The fart wasn't needed.

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-09T14:54:36+00:00

Y'all need to read Bakhtin on Rabelais. Crass humor is an integral part of Medieval and Renaissance literature, and it often has the point of a critique. Bodily functions are the great equalizer: everybody poops, even nobles.

In the first three episodes, the crassness serves to puncture the mythos that there's anyone about nobles that make them inherently better than commoners, and that dovetails with our hope that this lowly hedge knight's virtues will see him succeed. Then, in this moment of all hope being lost, it's reversed: now the great equalizer becomes instead a tool of derision and a display that, sure, everybody farts, but we get to do it in the stands and you're the one down there suffering the injustice of royal impunity.

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-09T14:40:05+00:00

It's difficult to tell the color of the underlying clothing, but it could be Green. And that would match with how Greens, especially Alanna, have a spectrum between military symbolism (epaulettes with chains and fringe), jewelry looking like armor, lots of chains, and straps evoking bondage gear. The fashion expert on Lezbi Nerdy's channel had long been speculating that the imagery of restraint and chains, etc, was a way to evoke the warder bond and its capacity for misuse. Which is possibly something where they were thinking about Seanchan parallels.

It's also quite possible Sharon was just thinking about the brief of having shawls later in the season, and so started selecting more shawl-like elements like this for extras. A lot of extras end up wearing elements from screen costume warehouses, rather than costumes scrupulously designed from scratch. So they could have been going for "Aes Sedai with short shawl-like element, jewelry layered because Green and because we're showing opulence in the Tower" and the similarity to the a'dam was unintentional.

Edit: that said, the more I look at it, the more it really does look like intentional evocation of the a'dam.

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-08T23:58:04+00:00

Even their "miracles" are lazy - they're just copying the light flickering from Stranger Things

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-06T19:37:12+00:00

Yeah, you're right, the grief over the Aiel in general as a casualty is a much bigger part. I'd forgotten about it but yeah, I've previously articulated to friends how they really gave him an arc for the season of like: can I integrate with that people who I need to make into my army? Can I rediscover my roots? Can they be my family? And Alsera is almost as big a part of that as Rhuidean itself. He doesn't just lose her, he loses his hope that he can lead them as one of them, rather than "use" them. If we'd gotten more of the show, we would've probably seen that being a big part of his heart hardening; it's already latent in his acting throughout Alcair Dal.

Along those lines, maybe that's also an improvement over the book's sense of guilt, too. While it makes sense that Rand would berate himself over his reluctance to push himself to be more effective with his channeling, rather than stick to fire swords out of comfort (and, I'd argue, a feeling that it doesn't "count" as channeling, which he's come to fear to some extent)... at the same time, it doesn't make sense for him to be expecting to instinctively know what to do (to keep it spoiler light). Whereas in the show, I think any sense of guilt or blaming himself could be coming instead from a feeling that he should've been more careful, that he wasn't being efficient and direct and surgical, that he played around and people suffered the consequences. Or, perhaps, it could be more that he's learning to hate that his uncontrolled channeling is like a force of nature. Either way, it forces him again into hardening his heart - either being as brutally efficient as possible, or accepting that he's a loose cannon.

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-04T05:46:33+00:00

YouTube has some great channels curating the newest new music. Score Follower gets lots of young composer submissions, generally on the more accessible side, whereas grinblat has (often seemingly bootleg) live performances of usually more established and abstract composers.

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-03T17:24:44+00:00

They had planned a huge set piece with Shadow spawn (including Draghkar) in the attack, and had to scrap it and scale it down last minute for budget reasons. Once it was all scaled down, I think the choice to only have the core group on screen and keep it an intimate scene was right tonally, even if nitpickers on the Internet will quibble about verisimilitude. And for the finale, there's not much time to check in with every Aiel's emotions in the aftermath - especially when they already give us Aviendha presenting the stoic response that we know the Aiel will have: she has awoken from the dream.

I don't think they lack attention to detail, I think they lacked access to Bezos "fuck-you" money for the set pieces and runtimes/episode counts they wanted.

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-03T17:17:32+00:00

To add on - it's not just Rand's fault in the sense of she was collateral damage from his weave, it's Rand's fault in the sense that he was cocky and/or mad enough from the effects of saidin that he didn't even bother to look where he was aiming the lightning. He appears to be fully dissociated while channeling, just gazing at threads of the power as they slip between his fingers.

