(To Robert, written August 31, 2020)
I’m about 9 hours into Lord of Chaos and here’s what’s happening:
Mat took his army to Illian to fight Sammael. Before that, though, he danced a “pattern dance” with a woman named Betsey in a tavern, which caused all of the women in the tavern to have dance parties with the soldiers that went there every night. Also, he rescued an orphan from being beaten by an angry man in the street.
I think these moments are meant to humanize Mat, since he’s such an enormous jerk otherwise. He was super awful in Fires of Heaven (he literally murdered a woman without consequence and it doesn’t seem to weigh too heavily on him in this book,) so maybe Robert Jordan is trying to redeem him, especially before battle, so we’re sad if he dies. I also had a silly thought that Mat is like a social media influencer. He already taught everyone his earworm hit song called “Jack of the Shadows” that all of his soldiers and Aiel are singing all the time, and that he retrieved from his ancient memories.
The forsaken are still scheming. Sammael visits Graendal in her lair of carnal delights in the Mountains of Mist, where she’s masquerading as an ailing domani woman. The only interesting thing about that scene was that Sammael says Rand will have united all of the kingdoms in the world before the Dark One breaks free of his lair. Then, he’ll hand all of the kingdoms to the Dark One. In another scene, Semirhage is torturing Aes Sedai for information.
This brings me to a very important question: The forsaken seem like an excellent example of an all-evil D&D party. They get together to scheme once in a while, but ultimately they split their party a lot and don’t trust one another. What types of D&D players would each of the forsaken be? I confess, I haven’t met many of them yet in the book, but they all talk about each other. Here are my characterizations:
- Sammael would be a half-orc barbarian (ugly, war-mongering,)
- Moghedian would be a tiefling rogue (hides in the shadows, sets traps,)
- Rahvin and Lanfear would probably be elven sorcerers (pretty, with lots of powerful and destructive spells,)
- Graendal could be a human wizard (hangs out a lot with other humans and uses spells to manipulate others,)
- Semirhage is a half-elf cleric (she’s a magical torturer who refers to her prisoners as “patients;” most of the torture scenes involve her stimulating the pleasure and pain centers of the brain with the one power)
- Asmodean might be a bard (no magic, is constantly playing the harp.)
Did you know that Lord of Chaos was nominated for the Locus award for best fantasy novel in 1995?
