Mat's Funniest Moments

[Deroi]

I saw this being mentioned earlier on the thread but I never understood why Nynaeve/Elayne should feel personally hit when Mat comments that it doesn't feel right leaving darkfriends running free. Are they upset because they literally think he's accusing them of letting darkfriends run free, is it because of Moghedien(did she escape by the point where this is happening and did Egwene tell them or did it happen later in the book?) or some other context I'm missing.

[DSgamer64]

Mat is by far one of my personal favorite characters, probably because his personality can be well related and he is a very realistic type of character in terms of his personality and habits.

[DSgamer64]

I really don't think Brandon should be criticised too much, you've got to remember that this is a monumental undertaking for anybody, there were bound to be mistakes or flaws, and the only person who could write the characters perfectly was Jordan himself.

 

Yeah but Brandon really redeemed himself in ToM when it comes to writing Mat's perspective. I think maybe it's because he brought Mat back to being a more realistic character, he wasn't as rogue like and he has come to accept his fate and what he must do in the world. And I think that is kind of why I enjoyed Mat more in ToM then I did earlier in the series, as RJ kept him very similar for quite a long period of time where he was all the gambler and the guy who was more interested in women and drinking then accepting his destiny.

[shortkut]

 

 

I would love if hinderstrap was RJ

LOL...

Imagine the outcry if it was barely touched by BS and only was a rough read because that is what unpolished RJ work looks like.

 

I didn't like it, but reading it didn't give me an aneurism like some people. I would die laughing reading people's responses after a bombshell like that

[jedman67]

One of my favorites is TGS: 34, when Mat plans his "invasion" of Trustair to find who is circulating pictures of himself and perrin. I don't have the quote handy, but when he discovers its Verin, his reaction is priceless.

[Ozzie_aiel]

That whole planning, down to the essay he wrote out for each character, was hilarious

[Arran]

 

I really don't think Brandon should be criticised too much, you've got to remember that this is a monumental undertaking for anybody, there were bound to be mistakes or flaws, and the only person who could write the characters perfectly was Jordan himself.

 

Yeah but Brandon really redeemed himself in ToM when it comes to writing Mat's perspective. I think maybe it's because he brought Mat back to being a more realistic character, he wasn't as rogue like and he has come to accept his fate and what he must do in the world. And I think that is kind of why I enjoyed Mat more in ToM then I did earlier in the series, as RJ kept him very similar for quite a long period of time where he was all the gambler and the guy who was more interested in women and drinking then accepting his destiny.

 

Yeah he really did! I'm not saying I didn't enjoy Mat's parts in TGS, I just thought it was a bit unfair to criticise Brandon for something that not many other people could have done a better job of :) However, I did enjoy Mat more in ToM, and that might be due to the fact that he is more himself rather than being forcibly funny.

[DSgamer64]

 

 

I really don't think Brandon should be criticised too much, you've got to remember that this is a monumental undertaking for anybody, there were bound to be mistakes or flaws, and the only person who could write the characters perfectly was Jordan himself.

 

Yeah but Brandon really redeemed himself in ToM when it comes to writing Mat's perspective. I think maybe it's because he brought Mat back to being a more realistic character, he wasn't as rogue like and he has come to accept his fate and what he must do in the world. And I think that is kind of why I enjoyed Mat more in ToM then I did earlier in the series, as RJ kept him very similar for quite a long period of time where he was all the gambler and the guy who was more interested in women and drinking then accepting his destiny.

 

Yeah he really did! I'm not saying I didn't enjoy Mat's parts in TGS, I just thought it was a bit unfair to criticise Brandon for something that not many other people could have done a better job of :) However, I did enjoy Mat more in ToM, and that might be due to the fact that he is more himself rather than being forcibly funny.

 

I have actually almost finished a re-read of TGS, and to be honest, I don't think Mat is THAT bad, but I think he still has some of his old mannerisms from earlier books and he is still coming to grips with the fact that he is somewhat married to Tuon, making him the Prince of Ravens (has it even been mentioned what that means or will it be AMOL revelation?). I agree that it seems like he tries to be funny, especially in the scene where he is comparing women to animals when talking to Talmanes, the funniness felt really forced.

