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.

On 10/22/2023 at 11:29 PM, Jsbrads2 said:

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

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

I see no point to restate anything else. 

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.

On 9/5/2023 at 9:38 AM, Samt said:

And maybe the whole story is a dream that Marin al’Vere has after drinking too much from the barrels Tam brought up.  It’s all well and good to speculate and we know that the arches are not fully understood. But a lot of the time we just have to accept the face value explanation when it works and makes sense and is supported by multiple parts of the story.  
 

The Aes Sedai don’t fully understand the arches and there are almost certainly other ways to use and control them. That doesn’t mean that the straightforward, consistent explanation that we get for what is known is completely incorrect.

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.

On 9/5/2023 at 10:11 AM, Scarloc99 said:

Not at all but I have long liked to think that almost all the fantastical ter'angeral that are found that pre date the war with the shadow are just items of whimsey created because people where lazy. You see the decadance of the forsaken and I don't think that is far from what the Age of Legends was like, no war, no poverty, Aes Sedai ruling over those that can't channel like lords over there servants. Coming up with more and more elaborate power created items to make every day life easier and easier. No one to stop and ask if what they are doing is right until hubris destroys them. 

It parallels in a lot of ways with the fall of the Eldar in the 40K universe, there an entire species (space elves) fell into corruption because there long lives and the lack of any real problems in society led them to become more and more decadent, seeking out ways to entertain. Eventually this led to the creation of pleasure cults and then the creation, in a massive burst of psychic energy, of a chaos god who went hunting for eldar souls to gobble up.
 

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.

On 9/21/2023 at 4:24 PM, Sabio said:

An oath rod can be used on everyone.  The companion says it can be used on those who can't channel.  It was originally used on violent people who were incorrigibly violent due to personality flaws or madness.  As a way to stop them from committing crimes.  The current Aes Sedai have no knowledge of its orginal purpose.  They would never consider using it on a male who could channel or an ordinary person.  

On 9/13/2023 at 3:50 AM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

I would say that there would be binders for both genders, the stories about criminals being bound were not limited to women. But I would also say it would not have worked. Just as an Aes Sedai can tell a lie if she thinks it is true (Logain set up by the Red Ajah, for example), when the men were mad they could have thought that they were doing something quite different than they were. Even making swear not to touch the source (which they probably would not have done, or they could have stayed in the steddings) would not help if you did it unintentionally or subconsciously. Probably.

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.

I agree! That said, on reflection, I believe in a stronger version of my case in that characters do point out how even experimenting with alternate uses of simple weaves can be dangerous. I feel like RJ was applying theories about how philosophy of science works, where you can have a paradigm that is successful at describing how something works without understanding how it works. Historical examples abound in medicine, like how a lot of traditional herbal medicine leans on naturally-produced compounds that would later be isolated and put into pill form, or in astronomy where people spent centuries perfecting epicycle math to describe (and successfully predict!) the movement of the planets assuming a geocentric model before Copernicus and Kepler became standard.

"You know that this particular flow of Fire can heat water. What kind of madman would apply it to stone!?!?!," to use an example from I think TSR, when Rand pushes all the heat from the fires in his room into his fireplace's stones.

It's hammered again and again that weaving is conceived of in this way. The kind of experimentation that would push past it (why can't I put a flow of Air underneath me to fly? Why can I make a bridge from Air but not just move it around me? What rule is actually determining this?) is something that we're told is too dangerous to try (I think it's in aCoS, when Rand weaves a bridge to climb onto the Sea People's ship). And that's in a world where Yoda-style lifting rocks with small weaves of Air is seen as appropriate basic training for beginners.

To add to that, it's frequently implied that the difference in knowledge between the AoL and the "present" is philosophical as much as volume. In PoD, Ishy/Moridin is losing his mind that "primitives" could figure out picking apart weaves, something that they didn't in the AoL (c.f. doctors shocked that some indigenous group curing a disease with a bad prognosis in modern medicine with some herb or with a practice that the medical establishment hasn't thought to try). The flashbacks from Rhuidean and memories of the Forsaken seem to cast the Aes Sedai of that time as more scientists than wizards; when Moghedien is in her Groundhog Day bubble she mentions that such bubbles were used to do experimentation where you could poke at space and time "safely."

