So, I suppose this needs to be asked... female trollocs...

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

Just did a quick search to see if this had been asked before, and yay, are there some interesting threads out there. A letter to Pam Korda...

 

Anyway. back to the point of discussion. 

 

Could an Emond Fielder, such as Rand, kill a female trolloc? I am torn on the subject, not least because, ewwwww, but would they see the humanity and helplessness in them and their "all too human eyes"^TM or would they be happy to remove the source of the trolloc threat. And why do wolves call Myrddral Neverborn, when they are? Has no one ever taken a wolf aside and explained the birds and the bees and the trollocs? Perhaps it is about time. 

[TravellingIsAGatewayDrug]

6 hours ago, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

Just did a quick search to see if this had been asked before, and yay, are there some interesting threads out there. A letter to Pam Korda...

 

Anyway. back to the point of discussion. 

 

Could an Emond Fielder, such as Rand, kill a female trolloc? I am torn on the subject, not least because, ewwwww, but would they see the humanity and helplessness in them and their "all too human eyes"^TM or would they be happy to remove the source of the trolloc threat. And why do wolves call Myrddral Neverborn, when they are? Has no one ever taken a wolf aside and explained the birds and the bees and the trollocs? Perhaps it is about time. 

The authors never actually cover the reproductive habits of the shadowspawn or their relevant anatomy from what I remember.

 

It was mentioned that most if not all types of them were created by one of the Forsaken. Perhaps they have no true sex.

 

Perhaps they crawl out of pits of mud, blood, muck, and filth after some ritual is done. Maybe even huck a few corpses in for good measure. That is kind of in line with how I picture them.

 

That would also cover the wolves' term for them.

Edited October 17, 2023 by TravellingIsAGatewayDrug

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

7 hours ago, TravellingIsAGatewayDrug said:

The authors never actually cover the reproductive habits of the shadowspawn or their relevant anatomy from what I remember.

 

It was mentioned that most if not all types of them were created by one of the Forsaken. Perhaps they have no true sex.

 

Perhaps they crawl out of pits of mud, blood, muck, and filth after some ritual is done. Maybe even huck a few corpses in for good measure. That is kind of in line with how I picture them.

 

That would also cover the wolves' term for them.

The books are quite quiet on the matter, except for the Myrddral, there it quite specifically talks about the Fades being throwbacks to the human stock. Which means there has to be a Daddy trolloc and a mummy trolloc who love each very much. Any kind of asexual reproduction would not create throwbacks. There are also hints in the trolloc tribes, which implies familial connections, though the books never take the idea of the tribes any further. The World of the Wheel of Time does try to fill in some of this information (female trollocs like being pregnant, presumably as opposed to other animals who hate it and try everything to stop becoming pregnant, maybe they even like sex? that would be strange), but it does not explain why none of it is visible in the books, where they live, why everyone lets them breed away (actually that is not true in the first book Lan alludes to fighting with trollocs in the blight is a foregone conclusion, so they are protected in some way while within the blight itself) or how hundreds of thousands of trollocs support themselves.

 

While the books are quiet on it, RJ appears not to have been, quite happily explaining the niceties of the situation, one explanation of which can be found by googling "A letter to Pam Korda".

[TravellingIsAGatewayDrug]

2 hours ago, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

...found by googling "A letter to Pam Korda".

Whelp. I stand corrected.

 

Horrifically corrected.

[Finnssss22]

Yeah, not a lot is known about Shadowspawn.

Even their creator Aginor only knows so much about them as they were all created using the True Power which is basically pure chaos. To say it's unpredictable would be a gross understatement heh.

Aginor didn't even create the Myrddral, they would just sometimes be "born" along with Trollocs. Despite experimenting on them, he still couldn't discover how this happened, what they were exactly or how their control over Trollocs works.

We didn't even see every kind of Shadowspawn or at least we only heard of Jumara being worms but according to Sammy they are only the larval version, that their full grown version is one of the nastiest Shadowspawn there is.

Or the insect like swarms of Cafar we only heard of.

There were only 6 Gholam's, 3 male and 3 female. I always figured the male versions were immune to Saidar and the female versions were immune to Saidin but that was never confirmed or denied. 

[Scarloc99]

On 10/18/2023 at 12:27 AM, TravellingIsAGatewayDrug said:

The authors never actually cover the reproductive habits of the shadowspawn or their relevant anatomy from what I remember.

 

It was mentioned that most if not all types of them were created by one of the Forsaken. Perhaps they have no true sex.

 

Perhaps they crawl out of pits of mud, blood, muck, and filth after some ritual is done. Maybe even huck a few corpses in for good measure. That is kind of in line with how I picture them.

 

That would also cover the wolves' term for them.

