The Eye of the World, chapters 34, 35, and 36, in which Rand is literally the centre of the universe

I LIIIIIIIIIVVVVE.

Quick explanation of the last two months: my antidepressants are letting me down, I am tired all the time and I feel lucky if I get six hours' sleep, and there was a three-week break between my first and second therapy sessions because I picked a bad time to start.  Thus, not so much with the energy and willpower to create blogposts, or write much of anything.  But I am by nature a writer and rambler and ranter, and it was long ago foretold that I would eventually be compelled to return.  Fortunately, the blogqueen also saw fit to establish a new posting regimen and nudge me as needed to get material ready in time.  Victory.

Let us now return to that rock of stability: the directionless meandering of Egwene And Her Amazing Pals towards an actual plot development.  Wait.  Dammit, Egwene isn't in this week's chapters.  Instead it's another Randathon as they finally reach Caemlyn without befalling any plot events that would actually engage me in this story.

The Eye of the World: p. 512--556

Chapter Thirty-Four: The Last Village

The eponymous village is Carysford, over the river Cary, and it looks normal enough to Our Weary Heroes, by which I mean it's got a bridge and no other discernible features.  They end up sleeping in haystacks again:

Heroes in the stories never had to sleep in haystacks, or under hedges.

I only have so much patience for characters in books thinking about how their lives aren't like books to begin with--it was probably clever the first time someone did it, back in the Triassic, but it's pure cliché now at the best of times.  At the worst times, like this, when people start thinking 'heroes in stories are never uncomfortable' I just start wondering what kind of unspeakably bland literary traditions this world has been saddled with*.

In the morning they join a slow parade of young men and token girls who are all apparently on their way to see the False Dragon in Caemlyn.  There's an encounter with an angry speeding merchant and a mounted guard that I don't fully understand, in which someone appears to call Rand 'Darkfriend' in a way that they intend to convey 'jackass'.  On the one hand, this makes some sense for people who haven't seen much in the way of apocalyptic cultists for many generations; on the other hand, it also seems linguistically uncreative, and this is a usage that we haven't seen in the previous 500 pages.

Sweet Eru Iluvatar, this is a slog.  I mean, I started this post half an hour ago thinking 'it's been forever; I am totally ready to dive back into the Generic Fantasy Adventures of WOT', but this is truly inedible word-paste.  (And let me add that I wrote this paragraph and then failed to get any further on this post for another two weeks.  Yesterday I climbed 26 flights of stairs for the hell of it, and I have an active World of Warcraft subscription, but Wheel of Time is a grind too far.)

Skim skim skim.  I don't know to what extent Robert Jordan popularised this method of characterisation, but as is my standard operating procedure, I hold him fully accountable for his contributions of human suffering: when Jordan wants to quickly make someone sympathetic and 'deep' even though we're never going to get to know them personally, he gives them a catchphrase and makes them ramble.  Rand and Mat overhear someone looking for them (big bounty on their heads) and then hop a ride with a guy who infodumps at us for a couple of pages, constantly repeating the phrase "I'm a good Queen's man" to shore up his credibility.  I threw the torrent of verbal meandering into the centrifuge and here's what came out:

• This country strictly has ruling queens, but is not called a queendom, I guess because that's the sort of thing a crazy feminist would do?
• Tradition states that the crown princess (or "Daughter-Heir" in WOT speak, because that's so much smoother) studies with the Aes Sedai and the eldest son studies with the Warders.
• This got the last prince killed and the princess disappeared before her coronation, leading to civil war a few decades ago.
• Queen Morgase also has an Aes Sedai grand vizier advisor whom many people suspect of Scheming.
• Robert Jordan thought it was reasonable to write "a queen is twice a woman, wed to a man, wed to the land" and no one stopped him.

The quantity of rambling done by minor characters in this book is amazing, and it irritates me, because it doesn't make them seem more realistic--it makes them seem like information nodes where our heroes just Press A To Talk at worst, and naive, scatterbrained inferiors at best.  The protagonists are far too wise to prattle on like that, and when they talk, they say important things, while extra after extra keeps jabbering, to the vexation of smart listeners like Rand and Mat.  The only positive I can spot is that Jordan has white guys doing this, not just women and brown people, but that would also require him to have more women and brown people, and in case you didn't notice he already has three women in this book and a queen who is like two women so obviously we're pretty close to capacity already.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Caemlyn

Our Heroes have finally arrived at the vast gated community metropolis, a fortress-city protected by fifty-foot walls of white stone and silver, the beacon of civilisation in dangerous lands and dangerous times: GondorCAEMLYN I meant--I meant--to say Caemlyn.  It is very unfathomably big and crammed full of people. I note that amongst all the many things about the city and its crowds that startle Rand, he doesn't talk about varied dress or skin tone, which makes me wonder if Caemlyn is a great big homogeneous blob or if it actually allows foreign people inside.

To remind us who's the real protagonist, Mat despairs how they can ever hide with so many people around, and Rand has to point out that they'll be impossible to find among so many people.  I assume this is meant to be Mat's evil dagger making him grouchy and hopeless, but how are they still alive, and is there any good reason that we had the details of their convenient journey chronicled for us for so many pages rather than montaged?  Mat keeps despairing for a few pages, but Rand is determined to find an inn called The Queen's Blessing that the gleeman mentioned before he died to show that the situation was serious.  Seeing that the local fashion involves sword hilts and scabbards wrapped in cloth, Rand finally strikes upon the incredible genius move to cover up the herons on his signature weaponry, although of course this takes two full pages to occur rather than getting summarised in a sentence so we can move on to actual action.  They finally find the inn, where the innkeeper is friendly and cautious and refuses to believe Thom is dead but otherwise accepts their story.

They're warned not to talk too badly of Aes Sedai (lest they draw the attention of royal guards) nor too positively (lest they get mobbed by Whitecloaks) and not to mention Thom, who PLOT TWIST used to be the queen's personal bard and possibly lover right after she was widowed.  Then Thom got tangled up in undefined business and spoke rudely enough to the queen to get a warrant on his head, because "he said some words, all right [...] words you don't say to any woman with Morgase's spirit. [....] And the Queen never forgets anything. You ever know a woman who did?"

Would any lady readers like to comment on this constant stream of WOMEN AMIRITE as compared to Tolkien's unyielding manscape in terms of women in classic high fantasy?  This is an atrocious choice: don't exist, or exist as caricatures and showpieces that explore the variety and complexity of women with all the nuance of open mic night at Judd Apatow's comedy club.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Web of the Pattern

The innkeeper predictably supplies them with the minimum necessary food and shelter and mentions the plague of rats lately, which Rand ties to being the devil's spies.  The maid gives Rand level five giggly eyelash batting, but he is too shy to say anything and she can't talk because she's set dressing.  Oh, no, she does finally talk when Rand asks for a private dining room, and she directs him to the library, where he meets an Ogier for the first time, which looks almost exactly like a trolloc, apparently.  The ogier, Loial, is very polite and very old (but still immature by his standards) and I'm beginning to think they're the elves of the setting--if so, ten points to Jordan for making them 'ugly' by human standards?  He's been hiding in the inn for four days after people tried to mob him in the streets, and there's a lot of the type of hard-to-parse dialogue that comes up whenever Jordan is trying to worldbuild subtly, but by the sound of it Loial ran away from home because official processes to let him set out at the tender age of ninety were taking too long.  He just wanted to see the world, and the Great Trees and you must shape the vision to the land and not the land to the vision et cetera et cetera.

Ogiers apparently built most of the cities for humans after we broke the world.  Nice of them.  Not clear on why.  They can't leave their home steddings for long, also not clear on why, and thus they're content to leave the majority of the planet to humans. Which: this is very convenient for a writer who wants to have non-human characters but still wants basically everywhere to be Humanville, and it's also kind of uncomfortably similar to the way a lot of white people seem to think of people of colour: sure,they're fine, as long as they stick to their enclaves and don't show up too often in our gated communities walled cities.  And yes, clearly we're supposed to like Loial, but so far he's the model minority.  He fully agrees that it's good and right that ogiers are bound to their stedding, he is willing to stay out of sight rather than make people uncomfortable by walking around in the street as if he's normal, and he's just a little bit more 'human' than the other ogiers--he got all hasty and ran away rather than wait years to get permission.

I eagerly wait to see if any of my expectations here steer me wrong.

Rand and Loial bond, and Rand ends up spilling the whole truth to the dude, who sums it up by declaring that Rand is ta'veren.  Y'all, this is the best thing.  Check it:

"...sometimes the Wheel bends a life-thread, or several threads, in such a way that all the surrounding threads are forced to swirl around it, and those force other threads, and those still others, and on and on. That first bending to make the Web, that is ta'veren, and there is nothing you can do to change it [....] Artur Hawkwing was ta'veren. So was Lews Therin Kinslayer, for that matter, I suppose."

LOIAL HAS IDENTIFIED RAND AS PLOT-RELEVANT.  Rand is very literally and metaphysically a main character and everyone else really is a background character swept up in the course of his fate.  I had heard rumours about this but I did not realise how blatant it would be.

In true RPG fashion, Loial immediately declares that he wants to travel with Rand, but Rand refuses because Loial is ten feet tall and less than stealthy, but they agree to hang out as long as they're both in Caemlyn, and hope to meet up again in Tar Valon.

And that's as far as I can make it this week, but come back next Wednesday for the blogqueen's next post, and tune in again in two weeks to catch up at last with Nynaeve.

