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.

I don't particularly think they needed "Dealing with," to be honest. They're going to continue their quest forever, or until the world changes enough that they can't. The ones in Seanchan lands will do exactly what they do anywhere else, except now it's fellas in bug helmets with some women with dresses with lightning bolts on taking some of your daughters instead of ladies in silk with sketchy sword friends whose cloaks ripple and distort their figure. That's fine! So to circle all the way back to the OP, I think the tinkers would be curious but ultimately, flat-out, not care. Their "quest" isn't literally an RPG notebook reminder to kill 15 rats in a cave that will sit there until they complete it and "move on"... it's a moral and ethical philosophy, a way of life. How many people spend their lives practicing Zen meditation only to die before ever achieving satori? How many people have lived their lives waiting for the Rapture only for them to die before it could get here? How many artists have spent their lives trying to be perfect and never got there? They ask about the song the way we say "good morning." They don't have to achieve the dreams of their ancestors, things don't have to go back how they were. The searching is the point! Their current beliefs might not be perfect reflections of what they were in the past, and that's fine too. They are what they are now. By the by, they absolutely did not break any promise.. they got the ter'angreal to where they needed to be, and the Aes Sedai came by and set up the magic dome. They did their part, they're done! That's why they were free to go look for the Song again. Their current existence is far from tragic. Again, sure, maybe they go into the columns and hear a growing song sung by their ancestors, but is it the Song? Who's to say? Why don't we have another good meal and dance a little. Tl;Dr The real song is the friends we met along the way

For one.. to reiterate other posts, it's not like he was on the couch watching TV and eating chips here. The man was busy. For two, as to why it doesn't rise up the priority chart: I do think it's another RJ piece of wisdom... Rand was working on a "devil you know" basis. He knows Taim is: - An arrogant megalomaniacal jerk - Really unhappy with being placed "under" Rand and "replaced" as the Dragon - A man who has been channeling for years, is not mad, probably isn't a forsaken because Bashere recognized him and he was running around before any of the Forsaken except Ishy were out, and is effective at creating human weapons. As long as he's doing 3, he can be 1 and 2 all he wants. Rand hates that, by the way, but he has to become hard and do what is necessary. That's the core tenet of the Darth Rand philosophy. I'm blanking but I'm like 70% sure he goes through this exact calculus nearly word-for-word in a book. The problem is that when people say "watch out for that sneaky ol Taim" to Rand, what he hears is "he's trying to usurp your authority and set himself up for after the Last Battle," not "he's a darkfriend/Forsaken and he's going to actively work against you at the Last Battle." Rand's so focused on forcing himself to be OK with possibility 1 he can't even let himself think about possibility 2... and that allows it to become reality. Part 3 is that he (as Darth Rand) is really overestimating the power of being an intimidating jerk himself. He's like "yeah Taim's sorted I went by a few times and vaguely threatened him and looked super tough he knows I'm stronger he knows I'm hard I've looked him in the eye and he backed down, sure he'll give them special pins or whatever but I have proved that I am the Sigma Male" and, like everyone who thinks like that, he's being childish and wrong and it bites him in the ass.

