I have read and agreed to abide by all the rules and filled out the attached form.

She already lured me into Shayol Gul. I'm afraid I'm still not through the welcome-thread in Tar Valon yet...

Does it come with cookies? I've always been told kaf goes great with cookies.

Could the solution possibly be "Welcome to the dark one's playground"?

Can I have a C please?

Yeah, I had a look at that, actually - but then it said sign-up was necessary to participate or something along those lines?

Thanks! Well, I was interested in book discussion mostly. I did try the TV show for a few episodes, but it never really caught my attention enough for me to keep watching it. I gather you have a bit of roleplaying and other forum games going on here too, so maybe I'll give that a try :-) Can you give a pointer of where to start? I did briefly have a look at Shayol Gul and some other of the other community boards, but it's all a bit overwhelming. Feel free to pm me, if talking about this would drag this thread off topic.

Well, now I am getting all hot and bothered, but it used to be just that warm, fuzzy feeling in your stomach 😅

Yep, I guess it was the talk of it being part of a network which made me think of it. Ofc, there are some ter'angreal which benefit from their shape, like the portals or wasn't there talk of a kindle-like device somewhere?

Thanks so much for the warm welcome! I'm looking forward to becoming part of the community. I hadn't noticed that little sheet with the magnifying glass, will start using it from now on 🙂

I played with the thought that it was not really designed as a bowl in the first place, but as a parabolic dish. It's just channelers in the third age not recognizing it as such. Ofc, this would most likely make it a very shallow bowl so probably not, but it's an entertaining thought.

I agree with this as the main reason so many people love the Wheel of Time. The characters are just so relateable. Sure, there are times they behave like idiots, and there are times when so much could have been solved if they just talked about their problems, about their doubts and feelings. But yeah, a lot of people do really have trouble talking about stuff like that, and I think recognizing that is one of the big strengths of RJ's writing. Maybe he takes it a bit over the top sometimes, particularly the conflict between men and women, but considering he wanted to make overcoming those differences and working together one of the big themes in his novels I can see why he did it. I've got to disagree with you on those two series being better than WoT. For Thomas Covenant I made it most of the way through book 1 before deciding on dropping it, so it does not even compare to EotW for me. Dune is a series I read all the way through, but I haven't reread any of them except for the first one. I might argue that the Dresden Files or the Discworld books are series which drag me in more than WoT, but they are a very different fantasy-genres than what Robert Jordan wrote, and I don't think I've reread either more times than WoT.

Ah, it is probably just me misremembering then, possibly influenced by the text on that wiki page. From what I could recall the change in personality wasn't big enough that alarm bells began blaring for people who knew them before they were turned, it was more like there were some raised eyebrows and thoughts "huh, Evin's been acting a bit odd lately". At any rate, I believe your second paragraph is correct, and that sometimes it is better to not think too hard about some of the world building in a series if you want to keep your suspension of disbelief 🙂

My personal head canon is that there is not much sexual dimorphism in trollocs, and that female trollocs fight along with the males. Of course that leaves the question of where they have their pregnant, young, etc. But tbh. it's a question which I've never really put that much thought into. Much as I don't think too hard on how society for other "evil" races work in e.g. Lord of the Rings, as I believe the answer will be "it doesn't work" if you really think about it. Take for instance the portal world Rand, Hurin and Loial visit in book 2, where the trollocs have won and you end up with a world where everything is dead except for a few grolm. Allegedly this is because with the trollocs exterminating humankind they are without a food source, and die out from infighting and starvation after hunting everything else to extinction. But how do they even get enough food in the main world? There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of trollocs in the blight. How are they fed? I think the borderlands would be depopulated pretty quickly if they get everything from them... I see it is a topic which has been discussed on these boards before (https://dragonmount.com/forums/topic/24977-the-shadows-economy/). I don't know if any consensus was reached in that thread, but I believe that for a lot of topics like this it is better to just suspend disbelief. As for your question about the morality of killing non-combatants of a sapient species, I feel it depends fairly strongly on whether or not trollocs are inherently evil or not. To quote a poster on a different forum, discussing whether or not killing all goblins in DnD is morally good: This is pretty much how I think about it too. At any rate, I think the Emond Fielders would have trouble killing anyone presenting as innocent. Or just killing anyone in cold blood, even if they do know that they are evil. Of course this changes throughout the series, particularly for Rand from what I recall.

Basically what the title says - it becomes clear in the books that a channeler can be turned by 13 myrdraals and 13 channelers working in tandem. Is any reason given in the books for why this wasn't used far more than it was. The wiki list only 14 people we know have been turned, although it is likely more were turned at the Black Tower. What makes me wonder the most is that the Black Ajah has been around since at least the Trolloc Wars, but doesn't seem to have practiced Turning. As evidenced by the hunt for the Black Ajah under Seaine Sedai, it wasn't that hard to abduct a Sister for an evening, and the strategic implications of being able to slowly turn the White Tower black seems immense. This was just an idea which occured to me while rereading the series, and I am not that far into it yet, so there may be some obvious reason I've missed. I don't seem to find much discussion of this by either a quick forum or google search so it kinda seems likely, so if someone here with a better grasp on the lore than me could weigh in, it would be much appreciated!

I did google it and there doesn't seem to be any further information on how trollocs procreate beyond what you already extrapolated from text in the books. I guess maybe in that they can't produce offspring with other species? There was also that stuff about what myrdraals like, I guess, which again is alluded to in the books, but it doesn't have all that much to do with the topic at hand. Is there something in particular you feel is expanded on in that letter beyond what's already been talked about in this thread?

I really liked Earthsea, but to be honest I the first book jammed better with me than the sequels. I'd definitely give it a try if you haven't read it though, Ursula K Le Guin is an amazing writer. If you like sci fi as well as fantasy, she has some great works in that genre as well. Another older book series I can recommend is the Lankhmar short stories by Fritz Leiber. More sword and sorcery than epic fantasy, but I feel he manages to mix humour, grittyness, and well, fantasy, really well. Well worth a try if you haven't read them yet, and easy reads too. For something a bit different, I really liked The Otori trilogy by Lian Hearn. What I really fell in love with in these books was the prose (which might have been thanks to the translation, I haven't read the English version), but it is a bit of a personal journey amid a struggle for rulership of the nation. I'll note on the Thomas Covenant books which were mentioned earlier in the thread that they never really drew me in, but then again I never made it through the first book so maybe they get better later on.

Hi everyone! I finally got round to joining the forums, after realising I had some new questions about the books upon listening to them for the first time on audiobook. I first read the books way back in the 90s, and have reread most of them a few times, with the exception of aMoL, and maybe one of the other Sanderson ones. Before moving on to the other parts of the forum, I realise I already have a question to ask here - is there no way to preview my post before posting? I only see a button for "submit topic", but maybe I'm missing something?