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butterflydm · 1 year

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wot reread: a memory of light (chapter 38-epilogue)

spoilers for a memory of light!

Well, the rest of the chapters have fewer pages in total than chapter 37 did, so this is going to be my last full reread post, though I do have a couple of follow-ups planned.

My timing ended up being pretty good, even though my original intention was just to reread books 1-3 in anticipation of the second season of the show. And now I’ve still got over a month to get good and excited about everything the show will be bringing to the table.

1. We go back to Rand, still deep in his conversation with TDO. The chapter “the Last Battle” really revolved around the battle between the forces outside Shayol Ghul, because it ended when the commander of the other army finally was killed (though there are still a ton of his forces to take care of, the head of the snake was cut off and so was the person who fancied himself Demandred’s replacement).

2. The ‘let go’ that Rand is hearing in his mind is in his father’s voice, and the meaning expands here -- let them sacrifice. it is their choice to make. And then Egwene’s voice -- am I not allowed to be a hero too?

Because this is something that Rand has been resisting over the course of the books -- basically ever since he accepted that he will be the sacrifice, he’s struggled with knowing that he’s not the only one, with knowing that other people are sometimes even sacrificing just to get him here, to this place. And, I imagine, with his tentative plans to maybe even survive this ‘sacrifice’, that’s going to make him feel even more guilty about other people giving up their lives in this fight.

3. He talks in dialogue with Egwene’s voice in his head (given that he’s existing around and between reality, it might really be Egwene’s voice too). He is not in charge of protecting her. He decided to take that charge on himself, back in EotW, but it was never his to claim. Let us die for what we believe, and do not try to steal that from us.

4. And so Rand takes himself through his list again, backwards, this time, releasing his feelings of shame for failing to save them, releasing his need to protect them. Letting go of the mountain that has been crushing him for the majority of the series.

He hadn’t realized how large it had become, how much he had let himself carry.

...

Ilyena was last. We are reborn, Rand thought, so we can do better the next time.

So do better.

5. And now Rand, as he stands surrounded by all time and nothing at the same time, comes to understand that the Darkness was never a being, never an entity of its own. It is the between of everything. It can only win if no one is willing to keep fighting against it.

6. Mat gets the news of Lan’s reported death. As he did with Egwene and with Elayne, he swallows the grief and doesn’t let it show to anyone else, instead using the news to spur the army onward to attack the now-stunned foe.

7. Rand tells TDO that he can’t win, and TDO argues that it has Rand in its grasp right now, and Rand says that that’s missing the point, because it was never just about his victory. The people he lists:

Morgase (?) - a woman, torn and beaten down, cast from her throne and made a puppet

Thom - a man who remembered stories and took fool boys under his wing

Moiraine - a woman who hunted truth before others could

Perrin (?) - a man whose family was taken from him, but who stood tall

Nynaeve - a woman who refused to believe she could not Heal those who had been harmed

Mat - a hero who insisted with every breath that he was not a hero

Egwene - a woman who would not bend her back while she was beaten and who stone with the Light for all who watched

Rand realizes -- “it was never about beating me. It was about breaking me.”

8. Okay, I have to say. I have to! But this is... this is literally also how the Seanchan work. This is their philosophy of life -- to take people and break them to the Seanchan’s purpose. As I’ve said before, there really is no way around the fact that the Seanchan are going to be the Great Evil of the Fourth Age. There are just too many Shadow-Seanchan parallels! Maybe Mat and Min can slow the train slightly but I don’t think they can actually put the breaks on it.

9. But back to now -- Rand and TDO watch the battlefield, where Mat is fighting -- Tam at his side, then Karede and his suicide-slave troops, then Loial and the Ogier. “Outnumbered three to one”. Mat is shouting in the Old Tongue: For the Light! For honor! For glory! For life itself!

I will take a moment to be glad that, despite the first half of this book trying so hard to align Mat with the slavers for whatever fucking reason, he’s not fighting for the slavers in this battle. That he actually did become the General of the Forces of the Light, not primarily the General of the Slavers. Looking back, it really does feel like the change was signaled when Mat first took off his Seanchan clothes and put back on his Two Rivers coat*. That seems to have been a visual cue about his change in characterization -- how he started pushing back more against Tuon, forcing her into more compromises, and standing more aligned with the Forces of Light rather than pandering to the slavers all the time. idk, maybe forcing Mat over to Ebou Dar at the start of the book was Sanderson’s way of trying to finally create a synthesis between the horrible Mat of CoT & KoD and the non-horrible Mat of the earlier books, and he felt like he actually had to take Seanchan!Mat to his worst conclusion before bringing him out again? It still really sucks that the Mat and Rand reunion happened during our low point of Mat’s characterization, though.

(* which appears to have been triggered by the ‘not pleasant’ conversation that Mat and Tuon had after Tuon berates him for not telling her that Egwene was briefly enslaved by the Seanchan. After that (off-screen) conversation, Mat starts being much more combative re: the Seanchan -- after that conversation is when he has his bitter/sarcastic thought that he’s not done much to convince Tuon to stop using damane and when he suggests to Min that she mislead Tuon about her viewings to try to soften her stance on Aes Sedai; so I think we can safely give Egwene credit for the turnaround in Mat’s characterization -- I wish that that conversation between Mat and Tuon hadn’t happened off-screen! like so many important emotional moments!, but it seems like perhaps that was a watershed moment for Mat)

Rand and TDO watch, and TDO taunts Rand “the son of battles. I will take him [Mat!]. I will take them all, adversary. As I took the king of nothing [this is Lan, I assume]”.

10. Mat thinks about how he knows he can win this battle, despite the horrible odds. He just needs “a favorable toss of the dice”.

And, not too far away, with the Trollocs outside his hiding place, Olver gives up on the idea of trying to get the Horn to Mat, and lifts the Horn of Valere to his lips.

11. First Mat, and then everyone else, hears Rand’s voice -- he calls out Shai’tan as wrong, telling everyone that Lan isn’t dead. And just after he says that, Mat hears the familiar golden and clear note of the Horn of Valere.

...wow, the Seanchan feel so superfluous to requirements right now. They didn’t show up until after the final combat was engaged, after Rand had his final necessary epiphany, after the Horn was blown (they have still not shown up, technically).

I’m going to take a moment to daydream about a world where Tuon’s nature as marath’damane was revealed and accepted, so she really did flee with the Seanchan (so that she can try to recover from this blow to her powerbase) and the Seanchan never returned to the Last Battle. This would be a much easier way to de-tangle Mat from the Seanchan than whatever he’s gonna need to actually do post-canon.

12. The Heroes of the Horn return and our first sight of them is Birgitte coming to save Elayne from Mellar, with a shining silver arrow. 😍

Birgitte standing over her own corpse kinda cracks me up. Good for her! It’s also probably the first time she’s felt like herself in books and books.

“That was the bloody Horn of Valere!” Mat announces to his troops. “We can still win this night!” Inside, he marvels over how the Horn was sounded without him, showing that one of the things that he’d believed that he was permanently tied to isn’t tied to him after all.

