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.

Nobody could, though. Moiraine can't see her weaves. In book 2 Egwene is not once described seeing or feeling her weaves in the tower. Are they too in the grip of Plot Willpower Power (tm)? I do have to acknowledge that at some point we're just approaching fiction from utterly different perspectives, which is fine. I won't be trying to talk you out of that; I will do my best to stick only to arguments "in universe." I agree to some extent with this read on the Power as interpreted in the 2nd Age, and the Forsaken's sneering disdain for these "savages" means they are repeatedly blindsided. I'd go further, with the various Forsaken All-Hands meetings where they mention things like Mesaana being a "researcher," Aran'gar talking about how she (as Balthamel) "studied savage cultures," or the use of the Dream Shards you mentioned specifically for research. I would say it's not just plausible but a definite aspect of the narrative that the 2nd Age was a time of focused, systematized inquiry into the One Power. That said, I don't think the conclusions you find follow this premise. "They did science to it, so they made rules, so they stopped truly understanding it" breaks down halfway through. For one, I think it's a misguided understanding of the (real world) philosophy of science that I don't think RJ shared--as much as science measures, defines, and restricts, it is definitionally infinitely recursive and open to change. Every physicist dreams of getting an impossible result in an experiment! That's how breakthroughs happen, that's what makes careers! Surely if results in experiments had showed "if you want it bad enough it just kind of happens" that would be the scientific understanding of the 2nd age? Yet it is not. A second-order narrative reliability concern is that the 2nd Age approached things "scientifically," sure, but our window into that culture, the Forsaken, were not very good scientists. They were the ones in it for power and prestige and not learning or the joy of discovery. They were the professors who lord it over students instead of really teaching, they were the ones who were petty and cruel and wanted shortcuts. In other words, the kind of people who would sign up when the Ancient Evil comes to murder everyone and promises them eternal life and infinite power for the low low price of condemning everyone else to be tortured to death. This is the selection criteria! They were the kind of people that spring up in any institution, regardless of its underlying philosophy. Further, I think adding "(---> white tower)" is a disastrous oversimplification for the ages. The White Tower are the savages! Some of the things the Tower knows are some of the aspects the Forsaken are most shocked by (warder bonds, picking apart weaves). If anything, the central weakness of 3rd Age Aes Sedai is that they mystify the power too much. The endless strict rules on when and where and how you can channel, the refusal to experiment or try anything new; these are not signs of an institution that seeks to demystify, they are an institution that's so deep in mysticism they can't conceptualize the power as anything but terrifying and unknowable, and seek to stay exclusively in the "shallow end" where they can prove it's safe. In other words, a binary between "mysticism = intuition = freedom = true understanding" and "science = intellectualizing = institution = limited understanding" breaks down completely upon close examination. These aspects are orthogonal to each other. You can have heavily institutionalized mystics and decentralized, chaotic science; you're equivocating ontological approaches with social organization. Modern, real-world scientific approaches definitely run one way and the 2nd Age follows it, but it is perhaps a fascinating historical exercise to ask how truly different Kings College Oxford runs today than it did when its primary job was to train people to debate heretics about the Trinity. And broadly, again in the real world, would you really argue that an Oxford graduate in 1324, a more mystical time in many places to be sure, understands the world better than any human with a high school education in 2024? Be serious. There is still much that is mysterious and unknown and unknowable, but if you wish to live in a time and place where nobody knows how measure and harness electricity, understand and defeat germs, practice agricultural chemistry, or establish systems that allow, encourage, and have succeeded in furthering each of those understandings over time... idk what to tell you. Enjoy famines and cholera ig? All this is to say; yes, I agree that we do not have clear Authorial Intent on what exactly the One Power is, and we have a variety of people in a variety of times and places applying a variety of approaches to understand the things they can apparently do with it. Many of them have decided they know what rules govern it; many of those rules are broken in the course of the narrative. However, on its face it appears your argument boils to "the One Power is the power to reshape reality however you want, if you want it bad enough, the only limits are the ones you place on it with your own conception of what you think it can do" which.. does not hold up to the most basic of scrutiny? Connection to and strength in the power is, even in the mystical 3rd age, reproducible and testable by multiple independent observers. Weaves do consistently perform (unless funky things are happening with the pattern, like after using the BoW outside Ebou Dar) as expected when reproduced consistently. In other words, it is something you can do science to. Is science wrong sometimes? Yes! Does an incorrect result or an eventually disproven belief mean an entire edifice of study should be thrown down and replaced with the mystical feelings? Why in the