Spoiler Thread for “Questions of Leadership,” the Second Chapter of Towers of Midnight

Just listen to it now. *grin* That was certainly not how I expected the whole Galad thing to go though…Should be very interesting to see how things turn out between the whitecloaks and Perrin now.

To Sanctume @@@@@ 6, There is no text version. They did the same thing with tGS. release a text verison of chapter 1, and an audio of chapter 2. If you don’t want to listen, you will have to wait for nov 2.

To Tabernerus @@@@@ 19 The other Lord Captains turn against Asunawa, execute him (off screen, dumping his head in front of Galad), and release Galad, all agreeing to make him Lord Captain Commander.

To subwoofer @@@@@ 36, it said in the prologue that the damage done by the bubble of evil couldn’t be healed all that well…the aes sedai were able to prevent most people from dying, but it couldn’t stop them from being really really sick.

-It isn’t so much the hardship that people find grating about Perrin’s thread…its perrin’s attitude. He refuses to accept that he is a leader, even though he has over one hundred thousand people following him at this point. Thats just blind refusal to accept the facts. It gets old after a while. On the other hand, we come from a very different time than they live in. In a fuedal society, there is a huge social difference between a commoner and a noble. commoners were generally just accepted as being incapable of leadership. it wasn’t their place, and they should stay out of it. So I could see it being difficult to get past that mindset that one of the many nobles floating around these days should be doing the leading. It still gets annoying though.

And I don’t have a problem with suspending disbelief. Its one of the most enjoyable things about reading fantasy. I was just objecting to whoever that was who said that women seemed unwilling to learn to defend themselves in the WoT world, since it seems obvious that the WoT has gone the opposite way from reality on that point.

Well, we have already skipped forward almost a month. Perrin went from over two months behind to almost caught up with Mat, at least(though it looks like mat skips forward a couple of weeks in chapter 8 too, so Perrin is still behind him, and they are both weeks behind Rand)

-Also, yes…the puzzle does seem significant. Maybe just as a symbol of his struggle to figure out all the peices of himself, but it would be interesting if it was a ter’angreal or something like that. Perrin has demonstrated that he is very good at puzzles like that in the past, solving complicated ones that have other people stumped very quickly. He has spent a month with this one. That suggests that it may be something special, beyond just a well made puzzle.

And I think we can all agree that it would have been awsome if that had happened normalphil. Would have saved us having to live through so much stupidity on her part. We just don’t have time for that sort of thing at this late point. And I don’t really want to suffer through it again anyway. Besides…Perrin might be close enough to be manipulating events with his ta’vereness.

To Isilel @@@@@ 66, not going to argue about Perrin’s leadership…we will see how it goes. I have seen many positive leadership traits in him, he just resists them because he doesn’t want to be a leader. which is a significant issue, granted, but hopefully one he will overcome in this book.

I agree that Morgase was an idiot for refusing to learn at least some basic self-defense when two very able people were willing to teach her. I was speaking to the fact that you appear to have attempted to turn this one example of stupidity into a universal thing.

I’m not sure where you are getting that historically the best fighters with lethal weapons weren’t necessarialy the most physically strong ones…while skill trumps strength, as I pointed out, strength with skill trumps skill without strength every time, which gives a significant advantage to the stronger person. Are you really denying that?

Also, not sure where you get that people become expert swordsmen after a couple of weeks of training…we have, as far as I know, two examples of someone becoming a blademaster very quickly. Rand spent maybe 6 months on fairly heavy training, and almost certainly some early memories of LTT leaking in, not to mention all the lives he lived when he went through the portal stone a few days before, many of which included gaining the heron, so that isn’t remotely a useful example. Aram spent over a year of literally constant training, and was very talented too. Other blademasters have all required 5+ years.

Reds are almost universally stupid, so they are not a useful example either, but regardless, we don’t really know one way or the other if they train in self-defense. Some of them, at least, might for all we have seen. They also suffer from the same issue that the Asha’man suffer from. When you have that much power at your fingertips, all the effort doesn’t seem worth it. It just goes into something that there is a good chance you will never need, since in most situations, you can just channel your way out of, or if you can’t, you are probably completely screwed anyway.

Borderwomen do train, so this is explicitly a point against your argument. They are known to pick up their husband’s swords after they fall and continue fighting. Fighting well, from what has been mentioned on the topic. And we have Faile’s example.

The only ruling lady we have seen other than Morgaise that we know anything at all about their level of combat training would be Berelain…who can kick some serious ass when needed, if you recall from her fight with Faile in the Stone. She specifically states that all Firsts of Mayane are trained to defend themselves against assassins.

So, again, your point appears to consist entirely of Morgase’s example, and everything else you mention, we either don’t know if they receive any self-defense training, or we have proof that they have.

To EmpressMaude @@@@@ 70…Hmm…I had forgotten about that quote. I know that it is mentioned that several ladies have effectively taken up their husband’s swords and lead the men after they fell, so I assumed there was some training involved. That there isn’t is rather insane. So I stand corrected in that instance. But yes…it is rare for women to learn to fight. Why wouldn’t it be? Most women just have no need to learn to fight. There are a few examples of women who should learn to fight, such as those who will be going to battle such as the borderland women, but other than that, there isn’t a whole lot of need most of the time. Or no more than there was on earth during the middle ages, and women didn’t learn then, so I don’t know why you see it as so strange that women didn’t learn the sword very much in the WoT world.

