To Make a Stand - Towers of Midnight chapter 24 - EP559 - WoT Spoilers

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
This is the Wheel of Time Spoilers podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah. I tried so hard to find any evidence from
anyone anywhere that genre is a word. And this is
apparently my personal mandala effects that I am making manifest
into the material plane.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Can you just say it one more time? Because I'm
having it? Because I say genre, right, there's John like
the name John, and then raw like Shira, and it's
two very distinct syllables. And that's not how you're saying it.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
I'm saying genre. Yeah, because I've switched the e in
the R at the end in my head, got it?
Which again, I swear to God I've seen that, But
I can find no evidence anywhere the entire ass Internet
that proves that I'm not making that up. So definitely
the world has changed on me. My mind is completely

(01:08):
a steel trap and not malleable or plastic or prone
to error whatsoever.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Obviously, obviously you're an alternate universe, because that's the better
explanation other than your mind is fallible.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, and that, kids, is how you are humble and
curious about the universe.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Fuck for me, it's just like the number of times
I think cell phones have really shown me how wrong
I am all the time because I will be like, no,
this is what happened, and my wife will be like, no,
this is what happened, and will definitely be like, Okay,
well we have recorded video. Let's go look, and we're
both wrong, right. You know. It's like, you know, I'm
always it's one of those things where, man, memory is

(01:47):
a bad, bad, bad indicator.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah. No, it's that thing when you relive a memory,
it's you're reliving the last time you remembered it, not
the original file, and like that's how error creep in
over time. I was just getting reminded of this by
someone like showing like a paper about it recently.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
For me, what I've really been discovering, especially at work lately,
because it's just a lot of complicated shit in my job, right,
and so expectation affects what I see so much more
than I would have ever realized. What I expect to
be there, I will see even if that's not what's there.
And like, because you know, I've got these machines that

(02:27):
keep really good records, like I can go back and
check and it's like often I'm like, oh man, I
could have sworn that I saw something entirely different.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, totally, and you actually have the literal receipts.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Like yeah, to be like, Nope, that's not what was there.
You know, the numbers were different, and yeah, it's frustrating,
you know, to be like, my brain is not seeing
and same thing when I'll go back and listen to
the audiobooks that I read, the number of times I
see words that aren't there, or see a different word
or add in or subtract words, and you're like, my god,

(02:58):
I thought I was reading what was on the pa
and I'm not. I'm reading what I expected to be
on the page.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yeah. I mean that's a huge part of so many
like optical illusions. It's not necessarily fucking with your optics.
It's just play with tricks of your memory buffer essentially.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
That. And I've been doing some crosswords lately just to
kill time, to sort of get away from scrolling. I'll
read a clue and I'll read one of the words
wrong and that's what the word, you know, And I'll
read that clue five, six, seven times before I'm like
and then I'll get enough crosswords to be like, oh,
I know what the answer is, and I'll reread the
clue and realize I've been reading the wrong word the
entire time. And it's like, how did I continue to

(03:37):
read that word so badly because once I read it
once wrong, that was my expectation.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah. Yeah, expectations are h hmm.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
They're a problem, and especially until Iran Riad where Paren
goes in this chapter, right, the expectations is what determines
what actually happens. It's backwards in that way. You know,
we have all this problem where you know, reality is
different from our expectations, and so we see what we expect.
Here they see what they expect because that's what actually

(04:08):
ends up happening. He uses his brain in his mind
to control tellern Riodd and how was that for a segue?

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Amazing expert professional in less than five minutes of turning
recording on BRAVA.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
Hey, you know I've got motivation. I like parent. I
am focused on a goal right here. You're gonna start
this thing and I'm gonna finish it. It's It's might
take me a decade, but I'm getting through this guy.
He's God damn books.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
And much like Paraen, you're so focused on the one
thing that you're missing that we actually start with a
lane in this chapter. Today we have to turn twenty
four to make a stand with the wolf as our symbol.
And the wolf is not related to a lane, obviously,
it's related to the parent section. To make a stand

(04:58):
is not related to a lane or to parent section.
That is related to the Geralda section because she says
something to the effective this is a good place to
make a stand, as good as any or whatever in Maredon.
But I don't quite understand why the wolf and that
title go with opening with Elaine. I don't know. If
I was putting these together, I would have the title

(05:19):
and the symbol go together and preferably go with the
first or significantly largest of the povs. That's how I
would design it.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Or try and come up with something that's like a
theme between the various povs. Right, I think that would
be really clever. But sometimes these are just so unrelated.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yeah, there isn't a theme between them.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
So I mean you could say that it's Elaine is
not standing ha ha, because she's got the bed rest
to not make a stand.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Lazy to make us sit lifely.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Oh yeah, I mean I Geralda was little wolf, right,
So the old.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
One he's the little wolf because he's Napoleon.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
He's no will gang you little guy, so the wolf
could reference him there, so it could just both be
the ey Giraldo because the wolf definitely doesn't reference paren
in this situation. Hm hm hmm.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Should I read an please? Okay? Bed rest, Melfane announced,
taking her ear from the wooden tube she'd placed against
Eline's chest. The midwife was a short, ample cheeked woman
who today wore her hair tied back by a translucent
blue scarf. Her neat dress was of white and matching
sky blue, as if worn in defiance of the perpetually

(06:41):
overcast sky. What Elaine asked one week, Melfane said, wagging
a thick finger at Elaine. You aren't to be on
your feet for one week. Elaine blinked, stunned, her exhaustion,
fleeing for the moment. Malfane smiled cheerfully as she consigned
Elaine to this impossible punishment, bed rest for a week.

(07:04):
And I'll cut it there, because, uh, you know, that's
basically the conclusion for the next several pages is Elaine
squawking about bed rest. In various ways, shapes and forms,
characters come through in and out. But that's the vibe
for where we're at.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
And I love the interaction between the midwife and her
being like, I'm the queen, I'm the Queen's midwife, and
he's not a single person that won't let me tell
you what to do because that's because you're pregnant.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Like, the only person who can supersede the queen is
the queen's midwife because she is speaking on behalf of
the queen's pregnancy, which is the only thing the queen
actually has to listen to more than herself.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Oh my god, love it.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
And then there's a fun interaction between Burgido and Elaine
or Brita's like, I'm glad you're staying here, and Elaine's like,
what would you trap me here forever? And she's like, no,
but six months might be nice.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Right right? If we could just get you through that
fourth trimester, I would be so much more happy.

Speaker 3 (07:59):
And then there is this legitimate point where Brigita is like, listen,
if you're gonna go into traps, let me know. I'm
your warder. I need to protect you. I can't protect
you in traps if you're not gonna tell me you're
getting into one.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, So I really liked this section from Brigita because
this is the argument Gowen thinks he's making to agwayn.
A lot of the words are the same. The anger
definitely is coming out in a lot of the same forms.
In this case, however, Brigita is completely fucking justified in

(08:37):
being angry at her literal eyes to die for treating
her like an annoying little boy that won't go away.
Right Like in Gowen's case, he's not actually bonded. Igway
didn't actually ask for that, Like, there's there's nothing Gowen
thinks that he's making this argument. He does not have
the legal or moral, or emotional or magical grounds for

(08:59):
that Burgita does.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
I'm nodding.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
It's just like and it's really funny too, because we
want Gawen to come and relieve Brigida of some of
her duties, right like they really could be. He could
be learning so much from her. She really could be
molding him into a very effective carbon copy of her
sense of duty. But instead, nah, and.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
Remember that's where we left him. He was heading towards them, right.
That was his last POV was I'm going to a lane, right,
I'm leaving a GWayne behind.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah, yeah, I mean yes, they're absolutely This feels like
it could be a moment where Gawen shows up saying
I don't know how to do this protecting the woman
I love thing, and Brigida has to take him under
her wing and be like, look, you need to actually
be bonded to her first before you take that tone
with her, like first of all, and like, yes, there's

(09:48):
the weird consent thing where Brigida and actually asked to
be a warder, but like she's made her peace with that,
like as she says here, like I was given these circumstances,
I've made my choice, but like you are now renegging
on the that you entered into with me, whereas you know,
Gowen is forcing the agreement onto Aguaine and saying this
is what I want, So therefore you're betraying me if
you don't follow through with.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
It and the content stuff you know, it was it
was bonded or die, right, those aren't like that exactly.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
Yeah, there's a level of choice that Brigida didn't have
that Gwen wants to have, but like that's that's beside
the point. The point is that Elaine asked for a
warder and Agwayne didn't, and only one of them gets
to be mad when they get circumvented, And like it's
super justified for Brigida to be like, what are we
doing here?

Speaker 3 (10:33):
What?

