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We're not talking about the same things... DomA Send a noteboard - 09/11/2012 11:31:12 PM
Demandred isn't the pinnacle of what an Aes Sedai could be in the AOL, and that doesn't even stem from his treachery. It starts because we now know conclusively that Lews Therin himself was no angel, and probably not at all as grand as we were led to believe. He was a lesser accomplished form of a flawed individual, despite all his strengths. There are third age characters with ten times the strength of character as Lews Therin or Demandred.


I fully agree.

Bel Medar and LTT appear not all that removed from this Age's Aes Sedai.

Both are gifted in the OP, but not in the Nynaeve/Semirhage ways, with one outstanding Talent that defined their career path.

Both appear to be scholars, or at least intellectuals, and both were power-obsessed politicians, who made a career rising through the hierarchy of the Aes Sedai Guild, as close to the top as they managed to. LTT was an artist. Both of them were writers, and for all we know they were novelists, not big time OP (they'd have been at the Collam Daan if they were) or political essayists! The whole society was deeply aesthetic, centered on its pleasures, and obsessed with gaining status.. you get the feeling that for many AS the primary motivation to serve was to shine enough to gained the status a third name gave an individual. There were AS like Moghedien and Balthamel not that interested in their ability, nor service. It's what Graendal denounced by making herself an abstemious ascete them turning into a caricature of the wost of AOL society.

Looking at Nynaeve's discoveries, you even get the feeling perhaps the AOL era before the Collapse had long been nearly stagnating, the greatest discoveries far in the past and the OP scholars more interested in competition between them then anything. Cliques everywhere.

The pre-WOS relations and situations of LTT/Bel Medar might not have been all that different, on a different scale of OP knowledge and sophistication of politics, than those of Elaida. Status, power, political bickering, lavish palaces, trophy wives.

The WOS woke them up. They accomplished great things, but LTT became more and more tyranical and stubborn, and Bel Medat ended up switching side.

No doubt Bel Medar is a genius of strategy and this will play out a lot, but indeed we have all signs he's not that great or brave physically and he hates getting his hands dirty. He's no daring soldier who will duel Rand, he's one of those backroom generals. A genius one. Demandred sounds much closer to a more competent Rhavin or Be'lal than a Sammael. As far as we can tell, Sammael is more comparable to LTT in personality.

RJ seems to have made Demandred into a kind of exagerated dark mirror of himself: RJ had a scholarly (scientific) background, got conscripted as a soldier, is a military-history buff and weapon collector, and after Vietnam he became a popular writer. And in his AOL, writers and artists could become politicians (well, there's Reagan...).

Demandred was an intellectual, writer and military-history buff who was forced to become a general.


Indeed.

It's all very odd. These Forsaken know each other from the AOL (speaking of lounging about in the Ansaline Gardens), and the community seems so small - Lews Therin was personal friends with some of the Forsaken, he dated Mierin, Demandred wanted Ilyena. It's all very 'inbred' if you ask me.

It seems like the social circles were indeed small, highly hierarchical and very cliquey. In many ways I'm reminded of the Hall and the various ajahs. Mesaana probably didn't have to bend her imagination too far. I think the flaws of the AOL are obvious to anyone who's really studied the series. It was no utopia, and the focus on getting a third name could easily be shifted to the focus of getting the third name. It's even likely that people without third names couldn't enter various social circles (Lews Therin calling Moiraine a Little Sister says so much about him - he actually sounds like Rahvin at that point). As readers even we can fall into the 'Age of Legends' trap.

While absolutely not defending the Shadow at all, I can completely see why some of the Forsaken turned. If one looks at Lanfear, you can see to what lengths she was prepared to go to get a third name and the result. It's no coincidence that the greatest philosopher started ranting about destructive theories and wrote books such as the Absence of Meaning, or that the world's great ascetic turned into a perversion, or that the great Healer defiled her own profession. Mesaana may have truly had significant talent for academia and the 'unsuited to research' is what broke her - the Collam Daan could certainly have been a cesspool of snooty academics who accepted people more on whim and less on ability.

I don't even think its impossible that Demandred and Lews Therin could have been interchangeable had the situations been slightly different. The AOL seems to have been a breeding ground for intense jealousy and an almost rabid desire to compete and see who could develop the most, the fastest. With everyone of importance living for several centuries, the stagnation would have been palpable.


A lot of this derives from rather raw, blunt observations on human nature and the forces that drive it.

