#by the way that tuon's scenes were written

[butterflydm]

I was skimming the books for fic-research reasons and just had to be baffled all over again at how the Seanchan invasion gets treated CoT-onward. The Kin were the spine of the Wise Women of Ebou Dar, who are, like THE people who are respected by everyone in the city. They all had to try to flee the area because of the Seanchan and any who didn't successfully flee but were Kin (and thus could channel) would have been instantly enslaved by the Seanchan. And yet we have that fucking weirdness in Mat's (fucking weird overall) first chapter in A Memory of Light where the Ebou Dari people are all "lol, why would a brutal invasion bother us in the slightest; we're too super-casual for an invasion to bother us".

I mean, that's all tied into the logistics problems that plagued all things Seanchan-related in the later books (they have infinite soldiers and infinite food & supplies and generally don't have to abide by the economics & logistics that Rand's side is required to follow) but it just really stood out to me because I was reading about how respected the Wise Women are (even in places like the Rahad) -- but the Seanchan's coming would have completely gutted them as a society and that should have an impact on how the Ebou Dari feel about the Seanchan. And it just ties into my overall feeling that Jordan stopped treating the Seanchan realistically starting in CoT and then Sanderson continued the trend when he took over the writing of the books.

But, yeah, one of the big things that I hope for from the prime show is that the Seanchan get treated with narrative consistency and we don't get an abrupt 180 on how the narrative treats them at the two-thirds point. Because what the Ebou Dari should be feeling (and what they were feeling in Winter's Heart!) is a lot of fear and paranoia and the desire to rebel, because the Seanchan are Always Watching and will Randomly Steal and Enslave People for reasons that the non-Seanchan people are not going to understand!

I am really curious about how much Seanchan Presence we're going to have in s3, because s2 made some bold choices in where it went with the Seanchan storyline and I am intensely curious about what kind of follow-up we'll have in s3. I've said a lot in the past that Tuon needs to be introduced sooner than she was in the books (Jordan waited way too late to introduce her! He should also have introduced her while she was still in Seanchan, imo, so that we actually could have seen her interacting with the rest of the Imperial family so that we would have a baseline of Seanchan Imperial Behavior to potentially contrast her against later -- but Tuon feels like another case where Jordan valued the surprise of the wham! line over giving a lot of detail and background) and I would absolutely be a fan of her being introduced in s3.

[alectology-archive]

"some day” I said, but I had a burst of inspiration so I typed it up - I’m posting plotlines that I thought were foreshadowed or how I personally imagined them playing out in my mind while I was reading the series. I’m putting them under the cut because it got long-ish:

- Egwene playing a bigger role in the black ajah hunt around the TDR era - she only got a single book of hunting black ajah and she was still a baby channeler then.

- I personally thought Elaida could have been better-written - it would have been fun to lean more into the tragedy aspect of her character. I think I thought she would vehemently oppose the idea of Rand being the true Dragon Reborn until it was too late (which would discredit her greatly with the aes sedai who’d allied with her) which would lead Rand to ally with the rebels.

- honestly I did expect a small-ish group of Aes Sedai to be more opposed to the need for them to follow the Dragon Reborn.

- Nynaeve and Elayne going to Amadicia/Amador proper in book 5 to really hook into and dig up the whitecloak plotline, where they meet Galad. Possible additional black ajah shenanigans. 

- More science from Lanfear! More horrifying acts committed by Lanfear! I can’t say I was completely betrayed because nothing in the books was as satisfying as the scene where she skinned Kadere.

- Asmodean staying as Rand’s toxic best friend who makes him worse quite a way into the series (potentially late book 7/early book 8) but I suppose he had to be killed off because of the establishment of the black tower.

- I thought Asmodean and Rand would join Valan Luca's circus for some reason at one point tho.

- Rand’s book 6 plotline being tackling Sammael in Illian. I thought Dumai's Wells took place during this war and a forsaken would capture him in the middle of it (hence the Box), setting off a rescue sequence.

(I briefly thought Rand would be stuffed in a stasis box) 

- Scenes set in Seandar where we actively get to see how the Shadow/Forsaken manipulate the High Blood with the possible reveal that the Shadow has been responsible for making the Seanchan worser than they already were to start with (a la how they are responsible for the all of the worst institutional rules that are in place in the White Tower). We do technically get a peak of this when we see Semirhage’s undercover scenes with Tuon.

- Mat returning to Caemlyn with Elayne & co and offering the Band to help her with the Succession

- pre-WH I thought Mat and Tuon would end up being either a political marriage or an enemies to lovers kind of relationship minus the circus arc (I think I imagined Tuon arriving at Caemlyn or Carihien, maybe, with an embassy to discuss the war with the Shadow) where they would eventually bond over managing to defeat an army with their combined forces, I guess?? 

- Myth told me about Tuon while I was still reading book 2/3, I think, lol, and I wasn’t really familiar with the Seanchan then and didn’t expect her to be Seanchan either, so I thought she’d probably be a highborn lady from the borderlands who was a skilled military leader.

- Rand confronting Taim/Demandred/Taimandred in the latter half of the series, and I’ll be forever upset about it not happening.

- Nynaeve and Moghedien having more homoerotic scenes + Nynaeve’s books 10-13-ish era plot being all about dealing with her and potentially Semirhage too, instead of being Rand’s accessory.

- The 13 black ajah sisters from TGH being properly confronted and defeated in the books 9-11 era but including Liandrin specifically

- Tuon actually confronting the side of her that could channel, and later being released by Mat when she starts to decide that the empire, as it is, should be destroyed and replaced by another governing body. The books made a point to say that she treated her slaves kindly so I was hoping she was a victim of the empire’s cruelty and conditioning and played along to its rules to protect herself, so I guess it wasn’t very fun to leave KoD knowing that she’d accomplished none of those potential character arcs before returning to her power base. 

I did remember making a couple of posts about how I enjoyed how antagonistic her relationship with Mat was - it just Feels Right that Mat would marry somebody who annoyed him in return which is why I’m a Mat x Elayne enthusiast - so my issue wasn’t really the romance, but her lack of a character arc.

Also I just feel Mat is tragedy’s (unwilling) best friend, so I kinda vibe with the idea that he never gets to be happy happy until later in life - so I don’t really mind the Seanchan plotline RJ had probably planned for him in the outriggers. I just lost my taste for it after Tuon renamed him in AMoL.

- Some sort of council meeting in the borderlands which Rand attends to persuade those nations to ally with him? 

- Rand being actually kidnapped by Semirhage and being taken to the borderlands (I don't know why, don't ask, I assumed RJ would want to worldbuild more and would take advantage of the opportunity by giving her a convenient reason to be there) just before the armies need to start marching to shayol ghul

- Moiraine and Siuan being reunited in the book 12 era and Moiraine being a source of consultation for Rand. I did NOT see the weird Gareth/Siuan romance coming - I always thought she’d stay single permanently.

- I did kind of think Siuan would be re-installed as Amyrlin, honestly. Or that she would play a greater role in advising Egwene.

- The Black Tower potentially being taken over by darkfriends and traitors completely to the point where it became a Forsaken stronghold, maybe.

- me legitimately thinking Mat and Rand would like. Kiss in book 5 or 12, lol. I think this thought occurred to me after the Rhuidean sequence.

- I thought Mat and Talmanes would probably sleep together, honestly.

- I was actually surprised by how homoerotic avilayne was so... no criticisms there, I suppose, but I kind of really did expect Elayne and Min to kiss after their lord of chaos scenes.

- Mat joining up with Rand after book 11 and using his skills to thwart the seanchan forces in almoth plain after promising Tuon that he would meet her on the battlefield next.

- Egwene and Egeanin actually communicating a bunch and Egeanin playing the part of Egwene’s knight, in a way. I learned Egwene would bond her as a Warder in AMoL all the way back when I was reading TSR and was falling in love with Egeanin + Egwene had such a homoerotic relationship with Avi + Egwene’s trauma after she was made a damane set up a great potential for a nuanced relationship.

- Egeanin playing proper traitor to the seanchan and giving up important secrets

[readerbell]

Tylin stinks and my sympathy for the way she left the series was curtailed by her actions. I hate the way that entire sequence is written. And while Elayne had a terrible initial reaction, the girls get a bad wrap for a situation they weren’t aware of until the very end. Elayne laughing was disgusting but she immediately apologised when the severity of what was going on dawned on her. She also apparently told Nynaeve about it. That’s the read I got from this section of the books as they’re leaving Ebou Dar.

Mat thinks Nynaeve’s glower is for him but Elayne’s commiserating face, Nynaeve’s glower and Tylin’s words all suggest to me that a) the glower is aimed at Tylin and b) Nynaeve had words with her telling her to back off. I just wish we got those words on the page. Nothing I know about Nynaeve tells me she would’ve left without saying anything & had they remained in the city while she continued making Mat’s life hell, I’m sure both girls would’ve made what they did to cow Amathera seem like child’s play. Nynaeve threatened the Seanchan Empress, who they needed for peace before the Last Battle just because she said something slightly negative about Mat. Tylin, with her heinous actions and power base of a single city, wouldn’t stand a chance. The only reasons it seems like they didn’t do enough to protect Mat are because they didn’t know what was truly happening to Mat until just before they were leaving, because we didn’t see that confrontation on screen and because RJ has a knack of writing sexually traumatising scenes and just never touching on them and the effect they have on people ever again. He does it with Nynaeve’s Accepted Test, he does it with Mat at the hands of Tylin, and again with Mesaana and Moghedien at the hands of Shaidar Haran. All these things happen and neither the bystanders or the victims ever think about it again. I HATE that aspect of the books.

As a side note, when Tuon asked Tylin to go flying on the to’raken with her, you have no idea how much I wished she would just throw her off mid-flight. 😭

[highladyluck]

Random meta/worldbuilding thoughts on the theme of eschatological time

Went down a Wikipedia hole today on the Millerites, a religious movement based around a specific prediction about the timing of Jesus’s second coming, and now I have three more Wheel of Time worldbuilding things to gleefully complain about and/or theorize on, as is my custom. (As usual, ‘ware whole-series spoilers.)

1) The Millerites apparently believed that Jesus would return "literally, visually, in the clouds of heaven" and I can't help but wonder if that's what RJ was borrowing for his 'Rand and Ba'alzamon fight in the clouds above Falme' aesthetic? The whole thing always struck me as super super weird since there's no in-world explanation for it except 'it's in the Prophecies', which doesn't tell you how it's done. Like we know the One Power can do projections/illusions, but there's no note anywhere that Moiraine or whoever was doing One Power cinematography at that moment. (However, I will consider headcanons that Verin was doing it for mysterious Verin reasons, just because that seems fun. Verin is extremely fun and mysterious, especially in book 2.)

I thought maybe it's the same kind of thing as the ta'veren television effect that the boys all start getting in later books- the swirl of colors in their heads that resolves into images of the other ta'veren, triggered by thought? But I think the color swirls are more related to 'reading the Pattern' and are similar to Egwene's Dreaming/the scenes Perrin sees in the sky in Tel'aran'rhiod/Min's visions. But 'floating images'/'images in the sky' does seem to be like... a way the Pattern appears to people, so maybe it is connected? And it's been a while since I read book 2; it's possible that Rand and Ba'alzamon are fighting at least partially in Tel'aran'rhiod, maybe due to the appearance of the Heroes of the Horn, who live there? In which case, sure, giant sky projections, sounds plausible, Tel'aran'rhiod is batshit like that.

