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butterflydm · 1 year ago

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wot reread: a memory of light (ch 11-16)

spoilers through the final book, a memory of light

Yeah, I am falling solidly on the side of hoping that the show makes one of the Green Ajah Sisters in Salidar the general/captain for Egwene's forces. It would just feel so much better than it being Bryne. Thoughts brought to you by this scene between Egwene & Adelorna.

2. Remember how I've said that I would try to restrain my Mat plotline-related thoughts until we actually had a Mat PoV? Okay, I didn't quite manage that but we've finally arrived to one!

Our first Mat PoV in AMoL begins with Mat just outside Ebou Dar, which is... an odd choice.

What opening in Ebou Dar means is that Mat’s big ‘moment of decision’ when he abandons his friends, the Band of the Red Hand, Olver, and the Last Battle itself to go chasing after his slaver bride... happens off-screen. I wonder if Sanderson tried to write it, couldn’t make it believable, so decided to make it past-tense so that he could just pretend there was a way for it to make sense and not actually have to deal with justifying it ‘on page’. Because Mat is a deserter from the Last Battle at this point. And it happened off the page. He was still planning to go back to Caemlyn at the end of ToM, so what on earth happened? The actual moment of Mat making the choice that will define his behavior for the entire rest of this book (and thus the ending of his character as a whole) happened off-screen.

Stop having important emotional moments happen off-screen! This is the worst one yet!

It’s so weird, because this was not really a problem in the first two books that Sanderson co-wrote but, in AMoL, so many important character moments are being left on the cutting room floor (or were never written at all, I guess; can’t know for sure either way for most of them). Like, this happened a time or two in ToM (Elayne and Gawyn not getting a proper reunion) but nowhere near as much as has been happening in AMoL.

2. ...also, how did Mat get to Ebou Dar? Grady was already in Merrilor (went there with Perrin at the end of ToM) and that's where he was making Gateways from; and so Mat would have needed to come to Merrilor to collect Pips, because he left his horse with Perrin's people (they walked through the Gateway to the Tower of Ghenjei). I can’t imagine that Jur Grady would be willing to send Mat down into Ebou Dar when they are on the eve of the Last Battle and everyone knows that the Seanchan are in charge of Ebou Dar and Grady explicitly disapproves of slavery and the Seanchan. Jur Grady is not going to help one of the Lord Dragon’s generals defect to the Seanchan (and, whether or not Mat chooses to see it that way... defecting to the Seanchan is what he's done, given that the Seanchan are still Rand's enemy at this point). And Moiraine has been trapped in amber since before Egwene rediscovered Traveling, so Moiraine couldn’t have done it for him.

Plus, the timelines were pretty tight, and Moiraine and Thom arrive at Merrilor AFTER the assault on Caemlyn happened so... how did Mat miss that, when we know that he was planning to return to Caemlyn before doing anything else? And we know that he doesn’t return to Caemlyn to take care of business BEFORE the attack on the city and THEN leave for Ebou Dar, because Olver and Talmanes are impatiently waiting for his return in the epilogue of ToM, which is when the attack happens.

So Mat has, apparently, developed teleportation skills? Ebou Dar is not physically close to the Tower of Ghenjei or to Merrilor. Did Sanderson originally write Mat as being at Merrilor with Moiraine but then abruptly changed his mind midway through the writing process (perhaps moving Mat’s post-reunion scenes with Rand over to Perrin as a result?), maybe because he realized that Mat & Fortuona still needed to, ah, consummate their marriage, and then he never got around to the logistics of how a non-channeler managed to travel the distance of several weeks overnight? Narratively, emotionally, and geographically, it makes no sense that Mat is in Ebou Dar. Mat can’t Travel.

Has anyone ever asked Sanderson about this? I did a quick search online but haven’t found anyone else questioning how weird this is. The closest I've come to finding anything like that was finding a pre-release post where people were speculating on an early released teaser version of chapter 11 and pretty much everyone in that thread did assume that Mat was in Ebou Dar after going to Merrilor with Moiraine first, because... yeah, that's what makes sense. It's really baffling that it didn't happen.

Unless I missed a throwaway sentence somewhere, there is just straight-up no explanation anywhere in this chapter about how Mat got to Ebou Dar so quickly.

3. I am having vivid memories of how jarring reading CoT!Mat was after having spent time with WH!Mat, going from someone who freed slaves to someone who enabled slavers. When I was wondering if AMoL!Mat would get the CoT!Mat treatment, I still expected there to be some kind of transition scene. This is wild.

I mean... maybe the narrative is going to... explain all this somehow? Maybe we’ll get a flashback? But right now, I am full of questions marks before I even get to the actual content of the chapter.

Anyway, we are pretty clearly now doing Mat from CoT & KoD, so I will adjust my Mat expectations accordingly: Mat will likely have dampened empathy, not be as intelligent as he normally is, and coddle Fortuona like she’s a hangry toddler constantly on the verge of a tantrum (well, he's not really wrong about her in that regard, tbh; she's basically that kid from that Twilight Zone episode where everyone walks around on eggshells around an extremely powerful and temperamental child because he can destroy them with a thought).

4. Hmm. The weird thing. Okay, one of the MANY weird things is that in TGS and ToM, it felt like Sanderson was working really hard to reconcile what Mat needed to do in the plot with the characterization that we’d been left with from CoT & KoD plus Mat’s original characterization pre-CoT. He didn’t always hit it on the head but mostly, while Mat could be frustrating at times, it was usually in ways that were inherited from Jordan. This chapter is just... out of nowhere. Who is this guy? What the hell happened?

I’m almost more confused than I am offended because almost everything in this section felt like it just... appeared from the ether with no logic behind it. I don’t even know how to react to the content of the chapter because it was just... completely nonsensical.

Like, Mat goes back to Ebou Dar, which he has decided feels like... home? Because of all fond memories he has of being sexually assaulted and how much he misses the duels that he put a lot of effort into avoiding when he was actually there last time? Okay. Apparently, that’s a thing for this version of Mat.

But once he’s there, he doesn’t actually go to find ~his wife~ until he finds out that she has people who potentially want to kill her. So he rushes to Ebou Dar (abandoning his friends, his semi-adopted child, and the fate of the world) but then proceeds to bum around in a tavern for a few hours, so he wasn’t really in that much of a hurry to see Fortuona until her life was potentially being threatened, so... eh? Was this supposed to convince me that he loves her?

I mean, he doesn’t want her to die, but if that counts as love, then I guess he was also desperately in love with Renna the sul’dam, since he was so upset over HER death back in KoD. Canonically, Mat (like all the Two Rivers' boys) has issues with women getting killed, so literally any threat to any woman’s life seems like it would motivate him here. I’m just... this whole section is so bizarre. Sanderson just... didn’t bother to explain why Mat didn’t go back to Caemlyn or how he got here.

5. You know, for all this time, my memory has said “oh Mat ran back to Ebou Dar to save Tuon’s life from assassins” (and I’ve been trying to work out when that happened and who could have possibly sent along that rumor, given where Mat was located at the end of ToM) and I was annoyed that Sanderson had decided to have Mat prioritize his slaver wife over the end of the world, but was ready to roll my eyes at it, call him Perrin 2.0, and then move on.

But Mat doesn’t even suspect assassins might be after Fortuona until he realizes that someone in this Ebou Dari tavern suspects that HE might be an assassin (even though “other Seanchan are sending assassins after Tuon” was literally a thing in KoD too -- lots of people hate your wife, Mat. Get used to it). So Mat deserted from the Last Battle for... no reason at all? Talmanes almost died because of Mat’s failures and Mat didn’t even have a reason to walk away from him and the Band and Olver?

6. When we left off in ToM, Mat was planning to go back to Caemlyn. Instead, he’s managed to teleport to Ebou Dar (with his horse) and completely change his motivations and none of it happened on the page. He doesn’t give a single thought to Rand or Elayne or Talmanes or Olver during this entire section. He thinks about his eye without ever thinking about how it got injured (because if he thinks about Moiraine, then Sanderson might have to explain how Mat separated from Moiraine & Thom).

Instead, the narration just acts like it makes sense for Mat to be in Ebou Dar even though it completely contradicts his last PoV chapter. We also get zero sense here of how long it's been since Mat's final scene in ToM -- he notes that his eye is missing, but he doesn't seem to be in pain. That seems unlikely, given both the initial physical trauma involved in the injury and also that Mat did nothing to care for the injury after it happened.

