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Yeah it's wild how early some of that stuff gets planted. in EotW Elyas Machera tells Perrin that some Aiel boys go north into the Blight alone to try to kill the Dark One, a thread that won't be touched on again for three more books and won't get paid off until Book 13.
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Mar 26, 2020 10:09
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Rereading Eye of the World for the tv show, and I just now noticed after thirty loving years that Paitr the squirrelly darkfriend who talks to Rand and Mat is the same Paitr who shows up much, much later in Amador. Other than the lady with the burning knife, who I remember from past readings, are there any other minor characters who show up that many books later.
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Apr 7, 2020 03:37
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Brolander posted:I wonder when the first "small voice" speaks to Nyn. It shows up in her first viewpoint chapter in the Great Hunt, which is, I think, her second viewpoint chapter total. Nynaeve's viewpoint is weird, because her little voice of common sense is almost completely indistinguishable from her little voice of doubt and shame, even in the text, which is why she basically walks face first into every imaginable problem. I also love how she is 100% right about every single piece of Aes Sedai bullshit while being completely incapable of leveraging that knowledge in any way to help herself.
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Apr 15, 2020 22:31
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:Unfortunately she is possibly the most competent ruler in the series. Galad for her in the end. Eh, the way she acts makes perfect sense if viewed from the Game of Houses viewpoint, where Faile is a nobles daughter making a political play for an up and coming lordling, and Perrin is a player who keeps signaling his interest for having a politically powerful mistress on the side. It just breaks down when you realize he’s being honest.
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Apr 16, 2020 16:28
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There’s a point after he meets “Selene” where Rand wishes Perrin or Mat was there: Perrin, because he knew how to talk to women and Mat, because he knew how to lie to them with a straight face. It’s probably the most self aware Rand gets until the Gathering Storm.
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Apr 16, 2020 17:50
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The closest he gets to womanizing in the first three books is the mention that Mat is the only one who claims to enjoy the coed baths in Shienar, although even he is actually too embarrassed to get up to anything.
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Apr 16, 2020 19:42
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“I have won again, Lews Therin.” Still, after all these years, one of the best parts of the series.
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Apr 20, 2020 16:24
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Invalid Validation posted:Well yea but it’s still more than just kill him till he dies. Least she had ambitions other than be the chosen one. Then stub a toe and get balefired out of existence. It's really amusing that only Ishamael ever really understood what the Dark one was, or what being Forsaken was actually about. quote:Given her level of emotional maturity, and how genuinely terrified of him she was when he tapped into the bigass sa'angreal, not to mention that she maybe-probably compelled that innkeeper into going "yo dude go bangapologise to your wife" and he still didn't, I could absolutely see her storming off in a huff. And that's assuming she didn't have evil business to be about. Lanfear peaced out because it became increasingly obvious to her that she couldn't reliably pass as a Cairhienan noblewoman to anyone who was actually Cairhienan, and there were limits to how many people she could compel without attracting attention. There's some indications that she may have either turned invisible or followed him around in TAR, because Rand remarks to himself multiple times that he can almost smell her perfume when he's farting around his rooms in the city. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 02:49
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The Dark One is Bill Murray from Groundhogs Day except that there’s no hope of escape, just an eternity of Sonny and Cher and Tobolowsky, or oblivion. .
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Apr 22, 2020 17:52
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al'Lan Mandragoran is a messy bitch who lives for drama.
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May 1, 2020 16:13
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I'm up to Keille Shaogi's first appearance on my re-read of the books, and I love that Lanfear's lovely thespian skills that only work because she uses them on extremely ignorant rural children is one of those unspoken threads running through the books. "No one will suspect that I, the beautiful Lanfear, am masquerading as Selene, the slightly less beautiful Cairhien noblewoman." *Disguise immediately falls apart when she meets someone who isn't dumb, horny, or Ogier.* "No one will suspect that I, the beautiful Lanfear, am masquerading as Sylvie, the old, ugly serving woman!" *Egwene nods along at the Tairen serving lady who is on a first name basis with Ishamael and refers to the "Great Lord of the Dark" in regular conversation* "No one will suspect that I, the beautiful Lanfear, am masquerading as Keille Shaogi, a fat peddler!" *Everyone is immediately freaked out by the fat lady who speaks, moves, and acts like a sexy seductress.*
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May 7, 2020 03:38
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:I think it's funny because it immediately becomes a joke that only Rand and Lanfear are in on. I think it's funny that everyone starts to think Rand's madness is finally manifesting in paranoia when he looks at the peddler wagons and goes "Welp, that's a loving trap."