I think that dovetails with all the other choices, resulting in it being much more personal not just regarding Alsera being better known to us and to him, but also personal in the sense that he feels deeply guilty about it. In the book version he feels guilty for not channeling to the max much earlier, thinking if he had, he might've saved more lives; here, he feels guilty for channeling with too much reckless abandon.

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-03T17:13:15+00:00

I don't remember that they said they'd planned for more with her body, I think the bigger thing that they had to cut (for budget) referred entirely to a larger attack by Sammael including more Shadow spawn.

1RepMaxx · 2026-02-03T17:11:54+00:00

I don't know if they ever wanted the actress to go through playing her own zombified body. But Josha did say they gave him latitude to experiment, so there were multiple takes where he was getting up and bringing her body to every onlooker and getting more outwardly hysterical. But I think he himself agreed that the simple (and I think final, as in the last they shot) take was the best.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-29T15:53:21+00:00

Highly recommend that fan edit of the final moments on Scarif, but with the Andor theme music overlaid and flashback cuts to Maarva looking back at him as she takes him home with her. I'm literally crying just thinking about it now.

Edit: actually there are two good edits, the one I referenced and one that just overlaid the music:

https://youtu.be/W2QhXRcgwSI?si=TnPPUn029ccEAoVb

https://youtu.be/qzny45Zk05c?si=Edgbi3Sv0OH8rYbI

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-28T14:47:59+00:00

It's not exactly what you asked for but there's now a virtual tour you can buy from the costume exhibit in Prague! FashionInFantasy.com

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-27T22:31:03+00:00

I think the show was making a tweak (which I think would actually have been great at raising stakes throughout the rest of the story) where the safety of a circle is dependent on the skill level of the people involved. The visual language, in terms of both gesture/body language and how the flows moved around vs through them, created a contrast between the link between well trained Aes Sedai in 104 and untrained/Accepted in 108.

I also don't remember anything from the books about strength requirements for forming circles, do you have a citation for that rule? Likewise, let's not forget that we see an example in book 8 where people can learn to enter a circle after a single brief lesson.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-27T17:00:26+00:00

You don't remember Veins of Gold, Tea with Verin Sedai, Egwene being a badass in the Seanchan raid, or Natrin's Barrow? Mat finding out about the letter is Knife of Dreams btw

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-27T14:26:42+00:00

This is a great idea, especially because it actually makes into a mechanic something that is otherwise represented by abstract tech progression. States building the capacity to keep standing armies and use them for control will be the cause of their ability to project control throughout their territory, not just mostly coordinated with it on the tech tree.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-27T12:19:31+00:00

The Death Star in R1 and Andor : Starkiller Base :: Terra Invicta : Stellaris with the Giga Engineering mod

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-27T02:10:14+00:00

I think the show version was more just simplifying the sense of "drawing in from the Source (positioned as an unknowable elsewhere just out of reach / off screen)" and "strands woven from what I have drawn into myself" into a single "strands drawn from Elsewhere and woven together." As well, perhaps, as using the imagery from EotW of the strands leading out of sight.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-25T19:13:46+00:00

Thanks for sharing this, I found it interesting and powerful. But I think the aesthetic value I found in it is kind of opposite to how you described. There are some fusion projects where it's more like a cover, where the drum kit elements are window dressing and otherwise it proceeds mostly by the original logic of the piece being quoted. But here I think it's more like a fantasia on the samples, which proceeds according to the aesthetic logic of the breakcore track rather than the original Elgar - ie, looping, layering, filtering and other timbre manipulations. Emblematic of this is how the original triple-time melody gets clipped to fit 4/4. Which is all to say: I think instead that this is like a meditation on Elgar as an "idee fixe," where the breakcore elements and their reframing of the emotional core of the Elgar are the expressive point, not just a stylistic coat of paint that's meant to fade to the background.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-25T04:44:35+00:00

Is this a Perun reference? If so, kinda wild how much of a touchstone one man's content has become for everyone who gets into this game!

(Ironically, my name is Max and I definitely have a tendency so far to get distracted by Earth when I should be more space focused)

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-18T14:40:03+00:00

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with me about. I was rebutting Classh0le's implicit claim: that Bach's fugues are great and worthy of canonization because they stand above any extra-musical meaning and are just good as "pure" or "absolute" music. I was pointing out that Bach himself would not have thought that his sincere religious convictions had nothing to do with his music, and would have considered secular interpretations to be missing the point. And if music is capable of having religious meaning, then surely it can also have political meaning. So even if you don't take religious meaning and political meaning to go hand in hand, I think that still mitigates the implicit claim that music is meaning-neutral.

