#were rand mat egwene and elayne

[butterflydm]

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

spoilers for a memory of light!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

So do better.

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

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

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

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

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

Moiraine - a woman who hunted truth before others could

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mat feels so scolded. As he deserves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*squints at the scene*

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

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

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

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

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

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

It never had been.

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

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

47. And now we are at the epilogue.

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

Perrin

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

“Have you sent for the three?”

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

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

Rand: 3 PoVs (4 pages total)

Mat: 2 PoVs (1 1/5 pages)

Perrin: 3 PoVs (6 1/5 pages)

Loial: 1 PoV (3 pages)

Moghedien: 1 PoV (1 page)

Nynaeve: 1 PoV (2 pages)

Birgitte: 1 PoV (1 page)

Tam: 1 PoV (1 page)

Min: 1 PoV (1/2 page)

Cadsuane: 1 PoV (1 page)

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

Anyway, Perrin finds Faile, happy ending, etc.

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

Mat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loial

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

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

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

Moghedien

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The funeral scene frustrates me to pieces.

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

*sigh*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minor elements I think were affect by the epilogue:

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

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

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

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

Overall top five characters throughout the entire series:

1. Elayne

2. Rand

3. Egwene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[staledirt87]

There's always a character I dislike in high fantasy books. Mistborn? Vin, ironically enough. Stormlight Archive? Don't really vibe with Shallan. Kingkiller Chronicles? Kvothe's love interest, starts with a D I forgot her name (been waiting so long for the third book I forgot a lot).

Wheel of Time, though, is one of the first book series I actually like all of the main cast, and with how big it is, that's really hard to do. Rand? Adore him, he's going through so much and everyone either wants to kill him, use him, or both. Perrin? I love his character and also he can talk to wolves sooo. Mat? Didn't like him at first but we never got his perspective until half way through the third book where I fell in love with him, and he was dying/mentally unwell the previous books. Moiraine? Girlboss, probably a lesbian with her relationship with the Amyrlin so far. Lan? I love myself a sacrifial "emotionless" body guard. Egwene? Probably my least favorite, but I still like her a lot. Nynaeve? Used to not like her, but then I realized she's just like me fr and I opened my mind to her presence. Elayne? Love the princess aura. Gawyn? Shares a name with my fav knight and also a wet dog.

[aenhanse]

people weren't lying those crossroads of twilight can really slog

[theoraclej]

THAT SEASON FINALE!

light, where to begin, a disjointed ramble of things I observed:

Dovie’andi se tovya sagain! - Mat said the words, he said the words!

And he made his own ashandarei! I hope he gets the raven-inlaid one though because I’m sure no one wants him running around with that dagger

And I know he’s going to get a massive S3 glow-up because he sees himself as MORE, now. Yay Mat!

RAND exploding the shit out of the Seanchan including Turak; nice way around his general lack of swordtraining which I’m sure will be remedied

Once the Heron, to set his path!

The interplay between Rand (and Lews Therin before him), Lanfear, Ishamael - they were besties in the Age of Legends, lmao!

I had expected the intro to be a high society polyam party they were attending, not the Sealing of Ishamael, 🤭

The Warder bond was beautiful, flowing, intimate, just what I imagined when reading these books some 25 years ago

I knew Moiraine was gonna say Lan was her better!

I’m so glad they’re back together though, legendary qpp

Nice to see the S1 intro sequence with the gorgeously woven Aes Sedai tapestry

I was a bit sad Nynaeve didn’t heal Elayne OR Rand but she DID swear to make Seta’s mother curse the first kiss her father ever gave her and THAT was cool

Hopper, my beloved! 😩 I would be chopping Whitecloaks too!

It was so satisfying to see Perrin obey his wolfly instincts already!

Elayne being the one to heal Rand’s wound was an interesting choice, and you can tell he was dazzled by her!

Book lines, book lines, book lines making me have conniptions every time one was uttered

“From birth to death I serve the Blood.”

UNO I KNEW YOU WERE COMING YA SHEEP-GUTTED MILK DRINKER

“For the Light, and Shinowa!” still gave me chills even without an expanded story behind it for Ingtar

Egwene al’Vere. I hope she earns a title of “the Unbroken” someday. Remember, Nynaeve even said that about her when Egwene was captured by Whitecloaks in S1!

Egwene, spitting out the damane gag and refusing to rain down fire on innocents, ah my girl, that’s that Two Rivers steel

Egwene, collaring Renna and choking her to death, being stronger than Renna, being able to withstand the pain of that because that’s exactly what Renna taught her

Egwene later, with that amazing shield against Ishamael to protect her friends!

Lanfear pushing Lan and Moiraine out of the ocean Waygate was very unexpected but totally within Lanfear’s lane, just to keep Moiraine away from Rand

Lanfear working to sell the Seals to Bayle Domon, which was so lmao also, and it really enhanced her utter shock when she entered the room later with the Seals all broken.

M O G H E D I E N 🕷️

She is perfectly creepy, perfect in every way. I can’t wait to see her tear shit up, or to see how she will be used in S3 and beyond

Never expected her to cage Lanfear in her webs, either, dang. Lillen Moiral wasn’t near so strong as Mierin. But we know some things are just Talents, and Moghedien is better in Tel’aran’rhiod than Lanfear

Did you notice Rand’s wound swirling with evil bits throughout the healed part? Really cool effect if you catch it

Aviendha, Bain, and Chiad showing they can fight just as well in close quarters in a city as in the Three-Fold Land; and then later acknowledging Rand as Car’a’carn

Though I’d hoped we’d get some good old He Who Comes With The Dawn in here too

Moiraine’s outstanding torpedo weaves that fucked up the Seanchan boats! And she understands the stakes - if the Dragon is gentled, or harmed, or captured, everyone’s life is in danger and that includes her and Lan

Anyhow fuck the Seanchan

Did it look like Suroth got blown up too? Does that mean she’s dead? I guess we’ll see who gathers in the scattered remnants of the Hailene!

The first “I’m not Lews Therin” from Rand

Mat taking a moment to mention Rand’s “shit hair” to Perrin while they were in the mix, lmao

That shadow ashandarei is really scary, it is a laser knife (lightsaber?) on a stick

I can’t wait for Perrin and Hopper to meet again in the Wolfdream

Speaking of which, I think Perrin’s eyes are permanently golden now

I cried at the coming of the Heroes of the Horn, I’m sure many of you did too 😭

Cool Hero fighting effects, I liked those

BIRGITTE SILVERBOW MY LOVELY

I figured Min’s vision of Mat “killing” Rand would be something like this, an accident, not an intentional thing

His blood on the rocks of Shayol Ghul…

AL’LAN MANDRAGORAN, the Uncrowned King, Sworn to the Flame, bonded again, fighting as he was meant to, just slicing through armies, snatching arrows out of the air and stabbing people with them, chef’s kiss

I wonder if Nynaeve’s “failures” and inability to channel at these vital moments will give her the drive to break her block

Ishamael’s channeling at the end was really impressive, a testament to how much more he knows than Rand

I hope that’s not the last we see of Fares Fares, he was remarkable as Ishamael and a truly enjoyable villain

And since they didn’t have the Dragon banner of Lews Therin Telamon found with the Horn like in the books, Moiraine saw to it that he was heralded with literal fire

This I can imagine many people seeing from far away, and of course rumor travels further

The Falmen sure seem to appreciate it and of course the Seanchan are gone for now

Lanfear asking the LIGHT to protect Rand at the end is something interesting and NOT LOST ON ME

I REALLY ENJOYED IT and am looking forward to a full rewatch of S1 and S2!