To mogbob @@@@@ 73, what rand did was block someone else’s gateway as it was closing. This is entirely different from just leaving your weave tied off, which is something that can be done by anyone who knows how on any weave. The problem is the size of the gateways.

To 11zeesha @@@@@ 76, Gawyn trained for years under Gareth Bryne(a blademaster) before he went to the White Tower. He was just polishing his skills and having it all come together there. And it did appear that “2 weeks” must have been exactly what he meant. if he had meant “I find it funny that you even bring this up in a series where people become expert swordsmen after a year or two of training”…that doesn’t really make his point.

-First, we have no idea when LTT’s skills started leaking over. Just because he wasn’t talking to Rand yet doesn’t mean he wasn’t getting some benefit. Rand was using very complicated weaves that a wilder shouldn’t have been able to figure out long before LTT started talking to him too. And there is the simple fact that Rand did master the sword so quickly. It is flat out said that even a talented person would probably require 5+ years to become a blademaster. The fact that Rand does it in 6 months-ish indicates pretty strongly that he was either getting something from LTT or from the going through the portal stones. And im not sure why you think the portal stones couldn’t have helped his sword skills too. He didn’t just see these lives, he lived them. including many of them in which he became a blademaster, and so he went through hundreds of lives learning the blade over and over again. He could easily have remembered bits and peices of this to help him become a blademaster so quickly. There were several of these lives where he did earn it.

But yes…main characters generally master things very quickly. I don’t know why you are being so dismissive of several reasons why it might actually be justified in this case.

Yes…speed and reflexes matter a lot. speed and reflexes which a man can have just as easily as a woman. The only significantly difference between men and women as a group when it comes to combat is physical strength. So in general, men are just going to be better at melee combat assuming the same training. There will be exceptions to this, but they should be very rare…more so than they are in the WoT world, not less, so I don’t know what people are complaining about.

To Terez27 @@@@@ 87, unless Perrin stays there for a long while, that isn’t it. The day perrin’s part of chapter 2 takes place on is around day 776 of the series(the burned building from the bubble of evil). Rand sees Perrin at the sword statue on around day 801. We have about 25 days to go.

My guess is that it is the whitecloak camp. Keep in mind that Brandon appears to be setting a blistering pace for the beginning of this book…Assuming this is maintained, Perin is going to be meeting with Galad fairly early in the book, so he needs to go ahead and discover the camp.

For 20+ days?? He appeard to want to hurry as of chapter 2. Unless something major changes that, i can’t imagine him staying that long. For that matter, I can’t imagine anything major enough to make him stay that long. And Bradon has said that although the timeline is off a few days here and there, it is pretty close. So it might be 22 days, it might be 30, but its not just four or five, which is the longest I can see Perrin staying, even assuming the stuff with the whitecloaks takes a little while.

To Isilel @@@@@ 117, In order:
There was very little melee fighting for at least a little while in the two rivers, since the bowmen kept the trollocs off for a while, so Aram had at least a week or so to train before he started to actually fight. Yes, he was unrealistically good at that point, but he is presented as a savant with a blade. *shrug* hence the reaching blademaster level in a bit under a year instead of five. But this sort of thing does happen in some cases in real life too. And with Perrin’s ta’vereness around, it gets more likely in that world.

-Rand and Perrin were hardly good with their weapons after a week of training. They managed to survive, barely in a couple of fights. probably at least partly because of their ta’veren. And it doesn’t take that long to learn the basics of swordplay. They were not learning advanced skills, they were just learning how to make effective swings and try and keep themselves alive for a couple of seconds until lan could come in and save them.

As far as I can remember, we have no idea if Mat practiced with knives before thom started teaching him. I have more of an issue with how fast mat learns to juggle and Rand learns to play the flute than with their weapons practice.

It doesn’t say that the gai’shan are actually good with swords at this point, only that an unusual number are showing a talent with them, based on perrin’s ta’vereness.

Mat was supposedly the best young person with a quarterstaff in the village, and all of the two rivers are apparently supernaturally gifted with weapons(bow and quarterstaff, mostly) based on the old blood. Given that this is literally a supernatural thing, I don’t see why you are even bothering to compare it with reality.

“But the very few somewhat competent female fighters do?” So I assume we are just ignoring thousands and thousands of maidens here?

Mat is the great fighter mostly because he has hundreds of memories of warriors in his head. So his skill is greater than anyone else alive. As I mentioned, skill can trump greater strenth, but in normal cases, as men have just as much a chance to practice their skill, their greater strength just gives them a large advantage.

The SG situations are not really normal for aes sedai…in fact, the red ajah, which you pointed out is the one most in need of martial training since they have no warders, very rarely works incognito.

But I don’t really care that much. I just wanted to point out that the WoT world has a lot more female martial ability than real life, not the other way around as you seemed to have suggested. There are good reasons for that, and they probably should have taken it even further given their situation(the female borderlanders stands out here), but there, as in our history, there are social reasons why this is not the case. Oh well. Lets move on.

On to another topic…Has the puzzle Perrin is working on been mentioned before? I think it might be more than just a symbol of his inner struggle to “understand the parts”. There have been several times in which Perrin has easily solved similar blacksmith’s puzzles in the past, so it seems like this might be more than just a particularly complicated one. Especially since Haral Luhhan is presented as unusually skilled (like everyone else in the Two Rivers), so the puzzles Perrin is used to working on would be as complicated as could likely be made with current technology, and he solves those quickly and easily. This one has been worked on for a month. Could it be a ter’angreal or something similar?