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Why am I your warder? If this is how you're
going to treat me, that's so justified. Gawain says the
same thing, and Agwain's retort is, but you're not my worder.
It go was like, oh my god, how can you
be some me? It's like it's a fact, my dd right.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
You haven't proven that you're loyal enough to be my order.
You just like want the title. You're like a guy
who wants a promotion to a job, not because he
can do the job, but because he wants the title
of the job.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Right. Yeah, it's just very it's just nice to see
this argument being made because you want to have your
supergirls get protected. So it's nice to have someone make
the argument from the moral high ground rather than from
off to the side in like naval gazing land.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
But well, nor the point that like she probably would
have been killed if she'd gone along, she wouldn't have
necessarily stopped the kidnapping, and she's not valuable as we
see later when she gets killed, right.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Like I mean, and then there's that, But that's a
level of meta gaming that we can't expect from them, right,
That's that's for us to know, as the spoiler people.
Because yeah, I mean, Elaine is right that that mission
was not for taking warders along. But maybe that mission
was for warders to shoot down before it ever happened
because it was a bad plan, right, Maybe that's how

(11:48):
Brigida protects you. She makes you realize that this is
not the way. You know. It's like I learned in
martial arts, like the best way to win a fight
is to not end up in one in the first place,
situational awareness and back away from the scary alley way
because you have spidy senses that are trained. You don't
need to win a knife fight. You need to avoid
a knife fight.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Nobody wins in a knife fight.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yeah, yeah, like a Burgida, a warder is there to
be like, maybe don't throw yourself into a pit of vipers.
Maybe maybe don't do that.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
And I like, Hawlene, it's like, well I'm not going
to do that again, and she's like, you're gonna do
something else, dumb though.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Like it, don't rule lawyer to me on a risk
taking a la.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
You've made a habit of this, then you're not going
to stop, especially.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
Now, like we know who you are as a person.
All we're asking is that you let the team back
you up.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
But I really do think there is this thing in
Elaine's brain that says, I have this prophecies from men
that makes me sort of have this guarantee, and anyone
I bring with me doesn't have that guarantee, and I'm
putting them at risk. And there's a reason why I'm
going by myself. I'm much less likely to put other
people in danger by doing that, ignoring the people who

(13:01):
have to die to rescue her every single time that
she puts herself in danger.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
But yeah, ignoring the boy who cried wolf emotional whiplash
that she's doing by sneaking behind her bodyguards rather than
convincing them that it's a good risk, Like, come on, girl,
respect the people that are trying to help you. So
Brigida gives her a very good I'm not mad, I'm
just disappointed, and Elaine shrinks like a small child, and
I for one am glad to see it.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
So in comes Matt.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
Right, Yes, Matt comes in like an anxious father. He's
so funny.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
I really did enjoy the sparring between Elaine and Matt.
Here there's a good amount of just like back and forth.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
And Brigida gets in on it. Like Elaine thinks at
the beginning, how like Matt and Brigida are tearing into her,
But then later Brigida's tearing into Matt too. Like good banter,
good banter all around.

Speaker 3 (13:50):
Yeah, good, well written banter. Just Matt, looks like you've
been losing end of a battle skirmish. The details are
none of your business.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
Yeah, what were you doing at a pool of your
own blood? Down to the dungeon? I was interrogating the
Black Auja.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
Oh yeah, okay, sure.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
She's not lying, she's just leaving out so much context.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
Matt is once again trying someone's trying to convince him
that he's being hunted by the Black Aja, which he
refuses to believe, no matter how many times he's been
attacked by bandits or robbers who are actually just people,
like all the way back to Tarvallin on his lucky night, Right, Yeah, Matt.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
And his refusal to acknowledge his position, both in the
pattern and on various assassin's lists, is really comical at
this point. At this point, even he knows it's a
bit right, right, it.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
Feels like it. We get a list of the dark
Friends who escaped Malar Chayne, Marilyn GalF and Falian.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Boda, right, and those two are from the origine Janel
Black Auja thirteen. Like they are continuing to slip in
and out of custody.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
And remember Chayanne is the original, right, the girl with
the knife in the you know she's back eyed.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
The way from the road trip from Hell. Yeah, yeah,
she's she's an old school dark friend and she is
on the lamb once again. And then the secretary was
you know, our one connection between that one high seat.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
Right, the one who we always yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
The one we're not sure she's a dark friend or not,
because her secretary was a sadist and a dark friend.
But anyway, he got killed. He got knifed in the
back in a clearly like tying up loose ends kind
of way.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
Well, and that was definitely a mel R kill on
the way out.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yes, oh yeah, is that true? Is that that Millie's
skin actually just gets away at the end of the
last battle.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
I think she kind of just puts her head down,
is like peace, I'm out. I'm not a dark friend anymore.
I'm just so survivor.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
I mean, honestly, good for her. She's a terrible person,
but so many of the women get like imprisoned or
brain wiped or married. Like if she just like ski
daddles off into the sunset, Like that's kind of cool
because she's been there since the beginning.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
And as far as I'm aware, this is it. This
is the end of her storyline, Like she escapes and
she is at large. Oh really yeah, Like this is
the last time she's mentioned.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
Wow, good for her, Sanderson, just let her go have
a reasonable I mean, she's a bad person. She should
have been punished in some regards.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
But also, like, I.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Don't know, there's something a little satisfying about a woman
not meeting a grizzly or embarrassing end. Does it make
her the only book dark friend? Does that make her
the only dark friend to live through the books? Land fear,
I will quit this podcast right now. I will turn
this podcast around and go hold exactly, make me drive

(16:49):
this podcast off a cliff exactly mean talk Land fear
is dead. You don't get to bring her back because haha,
Matt Hatch thought so the whole time. That's not no.
I like Matt, but he's not a generator of canon. No,
that's uh Eludra precisely, precisely.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
So we do have the moment where Eline kind of
reflects and goes like, I guess I didn't really get
anything out of this except being exhausted. Everybody kind of
got away.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
And copies of the Medallion now exist in dark front hands. Like,
we have the ability to make copies on our side,
but they also have copies, and that's not great. They
have a copy, okay, a copy, a singular copy, but
who knows, they might have their own dark a lane, right,
who will get to making I mean more inferior copies.
But still, you.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
Know, seems like the shan Chan should be up on
making copies of Taron Greol because they can make the
callers right, and they have the training in that. But
it feels like, you know, it's one of those things
where they're trained in one very specific turon greal and
in no way is that generalized to any other ones.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, I really would have loved a plot line where
the shawan Chan immediately glom onto these things even though
they are kind of inferior and just start churning them out.
And it's a whole like confounding factor. We can't head
canon that that happens in the Fourth Age. That Foxhead
medallion knockoffs are like a big part of the military
arms race that you know, shapes the conflicts of the
Fourth Age.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
Especially the ones that don't let you channel, right, because
then you can have a bunch of you know, someone
like tu On can have the Foxhad Medalion. Well, here's
the question. Would she be able to control an a
doom and hold a Foxhead medallion one of the flawed
Foxhead medallions?

Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, I would think not. I would think that that
would I feel like that would shut down the part
of your mind that's able to do the controlling.

Speaker 3 (18:42):
Stuff right right, And because you have to be in
a circle, right right, Yeah, death death Watch guards armed
with them would probably be the number one thing they do.
Can you imagine, oh, your death watchguards with the Amulet
coming at a.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Yeah wow, yeah definitely. And also you could have you know,
handcuffs or something for criminals where it's like okay, now
you can't channel because we like slap these cuffs on.

Speaker 3 (19:11):
You, right, right, you also can't be affected by channeling,
but you can't channel. Yeah, I guess that would be
it's kind of a side effect. But that is almost
a useful effect, right. It's it's like pharmacy drugs. Right.
Half the time they're like, oh, there's these side effects.
They end up becoming off label effects that sometimes people want.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah, that is not the worst analogy. So we end
the POV with Matt I think, laying out the beginnings
of his plan for how to deal with a goal
on mainly being asking for a gateway that gets made
in the palace and like that whole piece of the puzzle.

Speaker 3 (19:49):
Oh, I think, But he's asking for us a bunch
of copies of the medallion, right, because he's like, were
you able to copy it? And he's like, okay, well
now I need something right now that you can. Now
I know you can copy it, can I get a
bunch of copies?

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Oh? See, I thought he came in with the record.
I thought he was walking in meaning to ask her
about the gateway that gets made. I didn't think he
had put it all together in that brief moment of time.
I thought that like that was part of Oh no,
he was there to be with Brigida. They were hanging
out and then we're still in the immediate aftermath of
the thing, right. Yeah. I guess maybe he thought it

(20:25):
all through that fast.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
Because he's been thinking. He's been thinking and planning with
the people to be like, how can we take down
this goal home. He's gone through that planning stages.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Right, and he needs a gateway in order to do that.
He was going to have to ask her for a gateway,
regardless of if there's copies of the medallion in the picture.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
Totally but I'm sure. But because he asks, were you
able to copy it right there? Then he immediately goes
into okay, I need a favor.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Oh yeah, I no, that's true. That's true because he
probably was yeah, oh, because.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
That was probably as part of their planning. It's like,
if she's able to copy it, what can we do
with those? Can we use those copies to drive it? Right?
Because it's a two part plan. Drive it with the
well first, tempt it into place, then drive it with
the medallions through a gateway that's been already opened from
the other side. So he doesn't feel the channeling, right, yeah,
because it's a destination gateway instead of it. So there's

(21:20):
like there's like a multiple part plan. But I think
they had it all planned out, and I'm sure there
was this contingency if she's able to make copies of
the medallion, which of course is what she said she
wanted to do with it, right, Oh.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
Right, Yeah, she did tell him that when she go Okay,
I am bad at connecting the dots. I'm missing the
forest for the trees, like it's going out of style
right now.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
Well, that's why we're both here, So it's so one
of us can stop and look around every once in
a while.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Teamwork make the dream work.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
It really does. And this is that's the thing, Like
no one person can see everything. We make assumptions. We
were just talking about before this podcast started. How much
our expectations affect what we see and what we read
and how and how much, Yeah, your expectations about these
chapters and what you know about them effect. It's one
of the reasons I love going through and making my
notes because so often I look at something a little
bit closely, I look it up. I challenge my expectations