To return all the way back to the OP and rag on the Aes Sedai a little more.. the three boys are absolutely correct to not trust Aes Sedai. A majority of the Tower (even including the Salidar rebels) would be 100% down with locking all 3 of them in a room in the basement and trusting themselves to set everything up for the boys to be let out to play when the Last Battle started. Siuan, Leane and Moiraine knew that was an awful idea... and that's why they did what they did, in finding Rand and trying to help instead of shoving him into a box right from the word go in Emond's Field. And two of them were stilled for it! And as for Moiraine in particular, she herself would disagree with OP! She goes out of her way in book 4-5 to address how she came on too strong, how she didn't respect Rand as a person and was just trying to direct him as a tool, and she changes her approach. I think OP did hit on a frustration, which is that the three buddies are never just together being buddies ever again, basically after the Stone of Tear. They have the horrible flashes of color when they think of each other, try not to, and aggressively go their own way for the majority of the pagecount, which is sad. If you think every story should be a buddy comedy. The last thing I want to really dig in on is Mat. I completely understand the impulse that, after Cairhien, "Mat should be awesome and the Band of the Red Hand should be in lots of super cool battles and he should use his luck and General-memories superpowers to kick ass boyeeee." I understand this because I first read WoT when I was 16 and that's what I wanted and I was upset that Mat was such a (insert demeaning, feminizing word for coward of your choice here). Upon rereading as an adult, it makes an incredible amount of sense. You know what Mat got in those memories, even more than a mind as sound for tactics as his already was for horseflesh? He remembered dying. Hundreds of times. In hundreds of battles. I want you to really internalize that; people can struggle with trauma after one life-or-death situation. Mat is carrying around hundreds of literally unimaginable traumas (after all, I don't think any of us can remember dying), traumas specifically attached to battles! It's no wonder he fights against acknowledging or using the memories for as long as possible. Moreover, if there's one thing he understands--even when you win, if you lead in a battle, people die. Categorically. People you were responsible for. Even if you personally make it out, you have sent men to their deaths. That is its own kind of trauma, and he has thousands of that kind rattling around in his head with those bloody dice as well. I'd hang around the circus too! And honestly even then, his actions during the slog aren't conscious Mat-shirking behavior... he's sent by Rand to get Elayne. The only way to get out of Salidar is to take them by Ebou Dar (he is fairly obnoxious to Egwene, but I honestly think that's a great chapter to remind the reader like.. yeah, this would be like if some random kid who just passed confirmation class and applied to Seminary sat down across from you and said he was the Pope. It's ludicrous on its face! How is he supposed to take that seriously!). He gets caught up in the Seanchan invasion risking his life to find Olver, straight heroism, but then he's stuck acting the part and can't leave without the Aes Sedai. Once out, he's with Valan Luca's Interminable Menagerie Pt. 2 because there's no other way out that doesn't involve being tried and maximum executed by the Seanchan. All in all, I wouldn't say Mat acts like an "idiot." He acts like a soldier. He desperately seeks out any possible distraction to forget the things he has to do--serving girls, dicing, horses, drink--and then when push comes to shove he bloody does what he has to. I will say the only real disappointment is that the only time it would be time to say "ok no more cost of war no more grim reflections of RJ's own Vietnam experiences time to just bask in Mat and his luck and memories BTFOing overconfident dreadlord/Forsaken scum," it's in the Brando Sando books.. and he had well-documented issues in nailing down how to write Mat. So it is a little disappointing, but RJ's only real misstep in all that is dying (a controversial and poorly-received writing choice if there ever was one).

My mistake! It was Perrin that I had meant to have on the list, but you're right and it should be ten with Nyn.

"How many characters have been carried by Bela throughout the series?" [The "real" answer [Edited, initially wrong] is probably 10? Tam, Rand, Nynaeve Egwene, Perrin, Min, Suian, Leane, Olver, Faile. However, it's a trick question; the real correct answer is "all of them," as Bela is the Creator] "How many times does Nyneave tug her braid over the course of all 14 books?" [Redditor analysis estimates somewhere around 60] "What is the most arrogant way to walk across a room?" [Cat Crosses the Courtyard; this honestly is easy-to-possible, if you really want to be cruel pull out one of sword forms that aren't made as big a deal of from here ]

The biggest thing I'd argue you're missing is that for a lot of books 1-2 Mat is being mind controlled by the Magic Evil Dagger That Makes You A Prick. Yes, it was his dumbass idea to grab and hide the thing in the first place, but by the time he's running and hiding with Rand the dagger is amping up his bad decisions, making him selfish and paranoid and generally not a good person. It's channeling all of the simmering thousand year old resentful, self-destructive evil of Shadar Logoth directly into his limbic system. You're seeing him in Book 3 freshly freed of it and back to normal Mat--an impish troublemaker who's too smart for his own good, naturally resentful of authority and doing what he's told, and a natural-born shirker who would never be caught doing an honest day's work if he can avoid it. It's fine to dislike normal Mat too! He's charming to some and incredibly annoying to others, but he's definitely distinct from Evil Dagger Mat. He will change more! But that's where he's at now and why.

