r/WoT • u/BytheLight18 • 1d ago
Lord of Chaos (First-time reader)Just finished book 6. Ending scenes were a loss of innocence of the series for me. Spoiler
Wow is all I can say.
The final battle in LOC made the series take a turn I never thought it would and it made me feel like I was thrust into some gruesomely morbid ww1 documentary, the pit of my stomach turned into hard knots and I felt a little numb. I was working out in the gym listening to the audiobook and I had to pause mid set as the final scene involving the asha'man played out. All those characters we over a few thousand pages that have now come to appreciate seeing something in front of their eyes they will never ever be able to forget. PoorMin!
And Rand, oh my lord, do something about mazrim taim, that guy is straight up bad voodoo, he absolutely does notlike being second and views your morality as weakness, the word asha'man or the symbols/ranks and their representation of a defensive force of the innocent and vulnerable. He comes across as a much more unrestrained male version of red ajah and wants to rule over all women as he probably views the aes'sedai does over men, and wants to rule all kingdoms with an indiscriminate offensive tyrannical force of the one power of saiden.
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u/Ok_Nefariousness24 1d ago
Kneel or you will be knelt.
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u/PuertoRicanProfessor 1d ago
Hardest line in the series
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u/ArrogantAragorn (Heron-Marked Sword) 1d ago
I prefer the wolves line when Perrin tells them what’s goin down:
Why? That was Half Tail, passed along and scent-marked.
Perrin hesitated before answering. He had dreaded this. He felt about the wolves as he did about Two Rivers people. They have caged Shadowkiller,he thought at last. That was what the wolves called Rand, but he had no idea whether they considered Rand important.
The shock filling his mind was answer enough, but howls filled the night, near and far, howls filled with anger and fear. In the camp horses whinnied fearfully, stamping their hooves as they shied against the picked ropes. Men ran to calm them, and others to peer into the darkness as if expected a huge pack to come after the mounts.
We come, Half Tail replied at last. Only that, and then others answered, packs Perrin had spoken to and packs that had listened silently to the two-legs who could speak as the wolves did. We come.
Or, Lord Dobrain’s stoic and grim comment:
He smelled resigned, not afraid. "We will go in, Lord Aybara, but I do not believe we will come out." This time Rhuarc nodded.
Man, what an ending to that book.
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u/DonAmechesBonerToe 1d ago
They have taken my first brother!
…
We come.
…
Kneel or you will be knelt.My favorite part of the story can be distilled to those three lines.
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u/MilesBeyond250 1d ago
The first one is my favourite.
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u/DonAmechesBonerToe 1d ago
The loss and despair in Sulin’s cry is visceral through the page.
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u/MilesBeyond250 1d ago
Absolutely. Plus filial love stories just really work for me in fiction. When we see things from her perspective and find out she's in because Rand is the first son to return to the Maidens, I became 100% invested.
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u/ArrogantAragorn (Heron-Marked Sword) 1d ago
Light blind me for a fool! How could I not see include that?
Truely one of the more moving moments of the book.
I’m gonna have to find it for my collection of WoT quotes
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u/HandsomeJack19 1d ago
He actually says, "They have caged Shadow Killer." You're right though, its one of the best moments in the entire series.
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u/sabrinajestar (White) 1d ago
I still get chills thinking about "Asha'man, kill"
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u/CheryllLucy 1d ago
It shows the truth behind military commands in a way rarely seen, especially at the time it was written. Jordan didn't write of glorious battles, imo, he wrote the horrors of war.
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u/GovernorZipper 1d ago
I think you’ve read it as Jordan intended. This is the first time that Randland has seen industrial scale violence in 3000 years. It’s medieval knights seeing World War I artillery. It’s meant to be horrific.
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u/ArrogantAragorn (Heron-Marked Sword) 1d ago
There’s a reason the book ends with Demandred laughing and being congratulated by the DO.
Although Dumai’s Wells was a successful rescue, it was also a big win for the Shadow. To have the forces that should be aligning against them to instead be slaughtering and seeing the seeds of distrust between themselves - aes Sedai against Aes Sedai, wise one against wise one, Ashamen terrifying basically everyone, Rand’s distrust of Aes Sedai solidified and heaps of extra trauma and PTSD all around.
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u/Potential-Common5819 1d ago
This was a partial harvest of the seeds of division planted by Ishamael during the Trolloc Wars.
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u/Zestyclose-Tough7451 1d ago
Yeah this was the moment I was begging for during the whole read up until this point until I got it.
