That's what someone with a "strong sense of honour and a total lack of empathy is." A bad guy. It's not until the Brando books, sure, but you see Galad realize this in real time; as he sees the people most like him from the outside, and realizes that when you don't live inside a palace 'just always do the right thing' isn't quite so simple, and can have some ironic consequences. Honor without empathy describes most people who commit crimes against humanity. The natural human impulse is to dismiss such examples and say "well they weren't really honorable, duh"; yet in doing so, it reveals why it's evil in the first place. Honor is not objective. Their honor was not objective, and our honor is not objective. However, it lets us think it is. If our judgement of what to do is some abstract, self-serving "code" (that we, of course, are free to interpret as our motivated reasoning defines) and not the actual, living humans we interact with, we too are bad guys. We are laundering our regular, base, human desires through "honor" and it comes out the other side looking like the Objective Truth Of The Light. And along those lines, I think RJ does a good job of highlighting something about evil that I think is fundamentally real: the beginning is complicated, but the now is extremely simple. People have all kinds of reasons for getting into a criminal enterprise, for starting to embezzle, for signing on to the job at that investment firm. But the now, the moment when you're hurting someone for your own gain, is extremely simple. Carridin had all kinds of reasons for becoming a darkfriend, but now what he does is hurt people and try to get ahead. The magic isn't even required: as Verin shows, the process for becoming a Darkfriend isn't like being turned; you're linked to the dark one but it doesn't excise your original personality in the same way. RJ's doing "Just say no" to moral absolutism and evil. Even then, I think the villain writing in WoT is a strength and not a weakness. The evil in WoT is incredibly complicated! Sure, there's no dumb Thanos "wah wah I had to sacrifice my own daughter in order to do semi-omnicide" :C moments. On the other hand, the good guys repeatedly win because the Forsaken are competing with one another and their schemes overlap and clash. The darkfriends are all selfish, petty monsters, but they are each selfish and petty in their own peculiar ways, bouncing off each other and our heroes. Fain offers us an evil that itself hates and seeks to destroy the categorical, mystical evil of the world. I think all of this works better than having villains that monologue about how they deserve to do evil things because their dad was mean to them or whatever.

I would argue this naturally follows on the paradigm I laid out above; Compulsion works on anything with a human brain, since it's poking and prodding at your thoughts directly. Nyneave can Delve for it, and she "sees" it as a web sitting on your brain, poking at it. It's a weave that affects the physical world, like starting a fire or directing the wind. Turning, on the other hand, slurps out part of your soul. It's not affecting the physical world directly, it's magic on magic. It's shown as much, much more difficult than Compulsion, and requires both the True Power/DO Energy (via the fades) and the OP through a large (evil fade version) circle of channelers. My guess would be that only people who can channel are "open" enough to those energies for the process to function and get at your soul. A neato thing I just think I realized, I've always kind of wondered why 13? Shouldn't it depend on the strength of the channellers? And I think now the answer is that the limiting factor is the Myrddraal, they're made to a template and can only "channel" so much of the TP, and the weird TP circle rules say you need a 1:1 ratio. I wonder if Moridin with Callendor could turn someone on his own, weaving both together with enough strength.

The simplest answer of all is that he wasn't lying, he was just wrong. Yes, the wheel will keep turning. Yes, people will keep suffering. Yes, the world will be broken an infinite number of times, the Dragon/Champion of Light will have to go through this over and over and over again. And then some more. Forever. According to RJ/BS, the correct answer is to say "yes, and that's life, and we will try our best to do better every time." The incorrect answer is to be a coward and say "if it can never be perfect, we should end it all forever." Add to this: it's not common to "remember" your past lives (after all, in the fiction of WoT, one of us on this very forum could carry the soul of any of our favorite characters). Ishy, personally, wasn't really tied to the wheel, just the Dark One. He personally had lived 3 lives over and above the other Forsaken (waking up to mess around in the Trolloc Wars and the Hawkwing days), and his mind was completely broken. He wanted to stop existing, and if the only way to do that is to make everything stop existing he was OK with this. He wasn't lying, he was just extremely selfish and in unbearable agony.