So Buddhism holds that individuals will and should seek to escape the cycle of suffering, death, and rebirth via realizing Satori/Nirvana, but that's not a requirement across the universe like it is in Christianity. There's no rapture, there's no moment where everyone is judged. The wheel just keeps on turning, the only question is whether you as an individual are on it, and again the question of "but on a long enough time scale, won't we run out of souls as everyone joins us in nirvana?" is a nonsensical question in the cosmological framing. You're still imagining time as a line, and there's just something repeating along the line until every soul has finished the game. That isn't it at all! In this conception time is a circle, and some things (the Buddha and Boddhisatvas, heavens and hells) simply exist outside the circle, but if they're outside the circle Time doesn't exist because they're not in time. There will always be souls for the circle, because it's a loop, no matter how many people exist outside of it. It's hard to wrap your head around. In many ways that's on purpose; that's why Zen koans are things that don't make any sense or why esoteric Buddhist rites are so complex. The moment it makes sense to you is when you achieve nirvana, so it not making sense actually makes a lot of sense. Back to WoT itself.. it's not about improving "ourselves" --meaning the world. It's about improving "ourselves"-- individuals. It's about each human being having the right and dignity to exist in their part of the loop and make their own choices. Sure, the morality of that is part of the debate here. Rand is definitionally consigning those people to suffer, as suffering is part of living. Again and again. However, again, his fundamental decision is that it's wrong to make that decision for people. To take away ever participating in the loop again. Because he chose this, each thread will be woven back in, succeed and fail, probably suffer, die, and go eventually get woven right back in. But the point here isn't to bemoan that, it's to recognize that within each of those lives is a person, a person who deserves to have a chance to do the best they can that time around. It's not a roguelike, it's an arcade game. There's no progression system. It's a damn Wheel! The whole conception that it should be Rand's job to "win" the wheel for everyone is exactly why Ishmael is evil. And yeah, let's be real, of course the Dragon makes this decision every time. He will make this decision every time and he has made this decision every time. It is, and I repeat myself, a Wheel!!

Sorry for the double post, I've read speculation (I think even in older threads on this forum) that Ogier are aliens, either from another planet or just from a parallel universe reached via the portal stones. In this theory, the Book of Translation is how they "translate" between realities. There's no channeling where they're from, and the stedding are places they created to be able to keep a connection to the other world, so the dampening effects are a result of the worlds interacting in weird ways.

I feel like the Ogier in Seanchan are a thematic parallel to the Aiel on this side of the Aryth. Both were a group explicitly devoted to peace and the tending and growing of things; they even worked together on it in the AoL. It's a central part of the story how the Aiel's dedication to peace was tested, tortured, and only maintained by a portion of a portion, with the remainder becoming the single most warlike people on the continent. I don't think it's unreasonable to posit some kind of similar situation! As mentioned about the only thing we know is the access to stedding is a little more consistent. Let's speculate wildly! This could they're denser over there and that the Ogier were able to find them more easily. Post-breaking happens, there's chaos. The Ogier, wanting to recreate some kind of AoL agriculture within, have to militarize to defend the stedding--those unreliable, hasty humans want access to the food and safety from channelers, and they have to be kept out. Luthair appears; he offers them a deal. Protection, access to the stedding, long-term stability, freedom for worrying about channelers everywhere, freedom to grow and cultivate and nurture. All they need to do is provide soldiers. The broader culture of Seanchan Ogier expands their cultural drive to "Garden" by cultivating human society to remove the "weeds." Maybe it's more like the Aiel--the Gardeners are a radical sect who decided to throw in with the Crystal Throne while the elders harrumphed about how violence was wrong, but much like the Travelers can go through the waste unharmed the Gardeners can return to the stedding without being bothered, acting as a parallel society. Either way, you have a group of Ogier trained heavily in combat dedicated directly to the defense of the Seanchan monarchy, and they create the conditions to allow the rest of the Ogier to do what they want--chill in steddings, sing to trees, debate scholarship, etc. This checks every box of our Randland Ogier--the elders in the stedding are able to be patient, wise, separated from humans exactly because of the Empire and the provision of the Gardeners. Could be completely wrong! Seems to line up with the little we know, though.

I really think trying to describe cosmology in an explicitly magical world with physics is a mistake. Not for nothing, but there billions of real-life people who believe in reincarnation; a cursory look at various Hindu or Buddhist theologies will give you a bevy of ways to answer these questions. One of them is that souls are held in the Beyond until they're ready to be woven back in. It isn't a "closed system" in Randland itself, because there's an unknowable amount of souls hanging out (in Buddhism this is in a multitude of heavens, hells, pure lands, etc) waiting to be woven back in. Your soul will come back after you're gone, but not necessarily immediately. For Vajrayana Buddhists, if you're really important it is immediate (Lamas, for example), but not necessarily for anyone else. The other idea that's not uncommon is that souls are not species-specific; this is the logic Jains follow when they sweep the ground in front of them to avoid crushing an insect. So there's also "slack" in the system as you consider not just the souls of humans, but of every possible living thing. When it comes to WoT-specific, I think many are overstating the "eat your soul" levels of danger the Dark One's chicanery can create. As mentioned, balefire makes it impossible for the DO to resurrect his favs, but their souls are still in the Pattern. Grey men are an abomination for sure, but their soul has been transformed and not removed, presumably once the Grey Man is destroyed that soul returns to the pattern. Wolves are a special edge case; but again, the Wolf Dream is basically just an extension of wolf life. Best Boy Hopper's soul will come back one way or another, he just won't exist as Hopper in the Dream. Machin Shin again is pretty bad, but again it's holding onto and torturing those souls; very unpleasant for them, but nothing in the Pattern is forever and eventually the Wheel is going to get them back. Even something like Brigitte being ripped out of TAR too early is only breaking a particular relationship with the pattern and not pulling her thread out. Overall, I just really don't think this is a going concern. Physics works on a Western conception of linear time, but if you're on the Wheel (or operating in a theological/cosmological context that sees time as circular) this question really doesn't even make sense. Everything that will happen has already happened, and everything that's happened will happen. There will always be enough souls because time is circular (like some kind of Wheel. Of Time). There are souls this Turning because they were already there, and there will be for the next one because those are the ones for this one. There are no beginnings or endings, it's the first paragraph of every single book!