Proclaimed across the sky in fire 🔥🐲

[markantonys]

My Mom Reacts To: wheel of time season 2 episodes 1-4 (season 1)

episode 1

"if i had to carry water all that way for a bath, i'd get a smaller bathtub" you know what? that is a very fair point. just get a smaller tub, moiraine!

mom, #1 Lan Stan: so, he doesn't have any powers, right? except cunning and strength and loyalty of course me: of course

mom: so liandrin wants nynaeve to become red because she........doesn't want her to have a warder? me doing a great aes sedai truth-telling: nynaeve is really powerful so liandrin wants to recruit her for her own team

my dad predicted moiraine was scamming bayle domon and loved it when it was revealed that she was. as always, not too much commentary from him because he remains silent and seems to not be paying attention for most of the time, only to randomly come out with a completely correct prediction or read on a scene.

"i don't think it's true that neat and tidy things can't be worthwhile 🙄" clearly my mom subscribes more to the Egwene School Of Thought than to the Alanna School Of Thought

lan to moiraine after she is Mean to him: make dinner yourself mom: GOOD FOR YOU

when lan brings her the plate later and puts it on top of the maps: "what if he gets greasy food all over her maps?"

"ugh i hate dark scenes where i can't see anything" [scary fade appears] "okay maybe it's good that i can't see"

episode 2

my mom got all confused about rand's dream of him killing his friends and wondered at first if it was real, please pray for her when tel'aran'rhiod is introduced later

"HE'S BALD??????" all of us when we first saw s2 rand's new look djkfgjh

"they must like him here if he gets free food" my boy, beloved wherever he goes :')

she wasn't particularly fond of mat last season, but he's gotten quite a few laughs so far this season! (notably the moment when we ALL fell in love with New Mat, when he was miming liandrin locking the door)

she gave an annoyed TUH! at elayne dissing egwene's room, but didn't comment further, possibly because i'd just told her 20 seconds earlier that elayne was my favorite character and she didn't want to offend me jdkfgh

she was like "wait, is she blue or green???" during a scene where alanna was wearing a slightly-darker-than-normal green outfit, so i think it was definitely a good call by the show to dress aes sedai in their ajah colors always. hard to keep track otherwise!

after moiraine had her hand on her knife when verin revealed she knew about the dragon: "what was she gonna do?? just stab her right in front of all the others??? that's ridiculous!" djkfjg points were made! poor moiraine just kinda panicked and lost all her braincells for a moment there.

my mom was a randgwene shipper last season so i thought she was gonna be pissed about rand hooking up with a strange new woman whilst egwene mourns his death, but she has not said a single word about that situation yet! i did once catch her reading lanfear's wiki article which she'd gotten onto after reading lan's because "i just want to know what happens to him and i'm not going to read all those books" so maybe she retained some info from lanfear's article that made her suspect something fishy with selene?

she recognized min from s1 right away and hastened to add her to her handwritten character list, when other characters needed a couple scenes to get that honor, and i remember she laughed a lot at min's lines last season and she did again today. guys, if my mom becomes a min stan, i may never recover lmao (i'm mostly kidding, show!min has done nothing wrong and is cool. MOSTLY kidding.)

re: the list, i told her she wasn't allowed to google and print out a list of characters because she would see spoilers, only to accidentally spoil her myself last season by instinctively writing liandrin's name down in the "bad guys" column and making her ask "wait, so she's ACTUALLY a villain, not just mean??", rip (but i played it off as "oh she's just unfriendly to moiraine so that's why i put her there" so we shall see whether or not she ends up being surprised by the black ajah reveal)

when min was saying how she sees glimpses of the pattern, my mom made a connection to perrin seeing the past earlier, which i thought was very interesting! (since we hadn't yet learned that what he saw was actually a sending from the wolves.) min's viewings and wolfbrothers are the two major magical powers that have nothing to do with the one power, and it always minorly bugged me that they don't Fit In to the rest of the magic system (despite my apparently-hypocritical mocking of people who get hung up on lore rules etc haha), so i just thought it was neat to think of them in conjunction with each other.

mom, shocked and dismayed: MAT'S GOING TO KILL RAND???????? me: [vibrating with glee over The Great Cauthor Stabbening]

when nynaeve is taken to the arches: "so is she getting a promotion?"

there was some line during the moiraine-lan divorce that got a big offended gasp from our #1 Lan Stan, but i forget which one it was (it wasn't "we were never equals" it was an earlier one)

my dad just laughed when they first showed suroth and her redonkulus getup jkjfg the correct reaction to the pomp and ceremony of seanchan high blood

episode 3

when the aes sedai were saying nynaeve was ready to take the test my mom was like "NO SHE ISN'T!!!!" and was pressed about them rushing her into it

during the bandit attack in the test: "boy, i wouldn't want to live in this world!"

when nynaeve left the tower my mom was like "is this what happens in the books?!" and i couldn't reveal yet that it was still part of the test so i just instinctively said "you'll see" which is my response to everything, and she was like "no i won't, i'm not reading all these books" lmao

my dad during the version of mashiara playing during the lanaeve reunion: why is "somewhere over the rainbow" playing

sheriam: she wasn't ready mom: THAT'S WHAT I SAID!!!!!!!!!!!

she was genuinely very upset for a moment because she thought nynaeve was dead, but i think she then guessed pretty quickly that It Ain't Over Yet

scene transition from nynaeve being left in the arches over to the seanchan: "we're going from bad to worse!"

i was dithering over uno's impending death because i didn't want to spoil them but i thought my mom might want a trigger warning, and thankfully my dad went "that horn looks like it's in a dangerous spot" when they first made uno kneel, so i was all clear to say "yeah this is about to get gory" lmao

my dad wondered if suroth was the dark one which fascinated me! i think everyday negroes had the same thought, iirc. i guess it IS the logical conclusion when you know that ishy is the dark one's right-hand man and in this scene we see him being suroth's right-hand man!

my mom thought elayne might be evil or a spy! how could she! i guess she isn't accustomed to wheel of time strangers just being friendly without an ulterior motive djkfg i didn't outright say her theory was wrong because i'm not about to be a booksplainer, but i'm sure i was so visibly baffled at the idea of elayne being evil that i shot down the theory nonetheless haha

when liandrin goes to visit mat again: "how does she have time for all this? she has her sick son, she has mat, and she has whatever else she does at the tower"

when liandrin blames mat for nynaeve's death: "this lady is CRAZY!!"

mat's "is that an 'i'm here to murder you' stare or a 'light i never realized how handsome you are' stare" line was a big hit! love to see my boy getting some appreciation in this house

...............which he promptly squandered when he a) initially left his cell without freeing min too, and b) did not go comfort egwene. but i pointed out that liandrin's been psychologically tormenting him for months into thinking his friends are better off without him, because i couldn't bear to see them judge my boy!