(22:12):
through research, and so often just doing the notes, I
discover a whole other layer to these books.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah. Absolutely, So with that, is it time for a
POV switch over to Maradon.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
Yeah. After all though, and this is basically them in
the city. A lot of names here, a lot of names.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
I'm assuming this is another crop of donors and beta readers.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Some of them are, some of them have been around
for a while. But one of the things I did
discovered when researching this is where the names are coming from.
These aren't just fans, right, These are fans who donated
to a Wheel of Time charity raising money for research
into amyloid do amyloid dosis, which is what killed Robert Jordan.
So these are people who've raised money for the disease

(23:14):
that killed the research in the that disease.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
Okay, So every one of these names represents like a
material step towards trying to not lose the next Robert
Jordan in that exact way. That's that's a nice, bittersweet
kind of thing to have peppered through.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
And probably not all of them, right, I think some
of the people were I've been saying they're all beta readers,
and then I'm like, hm, I feel like something else
is going on here. I think some of the more
beta readers, but some of them are definitely those who
donated to the charity.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Well, like, we know that Matt Hatch is not one
of the charity donators, right like we know. Okay, so
a little call a a little columby. We don't know
the proportions, but that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
And so and tail was named for Stephen until way
to go Stephen Nice Nicee.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
I saw that name, and I'm like, okay, so this
is the beginning of the name. It seems like this
particular plot is taking a lot of the heavy lifting
on these names.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, of those names get just a lot of Saldaeans,
a lot of Borderlanders, A lot of people want to
be Borderlanders.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
I mean a lot of those guys gotta die real quick.
So it's a good place to be thrown all those names.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
I wanted to ask about the Trader banner, Trader's banner
by the Saldaeans. I don't understand why it's called the
traders banner. Did you catch that?

Speaker 2 (24:29):
It's a way of saying that they're traders. It's kind
of the pirate flag, right, They're declaring the ways in
which they're outside of the bounds of law. Like I mean,
not that I've ever heard of that in the real world.
I just like from context, it was like, okay, so
if you have done an uprising, and do you want
everyone to know there's a new guy in charge, this

(24:52):
is a way that you signal that.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
So are they saying that the people in the town
what are they against?

Speaker 2 (25:01):
The military had a coup. Okay, it was a military coup.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
So these are the people who did the coup in
order to ride out and rescue a Giralda. And they
are under this new banner, not the vram who was
in charge of the city, who's a dark friend, right,
like he's a terrible dark friend.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yes, yes, exactly. The leadership was not doing the right thing,
and so lower levels of the military decided that their
oath mattered more than the chain of command and that
they needed to rise up and literally kill their superiors
and take control of the city in order to do
the right thing. And this is a way for them

(25:39):
to signal to the town, to other armed forces, to
anyone that rides up to the gate. This is a
way for them to say, this is what we did,
and we're not hiding it. We're not claiming that that
didn't happen. I mean, and he has this whole thing
about how he's going to demand execution at the end,
and one of his subordinates says, you know, I'll be
with you to the end, and like clearly referencing the

(26:01):
part where there's going to be a you know, mass
execution when the queen comes back to town, which obviously
doesn't happen because most of them probably hurl themselves into
the last battle before Tanobia has a chance to get back,
because Tenobia dies in the last battle so.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
Well, and him and his wife claw out their eyes
and throw themselves out a window when Rand comes around.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Oh yeah, when Rand comes by doing his like glowing
Jesus thing.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, they drives them in sane.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
They can't handle it because they're pretty deep in the shadow,
you know. In this chapter, the guy Yearly says, I
can't tell if they're fools are dark friends, And the
answer is deep dark friends. They're not foolish dark friends.
They're not shadow level dark friends. They are deep in
the shadow. And that's why they needed a military coup
in order to get you know, to do the right thing.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
So and we see evidence of fighting before they rode out, right,
there were some there's basically, yeah, that evidence of the
coup is what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Exactly, because you know when two different when your giant
chain of command fractures into smaller pieces, some people are
going to pick the wrong side of that fracturing, right.
We saw that with the Tower coup. Right, many women
stayed who wish that they had left in the end.
But like you know, stuff breaks really fast. You find

(27:18):
yourself on one side of the fault line and that's
what you deal with. And sometimes you get run through
with a sword because that's how the friction is crumbling.
And you know it's okay to think, oh maybe I
should go with my superior officer. As stuff happens really fast,
like this happened in a matter of you know, minutes,
half an hour.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
Right, I mean we saw how confusing it was.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yeah, yeah, this was a really rapidly evolving situation. So yeah,
they had to kill some of their own countrymen in
order to do the right thing, which is again why
they're like, we're gonna proclaim this with a flag. We're
not going to pretend everything's fine and dandy.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
So either all the talks with Ram the Dark Friend, right.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, he wants to go see this lord and lady
that were willing to let him and his men die
until a literal military coup changed the thing. He needs
to meet them and look at them in the eye
and tell them to go to Hell straight from the
depths of his soul in person, which I love from him.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
When there was that moment where they're like, oh, and
you're dragonsworn, He's like, no, I'm I mean technically, yeah,
I guess.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
I am, Like yeah, I mean. He even makes the
argument to Yearly later like swear yourself to the dragon.
It fixes all of your allegiance problems. Like, sir, you're
proselytizing for becoming a dragon sworn. I think that makes
you a dragon sworn.

Speaker 3 (28:32):
Right, absolutely, But you know, for a long time, dragon
sworn has been this like foul thing that like just
created was an excuse to create havoc on because they
had all these false dragons and some people who were
dragon sworn. We dragon sworn to these false dragons give
up all allegiances and just you know, locusts across town
for no reason because they were false dragons. Right, So

(28:53):
you know, there's this history of dragon Sworn being something
that's very despicable and very looked down upon.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
And even in the books, even with this real dragon,
we've had dragons Sworn being mostly, you know, a disparaging
term for bandits who will use any excuse to break
down civic order. It makes me wonder how many of
those bands were actually not just horrible bandits, but we're
just being misunderstood weird religious seekers or whatever.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
Well, if you remember, a lot of the dragons Sworn
were white cloaks stirring up trouble back then, right, Oh, yeah,
that's right, because Rand was like, I want to go
down to them, and Marine's like, no, you shouldn't, And
it turned out he really shouldn't because they were white cloaks.
For the most part, there was some actual bands of
dragon Sworn, but it was just white cloaks stirring up
trouble because they were trying to use Pedro Nile was

(29:42):
using those disturbances to try and take over the plane,
and that's where he got all pissed off when the
Dark Friend.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Bores Jacob Cariden.

Speaker 3 (29:52):
Jacob Carriden failed to secure the land because He's like,
I set it up. I did all this work, you know,
like were bands of people's that was his job. That's
what Jacob Carroden was doing. Is he was out there
being dragon Sworn to terrorize the people so that the
White Cloaks could come in and take over. And so
he was literally a dark friend being the dragon Sworn.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, and it meant that Rand was never able to
gather up all the well meaning dragon Sworn who actually
wanted him to be their savior for this end of
the world doomsday cult situation because they were being divided
and conquered and controlled and managed by dark friends and
dupes of dark friends who were trying to make you know,
anemic fascism happen, basically.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
And if he did ride down and get anyone grouped together,
he'd never be able to gather enough groups fast enough
to keep from being wiped out. He'd gather attention faster
on once he was part of a group, that group
would be targeted. So that was whole Moraine's whole argument
about That was their whole argument in the Great Hunt
book to Great Hunt, right, and that was when the
most time passed. Right. Great Hunt was like a year
and three months, and like six months of that was

(30:56):
them arguing about him going down to the Dragon sworn,
which in a book that it takes, you know, two
and a half years from in a series that's two
and a half years from start to finish, six months
of it being them arguing about that one thing, right,
it was such a major part of their his experience
and the relationships that formed and everything that was going
on over those six months that we kind of skip past.