Having just finished a re-read, the characters in Rand's "all good" Dark One dead world are said to basically all be "turned," but to the Light; it's explicitly compared as the same "wrongness" behind their eyes. This, plus how Androl's chapters show turned Asha'man, makes me believe that in Randland humans are a dialectic, we have good and evil in our souls producing us. Turning permanently silences/removes the good and all that's left is your worst impulses with no redeeming emotions to counter them. Compulsion is a whole other thing, it's a real complicated weave that messes with the chemistry of your physical brain (rather than your metaphysical soul) and affects your decisionmaking. We get to see a spectrum and variety of applications, from Grandeal's personality obliterating nerve staple overwrite, to more subtle/less powerful versions that Liandrin or Verin have that just push someone's decisionmaking in a direction they could have taken. It all holds together fine imo. Turning and Compulsion add an extra dramatic layer where you can be betrayed by characters who absolutely have proven themselves trustworthy, and it adds an extra horrifying fate-worse-than-death threat to be deployed against our heroes themselves.

I think 1. is probably spot-on, the quote from Hawking Aan-Alone mentioned is: "The Pattern weaves itself around our necks like halters. You are here. The banner is here. The weave of this moment is set. We have come to the Horn, but we must follow the banner. And the Dragon." I think 2. is largely also wiped out by that quote. The heroes pop out, go "hey where's the Dragon," and nothing happens. It's not an I win button for anyone except for the Chosen One when Ages are coming to an end. When it comes to Jain/Noel--what's to say that this isn't the life that tied him to the Horn, (as he always has been)? When you think about it too hard, it also starts falling squarely into paradox territory as well. If you think way too hard you start to wonder if, over timeframes approaching infinity, "you can earn your way onto the Horn roster" results in every living soul being tied to the Horn. That's silly so let's not. On a much broader level, I think the best way to think about it is that the mechanics of the Wheel and Pattern more generally are something that the Horn taps into, not that the Horn is driving this. RJ mentioned in a blog post "For Randshammer, you might say that mortals made the Horn of Valere. They certainly weren't gods." The Horn is some kind of extra-ultra magic from Legends of Ages of Legends ago, that manages to pull out important threads that aren't currently in the Pattern to fight. It doesn't create their reincarnation or name them heroes, really, it just grabs threads that are already come around over and over and that are super strong. And with that, I buy the argument that the exact names can and will shift over time. Hawkwing calls Rand "the Dragon and "Lews Therin," but like.. he's a baby! Hawkwing's Empire happened 2,000 years after the Breaking, he's way closer to our heroes than LTT is in terms of lifetime. How can "Hawkwing" remember working with "Lews Therin," when LTT died 2,000 years before Hawkwing was born? Simple--they're using the last known name of the threads, but the threads are eternal types more than individuals. Hawkwing is the Leader, Mat is the Gambler, Rand/LTT is the Dragon, Brigitte is the Archer, etc etc. The Leader, under some other name, led the heroes of the horn when LTT called them, but his last famous incarnation was as Hawkwing so that's what he is called in this narrative. And RJ leans into this in lots of ways--one of the ones that really baked my potato was realizing that in another Turning, we would call Mat Odin. By the by that's one of my favorite little RJ things, the difference between "ancient" and "ancient," like how we're closer now to Caesar conquering the land around the pyramids than he was to them being built in the first place. Mat's memories from the Trolloc Wars and the general post-breaking dark ages also predate Hawkwing's birth... by another 1,000 years! Or the moment Cadsuane realizes she actually has more actual life experience than Semirhage, because she's been in suspended animation for 3,000 years and was "only" a few hundred when she went in. The Horn smushes it all together into "ancient," but you still see those differences.