"it's like we're in 18th century france!" was the first thing out of my mom's mouth when they went to the cairhienin party, i'm sure the costume designers would be thrilled!

mom: how did this lady from the poor district get them into a fancy party? and how could she afford these clothes? 🤨 me: 🤷👀

when logain pours out the wine: "AFTER ALL RAND'S HARD WORK TO GET IT!!"

why did my dad laugh when the inn was on fire jdkfg maybe he just likes to see rand have a bad time

mom: jeez, maybe rand shouldn't stay in other people's houses anymore me: i'm sure rand's thinking the same thing

mom at the end of the test: it's so sad that they keep getting glimpses of the nice lives they could've had 😔

episode 4

mom 2 seconds before the camera reveals who the visitor is: is her little sister moiraine? [camera shows moiraine] mom: I GUESSED SOMETHING FOR ONCE

"it's pretty rude to show up to someone's house and then say 'i don't have time to hang out with you'!"

selene: the fire wasn't your fault rand mom: well it kinda was actually

there was some moment where my dad referred to "sneezing and burning down an inn, or whatever he did" and it killed me, i wish i could remember the context bc it was even funnier in context

"i speak with the amyrlin every time i open my mouth" was also a hit! as was perrin asking if he would turn into a wolf and elyas saying "don't be stupid"

mom when moiraine waltzes into the foregate dressed to the nines: i thought she wanted to keep a low profile

just earlier that day we'd been bemoaning the lack of pockets in women's clothing, as one does, so my mom was like "[delighted] now THAT'S a pocket!" when moiraine fit a whole-ass knife into the pocket of her fancy dress. WOT costumers understand the importance of giving girls pockets! lanfear's outfits have a lot too

my dad said "she seems like a bad guy" about selene during the mountaintop scene, he been knew! but he ended up falling asleep and missing the reveal that he was right

meanwhile, mom: "i'm just waiting for a monster to crawl up that cliff and get them"

when alanna & co go through lan's bags to get the poem: "aww, i thought they were his friends! 😔"

mom: too bad moiraine won't just ask her sister about rand, she talked to him at the party! anvaere: so if you want to know where that redheaded boy is, you'll have to ask me very nicely over tea mom: [just as smug as anvaere]

when ishy shows up at min's room: "how is he EVERYWHERE????"

she didn't seem TOO surprised when liandrin attacked the girls, and she clocked that liandrin was working for ishy after this scene with min (or rather, she asked me if that was the case and i said "you'll see")

she let out the fondest chuckle when rand was like "[choking back tears] i'm going to leave now, thank you" he is BABY YOUR HONOR!!!

as the Lanfear Reveal started my mom said "i just knew she was evil" so that must be why she was so silent on the relationship and so un-judgmental of rand, she must've clocked selene's Bad Vibes from the start! or else she retained something from reading lanfear's wiki article a while back lmao

even so, she went "OH MY GOSH!!!!" and clapped her hands over her mouth in shock when moiraine slit lanfear's throat, which i think is one of her biggest reactions to anything in either season so far! the initial stabbing, zero reaction, but the followup throat-slitting, freakout.

the "i'm a monster too" line + Undead Lanfear Moment has her CONVINCED that forsaken are some kind of creatures or zombies, i'm trying to explain they're just humans who are really powerful and evil haha

at the final shot of lanfear: "i'm going to have nightmares! i'll have to go read my murder mystery to calm down before bed." duality of woman

[toastandjamie]

You know what, fuck it. Wheel of Time characters ghost hunting.

Rand does not necessarily believe in ghosts but if there is a ghost he Will try to punch it; but only because it scared one of his friends.

Mat goes in making fun of the whole thing but he’s absolutely terrified the whole time, he jumps at every noise but will deny it to his grave.

Perrin does not believe in ghosts but he does believe in the lack of structural integrity to abandoned buildings and is not happy about it.

Egwene does not believe in ghosts but she owns a ridiculous amount of ghost hunting equipment and takes the whole investigation very seriously despite this.

Nynaeve does not believe in ghosts, thinks your stupid for believing in ghosts, and is only coming to make sure no one hurts themselves.

Elayne surprisingly does believe in ghosts, though she’s very scientific about it. She will prove ghosts are real and refuses to hear otherwise.

Tuon does not believe in “ghosts” don’t be ridiculous that’s a children’s story- demons however-

Avienda does believe in ghosts and thinks doing investigations are extremely rude and disrespectful to the spirits

Faile does not believe in ghosts and is only here because Perrin is here.

Min does believe in ghosts and has in fact seen ghosts, she nearly broke Mat’s arm when he teased her about performing a seance

Gawyn does not believe in ghosts and didn’t want to come, but upon hearing Rand was going to be there he insisted on coming to “protect” Egwene. He spends the entire night glaring at Rand.

Galad does not believe in ghosts but if they Were real it would be wrong to disturb them. He declines coming on principle.

Berelain doesn’t believe in ghosts but was half tempted to go just to annoy Faile, she decided it was too much effort and stayed home with Galad.

Morraine, Lan and Suian all don’t believe in ghosts and think that everyone’s wasting time to doing something so ridiculous

Thom does not believe in ghosts but pretends he does so he can tell scary stories to the boys and scare them because they intrinsically believe everything he says. He finds this very funny.

[jackoshadows]

I just loved that the way Ryma from the Yellow Ajah attacked the Seanchan was by twisting the bodies of the Sul'dam and others. Using what she knows of healing weaves to attack. If these were the Greens we would have seen fireballs, but because she is Yellow we get a different kind of fight. It was amazing. This is the kind of writing I want to see more of.

Really enjoyed this episode. Egwene and Renna, Elayne and Nynaene, Mat and Rand. Just Perrin missing but let's just assume he was cuddling Hopper and having some happy times unlike everyone else.

[agardenandlibrary]

Puzzled, [Rand] stared at [Egwene]. "[Elayne] wanted to go. I'd have had tie her up to stop her. Besides, she'll be safer in Tanchico than near me or Mat—if we are going to attract bubbles of evil the way Moiraine says. You would be, too."

"That isn't what I mean at all. Of course she wanted to go. And you had no right to stop her. But why didn't you tell her you wished she would stay?"

"She wanted to go," he repeated, and grew more confused when she rolled her eyes as if he were speaking gibberish. If he had no right to stop Elayne, and she wanted to go, why was he supposed to try to talk her out of it? Especially when she was safer gone.

Rand, you're doing great, sweetie, no notes.

[jaqobis]

sorting out some finale impressions after sleeping on it

it's like.

moiraine being able to burn the ships despite the oaths; the protracted scene of renna's murder; perrin going into a rage and killing bornhald senior; rand one-shotting turak etc; mat stabbing people left and right with the dagger; nynaeve torturing the sul'dam but that plot coming to nothing (returning to that in a moment). like i read the interview, i know what the rand scene referenced. i can imagine the perrin scene was buildup for fear of the wolf. it's not that i just don't get it.

but like did dain necessarily need Valid Reason to hate perrin lol. again, i can see what they're doing. but What If The Whitecloaks Were Here To Fight The Seanchan -- which, yeah, they do oppose the seanchan in the books. but the specific framing of them to help and whatever, when no one else was willing to. specifically also throwing siuan under the bus bc allegedly the amyrlin also got a letter about this. even if this turns out to be a lie, this is the standing narrative for now, and in combination with everything else they did with siuan this season, yikes.

i read the interview, i know what the rand thing was referencing, but also that's a scene of rand acting in self-defense against darkfriends that were literally about to murder him. if he'd struck a second later, or waited, they might have succeeded. more importantly that's where he's in a situation where people have been trying to murder him literally day and night for, like, months. he hasn't slept in as long. the context is totally different. there is also a rand scene in TFOH where he talks about how it feels unfair to use saidin against non-channelers. you can just as easily argue that he Wouldn't do this.

i actually, personally, think it's very important for the egwene/rand parallels that her friends were there to save her from the seanchan, and that he later has to save himself from the box. i also think it was important for her development that she could know she has friends who would and do come for her. i also personally find that narrative much more satisfying, cool as her Moment was. i'd been spoiled about her killing renna going in, and like we can discuss morality whether rj was Right to ask if revenge is justice or if it's More Right for egwene to kill renna, we'd be here forever. i'm not really looking to comment on that. it is kind of a weird vibe to remove a meditation on violence, however, in a series that is anti-war, in a finale that seemed to make a lot of choices to depict and make this battle Cool, etc. that had us watch renna die for quite a long moment. renna certainly got what was coming to her, but idk.