I like to think that Aginor read the Lord of the rings and decided to try making Orcs, only to be told he would be sued by the Tolkien estate for copyright breach, and so in a fit of rage went to the dark lord, and with his new found powers decided to create the Trolloc. I don't thik they reproduce, that sounds far to messy for a Foresaken to mess about with, I think they are just, created. Also, trollocs will eat anything i cant see baby trollocs lasting beyond the next time mummy is hungry. 

 

Ooo your pregnant mavis, well you know Miriam I was peckish and fancied a nice snack later. 

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

The books hint at them being sexually active, but no more than that. The World of WoT and RJ though really go into quite some detail about it.

[Finnssss22]

1 hour ago, Scarloc99 said:

I like to think that Aginor read the Lord of the rings and decided to try making Orcs, only to be told he would be sued by the Tolkien estate for copyright breach, and so in a fit of rage went to the dark lord, and with his new found powers decided to create the Trolloc. I don't thik they reproduce, that sounds far to messy for a Foresaken to mess about with, I think they are just, created. Also, trollocs will eat anything i cant see baby trollocs lasting beyond the next time mummy is hungry. 

 

Ooo your pregnant mavis, well you know Miriam I was peckish and fancied a nice snack later. 

 

They have to be able to reproduce or Trollocs would've disappeared while Aginor was imprisoned for 3000 years and there certainly wouldn't have been enough to support over a 100 years of the Trolloc Wars.

This is flat out stated during one of the Forsaken's PoV's thinking about the mystery of how Fades come into being.

 

There's been many theories over the years from Fades simply being a by-product of using the True Power to Trolloc's actually having souls and that anytime a soul with the ability to Channel comes along it is born a Fade.

Edited October 19, 2023 by Finnssss22

[Scarloc99]

1 hour ago, Finnssss22 said:

 

They have to be able to reproduce or Trollocs would've disappeared while Aginor was imprisoned for 3000 years and there certainly wouldn't have been enough to support over a 100 years of the Trolloc Wars.

This is flat out stated during one of the Forsaken's PoV's thinking about the mystery of how Fades come into being.

 

There's been many theories over the years from Fades simply being a by-product of using the True Power to Trolloc's actually having souls and that anytime a soul with the ability to Channel comes along it is born a Fade.

Think the tongue in cheek humor was lost here, it is clear they reproduce, RJ went into it in rather cringey detail lol 

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

16 minutes ago, Scarloc99 said:

Think the tongue in cheek humor was lost here, it is clear they reproduce, RJ went into it in rather cringey detail lol 

*nods*

[Finnssss22]

On 10/19/2023 at 1:52 PM, Scarloc99 said:

Think the tongue in cheek humor was lost here, it is clear they reproduce, RJ went into it in rather cringey detail lol 

My bad, that's what I get for posting right before I was going to bed.

[EirikDaude]

On 10/18/2023 at 9:06 AM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

While the books are quiet on it, RJ appears not to have been, quite happily explaining the niceties of the situation, one explanation of which can be found by googling "A letter to Pam Korda".

I did google it and there doesn't seem to be any further information on how trollocs procreate beyond what you already extrapolated from text in the books. I guess maybe in that they can't produce offspring with other species? There was also that stuff about what myrdraals like, I guess, which again is alluded to in the books, but it doesn't have all that much to do with the topic at hand.

 

Is there something in particular you feel is expanded on in that letter beyond what's already been talked about in this thread?

Edited October 22, 2023 by EirikDaude
Missing word

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

On 10/22/2023 at 9:48 PM, EirikDaude said:

I did google it and there doesn't seem to be any further information on how trollocs procreate beyond what you already extrapolated from text in the books. I guess maybe in that they can't produce offspring with other species? There was also that stuff about what myrdraals like, I guess, which again is alluded to in the books, but it doesn't have all that much to do with the topic at hand.

 

Is there something in particular you feel is expanded on in that letter beyond what's already been talked about in this thread?

More about their heterosexual activity and ability to have children than anything else definitively relating to details of how they procreate. But it is clear that RJ has thought deeply about the subject, however little it is touched upon in the books.

 

Though the topic at hand was meant to be (though I derailed my own thread inside the opening post), what would be done with the female trollocs? Could someone from the Two Rivers kill females? They are shadowspawn and a constant source of Myrddral and other trollocs, but they are non-combatants, commit no direct crimes. It is an ethical quandary, one I though of mostly as a joke, but the more I think about, the more it is an unpleasant question. Forcibly sterilize them then let them live their lives in peace?What about trollocs that surrender? What about any baby Myrddral, with their cute little big eyes well, cute little something probably. Think of the children, think of the children.

[EirikDaude]

My personal head canon is that there is not much sexual dimorphism in trollocs, and that female trollocs fight along with the males. 