world would you think that? And with all that said, there is clearly knowledge about how to use it that is to some level instinctual in channellers, and which does appear to track relatively consistently with strength in the power. Your level of connection to the One Power will also determine how much you can split flows (Egwene embarrassing Accepted in the Tower during her captivity), how complex the weaves you can intuit are (Nyneave healing in unprecedented ways via trying to bully death itself), and how quickly and accurately you can copy the weaves of others. So a channeller's connection to the power is a kind of window, there is a innate and relatively fixed characteristic of people that determines how wide that window opens, and both power and knowledge flow through it. If you apply that knowledge and/or power outside of certain guidelines, you can break the window or yourself, either dying or losing access to the power; and so institutions spring up to strictly regulate what you go ahead and bring through. In the Second Age, those institutions expanded to creating guidelines for safety and then intentionally exploring (and exploiting!) the windows as much as possible; in the Third Age, those institutions only have enough juice to revolve around fearing the window or finding what you need and practicing how to use it in terms of pure utility (White Tower & Wise Ones, vs Seanchan & Windfinders respectively). We also know that your mental state is, to some extent, critically important--different for saidin and saidar, but either way you will not be able to successfully embrace the source without the right mindset; this can result in blocks or require the use of external tools, such as early in the tEotW where Moiraine used her fancy wizard's staff or forehead gem as a focus (neither were angreal, to my knowledge, just focus objects) before RJ got bored of that idea (or she was just the only one who needed them and it's never mentioned again, since we can't acknowledge these are books written by a person who changed his mind about a variety of things over actual human decades). And at long last, we come to Rand at Tarwin's Gap. Again, his actions throughout the early book are far from exceptional; he has a very strong connection to the power, and he survives his Harrowing. He weaves basic healing for Bela, he weaves a lightning bolt to escape the inn, and each time he suffers the physical effects of embracing and channeling saidin for the first time without guidance. I'm going to be perfectly honest; when I reread the book series for the first time as an adult a few years ago I did turn to google and poked around threads here, on reddit, on tar valon library about what exactly was even happening at the end of tEotW. It's wild and confusing! As, surely, the experience of doing that much with that much Power was for Rand. But still, what you've all been waiting for: how could he do it while being as afraid and baffled as the reader is the whole time? Was he simply exercising his Will to Power? Is our entire conception of the One Power just a bunch of misguided, foolishly "scientific" rules and attempts to obscure the simple fact that Rand is an Ubermensch who can alter reality through his pure intention? And the answer is really quite simple. It's the name of the book! What is the Eye of the World? It is a gigantic well of clean, untainted saidin put in one place in the hopes it would be used in the next turning of the wheel to fight the Dark One, as the Breaking-era Aes Sedai were able to reason out that you would need that half of the One Power to succeed and that the taint would mean at the very least there was no tradition of male channellers to provide it, possibly no sane male channellers whatsoever. The Well is really a pretty singular object in the series; Nyneave and Cadsuane have Ter'angreal that fulfill a similar purpose, but are comparatively tiny to the point the comparison is between a drop of water and a reservoir for a major city. This is where it becomes a battle of speculations, but a syllogism to consider: - We know the One Power can carry information as well as power - We know the Well was filled by extremely knowledgeable, powerful male Aes Sedai - We can speculate that the saidin within the well carried some of their knowledge And with that, Rand's typical Harrowing weaves are explained, and his atypical defeat of Ishmael and the Trollocs at Tarwin's gap is explained, all within our regular old One Power. Rand is simply a vessel, channelling the power and knowledge of those who made the Well in the first place, using it a little before it was really intended but exactly when and how it was really needed. He doesn't remember how to make a Gateway or the Matrix Smash because he was simply releasing those weaves from where they had been stored. He is not the Creator, he is not a god (or a God), just a simple farmer who was called to do great things and learned, through suffering and success, to do so. I'm more than willing to separate these phenomena, it was the Eye of the World in book 1 and then to behold the pipe at the conclusion and imagine that exposure to the Creator directly has after effects. I get that, thematically, at the end of the day Rand's greatest challenge is not to wield the Power; it is to make a decision. At the end of the day his journey is not really about developing as a wizard but as a person. It was all so that, at the end of all things, he can know that the world is better if people have the ability to choose, even if those choices are often evil. Those themes, that conclusion, don't add up to the further revelation that The Secret is real in Randland and every person (or maybe only the Specials?) can reshape reality without limits once they have fully self-manifested because they can not only choose their actions, but choose their very reality.

