15 hours ago, Andra said:

 

Here is the pertinent passage:

EotW Chapter 50 "The Eye of the World"

I always read that as if Mat (or his soul, anyway) was the "old friend, old enemy" he was talking about.  Not the dagger he carried, or the blackness it infected him with.  Mat who unknowingly shouted the battle cries of Manetheren in the Old Tongue, and who was probably the current incarnation of a ta'veren who had commanded forces on both sides of the field for thousands of years.

 

I suppose RJ could have intended it to be referring to Mashadar, of course.  But I never read it that way.

Thank you for the full context. I still think it's the dagger. Issues I have with the Mat Soul theory are:

- Either the dagger or Mashadar could sensibly called an "old thing," while that doesn't make as much sense for a soul

- I get your argument here, that he's uniquely connected, but even in the early going before I don't think Mat is any more connected to the past than other members of the EF5. Egwene also shouts in the Old Tongue in EoTW and gets a few "Tai'shar Manetheren"s, Perrin is directly linked to countless battles with the DO through the wolves, Rand is.. well uh he's permanently bound to the DO through the pattern as its eternal enemy. Only Nynaeve doesn't really have something. The other three all have souls/past lives/connections to the past and I don't know if Mat's would be unique enough for him to be singled out/tracked.

- Even if he were that distinct, several other Forsaken spend a significant amount of time and effort trying to track him down in the last few books, and never once do they think "oh yeah we can smell his soul." The thing that's changed about him between these two timeframes is the severing of his connection to Mashadar.)

- The "old friend" thing also bugs me, there are many instances in the books where Mat flashes back to his old lives and, while he fights on all sides of many battles, they're all post-breaking; and even with the Trolloc Wars in that time he is absolutely never once fighting on the Shadow's side. With how often those memories get mined to traumatize Mat, RJ would have certainly mentioned if he was carrying memories of carting off children to Trolloc cookpots. I don't think "on both sides" is accurate if you include the Shadow as a side.

On 4/8/2024 at 4:26 PM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

No you are wrong because you saying that the motivations of a character are somehow matters of opinion rather than fact. That you think they are well written is quite different from them having rounded motivations.

 

It is not about a degree of complexity - it is a degree of how they are defined as being bad. They are petty and shortsighted, and are bad for being bad in and of itself, even though they have to make huge sacrifices for it personally.

 

Saying you are confused by the criticism does not refute that criticism, nor does it mean that your opinions are somehow given more weight. You not understanding the criticisms on reflects on your ability to understand the issue, and not favourably on your ability to pass judgement upon it.

Let's dig in. Just the Forsaken, who probably get developed the most:

Sammael: Wants to be safe. Wants to set up his own place away from everything else and dig in. Hates Lews Therin (a theme will develop).

Demandred: Hates Lews Therin. Is Jealous of Lews Therin. Wants to prove he's better than Lews Therin.

Ishy: Has mathematically determined that he doesn't understand cyclical cosmology. Logically reasons that evil will win in the end and resistance is futile. Wants to die so bad.

Lanfear: Wants to beat her romantic rival from 3000 years ago, also next steps kill and replace God.

Rahvin: Pervert, political manipulator; reflexively cannot take no for an answer.

Moghedien: Wants to maintain her personal safety at all costs

Graendal: Pervert, connoisseur of all pleasures of the flesh in every possible way. Wants to experience them all forever.

Semirhage: Mad scientist, wants to experiment with the absolute limits of human perception (specifically along the axis of pain). True-blue psychopath and sadist.