 

Of course that leaves the question of where they have their pregnant, young, etc. But tbh. it's a question which I've never really put that much thought into. Much as I don't think too hard on how society for other "evil" races work in e.g. Lord of the Rings, as I believe the answer will be "it doesn't work" if you really think about it.

 

Take for instance the portal world Rand, Hurin and Loial visit in book 2, where the trollocs have won and you end up with a world where everything is dead except for a few grolm. Allegedly this is because with the trollocs exterminating humankind they are without a food source, and die out from infighting and starvation after hunting everything else to extinction. But how do they even get enough food in the main world? There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of trollocs in the blight. How are they fed? I think the borderlands would be depopulated pretty quickly if they get everything from them...

 

I see it is a topic which has been discussed on these boards before (https://dragonmount.com/forums/topic/24977-the-shadows-economy/). I don't know if any consensus was reached in that thread, but I believe that for a lot of topics like this it is better to just suspend disbelief.

 

As for your question about the morality of killing non-combatants of a sapient species, I feel it depends fairly strongly on whether or not trollocs are inherently evil or not. To quote a poster on a different forum, discussing whether or not killing all goblins in DnD is morally good: 

 

Quote

To me, there are 3 options:

 

1) They are constructs with no free will. In this case, they are virtually puppets of their creator. They are not evil themselves, but were created and programmed by an evil source. They are no different to robots built by a villain: You need to kill them, and it is not evil to kill them, but they cannot be evil in and of themselves. They are machines.

 

2) They are non-sentient animals, like lions or wolves. They have no concept of good or evil, and cannot be classed as such. All their behaviour stems from instinct. It would be acceptable to hunt them, or to chase them out of an area, but hunting them to extinction would certainly not be a heroic or good act.

 

3) They are sentient creatures with free will. If so, not all of them are necessarily evil. Some will make the conscious choice to be good. In that case, slaughtering an entire village because "all goblins are evil" without first ensuring there are no good (or neutral) ones is an evil act, because you may have killed a good one. Killing children is an evil act, because there was no way to know whether they would grow up to be evil.

 

In no case is an entire group inherently and unchangeably evil. They either have sentience and free will, in which case they have the opportunity to be good, or they don't, in which case they cannot be evil.

 

This is pretty much how I think about it too. At any rate, I think the Emond Fielders would have trouble killing anyone presenting as innocent. Or just killing anyone in cold blood, even if they do know that they are evil. Of course this changes throughout the series, particularly for Rand from what I recall.

 

 

[Sabio]

In the companion I think that mentions female trollocs stay in the blight and are mostly used to breed.  

[Kalessin]

I've looked at both the Companion and the World of RJ's WOT. The Companion:

Quote

 There were female Trollocs, but they simply existed as breeders, birthing and protecting their young.

The World of RJ's WOT:

Quote

As in the Age of Legends, only male Trollocs fight or hunt. Female are cloistered, serving as little more than breeding machines. Fortunately female Trollocs enjoy being pregnant. Trollocs can inter-breed with humans, but apparently prefer humans as food. In any case even if the human mother survives to give birth, the resulting offspring are usually stillborn, and the few born live do not survive long.

Still, they must be fed, and the articles say nothing to disprove that they regularly ate whoever was unlucky enough to not be eaten immediately by the raiding male trollocs.

[Scarloc99]

On 10/29/2023 at 4:08 AM, Sabio said:

In the companion I think that mentions female trollocs stay in the blight and are mostly used to breed.  

If you ever needed proof the shadow is evil, it wants it's females staying at home, raising the kids and cooking dinner while the men go out and earn a living. I bet they all worship an orange man with bad hair, and blame everything on those pesky Aiel crossing the border. 

[Shawlee]

On 10/17/2023 at 7:27 PM, TravellingIsAGatewayDrug said:

The authors never actually cover

 

 

Yes he did. When you read that rare Aginor, well when he became Osan'ger, POV. I think it's in "Chaos", in that long prologue if I am remembering correctly. Osan'ger thinks back to how he did not anticipate the Myrdralls when he made the Trollocs. They are some rare off shoot; throwbacks that was the word. And they are born from trolloc couplings (gag 🤢), at least he hints at that. He speculated it was the remnants of the human genes in them. Maybe that's why they can see channelling.

 

**entering into complete speculation territory from this point, take this with a grain of salt**

 

Maybe, Aginor experimented with some humans who could channel, and animals of course; to make some of the trollocs, and that might have caused some of them to pop out myrdralls? That has been my headcanon for years. I never looked online for theories, or read the companion book. I should remedy that now that you guys have mentioned. 

[Shawlee]

On 10/19/2023 at 12:02 PM, Finnssss22 said:

anytime a soul with the ability to Channel comes along it is born a Fade.