Violence Is Cool. Traumatic Experiences Lead To Empowering Moments. that's the vibe it's giving.

lan continued to be used just to prop up moiraine and explain how she's feeling and talk about how good she is. at least daniel henney got a pretty cool fight scene!

tbf leaning on the whitecloaks and ishamael as sad and sympathetic has sanderson written all over it

making the sul'dam weak channelers seems to lose some of the hypocrisy central to the seanchan empire; losing some of the hypocrisy and deep societal rot undercuts the commentary on institutional-level change needed to remove the damane system. combined with the deaths of both collared sul'dams, that secret also goes lost.

(they certainly might bring it back and address it later, but arguing that It's 100% Coming, Shut Up & Stop Whining is just as much of a bad faith argument as claiming the show sucks bc hurin isn't in it. i can only comment to what exists now. also, frankly, i've been told things i was criticising previously were OBVIOUSLY going to be addressed in the finale and. weren't? so like.)

nynaeve really was allowed to accomplish nothing useful huh. no speech about justice, no part of the successful figuring out how to uncollar, no healing, no protecting her friends from forsaken, nothing. for all that elayne was immediately walking around everywhere after her dramatic wound, they could've just. let nynaeve do that.

like i obviously understand that they're showing the block is a real problem, which it is, but this is a choice that was made.

also not a single mention of ryma after her big sacrifice huh. it would add approximately 5 seconds to runtime for the wondergirls to talk about saving egwene and ryma at any point.

loial's speech about them all being heroes + mat's hero of the horn thing + crowds cheering (yes i remember the end of tdr) + etc etc really building up this idea of Heroism As Cool. could be something they'll work to subvert later but it's certainly an element that existed in the books at this point. that they've stripped out.

also like why even bother destroying the heron mark sword without the buildup of why it matters to rand or why its destruction was narratively impactful. unearned. rand saying he won't serve ishamael in a thousand lifetimes, unearned. there were plenty of other moments that didn't feel earned to me that escape me now, which. a shame!

i've already rb'd a post that laid out my feelings about rand thus far pretty well so i'll mostly spare y'all but. it's an incredible disservice to his character to take a scene where he tries to sacrifice himself for egwene/his loved ones, knowingly opens himself up to terrible pain, and thereby gets the wound that gives him chronic pain for the rest of his life and kills him, and make it...a mistake of mat's. like. yes, we've seen him try to sacrifice himself at the eye. there's nothing wrong with repeating this beat? it's called a consistent character trait. it was already a subversion of the conceit of a 1v1 op heroic battle. they tried to fix something that didn't need fixing, to make a point it was already making. also rand just immediately up and about after getting this wound, even with healing, where he was out for days in the book. it just doesn't bode super well for depiction of chronic pain sufferer rand al'thor. i don't doubt they intend to show us the wound breaking open etc etc but you're also undercutting significance on multiple levels out the gate. it bothers me! but i'm chronically ill with chronic pain so i'm not going to pretend this is some coldly logical clear-eyed opinion.

also perrin killing bornhald sr the same way he killed laila. except it's not even an immediate heat of the moment in the same way, he had to go out and find bornhald sr and stab him repeatedly and be held back. like i love hopper too (another death that felt really. gratuitous in handling.) but christ's sake. it's sure a Look.

tl;dr the themes??? ? ? the themes ???? ? ? and then i remember the sanderson of it all and i understand lmao.

[starkdirewolflove]

The Wheel of Time thoughts

Im really loving season 2 so far, it’s much faster paced than season 1 and we’re digging into the characters emotions and motivations more. (I haven’t read the books so this is show only).

The last episode was brilliant and had so much going on but that was really Egwene’s episode like episode 3 was Nynaeve’s episode. Watching Egwene go through so much physical and mental torture was tough but as Loial said there is steel beneath the sweet exterior and she will survive this. There are also so many of her friends planning to rescue her: Loial wants to break her out of the kennels, Nynaeve and Elayne are working out how to remove the collar and won’t leave without her, Perrin is close by with Aviendha planning to rescue his friends from the Seanchan which will include Egwene once he knows she’s there and Rand will be on his way as soon as he has his meeting with the Amyrlin Seat. One of the scenes between Egwene and Renna I found interesting was after she got Egwene to use the One Power to burn down the tree she seemed so excited and happy like they really bonded so when she told Egwene she deserved a drink but Egwene fell back in agony because she wanted to attack Renna again, her face just dropped. Like she thought they were friends now and when that didn’t happen that’s when she turned physically violent for the first time, Renna said Egwene can’t hurt her but I think Egwene’s rejection in that moment hurt and that’s when she stopped trying to “cultivate a friendship.” There is going to be such a showdown between those two when Egwene gets rid of the collar and can fight back.

Lanfear/Selene has been an interesting new addition to the cast, I knew from the first sneak peek of her scene with Rand when she tells him if he wants something to take it that she was gonna be evil/a villain but she’s a brilliant villain. Love her calling Ishamael “Ishy” and banishing him from Rand’s dreams and the way she won Liandrin over to her side instead of Ishamael. Lanfear is definitely a femme fatale and is gonna stir things up with both sides.

Liandrin seems close to unraveling now. I think she knows it’s only a matter of time before her true nature is revealed, when she said Elayne was a complication she knew her plan was fucked but she couldn’t back down. Selling Nynaeve and Egwene to the Seanchan she could’ve explained their absence by saying Nynaeve left because of what happened to her in The Arches and Egwene went with her because she was so grief stricken when she thought Nynaeve died that she didn’t want to lose her again, but having the Daughter-Heir of Andor go missing too is one lie too many. All it takes is someone to send word to the Queen asking when her daughter is coming back to the White Tower and there’ll be an uproar. We also found out a bit more about Liandrin’s backstory from Lanfear and why she hates men so much, her life sounds pretty fucked up like and then her reward for swearing to the dark was that her son gets to live but as Lanfear said “this isn’t life.” He’s sick, bedridden, too old and can’t even speak and Liandrin couldn’t watch as Lanfear mercy killed him to “set her free.” I actually gasped when I saw Liandrin at the gathering of Aes Sedai in Cairhien because it’s all gonna blow up next week with her being in the same place as Rand, Mat, Min and Moiraine as well as the two Brown Ajah Verin and Yasicca being onto her now. She looked really panicked when she was trying to find out why the Amyrlin was in Cairhien with 14 Aes Sedai.

Moiraine has been through the ringer this season, she’s trying to cope with being Stilled and having an existential crisis that everything she has been doing for the last 20 years has been wrong and only helped the Dark instead of defeating it. Like that is some heavy burdens, but I think she has being going about things so wrong this season by keeping everyone at arms length and pushing away people who care about her. I know she’s trying to protect Lan because she thinks she’s going to die in this fight against the Dark and she doesn’t want him to feel her death through the bond and end up like Stepin but she should trust him more than she has this season, he’s been her best friend for 20 years, always has her back and would literally die for her, I hope they have a proper reunion next week. There seems to be a thaw with Moiraine and her family after she apologised for how she’s been treating them, like her nephew adores her and her sister still loves her even though there’s some unresolved issues between them but they’re still going to support her even if they don’t know what’s going on. Moiraine has obviously been in contact with Siuan since there was a letter with her seal on the writing desk. It was like a scene from some Victorian romance drama watching Moiraine drafting letters to “my dearest Siuan” and then throwing them away because she can’t explain herself properly, then her sister comes in and says “The Amyrlin Seat is her with fourteen Aes Sedai and she’s demanding an audience with you.” Lol that was brilliant, Moiraine’s face was a picture of shock and surprise, can’t wait to see what happens with them next week.

