Frodrick: So do I. It really makes sense for Nynaeve's character. She has always placed helping people before the White Tower, so I could not honestly see it go any other way.

Now taking bets: Who had the best/worst death this book?

 

So I've been reading this book for the last 5 hours. Just finished, actually.

Perrin: :awesome
Mat: :awesome
Rand: :awesome

Everyone in this book who was a named character: :awesome

Easily the best book of the series. :awesome

Edit:

And is it just me or does the whole wolf-related concepts and storyline of Perrin seem like it could have been a completly seperate story and series? Same for Mat and the Tower of Ghenji.

 

Read it when it came out, forgot to post. Anyone else feel that the last book is going to be incredible rushed? Just going to spoiler all of this, even if it aint.

Spoiler

There is shitloads going on still, Rand still hasn't dealt with the Seachan. Their at a day before Tai'Gamon or however you spell it, and Rand just leaves the Seachan sitting there. Pretty shit. I was looking forward to the Seachan being a big battle with Rand THEN the last battle. However as it is Matt will probably say something to Tuon and then the Seachan will magically appear at the last battle.

And with all this shit going on, I just can't see my Forsaken fights happening properly. As it is they don't, the forsaken are meant to be uber powerful and centuries old yet they still get their asses kicked in the lamest ways. I mean that dream world, especially in the last book, the way Mes was defeated was freaking lame. Shes centuries old and shes never thought 'Oh hey, this is a dream, this isn't real, I can do what I want.' Yet Egwene does at a moments notice? Degrading the forsaken much? I'd prefer her to die in her sleep with a knife in her back then to be defeated looking as stupid as she did.

I was looking forward in the last book all the Forsaken battles, big scenes one on ones etc and Rand pwning up, but I just can't see that happening with the shit Brandon's still got to deal with.

Not to mention the black tower. Theres a lot of words in one of these books, but theres still a lot of major plots and countless side plots to be wrapped up and then the last battle as well. I just feel some of those major plots are going to be incredible rushed.

Love the series, but bracing myself for major disappointment in the last book. It's probably got to do with that I set myself to high expectations on how these plots should be resolved, but as we saw with Moiraine, they can be incredible short and sweet.

 

I wouldn't go that far (in fact, I'm going to have to insist you put the pipe down, because you are clearly smoking more than just Two Rivers tabac).

Frankly, I felt the previous book was better (same quality of writing, for the most part, but more exciting stuff happened in it).

I'll make it simple, if it didn't have the Battle of Dumai's Wells in it, chances are good that it wasn't the best book in the series.

Spoiler

Egwene stomping all over the Seanchan was kick-ass on its own, never mind the other stuff that happened.

Except for a few standout moments, this book felt more to me like it simply served as a transition between book 1 and 3 of the final books. It's the book that had to happen, in order to tie up loose ends and get people where they all needed to be.

Spoiler

One of those standout moments being Perrin creating fuckin' Mjolnir! Or the WoT version of it, at least. I mean, come on: Mjolnir, Mah'alleinir... sound it out.

I've never been a huge Perrin fan. I started out liking him well enough, but the further we got into the books, the longer, slower, and more ponderous the Perrin sections got (that is, when he actually did show up in a book). His sections became tedious to read. FFS, his sole contribution a few books back was buying buggy grain!
However, Perrin fans should be pretty happy with both the face time Perrin gets in Towers of Midnight, but also with the quality of that time.

I've never been a hater about Elayne... but this book, since it featured her entire family, made me wonder if the Trakand/Damodred family weren't the stupidest single family in WoT. When they aren't doing asinine shit to put themselves or their allies in danger, they're taking misunderstandings and blowing them up to national proportions.

They're really quite moronic.

Spoiler

And Mat finally lost his eye -like we knew he would- more or less completing the Odin imagery that surrounds him: one eye, hanged from a unique tree in exchange for knowledge, ravens, and so on.

Rand's name may have 'Thor' in it, but he has more in common with Tyr, considering his missing hand.

Anyway, I had mixed feelings about how Rand used a disarming spell to beat the dark lord.

Overall, though, it was a good book, and the book we needed.

 

Lol.

