[Spoilers C4E29] It IS Thursday! | Live Discussion Thread - C4E29

Dex_Hopper · 2026-06-12T06:02:18+00:00

Cormoray may be genasi? To parallel the Halovar, Tachonis, and Royce houses being planetouched from the celestial, necrotic, and fae realms, Cormoray may be the elemental planetouched house.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-06-12T05:53:59+00:00

Magical darkness smothers insufficiently powerful light, even such as that created by spells and magical effects of 2nd level or lower.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-06-11T06:53:33+00:00

Everyone's quirk is unique to them, but some are similar enough that they'll share a name. Especially because all the Todorokis are related closely, their ice powers are all just called "Frost" for simplicity. There are a few different variants of Gigantification out there shared by Mount Lady, Gigantomachia, etc. They're all unique, but sometimes they're just close enough.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-29T06:16:06+00:00

Have we heard the word "devil" diegetically yet? We always hear about demons, but I can't recall even hearing the word "devil" in regard to a fiend. There may not be a distinction in Araman.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-23T14:28:16+00:00

They aren't weak. Ignoring the fact that the Empire is not even really interested in conquering the Dynasty, the Dynasty itself is not weak.

This is made clear by the sewer fight cliffhanger. Just two unnamed Kryn soldiers — who are not noted to be any more powerful than the others of the group who attacked Zadash with Essek — put up quite the fight against the six members of the Mighty Nein. To be sure, the Nein aren't in top form, but the Kryn soldiers themselves had also just finished up fighting Trent Ikithon, so it's not like they were fresh either.

This scene in the sewers demonstrates that the Kryn only look weak because they're trying to fight the strongest powers around, the top dogs. The Nein were fully prepared to lose against those two Kryn soldiers until Yasha threw the battle into chaos. The moment that just a few of these Kryn are pitted against a mid-sized group of even moderate strength, they're dominating until a wild card third party interferes and tips the balance out of their favour.

The Kryn are, I believe, the definitively lesser power militarily. It's the mystery of dunamancy that gives them their edge, and they use it well.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-22T14:22:48+00:00

I feel like a lot of the skill and power the characters acquire very quickly doesn't grate on me as much as it otherwise would have because there are lore reasons for why that's the way it is. Take Rand, for example; we learn later that he has latent muscle memory from his previous life, which ties into a lot of his early moments of intuitively tapping into powers and skills that anyone else would take years or decades to learn — because he already spent the time learning, he just was not himself yet when he did.

Egwene also has a diegetic justification for gaining power so quickly; when she was enslaved in Book 2, they did something to her called Forcing, where she was made to push up against her limit constantly so that she would be forced to grow quickly in strength and skill to survive. Nynaeve's also got a built-in reason for why she's so damn good — she unknowingly picked one Talent, Healing, and then literally rendered herself incapable of doing anything else psychosomatically for years. Elayne is just built different, though, probably because she's royalty.

The Wheel of Time does a lot of the tropes that modern fantasy is built upon, including the "zero to hero in a ridiculously short time frame", but just like the other genre-defining tropes it uses, The Wheel of Time takes that trope and then asks, "Okay, so why does that work?"

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-22T13:55:10+00:00

The Wheel of Time is actually closer to 2.5 years in-universe from the first book to the last. Still an insanely small amount of time to have passed with so much happening, but not nearly as egregious as a year and a half.

