Easing the Badger.

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

I'm rereading the Wheel of Time for the 5th time and the world that Robert Jordan created is incredibly deep, and some of my favorite things in this series are the small details.

One of my favorite bits in all of fantasy is the sign for the Inn called Easing the Badger, which has a white striped badger walking on its hind legs, and a smiling man holding a shovel. I love that no one knows what this actually means.

Another small detail that is great is in The Great Hunt, when Rand is at Lord Barthanes' party and he's getting swarmed by the Cairhienen noblewomen, and he gets trapped between the wall at his back and the wall formed by the noblewomen's overly wide dresses. Good stuff!

What are some of your favorite small details/moments in the Wheel of Time?

It would also be fun to try to come up with a dice/card/tabletop game for Easing the Badger, with rules that are nonsensical and the gameplay is just ridiculous. 

Edited September 22, 2021 by Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

[Dreamwa1ker]

On 9/22/2021 at 1:27 PM, Hoiditthroughthegrapevine said:

Another small detail that is great is in The Great Hunt, when Rand is at Lord Barthanes' party and he's getting swarmed by the Cairhienen noblewomen, and he gets trapped between the wall at his back and the wall formed by the noblewomen's overly wide dresses.

It gets even better. The cougar-ish noblewomen in the scene are coming onto Rand, he escapes by going to talk to Thom and:

Rand: All they wanted to talk about was their husbands being away
Thom: *chokes on drink*
Rand: you shouldn't gulp your drink so fast

I missed it the first time, but lol'd on this reread. There's so much humor off of characters being a little oblivious or naive.

Edited September 24, 2021 by Dreamwa1ker

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

6 hours ago, Dreamwa1ker said:

It gets even better. The cougar-ish noblewomen in the scene are coming onto Rand, he escapes by going to talk to Thom and:

Rand: All they wanted to talk about was their husbands being away
Thom: *chokes on drink*
Rand: you shouldn't gulp your drink so fast

I missed it the first time, but lol'd on this reread. There's so much humor off of characters being a little oblivious or naive.

Hahaha, so funny. 

I just finished the dragon reborn, and I swear, this time through the prose actually seems lean. The story is so large, the world so expansive, it's super impressive how Jordan has (forgive the semblance of a pun) tightly woven all the threads together. And when you are reading you have no idea that all these threads are heading towards an epic convergence. 

I think that through the first three books, Jordan had a vision that he could have followed to finish the series in the original planned 6 volumes. But he got lost in the magic of his own creation. Listening this time through, I can't blame him really. I wish I could stay at most of the Inns in Randland, and I wish I had a friend like Basil Gill that I could play stones with while smoking good two rivers tabac.

One thing that was pretty amazing this time through was the travel by portal stone. This is the first time that a small aside by Verin sedani actually made sense, that in all of the possible worlds that can be traveled to by the portal stones, the one constant was that the dark one was always bound in shayul ghul. 

Spoiler

This is super subtle foreshadowing for Ishmael's position of supporting the side of the dark because it shows by suggestion the only case where the true ending of the turning of the wheel of time happens by a negative, in that it doesn't exist. It's foreshadowing, so subtle in it's application that it's easy to miss it, that the world ceases to exist if the dark one escapes his prison. 

Brilliant!

And I think that it's indicative of what makes this series so amazing, the narrative is not so much foreshadowing as casually mentioning things that have already happened in the future. That's some serious forethought, and a brilliantly woven story. 

Edited September 25, 2021 by Hoiditthroughthegrapevine
Added some clarification.