Asmodean: Wants to be on the winning side

Aginor: Pervert and mad scientist, wants freedom to experiment with other bodies to his hearts content

Balthamel: Pervert

Bel'al: Literally who idk he's like Demandred lite

Like yeah, they're all bad people, I'll give you that. All of these motivations can be boiled down to selfishness and cowardice. Then again, those things feel like they would have have some venn diagram overlap with "people who would sign up with the Ancient Evil." Within that diagram, we've got some real range! From aesthetes to psychopaths to megolomaniacs to schemers, there's a real gamut of personality flaws here that, within the story, meaningfully interact. Lanfear's clashing motivations cause her to.. just do a lot, Asmodean's and Moghediens' cowardice are so strong that they, respectively, end up being windows into the AoL for Rand and The Wonder Girls, Ishmael's refusal to let anyone else kill Rand so that he can be turned to the Shadow and end the cycle vs, say,  Bel'al's off-script jumping in the Stone of Tear. You've got packs of Trollocs fighting each other more than once.

When it comes to third-age darkfriends, this is a true fact without an argumentative purpose. They are, for the most part, plot devices and not characters. They exist to raise the tension and stakes and make you second-guess any character you don't have direct PoV of working for the Light (and even then Verin gets the double twisty triple cross treatment). I think it's a little wild that you say they are categorically uninteresting and then name immediately two interesting ones.

On the other hand, we are eating good when it comes to non-darkfriend antagonists; many Aes Sedai fit the bill, from the Hall generally to Lelaine and Romanda specifically and of course, Queen Tyrant herself Elaida. You have the Seanchan as a psuedo-totalitarian magic-slaveocracy that nevertheless winds up fighting on the side of "good." You have the Shaido, who are, for sure, manipulated by Darkfriends--but who, by and large, are just assholes. You have the Prophet and the Whitecloaks, who are both ostensibly on the side of the Light but are also such assholes about it that it loops right back around to counterproductivity.

The story would not be improved in any way if we had more Marvel or Legend of Korra-style "he wants something that's arguably good but he went too far" antagonists, nor "he had to do it because Lews Therin was mean to him :C" and as mentioned, we already examples of both! One is an entire major faction!

The series is replete with antagonists who are under no circumstances "cardboard cutouts." In general, I find that an inability to identify with or understand a character whose actions "make no sense" or "are just evil to the core and are therefore boring" can be either a failure of characterization (on the author) or of imagination (on the reader). There is significant textual evidence that your claims demonstrate the latter.

As I said previously in this thread, I think there is a real failure here to have a theory of mind of how radicalization and membership in real-life atrocities and violent groups operates. Nobody woke up and said "hey I'm going to join the Khmer Rouge so I can do some mass murder, oh boy." They were sold a bill of goods; by the time they're driving the bulldozer over the people buried alive, their biggest concern is not being under the bulldozer. An extreme example; in WoT terms, our friend is like hey bro cool story you can get power and wealth for free it's not super legal but just like hang out with our friends what has the "Light" ever done for you, and before you know it you have the Black Ajah's finest threatening you with a Trolloc stewpot unless you locate the shephard in the picture before the day is done. This is not "petty and shortsighted." How does the average person know how Darkfriends lives are? The only way to know is to be one! Unreliable narration, including in-universe unreliable narration, is at the core of the story; how many people become Darkfriends because someone makes them grand promises, and when you try to say "yeah but.." they come back with "who told you that? A damn Whitecloak?" How is this not "believable" or "human"? What do you think a "3d" antagonist looks like?

RJ was in Southeast Asia and it very clearly affected him, and a lot of the Wheel of Time can be credibly read to be him honestly asking himself, and the world, "how can someone do this--how could somebody have done this." And it is not opinion to say he comes up with a variety of textured, realistic, three dimensional answers to these questions. If all you can see of them is the shadows on the wall while you screech and wail that it's an objective fact that shadows are colorless and 2d and everyone who noticed things you did not "weren't paying a lot of attention when reading the books...."

On 4/21/2024 at 1:14 AM, Taimandred said:

The most frustrating thing for me is that, it just seems like the bad guys were born bad. I cannot remember a single character being recruited or converted to the dark side. We hear how each Forsaken converted purely because they came from an era of peace and tranquility. All others seem to just be born into it. I know some obscure characters rethink their path to the dark, but all were insidious to start with.

 

As far as I can tell, since the first book, no named character who was not a dark friend becomes a dark friend aside from Taim's forced conversions in the appropriately named Black Tower (Rand was completely insane by then, I'm sure).