---

*There was some book I read around age 10 with kids going camping and getting into a competition with their girl-nemeses culminating in some kind of capture-the-flag battle, and the clearest thing I remember about it is near the end, when the protagonist and his buddies are drenched and muddy, in a standoff with their opponents, and he thinks to himself how silly it is to try to look like some grand champion in such a state.  Even as child-me read that, I thought Yes, that is how a champion looks: exhausted, battered, reaching for the pinnacle of the thing that is so difficult everyone would have thought it was impossible.  There's a quote from George Bernard Shaw:

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap"

...Which isn't for everyone, obviously, but is something that's always resonated with me.  I learned this last week that my great-grandfather was Shaw's bartender.  Neat.

The Eye of the World, chapters 30, 31, 32, and 33, in which a montage could have done all this work in six pages

Sorry about the lack of post last week; I was apparently run ragged (I don't know how) and needed to pass out for many, many hours.  In an attempt to make up for it, I shall forge ahead through four chapters today.  Gods have mercy on our et cetera.

When last we left, I was doing my absolute damnedest to read Elyas' conversation with Perrin as "Dude, WTF" and "Yes, you are right manwolf, that was a very WTF thing for me to think", as opposed to the trainwreck I now believe it to be, in which Perrin is all "Wow, that was awful of me" and Elyas be like "Naw, dog, your plan was way better than getting eaten by ravens, don't worry that you didn't ask her if she wanted you to pre-emptively murder her".

This the first of like a fifteen-book series that is basically the icon of fantasy literature for the end of the millennium and everyone's just okay with that.  Send help.

(Content: violence, animal death, misogyny.)

The Eye of the World: p. 440--512

Perrin and Elyas are still arguing about who's got a right to kill whom when the wolves beam a warning into their heads and they rush back to obliterate their camp in a panic.  Elyas whisper-shouts for Egwene to douse the fire:

She rose to her feet, staring at him uncertainly, then stepped closer to the fire, but slowly, clearly not understanding what was happening.  Elyas pushed roughly past her and snatched up the tea kettle , cursing when it burned him.  Juggling the hot pot, he upended it over the fire just the same.

My first question: after weeks on the run and facing death that very afternoon, why are we to believe that Egwene--quick-witted, daring Egwene--would just not clue in that she needed to hurry when she spotted Perrin and Elyas sprinting toward her with hissed warnings to douse the fire?

My second question: how daft does Elyas have to be to not realise that pouring water all over a fire is going to create an enormous plume of steam towering over their campsite and marking it better than a properly-shielded flame ever could?

My answer to both these questions: Egwene understands the danger, you incompetent wannabe lycanthrope, but she knows that the safe way to kill the fire is to smother it and she's looking for the appropriate tools to do so, since you, Hairy Manly Survivalist, didn't think to prepare something in advance, no doubt because you were too busy unbending weeds behind yourself to exactly the most natural 82-degree angle?

I look back fondly on the days when I liked Elyas, but, as I might have guessed, Egwene the True Protagonist remains the only worthy person present.

With the fire doused and the girl chastised for her girly lack of initiative, Elyas immediately determines that there's no way of actually hiding their camp, and so they have to split up before the danger gets here, not that he's willing to spare a breath to say what the danger is, though he does say that it's not the ravens, which seems unnecessarily uninformative.  Finally, as they ride away, Perrin says that the wolves saw a great bunch of humans on horses, and "they smell wrong [...] the way a rabid dog smells wrong."

There's a lot wrong with that comparison, as we shall shortly see, but first they have to scamper away into the darkness where Perrin (who has already revealed he's mind-linked with the wolves) lies about his newfound night-vision to Egwene.  Egwene, literally and figuratively in the dark, proves to still be the best person by trying to reassure Perrin of their safety and get his mind off the danger (she asks if he'll dance with her if they're home by Sunday, which I take to mean the midsummer festival).  Perrin is treated to a four-camera telepathic slasher flick as the humans and horses hunt the wolves in the dark and get mauled over and over again.  Eventually, they're spotted hiding anyway, and we find out these people are Whitecloaks, though Perrin maintains there's something unusually evil about this batch.  Perrin's about to surrender at lancepoint when Hopper, the wolf who loved to jump and wished he could fly, leaps in to the rescue, begins slaughtering, dies in a heroic sacrifice, and Perrin goes into a berserker rage before blacking out.

We have now had two sympathetic characters die, Thom and Hopper, and they both got biographical retrospectives within a couple of pages of their deaths.  Is this going to be a thing?  Are we going to have a bunch of two-dimensional characters running around until it's time for them to die, at which point they abruptly get a poignant backstory stapled on?  It works much better here than it did for Thom, but that has everything to do with wolf telepathy and not with Jordan finding his groove on the whole death-by-backstory thing.

They waken, heavily bound, in a Whitecloak tent, where the inexplicably malicious Byar gives the gaunt Lord Captain their post-fight statistics, drastically overestimating the number of wolves they fought and inventing a bunch of Darkfriends as well.  The Lord Captain knows better, and introduces himself as Geofram Bornhald, which I think makes him an ancestor of the dude back in Baerlon?  There's much questioning and threatening (Perrin gets smacked with his own axe) and wild theorising by Byar before Perrin and Egwene put together a pretty solid half-true cover story, but they make the mistake of naming Shadar Logoth, which convinces the Lord Captain that they've still lied about something.  He insists no one is irredeemable, especially Egwene, but some punishment awaits Perrin, who axed a couple of whitecloaks before he passed out.  Conveniently, they're on their way to Caemlyn as well (they Must Not Be Late, though of course we're not told for what) so I'm not overly concerned that Perrin will get anywhere near his gibbet.

I realise that this point (as I should have long ago) that Egwene and Perrin have been split off from the main party to be our ripoffs of Merry and Pippin, minus the other heroes' desperate and sympathetic search for them.  Hoping against hope that Egwene is also our Gandalf the White and saves the day with sweet wizardry.

Chapter Thirty-One: Play for Your Supper

All good things come to an end, by which I mean it's a Rand chapter next.  The first several pages mostly assure us that nothing unpredictable has happened or will ever again happen: Rand and Mat are headed to Caemlyn, they hide in hedges and such whenever they see dust trails on the road ahead or behind, Mat is still ensorcelled by his evil dagger, and Thom is still dead.  Villages they pass make them homesick and there's an evil voice whispering demoralising things in Rand's head.  They can't sell their stuff for cash (no economy to take a heron sword or a ruby dagger), and they don't like thieving (mostly because of ever-present watchdogs).

Occasionally they do a few hours' work on a farm in exchange for room and board, but Rand gets nervous because this is time the Fades have to catch up with them.  One extended episode at the Grinwell farm concerns Rand's desperate efforts not to have sex with the eldest daughter.  Let me pause to note here that we're more than 460 pages in and I have no idea why Rand desperately wants to not have sex with this hot farmgirl.  He's not promised or devoted to Egwene; he's barely mentioned her in chapters, although he's had enough turned-on reactions to make me think he's not asexual.  Is he just generally nervous?  Afraid of the consequences if they get caught?  Is he a member of a religion with strict rules on sexual conduct?  (I did some googling just to check up on Jordan's religion, which he described as "High Church Episcopalian", which is a welcome change from the intense LDS theology and morality underlying so much of Orson Scott Card's works.  And Brandon Sanderson, for that matter, who finished WOT after Jordan's death.)

But my point is more that while this book's character exploration has at least been more show than tell, it still hasn't actually shown us much of anything.  I know nothing about what Rand wants in life that would explain to me why he'd do everything to subtly indicate to a farmlady that he wanted her to stop her hot daughter from getting in his pants.  I know more about the architecture of cities our characters have never been than I do about Our Hero's values.  What's up with that?  Is he meant to be a cipher, a blank slate onto which The Reader can project Himself?  IS RAND AL'THOR THE ORIGINAL BELLA SWAN?!

Anyway, Rand starts playing the flute and Mat starts juggling (as Thom taught them), and they are able to make much better time, earning rooms in inns and aboard merchants' carts:

If there was more than one inn in a village, the innkeepers would bid for them once they heard Rand's flute and saw Mat juggle. Together they still did not come close to a gleeman, but they were more than most villages saw in a year.

A year?  These poor bastards live in the worst of all possible worlds.  A few days' flute tutelage (or 'flutelage') makes Rand a better musician than anyone in the average town?  My god.  Let the Dark One win.

Chapter Thirty-Two: Four Kings in Shadow

Four Kings is mentioned at the end of chapter 31, ominously, and proves to be a small town that gets a full page of description to start with, which is more than we can say for Rand's identity.  It's dusty and barren and the women are getting catcalled so badly that "even Mat gave a start at some of them".  (I assume Mat didn't try to get naked with the farmgirl because he's in a devoted relationship with his cursed dagger, which is also a clearer explanation than we have for Rand.)  The misogyny continues with an innkeeper who slaps a barmaid for dissing the local musician, further driving home that these are terrible people, though Rand and Mat do zero to protest her treatment and 'these men hate women' does not feature on Rand's list of reasons he doesn't like the town.  The grime is much more important.  So here I guess we have another example of highlighting misogyny in order to make dudely readers feel better about themselves (they would never do such a thing) while also letting them glide past it instead of having to engage or, y'know, do anything at all ever.  (Rand does threaten the innkeeper with violence if he gives them less than the food and bedding they agree upon.  Priorities: sorted.)