I’m just... no wonder my brain made shit up to make this make sense! This makes no sense! What on earth happened between the writing of TGS/ToM and the writing of AMoL to make Mat’s plotline change so abruptly? This is so bizarre! Why was so much more effort and page time put into showing us Galad's choices than have been put into Mat's? Why did we waste time on Slayer in the prologue but didn't bother explaining why Mat completely flipped his life upside down for no apparent reason?

7. I mean, on the plus side, that makes it extremely easy for fic writers (or the show adaptators) to rewrite or retcon, because Sanderson did not even bother to give Mat a reason to do any of this. Talmanes thinks so fondly of Mat during the prologue and Mat abandoned him! He abandoned the Band of the Red Hand right before the Last Battle! And the decision to do it wasn’t even on the page! Holy shit, what the fuck! the entire conceit of Mat’s character is “protests the idea of doing the right thing but then does the right thing anyway” and now he’s a deserter right before the end of the world.

and the worst part is that this fraction of his plotline ends up completely outweighing everything else he’s ever done when it comes to his ~fandom reputation~. He’s the unreliable one (despite always keeping his word and being incredibly reliable in earlier books); he’s the Bad Friend (despite clearly being a much closer friend to Rand than Perrin was in earlier books); he’s the one without a moral code who is willing to throw away hundreds of commoners/slaves for the sake of a single ~noble~ life (*cough* Perrin in Malden *cough*).

It is just so so ridiculous that after books and books of Mat accepting and knowing that he needs to be with Rand for the Last Battle and actively driving towards that goal (including in all of TGS & ToM!), that he fucked off at the last minute to hang out in slaver-town for shits and giggles?

8. I'm sorry, I can't let this go: he was planning to return to Caemlyn at the end of ToM!

Literally, here is the quote: “You find [Rand], Moiraine, but I’ve got things to do in Caemlyn. Don’t mean to argue and all, but that’s the fact of it. You should come there too. Elayne’s more likely than anyone else to be able to help you with Rand.”

Not long after that, this appears in Mat's internal narration: "[Mat] decided to make himself scarce, leaving [Moiraine and Thom] alone. He went to scout the area where their gateway was supposed to appear. It had better. They had no supplies, and Mat did not fancy flagging down a ship and riding the long way back to Caemlyn."

Clearly, the original plan was to have Mat return to Caemlyn* or at least to attempt to do so. And then the plan abruptly changed behind the scenes and we’re left with... this weird mess of a scene here in Ebou Dar that just feels utterly detached from reality.

(* as it is, it does seem likely that Mat will never even learn that he could have prevented Caemlyn from being attacked, might never even find out that Caemlyn was attacked at all. Which means that, in order to 'become' Seanchan, Mat has acquired one of the most annoying traits that Jordan gave to the Seanchan (especially Fortuona) -- a complete lack of narrative accountability for their choices and behaviors, and other people and the narrative itself not holding them to account for failures and choices that anyone else would be held to account for. Narratively, Mat should face the consequences of his decision not to read Verin's letter and to abandon the field before the Last Battle but... Fortuona is always coddled and sheltered from getting the natural narrative consequences for being an asshole, and now, perhaps, so is Mat)

9. Question - which is a messier and worse choice for the writer to make: Jordan abruptly turning down the dial on how much Mat cared about slavery in-between WH and CoT (presumably so that it would be believable that he would court & kiss an unrepentant slaver), or Sanderson abruptly having Mat desert right before the Last Battle, abandoning the Band of the Red Hand and Olver in the process?

I mean, they’re both awful, so I don’t know if I can pick, personally. Also, why is it always Mat who has the best parts of himself carved away while the narrative tries to pretend that nothing has changed?

This is now the fourth time that Mat has been harshly pulled away from his natural narrative progression, btw. The first two changes happen due to events in the story and so I find them... somewhat forgivable... but the last two involve ripping out actual parts of Mat’s characterization between books, and I’m much less forgiving of that.

In LoC, Mat stops being Rand’s general when Rand tells him to go to Salidar to help Elayne get to Caemlyn. Understandable story beat. No issue with this one except that it made me miss Mat & Rand’s interactions.

In ACoS, Mat is unable to go with Elayne to Caemlyn, instead being trapped in Ebou Dar. While I find the actual ‘getting trapped’ in Ebou Dar to be understandable plot nonsense, I do not find the contrivances to keep Rand from knowing that Mat has been left behind to be believable (but, of course, if Rand were allowed to know that Mat was in Ebou Dar, he would have saved Mat before ‘prophecy’ could have had its way with him). The creaky Hand of the Author is very apparent in this storyline.

In WH, Mat frees slaves, and pretty much everything in that book sets up Tuon’s circus journey to be a transformative experience for her (I went over this in detail in one of my last reread posts about WH, because it honestly blew my mind how many threads that WH laid out that CoT completely failed to follow up on)... but then in-between WH & CoT, Mat’s empathy is swapped so that instead of sympathizing with the former slaves (the Aes Sedai) as he did in WH, he instead sympathizes with the former and current slavers (the sul’dam and Tuon). We are not given any reason on the page for why Mat's sympathies have been swapped around.

In the last chapter of ToM, Mat plans to return to Caemlyn; in AMoL, he is abruptly in Ebou Dar, hundreds of miles to the south, a deserter from the Last Battle and a defector to the Seanchan. We do not see the moment when he decided to abandon Team Light and the Band.

Of course, every single one of these narrative swerves was in the service of pushing Mat into the arms of the Seanchan -- first physically, and then mentally. It’s telling how much force had to be applied to Mat to lock him into the role of being Fortuona’s Prince of Ravens. Left to his own natural narrative devices, Mat appears to have flowed back towards the Last Battle and towards Rand. On four different occasions, he has to be forcibly yanked towards his ‘destined’ role.

10. This PoV leaves me with two big questions:

Why is Mat in Ebou Dar?

How is Mat in Ebou Dar?

No, seriously, check out the map:

Make it make sense how Mat rode from the Tower of Ghenjei, all the way down to Ebou Dar, in the same amount of time that it took Moiraine and Thom to Travel to meet with Rand in Merrilor (which is instantaneous). Now, if this were Rand or Elayne or Aviendha or... you know, any other strong channeler who knew how to Travel... no big deal! Pop down to Ebou Dar and then back by lunchtime. But Mat is on a horse.

11. Most importantly, why wasn’t Mat changing his mind about the entire course of his life actually on the page? How on earth could us learning about Androl's twenty different past careers be more important than us actually getting Mat's change of heart on the page?

This chapter is like a weird fever dream about Mat, where distances don’t matter and characterizations change at the drop of a hat.

This would all make so much more sense if Mat actually did go to Merrilor and volunteered to go speak to Fortuona on behalf of the Westlands -- then someone sending him here by Gateway would make a lot of sense and it wouldn't matter that Mat traveled hundreds of miles in an instant because, well, Traveling will do that. As it is... the why and the how of Mat going to Ebou Dar are both left as complete mysteries.

12. It kinda feels like Sanderson skipped forward in Mat's storyline specifically so that he wouldn't have to explain how ToM!Mat changed into AMoL!Mat, two characterizations of Mat who appear to have very different motivations and loyalties. ToM's Mat had a very complicated relationship in the text with Fortuona -- he felt an obligation to protect her Because Wife, but also was very clearly trying to shear off "Tuon" from "the Seanchan" in his brain, and he was wildly (almost on overdrive) attracted to other women; yet he was also incredibly dedicated to his friends and to the Last Battle. ToM!Mat was a very complicated character, with a lot of contradictory thoughts and impulses to dig into and analyze. This Mat feels much less emotionally complex, at least so far, and we don't get any of the shadings of his torn loyalties between Prophecy Wife and everything else that he cares about -- he's just been cut off from his past life entirely, with very little signs of remorse or regret or grief over it. That's a huge change from where he was at the end of ToM!

The best comparison I can think of is if Sanderson had decided to leave Rand's epiphany off the page at the end of TGS -- if the last we saw of Rand in TGS was him leaving after almost killing his dad, and then the next we saw of him was in the ToM "Apples" chapter where he's making grass grow around him, completely skipping over the scene on Dragonmount (and never even referencing it; just acting like it makes sense that Rand is zen!Rand now and not ruthless!Rand anymore). That's what feels like happened with Mat -- he experienced a near-reversal of his established characterization and motivations off-screen between the books.