2) I'm unreasonably annoyed that the calendar extant in the Westlands at the time of the books is set at 998 NE and the events of the books take 2 years, so that the apocalypse is RIGHT ON SCHEDULE at the end of the millennium. I CALL BULLSHIT. NOBODY'S APOCALYPSE ARRIVES ON TIME. That cute little note about the calendar at the end of every Wheel of Time book? Where they're like 'oh yeah we lost a ton of records at various points in the Third Age, there were a bunch of different calendar systems before this, and the Farede calendar dating from the arbitrarily decided end of the War of the Hundred Years is now in use'? 'ARBITRARILY DECIDED', MY ASS.

Honestly the only way this makes sense is if the books were written in the 'far future' and either the author or (from an in-universe angle) their civilization fudged the dates of events so that the end of the War of the Hundred Years was exactly the time needed to have the Last Battle end right at the millennium. Actually, this also explains why the timeline is so extraordinarily compressed and everything supposedly happened in just two years. It absolutely didn't, they just fudged the timeline from the distant vantage point of the future. XD

In RJ's defense, that does appear to be part of the conceit. I think the implication is supposed to be either that Loial wrote the books, presumably 100s of years later knowing Ogier lifespans/project timelines, or someone else is writing this based on Loial's notes/book. This is supported by that FASCINATING opening verse in Lord of Chaos, with the skipping rhyme from 'Great Arvalon, the Fourth Age' which is clearly future Tar Valon. (I've always been obsessed with that verse, and I think the only other Fourth Age quote we get opening the books is at the end of AMoL, and that's about the Breaking and doesn't tell us anything about the future except that there is one.)

3) What are the odds that the Seanchan still use FF (From the Founding, the calendar Artur Hawkwing tried to establish that now 'only historians refer to') for their calendars? Pretty good, right? I wonder what wacky stuff they were expecting around whenever their millennial date was. Everybody would have an extra-keen eye out for omens once the date drew near.

Actually, it would kind of make sense if they had a false dragon around then. Didn’t one of the Westlands false dragons pop up around the turn of one of the earlier millenniums? Also, because the only thing more fun than one weird headcanon is another even weirder headcanon... what if there were Seanchan false dragons who were female? I don’t think male channelers with the spark in Seanchan live long enough to get much in the way of delusions of grandeur, plus the prophecies got corrupted so maybe people weren’t necessarily expecting a male Dragon (granted, this is a stretch). Mostly I’m thinking that a female false dragon in Seanchan would have similar motivations to Logain and Taim, like ‘eh, who’s to say I’m not the Dragon Reborn, also this might allow me to get more power/escape my otherwise inevitable fate.’ I know people have run with the Female Dragon idea, but I haven’t seen anyone write a female false dragon or a false dragon in Seanchan. (If you have, point me to those fics, I’m curious!) In the 1000+ year history of Artur Hawkwing’s Seanchan there would absolutely have been at least some channelers who were like ‘yeah no thanks I don’t want to be damane, what are my other options?’ I’m not saying any of them succeeded in exploring other options in the long run, but somebody must have asked the question. I’m just constantly chewing over the idea that Seanchan is really, really not as culturally homogeneous as Tuon believes it to be and Imperial propaganda says it is; the last rebellion was put down 200 years ago, but there’s absolutely damane who were alive then and even people with ordinary lifetimes can still hang on to bits of their culture (and/or anger/fear about how their ancestors were treated) for that long. My best example of this is Ajimbura, who is manifestly not fully assimilated; he’s a permanent exile from his culture, perhaps, but you definitely get the sense that he’s following Karede out of some sort of personal honor code that comes out of his cultural background even if it doesn’t match up to it completely, rather than because Karede successfully absorbed him into imperial Seanchan culture. You can take a man out of the Kaensada Hills but you can’t take the Kaensada Hills out of the man. (Also now I’m thinking about how Ajimbura is to Karede as Mat is to Tuon, in terms of loyalty/house-train-ability and it’s blowing my mind...)

[ivanaskye]

WoT Reactions: Book 9, Winter’s Heart

OKAY FINALLY. I finished Book 9 of Wheel of Time over a week ago and then just... didn’t write this.

So now it’s time to. Yee-haw!

Usually I go character-by-character, but that’s a little weird with this book since there are essentially three major plotlines, each “belonging” to a single character: Rand, Elayne, and Mat. [Clickbait voice] Which of these I’m most interested in may surprise you!

Elyane(’s plotline)

This is, unfortunately, the least interesting of the book’s plotlines. It’s mostly political intrigue, which I LIKE, but so far it’s basically all the set-up part of that intrigue with not much actually getting payoff yet.

I mean there very much is an assassination attempt, but that’s pretty low-stakes by this series’ standards.

Even if the guy who saved her and therefore got a shiny new place as the head of her guard ACTUALLY did so as part of a long con to get into an even BETTER position to kill her.

But... it says a few things that I don’t really remember most of the political machinations beyond that. She’s just kind of There, aware of other contenders to the throne, trying to pull things together, but not only has the other shoe not dropped yet, I’m not sure the first shoe has dropped

In GREAT news, however, she, Min, and Aviendha have bonded Rand

I honestly didn’t expect all three to do it together, especially since Min can’t channel, but it is honestly IDEAL

FINALLY some PROGRESS on these POLY DISASTERS

Ft. “Oops I can’t turn it off so now I’m getting graphic imagery of Rand having sex with one of the others in the bond, except as written by someone who will only write sex in euphemism and shocked ellipses”

There’s a lot of “Oh MY!”

It’s great

Mat(’s plotline)

Shockingly, this one is... my favorite...?

Like, it’s Mat

How did this happen

Well, I know how it happened. It happened because The Daughter of The Nine Moons finally showed up (and I absolutely knew that was who she was like, one paragraph into her first chapter, lol)

For those of you following along at home, the Daughter of The Nine Moons (given name: Tuon) is Mat’s PROPHECIED WIFE

And of course a Seanchan princess

Which, again, for those following at home, the Seanchan is the culture that does the slavery

So she’s enmeshed in THAT

Probably a good? person? from what we’ve seen so far, but she’ll probably be shocked when she learns that you can Not Make People Slaves

Which will probably come soon because when Mat was on his way escaping with a few Aes Sedai (a class of people that the Seanchan ALWAYS enslave)

He discovered she was ProphecyWife, panicked, and KIDNAPPED HER

LIKE YOU DO WHEN YOU’RE PANICKING

So that’s shaping up to be a good time. I’m ready.

And guess what’s even better?

THAT’S RIGHT EGEANIN’S BACK

MY DAUGHTER HAS RETURNED

And of course she’s part of this escape/kidnapping crew of disastrous nature

Tl;dr my heart is READY

Rand(’s plotline)

For the first while of the book, Rand is kind of stalking around, Laying Plans that the readers aren’t privy to, and trying to figure out what his own latest assassination attempt was all about

Gets bonded, as mentioned earlier

With Min still of course serving as his one (1) brain cell

BUT THEN

Then he goes to Nynaeve and is like. Help me with this thing.

AND THEN, FINALLY

SEVERAL FREAKING BOOKS’ WORTH OF PLANNING

AND OF THE READERS NOT BEING TOLD EVEN 5% OF WHAT HE’S THINKING

PAYS OFF

BECAUSE HE FREAKING JUST. SITS DOWN, WITH HE AND NYNAEVE HAVING A LINK TO THE MOST POWERFUL SA’ANGREAL OUT THERE

AND REMOVES

THE TAINT ON THE MALE SOURCE

HE JUST. THE BIGGEST COSMOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF THE PAST 4+ MILLENNIA? GONE NOW

Which was just

Such a well-handled scene

Also Cadsuane holding down the fort which is to say stopping the entire Forsaken from interfering with this

Although at least one Darkfriend has totally snuck into the ranks of the other Aes Sedai helping out

I just

I’m so proud of my boy

And I’m READY for the 9238493220 implications this is going to have on like, possibly the entire world

Also, of course, there were some actions of other characters not directly associated with any of these plotlines, so I’ll mention those too

Cyndane

She had four whole paragraphs of POV, and yet those paragraphs have a LOT of implications

Because she is almost definitely Lanfear

(Who else would be that possessive toward Rand, in those exact terms?)

This of course means Lanfear is alive, and escaped the other dimension she ended up in

WHICH APPARENTLY was the dimension with the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn, which are. The snake and fox spirit fellows who gave Mat his prophecy and are also allergic to iron and who we know very little about.

And of course... if she is alive, then...?

But I kind of imagine that if Moiraine escaped that dimension, we’d know about it by now

So my GUESS is that Moiraine is alive, BUT still with the Aelfinn and Eelfinn, whoever exactly THEY are

Faile

Is having problems

She (as well as Perrin) only gets a little bit of time early in the book, but that’s enough to know that, as one might expect, being kidnapped sucks

The most interesting thing right now regarding her is the ongoing question of when she’s going to figure out that Maighdin, supposed serving lady, is actually Elayne’s mother and the former queen of Andor

(Perrin’s also doing stuff but there aren’t really any new developments there)

...Okay, that’s actually about it for the other characters. See you next time!

[hey-appa]

Just finished Wheel of Time and I have a lot of feelings (spoilers)

Favourite book series now. I can’t believe I put them off for so long. I have the worst book hangover ever and need to get my feelings out. Mostly about (who I consider to be) the main characters but some other guys too.

Rand - Loved him. He was my fave from book 1 and although his dark days were a real struggle to read through I was so happy everything worked out for him and so glad he’s gone off to see the world in peace.

Perrin - I liked Perrin in the beginning, he was up there with Rand as one of my faves but then he met Faile. I didn’t really like their relationship too much, it was one of my least favourites and although Faile ended up growing on me I found it very hard to keep reading through the chapters where Perrin is trying to rescue her, it made me want to skim read them to get to the next bit. After he forged his hammer and started going to the wolf dream to fight he definitely ended the series on a high note and I was happy Faile didn’t end up dead since Perrin deserved to have his happy ending.

Mat - In book 1 I hated him. In book 2 I disliked him. Somewhere around the time he was sent to Salidar to fetch Elayne I realised I loved him. I think it helped that I didn’t like Elayne at this point so the fact he was annoyed by her too probably made me like him more. By the time he ends up with Tylin in Ebou Dar and then kidnapping Tuon he was my favourite character and remained that way for the rest of the series. Already planning some tattoos inspired by him.

Egwene - Another character I disliked in the beginning but ended up becoming a favourite. After she started training with the Wise Ones she became a lot more humble and easier to like and when she became the Amyrlin Seat I thought her character arc had gone perfectly. Her ending was unexpected since I thought all of the “main” guys woukd have plot armour but it was also a very fitting end.

Moiraine - I liked her in the beginning and found myself wanting to yell at Rand to let her help him often at the start. Although I think it was right she came back in the end I found her and Thom’s relationship a bit shocking, I know there were hints after Thom kept close hold of the letter re-reading it but it still felt a bit “out there” to me. 

Nynaeve - My feelings about Nynaeve are very similar to how I felt about Perrin. She became very annoying in the middle of the books and it wasn’t until after her block was gone that I started to like her again. 

Aviendha - One of the other characters I enjoyed all the way through. She was my favourite out of the 3 women for Rand and back when I disliked Elayne made her chapters a lot easier to get through.