See below, a world map from the 1200s: You will notice it is round. Medieval people (educated ones, anyway (and if that caveat makes you pause, I want you to consider for a moment if the (conservative estimate) 2/3s of Classical Greek society who were owned as property and illiterate were sitting around checking Eratosthenes's math)) knew full well the earth was round. Where medieval people were wrong was on geocentrism, but let's talk about that for a sec. Usually, and incorrectly, the Galileo affair is cited as the "dark ages church trying to hold back le epic science man when it was really "hey maybe don't write a book arguing your position where the Pope is clearly inserted as a character named 'dumbass.'" If you dig into the actual science, he was losing by the rules set out by the Greeks that the Church followed. The truth was only established when modern science started coalescing based on but in opposition to the model of inquiry established in Greece. The Scientific revolution was not some kind of return to Greek/Roman "science," it was a departure from Greek/Roman models that had been in active and continuous use and development. The model being defended by the church in Galileo's trial was the Ptolemaic model. You will notice a funny word in the middle. Looks Greek idk. "Healthcare declined," you say? Oh, you mean all those quacks assigning leeches because of Humors etc, right? Guess that ridiculous theory came from? Oh it was Greece. There also were certainly no architectural advances. Look at that! Romans very literally could never. They did not have the skill in stonework or access to glass or metalworking that allows this to exist. It was made from 1194–1248, smack in the so-called "dark ages." Fascinating. Now, you can ask yourself, was it a social good that vast resources went into spending an entire human lifetime making those windows to glorify religion as opposed to other pursuits? Sure. But what, exactly, did resources flow into in the Roman period? Vast edifices for bloodsport, palaces for autocratic rulers, triumphal arches erected with the riches of conquered, plundered and enslaved people? Wow, great! Sign me up! Sounds like a wonderland of Scientific Rationality! And I haven't even gotten to how "of course, it's a different story in Asia" is an insane thing to say, because knowledge is transferable. So how, exactly, was the world "held back" when the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean trade existed, allowing Asian advances and ideas to filter their way to Europe anyway? You are arguing for this chart unironically: And if you show it to any trained historian who has actually meaningfully engaged with the literature on Middle Ages Europe they will take one look at it and roll their eyes so hard they are in danger of muscle strain. Reverse image search the chart and you can have your pick of people with Ph.Ds dunking on it like it's the NBA all-star game. This is a good one. The real answer to this thread is: anyone talking about linear "advancement" or "progress" or "Civilizational development level" has not a single clue how history or science actually work. It is not like Civilization where you unlock "techs" in a linear progression forwards until Gandhi gets nukes, nor is it like a train that can either go forwards or backwards. It's complicated and messy. People can know how to make gorgeous, vaulted ceilings and stained glass that the Romans could only have dreamed of while also having no idea how to mix concrete to make things the Romans made as a matter of course. Is that "forward" or "backward"? You have contact between pre-Columbian Americans and Europeans, and Tenochititlan is larger than any city in Europe, with better plumbing, more advanced and efficient agriculture (potatoes and corn are exactly as "natural" as high-yield wheat or rice), math and astronomy that put Ptolemy to shame... also, no large-scale ironworking and no wheels. How can you subscribe to a linear model in the face of this? (without being hideously racist and reductionist and claiming that the Aztecs/Mayans were "backwards savages" despite the obvious material evidence to the contrary, or by thuggishly claiming military conquest is the sole measure of a society's worth, and even that only by ignoring that estimates of up to 90% of the precolumbian population of the Americas died from a variety of virgin soil epidemics during that conquest and that the vast majority of Cortez's army was made up of Mesoamericans sick of the Aztec's shit). Of course, complicating this is that RJ completely buys into a similarly deeply inaccurate paradigm of how history, societies, and "technology" develop. If only someone, anyone, had thought to make a school! There would be steam cars within months. Maybe you can chalk that up to "the Pattern said it was time" or whatever, but RJ's belief in Great Man history (ta'varen are people who are such Great Men that they literally distort reality around them) and the incorrect notion that scientific (and really all) advancement comes from the rare, singular genius who Figures It Out in a moment rather than broad, society-level incremental changes in understanding and economic and political contexts that are invariably necessary for those moments to happen. And when that context includes big scary nightmare monsters smashing up the place every couple hundred years...? Tl;dr medieval people weren't that dumb (or smart) and Roman people weren't that smart (or dumb). They were people who tried their best to understand the world around them in context that they lived, which included some degree of access to the knowledge of those who had come before. This process is not predetermined or linear, but it does build on itself. The whole premise of the OP is deeply misguided and the responses equally so.