[Arran]

 

 

 

I really don't think Brandon should be criticised too much, you've got to remember that this is a monumental undertaking for anybody, there were bound to be mistakes or flaws, and the only person who could write the characters perfectly was Jordan himself.

 

Yeah but Brandon really redeemed himself in ToM when it comes to writing Mat's perspective. I think maybe it's because he brought Mat back to being a more realistic character, he wasn't as rogue like and he has come to accept his fate and what he must do in the world. And I think that is kind of why I enjoyed Mat more in ToM then I did earlier in the series, as RJ kept him very similar for quite a long period of time where he was all the gambler and the guy who was more interested in women and drinking then accepting his destiny.

 

Yeah he really did! I'm not saying I didn't enjoy Mat's parts in TGS, I just thought it was a bit unfair to criticise Brandon for something that not many other people could have done a better job of :) However, I did enjoy Mat more in ToM, and that might be due to the fact that he is more himself rather than being forcibly funny.

 

I have actually almost finished a re-read of TGS, and to be honest, I don't think Mat is THAT bad, but I think he still has some of his old mannerisms from earlier books and he is still coming to grips with the fact that he is somewhat married to Tuon, making him the Prince of Ravens (has it even been mentioned what that means or will it be AMOL revelation?). I agree that it seems like he tries to be funny, especially in the scene where he is comparing women to animals when talking to Talmanes, the funniness felt really forced.

 

He's definitely not bad, he's just different and it seems like a lot of people picked up on that. I think Prince of Ravens is just an official title of being married to Tuon. Could be something to do with the Deathwatch Guard.

[slatanic1]

One of my favorites is TGS: 34, when Mat plans his "invasion" of Trustair to find who is circulating pictures of himself and perrin. I don't have the quote handy, but when he discovers its Verin, his reaction is priceless.

I just finished listening to this part on the way to work this morning...When Verin asks him why he didn't ask where she got the drawings of him, he said "I figured you just Saidar-ed it"

 

Hilarious!!

[DaoineSidhe]

Personally I found Mat in tGS, especially his first chapter in tGS, to be quite "off".  For the most part I have enjoyed BS's writing of WoT, and been pleased with the results.  But that first chapter of his in tGS is the reason I am back on DM after I had taken a many year break from the site.  Mat's always been a bit of a complainer, and vehemently denies publicly what the reader knows to be true, but I think BS took those aspects of Mat's personality and magnified them to the point where his Mat sounded like a caricature of himself.  BS certainly improved on Mat in ToM, although I cringe hard-core anytime I re-read his "letter" to Egwene, because I'm almost insulted by the way Mat's intelligence is written in that passage (yes, yes, it has since been shown that this letter was "sarcastic", but it the whole thing just seemed off to me).  Back to the OP topic though:

 

A couple I haven't seen posted on here:

-When Mat wakes up in the White Tower in tDR after being healed of the Shadar Logath Dagger.  He wakes up, and in comes Suian and Leane, and Mat immediately tries to say that he'll be on his way, and thanks for the healing, etc., and he is barely able to stand up.  Then later when Suian asks him if he remembers the Horn, he's like "what Horn?".  That entire sequence makes me laugh.

 

-Matt getting ambushed by the Aiel on the rooftop of Tear in tDR.  "What are you doing here?"  "Oh, I don't  know, I'm just out for a stroll.."

 

-Mat's removal of his throwing knives before the Wise Ones before entering Rhuidean

[Whizbang]

Re: the note to Elayne

 

That was just horrible. I am pretty sure Mat wrote a letter to Elayne in Ebu Dar, something about there not being anything here (in Ebu Dar) but flies, and you can just as easily find those in Caemlyn. Although his "hand" was boyish and square, it was not described as being almost illiterate. That letter kinda upset me.