There's some basic but serviceable foreshadowing with the occasional thunder and rising pressure as a storm rolls into town and finally bursts as they play.  Casual violence and sexual harassment of barmaids continues to be the order of the day.  (Rand is baffled that any of the women stay and put up with this treatment, and I'm just going to repeat what I said back in Speaker for the Dead: There are a lot of answers to that question, because people won't stop asking it, because they don't want any answer except the one they've already got, which is that if she stays, it's her own fault.)  Rand and Mat agree that the evil skinny innkeeper is definitely going to rob them, but they don't leave because they're still ravenous and they don't want to sleep in a rainstorm.  I'll spare y'all the prolonged pseudo-detective business that goes into working out that the one fancy dude who shows up at the inn and makes everyone uncomfortable is a rich merchant from Whitebridge who is definitely a Darkfriend.

The rest of the evening is unsurprising but serviceable Our Heroes Are Trapped tension-building, which I'd probably enjoy if I actually cared about anyone here.  The innkeeper and his bouncers are menacing, the inn is described in effective decrepit terms, and as Mat and Rand try to pry the bars off their room's window, they are engaged by the merchant, Howal Gode, who does not pretend even slightly to not be a nefarious villain.  The most interesting thing to get out of his monologuing is that he believes Rand and Mat are two of the new Dreadlords who will meet the devil when he awakens.  I say 'interesting' because for all the random fantasy bits thrown at us, we don't actually understand how pretty much anything is structured, and I'm inexplicably hoping that 'Dreadlord' is actually a title of some defined meaning which will shed further light on bad guy logistics if we ever get it defined.  I don't know why I think that's going to happen any time soon.  Maybe I'm just excited that the bad guys have prophecies too.

Our Heroes are saved by a bolt of lightning that happens to hit the inn at the exact moment that Rand silently wishes for "a way out", HINT HINT, and he and Mat make their getaway in the rain as Gode's lackeys smoulder on the ground.  Wow, saved at the last moment by improbability that precisely lined up with the simultaneous wishes of the character.  Again.  It's almost like there's magic in this world.

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Dark Waits

We ALL wait, Dark.  You're not special.  You're waiting for the end of all things, I'm waiting for a plot development.  Want to take bets on which of us will get what we want first?  Come on, I'll give you odds.

We cut to Rand and Mat riding into another village on a farmer's wagon, where they see uniformed Queen's Guards on patrol, and in a startling development, some worldbuilding actually answers my questions: Rand's never seen Queen's Guards before, and he reflects that he's vaguely aware his hometown is part of the kingdom of Andor, but they never have problems so big that they can't be settled with a meeting among a few villages' councils.  (He specifically mentions Village Councils, which y'all will recall are entirely made up of men, while the Women's Circles apparently aren't involved.  So feminist, y'all.)

Oh, lord.  After they hop off the farmer's wagon and keep walking for Carysford, we then cut back to the end of the last chapter so Jordan can detail for us every single that happened after the lightning strike.  I was not feeling deprived.  This turns out to be yet another dream, in which he is somehow able to confirm that the evil Gode is dead because Rand meets Ba'alzamon wearing his charred corpse like a snuggie.  Rand wakes up when he gets a fireball to the face, and Mat wakes up at the same time screaming about having lost his eyes, leading to Rand cradling Mat tenderly in the dark. (For the record, as much as I dislike most of these characters most of the time, I'm still 100% in favour of them being gay, bi, trans, or really anything other than hetero cis dudes with gender roles instead of bone marrow.

It's practically a montage: more villages and nourishing stew and gifts from farmers who would do more but always include the two-word sentence "My family" as an explanation to why they can't get more involved, more random villagers turning out to be Darkfriends, more questions raised in my mind about how and when Ba'alzamon is capable of making telepathic contact with his minions.  In another inn, Rand suddenly falls ill with chills, then fever, then hallucinations, which go on for pages and tell us nothing about anything or anyone.  The woman who arrives to try to treat him also turns out to be a Darkfriend, who tries to murder Rand with a magic burning dagger, and Rand has to give the usual they-are-evil-but-we-are-not speech in order to keep Mat from killing her before they stagger away.

The chapter ends with them getting on the wagon that we saw them getting off in the first scene of this same chapter, which is basically a metaphor for this entire series and also the Sisyphean hell in which I have trapped myself.  It's not that this chapter was badly written at all, it had solid imagery and creepy stuff and I can legitimately feel the exhaustion that Our Heroes are forcing their way through.  The problem ain't that.  The problem is that we're on page 512 and this book is made of filler.

Next week: they make it to Caemlyn, but your guess is as good as mine whether anything actually happens there.

The Eye of the World, chapters 24 and 25, in which nothing happens

Another two-chapter post this week because these chapters sap my will to live.  They also form a nice duology of toss-off ideas.  My working theory at this point is that Robert Jordan realised that instead of writing a lot of books with specific premises, he could write one book that contained six hundred premises and just tour around them without ever developing any, and that would be just as popular but much easier to write.

The Eye of the World: p. 348--378

Chapter Twenty-Four: Flight Down the Arinelle

This chapter again begins with a dream sequence as Rand is running around a fantastical maze, and the scenery as described is all very pretty but it does basically zero to advance the plot.  He's being hunted by the devil, he runs into the devil, he screams that it's all a dream and wakes up, but his finger is still bleeding from a thorn he touched in the dream.  I just gave you several minutes of your life back.  Then it's boat time again:

The Spray made haste slowly down the Arinelle.

FIGHT ME ROBERT JORDAN.

(There's also a note that all the sailors go barefoot because "boots could slip on a wet deck".  I don't--are human feet covered in suckers like octopus tentacles in this world?  I'm pretty sure humans are capable of creating boots with higher coefficients of static and kinetic friction than our feet.)

Most of this chapter appears to be filler--we get rundowns of the cyclical ire of the crew, between working hard to escape trollocs and grumbling that they've left the trollocs far behind; we get descriptions of how Thom keeps up the pretense that he's apprenticing Rand and Mat; we get talk of how Mat is constantly creeping away to 'be alone', which would be more sinister if Mat weren't a fairly typical teenage boy.  Mat does seem to have developed something of a treasure obsession, but since it has no plot relevance yet, I don't care.

Captain Domon rambles for a few pages (I am not exaggerating) about the wondrous things he's seen in the world, cursed metal towers and skeletons of ancient beasts.  Same old same old: instead of any kind of actual depth to the structure of the world, we're 356 pages in and the vastness of this land with its perfectly rectangular borders is being emphasised to us through endless lists of one-off wonders that we'll never hear of again.  There's mention in there of a crater somewhere with a giant silver spike in the centre that kills anyone who comes within a mile of it, and I spent a few minutes struggling to think of any reason that the existence of an instant-kill magic zone wouldn't be extremely important and interesting in a world with a lot of monsters that seem to have trouble properly dying.  These are all cool notions to throw into the world, but it bugs me that everyone's apparently just happy to let these things be completely mysterious untouched curiosities rather than actually incorporating them into their lives.  It doesn't feel more like a great big world to me; it feels like a weird museum for the protagonist to wander.

There's then a detailed explanation of how Rand messes about on top of the mast one day, freaks out the crew, Thom comes to get him, and he inexplicably nimbly clambers down again, in the perfect place to see why Mat keeps sneaking off all the time--he is, as anyone could have guessed, playing with his dagger.  Oh, an actual dagger?  Okay then.  It's very fancy and golden and he took it from Shadar Logoth, but it wasn't a gift so he's sure he didn't accidentally release that incredibly evil ghost-dude Moiraine warned them about.  This, obvs, is the source of his new obsession with treasure, but Rand agrees not to tell anyone, because Rand failed his Genre Savviness check today.  Rand talks about all the cash they'll get by selling it and Mat just says 'if we have to'.  He is also reluctant to admit he's been having more dreams, like Rand, and then they Don't Talk About That for a while.  Rand also retroactively freaks out about the stunts he pulled on the mast, and becomes more convinced that something is messing with his head.

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Traveling People

Oh fuck, are we going to get Fantasy Romani now?  This is gonna suck.  Egwene and the horse, Bela, do not particularly trust the wolf pack now just hanging out with them as they stroll onwards.  I thought for a moment that this was actually from Egwene's perspective, but no, that would be silly because she is a girl and therefore a distraction from serious, slow, thoughtful Perrin the cool dude who can, like, talk to wolves.  Egwene tries to get Elyas to share in riding Bela, like she and Perrin do, and he refuses:

She took a deep breath, and Perrin was wondering if she would succeed in bullying Elyas the way she did him, when he realized she was standing there with her mouth open, not saying a word.  Elyas was looking at her, just looking, with those yellow wolf's eyes. Egwene stepped back from the raw-boned man, and licked her lips, and stepped back again.

We know Elyas is cool because he can make girls shut up just by looking at them, when they try to 'bully' him with their logic and courteous offers.

It's like Tolkien, but feminist!  (Also, raw-boned?  What does that even mean?)

Perrin is slowly adjusting to his new wolfdar, constantly pointing out their presence to him, but he's comforted by his dreams, which no longer feature Ba'alzamon--they're normal dreams like he had back home, except that there's always a wolf in the background, facing away from him like a watchdog.  This is probably one of my favourite mystical things we've seen so far: and it's remarkably succinct and understated rather than getting three pages of explication.  I don't think that's coincidental.