I find it really frustrating that we never see the characters wiping their ass. It seems like they always have found the time to use the toilet, but we never see it on-screen. I cannot remember a single time when it's described to us what kind of toilet paper it was, or whether they wiped front-to-back or back-to-front.

Who gives a crap! We see all the characters in media res doing their thing, their motivations are all out there. Would it really have added anything to have a random darkfriend's spiral into swearing the oaths laid out for us in detail before they loom up in a random inn? Do we need a full flashback for Ingtar? Do you want one of the main PoV characters to fall to the darkness in a morality play fantasy epic? Did you really come onto a forum for the Wheel of Light-blasted Time books and say with your entire chest you wished there had been more redundant detail!?

While I agree that Mashadar falls neatly into that fun "ancient but not like ancient" category that I really enjoy about RJ's writing, and that it's always a fun fantasy trope for the heroes to unlock something hidden from evil only to be the ones to reveal it to evil.. Aginor does directly point at Mat when saying “an old thing, an old friend, an old enemy” led them to the Eye.

Possible ways this can make sense, in order of how much I'd buy them:

1) Ishy, as the leader of the Trolloc Wars, has tangled directly with Mashadar and there has been at least one team meeting since the two of them popped out and he's caught them up on the trail it leaves in the Pattern.

2) By the point, Fain has connected with Mordeth; even as he himself sits cooling his heels in Fal Dara's dungeons, it's possible that we now have a game of magical soul telephone: the DO can sense Fain, and Fain can sense the dagger. This also covers the "old friend" angle, as while Mashadar is unquestionably evil it'd still be tough for a Forsaken to call it a "friend."

3) The Crypt Keeper Duo were canonically very close to the edge of the Bore; not as close as Ishy, but exposed to the ravages of time. Especially with Aginor so directly connected to the Trollocs, might they have felt out Mashadar's battle with the Shadow and established enough of a connection to track the dagger?

4) Mordeth is/was a carrier of some violent, paranoid anti-shadow-but-still-evil thing that bubbled up during the War of Power, was defeated someway somehow by either side, and spread to Aridhol/Shadar Logoth in a way that Moiraine/3rd Age history would record as starting there. The story does have Mordeth arrive prior to his mind-poison spreading, eventually creating Mashadar. Was Mordeth patient 0 of a novel evil, or just a carrier/seed of an even older one that had been lurking, waiting 1000 years after the Breaking for things to get bad enough that it could again find fertile ground for Mashadarification?

1 hour ago, Samt said:

But is Aviendha one of the wonder girls or not?

Aviendha is wonderful but what really makes a Wonder Girl is running headlong into an incredibly dangerous situation you are in no way prepared for, sniffing at anyone who tries to explain the previous sentence to you, bumbling around aimlessly, and then somehow (and probably with the help of a long-suffering male companion or two) making it out alive and/or having largely succeeded in your mission.

See such fine outings as The Wonder Girls Take Tear, The Wonder Girls Tangle in Tanchico, The Wonder Girls Ebou Dar Escapade, or the Wonder Girls Salidar Skirt Smoothing Spectacular.

Later entries such as The Wonder Girls are In the Palace at Caemlyn dealing with the Kin and Sea Folk parts I, II, III, IV, up to IIIIVIVMIVIVIVICIVIXVIVIVID get a little bad and I don't count them.

If anything, the argument should probably be that Nyn and Elayne are the core members, Egwene is only along for one of those--she kind of takes the role as enabler/fixer as she keeps tabs on them in TAR.

On 3/21/2024 at 7:05 PM, Winnower IV said:

Many things

 

I will absolutely not stand for this Egwene slander. It is absolutely baffling to me to have a whole paragraph arguing her achievements are "unearned," when each and every other explanation for a character's power is..... also completely unearned!

