Admittedly we don't know all that much about how the war of power went, but I will say that I always believed that the reason the light lost so badly was less due to the actual warfare skills of the AS/light, and more due to the fact that the DO was able to touch the world so strongly and directly.

Consider that when people are talking about victory, they always seem to consider taking out the DO himself as vital. LTT's plan involves the seals, but even LPD's plan involves erecting the super-barrier around SG.

And what about the scene we get when Rand goes through that ter'angreal and sees the past. When the Aiel guy is told that the bore has been sealed he instantly assumes that they have won. That makes little sense since the large majority of the shadow forces are still out there. Unless ofcourse the removal of the DO would mean easy victory.

And this viewpoint does make sense to me. I mean look at everything thats happening in the books now. Bubbles of evil, food rotting everywhere and reality itself starting to fall apart. And this is with three seals still there, how much more could the DO do when he was fully free. Imagine the damage to the Light side if he could focus that damage to them and spare the areas on his side.



I always got the impression that LTT was a good general. It is even said that LTT did a good job and recaptured many lost areas and such, but was then driven back because "It was as if every step forward by the Shadow scattered the spores of chaos before it". A poetic description maybe, or perhaps a very accurate one that indicates the DO striking and giving his forces a strong advantage.

Anyway the point here is that if the DO and his influence plays a major role as everything seems to suggest, how likely is it really for the AS to "defect" en masse from LTT? I mean the AS are highly trained and educated and should be more aware than most that blaming LTT for the DO would be utterly absurd. I suppose I can see some of the more radical and unwise making LTT a convenient scapegoat, but all of them? Feels difficult to believe.



Well, first of all I should like to point out that tSaSG is supposedly an "in-world" text written by a scholar so what says in it is not necessarily 100% accurate. Mostly probably but with potential errors because of the whole history becomes legend and then myth thing. It is possible that RJ made it like this because he wanted to keep things vague. It is possible for things in that text to be proven wrong in the books without violating canon too much because of this.

Anyway, the point here is that given everything, it seems very strange for LTT to not be able to get his women since he only wanted seven and no more. RJ says that in AoL, 2-3% of the total population had the ability to channel. Now I don't know if it has been said exactly how large the population in AoL was, but given their technological level, their ability to supply virtually unlimited food and using our own world as a guide I would say there were probably a LOT of people. Our world has 6 billion, but lets massively downscale that just to be safe to just 100 million people. This is probably far too small an estimate, but even with that estimate, and assuming that half of the AS had died during the war (and splitting for the female thing), that would still leave half a million living female AS.

Think about that for a moment. Over half a million female AS running around, along with countless thousands of angreal and sa'angreal. And LTT was unable to find _SEVEN_ strong enough to help him? Sure you could claim that he needed people like Lanfear which were extremely rare even then, but that does not seem to fit considering that we KNOW that you can be weaker and still have skill and that weakness in power could be countered with angreal. If strength&dexterity were the only issues here, LTT should have found 7 people out of the vast ocean he had available. Even if 99% of female AS opposed him (a ridiculous number), that would still leave over 5000 left. More than the entire modern WT. And none of those were good enough for LTT?

It also does not make much sense that at the end, LTT went at it alone. I mean even if he did want the strongest possible women for some reason, why would he then choose to go alone rather than taking what he could get (weaker ones). I mean surely a weak link, even if thats not what he wanted, would be better than NONE at all? Unless we are supposed to believe that he was unable to convince even a single one of those half a million females to help him? How likely is that?

Add to this the fact that the strength thing kinda fails with what we learned in TGS, which is that LTT did not believe that brute force was the key and that he opposed the CK idea. If he did not think brute force was the key then why is it that he apparently wanted only the strongest females? And also, why did he want a link of just 13 rather than 72 which again would be far stronger, if it was strength that he wanted.

In my view the whole thing has many problems. Saying that LTT wanted a rare subset of AS with a pattern-modifying-talent was just one possible explanation that I thought of to try and explain some of these inconcistencies away.