Personally I sympathize with Moridin. The way RJ set up the wheel of time, everything seems so pointless. Ages repeat over and over with the same result. Free will is most definitely an illusion, considering the nature of ta'veren and how the wheel makes course adjustments.
... couldn't Moridin have simply balefired himself, or taught the weave to someone else and had them do it to him? Wouldn't that remove him from the pattern? If that's all he wanted, what was stopping him?
And for that matter, why did he never just balefire Rand? He had several opportunities through the course of the series. I always assumed before that there would be some reason that Rand's presence at the Last Battle was necessary for the Dark One to escape, which was why Rand was supposed to be left alive. But instead it seems as though they left Rand alive out of some hope that they could corrupt him. If they had simply killed him, wouldn't the Dark One have gotten free at the end? Or did I miss something where Rand's presence was needed to set him free?
If the Wheel has self-correcting mechanisms, maybe the inherent unintelligence of the bad guys is one of them.
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