Well, if that knot can be untied, Mat, maybe another one can be as well.

13. Between losing Demandred and the appearance of the Heroes of the Horn, the Shadow are now the ones who are on the defensive, with some Trollocs breaking and trying to run away.

The mist of the Heroes forms near Mat and he feels a moment of worry, wondering if maybe someone on the side of the Shadow summoned them. Hawkwing rides up to Mat, and tells him, “Do take better care of what has been allotted you. Almost, I worried we would not be summoned for this fight.”

I know, right? The lack of urgency in the Mat-in-Ebou-Dar half of the book about actually getting him to Merrilor to blow the Horn was really frustrating to me too!

When Mat confirms that this mean they’re fighting for the Light, Hawkwing tells him, “We would never fight for the Shadow.” The rumors about the Horn are wrong -- I feel like we learned this back in TGH as well but, you know, Mat was dying at the time, so I don’t blame him for not remembering.

Yeah, here’s the line: “We have come to the Horn, but we must follow the banner. And the Dragon.” So it was Rand, Perrin, and Mat who learned that. But, like I said, I don’t blame Mat for not remembering.

14. Hawkwing and Amaresu both scold Mat for not showing Rand enough appreciation for saving his life. Honestly, so fair and legit for Mat to finally be on the other end of a scolding like that. “I have seen you murmur that you fear his madness but all the while you forget that every breath you breathe - every step you take - comes at his forbearance. Your life is a gift from the Dragon Reborn, Gambler. Twice over.”

Mat feels so scolded. As he deserves.

He’s told that they can fight here because they have Rand’s banner and because Rand is... technically sort-of kind-of leading them... from a distance.

Amazingly, Mat takes a moment out of this encounter to marvel at how pretty one of the heroes is and then Remind Himself again that he’s married. He really does have to keep Reminding Himself. One of these days, he’s not going to remember to Remind Himself until after he’s already slept with someone else. It’s been more subtle in this book than in ToM, but Mat is still constantly checking out Every Other Lady around him.

15. Olver gets dug out of his hole by Trollocs but Noal, now one of the Heroes, arrives to save him. I don’t care about Noal, and Jordan definitely didn’t do enough to build up their relationship in CoT & KoD, but I still got a little misty at the tiny orphan child feeling grateful that one of the people who ‘abandoned’ him has finally come back.

16. haha, this next chapter is called ‘wolfbrother’ so I guess that Perrin is finally gonna wake up. But first, we have Elayne!

She’s able to wriggle lose enough to make the medallion copy shift away from her skin and fall to the ground, and now she can embrace saidar again. Elayne apologizes to Birgitte but Birgitte laughs it off, “Why do you mourn, Elayne? I have it all back! My memory has returned. It is wonderful! I don’t know how you stood me these last few weeks. I moped worse than a child who’d just broken her favorite toy.” Ah, yeah, that confirms that Birgitte’s spiral into bitterness was not meant to be a reflection of Elayne but on the dark place that Birgitte was in, with her loss of memories, I think. But it’s a shame that it feels like parts of the fandom just took Birgitte’s unrelated bitterness as a reason to slam on Elayne more. My girl gets so much undeserved hate.

And Elayne and Birgitte will ride back into the battle together. Not as Aes Sedai and Warder, but as friends. 😍 😍 😍 😍

17. Aviendha! I’ve missed you! Her timeline isn’t advancing as quickly as it has been for those further away from Shayol Ghul, so not as much as happened here in the valley. She can feel the channeling inside the Pit of Doom - “a quiet pulse”. Oh! The wolfbrother of the chapter’s title is actually Elyas, who Aviendha runs across now. The Darkhound Wild Hunt is happening, and hundreds of wolves have come to fight back against them.

Aviendha is about to go fetch channelers to help bring down the Darkhounds, when she spies Graendal a bit higher on the slope, with some Turned channelers, and Aiel guards under compulsion. Aviendha alerts her companions (Amys & Cadsuane) and then begins the fight against Graendal.

18. Elayne has a sword again. Where is she getting these swords? I’m just gonna assume it’s made out of Air or something. More useful than the sword, Elayne creates a banner with the Power, the red lion of Andor, lighting up the night.

19. [Mat] remembered, within those memories that were not his, leading forces far grander. Armies that were not fragmented, half-trained, wounded and exhausted. But Light help him, he had never been so proud.

...

This was the moment he had been seeking. It was the card upon which to bet everything he had. Ten to one odds, still, but the Sharan army, the Trollocs and the Fades had no head. No general to guide them.

...

Elayne’s death had been a lie. Her troops had been in disarray - they had lost more than a third of their soldiers - but just as they were about to be routed by the Trollocs, she rode into their midst and rallied them.

20. Catching up with Moggy! Hi, Moghedien. I bet your Last Battle is going pretty shitty. She kicks Demandred’s abandoned corpse. Oh, his devoted Shendla just left his body there to rot? Yikes. For Moghedien, she discovers that now that so many of the Chosen have been killed off, TDO is ready to let her have a taste of that sweet sweet True Power.

She disguises herself as Demandred and heads to the Sharan forces. I have to admit, given how open Min has been about her Talents, it’s kinda astonishing that Moghedien doesn’t know about her viewings. Min will tell anyone who stands still for five seconds, plus Tuon announced her as a Doomseer and has been plumping her up for the past whatever-number of chapters.

Moghedien starts to gear up for her role as Fake Demandred...

...and then she gets a blast of cannon/dragon-fire in her face from the Band’s part of Mat’s plan.

21. Instead of the Band leaving their caves to fight; channelers are opening them up brief windows to shoot through. Aludra is placed up on a high location with a spy-glass, giving orders to the channelers for the next locations for the booms. Honestly very clever.

22. As Aviendha fights in the valley, plants grow to cover her passage.

They had come right when she had needed them to hide her approach. Happenstance? She chose to believe otherwise. She could feel [Rand], in the back of her mind. He fought, a true warrior. His battle lent her strength, and she tried to return the same.

Determination. Honor. Glory. Fight on, shade of my heart. Fight on.

😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍

23. Aviendha kills a Compelled attacker, only realizing it’s Rhuarc after she has struck the fatal blow. She kills him moments before he would have killed her, and only her shoulder gets injured.

She does her best to convince herself that she only killed a shell. That Rhuarc was already dead.

There is a burst of determination from Rand (Strength, Aviendha) and her fatigue leaves her, and she refocuses on the fight.

24. Aviendha studies Graendal and decides on her approach -- she creates a spear made out of fire and light, and some other weaves in reserve -- and charges for Graendal. See, this makes a lot more sense that Elayne randomly having a sword, because this is a weapon and Aviendha knows and has trained in most of her life. I think that Sanderson Just Likes Swords tbh.

I really love the description here because of how it brings back Aviendha’s Maiden roots as she launches her attack on Graendal. The ground explodes underneath her (her legs get pretty destroyed, it sounds like), but she’s leaping up already aimed like a spear herself, and she sinks the spear into Graendal’s side just as Graendal is using the True Power to Travel... and because they’re touching, she goes along with Graendal when she Travels.