Siuan and Gareth - This was my favourite relationship of the series and I only wished we could have had more scenes from their viewpoints.

Bela - The bestest horse. I didn’t cry at the other deaths in the books but I shed a tear when Bela died, she’d popped up in so many places with so many different characters riding her that her death really hit home that I was coming to the end of the last book.

Honestly though, despite not liking some characters in the beginning and not liking some during the middle they all ended up growing on me (even Elayne) and by the end there wasn’t a single character I didn’t enjoy reading about.

I am very excited that the TV show is being made and I only hope it doesn’t end up like Game of Thrones (the excuse of the books not being written makes no difference this time so fingers crossed).

And I am so excited to finally get to see some WoT memes without worrying about spoilers!

[neuxue]

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 34

Everything from fireworks to Fourier transforms, because why the hell not. Oh and Mat is there. (Or is he?)

Chapter 34: Legends

Oh it’s Mat.

I have very little enthusiasm for Mat, especially this book’s Mat, but at the same time maybe it’s good to have a chapter that isn’t guaranteed to ruin me, just for a change of pace and a chance to catch my breath and regrow my limited supply of emotions.

Occasionally, the wind would blow, and a small sprinkle of dead pine needles would shake free from the boughs above

I see what you’re doing there, with your wind associated with death and release.

Mat’s clearly still a little shaken by Hinderstap, and is not particularly keen to go running into this next town. Can’t say I blame him.

This time he would plan and he would be ready. He nodded to himself in satisfaction.

Yeah, no, still not getting the cadence right here. It’s too…deliberately set up to be funny. Exaggerated. It’s like he’s being written as a caricature of himself.

Apparently it’s a woman who’s looking for him…I thought the pictures of him and Perrin were linked to Moridin’s directive to kill them – we’ve seen at least one attempt on each of them since then – but this sounds like someone who just wants to find him. Who, though? It doesn’t seem like it could be Tuon, and most of the other characters are tied up elsewhere, and none have recently mentioned trying to find Mat.

And it would probably be more efficient to just…read and find out than to try to list out all of the named female characters in the series thus far and cross-reference them against Mat’s story to figure out why they might be looking for him, wouldn’t it? I’ll leave the listing of ladies to Rand.

We’re getting fireworks as signal flares again, and I do have to applaud the ingenuity of the charactesr in this series. So far we’ve got fireworks used as: a distraction, entertainment, currency, battering ram, therapy, weapon, communication device. Have I missed anything?

Also, the red-for-danger, green-for-all-clear system brings another question to mind that maybe someone out there has an answer to: why do we continue to rely so heavily on red/green for important signalling distinctions (port/starboard, stop/go – things you really don’t want to mix up) when red-green is the most common spectrum of colourblindness?

I suppose the choice of colours predated any solid statistics on things like rates of colourblindness, and boats have the whole whistle system as well, and traffic lights have position as well as colour, but still.

Maybe it’s a chemistry thing? If red and green are the easiest colours to make in a fire or lamp or flare or light, it would make sense that those would have become the colours used for signalling when coloured lights were first used in such a way, and then it’s the kind of thing that would stick. So maybe lithium/strontium/barium/copper were more readily available, or happened to be used/discovered as colourants first?

And that was a tangent.

Meanwhile, Mat’s pulling a whole Argo here, creating false identities for the people he’s sending into the town. Okay, a reverse Argo, maybe, as that was exfiltration and this is infiltration but shhh. (Great movie, by the way, if you’ve not seen it – one of those ‘stranger than fiction’ true stories).

“Wait, Mat,” Mandevwin said, scratching his face near his eye patch. “I’m to be an apprentice gleeman? I’m not certain my voice is suited to fine signing. You’ve heard me, I warrant. And with only one eye, I doubt I’ll fare well at juggling.”

So I think by now we all know my thoughts on what ‘give up half the light of the world’ means, what with Mat being as Odin as it’s possible to be this side of actual Norse mythology…and yeah that doesn’t bode well for his juggling and knife-throwing skills, does it? Now I wonder if those skills were given to him intentionally not just as a fitting trait for a character of his archetype but to twist the knife a little in that sacrifice. Like Rand’s skill with the sword and then the loss of his hand.

(Also his skill at being a person and the eventual loss of his sanity, but we’ll just leave that one alone for the moment.)

“Aren’t I a little old to be an apprentice, though?”

“Nonsense,” Mat said. “You’re young at heart, and since you never married – the only woman you ever loved ran away with the tanner’s son – Thom’s arrival offered you an opportunity to start fresh.”

“But I don’t want to leave my great-aunt,” Mandevwin protested. “She’s cared for me since I was a child! It’s not honest of a man to abandon an elderly woman just because she gets a little confused.”

“There is no great-aunt,” Mat said with exasperation. “This is just a legend, a story to go with your false name.”

The thing is, if you take it completely out of context – as in, out of the Wheel of Time completely – there’s nothing particularly wrong with this exchange. It’s not the funniest thing I’ve ever read in my life, but it’s entertaining and a fun sort of ‘yes and’ game between characters. It builds a sense of their relationship, adds a little bit of depth to Mandevwin, presents Mat as creative and a little more fond of stories than he might admit while being a general…

But you have to completely dissociate it from the actual characters for it to work. It’s an alright scene, if it’s not about Matrim Cauthon in The Wheel of Time. If you read it as being from a different story entirely, with characters that just happen to have these names.

And that’s pretty much the problem with Mat. Other characters may see their lexicon shift a bit, or their tendency to externalise their thoughts a little more, but Mat’s been replaced with another character entirely.

I mean, so has Rand, but that’s his own damn fault.

“Too late,” Mat said, rifling through a stack on his desk, searching out a cluster of five pages covered in scrawled handwriting. “You can’t change now. I spent half the night working on your story. It’s the best out of the lot.”

I could almost give the rest a pass, because Mat coming up with false identities that make a fine story but will probably end up falling apart is not too far out of character, even if the conversation felt nothing like him – it’s not unlike what he did with himself, Egeanin, Tuon, and the others when they ran away with Luca’s show, after all – but Mat spending half a night writing up stories for each of them? I can’t make that fit.

“Are you sure we’re not taking this a little too far, lad?” Thom asked.

I think it’s meant to be a little out of character, as a way of showing how on edge he is. The fact that Thom comments on it serves as a narrative cue that this is intentionally off. But it’s too far and not quite in the right direction, so instead of helping us understand where Mat’s head is right now, it’s just…weird.

“I’m tired of walking into traps unprepared. I plan to take command of my own destiny, stop running from problem to problem. It’s time to be in charge.”

And the fact that Mat is so off in this book makes it hard for me to say anything about his actual story or character, because I don’t completely…trust any of it enough. So on the one hand I want to unpack this line, because there’s a lot there in terms of Mat’s own character arc, and his struggle between denial and acceptance of his role, and between luck and improvisation vs planning and strategy. But on the other hand, it’s hard to find any real motivation to do that when I feel like this isn’t really Mat. If that makes sense.

So actually, I’m going to do something a little out of character myself, here. I’m going to read the rest of this scene before commenting further, just to see if I can get a better sense of what’s going on from the general shape of it than from following it line-by-line.

Okay. Mat talks Talmanes through his own constructed backstory, then goes and inspects the camp and thinks about the Band and their current situation and also crossbows, and now he’s visiting Aludra so I’ll stop here for a moment before we get into that.

The bit with the crossbows comes closer to feeling like Mat again. The rest…still feels like it belongs in another book entirely. Also, weird how Mat knows two guys named Talmanes, right?

There are two main issues at play here, as far as I can figure it. The first is the issue of perception and distortion, which, broken down, looks something like this:

Jordan creates the character of Mat in his head

Jordan commits that character to writing. There’s distortion and filtering even here, because words are limiting and no writer isthatgood, and some information will not be conveyed or will be conveyed only obliquely, other things given more prominence, etc. Just like a photo is never going to be a perfect representation of an actual person, because you only have two dimensions to show something that exists in three.

Sanderson (or any reader) reads Mat. Filtering happens here because of how brains work; we’re not perfect machines that can take in every piece of information and give it equal and unbiased weight. Different things will register differently with different readers based on everything about them.

Sanderson (or any reader) creates a mental image/construct/version of Mat, adding the new information to it as it comes along – like making a sculpture from a drawing of a photo. This again is prone to filtering and distortion because of what information registers more or less strongly, how it’s interpreted, and all kinds of other factors.

Sanderson commits his version of Mat to writing, imperfectly portraying his own mental image of the character.

The reader reads Sanderson’s version of Mat, repeating steps 3 and 4.

Obviously this would apply to any character, not just Mat, but I think with Mat it’s an issue of a stronger filter/bias at steps 3, 4, and 5 but especially 4.

It’s something you see a lot in fanfiction, actually, especially in fanfiction centred on characters that can be strongly linked to a specific archetype. If you have the mental fortitude for it, check out some Avengers fanfiction sometime, and you’ll see a huge variation in how these iconic, archetypal characters are portrayed. Because they go through these processing and reconstruction steps, and so much of that is affected by each person’s own experience with or existing idea of the shape of those archetypes.

So we get into things like confirmation bias – if you have a pre-existing ‘outline’ of a character in your head based on the first impression they give, you’re going to end up paying more attention to things that fit into that outline, and ignoring things that don’t. And with these kinds of archetypal characters, it’s hard not to have that pre-existing outline unless you’ve been literally living under a rock for your entire life. In which case you have bigger problems. Also, I think with those sorts of characters, because you have this pre-existing model, your brain is more likely to essentially take short-cuts and go ‘yep, I know what this is’, whereas with characters that aren’t so easily categorised or immediately identified, you’ll rely more on the information directly presented, rather than on that outline.  

That affects what you pay attention or give weight to, and that affects how you reconstruct the character in your mind, which creates an ongoing feedback loop but/and also affects how you portray the character yourself, should you ever do so.

It’s a process akin to…okay the first analogy that comes to mind is a Fourier transform followed by the addition of noise or any kind of alteration to any of the resulting frequencies, followed by an inverse Fourier transform to bring you back to something that no longer perfectly resembles the original. Because I’m a fucking nerd. In case that wasn’t already abundantly clear from everything about me.

But perhaps a more broadly accessible analogy is the game of taking a word or phrase or song or whatever and sticking it through a few different languages on google translate, and then translating the result back to the starting language and laughing and how ridiculous it ends up sounding.

(On a tangent from my tangent, I think this is part of why outsider POV can be so interesting. It’s a chance to watch this entire process take place in the minds of other characters, who essentially each create their own version of the character in question.)  

Anyway, I think this is the first issue: Sanderson reads Mat, his brain goes ‘oh look, a trickster/rogue! I know what that is!’, which colours how he continues to read and interpret Mat, which shapes the Mat that lives in his head, which shapes how he then writes Mat.

The second problem, I think, is that Sanderson is somewhat aware that he’s doing this. Why is that a problem, you ask? Because it means that, while he’s not writing Jordan’s version of Mat, he also avoids committing completely to his own style of portraying a trickster/rogue. Which leaves us stranded somewhere in the middle, and you can feel the uncertainty and discomfort and tension between what he thinks he’s meant to be doing and what he wants to do. And Mat’s not the kind of character you can commit to halfway.

Okay, picking back up in a more normal fashion, hopefully (unless this next scene goes the way of the first).