A contribution in no particular order: - I like that it's over. I like that there are still mysteries. I like that we have no idea exactly what went on or what's going on in Shara, I like that we can wonder what might happen after the surely-to-be-increasingly-misnamed Last Battle. I think these are strengths of the narrative, not weaknesses; having every wiki page filled out and every t crossed and every i dotted is not good storytelling to me. A fully understood world is a boring one. I like talking about this one! I would absolutely hate if someone tried to pick it up and do their own thing. Even with HJ actively involved and an actual mountain of notes and his level best, a pro like Brando Sando turned out work that felt.. off. Anything new would be worse; it's completely unavoidable. I know I can just not read it (just as I have just stopped watching the other turning of the wheel...) but still. - Again my feelings on the minute to minute are mixed (not going to relitigate Mat) but the broad strokes of the ending I tend to like. I like that not every character gets a big shining moment, and some of them just get got. Padan Fain got exactly what he deserved; more than anything he wanted to be important and being dispatched as an afterthought brought me joy. Structurally there's criticisms to be made that so much of the Last Battle is between our heroes and an army that just appeared instead of any of the looming threats we've been seeing our heroes battle for most of the series, but I thought it fit well into the wider pattern (ha) of "taking your eye off the ball." We get shocked with the Seanchan really early on in the series, many semi-antagonists get shocked with the Aiel being very relevant and not just distant "savages," and like oh yeah there are just tons of people over there in Shara that we've just not dealt with at all. On one level it's "oh wow they came outta nowhere" and on another it works perfectly; of course the Shadow is working there as well! And without the real Dragon to mess around it was able to just win. - I really don't have any beef with any of the other characters' endings. Egwene died as she lived, biting off more than she could chew. Gawyn died as he lived, making awful decisions. Siuan died as she lived, doing things in the background that nobody really appreciated. The final battle being one of philosophy and not of power is also really not the problem to me other have said it is. "Rand beats the dark one in a fight and fain replaces him" would be the lamest, marvel multiverse ass ending. It is, literally, exactly what the Dark One wants you to think would happen. When it comes to the philosophy itself yeah I'm not sure it fully checks out. The comparison to A Good Place is an apt one, where the final conflict ends up asking at a real basic level what even is "good"? Interestingly WoT ends up quite Christian, where a standard response to Theodicy (if God is all good and all powerful why is there evil) is that "good" only exists and a concept in opposition to evil, and that it can't exist on its own; that without the option to be evil, there is no meaning in choosing to be good. It's not terrible, and I think some takes on this in the thread have approached it maybe too literally. Like if you're complaining "he was a loser who Rand could crush" you really missed the point. The Dark One is not a single consciousness or bad boss, it's the teleological concept of evil, selfishness, chaos, etc. If you expected Rand and the fundamental concept of evil to duel with swords by having Tiger goes to the Grocery Store meets Cat raked the Litterbox you're in the wrong mindset here. That's what Demandred is here for. The moral philosophy is the fight. Fantasy authors have this incredible power to define reality within their worlds. Our ultimate conclusion RJ's universe presents Rand is that it is actually impossible for things to be better, or more precisely for things to be made better. The Dragon will save humankind (prevent the breaking of Wheel), but he will never and can never save us from the many ways we harm each other (the various oppressions of the Seanchan/the Tower(s)/the nobility, wars more generally, individual acts of petty harm, bossy village Wisdoms) without rendering us inhuman. Ishmael concludes the best thing to do in that situation is to give in and blow it all up as the only way to escape; Rand concludes ("correctly") that we just have to do the best with what we have as messy, imperfect humans. I think it's fine! It's definitely of a piece with RJ's overall worldview; an acknowledgement the status quo is unjust and untenable, but a deep skepticism of anyone (like Ishy pre-tantrum that he can't, like baby Rand in Tear/Cairhein or Darth Rand later) who think they can just sweep in and change everything all at once by (in some cases literal) magic.

