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There are a lot of inexplicable notes like this. Terez Send a noteboard - 14/11/2015 06:33:11 AM

View original postI can't imagine why the two things of which Nynaeve is cited as being ignorant would ever apply to her. Nobody, aside from themselves and their superiors, knew that Balthamel & Aginor were resurrected, and I can't imagine why it would need to be specified that Nynaeve doesn't know. Nobody but Moiraine & the Shadow knew about Asmodean, so, again, I don't see why there was a need to specify that Nynaeve didn't know. I could see needing to specify that Rand doesn't know about Moghedian, since he saw her in a collar with Nynaeve and used the term "Chosen" with what seemed to be deliberation, and Nynaeve noted a reaction from Moghedian. At the time, I thought that was sure to come up in LoC.

Also, the bit about thinking Moghedian was still a prisoner. Nynaeve learned about her escape the same night it happened, so that's a minuscule window for which that datum is relevant.

It seems to me like a whole lot of stuff changed from his mentality when writing the cards to what went into the books.


Sometimes I get the impression, reading these notes, that RJ wrote them half as an attempt to stay organized and half as a way to brainstorm plot points. He wrote them for himself and edited them haphazardly. In this case, he might have been laying out a bunch of things Nynaeve didn't know about in order to come up with something she could discover as a plot point in ACOS, but he did similar lists with a number of characters.

This is part of what makes the notes frustrating. In some ways, they're goldmines of curious nuggets that shed a lot of light on RJ's writing process with bits of plot and worldbuilding that never made it into the books, some of which are clearly post-canon, others of which are not. Alan and Maria apparently had a very difficult time sorting out which were which, and this led to several continuity questions when they had to decide whether or not to include something in the Companion.

But overall, the notes are a jumbled mess of information that, for the most part, has already been revealed in the books. Brandon posted about this a bit on Reddit (see link below).


Those notes are NOT easy to parse. The big problem is that they involve a lot of repeated information, most of it well known by now, so finding the tidbits like this is exceptionally difficult.

Reddit post
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Demandred, Taim and Asmodean - 13/11/2015 05:22:36 PM 3333 Views
Holy...SHIT! - 13/11/2015 07:12:08 PM 1892 Views
Yup...shocked, but hardly surprised. - 13/11/2015 08:12:54 PM 1455 Views
Thank you so much for revealing it - 13/11/2015 08:57:32 PM 1589 Views
I agree... - 13/11/2015 09:03:21 PM 1411 Views
Re: Holy...SHIT! - 18/11/2015 05:21:26 PM 1225 Views
Re: Demandred, Taim and Asmodean - 13/11/2015 07:15:14 PM 1559 Views
There was bound to be changes of mind... - 13/11/2015 10:50:39 PM 2073 Views
Hmmm... - 13/11/2015 11:59:41 PM 1376 Views
I just can't believe he was that lazy/sloppy in editing LOC. - 14/11/2015 12:29:47 AM 1831 Views
I thought Shara was begging to be noticed as a last minute foe. - 14/11/2015 02:46:42 AM 1566 Views
So did a lot of people. But... - 14/11/2015 05:27:27 AM 1532 Views
I still tend to think Demandred in Shara was Sanderson's creation - 16/11/2015 09:07:28 PM 1688 Views
He has pretty much admitted as much publicly. - 17/11/2015 03:14:19 AM 1487 Views
Agreed. In fact.. - 17/11/2015 03:19:20 AM 1356 Views
Re: I still tend to think Demandred in Shara was Sanderson's creation - 17/11/2015 05:08:58 PM 1254 Views
One more comment on the timing - 21/11/2015 04:29:02 PM 1443 Views
I don't get the Nynaeve note - 14/11/2015 02:32:28 AM 1698 Views
There are a lot of inexplicable notes like this. - 14/11/2015 06:33:11 AM 1575 Views
Nynaeve was one of the few who met the original Balthamel and Aginor - 17/11/2015 08:46:43 PM 1297 Views
Re: Nynaeve was one of the few who met the original Balthamel and Aginor - 17/11/2015 09:33:34 PM 1130 Views
It's interesting that stopping Taimandred coincided with the drop in series quality. - 16/11/2015 05:02:38 AM 1934 Views
Some of this could have been interesting - 16/11/2015 04:37:00 PM 1508 Views
It would take away from Verin though - 16/11/2015 05:05:41 PM 1073 Views
That is a good point - 16/11/2015 08:52:37 PM 1153 Views
For the record my suggestion was not that he was a mole - 17/11/2015 01:56:41 AM 1287 Views
that was clear in your post - 19/11/2015 05:36:02 PM 1155 Views
Sanderson certainly did that - 20/11/2015 05:08:03 PM 1288 Views
I don't think I would have cared for that - 20/11/2015 06:05:19 PM 1263 Views
It didn't necessarily have to be "dark", just a bit less two-dimensional. - 20/11/2015 10:00:59 PM 1252 Views
I mostly agree - 21/11/2015 06:38:31 AM 1137 Views
This I can agree with - 23/11/2015 04:12:19 PM 1078 Views
I don't read a ton of fantasy anymore - 23/11/2015 04:29:47 PM 1443 Views

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