Aludra’s making fireworks, Egeanin’s helping, and Mat’s trying to remember that he is a married man now.

Mat still had trouble figuring out what to call the woman. She wanted to be known as Leilwin, and sometimes he thought of her like that. It was foolish to go about changing your name just because someone said you had to

I like this, because it can be extended to a broader commentary on changing not just your name but your identity based on who or what you believe you must be. Tuon has the power, in the society in which Egeanin was raised, the society that shaped her mindset and identity and sense of self, to command that she take a new name and a new place. And that sticks even when – and perhaps even because – she chooses to remove herself from Seanchan society. She is a different person now, and the name is part cause and part symbol of that.

But it has a broader meaning here, for Mat himself and for Rand and for Egwene and for so many others. It’s the question of accepting a name or an identity that is given – the Dragon Reborn or the trickster or the Prince of the Ravens or son of battles or Amyrlin or wolf king. Prophecy and Pattern demand those roles be filled, and ask that they fill those roles, and so do they change to do so? Do they take on those names and fit themselves to those outlines, and if so is it by choice or by force?

Seems like all is not well between Mat and Aludra these days. Another word of advice: try to avoid pissing off the person who makes your explosives.

Honestly, I thought I was unqualified to give dating advice. But Mat and Gawyn and honestly the whole lot of them are really making me question that.

Then again, I thought Aludra and Mat were fine after Aludra made it clear she wasn’t interested in pursuing or being pursued by Mat once he began courting Tuon. Has he done something since then to irritate her?

“Are these the plans for the dragons?” Mat asked eagerly. He knelt down on one knee to inspect the sheets, without touching them. Aludra could be particular about that kind of thing.

“Yes.” She was still tapping with her hammer. She eyed him, looking just faintly uncomfortable. Because of Tuon, he suspected.

“And these figures?” Mat tried to ignore the awkwardness.

“Supply requirements,” she said.

So one thing I’ve been thinking about, and which this exchange highlights rather well, is why Mat seems to be the one so closely linked with and arguably credited with the weaponization of gunpowder, when in reality it’s pretty much all Aludra.

I’m curious as to whether this is just me, or whether it’s true of fandom as a whole – that gunpowder is linked and credited to Mat. Because narratively it seems like it’s set up that way – he plays with the fireworks Aludra gives him in TDR, and then there’s Egwene dreaming of him reaching up to grab a firework from the sky and knowing this will change the world, and dreaming again of him bowling with human lives as the bowling pins and knowing it’s linked to the same thing. And he’s the one who plans the battles in which Aludra’s explosives are used.

But he doesn’t actually come up with any of the ideas – he just incorporates them. She already has plans for her ‘dragons’ when she sets him the bellfounder riddle. She’s already thought through how her fireworks can be altered for various uses in battle. She doesn’t have the funding or resources, but she has the rest of it.

So I wonder if my brain has just taken the shortcut here of crediting Mat with the advent of gunpowder weaponry because he’s a far more major character, he’s the battle strategist, and he’s given all these pieces of foreshadowing and prophecy that link him to this innovation.

I also wonder if some element of it is unconscious gender bias on my part – that while I love the fact that it’s a woman who invents this, and that there’s no downplaying of the rather dark and destructive potential this has to change battle and war and the entire world, some part of me finds it much easier to associate that with a man than a woman. Something to think about, I suppose.

How would the common people react if they knew that the majestic nightflowers were just paper, powder, and – of all things – bat dung? No wonder Illuminators were so secretive with their craft. It wasn’t just about preventing competition. The more you knew about the process, the less wondrous and more ordinary it became.

There’s a great deal of truth to that.

And that, actually, seems like a very in-character observation for Mat to make. It’s something a trickster and a gambler and a strategist or general would understand: the value of knowing how things work, but also the value of misdirection and sleight-of-hand.

It’s a fitting realisation as well in a series that deals so much with the nature of information and knowledge and perception, and the interplay between them.

“This is a lot of material,” Mat said.

“A miracle, that is what you asked me for, Matrim Cauthon,” she replied, handing her nightflower to Leilwin and picking up her writing board. She made some notations on the sheet strapped to the front. “That miracle, I have broken down into a list of ingredients. A feat which is in itself miraculous, yes? Do not complain of the heat when someone offers you the sun in the palm of her hands.”

Hard to argue with that.

I do like Aludra – I always have; she’s a fun character. And a more complex one than her relatively little screen-time would ordinarily allow. As she has to be, I think; her place in the story but especially in her world is itself complex. Her innovation will change the world, and once unleashed that’s not something you can take back. Introducing gunpowder to a world is a heavy role for an otherwise bit-part character, but she’s written in such a way that it works. I do think that’s part of why the narrative leans on Mat so heavily in that regard, as a way of…offloading some of that weight onto a more central character.

“The Dragon Reborn, he can afford such costs.”

If nothing else, he’ll be relieved to be dealing with high costs in such an ordinary currency, after having had to pay such steep prices in less conventional ones – flesh, soul, sanity…

Maybe Rand could manage costs like these, but Matcertainly couldn’t. He’d have to dice with the queen of Andor herself to find this kind of coin!

I think Elayne would quite enjoy that, actually.

But that was Rand’s problem.

Honestly, Rand has well over 99 problems and I’m not even sure this makes the list. But okay.

Burn him, he’d better appreciate what Mat was going through for him.

At this point it’s all he can do to appreciate things like the fact that Nynaeve wants him to live, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

“How many bellfounders are you going to need for this project?”

“Every one you can get,” Aludra said curtly. “Is that not what you promised me? Every bellfounder from Andor to Tear.”

“I suppose,” Mat said. He hadn’t actually expected her to take him literally on that. “What about copper and tin? You don’t have an estimate of those.”

“I need all of it.”

Okay, this is genuinely funny. Most of the credit goes to Aludra, who is written better than pretty much anyone else in Mat’s chapters so far this book. But this is great.

But then you stop laughing, and it becomes very much a sign of how non-trivial the invention of cannons and weaponised explosives is. This is not a small endeavour. This is not something that will be used in one battle and can then either catch on or fade back into obscurity. This is huge, and world-changing. A larger scale than Mat dreamed of and now he’s having to face the full reality of it. It’s one thing to see this in battle and know theoretically that this is going to change everything. It’s another thing to see it written out in figures that demand all the copper and tin that can be found on an entire continent.

Their eyes met for a moment, and Mat realised he’d probably been too curt with her. Maybe he was uncomfortable around her. A little. They’d been getting close before Tuon. And was that pain, hidden in Aludra’s eyes?

“I’m sorry, Aludra,” he said. “I shouldn’t have talked like that.”

She shrugged.

He took a deep breath. “Look, I know that…well, it’s odd how Tuon—”

She waved a hand, cutting him off. “It is nothing. I have my dragons. You have brought me the chance to create them. Other matters are no longer of concern. I wish you happiness.”

I guess I’m just confused because I thought we already did this, with Aludra telling Mat that she wouldn’t tell him the secrets that would make him blush and that she had no plans of being juggled. I sort of figured that was it. But I also thought it was just a bit of fun for both of them, while this would suggest that there were maybe a few feelings involved – just one or two, mind you – which I suppose would account for some continued awkwardness.

That and the fact that Mat has no idea how he’s supposed to behave around women now that he’s married.

Nice of him to offer a sincere apology, though. I’ll give him that.

“But it will take much time, and yet you refuse to tell me when the dragons will be needed.”

“Can’t tell you things I don’t know myself, Aludra,” Mat said, glancing northward. He felt a strange tugging, as if someone had hooked a fisherman’s line about his insides and was softly – but insistently – pulling on it. Rand, is that you, burn you? Colours swirled. “Soon, Aludra,” he found himself saying. “Time is short. So short.”

The storm is coming, and we must go north.

Mat tells Egeanin that he doesn’t want her giving the secret of these weapons to the Seanchan, but…yeah, this isn’t something you’re going to be able to control, once they’re used. And I think he still doesn’t quite see that, doesn’t quite grasp the magnitude of what this is. Which isn’t all that surprising, because it’s the sort of thing that’s almost too much to wrap your head around until it happens. It’s like trying to imagine the ubiquity and myriad uses of smartphones when you’ve only just figured out how to harness lightning.

“By the way, I nearly forgot. Do you know anything about crossbows, Aludra?”

Ha. This is such a classic ‘I know nothing about your field/profession, so I figure you do all of it?’ It’s like when my grandmother asks me to predict the weather because that’s definitely covered under ‘geology’…

She’s the closest thing to an engineer he has, so sure, why not? And your paediatrician could probably perform a bit of neurosurgery on the side, right?

Now, if you wanted to modify a handheld projectile weapon so that its projectiles exploded…

Oh hey it’s the mystery person who’s been looking for him. OH. An Aes Sedai.

OH HEY IT’S VERIN.

Haven’t seen her since she left Rand with that letter and went off to conduct her own mysterious business. What have you been up to, Verin?

How long ago was that, in this timeline? Rand’s apparently a head of the rest of them now, if he saw Mat in Caemlyn, so maybe this isn’t actually all that long after Verin left Rand in KoD.

But why did she leave and why is she here and hi, Verin!

Well that solves one problem for him: she can Travel, so he can get to Caemlyn in time for supper. Time to move the plot along.

He hesitated, eyeing Verin, forcing himself to contain his excitement. There was always a cost when Aes Sedai were involved.

“What do you want?” he asked.

GOOD. QUESTION. Yes, Verin, tell us. What exactly do you want?

She just says she’s been held here because of his own ta’veren effect. Which…is certainly possible, but almost as certainly not the entire truth.

Next (TGS ch 35) Previous (TGS ch 33)

[butterflydm]

The Queen's Thief: book one (The Thief)

recommended to me by @markantonys!

What I knew going into the series:

Main character is a thief and an unreliable narrator.

Main romance is enemies-to-lovers and was described to me as "what if Mat & Tuon from The Wheel of Time was actually written well", so that is intriguing!

There's at least one scene in the series where the main character and his love interest (who is a queen; hence the title??) dance together, and I love a good dancing scene. (spoilers: it is not in this book)

I think that's all I knew, starting out! Rogue x royal romance, here we go!

I really enjoyed this! It's a good Quest book and Eugenides is an absolutely charming narrator that you cannot trust as far as a six-year old child could throw him. I really loved the relationships that developed between him and his Quest Companions, and I thought the way that the author doled out the true information about Gen's past was really well done. I knew going into the book that he was an unreliable narrator, so I guessed part of the way through who he was (the official King's Thief of Eddis) -- I think the hint that tipped me off was his mention of his affection for one of his cousins' being what landed him in jail.

The quest itself was also fantastic! I really enjoyed Gen figuring out the puzzle of the temple, and I loved the reveal that he's been stealing little things during this whole journey.

There's only one scene between Gen and the queen of Attolia in this book, but I can already see what @markantonys means about them being a better version of Mat & Tuon. Gen is a LOT like Mat (there's a great scene where he talks in his head about he's not going to risk himself to save the magus and Sophos but, of course, he instinctively does just that) and Attolia has a cold and cruel vibe, like Tuon (might be a mask? might be who she really is? I will find out!).

