I may be broken.

I saw the ending of the Les Miserables movie a few years back, and to me, it looked like Hugh Jackman, in his afterlife, turned away from the clergyman, who I took to be offering him Heaven. And Anne Hathaway, who seemed to be trying to take him to the priest, kind of slumps for a minute, like she's disappointed in his choice, like maybe because of what Jean did for her, she owes him cosmically and her fate is tied to his, so if he rejects heaven, she's out, too. And then we cut to all the troublemakers who were blessedly excised in their stupid revolution, and they are all on the barricade cheerfully singing their "Let's highjack some dude's funeral for our political goals and fuck the family who might be mourning him or the other citizens of the country he also cared about, since he served in its military, and stir up trouble until we cause one of our people to get shot by accident and use it as a casus belli to riot and fuck up our city even worse" song. And then Jackman and Hathaway are singing along, and since they turned their back on the clergyman and heaven, I have to assume that they are in hell with the militant rioters. I missed a brief tiny shot of Jackman and Hathaway following the clergyman into a door, so my interpretation is clearly wrong, but it fits better than the story they are trying to tell. Because Heaven is not an eternal struggle and conflict, if it is, it's not heaven. At best, the malcontents are in some sort of afterlife asylum for horribly broken people who are not evil enough to go to Hell, or are so messed up they cannot be held accountable for their crimes and sins, so they get to indulge their contrarian and insatiable compulsion to fight.

Looking back on some of my older WoT posts, from years and years back, especially on wotmania, yeah. I was a bit of an asshole at times. I didn't mean it that way, but I actually preferred threads and posts I disagreed with, because I thought better when there was another thought to push back against, to give structure to my thoughts. The oppositional nature of my involvement in discussions, my enthusiasm for the subject and entertainment with invective, all came out as much more angry than I felt and more assholish than I intended.

So there are a couple of different ways to look at this - either all my experience in WoT fandom to this date has been training, honing and preparing me for the fight of my life, to stand as a champion against the ultimate threat to "The Wheel of Time" as a fandom concept and go down battling hopelessly until it ends, and maybe shine a tiny bit of light on the flaws that a few people will read and help them to realize how bad it is, to spit out their Kool Aid or reconcile the discontent they can't explain.

In the words of one of the few good streaming shows made of a pre-existing IP we just did not appreciate enough in the late 90s, early 00s, when a rebel is asked what he sacrifices for his cause:
"Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I've given up all chance at inner peace. I've made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion, I'm damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they've set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude."

Or maybe I'm just one of those loser asshole French guys, and WoT on Prime is my eternal Parisian barricade in the not-so-Heavenly afterlife of the book series.