25. Mat rides with the Heroes of the Horn. He gets them to confirm that he isn’t one of them. He can see Elayne from where he is.

Mat saw Elayne’s banner glowing above them in the sky, crafted of the One Power, and caught a glimpse of someone who looked like her riding among the soldiers, hair glowing as if lit from behind her. She seemed a bloody Hero of the Horn herself.

26. And then the great battle is over, at least here on the battlefield.

He would have to thank Tuon for returning. He did not go looking for her, though. He had a feeling she would expect him to perform his princely duties, whatever they might be.

Hmm.

27. He does feel that tugging. Rand needs him. He tries to convince himself that this was his part, out here, and whatever is going on where Rand is... that’s Rand’s business. The dice are still tumbling in his head. This part here manages to capture Mat’s double-think in a way that I didn’t feel like came across in the actual chapter when we had the Rand & Mat reunion.

After trying to talk himself out of it, Mat ends up saying that he’s a fool because “I need to go to Rand.”

As a parting note, he asks Hawkwing to go have a conversation with “their Empress” (Tuon), and hmm, interesting. Okay, I need to break this down a bit.

So, one of the things that gave Tuon the big jollies back in the negotiation chapter with Rand was Mat referring to the Seanchan forces as “our forces”, which she basically interpreted as “haha you’re mine now, no take-backs”. And here, he does not call the Seanchan empress “my” Empress. He says she’s “their” Empress. The Empress of the Seanchan, who he is not currently identifying with, it would seem. So. That’s interesting.

We don’t get to see the conversation between Hawkwing and Tuon, of course, but what would Mat assume about what Hawkwing would tell Tuon? Why would Mat send Hawkwing to talk to her? The Heroes of the Horn follow Rand, pretty explicitly. They literally just recently scolded Mat for not appreciating Rand enough. They are aware of current events in the world and of the Seanchan Empire.

Which is to say... of course, Mat is assuming that Hawkwing will try to set Tuon straight on how to be an Empress without abusing millions of people under her power. Hawkwing told him that they would never fight for the Shadow. I think it’s reasonable for Mat to assume that he would disapprove of slavery. And Hawkwing’s hatred of Aes Sedai in his lifetime was canonically influenced by Ishamael, if I recall correctly, so the idea that Ishamael’s corruption is still influencing him in his Horn-form just seems like kinda silly to me. So. That’s my stance on that. Mat has clearly stated in recent chapters that he disapproves of the damane system, in particular, and that he wants to influence Tuon to soften her stance on Aes Sedai. So we know what Mat’s motivations are in sending Hawkwing off to talk to her. And it kinda fits Mat’s pattern of trying to use other people to influence Tuon to be less awful.

28. Rand has thought about Mat often, here in the battle with TDO. He thinks of him again -- Beneath them, on the battlefield, the Trollocs had fallen, beaten by a young gambler from the Two Rivers.

29. Oh, hey, Perrin just woke up. Page 853. He went to sleep on page 670. Nice long nap. Missed... a lot of stuff.

He learns that the battle at Merrilor has been won, but the battle at Thakan’dar, outside of Shayol Ghul, rages on. He gets his exhaustion washed away by one of the Aes Sedai and goes physically back into TAR (where he left Gaul to guard the cave where Rand fights).

30. In the waking world, Thom is the one guarding that cave entrance and he ponders the various ways that the ending of the world can be turned into a song, once this is all over.

31. Mat goes to Grady and tells him that he needs to be taken to Shayol Ghul. He’s brought Rand’s banner with him. Hanging out with Grady are Olver and Noal. The dice are still tumbling in Mat’s head. As far as I can tell, they haven’t stopped since Elayne asked him if he knew what he was doing.

Mat, on thinking about Noal/Jain becoming a Hero of the Horn:

Well, you wouldn’t find Mat trading places with him. Noal might enjoy it, but Mat wouldn’t dance at another man’s command. Not for immortality itself, no he wouldn’t.

Another data point that I’m placing into the pile.

Grady says that Traveling is wonky in that direction. Can’t be done.

Mat won’t accept that as an answer, and he gets Grady to take him (and Olver) as close as they can get -- a Seanchan scouting camp, a day away.

32. lol, we get a tiny glimpse into Fain the mist god-demon here. This just feels so anti-climatic, to still have Fain around at a time like this. Anyway, he’s basically a walking Shadar Logoth at this point. Fain kinda suffers from the same issues as Slayer, in that it feels like he’s a villain that the story grew past and yet he hung around anyway.

33. Gaul has been standing alone against Slayer all this time in TAR, fighting against him and protecting Rand, on his own, while Perrin was taking his restorative nap. But now Perrin is back to help. On the plus side, because of the time dilation stuff, only two hours has passed for Gaul in here.

34. Since he couldn’t take a gateway to Shayol Ghul, Mat is going by dragon to’raken. And, yes, Mat takes time out of his terror at being up so high to notice how pretty the morat’to’raken is, even as he thinks that anyone willing to do this must be “completely insane”. Olver, who is riding with them, is having a great time, though.

From up high, Mat sees a mist covering the valley below and gets a tingling that tells him... it’s about Fain and the dagger.

35. Then their to’raken gets hit by arrows, killing the rider or knocking her out. Mat undoes his straps and climbs over to take the to’raken’s reins. So he’s... he’s riding the closest thing that this world has to a dragon. Subtext, fun for the whole family.

He does his best to give them a gentle landing. It is not terribly gentle.

36. In the aftermath of the crash, Mat thinks that kidnapping Tuon (aka marrying her) is the worst decision that he’s ever made. Hmm. And this is after she ‘returned’ to the battlefield per their plan.

“That,” [Mat] finally groaned, “is the worst bloody idea I’ve ever had.” He hesitated. “Maybe the second worst.” He had decided to kidnap Tuon, after all.

And he doesn’t undercut that thought with any kind of caveat. He just lets it stand as he moves on to the next thing. Another interesting data point.

37. Mat literally panics when he realizes that Rand’s banner has gone missing during their dragon to’raken flight. Why does it seem like Sanderson is so much better at writing Cauthor-related scenes when Mat and Rand are separated from each other?

Olver points out that the swirling clouds above them are forming Rand’s sign, and then he blows the Horn again, for good measure.

38. Rand breaks out of his frozen battle with TDO and re-enters his own body. “From his watching of the Pattern, he knew that although only minutes had passed here since he’d entered, in the valley outside this cavern, days had passed, and farther out into the world, it had been much longer.”

He points Callandor at Moridin, and Moridin promptly throws a knife at Alanna.

Broke back to consciousness by Nynaeve’s herbs, Alanna pulls herself together long enough to release the bond she forced on Rand before she dies.

...I kinda feel the need to point out that Moiraine has done nothing but be a battery for Rand since she entered the cave with him.

I also feel bad for Alanna, who really disappeared from the story once Min was bonded to Rand and could take over as Cadsuane’s Rand mood-ring, and now is only here so that she can die. I have extremely large beef against Alanna for forcibly bonding Rand but it feels like the story really should have used that beat even more than it did, rather than it disappearing after WH.