On the one hand, that PoV is from earlier than when she's cut loose, and he declares himself King right when she leaves; I don't think it's out of the question that we're both right here. He still had use for her until he didn't. As to the second, I too don't want to get too much into RL stuff so I'll agree but add--how satisfying would it be for her to come crawling back, having been turned away by every single place she thought she would find allies or succor? How rich would it be to tell her lmao, there's no place for you here, beg? How hilarious (to him) would it be if she wound up at his beck and call without even needing the Compulsion because she'd been played so badly? It's hard to say what the long term plan there was because he got turned to brightly floating motes soon thereafter.

I always get a headache like the True Power touching the One Power whenever I think too hard about Ta'varen. He really backs off it in later books, but it feels like it's every 3rd word in the first few (especially when Loial is "on screen" to be like "That's so unlikely! But aha yes mmm Ta'varen"). I don't think Fain is one, by the by. He's "something else, something worse," plus Mordeth. Both of those "rulesets" are vague and spooky enough to explain everything he manages to do. Big picture though I can never decide whether it's RJ's greatest triumph or most embarrassing weak spot that he had the cojones to be like "why yes, the oldest and most powerful magic in my fantasy world, above and beyond any other, is the Magic that Makes the Plot Happen." Let's be real, at the end of the day that's what any Chosen One is and to have the characters openly engaging with and discussing it opens up, complicates, and puts his own spin on the very classical Man vs Fate conflict that Western literature has been bandying about since the BCEs... but come on.

To start, my basic understanding is that Rahvin was using powerful but specific and temporary Compulsions on Morgase to some extent; he didn't obliterate her self-concept the way that Grandael does, and in FoH when she comes in hot about the Two Rivers business, it seems like he has to put on a new net just to say basically "go back to your room and leave us be." [Edited to add: I forgot it but looked up an exact quote from his PoV: "A scowl twisted his face. It did with some. A few-a very few-had a strength of self so firm that their minds searched, even if unaware for crevices through which to slide away. It was his bad luck that he still had some small need for one such. She could be handled, but she kept trying to find escape without knowing she was trapped." So basically, if he didn't want to fry her mind, he was left having to use temporary solutions.] So it's not a permanent thing that somehow got switched off, it's more like a subscription that doesn't auto-renew that he changes up every time. With that, three theories: - He let her go on purpose as part of a gambit; this seems less likely to me. Why not just kill her? A possibility is that the plan was for her to go to a former ally that he's poisoned against her (or that he forced her to poison against herself), and they off her publicly, which gives him a chance to strengthen his position further and puts any blame for her death squarely off of his shoulders. If that's the case.. why not just Compel her to do that instead of letting her completely loose? I think it's less likely. - He got sloppy and overconfident (which is, to some extent, what gets him killed like 10 chapters later anyway (though how are you going to plan for Nyneave with one of your co-workers on a leash? Idk but still)). He was busy and distracted setting things up for Rand, so he thinks he's in the endgame and/or he's too busy with his other 6 trollops. He forgets to top up the Compulsion, she manages to have a moment of clarity. It really doesn't matter, though, because oh whoops, he's burned every single bridge she could cross and centralized all power to him. Literally who cares if she goes, he's king now and there's nothing she can do... which leads us to - He let her go on purpose because he didn't need her any more, and letting her come back up to her senses to see how hopeless her situation is is the greatest way to dunk on her. This is the one I think is closest. He is, like many of the Forsaken, an insane, narcissistic sociopath. He is, though, the one that's real good at politics. So of course he completely plays one of the most powerful women on the planet for a fool, toys with her, and when he's done Compelling her into systemically and utterly shredding any shred of power, legitimacy or legacy she might ever possess and establishing him as unquestioned King with her own mouth and body, he leaves her to do whatever the hell she wants. He has conquered her in the most complete, disgusting, and total way, rendering her utterly powerless. In the final move of many such men, he has shown the greatest disrespect of all and completely forgotten about her. To kill her would be to imply that she was still worth killing. To keep using her would be to imply that she is still worth using. To him, she is now useless, and it is the greatest and most satisfying cruelty to just cut her loose.