The big difference that that Attolia ALREADY respects Gen, even as they are definitely enemies at this point in time, and it's the lack of respect from Tuon towards Mat that really makes it impossible for me to enjoy reading about them in any way. I understand intellectually that some people are really into the whole "the man is filth on the woman's shoe as she steps on his neck" relationship vibe but it is not for me. There has to be some level of mutual respect and affection for me to care about the relationship and even after Sanderson took over the series and did his best to show an ounce of that from Tuon's perspective, it felt like too little, too late because she'd spent so much time treating him like a slave/future slave of hers (literally, because she is a slaver).

When Gen tells the queen that she's "more beautiful but less kind" than the woman he already serves (which is his cousin, the queen of Eddis, though he pretends it's about a women he's pledged himself to in love), it genuinely gets to her because she respects his opinion and so it matters to her that he rejects her offer of becoming her official thief.

I also really enjoyed the little interludes where the characters were telling stories to each other about the gods of the world!

Very good book and a quick read.

[neuxue]

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 20

In which Mat shows up for the first time this book, and I am...underwhelmed

Chapter 20: On a Broken Road

I return! Adulthood is overrated and I would much rather just read books for a living. Alas.

So. I have tea, and Chapter 20 of The Gathering Storm, and a promise to myself not to leave this chair until the chapter is done. Let’s do this.

“Women,” Mat declared

Well aren’t we off to a great start.

“are like mules.”

*raises eyebrow* done with your shit and liable to kick you where it hurts?

“Wait. No. Goats. Women are like goats.”

So that part last chapter where Tuon thought to him not to dig himself into deeper trouble than he can climb out of? It only took about three words for him to toss the shovel aside and rev up the fucking bulldozer.

Come on, Mat. You ended last book on such a high, don’t ruin it now.

Also that line doesn’t sound very Mat – in terms of diction and syntax, not in terms of sentiment – but I’ll class that as a nitpick and move on.

“Pure poetry, Mat,” Talmanes said

That also doesn’t sound particularly like Talmanes, but in fairness we haven’t seen all that much of Talmanes.

They’d been lucky to find this ancient road, which must have been made before the Breaking. It was mostly overgrown, the stones shattered in many places, large sections of the roadway just…well, just gone.

Almost as if the path is hard to follow, as if there are places where it seems not to connect or make sense, or where there are pieces missing and it’s not at all smooth, and so it’s like a metaphor, you see. The right hand falters and the left hand strays, but they’re both making their way back towards the centre now, even if one is on a broken road and the other is still trying to find his path, so it’s all symbolic and whatnot.

Sapling pines had begun to sprout at the sides of the roadway and between rocks, miniature versions of their towering fathers above.

It’s the ciiiiiircle of liiiiiiiife…..

I’m sorry.

“It’s like...Well, reasoning with a woman is like sitting down to a friendly game of dice. Only the woman refuses to acknowledge the basic bloody rules of the game. A man, he’ll cheat you – but he’ll do it honestly. He’ll use loaded dice, so that you think you’re losing by chance. And if you aren’t clever enough to spot what he’s doing, then maybe he deserves to take your coin. And that’s that.

“A woman, though, she’ll sit down to that same game and she’ll smile, and act like she’s going to play. Only when it’s her turn to throw she’ll toss a pair of her own dice that are blank on all sides.”

So this feels…off, to me. And not in an overly critical nitpicking sense, but in a this is actually jarring to read sense.

Mostly, I think, it’s because Mat shouldn’t be saying all of this out loud. This reads much more like his internal narrative, and even then it’s usually broken up a bit more. The sentiment – much as it makes me roll my eyes because who doesn’t love misogyny in the form of ‘women are mysterious and entirely incomprehensible creatures set on playing games with men’ – isn’t too far from things Mat has thought before, but the way it’s framed feels wrong.

The long, drawn-out metaphor, the way he’s just monologuing his merry way down this road…on the whole, Mat doesn’t do that. When Mat’s exasperated, we usually get the occasional grumble or maybe an exclamation out loud, and the rest is in his internal monologue, interspersed with the action of the scene.

This is much more suited to Thom Merrilin, really.

Also, when it comes to the subject of Women, Mat definitely makes generalisations both in his thoughts and out loud, but they’re usually more closely linked to specific characters.

“Now, you’ll scratch your head and look at the dice. Then you’ll look up at her, then down at the dice again. ‘But there aren’t any pips on these dice,’ you’ll say.

“’Yes there are,’ she’ll say

Mat just doesn’t talk like this. He doesn’t create entire metaphorical scenarios, complete with dialogue, and then narrate them to make his point. When Thom goes off on his bootmaker story, Mat interjects with “what in the Pit of Doom does this have to do with making those fool women see sense?” And then Thom proceeds to tell this long and supposedly didactic story, while Mat sits there and wonders when we’re going to get to the point, which is Elayne and Egwene and Nynaeve.

This whole game-of-dice metaphor could work, perhaps, if it were broken up into single sentences – most of them unspoken but instead just part of Mat’s own thoughts – and scattered throughout the chapter to form a mini-theme. That’s something Jordan does with chapters from time to time. A Cluster of Rosebuds last book did something similar, actually, with the running theme of courtship-as-tactics.

Mat has just spent an entire page monologuing, uninterrupted even by his own thoughts or narrative. The only other time I can think of where Mat even comes close to talking for that long is when he pulls the stole off of Egwene’s shoulders and starts his ‘no, you listen to me’ routine with her and Elayne and Nynaeve. And the whole point there is the lack of interruption, because the reader knows he has everything completely backwards and is digging himself a rather spectacular hole.

Oh, and the time he gets annoyed at the Eelfinn not answering his questions, and starts running off at the mouth without realising what’s happening. Again, this serves a rather important purpose, because it’s what lands him Odin’s role.

Mat’s character relies heavily on the contrasts and interplay between what he says, what he thinks, what he does, and what happens around him. The play of ironies that drives Mat’s character is created by the dissonance between when he says and thinks, and how he actually interacts with the world around him and how other characters view him, so that the reader actually knows him better than he knows himself. Mat’s character depends on context.  

And you can strip him of elements of that context in certain scenes, but it’s usually with a deliberate purpose – upsetting the balance of his narrative by letting him speak uninterrupted (or think uninterrupted or act uninterrupted) has consequences one way or another.

Here, though, there isn’t any of that. There’s just…nothing but Mat talking. And so we’re completely stripped of the balancing effect that allows his character to work.

“’Clearly you can see that they actually came up as twos!’ And she’ll believe it. She’ll bloody believe it!”

“Incredible,” Talmanes said.

The other issue here – or rather, part of the same issue of a complete lack of context or framing or interspersed balancing narrative, action, or other characters to serve as kaleidoscope lenses – is that Talmanes is being used here as an entirely flat sounding board, rather than as a chorus. The difference between the two can be subtle, which no doubt makes it difficult to write well, but there is a difference. All this line from Talmanes does is to remind you that Mat is not giving a soliloquy, and it doesn’t even do that particularly well.

The point of surrounding Mat with other characters is not so they can act as mirrors or supports but so they can act as lenses, giving the reader a different perspective through which to view Mat, in order to build a more accurate picture of him than he presents on his own.

You have to surround him with chorus and context, so that everything he says and does is filtered and reflected and bounced around off of all these different mirrors, each reflecting a fragment froma  different angle, so that all the fragments come together into a mostly cohesive whole that is more than the sum of its reflected parts for the reader. That leaves Mat free to dive headfirst into the nearest pile of dramatic irony.

Without the chorus, though, without context or characters who serve to inform and illumnate rather than provide a simple and unaltered reflection, you’re forced to more or less take Mat at face value. Which flattens him as a character and also makes things like the misogyny of this absurd dice analogy far more frustrating than it might otherwise be, because the narrative is doing absolutely fuck-all to contradict, qualify, or moderate that view.

So now that I’ve spent more words talking about that monologue than it actually contains…

Oh wait nope we’re still going.

This would probably annoy me significantly more if I liked Mat more than I do; I admit that I’d rather see Mat written weirdly than more or less any of the other major characters. Sorry, Mat. I did name my new fox-neighbour after you, though, so there’s that.

As is, it actually doesn’t annoy me much more than Jordan’s Mat was wont to do, and instead is weirdly interesting to me from a meta perspective, in terms of working out exactly what feels so wrong about this, and why it would have been written this way.

“By the time they’re done,” Mat continued, almost more to himself

Almost? Please. The attempt at putting Talmanes into this conversation is almost more awkward than if Mat has actually been talking to a tree this entire time.

And is far more awkward than if this entire thing had been in Mat’s thoughts. Preferably chopped up and scattered as seasoning throughout the chapter.

“You’ll sit there and stare at the table and begin to wonder, just maybe, if those dice didn’t read twos after all. If only to preserve what’s left of your sanity. That’s what it’s like to reason with a woman”

Actually there’s a name for that; it’s called gaslighting and it’s far more commonly done to women than by them, especially in abusive relationships. But sure, let’s just flip it around and turn it into an accusation against half the population, conveniently placing men as the victims and women as, yet again, mysterious incomprehensible creatures who delight in toying with men.

And speaking of ‘toying’, I wouldn’t find this whole rant nearly as irritating if it were about a woman specifically rather than women in general. It would be more interesting than offensive if he were talking about Tuon here, because their whole relationship is a mess and there’s so much to play with there. This would fit right in with the characterisation of their courtship as a game of strategy and tactics, of manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, of two people at the table each playing a slightly different game.

It doesn’t even all need to be specifically about Tuon – Mat certainly isn’t above a bit of sweeping generalisation – but there needs to be a few anchoring mentions of her. Give 90% of this to his internal monologue and make it mostly about Tuon, and then let him say the other 10% aloud, about women in general, and then Talmanes is only getting pieces of the whole and is responding to those, the reader gets the entire thing, and you start to get some of Mat’s typical contrasts back.

I don’t know who this is but it sure as hell isn’t Talmanes.

Of course, few ‘mountains’ in this area were impressive, not compared to the Mountains of Mist, back near the Two Rivers.

Or, you know, Dragonmount.

But then, it’s hard to be impressive compared to a magic volcano that is pyre, grave, and cairn to humanity’s recurring nightmare and answered prayers.

And Mat was determined. Determined not to be pinned in by the Seanchan again

Militarily, at least.

Innuendo aside, though, this is what I want to see more of with Mat. The whole clusterfuck that comes of being in love with (and now married to) the empress of a nation you despise. It’s an interesting version of the ‘enemies-to-lovers’ trope in that they are both, simultaneously, but in different capacities and contexts, and that? Is fascinating to me, as a concept.

But I also feel like, as with so much else about Mat, I want something written in E but his story is actually written in G. If that makes any sense at all.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is why I have never been able to like Mat as much as I sometimes feel like I should. On paper, there’s a lot about him that’s right up my alley. But then the way it’s executed tends to put more emphasis on the things I’m not so interested in, and leave unexplored the things I am intrigued by. I tend to say that Mat is just Not My Type, but I actually think it’s a case of me being able to see all the ways in which he comes so close to being my type but the story chooses to focus on different things. It’s almost more frustrating, that way.

I should clarify that I don’t even mean this as a criticism. No doubt if Mat were written the way I would want him written, plenty of other people would be having exactly the same issue I’m having now. But it does explain why he irritates me sometimes, and why I can’t quite seem to enjoy him much of the time.

He wanted out of this hangman’s noose of a country.

I See What You Did There.