I don't disagree with anything anyone's brought up, to me it always read the most as our first big example of two things: 1) The Forsaken are incredibly powerful but also incredibly arrogant, and Moghedien is not actually that much better at manipulating TAR than the "filthy savage primitive wilders" among the Aiel that have transitively trained Nyneave, who knows just enough to be dangerous and just enough to stop Moghedien from rewriting TAR reality with the a'dam. Part 2 of "the Forsaken don't know everything" is that a'dams are "new"--they were invented post-breaking by an Aes Sedai already in Seanchan, based on some combination of circles and also warder bonds that (by the way) are also post-breaking. She has no reference for what exactly the a'dam is doing. Had her wits truly about her she maybe still could have simply willed the a'dam off her neck and out of existence? That said, about having her wits about her... 2) The Forsaken are incredibly powerful but still just people, and pretty crappy people at that. They have disordered personalities--that's why they signed up with the Ancient Evil in the first place! Moghedien is an inveterate coward. A vicious, clever, malignant coward, but above all she's driven by fear. From her PoV chapters and her clash with Nyneave in Tanchico it's clear she's competent at pulling strings, but she's real bad in a pinch. She does not deal well with a well-executed plan going off the rails. We see from the black ajah girl's club chapters that she's so mad that Nyneave embarrassed her at the Panarch's palace that she's getting sloppy. She's ignoring what she should be doing to chase around this wilder (and her hero of the horn pal) for revenge. It can only be described as tilting. So when her hastily but well-laid plan to torture said wilder for all infinity suddenly goes off the rails, she doesn't have her wits about her. It's happening again! Last time she was just out-Powered but this time she's been outsmarted, and that's just not processing in time. She tilts right off the face of the earth. That's one of my favorite things about RJ, you can say it's one of his core themes coming out of his Vietnam experiences--the "stronger" person doesn't always win. Sometimes there's something they just didn't or couldn't consider. Sometimes they choke. As they say in sports, "that's why they play the games."

I'd cosign everyone pointing out that RJ does a very good job of capturing that decisions are made by people, who don't always have the same decisionmaking calculus that a dispassionate observer might have. The thing I would add that makes a lot of decisions infuriating is how RJ constantly plays around with dramatic irony and makes it really clear just how little of what's going on any single character actually knows. Even once things like Traveling and T'A'R are discovered so long-distance communication isn't just pigeons and tavern rumors (at least for some characters), there's still a lot. Moiraine is the GOAT, literal savior of the world second only to Bela and I'm glad OP is coming around. But even she fumbles the bag, more often than you notice at first, and honestly the more you read the more those early fumbles become contextualized. Even by FoH, really think about it--the wise, Gandalf-style wizard that brings our kids into this world of magic has very little idea what's going on and is scared out of her mind for the entire first book. She has to put on a brave front for these literal children she's dragging all the way across the face of the planet to face an ancient evil that bodied wizards way more powerful and knowledgeable than her, and she's grasping at poorly-translated straws from a prophecy with 10 translations and 1,000 interpretations, but she's losing her damn mind for all of EotW. She doesn't know how Rand will learn to channel, she doesn't know much more about the Forsaken than their names, she doesn't know Rand is going to be permanently locked into Lews Therin's Rage Reaction channel. She does her best anyway! Take her buddy Siuan; she's arrogant for sure but she kind of has to be; if she shows weakness she's dead or worse. She's a relatively young Amyrlin whose entire time with the stole has been devoted to a plot that most Sitters would see as blasphemy at best and treason at worst; I'm pretty sure that at several points before the end of FoH she's explicitly said "if anyone finds out what Moiraine and I have been up to we'll be executed or stilled." And even then, she further knows that if the Black Ajah gets wind of what she's up there are fates worse than stilling. She has to throw people off the scent by putting up a front of everything else she's doing, and you can see how she'd be kind of distracted. She can't even get a lot of information about what she needs to know from the organization she ostensibly runs, because in the White Tower the most innocent question reveals that you wanted to know the answer to whoever you asked. Swimming with silverpike indeed! It's hard to say she made every move perfectly, but I'd say for the circumstances she did pretty well at accomplishing her aims. I would also say she becomes more sympathetic as the narrative goes on and you have more of a chance to get to see her thought process and reflect. Nynaeve, on the other hand, really is just kind of an asshole. To my mind she's a well-intentioned, supernaturally gifted misandrist bully who always thinks she's justified and right and whose unbelievably strong magical powers and talent mean that she often comes out on top anyway and has her terrible instincts confirmed. When she does mess up real bad, she either ignores it and blames everyone else (probably men, probably mostly Mat), or completely folds in on herself with self-recrimination... there's no in between. Keep reading, though, she does have growth throughout the series, and these complexities are what make reading the series entertaining.