 

❤️❤️ lol this has been my headcanon for years, thanks 😊 for mentioning it, it makes me feel less stupid about it hahah

[Scarloc99]

On 10/31/2023 at 3:10 AM, Shawlee said:

 

 

Yes he did. When you read that rare Aginor, well when he became Osan'ger, POV. I think it's in "Chaos", in that long prologue if I am remembering correctly. Osan'ger thinks back to how he did not anticipate the Myrdralls when he made the Trollocs. They are some rare off shoot; throwbacks that was the word. And they are born from trolloc couplings (gag 🤢), at least he hints at that. He speculated it was the remnants of the human genes in them. Maybe that's why they can see channelling.

 

**entering into complete speculation territory from this point, take this with a grain of salt**

 

Maybe, Aginor experimented with some humans who could channel, and animals of course; to make some of the trollocs, and that might have caused some of them to pop out myrdralls? That has been my headcanon for years. I never looked online for theories, or read the companion book. I should remedy that now that you guys have mentioned. 

I will return to my original, Aginor was a massive Tolkien Fan (WOT is future earth, so there was def a tolkien), and all he was trying to do was his own bit of Tolkien fan art, I mean, they didn't look like orcs, but that was because he was worried about a whole legal battle with the Tolkien estate about rights etc. :). 

 

I do like the thought that Aes Sedai in the AOL tried to use the power to replicate there fav fantasy moments :). LTT was only called the Dragon because he was a massive Wizards of the Coast nerd and wanted to be Bahamat ;). 

[Shawlee]

On 10/23/2023 at 6:11 PM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

What about any baby Myrddral, with their cute little big eyes well, cute little something probably. Think of the children, think of the children.

 

I AM DYING. 🤣🤣🤣 poor baby myrdralls, I mean Birgitte would be sympathetic, as she loves kids, esp the ugly ones. 🤣

 

On 10/23/2023 at 6:11 PM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

 It is an ethical quandary, one I though of mostly as a joke, but the more I think about, the more it is an unpleasant question.

 

For real tho, what an ethical quandary! 🤔

 

But as we, people of "the main continent"(seanchen's dont have them, the only other continent we've got to learn about) are trying to eliminate all shadowspawn so yeah, unpleasant or not that has to be done, and if rand or tam has anything to say, the women will box their ears)

 

SOOOO, Bring in the Aiel, they have no compunction about killing females, or the Wolves. 

 

Shhhh, 🤫🤫🤫Rand Al'Thor doesn't need to know. 

 

 

Edited November 2, 2023 by Shawlee

[Scarloc99]

44 minutes ago, Shawlee said:

 

I AM DYING. 🤣🤣🤣 poor baby myrdralls, I mean Birgitte would be sympathetic, as she loves kids, esp the ugly ones. 🤣

 

 

For real tho, what an ethical quandary! 🤔

 

But as we, people of "the main continent"(seanchen's dont have them, the only other continent we've got to learn about) are trying to eliminate all shadowspawn so yeah, unpleasant or not that has to be done, and if rand or tam has anything to say, the women will box their ears)

 

SOOOO, Bring in the Aiel, they have no compunction about killing females, or the Wolves. 

 

Shhhh, 🤫🤫🤫Rand Al'Thor doesn't need to know. 

 

 

I mean how many women are killed just generally in the last battle, all those sharan women fighting for instance. Rand and Perrins viewpoint is predicated on the idea that only Men fight. We know that the Seanchan have female warriors, so when Rand went all crazy killing Seanchan warriors, he was killing women with no issues. When Perrin allowed masemas crazies to hold the line, he was putting women to death. 

 

[Shawlee]

5 minutes ago, Scarloc99 said:

I mean how many women are killed just generally in the last battle, all those sharan women fighting for instance. Rand and Perrins viewpoint is predicated on the idea that only Men fight. We know that the Seanchan have female warriors, so when Rand went all crazy killing Seanchan warriors, he was killing women with no issues. When Perrin allowed masemas crazies to hold the line, he was putting women to death. 

 

 

"The hypocrisy of Rand & Perrin" someone should write an epic on it. This Fandom has enough poets, as I have seen, in my one whole week of being in it.  

 

🥹🤔🙌

[Elgee]

On 10/24/2023 at 12:11 AM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

What about any baby Myrddral, with their cute little big eyes well, cute little something probably.

 

And yet the White Tower wouldn't let me keep one as a pet. I had to send it back to Shayol Ghul. Still miffed.

[WheelofJuke]

Maybe the uncertainty of Myddraals' origin stems from the use of Unwanted Trolloc Baby Drop Boxes...

*young Trolloc couple give birth*
*see eyeless human slug thing*
*decide to try again, later*

I'll show myself out now, thanks. 😐