Your argument is self-defeating as a result. Everything you list is the exact evidence needed to argue that Egwene earned her power as much, if not more than any other character. Egwene chose to join the Aiel, yes. And she worked her ass off (and got her ass beaten off) to learn from them! She is later able to resist the Tower's coercive violence due to learning the Aiel approach to processing pain. How is that unearned? She is born with a Talent in dreaming, but her skills in TAR are earned by endless practice and experience. She is born with a ridiculous talent in the Power, sure, and also she earns her abilities by practicing with every single group that channels saidar outside of Shara (brief but intense period in the tower, forced by the Seanchan, learning with the Aiel, and brief but instructive turns with the Sea People and the Kin).

How is this not merit? You seem to have missed that she was explicitly raised Amyrlin to be a puppet; every shred of material power she wielded was power that she earned through shrewd politicking. Political acumen she learned and earned from the Wise Ones and from being smart enough to know when to listen to Siuan and when to push back, a nuance that many other characters in the book treat as all (everything this person says is gospel) or nothing (woolheaded fool!).

Also, not for nothing.. she is involved "in the war" from day 1, and her actions are absolutely key to winning it. She "tangles" with Lanfear at the docks (and gets horribly tortured, helpless, almost like she's not a day-1 superpower, fascinating). Multiple Forsaken had spent literal millennia ensuring that the White Tower would be, at best, a fractured mess at TG. And they did a good job! Yet Egwene delivered a unified, motivated, effective force. How? Through constant (on screen!) hard work. It's contrived, yes, but my brother in the Light you are reading a fantasy novel; every single thing she does prepares her to do the things she will do. She had to learn in the Tower, get caught by the Seanchan, and study with the Aiel; this allows her to become effective. And effective she is! First keeping the Salidar group together through force of will, and then doing civil disobedience so hard she destroys an Amyrlin seat, then directly fighting the Seanchan in the Tower Raid more effectively than literally any other character in the entire series, then taking two sides that were textually at war a week ago and leading them into battle as a unified force.

Of course, to you all of these are "unearned." Every accomplishment is another sign of how she didn't deserve her accomplishments. Every conversation with Moiraine (Light forbid she question the mysterious wizard that has them wrapped up in 85 plots she doesn't understand, even the evidence that she's not a day-1 genius is instead evidence she's horrible), every miserable night she spent running laps unclothed in 30 degree weather to earn more lessons from the wizard-politicians of the waste or being pushed to burnout for living weapon purposes by a sadist using a nightmare slave collar or discussing politics with one of the greatest wizard-politicians to ever do it doesn't count, for some reason, as "earning it." OK sure. She "has it ridiculously easy." I don't... did you read any chapters that involve a Wise One? Or the Seanchan?

What, in your eyes, makes a character "deserving"? What makes Rand a leader and Egwene a bully? What is the line between ambition and megolomania? Why is Thom playing the game of houses just him being experienced and skillful, and Egwene doing it a sign that she is a dishonest liar that USES people?

With that established, I find it fascinating that of the 12 things you listed she was "unrealistically" a "master" of, 10 of them are just "things politicians do" and 2 are "channelling." These are, precisely the two things she spent every single page of the series, from her introduction as the Mayor's daughter and potential Wise Woman apprentice, learning (or being forced to learn) to be good at. You're gonna have to help me out here.

Being the class clown and prepped for selling horses, but then bumbling into a mystical alternate reality, shouting nonsense like a stubborn idiot, and getting tricked into having memories shoved into your brain while nearly dying.... now that's 110% legit earned. Mat is obviously the greatest general of all time and it's based as hell. Don't worry about it.

When it comes to relationships, I think that *just like Rand* in the first few books, Egwene is experiencing a lot. She's suddenly out of her tiny village, she's had some trauma, her and Perrin find a (relatively) safe space among the Tuatha'an for a minute.. Is it really some kind of massive character flaw that she smiles at and dances with a guy? And then leaves the next day? A little harsh. Smiles and dances were all she'd ever done with Rand! They were "expected" but not really in any modern concept of dating or "going steady"?

