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21 Responses to “The 4th Age Podcast – Episode 46”

Posted by Annie on January 22nd, 2009 at 6:56 am Hello, you were talking about Seanchan armour and I found this website about Japanese armour. It reminds me strongly about Seanchan armour. Here’s the site: http://www.roninswords.com.au/armour-page.htm Keep up the good work.

Posted by Virginia on January 22nd, 2009 at 8:08 pm Thanks, Annie! I sent that link on to Andrew in case he doesn’t get to the podcast page right away. I know he’ll be interested, as I was.

Posted by Heather J. on January 29th, 2009 at 9:18 am I enjoyed this run down of the exotics, but I still get them all confused. And on the “armored bear” – as you were discussing this I kept picturing the polar bear fight scene from The Golden Compass … and then Virginia brought it up!

Posted by Virginia on January 29th, 2009 at 8:20 pm Two great minds with but a single thought….

Posted by sara on January 30th, 2009 at 8:56 pm I think that before the Breaking, likely the fauna of both Randland and Seanchan were distributed much differently…well, even the land was laid out completely differently. It’s probable that lands where Grolm and Lopar roamed were cloven by earthquakes and drowned by floods during the Breaking, leaving breeding populations on the Seanchan side and wiping out the rest. I don’t think enough time has passed evolutionarily for three-eyed creatures to become dominant out of the blue.(Although it doesn’t seem there are any animals in Randland that the Seanchan don’t recognize.) I agree that the beasts are not intrinsically evil, therefore I don’t think they were created by a Forsaken or the Dark One, a la the Trollocs. Maybe, though, these three-eyed wonders are some sort of evolutionary mutants spawned by post-Breaking ?radioactivity? bubbles of the Power?, like the Hulk or Spidey? Or, perhaps, transported from an alternate world during a Power spasm as LTT ran amok? Sorry, long week. Anyway, I also had some thoughts on the Aiel diet. I did NOT get the impression that their diet was protein-poor. They have herds of animals they use for meat and milk, they have zemai (which I have always assumed is similar to corn), they have grain and beans, they have domestic fowl, and they eat snakes and other desert reptiles. Whereas, the Cairhienin (sp?) are uniformly short despite their abundance of meat, fish, fowl, and produce. Recall that the Aiel are descended from the True Aiel, a pacifist vegetarian folk…the Tinkers are still vegetarian. So I figure, apart from genetics, it must be that the Aiel diet is protein-calorie rich enough to elicit maximal height. Finally, as a warrior society, physical prowess is valued, and perhaps the taller males have a reproductve advantage (the chicks dig them more). Good Night!

Posted by Virginia on February 2nd, 2009 at 10:12 am Sara – Wow, I dare you to call ANY Aiel woman a chick to her face….let alone a Far Dareis Mai! But you may be right. Love the idea of the 3-eyes coming about as mutants. Much harder to do three eyes evolutionarily than the 6-toed cats of the two rivers, I would think. Polydactylism is fairly common as a mutation – extra eyes, though… And what would be the advantage to them, placed as they are?? What I don’t understand is how the Aiel manage to keep grazing animals and raise grain crops in the desert – not easy! And where do they get all this bull-hide leather for shields and so on. Don’t recal mention of cattle at all. Maybe they trade for it..??

Posted by sara on February 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm I guess they irrigate, there seem to be a few springs in the Waste, and they have terraced the walls of the canyons and their rooftops. I imagined it to be similar to the now-ruined terracing and irrigation in Chaco canyon and south into Chihuahua. I would like to try some of those sweet crunchy grubs they savor. Gomai? or something. MMMMMMMM! and maybe one of those yummy poisonous snakes.

Posted by Virginia on February 2nd, 2009 at 6:40 pm Motai are the crunchy grubs – eewww….

Posted by BrainWyrms » Blog Archive » Mon Feb 2 2009 on February 2nd, 2009 at 6:40 pm [...] The 4th Age Podcast – Episode 46 [...]

Posted by The Bob on February 3rd, 2009 at 12:56 pm I guess I have to refer to either Bear Grylls or that other guy who did the survivor type shows. When we think of deserts we traditionally think of the sweeping sand and I think movies like to portray that as well. Makes for a better scene. But he was in the desert and it was just lots of vegetation but none of it was really good to eat or it all had thorns and spines and poisen that. And I do remember them talking about spikey plants and such. At those places the water isn’t really there to be seen. It’s all underground and you’d most likely have to dig a really good distance to get at it and then it would be like a little dirty puddle. What we can’t eat prolly animals can and so their goats and such would be able to gobble some of that stuff down and I also think I do recall them talking about the herds and such moving. Most likely going from area to area so their goats don’t totally exhaust the places of edibles. The grain stuff has to be what they were growing on the terraces with everyone out watering the stuff. Maybe the corn type stuff is special occasion additives and not common food. They certainly have to trade it. Maybe Shara has lots of fast food places and so go through a lot of cows and are glad that the Aiel live nearby to scoop up all their byproducts.