More exciting stuff happened in the last one? Are you serious?

Spoiler

Perrin's shennanigans, the adventure into the Tower of Ghenji, the insight into the future of the Aiel, the overrunning of the Borderlands, the Last Charge of the Golden Crane, the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Trollocs and their ilk at the hands of Rand, and the defeat of the gholam

Dude, Rand just Dumai's Well'd a fucking army by himself. Perrin did pretty much the same, and well, Mat is Mat. :awesome

Edit: Oh, and everyone, go read the glossary. Reveals ahoy exist there. Including Asmodean's killer.

 

Fucking tease.

*Runs and picks up his discarded book and reads the glossary, for the first time.*

 

Just finished it. I have to say, it was pretty awesome.

Spoiler

Perrin became a hell of a lot less boring once he stopped whining about not wanting to be a wolf and manned up.

Rand blasting the fuck out of the Trollocs at Maradon was pretty cool, but Sanderson could have done a way better job of describing it. I got the feeling that it was a bajillion time more epic than Dumai's Wells, but all he said was (basically) "The Trollocs displeased Rand, and his hand did go SMOOSH." Most of Rand's other epic battles (Dumai's Wells, that one in the nobleman's mansion where he re-discovered deathgates and other cool toys) were described way better. No surprise, they were both done by Jordan. Something tells me Sanderson needs to work on his epic battle scenes.

I was just wondering what had become of Logain when I got to the first Black Tower section and discovered that he's missing. I'm pretty curious about what he's been up to. Also, Taim is definitely doing something strange. He's gotta be either REALLY insane or one of the Forsaken. I've been favoring the Forsaken hypothesis for a while now, but I can't think of who he might be (I've sorta lost track of who's died, who's been resurrected, and who got balefire'd). MOAR BLACK TOWER!

The Tower of Ghenji was pretty cool, though Mat was kind of an idiot for missing the obvious loophole. And I totally called Noal being Jain Farstrider right after he was introduced.

It did have some annoying parts though.

Spoiler

The number of weddings/proposals/mooning over opposite sex. This really started to piss me off after while. Morgase and Tallanvor I could see I guess; that one's been building up the sexual tension since before they escaped Caemlyn. But Moiraine and Thom? In retrospect, it's not too hard to see that she had the hots for him, but still, it seemed pointless besides getting Thom made a Warder (which wouldn't have required marriage), even disregarding the fact that Thom hates Aes Sedai. Same sorta goes for Egwene and Gawyn. Yeah, he needed to be made her Warder, but they didn't need to talk about marriage. And while Berelain going stupid over Galad was funny, it served no real purpose.

Also, Verin's note. If it was so damn important, she shouldn't have made it sound like she was going to make Mat do something he wouldn't like. She'd been around him long enough to know how he felt about Aes Sedai. The only reason I can see for her not just telling him the situation and getting him to tell Elayne if she wasn't back in a day is her wanting to maintain the Aes Sedai mystique. Verin was smarter than that. Better yet, she could have sent the note to Elayne, or even told Mat to give it to her.

I'm eagerly awaiting the final installment; still so much to take care of:

Spoiler

the Seanchan, the Black Tower arc, the confrontation between Rand, Egwene, and Elayne over the seals, fucking Tarmon Gai'don, Lan's fate (though the Prophecy of the Shadow sorta hinted at that)...gah! So many loose ends still!

Edit:
Also,

Spoiler

Most honorable is a bit of a tie between Hopper's spirit and Noal. Best (most awesome) goes to the two Bloodknives that Gawyn killed. That or the entire Trolloc army that Rand smashed singlehandedly. Most deserved is a tie between Byar (hated him since he appeared) and Mesaana (even though she didn't technically die).

 

Spoiler

Mesaana's fate was just god-awful. Needed more buildup. Maybe if Sanderson had done it from her point of view, of showing us her satisfaction with crushing this insolent little girl from a shattered remnant of the Tower, only to find that the girl was strong, and the Tower was still standing for a reason...

Yeah. It's like that.

As for the Seanchan,

Spoiler

One thing I don't like about Sanderson is that he's relegating them more to the side, and what hints we get about them are so tantalizingly juicy. Like Aviendha's visions of the future, or seeing Elaida kneel before Tuon. I loved Knife of Dreams because of the Mat/Tuon interaction. I want more.