There used to be a time, not so long ago, where the strength and agressivity of males was a matter of plain survival. A function of all religions is to define and strictly code what's beneficial to the survival of a group vs. what is detrimental (with the ensuing flaws when the systems survive too long... female infidelity was a grievous thing when people assigned magical value to blood and bloodlines. Not so relevant in the days when people can use sperm banks... it became a purely abstract "moral" issue. Same for homosexuality, a danger among a desert people with extremely low rate of survival of its offspring, not relevant anymore today, again an abstract matter of morality mostly religious believers care about).

Anyway, another function of those early cultural and religious codes was to channel some aspects of human nature and diffuse their danger. Killing your own, raping your women etc. eventually became "sins", or dishonorable among warrior people. It refocussed male agressivity against "the other", the non believers, the other tribes. We still have not adjusted to the fact humanity is now a whole tribe, we're still stuck with the more unsavoury and detrimental aspects of monotheism that define the "them" vs. the "us".

It seems to be the same sort of observations that RJ used for his AOL.

LTT and his contemporaries were probably standing on the shoulders of giants. Their time was hardly the best of their Age, they were in decline. Their ancestors had created this utopia, they were caught in it, in the phase when it was becoming corrupt and decaying.

The AOL had removed all the problems regarding basic needs. Men didn't have to protect anyone, nor fight for food. Everybody ate, everybody was safe enough and there were police for the rest. Political mechanisms were in place to avoid war, the whole concept of warfare had been eradicated.

But instincts and human nature remain, and it would be the more present as old ideals surrounding the "Servants of All" lost their meaning, when being a servant of all meant you served a little and not quite as often as in the beginnings of the Guild. It sounds like LTT's era when for the most part the system worked like a well-oiled machine, Aes Sedai were keener to mass product ter'angreal for every uses than to go provide the service in person. Less and less new uses were being developped for the OP, and more and more AS researchers skipped the simple (like Nynaeve's method to heal severing) to venture in the overly complex, abstract and esoterical... vacuoles, mirror worlds, drilling holes in the pattern and so on. The Guild wasn't called in the fields with the Aiel anymore, someone had made Nym for that. Aes Sedai more and more devoted their talents to pointless ventures, overly complex engineering feats etc.

So yeah, you get the feeling in LTT's time there were the masses of AS, a lot of them like Balthamel/Moghedien were totally wasting their talent and rarely called upon as there was nothing to do - nothing the Guild still had the drive to put in motion anymore, too busy with the internal competetion, and the Guild clique who had turned their greed, ambitions, aggressivity, desire for power into this vast contest for status and power. Shining in that society must have been exacting indeed, but also similar to what drives financiers to amass fortunes in hundreds of billions, far more than they and everyone they know could spend in a lifetime for personal use. They could stop, and spend their best years of life doing other things, in complete freedom, but they don't.

And yeah, the White Tower and it's Ivory Tower and apathy with the OP hardly seem unique, they were the heirs of the late AOL guild. They had a brief rebound with the WOS, but almost entirely devoted to devising ways to destroy with the OP, stuff the post-breaking AS turned their backs on. They had lost a lot of the work of "giants" that preceeded the time of LTT, but they inherited a great deal of the apathy of the AS of LTT's time, and a lot of their culture...

And yes, it's not too surprising 50% of the AS eventually joined the Shadow. And I suspect at first the really strong/succesful ones were rare among the Chosen, mostly it was the masses unable to shine in the Guild, the lazy ones, the bitter ones etc. until the Shadow became strong enough to start to attract some of the ones vying for the top positions of the Guild or their fields but who couldn't reach as far as they dreamed of... the Barid Bel Medar for instance, who's gone where LTT wouldn't follow to outshine him.

The more the series progressed, the less LTT appears to be "squeaky clean"... arrogant to the point of considering himself the pinnacle of his Age (a flaw common to many of his time, it appears), divisive, terribly stubborn and full of himself, overly ambitious, probably extremely sensitive to the slightest mark of disrespect, and if we go with Moghedien's comment (or was it Graendal), he was also insufferably sanctimonious about the cosmology (which recalls most Elan Morin). He wasn't a terrible man, we've seen much better aspects of him too, but he was no white as snow hero either.

The irony is that a few channellers of this time like Nynaeve might have outshined most of the AOL AS with the same education... but probably not had they been raised in the culture of the AOL... the whole AOL society had removed most of the impetus for the AS to shine in what would have really mattered, too busy creating the most amazing Virtual Reality ter'angreal that would flabbergast everyone at the fashionable social spot to be seen at that week, if you had the status to be allowed in.




Today we have 6 billion people on earth. Let's say that in the Middle Ages there were 500 million people on earth.

