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If you haven't read New Spring yet, Tor's giving it away as their free ebook of the month until 9/21.
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Sep 18, 2019 01:53
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Elayne is mostly tolerable because she's paired with Birgitte, who is awesome. Nihilarian posted:please dont spoil poo poo for all the new readers this tv show will hopefully bring in This book series is 14 books long and 29 years old. If we want to avoid spoiling things, we're gonna have to spoiler tag pretty much everything. It's really not worth it, imo.
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Oct 14, 2019 06:27
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cryptoclastic posted:My mental image of Thom was always Sam Elliott even though I didn't know his name. I think I had seen him in one movie or something, and when I read the books he just fit perfectly. It was definitely the mustache. His role as Virgil in Tombstone is my mental image of Thom.  I think he's a bit too old for it now, though. Dunno who I'd cast as him.
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Oct 16, 2019 06:37
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:I do like how flawed all of the Forsaken are, and the only one that learns a drat thing is Demandred. Instead of just being mad at Lews Therin he goes and gets the biggest army and learns to be the best fighter. The rest, to one degree or another, die because they are at each other's throats. One of my favorite things about the Forsaken is how many of them seem to have gone over to the Shadow just because of Lews Therin. There's even a point where the Lews Therin voice in Rand's head muses something along the lines of "Demandred could very well have been one of the greatest heroes of the age if I had been more of a friend and less of an antagonistic competitive rear end in a top hat." That does make me wonder how he treated the rest of them. I mean, how big of an rear end in a top hat do you have to be to make so many of the best and brightest on your side go "You know what? gently caress that guy, I'm going to go sign on with Satan"?
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Oct 21, 2019 03:34
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Rereading the series, I'm sort of surprised by some of the stuff I missed that was really predictable. You learn in the first book that the Aiel send male channelers into the Blight to "kill Sightblinder". You learn in the second book that channelers can be forcibly turned to the Shadow. And in book 7 or so you learn that channelers who are not bound by an Oath Rod can live to be several hundred years old. But somehow I never put all these facts together to reach the logical conclusion that there's probably 500+ years worth of Shadow-turned male channelers living in the Blight somewhere.
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Oct 28, 2019 00:03
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That's why I always found it so frustrating that Egwene insisted that the Aes Sedai continue taking the Three Oaths, even after it's well established that the Three Oaths do not help the Aes Sedai in any way. Since they're only bound to the exact wording of the Oaths, the oaths are almost completely useless. All they really do is continually remind people that they should not be trusted, because why would a trustworthy person have to be bound in such a manner? Also, the Aes Sedai parts are terrible because they focus so heavily on Egwene, and Egwene is the worst character in the series. She's even worse than Elayne. Khizan fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 21:09
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Atlas Hugged posted:I think the Two Rivers lads are great examples of all three ways to become a noble: Perrin married into the nobility way before Mat ever did.
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Nov 8, 2019 00:28
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Data Graham posted:Yeah but I want to know what kind of crazy. Like what did he actually do. What was the narrative of him going crazy like? What literally happened? Did he kill everyone around him and feast upon their entrails? Did he set himself on fire? Did he roll around in a pigsty? He went home and killed all of his family and friends. This is why he is known as the Kinslayer. The aftermath of this is covered in the prologue to the first book, where you see Lews Therin stepping over the corpse of his wife as he calls her name and asks where she is. How much more do you need?
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Nov 14, 2019 09:07
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I never gave it any real thought, but "easing the badger" does seem like it would fit in with phrases like 'spanking the monkey' or 'flogging the dolphin'.
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Dec 10, 2019 09:55
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Also making arrogance out of humility is super on brand for a certain type of country folk. It’s the same spirit that makes “Bless their heart” into cutting words. Yeah, this. You haven't seen anything until you've seen two old country ladies determined to out-humble each other.
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Dec 25, 2019 00:12
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ONE YEAR LATER posted:The Daughter-spare.