39. Perrin kills Slayer. Finally. And then he pulls back out of TAR and is “on the rocks in the valley of Thakan’dar”, near where the Aiel are gathered.

40. Mat leaves Olver with the Heroes and meets up with Perrin at the mouth of the cave. So, yes, Mat and Perrin get another reunion. Why does Perrin! Get all the reunions! This is what I was talking about when I said how annoyed I was that Mat thinking about Rand tugging on him wouldn’t end up with any good payoff. All we get is yet another Mat and Perrin reunion.

That Rand is literally inside that cave and yet the three ta’veren do not reunite here is honestly somewhat infuriating for me. Genuinely those two things: the Emond’s Five reunite and the ta’veren three reunite should have been at the TOP of Sanderson’s priority list! There is a lot that I have enjoyed about AMoL but there are just way too many important emotional moments that were either skipped or didn’t happen at all but should have happened.

And, fuck, letting Mat and Rand have a scene that doesn’t take place during Mat’s weird Ebou Dar adventure. That would have been nice! Once Mat decides that he’s not going to be a lapdog for the Seanchan/Tuon anymore, his storyline and his PoV get so much better and so much more enjoyable and I am just... eternal bitterness that our only Mat & Rand reunion was plopped into our most lapdoggy-Mat era.

Mat came here specifically to protect Rand and then he never sees him! That is just fucking awful. They deserved a better reunion. What was the point of having the Heroes scold Mat if we didn’t actually get to see Mat and Rand interact again after it? This is kinda a place where the epilogue is mostly at fault -- Mat just strolling off to plan a fireworks show for Tuon post-Last Battle conflicts pretty hard with him spending time with his dying best friend, tonally-speaking -- but that really just makes it all the more frustrating that the only Cauthor reunion took place when Mat was in his worst Seanchan-era.

41. Aviendha attacks Graendal with an exploding gateway; and Mat kills Fain/Mordeth/etc.

And Perrin almost takes off to go searching for Faile but manages to resist the urge: If Rand died, then he would lose Faile. And everything else.

Yes. I have tried to yell this at the fictional characters so many times: if the world dies, then so does your sweetheart! It’s nice that Perrin finally listened.

42. And for his final trick, Moridin grabs Callandor, and Moiraine and Nynaeve spring their trap, using the flaw in Callandor to take control of the ‘circle’ that Moridin has accidentally formed with them. With Moridin having pulled the True Power, Rand is now able to enter the link, and Moiraine and Nynaeve can feed him all three sets of Power: saidar, saidin, and the True Power. Light explodes from him, and from Shayol Ghul, as Rand uses the True Power to protect himself as he reaches through the Bore and grabs onto the Dark One.

43. We get a quick beat of people reacting to the light:

Elayne is on the battlefield of Merrilor, as they search for the living among the dead. She feels the “swelling of power in Rand” and her attention focuses on him.

Thom shields his eyes as the light bursts from the entrance to the Pit of Doom.

Min appears to have managed to get away from the Seanchan for now, changing linens for the wounded, perhaps also on the Field of Merrilor.

Aviendha is drawn back from the darkness of near-death by the light and the warmth of Rand inside her, and realizes that her explosion twisted the compulsion weave so that Graendal compelled herself to worship Aviendha. Awkward!

Logain sees the light and knows that it’s what was meant by the message that Egwene sent, and he breaks the seals on the Dark One’s prison.

44. In TAR, Perrin runs across Lanfear. Together, they walk into Shayol Ghul, and we learn that she apparently compelled Perrin a little while ago? He’s able to pull out of it by reminding himself of his duty and of Faile, and he snaps her neck, killing her.

*squints at the scene*

Yeah, I mean. That’s certainly still what looks like happened? Sorry, Sanderson, I’m not seeing your hints here about Lanfear tricking Perrin and surviving.

45. Rand holds the Dark One in his hand. Or the representation of his hand. And, once again, when Rand tells TDO how pitiful he is, all I see are echoes of the Seanchan:

You would have enslaved me as you would have enslaved the others. You cannot give oblivion. Rest is not yours. Only torment.

Rand can feel himself dying, his life blood slipping away. Realizing that the world that he’d seen without the Dark One would have been the truth, he knows that he cannot kill it. So he thrusts TDO back into his prison, braids saidar and saidin together to reforge a new shield onto the Bore.

With this new form of the Power, Rand pulled together the rent that had been made here long ago by foolish men.

He understood, finally, that the Dark One was not the enemy.

It never had been.

(because it only reflected the evil that people were already capable of)

46. The black hole inside the cave expands, as Moiraine and Nynaeve run for the safety of the cave entrance.

47. And now we are at the epilogue.

Much like I did with The Last Battle chapter, I’ll take the epilogue in sections by character. Rand & co will go last, this time.

Perrin

The spirits of the dead wolves fade back into the dream. Perrin voluntarily worries about Rand? Wow, that feels kinda out of character for Perrin, who has always been way better at pushing away thoughts of Rand than Mat has been, but I guess let’s go with it. It seems to exist to tell us that Perrin no longer sees color swirls and no longer feels any tugging towards anything. “Those seemed like very bad signs.”

“Have you sent for the three?”

What a weird way to ask “do Rand’s girlfriends know that he’s dying?”

I’m going to take a minute and count up the PoV & page counts everyone gets in the epilogue.

Rand: 3 PoVs (4 pages total)

Mat: 2 PoVs (1 1/5 pages)

Perrin: 3 PoVs (6 1/5 pages)

Loial: 1 PoV (3 pages)

Moghedien: 1 PoV (1 page)

Nynaeve: 1 PoV (2 pages)

Birgitte: 1 PoV (1 page)

Tam: 1 PoV (1 page)

Min: 1 PoV (1/2 page)

Cadsuane: 1 PoV (1 page)

That’s a lot of Perrin, comparatively-speaking.

Anyway, Perrin finds Faile, happy ending, etc.

...oh, I just looked it up and Sanderson answered some questions about the epilogue (tor[dot]com/2013/01/23/brandon-sandersons-wheel-of-time-answers-from-torchat/)! He added Perrin’s and Loial’s scene(s). Ha! I knew that Loial was a Sanderson addition because he uses “Matrim” instead of Mat (that is, imo, by far the easiest ‘tell’ of a Sanderson scene -- someone using ‘Matrim’ when they normally wouldn’t). And the Perrin scenes make sense too because it really builds off of and finishes the narrative thread that was at play earlier in the book for Perrin, which was presumably all written by Sanderson.

Mat

Mat strolls away from the aftermath of having killed Padan Fain, calling the dagger “a gamble I don’t want to touch”. The dice stop rolling in Mat’s head after he decides not to pick up the dagger. Hmm. Mat avoiding becoming the new Fain for the Fourth Age?

After that, we skip to his scene with Tuon. And there are only those two scenes with Mat in the epilogue -- killing Fain and finding out that he’s been baby-trapped into the Seanchan Empire. Though Perrin confirms in his own PoV scenes that he no longer gets the swirls or the tugging, we don’t get the same kind of confirmation in Mat’s (very short) scenes.