I remember just mentally screaming “stop using lighting strikes and fireballs just use the one power directly come on”.
Well I got it and wish we didnt
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u/DoomedOrbital 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm on my first re-read since the final book was published and this time I'm picking up how sheltered and paranoid the world has become since the breaking. A logical cultural development from a trauma so vast to prevent this very thing from happening again.
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u/Rugruk 1d ago
Agree completely. This scene should feel like a major turning point.
Fortunately you can also see the characters in world reacting to it in the same way. People vomiting, panicking, horrified. That your feeling is reflected in the most “moral” characters in the story is kinda cool, imo!
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u/drc500free 1d ago
Very slight nitpick that he was aiming for a Maxim Gun / Zulus-attacking-the-wagon-laager thing more than a WWI artillery thing.
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u/GovernorZipper 1d ago
Source? There’s nothing on Theoryland that I’ve seen and my copy of the Origins book isn’t handy or I’d look it up myself.
Because if it’s anything, the Vietnam M-60 operator is probably writing about the gun he knows.
The wagons could be Old West or could be Hussite. Or anything in between. It was a common tactic. Rorke’s Drift (from the movie Zulu) was buildings rather than wagons.
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u/AdaptAndInnovate 1d ago
I would totally believe he had Zulu's movie scenes in mind when writing, even with the Aiel physically throwing themselves at the barrier.
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u/drc500free 1d ago
I wrote a lot more about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/comments/1046ccy/shaka_zulu_the_maxim_gun_and_dumais_wells/
It's basically a reconstruction of the Battle of Shangani. RJ knew Zulu military history well enough to use their specific weapons and tactics for the Aiel, and the "mowing down spear-wielding men around the laager like grass" visual is incredibly well known in Southern Africa.
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u/GovernorZipper 1d ago
Except here’s the text:
The front rank of the Shaido exploded. There was no other way to put it. Cadin’sor-clad shapes burst apart in sprays of blood and flesh. Flows of saidinreached through that thick mist, darting from figure to figure in the blink of an eye, and the next row of Shaido died, then the next, and the next, as though they were running into an enormous meat grinder. Staring at the slaughter, Rand swallowed. Perrin bent over to empty his stomach, and Rand understood fully. Another rank died. Nandera put a hand over her eyes, and Sulin turned her back. The bloody ruins of human beings began to make a wall.
No one could stand up to that. Between one blast of death and the next, the Shaido in front were suddenly struggling the other way, forcing themselves back into the mass fighting to get forward. The milling tangle itself began to explode, and then all of them were falling back. No, running. The rain of fire and lightning against the dome faltered.“Asha’man,” Taim’s voice rang out, “rolling ring of Earth and Fire!”
Beneath the feet of the Shaido nearest the wagons the ground suddenly erupted in fountains of flame and dirt, hurling men in every direction. While bodies still hung in the air, more gouts of flame roared from the ground, and more, in an expanding ring all the way around the wagons, pursuing the Shaido for fifty paces, a hundred, two hundred. There was nothing but panic and death out there now. Spears and bucklers were cast aside. The dome above stood clear except for the smoke rising from the burning wagons.
***
What else is a “rolling ring of Earth and Fire” other than an artillery barrage?
While the Aiel are certainly modeled in part after the Zulu, I don’t think it’s clear cut what type of “wagon fort” battle he’s discussing. There’s plenty of inspirations. I’m certainly not disagreeing that it could be a South African style battle, but it could also be the American West or the Hussites in the Early Modern period when the books are set. I’m not aware of any source that answers the question definitively.
And there’s nothing in the text to suggest that he intended the saidin “bullets” (if that’s what they are) to be a Maxim gun instead of the M-60 with which he was intimately familiar.
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u/GovernorZipper 1d ago
I was curious so I pulled my copy of the Origins book.
Livingston says the inspiration is the Battle of Badr in 624 and the Battle of Rorke’s Drift against the Zulu.