(31:16):
That was the biggest time jump, and I honestly do
think that we could have had more of those in
the series as they went on. There's times when he's
in a palace where I think like another couple of
months could have gone by and we would have been like, oh, yeah,
this makes more sense as everybody has more time to
catch up, things have time to happen. But then you
have other characters who are stuck traveling and it wouldn't
make sense for them to be traveling for like three years.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
It's hard to make a sprawling fantasy world. I think
it is.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
It is, so yeah, there's this argument between Yoli and
Drawl to about, hey, come join with me, you know,
swear to the Dragon. We talked about that briefly, and
he's like, no, no, I'm going to stick with my oaths,
And so Aal was like, well, we're going to make
a stand here. We got the army because they still
have that giant trollic army outside. Just because they were
rescued into the town doesn't mean the Trollic army has disappeared, right,

(32:06):
It's this huge giant army they've been fighting this whole time.
Now they have walls, they have a slight advantage, but
it's not gone.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Right. The town is still vulnerable. The two armies are vulnerable,
the border lands are vulnerable. Right, the bigger problem still exists.
And yeah, Yurely is like, I'm going to demand execution
at the end of this. But in the meantime, how
big can we make those gateways? What kind of like
interesting plot twists can we add to our siege as

(32:33):
I defend my city? And a Charl is like, yeah,
I guess if you're willing to give your life up
for me, this is where I'm making my stand. I'm
going to give up my life for you to make
this a focal early battle of the last battle, Like
here we go, this is the spot.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
The commuted sentence comes into play a bunch in these books.
Right with paren here, I feel like there's like I
yeel or something that are gonna go kill themselves, and
parents like I'll put you on the front lines. Probably
died there, and they're like, cool, might be borderlanders. I
can't remember. I'm getting who that is mixed up. But
there's a couple of times where there's like someone who
committed Oh yeah, it's someone who committed a crime. Yeah,

(33:13):
I'll remember it later. I'll remember once we turn off recording.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yes, this is definitely a shower thoughts kind of kind
of remembering because I feel like you're right, but I
am not drawing the name or the circumstance to mine.
And yet also the end of this POV is where
we get the title of the chapter to make a
stand in the city, and then we POV switch over

(33:47):
to Perrin.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
Yes, and we start out of the dream and then
in the dream and then back out of the dream.
And there's not much more in the out of the
dream other than him going I'm gonna fight the like
cloaks tomorrow. They've forced me into it. I don't want
to do it, but he's telling fail essentially like prepare
for war.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yeah, and then after the dream he thinks about it
even harder. And but yeah, the thoughts that the before
and after the dream sequence are very, very connected.

Speaker 3 (34:17):
So the dream sequence is I mean, that's a talking
training montage right for the first time.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
A lot of mechanics being communicated, a lot of four
shocks of the conflict with Slayer, the being hunted, the dome. Well,
the dome isn't really here, but the being hunted and
the dome connect. Yeah, a lot of four shocks for
exciting new dream stuff that's going to be happening with
Parent over the rest of this book, rest of the series.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
And then just lineing, like the second paragraph, Beloir had
not recognized the seal Parent had described, get.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
You going, that's such bullshit.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
It's such bullshit. It's such bullshit that Baloir would not
recognize Gallid Seal, right, who's been in the White Cloaks
since before he was in the White Cloaks is one
of the most important political figures of and Or. When
he dealt with Andor and more, Gaze and like, yeah,
and Morgaze was constantly asking for him, and they were

(35:14):
saying they were lying and saying he can't be around
like pedri Nile was there for all that, Beloir was
there for all of that. He knows exactly who he is.
He knows exactly where he was stationed, he knows the symbol.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
It's the only way that this makes sense is if
you commission a new personal seal as part of becoming
Lord Captain commander, which we've had exactly no mention of.
So it's every reason to believe that Baalwar is the
man who assembled the entire file on go On. Baller's

(35:45):
the one who pulled together all the information and put
it in a nice manimal envelope and put it on
Pedro Nile's desk and said, here you go. This is
everything we know about this man. Balwer absolutely knows who
Galas is based on his steal. This is the most
glaring annoying plot hole in the history of glaring annoying plot.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Holes, because so much of Paren's plot line here is
bound up in him not knowing who this is and
how much they are able to repair their you know,
gain mutual respect, have more gaze, step in. All of
those things are super important just to knowing who he is.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
It's so critical, like paren just wants to not kill
these guys. Galad just wants to get justice. And Baalwer
is sitting there like Matt with that fucking letter, just
like Terpreter, except in this case he doesn't even He's
just a plot hole. This is Sanderson's fault. This isn't

(36:41):
even Ballwer's fault.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
These are Sanderson's way of building tension that make me
not happy. Write a letter that he has in his
pocket that he's just not gonna read because he's stubborn.
Right to me, that's just frustrating. This as well, is
just a frustrating way of saying, Oh, they're just not
gonna talk to each other. And Baalwer is a plot
hole where I feel like he's forcing that into place.
He's building force tension here in a way that I

(37:05):
don't like. It's it's very frustrating.

Speaker 2 (37:07):
It's embarrassing. Okay, put respect on Balwer's name, as light
blinded fool says like this is not fair to bal War.
Balwer is not the intelligence von Braun of these books
for nothing. You just can't do that. You just can't
do someone in sh I forget who a few days
ago was like Balwer is the literal Von Brown of

(37:30):
the books, because there's this little couple like about Von
Brown not caring where the rockets come down because it's
not his department. Ball Wer's kind of the same with
the way that he just does intelligence for like the
absolute worst people. But like at least give him the
credit for having done the intelligence work Sanderson.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
Right, right, and being yeah, and a source of good intelligence, right.
You just you completely undermine his character with that line.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
Yeah. Absolutely. Also, did you see in the Elaine section
there's even mention of the invasion of Camlin, Right, She's
thinking she doesn't mention it to Matt because she don't
want to cause panic or whatever, But it's like it's
on the page. The universe is just like it's right there,
makes it right? Yeah, So like if she had just
mentioned it around Matt, maybe he would have for some

(38:17):
reason pulled that. I don't know, I don't know, it's just, yeah,
Sanderson's methods of building tension are a bit hidden miss
for us, I think would be the charitable way to
say that.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
So, yeah, I don't know how much you want to
talk about this training montage. You know, he starts off
just running as fast as he can, then he figures
out how to essentially appear where he wants to appear,
and then he sort of gets what I think is
a big level up for the first time, which is
the ability to follow someone who teleports. And that's not
something that's necessarily anybody else has had except maybe the

(38:50):
forsaken using weaves.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
Yeah, I feel like the way that Hopper describes it
makes me think that other dreamers can develop a similar sense,
because it's not just smells, kind of the analogy metaphor.
There's more to it than that. So I think that
dreamers and presumably people who know magic in various forms
can also have that skill. But yeah, we don't see

(39:14):
it in practice. Oh yeah, Amis does that when she
first meets Agwain. Right, she's able to follow a GWayne
to tan Chiko.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
That's right, She's like, where is this place? She does
no idea because she just senses.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah, she just followed Agway like, so clearly, yes, this
skill transcends wolfy olfactory skills.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
And I like the way they're able to say anyone
who can smell as I do, and maybe the wise
ones are just clever enough to make themselves have a
better sense of smell.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
Nah, I think it's just that smell is too much
of an analogy. It's it's not their old factory hardware.
It's something to do with their sense of presence in
the dream, which the wolves are going to interpret through
their best sense, which is smell.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
We go through all the arguments about you know, we've
talked about this million times, but paren you know, it's
not wolf in him, it's the human in him. Right.
He's the only one who had to be stopped and
told in the hunt. The wolves know when to end
the hunt. The person in you who he wants to
continue violence long past the normal point is not a wolf, right.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
And he asks the question is it possible to run
on four legs and not come too strongly, to which
Opera says, yeah, obviously, it's.

Speaker 3 (40:19):
Like you're mixing up those two things. Parents. He's he's
being a wolf and being here too strongly are not
the same thing.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Right exactly, And it's yeah, we've talked about it a
million times. Sanderson does say a lot of really good
versions of what he wants to say here. The problem
is that he didn't cut out the six other versions
right that that he.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
Wrote, right, Yeah, the number of times he's like, he
doesn't need to control the wolves, he needs to control himself.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Say it once, Say it as a metaphor, say it
as an allegory, Say it poetically with one little piece
missing for you to bridge as an exercise for the reader.
Don't fucking give me every version of the way this
could have been said, just spliced together. It's try hard.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
It's it's how much can I change about my surroundings?
It's just like he knows, this parent knows he can
change the things around him.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, he's asking for I mean, sometimes it's good to
go back to the basics and ask your teacher to
just really refresh your memory on how the basic mechanics work. Again,
expectation and memory are weird plastic things. But yeah, it
also feels like learning regression in this case, rather than
now that I understand that this balance is different, can

(41:32):
we go back to the top and start over? Like
that would be one thing. But instead he's just like,
can I change my clothes?

Speaker 3 (41:39):
Yeah? Yes, yes, Like he's been able to summon like
arrows for his bow for a long time and stuff
like that.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
Right, Well, those are D and D rules. You don't
question it, we.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
Get a little bit of foreshadow, and we've got all
the wolves on the slopes.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
Of Dragon Mount, right, So I be so excited when
I saw the dragon myself like, wait, is this the chapter?
Like there's no way, I like flip to the end,
like no, no, no, no, no, We're just we're building tension for
that in a way that is actually effective.

