Like the reunion of Mat and Perrin where Brandon went back to the badger as if Mat was still in that mood she means? That suffered a bit from the KJA syndrome.

Yeah, there's a bit of the fanboy in Brandon, but by and large I find he keeps it under control.

The concept of the scene is good - the tone shows well the change in Rand and Perrin for one thing - it's just the topic of conversation that's odd. There's so many other light topics to chat about and have a laugh, no need to rehash something they already discussed, not in a book at least (as in RL friends do this all the time). It was a good occasion to show these two are more mature too.

I guess Brandon thought that scene seemed to fit naturally, oblivious to the fact he had that impression because there was this other one much like it he forgot about, the last time Perrin and Rand talked of the TR together...




He may simply mean that when Mat's storyline starts, he will be three days behind the others. Let's say we see Mat the first time in the aftermath of the Caemlyn battle only, when the others are by that point three days ahead of him in the middle of the Merrilor meeting (as we see, we pick up first with Rand/Perrin on the eve of the meeting). This would fit my idea that Mat will see Caemlyn already fallen, most of the Band destroyed (they sacrificed themselves to hold the inner city with the dragons, where they gathered the surviving citizens - by the time reinforcements will come to evacuate those, the Band will be almost decimated... like their TW counterpart at EF), and he decides instead of going to Merrilor, he must go to Ebou Dar and try to make Tuon undertstand the Last Battle has now started and without an alliance of all forces of the Light, the Shadow will win. That would leave Thom (unless he goes with Mat) and Moiraine the job of telling Rand and co. at Merrilor that Mat has gone... to try to bring his wife to their side. But Mat won't return... and thus "Mat the traitor" will come to pass.

He won't be back because Fortuona won't budge an inch from her position. He will have to impress her generals with his genius (eg: by pointing out all the flaws in their plans or coming up with brilliant ideas to use their assets), and somehow he will end up as Prince of Ravens in the lead of the Seanchan armies. He will eventually trap the Seanchan with an attack on Caemlyn he will conceive, knowing it's the Shadow they'll find there. The inevitable alliance will happen later (during an attack by the Shadow on Tar Valon, possibly), once the Seanchan have seen in the field what the Light is really facing and how doomed they are if they don't give up their war against channelers.

Tuon won't budge from her beliefs until her situation is desperate and her hatred and fear of the Shadow and its imminent victory makes her hatred of TV take second place to the survival of humanity. Right now from her perspective, with the gain of travelling, the tide is turning in her favour. Not the best time to convince her she's on the verge of total and final disaster and must give up on the Return and make a truce with Tar Valon (and thus the fact RJ had to give her that victory at TV).

So Mat will have to start by making her armies his which, with a combination of Mat's charisma, his genius and having around him a few people who think like Tylee - who conveniently rose in rank - is feasible.

As for jumping around the timelines, the Tam issue was bearable and as Brandon chose to put the Tear events and the epiphany in TGS (his worst WOT decision so far - RJ's outline called for ending TGS on two cliffhangers - returning to Egwene and Rand by mid-book in TOM as the best compromise not to butcher too much RJ's intended dramatic impact for the Seanchan attack and Epiphany, but let's not get into that again), unavoidable.

It's rather the perfectly avoidable ones in TOM itself with Egwene/Elayne and co., Graendal, or even the baffling decision to open the book with Egwene and Rand I found extremely annoying (and it's not just to bitch for the sake of bitching, it actually ruined my enjoyment of the book which I like to describe as a collection of great and better scenes that alas felt as if the chapters were then put in order by a bunch of slightly senile monkeys).



It's the whole "grapes / don't match / wines" formulation that's incorrect and that an editor normally ought to have caught. TOM was especially full of annoying sentences or semantic errors like this, and I was hoping with the extra time Harriet would have caught them this time...

Brandon either meant that few vineyards in this Age could produce vintages comparable to the best of the AOL or that the quality of the grapes in this Age can't produce wine that match the AOL's best wines, but either way it's the sentence he wrote that's meaningless and non sensical. Not Brandon's first weirdly worded comment on wine or its taste or characteristics (most of the others not in WOT) - not a mormon's best area of expertise I guess!

(I remember Moridin's opinion, but don't forget in KOD Graendal the hedonist thought what Moridin served, while fine, didn't match the kind of vintages served at the Ansaline Gardens. It sounds like LTT just leans more toward her opinion than Moridin's).



It's certainly not as bad as many passages in TOM, but not on par either with scenes from the prologue (one of which was good enough to fool me RJ wrote it when it was confirmed later Brandon did).