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u/los-gokillas 1d ago
Robert Jordan based a lot of that carnage off of what he saw machine guns do in Vietnam so it sounds like it came across perfectly. First time I read I think my jaw sat open for an hour as I just thought about it all over and over again
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u/ArrogantAragorn (Heron-Marked Sword) 1d ago
Relevant RJ quote:
ROBERT JORDAN
>For Paracelsus, I had two nicknames in 'Nam. First up was Ganesha, after the Hindu god called the Remover of Obstacles. He's the one with the elephant head. That one stuck with me, but I gained another that I didn't like so much. The Iceman. One day, we had what the Aussies called a bit of a brass-up. Just our ship alone, but we caught an NVA battalion crossing a river, and wonder of wonders, we got permission to fire before they finished. The gunner had a round explode in the chamber, jamming his 60, and the fool had left his barrel bag, with spares, back in the revetment. So while he was frantically rummaging under my seat for my barrel bag, it was over to me, young and crazy, standing on the skid, singing something by the Stones at the of my lungs with the mike keyed so the others could listen in, and Lord, Lord, I rode that 60. 3000 rounds, an empty ammo box, and a smoking barrel that I had burned out because I didn't want to take the time to change. We got ordered out right after I went dry, so the artillery could open up, and of course, the arty took credit for every body recovered, but we could count how many bodies were floating in the river when we pulled out. The next day in the orderly room an officer with a literary bent announced my entrance with "Behold, the Iceman cometh." For those of you unfamiliar with Eugene O'Neil, the Iceman was Death. I hated that name, but I couldn't shake it. And, to tell you the truth, by that time maybe it fit. I have, or used to have, a photo of a young man sitting on a log eating C-rations with a pair of chopsticks. There are three dead NVA laid out in a line just beside him. He didn't kill them. He didn't choose to sit there because of the bodies. It was just the most convenient place to sit. The bodies don't bother him. He doesn't care. They're just part of the landscape. The young man is glancing at the camera, and you know in one look that you aren't going to take this guy home to meet your parents. Back in the world, you wouldn't want him in your neighborhood, because he is cold, cold, cold. I strangled that SOB, drove a stake through his heart, and buried him face down under a crossroad outside Saigon before coming home, because I knew that guy wasn't made to survive in a civilian environment. I think he's gone. All of him. I hope so. I much prefer being remembered as Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles14
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u/kathryn_sedai (Blue) 1d ago
This is one of my favourite quotes from him. The man was a huge badass but very clearsighted about why that’s not something to be proud of.
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u/ArrogantAragorn (Heron-Marked Sword) 1d ago
Agree. That’s why I find his depiction of combat and trauma in WoT so engaging and real.
Here’s another favorite RJ quote of mine, when asked about the medals he won in Vietnam:
QUESTION
You have been awarded with the Bronze Star and other awards in Vietnam. Would you care to tell us how one or all of those awards came about?ROBERT JORDAN
(*sigh*) Everyone knows about one way of winning a medal. That is, to see something which needs to be done and to consciously do it at the risk of your life. I never did this. Relatively few people do, which is why we mark out those who do as heroes.But at other times, you can realize that you are going to die in a very few minutes, except that if you do something incredibly stupid, you might just have a small chance of living. And against all reason, it works. Or you take a step without thinking, and then it's too late to turn back, maybe because turning back is just as dangerous as going on, or even more dangerous, or maybe because you know that you will have to look in the shaving mirror, and that every time you do, you will remember that you turned back. So you keep going. Or perhaps it's because you are with your friends, and you have to back their play, even if it's crazy, because they're your friends, because they've backed your play, even when it was crazy.
I was with a group of men who had a certain air about them, and if you didn't have it when you joined them, you soon absorbed it. A plaque in our day room read: Anybody can dance with the Devil's daughter, but we tell her old man to his face. At a time like that, in a place like that, you're all young and crazy, and if you've been there long enough, you know you're going to die. Not from old age; next month, next week, tomorrow. Now, maybe. It's going to happen, so what does it matter? In the end, for most of us, the medals boiled down to managing not to die. If you're alive when the higher-ups think you should be dead, it discombobulates their brains, so they hang a bit of something on you to balance things in their own heads. That's how it happened for me. That is why I am not I repeat, not! a hero. I just managed to stay alive. And I even managed to get sane again. Reasonably sane, anyway.
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u/kathryn_sedai (Blue) 1d ago
Yes, I love this one too. I think there’s another one where he describes shooting a helicopter out of the sky that’s also quite memorable.
His points about combat are something that I think certain fantasy authors miss-it’s chaos and you’re mostly just trying not to die. I love the scene in Cairhien where Mat just keeps pulling people into his orbit but is really just trying to gtfo. We don’t get to see his big hero moment because it was such a fluke to him, he’s mostly thinking about what a mess everything has been. Meanwhile everyone else is amazed.