And with that, I do disagree with a lot of the years-old sentiment in this thread that she was done dirty in this; I think it's a great example of how, as in real life, childhood sweethearts can enter a larger world, both grow and change, and realize they grew and changed apart. It's totally fine and neither of them are at fault. It's a completely normal part of life! I know only a few adults who are still with someone they were into when they were 16; RJ was spot-on with that whole dynamic.

Yet for you, it is a sign she is a "HORRIBLE" person. Yikes.

I don't think Egwene is a tragedy, as the OOP speculates; I absolutely do not think she is HORRIBLE, as you disjointedly ranted. As the crowd seemed to get to towards the middle of the thread, Egwene's story is a triumph. Yes, she lived fast and died young. But in that time she accomplished a tremendous amount; her death itself took two of the most powerful tools (Sakarnen and Taim/the Dreadlords) the Dark had off the board and was one of the last pushes Rand needed to understand that human beings fundamentally deserve the right of agency. All of that while having "No memories, No most powerful channeler perks, no wolf powers, no reborn guy in her head, no Ta'Verin." Good for her!

The question has already been satisfyingly answered and nobody asked, but I just wanted to put on the record that under my roof, Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve are "the Wonder Girls" thank you.

On 4/5/2024 at 2:09 PM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

It is one of the failings of the books that the "evil" characters are so two dimensional. 

 

The bad guys are just bad. Jaichim Carridin and Hadnan Kadere both had apparent family ties, but these were wholly subservient to being bad. Liandrin is just spiteful and greedy. They nearly are always blinded by greed or hatred or both. 

 

I assume this was an attempt to have a clear contrast between evil and good. A powerful vision of good and evil, as Orson Scott Card proclaimed. Also I cannot overlook that most of them had sold their souls, or were being manipulated by the One Power, that I cannot deny would help remove nuance.

 

But for Byar, who could have been a very interesting character with his conflicting loyalty and cruelty, a strong sense of honour and total lack of empathy, instead was sold down the "bad guy" route, that made him very unsatisfying for a character that features nearly through the entire story.

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.

6 hours ago, Sabio said:

Don;t forget only people the Shadow can turn are who can channel but anyone is vulnerable to compulsion.  So what is it about being able to channel that leaves one vulnerable?

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.

On 3/15/2024 at 5:25 PM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

That is kind of difficult to say. 

 

Thinking, thinking. Well, as Ba'alzamon. he told all three Emond's Field boys that he knew who they were and the Eye would never serve them. Owing to the fact, he didn't actually know which was the Dragon Reborn, that would have to go down as a lie, though not to Rand, there he was actually correct 🙂

 

What about the Tower will try to use you? That could be seen as manipulating the truth, but he seemed to more than imply that the Tower would not be about winning the last battle only. Though, that could all be put down to insinuation. 

 

Certainly I don't think there is anything in Ishamael's character that we should trust - all his good qualities (if there were any left in Ba'alzamon) - were entirely secondary to his hopes of ending suffering by breaking the wheel. If he would sell his soul, cause so much suffering through thousands of years, he would not be above telling whatever he thought would be the most effective lie to gain the breaking of the wheel. What people will do for the greater good, huh?

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.

On 5/6/2022 at 7:44 AM, Stedding Tofu said:

 

Well if it's canon, then fair enough.  My problem with it is

 

1.  If The Champion must be born to oppose and re-imprison The Dark One then there's no way he will ever be called by the horn, at least not at any age's "Last Battle".  The purpose of the horn is to call heroes to fight in those Last Battles so there's no point in him being tied to it if he will always be a no show.  In other words he has a defined role that is incompatible with the purpose of the horn, so, e.g. (and to use the obvious to illustrate my point) Moiraine and Siuan initially intend for Rand to have and to blow the horn not to be summoned by it.