I feel like my niche on here is poo pooing theories. That said, poo poo! A few considerations: - I find it unlikely that Lanfear ever use Compulsion on LTT. She is among the most insanely prideful people alive and is utterly convinced she can manipulate, seduce, and rule alongside LTT ("Rand" is just a husk that he will have to overcome). I don't think it fits into her character to "cheat" by using compulsion, when she's doing so well playing the helpless but also all-knowing damsel. - Saidar channelling is almost always described as goosebumps or a prickling sensation, not a "chill down the spine." I know they're not that dissimilar but RJ is famously almost slavishly consistent in his descriptions of things. - Compulsion (I'm going to stick to the RJ works for this, BS made a bunch of rules about it to make it one of his magic system logic games that he loves but idk how much of that is in the original) seems to be fairly binary. It works or it doesn't. Some have conditions--Liandrin's requires the person to like her, Verin's requires a logical reason that the person wants to do it, Grandael's is so overpowering it just obliterates the person altogether--but in all these cases, once the condition is fulfilled the person will do what they're told. It's not a matter of there being a suggestion in their head, it's a, well, compulsion. The victim's brains rationalize why they're doing it but they do. To me, I think the simple explanation is the right one. An all-time legendary beauty (not as hot as Ileana tho don't @ me lanfear) is doing her best to seduce a simple farm boy and succeeding, and he's coming to grips with the process of mastering the overwhelming power of Saidin. I think those two are the simpler and more effective explanations for everything that happens in that chapter.

The mysticism is what I really miss. RJ will have characters who've spent books being unable to express their emotions productively to one another (which is true to life!), who after two scenes of Brando are saying "hello, I was upset about this thing that you did, I realize it is unreasonable but nevertheless" and the other character says "yes it is quite unreasonable but I can understand thank you." Perrin and Faile are particularly rough for this. Even in PoVs, things like the stark difference between RJs constant obfuscation of how exactly the Power works and what exactly is happening with weaves beyond other characters reactions is replaced with the very detailed description Aviendha gives in her PoV of trying to put out the fire at the manor. And even there! Aviendha's PoV talking about toh is both kind of true to her character but just... laid out for you as a reader. RJ would talk around and hint and intimate and coyly hide things, BS will just say "here's how they were feeling and here's why let's move on." And I'll tell you, BS still manages to write gripping plots, engaging characters, and good reads despite(?) all that. It's just different. My first read through I hated it, I was like "OK well I'm getting the ending but I might as well have just read RJ's notes." In between then and my current reread, I've read a whole pile of the Cosmere and I've gotten a much better feel for BS's writing--he can be subtle! When his characters explain exactly how they're feeling, they can still be lying to each other. PoV characters will give a ton of clear detail.. and they can be wrong about that detail. He's so blunt that it lets him be subtle, if that makes sense. I've come all the around to where Asthereal is on this. BS did as good a job as anyone could. It wasn't perfect, but he made a conscious choice to not try to write just like RJ would have and I think the books are better for it. It feels like a kind of betrayal, but I did really enjoy tGS and I'm actually looking forward to ToM.

