It will just be so anticlimactic if after all the anticipation and mystery, Demandred is defeated by Mr. "Rand knows girls so much better than I do. Why are the dice rolling in my head again?"
It will just be so cartoonish. Demandred should be defeated by some kind of Saving Private Ryan or Braveheart scene, where heroic sacrifice leads to the great enemy general being overcome at great personal cost to the Light.
Not by some bumbling Huckleberry Finn who kills him by accident and then bends down to pick up his hat, slaying 10 Myrdraal with a flourish on the way out shouting Burn me and Blood and Bloody ashes all the while.
It just makes an even greater mockery of what should be a grave situation. The end of the world and all.
It will just be so cartoonish. Demandred should be defeated by some kind of Saving Private Ryan or Braveheart scene, where heroic sacrifice leads to the great enemy general being overcome at great personal cost to the Light.
Not by some bumbling Huckleberry Finn who kills him by accident and then bends down to pick up his hat, slaying 10 Myrdraal with a flourish on the way out shouting Burn me and Blood and Bloody ashes all the while.
It just makes an even greater mockery of what should be a grave situation. The end of the world and all.
Well, you better get used to the idea, why else do you think RJ merged in Mat a juvenile trickster, with unnatural luck, with a walking encyclopedia of 2000 years of military knowledge if not to provide Demandred with a worthy foe in the LB?
You overestimate Demandred. The War of Shadow lasted just 10 years. In that time, Demandred first studied warfare in old books and build up armies of people who had no idea how to fight in a war from the ground up, all this to face Forsaken with nearly zero knowledge of warfare themselves who relied on armies of millions of Shadowspawn to face an unprepared, unknowledgeable foe...the early years of the WOS musn't have been fancy, it must have been a complete barbaric and chaotic mess... until Bel Medar/LTT got organized and started using real strategy and tactics against a foe that used primitive ones, relying of sheer numbers and savagery. It's hardly the greatest military minds of all ages Barid Bel Medar faced in his few years serving the Light, and then by mid-war he switched to leading billions of Shadowspawn against leaders of the Light who had by then a few years of field experience and who knew Sammael's and Demandred's styles very well, but were seeing their high tech gizmos disappear by the day, forcing them to rely more and more on channellers. Demandred's certainly very intelligent (far more than Mat), but he's still a gifted dilettante with a few years or real experience when it comes to war. He probably relied a lot on all the classic strategies and tactics he found in books, because the foes he faced didn't know any of that stuff, so all those old tricks worked. He won't have it so easy with Mat, who knows all this old stuff, and new stuff developped over 3000 years (and again, we've got the clues Demandred has started learning about all this in books)... Don't forget, Mat has greater "experience" (memories) of fighting Shadowspawn armies than Demandred and LTT combined. Ishamael isn't a military mind (though Moridin commented once he has studied since the WOS, even in fields favoured by Sammael, suggesting he's not hapless in warfare nowadays), he probably relied heavily on strategies developped by the Shadow's generals in the WOS for the Trolloc Wars, and Mat has a whole compendium of memories from that time.
Demandred's great advantage over Mat is that he's got the initiative and a whole lot of time to prepare his campaign, while Mat will have to improvise. But in the ten years of WOS, he'll have developped a personal style of generalling - again his luck may be that Mat won't have access to any of Rand's knowledge of Demandred's style for a while yet and will have to figure him out all by himself. But RJ has made Mat the ultimate general, because he doesn't have personal habits and quirks, Mat's own military knowledge is a total blank slate - whatever seems best in any given situation rather comes to him from his memories. He fights like one general one hour, and like another the next... extremely unpredictable. Not easy for someone even as intelligent as Demandred to fight a foe who switch pattern every day. You think you've figured out Mat, and he still does something unexpected.
My feeling is that Mat in the first part of the book will finally have a real challenge with Demandred and the Seanchan army may never be called "ever victorious" again. However, later in the war when Mat has had time to figure out Demandred, he's likely to turn the tide and ultimately defeat him.
Don't expect Rand will lead the campaign against Demandred, he flatly said in TOM he doesn't intend to lead the war this time around. It doesn't mean he won't finish him up ultimately, but he's not the one who will lead the campaign against him. And it's a boon for the Light, because all of Rand's battle knowledge comes from LTT and Demandred knows LTT all too well, and has no doubt prepared himself to fight a LTT who can rely only on third Age resources but for channelers he can train to use more advanced stuff. Demandred believes he knows his foe very well, he's in for a bad surprise. He'll sweat too, not only Mat will.
[Mik's Warp] - Demandred is.....*click to find out*
05/11/2012 01:06:42 PM
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There are only 2 months left before AMOL comes out (or less)...