Speaker 3 (42:06):
But yeah, why are they there, except like we saw
it at the end of the last book.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
So it's well, yes, yeah, I mean yeah, but you know,
now it's kind of like a fun anticipation because you're like, oh,
this is gonna We're gonna see that, and you know,
it's kind of fun to get warmed up to it.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
But a part of me, I almost wish that we'd
take in the parent chapters and put them in order
in place. It would have made the first book so
much Yeah, it would have made so much work, and
it would have made it much much harder to navigate
these chapters because the pov, like the Matt POV and
Elaine POV we just did, are vastly different in time
than the parent POV we're in right now, right even

(42:46):
though they're in the same chapter. So we couldn't have
even done it chapter by chapter, which is I think
what made it so hard. Yeah, we would have done
it POV by POV, and separating out POV's would have
been really difficult between books.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
Yeah, I mean, as Athlon was saying, this is the
symptoms of the I made a book physically too big
to be bound, Like we're deep in the throes of
the fracture lines created by that problem. And yeah, it
would be hard to fix.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
Because they had to have end point for the first book,
so they had to move forward his epiphany when really
it would have fit better at the end of this book.
And if you just had a bunch of this parent
stuff in the previous book, But then you have had
a whole book of build up, right, which you know,
if you think about it as one whole book, the
Memory of Light, the final book is sort of the

(43:39):
Sander lance the ending, right, but can you imagine a
whole book of just like all the boring stuff that
we did in the previous book, plus all the boring
stuff we did in this book. As he sets everything up, now,
we would have.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
Been arguing for to hell with the timeline gives me some.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
Action, right, exactly exactly exactly so, but it would have
been interesting. I think the podcast through it in some
sort of order, but I think the we would have
needed someone full time just to work on the logistics
of that. Basically, we would need like Maria Simmons.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
So then we get our first of our new leveled
up parent encounters with Slayer, Yes, which is fun and exciting,
and my love of Sanderson's action writing kicks right back in.
I was just mad at him for having the as
Marcy Penn put it, that audihd like spiraling around explaining

(44:30):
yourself thing like he was just doing that, and I
was annoyed at him. But now a paragraph later, we're
going to do a really cool action sequence with Slayer
in the Dream, and I'm super here and excited that
Sanderson's at the Pentagon and it.

Speaker 3 (44:41):
Starts with the murder of morning Light, one of the wolfs,
and basically she, yeah, out of existence all made it
so bad, just completely out of Yeah, dying in the
Wolf Dream is bad.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
I don't think it's fair. I'm going to go on
record saying I don't think it's fair that if a
wolf dies in the Wolf Dream gets booted out of
existence for all time. I think that's unfair. Heaven should
be safer, not more dangerous.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
That's why Slayer is so bad, right, Like he's unique,
he's different, like this has never happened before.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
So uncool. So yeah, paren hears that there's danger and
decides to run headlong into it. Basically is what happens,
and then like it's like D and D like the
literal like action rounds. It happens like in just a
few seconds, and like a few minutes later he is
back where he started, being like, well that went badly,
Like it's really fast actually just how because physics don't

(45:33):
have to apply in the dream and travel isn't a thing,
and even the speed of thought is almost like faster
than normal. The entire encounter takes like literally two and
a half minutes.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
It reminds me a lot of Logan's attack on Demondred,
where he like goes in attack, attack, attack, gets his
ass kicked, runs away, and he's like moaning on the
ground thirty seconds later like oh that went poorly.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Ow yeah. Yeah. A lot of times in movies, TV,
comic books, the action sequence is slowed down into this
like big long. It takes a whole episode to get
through one boss fight. But like, I kind of like
the writing here where it's like, oh no, that actually
was really fast, Like it's it's a couple of pages,
but the character is very like cognizant of how little

(46:14):
real world time passed.

Speaker 3 (46:16):
And that's something that I don't think Jordan did as
much because he would be like, and then there were
these sword forms, and he lists a couple of sword
forms and then someone would die, right Like this blow
by blow is very much a Sanderson way of writing.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Yeah, which I love. It's like a full HD color
panel comics in my head. It's just amazing.

Speaker 3 (46:38):
So we get to mention of how Slayer looks like Land,
so we know that's Esam, right, he's in the Esom body.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
That is Land's cousin, uncle, uncle, cousin.

Speaker 3 (46:49):
I don't remember.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
I think they're cousins because when he talks about killing
his cousin, When Slayer talks about like wanting to like
kill his cousin in the wench, right, that's landon Ninive
that he was talking about, not random men, right.

Speaker 3 (47:03):
Because I thought that Luke was Rand's cousin and Esam
is Land's uncle.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Oh or is it just.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
To the Googles, to the Google, to the Internet, which
keeps track of this stuff.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
We need to call in more nerds.

Speaker 3 (47:21):
Yeah, so Luke is Rand's uncle.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Oh, it's Rand's uncle. Okay. Luke is oh right, because
he's t Grain's brother.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
And then Esam was cousin of Land, so ESM's the cousin.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
Okay, So I was right about cousins.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
Yes, trust yourself.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
No, that is a bad idea.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
And so they're fighting and Param whips out his I
can follow you anywhere, and Slayer whips out I can
change the world to bind you, and is basically has
the world freeze him solid and use it to you know,
put him in place so he can shoot him with
his bow, and Paren dipped out and wills himself away
at the last minute.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, it's a really good exam. It's like in a
D and D campaign when you run up against a
boss that you're very much supposed to get more levels
before you face, and you're like, never mind.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
Do a little puddle jumper. Yeah. He changed things, made
the dock vanish beneath me, created ropes to buy me,
push the water back so you can get a clear
shot at me.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
And I'm just like paren you have all the same
powers in you, Like you can make the water reappear,
you can breathe underwater, you can make a shield out
of the dock.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
You can you can it's just a weave.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, but you know again, it even says in the
paragraph like he used his newfound skill to go chasing
after a super dangerous character. It's like, yeah, he's not practicing.
This is why he does the training with the nightmares
is so that way those kinds of thoughts are second
nature rather than a fully cognated process in his brain.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
Right right, Yeah, He's he's like that person who takes
intro to psych and thinks they know everything about a
human psychology. He's like, I can photo, I can analyze everybody,
and then the second they start getting into actual people
are like, oh, I'm in over my head. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
It's like when you take mushrooms for the first time
and you're like, everyone needs to take mushrooms. I'll just
put LSD in the water all the world's problems and
then you like actually pay any attention to like the
history of the hippie movement or how psychedelics have affected society,
and you're like, hmm, maybe not. Maybe I should just
start a hippie jam band and just try to like

(49:35):
do that instead.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
I definitely heard people be like, dude, if we just
legalize marijuana, like all of our problems are going to
go away, because everyone's going to be stoned and they're
all going to get along and like everything's going to
be great, like and the only times I heard that,
and then I've heard that so many times. It turns
out people are still assholes.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Well, it turns out because it fixes a lot of
problems of criminalization. To decriminalize the thing that people are
going to do anyway, but likely they I refer you
to all the problems in the world that existed before
marijuana prohibition.

Speaker 3 (50:08):
There were no problems in the world back then. That's
why we want to make America great again.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
I will flip this table. I'm going to reach through
your computer and flip your table.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Yeah, that's my favorite one. What year exactly, would you
like call the good old days? And would you like
all the policies yeah, that we're enacted back then, Because
the further back you go, the more you're like, well,
I don't want these policies. I want those policies and
it's like, hm hmm, yeah, I'm just going to you
just say the quiet part a little bit louder for
the people sitting right next to you, so that they

(50:41):
know what a piece of shit you are.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
I mean, seriously, who gave you a credit card? Anyway? God?

Speaker 2 (50:48):
Anyway?

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
Hopper scolds Parent much like Brigida scolded a Lane, and
then says, Okay, fine, maybe I'll train you later, but
tonight we need to mourn the fact that a wolf
has been murdered by that asshole. And so Paren decides
that he needs to go think about all of that
in the real world, and we pov switched to him

(51:13):
in the Waking world.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
I would say, Hopper decides Parent needs to think about
it in the real world, get the fuck out.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Sure, yeah, for sure. But Paren you know, deliberately gets
out of bed and goes off to think about it
and talks to Alias, which is nice. It makes for
a good you know, debrief after this intense wolf session.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
Totally totally Yeah, that's sort of the human perspective on
what the wolves are teaching him.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Yeah, because Elias has been there for longer, like he
hasn't engaged with the wolf dream as much, but he
has engaged with the being a wolf brother thing, and
paren just got a big level up. It would help
to talk through some of it with someone who gets it.

Speaker 3 (51:48):
And Gall's following parent around and Parent's like, yeah, that's
probably because he's trying to avoid Bandon Chiad because they're
living in this tent now, which is yeah, but it's
a little bit of like Boomer my wife humor right
with my wife. Right, He's like, he finally got what
he wanted and now he's avoiding them.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yeah. I can't tell if Baine and Chiad are like,
actually really annoying, or if Sanderson and Jordan just thought
they were, like, I'm really like, I want I don't
know how I'm trying to feel about the Gall situation,
because I really like Gall. I want him to be
a cool guy in a cool situation. And I can't

(52:25):
tell if Bane and Chiod are like actually making his
life worse or if the authors of the books just
thought it would be funnier to make it seem that way.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
I think that's it just feels to me this whole like, oh,
it's worse than one wife, two wives, you know, and
it's just it's yeah, please. I hope I get proved
wrong at some point. But that's to me, the feeling
I get from this whole Band and Chiad situation. I
don't like it, no, because there was this whole thing
where he's pursuing one of them and he is willing

(52:55):
to get together the other one, and I would have
liked to see that sort of love grow between all
three of them in a way that was a little
more organic rather than yeah, I love this one and
I'm putting up with that one. You know, I love Chiod,
but I'm putting up with Bain. Seems to be sort
of the feeling I'm getting from his actions here.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
And it also feels like Bane and Chiad just want
to be together and they're like playing this game to
have Gall like as a piece of infrastructure or furniture
and always as like a second class citizen to their relationship.
And again, I would yeah, like to see it develop
from a couple with a third wheel to a full

(53:34):
blown throttle where like they have a household. I don't know,
there's just no sense of household. There's like Bane and
Chiod and then there's this annoying guy Gall that I
guess they have to let live in the garage or whatever.
I don't know, it's weird.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
Well, and they don't forget they are now guy Shine
because they got captured and so he they're his guy Shine.
But then, like I think he's trying to go back
to that whole situation where you know, you hear these
stories about clan chiefs who take these women guys shine
and then end up kind of like being bullied into
marrying them within the air and stuff like that, and

(54:08):
I think he's trying to reference that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
But Gall is supposed to become a clan chief in
the fourth age, that is from Aviander's visions and comments
made by wise One's way back in the day. That
does seem to be in his future. So yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
Guess, but he basically seems to take Rark's place when
Rark is mindfuld.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
Right, yeah, exactly, Gall is going to be Ruark two
point zero. Yeah, I think you're right about it, just
being the boomer hummer blah.