I was looking up which book to look in for evidence on this when I stumbled across an oblique RJ answer to this question: " Week 21 Submitted by: Brian R Question: One thing that's always confused me is just why Dashiva/Osangar chose to attack Rand (with the turncoat Asha'man) when he did. The last time we saw Rand with Dashiva before that was when they went together (with Flinn, Hopwil and Morr) to confront Cadsuane, and there didn't seem to be any one particular incident that would "set him off." Robert Jordan Answers: Partly this was guilty conscience working. Even people who don't have a conscience can have a guilty conscience, the sudden conviction - as when Rand came on Dashiva and the others - that somebody knows what they are up to. Add to this that Dashiva was plain getting tired of trailing around after Rand, taking orders. He's one of the Chosen, and the Dark One reclaimed him from death, which is really good, but he's been stuck in a decidedly second-rate body and stuck spying on Rand, fetching and carrying like a servant as he sees it, with hardly even an opportunity to put a spoke in Rand's wheels except in very minor ways. How much better if Rand simply died. Summary: Dashiva went after Rand as he was worried that Rand was on to him and really hated having to pretend to be less than he was." https://library.tarvalon.net/index.php?title=Question_of_the_Week#Week_21 So apparently this was a decision that Osan'gar/Aginor/Dashiva made of his own accord as a Chosen, and not following Taim. It's still unclear to me at that point whether he put Taim up to it, he agreed, or he just flat-out lied to the other Asha'man and claimed it was orders from The Boss, but at that point it hardly matters.

In the first place, the easiest and most correct response to this discussion is "this is the deliberately vague and tragic backstory to a story, if the backstory happened differently the story wouldn't happen, also it's deliberately vague, so talking about it is deeply pointless." And that's true. However, this still is stuck in my craw. At the second meta level, in all honesty, arguing that people should have just all got together, sat back and thought logically, then all proceeded as a group about what was best for everyone on a thousand-year timeline just as a second apocalypse was crashing in on the heels of a first one (the consequences of the bore in the first place and the War of the Shadow had already functionally destroyed the AoL civilization) is to fundamentally miss the point both of the Wheel of Time and also to demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of history and/or of human beings in general. Like things in the WoT are honestly going way better than they were at the conclusion of the War of Shadow, and look how that went. If RJ has a single thematic consistency through the skirt-smoothing and the spanking and the character bloat and the flowing between randomly named sword forms it's that evil will always be with us because humans are selfish, and that even when people are all acting selflessly, they still are operating with limited information and without being able to communicate or trust or agree on what is the best selfless way forward (but, of course that evil will always lose because selfishness is ultimately self-defeating). On the first in-universe level, the Breaking had to happen because it was the next step in the Turning of the Wheel. Fate is another pretty frequent theme here and it's really consistently highlighted that there's no clever wordplay or legalese loophole that's going to get you around something the Pattern needs to happen. It's unbelievable arrogance to think that oh yes, "building a defensive base" and "setting up a clever oath to swear on the binding rods," both things that can know would be logistically impossible and also not work even with the incredibly limited and unreliably narrated information we have, would have simply allowed the Pattern to be completely altered and the AoL to snap right back. Like my brother in the Light, the name of the series is the Wheel of Time. The metaphorical wheel that spins out the Pattern inevitably as it wills, beyond the power of any mortal mind or will, even those with literal earth-shaking magic power. And you're going to sit here and type "well, the reason the AoL ended is actually because those fee-males screwed up." Really. Blood and bloody ashes. It's some kind of hilarious combination of arrogance, woolbrainedness, and misguidednes to actually will your fingers into typing: "Mostly, it seems that the female Aes Sedai of the time didn't do a good enough job in getting organized. Normally, you'd build some kind of defensive base that you could try to act out of." In getting organized? Half of their military, including their most trusted friends had suddenly turned into uncontrollable living weapons or were slowly turning into living weapons, decades into a total, genocidal war (that they were losing) that started because half of of their trusted friends at that point had actively betrayed them to the cosmic horrors prosecuting said genocidal war. Every piece of your infrastructure to command or communicate is being or has been destroyed. Building a defensive base? My dude, everything left was a defensive base. More to the point, what exactly do you think the Stone of Tear is and where did it come from? Have you, perchance, heard of a crazy little fortification that the female Aes Sedai still use called the bloody White Tower!? The problem here isn't "having a defensive base," it's the minor issue that each of those defensive bases is staffed by the people now going mad. Light! Bear in mind, and again, we have literally nothing from the books to go on, but we're operating with the thousands-of-years later out of universe explanations of what happened and why. What is this experience like for someone there? Are all the men going to go mad or only some? Is the taint going to spread to saidar? Is it temporary? Why is it happening? How does it work? "Modern" Aes Sedai (and thus us readers) have pretty clear answers to these, it's a little different for someone at the dawn of the Breaking trying to figure them out by discussing it with your husband when he suddenly starts laughing and replaces all the rock in the "defensive base" you're in with lava. They have no idea what the right decision is! There are no right decisions! And then we get to the single word that meant I couldn't not post----- "Normally." Normally. NORMALLY?! Please, share with me in what world anything about that situation is normal to you or I!? "Ah yes, well when I am facing down the barrel of the entire world collapsing due to magic that we thought we understood and it turns out absolutely did not and for decades half-man half nightmare magic abominations have wiped out entire cities with the aid of my old university professors and half the people I just sacrificed everything to fight alongside and unbelievably have just managed to locked the enemy's main source of power and strongest leaders away, have suddenly started imagining their children and friends are demons and are currently turning what's left into mountain ranges and/or oceans for reasons I could not predict and can't understand. Well normally you'd build a defensive base that you could try to act out of. I just did it last week it's nbd." tldr without the breaking there's no story and the literal name of the series is a symbol of the grinding inevitability of fate so this is a dumb argument, but no, you wouldn't have done a "good enough job" either, sorry.

