Never read this over on Reddit. That was what I thought, when I read it, but I didn’t have Nakomi at all, and it was simpler. Still, that line would have him infest the Bore, seep to a place and position that made him just like the Dark One.
I never connected his death to how the false dragons dropped like flies though, and that really redeems his final scene as intentionally anti-climactic.
My relationship with Wheel of Time is complicated, because I started reading this when I was in elementary school. A seminal childhood moment was going to a Crown Books and having some misguided clerk give 4th grade me copies of Eddings, Jordan, and GRRM books. At first, I enjoyed the LOTR riff and then got overwhelmed by the everything else. When I was in middle school, I was sent to boarding school and became enraptured with the world and started to love the Big Plot, but then hit the slog and got irritated and bored. As I hit high school and college, I mainly read out of nostalgia and was sarcastic and rude about the constant character work and worldbuilding. ("Enough about the dresses!") As an adult-adult, after Jordan died, I was heartbroken, but I thought Sanderson did a good enough job wrapping up the plot that I was satisfied. I decided after the show to give the audiobooks a shot and I've been floored now at how much I actually admire the man's madcap ambition and dedication to the world. What was once boring might still be boring, but it's really fascinating to see the attention Jordan is paying to every corner of life on his planet that he can. I thought I outgrew fantasy, but now I want to grow into it.
Your line-by-line analysis here perfectly exemplifies what I've been admiring. Thank you as always!
On this re-read, Gawyn and his Younglings are tragic and make me think of the kids in the Wire Season 4, in that they're being failed by institutions and receiving no guidance or support from any sort of mentor. Gawyn killed his mentor and is now just used for whatever violence someone can talk him into and nobody, not even Egwene or Elayne, seem to feel like he's worth taking the time to bring into the fold. I don't see a reason for Egwene to not have Traveled upon taking the stole, snatched him up and bonded him so he could continue instruction with Gareth Bryne. He wanted to be bonded to her, she wanted to bond him, but somehow everyone just decided to leave him in the wind with his Younglings to be used by anyone else. Knowing how wrong and deranged he was about everything, someone should have helped him instead of leaving it on the to-do list.
I know, I know, the communication gaps are a theme, but Gawyn did help Rand and Min get captured and tortured partly because nobody cared enough about him to try to turn him away from that road.
That's a great take. I think you could make the same argument about Galad. He was always kind of forced to go it alone because Morgase didn't much care for him. It's not until she chooses to accept him as her son that he grows as a person. It reminds me of a quote from the good place:
The point is: People improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don’t?
I think the Wheel of Time shares that theme quite a bit, but tweaks it:
People improve when they get external love and support. They just have to be willing to accept it.
My reread definitely is putting me more in the shoes of the saidar-bearers this time around. Egwene's ascension seems to be a parallel to Rand, and just as Rand fairly early on starts his "I MUST BECOME HARDER" shtikt, I think Egwene starts to harden at the same time too. We're frustrated seeing Egwene compartmentalize shit and keep it from Rand at the same time Rand is hiding an actual Forsaken and keeping his correspondences with Lanfear to himself & Mat has made a bargain with demented Djinn and come out having been obviously hung and badly concealing the fact that he's carrying the memories of a thousand dead men in his head.
My main complaint about Cadsuane is that we're told she's a legend, but we didn't get legends of her up until she was introduced. We know she's ostensibly a badass and has fought tons of power-wielding dudes, but I think if we had seen that she's an outright action hero before we saw that she was a Mean School Counselor, there would be more understanding. How many Marvel movies have we seen where Iron Man or some veteran hero is skeptical and tries to impart some lesson onto the junior hero, who grows into the role and surprises everyone? Cadsuane is that senior hero.
I see something of myself in her, too. Rand is visibly, publicly, and obviously acting crazy as shit. Someone has to intervene, but most people are too shy or scared to do it. Imperfect people often volunteer to do difficult jobs because nobody else does.
Thank you for posting this here! I remember this post and I think of it frequently. I actually like the idea, too, of Elaida, Masema and the Whitecloaks as potential Fain-saken, and it'll always haunt me to some extent wondering what Jordan's ultimate plot with Fain was. I think most everyone I read these books with in high school assumed there was some vestigal LotR style ending coming where Rand beat Shaitan with Callandor and then a rabid Fain came and stabbed him, or somehow that Rand "becoming Nae'bliss" would come to pass, Rand would become a vessel and get stabbed. When we got closer to the end, I wondered if his influence over Shadowspawn would have allowed him to actually control the DO by corrupting Shaidar Haran. Then we got his fight with Mat instead, and it's always boggled me how Sanderson dropped that thread so badly. That's when I found the "backup theory," which makes so much sense in light of what we got -- Fain could have been the replacement DO, if "there must always be one," but Rand chose right so the replacement was trashed.
There's a lot about the Wheel as an AI blindly generating false dragons, back-up Dark Ones, etc. until it generates Ta'averen that wrap everything into the correct pattern that fascinates me, because it implies fallibility and randomness to the Wheel just as the Pattern implies total order. I was a die-hard Taimdred believer, and it's undisputable to me that it was a plotpoint that was changed, but since it was, it has struck me too that there's some curiosity to Taim and Demadred both being spun out as second-to-the-Dragon, bitter men with the same facial features. Was the Wheel somehow unaware that Demadred was still alive and active and, finding his thread unavailable, spun out a new archetype?
"An effect of the Wheel, really. It wasn't the Creator. The Wheel is more than a simple mechanism. Remember the Wheel can spin out ta'veren, can spin out Heroes as a self-correcting device because the Pattern is drifting from what it is supposed to be. We are not talking about something as simple as a spinning wheel at all, we are talking something more along the lines of the most complex computer you could possibly imagine. There were at that time, two, there were false Dragons that had a chance to create a lot of disruption. By the appearance in the sky at that battle, not just in Falme but in other places, those false Dragons were taken off the board because there was only room now for one, for one Dragon."
I read the books when they were coming out in the late 90s, and am currently doing an audio-book re-read, just starting Knife of Dreams. It's been almost ten years since AMOL came out and I hadn't touched the franchise during that time, so it's almost fresh.
I think i remember this post and it's a very elegant theory, in my opinion. I see the "backup dark one" as having parallels to the multitude of false dragons, since the pattern "demanded" a dragon. Once Rand was proclaimed, the pattern's garbage collection routine kicked in, and the false dragons were swiftly de-dragoned.
I also really like the idea of having different flavours of dark one for different turnings. I get the impression that a new turning doesn't have to be identical to the last, as long as it hits the important notes.
I'm an absolute Wheel of Time junkie, and I've read and listened to the whole series more times than i can remember. It's comfortingly familiar now, but so richly detailed that i can always get something new out of it.
I'm enjoying it! I can't wait to see how the whole thing ends. Some parts are pretty sloggy though. I find it hard to remember what everyone is up to as well.
Yeah, you're at a bit of a slow point in the series, but it picks up again very soon. My biggest problem was always remembering all the Aes Sedai and their various comings and goings. I'm slightly too lazy to take notes though.
You're definitely at the end of the slog, imho. Post-Knife of Dreams, everyone starts to "come together" again, and plots start to pay back off. At the time I read them, I remember being very irritated by how much things had sprawled out and how many minor characters I was expected to keep track of. Now, I find it sort of mesmerizing and fascinating that RJ decided to do things that way.
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