We're into semantic weeds at this point because I 95% agree! It's just that trying to get Rand to see himself as a human... by constantly degrading him in public, up to and including whipping his ass with the Power in front of some of his most crucial underlings, is bully behavior to me. Why would Verin even wonder if Caddy is a bad influence in the first place? I would argue it is because she had done nothing but try to bully him into listening to her (correct!) advice, and Verin was trying to decide if the advice or the bullying was at the core here. To me, the changes in Cadsuane in the last few books are a matter of degree and not kind. She doubles and triples down, yes, but it does follow what was already there.

I don't know if you can blame this on Brando Sando; she's a bully from the start. She's so obnoxious upon her introduction that all-time MVP Verin considers straight up murdering her when they're in Far Madding, before confirming she really is just trying to push Rand on the path to winning TG. The books are chock-full of people doing otherwise awful things they feel are necessary; not least of which is Rand himself! There is more than one PoV chapter in the RJ books from Caddy where she really clearly lays out how she believes that Rand has to be "brought in hand" and taught "how to behave" before he can win. Like I said, there are levels to the irony how she doesn't see that her methods are ineffective and how her experience doesn't exactly apply to this situation and how, broadly, she's making many of the exact errors it's so easy for her to see in Rand. That's what makes it interesting!

If you're still looking, the active Taimandred thread is here, it has meandered and gotten derailed a little bit but my tldr understanding is RJ did originally intend Taim to be Demandred, wrote it that way and dropped hints in the early books, changed his mind, but repeatedly denied that the change was because fans guessed it. As for Caddy, yeah she's a bully. In some ways she's also what Rand needs? He did need to be pushed out of the Darth Rand mindset; probably her best thesis statement is all the stuff about "steel shatters, a willow bends." Of course, her methods were not particularly effective, but it was a message that was part of Rand's journey to enlightenment. He needed to learn that true strength isn't cutting away all weakness, ignoring all pain, removing all weak spots.. but rather embracing the vulnerability that is love, which in turn gives you the strength to protect what you love. Ironically, of course, she tries to achieve this by overpowering and bullying him into realizing he needs to be compassionate. I think it's totally fine that she just shows up. Not everything needs foreshadowing, it's Ok for there to just be shadows. I think it's good when things happen in a narrative you couldn't perfectly predict that develop it in interesting ways. I agree with the toad; whether you like her as a person or not, she certainly pushes the narrative into developing in interesting ways.