 

2.  The ability to channel is tied to the soul so unless the horn is always kept out of circulation until each Last Battle approaches whoever has it has unimaginable power. Imagine the Shaido or Sharans being able to summon not just the heroes of the horn but the Creator's Champion to demolish their opponents for them.  We get a taste of that at Falme and the heroes aren't picky about who they fight as long as someone has a banner.  The Creator's Champion could end up being the most destructive force in the world and free will has no bearing on it.  I know that's a problem with the horn in general but tying the Creator's Champion to it seems too much power.

 

 

True but that's a paradox of the nature of non-linear time and the idea of reincarnation.  The heroes have to do something to become tied to the horn versus they have always been tied to it.  Does Noal / Jain Farstrider become tied to the horn because of his actions or was his soul always tied to the horn and Jain was merely an incarnation of that soul?

 

If the heroes have always been tied to the horn then the name they are known by could be better thought of as the current age's memory of their most significant recent past life (Birgitte) rather than the "original".  The two would be thought of as the same in universe.  I don't really like the idea of the heroes as an eternally closed group of superheroes that ordinary men and women can't be elevated to because of acts of great heroism.  So Noal/Jain or Artur Hawkwing didn't become tied to the horn because of their actions (and no one can) but did great things in life because they were already heroes.  I much prefer the idea of Jain being a man / soul who becomes tied to the horn because of what he did in this life he lived.

 

Souls are eternal, individual live and names are unique.  Lews Therin was named dragon and Rand was the one prophesied to be the dragon reborn.  Maybe in the next age they will remember Rand as the sheepherder before he or the dragon are completely forgotten and the next turning of the wheel brings new legends and names.  The heroes will have been forgotten so to avoid the souls of Hawkwing, Birgitte or Jain appearing as complete strangers they would have to appear as the most recently memorable incarnations of those souls.  That seems a bit of a cheat to me and new heroes arising because heroic lives were lived that linked new souls to the horn and "released" those from the previous turning of the wheel feels better in terms of free will and agency. 

 

Whether or no it works that way I don't know but each turning of he wheel is seven ages and we only get a window on the 2nd (AoL) and the 3rd with a bare hint of portal stones being a remnant from the 1st.

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.

On 1/15/2024 at 5:50 AM, Asthereal said:

 

Sure, you could go into detail about which aspects saw decline and which saw progress, but the fact that ancient Greek scientists knew that the Earth was round, and that they knew approximately how large it was, but that in 1200AC people thought the Earth was flat and so on should tell us more than enough.

Ever since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, we saw decline in most fields. Mainly in education, healthcare, state law, and most sciences. Turns out having the church as your main source of leadership is suboptimal. Let's face it: advancements were few and far between during the dark ages in the western world. Of course it's a completely different story in Asia. But let's not go into full history mode. I was only making the point that advancements aren't nearly as inevitable as the mordern Westerner might expect.

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 2/15/2024 at 12:25 PM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

Very insightful, though I would generally favour following the book's given motivation until there is a compelling reason (sorry) not to. Definitely, he was lax, a toady on her door would have been sufficient to stop her escape, obviously she was not a high priority. But iirc we see Rahvins's point of view where he expressly refers to Morgase as someone he still had use for. He was aware that she was struggling but took insufficient measures. There is no reason I can see to contradict his inner thoughts, unreliable narrator cannot be said to be at play here. 

 

Also not wanting to let RL intrude, but narcissists never let you go. Never. 100% they would destroy you rather than letting you go your own way. Rahvin might let her feel how useless she was but then he would reel her back in and feed on her hopelessness. If he was a narcissist anyway. Someone suffering out of sight gives them no supply, and risks them not being the centre of attention. 

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.

5 hours ago, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

Except in Morgase's case, it works or it doesn't and when it works, it works, except when it doesn't. Which is necessary for the plot, and makes Compulsion a little bit less like a "I win" button, but still slightly unsatisfying. 

 

Though aside from that quibble, I definitely agree that while there is nothing that proves there was no Compulsion, and it does fit to an extent, it does not seem consistent with Lanfear's personality. She goes to great lengths to try to bring Rand to her voluntarily. Now it could be argued this would just be tiniest of tiniest nudges, but it still to me feels like a step over a line, that if Lanfear was going to cross, she would do so a lot more emphatically.