It's been a month here but I can't help myself. Light! Did you get outbargained by a sailmistress and hold a grudge? What do you have against the sea folk? It's clear, over and over, that the skills the windfinders had were: - Complicated - Necessary - Involved understanding/capabilities the AoL AS did not have. Quotes from both Moridin in the book and RJ himself outside it already in this thread make that clear as crystal. You're in this thread blowing off "Cannons" left and right with very little substantive evidence. Go back and re-read the section where they actually use the Bowl of Winds. A lot is made of who is leading the circle. A lot is made about how much expertise it took and the complexity of what had to be done. A lot of laborious comparisons to steering a ship are made. Further, if you want evidence the Bowl was stretched beyond its original parameters, the obvious answer is the way the Power gets screwy everywhere around where it was used. The Bowl itself survived, but it was putting out so much power in ways it wasn't designed for that every channeler around Ebou Dar felt it and it's commented on again and again how uncomfortable they all are, from the damane to the Aes Sedai to the Kin to the asha'man. What's going on with Rand is arguably distinct, but the Power is unquestionably affected. There's your canon right there. I really don't understand why you keep saying 'cannon cannon' without a single quote or reference, directly contradicting multiple insinuations and out-and-out statements from the books, as if you saying the magic word means that your textually provably incorrect memories are gospel truth.

I don't know, the argument here isn't that the explanation is incorrect it's that it's incomplete, which is a huge theme that RJ delves into over and over again throughout the books. The "present" day inhabitants of Randland are living in a post-apocolypse, this is a very explicitly cargo cult/Canticle for Liebowitz situation. OP did a great job of summarizing other textual evidence for this theme shown via other ter'angreal. And that said, we can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that 1) the arches were made before the breaking, and with a slightly lower degree that 2) AoL Aes Sedai did not go through any testing like this. So I'm all-in on the "what if we set the holodeck to "personalized temptation" and only gave them one chance to leave to make sure these kids are mentally tough enough" becomes "these are the mystical mysterious testing arches" theory. And yeah, it's also fairly confirmed canon that Ishy actively manipulated White Tower tradition to create long-term structural weaknesses, so he might have had a hand in tweaking the settings here and there for sure. I find this to be a little wild. Imagine believing that a place with no war or poverty is bad. The Aiel were definitely in service to Aes Sedai, but it's never implied that Chanellers were an oppressive class in general; again, quite the opposite is evidenced by all the ter'angreal made for the sole reason of bestowing the benefits of channeling on non-channelers. If you compare the AoL to present-day Randland (hell, present day Earth!), can you really say there are fewer people ruling over others like their servants? In both situations it only ends up being bad because there's spooky evil magic! The tragedy is that none of them knew that the Bore would unleash the Dark One, it was out of left-field. And even then, there were moral systems in place to ask which research was worth doing and not. That's the whole reason Semirhage and Aginor fell to the shadow; both wanted freedom to experiment without any ethical boundaries, and both got it. Everything that happens after is the Fall of Man, people be petty stuff, but the AoL is pretty firmly established as a good time for everyone. If you could recreate the AoL right now, it would be a morally incomprehensible position to refuse it because it would be "decadent." If your moral system requires there to be spooky evil magic to punish the "hubris" of trying to make other people's lives materially better, it's not a good moral system!