I'm really not a fan of this theory; I think it is ignoring the development of a text and making up material to fill in gaps that don't exist. The magic system definitely shifts over the course of the series, from a much more mysterious, inexplicable "soft" version at the start to a much more categorized, ordered "hard" system by the end. I have seen this written off as RJ being flat consistent all the way through but the characters learning more, but I honestly don't think that holds up under the scrutiny of a reread; you get early PoVs of characters (Moiraine, various Forsaken, the Wonder Girls in the tower, etc) where the way the use of the Power is described is quite distinct from how it is described later in the books. The lack of description of weaves, to me, is an indication of absolutely nothing. This theory also mistakenly conflates two things; complexity and danger. Weaving is repeatedly and constantly described as dangerous. However, it is only ever described as complex in comparison to other weaves. There is never, never once, a scene where a character describes learning a weave stitch by stitch. There are dozens upon dozens of scenes (especially later, after RJ had clarified the system to himself) where a character sees a weave exactly once, and then immediately reproduces it, safely and in full. When LTT takes the wheel and is weaving at the estate in Tear, Logain and all the other Asha'man see the deathgates and the death flowers and other mysterious ancient battle weaves once and within seconds, during a pitched battle, are repeating them flawlessly. The Aes Sedai of the series are showing each other weaves to immediately reproduce them constantly. Gateways themselves spread like wildfire, and never once is it a challenge to learn it; the only stated limitation is how much power is available to create it. Elayne erases two square miles of Altara picking apart a gateway because just the residue would be enough to teach the damane how to Travel. It's not just seeing weaves, either! Channellers create functional weaves instinctively all the time. Honestly, the theme you mention is best reinforced by how the sclerotic systems of power like the White Tower are exactly what enforce an understanding of the OP as limited and complex. Moiraine's eavesdropping and both Liandrin's and Verin's limited Compulsions are both powerful, functional weaves that they intuited from nothing before they came to the Tower; it's only the culture of third age Aes Sedai that means they keep them to themselves 1) to get one over on other Aes Sedai and 2) because they would immediately and out of hand be dismissed as "wilder weaves" that no self-respecting Aes Sedai would give the time of day to. So we have definite text that wilders regularly successfully are able to channel, if they survive their harrowing. Further, every male channeler of this age, canonically including Taim and Logain, are self-taught. Weren't they too, all of them, cross stitching (which tbh isn't that hard, it's way easier than the original metaphor of weaving, why not stick with that?) a tapestry of the universe blindfolded with sleeping hands behind their back upside down in a blizzard uphill both ways while getting a sensual massage from a scantily clad Domani masseuse? It's cute to "often describe" something thus, but it's flat out not supported by the text. The most experienced weaver can't reproduce a tapestry after seeing it once, much less just figure out on their own how to make a new one from scratch when trial-and-error literally means burning to a cinder, and yet that happens over and over and over. And it's not just our super special chosen ones doing it! The average channeller does, throughout the later books. And with that established, this theory withers on the vine. Why invent a new, super ultra secret backup magic system when every single thing (aside from the pipe, a series ending stinger to keep you guessing and much better explained by what happened in the cave) can be explained by the system that's already here? It's not described in those terms in EotW, sure, but then nothing anyone does with the Power is because RJ hadn't nailed down how he was going to talk about it yet. Our old pal Occam has something to say about this. If you don't think the One Power allows for things that the One Power regularly does... maybe your understanding of the One Power is what is wrong.

The Myrddraal are beings created by Aginor explicitly as living weapons, though, they are definitionally Shadowspawn and physically cannot make independent moral judgements. They are creatures of the Dark One/The Shadow fully and completely. The Aiel are humans. They follow a particular code, but there are very clearly Aiel in the series working to advance the Light or to advance their own petty concerns (Sevannah and the Shaido more broadly). Aiel end up fighting for the Shadow; turned against their will, sure, but also you can't exactly "turn" a Myrddraal to the light. The point is that humans have the power of choice. To other points, both Sharans and Sea Folk are specifically mentioned to have much darker skin tones than the Aiel. Aiel can hide really well in the daytime, but uh, they do hide better at night. Also, they cannot slide sideways into daylight to disappear or phase through walls. I feel like this reading is really missing the forest for the trees (or should I say missing the tree for the leaves?) To me, the characters most in opposition to Fades are Warders. Apart from named characters with plot armor who start to knock them down like bowling pins in books 4+5, Warders are the only humans with a reasonable 1-on-1 chance against a Fade (Aiel still need to gang up on them and are going to take heavy casualties). They also have weird cloaks. They're real good with swords. They are also "created" using the power, by supporters of the Light, and almost certainly with fighting Fades in mind, and this process robs them of some degree of free will through the bond. If anything, I don't think there is supposed to be a "direct opposite" to Fades other than people in general. They are inhuman monsters who physically resemble us but are different in the most important aspects that I listed above: they are "soulless" both in name and in truth, and they cannot choose how to behave morally. They are fundamental perversions of humanity. They are a representation the Dark One's solution for the messiness of the world; to strip everything of the choice between Light or Dark, and force them to the Dark path (and it is the inverse destruction of free will that Rand rejects in the conclusion).