Additionally, anybody else notice that Tuon's new name sounds very, very similar to Fortune-as in Luck, as in Mat's gift?

Battle-wise, Sanderson's shown himself to be decent at that. Like Egwene in the Gathering Storm.

Spoiler

Rand's casual killing of all of them, I think, was deliberate. It was a signal that he had just turned the dials up again. An entire army of Trollocs was nothing compared to him, whereas General Guerrilla Warfare Badass(forgot his name) had to struggle against them.

But what I really didn't like was that

Spoiler

The Tower of Ghenji was sort of tacked on at the end. I mean, I think Mat should have spent a substantial amount of time there, for a good portion of the book. Not at the end, after the big awesome battle against the Mesaana, Slayer, and the Bloodknives. I mean, it became very much an anticlimax. Awesome? Yes. But still, very much out of place. Sanderson should have placed it before that battle. Somehow.

 

Spoiler

it was graendal

also @frodrick

I forgot about this. I was all emo about the fate of the aiel until I found this. Thank gawd Aviendha's viewing isn't going to happen.

 

Spoiler

Except that isn't what happened. It wasn't Aviendha's choices but her descendants' choices that she viewed in the ter'angreal.

 

The thing about Verin's note was

Spoiler

it was [supposed to be] a no lose situation. Either Mat opens the note and is forced to stick around in Camelyn or he doesn't open the note and [The Band] is...forced to stick around in Camelyn. Either way, it's still got defenders. That's not to say they're not FUCKED since Mat isn't there, but they should be okay without him.

 

Just finished it, got it Wednesday and i had to work so i couldn't do a all niter like i did with the last one. i can honestly say im going to have nightmares about whats happening in the Black Tower, Ive had nightmares about that same thing with whats going on with those people since childhood, shudder.

I'm looking forward to the last part but there where some parts that just felt blah to me. i don't know if it was the words used for some of it or just how it was handled but whatever all in all a great read.

 

I think everyone needs to remember that Sanderson is NOT making these last books up from whole cloth. Jordan had a million characters and scenarios going at once, and you'd better believe he had notes on all of them. Same goes for the events of the final books.

While it is ultimately Sanderson who will present these events, they have already been decided upon and, I would wager, the order of their occurrence has as well (for all but the most inconsequential things).

Don't forget that Jordan would relegate characters and situations to the back burner for whole books -thousands of pages- at a time. Hell, even one or more of the three ta'veren at a time get set aside for an entire book, garnering no more than a few pages before they disappear for another five or six hundred.

If any given group like, say, Perrin's army, gets ignored or 'back-burnered' by Sanderson, you can bet that's to serve the plot outline laid out by Jordan ahead of time. Even in cases where Sanderson has more freedom to go with his own scheduling, with so many characters (or massive groups of characters, like the Seanchan, since whole nations are embroiled in the events) and plotlines to deal with, I'm sure there are times when he'll have little choice but to leave a group in the background for a while and get back to them as plot permits.

When was the last time we heard more than a tiny peep from Loial? Bet it predates Sanderson's stewardship of the series.

There were books where Rand was barely even seen, and scarcely mentioned by the other characters. Bearing that in mind, and that Jordan left extensive notes for his wife and Sanderson to work with, I'm not quick to pin any particular perceived niggle about the book on the man finishing them.

You'll note that Wikipedia says "Completed by Brandon Sanderson," not "Written by Brandon Sanderson." There's another man's name on the cover with his, and that man was the one who dictated the vast majority of the current plotting and scheduling.

I think Sanderson is doing a remarkable job of presenting the last books to the reader. Events will happen as they happen, characters and groups thereof will take hold of, then vanish from the focus of the story just as they did when Jordan was alive to punch the keys himself.

Spoiler

As frodrick said, I think Rand annihilating the trollocs was never supposed to be epic like Dumai's Wells. The fact is, he is finally stepping up and becoming what he was meant to be.

In the Age of Legends, mere handfuls of channelers could destroy whole cities and reshape whole regions until they were unrecognizable. Lews Therin was equal to those channelers, if not far above them.