I'm with Aan-Alone here--I don't think the reaction of the damane is a sign there are no stedding in Seanchan, just that the damane/sul'dam never go there. Why would they? Given what we know about the Seanchan more generally, it's very easy to assume that the Gardener contract involves numerous laws (probably punishable by a horrible death) against any humans even getting close. You are the Seanchan Empire. Your single greatest strength is that you have a near-monopoly on powerful enslaved channellers. Do you want it to be public knowledge that there are neato places where that strength is completely neutralized? Much better if that land is for the Ogier and them alone. I do agree there's probably only one Book, but I don't think that means it's "unique" to Randland but more that there's only one, and during the Breaking it wound up on that side of the ocean. The Ogier over there are fundamentally the same, they just don't have it. I think the Great Stump being mad at them fits easily in my theory above; the Ogier in Seanchan were in a very different political and social situation and made very different choices, and it's nothing if not human (or close enough) to be livid at a group of people like you who've made different choices.

Gonna be honest I didn't really read this as unique to the Two Rivers. I always felt this was one of RJ's better history reads; in most places for most of history, the vast majority of people ostensibly within the boundaries of a particular "Kingdom" wouldn't have been able to name their kind, much less recognize them on sight. They'd know the local authorities, whether it's a Big Man or a Lord or a Village Council or what have you, but anything beyond that was both meaningless and unimportant. Randland seems kind of poised in a late-middle-ages-with-magic vibe, these are definitely not nation-states, speaking generally. They have relatively undeveloped state capacity and militaries still reliant on small numbers of men-at-arms supported by vast peasant levies. They do not have accurate maps of their own territory, efficient modern taxation systems (a royal collector comes around once in a while), censuses, systems to create a draft, etc etc. In that kind of situation, nationalism cannot really function. If anything the weirdos are guys like Ituralde who are expressing a kind of direct early-modern national fervor, where he's not just loyal to the King (and by extension seeking to protect his own material interests delivered by him) as a Middle Ages noble would absolutely be--he makes more intuitive sense to us as moderns because he wants the Seanchan out of His Land, but he is the exception in the WoT. The Two Rivers approach of "oh, that's the blob we're in on the map? OK if you say so" is almost certainly the default. It's just that the Two Rivers is the only time we see the PoV of any characters who aren't noble or from an urban center. Our only counterindication is when Elayne is all "you are my subjects" to Our Good Boys, and they are kind of baffled by it and she is baffled they are baffled. However, Elayne is still young, naive, and supremely sheltered; her shock that Rand doesn't recognize her on sight should not, imo, be taken as a sign that the Two Rivers is uniquely staunchly independent but that this is just how peasants are and this is the first time Elayne has talked to one of the creatures. Tldr I don't think Morgase would be surprised. It wouldn't be that fun.

It's implicit; it's the one with our Good Boys Rand, Mat and Perrin in it! (Bela is obviously in every turning of the wheel, but she's in it too.) We really, truly don't need any reason other than that. You might have kept your elementary school yearbook from 5th grade; why is that year so important? Why don't you have all the yearbooks from all the years your school was in operation...? It doesn't have to be unique or climactic or the only time something is happening for it to be a good story imo. It just has to be a good story. And from there, going too much more into any of it is RAFO as the original responders responded lo these many months gone.