I will say that there is more subtlety in Mat’s ending here than I had remembered -- I was extremely unhappy about his ending but this marriage is pretty troubled already in the text, and so it’s not really the book that tries to pretend this is a happy “babies ever after” ending for Mat; I feel like that’s maybe more of a vibe that I got from fans at the time, rather than from the text. There are a lot of “male power fantasy” fans who just really like that Mat ends up married to an Empress and commanding vast armies, I think, at least from what I’ve seen around the internet (and especially back when the series was originally published).

And Mat specifically forces a grin at the news that Fortuona is pregnant, so he’s not genuinely happy about it (and we got things in recent chapters like Mat thinking that kidnapping Tuon was the worst idea he’d ever had).

But, honestly, I do still hate that it happens. I hate it up one side and down the other. It sucks as an ending for Mat so much. Miserable marriage, awful wife, horrible shackles tying him to a terrible fascist empire built on slavery.

That being said... just Tuon’s rule is incredibly fragile, this marriage is also incredibly fragile (which is probably why Jordan slapped a baby in there to begin with -- otherwise, given his general misery level in many of the Seanchan-related scenes, it’s difficult to see how Mat could bring himself to stick with Tuon for long enough to do whatever plot-related things Jordan was imagining would have happened in the outriggers -- the baby is a trap for Mat, not from Tuon but from Jordan).

There are still so many things about the Seanchan that could end up being deal-breakers for Mat if he finds out about them!

(ex. Bodewhin Cauthon is never mentioned in the books after Knife of Dreams, so it is entirely possible that she is among the new damane who were taken by the Seanchan in recent days, and Mat might end up seeing his sister with a collar around her neck post-canon. How would he react to that? And to Tuon’s unwillingness to let her go?)

In addition to Mat potentially seeing people he knows and cares about in collars, we also have the possibility of him learning just how brutal Tuon’s attack against the White Tower was (there isn’t any indication that he knows about the attack at all yet); or Talmanes telling him about Verin’s letter and Mat realizing how damaging his fear of Aes Sedai has been for the world; or further in the future there’s Mat’s potential reaction to the lethal political wrangling that Imperial heirs are meant to get up to (he was disturbed enough that Galgan liking him only means that subpar assassins will be sent against him -- when he realizes that Tuon might well encourage their own kids to kill each other to win her favor, it’s very hard to see him brushing that off). Plus he’s regained his sense of disgust over the damane system. So there are a lot of powderkegs waiting to be blown sky-high for Mat, post-canon.

idk, Mat’s storyline is maybe the one where I most have to untangle whether I dislike it more because I feel like it was executed poorly or if I dislike it because it sets up a situation that will never get resolution. And how connected are those things?

A big frustration that I’ve had with how Jordan and then Sanderson handled Mat’s storyline over the course of the last few books of the series was how many shortcuts were taken with his character and how artificial forcing him into the Seanchans’ arms has felt to me.

a. Mat getting trapped in Ebou Dar and then all the characters involved taking a vow of silence when it came to telling Rand about it. Mat getting trapped in Ebou Dar is plot nonsense: relatively forgivable. But having multiple characters being given the opportunity to change that situation and just... not bothering to do it is... that’s a characterization issue. It severely impacted my feelings about Nynaeve for Jordan to turn her into the kind of person who just doesn’t bother to tell Rand that his best friend was left behind in that kind of perilous situation. Plot manipulations... that’s just how the plot works. But over and over, characters got broken or bent for the purpose of jamming Mat into the Seanchan storyline.

b. Setalle Anan is a minor character, so I get why people don’t care about her, but she’s a character who pretty much completely reverses her characterization between WH & CoT (in WH, she is anti-slavery and finds Mat charming and trustworthy; in CoT & KoD, she protects and waits on Tuon while treating Mat like the dangerous one, including betraying Mat’s secrets to Tuon -- and her betrayals are never acknowledged by the text in any way; she just keeps on being treated as if she’s a friendly supporting character) and, from what I could see, it’s just so obviously done in order to protect Tuon from ever having even a sliver of character growth rather than it making sense for Setalle Anan’s character.

c. We keep tiptoeing up to the brink of Actually Having A Plot Happen with the Seanchan and then backing away at the last minute without really having a good reason to do it. Incredibly frustrating. This was one of my main annoyances with CoT & KoD. And in AMoL, both Rand and Egwene inexplicably back down when they have Tuon on the ropes and off-balance.

d. Mat’s teleportation to Ebou Dar in-between Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light. I’ve talked about this one a lot but yeah. It’s just... really bad? I do suspect that Sanderson couldn’t figure out any way to actually make it believable that Mat would go to the Seanchan and that’s why he had it all happen off-the-page. But the careless damage that it does to Mat’s characterization is just horrific. Mat gets ripped out of the action of the first third of the book, and doesn’t get to the Last Battle itself until the book is more than half over. Once Mat is actually engaging in the Last Battle, his characterization steadies a lot but especially those first four chapters with Mat, it feels like we’re only working with half of his characterization and the other half has vanished somewhere in-between ToM & AMoL.

(and if Mat hadn’t been cut-and-pasted from the Tower of Ghenjei over to Ebou Dar, then we would have had a full reunion at Merrilor. So I’m annoyed/bitter about that too)

I could keep going but... let’s keep it at four issues for right now so that we’re not here all day, lol.

All of those issues are problems that I had with the execution of the storyline.

I am not inherently opposed to depressing endings for characters that I love but... it has to be done well. It has to make sense. And Mat’s ending just... required cutting away too many parts of him (and other characters) for it to make sense to me.

But though it is not always handled well (to put it mildly), Mat’s storyline with Tuon (and Tylin before her) is an example of the ‘typical gender roles are swapped’ done in a way that is more down to the very core of his storyline than a lot of other storylines, which are more on the surface.

He’s much less politically powerful than his spouse and needs to use guile, intrigue, and manipulation to get his way and try to persuade her to a gentler and kinder path than her warlike nature naturally aligns towards.

He undergoes something of a gender-swapped version of “The Taming of the Shrew” storyline, in which a fiercely independent person gets coerced/’tamed’ into being a properly submissive spouse (or, depending on your interpretation, into pretending to be one) -- many of the tricks that Tuon and Tylin use are similar to what Petruchio does to Katherine in the play. Mat gets publicly humiliated and starved by Tylin into submitting to her (which is what Petruchio does to Katherine during/after their wedding), and isolated away from his past connections during his time with Tuon, where he constantly has to act to try to figure out how to appease her without provoking her temper (Petruchio compares taming Katherine to falcon-taming, but Tuon would probably compare it to horse-training or damane-breaking), and Petruchio changes her name from ‘Katherine’ to ‘Kate’, which fits pretty well with Tuon’s insistence on never once calling Mat ‘Mat’.