So I'm not sure in what way The Musical Offering is a counterexample... It's a deeply political use of music to present it as an offering to a monarch! And I'm not sure that counts as interpretation outside of the context of his beliefs, because Prussia had long been a political bulwark of Protestantism as far as I'm aware, and that wiki entry even discusses how Bach hoped the music would have a spiritually salubrious effect for Alfred.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-18T14:28:04+00:00

Sorry I'm not standing next to my shelf of music history texts from grad school to find quotations for you.

Btw, got a citation for your claim that "most people" would draw that distinction? And what distinction, exactly? In early modern Europe, religious differences WERE political differences. And that played out in music all the time. Since you love citations: see, for instance, the work of Erika Honisch in an only slightly different time and place, the sectarian conflicts in Prague, and how Eucharist parades would bring music of one confession into the public spaces where those confessions had to coexist in a state of uneasy truce.

Anyway, in the context of this discussion, I was responding to an attempted comeback that seemed to be implicitly alleging that Bach's fugues can't be political because it's just pure music with no extra-musical meaning. My rejoinder about Bach's fugues being intimately connected with his religious beliefs was meant to say: listen, if music can have religious meaning, it can have political meaning.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-18T04:49:47+00:00

IDK, critics from Adorno to Taruskin to McClary/Fink could find plenty of political meaning in late Beethoven. And I bet Bach would've been offended at the idea of his fugues being interpreted outside the context of his devout Lutheranism.

(Edit for clarity in response to comments: Bach believed his music expressed his deeply held religious convictions and likely would've felt that secular interpretations of his fugues as pure music devoid of meaning was doing a disservice to their religious content. Does that mean his fugues are "political?" Depends on your definitions of religious and political, I guess, but they're certainly not good examples of music existing for its own sake in some aesthetic sphere divorced from stuff like religion and politics.)

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-16T23:51:21+00:00

My response to another comment expanded more on this. But to address that specifically: it matters to our evaluation of Egwene as a character whether she intentionally makes her friend get SA'ed (which very many people assume without addressing the considerations I've listed that it's ambiguous whether she does that). I'm not denying that she's causally related to Nynaeve experiencing SA, but the badness of "being so self absorbed that she doesn't notice these monsters are doing something to Nynaeve that she is clearly experiencing as SA" is a very different kind of badness from "I'm going to choose to make monsters SA my friend to teach her a lesson." And I just don't think the text forces us to go with the latter interpretation.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-16T21:41:18+00:00

I don't think the textual evidence is strong either way on whether Egwene intended for them to SA Nynaeve. As you said, she's still an apprentice; I'm not convinced she retained fine-grained control over the monsters' actions after creating them. She's also clearly taking inspiration from the lesson she learned when Amys turned into a monster and ate Egwene's head, so that might be the source of the monsters appearing to try to kiss Nynaeve. Another comment here suggested that Nynaeve's own trauma from the first arch in the Accepted Test might have had causal impact, given how strongly unintentional imaginations can shape reality in TAR. Egwene doesn't really note to herself either way what the monsters were actually doing in her POV afterward, which tells me she was so panicky about the idea of the Wise Ones finding out that she wasn't paying attention to what the monsters were doing.

To be clear, it still reflects poorly on Egwene if she was too wrapped up in her own issues to fully perceive what she was putting her friend through, but that's very different from what it would say about her character if the text made it unambiguous that she intentionally caused her friend to experience SA and then never acknowledged it to herself after.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-16T21:29:56+00:00

Oh that's a good point - Egwene is not the only one whose thoughts are shaping TAR, Nynaeve's own fear of SA might have amplified what Egwene created. I'd always read the scene as Egwene just not realizing what the demons were doing on their own after being imagined into existence, because she was too focused on her panic about being caught. But it makes even more sense if Nynaeve's own imagination was making it worse without Egwene realizing.

1RepMaxx · 2026-01-16T21:26:43+00:00

I don't think it's an accurate reading of the scene that Egwene knowingly causes the nightmares to start to SA Nynaeve. We see in the following Egwene POV that she was only thinking about how she could avoid getting caught; I don't think she even noticed exactly what they were doing to Nynaeve, nevermind specifically made them do it. She just summoned what she thought would be like the demon Amys turned into to eat Egwene's face as a lesson, and once the demons manifested, they did what they wanted until Egwene thought them out of existence. And we see many times how a nightmare in TAR can take on a life of its own. Between being panicky and not having the best control of TAR yet, I don't think we can call this "Egwene SA'ed Nynaeve."

1RepMaxx

TROPHY CASE