I love how the nicompoopery expressed on this site can make me feel all even-handed and impartial by allowing me to attack and defend the same character in successive threads.
Who are you and what have you done with Sidious? How is Sidious failing to admire one of the three most powerful women in the world, and one of the two or three most accomplished channeling females?

Which rant was this? Aside from the usual ruminations inspired the queens on the ceiling, I can't recall much about her lineage. In fact, there was more about that stuff in Rand & Elenia's one conversation in LoC than in most of Elayne's story arc. In fact, most of Elayne's perspective had everything to do with the practical aspects of trying to win the throne, and nothing to do with her rights to it. Unlike Egwene, who had to keep coming up with reasons to remind herself that Elaida is the worst thing ever in order to justify her own illegal quest for power in order to save and aggrandize a relatively small organization, whose members were the people in the world in least need of protection.

Yes, those handful of chapters in three books were SOOO tiresome, as opposed to the far more chapters devoted to the constantly changing issues of who was right and who was evil at the current moment of the struggle to replace the CEO of Inept Channelers Inc., which dragged on even closer. The Andoran succession question was about who would rule, and determine the fate of, the largest and most powerful nation in the world, and have a great deal of meaning for Cairhien as well. We are talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people and thousands of soldiers brought under trustworthy leadership. We are talking about a patron being found in the right place and time in order to develop and deploy the most important military technological innovation in the history of the world, which the greatest authority of military matters ever in that same history of the world, decrees to be more militarily useful than those channelers Egwene is so ready to ignore the Last Battle to protect from being told what to do too harshly!

As opposed to lies, slander, innuendo and plot-mandated stupidity on the part of her opponents.

Try the better part of a year.

Aaaaand he's back! There's the Sidious we all know and love, whose eyes are so dazzled by the Forsaken as the most powerful channelers in the series, that everything is in terms of them. They are the increasingly pathetic minions of the real threat, who die off easily when the Dark One is sealed away, and lack the nerve to do any real damage. The very worst that Semirhage could do was push Rand a little further down his already chosen path, and was reversed the minute he pulled his head out of his ass and thought about it. The most competent Forsaken left, was reduced to a fugitive and utterly failed her attempts to ruin Perrin, who never even noticed she was an enemy, despite her being given operational command of the Shadow's deadliest assassin and a powerful ter'angreal weapon. She was driven out of her carefully secured hideout by a man who couldn't even be bothered to follow up on her. The rest of them have fared no better and done no more serious damage, and most of the discussion about them nowadays is from your fellow travelers who are underwhelmed with their presentation as archenemies. But all that really matters to you is defeating these incompetent nuisances.

As has been demonstrated in RJ's QotW and the books, the Forsaken's fortunes rise and fall with the Dark One and his access to the world. The important thing regarding that access is maintaining the Seals on his prison and the key attributes of "belief and order" which play will their part in how the world can defeat him. Rand has also hinted as much, suggesting that he needs the people of the world to do their part in order for humanity to triumph. With more people behind him, he has a better chance of removing the Dark One from the picture, at which point any Forsaken become irrelevant. The sole contribution the Forsaken could make in this effort is if their effects on their subject peoples act against the belief and order that support the Light. What it boils down to is not amassing power and magical resources, all of which would be dwarfed by the Dark One no matter how much the good guys gather, but on leading the people of the world. And Elayne's role in forming what is obviously the nascent Pact of the Griffen and course correcting Rahvin's damage to the Andoran psyche and social order are far more important to the metaphysical struggle than Egwene's reorganization of a few of the 1%.

They are soldiers who died doing their duty. How many would have died in Egwene's tactic-free battle-plan against Mesaana, which required a lot of dumb luck to succeed. Elayne did nothing wrong except in hindsight, and only because of information she could not possibly know. The only right thing to do in light of that was to wait, and one of the world's greatest military minds said earlier in the series that you cannot wait until you know everything, because you lose the initiative. Elayne identified a traitor in her group the minute he showed up, while Egwene thought admiring things about Sheriam and Halima for months and weeks, until OTHER people figured out they were evil. Elayne actively worked to trace her identified spy back to his source, and when she discovered the Black sisters, moved quickly and decisively to get rid of them. As opposed to Egwene, who bitched out the Black Ajah hunters in the Tower for the steps they took to keep their operation secret, because they did not trust a proven traitor & liar to help them! And yet, Sidious and his ilk praise Egwene for merely doing the normal thing and executing identified Black sisters who are totally in her power!

Well, she's not a coward to stand out in the street pissing herself over the danger. And she and Nynaeve, with no other channelers, went into a palace containing eleven sisters and came out with their mission accomplished and no losses.

The entire success of the whole day's events was due to Elayne's use of the initiative. She struck first and forced the Black sisters to respond to her, and her rescue was made possible by her own connections and agreements. In fact, her Hero of the Horn warder, despite Birgitte's role in the rescue was wrong on three different occasions when she argued with Elayne, and the day would have been a failure had Elayne listened to her on any of those issues.
- She wanted Elayne to stay behind. Had Elayne done so, everyone else would have died and there would have been no way to trace the Black sisters, who would have escaped easily. The only one they had any motive for keeping alive was Elayne, and Elayne knew she could not be killed, thanks to Min's viewing. What is more, without any knowledge of who she could trust, Vandene would likely have fallen to Careane's treachery before getting the chance to avenge her sister.
- She wanted to accompany Elayne into the house. Had she done so, she would have died, adversely affecting Elayne subsequently as she tried to finish securing her rule and leading her people to the Last Battle, and what is more, left no one capable of finding and rescuing Elayne until far too late, after Andor was lost and the Black sisters might have scattered.
- She wanted to return Elayne immediately to the palace after her rescue, which would have cost Elayne the victory and prolonged the war of succession. At the very best, the attack on the gate would have been repulsed and the enemy leadership pulled back to lick their wounds and scheme and then side with the approaching faction that supported Dyelin, just to spite Elayne, and forcing Elayne to step aside from yet another woman who has been wrong whenever she opposed Elayne, especially on military matters. Dyelin, who opposed Elayne even raising an army, would certainly never have backed the investment and development of artillery.