Did we need any group of people talked about in the books? The books could have been written any way, but they were written this way and they were in it so I guess yes. I think they get a bad rap mostly because a number of the Windfinders featured so heavily in the worst (Elayne) components of The Slog (tm). Setting that side, I think they do serve positive functions in the narrative, however. They add another element of "there's people in this world who interact with our character's society but have their own stuff going on," to complement the Aiel and lay track for the Sharans. They function as useful early warning signs for the Seanchan. They, as mentioned, are pretty critical to ending the endless descriptions of characters' faces sweating so we could move on to everyone drinking spiced wine and hugging their cloaks closely around them. They give us another society's answers to "what do you do with channellers" to compare/contrast the Aiel, Seanchan, and White Tower. They are another fascinating look into possible social and gender dynamics structured around life lived almost entirely on ships. Idk... they take off their blouses when they're not in sight of land? I've always liked the Sea Folk.

That's... that's basically what was happening? The sitters were largely barely a decade into being raised to the shawl, Siuan was one of the youngest Amyrlins in history (until Our Girl Eggy, ofc), the tower's numbers were at a low ebb. Older, wiser AS had figured out by New Spring that rising too high introduced severe life-threatening occupational hazards. Still, nobody was willing to say "black ajah" out loud, the paranoia was largely directed inwards, but it's there and it is severely damaging. The Tower was barely functioning, even before the split. Siuan is clearly stressed. They're failing to keep a lid on false Dragons; both Logain and Taim were allowed to get out of control. Taim even slips away. Wars are breaking out, like in Tarabon and Arad Domon, that a "functioning" Tower would/should have seen coming and prevented. The Forsaken slip into and take charge of nearly every major state; how many of them did the Tower challenge in any possible way? None! Meanwhile, she's sending literal children to hunt murderers working for ancient evils. She is managing the single most important thing any 3rd Age Aes Sedai has ever done (the Dragon Reborn), and so the duly elected Amyrlin Seat trusts... nobody but her two also relatively-young school friends. "Function" is a strong word! While the core component of being a 3rd age Aes Sedai is to project cool, calm, collected control of any situation at all times and the Tower as a whole is functionally doing that (right up until it splits), I'd argue that even by EotW the Tower is not really "functioning" in many of its core missions. Ishy and the Black Ajah had really done a number on them. And to all that--I'd always figured it wasn't that deep, and that Aran'gar killed Anaiya because he wanted to. Maybe she was digging on her own and got too close, maybe he randomly slipped up and she saw evidence of him weaving saidin in the wrong place a the wrong time, maybe he (a known creepy misogynist pysochopath) just got sick of hanging around all these damn savages without having a little "fun" here and there. The only real relevance to the larger plot imo is that he was plugged into the Black Ajah network and just felt that safe to kill with relative impunity.

