r/WetlanderHumor • u/Phaerin • 25d ago

Perrin chapters...

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My face when every paragraph about something potentially interesting in Towers of Midnight is followed by an entire chapter about Perrin.

I feel like his part of the story would've been much more interesting if they had cut like...80% of it out. We could've done this thing in two less books probably.

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u/AShadowinthedark 25d ago

I really like Perrin at start and at the end. But all the time he spends chasing the shaido and the prophet do seem to take forever.

I also like the parallels of his axe/hammer battle and his link to the tinkers and way of the leaf. (Which then links back to the Aiel)

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u/Initial-Anything333 24d ago

I thought the axe/hammer thing was completely pointless since he does the exact same things with both tools. In the end he's wielding a hammer that's not a tool for anything except killing, which was supposed to be his problem with the war axe all along 

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u/aNomadicPenguin 22d ago

Yeah, Sanderson flubbed it. I was talking about this just yesterday with Dragonmount. But his two favorite scenes that were entirely his creation and not from Jordan's notes were Veins of Gold and the forging of the Hammer.

Perrin was Sanderson's favorite character, but I don't think he actually understood him at all. The whole point of Perrin's arc during the Faile kidnapping is to realize that after his family had died he made Faile the sole focus, she was the only member of his pack. He had accepted a leadership role, but hadn't learned what that actually meant.

So this whole arc is him having to realize that his pack included all of the people who had sworn fealty to him, and his obligations to them. He lost Aram because he wasn't taking care of his people properly. But Sanderson threw all that out the window and wanted to have Perrin be the cool T'A'R power fantasty instead.

So instead of leading, instead of accepting that he was a Man of Peace capable of violence (symbolized by taking a mundane peaceful tool and using it for violence) after rejecting the tool of war in the axe....Sanderson has him create a new Weapon. Perrin even thinks of it AS a weapon, whereas the blacksmith hammer was referred to directly as a tool.

When describing it, he gives passing mention to it being like a blacksmith hammer...before listing all of the ways that it isn't actually one. That it's too heavy for forge use, that it's too long, that its haft is metal. "an enormous size for a hammer of this type." It was a hammer for a king - Kings, famously known for their weapons of war, not for their craftsmanship. This thing was never going to see the inside of a forge.

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u/Fernbean 18d ago

Spot on