I differentiate too well between real life and fake people, but I can grasp in the abstract what is sad or not, or choke-up moments. The last stand in the Border tower story, Lan's charge, etc, were more emotionally affecting (in the abstract) than Aviendha's experience. Hell, the stories RAND experienced in Rhuidean were more affecting, because they had ACTUALLY happened. Aviendha's descendants MIGHT come to a bad end. Rand's ancestors DID. One died of a heart attack after spending years on a fruitless trek in a collapsing world, watching his family die and people dwindle around him. Another saw his children slaughtered, abducted and raped, and was left with a couple of grandchildren to care for, only to see them apostasize from everything he held dear when they reached adulthood. Others saw their entire civilization collapse around them, were lynched or went all crazy (in a way that looks kind of sensible to our zombie-conscious culture) holing up in a city with a gun, ready for the apocalypse. Rand's family caught a whole ton of crap on their heads before getting to the Three-Fold Land, where they at least prospered, for certain values of "prospered" though their people gave up the values and culture they once held dear to become a vague and unrecognizable shadow of themselves. And it REALLY happened and cannot be averted. That's sadder than a bunch of pamper elites inheriting respect and authority from their genuinely great parents and running what their parents fought to preserve into the ground. My hobby is history, and I've seen tons of examples of that happening in the real world.