On 2/9/2023 at 12:59 PM, Scarloc99 said: I always wonder what happened in the age of legends to get rid of simple guns. You have what I guess are lasers and fire canons etc, and sword fighting. But what about a good old pistol, that could have done for all the forsaken one at a time lol. I guess it’s the same reason as why Harry never took a handgun to the Voldemort fight, or why dr evil never let his son just shoot Austin Powers in the head, just not the way things are done :). [Click and drag to move] The thread's already been necroed so I just wanted to jump in with some ideas about year-old arguments-- guns are totally useless without a massive industrial base to support them. "Gun" (cannon made by bellmaker) is not remotely comparable to "gun" (M16 with literally infinite refills from the quartermaster). In real human history it was centuries from one to the other, and the distinction is not "people wanting guns" but the gigantic industrial capacity required to manufacture precision rifling in the first place, consistently manufacture functional drop-in replacement parts, and manufacture ammunition. Ok, so the Breaking is happening and you have a "good old pistol." Where do the bullets come from? When the firing mechanism breaks where are you getting a new one? I'd also argue that it probably wouldn't do for the Forsaken at all--one would imagine weaving a shield of Air around you would be standard operating procedure where slugthrowers were involved. This is possibly why they were using "shocklances" in the first place in the AoL. To the further point; a gun is really, really not "cannon but smaller," and people tend to vastly overstate the impact early firearms had on warfare upon their invention. It was gradual, incorporated into tactics over actual literal centuries and took those centuries to develop the tactics, innovate the material weapons, and develop the industrial backing to make their widespread use in warfare practical. The Seanchan have a vast, dictatorial empire, sure. You can go ahead and ask any of the vast, dictatorial empires of the 19c (Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, Qing Empire) just how easy it is to snap your fingers and industrialize and massively overturn your feudal landowning structure to accommodate the logic of industrial capital. If there is going to be a Randland Industrial Revolution I'd put it in the Two Rivers; access to coal and iron from the Mountains of Mist, influx of new urban workers from refugees, newly centralized but concept-of-nobility agnostic leadership in Perrin Goldeneyes, relatively easy access to explicit innovations in the Caemlyn University, a flexible fighting force used to ranged combat and innovation. It's just fantasy England. Finally; anybody expecting "and then the whole world watched the Dark One go down and all took hands together and danced in a circle and the Seanchan voluntarily gave up their slave culture of a thousand years and the Aiel became pacifists again and the Aes Sedai took their noses out of the air and all the nobility of Randland voluntarily gave up Daes Dae'mar and their exploitative hereditary privileges forever and there was a peaceful whole-world democracy and everything was good forever and ever amen"... was reading different books than everyone else?? There is nothing, no reading possible of this series that implied that all of humanity would be made perfect, somehow, much less even better, by Rand's sacrifice or by the defeat of the Dark One--only that we would be allowed to keep trying at all. That's uplifting and hopeful in its own way! I think that's the central hope peeking through all of our characters' responses to the grim possibilities they see in the various magic peeks forwards--that we as humans can keep trying and make a world that is better than we found it. A saccharine, everything's tied up and every problem has been solved ending was never in the cards; that's just not how this world (or any realistic world!) works.

https://www.theoryland.com/forums/discussion/8767 That is the best one I found, it had been previously linked on dragonmount, in this thread. The theoryland post has a number of direct quotes from LoC-era notes including: "[quote=RJ]b) Demandred: Hated/feared/despised Lews Therin. Like Lanfear, he plays for larger stakes than most of the others, who are trying to stake out wordly kingdoms. HE WILL SHOW UP CLAIMING TO BE [U][B]MAZRIM TAIM[/B][/U]. TAKING ADVANTAGE OF RAND'S AMNESTY.[/quote] Also in Box 55, there is a file dedicated to Rand. On page 34 of that file, this paragraph appears twice in the notes on Dumai's Wells (note the change tthing that's o past tense): [quote=RJ]Taim/Demandred showed up, not so much because his party wants Rand free -- though that might be a point in their plans; on the other hand, Rand in the hands of the White Tower, and thus within Mesaana's power, could still cause one hell of a lot of chaos -- but because of learning that the Shaido were moving in. They could not be sure the Aes Sedai could drive off the Shaido, nor that the Shaido would not kill Rand. And a rescued Rand, pissed at the Aes Sedai will [U]really[/U] be a source of chaos and disunity.[/quote]" I'm pretty sure the poster is a known member of the community who had access to the notes and the quotes are trustable. It's definitely worth it to replicate my research and type "Taimandred" into google. There are a dizzying variety of threads back in the dragonmount archives, on reddit, on Tar Valon Library, and on theoryland that make Taimandred all but confirmed as of LoC, the only real unknown here is why exactly RJ changed his mind. In my estimation, what "just rumors" isn't Taimandred itself, but more the narrative that "RJ changed it because people guessed" or "because he thought it was too obvious"--maybe he just liked it better this way and changed his mind. Maybe he thought up the Shara stuff and was like "oh yeah that's better let's do that." But it is pretty established here in 2023 that there was a change along the way.