Magic system

[Numuhukumakiaki'aialunamon]

Hi, I know there are many threads out there with people asking how the magic system works in WoT and I’ve gone through most of them, trust me. I understand it, but while I read the books - I have recently finished the fourth one - I don’t understand how the characters could weave these things they do. 
I went in hoping that book 4 would explain it to me so I could understand it even better, and for the entirety of the book I was patiently waiting and when I finished it the amazing feeling of have read a such great book combined with the unsatisfaction of not getting what I wanted from it. Don’t get me wrong I totally loved it and I did get some  knowledge of the system. So my question is - and please don’t spoil anything - in which book does it get in-depth explained?
Thanks in advance.

[FantasyFanatic]

I'm currently one book 3, so I don't know much about the magic system. Daniel Greene put out a video that kinda explains this, but I think that that is part of the point of the series is Rand trying to find out more about the One Power and trying to find out how to hold off madness. But I've barely started the series so I don't really know.

[Turin Turambar]

I don't think it's ever revealed entirely how the magic system works. There are tidbits sprinkled throughout the series, though.

[Weltall]

Wheel of Time magic isn't explained to the degree that Brandon does, so if you're expecting a moment like the 'aha, it makes so much sense that these were the uses of the remaining metals' in Mistborn, you're not going to find nearly so much of that. There are a few things like that, but it's not as prominent. At least, until Brandon got to write one character 'his way' in the last three books and the influence is obvious. The gist of the magic is that you have 'threads' made up of the five elements and how many you use, how 'thick' they are and how you weave them together determine the result. It's kind of like Aon Dor in that we know the fundamentals (the elements vs the Aons) but we don't know the specifics (the exact makeup of the weaves vs the modifiers that tell an Aon how to perform its main function), if that helps.

As far as how any given weave is learned, a lot of it comes down to teaching. I forget exactly where in the series it is (sorry, at fourteen books plus New Spring, I can't remember everything offhand ) but one character reflects on how Aes Sedai aren't nearly as good with fireballs as other channelers because when they're taught how to perform it, the training includes a physical throwing motion to help them with the weaving. The gesture is unnecessary, slows down the process slightly and means they can't use that weave if their arms are restrained, but because they learned it that way it's now mentally inseparable from the weave itself. Channelers from cultures that train their own people don't do it that way and so they can use that weave more effectively.

There are also plenty of instances of characters performing a weave either by instinct or in Rand's case due to his reincarnation status letting him 'remember' a weave that his past life had known. In these instances, once they've performed the weave once they can usually remember how they did it and repeat it again later. This isn't unique to major characters though, as pretty much all 'wilder' channelers figure out a couple of weaves by instinct. This gets discussed in... Path of Daggers, I think. Point being, it's an established part of the system that channelers can sometimes just feel their way through a weave and make it work.

All that said, the system is ultimately a little fuzzy. Per Path of Daggers, while a weave done correctly will produce the same output every time, a weave that collapses under certain circumstances can have completely unpredictable effects, so even if you know all the threads that went into it, how they were originally woven and what the weave should do, once that random factor falls into play all bets are off.

[Gderu]

On 4/15/2020 at 8:20 PM, Weltall said:

 

All that said, the system is ultimately a little fuzzy. Per Path of Daggers, while a weave done correctly will produce the same output every time, a weave that collapses under certain circumstances can have completely unpredictable effects, so even if you know all the threads that went into it, how they were originally woven and what the weave should do, once that random factor falls into play all bets are off.

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure they meant that the unpredictable results can happen depending on where they are in the unweaving process. I don't think that it's just completley random.

[Weltall]

Given Aviendha's description of how she trained on 'a simple knot tied in a flow of Wind' and it produced different results, yes, the effect is pretty much random. What threads the weave consists of influence the potential result of the end product but they're not enough to have real predictive value. IE there was no chance that Aviendha's training weave could do what we saw in Path of Daggers because it was too simple, but the PoD weave could have collapsed into a harmless puff of wind like the training weave did on some of her failures.

So yeah, the more complicated the weave is, the more potential things it could collapse into (and the more impossible it is to say what the outcome would be) but even the simplest possible weave can produce different possible outcomes when improperly unwoven.

[Truthwatch3r]

I'm on book 4 right now, so maybe there's more to come that will change this, but when they talk about "weaves" I think of Michael J. Sullivan's magic system. In his Legends of the First Empire series, it's helpful to Suri when learning magic that she grew up playing cat's cradle.