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May 7, 2020 03:48
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The Glumslinger posted:I love how no one ever points out how loving dumb and horny Rand must have been to not question it at the time. The really funny bit, in retrospect, is that the first person he tells about Selene after she leaves him is Verin, who says something along the lines of "Well, I'd sure like to pick that young lady's brain" and then goes off by herself for a while to entirely lose her loving poo poo, because of course she knows.
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May 7, 2020 10:03
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No, those were just the Dark One's touch causing the fabric of the world to warp in strange ways. The other effect of balefire is that it it unweaves threads from the pattern, and the pattern can only be woven and unwoven so many times, so if you use balefire too much reality starts to literally come apart at the seams. which is why in the Last battle when balefiire gets tossed around like candy at Halloween, there are literal cracks in the ground leading to an unending black void.
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May 16, 2020 13:10
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:You'll probably find on a reread that it's more obvious. I certainly did. It's written in such a way that it's just hinted at because, bluntly, it's none of the main character's business, and all of them had bigger things to worry about anyway. Yeah, there's tons of stuff setting it up, even back in the first book. Thom constantly catches himself thinking that Morraine is a pretty woman, and Morraine drops multiple hints that indicate that she has prophetic knowledge that Thom can't possibly have been killed by that Fade after talking to Min. Later on, she's equally sure that he won't die in Tarabon, There are other hints; foretellings that Thom and Mat will go into the Tower of Ghenji together ("Courage to strengthen, fire to blind, music to dazzle, iron to bind") to rescue someone, who could it possibly be? etc. Also, frankly, ““I could wager I know the face of the man I will marry better than either of you knows that of your future husband....perhaps I only meant we share an ignorance. Do not read too much into a few words.” is the single most obviously weasel-wordy Aes Sedai thing Morraine in the entire series, which is a dead giveaway.
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May 17, 2020 21:40
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bell jar posted:My favourite interpretation, upon re-reading EotW, is that Moiraine and Thom knew each other from well before meeting in the Two Rivers. Their initial conversation is quite funny if you consider that they're both trying not to give away the other. Thom knows that Moiraine is an Aes Sedai, and Moiraine knows that Thom was a court bard, but they're both trying to feel out each other's current guise without giving it away to the boys. I think that they may have had a small relationship before everything went down with his nephew and the Red Ajah Of course she knew Thom. He killed her half-brother.
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May 18, 2020 01:46
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:that was in tgh No, that was her cousin. Her brother was Tarangil, Elayne's dad who Thom also killed. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 01:58 on May 18, 2020 |
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May 18, 2020 01:55
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:At which time Moiraine was already in the White Tower, though, right? Thom was probably naturally wary that Moiraine knew about him being more than a court bard, though except for the fact that little escapes Moiraine I would have said she wouldn’t necessarily have known Thom. Mat Cauthon posted:Thom is definitely in my top 3 favorite characters for this reason alone. In any other story or any other Age he'd be a Hero in his own right.
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May 18, 2020 03:24
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Rereading Fires of Heaven: I don't understand why, even using Elayne-logic, she thought the elephant tamer lady would drop everything and travel with her.
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May 18, 2020 16:05
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Vavrek posted:Audiobook status: No lie; I hit this point yesterday, and it spooked my dog so much he jumped up and ran around barking.