I think there are two things going on. In universe: Faile's behavior is childish and inexcusable. If, as some defenders claim, she's angry that Perrin's behavior is still leading Berelain on because he doesn't know how to actually signal he's not interested.. then she could, I dunno, tell him that so that he knows how to signal he's not interested. Instead, she throws tantrums, "you know what you did"s, etc. Her PoV chapters make it really clear that she knows he's a backwards farmboy! It's the core of their dynamic! And yet this backwards farmboy, who clearly and repeatedly relies on her for all other social cues and court behaviors, is just supposed to know the baffling and contradictory rules of high court flirting and it's totally justified to constantly emotionally abuse him about it? In the hopes that he shouts back...?? And then, older and wiser characters (Bashere and Elyas especially) sweep in to say "oh ya, that's how Saldaean broads are, just be toxic back lmao you'll figure it out." Count me on the side that Berelain's continued actions are out of pure spite, regardless of whether she has a chance or not. She's a savvy political operator, the definition of a "sex is a weapon" character, and she couldn't beat Faile with fists so she's using the weapons she has. It's petty but if there's a single unifying theme of the WoT it's that human pettiness is the single strongest force in the entire world. Easily 9 out of 13 Forsaken turned out of pettiness. Multiple characters have a literal choice between being living and being petty and they ride right to their deaths. No doubt in my mind; her actions are pettier than an Ebou Dari dress, sown up the side to display colorful layered petticoats (and with an oval cut-out revealing ample bosom obvs). Out of universe: To me this isn't so much a male perspective as a patriarchal one. I have absolutely met women who have 100% internalized the things that women in WoT PoV chapters think and how they act; "men are dumb and women are crazy" is a crowd-pleasing standup trope for a reason. The number of romantic comedies or romance novels that have characters as toxic as Faile (or more!) who demand (and eventually receive) a partner who knows their wants and needs, based simply on "understanding," without any of that pesky "communication" stuff (which does, in fact, involve trusting said partner to ignore frequent and vociferous lies about their wants and needs in favor of what they know they are) is... uh.. it's common! If anything I think RJ deserves a lot of credit for really realistically digging into that dynamic and how frustrating and harmful it is. On the other hand, despite and along with that sensitivity, the narrative ends up being deeply ("small-c") conservative. "Yes, these oppressive systems are incredibly flawed and challenging, here are all the ways they're broken. However, ultimately, we all just have to change ourselves and suffer to fit in them because the alternative is chaos and that's much worse." This isn't unique; any description of what's happening around the prophet tends to veer into lightly warmed-over frothing anticommunism, Rand's narrative arc from the perspective of leadership is not "how to not be a tyrant" but "how to be a tyrant correctly." The nobility more broadly is dunked on endlessly for their asinine behavior throughout the series, yet Perrin's leadership arc is how he needs to grow up and accept that the Two Rivers requires a Lord, the people want and need a Lord, and he needs to stop skirting his responsibility to act as if he's a priori better than everyone else, live better than everyone else, and have more power than everyone else. He just has to do it correctly, unlike that oily stuffed popinjay Wieremon. The system doesn't make sense and it isn't fair but Light! It's the system! Really, to me, that's the most frustrating thing about Perrin/Faile. It's not that their relationship is toxic, it's not that it drags on forever, it's that the "solution" that RJ presents us with (and BS carries forward) is for them each to correctly play their roles in the toxic dynamic. They are simply coming to terms "with reality," instead of, as the modern reader might prefer, concluding that these roles are determined by people and can be changed by people, and might not be right for the only 2 people with any right to say what the rules are in their own relationship.

Given both of these, I feel like during the Breaking someone must have thought of it, right? "Jim's going mad, he knows it and I know it, so let's make him swear not to hurt anyone unless he's personally threatened." Jim wakes up, sees the whole room full of Trollocs, and only after smashing the walls together does he realize it was his loved ones all along. I feel like you can credibly extend this to the cleverest oath that doesn't itself break AoL-Aes Sedai morality/that isn't tantamount to severing/execution (in which case.. just do that). The Dark One is awfully creative. So I think the answer to the original question is that the madness wouldn't override, necessarily, but it would almost certainly seep around them and you'd still get unfortunate results.