[jedman67]

Re: the note to Elayne

 

That was just horrible. I am pretty sure Mat wrote a letter to Elayne in Ebu Dar, something about there not being anything here (in Ebu Dar) but flies, and you can just as easily find those in Caemlyn. Although his "hand" was boyish and square, it was not described as being almost illiterate. That letter kinda upset me.

I found it hysterical! Also you need to note that in an agrarian/feudal society (which is most of randland) few commoners know how to write well, or know the principles of grammar. Few commoners know how to write, period. You can expect someone like the mayor of EF insisting that all boys learn their letters, and you can also expect that most will stop the minute they dont need to learn anymore. You also see a large number of clerks whose job it is to write for people who cant write [well] on their own.

I can't recall many examples of WoT main characters writing, aside from AS - and they're pretty much the same category as nobles in this case.

 

I can easily picture Mat throwing a tantrum after Elayne ignores him once again (or so he believes), furiously dashing off an angry letter without taking care to keep it neat or the spelling correct. He also must be at least a little ADHD....

[Whizbang]

Oh, the letter itself was funny.  I did laugh.  But with all the knowledge Mat has in his head, if any of the Emonds Fielders know how to write, it is him.  Perrin writes letters, almost poetry, to Faile a couple of times.  Rand writes letters and decrees and the like, and no one comments on his grammar or whatnot (though maybe people are afraid to).  Mat, though rogue-ish and certainly the type to skip on his writing lessons and practice as a boy, has the memories of hundreds of men, some of them nobles and military men used to issuing orders, which includes written commands, I am sure.

 

Funny? Yes.  Fit his character? No.

 

Maybe it will be better this read through.

[The Fisher King]

Two funny things I never noted before that I picked up recently:

 

1 In TSR, early in the book, he promises himself that he will NEVER give up all of his knives again - for ANYONE - not even the Amyrlin Seat.....Then, later in the same book he does just that and gives them all up again before entering Rhuidean. And that itself is funny, as he keeps finding more and more in his clothes that he has to give up.

 

 

2 The beginning of LOC when Rand and Bashere are discussing military matters and Bashere is impressed with Mat's knowledge and remarks: ''I'd like to see the books that young man read.''

 

lol

 

 

Fish

[jedman67]

Oh, the letter itself was funny.  I did laugh.  But with all the knowledge Mat has in his head, if any of the Emonds Fielders know how to write, it is him.  Perrin writes letters, almost poetry, to Faile a couple of times.  Rand writes letters and decrees and the like, and no one comments on his grammar or whatnot (though maybe people are afraid to).  Mat, though rogue-ish and certainly the type to skip on his writing lessons and practice as a boy, has the memories of hundreds of men, some of them nobles and military men used to issuing orders, which includes written commands, I am sure.

 

Funny? Yes.  Fit his character? No.

 

Maybe it will be better this read through.

Rand had been thouroghly educated by both Thom and Moiraine. and still, i see it more of impulsively dashing off a quick letter than a thought-out carefully written note. His spelling isn't atrocious, just hurried.

[TheVitaleMob]

I agree that it seems like he tries to be funny, especially in the scene where he is comparing women to animals when talking to Talmanes, the funniness felt really forced.

 

That might have been THE funniest scene for me in the entire series to date.  It could be because Michael Kramer did such a great job with it also, but I usually rewind it five or so times every time I come across it.

 

Edit: I just went back to it, and I don't know if we're talking about the same scene: TGS 20 when explaining the "dice game" with blank dice.

[The Fisher King]

If we had never seen the letter written by Mat in ACOS I may not have been so disturbed by the situation in TOM. We see how well Mat writes in his first letter.

 

It is made clear that the reason Mat writes the letter in TOM the way he does is because he is intentionally trying to be ''funny'' - and THAT was what I hated most. The ''sense of humor'' behind the letter in TOM is soooo not Mat's real sense of humor at ALL and that was why it was so jarring to me.

 

Now, I know that a lot of people enjoyed the letter and found it side-splittingly hilarious and I totally respect that. I just personally didn't care for it.