And yet, because Perrin is a useless sack, he also resents and fears the wolves that speak to him, guard him, and bring him food, and thinks he'd be willing to go hungry if they'd just go away.  He also almost takes a shot at some giant mastiffs that leap out of a copse of trees, but Elyas calms them and explains that there are Tuatha'an camping within, and because everything has like fifty names in this world, they're also known as Tinkers or the Traveling People.  Okay, not Fantasy Romani, then, but Fantasy Irish Travellers.  Egwene immediately brings up the stereotype that they're all thieves, and Elyas shuts her down.  Elyas remains the Best Dude, but really, can Egwene just not have nice things anymore?  Perrin has heard about the their legendary tinsmithing skills and wants to check it out.  One point to House Useless Sack.

(We pause now to talk about demonyms.  I note that Jordan here uses most of the common terms for Travellers except for 'gypsy', which is a racial slur, specifically against the Romani and related peoples.  I would give points for that, except that I'm guessing he didn't use it because it sounded too Earthlike, while 'Tuatha'an' is just, like, Dog Gaelic.  WOT hereafter refers to these people mostly as 'tinkers', but the interwebs inform me that this is also sometimes used as a pejorative against actual Irish Travellers, so I'm going to skip that for the sake of simplicity and courtesy.)

Elyas leads them into the trees, and while Perrin has never seen Travellers before, their camp is exactly what he expects from stories, because stories about exotic ethnic minorities are always perfectly accurate and don't overstate anything.  (Except for the stealing, apparently.)  The camp is exactly what a stereotypical Traveller or Romani camp looks like, with giant brightly-painted wagons and clothes with eye-hurtingly contrasting vivid colours.  Well, I say vivid colours, but the other obvious reason to base these people on Irish Travellers instead of Romani is that we were in great danger of accidentally including brown people in this story.  Dodged a bullet there.

They sit down for a meal with the elder and his wife, and a grandson who shows up to hit on Egwene.  (Perrin admits he's cute but figures he's like that player back home who dates all the girls at once.)  We also get some infodumps on Traveller pacifism (they're very pacifist) and Aram takes Egwene away to dance.  The elder relates a story of news from a couple of years ago, some warning that a Traveller band got from a dying Aiel warrior while crossing the Wastes, saying that the Dark One is coming to blind the Eye of the World and kill the World-Serpent.  Perrin spends most of this time baffled at the notion of a society where female warriors are common and accepted.  Egwene dances with Aram until it's late, snaps at Perrin that Aram is a sweet fun boy and not just a player, and then breaks down in tears and begs him to tell her that the others are still alive, before she kisses him on the cheek and heads to bed down among the women.

Why in the world is Perrin our POV character here?  He has, like, two emotions and no direction in life.  Egwene frequently acts like a real person and has a vastly more interesting potential storyline, but she's too busy getting saddled with the role of overemotional token chick who needs a man to support her.  At least if their roles were swapped Perrin wouldn't have any personality to waste on his overwrought outbursts.

I'm also curious about the pacifism the Travellers expound, because the narrative certainly treats them like they're sensible rather than naive fools, but the narrative is also totally onboard with Our Heroes beheading enemies all over the place.  The elder would have Perrin believe that the spiritual self-harm that results from doing violence to other people is much worse than the physical violence that they're doing, but he's saying this in a world with a malevolent ancient god that works tirelessly to destroy all of existence, which makes 'running away' a questionable plan at best.  I mean, I guess it's supposed to be an even presentation of the options, but it feels rather more like 'I beat a bad guy to death with another bad guy this morning, but I appreciate pacifism, so you know I'm a good dude'.  Whereas Egwene, who supports this pacifist notion much more strongly, is an overemotional wreck who needs to deal with her emotions by shoving her tongue down hot nomad boy's throat like it's an ovipositor.

I'm saying that Ender's Game was supposedly about peace and mercy too, and that's full of people who are all about that genocide, 'bout that genocide, 'bout that genocide, no trouble.  Pacifism in fantasy would be more interesting if it were ever brought up with more depth than 'foolish idealism' or 'theoretical notion that we don't actually need to engage with'.

Next week: Rand arrives at Whitebridge, at the end of the White Bridge, which I can only assume is some kind of gated community with a lot of dentists and financiers.

The Eye of the World, chapters 19 and 20, in which no one makes good decisions

It's honestly harder to carve into this book than it was for any of Card's works.  Not because this is more horrifying, but because Card is, in comparison, an incredibly concise writer, while Jordan apparently takes pride in writing pages of description I couldn't cut through with a hacksaw and a Loggingbot 3000 Automatic Hewing Droid.  For that reason, please accept my apologies as we only get through two chapters this week.

The Eye of the World: p. 275--313

Chapter Nineteen: Shadow's Waiting

The title trips me up here.  'Shadows Waiting' I would understand to mean 'there are shadows which are waiting', generic but okay.  The apostrophe means it's either a contraction, which seems deeply unlikely (casual language is always less MYTHIC), or a possessive gerund, in which case this chapter is about the waiting that some particular shadow has done, which sounds like really boring performance art.  I've gotten this far in life without seeing Godot and I'm not going to start now.

When last we left Our Heroes, they were creeping into the ruined city now called Shadar Logoth, which is of course hella impressive, as all ancient ruins must be.  Every giant building is capped with one to five marble domes, "each one shaped differently", and I'm not even sure how you do that with a feature that's literally named for its shape.  Very, very creative use of convexity, apparently.  There are also long pillar-lined streets leading up to sky-scraping towers, and I would like to know how it is that Rand didn't see any of those buildings from a distance.  Every intersection has a fountain, monument, or be-pedestalled statue, which must have made for terrible traffic flow back in the day.

Lan picks a ruined tower with an intact main floor and no door whatsoever for their camp.  The doorway is literally so big that they bring the horses inside in pairs, but apparently that's secure enough for Lan's liking.  Nynaeve immediately starts try to herb Moiraine up, and shuts Lan right down when he interjects, but Moiraine says all she needs is a power nap.  She does, however, accept some herbal tea to help with that.  These two were practically made for hurt/comfort fanfic.

The farmboys explore for a while, Mat seems kinda hypnotised by an alleyway, and Rand is bright enough to still be feeling weird about the way he shouted ancient war cries earlier, like he was possessed.  Thom the gleeman tells them not to joke about possession and resurrection, because it's a Big Deal.  Hasn't that already been made very clear with talk of the Dragon Reborn, harbinger of the salvatiomageddon of the world?  Rand angsts more about maybe being adopted.  FORESHADOW FORESHADOW.

Mat, whom I am tempted to only call by his ancient Manetheren name, Makes Bad Decisions, wants to go explore the ruins, and explicitly says not to ask permission because they know they won't get it.  Goddammit, Mat, you are hiding from the devil's besties with the help of a witch who can set you on fire by wishing hard enough.  I hope Perrin leaves you for Rand.  But the three of them obviously go off exploring, and it's time for more of those nudge-wink-modern-world references, as they puzzle out what could possibly be the purpose of a building that's clearly a sports stadium.  There's another building that's just a huge dome covering a single large room; please tell me that's not supposed to be a capitol building like the U.S. senate.  Aridhol isn't just DC, right?  Please?

Mat's talking about climbing a tower when the Most Suspicious Man In The World pops up out of nowhere and introduces himself as Mordeth oh my god I can't.  He claims to be a treasure hunter and says things that are supposed to be sly while a huge neon sign blinks the words VILLAIN over his head.  He asks them to help carry all the loot he's found, and leads them down into a huge trove of gold and weapons, before Rand finally notices Mordeth doesn't have a shadow.  He briefly turns into a huge monster before his illusion fades and he wisps away through a crack in the walls, at which point Rand and Perrin forcibly drag Mat out by his arms.  The lights go out behind them, and on the street again they're still convinced they're being watched, but they make it back to camp, where Moiraine chews them out and gives them another giant history lesson.  TL;DR: Mordeth was an ancient advisor who turned the noble kings of Aridhol evil and sowed chaos until the people of the city destroyed themselves under the influence of something called Mashadar.  'Shadow's Waiting' is the short form of 'the place where the shadow waits', the literal translation of Shadar Logoth.

This is all stuff that would be way more interesting in the hands of someone who was telling a story instead of telling us about telling a story.  Moiraine rattles off a chain of loosely-connected events with no actual explanations, about the last noble prince and how he was betrayed and ran away and found a wife and they both ended up dead, possibly Romeo-and-Juliet-style, but since it lacks much poetic value, it's only compelling if you tell yourself the story.

We did talk, back in Ender's Game, about how the strongest stories are often the ones that we invent for ourselves, and how popular books often seem to try to tap into a null zone where the reader is the one actually filling in the details and explaining things however they like best.  I'm starting to wonder if Robert Jordan's success wasn't that he did that on a grand scale, and for every generic fan of fantasy, not just bitter geeks or teenage girls with unhealthy romantic notions.  What I'm suggesting is that Wheel of Time might perhaps be a book that tries to pretend to be a better book, the way butterflies sometimes have camouflage patterns that look like jaguar eyes.

It makes as much sense as anything else so far.

Anyway, Moredeath Mordeth wants a new host body that will let him escape the city, but they're safe as long as they didn't do any of the fairy-rules types of things that would let him enthrall them, like accepting gifts or whatever.  They all try to rest, but Lan arrives in the middle of the night to report that Trollocs (which we are assured are far too scared to enter the city, that's the point) have entered the city, with sufficient prodding from Halfmen.  I'm 90% sure Our Heroes haven't slept properly since before Baerlon.  How are they not all dead, again?  Magic?  Super.