13. Though that's kinda the issue with Mat's "corruption arc" in general (if you want to call it that; it doesn't really have enough substance to it to deserve the name imo) -- we never actually see him change on-screen; he just conveniently changes his feelings about slavery between WH & CoT so that he'll be willing to kiss Fortuona even though she remains an unrepentant slaver; and then he conveniently changes his motivations between ToM & AMoL so that his next destination is Ebou Dar instead of Caemlyn/Merrilor. The moment of decision doesn't happen on the page. I have enjoyed and watched many corruption arcs but... it's gotta actually happen on the page, not in between books.

Um. Yeah. Will the next Mat PoV section be just as confusing as this one? Or will we get an explanation of some kind? I guess I will... find out?

14. Side note: the Tuatha'an have utterly screwed themselves over as a people for the foreseeable future. Literally walked themselves into the lion's mouth. Any teenager shows the spark? Damane. Grow up a little too pretty? Da'covale. But I guess they may consider feeding their children into the machinery of the empire to be a ~worthwhile price~ for them to pay in order to not personally engage in violence, even though said empire definitely does engage in massive amounts of violence (and will do so even under any kind of peace treaty that might be signed because: slavery is violence). This is not a Sanderson thing, though, because Jordan is the one who decided that the Tuatha'an culture of pacifism was aligned with slavery and invasion, back in Knife of Dreams, when he had the Tuatha'an flock to Altara.

15. Any other thoughts on this section before I move on to the next PoV? Ah, I guess I should actually engage with the content of the chapter, lol. I'll do my best.

It is kinda funny, in a ??? way, how Mat goes "yeah, wasn't Tylin Good Times?", "Oh, I hope that I get lots of women... just like her", "haha, oh no, Tuon is Just Like Her", "Um, maybe only one more of them is okay after all". It's bizarre and illogical and completely detached from reality but somewhat funny, in a "please stop talking yourself into a toxic situation" kind of way.

The main problem is that Mat doesn't have any given narrative reason to be here, talking himself into wanting to spend time with the slavers & with the empress slaver. If Mat had an external reason to be here -- or even an internal one that had been articulated in some way in the text -- then this entire PoV would have some kind of grounding in narrative reality. As it is, just like with refusing to get his eye injury treated, it feels like Mat is punishing himself for no reason (and punishing readers, or at least me, along with him).

16. "The Ebou Dari won't riot at something as unimportant as being conquered."

...

????????????????????

God, the whitewashing of the Seanchan invasion is such a bizarre thing to witness. Your city being invaded and terrorized is no big deal, apparently! The Wise Women (who were their healers & local herbalists) completely vanishing from the city... no big deal! Not important, y'all!

It's been maybe four months* (maximum) since Ebou Dar was invaded, but I guess everyone is over that now? Setalle Anan was making a big deal out of nothing when she decided she wanted to leave the city, I guess.

(* Mat was healing from his injuries taken by the invasion for roughly a month; then I believe that the circus was on the road for... like a month?; and then it would have taken a month or so for Fortuona to be escorted back to Ebou Dar; plus whatever Mat's travel time was to get back to Ebou Dar -- apparently we're supposed to believe that it's been at least six months, per Elayne's pregnancy symptoms but... where is that extra time coming from? Was Mat trapped in the circus plot for three whole months? (which would mean that Rand was chilling in a mansion in Tear doing nothing but having sex with Min and talking to Loial about his book for those same three months, which is recklessly negligent of him, if I'm supposed to believe it) I find that really hard to believe)

17. Hmm. If we take into account that Sanderson was trying to keep in mind that "what Mat thinks and says doesn't always reflect how he genuinely feels" (something Sanderson mentions knowing was a key part of Mat's characterization in his retrospective) then I expect we're supposed to take all his weird mental blather about how ~great!~ Ebou Dar was and how ~fun times!~ his rapist Tylin was with more than a few grains of salt.

But I really am thrown by how it makes no sense for Mat to be here in this context. Mat not being able to channel is a pretty significant part of his characterization, and it's also a limiting factor that means that he cannot travel hundreds of miles in a single day without significant help from someone who (a) can channel fairly strongly, (b) knows the Traveling weave, and (c) is inclined to help Mat get to where he's going.

So, let's do a little reworking before we move on. What if Mat had actually followed the path that was set out for him at the end of ToM?

His plan was to go to Caemlyn, but he was waiting for Grady's gateway in order to leave the Tower of Ghenjei area at all, which means that he would go with Moiraine and Thom to Merrilor (because that's where Grady is). Once at Merrilor, upon requesting to be sent to Caemlyn, he would learn that Caemlyn was attacked, that Talmanes nearly died (and that Olver is missing? idk, the text has said nothing about Olver's location as of this point in the story). But then he goes to the big meeting and learns how precarious things are with the Seanchan. So, Mat is on the horns of a dilemma, where he has two obligations (his failure in Caemlyn vs his failure with Fortuona) and no way he can fulfill both obligations at the same time. He has to choose.

He chooses to go to Ebou Dar, which is tactically the better choice. This does take him out of the running for leading the armies at this time (so Elayne would still be doing that) but Mat is the only person who can meet with Fortuona as something other than an enemy. He is gateway'd in to just outside the city and then we pick up with this chapter here. Most of this chapter could even stay roughly the same -- Mat trying to get the feel of the city before he goes in to talk with Fortuona, and then him finding out she potentially has assassins after her jumpstarting him into high gear.

If that were the case, then Mat's brain-breaking justifications for why Ebou Dar is just ~the greatest~ and Tylin was just ~the best~ and so Tuon will just be an extension of the ~awesome times~ that Mat had in Ebou Dar with Tylin and how the Seanchan's culture of slavery definitely isn't any more extreme than any of the other cultures he knows!... all of that [footage not found] stuff that Mat is claiming is true would come across much better as Mat frantically trying to make himself feel less panicked over his worries about Fortuona enslaving him as da'covale, a fear that has been haunting him for books. Especially if Mat presents himself as very confident about his ability to win Fortuona over, and then we see in his internal narration that he has no clue how she feels about him and wonders if his task is even possible.

This would also solve two other weird situations -- it would have given Mat and Min a chance to meet (while Mat is in his right mind and not dagger-addled) which would also have given Min something to do while Rand was spending all time with Elayne and Aviendha instead of Min just being a silent lurking presence in this section of the book; and it would explain why Rand still hasn't gone to visit the Seanchan.

Because that was Rand's plan after the big meeting but it's been at least two or three days in Rand's timeline and we still haven't done it (per Perrin's narration, Mat is already in Ebou Dar after the meeting that he and Elayne have with the generals, which is immediately after the pavilion meeting; makes zero sense but that's what the narrative tells us happened). But if Mat was sent on purpose to try to win Fortuona over to a reasonable truce, then it would make sense for Rand to give him some space and time to do that. Instead, Rand just... hangs out and does nothing for a couple of days while everyone else fights?

And the thing is... it would not significantly increase the page time to do things this way. That's the most baffling part. Give Mat & Min maybe one scene to show that they're bonding. Give those Perrin & Rand scenes that felt out of place to Mat & Rand. And the rest of the Mat-related stuff can be somewhat in the background, with chapter 11 still being his first PoV chapter if you like. It would add maybe five pages to the early parts of the book, which could easily be found by cutting down some of the Androl & Pevara scenes.

So clearly this was an active choice by Sanderson & Team Jordan but... why? Was it just too difficult for them to believe that Mat would condemn himself to marriage with Fortuona if we actually saw the moment when he decided to go to her? Was it to add to the feeling that Mat's story is unfinished by withholding the conclusions of Mat's character arcs from him? Was it a case of 'writing to the epilogue', even if that meant ignoring what had previously been established at the end of ToM?

I'm assuming that they assumed that the chaos of the Last Battle would mean that no one would ever question the logistics of this and that does seem mostly true -- I certainly didn't catch it on my first read of this book (pretty sure I was too busy hating that Mat was in Ebou Dar at all to question how Mat was in Ebou Dar).

18. Speaking of Rand! Let's find out what he has been doing the last couple of days instead of going to try to make a peace treaty with the Seanchan.

Moiraine is also wondering why Rand is just standing around, doing nothing. Hey, you know what's really weird, Moiraine? That you and Rand aren't talking about whatever happened that made Mat change his mind from going to Caemlyn to instead decide to go to Ebou Dar (and how he got there so quickly). Mat saved you from the 'finn! Mat was the whole reason that you got out! And then he just straight-up deserted from the Last Battle. This isn't worth a conversation or two with Rand? It's so bizarre that absolutely no one is talking to Moiraine (or Thom?) about Mat, especially Perrin, who knows that Mat specifically went off to save Moiraine (with Thom and with another guy who Perrin certainly doesn't care about, or care to notice also didn't return).

