PM, Gypsum said:

 

Yes, that's what I got out of it. "The university ethics committee wouldn't let me do my study so I turned to the Dark One." Having spent far too much time in universities (and no longer in academia), I always thought it was very funny that most of the Forsaken were high-up academics frustrated with their career progression. Sounds about right. I'm pretty sure I had one of them as my first PhD supervisor.

 

On 10/4/2023 at 5:58 PM, Bugglesley said:

And even then, there were moral systems in place to ask which research was worth doing and not. That's the whole reason Semirhage and Aginor fell to the shadow; both wanted freedom to experiment without any ethical boundaries, and both got it.

 

2 out of how many got caught, the 2 worst, they demonstrate that even in this so called "utopia" evil still existed. But also, the whole investigation of the bore shows the arrogance and hubris of channellers, they didn't stop to think, "should I" they didn't stop to investigate or ask, they just did, they at no point enquired with non channellers. The little info we get makes me think that the age of legends for a non channeller was pretty awful, no real power, no real say, no real ability to enact real change. And among channellers an expectation that the "most powerful voice" in the room would make the decisions the fact LTT is so shocked that the female Aes Sedai disagree with his plan and refuse to go along shows he was used to just being followed. 

[Jsbrads2]

In LTT’s defense, he had a working solution that could be applied at that time.

The women didn’t have access to Choen Dal.

And the world was falling apart.

I see the women as being obstinate and shortsighted.

[Scarloc99]

19 minutes ago, Jsbrads2 said:

In LTT’s defense, he had a working solution that could be applied at that time.

The women didn’t have access to Choen Dal.

And the world was falling apart.

I see the women as being obstinate and shortsighted.

and yet if they had taken part both halfs of the power would have been tainted, no hope for the world in that turning. 

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

12 hours ago, Scarloc99 said:

 

 

2 out of how many got caught, the 2 worst, they demonstrate that even in this so called "utopia" evil still existed. But also, the whole investigation of the bore shows the arrogance and hubris of channellers, they didn't stop to think, "should I" they didn't stop to investigate or ask, they just did, they at no point enquired with non channellers. The little info we get makes me think that the age of legends for a non channeller was pretty awful, no real power, no real say, no real ability to enact real change. And among channellers an expectation that the "most powerful voice" in the room would make the decisions the fact LTT is so shocked that the female Aes Sedai disagree with his plan and refuse to go along shows he was used to just being followed. 

I am not sure where this assumption that being a non-channeler was so bad in the AoL comes from. Channelers only make up a small part of the population, and there was nothing to say that the government was made up channelers, or that channelers as a whole had any say over anything but the Hall of Servants. 

 

The only thing obvious is that the society was driven by status and prestige earned by public service, and that would be where channelers excelled, not because they could channel per se but because their lifespans would allow them to shine in their respective fields which largely seemed to include professions that did not require the One Power, channeling seemed to be a side-line more than a way of life.

 

Obviously that is not to say that it was perfect, but they had free, clean energy, no hunger, no (weather based at least) natural disasters... any problems they did have would nearly have to be first world problems that we can only dream of on this planet.

 

There seems to be a deep underlying suspicion of any Utopia, which in this case seems unfounded. 

[Jsbrads2]

On 10/16/2023 at 1:14 PM, Scarloc99 said:

and yet if they had taken part both halfs of the power would have been tainted, no hope for the world in that turning. 

the choen dal wouldn’t have solved that problem. Also, I have no idea what methods could be used to heal a tear in the fabric of the universe. Maybe they could have wrapped it temporarily, cutting off Darkfriends from DO, maybe even trapping Forsaken inside. Then with the head of the beast temporarily cut off, find a more permanent solution. 

[Ioulaum]

The problem is that many of the ter'angreal seem to be one-off, artisinal artifacts.

 

Like, if they were just consumer products, you wouldn't make special shapes for an angreal (like Rand's fat man angreal)... You'd just have some generic shape where it's obvious that "It's an iPhone".

 

The fact that even The Forsaken are wary of the objects of Power that might be in the Stone of Tear because of their unknown effects, implies that they might not be able to recognize that many of them either.

 

Stuff like ancestral memory recall, or interdimensional simulation (if not actual possession of bodies in alternate lives)...

 

I'd be more inclined to assume that they are billion dollar research projects and not consumer goods.

 

The Age of Legends also just doesn't seem very advanced from a usability standpoint as far as their products are concerned... Maybe because their tech was more dependent on things like "the talent for making angreal" rather than Math.

[Scarloc99]

On 10/18/2023 at 10:34 AM, Ioulaum said:

The problem is that many of the ter'angreal seem to be one-off, artisinal artifacts.

 

Like, if they were just consumer products, you wouldn't make special shapes for an angreal (like Rand's fat man angreal)... You'd just have some generic shape where it's obvious that "It's an iPhone".

 

The fact that even The Forsaken are wary of the objects of Power that might be in the Stone of Tear because of their unknown effects, implies that they might not be able to recognize that many of them either.

 

Stuff like ancestral memory recall, or interdimensional simulation (if not actual possession of bodies in alternate lives)...

 

I'd be more inclined to assume that they are billion dollar research projects and not consumer goods.

 

The Age of Legends also just doesn't seem very advanced from a usability standpoint as far as their products are concerned... Maybe because their tech was more dependent on things like "the talent for making angreal" rather than Math.

I mean you assume they are unique, you never know, maybe there where queues hours long waiting for the latest release of the Fat Man angreal. Fat Man 5.6, now slightly slimmer and in a different shade of green.  

Edited October 19, 2023 by Scarloc99

[Ioulaum]

On 10/19/2023 at 8:10 AM, Scarloc99 said:

I mean you assume they are unique, you never know, maybe there where queues hours long waiting for the latest release of the Fat Man angreal. Fat Man 5.6, now slightly slimmer and in a different shade of green.  

 

Yes, but if that were true, the Forsaken would not have to be very concerned about whether they could identify what they were dealing with.

 

If the ter'angreal were sensibly designed, they'd all have some form of identification and instruction manual built-in. And if alternatively, you needed a common database to look the items up... Then for a common tool, at least one would likely have survived to fall into Aes Sedai hands.

 

Anyway, WoT's ter'angreal seem like ancient magic in many series... Mostly unique objects without much history or concern for the ecosystem necessary to enable building them.

Nothing wrong with that really.

[Finnssss22]

On 10/17/2023 at 9:46 AM, Jsbrads2 said:

the choen dal wouldn’t have solved that problem. Also, I have no idea what methods could be used to heal a tear in the fabric of the universe. Maybe they could have wrapped it temporarily, cutting off Darkfriends from DO, maybe even trapping Forsaken inside. Then with the head of the beast temporarily cut off, find a more permanent solution. 

 

There was no solution at that time. While LTT originally resented the Woman for not helping, the amalgamated Rand/LTT came to understand that the Woman not helping was the right call and that it was highly likely Saidar would've also been tainted.

Even though Callandor was made during the War of Power, it's flaw was discovered quite quickly and more or less shelved. Its importance wasn't revealed until about 80 years after the Sealing of the Bore during the Breaking when Deindre Sedai's foretellings of the Prophecies of the Dragon sent the Nym to the Eye with the Dragon Banner, the Horn and a Seal, constructed the Fortress of Tear to hold Callandor and eventually created Rhuidean setting up the Glass Columns and the Rings.

Edited October 23, 2023 by Finnssss22