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Dec 25, 2019 10:52
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bloom posted:Thinking that "the primitives" couldn't possibly come up with anything new was like the main weakness all the forsaken had. That and constant infighting. A major weakness that a lot of them had is that they hated Lews Therin so much that all of their plans were designed around them personally showing Lews Therin up and rubbing his face in it. That's the cause of a lot of the infighting; they hated Lews Therin so much that they'd sabotage anybody else who might have a chance of success so that they could be the one to beat him. They ignored Rand al'Thor entirely, for the most part. They didn't want to beat the Dragon Reborn, they wanted to beat the Dragon himself.
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Jan 5, 2020 05:53
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Ani posted:It feels like Aginor just shouldn't have been there - instead have Balthamel defeat Moiraine, chase Rand, then just as he's about to defeat Rand, have the Green Man kill him. Aginor was a terrible combatant and channeler, IIRC. He only got his Forsaken status because he was a brilliant genetic engineer. I could see him getting shaken enough about the situation to just completely fumble it.
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Feb 13, 2020 20:32
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They're just a sort of decorative formal coat that's worn because walking around in shirtsleeves is lower class, like some kind of fantasy sport coat or whatnot. Here's Rand in the sort of fancy embroidered coat he's always complaining about in the early books. 
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Mar 9, 2020 08:10
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:Huh. Never occurred to me. Mat realizing that Birgitte is that Birgitte and the whole "Speak we what language, Sounder of the Horn?" thing. Rand and Lews Therin coming to an accord at Dumai's Well. Everything involving the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn.
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Mar 10, 2020 06:24
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:That's Book 11, Knife of Dreams, the last of the Jordan books. If you remove the Elayne/Perrin/Faile bits, I'm pretty sure the book is like 70% shorter.
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Mar 20, 2020 23:00
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COOL CORN posted:Do we ever find out why Emond's Field is so special? People keep saying things like "wow, 2 Aes Sedai and 3 ta'veren from one place, it must be very special!" But like... is there actually something more going on? Moiraine tells you why in The Eye of the World, when she's telling the villagers the story of Manetheran. Emond's Field is Aemon's Field, where the last king of Manetheran, Aemon al Caar al Thorin, died on the field of battle and the old blood of Manetheran is still strong there. It's why they have farmers with names like Paet al'Caar and Tam al'Thor, and it's why Mat is shouting battlecries from Manetheran in the Old Tongue in the first book. "Carai an Caldazar! Carai an Ellisande! Al Ellisande!"
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May 4, 2020 19:19
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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. Rand's friends are just as dumb and horny and inexperienced as he is, Moiraine isn't going to want to alienate him, Lan will follow Moiraine's lead, and nobody else there would just start talking poo poo about the Dragon Reborn.
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May 7, 2020 06:40
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Eighties ZomCom posted:I think an Ashaman was leading the circle at the forging so even if there were Aes Sedai in the circle, it may not count as going against the Oaths since they weren't leading the circle. I went back and reread the forging of the hammer(Towers of Midnight, ch40) and it was Neald leading Grady and the Wise Ones in a circle, no Aes Sedai involved at all.
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May 7, 2020 15:24
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There's also been two Alans who walked on the moon(Shepard and Bean), I could see 'Lenn" being a corruption of Alan.
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May 14, 2020 00:04
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Safety Biscuits posted:Third after Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya, thank you Technically they would be cosmonauts.
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May 14, 2020 03:05
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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 They wouldn't even have to have met each other to know this. Thom is definitely experienced enough to know the 'ageless' face of an Aes Sedai when he sees one, and Moiraine was Blue Ajah and would almost certainly have known of Thom even if she had never met him, what with him being Morgase's onetime lover and fixer. Khizan fucked around with this message at 03:00 on May 18, 2020 |
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May 18, 2020 02:55
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Just have Rand read the letter while she does a voiceover, easy enough.