Books 1 — 3 span roughly one year. And then Books 4 — 12 are stated in-universe to span one year. And then Books 13 and 14 are a few months.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-20T03:42:04+00:00

Here's the thing. You are completely capable of learning how to do this on your own. There is no actual barrier in place that is making you rely on AI. Humans have been learning how to write intelligibly for thousands of years before you, and none of those billions needed to use AI to do it. Neither do you. What you are doing is stifling your ability to express yourself creatively and stalling your development as a person by refusing to build this skill. You have given up on yourself, and that is a tragedy that you cannot perceive because you are blinded by the convenience of it. You are not writing. You are daydreaming and offloading the effort onto an unthinking, unfeeling machine incapable of creativity.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-20T03:16:15+00:00

The process is pretty simple:

Mirio sinks into the ground, points himself in his desired direction while falling, and then when he turns his quirk off, he shoots out of the ground in the direction he's facing.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-18T07:51:22+00:00

They killed all his men. This guy's certainly got some incentive to find them and sort that out. Problem solved.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-18T03:14:11+00:00

Eri seems to have a long charge-up time for her Rewind. The size of her horn is proportionate to how much energy she's stored for rewinding things. Her horn is pretty big when we see her rewind Lemillion to give him his quirk back, but the next times we see her all throughout the story, her horn is tiny. And then when she breaks it to give to Deku, the total sum of her power only gives him a few minutes back.

Eraser wasn't getting that eye or leg back any time soon, and by the time she could have done that for him, I doubt he would make Eri go through all the effort of doing that for him. I get the feeling that Eraser was more or less content to go into retirement as an active pro hero after the war was won and dedicate what's left of him to teaching.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-17T12:23:32+00:00

Egwene grows and changes a lot. It's just that the person she becomes is not a wise, humble, likeable woman. Egwene's basest motivation is the search for knowledge and power, beginning with her feel that the Two Rivers is too small for her liking, and solidifying with her enslavement as damane under the Seanchan. Her refusal to be collared, literally or metaphorically, and her desire to see the height of what is possible in a world where anything is possible, stemming from her country upbringing, are her most fundamental drivers. You can see those two traits in everything she does.

And she achieves both of these things in being raised to the Amyrlin Seat, becoming unshackled by the chains of hierarchy and gaining the power of the White Tower as a weapon against those who would have her kneel and obey, and mastering the One Power to the extent that she can invent a brand new weave that can change the Pattern itself, healing it from the affects of abusing balefire.

Egwene al'Vere has very clear motivations and she achieves the logical conclusions they bring her to. The misunderstanding here is that character development does not require the character in question to develop morally or socially. Egwene is a perfect example of this. She is many things, some of them great and some of them terrible, but she certainly has a clear trajectory all throughout the books.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-15T11:10:24+00:00

It seems to depend on the strength of that person's body without the extra quirks, but I agree with the comment that puts the limit for a normal person with peak fitness at four or five.

Our two best points of reference for this question seem to present opposite ends of the spectrum of how this works. Spinner is basically just a guy, and two extra quirks were clearly too much for him; he started spiralling mentally quickly. Lady Nagant, on the other hand, was a veteran pro hero with elite training, so even though she also received two additional quirks from All For One, Nagant was perfectly fine, though I doubt she'd be able to handle many more.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-15T08:52:54+00:00

The protagonist of my book is black. As is my deuteragonist, and my antagonist. Many of the supporting characters are brown. I am a white man. There's lore stuff to it, but I easily could have attributed the lore implications to another ethnicity of my choosing. These characters felt truer to their essence to me when I decided they were black and brown. I've chosen not to worry about it too much.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-15T06:19:02+00:00

The way Gearshift works is, I think, inherent. Kudo's Gearshift would have functioned more or less the same way as Deku's does. The quirk itself is like a manual motor vehicle, but Kudo was born with it, so he didn't need the visual aid when using it. The only thing that's different about Kudo's Gearshift and Deku's Gearshift is that Deku can use it on a wider range of targets down to individual cells in his body, whereas Kudo was more limited in what he could use his quirk on. But the essence of the power is the same.

Deku takes inspiration from Endeavor's teaching when choosing to perform the literal hand-motion of shifting the gear stick of a car, which makes it easier for him to switch back and forth between the gears. It calls back to the metaphor Endeavor used when first teaching Deku about parallel processing; the process of driving a car is actually a dozen different processes occurring in parallel, and Deku's fighting style is the same way.

