Yes, in the Tower the Black Ajah can easily kidnap another Aes Sedai, but there is no way for them to take the AS out of the tower or bring in Fades.

It would be harder to kidnap AS outside of the Tower. When the BA decided to reveal who 13 of them were it was for a major trap for the Dragon, not to catch one sister too early to be used in the Final Battle.

Turning people years before the Final Battle is too dangerous because they can’t hide who they are as well as the regular BA. Also once the Tower figures out people are being turned, the whole of the BA becomes at risk.

Verin gets back with the girls at the beginning of book 3 and she gives the Horn of Valere to Siuan. But she hid from everyone what she brought back so it would have been a well guarded secret. But what did she tell the Black Ajah was in the bag???

Do you have someone in your family (like a grandmother or great grandmother) with a name similar to a character in the book?

On 12/23/2023 at 9:48 PM, Gary Again said:

I always liked the name Joya from the books. It's the name of Egwene and Rand's kid in her tower tests.

And a woman in the black Ajah 😮

Ogier were police in the AoL.

I thought the Seanchan Ogier didn’t find the Stedding. And the ruler of Seanchan cared for them until they could live without the Stedding changing them into a harsher personality. Then that family married into the Hawkwing family. 🤷

On 10/20/2023 at 11:27 AM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

But where are you getting this information from? As I remember it, the books are nowhere near that specific. Certainly not down to how the ter'angreal were created. I do agree that whatever was in RJ's head, it is what is in the books that is the most important. But I do not remember most of what you are stating as fact being mentioned in the books. Am I misremembering?

One can logically infer if this device can do what the AoL device couldn’t, then it must have been a Breaking time device, trying to save the human race, and they probably did back then, maybe used it once, or many times until the world settled down and when they didn’t need it to right the weather anymore, the pattern hid it from the world.

you don’t have to reach the same conclusions given the same data, I would like to hear what other people think.

The book is very clear it wasn’t windfinder skill, just initiated.

that is cannon, period. 
you don’t have to agree.

I see no point to restate anything else. 

On 10/18/2023 at 12:22 PM, Ioulaum said:

The Damane seem like the best group for iteration on effective battle tactics. Since the Suldam could see weaves and control them - and they would benefit from new techniques that brought victory in battle.

Like, even a weak female channeler may be able to use air to block your nostrils and mouth with Air, and then you're dead pretty quick. And even before they died, most people would be panicking pretty hard, so they'd be useless in a fight.

 

But... If the story became too much about the channelers, then that would complicate things. And human soldiers would quickly become meaningless in deciding the outcomes of battles.

 

Reading WoT could be annoying at times because the characters often seemed remarkably stupid. But that's part of what created the drama that made the story entertaining.

But the Damane would not really be reaarded for improving things, they would probably be punished, so they can’t innovate.

And even tho the Suldam can kind of see weaves and stuff at the end of the day, they aren’t holding the weaves, they aren’t manipulating the weaves, and so they can’t innovate as well. 

“One such device should not be enough to affect even a large part of a single continent.”

If the device he was thinking of could not affect even a significant portion of one continent, that implies it is a different device.

In the AoL, weather stations would be located on top of a buildings and other choice locations and feed information to a computer that would collect all the data and the send all the commands to an automated global system of devices powered by the Standing Wave.

Automated systems mentioned by another Forsaken (?Asmodean) aren’t operated by people, but there could be Terangreal in the system which are triggered by the computer system, probably by input power from the standing wave, not initiated by Saidar.

The people who created the terangreal of the AoL didn’t include an alternate initialization for an automated terangreal powered by the Standing Wave to also allow women to use them.

If we disagree what is cannon, we will disagree on much, even if we agree on what is cannon, we could still have different perspectives on what’s what.

Maybe if the Bowl of Winds was a broken melted lump at the end of the channeling you could argue it was used beyond its capacity (much like the female Choen Dal (which doesn’t make sense that it could break when used)) but it wasn’t. It isn’t the same device. And even if the Seafolk used a secret chord to change the weather, it still wasn’t weather skill, it was merely knowledge of that secret chord.