In truth, Master Roidelle didn’t have a lot of experience being a guide. He was a scholar, an academic. He could explain a map for you perfectly, but he had as much trouble as Vanin making sense of where they were

I don’t know what kind of scholar you’re thinking of, but scholarly and academic mapmaking in my experience involved a hell of a lot of hiking through very real bogs with a compass and a notebook and no free hands to hold an umbrella. Also through a desert taking bearings from the rather homogeneous landscape of low hills because your GPS ran out of battery but like hell were you going to waste an entire day in the field to go back and change them, so you’d better know how to navigate by compass and aerial photograph and make sure the features you plot are still accurate to within a few metres.

Academia and practical field knowledge are NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE, is what I’m saying here. Anyway. Moving on…

Since this roadway was so disjointed and broken, the pines high enough to obscure landmarks, the hilltops all nearly identical.

Okay, fine, it’s a metaphor. I will grudgingly accept this.

But seriously. Try to tell a geologist that scholars don’t know how to use the maps they make and you’re likely to get a compass-clinometer in the face.

“I’m just asking,” Mat said, pulling down the brim of his hat against the sun. “A commander’s got to ask things like this.”

That second bit, again, should be in his thoughts rather than out loud. Probably with some follow-up thought about how he isn’t going to start being bloody responsible just because he’s married. Something like...I don’t know. This, maybe:

“I’m just asking,” Mat said, pulling down the brim of his hat against the sun. A commander had to ask these sorts of questions. A commander! Burn him, he wanted to avoid battles, not command them. Only, avoiding those battles behind him would have meant leaving all those Seanchan to chase after Tuon. Tuon. His wife. A commander, a husband, and a noble. He had to laugh – it was either that or weep. Just when he had started to think he understood the rules of the game she was playing, she had to marry him and make him some Prince of the bloody Ravens. Well burn him if he was going to let that turn him into a bloody noble, but he was the Band’s commander, whether he wanted it or not, and they were counting on him to see them out of this butcher’s yard. “Just find the flaming mountain,” he said to Vanin, frowning when the man only looked amused.

I mean that’s rough and not really in Jordan’s style either (trust me I would not even for a moment try to claim that I could do a better job of finishing this series than Sanderson; that is not at all the purpose of this), but it’s kind of how I picture this working. Mostly internal monologue, an occasional mention of the whole dice game thing here and there to keep a running theme rather than beating you over the head with a clumsily narrated analogy, Tuon coming up frequently in his thoughts as she’s sort of the cause of his current crisis of self, and a contrast between what he thinks and what other characters see of him.

“Don’t look so glum, Mat,” Talmanes said, puffing on his gold-rimmed pipe. Where’d he gotten that, anyway? Mat didn’t remember him having it before. “Your men have full bellies, full pockets, and they just won a great victory. Not  much more than that a soldier can ask for.”

I think what’s bothering me about Talmanes is that he sounds more like Nalesean here. I liked Talmanes better; can I have him back now please?

“There aren’t losses when you don’t fight in the first place.”

“Then why ride to battle so often?”

“I only fight when I can’t avoid it!” Mat snapped. Blood and bloody ashes, he only fought when he had to. When they trapped him! Why did that seem to happen every time he turned around.

This is better. ‘I only fight when I can’t avoid it’ still feels to me more like something Mat would think rather than actually say, but overall this exchange feels much more true to both of them. And I rather  like Talmanes’s question here.

There aren’t losses when you don’t fight in the first place…it reminds me actually of Rand’s there was a price to be paid for any decision he made. There was a price for who he was. Other people paid it. He had to keep reminding himself that it was a far smaller price than they would pay without him.

Because the answer to ‘then why ride to battle so often’ comes down to something similar, really. There aren’t any losses when you don’t fight in the first place in the same way that Rand’s existence brings a price. Without it, that specific price wouldn’t be paid, but another would. Mat can’t run from battles, and by leading his people through them, he is almost certainly helping to keep the cost from escalating. (Even as he’s helping to change warfare into something even more destructive by introducing gunpowder weapons). There’s a whole interplay, with so many of the main cast, between cost and mitigation, between salvation and destruction.

And so you run into questions like how much destruction is the salvation of the world worth? At what point does the cost become too high? At what point do the scales balance? And how can you accept those costs and not let them consume you, while still retaining enough humanity to care about them at all? Rand’s quickly sliding towards a threshold in that regard, but it comes up in variation with the other characters as well.

Mat tells himself that he avoids battles, but the Aelfinn named him Son of Battles and the name has proved true, and his denials do not always ring entirely true. And yet he does truly hate the price that always must be paid; Mat in the aftermath of a battle is often when I enjoy him the most, because there are some truly beautiful scenes and lines that come out of it.

But perhaps it is precisely this balance he strikes between the thrill of the battle and the stakes and the strategy and the despair at the thought of the cost that makes him a good commander, strategy aside. He can denounce responsibility till he’s blue in the face, but at the end of the day he is always trying to minimise that cost, to keep those who follow him safe. They weren’t even his during that first battle in Cairhien, but he couldn’t bring himself to abandon them. Leading them meant paying a certain price, but leaving them would have meant paying a higher, though he wouldn’t have been there to see it.

Why do you ride to battle so often? Because the cost would be higher if he did not.

Probably.

(It’s that ‘probably’ that can cause so much doubt and anguish. You never can prove a negative…)

Of course, Mat was now a nobleman himself. Don’t think about that, he told himself. Talmanes had spent a few days calling Mat “Your Highness” until Mat had lost his temper and yelled at the man – Cairhienin could be such sticklers for rank.

When Mat had first realised what his marriage to Tuon meant, he’d laughed, but it had been the laughter of incredulous pain. And men called him lucky. Well why couldn’t his luck have helped him avoid this fate? Bloody Prince of the Ravens? What did that mean?

This is definitely better. It still feels different from Jordan – and perhaps explains things a little too directly – but it’s far less immediately jarring than the start of this chapter was.

Would the Seanchan chase him? He and Tuon both knew they were on opposing sides now, and she’d seen what his army could do.

YES I WANT THIS. I want Mat to face the Seanchan Army on the battlefield, with them reinforced by the Deathwatch Guard and armed with knowledge from Tuon of Mat’s strategy and style. With women on the front lines because Tuon knows Mat has sworn to himself never to kill another woman. I want a scene that alternates between Mat’s perspective, facing this battle, and Tuon in the Tarasin Palace, unrolling a report delivered by raken with her long lacquered fingernails, calmly issuing orders to her commanders on how to proceed. Mat as the general and Tuon as the Empress, enemies. And that battlefield is between them when next they meet, but they meet as Mat and Tuon this time and so it’s not the same but nor does it erase the blood, and okay I’ll stop because I feel like this is unlikely. Still, I want it, and I will take whatever I can get. I do enjoy the setup, and even these thoughts from Mat about how they are on opposing sides, while in the next sentence he wonders if she loves him. What an excellent fucked up mess.

She’d stayed in his possession, enduring captivity, never running. But he had little doubt that she’d move against him if she thought it best for her empire.

And he will continue to oppose that empire. “You are not my enemy, but your empire is.” Where do you go from there?

Yes, she’d send men after him, though potential pursuit didn’t trouble him half as much as the worry that she might not make it back to Ebou Dar safely.

I rather like this as well – the protectiveness here is rather fascinating in contrast with the fact that, from a military standpoint, the Seanchan are a truly formidable enemy (and more so if Tuon does make it back to Ebou Dar safely).

Puts rather a twist on ‘love thine enemy’, doesn’t it?

So we’re once again in a place where the entities and emblems and figures and thrones are set against one another, even as the people occupying those roles still love. It’s a balance that cannot hold long without collapsing one way or another, but that’s part of what makes it fascinating. Mat and Tuon, Rand and Egwene, Egwene and Gawyn and Elayne and Galad…also Rand and Moridin, if you think about it, which is Fine, I’m fine, this is not a problem at all…

“Mat,” Talmanes said, pointing at him with the pipe again. “I’m surprised at you. Why, you’re starting to sound downright husbandly.”

TALMANES. IS. NOT. NALESEAN.

Also Naleseamanes, you can stop saying Mat’s name every single sentence. Though I suppose it’s understandable; I too would need reassurance that this version of Mat is in fact Mat.

Mat’s denial is also weird and this whole ensuing conversation is weird and feels off. For mostly the same reasons as I’ve already gone on about at length.

“What was that? What does that mean?”

“Nothing, Mat,” Talmanes said hurriedly. “Just that, the way you’re mooning after her, I—”

“I’m not mooning,” Mat snapped […] “I’m just worried. That’s all. She knows a lot about the Band, and she could give away our strengths.”

Just…nope. That first bit is not how Mat talks at all, and his denial takes a very different form to this. This is almost more Nynaeve’s style, though even then it’s not a perfect fit. And while Mat is similar in many ways to Nynaeve, they don’t talk the same way.

There are some moments where he reads just fine, but then something like this comes along and it’s just…I’ve tried in TGS thus far to avoid excessive pointing out of differences between Sanderson and Jordan because for the most part it would be an exercise in futility. There are going to be differences because Sanderson is a different author, and with occasional exceptions I haven’t minded them too much. But this is to a much greater extent, and is to the point where it’s actually distracting.

Maybe if I liked Mat more, I would be more inclined to find things I liked about this chapter? I don’t know. Well, it is what it is. And at the end of the day, weighed against the alternative – the series remaining unfinished – I’ll take this in a heartbeat.

“Ever consider marrying one of them?”

“No, thank the Light,” Talmanes said. Then, apparently, he thought better of what he’d just said. “I mean, it wasn’t right for me at the time, Mat. But I’m certain it will work out fine for you.”

I would not be so certain and also I want my Talmanes back.

Mat scowled. If Tuon was going to bloody finally decide to go through with the marriage, couldn’t she have picked a time when others couldn’t hear?

Okay that got a smile. Well, a fond rolling of eyes anyway.

Aes Sedai were great at keeping secrets unless those secrets could in any way embarrass or inconvenience Matrim Cauthon. Then you could be certain the news would spread through the entire camp in a day’s time, and likely be known three villages down the road as well.

Definitely better, especially because here we’re back to the contrasts and contradictions that are so fundamental to Mat’s character. Because certain key secrets known to some Aes Sedai, such as the fact that he sounded the Horn of Valere, have actually been kept very quiet indeed.

“I’m not giving up gambling,” Mat muttered. “Or drinking.”

“So I believe you’ve told me,” Talmanes said. “Three or four times so far. I half believe that if I were to peek into your tent at night, I’d find you mumbling it in your sleep. ‘I’m going to keep bloody gambling! Bloody, bloody gambling and drinking! Where’s my bloody drink? Anyone want to gamble for it?’”

Hello, 999? I would like to report the abduction and probable murder of Lord Talmanes of House Delovinde. Please let me know if you find him; he was supposed to be here several pages ago and his family and I are growing very concerned.

“You won’t go soft just because you got married, Mat. Why, some of the Great Captains themselves are married, I believe. Davram Bashere is for certain, and Rodel Ituralde.”

Gareth Bryne…well, we’ll have to wager on that one.

“No, you won’t go soft because you’re married.” Mat nodded sharply. Good that was settled. “You might go boring though,” Talmanes noted.

WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH TALMANES. I miss Talmanes. I suppose this is how I would feel about Mat if I liked Mat more. Huh. Okay, those of you who like Mat more than I do…in the immortal words of Zuko, that’s rough buddy.

Talmanes would be a wine snob, though. I will give him that.