05/11/2012 02:10:07 PM
- 1292 Views
Re: There are only 2 months left before AMOL comes out (or less)...
06/11/2012 12:40:54 PM
- 1183 Views
I say Roederan is a better choice simply because of where he is located
06/11/2012 11:01:28 PM
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Re: I say Roederan is a better choice simply because of where he is located
07/11/2012 09:42:00 AM
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Plausible, albeit antilclimactic *NM*
05/11/2012 06:32:38 PM
- 607 Views
Unless Mat is Demandred, at this point it will be anticlimactic. *NM*
06/11/2012 04:02:38 AM
- 565 Views
You've tried too hard...
05/11/2012 07:53:41 PM
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Will be so disappointed if the Shadow's greatest (non-crazy) leader is defeated by Mr Happy Go Lucky
05/11/2012 08:57:59 PM
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I doubt Mat will kill him personally but
05/11/2012 09:24:48 PM
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I don't know
06/11/2012 02:01:41 AM
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My prediction of how it plays out...
06/11/2012 07:12:15 AM
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I don't think that's likely
06/11/2012 06:04:55 PM
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Re: I don't think that's likely
06/11/2012 11:21:21 PM
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Re: I don't think that's likely
07/11/2012 08:14:28 PM
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Re: I don't think that's likely
07/11/2012 09:05:07 PM
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Re: I don't think that's likely
08/11/2012 05:52:16 PM
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It sounds like we're at the same stage of vision of the AOL
08/11/2012 07:48:17 PM
- 891 Views
Statistics refute some of that...
09/11/2012 07:35:59 AM
- 903 Views
We're not talking about the same things...
09/11/2012 11:31:12 PM
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The real question is how much of that was caused by the Bore and the Collapse
09/11/2012 11:50:20 PM
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It doesn't mean no one in this Age can be at Talented or Intelligent.
09/11/2012 11:43:26 PM
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Re: It doesn't mean no one in this Age can be at Talented or Intelligent.
10/11/2012 07:34:34 AM
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You're putting the Evil on a pedestal.
06/11/2012 03:12:38 AM
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... is defeated by Mr Happy Go Lucky
06/11/2012 08:45:02 PM
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Mat is essentially the man (men) who wrote the books Demandred studied
06/11/2012 10:42:40 PM
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I didn't try hard at all; Demandred found me...
06/11/2012 03:31:41 PM
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My biggest contention with Demandred being with the Sea Folk
06/11/2012 10:54:50 PM
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Re: My biggest contention with Demandred being with the Sea Folk
07/11/2012 12:07:02 AM
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Well, it instantly gives the Shadow access to attacking every coastal city...
07/11/2012 10:32:23 AM
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If he married Nynaeve and Moiraine he'd have his wives at Rand's side in the Pit too....
07/11/2012 03:28:38 PM
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I find that approach unnecessarily convoluted. Just hit them with 1 billion Trollocs and crush them.
08/11/2012 07:00:36 AM
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May I ask some practical questions?
08/11/2012 05:28:41 PM
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Re: May I ask some practical questions?
08/11/2012 10:35:38 PM
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Re: May I ask some practical questions?
10/11/2012 12:09:15 AM
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Re: May I ask some practical questions?
10/11/2012 03:11:59 AM
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LOL ... Seems more than a little far fetched *NM*
10/11/2012 06:17:34 AM
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Well, they hadn't planned on them being Traveling grounds as they didn't know about
09/11/2012 02:57:16 PM
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Re: Well, they hadn't planned on them being Traveling grounds as they didn't know about
09/11/2012 09:03:14 PM
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I know. I'm saying they were not doing this with Traveling in mind.
09/11/2012 11:57:34 PM
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Re: I know. I'm saying they were not doing this with Traveling in mind.
10/11/2012 10:08:04 PM
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I see what you are getting at ... And I see how Zaida used it to her advantage
11/11/2012 07:45:19 AM
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Re: I see what you are getting at ... And I see how Zaida used it to her advantage
12/11/2012 02:57:08 PM
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Nesta sent 2 ambassadors to the Coramoor. Both looking for the same thing
12/11/2012 04:11:50 PM
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Re: Nesta sent 2 ambassadors to the Coramoor. Both looking for the same thing
12/11/2012 06:01:33 PM
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Well there is also the fact that Harine pretty much tells us she MUST make a Bargain
12/11/2012 06:51:24 PM
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Re: Well there is also the fact that Harine pretty much tells us she MUST make a Bargain
12/11/2012 09:30:57 PM
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Not to belabor the point
12/11/2012 10:56:39 PM
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Re: Not to belabor the point
13/11/2012 12:46:21 AM
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I think you are way off base on the economics
13/11/2012 01:24:35 AM
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