Speaker 3 (54:35):
A lot more of this chapter is Paren talking about
how he's dogged on projects. You know, it's just he's
rewriting stuff that we know about Paren that was written
back in either world he's slow to speak, he likes
to consider things from all the angles. He likes to
finish everything he starts. He doesn't like it when people

(54:55):
can't finish things. He basically he's the opposite of Adhd.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
He even has this thought like, why is it that
his mind works so much better when he's doing something.
It's like, because that's how a lot of human minds work.
It's it's it's almost phrase like it's a failing. It's like, parent,
You're not a failure, You're just autistic. It's okay, but yeah,
it's all good thoughts, reiterated ad nauseum in a regressed voice,

(55:25):
good thoughts at their core.

Speaker 3 (55:27):
And Chad is pointing out that like, Gall is not
part of the same clan as Roark, so he you know,
he's he's a shur Ad and Rock is a tard Ad.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
So I thought we meant replaced him in our hearts. Yes,
yeahs as ieo clan chief Daddy. I didn't think we
meant like literally in the because obviously they're from different clans.
I mean, you know, obviously obviously.

Speaker 3 (55:47):
Now now the Chad has looked up and researched it
and put it in chat obviously obvious.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Now, thank you chat for keeping us honest, But in
my mind, I was saying like replacement urk, like in
our hearts, as like the ideal daddy with two wives
as everyone wants. You know, that's just the ideal a
ial clan chief situation.

Speaker 3 (56:05):
See. And again this conversation then between Parent and Elias,
which to me feels like something they should have had
ages ago. Right, This feels like one of those things
that again Sanderson's going back and being like, I feel
like I need to fix some of the communication between
these characters. So I need Parent and Alias to have
this conversation about the wolves because they've never had it,
and it's so dumb that they haven't had it.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
He's switching from saying something that's been said too many times,
so switching is something that should have been said a
long time ago. Without missing a beat, he just goes
from like ad nauseum to finally.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
And topics go from gnome where he's like, you know,
I found a balance this moment where he says I
found a balance, right, which I think is the key point.
But essentially he's saying I found a balance. You have
to as well. I don't know how you're going to
find the balance. I don't know how I found the balance.
I just did find your own balance. And like the
fact that he says that, and then it takes Parent

(56:57):
another like huge chunk of this book to be like,
oh need to find a balance, and I'm just like,
oh my god, Like that's his big realization at the end.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
And they literally have the exchange. So Elia says, I
left my life for the wolves. That doesn't mean you
have to. Gnome had to did he have to?

Speaker 3 (57:14):
Right?

Speaker 2 (57:15):
And that question is treated by Paren like it's rhetorical,
but I'm like no, but really, that is actually the
answer that Boundless is going to give you is that
he did not have to. That was a choice, Like
everyone's got their own balance. And Elias is literally telling
you that now you should wake up in the morning
with this revelation. You should go to sleep thinking about

(57:36):
this and wake up in the morning having finally put
it all together. Like that's how this should have gone.

Speaker 3 (57:42):
Yeah, we didn't need the whole null confrontation thing that
he ended up doing, or we.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
Just needed him to have a conversation with Boundless a
little bit sooner under slightly less Dire circumstances. Yeah, we
just needed him to interrogate Elias one more time about
what makes that balance feel? Right? Okay, let me just
approach this as an autism coach. Okay, how do you
find the balance you feel where there's relief in your body,
where the tension drops out of your chest, and that

(58:09):
is the accommodation that you need to live your life? Paren, Okay,
everyone else can take that advice too, But like literally,
that's what parent needs to learn, is that, like, the
thing that makes you feel good is what will be
balanced for you. You can't fight it. You can't change
what makes a balance. You just need to discover it.
And I wish that Elias had some insight on that,

(58:29):
but I do Paren listen.

Speaker 3 (58:31):
To me, Well, thanks, I guess that means I'm quitting
my job.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
Unfortunately, that is generally what that advice will get you
is unrealistic decisions that don't actually work up because capitalism
is a bitch, But it really would have worked here
for Paren trying to figure out this whole how to
not go insane thing. It's like it's right there. The
thing that makes you tense up is not balance, and

(58:57):
the thing that makes you relax is.

Speaker 3 (58:58):
Balance Unlis, how the whole time, you could have asked
him from the very beginning instead of talking to an,
I said, I talk to the other wolf brother, who's
clearly doing fine. And I think there is a moment
where he talks to him and Alies basically says, I
don't know back in the early books.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
But yeah, then he just reiterates it here, and he
also reiterates here that the I said, I tried to
gentle him and that was kind of what made him snap.
And I just don't understand why that would be a
problem for a man who can't channel. Like, they throw
some weaves on you, nothing happens, You laugh at them, like,
I don't see why you have to kill wards and

(59:34):
run away.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
Because when the police arrest you, you run away, even
if you don't think that. I don't know. It's just
he didn't want to be taken, he didn't want to
be detained. He's a sovereign citizen, okay.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
I just I feel like killing Warters when what they
were going to try to do to you was empirically
not going to hurt you, is just not in scale.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
He said he didn't think it would, but at the time.
He didn't know.

Speaker 2 (59:59):
You know, I wish that there was a little bit
more conversation about that instead of just reiterating it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:06):
In my head canon, there was some dark friendery going on,
and if he'd been taken, they would have made sure
he didn't survive.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Oh, this was in the period of the vileness, wasn't it.
This is like specifically like right around that period, right,
because we see him before, we see him before, and
that's like a year or less before the vileness of
Oh no, yeah, so he would have had a sense that,
like any man taken into their custody isn't coming out alive. Okay, no,
fair enough, fair enough, that's reasonable.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
And they're taking down lucky people, they're taking down special people,
right that they're taking that because the dragon has been
reborn and they're trying to And the only hint that
they have is channelers are considered lucky or special or different.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
Right, so the odds of dying, regardless of your channeling ability,
were higher than ever before in the last three thousand
years of a questionable track record. Oh okay, no, that's fair,
that's fair. He did not know that then dealing with
him was going to be it because if it had
been a definitely non lethal, like we just need to
like take you in and like do an interview and
like try to apply some wads for you, it'll be

(01:01:12):
like a two hour in and out doctor appointment. There's
no need to kill anyone over that. But that's not
what they were. That was not the landscape that he
was looking at. Now that's it. I never actually thought
about the timeline against the vileness, but he probably knew
something was up. So hmm hmm. Interesting, good good catch.

Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
Get mars Pan's sort of drawing an analogy here between
Warders and Elias and the White Cloaks and paren the
people you had to slay when you discovered your powers
to get away and live your life.

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
It's just if a group source with wheel slightly wolfy
be on your guard.

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
Well, you know, you don't want to get the ww involved,
because then you know, then you get the WWE the
ww F. Yeah, you don't want that. You don't want that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
That's the world wide Life so bad they just lose
you and junk mail with cute animals on it, like.

Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
The wolf Pack. I mean, I don't know, this is
all sorts of things going.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
On, And yeah, We sort of end the chapter with
Elias and Paren reiterating for the umpteenth time that Paren
feels weird about this whole White Cloak situation, and he's
having weird visions in his dreams that make him feel
like this is extra wrong and extra bad.

Speaker 3 (01:02:24):
Which is what the visions are for, right, The visions
are warning him to save the White Cloaks basically.

Speaker 2 (01:02:29):
I mean, he even has this great thought which I
think shows his leadership earlier, where he's just like, we
need those swords from both sides for the battle. It
is like he's already thinking of the White Cloaks as
his own, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:02:40):
And also he doesn't want to lose the people he's
going to lose if he confronts them, right, He's like that,
no matter how minor it is, and how like, honestly,
I think with the long Bows and the Channelers it
would be almost they might like lose one person to
a straight arrow. Like, I really just don't think the
White Cloaks are a threat in any way, shape or
form to Parent's army.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
Not with unhidden channelers.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
Yeah for sure. But that's why parents. One of the
reasons that Parent's a good leader is that he considers
unnecessary risk to even one of his people to be
a thing worth avoiding. He's like, is it necessary that
I risk anyone at all? And he doesn't really think so.
But also, the White Cloaks are insisting, so we're going
to spend another fourteen thousand fucking chapters worrying about it

(01:03:22):
before we ultimately don't actually attack them.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
And attack the Trollis and the other you know, yeah, it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
Hey, how long there is between here and there? There's
so much back and forth, and then we still have
the trial to get through. And it's just like the
battle itself is great and that that is going to
be fun.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
But like, and the idea of the trial of having
more gasee be discovered and be the person who moderates
it fantastic. Love that idea.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
Do it in like a chapter, maybe two. I'll give
you two chapters. You can have one chapter break as
a treat not seventy five chapter breaks.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
I just the parents stuff could have been edited way
down and included way earlier. That's my opinion on it.
I don't necessarily think we needed three books, sacrileged to
say or not even that we didn't need three books
as like so much as we could have spent more
time on other things in those three books.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Yeah we needed we needed three books.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
We needed three books, but the parents stuff took up
way too much of it. And yeah, just the repetition, right,
Like there was there's more side characters, there's more more
low gained stuff, more forsaken stuff. Right. I would have
loved to see more of what the Dark Friends are doing. Right,
I feel like we were in this critical stage where
we're finally getting to see the battle between the two sides,

