Lan is a sort of unique figure in the world of WoT. Apparently one of the most famous people in that world, second only to a false dragon or monarch or a great noble, and while he shares some of the characteristics of such people that can be attributed to the reputations they have, he doesn’t actually rule or lead anyone, has committed no atrocities or for that matter done many great deeds or achieved great things that would normally make a man a living legend. Even more interesting is how he shies away from doing anything to earn that reputation or coming remotely close to being a “great” man. When we first meet him, chronologically speaking, he is leading a relatively small unit of soldiers in the Aiel War, and encounters Aiel who know of him and are impressed enough to forego their habitual violent response. No explanation is given at the time for their reaction though later they say they know his back-story and find it very impressive and honorable. Again, to this point in his life he has not done all that much besides fight in the Blight alongside his teachers. Later, upon his return to the Borderlands, he receives a generally positive reception and becomes immersed in intrigue of which he wants no part, but goes along for the sake of his mentor, Bukama, and the debt Lan feels he owes him.

This is the key to Lan and his future behavior and the pattern of his actions. Of all the characters, he is in many ways dealt the worst hand in life. He was never permitted to be his own person, but was raised for the sake of others. He was treated in the same way many responsibly brought-up nobles and rulers may have been (Elayne’s own somewhat dysfunctional childhood and family dynamic are a parallel), however unlike a ruler or noble, he is not being raised for the good or well-being of a nation-state, but of a nation, in the sense of a people, that has lost its state. The trappings of the Malkieri state were destroyed when he was born, leaving only the people, who for the most part have begun spreading to other nations and making new lives for themselves. Some have gone so far as to acculturate within their new nations while others cling to the customs and habits of their lost land, like political refugees are seen to do so often in the real world. It is suggested that, at least when Lan was a boy and young man, they tried to maintain communities of Malkieri that would appear to have dissolved as their children grew up with less attachment to a land they had never seen and moved on with their lives, marrying into the nations within which they live and so on. Lan, the son of the lost rulers of Malkier, was trapped from birth by his role. His own guardians, no doubt trying to honor the memories of a man and woman they respected or honored, brought Lan up to be the king of a nation that no longer existed in a form that can use a king. The only way their king can serve the Malkieri is as a living symbol of what they lost and what they hope to regain.

However hopeless, the dream of Malkier restored died hard. Mention is made of Malkier Aes Sedai dying in futile schemes to win back their nation, but there is little or no mention of the Blight ever receding so much as a league, let alone giving back the entire territory of a kingdom. As such, there is no land Lan can rule, and he knows it. The prosperity and safety of his people, by the time he comes of age, is no longer his duty, but that of the rulers into whose kingdoms the Malkieri have dispersed. He has no practical purpose, but has been raised to place his duty to his people above all else.

This is why when he returns to the Borderlands in New Spring, he says he has come back to die, and why he is so frustrated by Edeyn’s snaring him in her schemes. Though the absurd Malkieri customs that bind him to her will seem foolish to a reader, it is not so much Edeyn’s doing as all who were involved in his upbringing. For all those who still cling to the culture and memories of Malkier (and they are the culture and customs with which Lan was raised, so they are his as well, and all he has, at that), for their Uncrowned King to break with custom in even a small way would be a crushing blow – a confirmation of what the rational part of their brains may be telling them, but of which their hearts are resisting acceptance: namely that Malkier is gone, their people are drifting away and within a generation, no one will BE Malkieri aside from an occasional odd custom or habit of dress cropping up among men & women who are otherwise indistinguishable from the Saldaeans or Arafellien among whom they live.

It is one thing when your kids roll their eyes when you make them wear Malkieri clothes or observe Malkieri feast days which their Shienarin or Kandori playmates don’t understand, it is one thing to notice that all the people who dress and act as you do are growing older and older and their children are less and less like them and you, but as long as your king appears to be keeping the faith, you can feel proud rather than pathetic. You are not a castaway from a lost land, stranded amidst a sea of strangers, you are part of something bigger! You are a member of the Malkieri nation in exile, something that will go on after your death, rather than dying with you and your peers. You can cling to the dream that no matter how hopeless it looks, even if you know deep down inside that you will never again see the lakes and towers of Malkier with the Golden Crane flying atop them, perhaps in the years to come, a descendant of al’Lan Mandragoran will lead your own descendants and those of your friends and neighbors back to a reborn Malkier, reclaimed from the Shadow and the king you barely remember avenged. It might seem sad and pathetic, but these are the people for which Lan has been raised to live.

And he knows the futility of that dream. He has all but grown up in the Blight and been trained with weapons all his life to be the ideal warrior against the Shadow. No doubt he has received similar training in tactics and strategy as Gawyn and Elayne mention learning in their childhoods, and learned what rulers must know to administer a nation. Given all that, he could hardly fail to see the hopelessness of his “cause.” And he adheres to old saying that “death is lighter than a feather, duty is heavier than a mountain.” This is the duty he finds so heavy – living every moment of his life to the impossible standard of heroes recalled in a rosy glow of past glories, and as the living symbol of something that no longer exists, except in the minds of an aging population who would probably be better off letting go and moving on. What is more, this obsession with Malkier cannot be good for the unity of the Borderlands and is probably a distraction from their mission of defending against the Shadow. Probably the only thing that saved them was the memory that national disunity and hubristic military adventurism was the cause of Malkier’s downfall, preventing a “Malkier lobby” within each Borderland from encouraging them to waste their strength attempting to regain it.

