Don’t Feed the Trollocs
The Trollocs armies are easily fed, feasting on their own dead. It seems like there should be a way to sabotage this food source. Poison it? Set it on fire? Or would that just be - ugh - cooking their food for them?
Speaking of Trollocs, with the exception of a brief confrontation between Rand and some Dreadlords, so far the battles of AMOL has just involved fighting them.
And I’ve realised that this is not what I expect from WOT. Yes, there have been a few battles with Trollocs here and there - and Trollocs vs The Two Rivers back in TSR was a notably prolonged one. But the most significant battles have involved conflict with other humans, like the Shaido, the Seanchan, Slayer, the Black Ajah, Darkfriends and/or the Forsaken.
All this fighting Trollocs reminds me of The Lord of the Rings and fighting Orcs. It’s really not very often that WOT feels reminiscent of LOTR in this way.
(So in WOT, archers are ordered to “Loose”. It’s a logical term that nevertheless doesn’t have the same oomph as Aragorn shouting “Fire!” in the The Two Towers (a line memorable mainly because the trailer came out in the days of dial-up, and if my siblings and I went to the effort of downloading something, then we were going to watch it repeatedly until we’d memorised it).)
I know this is only Tarmon Gai’don so far. There are another ~620 pages to go, and they involve conflicts much more personal than butchering. (Perrin, for instance, has just set off on his quest to face his nemesis. The plot, it is a-going places.)
But because those later conflicts were so much more memorable, I’d forgotten about these opening moves against Trollocs...
And a part of me wishes there was less military strategy against such an uninspiring enemy (they’re like pawns in chess, only less aesthetically pleasing) and more reunions. Or farewells. But it is what it is. Back to the book I go!