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. 

Traveling

a regular gateway isn’t as effective as a deathgate. A deathgate opens to a new location each time it opens and deposits a few body in each random location to prevent clogging up the gate. 

I have no idea what you are referring to. I am referring to the placement of stars with increasing points to initiate the bowl of winds. The book doesn’t describe any other channeling. 
 

Age of Legend didn’t use bowls of winds. They had black boxes in the basements of structures with sensor arrays on the roof. Probably powered by the standing wave. 

the Bowl of Winds, is a Breaking terangreal, either made by a Seafolk person(s) or granted to the Seafolk.

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.

Scar, the book itself is very clear, they initiated it. If your source contradicts the books, you shouldn’t consider it cannon, you know I don’t. 

Heavy, Forsaken can be surprised by many things, my assumption the Bowl was a Breaking tech not AoL tech is enough, but add that the total power used was more than could be created by an ordinary full circle of Aes Sedai would add on too. 

The simplest read, is that Rand got a gift from the Creator.

More complex, at the Bore, he was able to manipulate the threads of the pattern and that ability stuck with him.

Even more complex, the ability to manipulate the world was always present but he never believed he could so he created an intermediate way of doing things, like a block, preventing from seeing the limitless power he always had access to, and after he sidestepped that at the Bore the illusion disappeared and he didn’t take the time to reform the illusion/Block. 

Scar, yes it is possible, but very unlikely, out of the thousands/millions of babies being born after her departure. And we have no idea how long after, it could be seconds, minutes, hours, days or longer, there is no evidence as to the timing.

Heavy, Birgitte saying she think Gaidal is nursing is not evidence of anything, Birgitte is hardly a philosopher on the timing of a soul entering the body of baby, and were she, she could be wrong.

Wotfan, the truth is Birgitte doesn’t know. This is just how she describes things, not reality.

Scar, Heros don’t need to replace ordinary souls, the Pattern also arranges the parents to meet and times the birth, the Pattern isn’t caught by surprise at the moment of birth and there is no chance of the Pattern being confounded by a death in stillbirth, the Pattern picks who gets a stillborn baby too.

Wotfan, I presume the Dark One’s abilities are somewhat inflated, either intentionally or unintentionally by Ishy and I’m leaning more to the prior. The Dark One has no power to impact the soul of baby before or after birth. We only have evidence of the Dark One able to have impact on the souls of his Channelers who have black wires connecting themselves to HIM, and obviously he must be able to kick the souls out of bodies, presume these are Darkfriends who are at the Bore.

On 9/19/2023 at 1:01 PM, TravellingIsAGatewayDrug said:

When a pair of the rebel sisters were killed by a forsaken, I believe they mentioned that it appeared that the forsaken just wove a bubble around their heads and allowed them to suffocate.

 

It irked me that something so simple was identified as being used, so they were clearly aware of it, but then in the ensuing battle with the Seanchan they don't use the same trick. I mean, bubbling a Raken or To'Raken's head seems a more efficient use than spraying gouts of flame all over the place.

 

Rand had booby-trapped the ways in Shayol Ghul fairly cleverly, allowing trollocs to pass through and then later perish.

 

When Rand was defending the manor (I think it was a manor, fighting alongside Logain) and utilized gateways as a weapon against the trollocs, it was clever in a fashion. On the other hand gateways opening and closing like slicing jaws of doom seemes wasted. Yes, they will slice through anything, but with the fact that shadowspawn simply die when passing through a gate it seemed it would be easiers to just weave a standing/stable gateway and sweep it through swathes of shadowspawn like a shop-vac of justice.