(01:04:37):
and both sides are out and existing, and like, I
feel like we as the books go on, we get
more and more and more dark Friend povs, because in
the first few books, dark Friends are this mysterious thing
that like could or could not exist, right, But as
we go on, we're getting much more forsaken povs, dark
friend povs, and I just don't feel like we get
a lot of that in these books. It's just like

(01:04:58):
I almost think a better way to build tension would
have been and show what's happening on the other side.
You know, we're building up these armies, Show where the
Trock Armies are building up. Show is Shamael putting together
his forces. Show more of you know, Millie Skin and
the Dreadlords, you know, like that would have been great
page filler stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:05:17):
No, we need parent naval gazing to the point of
literally driving us all bonkers, you.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
Know, and if anything else, a little more shan Chan content.
I never thought I'd ask for that, But like you know,
I would have loved to see Matt and Tuon have
a little more, you know, when he goes back and
he gets up in the robes and everything. I would
have loved to see him maybe make more changes the
empire in order to get them to bring them to battle.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
Yep. But these are the books we got.

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
These are the books we got. Yeah. No, And as
much as we are complaining about them, I am infinitely
grateful that he sat down and wrote them. I think
he did a better job, and that the kind of
book it was is better suited for his writing style, right,
because it's got the battles, it's got the like you said,
the majestic three D scenes where you get to see
it all. I think that's really really well done. But god,

(01:06:06):
you know, part of me still wishes Jordan had been
there to finish them. Off. Yeah, and Knife of Dreams
is such a good book, right, and you can see
that he is gathering for the finish in Knife of Dreams.
So I don't believe anyone who says, oh, he wouldn't
have finished it. He was just going to write more
and more and more. I was like, no, look at
what Knife of Dreams was doing. Like he was there,
he was ready to finish these books.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
Yeah. No, he was not going to pull a Game
of Thrones, no Martin on us at all. He did
the thing he always said on the back of his
dust jacket was that he was going to continue writing
until they nailed his coffin shut. He did do that.

Speaker 3 (01:06:38):
He did do that. That was quite literally. I just
don't think that he thought that would be in his fifties.
I think he thought that would be in his seventies, eighties, nineties, right.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Which is what we all deserved.

Speaker 3 (01:06:48):
Yeah, no, I God, I would have killed for him
to finish this ending and then write a bunch of
sequels that I thought were terrible and could criticize. To
live in that world, that world where Robert Jordan is
still pumping out terrible, terrible outrigger.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
I want that world. I want to be mad at
him for not just letting a dead horse lie already,
let it go it I got as much as I
do love these books and what Sanderson did with them.
If I could switch worlds, I would, oh, well, I.

Speaker 3 (01:07:24):
Just want to reach into the bookstore in the other
world and just be like ooint, let me get those
finished copies and all right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
But Alas, do you want to do a readout?

Speaker 3 (01:07:34):
Hya? You? I guess I can read this hut. Also,
this is Alias quote. I'll start with his list quote
that makes absolutely what okay? You don't understand the Lias.
It's nothing, Elias said, I had forgotten that it could
be nice to be around people for a change. I
don't know how long I can stay though. The last
hunt is almost here. But Elias, you don't want to
be around people ever? You hate people?

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
I miss beer. Yeah, that definitely feels like it Isn't
civilization's a nice you weird feral people. Don't you want
to come back to good civilization where we have clean,
tucked in shirts. Don't you feel bad having an untrimmed beard?
You fucking weirdo feral people. That is kind of how
that line feels to me.

Speaker 3 (01:08:13):
It does.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
As a feral person, I resent it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:15):
But he's a wolf. He feels uncomfortable around people that
is well established.

Speaker 2 (01:08:20):
Yeah, maybe if he said, like, your camp is easier
to be around than any other collection of two legs
I've been in in twenty years, then I would be like, okay, cool.
Paren can even make friendly with the wolf brothers. But yeah,
just oh I miss peopils. No he doesn't.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
No, Well, Elias is the same uncomfortable civilization that a
wolf is. Right, he is a wild creature in that way.
That's his his balance is much wilder than parents.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Yeah, he's really close to the wolves that thought maybe
hanging out with people would be worth their time. Like
that's about his balance is the wolf that was like, eh,
maybe I'll take some snacks, Maybe I'll allow a few headpets.

Speaker 3 (01:08:57):
Paren looked up at the sky again that it is
passed the word on to Tam and the others. For me,
I've made my decision. The White Cloaks have picked a
place to fight. I've decided to go ahead and meet
them tomorrow. All right, Elias said, you don't smell like
you want to do it, though it needs to be done.
Paren said, and that's that everyone wants him to be

(01:09:19):
a lord. Well, this was the sort of thing lords did,
make decisions that nobody wanted to make. It would still
sicken him to give the order. He'd seen a vision
of those wolves running sheep toward a beast. It seemed
to him that maybe that's what he was doing, running
the white cloaks towards destruction. They certainly wore the color
of sheep's wool. But what to make of the vision
of Fayel and the others approaching a cliff? Elias moved off,

(01:09:42):
leaving Paren with the axe still on his shoulder. He
felt as if he hadn't been chopping logs but bodies. Also,
can we just talk about the fact that he fucking
picks up an axe and starts using it to chop wood,
and like, it's not really a dress, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
A different ex design.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
No, he threw away the fucking axe. You cannot have
him pick up another axe just to do chores because
you want him to tropple it. Oh my god, I
forgot to make a big thing about this earlier. But no, no,
bad Sanderson, you do not get him to pick up
an axe and not deal with the emotional trauma of
cutting off a man's hand with an axe, and really, well,

(01:10:22):
it's a tool, it's not a battle axe. Therefore no, Yeah,
that's the whole point of his thing is the hammer
is a tool, and the axe is a weapon, and
only a weapon. And the second you use an axe
as a tool, you're undercutting the whole point of the drug.
I don't like it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
Yep, I am nodding so hard. I'm nodding so hard.
It's so disrespectful to how much tortured agonizing you forced
us to read about how important the axe is for
him to just say, oh, it's a different design act,
so I have no trauma at all. It's like what what? Yeah? No,
much nodding, much nodding, very annoy much nod Also, I

(01:11:00):
kind of liked the line about he hadn't you know,
the hadn't been chopping logs but bodies, but also some
of whose chopped logs? I just didn't I get stuck
in the literalism of that, and like, I don't think
chopping meat is at all like chopping cured firewood. It's
just me, but I want this line to be a banger.
But instead of just get really.

Speaker 3 (01:11:19):
Stuck bodies and logs don't chop the same way.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
They really don't. I've only ever chopped the one, to
be clear, but like I can extrapolate the different textures.

Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
I gutted a fish for the first time the other
day yesterday. Yeah, I had a friend of mine say
they got to basically were free whole fish someone gave them,
which was a giant salmon, and so they were like,
I do not know how to gut this. I do
not know what to do with it or how to
cook it and how to break it down. So I
was like, well, I can watch a YouTube video and
figure it out. So yeah, and I just like the

(01:12:28):
cutting into the body of the fish was actually a
little bit of a first, Like making that initial slit
very much felt like cutting into a body, and that
was probably the most out of all the grossness. And
like the pulling out the guts and chopping off the
head and undoing the gills and butterflying the fish, none

(01:12:48):
of that bothered me, except the initial cut into the
body cavity, because it very much felt like cutting into
a body cavity.

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):
It hadn't been broken down into something recognizable as like
a kitchen thing. It was still like a nature thing
and animal.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
It was still an animal that I was cutting off,
you know, and shocking. I was shocked by how much
force it took to actually open up that body cavity
as well, you know how much the muscle resisted.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
Right. Yeah, it looks one way in brief cutaway in
movie type situations. It's very much a different thing to
actually deal with that sort of thing in real life.
I have not done it much myself, but I've been
present for it several times and seeing people go through that, like, wow,
this is way harder than I thought. Like, I've seen
the look on someone's face a couple of times going
through that thought process.

Speaker 3 (01:13:34):
And yeah, but then once you penetrate, like how then
easy it is to then continue to cut right and
how Yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:13:43):
It's nothing like whittling. I have done a lot of whittling.
It's nothing like that.

Speaker 3 (01:13:48):
Yeah, it's soft and squishy until you're into it, and
then it's fairly easy to tear through. But then there
are bones, right, and so then there's this whole other
structure whereas woods just would it's all pretty much throughout.
Usually some what is.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
More splintery and ridiculous to work with than others. But yeah,
it's not nearly as variable as a meat suit. Well
with do you live in the Pacific Northwest life land
at Pool? You know, pretty wild and fairly out here.

