#wot book 8

[shitpostingkats]

On the heights, all paths are paved with memes.

[markantonys]

the good thing about the slog is that because such little of true import happens over such a long chunk of the series, the show is quite well-positioned to be able to tell the whole story cohesively in any number of seasons after 4. only 4 seasons would be tricky, but 5 or 6 would be just as doable as 7 or 8. (disclaimer that there has not been any news or speculation about potentially getting less than 8 seasons so don't panic haha it's just a topic i was randomly thinking about today! that being said, i do think 8 seasons is pretty ambitious in today's television landscape, especially if it continues to take 2 years to make each season, so while we're all hoping for the full 8, it's worth imagining how they could do it in fewer.)

i expect s4 to roughly coincide with the end of LOC, so, dumai's wells for rand and being raised amyrlin for egwene. perrin, mat, nynaeve, and elayne have more wiggle room in what they might be getting up to during s4 (it seems possible the ebou dar trip might be absorbed into tanchico in s3, and perrin may have to get an invented plotline or have a later plotline brought forward for s4 since he has so little in TFOH-LOC), so i won't guess at the endpoint for them beyond that it will likely leave them ready to kick into a fresh new storyline for s5. and nynaeve frankly doesn't have a book storyline after ebou dar (she's just supporting rand's & lan's storylines), so i'll ignore her in this post and just focus on the other 5 mains. fingers crossed the show will come up with more for nynaeve to do during this part of the story, but that's a separate topic.

after LOC, as far as i can recall, each of them only has 1-2 main things they strictly Must do before the last battle (obviously i've left out a bunch of stuff, but i'm thinking of just the absolute bare minimum essentials here):

rand: cleanse saidin (only requires 1 episode); reach his lowest point, then pull himself back up again, all the while simultaneously working to get as many nations under his banner as possible

egwene: unite the tower as uncontested amyrlin

perrin: finish wolf training; fold the whitecloaks into his army

mat: rescue moiraine (only requires 1 episode); get himself in charge of the seanchan forces

elayne: become uncontested queen of andor

so if s4 ends where i speculate, they'd all be perfectly positioned to spend 4-6 episodes of s5 doing these things, then the last battle for the remaining 2-4 episodes, and boom, we've fit all the most crucial things into only 5 seasons.

i know the instinct is to gasp and insist that they all have so much else to do, but.........do they really? everybody agrees that egwene & elayne & perrin only have 1 plotline during books 7-11 which is dragged out for more books than is needed to tell it, so mat and rand are really the sticking points. but if you think about it, mat spends this time repeatedly starting one plotline but then getting yanked out of it partway through to start a new one, so he doesn't actually accomplish that much story-wise. rand, meanwhile, is on a bunch of little 1-book quests (taking illian, seanchan campaign, hunting traitor asha'man, trying to meet with DOTNM) that could be cut for time or merged into his Darth Rand emotional arc from TGS. honestly, he's so emotionally stagnant for most of books 7-11 (he's either not present, dicking around doing nothing, or repeating emotional beats he already did in TSR-LOC) that i don't think going from dumai's wells straight to Darth Rand would be a bad idea at all, if the show had to; in fact, dumai's wells is kind of a perfect launchpoint for that arc, emotions-wise, and plot-wise, if they wanted to replace some of the arad doman events with some slog events, but just put the Darth Rand emotional spin on those slog events, they could easily do so (for example, him being reckless/arrogant with callandor against the seanchan and getting his own people killed could sub in for natrin's barrow in showing how ruthlessly Ends Justify Means he's becoming).

but anyway, these are imo the absolute most crucial pre-TLB plot points of the second half of the series (at least for these main characters, i'm not taking ALL characters into account in this post) and they could be fit into only 5 seasons without much trouble. now if you've got 6, 7, or 8 seasons, that gives extra room to expand these plot points and also add in some additional, not-strictly-required-but-nice-to-have plot points like more Little Rand Quests, elayne taking the throne of cairhien, egwene & gawyn hunting assassins in the tower, and the faile kidnapping plotline. (while making this post i actually had a wild thought of the faile kidnapping being perrin's s4 plotline followed by wolves & whitecloak stuff in s5 then into TLB, or alternately the whitecloaks being part of the kidnapping plotline as perrin's unlikely allies rather than the seanchan; could be a great structure for a 5-6 season scenario, but for 7-8 it would cause perrin to run out of content too quickly haha)

[tiredmoonslut]

Me every time Egwene does anything

[near-dareis-mai]

Something interesting to me that I think fails to be taken into account of the criticism "the Dragon Reborn can be more than one person or any gender" plotline in the show is that I feel most of the critics seem to mistakenly assume that the show is presenting it as a fact that the Prophecies of the Dragon are flawed, and that the show is presenting Moiraine's personal ideas of the Dragon as ironclad fact.