So I think the answer to "why don't they do clever reuses, even with simple weaves" is that because, if you're a wizard, you just don't do that. Not only does it not cross your mind, your eyes will widen in a pale face and you will forget your Aes Sedai cool to frantically stop anyone who tries. Your entire training reinforced the idea that you never try anything on your own, you only do what you have practiced to do, and only in the exact way you have practiced to do it. It's bone-deep social norms enforced by frequent "visits to the Mistress of Novices that leave you unable to sit comfortably for a day" and just enough Novices and Browns that broke the rules (even while they were being careful!) being stilled/exploding to prove the case.

The channelers in book-timeframe are all wizards. The Windfinders or Wise Ones are in different Wizarding traditions and so there are things they do that AS believe to be terrible, but they do have their own rules. Our exceptions are the Wonder Girls, who are too dumb/smart/pattern-blessed/pulled out of the Tower to hunt Black Ajah before they had the caution (literally) beaten into them, and the Asha'man who are madmen being pushed by a madman (and yeah on this reread, it feels so painfully obvious Taim is supposed to be Demandred in LoC). One of the themes that RJ definitely included on purpose is how, paradigmatically, we the readers can identify with and understand the Forsaken (and LTT, when he's lucid) more than many of the main characters. For the most part, most people educated even up to middle school in the real life present day think "like scientists," the paradigm of Western science feels as natural to us as air and it's hard to wrap our minds around people who don't follow it; but they are being rational, in their own way.

It's repeatedly explained throughout the series that there is a pretty rational fear in channeling cultures--weaves can have unpredictable effects, doing something new can kill or (worse) still you. That calcifies, culturally, into the widespread Aes Sedai refusal to even consider trying to use the power in novel ways or ever try anything new (add to this the toxic culture of keeping tricks to yourself). There's a lot of hints that this culture was explicitly encouraged by Ishmael in his various vacations from the Bore. Meanwhile, the other channeling cultures are similarly rationally fearful experimentation, with the added fear of discovery by the Aes Sedai themselves. It's not until the Dragon breaks all bonds and we see the superheroes the Pattern spits out to be Rand's friends even doing new things. So the lack of creativity is built into the setting to some extent.

On the flipside the Asha'man are discovering things like crazy through the power of nihilism, we never really know how many men die or are severed at the Black Tower figuring things out or being pushed but it's intimated it's not a small number.

What I do think is a little lacking is that it's more "Nyneave got so offended that someone thought they would be permitted to die in her presence that she instinctively realized a new way to DO something" or "Whaat how could Flinn do such a thing" rather than "someone clever realized that this weave used for x could do y in a different context." This thread already has nearly all the examples I can think of, between the air bubbles or the gateway slicers (and even then, it's cool but kind of dumb? It's repeatedly pointed out that gateways rely on "heavy" use of the Power, it's gotta be more than just making a knife out of Air? (or that cool red spiderweb thing that Sammael uses on Rand)). The only other one I can think of is Asha'man just making people explode from the inside rather than wasting energy shooting a lightning bolt or what have you.

Out of universe, though, I do like that the Power exists as a soft fantasy 'plot magic' that can sort of do whatever it wants when it needs to to create a satisfying story. By being so mystical/ancient/dangerous/unclear and by insisting that even the characters who claim to be experts are still limited, confused, and flawed it lets RJ use it in all kinds of interesting and dramatic ways. By giving you hints of what it might do but never really being totally clear about what it can (and what it cannot!) it avoids feeling cheap or unearned (on which I understand that some disagree) while still giving him ton of leeway to create setups and payoffs. Opening the floodgates with too much too-clever "ah ha, rather than smashing him with a lightning bolt I will simply tweak the electricity that makes his heart beat" or whatever would 1) be way less cool than waves of Shaido bodies bursting into chunky marinara 2) encourages the kind of endless, endless and unsatisfying "why don't they just..." in the mind of the reader that we could easily get caught up in this very thread. I think he leans into "it comes down to how strong you are" because this is an epic narrative political fantasy and not a shounen battler.