#Rand al'Thor

[markantonys]

THE WHEEL OF TIME | season 3 teaser + characters

[youronebraincell]

[alverelover]

[iliiuan]

I saw someone raving about the show because the main character is a middle aged woman. I just sighed and scrolled along.

Min insisting on being beside Rand is one of her qualities that bleeds into toxicity. She pulled a similar stunt at the Cleansing, and it didn't make sense there, either. She is very bad at understanding that she is useless against channelers, and almost useless against armed combatants. Rand has things he needs to do where she is a hindrance, but she refuses to ever stay home. And he won't ever force the issue, fool that he is.

Moiraine goes through the Redstone doorway and doesn't die, but the Warder Bond with Lan is severed. There are a few possibilities for why that might be:

Transporting to another dimension severs the bond -> this one doesn't hold up because when she went through the first doorway, nothing happened.

The destruction of the doorway affected the bond -> this one doesn't make much more sense, because what possible mechanism would accomplish that? She can still channel, so there's no reason for the bond to be severed.

Which leaves me with

Moiraine used one of her requests with the Finn to sever the bond.

[asha-mage]

Because I am coping with current world events in a completely normal manner I've been thinking a lot about how one of the tensions that underpins the whole of Wheel of Time is Robert Jordan as 'person who likes history' vs Robert Jordan as 'person who had to live through the Cold War.'

Something that can be really hard for people born after the Cold War (like myself) to grasp is that for a long time history was the ultimate reassurance against existential dread. Civilizations could rise and fall, empires could crumble, disasters could wipe out a hell of a lot of people, but human beings as a species, where never in any real danger of dying out. New countries would eventually rise out of the ashes of old ones, societies would change to be unrecognizable but they would still be there, religions, cultures ideologies etc might all die out but the people would still be around. History provided the ultimate comfort: whatever happened in our brief finite lives human beings as an group would eventually be fine.

But that changed after World War 2 and the invention of a little something called the atomic bomb. Suddenly human beings had the potential to destroy not just ourselves but all life on earth if things went wrong enough. For the first time in history their was no real guarantee that human beings as a species would make it, and in fact their was a whole lot of reason to believe based on the patterns of history that eventually that power would get used and human kind would destroy itself. That was the Cold War- two nuclear states who really really wanted to start blasting each other to pieces but couldn't without risking the end of life as we know it.

The tension between these two realities- the assurance of history that life will go on and the reality that human beings could in theory actually end the fucking world, is built into the core of Wheel of Time. The first lines assure us: time is cyclical. It's all happened before. It's all going to happen again. Human being will live out the same stories in endless variation, the same patterns will always reemerge. And the world has already survived one apocalyptic event: the Breaking, and come out the other side not doing fantastically, but still around. The world has been reshaped forever and whole eras of progress have been undone, but humanity remains.

But at the same time doomsday weapons with the potential to wipe out the species are everywhere. The Choden Kal can crack the planet open like an egg. Balefire burns apart time itself. A plague of madness is waiting for any old schmo to wander into it's den and carry it back outside so it can infect and destroy everyone. Their are all kinds of different big glowing red 'destroy humanity' buttons laying around in WoT just begging to get pressed. And in a way the Dark One is the ultimate version of that because that button has already been pressed. The Bore has been opened. Left alone humanity is fucked and everyone knows it. It can be delayed and pushed back, but never truly stopped, except by the intervention of destiny- the intervention of the Dragon. That's the core conflict of the series. Rand is struggling to stop a missile that's already been launched, prevent an end everyone can see coming. It's not just 'I need to defeat the big bad evil overlord or everything will be bad forever', it's 'I need to stop the Dark One or that's the end of human beings as an idea'.

What's especially interesting is that Jordan isn't even framing the Wheel/Pattern as uniformly good, because it's history and history is messy and complicated and full of contradictions and no easy answers. The Wheel, the Pattern, is not some force for righteousness. It's a neutral fact of existence. Not what's best or what's ideal- those are subjective and grounded in human understanding of the world- but what's necessary and what's true. To want to break free from history, to break the Wheel, is to want to break free of being human. That's what the Forsaken all truly want (as I have talked about before): to leave behind their humanity, and their willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to do it. What that looks like and what motivates that desire is different for each of them but their united in that common goal, and they all either disregard the consequences of what it will mean or don't understand them.

The story of history is one of incredible suffering and amazing triumph: it's full of heartache and joy in equal measure. It's not fair or just or simple to understand, but it is a reflection of who we all are collectively. The fight to preserve the Wheel isn't a fight to preserve what is good or ideal, it is a fight to preserve what is human. Because as long as the story can keep going, we can have hope for tomorrow.

And Jordan promises right from the offing that their will always be a tomorrow. No beginnings. No endings. Just whatever comes next.

As we enter a period of history that is the most uncertain it's ever been in my lifetime, I can't help but I think of the incredible courage and strength it must have taken be staring down the barrel of nuclear armageddon and stubbornly insist that there would be a tomorrow. The man wrote eleven of the best books ever made exploring this exact struggle- about never giving in to despair or pain, never buying into the belief that things are hopeless, that humanity sucks and we're all doomed.

And remembering that...I don't know. It makes a little easier to breath and keep walking towards tomorrow myself.

[knight--error]

One of my favorite bits in Wheel of Time which I'm sure plenty of people hated (a thing you could say about almost any aspect of the series) is how each of the main three Two Rivers guys have love lives that often fail to even walk the line between hilarious and horrifying, let alone be functional and healthy; but every time they're doing really poorly, each one thinks, independently, "Man, I bet [one of the other Two Rivers guys] would know exactly what to do. He's so good with women." And then you mentally smash cut to that other guy, who is having a somehow worse time, even though that should be impossible.

[stradowskijosha]

JOSHA STRADOWSKI as RAND AL'THOR in THE WHEEL OF TIME S3 TRAILER

[zanephillips]

JOSHA STRADOWSKI The Wheel of Time 2.06 "Eyes Without Pity"

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Little detail I love in Wheel of Time is that no one knows what an actual dragon is. That knowledge was lost completely in the Breaking of the World and now the word dragon is only associated with Lews Therin so when they find his banner with an actual dragon on it everyone is like "What the fuck is this thing? Why would the Dragon have some weirdass lizard thing on his banner?"

[fitz]

The Wheel of time, Season 3, official trailer.

[sophthebof]

Rand al’Thor for 5 books:

[wo-mary]

The Wheel of Time | Season 3 Teaser Trailer

[markantonys]

THE WHEEL OF TIME | s3 trailer + EF6

[alverelover]

[nervouspearl]

speak no word that is not true

[two-ponds-and-a-bowtie]

HE'S SICK FOR THIS