It also feels bizarre that Perrin was content to just go "oh, I guess Mat decided to sit out the Last Battle, la-di-da" when he got that Ebou Dar vision in his head, because there's absolutely no hint or indication that he even considered asking Moiraine or Thom what made Mat decide to desert the armies right before the Last Battle. At least Rand has no clue that Mat went off on a secret mission to save Moiraine, so he doesn't have any idea that he should ask Moiraine or Thom anything. Perrin does know but just doesn't feel like sharing any of that information with anyone, either because he likes Knowing Secrets or because he is a useless person.

Also, Rand is now in Shienar, hanging out with Lan's section of the army, so Perrin is, uh, doing a great job of sticking by his side, lol, all the way over in Caemlyn as he is.

19. Haha, Rand thinks here that he'd forgotten how annoying Moiraine could be. That does kinda feel like it touches on an (unintentional, maybe) theme of making saints out of the dead -- we had sainted dead Fortuona in Aviendha's future vision (a "woman of honor"), we have Mat making a saint out of dead Tylin (good ol' Fun Times Tylin), and we have Rand realizing that he'd forgotten all the parts of Moiraine that actually kinda rubbed him the wrong way, because he made a saint out of her once she was 'dead'. Again, I don't know if that's an intentional theme, but I do find it interesting.

20. The distance between Lan and Moiraine here is sad but understandable. Moiraine did the best she could to burn that relationship down before she went into the doorway (and right after, by giving away his bond to someone else, someone who took advantage of the bond and abused him). Lan still respects her -- he tells Rand that it's wise to listen to her -- but it'll be a long long time before he can bring himself to trust her emotionally again, if he ever manages it.

21. One little thing that Rand did was have his smiths make crowns for Lan and Nynaeve, based on old drawings of the Malkieri royalty. Aww. So that's another extremely sentimental gift that Rand has handed out, drawing on his personal knowledge of the person(s) in question.

22. *gasp* Rand went back to Dumai's Wells to search out the little fat man angreal. Ah! Emotions! So he uses that angreal here, as he fights on behalf of Lan's section of the army to take out the enemy's channelers. I'm also glad that he's not literally standing around doing nothing, lol.

And we do see in this chapter that all of Rand's emotions from pre-epiphany -- his anger and frustration and his dislike of Taim -- are all still there; he just has better control now (like he said to Perrin). After having such little access to Rand in ToM and being iced out, it really is a relief to be inside his head again and to see that there's a lot more going on than what Min was able to glean from the bond.

23. Birgitte is leading a squad of Aiel, for... reasons. But the focus of this chapter is more on Birgitte's agonizing sense of loss over her fading memories and her fear that it means she is no longer bound to the Wheel as a Hero of the Horn. Birgitte is definitely more likable when she's focusing on her own shit rather than trying to micromanage Elayne's life. They pass a group of Trollocs who are "several days" dead, so time is definitely passing on the battlefield.

24. Rand is in the dream, wearing Two Rivers clothes and sturdy boots. Sturdy boots, you say? This feels like an interesting companion to Mat's thoughts on boots -- how nobles have too many, for every type of occasion, but all you really need are three pairs of boots, with sturdy working boots being your 'best' pair.

25. This is a dreamshard, and Rand learned the crafting of it from Lews Therin's memories. It's a place that mingles memory with fantasy, and this specific one, Rand thinks of as his 'valley of peace'. AMoL tries to shatter my "Rand as potential Dreamer" vibes by telling us that LTT wasn't a Dreamer and I say, "too late, I've already integrated that into my Rand worldview" (tbh I think that Jordan considered the idea of making LTT a dreamer (in TDR) and decided against it (in TSR) because he already had both Egwene & Perrin involved in all that and he didn't want Rand to be able to Do Everything).

26. There's a cavern in his dreamshard that Rand didn't put there. He wonders if it was put there by Moridin and tries to avoid it, but he finds himself encountering it again and again, so he enters. And there, in a pool of water, is Lanfear/Mierin/Cyndane. Okay, glad we're going back to this, but let's see where it takes us.

27. "Yes, her face was different, but faces were no longer of much matter to him. She was still the same person." Okay, yes, more of this. Rand reflecting on how the face is not the thing that matters! Very interesting results of him embracing the memories from Lews Therin. Rand remembers how Lanfear was the only one who'd sought out and chosen her new name when she became Forsaken. And he remembers their relationship from Lews Therin's youth, mingled with the way that he'd felt about her when he'd encountered "Lady Selene". Lanfear tries to convince him that she needs him to save her from the Dark One, but when he doesn't fall for it, the pool she was pretending to be drowning in vanishes.

28. There's a moment when Rand wonders if she might genuinely be willing to turn back to the Light, but she falters, tells him that she cannot make that choice. I feel somewhat "eh" about Rand telling her that LTT never loved her and never understood what love was before he met "her" (aka Ilyena). Lews Therin genuinely loving Mierin first wouldn't make his love for Ilyena lesser. I mean, I can go either way on it, but... there are different types of love (also, it's implied here that LTT & M were in a relationship for literal centuries which is definitely way longer than it was in my head lol). Anyway, Rand thinks here that he lets her go "as Lews Therin was never able to", because even after he stopped caring for her, he "held on to hatred and scorn". And Lanfear also sees here that "the core" of Rand is Rand and not Lews Therin, including his love for Elayne, Aviendha, & Min.

29. Hey, hey Perrin. Any thoughts about how Mat ran away from the Last Battle? Any considerations about asking Moiraine or Thom or Grady about Mat bouncing and defecting to his slaver wife?

No? No thoughts about any of that. Well, thanks for nothing, Perrin!

It does feel so ridiculous that literally everyone is engaged in the Last Battle right now except for Mat, who took a (two month? instantaneous? who knows!) detour to drink with slavers. Especially since they all believe that Mat is supposed to blow the Horn of Valere! How is hunting him down and yanking him to the battle to put his mouth on that horn not priority #1? We are not given any reason in the text why Perrin is so chill with Mat running away to "do something with the Seanchan" in Ebou Dar. Perrin knows that Mat is supposed to blow the Horn but... no big deal, I guess. For Perrin, Mat taking a vacation is more important than saving the world (*).

This complete lack of "we gotta get Mat to Merrilor" urgency is another reason why everything would make so much more sense if Mat had been deliberately sent from Merrilor to talk to Fortuona. Mat is genuinely important to the Last Battle -- as far as everyone in charge is concerned, he's irreplaceable, because of the Horn of Valere! But absolutely no one seems invested in actually locating him and bringing him to Merrilor. Even Elayne treats it more as a "oh what an annoyance" when she brings it up.

I assume that the reason Sanderson is doing his best not to bring it to the readers' attention is so that no one notices what a massive plot hole we have going on here but, man, it's so weird how little the characters care about not being able to use one of the key artifacts of the Last Battle.

30. I gotta say, Egwene using a sa’angreal and feeling like she vibes with it the way some fighters vibe with their swords feels like it makes a lot more sense than Elayne waving an actual sword around in her last PoV (I’m still not even sure where she got the sword).

31. We find out in Elayne’s next PoV that Rand is dropping by for visits sometimes. Any of those visits happen to include having dinners with Tam, Rand’s father and the grandfather of your future children, Elayne? If they do, we don’t find out about it. It’s so weird that Elayne is apparently interacting with Tam regularly but just as a captain in Perrin’s section of the army. So bizarre! Also, it sounds like quite a bit of time has passed and Rand still hasn’t gone down to visit the Seanchan like he said he was planning on doing after the big meeting. That choice would make so much more sense if Mat had been sent there deliberately to negotiate with Fortuona! As it is, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why Rand would wait around on making contact with them again. We know that they’re worried that the Seanchan will attack their back lines while they’re fighting the Shadowspawn, so why isn’t Rand trying to deal with that!

We get a timestamp for how long Elayne has been working on the battle: a week.

32. Talmanes is working directly under Elayne. I wonder if he’s ever tempted to tell her about the letter. Hundreds of thousands dead, because Mat is scared of Aes Sedai strings.

And it sounds like forces are needing to retreat on the majority of the fronts.

33. Can someone smack Perrin for me? Tam gives Elayne a compliment (which I will give a mild ‘aww’ to, even if the narrative refuses to allow them to actually talk about the fact that he’s the grandfather to the kids she’s carrying) and Perrin immediately puts her down and essentially says that her only actual talent is shutting up and listening to the good advice of men. What an asshole! Someone is still sore that Elayne tried to give him a job that he didn’t want, I guess.