Chapter Twenty: Dust on the Wind

Our Heroes bravely run away into the nighttime streets, but tendrils of fog creep in at ground level and Moiraine commands them to stop.  The fog is the body of Mashadar, and it kills instantly on contact, so they have to split up to avoid it.  (Jumping over a tendril "as big around as a leg" is apparently not an option.  What did I say last time about CRPG heroes?  Find the jump button, Rand.)

Rand bravely leads the rest of the party on, but they run into trollocs and run madly off in all directions.  We get to see Mashadar eat some trollocs and a halfman, and I'm left wondering: if we know that Moiraine has the power to ward away Mashadar And Friends, why isn't this city the favourite battleground of the forces of good?  Live in its buildings, have your wizards ward away the evil magic, no one goes out at night, and when the forces of evil try to invade again, just drop the street wards and flood them with murder-fog.  BRB, writing a more interesting fantasy novel based on this concept.

Rand finds Mat and Thom again and they escape the city, and we get the first scene from someone else's point of view: Perrin, staring at the path out of town, testing his axe blade and thinking carefully.  He is, we are told, a careful thinker, since he has Mat as his cautionary example of quick decision-making.  He quickly gets found by Egwene and they also run off together.  (I note that for our first non-Rand scene, we've got the hulk's point of view instead of, say, the wizard-apprentice who might have much more extensive thoughts about everything she's seen tonight.)  Perrin manages to drive his horse right over a cliff and into the river, struggles not to drown for about a page, and finally realises that he's actually managed to get all the way across to the far side.  With his heavy cloak, boots, and fricking battle axe.  He's not even a good swimmer.  And Moiraine's plan to cross the river was 'place a magical ward around us while we build rafts'?  Apparently all you need is hip-waders and the strength to dogpaddle for forty seconds.

Back with Rand, they get ambushed by trollocs in the woods and Thom suddenly proves ninja by throwing "my best knives" into the backs of three of them.  All of those big-name heroes are seeming less and less impressive as our backwoods randos laugh off the evil hordes.  They find a boat, there's much scuffling, and Rand is once again moments from death under a trolloc when the ship's boom smacks it overboard.  The narrative all but says 'Yes, that was a deus ex machina'.  Oh, but then there's an extended argument among the crew about whether the boom was secured or not, which I'm guessing is foreshadowing that Rand actually willed it to save him because he is magic.

Captain Domon is kind of a no-win situation in terms of racism, because he speaks in broken English, but it's also not quite clear if he's supposed to be white or not, so either we continue to have the palest cast ever or our first POC has questionable language skills.  Thom bluffs a whole backstory out of the dangers that have assailed them thus far, living the gleeman's life, travelling "like dust on the wind".  But it's not enough to buy passage, and since Rand refuses to give up his sword, he and Mat hand over their silver coins from Moiraine instead.  The chapter ends with Rand leaning overboard, repeating that he tried to convince Egwene not to come with them.  Despite the fact that he's on a boat with a sketchy bard and a ship captain who wants his sword and doesn't care about throwing him overboard, I'm not sure why Rand thinks she'd be safer with him than with the wizard and her pet super-knight.

I apologise for cutting short this week, but my loathing of this book has overwhelmed my work ethic.  Instead, I offer you this:

Next week: sudden unexpected extended Bechdel pass.  I'm looking forward to it.

The Eye of the World, chapters 16, 17, and 18, in which we need a better class of villain

Oh my god I have left this blog so bereft.  My apologies to the six of you who are still reading (because of those hypnotic messages I implanted in some of the hyperlinks).  Everything with my family over the holidays was more jam-packed than expected and then it's taken a couple of weeks to recover and get back into a writing groove.  I couldn't even maintain my intended Doctor Who marathon posts (although the rest of those will still happen).

In case you missed Sunday's announcement, my posts will now be going up on Wednesdays (the alliteration of WOT Wednesday was the final tipping factor).  I mean, Sundays are pretty good days already, but we need some stuff to look forward to in the middle of the week, so I decided to fill the niche.  Let's get back into it, eh?

The Eye of the World: p. 230--274

Chapter Sixteen: The Wisdom

When last we left Our Heroes they were busily not telling any of the women about their important plot discoveries, and learned that the careful efforts their party wizard went through to cover and block their trail were no match for their harpy of a witch-neighbour.  Naturally, the next chapter starts with them getting pulled aside by Min the prophet girl, who quickly tells Rand that Nynaeve is also radiating Plot Relevance.  Rand keeps this (and all of Min's plot-sensing powers) secret from the rest of the party, justifying it with a vague wave of 'it might be dangerous'.

Nynaeve and Moiraine are found staring each other down from either end of the dining table, filling the room with an icy aura, because powerful women are automatic nemeses I guess?  Nynaeve tugs at her braid, which Rand identifies as her habit "when she was being even more stubborn than usual with the Village Council".  Irrationally hard-headed women being 'stubborn' is the same thing as strong characterisation, right?

Nynaeve reveals that while she had already guessed that Our Heroes would go to Baerlon, she also tracked them, using the incredible hunting skills that her father taught her (specifically because he had no sons--apparently teaching things to girls requires special justification).  We are assured by Lan that almost no one in the world could do this.  Sweet Bahamut, was Two Rivers settled by a party of level 20s who got tired of dungeoneering?

I've tried twice already to write this post and I keep dragging to a halt in this section because I just can't take the recapping anymore.  Nynaeve wants them to come home because honestly who believes in trollocs; Moiraine says they can because obvs monsters and darkness and evil.  There is much staring down and posturing, the men flee the room and mutter to themselves, and finally Nynaeve emerges, relented.  There is just so much "what about monsters" "but I don't trust lady wizards" repetition I am in danger of losing consciousness.

This kitten has never known suffering like mine.

Rand asks why they sent Nynaeve rather than literally anyone else in town, and Nynaeve notes how much he's grown in a week, since he never would have questioned anything she did before.  Really?  Rand's been pretty inquisitive for a farmboy hero since the beginning (it's his strongest quality), and I like my character development earned.  Anyway, Nynaeve explains that the village meetings were a mess--"The Light save me from men who think with the hair on their chests" is one of the better lines so far, despite its ridiculousness--and the Women's Circle took swifter action and sent her on ahead, while the men are "probably still arguing about who to send".

While I get that 'girls rule, boys drool' rhetoric has its place in a patriarchal society, it doesn't exactly make for a cohesive case for inherent equality when the story is busily saying men are incompetent but they still make up the majority of the cast, while all the women are the exceptions: the wizard, the runaway, and now the renegade doctor.  I suppose there's a certain amount of realism to a setting wherein the women have to be twice as competent as the men just to earn a normal place, but this kind of 'men suck and run everything, what are you going to do' doesn't challenge that narrative so much as it reinforces a world where dudes aren't expected or required to do any better.

Lastly, Nynaeve explains that Moiraine was questioning her about the three boys' backgrounds, whether any of them might have been born outside Two Rivers, and Rand finally brings up Tam's "fever-dream".  Nynaeve awkwardly confirms that Tam left home long ago and she's just old enough to remember when he came back with a hot wife and a baby, but doesn't address whether Rand was a foundling or not.

Chapter Seventeen: Watchers and Hunters

Back in the common room, Thom is telling yet another story of the Great Hunt of the Horn, which seems to be sort of a grail-quest that's been attempted a lot over the centuries.

"...To the eight corners of the world, the Hunters ride, to the eight pillars of heaven, where the winds of time blow and fate seizes the mighty and the small alike by the forelock. Now, the greatest of the Hunters is Rogosh of Talmour, Rogosh Eagle-eye, famed at the court of the High King, feared on the slopes of Shayol Ghul..."

At this point I think I'd rather listen to Thom for a chapter than endure any more of this recap-happy Rivendell-knockoff, but instead we just get a list of titles of Thom's stories, then it's music time (Robert Jordan desperately wishes he were Tolkien but his lyrics are vastly less inspired), then dancing time.  This reads somewhat less like swing dance and more like a swingers' party, with much talk of "passing his partner to the next man", but it's also a shippers' dream, since it means Rand dances with a series of hot local girls, Nynaeve, Moiraine, and Egwene, with increasing awkwardness.  (He considers and rejects the idea of trying to talk to Egwene again, because humph and also pfah.)  There's a man with a scarred face who spends the dance increasingly glaring at Rand, so presumably as usual ugly scars make you evil and dude's going to jump Our Heroes later.  Ah, yes, we're informed by the innkeeper that he's a Whitecloak spy.  That's what you really want in your spies: incredibly distinctive facial marks and a penchant for furiously staring at his targets.  It's like Battle School levels of brilliance all over again.

The dances eventually end, Rand goes to get some pre-bed milk, and on his way back down a dark hall gets ambushed by a Fade.  He can't look away from its pasty white eyeless face, which makes fleeing hard, and at the sounds of boots from above (Lan is supposed to sense these things coming from miles off, isn't he?) it draws its black sword, moves as if to slaughter him, and then just declares "You belong to the Great Lord of the Dark [....] You are his" before running off, and then Lan arrives and declares there's no point in chasing it.  Really, Lan?  You're supposed to be borderline superhuman; take a sprint.  At this point I almost suspect that he and the Fade are working together.