Mat exhaled in relief. He’d begun to think that they might end up wandering these mountains until the Last Battle came and went.

Lost and uncertain, the left hand strays…only not anymore.

This thing with the maps, though…this is another part, I think, of why this chapter isn’t working for me. There’s nothing happening. That in itself isn’t completely new; there are plenty of chapters in Jordan’s books in which not a whole lot actually happens in terms of events, but there’s usually still a purpose to them, and they tend to be done differently for different characters. Someone like Elayne can just about pull off a scene that’s mostly just conversation (well, given some people’s comments, I guess these scenes also don’t work for everyone, but at least they’re in line with Elayne’s character as a politician in a political arc).

Mat also definitely have scenes that aren’t action-packed, but Mat’s ‘passive’ scenes serve a very specific purpose; in these, the passivity is a point unto itself. This sort of scene, with a long stretch of nothing but talking and analysing something, is more suited to Perrin. Mat’s scenes, when they’re not the contemplative storm that precedes a character moment, rely on action to bely the thoughts. There’s a constant play of contractions between what he thinks or says and what he does, and removing the active element causes that balance to collapse. We’re effectively getting only half the picture here, and it throws everything off.

The action can be subtle, but it’s nearly always there. Otherwise, everything is silence and we’re entirely in Mat’s thoughts. Mat doesn’t do ‘talking heads’ scenes. They don’t work for him.

So the tone feels wrong, and the ratio of thought-to-dialogue feels wrong, as does the balance of thought/dialogue and action, but also just the way the scene is framed and planned and outlined feels wrong. It isn’t the right kind of scene for Mat. The conversation might have felt less jarring if it were set against a stronger backdrop, but it isn’t, so there isn’t even anything to distract from the wrongness of the conversations.

Sigh, hello Joline.

Mat and I can agree on one thing: Joline is annoying. And annoyingly incompetent. It doesn’t help that she has the bad luck to show up in scenes that annoy me all on their own, but she really does have a gift for being irritating, and I don’t often side with Mat on who he considers irritating, so that’s saying something.

She couldn’t hurt him with the Power, of course – even without his medallion, since Aes Sedai were sworn not to use the Power to kill except in very specific instances. But he was no fool. He’d noticed that those oaths of theirs didn’t say anything about using knives.

The funny thing is, I don’t know how many Aes Sedai would have noticed that loophole. No doubt some would have. Those who involve themselves with the world, rather than closing themselves off from it. But the others? It would be a very Aes Sedai blind spot for them to have.

Still, from the way each of those Aes Sedai looked at Mat in turn as they reached the front of the line, you’d never know that they owed him their lives. That was the way of it with women. Save her life, and she’d inevitably cliam that she’d been about to escape on her own, and therefore owed you nothing. Half the time, she’d berate you for messing up her supposed plans.

Sigh. This is entirely true to Mat, and true to Jordan’s writing of Mat, and it annoyed me as much when Jordan did it as now, because the narrative continues to back him up on this.

‘Here now’ is an Elend phrase, not a Mat one. The fact that I cannot stand Elend is probably not helping matters here.

Teslyn, at least, continues to be her surprisingly awesome self.

If they’re headed to Caemlyn, that means there’s a good chance of a reunion between Elayne and Mat. I am genuinely looking forward to this. He can teach her to swear and she can teach him to royalty and it’ll be great.

After that, he could make good on his promise to Thom.

YES! MOIRAINE! GO GET MOIRAINE! GO TO THE TOWER SON OF BATTLES! GO TO THE TOWER, TRICKSTER! GO, GAMBLER! GO!

Can I please just skip over Mat and Joline talking to each other? Do I have to read it? I don’t want to. I don’t like these conversations; they always make me annoyed and tired.

“You’re welcome to go on your own,” Mat said.

Please. Please take him up on that. I am so ready to be done with Mat And The Three Aes Sedai. I’ve liked some of his interactions with Teslyn, but aside from that, it has been a trial. (‘A Cold Medallion’ is in the running for my least favourite chapter in the entire series, if that gives you an indication of how very, very ready I am for this particular part of this subplot to end).

Damn it.

“I count two of you,” Mat said, his anger rising. “That means four horses. I figured you’d be smart enough to do that math, Joline.” And then, softer, he added, “if just barely.”

Excuse me, I need to go hit my head against a wall several hundred times. EVERYONE IN THIS CONVERSATION PISSES ME OFF. Joline, because she’s being arrogant and incompetent. Mat, because this kind of insult irks me, for reasons you can probably guess, but also I can’t entirely disagree with him on this one, but also…

*hits head against wall a few more times*

Are they done yet?

Also it’s yet another line that doesn’t really read like Mat. Not that the sentiment is wrong, because Mat does not hold Joline in anything much higher than contempt, but that specific brand of under-his-breath mockery isn’t really his style.

Teslyn gave him a shocked glance, seeming disappointed.

How…meta.

To the side, Talmanes just lowered his pipe and whistled quietly.

I see Talmanes as more of a lowered his pipe and raised an eyebrow type if anything, or he could pull a Lan and suddenly become completely absorbed in studying the contents of the bowl of his pipe until the awkward stops (while of course following every word because he’s as Cairhienin as they come).

“That medallion of yours makes you impudent, Matrim Cauthon,” Joline said coldly.

“My mouth makes me impudent, Joline,” Mat replied with a sigh, fingering the medallion hidden beneath his loosely tied shirt. “The medallion just makes me truthful.”

The tone – weary rather than flippant – and that second half of the line almost makes this work, but it’s still a bit too…well, a bit too Sanderson to feel like Mat. Which I think is part of the issue; Mat is the sort of character who you could at first glance toss in the same group as some of Sanderson’s characters, but on a closer look Mat really doesn’t belong there. This is Sanderson’s humour, and the humour Mat serves to provide is different.

Mat’s humour isn’t in witty retorts; those are reserved more for the Aiel (and occasionally Rand, oddly enough). Mat’s humour comes more from the piling-on of minor dramatic irony throughout a scene or arc, so that what he says is funny because he’s the only one not in on the joke.

And that’s…not a style of humour I’ve ever seen Brandon Sanderson write, that I can think of. His humour comes from the characters themselves saying or doing things that are funny or witty or clever. Mat’s humour comes from the way Mat’s statements fall on the surrounding story. It’s situational humour rather than intentional humour. It’s saying something unintentionally funny rather than cracking a joke.

Mat has never really struck me as a funny character. He’s used for comic relief sometimes, much as Nynaeve is, but I wouldn’t actually call either of them funny, for the most part. Mat’s funny to read – if your humour runs that way; mine often doesn’t, so I could be wrong here – because the reader actually knows him far better than he knows himself. You’re not laughing with him, you’re laughing at him.

And on the occasions when what he actually says is meant to be funny, it tends to be more a tone of irreverence than an actual joke or wisecrack or one-liner. This seems to fall into that second category, though the fact that the tone isn’t presented as flippant definitely goes some way towards mitigating it. Still, it reads more like a character who’s used to making witty and cutting rejoinders and is now doing it out of force of habit, which…isn’t Mat, because that’s not his style to begin with.

Anyway. Now we’re bartering with horses as the currency and ‘an end to Mat and Joline ever having conversations’ as the much-coveted item for purchase.

The fact that Joline hasn’t thought about the logistics beyond the immediate numbers needed for her convenience is entirely true to her character, I must say. She’s a great example of all the negative traits of Aes Sedai and precious few of the positive ones.

If the land didn’t decide to start blooming soon…

Not sure our wounded Fisher King is in much of a blooming sort of mood at the moment, so you might be shit out of luck on that one, sorry. But you never know; maybe if you ask him nicely?

“But with only one horse each, we’ll barely be faster than the army!” Joline said.

You are an embarrassment to your Ajah.

“And Vanin,” Mat called. “Make sure Mandevwin is aware that when I say ‘a few of us’ will go down, I mean a very small group, led by myself and Talmanes. I won’t have that village invaded by seven thousand soldiers looking for fun!”

No fun is to be had! By anyone! Not one single fun! If I have to be all responsible and shit then damn it, so do you. You hear me? No. Fun.

Mat turned back to the Aes Sedai. “Well?” he asked. “You taking my kind offer or not?”

It seems like such a small thing, this feeling that some of the things he says aloud in this chapter should really be in his internal monologue. Surely it shouldn’t make that much difference…and yet it really, really does. This, at least the way I interpret Mat (and there is of course the possibility that I’m talking out my ass here and am completely wrong about all of this) should read more like... ‘Mat turned back to the Aes Sedai. “Well?” he asked. Joline sniffed, and he knew all too well what that meant. He would have been glad to be rid of her, but not for any twenty horses! That was pure madness, so why did Teslyn look so disappointed? She usually had some sense, for an Aes Sedai. It had been a perfectly reasonable offer, burn him. It had!’

Well, or a better-written version of putting everything in Mat’s thoughts rather than out loud.

Teslyn trailed after, regarding Mat with a curious expression. She still looked disappointed in him too. He glanced away, then felt annoyed at himself. What did he care what she thought?

This is done much better, with the contrast again between what Mat says and what he feels, between what he feels and what he tells himself, between what he tells himself and what we see of other characters’ perceptions of him.

And it does better than the entire chapter thus far in showing that Mat is on edge. Which is entirely true to character, but unfortunately gets overshadowed by the chapter…trying to illustrate it and massively overshooting the mark.

Has Talmanes uttered a single sentence without appending Mat’s name to it this chapter? I’d look back and check but the very thought fills me with dread.

“You really do miss her,” Talmanes said, sounding a little surprised as their horses fell into place beside one another.

Talmanes? Is that you? I’ve missed you!

This is so much more like him, though, to see straight to the heart of the issue and state it like this. It reminds me a little of his conversation with Egwene. Ah, that conversation. That was a wonderful thing.

“What are you blathering about now?”

Damn it, stop ruining this moment! It doesn’t help that I dislike the word ‘blathering’ in any context, to say nothing of how it feels wrong here.

“Mat, you are not always the most refined of men, I’ll admit. Sometimes your humour is indeed a bit ripe and your tone on the brusque side. But you are rarely downright rude, nor intentionally insulting. You really are on edge, aren’t you?”

Mat said nothing, just pulled the brim of his hat down again.

It’s like they’re taking it in turns to be in character. Talmanes was fine with the ‘you really do miss her’ line and Mat was way off with the ‘blathering’ and then it flipped and now Mat’s alright but Talmanes is saying too many words.

Also it’s almost amusing on a somewhat meta level, because basically what Talmanes is saying is ‘you are out of character’ and…oh, you have no idea. I get that the chapter is intentionally aiming for Mat to feel a bit off, because he is on edge. But that, done well, would look different. This just looks…like Sanderson doesn’t quite have the hang of writing Mat, yet.

Again, I’ve felt that way with his first chapters of a few other characters (Aviendha comes to mind), but even those stood out less. They were more within the ‘margin of error’ I had expected, but this is…not.

Ah well. You can’t have everything, and one chapter out of twenty so far really isn’t doing all that badly, when you think about the task as a whole.

“We’re done with this conversation,” Mat said […] “I just—” “Over,” Mat said.

Talmanes wouldn’t protest; Talmanes would give a solemn nod or slight bow, and Mat would have no way of determining whether it was mocking or entirely sincere. This, here, is a very Sanderson-esque exchange.

“We’ll buy what we can at the village,” Mat said.