Lan The Man, he’s done following orders and is taking action to protect Moiraine whether she wants him to or not. He’s been tagging along with Alanna and her warders as if they have him on suicide watch but he’s been figuring out his next move in the fight against the dark and how best to help Moiraine. I can’t believe that Alanna, Maksim and Ihvon actually thought Lan was a dark friend but their confrontation helped move things along. Alanna translated the prophecy about Lanfear, Lan found out where the Amyrlin was and got them to go with him to get her for Moiraine but he also had to tell them about Rand being the Dragon Reborn. I loved that Lan showed up at the end just outside of Cairhien to stop Rand from leaving so now everyone can share information and make a plan to fight back against Ishamael and the Seanchan.

[cannoli-reader]

That stuff in your post on how Egwene should have ended was really harsh on Moiraine! She had no choice, there were only bad options if she didn't do what she did.

Who says? The lady who tells us that the Aiel and Mat & Perrin are not in the Prophecies of the Dragon, who said that women were just as strong in the Power as men, and that the Heroes of the Horn will fight for the Shadow if the wrong person blows it?

Moriaine is not infallible, and this, in particular, is a place where the story itself introduces beforehand, reasons to doubt her assertions. Jordan does this a lot, throwing in the counter-argument before the argument is made.

When Moiraine first went into Rhuidean, we got warnings that the alternative scenarios disappear from your memory, that your mind can't retain it all. She was also told about the dangers of making assumptions about prophecies. The Wise Ones tell her that in every dream they had of her coming to the Three Fold Land, she insisted on going to Rhuidean, only for in reality, Melaine to let it slip that they dreamed Moiraine needs to go through the rings.

What we can take away from this is, is that merely by knowing the future, you alter how it plays out. This happens with Moiraine. She claims that they would inevitably end up on the docks, confronting an enraged Lanfear, but how or why would that have played out? Rand had no intention of going anywhere near the docks. He was going straight to the mustering ground to Skim to Caemlyn. There might have been a delay for the Maidens' intervention, but after being stalled to deal with Sulin's complaints, Rand would have had even less patience for potential delays. The only reason he goes anywhere near Lanfear is that Moiraine insisted he come and everyone around Rand supported her for various reasons of their own. There is also the possibility that seeing Rand & Aviendha in close proximity put their relationship foremost in Kadere's mind, and led to him telling Lanfear about them hooking up. Maybe if he had not seen them, and got confirmation in his own mind, he might not have bothered reporting that tidbit to her, and she might not have flipped her shit.

But even if she does get the word from Kadere, and go psycho looking to kill Aviendha, what good is that going to do her, if Moiraine does not drag Rand & Aviendha down to the docks to set up her "rescue"? Maybe if she comes after them, she pops in in the middle of the battle around the Royal Palace in Caemlyn, and Rahvin kills her, thinking she's after him. Or she takes a random kill shot which are prone to happen in the chaos of a full scale battle. And Moiraine does not get the credit, and keeps sliding down in importance as a mere lackey of Rand, and eventually completely overshadowed when Cadsuane arrives.

A bad faith interpretation of her character might suggest that the timelines branching from the docks were Moiraine's preference, having seen that fate and diminishment, and choosing to set up the dock fight to thwart her own irrelevance. But even putting the best possible intentions on Moiraine, she overlooked the fact that she forgot 99% of what she saw in the rings, and is misinterpreting a warning that going down to the docks has only bad outcomes, except along a very narrow path, requiring a lot of good luck to achieve.

For comparison, look at all the stuff Aviendha gives no indication of remembering from her own spin through the rings:

Rand's revelations about the Aiel backstory

Opening Rhuidean

The battle at Cairhien

Fighting Trollocs in Caemlyn

An encounter with a village of Aes Sedai who want to recruit her

A near-encounter with a Forsaken fleeing Ebou Dar

The Bowl of the Winds

The Seanchan (either encounter)

The destruction of Elayne's gateway

The siege of Caemlyn

All we know she saw was a version of her sexual encounter with Rand that seems to have made her think he was going to rape her, and that there would be a relationship with them and other women.

Absolutely nothing we know about the rings in Rhuidean support Moiraine's assertion that the encounter at the docks was inevitable once they were told of Morgase's death, and there were only three possible outcomes of the confrontation.

[butterflydm]

WoT reread: pre-Sanderson books

spoilers through knife of dreams

I deliberately took a break in between the Jordan books and the Sanderson ones, mostly so that I won’t be ‘grading on a curve’, basically, and will be able to judge Sanderson’s characterization on its own terms rather than just being relieved that I no longer have to read CoT/KoD Mat & Perrin. I would honestly have preferred Mat standing in a field picking his nose for two books rather than the character assassination that we got in CoT/KoD, so my bar for the male characters was VERY low going into the Sanderson books, back when they first came out.

Anyway, as I enter The Gathering Storm, I just want to note what everyone should be doing next, per their most recent PoVs in the previous main-story book, and also my general feelings on the characters as of where we ended in KoD:

Rand: desperately trying to make a truce with the Seanchan, even if he has to return women to slavery to do it. Other than that, he’s basically been refusing to do anything plot-related for the last two books, mostly just treading water instead (despite there being several plot-related things that he COULD have been doing). I’m frustrated with how Rand’s plotline has ground to a halt so that we can spend way too much time with Perrin and Mat’s pointless sidequests. Theory: Jordan couldn’t figure out how to get Rand to what happens in the ending, so he focused on Mat and Perrin in order to avoid thinking about Rand.

Egwene: she is currently captive in the White Tower and her next plot point was very clearly stated in KoD - she will be serving Elaida at her next dinner that evening. Her current plot is essentially the same as the plot she's had the last six books -- become undisputed Amyrlin Seat of a united White Tower. This is really one of those plotlines that’s good but, wow, really should have taken place over fewer books.

Elayne: she's won over the Houses and now just needs to be officially crowned and then buckle down to the work of getting Andor ready to help during the Last Battle. Proud of her, love her so much. Egwene and Elayne (and the prologues) were basically the only good parts of CoT & KoD for me. Rand & Nynaeve had one or maybe two good scenes each in that entire section.