So again they have to run away in the dead of night, because that hasn't gotten old.  For some reason Egwene this time looks "frightened almost to tears", which hasn't been her reaction to any of the dangers so far faced.  I guess with Nynaeve added to the lineup we've reached Critical Girl Mass and Egwene is allowed to relinquish her position as the cool enthusiastic adventurer, in favour of being the chick?  Let's hope that doesn't last.  Rand's response to seeing her teary face is to think "At least she doesn't think it's an adventure anymore" (which: shut up, Rand), but then he feels shame and actually apologises for his general jackwagonry of late.  I don't hate Rand as much as I expected to--not yet, at least.

Lan bribes his way past the gate guards easily enough (there's a law against letting people into town after dark, but not specifically against letting them out) but is interrupted by a pack of Whitecloaks who do their best to make it sound like anyone who ever questions their whims is the devil's personal nutritionist and decorator.  Their leader reveals himself to of course be one of the guys Mat 'pranked' fifty chapters ago, Bornhald, and declares the whole party Darkfriends in need of interrogation, but Moiraine steps up and goes wizardly-booming-voice, telling them off.  Bornhald attacks:

...He slashed at her in the same motion that cleared his sword.  Rand cried out as Moiraine's staff rose to intercept the blade.  That delicately carved wood could not possibly stop hard-swung steel.

...Said no one who understands that swords are finesse weapons, not medieval chainsaws.  Delicate carvings or not, her unfixed staff is going to do just fine against a panicked one-armed swing with a sword.  Also, of course, wizard, so Bornhald flies back into his goons, sword half-melted and bent.  Moiraine, who has already grown taller than the rest of them, bursts up higher than the wall and literally steps over it once the rest of Our Heroes have booked it on horseback.

As soon as Moiraine's out of town she shrinks back down to normal size, and insists that Egwene was just seeing things when asked about turning giant.  Sigh.  Moiraine, everyone saw you, and in particular you've just tantalised this young girl with her wizarding potential and you think she won't be curious about how to grow tall enough to crush her enemies and make them rue the day they--but anyway, this is not how you win anyone's trust.  At this rate Egwene is going to become one of those people who experiments with powers she doesn't understand and tears holes in the firmament of reality.

A short distance from town, they look back to see a plume of fiery smoke over Baerlon, which Moiraine concludes is the inn going up in flames.  Unlike the destroyed raft, this wasn't her doing, though I find myself wishing that it was--that would actually provide some real moral confusion, clear evidence that Moiraine's ruthlessness in her world-saving quest includes screwing over allies once she has no further need of them.  She instead notes that she warned him but "he would not take it seriously", which we're meant to take as frustrated, but unless proven otherwise, I'm going to assume she's thinking 'If he'd only listened I wouldn't have had to burn down his life'.

But for now she'd have us believe it was Darkfriends still just a step behind them.  The Darkfriends apparently have terrible recon, since they were able to implement a plan to burn down an entire jam-packed inn that night but couldn't spare a scout to catch the party of eight and their horses sneaking away after the Fade tried to hit on Rand.  What kind of modus operandi are these villains even using?

Nynaeve continues to win points (as generally happens with women we're not supposed to approve of in these books, have you noticed?) by asking why Moiraine isn't helping any of the people now fleeing a burning inn because of her, and Moiraine just says she'd make things worse by drawing more attention to the victims, both from the monsters and the whitecloaks.  She does, however, promise to have gold mailed to the innkeeper, enough to rebuild his inn and help out anyone who lost anything in the fire, but anything more than that and they might as well ritually sacrifice their whole families to the devil right then and there so stop asking questions this isn't a cheerocracy.

The rest of the chapter is just them wearily marching and taking an uncomfortable one-hour pre-dawn nap, with the boys muttering to each other again about how this is more dangerous than they expected and they won't be safe until Tar Valon.  (Points to Perrin, who also thinks Moiraine should have done more to help the inn.)  It couldn't be more obvious at this point that they won't be safe at Tar Valon either, any more than the One Ring was really safe in Rivendell.  By Eru, I want to skip ahead.

Chapter Eighteen: The Caemlyn Road

We're two hundred and sixty pages in and we're still on Disc One, to speak in CRPG terms.  Maybe people become Darkfriends just because they're bored.  I might sign up with Satan for a chance to shake things up.

The Caemlyn Road was not very different from the North Road through the Two Rivers.

I would unquestionably sign up with Satan at this point.

They ride along this road through low hills for days, occasionally stopping on top of a hill to scout.  No fires allowed, ever, which means no tea, to their sorrow, since it would break up the monotony of endless bread and cheese.  It doesn't sound like Egwene's been getting her magic lessons, either--if her first test involved making a stone light up, wouldn't it be a good idea to maybe try the ever-practical 'how to boil water by wishing hard' spell next?  They're travelling with an awesome wizard, why isn't there any option for tea?  And if you're so desperate to not be seen, why are you hanging out on hilltops instead of ditches?  For that matter, you and everyone else knows you're heading for once again the Only Bridge For Miles, so why would a flying demon seek you out by daylight instead of lying in ambush?  (The gleeman points this out and gets brushed aside.)  I mean, if the devil knows where you were and where you're going, isn't step one 'destroy the Only Bridge For Miles'?  And why doesn't Moiraine have a spell on hand for crossing water?  Why does she keep leaving herself at the mercy of ferries?  Why is the fate of good and evil being left up to the robustness of the public transportation infrastructure?

Echoes of hunting horns announce that trollocs are after them, and Lan scouts to determine that there are at least three Fades leading platoons.  They finally decide they're being driven into a trap, and given the choice of going south into the menacing Hills of Absher or north to the Arinelle, Moiraine ignores Lan's suggestion of "a place the Trollocs will not go" and takes them north, riding hard as the trollocs close in.

Instead, Our Heroes crest a hill and find themselves staring down into a half-ready trap, a mess of trollocs with hooks and lassos led by a Fade, and with a variety of battle-cries that are all basically Tolkienish versions of #YOLO, they charge into battle.  Lan and the Fade get to do single combat, of course, and their swords hack at each other exactly the way no one who knows how to use a sword would ever do oh my god they're scalpels not clubs.  Sigh.  Moiraine's weapon of choice is Spontaneous Trolloc Combustion--not sure why she doesn't cast it on the Fade--and the Other Wimminz stick close to her while the boys get hacking.  Rand manages to chop a catchpole in half "with an awkward slash", so maybe the trollocs are just using Nerf weapons, but by sheer numbers they're all getting swarmed, Rand gets a hook in his shoulder, Perrin is halfway dragged out of his saddle, and--

Look, here's the thing, I was actually feeling some tension at this point.  For all that his characters apparently wield only Vorpal (TM) Brand Farm Equipment, the language is pretty tense and bit by bit our heroes are getting dragged down by terrifying beastmen and I don't think Moiraine has a spell of deus ex machina for this scene, so for a moment I forgot that there were six hundred sequels with all of these characters and I wondered how they could possibly get out of this unscathed.  Okay?  I got into the story.  I was onboard.

Then the trollocs en masse start screaming and falling over having some kind of fit, and Rand notices that Lan has beheaded the Fade.

Really?  I mean, really.  At least when they did this in Star Wars Episode One they had the decency to announce well in advance that destroying the central computer would break all the droid soldiers.  The devil's legions of evil need a command unit or they bluescreen?  Why would you ever send a Fade into melee combat if this is what happens?

(Also, and this is especially nitpicky, if all of the farmboys are deadly archers, why are they bothering with melee weapons at all?  Why didn't they go bow shopping in Baerlon?  Genghis Khan conquered most of Asia and Europe with horses, bows, and a mind like an icebreaker ship.  Especially when you don't want to get roped or something, distance weapons seem like the way to go.

They take off again, since there are still more trollocs coming, but then Moiraine gets a full page describing how she throws an earthquake at them and calls up a wall of fire to buy them more time (although earth and fire are her opposed schools, so she's very tired afterwards). Nynaeve slips her some herbs, which she takes.  (Nynaeve's been trying to talk to Moiraine about herbs for days, which I like to think was just really awkward flirting.  Yes, I'm shipping it.  Obvs.)

When they have a chance to stop, Moiraine talks about their impromptu battle-cries, because Mat in particular shouted something in a language he's never heard before, which turned out to translate to 'in the name of some of my ancestral rulers like the Rose of the Sun'.  Moiraine takes this as proof that the Manetheren blood (which makes them better than everyone else, I guess) is still strong in them, and not--just as a f'r'instance--evidence that someone is messing around with his mind and memories.  Questionable, is all I'm saying.

More horns sound, Lan brings up once again that they have a perfect hiding place and his brother Balin will set them a great feast so Moiraine casts a misdirection spell (why has she not been casting those all day) to buy them enough time to flee into ancient  Moria Aridhol, an enormous abandoned stone city just hangin' out in the middle of the hills.  It's all supposed to be very ominous for some reason, and Lan says they have to find shelter before dark, dodging the question of the city's current name.  As they sneak inside, Moiraine grimly announces that it's now called Shadar Logoth.

Is that supposed to mean something to me?  If you're going to end your chapter on a dramatic revelation, make sure you reveal something that the reader actually understands.  I feel like that's a pretty basic guideline.  This is a bit like trying to convince Lex Luthor it's a big deal that Superman is secretly Kal-El.  The fuck does that mean?

Next week: In a refreshing break from CRPG rules, Mat tries to loot the abandoned city and, instead of getting a weapon upgrade, ruins everything.