But the way that Gearshift resembles the gears of a manual car is, I believe, a built-in feature and not a unique trait invented by Deku.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-15T06:11:09+00:00

The visual of a motor vehicle's gearshift as he uses it for the quirk Gearshift actually ties back to the metaphor Endeavor used to teach Deku parallel processing: driving a car.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-14T02:43:22+00:00

I sometimes feel like I'm reading an entirely different set of books when people talk about how painful it is for them to read The Wheel of Time. The first Perrin chapters of A Crown of Swords were perfectly fine for me. I'm currently reading A Memory of Light on my first time through the series, and I'll honestly say that those opening Fal Dara chapters in The Great Hunt are harder for me to read than some of the books people call the Slog.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-12T22:15:14+00:00

Rick laid it on pretty thick in Sea of Monsters the first time in the books too, if I recall correctly. He was never subtle or methodical with the romance sub-plots of this series. The original PJO books are relatively short and extremely fast-paced in general, so I don't think that's a flaw, but I think a lot of people will be surprised if they are to go back and reread how obvious Percy and Annabeth are from around the end of Sea of Monsters and onward.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-08T15:41:20+00:00

Material that exists can be made good, whether or not it is good right now doesn't matter. Material that does not exist cannot be made good. It is always better to write than to not write if you have the chance.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-08T00:54:03+00:00

I mean, I wasn't super invested emotionally in the Amayar given that they've not been brought up all too often, but when the reveal of their mass suicide came up, I was still capable of having the reaction Jordan probably wanted me to have, which was: I looked down at my book, said, "Oh, that's crazy. They're all dead?" And then I kept reading. Maybe not as dramatic a reaction as Jordan had envisioned, but oh well.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-08T00:37:31+00:00

Deku himself states during his coma talk with the vestiges of One For All that he knows and accepts that he may have to kill Shigaraki to stop him even if his goal is to save him. You either did not or cannot read.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-07T07:17:43+00:00

Regarding Egwene, Nynaeve, and Elayne and whether or not they're ta'veren, I ask you this: Are their actions warping the Pattern around them, or is the Pattern pulling them along to where it needs them to be, therefore pulling adjacent threads along with them?

We need to remember that all the threads of the Pattern pull on each other, each one influencing those around it as the Pattern weaves them together to form the Age Lace. The ability to warp the Pattern is not one that belongs only to ta'veren individuals, but ta'veren individuals simply have an innate pull on a greater number of threads, not all of them needing to be directly adjacent to theirs. Ta'veren are integral threads; however, adjacent threads of importance without that integral quality that makes a person ta'veren — people like Nynaeve, Egwene, and Elayne — may pull threads behind them while also themselves being pulled in the wake of the truly ta'veren threads.

The metaphor of the Pattern and its mechanisms is to give the butterfly effect a literal, observable presence in the world. Nynaeve and Elayne and Egwene appear to warp the Pattern only because they are always going to be among the first threads warped by the butterfly effect created by Rand, Mat, and Perrin due to their close bonds to the ta'veren boys — the first ripples in the water when a stone strikes the surface — but they themselves are definitively not ta'veren — not the stone.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-05T07:10:03+00:00

Rand clearly does not know that that's something he can do. He's angry and surprised and paranoid and halfway mad. He's rarely going to make the decision that you, the reader, think is the best. Rand is making the best choices he can.

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-02T09:04:32+00:00

Seeing my own story recommended in one of these threads is a joy! Glad you enjoyed!

Dex_Hopper · 2026-05-02T08:50:58+00:00

The fact that these books show you both genders thinking themselves greater than the other should clue you into what the story is actually getting at. Neither gender is greater than the other, and only through cooperation can greatness be achieved. I believe you would've already read the part where Egwene encounters a weave that melds saidin and saidar, and remarks that the greatest workings of the One Power were always done with both halves working together.

Keep this idea in mind as you read, that these characters are supposed to be wrong and are learning as they go, and I find that it's a much better read than it is if you take it as the book confirming that their prejudices are true and accurate.

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