As mentioned, this is a discussion of speculation vs speculation, so there will not be a definite resolution as to which one is right outright in the text; my own theory being a theory is no more an argument against it than yours being one. They are both based in the text to some degree but require inference to some degree. That said I still think I'm right, and that what we do have lines up with it more satisfactorily. I did my best to "show my work" in terms of how to get to the conclusion that the power comes "with its own instructions," so to speak. To elucidate: So we have 3 competing explanations for how wilders (including Rand but speaking generally) are able to successfully perform complex weaves without dying/burning out--which is still, textually, a likely outcome, but we're asking why it isn't a certainty given the nexus of danger and complexity involved: - The Power contains information, weaves "feel right" for a particular desired outcome because the One Power has those processes communicated through the "window" with the power to actually do it; some people grasp this and some don't - Everyone has some level of access to past lives' memories; not necessarily in the form of full conversations, but on a level of instinct and intuition. Wilders who are able to better access these memories can remember the times their past lives learned them and successfully channel. This does have (unreliable narrator alert) background from when Semirhage is trying to explain to everyone how Rand is mad, and how the fact that the voice in his head is real is actually worse, you see how that's worse, right? - All of our mechanisms for understanding the power are an over-rationalized explanation for what's really happening. All of the in-universe explanations are just how those characters have chosen to understand an underlying mechanism for reifying the will of an individual on the world, much as characters alter reality in TAR. The whole ediface of weaves, webs, power, flows etc is something like a 2-dimensional projection of a 5-dimensional reality that Rand (and other channellers?) have been tapping into. It's how this power is expressed, but it isn't what it is. Rand moves from doing it "the real way" unintentionally, to thinking, learning, and understanding "weaving" (that actually sets him back by holding him to imagined limitations), and transcends to understanding and mastering the real power and control over reality by the end. I have tried my best to get out of "cast opponent's arguments as uncharitably as possible and mine as obvious as possible" mode to summarize here. I can understand reading this and saying "that summary is accurate, and it clearly shows door 3 is the best." However, if anyone has been sticking with my walls of text so far, I'd like to try to convince you otherwise. I have already gone over when I don't buy narratively that the 2nd Age Aes Sedai were fundamentally and utterly wrong about what the power is. To elaborate, what I do buy completely is that the 2nd Age AS we see are arrogant, sneering chauvinists would be shocked that, in 3,000 years of constant use and experimentation, the 3rd Age channellers could have figured out some tricks they never did or that allowed for the Power to be used in ways they didn't think to use it. In real life there are places where the wheel was simply never put to widespread use outside of children's toys or where atlatls were preferred to any kind of bow; it's really, really, definitionally difficult to think of something outside the paradigm you're working with, and back to 2nd Age Randland I'd bet it'd be hard to get research funding to study picking apart weaves when everyone knows it's impossible and the time/resources spent on it would be wasted. In other words, it's bare narrative reality that they are wrong about some things, but I don't think they were fundamentally wrong about everything. The fact that wilders were, presumably, vanishingly rare in the 2nd age and the fact that the origins of weaves in general were shrouded in history mean that it makes sense they wouldn't understand where weaves "come from" in a vacuum; "they're carried by the power" is something they could get wrong, "you really are just imposing your will on the world and the weaves follow" is also possible but seems less likely to be missed. For second, I think that as much as TAR and the "real" world exist in parallel and are reflections of each other, RJ does consistently keep them separated. Moving from one to the other in the flesh is anathema to the Aiel, a horrible perversion of how things should work when whatever Slayer is does it, and is used sparingly as a tool by 2nd Age AS like the Forsaken. I don't think the intention was to collapse their fundamental natures; "life is a dream" from the Aiel is a pretty common trope among cultures that venerate warfare and warriors throughout history and this alternate cause swamps any cosmological hints it could be dropping, to me. Finally, and this is something of a personal bugbear, but I do strongly dislike supernatural power systems built around "wanting it badly enough." It always, to me, makes me wonder: for every channelling-capable character who canonically saw their entire life fall apart around them, the worst possible things happen to their loved ones, of all the Aes Sedai tortured to death while shielded by darkfriends or slaughtered by whitecloaks or torn to shreds by Trollocs, not a one "wanted" that to stop badly enough? Again the real world is bleeding through, but it's the fundamental cruelty of all "power of positive thinking" ideology: the more you overstate its effects, the more the inverse becomes that anything bad is your fault because you could have stopped it by not wanting it to happen. It's unimaginably callous! Shields are just a weave! We are to believe that while yes, Rand suffered and learned, nobody else ever in all of recorded 3rd age history suffered as much as him? Or learned as he did? He is a chosen one and Ta'veren, yes, but neither of those are really germane to becoming 3rd-age Buddha, alone achieving enlightenment. I feel the causality runs rather backwards to this, that he bends the pattern around him because the pattern bends it around him, that he has a strong connection to the Power, and this allows him to accomplish extraordinary things despite and along with the suffering, that the suffering affected his moral character and not his wizard one. Making them one in the same is less satisfying, somehow, to me. Anyway I'm really enjoying this let me know what you all think.