The Eye of the World, chapters five, six, and seven, in which the plot begins

I started reading The Fault in our Stars this weekend, and while I don't think I could or would want to do a full series on it (most of all because I've never been directly impacted by someone's terminal disease before), I might toss a bonus post or two up about it sometime soon, because when it's good it's pretty dang good, and when it's bad it's all OH JOHN GREEN NO.  We'll see how the rest of the book goes first.

The Eye of the World: p. 62--103

Chapter Five: Winternight

Starting us off on a light but confusing note, the first page, describing the al'Thor house, looks like it's supposed to be full of double entendres:

Tam and Rang were considered out of the ordinary as much for being two men living alone as for farming in the Westwood.

'Alone' except for all the other bachelor merchants and farmboys who stop by to keep them company, of course.  Quite out of the ordinary, yes, quite strange, quite, quite queer.

The house was still in a tidy state of repair, the thatch tightly mended and the doors and shutters well-hung and snug-fitting.

Well, I mean, who doesn't like well-hung shutters snugly fitting into their tight thatch?

Apologies; I'm twelve.  Moving on.

They scope out the unspooked animals and the untainted well and decide the Black Rider wasn't here, set about doing various chores, keeping their bow and spear close at hand, making Traditional Fantasy Stew for dinner, et cetera, et cetera, pages of this.  When they finally head inside, it is extremely cozy and all the wars and magic feel very far away.  Dad al'Thor nevertheless locks the doors, for the first time in Rand's memory, because no one ever locks their doors, which causes me to wonder why they have locks at all.  Dad also busts out the secret family sword, which, by its slight curve (stop snickering), single sharp side, and heron designs, I'm guessing is a katana or wakizashi.  Robert Jordan is giving his Quaint English Whitebread farmboy hero a katana.

How exactly did all of these tropes get associated with fanfiction when best-selling authors with endless heaps of praise to their name have been doing it for years?  (Gatekeeping and sexism, the answers are gatekeeping and sexism.)

Dad al'Thor bought it a long time ago, although Mom disapproved, and he comments grimly about how impractical it is to a farmer's life and he should have given it away.  Obviously that means he's never practised all these years and so won't know what he's doing, right?  Nope.  A minotaur bursts through the locked door, Rand throws the kettle at it, and Dad kills it in a single thrust, and then the next one that comes in after it, instant-death blows that in the real world are generally reserved for decapitation.  Dad shouts for Rand to run and hide in the cold dark woods full of monsters.  Dad has made a series of bad decisions today and this might be a winner.  Rand scrambles out a window as monsters burst in the back door, there is much scurrying and echoes of steel hitting steel (so much for that beautiful unmangled sword), and Dad busts out the front window (inexplicably immune to glass shards) and leads the monsters off on a chase as Rand stumbles fearfully through the woods.  They reunite and Dad explains that the minotaurish things are Trollocs, our signature Always Chaotic Evil race.  (I have an asexual friend who remains delighted that this forms the acronym ACE.)

Dad's weak and bleeding, so Rand takes the sword and goes back to the farmhouse (sheep all slaughtered, house all wrecked) to get geared up.  One Trolloc turns out to have faked its death to lie in wait, and haltingly tells Rand to wait and talk to the Myrdraal that's coming, which is also called a Fade, so now we have two new Capitalised Names for one being without the slightest clue what it is.  (It is apparently a very tall monster.)  It then helps Rand perform the Traditional First Farmboy Hero Kill by leaping at him, and he gets his sword up just in time for it to impale itself as it tackles him to the floor.  He loots what he can from the ruin of their home, chops up a broken cart axle with the sword (even Rand realises this is improbable) and runs with it all back to Dad al'Thor, who is feverish and having nightmares and must be taken to Rivendell Emond's Field as soon as possible.

So, quaint rural homeland, Black Rider, slightly magic sword received from father figure, Morgul wound, orcs speaking the Black Tongue, need for a druid healer to cure a cursed wound... I mean, wow.  I honest to Eru Iluvatar did not expect Wheel of Time to be this severe a knockoff of Lord of the Rings.

Chapter Six: The Westwood

Rand binds his dad's wounds, al'Guyvers a stretcher out of the axles and blankets, and starts dragging him through the woods, with much narrative emphasis on how scary this is and he's only alive by luck and his sword-and-sorcery-adventure daydreams never involved anything this grim.  How old is Rand?  Sixteen?  I like him more the younger I picture him, because this all becomes more impressive and I have less desire to tell him to just shut up and do the job already.  He drags his dad through the woods (with constant yelps of pain when they go over rocks and roots).  From Dad al'Thor's epic babbling, he's either reciting legends or he had a much more heroic unmarried life than we were led to believe.  The Black Rider shows up on the road, leading the trollocs, but they go unnoticed.  Is the town screwed?  I think the town is screwed.  Especially once Rand starts extended descriptions of what the party will be like when everything settles down and they can finally take their new yacht for a spin after that police detective finishes his last day on the job.

Dad al'Thor is muttering more 'nonsense' about cuttings from the Tree of Life, Avendesora, which Rand al'Expositions to us belongs to the Green Man, who is also just legend (like trollocs, Rand admits).  He then fever-talks his way through a story of finding a baby in the snow after a battle and how he knew Kari wanted children and Rand is a good name, and Rand is genre-savvy enough to realise on the spot that this means he was adopted, which is on the one hand implausible and on the other hand oh thank god we're not having that drawn out too much.  I mean, if you must be that blatant, let the hero clue in as soon as the reader.

Chapter Seven: Out of the Woods

Is that a pun, because they're literally and figuratively out of the woods, or ironic, because things aren't going to get any better?  I appreciate good wordplay.  Good wordplay.

As day breaks and Rand is a hungry aching golem trudging through the woods, he finally reaches Emond's Field, which is indeed half burnt-down.  However, there are plenty of survivors picking through the wreckage, and Egwene leads them to Nynaeve, who takes a look at Dad al'Thor and reports that he's beyond any help she can give.  Tough luck, Tam.  At best you were going to be Obi-Wan, but it looks like you're Uncle Owen.  (Still a better role than Mother Organa.)  There is much milling and description and encounters with sympathetic villagers.  The mayor explains that the mysterious visitors are indeed and Aes Sedai and a Warder, and they saved what's left of the village via lightning magic and deadly swordplay, and finally someone remembers that Aes Sedai have healing magic as well.  But, despite the way Everyone Knows that women are the only ones who can safely use magic, Everyone Also Knows that you never want to get mixed up with their help, either, and Rand's first instinct is intense repulsion at the thought.  Even in a world where women are the preferred mages and they charge into battle to protect random villages from monsters, the menfolk might rather watch their father die from a Not-Morgul Blade wound than ask one for help.

Light, is there a story with an Aes Sedai where she isn't a villain?

I ask you.  If literally every story about Aes Sedai casts them as villains, they should be many times more terrifying than trollocs in the common consciousness, and yet still people talk about them fighting the evil False Dragons and such.  Moiraine just saved everyone's lives, so thinking she might help makes sense, but their response to her rescue wasn't 'Holy wonderballs, there's an Aes Sedai and she's helping us, oh my god, oh my god, what is this life', it was to get back to sifting the wreckage and leave her to burn the trolloc corpses with her buddy Lan.  They should be acting like Darth Vader showed up to save them all.  And then they start talking about how she's got healing magic, which--if Aes Sedai are in the habit of healing people in extreme circumstances, how do they have such a bad rep?  Are they all satanically going around demanding people's first-born children in exchange for curing a severe case of Legs Chopped Off?  Who invented this prejudice?

Rand finds them (Lan is busy with the trolloc bodies, having found sigils from seven separate clans now) and manages to ask for help from Moiraine, regardless of the cost.  She is of course happy to help (everyone else keeps refusing her), although she moves slowly, tired from all that magicking.  Lan remarks that "Even with an angreal, what she did last night was like running around the village with a sack of stones on her back", and for those of you who spend your time doing productive things unlike myself, I'll note that 'sangreal' is an old term for the Holy Grail, so we're still flush with random Arthurian references.

This is a bit of a short post, but that tends to be how it goes when chapters are 90% descriptions of settings and the way people are running around in them.  One of the explanations I heard for WOT's length, long ago, was that Robert Jordan only planned for it to be four books, but when they started selling so well he was asked to extend the series, and did so with gusto.  But we're more than a hundred pages in now and we're at the point I would probably have called the end of chapter two if I were writing this book, so I'm skeptical of this claim.  A lot of the material isn't bad, it's just filler, and not especially brilliant filler either.  There's some poetry, there's some realism, but it's also just very forgettable text.  I feel like this is the cheese sandwich of fantasy: popular, tasty enough, but just not that much going on except that afterwards you have food inside you.  The problem so far is that the worldbuilding doesn't really make sense yet and I don't care much about what happens to the sandwich, let alone whether the sandwich's father lives or dies.

The Eye of the World, chapters 1 and 2, in which nothing happens

Sorry about missing last week's post; hope you all enjoyed seeing the blogqueen back in action.  I was in the American South, where it's apparently reasonable for train stations to have signs that expressly forbid all weapons "except firearms (with a permit)", which says all that is necessary about that.  On the plus side, I spent some more time with my American friends, makers of the excellent YouStar web series.  (I play EruditeConnoisseur64 and try to keep a straight face.)   So the risk was acceptable.  Everyone was very nice and I met very few huge racists.

Now, back to the Wheel of Time.

(Content: gender essentialism. Fun content: how excited are you about blatant theft from random cultures, languages, and mythologies?  No?  What about Mallory Ortberg?)