When, in fact, if you watch Episode 6 closely, what you're actually getting is an argument between two diametrically opposed points of view a) Moiraine, who thinks the Tower prophecies might be innacurate, and who therefore thinks they need to cast a wider net for who the Dragon Reborn is and b) Siuan, who thinks the Tower's prophecies are accurate, and who therefore thinks that they should be narrowing the candidates down according to who prophecy says the Dragon Reborn should be.

So you've got a) Moiraine, who's travelled all through the Westlands, and heard a hundred stories about the Dragon from a hundred different villages, taking the argument that the prophecies of the White Tower can be fallible and that some other prophecy out there might be the one they're looking for. It's natural for her to take this argument, because twenty years of being outside of the Tower and hearing differing stories is naturally going to shape her mind to be skeptical that the Tower is the only authority in this, or that the Tower holds the only right set of prophecies. It makes total sense for Moiraine to put forward this argument.

And then you've got b) Siuan, who's stayed in the Tower, who leads the Tower, who knows first hand the rigorous fact and information storage protocols of the Tower, taking the argument that the Tower's set of the Prophecies of the Dragon are accurate, and that they should stick to identifying the Dragon Reborn using them. It's natural for Siuan to take this argument, because the White Tower is pretty much the only institution to make it out of the chaotic post-Breaking period intact, and from the start the Aes Sedai have shown a vested interest in ACCURATELY preserving information, to the point where the Tar Valon library has a copy of every single book in existence. It makes total sense for Siuan to put forward this argument that the Tower's prophecies will be accurate in a way that no word-of-mouth prophecies passed down through generations in some out-of-the-way village would be.

But, at the end of the day, that's just what they are: arguments. The show presents both Moiraine and Siuan's arguments neutrally, and with equal weight: it doesn't actually take a side. It doesn't actually say that Moiraine is right. It doesn't actually say Siuan is right. Instead, it lets them present opposing arguments for tracking down the identify of the Dragon Reborn, and then the plot moves right along without establishing either one as right just yet.

And the kicker is, by the end of the series, THEY'RE BOTH GONNA BE RIGHT.

Siuan is going to be right, because yes the Tower's prophecies ARE going to turn out to be the most accurate of the prophecies in all the Westlands that Moiraine has travelled to. ALL the Tower prophecies are going to come true, even if the Aes Sedai haven't interpreted them correctly.

And Moiraine is going to be right because there ARE going to be other people with accurate prophecies that will come to light: the Aiel and the Sea Folk. The Sea Folk prophecies of the Coramoor and the Aiel prophecies of the Car'a'carn are going to come to light, and they're going to be just as right as the prophecies of the Tower.

It's just… as a book-first fan myself who watched the show later, I have no idea how we book fans can be mad about this one, and I simply don't understand the criticism that this was a short-lived plot point with little value going forward. The show can only have created this argument if the show-runner has full knowledge of how the book series wraps up, a long-running thread that can only be proven in multiple seasons, rather than just a one-season mystery box. And they've even taken care to set up the opposing ends of the argument be Moiraine and Siuan, the two people who first started the quest together, the two people who first head Gitara's prophecy of the Dragon being reborn. In Season 1, they've set up an almost metaphysical argument between Moiraine and Siuan that can only truly be answered in Season 8 after the Last Battle, at the end of the age of prophecies.

Additionally, they're also foreshadowing an argument that's going to happen between Rand and Tuon near the very end of the series: what do you do when two sets of supposedly infallible prophecies seem to clash, as the Westlands and Seanchan prophecies seem to clash, re: the Dragon kneeling to the Crystal Throne?

What part about this shows a lack of forethought, of not thinking through implications? To me, it shows the opposite. It shows that they're thinking through implications so deeply that they've set up this overarching near-metaphysical argument in Season 1 that can only be truly resolved in the final season of the final episode of the show.

[moghedien]

watching the last episode and trying to get a good shot on the Forsaken statues and being like "why does it look like their are only 7, I thought there was gonna be 8 Forsaken in the show" and then my mind immediately was like "7 deadly sins?" and began categorizing

[cha-faile]

It must be so difficult slimming WoT to fit into 64 episodes, and I wish Amazon had given them just a few more per season. 10 or 12 episode seasons would allow for so much more breadth and depth! A bit longer in the 2 rivers in s1, and more of the road trip adventures. More White Tower people and interactions in s2. More little beloved scenes from the books transposed in. More room for silliness, for context, for AoL glimpses and Forsaken shenanigans. It's so good, but every second feels full, important. Just a few more episodes to breathe!!