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May 20, 2020 14:15
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Ungratek posted:I never thought it was hard to figure out. There were barely anyone who it even could have been. It's obvious if you assume there's nothing weird going on: Asmodean recognizes his killer, so it's probably one of the forsaken. Asmodean ought to have felt a man channeling or traveling, so it's probably a female forsaken. There is exactly one female forsaken who had any reason to be in the vicinity and who didn't just fall through a portal into another dimension and explode: Graendal. The problem is, it could easily have been something non obvious; there were so many pieces on the board at that point that were perfectly capable of killing Asmodean, and who plausibly could have fit the other clues. It could have been Semhirage or Mesaana, it could have been Slayer, it could have been a gholam. it could have been something weird and off the wall, like Lanfear or Moraine returning unscathed from Aelfinn lands. It's obvious if you're Robert Jordan, and you know where all those other characters are and what they're up to, but not to everyone else. It's a locked room mystery where a dozen characters have godlike powers and are invisible. VVVVV EDIT: Or that. VVVVV Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 11:45 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 10:48
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mossyfisk posted:Here's a quote from RJ's notes: I knew about the Taimandred thing, but not that he originally killed Asmodean, but in retrospect that makes much more sense than the outcome that we got: Graendal doing it, while plausible, doesn't really add anything to the larger narrative, while Taimandred killing Asmodean makes Asmodean's death another clue to the identity of Taimandred. Demandred killed Asmodean before arriving in his Mazram Taim guise because he worried that Asmodean could have recognized him even through the disguise(?*). Lews Therin did immedately recognize him through the disguise, but it's not like Demandred could have known that, since Rand doesn't even know that. *It's not really clear if Demandred was initially supposed to be disguised with the power using an inverted weave as Mazrim Taim, since he apparently didn't look enough like him to fool Davram Bashere, but it's possible that he really did it but weaves of the power couldn't fake a beard so he ended up with a half-assed disguise.
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May 26, 2020 19:48
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Invalid Validation posted:I Lews Therin ever wrong in Rands head? I don’t remember any instances. It depends on what you mean by "wrong". He often doesn't seem to understand where and when he is. He often thinks he's still in the Second Age and that Rand is a voice in his head (which, given that time is a Wheel, may be true). There's a few times where he mistakenly interprets someone from the present as being someone from the past -- pretty much always a woman Rand loves and Ilyena. There's multiple times where he tries to seize control of saidin away from Rand which causes problems at a critical moment, although at least once it also helps Rand. There's also at least one time when he grabs the power and tries to use it explicitly to kill himself and has to be talked out of it by Rand. He's sometimes mistaken, but never factually incorrect or a liar. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 02:40 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 02:19
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The problem with Elayne is the Captain Kirk Problem, which is that for obvious and sensible reasons the captain does not go on away missions, because if there's one person who, when they die everything falls apart, you put that person in a nice safe bunker behind all of the walls and bulkheads. But that doesn't make for good television, so for the sake of narrative convenience the captain goes on away missions and we, the audience, implicitly understand that they'll never get menaced too much, because it's all in service of better storytelling. And that's Elayne. Daughter heir and Aes Sedai, adventure-princess, leading from the front and walking face first into ever danger. Except that Robert Jordan has a realistic enough take on worldbuilding that he does write in the natural consequences that come from having a daughter heir and queen who gallivants around personally endangering herself, even though her death, or even temporary absence, would be incredibly politically destabilizing to her kingdom. People die because she fucks off to Falme, or Ebou Dar, or Tanchico, or wherever. Soldiers are dispatched, there are riots in the streets. There's a low key civil war. It ends up being a net positive, because it keeps her out of Rhavin's hands and allows her to discover a talent for terrangreal and a ton of other necessary plot stuff, but she can't possibly have known that before hurling herself into the thick of it. So what you end up with, in order to have a character who is in the places she needs to be to give the readers a viewpoint on the action, is that Elayne, when viewed objectively from the outside, is undeniably very brave, but also undeniably dumb as a loving stump. And that's all leaving aside the Min's viewing temporary immortality shenanigans.
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May 27, 2020 11:19
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Invalid Validation posted:Egwene knows Gawyn for about two seconds before going off to galavant with Wise Ones, so of course they are soulmates. I think the only relationship that makes any fuckin sense in these books is Perrin’s. Possibly Min’s. Min is weird, because she speaks about two sentences to Rand, then the next time they meet literally crawls in bed with him. But in between those two events are months spent pondering the knowledge that she would, eventually, get in bed with him. Min is just weird, in general, and kind of horrifying in the abstract. Rand/Aviendha and Perrin/Faile are the only relationships in the book that really have the time to grow organically without any weird fate shenanigans.