Mat: in CoT & KoD, he lost almost every good quality that he had EXCEPT for his loyalty to Rand; instead of keeping his promises being about him (secretly) being a man of deep integrity, it has essentially become a weird fey thing where he apparently feels a compulsion to keep his word but puts it off for as long as possible first. He completely threw away all his character growth from the earlier books and considers slavers to be more worthwhile companions than Aes Sedai. Expects that the next time he will see his 'wife' is being faced off against her troops on the battlefield and is somewhat sad about this (because he's talked himself into liking her despite her being a genuinely awful person) but he's prepared to do it anyway. I am DEEPLY disappointed in Mat, for the most part. His characterization basically fell off a cliff in CoT. He does still have enough loyalty to Rand and enough intelligence that he didn't actually betray anything to Tuon during their time together -- he didn't tell her Rand was his friend (Talmanes did, sorta by accident) and he didn't tell her about his medallion (Setalle Anan did, in a very bizarre characterization reversal of her own where she went from vehemently anti-slavery in WH to kissing Tuon’s ass and giving up other people’s secrets to her. I will note that trying to ‘reason’ someone out of bigotry doesn’t require throwing your previous friends under the bus and betraying them! -- post-WH Setalle Anan is kinda Opposite Day to the Setalle Anan that we got to know in ACoS & WH, who thought of Mat as a loveable rapscallion and who hated slavery, as opposed to CoT/KoD Setalle Anan, who automatically sides with Tuon against Mat because they’re both women but is willing to have ~reasonable discussions~ with Tuon about the pros and cons of slavery and is also literally fetching and carrying for a slaver) -- but CoT!Mat is just straight-up an inferior character to pre-CoT!Mat. Jordan just... really trashed Mat in these two books and it feels like most of the reason that he did it was so that Tuon wouldn’t be required to experience any character growth because Mat just rolls over for her instead of challenging her (there is so much rolling over and not challenging Tuon in these two books. And the few people who DO challenge her are all people that she instinctively non-persons anyway, so it has no impact on her) and spends the majority of his page time attempting to appease her. And destroying a main character in order to prop up a minor character is such a poor narrative choice. Just... everything about how Mat was written in CoT & KoD has frustrated me so much. Poor writing choices that turned a favorite character into one of the worst in the series. IMO, the outriggers were the worst idea that Jordan ever had, because it led to him tanking a major plotline and major characters in his main story. Mat transforms from being a “good and great man” (to paraphrase Nestelle from WH) who risks himself to free slaves into being a selfish and weak-willed patsy for his slaver ‘wife’, who looks the other way when she reclaims ownership over all the slaves in her ‘rescue party’. Anyway, his next plan is to go north to Caemlyn to the Tower of Ghenjei to help Thom save Moiraine & then he was going to reunite with Rand, because he has a lot of Last Battle-related help that he can deliver to him (or maybe the other way around). 

Nynaeve: has not had a plot of her own in a while; the last time she had a plot that wasn't basically "help this man over here" was TPoD.

Perrin: finished his own soul (& woman) selling story in KoD; has been reunited with Faile (the only thing he cares about), so should FINALLY be heading back to Rand, one way or the other. I am disappointed in Perrin, but that's nothing new. He did sink to a new low in KoD, now officially being a slaver himself, having sold two hundred-ish women into slavery. So... there’s that.

For secondary/tertiary characters who we know about:

Aviendha: traveling with the Aiel in Arad Doman and 'catching up' on her Wise One training.

Galad: leading seven thousand Whitecloaks, having 'deserted' from the Seanchan forces and planning to work with Rand & the Aes Sedai to fight in the Last Battle.

Ituralde: working with the Dragonsworn to try to rid Tarabon of Seanchan and firm up Arad Doman as a bulwark against the Seanchan invasion.

Pevara & Co: in the Black Tower, having just made a deal with Taim to bond with Asha'man.

Tam: recently found out his son is the Dragon Reborn (not from Perrin)

Gawyn: still taking orders from Elaida, does not yet know Egwene is prisoner in the White Tower.

Lan Mandragoran: riding from the furthest west part of the Borderlands over to the furthest east part of the Borderlands, to fight against the Shadow.

Cadsuane: still hasn’t taught Rand ‘laughter and tears’, which is literally her only goal.

Loial: plans to talk to the Great Stump to try to convince the Ogier not to abandon the world right before the Last Battle.

Forsaken: Moridin has declared that no one is to hurt Rand but definitely please try to kill off Perrin and Mat; at least some of the Forsaken are all "lol nah I'm gonna try to kill Rand anyway".

Tuon the slaver overlord: being an asshole High Blood/Empress and in deep denial that, by her own beliefs, she should turn herself over to become a damane; her main goal is probably forcing Rand to kneel in front of her; general villain-type goals of invasion and enslavement of others, etc. It really is a shame that Jordan decided to yeet any potential for her character into the void. She was intriguing in Winter’s Heart. And then never again, lol.

Bashere: there was an assassination attempt on his wife back in the CoT prologue that made him agree to something that he’d been asked by “the man who spoke to me yesterday” and we haven’t really checked in with him since then.

Olver: in LoC, he was a war orphan who was a believable child who seemed like a genuinely interesting addition to Mat’s story. In ACoS, all he cared about were boobs. In WH, he barely even noticed that the Seanchan had invaded, because he still only cared about boobs. In CoT, he briefly acknowledges that the Seanchan are the bad guys hunting them but does not at all react to them similarly to how he reacted to the Aiel in LoC - he shows no signs of anger over Mat having been injured by the Seanchan invasion, despite anger towards the Aiel due to his parents dying in the Aiel invasion being a big thing for him in LoC. In KoD, he’s buddy-buddy with Head Slaver and once again obsessing over boobs (this time, leering at a slave’s boobs, which. you know. charming). The only book where I’ve been able to stand Olver was LoC tbh. He's been just a weird & exaggerated parody of Mat in every book past that.

Minor general spoilers below for some things I vaguely recall about the last three books (no spoilers about the ending):

.

.

.

.

.

.

I’ve read the Origins book & glanced over Sanderson’s retrospective on writing the last three books, and he mentioned some specific bits that were already written by Jordan, so I will probably keep that in mind as I read. I’ve only read the Sanderson WoT books once, so I’ll be finding out now if the experience is different this time around. 

I do feel like some of the criticisms that I’ve seen of his writing are already very present in CoT & KoD, though, specifically:

Mat’s character being noticeably more sexist (honestly, all the male characters feel like they’ve gotten more sexist the last few books; Mat is just the most obvious example).

Mat feeling wildly out of character to who he’d previously been.  Wildly out of character. To who he’d been in Winter’s Heart. Which took place one week before Crossroads of Twilight picks his story up again, and suddenly Mat doesn’t give a shit about the Aes Sedai that he risked his own escape to help ONE WEEK AGO. He’s completely forgotten that his little sister (among other women he cares about, like Elayne, who he had an entire book about coming to terms with, and like Egwene and Nynaeve) is a channeler who Tuon would happily debase and destroy until she groveled at Tuon’s feet. Mat’s reactions to almost everything Tuon does are just such character assassination that I can’t even acknowledge CoT/KoD!Mat as the same character as EotW-WH!Mat. His reactions just seem... so bizarrely off from anything he would have done previously. It really does feel like Jordan parachuted in a pod!Mat from a parallel world. I LOVED EotW-WH!Mat. You couldn’t pay me to be in a room with CoT/KoD!Mat.

Nynaeve not having a storyline of her own or doing much of anything unrelated to the men in her life.

Sanderson didn’t fix any of those problems (from what I recall) and it would have been nice if he had, but he didn’t create them either.