[andorsworst]

[cxsmiicc]

picked up tfoh thinking oh yay its smaller than the last one then checked the page count and questioned every decision that led me to this point

[black-ajah-hq]

Some part of me is wondering the episode 2 cold open with Rand is quite intentional and is set up to mirror a cold opening at the end of the season…Dragonmount (EoTW prologue).

They just seem suspiciously similar. Rand dreams that he killed his friends and loved ones, then wakes up to a forsaken…

[wheeloftime-wheelofthoughts]

I cried over Fedwin Morr.

For whatever reason, this was one of the most powerful scenes in this series for me thus far.

[alectology-archive]

I saw that post about tgh/tdr being adapted and like. yeah, rand has very fundamentally different journeys in the two books in ways that are very clever and dear to me but it’s alright for television as a medium to condense stuff. that’s just how adaptations work. and yes, the two endings are repetitive - to a close enough degree that although I prefer reading them as two separate books, I’m not sure it would work as an adaptation. (I think thematic explorations and narrative points that are very good on pay offs for readers but not necessarily well-translatable to the screen can tend to be a wider category than people realise.)

[deeplyridiculouslyinlove]

I’ve already finished book 8! I think 3 days is a record — I’ll be honest that I listened to much of this book on a faster speed than I generally would. I didn’t find it boring like some people do, but I also don’t know if there were any real standout moments for me. I have no notes of things I either really liked or really disliked, which is a first for me!

I’m definitely excited for whatever happens with Cadsuane, she’s an interesting addition to the series for me. And I liked the end part where the heads of the Ajahs are hunting down the Black Ajah in the tower and trying to ferret out the rebel spies. I feel like that’s going to be a fun plot point next book. And I remain so sad about Min…

For some reason all five libraries where I have a card had the book 10 audiobook checked out within the last three days, so now I have a likely two week wait for book 10 after I finish 9. Maybe I’ll finally read New Spring?!

[thebadtimewolf]

.

[moghedien]

here's my predictions for the next two episode cold openings:

7. New Spring flashback

8. Dragonmount

[the-caracarn-isnt-a-king]

I hate Faile. The way she interacts with Perrin and her jealousy annoys me so much.

I keep waiting for her to be secretly evil but it never happens

[daisyachain]

Speaking of gender politics. There are two instances of forced-bonding that we experience from the victims’ POV, Rand and Toveine. Both experiences are treated bizarrely.

Rand is treated as rightfully pissed, but the issue is portrayed as his anger at betrayal/manipulation rather than having his mind violated. The downsides of the bond all fall on Alanna, who is in constant pain and is essentially reduced to a weepy lamp. Alanna does not and is unable to control Rand through the bond, she has 0 impact on his actions, and they are separated for most of their time bonded with the adverse effects falling only in Alanna.

However, the narrative also treats Alanna as a harmless, pitiable figure. Via Min, Rand’s hatred of her is treated as a little over-the-top and impractical, like holding too long of a grudge. He is encouraged to ‘get over it’ in a way, as if he hasn’t been involuntarily forced to have a location tag on him for the rest of his goddamn life. Rand’s experience is treated seriously, but the character’s POV shows it as no worse a crime than other political betrayals he experiences via Taim, “Dashiva”, Elaida.

Contrast Toveine, her experience is shown as intimately miserable. Unlike Rand’s resentful anger, her reaction is to break down and the restraints placed on her are extreme. Her movement is curtailed and she can’t think without it being immediately transmitted to a man who has power of life and death over her via turning her over to Taim’s faction and literally keeping her in captivity. While Alanna’s violation of Rand is shown as manipulation, a trick, a betrayal, Logain’s violation of Toveine is brute force. The evil he does is unique as seen through her viewpoint, cruel and unusual, only better than death because she still has enough will to scheme about it. Toveine’s victimhood is portrayed more affectingly than Rand’s and her hatred portrayed as more justified…yet Logain is also portrayed more sympathetically than Alanna, with Toveine’s POV noting that he’s not so bad and treats them well. Rand never internally forgives Alanna; the narrative shows that he’s justified in not doing so, even if it criticizes him for it. Alanna is shown as weak, stupid, and too incompetent to harm Rand.

Meanwhile the narrative shows Logain as powerful and callous, he forces two women into captivity and bangs one of them who is psychically unable to resist him. The narrative takes pains to point out that actually Gabrelle is trying to seduce him and he wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t want it, but that’s the point—Jordan is portraying Logain as a good, solid dude who makes some bad decisions wrt his bond-raping two Aes Sedai, and saying that they should forgive him because he’s a dude. Even though Toveine suffers more at his hands than Rand does at Alanna’s, Logain is rewarded while Alanna is punished, Rand’s suffering is both trivialized and honoured while Toveine’s is both emphasized and discounted. Kill me now