(I say that as if Perrin has ever shown any respect to any woman outside of Faile and sometimes Moiraine; he spent, like, four solid books ignoring the multitude of smart women trying to give him advice during the Slog period because he was so laser-focused on Sacrificing Anything For Faile -- “listens well to those who know their tactics” is certainly not something that Perrin could ever be accused of. He’s too busy poisoning water supplies and selling women into slavery)

34. Perrin feels the tug of Rand calling him, ta’veren to ta’veren. Does not describe it in any kind of poetic way, as Mat sometimes would. So he gives the command to Tam. ...he could have just as easily done that from the position that Elayne had given him -- handled it until he felt himself being yanked to Rand.

35. ...Bornhald tells Perrin that Fain killed his parents, not the Trollocs. Why would you pick at an old scab in the middle of the Last Battle? What awful timing! Tell him afterwards! Put it in a letter if you think you might die! Seriously, is Bornhald trying to throw Perrin off his game and make him vulnerable? Also, I’m pretty sure that Perrin isn’t even the one who deals with Fain in the end, so that makes this exchange feel extra pointless. Would 100% trade it for a scene where Elayne and Tam actually acknowledge their relationship to each other.

(why is Bornhald getting closure by revealing this lie considered more narratively important than seeing the moment when Mat decided to desert from the Last Battle??? Mat is a main character! Bornhald is a tertiary character! It is more important to show Mat’s character beats than Bornhald’s. I should not have to say this!)

36. Apparently Aviendha and Rand have been getting some personal time near where Rand is making his plans to go into Shayol Ghul. Not that we actually get told that, mind you, we just find out when Perrin arrives that she’s one of the advisers who has been here at his camp the whole time. Anyway, Perrin gets to reunite with Rand again, because of course he does. A special two-page goodbye for Perrin Aybara! Rand and Perrin get to share an ‘embrace’. Uh-huh. Hey, Perrin, your Author’s Pet is showing.

37. Rand tells Perrin to “watch out for Mat”, because he’s worried that he’ll do something “highly dangerous”. This would all make so much more sense if Mat had been deliberately sent to Ebou Dar! It is just so wildly frustrating how Mat has been vanished from all these Last Battle plotlines.

Why doesn’t Perrin tell Rand right now that Mat is in Ebou Dar, dealing with the Seanchan, the way that he told Elayne? Rand tells him that he thinks Mat may do something dangerous but that he’s not sure what it is and Perrin is just like “aw shucks that’s above my paygrade, boss” despite having so much more knowledge in this situation than Rand has. How is it possible that Rand is still on an information diet from his allies during the Last Battle? Perrin knows that Mat ran off to Ebou Dar and doesn’t bother to tell Rand! Even after Rand has directly said that he’s worrying about Mat!

38. I am going to hope very hard that show!Perrin never becomes the person that book!Perrin becomes. Show!Perrin is a darling and I love him. Book!Perrin is an asshole.

39. Chapter fourteen is entirely Perrin (& Gaul) in TAR & Androl in the Black Tower. Things of note:

Perrin turns off the dreamspike that was covering the Black Tower

Lanfear has to settle for chasing & attempting to get through to Perrin, now that Rand has thoroughly rejected her

Gaul does a really good job in TAR because he has a solid sense of self. Yay, Gaul! Perrin really underestimates him here

big fight at the Black Tower after the dreamspike is disabled

40. So, the thing with Mat in AMoL is... because his arrival in Ebou Dar defies simple geographical logistics, it’s difficult for me to take anything he does here seriously, because there’s not really any way that he could be here, doing these things.

First, he has to go all the way to Whitebridge, all alone, where I will charitably assume that Perrin decided to abandon Pips when he moved the rest of his camp to Merrilor. That’s at least a week (it took ten days when they were traveling by boat in EotW. I will, again, be charitable and assume Mat was able to flag down a boat even as the Last Battle is starting). Luckily, Pips is still alive, despite being abandoned. Yay! Mat has decided to aim Pips south instead of towards Caemlyn, because he wants to defect to the Seanchan because... he wants to eat Seanchan weevils instead of Andoran weevils while he waits for the Dark One to destroy the world, I guess. We never actually got a reason. It’s still gonna take him at least a month, and probably more like two months, to get down to Ebou Dar. And he’ll need to be dodging Seanchan patrols all the way south (he is actively trying to avoid notice), which is gonna add time to his trip.

It is not possible for this timeline to make sense. Events in Merrilor are moving much more quickly than that, even if you try to use time dilation as an excuse.

So, yeah, it’s hard for me to engage with “Mat is climbing up the palace walls in Ebou Dar” when, logically, he should still be around Whitebridge collecting Pips at this point in the narrative.

But I will do my best.

41. Mat thinks about how he knew every escape route from the palace... and also, haha, oh how he jested with Fun Times Tylin about how she needed to fix them so that he... couldn’t escape her any more? Yikes, bro. Also, that is 100% not a conversation that ever actually happened with Tylin. Mat wasn’t chatting with her about his potential escape routes. He was attempting to use them and getting dragged back and locked in and starved until he submitted.

Thinking about Tylin does make Mat feel for a moment that his scarf “felt like a ribbon that felt like a chain” (Ah. Alluding to how Tylin tied him up to rape him; notably, the time with the pink ribbons was the time that she raped him after Tuon had offered to buy him), though he immediately turns his thoughts to something else, so he doesn’t want to focus on the thought.

So I do think we aren’t supposed to take Fun Times Tylin seriously (she’s a dead saint and not a living abuser anymore) -- I think we’re supposed to realize that Mat is frantically lying to himself but, again, the problem is that there’s nothing to ground Mat here in Ebou Dar. We aren’t being given a reason. Mat is displaced in time and space, and we are displaced along with him. When is this moment happening in relation to what’s happening in Merrilor? It was a week ago for Perrin that he said that Mat was “in Ebou Dar, doing something with the Seanchan” but only a few hours has passed for Mat since he arrived in Ebou Dar. I’m pretty sure we’re not actually going to spend a whole week alone with Mat here in Ebou Dar, either.

Maybe this time weirdness is on purpose -- maybe Mat is meant to be essentially unstuck in time, unmoored from reality. Maybe that’s supposed to be another sign of how close the Dark One is but... it just doesn’t feel like there’s any consistency. Weeks apparently pass in a single night as Mat rides to Merrilor but then time slows down to a crawl where a week passes in Merrilor but it’s only been a few hours for Mat? That makes no sense. If there was a time dilation that strong going on already, people would have noticed it by now, because Mayene is the staging ground for the Yellow Ajah hospital and that’s roughly as far away as Ebou Dar is from Shayol Ghul.

I have so many unanswered questions.

Where did Pips come from? We don’t know. Why did Mat decide to go to Ebou Dar instead of Caemlyn? We don’t know. How long has it been since his eye was ripped out? We don’t know. Why wouldn’t Perrin say something more substantial to Rand when Rand reveals that he’s worrying over Mat?

Again, we just don't know.

Though I guess there’s some (frustrating) narrative symmetry in no one ever being willing to tell Rand anything useful ever. You know, Light forbid the savior of the world get any actionable information without needing to dig it out himself or bully people into telling him. Even at the Last Battle, no one tells Rand anything.

42. Still, we have established that Tylin’s ribbons remind Mat of chains. I’ll remember that. Ribbons = chains = forcing himself to submit to a relationship because he doesn’t think he has the option to say ‘no’? I do believe that a ribbon is going to come up again. Mat reminding himself that Tuon and Tylin are the same kind of person? We’ll see when we get there.

And he also directly compared Tuon to Tylin in his previous chapter as well. Tuon is the new Tylin (he hopes that she will be his last Tylin, in the previous chapter -- something that can definitely be read in two very different ways). So, for Mat, Tuon=Tylin and a ribbon=a chain.

(wow, this would be so tragic and painful if... Mat actually had a reason to be forcing himself through all this. The narrative symmetry is THERE but the connecting tissue has been ripped away. Why wasn’t Mat at Merrilor to learn about Caemlyn and the Seanchan danger? We just don’t know. But “Mat doesn’t have a good reason to be forcing himself to do this” was also the mood in all of CoT & KoD, lol)

43. Mat thinking about his dad’s advice -- “always know which way you’re going to ride” -- feels especially weird here because Mat has never given the readers a reason for why he ‘turned his horse around’ and went to Ebou Dar instead of Caemlyn. The context for the advice appears to be “because sometimes the other side in the horse-trading negotiation will try to steal your horses and you need to hurry out of there” which is... interesting. That Mat is thinking about the right way to handle people who can’t be trusted and volatile situations. Underneath the surface, maybe he’s aware that Fortuona is always ready to cheat the other side. Another way to put the advice Mat thinks about here is “always know your exit strategy”. Do you already know your exit strategy and you just aren’t sharing it with the readers, Mat?