Plus Mat getting his name changed to indicate that he now ‘belongs’ to Tuon’s people fits into this general category -- and historically, in the culture that Jordan belonged to, that’s normally a role given to women, to be given a new name that shows that they are now of their husband’s people and not their father’s; it’s usually their last name but, in the not too-distant past (and maybe currently in some places as well, idk), at least in the USA, women were often referred to as Mrs. “husband’s first name” “husband’s last name” with none of their own name making it into the address.

But a lot of the issues that I have with how this was written is that it felt like Mat was behaving like his hand was forced even when it wasn’t. Which is definitely a writing issue -- it’s a similar issue to the one that I have with the Rand & Min romance, for example, where Min desperately chases after something even though she doesn’t really want it at the start. Prophecy gets used as a way to skip actually writing important character or relationship beats, instead of prophecy being one of many tools in the writer’s kit.

So, yeah, it really is the execution of the storyline that is the biggest problem for me with Mat & Tuon, and the way it feels like he is pulled away from his other attachments whether or not that makes any narrative or character sense.

I really hope that the show does better with them, and with Mat in his endgame (should we get there, etc.).

I will say that I do think that Sanderson handled the romance better than Jordan did; the main problem was that it was already fundamentally broken by how the relationship was written in CoT & KoD, imo (the KoD collaring chapter in particular made me despise them as a pairing and my feelings never recovered from that moment). But in Sanderson’s books, we actually see the effects of Tuon compromising with Mat during various points of the Last Battle (though we see don’t actually see their private discussions and/or arguments that lead to those compromises), and there’s always a throughline showing how miserable the Seanchan lifestyle is for Mat, and those are two things that were majorly missing from CoT & KoD for me, but that make sense as the only way to make the romance even half-believable for Mat’s pre-established characterization from WH and earlier.

The three big issues that I have with Sanderson’s Mat are: the terrible first chapter of TGS (with the gross sexism); the terrible first chapter of AMoL (now featuring inexplicable teleportation); and the deep deep disservice done to Mat and Rand’s friendship (Rand got a personal goodbye with EVERYONE important to him EXCEPT Mat! And Mat got a personal reunion with everyone important to him, except Rand! All they got was the negotiation scene that was ultimately all about Fortuona and the Seanchan treaty, with Mat and Rand’s friendship being the set dressing around the scene).

But the relationship with Tuon honestly... makes a lot more sense in this book than it did in CoT & KoD (once we work past the brain-breaking logistics of the first chapter or so). There are TONS of hints that Mat has uncomfortable vibes going on underneath his casual exterior, plus Tuon actually does make some attempts at compromising with him, and if the well hadn’t been poisoned by how much I despised CoT/KoD-era Mat & Tuon then... I might have had a chance at enjoying AMoL-era Mat & Tuon for the toxic trainwreck that it is.

But, like all the characters & relationships in AMoL, we skip some pretty big moments in the Mat & Tuon relationship -- we see the effects of them compromising but we never actually see them coming to that compromise in private, which I feel like we needed after how unyielding and frankly how annoying Jordan made Tuon about everything.

We do end up with a Mat & a ‘Fortuona’ who remain at cross-purposes -- Mat continues to think of and refer to her as ‘Tuon’ while Fortuona has kinda reversed from thinking of him as a ‘buffoon’ to instead believing that he has the same kind of practical motivations behind his choices that she does, which is also not accurate. But Sanderson did add in some actual give-and-take to their relationship, which Jordan never seemed willing to do, so the AMoL-era Mat & Tuon is a lot more genuinely engaging for me, even if I do still think that they are one of the most obviously doomed fictional marriages that I have ever seen.

Final Mat-related question for the moment: the Seanchan Empire is based on authoritarian governments throughout history, so does how the Seanchan Empire operates mimic the behavior of a cult?

The popular model for cults is the BITE model, which was developed by a man who was deprogrammed from the Moon cult in 1976 (Steve Hassan). It’s an acronym:

Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion control. BITE.

Do the Seanchan seek to control people’s behavior? (yes) Do they seek to control the flow of information that the people under them learn? (yes) Do they seek to have their members reject critical thought and only apply to the group-think? (yes) Do they manipulate the emotions of their followers, usually instilling fear or paranoia about outsiders? (yes)

We know from earlier books that the Seanchan culture =/= the Seanchan Empire. There are constant civil wars and uprisings in their native land. This is explicitly why they are such good soldiers, because they are always fighting each other. Yet they present themselves as a monolith when they come to the Westlands, bragging about how they’re here to bring ‘order’ to a lawless continent. What they say about themselves does not match the truth of what else we know about them.

How does the Seanchan Empire exercise its control over its people? Everything I included here is something I think we’ve see the Empire do, but I did bold ones that are particularly blatant in the text.

Behavior control: Control types of clothing and hairstyles; permission required for major decisions; rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors both positive and negative; discourage individualism; encourage group-think; impose rigid rules and regulations; punish disobedience by beating, torture, burning, cutting, rape, or tattooing/branding; threaten harm to family and friends; encourage and engage in corporal punishment; instill dependency and obedience; kidnapping; beating; torture; murder

Information control: Distort information to make it more acceptable; systematically lie to the cult members; minimize or discourage access to non-cult sources of information; ensure that information is not freely accessible; control information at different levels and missions within group; allow only leadership to decide who needs to know what and when; encourage spying on other members; impose a buddy system to monitor and control member; report deviant thoughts, feelings, and actions to leadership; ensure that individual behavior is monitored by group; extensive use of cult-generated propaganda

Thought control: require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth; adopting the group’s ‘map of reality’ as reality; instill black and white thinking; organize people into us vs them; change person’s name and identity; use of loaded language and cliches which constrict knowledge; encourage only ‘good and proper’ thoughts; thought-stopping techniques to shut down reality testing: denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking; rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism; forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy; labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful

Emotion control: teach emotion-stopping techniques to block feelings of homesickness, anger, doubt; make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault; promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness; instill fear, such as fear of: thinking independently, the outside world, leaving or being shunned by the group; ritualistic and sometimes public confessions of sins; phobia indoctrination: inculcating irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority, no happiness or fulfillment possible outside of group; shunning of those who leave; being told there is never a legitimate reason to leave.

“Destructive mind control can be determined when the overall effect of these four components promotes dependency and obedience to some leader or cause; it is not necessary for every single item on the list to be present.“ (in this case, that would be to the Empress, ~may she live forever~)

(all taken from freedomofmind(dot)com -- not linking because sometimes outside links make tumblr act weird about posts)

On the page, we witness the slow process of Leilwin née Egeanin pulling away and deprogramming from the Seanchan Empire, and then in this book, it feels like Mat has begun that process as well. And it feels like they started the same way -- because of a massive overreach by Tuon, the leader of the cult/Empire. Leilwin née Egeanin gets humiliated and punished by Tuon for no reason; just because Tuon felt like being a brat that day, and that moment of humiliation -- the re-naming and the forcing of the jewelry on her in a way that treated her like a slave -- was really what made Leilwin née Egeanin start to pull away from the other Seanchan and go into the path that eventually led to her being, however briefly, Egwene’s Warder.

