#unmarkedcards

[matgpt]

Hey I was talking to Spock lately and he said something about the moons of his planet being shrouded in mystery and that there were nine of them. Have you been to Vulcan? I hear it's nice in winter.

I have not, and now I will never go there! Thank you very much for the tip.

[neuxue]

The status of balefired people is still one of the most hotly debated things in the fandom and I'm not sure why. Jordan made clear on several occasions that balefired people reincarnate naturally but are out of the Dark One's reach, but somehow there always seem to be people who haven't heard that in the fandom. It's baffling.

I don’t know that I would consider it baffling, necessarily. Maybe actual debate around it, depending on the forum, but it’s not all that surprising that some readers won’t have engaged with interview content or extracanonical material, and it is left rather ambiguous in the text itself.

[neuxue]

As someone who read the books as they came out, I'd suggest that RJ simply responded to changes in social perspectives on queer people by giving the readers what they wanted. Early parts were entirely straight; then there was titillating lesbian subtext followed by text. Only very late are same-sex relationships "just there". I don't think he could have kept it up much longer because the series makes the gender binary a literal force of nature, but he might have tried.

Yeah, I think that’s a fair reading, and a good way of putting it. It mainly reads like an attempt to add in something he felt, for whatever reason, like he should... but not something he specifically wanted to examine or focus on or make a point of in any way.

Which... yeah, definitely comes with its pros and cons. Appreciate the effort! Execution sometimes is... not great!

[neuxue]

I've been over and over the Choedan Kal. Perhaps they should never have been made. Perhaps they would never have been needed, somehow, if they hadn't been made. Or maybe they represent an alternate path, somehow, where a woman tries to use them alone and taints saidar instead of saidin. Maybe they are in the Prophecies, in that passage about the Cleansing, but the symbolism is too dense. Prophecy is complicated.

‘Prophecy is complicated’ is a great summary of, honestly, an entire genre. 

[neuxue]

I think it was here that I first saw "the failures of Lews Therin" and realized I wasn't seeing the character as people in-universe remembered him. I was seeing "Lews Therin, destructive savior who did the only thing that could be done to save the world". And yeah, that's terrifying enough for his reputation, because what had to be done to save the world ended civilization for a few hundred years. But to Nynaeve, he's "the savior who screwed up and wrecked the world". Very different lens.

That’s a really good point, and very much a part of the whole issue of perception and appearances. And also very much in line with how Jordan plays with internal and outsider POV to present these vastly different images of a character, depending on who’s looking. 

It’s also a good…reminder, I suppose, of how Rand himself is seen, and what it means to the layperson to hear ‘the Dragon Reborn’.

[neuxue]

At a point when the debate was virtually polarized between "the Seanchan prophecies are corrupted by Imperial edict" and a few holdouts for "maybe the Seanchan just translated some passages differently", I suggested that maybe there were legitimate surviving prophecies that had been made in Seanchan itself, perhaps even before the conquest. It's its own land, with its own history, as likely to have its own prophecies as the Aiel or Sea Folk. Perhaps they simply compiled the old with the new.

I didn’t realise there was such a debate! 

My immediate take was more along the lines of differences in translation/interpretation, somewhat like how we see Elaida interpreting her Foretellings in ways that benefit her, when in reality there’s a great deal of ambiguity there, and with the reader’s privilege of knowing more than she does, the alternative interpretations seem much more likely. 

And yes, additional prophecies/Foretellings made after the Seanchan crossed the ocean certainly seem like a possibility, and would contribute to an eventually divergent canon of prophecy.

[neuxue]

I have read that Harriet specifically asked for something like this, something that was outright horror instead of just...horror-action-fantasy. I won't say it doesn't serve any other purpose but as such it does the job quite effectively.

That explains some of it, then! I suppose there has been a brief horror interlude in most of the books thus far, and it does make a certain kind of sense that these would escalate as the Pattern is strained and the series draws towards its crisis point, so maybe that’s all a scene like this needs to do! (Though this is WoT, so I sort of…doubt it doesn’t serve at least a secondary purpose, if not a tertiary).

[neuxue]

Re: Asmodean, clever observers have noticed that Asmo knows information about Graendal that no one else has. Hanging about with Graendal seems like a dangerous course of action, but perhaps he was trying to set up somewhere on the west coast and ran afoul of her.

He was trying to be a busker in Portland, and things just didn’t work out.

But that is a good point! It could even be the other way around--Graendal could have approached him at one point for reasons of her own, as she’s done with the others, and then decided he wasn’t worth her time. Or maybe decided that she’d be better off letting Lanfear have him for whatever the fuck Lanfear is planning, because then Graendal could sit back and watch. I’d enjoy seeing a conversation between Graendal and Asmodean though. Really between Asmodean and any of the others...