44. Here, Mat thinks about Rand but hastily suppresses the color swirls and, once again, we do not get any kind of insight into the moment between books that made Mat decide to turn deserter, except for a weird sort of cowardice that Mat has never had before -- Mat has talked a big game (out loud and in his head) about leaving but then never actually does it, because he’s always there when he’s needed. The moment when Mat fails to "go into the fire” for his friends seems like a significant enough deviation from the norm that it needed to be on the page.

Also, interesting to note that Mat still doesn’t plan to actually live a married life with Fortuona here? He thinks that he can save her life and then go off gambling and drinking in the city on his own, which is an incredibly optimistic case of wishful thinking.

45. Only a page or so later, Mat again has to suppress thoughts of Rand and Perrin. See, the problem is the time. Because it takes so long to get to Ebou Dar, even if you take the “there literally isn’t time in the narrative for Mat to have gotten there” out of the equation, you also go back to “and there was all the time in the world for him to change his mind”. He’s now had to suppress thoughts of Rand (& Perrin) twice in less than a handful of minutes, and I’m supposed to believe that he just spent weeks doing that while riding down to Ebou Dar? And, once again, he also doesn’t think here about how he abandoned Olver & the Band of the Red Hand. It really is baffling that Sanderson & Team Jordan decided to go with “Mat is genuinely a deserter and a defector” rather than “Mat leverages his marriage as negotiation” when we literally just had Mat learning, in the Tower of Ghenjei, that he had the ability to use prophecy and the technical letter of the prophetic law to his own advantage. When Mat was planning, in the final chapter of ToM, to return to Caemlyn because he has obligations there. How did that turn into “Mat teleports to Ebou Dar with his horse, because he really is a coward at heart”?

Is the idea supposed to be that Mat got a color swirl that confirmed that the Last Battle had truly started, and it made him freak out and rabbit down south instead of going back to protect Olver and work with the Band, figuring that if there was any place to avoid the Last Battle, it was among the people who were Rand’s enemies and who definitely wouldn’t be among those fighting the Dark One? If so, then that moment needed to be on the page.

That really is what this all boils down to -- leaving essential character moments off the page, thus making the Last Battle itself feel much more hollow and pointless than it should, because we are not being emotionally connected to the people involved in the Battle. When you do that, they end up just being figures to move around a game board rather than characters that we’re invested in.

Things we left off the page (so far):

The moment Mat turns coward and decides to run from TLB

Mat’s separation from Moiraine & Thom

How Moiraine & Thom got to Merrilor

How Mat got to Ebou Dar

How Mat got his horse back

Rand realizing that Elayne is pregnant

Egwene & Gawyn’s wedding

Rand & Tam’s dinner at Merrilor

The conversation between Aviendha, Elayne & Min before Aviendha goes to Rand

Tam and Elayne’s first conversation with Tam knowing that Elayne is pregnant with Rand’s kids

how everyone knows now that Rand has three girlfriends

Any of those things would have been a better use of our limited page time than the Androl PoVs that we’ve gotten. And I say this as someone who does not dislike or hate Androl.

46. Hmm, this scene with Selucia seems to re-affirm the subtext that we just established -- the only way out of his relationship with Tuon, she says, is death. “Your neck in a cord” (also the title of the chapter, which would have been chosen by Harriet, who we know was aware that what Tylin was doing to Mat was rape). No more choice here than he had with Tylin. The metaphor expands. Mat always has something around his neck, leashing him. The scarf he uses to cover his scar is a hanging cord is a pink ribbon is a chain of ownership... death or slavery as the only options; to be hanged again or to be owned. But instead of being sold by Tylin to Tuon, he was sold to Tuon by the Pattern (or by the Aelfinn). The actual vibe with which the Fortuona relationship is being approached is... not actually something I’m having a problem with at the moment (at least not from Mat’s side), but the big issue is how abruptly Mat has cut himself off from his other obligations (broken record but: Mat’s behavior would make so much more sense if he’d come here deliberately to make a truce with the Seanchan, because he’s trying to make up for his failure with Caemlyn).

Also, we get a repetition of Tuon=Tylin here -- Mat has a flashback to the pink ribbons tied to the headboard when he catches a glimpse of the bedroom that is now Fortuona’s official suite. It’s also clearly framed as a bad memory (like a PTSD flashback) which contrast very strongly with how he’s trying to pretend that he and Fun Times Tylin were just engaging in a game all those times that she trapped and raped him. The pink ribbons really do feel like they’ve been established as a connecting thread between Tylin & Tuon at this point, in the subtext.

It almost makes me feel silly that I went to so much effort to point out all the Tylin & Tuon parallels in an earlier post, because at this point the book is basically straight-up saying “Yeah, Tuon is just Tylin with a new coat of paint”. The ribbon is a chain! Brace yourself for your trading partner to betray you! Make sure to prepare an exit strategy! Your only choices with the Seanchan are being a slave or dying!

47. Oh, we’re getting one of Rand’s visitations to Elayne’s. Considering how much compare-and-contrasting Sanderson did in ToM between Elayne and Fortuona, placing this scene right before Mat reunites with Fortuona is an interesting choice.

Eh, nevermind. He visited Elayne earlier (off the page) and this is a visit to his dad instead. lol. I mean, I guess it’s an okay scene, but I’d rather have had the dinner between Rand & Tam earlier in the book, or have Rand and Tam actually acknowledge here that Tam is going to be having grandkids and that he’s literally now directly underneath Elayne’s command and one of her seconds now that he’s taken over Perrin’s command.

Another missed emotional moment: Rand talking to HIS father about his own regret over potentially dying and not being a father to his own kids. I feel like that would have been way more touching than this sword business. That being said, this is another moment of Rand giving a sentimental gift that speaks to his relationship with the people involved. So we now have:

Elayne: the Seed to create angreal

Lan & Nynaeve: replicas of the old Malkieri crowns

Tam: a sword to replace the one that Rand took back in EotW

And instead of talking about the future kids/grandkids or anything about Elayne, Rand and Tam duel. Honestly that just feels like a waste of page time to me. It’s not a bad scene but... eh, there are other things that it feels like Tam and Rand needed to talk about more. They had an entire scene without Rand or Tam ever mentioning the whole “So, Elayne is pregnant with your children” thing; despite literally the entire army knowing about it. What a strange choice!

48. Anyway, back to Mat, where he watches Fortuona do some fighting stances and tries his best to talk himself into being in love with her Because Wife. I guess it’s up to subjective judgement on whether or not you find his reasoning convincing. Was this specific moment maybe the reason that Sanderson vanished away Mat’s obligations and affections to the Westlands (that were all still so present in ToM)? Because it would be harder to do the “force yourself into love” tango if Mat appeared to realize that he had literally any other option available to him?

The reasons that Mat gives here for potentially loving her:

she’s hot enough that he’s willing to have sex with her

he married her so he might as well do his best to love her

trying to get her to marry him back was a challenge and he enjoys beating challenges

Literally nothing about her personality, lol. I mean, her personality is pretty rancid, so I understand why Mat would have had a hard time finding anything positive but, lol. What a list!

We’re told that Mat has been pondering this ‘for weeks’ and yet this is all he’s able to come up with: we’re already married and she’s attractive enough and if I’m able to get her to like me then I’ll Win The Game. Weeks of this question “scratching like an itch” at the back of his mind and this is all he’s been able to scrape up. lol and yikes. #AreTheStraightsOkay? (no, they are not)

Also, Mat setting up the situation with Fortuona as a game and he “plays to win” brings me back to how he’s been trying to play off Tylin raping him as the two of them playing a game as well. So that’s another fairly ugly Tylin-Tuon parallel.