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Jun 2, 2020 14:46
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Just got to the part where Nynaeve heals stilling. God, the Aes Sedai are just totally insufferable, aren't they? It's amazing to think how many problems they face throughout the series that could be solved if for one second any single one of them would just stop being absolute assholes to literally everyone.
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Jun 2, 2020 15:09
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bloom posted:I've been on and off listening to the wot spoilers podcast linked near the beginning of this thread and an interesting idea they float is that Jordan's original plan was to have Egwene hook up with Galad rather than Gawyn. Would have made for a better relationship imho. Gawyn: betrays his country for the Tower, betrays the Tower for a woman, betrays the woman for futile pride.
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Jun 2, 2020 18:42
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Democratic Pirate posted:I always wondered how long a sword could last in a battle hitting shields and armor until it changes from something that effortlessly glides through a grown man’s leg to a blunt metal stick with a sharp point. Swords mostly didn't get used for that by most armies -- a sword is the ancient equivalent of a pistol, nice to have on your hip but not the first recourse -- and the armies that did go big into swords generally used them as stabbing weapons (hello Mr. Roman Gladius!). As for the reason warders didn't walk around with quarterstaves: you try walking around the halls of the White Tower with a seven foot long stick day in and day out and see how long it takes you to get tired of it.
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Jun 2, 2020 22:47
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:Who wears heavy/metal armor in Randland anyway? Seanchan have some kind of plate, though I don't remember if it's supposed to be metal, I think Shienarans are supposed to wear some kind of heavy stuff? The Seanchan wore lamellar armor to go with their samurai aesthetic.
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Jun 3, 2020 01:16
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Invalid Validation posted:Also I just got to the Sharan section in AMoL and what the Christ? Why introduce a completely new culture in the last book?
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Jun 4, 2020 15:59
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I'm slowly going through the Lord of Chaos audiobook, and it is wild, in retrospect, how much Taim is Demandred. Every single thing revealed about Demandred in the Prologue and in the Forsaken's mental asides is paid off point for point by Taim within the book. Demandred joined the shadow because he was jealous of Lews Therin? Rand thinks "Huh, I wonder why Mazrim Taim's face keeps showing murderous rage every time I stand on this dais and put him literally in my shadow. Oh well!" Moghedien tells Nynave that, in the previous age, "stilling" and "gentling" were both called "severing"? Taim casually refers to Ashaman as being "severed" s few chapters later. Also, on a more subtle note, I love how Alanna gets secondhand PTSD from just feeling a fraction of what Rand goes through every minute of every day, and just slowly unravels throughout the series..
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Jun 4, 2020 16:28
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ConfusedUs posted:* Can someone spoil what the hell happened to Noal in the time between when he was gallivanting about as Jain Farstrider and the time that he joins up with Mat in Ebu Dar? I get the sense that he was doing something, somewhere, that was important to the plot. Did he show up in someone else's chapters, or as some kind of behind-the-scenes mover and shaker? Twice in the books it's said that Jain vanished during his last journey when he traveled north into the blasted lands, to try to see what lay beyond the Blight. This would have been about 20 years before the events of the books, around the time of the Aiel war. He was probably captured in the Blight, and taken to Shayol Ghul, where a still partially bound Ishamael tried to turn him to the dark side and, failing that, worked compulsion on him in order to get him to do what he wanted. He comes out of the Blight just after the Aiel War, and winds up at an Ogier stedding, nearly dead, where he warns the Ogier that the Dark one is searching for the Eye of the World, and then moves on. This was apparently part of Ishamael's design, to lay seeds that would bring Rand to the Eye of the World so that prophecy could be fulfilled. From this point Jain just vanishes for twenty years. We know that he has a wife, and that she dies at some point during this, and that her death in some way causes him to realize that he has been working for Ishamael under compulsion. Ashamed, he abandons his identity, and possibly goes hunting for Ishamael. He shows up again in Grandeal's palace after Ishamael dies for the first time. It seems as if she picked him up -- because of his fame he would have made a decent pet, even if ugly -- and layered more compulsion on him to turn him into one of her hounds, which left him with mental blocks and memory loss. She sends him to Ebou Dar to spy on the network of Darkfriends that are initially working for Moghedien, and then Sammael, to search for a cache of angreal and ter'angreal. Mat showing up seems to allow him to break most of his compulsion, and then the events of the books happen. If I had to guess, the reason that Noel's plot never entirely pays off is it was bound up with the Luc/Issam backstory, as well as the Lan/Malkieri kingship plot. It seems like Jordan lays a lot of groundwork during the earliest books, especially EotW, for a Tolkienesque return of the true king narrative that became less and less important as the focus of the books shifted over time.