The Eye of the World: p. 1--31

Chapter 1: An Empty Road

There's a lot of advice out there about how to start your book: with action, with things happening, with decisions being made, with whatever the real inciting event is.  Famously, fantasy novels are bad at this, spending endless quantities of time meandering about with farm chores and pub crawls to be more like Lord of the Rings before they get around to the plot.  I am unsurprised that EOTW is a great example of the latter.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

Nice for them as likes it, I guess.

Our Hero, Rand al'Thor (and his dad) are walking down the Quarry Road that I thought was a river but in fact just ends at the start of a river, feeling uncomfortable in his wet cloak on a blustery day, other hand on his bow in case of wolves.  Summarising the first three pages: wind, trees, foresty, cold, Dad al'Thor is a tough salt-of-the-earth man, Mom al'Thor is long dead (although it's preemptive, I'm still going to call that Fridged Women Tally: 2).  Four pages in, Rand sees a mysterious black rider on a black horse on the road behind them, who has disappeared by the time Rand points him out to dad.  They agree they need to go smoke and booze in a warm house, and dad suggests Rand wants to see Egwene, the mayor's daughter, though Rand silently disagrees because she makes him feel funny in his bathing suit area without even meaning to.

He we hoping his father had not noticed he was afraid when Tam said, "Remember the flame, lad, and the void." 

It was an odd thing Tam had taught him. Concentrate on a single flame and feed all your passions into it--fear, hate, anger--until your mind became empty. Become one with the void, Tam said, and you could do anything. Nobody else in Emond's Field talked that way. But Tam had won the archery competition at Bel Tine every year with his flame and his void.

Now we've got this randomly introduced pseudo-zen thing from Tam, but also an obvious reference to Beltane, so evidence continues to lean towards this story randomly hodgepodging cool things from various cultures however Robert Jordan whims.  Is there an actual reason this farmer dude is a zen archer?  I'm hoping so, but I'm also worried it's going to be terrible.

They arrive in Emond's Field, where the heads of houses are called "goodmen" and "goodwives" and gender roles are enforced by cosmic law.

Whether or not leaves had appeared on the trees, no woman would let Bel Tine come before her spring cleaning was done. [....] On roof after roof the goodman of the house clamebered about, checking the thatch to see if the winter's damage meant calling on old Cenn Buie, the thatcher.

I feel like I'm in the medieval fantasy version of Pepperidge Farm, except that would probably be more like Mallory Ortberg's Letters from Chris Kimball, which are masterpieces of sothothic horror.  Someone named Wit Congar stops the al'Thors to complain about the Wisdom of Emond's Field, Nynaeve, who is apparently a person and chosen by women.  She apparently badly mispredicted the severity of the last winter, and Wit wants the Village Council to overrule the Women's Circle, but he gets called out by his wife Daise, "twice as wide as Wit, a hard-faced woman without an ounce of fat on her", so as we can see when people don't conform to their expected gender positions they are whiners and nags.  The al'Thors book it before Daise notices them, because they are both single men and therefore the women of Emond's Field would like nothing more than to set Tam (and now Rand) with a widowed friend or someone's daughter.  Rand is much too stubborn to allow himself to be set up with any farmgirl he likes, or something.

I'm skipping a lot of description of the layout of the grounds and of Pepperidge-Farm-remembers type narrative, like the Pole (obviously a maypole): "No one knew when the custom began or why--it was another thing that was the way it had always been--but it was an excuse to sing and dance, and nobody in the Two Rivers needed much excuse but that."  ITS FOLKSY, GOT IT?  DO YOU GET IT?

They're also very excited about the prospect of fireworks for the first time in a decade.

The al'Thors arrive at the al'Veres' place, home of the mayor/innkeeper, and they all talk grumpily about the weather and the prospect of next winter never ending and everyone freezing to death, et cetera.  Rand instead talks with his buddy Mat, who plans to set an old badger loose in town to scare the girls, but by sheer coincidence he also immediately brings up that he recently saw "a man in a black cloak, on a black horse [...] and his cloak doesn't move in the wind" , just as Rand did, and then he vanished as soon as Mat looked away.

"I actually thought--just for a minute, mind--it might be the Dark One." He tried another laugh, but no sound at all came out this time. 

Rand took a deep breath. As much to remind himself as for any other reason, he said by rote, "The Dark One and all of the Forsaken are bound in Shayol Ghul,beyond the Great Blight, bound by the Creator at the moment of Creation, bound until the end of time. The hand of the Creator shelters the world, and the Light shines on us all."

Well, that's one way of getting exposition out of the way.  Just so we're clear on this, that's Shayol as in the Hebrew Sheol, and Ghul as in demon.  Jordan must have spent at least half an hour creating his mythology.

Mat gets roped into helping unload the booze from the cart, with the promise of then getting to go see the visiting gleeman, who is apparently made of awesome.

To have one there actually during Bel Tine, with his harp and his flute and his stories and all... Emond's Field would still be talking about this Festival ten years off, even if there were not any fireworks.

I'm going to assume that 'gleeman' is a euphemism for 'marijuana dealer'.  Nothing much else happens for the rest of the chapter as far as I can tell, beyond talking about how much people will be excited and how much the fireworks cost.

Chapter Two: Strangers

The Village Council (which appears to be all men--please tell me that the neutrally-named council isn't the male counterpart to the Women's Circle, please please please) are gathering in the mayor's home, looking grim and smoking and suchlike.  The mayor's wife arrives with food, of course, and Rand likes her because she doesn't try to set his dad up with anyone.

Toward Rand her motherliness extended to warm smiles and a quick snack whenever he came by the inn, but she did as much for every young man in the area. If she occasionally looked at him as if she wanted to do more, at least she took it no further than looks, for which he was deeply grateful.

The mayor's wife wants to jump our teenage hero, but she only gawks, so he's grateful for the relative lack of inappropriate actions.  Le sigh.  That is not how gratitude is supposed to work.  I suppose/hope Jordan just means grateful in the sense of glad, but the connotation is not the same.  Rand and Mat finish hauling in the booze kegs and meet a younger boy, Ewin, who tells them all about the strangers in town.  Not the black rider:

"And his cloak is green. Or maybe gray. It changes. It seems to fade into wherever he's standing. Sometimes you don't see him even when you look right at him, not unless he moves. And hers is blue, like the sky, and ten times fancier than any feastday clothes I ever saw. She's ten times prettier than anybody I ever saw, too."

I'm kind of charmed by the way everyone in this book at the same time has no familiarity with magic but are constantly like 'Did you see someone teleporting on the road today?' 'Yeah, and the dude in the inn can turn invisible!'  It's almost like magic realism, minus the realism.  Also, while the dudes thus far have been characterised with their skills, their philosophies, their senses of humour, their jobs, all that jazz, all of the women have been characterised based on their interactions with men and/or their physical attractiveness.  That's a lot less charming.

Oh, wait, no, we play Six Degrees of Bechdel Separation, because Rand hears from Ewin who overheard the visiting lady Moiraine talking to the village Wisdom, Nynaeve, who got all huffy because Moiraine called her "child" while asking for directions.  She apologised upon realising she was talking to the Wisdom, and asked a bunch more respectful questions.  So our two plot-relevant living women have now been characterised by their failure to get along and Nynaeve's uncontrolled temper.

Outside, Rand gets another unpleasant feeling of being watched, which apparently comes from a raven on the roof of the inn.  He and Mat both whip stones at it, but it sidesteps them, and then takes off when Moiraine appears and calls it "A vile bird [...] to be mistrusted in the best of times."  Harsh, gal.  #notallravens

Moiraine is indeed the tiny woman from the cover, only as tall as Rand's chest, young but "there was a maturity about her large, dark eyes, a hint of knowing that no one could have gotten young".  Her clothes and jewelry get a half-page of dedicated description.  They all trip over their tongues introducing themselves, and Moiraine explains that she's a historian, come to Two Rivers as "a collector of old stories".  There's some rambling chatter about the Wheel of Time and the Great Pattern and how the names for things and people change over time,and then she leaves,"appearing to glide over the ground rather than walk, her cloak spreading on either side of her like wings."

So far I have no reason to believe Rand is a more interesting protagonist than Moiraine would be.

They finally spot her bodyguard, Lan, standing by the inn, stealthy and hard-faced with a hand on his sword.  Ewin guesses he's a Warder, but Mat shoots this down because Warders are 1) fictional and 2) covered in gold and jewels and spend all their time slaying monsters in the Great Blight up north, which... look, are they real or not?  If your case is 'that's not real', maybe just stick with that, rather than adding the details of the not-real thing you're saying doesn't exist?

Moiraine hired them all as assistants while in town, and pressed a silver coin on each of them that Rand estimates is worth a good horse.  They each agree that it seems like it would be wrong to spend it, and will keep it as their bond with Moiraine, and then they see a huge eight-horse wagon rolling into town, the peddler.

It was going to be the best Bel Tine ever.

Christmas is going to be ruined and I'm legitimately looking forward to it.

So, apart from the rubbish representation of women so far, what I'm noticing is mostly that if I had actual affection for this story, instead of the cold stony husk that is my unbeating heart, I could imagine finding this crawlingly slow opening rather relaxing, the kind of thing that I would look forward to rereading on days when I just wanted something soothing and familiar to dwell in, the literary equivalent of petting a cat.  However, it should probably be noted that I recently started some really great antidepressants and I find damn near everything soothing compared to how I felt a month ago, so maybe I'm not the most unbiased opinion on such matters.