49. He saves Fortuona’s life (oddly, not from Seanchan assassins, but from a Gray Man, which makes zero sense -- the Shadow should be cheering Fortuona on, not trying to kill her. She’s currently helping them out a lot). This is a genuine point of confusion for me, because Mat’s last chapter literally set up Fortuona as being targeted by assassins from fellow Seanchan and that... makes a lot of sense. Why can’t Mat just save her from a normal assassin? But I guess the readers need to be hit over the head with “SEE, she’s An Official Good Guy Now! You can tell because the Bad Guys are trying to kill her”. As opposed to, you know, actually writing her as capable of being a good person at any point in the series. (is she supposed to be capable of being a good person? or is it supposed to be clear that this is not something she has any ability or interest in?)

Though he does save her life, the Gray Man gets away and I’m currently assuming that’s to give Mat a reason to stick around even as Fortuona makes him more uncomfortable -- because he believes that he is obligated to protect her Because Wife.

50. This chapter does make me think about how ‘good writing’ is somewhat subjective, though, because Fortuona is a character that I’ve seen people say they like more for the ‘good writing’ than actually liking her as a person but... out of all of her scenes, I only really feel like three are particularly ‘well written’ in terms of her as a character (her introduction scene on the ship; the conversation with Mat in the damane kennels in WH, and her confrontation with Rand in TGS) and other than that, she tends to feel like a very flat and non-dynamic character to me, which makes her boring in addition to being annoying. That doesn’t mean that the people who feel that she’s well-written are wrong (as I mentioned above, I do think there’s an element of subjectivity at play); but I do find it an interesting point of disagreement.

51. Anyway, I am less interested in the play-by-play details of the ‘marriage’ between Mat and Fortuona and more interested in looking at two specific questions: 1) how much is Mat willfully deluding himself about Tuon? and 2) Does Fortuona show any interest in Mat as an actual person or does she only show interest in him as an objectified tool that she can use for her benefit? So I am going to see if Fortuona shows any interest in the parts of Mat that are not useful to her or the Empire -- does she care about his favorite color? (lol no) Does she ask after Olver? (lol no) Does she care that he was recently brutally injured? (this one is... subjective? she basically tells him that she likes him better now that he’s visibly wounded, but it’s up to the reader whether or not that goes beyond her thinking that him being “less pretty” makes him a more effective enforcer for her) Etc.

Before we even get to this chapter, Mat already has one willful delusion racked up from ToM: He believes that Tuon will ‘surprise’ the rest of the Seanchan Empire with the choices that she makes. We have demonstrably seen in her scenes so far that this is not true; and Mat was given zero reason in his scenes together with Tuon in WH-KoD to believe it would be true. This is something that Mat made up out of whole cloth because he wanted to believe it.

He added another delusion earlier in this chapter: Mat was operating under the illusion that if he went to Tuon to save her life, she would allow him to leave again, and he could go back out into the city to do his own thing rather than occupy the position of ‘Prince of Ravens’ under her ownership command.

52. He does learn one useful thing here, and maybe this is the reason why Sanderson cut off Mat’s other relationships -- Mat learns that Fortuona trusts him not to kill her (which does remind me of her wistful fantasy back in ToM about “unwavering loyalty” from the Prince of Ravens). If Mat had been sent here to negotiate with Fortuona, instead of being a deserter and a defector, then him learning this info about her would place him in a one-up position over her and give him an essential bit of knowledge-power as he entered negotiations.

But one key aspect of how the Mat & Fortuona relationship has developed in the series is that Mat is never allowed to have any kind of advantage over Tuon that isn’t immediately neutralized by the narrative. Jordan went to extreme lengths in CoT to ensure that Fortuona was always the one in the position of power (despite her having been kidnapped and removed from her power base) in the form of giving her inexplicable allies (Setalle Anan going from anti-slavery to buddying up with slavers in-between WH & CoT) who fought against Mat on her behalf. At the time, I attributed that to his decision to punt off any character growth for Tuon to the outriggers, but what it means is that that’s the precedent that was set for the Mat & Tuon relationship as a whole -- no matter how much it requires you to mangle and twist narrative logic, Mat is never allowed to have an advantage over Fortuona. He has to remain the underdog, even when that makes no sense in how the events of the story are playing out.

But that’s also part of what ruins it as a good enemies-to-lovers romance imo. Because there’s never allowed to be any give-and-take of the power balance between Mat and Fortuona. Instead, the relationship is all ‘give’ on Mat’s side and all ‘take’ on Fortuona’s.

53. Mat chooses to believe that Fortuona’s trust here is a sign that she potentially cares about him, choosing to ignore the fact that everyone else she ‘trusts’ is a slave she owns. Willful delusion number three.

And willful delusion number two gets immediately burst here -- when Mat implies that he’s only here to warn her and not to ‘return’ to her, she makes it clear that that’s not an option, not in her mind, anyway. And Sanderson & Team Jordan put Mat into a position where he really doesn’t have much choice about that, by tearing away his connections to the Westlands in-between books.

54. We do get another ~lovely~ reminder that Fortuona is a person who is incapable of admitting that she has ever been wrong about anything in her life when she pretends that she always believed that Trollocs were real and definitely didn’t mock Mat for telling her the truth about them. Living with people like that is genuinely hellish so, yeah. Mat has that to look forward to (again, it blows my mind how fans get on Elayne & the Wondergirls’ cases for their ‘ingratitude’ towards Mat, but Fortuona doesn’t get that same flack for behaving much worse).

lol, Fortuona telling him that she has ~decided~ not to be jealous about him spending time near another woman (she has magically intuited that he was rescuing a woman from a troublesome situation recently? since she had absolutely zero clues to put that together, I’m just going to assume that she thinks that’s how he spends all his free time, given what happened in WH and that she was kidnapped by him while he was rescuing other women).

Given how she acted around Joline, Fortuona ‘not being jealous’ every time he spends time with another woman is going to be another thing that will make Mat’s life with her extremely hellish. Of course, I’m sure she’ll manage the situation by trying to make sure that the only women Mat ever spends time with are her slaves, since she knows from WH that Mat finds the idea of having sex with slaves to be distasteful (though I doubt she has any clue why, even now -- her own objection was “damane are animals and I don’t want a pervert for a husband” and had nothing to do with consent). But I do wonder if Fortuona pointedly telling Mat that she’s ~decided~ not to be jealous about him rescuing another woman will have an impact on how he interacts with other women once he’s actually allowed to be around non-slaves again.

55. “He could not have lost her already.” Willful delusion number four? When have you ever ‘had’ her, Mat? But, yeah, Mat is doing his best to flirt with Fortuona and she’s giving absolutely nothing back. There’s something kind of sad/funny about Mat thinking that her being ‘cold’ is something that is “different now that she’s Empress” when that’s how she acted in all of CoT & KoD whenever she wasn’t throwing tantrums. It’s how she acted in WH too. This is not a new thing.

Mat really has made up a whole-ass completely different woman in his head and Fortuona is already failing to live up to her. I feel like I remember Mat being disappointed by Actual Fortuona at least one more time in the book, and I’m curious to see if it happens more often than that. But, yeah, Mat made up a girl in his head and now he has to compare that dreamed-up version of Tuon to the reality of Fortuona.

Qualities of Fictional Tuon:

Not Like The Other Seanchan

Not Cold

Not Possessive

Qualities of Actual Fortuona:

Pretty much the archtypical Seanchan High Blood

Formal even in private

Literally owns people, and has been possessive of Mat in the past (she was incredibly jealous over Joline, which was kinda hilarious because Aludra was the one that Mat had a genuine romantic history with and Tuon never clocked it)

56. Note that when Mat objects to being called “Highness” and being put in charge of training Seanchan forces (which does make him officially a defector, if he wasn’t before -- I guess before he was ‘only’ a deserter and now he’s a defector), Fortuona just straight-up ignores him and talks to Karede instead.

*whispers to Mat* it’s because she doesn’t respect you as a person *flutters away*

Instead of addressing Mat’s issues with how she’s treating him, she starts undressing and uses sex as a way to reward him for saving her life, to encourage him to continue to protect her, I would assume. And probably because she does want to have sex with him, and likely has wanted to have sex with him since she was first introduced to him in his role as Tylin’s (sex) Toy -- ex. Mat thought that she didn’t get anything out of him kissing her back in KoD but in her own PoV, she was shaken by his skills at kissing. And also because she needs her heir, as she mentions a little later in the conversation. But she is also explicitly using sex as a reward for good behavior (”Tonight, you have saved my life. That will earn you special privilege”).

57. Mat tries to figure out if she’ll ever care for him the way he would want a romantic partner to care for him, and she basically says “sorry, bub, that’s a ‘no’; I’m in it for the omens and the baby-making” and he has a ‘sinking feeling’ at her response but tries to convince himself that what she’s willing to offer him is enough or that he’ll be able to win her over eventually.