Speaker 3 (01:14:15):
I mean I did live also on the border of
West Virginia and Virginia, and there was a lot of
hunting going on out there, but I did not. I
do not have the hunter's experience of cutting open deer
and gutting deer and sort of that. That's something that's
never been on my plate, which I'm kind of happy about.
But I'm sure anyone out there who's hunting is like
rolling their eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
In my experience here, most of the experience I have
is in helping people deal with butchering backyard chickens. That's
most of the experience. I have not actually done the work,
but I have been handing tools and providing water and
just being the support person around that process. But those
were chickens we had raised, rather than wild animals we

(01:14:54):
had acquired.

Speaker 3 (01:14:55):
I had a job where I had to put chickens
to sleep at two weeks old. Mmmm. They were being
used for testing and so they were exposed, you know, blind.
It was a blind study. So some of them were
exposed to lead in the egg and some of them weren't.
And then they hatched, and we did some tests on
them for the first two weeks, and then they were

(01:15:15):
full of lead or not depending on which ones you
didn't know. So they basically had to be put to
sleep and disposed of as biomedical toxic waste full of
heavy metals.

Speaker 2 (01:15:25):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:15:26):
And so I had a protocol where I basically would
inject a poison of some kind into the livers of
the baby of the two weeks old baby chicks to
put them down.

Speaker 2 (01:15:36):
I mean, that's nicer than the meat grinder method that
they use for other parts of chicken industrial stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:15:44):
Yes, yeah, I mean it was lab protocol rather than
industrial protocol. Right, so it had a lot of you know,
ethical oversight and stuff like that, yet no lead and
chickens they did not get through. They they were killed
at two weeks old. None of them lived longer than that.
I think maybe we had I think we had a
smaller group that lived the six weeks old for some
follow up studies. But they were very carefully disposed of

(01:16:07):
animal testing then raised very you know, they had a
nice life for the two weeks, but.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
The ones that weren't full of lead anyway was having
a better time.

Speaker 3 (01:16:18):
I would imagine, Yeah, it's interesting, I can go into
the study a little bit, but it's chickens. Baby chickens
peep at a very predictable rate, so you can actually
measure the frequency at which baby chickens peep just like
genetically their program to essentially be little homing beacons for
their mother. They just peep, peep, peep, peep, and then
you can distract them and they'll stop peeping for a

(01:16:40):
second and look at what you're distracting them with. Right,
So you usually just play noise or you do something,
flash something at them, and they'll stop peeping and look
around and be like, what the what the fuck was that?
And when they forget about it, they'll go back to peeping.
Chickens with ADHD and exposure to lead basically have symptoms
of ADHD and they will stop looking around and they
will go back to peeping much faster. And so you

(01:17:02):
can actually very easily quantify the level of exposure with
the level of ADHD based on the peep frequency.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):
Wow, that makes sense, And.

Speaker 3 (01:17:12):
Then that was used to correlate like what level of
exposure actually causes changes and then you can sort of
create laws around exposure levels in right public, you know.
And the longer I worked on that, the more I
realized that there is no safe leisure. Basically, the lower
level they would test, the more effect they would find. Right,

(01:17:32):
there is just no safe level of lead exposure. Like,
it's bad for you. Lead is bad.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
The less there was, the more of an effect.

Speaker 3 (01:17:41):
No, the less there, it didn't matter how low you went,
there was always an effect.

Speaker 2 (01:17:45):
Okay, okay, yeah, I was just like, it's not like
a homeopathy.

Speaker 3 (01:17:48):
No no, no, no no no no no, no no no.
But it didn't really matter how low you went with
the lead exposure. There was always some measurable effect.

Speaker 2 (01:17:57):
Yeah. It's one of those things that has, as far
as we can tell, literally no redeeming qualities or neutral effects.
It's just bad in a way that most things are complicated,
Most things have context and facets and compounding. Fact. No,
lead is just bad. It's just bad. That's it. That's
the end of the statement. It's bad.

Speaker 3 (01:18:16):
And essentially to say levels are set by these the
levels at which we're able to detect changes in behavior, right,
Like it's the level of our testing that affects the
amount that we have, not necessarily the amount that it affects.

Speaker 2 (01:18:29):
Us, right, right, every time we refine our sensitivity, we
continue to discover that there's a problem.

Speaker 3 (01:18:37):
There's still a problem even at that level. Yeah. So, yeah,
it's leads bad. And we exposed an entire generation to it,
or multiple generations to it through leaded gasoline and leaded
paint and leaded pipes.

Speaker 2 (01:18:52):
Yeah. Yeah, far too much lead for comfort. And I mean,
in fairness, we've been doing this for a long time,
because you're a weekly reminder that I can never stop
thinking about the Roman Empire. They knew that lead pipes
were not great. They knew that lead powder in their
wine was not great. They knew that lead in their

(01:19:12):
cosmetics was not great. They associated the symptoms of lead
poisoning with the God who was associated with lead, like
they knew, But wine tasted like shit, and let is sweet,
and makeup didn't have anti caking agents or whatever, and
lead is a good binding agent. And you know so,

(01:19:33):
in fairness, our civilization has for thousands of years been
affected by powerful people with far too much lead in
their blood.

Speaker 3 (01:19:40):
Well, and wasn't there the whole thing where you have
like pewter plates and pewters made with lead, and so
people would you know, only rich people had pewter plates
and or silver plates. I don't remember exactly what the
combination was, but they and then which was fine until
tomatoes were imported in England and tomatoes are and all

(01:20:00):
of a sudden, all this city is eating away at
the lead and it's getting into the food and people
who were eating safely off these plates are getting lead poisoning. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
People even can get lead poisoning from game that has
too much lead like bullets in it. Like vultures can
die of lead poisoning if they eat too much carrion
that has lead bullets in it. Like we're just dumping
lead in the water as fishing sinkers and in the
ground as bullets, and just it's fine, it's fine, We're fine.

Speaker 3 (01:20:30):
Well, but lead in a way is such a useful metal, right,
that's the problem, because it is it is very non corrosive. Right,
it's as almost as stable as something like gold, while
being far far more common in terms of like it's
you can use it for pipes and it's not going
to erode away.

Speaker 2 (01:20:48):
Yeah, easy to work, long lasting.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):
Yeah, easily malluable. Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):
It doesn't really react with a lot of things. It's
not like it does. All it reacts with is life. Right,
It's very bad for biological materials, but it works fine
with whatever building materials you want to put it with.
Lead is like legos, fun to use, just don't eat it,
except you have to use gloves like with lead in

(01:21:13):
a way that you don't have to with legos.

Speaker 3 (01:21:16):
Same thing with asbestos, where it's like asbestos is incredibly
helpful at fireproofing things, and like it has all these
useful properties. That's why it was you so widespread. It
just also gets in your lungs and causes you to
die a horrible, horrible.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
Death, right right. Yeah, it's about use case, it's about context.
It's about keeping things in their lane and being safe
about your risk assessment and what happens in fifty years
when we pull these walls apart.

Speaker 3 (01:21:44):
It's why stuff like it's in a lot of ways
why progress in society has to be slow. It's like,
we want to be faster than this, but you have
to do the testing, you have to check things out,
you have to find out the long term effects. Right,
what happens when you make everything out of plastic? Will
you end up with microplastics and all of your food
and fish and animals and body tissue? And what does
that mean?

Speaker 2 (01:22:04):
We don't know yet, right, And it's like there's that
fun little aphorism. You know, regulations are written in blood,
which is, you know, on the one hand, as searing
indictment of you know, our capitalist mofest break through society,
but also you don't know what you don't know, Like
sometimes regulations are written in blood because we just didn't
know that that was a thing we needed to like

(01:22:26):
figure out until a bunch of people died. I was like, oh,
that's bad.

Speaker 3 (01:22:32):
Actually, yeah, apparently the handedness of a certain drug can
affect babies in uterow.

Speaker 2 (01:22:37):
Right, right, that was not necessary. I mean, you know,
there's usually capitalismst of. I'm not letting capitalism off the hook.
I'm just saying, like, we've discovered a lot of things
the hard way, like genuinely discovered things the hard way,
not because we were deliberately cutting corners, but just because
we didn't know what we didn't know. Marie Curie I know, right, like, yeah,

(01:23:00):
capitalism didn't drive her to be saturated in radioactive dust, right,
Like that was her scientific curiosity and lack of knowing
about how radiation worked.

Speaker 3 (01:23:11):
That Yeah, all right, well, and I think on that
happy note, we are done with this chapter. Is there
anything else you wanted to cover?

Speaker 2 (01:23:19):
I think you said we had patreons, but clearly we
did not prepare for that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:23):
We did not prepare for that. Yeah, maybe we can
get that on the next next episode.

Speaker 2 (01:23:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:28):
I've seen a few names come through, so I wanted
to get out and get out there and thank folks
before they had to wait too long.

Speaker 2 (01:23:35):
Yeah. I don't think I've got anything else. I don't
have any notes. I do know that I have notes
for our other project that we're about to go record.
So yeah, let's turn this recording off and get the
hell out of here.

Speaker 3 (01:23:48):
Bye bye, everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:23:53):
Thank you for listening to the Wheel of Time Spoilers podcast.
Please rate and review us on your podcast app and
consider why are supporting us on Patreon for ad free episodes.
Watt Spoilers is a production of Fox and Raven Media.
For more podcasts from Fox and Raven Media, visit our
website at Foxendravenmedia dot com.

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To Make a Stand - Towers of Midnight chapter 24 - EP559

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}To Make a Stand - Towers of Midnight chapter 24 - EP559