 

JMO

 

 

Fish

[Jak o' the Shadows]

funny letter in it's own right.  defend it all you want though, it wasn't Mat.   Fish is right.  Jarring.

 

 

-Mat meeting Birgette incognito in Caemlyn was pretty funny.  "You could charm the helmet of a general on a battlefield"

 

-The running joke about Olver and the bad habits he's learning from 'some member(s) of the Band'

[Balefire to da face!]

I find it more believable that Mat would have a limited vocabulary and bad spelling then that the letter was meant to be funny. As said, it doesn't jell with Mat's sense of humor.

 

Where as, while Mat is clearly literate, he is also the only Emond Fielder that doesn't like to read, is never shown to be interested in libraries or collections of books, and RJ himself made numerous jokes about the ridiculousness of Mat ever reading or wanting to read a book. It's actually more unbelievable that we've never seen anyone else make a spelling error on handwritten notes in the entire series. But on the whole, the literacy rate of Randland seems to be a bit unbelievable compared to just about anything pre-modern in our world.

[Azrayne]

 

Brandon himself said it best about these slapstick over the top lines...

 

Interview: 2012

Reddit 2012 (WoT)

necrosxiaoban (August 2012)

Mat's voice really changed from The Gathering Storm to Towers of Midnight. In The Gathering Storm he seemed almost a parody of himself, while in Towers of Midnight he eased back on his roguish nature and felt much more real. Why do you think Mat came across that way in The Gathering Storm, and were you specifically motivated to correct it in Towers of Midnight or did that happen naturally?

Brandon Sanderson (August 2012)

One of the big dangers in doing what I'm doing is turning the characters into parodies of themselves, exactly as you stated. This is kind of the 'uncanny valley' of working in someone else's world. If you get them close, but still wrong, it can feel worse than if you'd been more off.

Jason from Dragonmount, in the early reads, was the first one to warn me that Mat was "off." I was surprised, as I felt I'd gotten him down. However, in going back to Mr. Jordan's writing and delving into it, I realized I'd missed large parts of what made Mat into Mat—the tension between what he says and does, the constant little quips in narrative (which tend to be more clever than the actual things he says out loud), the complaining that isn't really complaining. I didn't understand Mat. I tried so hard to make him funny, I wrote the HIM out of him. (I feel Peter Jackson did some of this with Gimli in the Lord of the Rings films.)

So I'd say I was specifically motivated rather than it happening naturally. I should mention, however, that the sequences RJ worked on for Mat all ended up in Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light, not in The Gathering Storm. Some of what you are noticing isn't me, but the master himself.

 

 

This is why I like Sanderson, so few authors are willing to sit down and have honest discussions about their work like that without letting ego get in the way.

 

He definitely was rather off in TGS, it stood out worst for me during his interchanges with Talmanes, felt like a whole other character for a while there. Though tbh, I'm surprised that's the worst of it, it's a rare author who can pick up another man's series mid-stride and continue it so convincingly.

[Suttree]

I find it more believable that Mat would have a limited vocabulary and bad spelling then that the letter was meant to be funny.

Problem with that being we have already seen him write one with none of those issues earlier in the series.

[Aulduron]

But Tom wasn't laffing at him then.

[Morden]

 

I find it more believable that Mat would have a limited vocabulary and bad spelling then that the letter was meant to be funny.

Problem with that being we have already seen him write one with none of those issues earlier in the series.

I agree to an extent, but we did not see the first few letters he had sent her in Caemlyn, the ones which were ignored. it could well be that he sat down and thought a bit and tried hard to write something better. That would explain Thom laughing, especially if he was asking Thom how to spell things and what they mean.

[Morden]

 

I find it more believable that Mat would have a limited vocabulary and bad spelling then that the letter was meant to be funny.

Problem with that being we have already seen him write one with none of those issues earlier in the series.

I agree to an extent, but we did not see the first few letters he had sent her in Caemlyn, the ones which were ignored. it could well be that he sat down and thought a bit and tried hard to write something better. That would explain Thom laughing, especially if he was asking Thom how to spell things and what they mean.