History Headscratchers / TheWheelOfTime

*** Regarding the point about Perrin supposedly being in disgrace: Rand sent him on a mission to fetch a specific person and bring him back. He made sure Perrin had a small army and some channelers with him in case this person was unwilling to come back peacefully. By the time Faile was captured, that task has been completely accomplished-he has the person Rand wanted and is prepared to head back to Rand (Masema offered some bogus excuse about not wanting to Travel unless Rand was weaving...which could have been solved by bringing Rand). The only thing preventing him from going back to Rand was the fact that his wife was kidnapped. This is where the subplot goes insane-the fact that his missions is SUPPOSED to be taking him immediately back to Rand is forgotten. Rand never wonders why his friend is taking months and months on a quest that should have taken 2 weeks, at most. Perrin never tries to get word to say "I did what you wanted, but now I need help with something." Keep in mind that he later recognizes that he needs tons of extra manpower, and instead of trying to find his closest friend (who leads the most powerful army known to exist), he instead makes friendly with the Seanchan who have been nothing but hostile prior to this point. He also scoops up tons of people from the Two Rivers to help fight (including Rand's own father) but never asks Rand. Also, I can't reiterate enough that he's already accomplished the one task he was supposed to do and is still not even trying to tell Rand about it. There are so many lampshades hanging on the fact that he can Travel all over the place to accomplish his goals that it gets ridiculous. This subplot goes so rampant that it develops its own subplot where they need to get grain, and instead of heading to the huge grain markets of Tear, they Travel to a place only a few miles away. It gets even more nuts when these two characters don't reunite after Faile is rescued and Masema is dead. They don't have enough people to make Gateways for the huge mass of people, so instead of trying to tell Rand where they are, they just decide to have everyone walk instead. It's an Idiot Plot that drags over five not-small books.

* The lack of other languages is common for fantasy in general for the sake of ensuring that communication can reasonably happen. Language barriers are usually used only as a plot device, after all. Or, it can simply be that the characters all know a common language with the implication that they are all speaking it. It could explain the regional dialects, as people speaking a language not their own, even fluently, tend to still have linguistic quirks of their own native language in their speech. It's one of those things [[Belissario'sMaxim I prefer to]] [[MST3KMandtra not overthink about]].

Specifically the ritual behind it. When they become sisters in a blood brothers sort of way, the Aiel woman who serves as the 'mother' seems to be physically exhausted as if she had actually given birth. The scene also suggests that Elayne certainly felt like she'd been in the womb, then born. Was this literal (in which case it would be strange, but far from the strangest thing to happen in the series) or just a result of the channelling involved in the ritual, which made the feel like it.

* How come everyone agrees that the Creator and the Dark One are male? This wouldn't be such a nagging headscratcher if it weren't for all the "there must be a balance of stereotypical male and female" stuff all through the series - even the non-anthropomorphic power source that drives the endless cycles of history is split into male and female, so you'd expect that the Creator who set the whole thing up would contain aspects of both male and female (which has happened in real-world cosmologies, the one that springs to mind being AztecMythology). Even if no one in Randland was able to conceive of anything transgressing the gender binary, why do none of the matriarchies, or anyone in the gender-egalitarian Seanchan, ever consider using female pronouns for the local equivalent of God? And to make this even more of an egregious oddity, iirc in A Memory of Light Rand realises that the Dark One actually is beyond human concepts of gender - did this never occur to anyone else? None of the great philosophers of the Age of Legends or the White Tower, none of the Forsaken who actually have conversations with the Dark One?

* What was the point of making teacups and animal statues out of cuendillar -- which evidently happened in the AoL? You'd think the priceless artifacts that collectors had in the books would be more along the lines of knives, wrenches, shovels, etc, since there is some utility in having an unbreakable tool. I can't fathom why someone would think it's a good idea to make a giraffe statute that can be hurled into the sun and remain undamaged.

*** I think the key point being missed here is that Rand(even by the third book you are seeing the signs) is actively ''going insanse''. It isn't as pronounced as later in the series, such as when the list gets started, something I always interpreted as part of his insanity but it is still happening. He doesn't make logical choices all the time. Hell, a lot of the time his first instinct choices are just bad. He admits this. And Lews Therin is already past the point of batshit ''insanse''. He obsesses over Ilyena not because he doesn't regret killing his children or everyone else he cared about, but because a) she was the first thing he saw when Ishmael gave him sanity back (which was minutes before his death) and b) because he is crazy. you can't expect any kind of rationality from somebody as far gone as him.

*** [[spoiler:My take on the Sharan prophecies is that they were two-choice prophecies like the Borderlander prophecy that had their leaders slapping him in the face. The Wyld is destined to kill the Dragon only if the Dragon goes into the last battle as completely insane as Rand was before his epiphany on Dragonmount. A cycle where the Shadow won is probably better than letting an insane Dragon unmake the world entirely. Thus if Rand hadn't had his epiphany, Demandred would have been the hero of the story, perhaps even turning on the Shadow at the end as he was tempted to. With the Dragon dead, his only reason for serving the Shadow dies with him.]]