For Mat, it really seems like whatever happened in that ‘not pleasant’ discussion that he and Tuon had after she berated him for, essentially, prioritizing Egwene’s privacy over Tuon’s desire to get information from him... that discussion (that we didn’t get to see) really seemed to lead to the more combative Mat who refused to back down and roll over for her. Mat still feels a level of protectiveness and affection for Tuon through the rest of the book but he stops letting her push him around and he starts acting like he cares about doing something about the slavery system in the Seanchan Empire again, which was a part of him that we lost at the start of CoT and I have hated so much that we lost in his character. But it slowly grows back over the course of the second half of AMoL.

Again, my big regret here is that the Mat & Rand reunion happened before Mat started his spine regrowth program. Even though Mat does start to push back on Tuon more here, he still never finished several of his character arcs that were set up over the course of the entire series: namely his own mistrust of Aes Sedai and his fear of Rand as a channeler. Both of those fears were things that he was actively working in the text and that he abruptly backtracked on when Tuon was introduced into his life (because being chill with channelers and being chill with people who enslave channelers is contradictory and so Jordan decided... to go with being chill with slavers). So those are two flapping loose ends for his character at the end of this series that never got to fully be addressed because the ‘romance’ was prioritized over Mat’s characterization.

Loial

Loial is looking for people to help him with accounts for his book and “Perrin ignored me and Mat cannot be found”.

Mat just completely disappearing from the Westlands side of things to go set up a fireworks show for Tuon (and asking Aludra to be the one to set it up, which just seems kinda mean, considering that the Seanchan pretty much completely eliminated the Illuminators) is just... frustrating. Apparently Mat visited the battlefield here “smiling and healthy” but then vanished. So, in theory, there’s an empty place here where Mat might have visited Rand and talked to Elayne & co one last time, since Rand is in the main healing tent on this battlefield.

Loial also notes how odd it is that Elayne and Min don’t seem to feel any urge to go in to hold Rand’s hand while he’s dying (Aviendha is getting her legs looked at). I know, Loial! They’re the worst fake-grievers who ever lived, I swear. If the whole point is to trick people into thinking Rand is dead, then it might be a good idea to... actually try to trick people?

Moghedien

In which Tuon’s people are already breaking the terms of the treaty by snatching up channelers from the battlefield at Merrilor. No hundred years of peace, Rand. I’m sorry.

Rand (& all those who say ‘goodbye’ to him, or who don’t)

Rand leaves the mountain, slipping on his own blood and carrying a body. Shayol Ghul is trying to close before he can leave and he only barely makes it out in time before the cave snaps shut behind him.

Moiraine tells Rand that he did well, and Nynaeve tries desperately to keep him alive, but eventually, and without ever waking back up, ‘Rand’ dies.

Elayne, Aviendha, and Min do the absolute worst job of playing grieving widows ever. Like, if Rand had actually died, I could understand this better. Because they might really be in shock. But they know he’s alive! And their whole job is to convince people that they absolutely believe that he’s dead! Just... pinch your arm until you start crying! This is literally the most suspicious way that they could have gone about things -- Nynaeve is already extremely suspicious of how they’re acting. Seriously, she’s gonna wiggle the truth out of them pretty much five seconds post-epilogue.

Birgitte comes to say goodbye to Elayne because she’s about to be reborn... and to mention that she’s tossed away the Horn of Valere. Sure hope that Elayne doesn’t regret that in ten years when they’re at war with the Seanchan!

Tam hopes that now his son can get some rest. My hope is that Rand will, you know, go and talk to his dad after he’s had a chance to recover from the stress and trauma of the Last Battle. Also, Tam... you’re gonna have grandkids. No thoughts on that, I see. Still no thoughts on that.

The funeral scene frustrates me to pieces.

Honestly, the most frustrating thing about the funeral scene is how easy it would have been to casually mention that Mat and Perrin were there? Like, that’s ONE SENTENCE. Just... the erasure of those years of friendship, because heterosexual marriage, in Jordan’s fictional world, meant that close male-male friendships just stopped existing. It’s depressing. That CADSUANE is considered to have more right to be at Rand’s funeral than his childhood friends who were also vital parts of the Last Battle. It’s insulting. And apparently Tam organized it? But he couldn’t be bothered to invite his kid’s best friends. Definitely a place where Sanderson should have done some editing of the original epilogue. One sentence is all that was needed.

*sigh*

I do think that Sanderson did try to set up why Mat wouldn’t have gone -- we have seen Mat, in several of his recent PoV scenes, swallowing his grief over losing people he loves and not letting it appear to affect him openly, even as it rocked him deeply, so Rand’s death would be another of those gut-punches that he would do his best to pretend didn’t happen. But, fuck... it just sucks that the friendship between Mat and Rand is such a sublimated thing in this last book, when Rand and Mat both got to much more openly deal with pretty much every other important relationship that they had (though I will note that Rand and Sulin never got a reunion either! Rude!).

Perrin didn’t get anything like that kind of subtextual explanation, but Perrin actually did visit Rand’s healing tent while he was dying, so at least he got that much. *shrugs*

Min thinking here about how the assembled people expect a ‘show’ of grief -- yes, they have all found it exceedingly odd that none of you appear to be grieving the man you said that you loved.

Rand wakes up in his new body, washed clean of the wounds that he’d taken over the course of the series. No more missing hand; no more agonizing pain in his side.

I have to admit “she left me some money” feels like a pretty anti-climatic way for Alivia to “help Rand die”? She wasn’t really involved in his “death” at all -- it was really Moiraine and Nynaeve who were the ones who ‘helped’ him die. I mean, any one of Min, Elayne, or Aviendha could have left him some money, since they all know he’s alive. I wonder if Jordan was originally thinking that Alivia would be the one joining Rand & Nynaeve for the cave journey, and it was Sanderson who decided that Moiraine would be more appropriate? Nothing distinctively Moiraine happens in that cave, not the way that Nynaeve was needed to be there to heal Alanna without using the Power. Like, this poor woman was harassed by Min for a handful of books because of that prophecy and all she did was leave Rand some money! Min better find her and apologize to her! (I already know that she won’t)

Haha, so confession: my brain edited out that new!Rand had lost saidin. My brain was just like “nope, of course he can still channel”. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Rand not being a channeler at the end of the story, so that part I’m not thrilled about. He does have his newfound ability to use the threads of reality to basically channel anyway, though. Or at least I assume that’s what the pipe scene is about.

And then his thought, too, about ‘which’ of the women will follow him - yeah, you’re right that thinking that means you’ve gotten a swollen head! They all have responsibilities! Though since Rand leaves so abruptly here, there’s a lot that he doesn’t know, and the two things that most affect this specific question are: the extent of Aviendha’s injuries and the extent of Min’s involvement with the Seanchan. Literally zero of them is in a position to go chasing after Rand, even if they wanted to! Rand is the one who has no obligations and can easily visit them if he wants (well, maybe not ‘easily’ if Min does end up in the Empire).

But I can still remember, wow, what a relief it was that he was alive at the end, and free and unbound. The rest can be... adjusted by post-canon theories.

