Hey I was talking to Spock lately and he said something about the moons of his planet being shrouded in mystery and that there were nine of them. Have you been to Vulcan? I hear it's nice in winter.

The status of balefired people is still one of the most hotly debated things in the fandom and I'm not sure why. Jordan made clear on several occasions that balefired people reincarnate naturally but are out of the Dark One's reach, but somehow there always seem to be people who haven't heard that in the fandom. It's baffling.

As someone who read the books as they came out, I'd suggest that RJ simply responded to changes in social perspectives on queer people by giving the readers what they wanted. Early parts were entirely straight; then there was titillating lesbian subtext followed by text. Only very late are same-sex relationships "just there". I don't think he could have kept it up much longer because the series makes the gender binary a literal force of nature, but he might have tried.

I've been over and over the Choedan Kal. Perhaps they should never have been made. Perhaps they would never have been needed, somehow, if they hadn't been made. Or maybe they represent an alternate path, somehow, where a woman tries to use them alone and taints saidar instead of saidin. Maybe they are in the Prophecies, in that passage about the Cleansing, but the symbolism is too dense. Prophecy is complicated.

I think it was here that I first saw "the failures of Lews Therin" and realized I wasn't seeing the character as people in-universe remembered him. I was seeing "Lews Therin, destructive savior who did the only thing that could be done to save the world". And yeah, that's terrifying enough for his reputation, because what had to be done to save the world ended civilization for a few hundred years. But to Nynaeve, he's "the savior who screwed up and wrecked the world". Very different lens.

At a point when the debate was virtually polarized between "the Seanchan prophecies are corrupted by Imperial edict" and a few holdouts for "maybe the Seanchan just translated some passages differently", I suggested that maybe there were legitimate surviving prophecies that had been made in Seanchan itself, perhaps even before the conquest. It's its own land, with its own history, as likely to have its own prophecies as the Aiel or Sea Folk. Perhaps they simply compiled the old with the new.

I have read that Harriet specifically asked for something like this, something that was outright horror instead of just...horror-action-fantasy. I won't say it doesn't serve any other purpose but as such it does the job quite effectively.

Re: Asmodean, clever observers have noticed that Asmo knows information about Graendal that no one else has. Hanging about with Graendal seems like a dangerous course of action, but perhaps he was trying to set up somewhere on the west coast and ran afoul of her.