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.

24 minutes ago, WheelofJuke said:

While Sanderson did a fair enough job wrapping up the series, he writes in a markedly perfunctory manner, especially in dealing with subjects of emotional depth, especially between two or more characters, something at which Jordan excelled. 

It felt to me like he was going by a checklist of plot points to tick off, without adding much in terms of emotional impact. 
 

Obviously I paint with broad strokes, and there are some notable exceptions (e.g., Egwene's ending), but Sanderson just doesn't punch at quite the same weight as RJ.  There's a quasi-mystical element to RJ's style that Sanderson simply couldn't reproduce nor find a suitable replacement. 

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.

On 2/4/2024 at 11:57 AM, wotfan4472 said:

Yes. The stedding are unique to Randland, because there is no hint of how damane are affected, until they got to the mainland.

 

When a damane entered a stedding, which was abandoned, both the suldam and damane freaked out.

 

I also think the Book Of Translation is unique to Randland as well. Which explains when we hear from Loial's mother when she speaks to Loial that there are Ogier from Seanchan negotiating with The Great Stump, and she is very clear about how all the Stedding leaders present are basically outraged with the Seanchan Ogier and their interactions with humans.

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.

On 2/5/2024 at 5:00 AM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

I always thought it would be interesting to see Morgase (or maybe Elayne, but her mother would have been better, imho) coming to the Two Rivers. Not sure when in the story would have been best, and the whole Lord of the Two Rivers would have confused things. But it would have been fun I think to see the village council and the women's circle offer hospitality to the Queen while explaining actually they were not part of her Kingdom.

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.

On 1/24/2024 at 11:07 AM, Aan-Alone said:

Aside from this, I don't recall any other reason presented as to why "This Turning" is more significant. 

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.

On 1/19/2024 at 2:12 PM, SinisterDeath said:

He couldn't see his weaves. He couldn't feel his weaves, and he didn't know what he was doing, 

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)?

On 1/19/2024 at 2:12 PM, SinisterDeath said:

It's applying everything we know from the beginning of the first book to the ending of the last book, and assuming every inconsistency in the novels magic system is "true", and then figuring out how to make everything "consistent" when you have a bunch of inconsistencies!

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."

On 1/19/2024 at 2:12 PM, SinisterDeath said:

It's entirely plausible that Aes Sedai in the 2nd Age applied the scientific method to the one power. (Re: See RJ's personal religious views) This could be RJ's form of commentary on how "scientists" have applied the scientific method to the natural world, and the world at large, and how it's "demystified" everything, and how it's removed the "magic" and "mystery" from the world.

Bu applying that method to the one power, they've created rules like "this works" and "this doesn't work" . That leads to tradition and self imposed rules and limitations upon institutions (---> white tower). Which is why the Forsaken were surprised that certain things were possible when they thought they were impossible.

 

Your assertion that I'm creating a new magic system is baloney. I'm just trying to keep everything consistently true (in my own head canon) instead of hand-waving away that RJ evolved his magic system and ignore how "magic" worked in the first 3 books.

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.

52 minutes ago, dwn said:

Verin only considers murdering her becuase she worries Cadsuane's impact would be bad for Rand and the Light side--and she doesn't go through with it when she learns Cadsuane's intent (see below).

 

Cadsuane certainly wasn't a bully in the early books, assuming you define 'bully' to be someone forcing others down merely to feel powerful. Cadusance used various tactics--some agressive, some manipulative, some honest and straightforward--depending on the circumstances. Her primary goal was always to make Rand and the Asha'man see themselves as humans rather than weapons. Part of her strategy was making Rand treat others with courtesy and respect, at a time when he was rapidly devolving into an authoritarian dictator.

 

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.

21 minutes ago, dwn said:

 

I think some of Cadsuane's questionabile behaviour in the final books is due to the author change. From a bird's eye view her decisions make sense, but her interactions with other characters feel somewhat off.

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.