 

Also, I haven't quite finished the books yet, but I'm kind of surprised that with Ashaman and Sisters bonding eachother, nobody has mentioned trying a dual bond yet. In example, an Ashaman could bond a sister as a warder, and then that sister could bond him as a warder in turn. We don't see any real detriment to bonding warders, it doesn't seem to tax the Aes Sedai in any way, and it seems to boost the warder's physical abilities. I imagine that dual-bonding between opposite sexed OP users would be a net positive and closest you could get to a unification of the halves of the OP. I'm sure it would be weird mentally with bonds and all, but it may have been a fun concept.

 

Maybe it is still coming though...

Deathgates don’t need a sweeper, they slide forward on their own. Open, slide forward, close, reopen, slide forward…

more generally, fairly early in the books, Rand and Avienda are facing many soldiers and two Damane, Avienda blocks the Damane, but there is no way Rand can trap so many individuals with separate weaves, and he makes one weave of air that snakes through their ranks and holds everyone. Not bad.

Later in the books, Nynaeve figures out how to heal madness after Rand helps her “heal” compulsion.

Bug, RJ early on announced that there will be no flying, even tho we know they had flying in AoL and Lenn flew too. It should be possible, the two basic methods of flying are buoyancy, like balloons, Rand had no trouble compressing the air around him when he sat at the peak of Dragonmount. The second basic method is dynamic flight, and that is very very complex, I’m an engineer and knowing how complex it really is makes it so hard to understand how we figured it out. We basically skipped lots of understanding with lots of trial and error. Wright brothers made a very good wind tunnel for testing different airfoils and they found one that worked. Others tried to test airfoils, but without the Wright’s wind tunnel, their test methods were less effective and failed.

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!

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. 

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.

We may disagree about what is cannon, but the book is very clear, the actions by the Sea Folk Windfinder was not a use of her subtle skill, she merely applied the startup sequence of weaves and the Terangreal did the rest uncontrolled by the windfinders.

Manetheren was an end of Breaking society unlike most of the modern nations. It was tucked deep into a mountain range, prioritizing protection from attack over trade. But the society would have had to fail eventually or so significantly readjusted from defense to trade for the country to survive, a very unlikely action.

Most modern countries and capitals are on navigable waters.

Not really. The weather terangreal would be located in fenced off and perhaps warded plots of land like electrical transformers from an earlier age 😉

I don’t think the Sea Folk were exerting any skill at all. That was just the activation sequence. The Sea Folk wind finder just used all the power available to her and put stars of increasing number of points onto the bowl, there was no discussion of her weaving any complex weaves.

In the first book, the weather snaps back with no one doing anything.

And even had the Dark One this time sent the world onto the hockey stick part of change, and this was the equivalent to a ship going off a water fall, enough force can fly that ship in a curve and back onto the river far from the cliff, that’s what the girls did with Nynaeve and Taalen using strong angreal, just those two gals contributed how many female Forsaken equivalent of Saidar? 7? 10? More? The rest of young women contributed 1? 2? Or more? All the older women? 1/2? 1? Getting that amount of Saidar should have been impossible too.
Spoilers from AMoL: As to overwhelming the Dark Ones hold on the weather… later we see local changes be made by Rand humming 💁‍♂️

I had this amazing idea for that moment where Mat drops the doll in season 1 leaving the Grinwell’s? farm.

he drops the doll and walks away and the lighting changes… a woman with an intricate braid walks over to it and picks it up… fade to black. 

On 9/4/2023 at 7:26 PM, nsmallw said:

I really enjoyed this episode. I am happy they've improved over season one. But I just was woken up with an odd thought. Perrin is writing a letter to Egwene and Nynaeve...a letter? I didn't know the Westlands had a postal service lol. However did he get the letter from Arad Doman to Tar Valon? It just seems sloppy writing to me .   I really hope they either explain the process or stop doing it.  Am I being ridiculous about this ? I'd love to know if anyone was confused as me about this. Thanks,otherwise a good starting episode.

Pretty sure there isn’t a formal postal system, but people can give a letter to a wagon train going to a certain city for a silver penny and when the wagon train gets there the wagon driver gives a copper penny to a local kid to run the letter to the person on the letter.