Can Rand, finally taking command of his own power and being who he needs to be, destroy an army with a seemingly effortless, though tiring, wave of his hand? You betcha.

This scene was NEVER supposed to top Dumai's Wells, and it would be utterly ridiculous to think it should have. The events of Dumai's Wells were built up over many chapters, with the focus jumping back and forth to multiple groups of characters, each of them drawing closer to the battlefield until the climax.

Who fought there? Five thousand of Rand's Aiel, a thousand Maidens of the Spear (determined to rescue their first-brother), and nearly a hundred Wise Ones wielding the One Power (which most people weren't aware they could do) in battle, Loial with a huge fucking axe, forty-fuck-thousand treacherous Shaido Aiel, including around 300 Wise Ones that could use the One Power, thirty-nine of Elaida's Aes Sedai, with nearly six hundred Younglings (lead by that ignorant twat, Gawyn), the nine Salidar Aes Sedai, Dobraine's Cairhienen, Winged Guard from Mayene, hundreds of men from the Two Rivers, Perrin and a thousand wolves...

All of these forces collided on the impromptu battlefield of Dumai's Wells!

In the lead up to the fight, alone, you have Rand killing a Warder with his BARE HANDS, without the use of the One Power, and nearly killing another with the fallen Warder's sword.

And there was Perrin sending for help from the wolves... "They have caged Shadowkiller." "We come."

You had Rand and Min captured by Elaida's flunkies, the former being blocked, beaten, and tortured, confined to a tight chest until the man developed claustrophobia!

And there was Rand cooperating with Lews Therin in his head in order to, again, do the impossible and break free from the shield which prevented him from channeling. He STILLS the three Aes Sedai who were holding his shield, just in the process of breaking free, as incidental collateral damage!

And then, on top of all that, two-hundred male channelers pop in out of nowhere and start devastating everything that fucking moves! And in such a disciplined, organized fashion, too. They had uniforms, maneuvers...

Male channelers were rare and feared. Most folks had never seen one, and the only ones they'd even heard of were False Dragons, which were themselves practically myth. Now, all of a sudden, there's this big group of them fighting as a military unit and more or less putting the Aes Sedai to shame with their efficacy on the battlefield.

"I told you to make weapons, Taim. Show me just how deadly they are. Disperse the Shaido. Break them." "Asha'man, kill!"

"They are on their knees, Aes Sedai. Kneel!" "Kneel and swear to the Lord Dragon," he said, softly, "or you will be knelt."

Oh, yeah, and some Aes Sedai swear fucking fealty to Rand.

Dumai's Wells was HUGE for so many reasons, many of them having nothing to do with the fight. We saw things we had never seen before... On the other hand, we saw Rand slaughter mass quantities of trollocs with a wave of his hand (using a form of Darkspawn-seeking lightning) way back before he even traveled to the Aeil Waste. To think that a single-handed ass-kicking of nameless meat by Rand should be elevated to anywhere near Dumai's Wells status is repugnant.

That's not even mentioning that, in laying so much importance on Rand detonating the trollocs at the end of a chapter, many people forget the much more significant battle that had been fought in that city by the ordinary soldiers against the forces of the dark up to that point. That was ordinary people fighting against extraordinary odds, and they did so admirably. For all that they lacked the power of a Dragon Reborn, their actions were all the more heroic for it.

Rand's portion of the fighting shouldn't be important because of the sheer tonnage of trolloc meat he spread over the earth. If that's what mattered, you'd have super!Rand, not Dragon Reborn!Rand. The real significance of Rand destroying the trolloc army was him coming into his own and accepting what he must do to defeat the Dark One, not that he curb stomped some fucking cannon fodder.

Name ONE character fighting on the Dark One's side, in that scene, other than the off-screen Forsaken that set it in motion.

What, there weren't any? Now name all the people whose lives were changed, people getting their asses kicked, physically or politically, literally or figuratively, in person or by association, because of Dumai's Wells.

Well, shit...

 

Warlocke: I guess I see your point, but the way it was described made it sound like it was supposed to be cooler and it got dumbed down. And there's no way I'd have forgotten what came before.