Notably, Fortuona only tells him that she will treat him as more than a toy when he flat-out tells her that he’ll leave if she can’t give him that much, which will probably not be a fun pattern for either of them to keep playing out in the future.

I also note here, again, how much importance Fortuona places on appearances -- Mat had already been experienced in battle before, but the lack of the eye makes him visibly affected by battle. And that really feels like it goes back to how Fortuona is actually much worse at reading people than she believes she is -- she’s great at reading the obvious surface cues, but if she’s dealing with anyone who is deeper than the surface, she’s at a complete loss. So now the first thing about Mat that she found admirable* is on the surface, where she can point it out to the other Blood if needed.

(* it’s not until she sees Mat being respected by the soldiers of the Band of the Red Hand in KoD that she sees him as more than a “buffoon”, to use her own word -- she wasn’t capable of seeing under Mat’s surface on her own)

And so they have sex in front of her guards, which is... hmm. We know that Mat wanted to have their first kiss in private, back in KoD, and Tuon insisted on making it a big public affair in front of everyone and probably especially Joline. So is he screwing her in public because he assumes that’s how she wants it?

58. But, yeah, literally all of that still could have happened if Mat had gone to Merrilor. The only difference, as far as I can see, is that we got cheated out of Mat reuniting with the rest of the Emond’s Field Five (and especially Rand), with everything implied along with that. At least half of Mat’s emotional complexity gets sheared away when you shear away his Westlands emotional connections. Off the page. In-between books. So all we have now is his tense and toxic situation with Tuon, and nothing healthier. So maybe it was done as a way of boxing Mat into his ‘destiny’ and not allowing him any glimpse of sunlight. (I’m reminded of how he compared traveling with Tuon to being trapped in a tunnel, without any sight of the outside world, and then I get depressed again, lol).

59. Aww, this Loial PoV is sweet. “Loial, son of Arent son of Halan, had secretly always wanted to be hasty.” I mean, then it becomes a battle, because the Ogier are engaging with the Trollocs in Andor, but the beginning is very sweet!

I’m guessing this objectification of enemies as “weeds” to be rooted out is probably the mindset of the Seanchan Ogier 'Gardeners' all the time.

Galad is also continuing to get a taste of disliking the extremity of the group that he’s joined/is leading -- when some of the other Whitecloaks call the Ogier ‘Darkfriends’ for their willingness to fight and their fierce determination, he points out that they are fighting Shadowspawn.

60. Rand says now that it’s “time to go” to “Mat, in Ebou Dar”. God, this would make so much more sense if Mat had been sent there deliberately. As it is, this is the first time we’ve gotten any sense that Rand was ‘waiting on Mat’ (also... um, not sure if Sanderson realized this, but the implication here is that Rand just watched Mat having sex with Tuon -- guess that counts as payback for all the times that Mat accidentally watched Rand having sex with Min).

Ah-ha! Thom told Rand about the situation with Mat!!!! This is HUGE INFORMATION! Thom coming in clutch with actually sharing information with Rand in a way that no one else has ever been willing to do. But this is fascinating because there’s so much information that Thom could have given Rand here: he knows that Mat married Tuon ‘accidentally’; he knows that she’s capable of channeling (confirmed in that conversation at the end of ToM) though I’m not sure if he knows that all sul’dam can channel, he witnessed the vast majority of the ‘relationship’ that developed between Mat and Tuon.

And Thom is the one person we know who has been willing to freely share information with Rand because he believes that more information is actually a good thing for a ruler to have (he was essentially Rand’s spymaster in Tear, before Moiraine bribed him to leave). Oh, but that is a WEALTH of information that Rand potentially has now. Thom is back and now someone is finally giving Rand actionable information. Rand potentially got both stories from Thom -- the heroic story that Thom told to Elayne and the ‘Mat married a slaver’ story that he told to Perrin, plus the information that he could have gleaned from that final conversation with Mat in ToM.

Of course, we don’t actually get to see the conversation between Thom and Rand to know exactly what he was told but! Rand going into this situation potentially knowing that Mat’s marriage to Fortuona was an accident on Mat’s part that Moiraine sees as a ta’veren move by the Pattern actually helps explain several things about his choices in that upcoming scene, I think, and why he doesn’t seem to have any concern or fear about what Mat marrying a slaver might mean about Mat as a person. He’s trusting the Wheel and the Pattern, and his own belief in Mat's nature (whether or not Mat still deserves it).

After so many books of Rand needing to claw and bully his way into getting even a tiny scrap of information, it’s such a relief that he has Thom back in his life, if only for this little while, to be a person who freely shares info with Rand.

61. Perrin managed to successfully trick Rand into thinking that he’s ‘grown up’ when honestly I feel like Perrin is the least mature out of the three ta’veren. But it’s cute how Rand aligns himself with Mat here, as the two who are only ‘pretending’ to be grown up.

I do think this conversation with Moiraine and Rand is sweet. <3 We also add another sentimental gift to the list: the silver Tar Valon coin for Moiraine.

Haha, at Moiraine getting to learn here that she’s one-up on Cadsuane -- Cadsaune fell for Rand’s “I have four hundred years of memories” play, but Moiraine pushes back on it.

Anyway, if I managed to miss the line that explained How Mat Got To Ebou Dar So Quickly, please point it out to me, because wtf.

(some late book spoilers below)

(*) ...it's almost like they already know that they don't really need Mat for the Horn. A bit of the Author whispering in everyone's ears to tell them that Mat isn't needed yet, so no need to worry about his absence. Reminds me of how all the characters took a vow of silence about Mat getting left behind in Ebou Dar back during the Jordan run so that Rand wouldn't find out.

Why does this keep happening to Mat specifically?

P.S. I know there’s some time dilation at play, especially as we go deeper into the Last Battle, but if Mat really had spent weeks riding down to Ebou Dar (while only a night passed in Merrilor), then the Seanchan would have launched a second strike on the White Tower by now (with Traveling).

Plus, Perrin clearly says that Mat is already in Ebou Dar a few hours after that big meeting in the tent, which means if we're dealing with that massive of a time dilation, then by the time Rand (eventually) goes to Ebou Dar to meet with Fortuona, it should be several months later, if "hours" in Merrilor was "weeks" for Mat as he rode down to Ebou Dar. And from what I recall, Mat does not spend several months lounging around in Ebou Dar before Rand shows up. iirc, Rand shows up soon after Mat's arrival in Ebou Dar.

And Mat still would have needed to go to Merrilor to get Pips in the first place, which really throws this entire scenario into incoherent nonsense, because Mat did not bring his horse to the Tower of Ghenjei. They walked through the gateway, no horses with them. The text in ToM is very clear on that point*. So where did Pips come from in this chapter?

(* "The small group stood on the Traveling ground outside Perrin's camp."

"[Mat] took a breath and stepped through the gateway. Quiet Noal followed, smelling of determination. That one was a lot tougher than he looked. Thom nodded to Perrin, mustaches wagging, then hopped through. He was spry, though he still bore the stiff leg from fighting the Fade two years ago.

Light guide you, Perrin prayed, raising a hand to the three as they trudged along the river's bank."

No horses. No Pips. Where did Pips come from in AMoL? How did Mat reunite with him, when the only way to do so would be to go with Grady to Perrin's camp... which is now in Merrilor?)

Pips being in Mat's opening chapter really does feel like another glaring indicator that Mat's plotline originally took him to Merrilor before he went to Ebou Dar, and it's baffling that it got changed into Mat being a deserter -- was this perhaps an example of Jordan leaving behind contradictory notes for Mat's storyline and Team Jordan deciding to go with both sets of notes even though they didn't gel with each other? Sanderson does mention in his retrospective that some of the notes that were left behind just straight-up contradicted each other (likely because Jordan hadn't made his mind up on which direction to take that section of the story).

Maybe Sanderson is just really bad at first chapters with Mat? Mat in his first PoV chapter in The Gathering Storm was also pretty rancid but then got much better as the book continued on.

Anyway, in future Mat-related chapters, I'll do my best not to focus on the brain-breaking and impossible logistics given to us by this plotline, though I will probably point out moments that I think would be more effective if Mat's storyline had followed what was set out in the final chapter of ToM.

#wot reread #wot #wheel of time #the wheel of time #rand al'thor #mat cauthon #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #wot amol spoilers #wot a memory of light spoilers #i get pretty heated about mat here #along the lines of how i reacted to much of cot & kod #seanchan content warning #this one is pretty long

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