Some other things that I personally dislike in the series as of KoD and that I am curious to see how Sanderson handles compared to Jordan:

Slavery being an Acceptable Evil, especially with Mat, in particular as of CoT/KoD, only caring about slavery when it threatens him personally and not giving a shit about other people anymore (and he cared a LOT in Winter’s Heart. The contrast between how deeply he cares about saving the Aes Sedai & Windfinders in WH vs treating the Aes Sedai like unwanted pests in CoT is incredibly jarring). But, in general, it feels like Jordan decided that the main PoV male characters aren’t going to care about slavery if the slaves are primarily women which is... such an ugly look. It feels like the Seanchan storyline went off the rails hard in CoT & KoD, and I don’t personally feel like “but the planned outriggers!!” is a valid excuse for destroying a main storyline and main characters so badly. Having ALL THREE of the main male PoV characters coming to the conclusion that other people being enslaved is the ~price they are willing to pay~ for what needs to be done is...  it’s very much that Lord Farquaad meme, yes? “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.” Mat deciding that he needs to defend and protect the slaver overlord hurts other people, not Mat. Perrin selling two hundred women into slavery is hurting them, not Perrin; Rand sending the damane back into slavery... etc. They are not ‘making sacrifices for the greater good’, they are sacrificing other people. They are saying that these specific people (who are all women) are not worthy of being allowed to have free will and lives of their own. And that author putting that storyline in three different plotlines implies things that wouldn’t be implied if only one of the main guys was doing it. “Women’s freedom is negotiable” is basically the message in Rand, Perrin, and Mat’s storylines in CoT & KoD. “When we say we want to save the world, we don’t mean women.” And I did not get the feeling that was the original intention of the damane/Seanchan storyline! Which is why CoT & KoD rank so incredibly low on my ranking order. Because it feels like Jordan broke the narrative promises that he made about this storyline all the way through Winter’s Heart. I think Jordan exploring this idea (of his characters willing to sacrifice women’s freedom for the sake of saving the rest of the world) could have worked in a critique kind of way if it had only been in ONE of the plotlines while the other two plotlines were about things other than allying with the Seanchan. Mat’s character is the one that gets the most distorted by this plotline, so I would have tossed his out entirely. Perrin’s is mostly in character -- his entire plot here was that he would be willing to do anything for Faile, even vile and evil things -- but I think Jordan actively deciding to have him LIKE Tylee even as her people are carting off her new slaves in the background was a character-breaking choice. Rand’s plotline would genuinely be fine (because he’s the most reluctant of the three PoVs on allying with the slavers)... except that Min and Nynaeve should have mentioned the sul’dam secret. It’s wildly frustrating how useless they are in the Seanchan plotline when they literally know THE key secret about the military and economic might of the empire. Jordan had them suffer convenient amnesia so that he could do his ‘allying with the slavers’ plotline.

The domestic violence that is endemic in the majority of the male-female relationships in the series. In particular, I am curious to see if Sanderson ever has the female characters hauling off and straight-up punching their ‘love interests’ in the ribs the way that Jordan so frequently had them do. This is an issue that really started around A Crown of Swords and has gotten steadily worse (in The Shadow Rising, Faile punching Perrin is called out as a bad thing by Perrin and by the end of the book, neither of them are being violent with the other, but in ACoS and beyond, violence is just treated as the norm in romantic relationships). 

Related but adjacent, I am also curious to see if beating/spanking remains as large a fixture in the series as Jordan had made it in the last few books.

Women being politically/magically diminished in order to be in a relationship with non-political/non-magical men (ex. Morgase and Tallanvor; Siuan and Gareth; technically Juilin and Amathera but that feels like the most understandable of the examples).

Women being stuffed into Fates Worse Than Death while men just get to be killed off (and the Seanchan becoming a dumping ground for “out of control” women that Jordan didn’t want to kill off).

Min being a liability to Rand but the narrative keeps telling us she’s Best Girl, Just Trust Me.

Tuon being a genuinely cruel and malicious person, but Mat keeps telling us she’s Better Than Most Nobles, Just Trust Me.

Okay, I think that’s everything I wanted to note before I started my The Gathering Storm reread.

[onaperduamedee]

Thoughts on episode 4

The post-cold open scenes with Anveare putting on her armor for a day of political intrigue was beautiful. I love the way this world comes off as cruel and ruthless, and how often characters talk about it being broken.

Perrin, Elyas and Hopper scenes were the most enjoyable to me. I'm really digging their energy together and the Wolf language is cleverly, beautifully shown. Perrin and Hopper were adorable, and Elyas "adopting" Perrin makes them the first healthy mentor/mentee relationship of this season. There isn't enough of them though.

So Moiraine is 70-80... I don't know what to do with that information. I understand why they did it story-wise, but you remove A Lot of Moiraine's motivations by doing that. I'll have to WAFO. I'm very attached to the parallel between Siuan, Moiraine and Lan, and the EF5 when they started out: cutting it for the sake of a point already driven home by Liandrin's son seems wasteful.

I like that Liandrin works so hard to gain Nynaev'es trust because it makes Nyn's taking her "help" at face value much more believable than in the books (where she was frankly gullible). Nyn's rejection of the White Tower is leading her straight into Liandrin's arms and thus playing into the Dark One's hand. Nynaeve is going to feel so betrayed and her distrust of every AS will grow tenfold. The show hasn't made clear yet except in bonus material that Liandrin is specifically a DF which is confusing.

Moiraine's machinations are fun, as are Liandrin's, but the latter work better for me because we're getting so much more insights into hers. I cannot fault Alanna for believing Mo may be a DF because Mo, I love you, but you are at your shadiest here. That said, the Logain and Moiraine scene was a lot.

Where the hell is Siuan? At this point, I am assuming that two scenes in her empty study and multiple characters mentioning her absence are significant details enough for her to be doing something really important off screen. Is she on a secret mission? Is she trapped somewhere? What in the Light is going on?

I love Egwene with my whole heart. I love Nyn with my whole heart. I find their relationship fascinating but I'm really not sure about how they are being written. I like that the estrangement is paralleling Anvaere and Moiraine but Egwene and Nyn's relationship is different and it's bugging me. It's keeping with the books' theme of communication being the characters' greatest foe.

Egwene wanting to protect her friends and feeling like she failed Rand at the Eye... Yeah, that jealousy angle is BS and Elayne misread the situation through and through. Egwene is feeling useless not jealous, which is why she makes rash decisions at every turn to go help her friends.

Extremely unsure about this Min/Mat business. I like that Min is unwittingly embroiled in DF business and promised something she truly desires by Ishamael. I like less that Mat seems not to have an arc at all. They do have fantastic chemistry though so the writers hit jackpot.

The visual of Lanfear getting stabbed and replaced by Moiraine... Perfect. Between the colour schemes, the choking, and the location, they are really driving home that Lanfear is a dark mirror to Moiraine. I'm looking forward to Moiraine unearthing Lanfear's twisted teachings of Rand.

I really enjoy meeting Alanna's family and the dynamic between Maksim, Ivhon and Lan. I love seeing that Aes Sedai can have a fulfilling family life outside of the Tower because that was one of my greatest points of frustration in the books.

The Lan plot is really not doing it for me though. The incertitude about Moiraine's status is making it difficult to embrace this storyline as the characters are always dancing around whether or not Mo and Lan are indefinitely severed. I was curious about Lan getting a storyline outside of Moiraine, but he really isn't? I also dislike the idea that Lan just apparently doesn't care about their mission outside of Moiraine? He learns that Rand is alive and goes "not my problem"? If Mo and Lan were really fighting in lockstep, why is he abandoning their mission now?

As much as I love Moiraine getting to sleuth around Cairhien and avoid her terrifying sister, her storyline is dragging as well. We really need to move forward with the power thing or at least get an insight into what she is thinking because she's losing the general audience's sympathy and I cannot fault them.

The episode was tied by the theme of family in its various forms, biological, adopted, packs, sisterhood, with the biggest parallels between Nyn and Eggy, and Moiraine and Anvaere. Funnily this also sets Rand as part of the Forsaken pack. I suspect that unfortunately Lanfear did a lot of damage to his psyche and the fact that he has more bursts of anger, one ending in him choking Moiraine, is telling. It's exciting.

Overall, I'll have to wait to see how certain plots will resolve to judge whether or not their execution was satisfying here because I'm very unsure about them.

[highladyluck]

Season 2, Episode 8 Post-blog:

So I did not liveblog this episode since I had friends over to do a watch party, but here's everything I remembered that I wanted to talk about!