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Jun 9, 2020 23:54
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Prairie Bus posted:I’ve found I really like Berelain on the reread. Her (admittedly very minimal) father/daughter thing with Rhuarc was fun and she really is just doing what she needs to in order to keep Mayene independent.
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Jun 11, 2020 14:37
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Vavrek posted:Seriously? I thought Faile was a couple years older than Perrin. Wild. She was the youngest Hunter of the Horn at the swearing in. She's basically a cosplaying hot topic teenager at the start of the books. Invalid Validation posted:Ya know at the end there Rand realizes there needs to be darkness since if there’s no darkness then everyone is kind of a zombie? Well guess what Rand? You going through the motions of doing the exact thing prophecy says you will isn’t exactly the high mark of free will you think it is. Yeah, the underlying moral philosophy and meta-cosmology of the books never really pans out, although it's possible Jordan would have handled it better if he'd lived. It's best not to dwell on it too much.
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Jun 12, 2020 02:10
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Gnoman posted:Except that the motivation of everyone involved except possibly Lanfear was not "HELL YEAH! MORE POWER!", but more "Think how much good we could achieve with this! How much greater can we become once men and women shape the same power!". I mean, they were probably after both. Lanfear in particular was gunning for a Third Name, which was the Age of Legends equivalent of a knighthood, and she probably wasn't the only one. It seems just as likely that her whole team got so geared up to make a new discovery and become famous that they didn't take adequate safety precautions, as evidenced by the fact that almost all of them immediately exploded.
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Jun 12, 2020 05:01
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:How did Lanfear survive? We see in the flashback that the thing exploded and fell from the sky. Stranger things have happened, sure, but part of me wonders if she didn't just wake up late that day, knowing there was a chance poo poo might have gone wrong. I think she just gated away in the nick of time. She was an immensely powerful Aes Sedai. Her research partner also survived, although he later killed himself from shame.
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Jun 12, 2020 11:17
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Vavrek posted:New mental image gained. Thanks for that. (No, really. Faile makes a lot more sense if she's like 17 than the 22-23 I thought she was.) If you read between the lines, she also had an extremely structured and restrictive childhood; Perrin may have been the first boy her age she'd ever been left alone with.
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Jun 12, 2020 11:22
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Right. Beidomon's fate isn't in the books, it was revealed in an interview with RJ. See, after he was offhandedly mention in TSR, the fans started developing more and more elaborate theories about what had happened to him, including him becoming one of the other forsaken or, weirdly, Lews Therin Telamon. Eventually Jordan had to clarify that he was just some guy.
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Jun 12, 2020 17:19
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Khizan posted:I'm looking for some new long audiobooks to listen to in the car. Does anybody know how good the WoT ones are? I've read the entire series so I'm okay with just picking out certain standout books to listen to if some are notably better than others. The WoT audiobooks are top tier. They’re all read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading, with him doing the male POV chapters and her the female, which is a surprisingly effective choice.
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Jun 14, 2020 01:19
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Johnny Joestar posted:yeah i have to imagine you said the wrong book title because winter's heart absolutely ends with one of the most bombastic events in the series Knife of Dreams. That's what made Jordan's death so hard; he had just gotten all of the pieces on the board into a really interesting place, and then....
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Jun 15, 2020 23:09
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