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May 18, 2020 13:13
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Anias posted:Healing talk IIRC, the cleansing of saidin wasn't because of True Power neutralizing the taint or anything like that. Mashadar was formed out of the hatred and mistrust of the populace, but that hatred came about as an attempt to beat the Shadow by out-eviling the Shadow, and it was absolutely opposed to it. He cleansed saidin by dumping a shitload of it into Shadar Logoth. Mashadar started consuming the taint and all Rand had to do was keep the two of them connected until both the taint and Mashadar had burned themselves out. The True Power never factored into it. ChickenWing posted:I'd look at it like the dark ages, writ large. You suddenly have a massive loss of knowledge, plus an ongoing crisis keeping people in conflict and from properly passing on what knowledge they do have. Knowledge keeps getting lost, and what little remains is mostly passed on through rote memorization. You have to rebuild all your theory again just to get to the point that you understand what you can already do, much less improve upon it. There's also the decline in the strength of their channelers over the years. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of weaves were lost just because the last people who knew them died before they could find students who were strong enough to handle them. Add in losses from battle in the Trolloc Wars and such and it's not surprising that a lot of things were lost.
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May 21, 2020 22:09
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I hate Egwene the most. Sure, Elayne is objectively the worst. No argument there. But at least she's always around Birgitte and Aviendha, and the Aiel Wise Ones, and Dyelin. Egwene, while less terrible, has a worse supporting cast and she has that "proves her worthiness for the Amyrlin Seat because she can withstand repeated spankings" bullshit going on and I just can't loving stand her.
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Jun 2, 2020 01:27
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bloom posted:Despite all their flaws Egwene and Elayne both have one big thing going for them: Gawyn is a big part of why Egwene is my least favorite.
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Jun 2, 2020 04:24
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Zore posted:You could also just merge some. Like Sammael and Rahvin both fill very, very similar story spaces and have almost exactly the same plot and downfall. Yeah but they fill those similar spaces simultaneously in two very important nations with two very different methods of control. I feel like trying to squeeze one Rahvmael into both Andor and Illian would end up being way worse than just having a Rahvin and a Sammael. I can't really see any Forsaken that you could cut or combine without making more problems than just including them all would cause.
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Jun 4, 2020 23:59
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Androl was probably the worst thing Sanderson did in the WoT books. The stupid portal bullshit felt so much like something out of one of his books where it's all about manipulating the technicalities and loopholes of a magic system. Same for the "I can use a gateway to spy on the battlefield from above!" and the "open gateway, shoot cannon, close gateway" things. I mean, I half expected Androl to encounter a Portal-esque scenario that could only be handled by using gateways to throw around a large iron cube. It all felt just glaringly out of place to me.
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Jun 10, 2020 08:36
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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.
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Jun 14, 2020 00:31
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Old Kentucky Shark posted: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. Thanks for all the comments, this all sounds super promising. I think I'm gonna start with TSR and go on from there.
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Jun 14, 2020 20:04
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Zore posted:I still think the funniest arbitrary rule about Gateways is that they just instantly kill any shadowspawn who go through them. Its just so blatantly an 'oh gently caress I don't want to deal with Forsaken travelling armies of Trollocs everywhere' patch. I imagine it's an intentional design choice, because the worst enemies of the Chosen(aside from Lews Therin) were always the other Chosen. I imagine that "Demandred cannot trivially flood my research lab with Trollocs" was something Aginor considered to be a good thing.
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Jun 17, 2020 20:17
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Mat's da is also the quarterstaff champion of the Two Rivers and I could see that, too.
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Jun 26, 2020 04:55
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I think it's worth noting that part of the reason Rand is so hosed up about his list is because he's the Kinslayer Reborn. While he definitely does have his own issues on the subject that he needs to deal with, they're a bit exacerbated by the madness and the ghost in his head that never stops shrieking about how he killed his wife.