Hopefully with Mat’s luck that’ll work better for him than So Habor did for Perrin.

I don’t like sidekick!Talmanes. He makes me sad.

“You’re going to kindly take me up on my offer to go enjoy ourselves at the tavern,” Mat said. “And while we’re at it, we’re going to resupply. If my luck’s with me, we’ll do it for free.”

If Egwene or Nynaeve had been there, they’d have boxed his ears and told him he was going to do no such thing. Tuon probably would have looked at him curiously and then said something that made him feel his shame right down into his boots.

You kidding? She’d have asked how many knife fights there were likely to be, and then gone and ordered an ale to sip while she watched.

The good thing about Talmanes, however, was that he simply spurred his horse forward, face stoic, eyes betraying just a hint of amusement. “Well, I’ve got to see this, then!”

Nope.

Cut out that last line of dialogue there and it might be fine.

As is…well, the chapter ends approximately how it started. Let’s leave it at that.

Next (TGS ch 21) Previous (TGS ch 19)

[neuxue]

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 6

Ituralde has a battlefield chat, Leane attempts Extreme Stone-Swimming, and Egwene would like the Tower to rediscover some structural integrity, both literal and metaphorical.

Chapter 6: When Iron Melts

(Happy second birthday to this liveblog...I’m not sure whether to be proud or vaguely horrified).

I like this chapter icon.

Oh hey Ituralde’s also been promoted from the prologues.

He’s on a battlefield, and he’s alive so I’d say the odds are good he won.

Indeed he has. So now his prize is that he gets to stroll through this lovely field of corpses.

What would be written of this battle? It would depend on who was writing.

This is good on its own, but it’s made better by the fact that it’s in the beginning of the first book by a different author. Which makes it weirdly meta-appropriate.

Soon a blanket of darkness would cradle the bodies, and the survivors could pretend for a time that the grassland was a grave for their friends. And for the people their friends had killed.

I like these sorts of aftermath scenes, when the chaos and adrenaline of battle has turned to a soft and weary reflection, and enemies and allies alike look the same in death.

The Seanchan general is not quite dead yet, so Ituralde goes to have a chat with him, and this feels almost like a scene out of one of Mat’s borrowed memories.

It felt odd to be out of uniform. A man like this General Turan did not deserve a soldier in drab.  […] “You’re him, then,” Turan said, looking up at Ituralde. […] “I am,” Ituralde said.

“They call you a ‘Great Captain’ in Tarabon.”

“They do.” 

“It’s deserved,” Turan said, coughing.

I love this as well, the mutual respect between two men who, only minutes or hours ago, were enemies. Two men who played a game against each other in which the pieces were other lives – including, now, one of theirs – and yet there is no resentment. Just acknowledgment of a game well played, and respect given to both the victorious and the fallen.

It definitely continues the ongoing trend of humanising the Seanchan, as well as adding to the sense that this is, to some extent, nonsensical. The Seanchan are invaders, and there’s the little matter of slavery, but then there are scenes like this, or like Perrin with Tylee, or Mat with Karede, in which there is respect and sometimes even friendship across what could turn in an instant to battle lines. But they all accept the inevitability of ongoing war as a given. Tylee says she hopes not to face Perrin on the battlefield…but nor can she make any agreements regarding the lands he claims to protect. Mat tells Tuon that she is not his enemy, but her empire is, and next time he sees Seanchan it will likely be in battle. Ituralde and Turan respect each other – though they’ve never met – but have this conversation surrounded by the dead. Ceasefire and accord should not be impossible – both sides are human, after all, and there is a far greater battle coming – but that’s sadly not how it works.

Turan wants to know how Ituralde managed this victory, and Ituralde just…tells him. They’re so calmly having this conversation, when one of them is about to die and so many already have, and even so there is far more admiration than anger. This is who they are, and this is what they do. It’s nothing personal; not really. And in other circumstances they could well have been friends.

Clever strategy, though. A decoy army – Patroclus would be proud.

Turan shook his head in disbelief. “You realise what you have done,” he said. There was no threat in his voice. In fact, there was a fair amount of admiration. “High Lady Suroth will never accept this failure. She will have to break you now, if only to save face.”

And it isn’t a threat. It’s not resentment. It isn’t even a warning. It’s just a fact, one general to another.

Though of course High Lady Suroth doesn’t exist anymore. But Turan doesn’t know that.

So now they’re just calmly discussing Ituralde’s plans and how to defeat the Seanchan and there’s nothing personal in it; they’re just talking trade. On a bloody battlefield. With one of them stabbed.

“You know you can’t beat us,” Turan said softly. “I see it in your eyes, Great Captain.”

Ituralde nodded.

“Why, then?” Turan asked.

“Why does a crow fly?” Ituralde asked.

Well that’s…admirable but also very sad. He fights because he has to; because they are an enemy and this is what he does and he can’t not. But it also adds to the feeling of inevitability, the feeling that Tarmon Gai’don may be little more than a punctuation mark in this ongoing conflict. And it’s sad because of the resignation here, the notion that fighting even when there seems to be no way to win, without ever truly considering that there could be any other option.

Turan himself must have known from the moment those gates opened that he was doomed. But he had not surrendered; he had fought until his army broke, scattering in too many directions for Ituralde’s exhausted troops to catch. Turan understood. Sometimes, surrender wasn’t worth the cost.

Fighting to the last, even when there seems to be no hope of victory – the whole idea of you surrender when you’re dead – has its place. But here, it’s shadowed by the question of if it truly has to be that way. If they should not instead be on the same side, because here they are talking calmly and not hating one another, and Tarmon Gai’don is coming, and they are both on the side of the Light. Which should be enough, and isn’t enough.

Anyway, I really like this whole conversation.

And Ituralde.

Abandoning one’s homeland to invaders…well, Ituralde couldn’t do that. Not even if the fight was impossible to win.

Except he very well may have to. For now, at least; who’s to say what may come after.

Again, it’s an admirable sentiment, and an admirable mindset to be able to take, but the question is whether or not it belongs here, in this particular fight. To which there may not be a simple answer.

It’ll be a good attitude to have when humanity is fighting for the entire world, though, so there’s that.

He did what needed to be done, when it needed to be done. And right now, Arad Doman needed to fight. They would lose, but their children would always know that their fathers had resisted. That resistance would be important in a hundred years, when a rebellion came. If one came.

I really like that. He’s not fighting a losing battle out of nothing but stubbornness or habit; he’s fighting a losing battle because he recognises that it may pave the way for someone else, for a future, for a chance to win even if he doesn’t live to see it. He’s fighting so that that chance can exist.

Turan struggled, reaching for his sword. Ituralde hesitated, turning back.

“Will you do it?” Turan asked.

Ituralde nodded, unsheathing his own sword.

“It has been an honour,” Turan said, then closed his eyes. Ituralde’s sword – heron-marked – took the man’s head a moment later. Turan’s own blade bore a heron, barely visible on the gleaming length of blade the Seanchan had managed to pull. It was a pity that the two of them hadn’t been able to cross swords – though, in a way, these past weeks had been just that, on a different scale.

Ituralde cleaned his sword, then slid it back into its sheath. In a final gesture, he slid Turan’s sword out an rammed it into the ground beside the fallen general.

A last honour, between two enemies who are enemies by duty rather than hatred, and who know each other all too well, despite never having met until now.

This is such a lovely scene, just the right flavour of bittersweet.

I’m vaguely surprised Ituralde is a blademaster, though. But I like the thought that he and Turan have been crossing swords, so to speak, this entire time.

[Ituralde made his way back across the shadowed field of corpses. The ravens had begun.

What a great line to end on, with its double meaning.

Is this a Leane POV? Cool. I like Leane.

Leane would like some better laundry options, or maybe a wardrobe, but otherwise she’s more or less okay witih her cell. Except, of course, for the fact that it’s a cell.

Her voice does come through here as being very practical and down-to-earth, which suits her.

The Amyrlin sat on her stool, expression thoughtful. And she was Amyrlin. It was impossible to think of her any other way. How could a child so young have learned so quickly? That straight back, that poised expression. Being in control wasn’t so much about the power you had, but the power you implied you had.

Perception and illusion. And also a dash of Egwene Is Just That Awesome, of course.

Leane acknowledges that last factor as well, because Egwene looks exhausted and Leane knows she’s being beaten multiple times daily, but she still visits without fail, and looks like the Amyrlin she is, and promises Leane she will free her.

Um?

Frowning, Leane looked at the bars, and was shocked to see Egwene’s handprints on the iron.

“What in the Light—” Leane said, poking at one of the bars. It bent beneath her finger like warm wax on the lip of a candle’s bowl.

Yikes?

When iron melts. And I doubt it’s because the Pattern wants Leane to be free. And now the stones are melting. So much for the Tower being strong…

Egwene grabs Leane and shouts at the Yellow guards to get off their arses and do something because seriously, does she have to do everything around here?

Leane is saved. And out of her cell. So that’s an improvement, though her dress might disagree, unless partial lithification is the next big thing in fashion.

“These sorts of events are more frequent,” Egwene said calmly, glancing at the two Yellows. “The Dark One is getting stronger. The Last Battle approaches. What is your Amyrlin doing about it?”

Damn. Calm, collected, and no doubt at least a little bit terrifying. And right.

Egwene 1 – 0 Other Aes Sedai.

Actually Egwene’s probably at several hundred by now but I lost track halfway through Honey in the Tea so let’s just say she’s wiping the floor with them. (Though actually it seems the floor is perfectly willing to wipe itself now).

And now Egwene. Who is, unsurprisingly, rather frustrated with the Aes Sedai’s collective inability to get their shit together.

If even the ground itself could not be trusted, then what could?

Cuendillar, maybe? Elaida’s ability to fuck everything up? Rand’s inability to tell a joke? Yeah, I’m running out of certainties, too, Egwene.

Oh and it seems the shitfuckery hasn’t finished. Pattern, go home, you’re drunk.

Maenadrin folded her arms, regarding Egwene with a set of dark eyes. Negaine, tall and spindly, stalked up to Egwene. “What business have you here this time of night, child?” she demanded. “Did a sister send for you? You should be back in your room for sleep.”

Wordlessly, Egwene pointed out the window. Negaine glanced out, frowning. She froze, gasping softly. She looked back in at the hallway, then back out, as if unable to believe where she was.

Egwene definitely deals with these incidents well. There’s no response she could have given, really, while maintaining dignity – trying to explain would have sounded like a mess. But this way she retains her composure, and they are the ones thrown into uncertainty and confusion. And she ends up looking calm and unshaken by contrast. Not like a novice at all, and more like an Aes Sedai than any of those who wear their supposed serenity like a brittle mask.

It appeared that two sections of the Tower had been swapped, and the slumbering Brown sisters had been moved from their sections on the upper levels down into the wing. The novices’ rooms – intact – had been placed where the section of Brown sisters had been.

That seems…geometrically improbable, to say the least. But sure, okay, no Aes Sedai were harmed in the making of this horror show.

That would leave the Browns divided, half in the wing, half in their old location – with a clump of novices in the middle of them. A division aptly representative of the less-visible divisions the Ajahs were suffering.

Thanks for explaining; I’m sure I would never have understood the metaphor on my own.

It is fitting, though. (Even if the rooms really shouldn’t fit).

The chapters seem shorter on average in this book thus far than in several of the previous ones, and I can’t say I’m complaining.

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