As far as I can tell, the two Seanchan sul'dam that got collared are not going to be found with the collar on them. (Not sure if Renna is dead or if Egwene chose to uncollar her, but either way she's not chained up in a basement with the collar on waiting to be discovered by her peers.) I was thinking at first that this had major implications for the rest of the Seanchan storyline. But really, it only has implications for Suroth, since in the books Suroth (and Alwhin, who is already her Voice in the show) sit on the information until Egeanin discovers it separately. Egeanin can still be the first Seanchan to know and do anything about it. I do think this lack of a dangling thread, Suroth's ship being blown up, and the way it's hard to get actors to come back seasons later make it more likely we've seen the last of Suroth. I would be happy to eat my words, though! Also, Egwene, Nyneave, and Elayne all know you can collar a sul'dam, and possibly Mat, Rand, and Perrin will soon as well if anyone remembers to communicate this information, so any one of them could spill the beans.

Major props to whoever hypothesized that Uno would be a Hero of the Horn; not sure if he's implied to be Gaidal Cain or not (possibly not? there was a blink-and-I-missed it moment of PDA between Birgitte and somebody but I am not sure if it was Uno or not).

I did not anticipate Mat making an ashandarai out of household objects and the dagger and I am EXTREMELY PROUD of him. Also proud of him for escaping traps! My boy is really coming into his own! I also really appreciate the classic blunder of doing the same thing to Mat again but worse- the Dark does not understand that my boy thrives when you do that. He solves his problems by escalating them in intensity or magnitude. You can only put him in a room with drugs once, if you put him in a room with drugs again he will use them in an unconventional manner to escape and also destroy his enemies.

Also props to whoever guessed that the Horn would trigger memories for Mat- I'm intrigued by where they are going with this. I hope it's not precluding the Aelfinn and Eelfinn, but given all the hanging foreshadowing, the makeshift ashandarai, and Lanfear yeeting Moiraine out of the waygate doorway, I don't really think they'd cut the Eelfinn. It's the Aelfinn that seem slightly less like a sure thing, and I'm going to be a little on edge until Mat gets the DotNM prophecy somehow. I don't think they'd cut the problematic fave; it's a juicy part, idk what Mat would even do if he weren't babysitting the Seanchan in the later plot, and they've been doing great with the 'you're wrong but I see where you're coming from' characters. But they've either cut or significantly changed the Moiraine/Thom relationship in the show, and the two relationships are kind of linked in my head for thematic reasons. I'm probably overthinking it though.

HOPPER T_T

Dain looked like a boy band member who fell off the stage and got trampled in the mosh pit.

Loved that Egwene got to face off against Ishamael! Loved Egwene all the time forever actually. I was also entertained that Egwene had like one semester of Magic College and used it to school the Seanchan on linking mechanics. She's right that the sul'dam don't know how to link properly and are weak little babies when it comes to channeling, and she should say it.

Nyneave and Elayne were great, as usual- very impressed with Elayne, who is finally living all her Battle Queen fantasies and is being very brave about how much they suck, actually. Nyneave is in for some self-loathing next season though, I'm afraid. I love that Rand and Elayne still get to have a meet-cute when she's treating his wounds. :P

I was very happy for Tumblr User Moghedien that we got to see Forsaken Moghedien. She's offputting and very gay, just like I imagined!

[markantonys]

i was thinking about lanfear telling rand that the word "sorry" will lose all meaning if he keeps saying it, and out of curiosity i searched all the episode transcripts to see how often rand says sorry. i found that, just looking at total instances of the word and not specific characters, there's usually 1-4 "sorry"s per episode. got to 2x08 and went "damn 13 'sorry's in this episode?? what happened here?????" and i clicked along and realized it was because of mat and the stabbening 😭😭

anyway here's a good old-fashioned Chart Of Inane And Useless WOT Data!

my statistician's notes:

i only searched for the word "sorry", so this does not capture other ways of apologizing or expressing regret/guilt

i excluded all "sorry"s said to mean "what did you say?" rather than "i'm apologizing", and all "sorry"s which i deemed insincere (liandrin had a few of those lmao, and also things like elayne jokingly saying "sorry" after egwene says her homemade moonshine is very strong - some subjectivity here about what i considered sincere or not)

i did not include minor characters or characters who only said a sincere "sorry" once

repetitive "sorry"s were counted individually, and this accounts for most of our heavy-hitters: liandrin says "sorry" 5x after giving her son that herb and mat says "sorry" 7x after stabbing rand

rand has a few double "sorry"s, but never more than 2 in one sentence/exchange. so his 14 are because he really does say "sorry" a lot! 6 times in s1 and 8 times in s2

the absolute only time moiraine says "sorry" in the entire show so far is when she's pretending to be a frightened noblewoman with the whitecloaks in 1x02. siuan has never said it. queen shit.

[toastandjamie]

So I reached the point in my Eye of the World reread where Rand and Mat’s road trip Gets Worse. As in Four Kings and every thing after that until they reach Camlyn. I wanna talk about about something Rand said that stood out to me the first time and only caught my attention more this time. After Mat lost his sight and the two are fleeing Four Kings we all know the “I won’t leave you. Not ever.” Line but another line that caught my attention was later on, when they were approached by Paitr and they learn he’s a dark friend. Rand’s main worry is Paitr realizing Mat can’t see, he recalls to the audience the time where one of his sheep, who had a lame leg was separated from the flock by a wolf and once separated was swarmed by the pack. Rand is using this as a comparison for his fear of what could happen if the dark friends or shadow spawn learn about Mat’s injury, that Mat will get specifically targeted as vulnerable.

What interested me the most about this line is how it reinforces a theme for Rand in the first book. Which is Rand as a protector. From the moment Rand and Mat are separated from the others we see Rand taking on the role as their protector, despite knowing that he knows very little of the sword he always reaches for it when there’s danger. Rand is always the one to lead them and to speak with others, he’s the one who stands guard while Mat finds a place in the brush for them to sleep. Even before the group are separated Rand is constantly standing as a protector for his friends, when Morraine or Lan act in a way the boys interpret as threatening, Rand is the one to place himself in their way and stand up for himself and his friends, he directly promises to protect Egwene. This idea of him being a protector, a care taker, grows once Mat loses his sight, because Rand fully takes on the role believing that if something were to happen Mat would be unable to run away let alone protect himself, just like the crippled sheep. Rand says that he couldn’t leave the rest of the flock to rescue the sheep, and they were too far away to get a clear shot at the wolves, so he was forced to let the pack take the injured sheep. This is something Rand fears will happen with Mat as well, that if something happens he won’t be able to protect Mat. I think about what Rand said to Mat after they both had a Be’elzamon nightmare after four kings, Mat crying about the dark one taking his eyes, Rand comforts him, cradling him “like a baby” and reassuring him that Be’elzamon can’t hurt them, that they won’t let him hurt them. The implied “I won’t let him hurt us” is painfully obvious. I think about another story we heard about Rand, when an injured lamb got lost and Rand rescued it carrying it back to Emmonds Field to tell everyone about what happened. Rand is always protecting others even to his own detriment. I often wonder what would have happened if Mat never got his sight back, how that would have affected the two of them.

I think a lot about Rand asserting himself as others protector, with Egwene, Mat, Elayne, Min, Avienda. How in all of these relationships, despite knowing that they are capable of taking care of themselves, there’s always that feeling he has that he has to protect them, that he is responsible for their safety and well being. Especially early on in the series. Rand gives me f e e l i n g s.