You are going to find more taller, stronger, smarter and more gifted people today than in the Middle Ages, simply due to sheer numbers.

The population stats of the AOL vs. Third Age are even more starkly contrasted. Probably around 10 or 20 billion vs maybe 100-200 million.

If someone is a 1 in a billion talent, there would have been 10 or 20 of them in the AOL, but zero in the current Age.

And if there is a single one in a hundred million talented individual in the Third Age, there would have been up to 200 of them in the AOL.

This stretches all the way down the ranks. Sheer numbers ensure that Demandred, Lews Therin and co. were of unmatched talent and intelligence compared to anyone from the Third Age.


You're talking about the pool of raw talents being forcibly larger the more of the total of all channellers are found - and from a larger pool to begin with on the one hand, and about AOL AS being adept at performing what they were trained to do on the other.

We're not contesting any of that, Sid and me were rather discussing the fact we believe the late pre-WOS AOL was already a society in decline, jaded, obsessed with pleasures and status and having it easy and with more and more useless "showey" or esoterical ventures with the OP, keen to build and mass produced ter'angreal or to build Constructs to spare them tasks, already "servants of all" more in name than reality. I, and Sidious seems to agree, don't believe the end of the AOL was the quite the pinnacle of that Age, nor that the likes of Bel Medar, Semirhage, Mierin or LTT were the "greatest AS of their Age". Some of the best of their time, but not quite of the whole Age, that the Age reached its pinnacle way before their days, which were rather a stage where that society had started a slow decline that accelerated sharply after the Bore was created and went down the drain with the WOS.