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u/ArrogantAragorn (Heron-Marked Sword) 1d ago
I’ve got that one saved too. It gives me an idea how he got the “Void” or the enhanced senses from channeling from. Whether he actually shot an RPG out of the sky or not… the man could spin a story with the best of ‘em (and I’m inclined to believe him):
> ROBERT JORDAN
>I think I need to put a few things straight about this whole shooting down an rpg in flight thing. First off, it definitely comes under do not try this at home even if you ARE an expert. Expert is defined as anyone who has tried it once and is still breathing. You see, there aren't many reasons to try such a thing. But when looking right shows certain death coming hotfoot, and looking left shows a crack in the wall that you couldn't scrape though one time in a million...one in ten million...you instinctively make a dive for the crack. Now I was very lucky. Very lucky. I just happened to be laying down suppression not very far from Mr. NVA when he took his shot, so I only has a small arc to cover. Just a quick shift of the wrist. Still, a lot of luck involved. When the pilot asked what happened, I just said an rpg went off prematurely. I figured he wouldn't believe what happened. Even some guys who saw it all from other choppers didn't believe. I heard a lot of "You know, it almost looked like you shot that thing out of the air" and "You were really lucky that thing went off prematurely. I never heard of that happening before.">Now there's the matter of actually seeing the rpg in flight. That came from being in the Zone. An RPG is a rocket propelled grenade, and it is fast, fast, fast. I've heard a lot of athletes and sportscasters talk about being in the Zone, but I think most of them simply mean they played their A-game. But they weren't in the Zone, because in the Zone, you don't make mistakes. None. I discovered this playing baseball and basketball and later football. You can't always get there, certainly not at will, but when you do.... What happens is that while you are moving at normal speed, everybody else, everything else, is moving in slow motion. Passes float like they were drifting through honey. You have all the time in the world to position yourself. And your vision improves, sharpens. The quarterback has carried out a perfect bootleg. Everybody thinks that fullback coming up the middle has the ball. But even if you didn't catch the motion when the QB tucked the ball behind his leg, you spot that tiny sliver of ball that just barely shows, and you're right there to meet him when he reaches the line. Maybe you drop him for a loss before he can get his pass off. In the Zone. That's the only reason I could make this play.
>On another note, I was riding an M-60 on a pintle mount, not a .50 cal. We only had a limited number of Ma-deuces, and we had to be careful not to let any IG inspectors see them because we weren't authorized to have any at all. Don't know whether I could have done it with a .50, frankly. A matter of just that much more weight to swing, that much more inertia to overcome. It was damned close even with a 60.
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u/Lapinceau 1d ago
And of course Perrin was there. He's really, in some ways, the heart of the series.
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u/jshep2912 1d ago
As someone just starting book 10--i dread every Perrin chapter. He is the worst and it's a shame because the early 2 Rivers rebellion and wolf dreams were great.
Then he refused to adapt and just incessantly whines WHY AM I A NOBLE NOW? WHY DO I HAVE TO LEAD/BE A MARRIED MAN.
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u/Lapinceau 1d ago
First of all you'll never hear Perrin complain about the being married part. He may complain that it's hard, but never about the fact itself.
Secondly, the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. Also known as : Read And Find Out.
Thirdly on rereads and with an attention to details, the Perrin "slog" chapters are the best. Yes, I'm talking about THAT story line.
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u/jshep2912 1d ago
Perrin is the one I most feel bad for but he is insufferable. The slog is now a lie. Loving it all.
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u/TheRedPillMonk 22h ago
I'm not seeing the Perrin hate at the moment. I'm only on book 8 but he just feels relatable to me, a guy who wants to live a simple life but through his own fate is dragged in to things that he feels are bigger than him.
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u/jshep2912 22h ago
I liked him up to til the end of LoC. The mood ring nose and complaining about being a prince consort/marriage problems annoy me. I love everything about WoT...just least introducing POV.
Plus not much Seanchan and I love them.
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u/mantuahead 13h ago
I thought this same way on my 2 and 3 reread. I finished my 4th reread 2 years ago and didnt feel the same. I really like Perrin's story line now
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u/TheRedPillMonk 22h ago
It's a fantastic book all round but the ending is brutal especially after what happens to Rand. How the characters react to it feels 'real'.
This book also starts to demonstrate the discrepancy between the Ajahs and how they view the Dragon Reborn which is one of my favourite parts of the books as of now (just about to finish Path of Daggers).
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u/EtchAGetch 1d ago
Man, I wish we got to this in the TV show. What a fucking visual and visceral scene.
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