As it is, they expect Lan to do actually attempt to restore Malkier someday, and that is why they will follow him if he raises the Golden Crane. They would follow him because in the stories, the king leads his people to win back their homeland, and surely he will succeed. All the other bits of his back-story are like something out of a legend – the child sworn in his cradle to avenge the nation, the small band of heroes carrying him to safety out of the dying kingdom through the advancing Blight, one jump ahead of the hordes of Shadowspawn, the son of the king growing to manhood as a highly skilled warrior, the very epitome of a Borderland warlord. How could such a story end badly? No matter what seasoned warriors or cynical veteran soldiers might know of their chances, like the Malkieri who cling to their lost homeland, they cannot REALLY believe it will sputter out in a massacre of outnumbered aging soldiers deep inside the Blight. So Lan cannot raise his banner, and he cannot let himself lead men on a futile crusade, because it has no chance, and he will only be leading them to a wasteful death, not unlike his uncle's expedition that doomed Malkier in the first place.

The other option is never doing anything to advance the cause of reclaiming Malkier. And Lan has seen this end, too. It is something very similar to what we see of his life between his arrival in Chachin and getting involved with Moiraine’s scheme. While it seems ridiculous that this badass death-on-two-legs god-of-war can be constrained and corralled into going along with an ambitious cougar’s scheme to gain power and influence, it is sort of symbolic of how he is trapped by the expectations of the Malkieri survivors. It is not a lock of hair or a woman’s command that holds him, or even the customs of a lost kingdom. It is the duty of a king, which for Lan is not protecting his people or leading his kingdom, but has been reduced to preserving a dream and living out a grand adventure story to comfort them in their exile. For Lan, to take up the mantle of king-in-exile of Malkier will mean a lifetime of being ensnared in schemes like those of Edeyn and her kindred seekers of power and influence, or public relations appearances, with speeches and posturing and gladhanding well-meaning romantics and irreconcilables who can’t accept that Malkier is as dead as the Compact of the Ten Nations. And eventually, he will no longer be the hope of a people, but an old man and a pathetic figure hanging around the courts of the Borderlands. Gradually the rulers & soldiers who remember Malkier will be replaced by their successors for whom Malkier is less and less of a recent tragedy and increasingly relegated to history as one more step back among many in their unending war. Dealing with the new crises and challenges for the Borderlands will leave precious little time for reliving the old glories of Malkier or dreams of taking back the kingdom. Playing host to the King of Malkier will be less and less of an honor and stern reminder of their duty and consequences of failure, and more and more of an awkward and onerous obligation, humoring & playing host to the old man and his fading entourage. And in attempting to satisfy the surviving Malkieri by being a mascot for the kingdom, he will kill those dreams slowly. As he ages and fades, so will their own dreams and memories of past glories, and Malkier will lose its luster as a romantic cause, until people breathe a sigh of relief in private even as they throw a magnificent funeral and weep sincere tears for the last King of Malkier.

No matter which form, Lan must have foreseen the futility and inevitable disappointment that must come to his "legend," whether through decline or defeat. As a boy, youth & young man, he was a romantic figure and an archetypal legend personified - the dispossessed heir of a noble kingdom. Unlike Prince Caspian or Bonnie Prince Charlie or Daenerys Targaryen, his kingdom is destroyed and cannot be retrieved in a dashing crusade to avenge his parents' killers and reclaim his rightful heritage. Only the fact of his being born so near the time of the Dragon's presumably inevitable defeat of the Shadow makes it possible for readers to even entertain the notion of the restoration of Malkier. Lan knows he cannot meet the absurd and unrealistic expectations of the sort of people who would come to his banner, and Nynaeve's manipulation of those same expectations in KoD is in some ways a cynical exercise in channeling that futile romanticism into a useful end, but not one that could have been imagined when he was younger and had no clue of the imminence of the Last Battle. Lan sought his death in the Blight in New Spring because he could not break the shackles of his Legend and lacked the indifference he'd need to disappoint people by telling them outright to piss off and get a life. So he sought to end the pressure in a way that would satisfy all the a-holes who made him the focus of their wistful dreaming - a noble but inevitable death against the Blight, which he would not ask of those who would have followed him.

All the rest of the Malkieri were allowed to make their own lives and move on - Lan was denied that choice, and forced to live as the embodiment of their homesickness, the personification of their wishful fantasy of retaking their land from the Blight. As life went on and the dream slipped further and further from their hearts' grasp, Lan would devolve into a pathetic figure representing not a romantic dream, but a lost cause, and he would bear the embarrassment and scorn for all who would not let it die. Rather than just say "It's not happening people! Let me settle for living a good life and doing what I choose, instead of what all of you would choose for me," he sought his death, to remain forever in people's minds and hearts, the valiant tragic hero, who died trying to save his doomed kingdom, rather than a pathetic exile, whose dwindling prowess & fading luster is blamed for the killing of hopes that should not have been nourished in the first place.

Thus, he joins Moiraine’s quest to find the Dragon Reborn. It is a mission he can undertake while honoring his obligations to Malkier – how better to avenge his nation and fight the Shadow than by facilitating the rise of the Dragon Reborn, who is humanity’s best hope of defeating the Dark One? This also accounts for his presumptive cooperation with Nynaeve’s recruiting tactics in KoD, and acquits him of the charge of being inferior in guts to the main characters, IMO. His refusal to lead men to their deaths in battle is something that Rand, Mat, Perrin and even Elayne have had to deal with and accept, however little they like it. Even worse, some of them have had to do it to their childhood friends. Yet, this more or less essential step in their development is one that Lan seems to balk at in New Spring in his conversation with Moiraine. Hopefully this analysis explains why Lan is NOT a little bitch for failing to make the same adjustment all the kids he mocks made after their first battle.