Had Elayne NOT stormed the house, she would have only increased the chances of her enemies discovering she was onto them, and then disappearing, to strike again at a time and place of their choosing. She would also not have flushed out Chesmal, Asna & Temaile, with their ray gun ter'angreal that let them strike with impunity. Had Elayne waited to know more, or be ABSOLUTELY SURE that no other Black sisters were in Caemlyn, there is no telling whether she would have turned up more intelligence before the Black factions' plans had matured, and she found herself awakening to the Black sisters dragging her out of bed and the palace, and zapping Birgitte unawares when she came to investigate why Elayne was suddenly alarmed and departing the Palace in some discomfort.

What if Shadar Haran was there!! What if he had a magic sword that shot fireballs, and a genie that grants wishes! What if the Last Battle kicked off the next morning! What if lightning struck the house! In any and all cases, better to be the hammer than the nail. Rand never beat a Forsaken by sitting on his ass and waiting for them to come to him, aside from his bit of evil luck with Semirhage. When he found out about Forsaken, he went after them. The Forsaken are more powerful and have counters for just about any defense the good guys know. The best way to nail them is to attack them by surprise and take a chance. Moiraine attacked Bel'al and won, she attacked Lanfear, when according to the mathematics of Sidious' Forsaken capability and power assessment, she should have remained huddled under her wagon, or kept Rand well away from the docks. Rand went after Callandor, thinking he would have to challenge Ba'alzamon for it, and he beat him on the previous occasion by embracing a tactic everyone had already told him was certain to get himself killed. He went after Sammael & Rhavin and beat them, and he destroyed Greandal's base of operations and drove her into hiding. He went after Asmodean, not only knowing that the other man was far more knowledgeable, but COUNTING on that superior ability, because he wanted to capture him for a teacher. What is more, he almost blew it, by hanging back and allowing Asmodean the initiative, which almost ended in disaster, with one of the Forsaken gaining the Choedan Kal! What advantages might the Black factions in Caemlyn gained while Elayne waited for her scouts to prove a negative (which any White could tell you is logically impossible).


Yes, because she is smart enough to know what other characters have to be repeatedly told throughout the series - people get killed. Deal with it and move on, because your responsibilities are to the living. Those men died for a far better purpose than any of the others who fell in the fighting in Caemlyn up until that day - they went out fighting the Shadow, as opposed to fending off attacks from greedy politicians in a civil war. Better quick death from a blast of the One Power than choking on your own blood from a countryman's arrow in your throat, or his sword spilling your intestines over your boots.

And anyway, as I said above, it was only thanks to her decisions that she was able to be rescued. There was NOTHING she could have done to prevent her capture, aside from completely craven tactics, like sending others to fruitlessly die in her place. None of you would-be Hawkwings who have criticized her for this over the last seven years have ever once offered a viable alternative, other than "sit and wait some more" in hopes the odds will improve, or that someone, somehow, stumbles over the existence of Eldrith's gang. Remember that while Rand held Caemlyn, the Aiel and Davram Bashere, despite actively searching for Marillin in particular, were unable to find her, let alone any other sisters. In New Spring Moiraine even comments on the futility of trying to hide your observation efforts from a sister, when doing so results in the death of an experienced warrior of Warder-level capabilities. Previous efforts at scouting had only resulted in the death of more scouts, and Elayne had just received word of the most recent in a series of ongoing murders of the Kinswomen. How many more guardsmen, scouts & Kinswomen were supposed to die while she continued to wait and hope for information she had no way of knowing she even needed, in violation of one of the greatest military genius' personal maxims?

Not when you are outnumbered and outgunned. Maybe those guys would have lived, but others would have died in their place. With the number and greater power of enemies stacked against her, Elayne did well to come out on top. Meanwhile, you are falling back on your all-to-typical habit of whining that people who won, should not have. The Forsaken are great and wonderful and all-powerful! How can they fall again and again to such clumsy bumpkins?! When your primary commentary on fights is to protest the outcomes as improbable or unlikely, and thus proving that your estimations of what it takes to win are out of alignment with the actual outcomes, you have no business Monday-morning-quarterbacking the happy outcome of a victory.

What atrocity? The loss of a few men who were soldiers and would have died on some other battlefield? The loss of the most-frequently-wrong & newest and least capable sister from her entourage? Or the old fart retiree on a vengeance (before you seek vengeance, dig two graves) kick?

And when someone waltzes into Elayne's bedroom and hands HER a list of all the Darkfriends she has to worry about, you can say that she would not have done better. If Egwene was so subtle and brilliant, how do you explain Nicola's death? Surely there were no Darkfriends who could have killed her and anyone else who got killed in Egwene's melee in T'A'R, because the Mother was so subtle and brilliant?

That is your yardstick for judging a ruler? She didn't win in a sufficiently flashy or glamorous fashion, against great odds? And you post this after I make a case based on misrule and mistreatment of her people? Even if you are going to make the former case, isn't this kind of a lame thing? Like coming up to Ba'alzamon's body on the floor of the Heart of the Stone, and dropping a citation for jaywalking.