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Jul 3, 2020 22:37
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I knew Egwene was gonna die as soon as she bonded Gawyn, because there was no way that fuckup was gonna make it through the Last Battle and there was no way Egwene was going to survive his death.
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Jul 14, 2020 03:04
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jng2058 posted:Thing is, it may not have been unwinnable at that moment. The alternate future Aiel from Aviendha's vision waited a full generation to take their shot at the Seanchan, and by then it was too late. It was "The Raven Empire" by then, and presumably Mat and Tuon had gone back to Seanchan proper and unfucked the place and re-established control. The Seanchan had signed the Dragon's Peace, which granted them the lands they had taken, and the Aiel had signed on as the enforcers of the peace. If Egwene had moved against the Seanchan immediately, my money is on the Aiel taking the Seanchan's side. They were just made the enforcers of the treaty. They'd have to side against Egwene. While they may feel forced to break it in the future, as per Aviendha's vision, I cannot see them setting it aside so quickly. It would show them to have acted without honor and signed in bad faith. My guess is that they'd take the very suggestion of that as an insult.
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Jul 14, 2020 12:23
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Which is... questionable at best as a decision, and maybe a sign that Egwene would not have made a great Amyrlin, because almost every other part of the books portray the White Tower as a deeply dysfunctional and destructively insular institution. Almost every other time they interact with any other group of channellers in the books they get systematically owned over and over again because almost every single Aes Sedai is shown to be short-sighted to the point of destruction when faced with any problem not encompassed by tower politics. I feel like a lot of the problem is that the Aes Sedai are so used to being above the rest of society that it isn't real to them anymore, doesn't have any real meaning. Even the lowliest shittiest Aes Sedai still expects anybody who isn't Aes Sedai to jump when she snaps her fingers. The only thing of real importance to them is the Tower and its internal politics and everything else can be safely ignored. They're not used to having to treat people as their equals and they're not used to negotiating on any kind of an equal footing, and so they're completely loving inept at dealing with people when they aren't able to just throw their weight around and win by default. Also, I feel like Egwene had a bit of that tenured professor thing going on, where once she got comfortable at the top of the system it magically happened that there wasn't really a need to reform it, after all.
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Jul 17, 2020 05:46
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Donkey posted:I don't know that Lan would have immediately left for the blight, considering he offered to go with Nynaeve to Tanchico and abandon Moiraine only a short time before that, but that is a possibility. It was a punishment. She didn't just have to give up the bond, she had to give it to somebody else so that there was no chance of her getting it back.
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Jul 22, 2020 05:48
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Invalid Validation posted:But if it is easily broken then why wouldn’t you just have an army of warders? You could fight a war with supermen and then just let them go after. Cause the Aes Sedai eats the backlash when one of them dies, so you're not gonna find very many Aes Sedai willing to sign up to potentially eat multiple Warder deaths per battle because you're using them as frontline troops. We're talking "Siaun and Leane cry themselves to sleep for months and Egwene turns into a wizard berserker" here. It would be a great way to ruin an Aes Sedai. Even worse, you could lose the Aes Sedai bound to a whole squad of warders for some reason and watch them all go berserk. And that's not getting into the whole "Aes Sedai are too proud to just be a power source for a squad of warden-bound soldiers thing, which would be a huge issue.
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Jul 22, 2020 09:44
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Johnny Joestar posted:perrin's supersenses didn't really help him out much, at least at the beginning. the issue wasn't knowing what emotions faile was feeling, it was that he had like no loving clue why she was feeling the way she did. knowing someone threw a brick at you is great and all but knowing who and why they did it is another thing entirely and usually good to find out. Yeah, "knowing that somebody is mad at you" and "knowing why somebody is mad at you" are two entirely different things.
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Jul 23, 2020 07:17
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 13:25 |
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Lanfear's biggest contribution to the effort was indirectly removing Moiraine from play by getting tackled through a doorway.
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Jul 23, 2020 23:00
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