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[Mik's Warp] - Demandred is.....*click to find out* - 05/11/2012 01:06:42 PM 2751 Views
There are only 2 months left before AMOL comes out (or less)... - 05/11/2012 02:10:07 PM 1307 Views
Nah.. forget that - 05/11/2012 08:29:53 PM 1152 Views
Re: Nah.. forget that - 05/11/2012 10:07:46 PM 1007 Views
Re: There are only 2 months left before AMOL comes out (or less)... - 06/11/2012 12:40:54 PM 1195 Views
I'm not saying it's not a well-reasoned theory; it is. - 06/11/2012 06:02:36 PM 1208 Views
I say Roederan is a better choice simply because of where he is located - 06/11/2012 11:01:28 PM 1106 Views
Re: I say Roederan is a better choice simply because of where he is located - 07/11/2012 09:42:00 AM 1363 Views
I applaud your effort, but to be honest I just can't see it - 07/11/2012 04:48:17 PM 979 Views
Re: I applaud your effort, but to be honest I just can't see it - 07/11/2012 08:36:34 PM 1236 Views
There has been a lot of waste in WOT..... - 06/11/2012 06:26:56 PM 926 Views
LIKE! *NM* - 09/12/2012 02:37:49 PM 1036 Views
Whoops *NM* - 06/11/2012 07:27:06 PM 561 Views
Plausible, albeit antilclimactic *NM* - 05/11/2012 06:32:38 PM 613 Views
Unless Mat is Demandred, at this point it will be anticlimactic. *NM* - 06/11/2012 04:02:38 AM 572 Views
That would be EPIC *NM* - 06/11/2012 07:53:30 PM 578 Views
That would be EPIC *NM* - 06/11/2012 07:53:31 PM 574 Views
You've tried too hard... - 05/11/2012 07:53:41 PM 2819 Views
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 1148 Views
I doubt Mat will kill him personally but - 05/11/2012 09:24:48 PM 902 Views
I don't know - 06/11/2012 02:01:41 AM 912 Views
My prediction of how it plays out... - 06/11/2012 07:12:15 AM 1010 Views
I don't think that's likely - 06/11/2012 06:04:55 PM 969 Views
LOL ... it will be a saying in the next Age - 06/11/2012 10:36:04 PM 908 Views
Re: I don't think that's likely - 06/11/2012 11:21:21 PM 907 Views
Re: I don't think that's likely - 07/11/2012 08:14:28 PM 1035 Views
Re: I don't think that's likely - 07/11/2012 09:05:07 PM 1138 Views
Re: I don't think that's likely - 08/11/2012 05:52:16 PM 952 Views
It sounds like we're at the same stage of vision of the AOL - 08/11/2012 07:48:17 PM 907 Views
Statistics refute some of that... - 09/11/2012 07:35:59 AM 918 Views
We're not talking about the same things... - 09/11/2012 11:31:12 PM 901 Views
It doesn't mean no one in this Age can be at Talented or Intelligent. - 09/11/2012 11:43:26 PM 1096 Views
Re: It doesn't mean no one in this Age can be at Talented or Intelligent. - 10/11/2012 07:34:34 AM 1011 Views
You seriously believe that? - 10/11/2012 04:17:09 PM 941 Views
Mat has grown quiet a bit since those days - 06/11/2012 01:55:48 AM 1068 Views
You're putting the Evil on a pedestal. - 06/11/2012 03:12:38 AM 833 Views
No, just desperately trying to raise the stakes a bit... - 06/11/2012 07:00:59 AM 981 Views
That's essentially what I was saying - 06/11/2012 03:35:45 PM 1101 Views
hmmm - 06/11/2012 10:27:00 AM 1235 Views
... is defeated by Mr Happy Go Lucky - 06/11/2012 08:45:02 PM 1060 Views
Mat is essentially the man (men) who wrote the books Demandred studied - 06/11/2012 10:42:40 PM 889 Views
Exactly... - 06/11/2012 11:45:36 PM 1056 Views
... is defeated by Mr Happy Go Lucky - 06/11/2012 08:45:29 PM 1101 Views
I didn't try hard at all; Demandred found me... - 06/11/2012 03:31:41 PM 1068 Views
My biggest contention with Demandred being with the Sea Folk - 06/11/2012 10:54:50 PM 1039 Views
Re: My biggest contention with Demandred being with the Sea Folk - 07/11/2012 12:07:02 AM 1090 Views
Well, it instantly gives the Shadow access to attacking every coastal city... - 07/11/2012 10:32:23 AM 964 Views
Exactly! - 07/11/2012 10:54:14 AM 1512 Views
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 934 Views
I find that approach unnecessarily convoluted. Just hit them with 1 billion Trollocs and crush them. - 08/11/2012 07:00:36 AM 917 Views
Not likely he has that many... - 08/11/2012 03:00:32 PM 851 Views
May I ask some practical questions? - 08/11/2012 05:28:41 PM 856 Views
Re: May I ask some practical questions? - 08/11/2012 10:35:38 PM 993 Views
Re: May I ask some practical questions? - 10/11/2012 12:09:15 AM 924 Views
Re: May I ask some practical questions? - 10/11/2012 03:11:59 AM 931 Views
LOL ... Seems more than a little far fetched *NM* - 10/11/2012 06:17:34 AM 518 Views
Well you asked for an explanation - 13/11/2012 10:23:41 PM 843 Views
fair enough *NM* - 14/11/2012 01:31:52 AM 491 Views
Re: May I ask some practical questions? - 10/11/2012 07:15:58 PM 972 Views
Exactly! - 11/11/2012 07:38:46 AM 974 Views
Good practical questions... - 09/11/2012 07:24:14 AM 971 Views
He doesn't need the SF for that - 09/11/2012 03:00:34 PM 751 Views
Well, they hadn't planned on them being Traveling grounds as they didn't know about - 09/11/2012 02:57:16 PM 805 Views
Re: Well, they hadn't planned on them being Traveling grounds as they didn't know about - 09/11/2012 09:03:14 PM 927 Views
I know. I'm saying they were not doing this with Traveling in mind. - 09/11/2012 11:57:34 PM 897 Views
Re: I know. I'm saying they were not doing this with Traveling in mind. - 10/11/2012 10:08:04 PM 2435 Views
I see what you are getting at ... And I see how Zaida used it to her advantage - 11/11/2012 07:45:19 AM 957 Views
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 975 Views
Nesta sent 2 ambassadors to the Coramoor. Both looking for the same thing - 12/11/2012 04:11:50 PM 1005 Views
Re: Nesta sent 2 ambassadors to the Coramoor. Both looking for the same thing - 12/11/2012 06:01:33 PM 1098 Views
Well there is also the fact that Harine pretty much tells us she MUST make a Bargain - 12/11/2012 06:51:24 PM 1123 Views
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 923 Views
Not to belabor the point - 12/11/2012 10:56:39 PM 874 Views
Re: Not to belabor the point - 13/11/2012 12:46:21 AM 833 Views
I think you are way off base on the economics - 13/11/2012 01:24:35 AM 802 Views
Re: I think you are way off base on the economics - 13/11/2012 03:48:40 PM 925 Views
no reason to *NM* - 14/11/2012 01:35:55 AM 509 Views
I don't see the problem... - 07/11/2012 10:52:49 AM 1643 Views
This is preposterous - 07/11/2012 04:15:11 PM 1346 Views
Who? - 06/11/2012 07:29:46 PM 873 Views
Paah, he's clearly on the Isle of Madmen to the south. - 10/11/2012 03:28:26 AM 1295 Views

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