In terms of ‘things that aren’t covered but that we can probably assume’:

It does look like Elayne ended up with all three of the medallion copies -- the one Mellar used on her, the one that was on Birgitte’s body, and the third was with Lan and she probably reclaimed it (there’s nothing to indicate that Mat spoke with Lan and got it back), so the slaver empress never gets that medallion that Mat wanted to give her back in ToM. Tragic.

Despite Elayne and Tam speaking frequently over the course of AMoL, they somehow never speak about the whole grandkids issue. I feel like we can assume that this happens at some point, post-epilogue? Elayne and Aviendha both seem like they would go back to Caemlyn to rebuild. And Tam doesn’t really have a reason to go back to the Two Rivers at this point, so I can see him ending in Caemlyn too because: grandkids.

Technically, Min has slipped the Seanchan net at this point and could just not go back if she wants, so she can either go back to the Seanchan or she could go to Caemlyn with Elayne & Aviendha, but if she does stay away from the Seanchan, Tuon is going to try to get her back. Unless she was super-turned off by Min actually standing up to her in front of all the Blood and hastily makes Selucia her Truthspeaker again. That’s another possibility.

Ah, since we were told earlier that Melaine was about ready to give birth and Birgitte tells Elayne that she’s about to be reborn: Melaine might be her mom. I feel like Birgitte being reborn as Aiel sounds kinda fun.

I feel like Rand would not actually enjoy traveling all on his own after a while, given what we know about him, so he would probably end up visiting Caemlyn. And given how suspicious Nynaeve already is in the epilogue, I’m going to guess that she knows the truth by the time Rand goes to Caemlyn.

If Mat decides to leave the Seanchan behind at any point, he will probably also go to Caemlyn, and Mat and Rand can finally have a good reunion.

All in all, there are things about the ending that don’t thrill me but there are also things I really like. And having an ending at all helps in terms of sparking the imagination for fanfiction or meta or... an Amazon Prime television series. I don’t think we would have ever gotten the series if the books had stayed unfinished.

The epilogue checklist (and my theories about how it affected AMoL)

So, while reading AMoL, it felt like Sanderson took a couple of shortcuts in order to bruteforce the characters into reaching their epilogue endpoints, because there simply wasn’t enough time for it to happen naturally. This is my list of things that I believe got shortchanged due to “writing to the epilogue”:

Fortuona is pregnant in the epilogue: at the start of AMoL, Mat gets teleported to Ebou Dar without any kind of narrative or logistical explanation (contradicting his PoV chapter in the ending of ToM, where he was planning to return to Caemlyn, which would have thrust him directly into the main stories at play in the prologue & early chapters). I feel like part of it is that Sanderson really wanted to get that bun in the oven as quickly as possible.

“they expected something from the three of them; a show of some kind” : There’s just a wide acknowledgement in the epilogue that literally everyone knows that Rand has three girlfriends, so everyone just already knows in AMoL that Rand is in a relationship with three women now. No need for anyone to have emotional reactions to it, please! (not even Rand’s literal dad!) This one also ends up being weird because it seems to change from moment-to-moment whether or not the whole army knows that Rand has three girlfriends (if everyone knows already, why is Rand playing spy games with Elayne?).

Min is Fortuona’s pregnancy test: Min instantly respects ~Fortuona~ as an empress even while thinking that she doesn’t normally respect nobility. Bizarre, considering Min’s own history with the Seanchan from Falme.

Mat kills Fain: we got two super-quick glimpses of Fain earlier in the book to set up this moment but Mat had so much other stuff to do that Sanderson couldn’t really do more than say: yeah, Fain exists and he’s bad, lol.

Minor elements I think were affect by the epilogue:

Rand is still pondering over the idea of choosing between Elayne, Aviendha, or Min: we get Rand’s going “am I allowed to love three women? idk sounds fake” when he and Aviendha sleep together in chapter 4, which just was kinda silly. I think the epilogue is also the genesis of the vibe where Rand appears to consider “having sex with Min for months” to not be any kind of “choice” when it comes to the three women, but having a romantic interlude with Aviendha or Elayne would signal a choice -- because the epilogue acts like the situation between Rand and each of the three women is roughly equal, so “months of sex with Min” appears to hold the same emotional weight to Rand as “pining from afar with two nights of intense passion” does when he thinks of either Elayne or Aviendha.

Mat has no thoughts about any of the Westlands characters: I think that this is more of a subconscious effect -- as he focused more on the final book, I think Sanderson focused on the relationships highlighted in the all-important epilogue... and the only person that Mat cares about in the epilogue is himself *cough* I mean, Fortuona, of course, lol. In both TGS and in ToM, Mat’s deep affection for various Westlands characters was constantly on display, as shown in his own ‘loves lying to himself’ way. This gets curtailed in AMoL, especially in the early Ebou Dar chapters.

I think I’m going to let myself might let myself marinate over the various books before I post a final list of my personal ranking of the books.

One thing that I’ve really noticed is that, more than any other character, the quality of Mat’s storyline has a huge impact on my overall enjoyment of the book. In CoT & KoD, Elayne and Egwene (both of whom I love), got pretty good stories. But Mat’s story was so bad that it made it difficult for me to enjoy the good parts. But maybe some time just letting myself think about the series as a whole will balance out my thoughts. Does that make Mat my favorite character or just my most impactful character? idk. I feel like Elayne or Rand would more consistently hit the top of my favorites.

Overall top five characters throughout the entire series:

1. Elayne

2. Rand

3. Egwene

4. Mat (might be higher if not for CoT & KoD)

5. Nynaeve (might be higher if she didn’t basically disappear after she married Lan)

Then, moving on to the next favs, I think there’s more uncertainty there for me:

6. Verin, probably, but it could be Moiraine. Let’s say they tie.

7. Aviendha and Siuan can both go here. Both generally very good and interesting characters.

8. You know, I had a real turnaround with Gawyn in this reread of the books; I’m gonna put him here. He can share this spot with Leilwin née Egeanin.

9. Loial, probably. Needed more PoV; that would have been nice. I’ll put Faile here with him.

10. For more minor characters, I gotta give a shout-out to Narishma (favorite Asha’man), Sulin, Pevara during her Black Ajah Hunter phase, Olver is really good in his sections here in AMoL, Asmodean for being my favorite fail-Forsaken and Moghedien for sticking it out until the very end, Elaida honestly very fun PoV as far as villains go, Teslyn and Joline for being troopers and enduring Mat Cauthon at his very worst, my girl Berelain who always deserved better, the ‘Finn in general always lots of fun, Aludra and Juilin who always kept their integrity intact.

#wot #wheel of time #wot reread #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #wot amol spoilers #wot a memory of light spoilers #mat cauthon #rand al'thor #elayne trakand #so it really feels like the 'main characters' of the actual last battle #were rand mat egwene and elayne #with everyone else being more of a secondary character #who helped the one of those main four storylines #posting this today because ao3 is being slightly iffy right now #so i'm going to post the next chapter of voice on thursday #and just give ao3 some time to work out whatever the connection issues are

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