Finally, the first Mat viewpoint comes almost 1/3 into The Dragon Reborn . It just doesn’t feel like the Wheel of Time to me until Mat is himself.
Amanda on Facebook points out that it was good RJ waited to give a Mat VP; if it had been earlier, he’d have felt less awesome.
This is a good insight; dagger-tied Mat was frail, paranoid; that might have tainted perception of him strongly if we’d had a VP.
I have always felt that in The Eye of the World Mat was just baggage, in The Great Hunt he was a McGuffin, but in The Dragon Reborn his story truly starts.
Agreed.
Siuan to Mat: You remind me of my uncle…died pulling children out of a burning house… Will you be there when the flames are high?
This feels like a perfect place for him to step to center stage, as this is the book where we lose Rand for the first time.
Wait, we lose Rand!?!
He’s not in the third book very much. He comes back in the fourth.
Do you have any insight into how at the start of The Dragon Reborn , Rand appears more ‘mad’ than he was at the end of The Great Hunt ?
He is doing a poor job of dealing with having killed a person for the first time.
Brandon might be speaking from the notes, but I rather thought it had more to do with the fact that he was proclaimed against his will by the heroes of the horn, and by his battle being broadcast for all of Falme. He was trying to resist saidin and failing, trying to figure out what to do with it and failing, and Callandor was calling him in his dreams. Who knows what else was in his dreams. He was channeling tainted saidin , and suffering from the unhealing wound given to him by Ishamael (presumably with the True Power). Turak played a part in the downward spiral, but I don’t think it was really the catalyst. (Though knowing Rand, it was probably a convenient thing to dwell upon so as to avoid having to dwell too much upon the rest.) And of course, Turak was not the first person he killed, though Rand apparently didn’t realize he killed Aginor (this has actually been debated) and the men in Four Kings.
I hear you loud and clear! I love when [Mat] first learns about his Luck. Was RJ method writing it feels real watching Mat?
RJ was a ‘method writer’ in many ways. He very much got into a character. Harriet tells stories about it.
@josephpeavey asked me to share a story about RJ “Method writing.” Well, Harriet had a great one…
She says she’d catch him slinking into the house, walking with a different mood. She knew he’d been writing Padan Fain that day.
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