Timewaster's Guide Archive

Quote from: anthonypeers on March 14, 2011, 10:39:47 PM

Back to the original question, has anyone considered the fact that what the king said was the last words out of his mouth, spoken just seconds before his death?  There's a definite possibility that what the king spoke was actually just death-babbling, (perhaps he was channeling Nohadon,)  and Szeth simply interpreted it as actually coming from the king's conscious will because 1) it seemed to fit the context and 2) the death-babbling phenomenon seems to have started at right about this same time and Szeth was probably not aware of it yet.

I've considered that, but in a rather different way - there's nothing "just" about "just death babbling".  The pre-death blurbs are all full of meaning, prophecy, and supernatural insight, and at least some of them definitively indicate continued awareness of the speaker's present situation and preferences - for example, there's one where one of Taravangian's victims states specifically that he refuses to tell of what he sees because he knows what Taravangian is doing and hates him for it.  Thus, Gavilar's request being part of that phenomenon would grant it more weight, not less.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the death-babbling phenomenon is the original reason for the Shinovar custom of honoring dying requests - it's happened before, or has always been happening, and at some point in ancient history they learned to take special heed of dying words specifically because dying words are backed by more than mortal knowledge.  The recent upsurge could be explained by the Everstorm entering the death-viewable future and giving a lot more people something worth actually talking about in their final moments.  Maybe death-babbling has been happening for a long time, but few enough people saw anything significant enough to inspire them to speak that no one really noticed.

Very interesting.  Lots of good points.  But remember the whole bit about all the magical stuff the rest of Roshar takes for granted not holding sway in Shinovar?

First off, I really love Brandon's work and the last couple Wheel of Time books have been really great.  But there was one thing that really confused the heck out of me.

For several books now, we've seen Rand slowly losing his humanity and hardening his heart. His Warders can feel the emotional effect, but they can't hear his thoughts.  We, on the other hand, do have the occasional peek inside his head, and it's always related to the litany of women who have died because of him, a list that always begins with the same name: Moiraine Damodred Aes Sedai.  Cadsuane always says he'll have to regain the emotions he's suppressing in order to be an effective Dragon come the Last Battle, but she doesn't know why he's suppressing them in the first place.  But we do: it's because of the women, and particularly Moiraine.

But we've always known that Moiraine was still alive. Even before seeing Thom's letter, we knew Moiraine is alive because of Min's viewing.  It always felt to me like these two things, taken together, constitute a very clear piece of foreshadowing: the event that restored Rand's humanity would be the shock of meting Moiraine, alive and well, after she was rescued from the tower, which makes the very foundation of the wall he's been sealing all his emotions behind crumble.

Instead, Rand goes up to Dragonmount and does something completely unrelated, an entire book before Moiraine gets rescued, and ends up getting his humanity back that way... and I was just all "what the heck just happened?" To me that doesn't feel like it fits at all.

Any thoughts or alternative perspectives on this?