Posted by The Bob on February 3rd, 2009 at 1:23 pm Probably not exactly the place to say this but I just sort of found these podcasts and really the time to listen to them too and there was one a while back that I wanted to comment on. I remember somebody saying how hard it was to believe that Aes Sedai could have gone so long without experimenting a little and finding out the stuff that Elayne, Egwene, and Nyneave find out. It doesn’t make sense to think that somebody just couldn’t add a little earth and come up with better healings or change a weave a little to get something else. Unless you look at it from the point of view of an Aes Sedai. From the time that they start out they are told not to do anything with the One Power unless they have approval. They are trained to do everything in very specific ways. Told to do them over and over again until they got them right. Time and Time again we hear warnings about what happens to channelers who try and do things differently. They get burned out or they kill themselves. That was the warning with healing is that they will get killed and even more so the patient will get killed to if they don’t know what they are doing. Thus adding a little flow of this or that would be like a doctor putting random powders or solutions into somebody while they are operating just to see what happens. By the time they get to be full sisters and thus have full permission or no need of it to experiment a little with the one power they most likely wouldn’t want to. They’d be sure they know everything about what they are doing already and thus they wouldn’t have to experiment. Thinking it wouldn’t have been taught if it wasn’t the best way of doing such a thing. Also they wouldn’t want to risk the One Power just to see if a fire ball would burn longer with a little earth added or what it would do with some spirit. Like pouring random liquids in your eyes risking destroying them trying to find a way to see a little better. Even if they do experiment Aes Sedai are kind of like major companies all unto themselves. They come up with something and they are going to keep that information and not spread it around. The only time it does get spread around is when enough people know it that it might as well be common knowledge or they get caught doing it and then pretend they just discovered it and that they were going to tell everyone once they knew exactly how well it worked. So all the little tricks that would get discovered easily might die with a sister. Kind of stupid if you ask me but a lot of Aes Sedai traditions are stupid. Must be a reason for them though or they wouldn’t be there (Or is that just what they think.) Then it comes down to the Two Rivers newbies who come in and all of a sudden are discovering things that nobody knew before. That’s simple they are let off their leach (the mental kind and not the silver kind) by getting sent out into the world without Aes Sedai telling them that’s not how it’s done and that they can’t touch the One Power without permission. So they are just learning things not by training but but random chance. Knowing the basics of something and just working out how to get the result they want. So of course they are going to be the ones to discover things. Plus for an Aes Sedai it’s sort of logical to let others do the experimenting and risk burning themselves out or killing themselves. They are Accepted/Novices so anything they learn they are going to pass on to everyone so it’s a win win situation for them. Finally my extensive time watching TV had me watching some show about Monkeys and Humans. How they learn and what not to see how close and different we are. So this lady has this special black box with a wand on it and she shows a monkey how to open in. Wave the wand around the top poke the wand inside a hole or two and then use it to flip an internal latch. The monkeys watched it all and did it opening the latch to get the monkey version of candy. She did the same thing for humans and they kids follow the same pattern and open the box. Then she switches the black box for a clear one. Gives it to the monkeys and they follow the same pattern open it up and get the candy. But they see that none of the waving wand action or the poking in the holes actually does anything. So the next time they use the wand to flip the switch and just get the candy. The human kids of course get the same clear box but they repeat everything they were shown with the black box to get the candy despite seeing it does nothing at all. Waving wand and poking and then flipping the internal switch. Everytime. That is a long way to saying that Humans learn by being taught. For most of us that’s how we learn. We are shown enough times that we remember and so we repeat the process. Most Aes Sedai being human are shown how to do things a certain way and they will repeat the process until shown how to do it another way.

Posted by Jay on February 6th, 2009 at 8:43 am Any news on the next Podcast? You guys were starting to get a little rythmn going for a while.

Posted by sara on March 5th, 2009 at 6:47 am HELLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOO Miss your voices……

Posted by Anita on March 10th, 2009 at 7:47 am on this podcast someone (Virginia?) said that Rand took them to the alternate land with the portal stone. I would respectfully direct you to Egwene’s dream Chapter 13, in The Great Hunt, where she is telling Anaiya: “…and she saw Rand sleeping on the ground, wrapped in a cloak.A woman had been standing over him, looking down…Then there was a flash of light, and they were gone. Both of them.” So I thought that Selene/Lanfear had done the transporting. Comments?

Posted by sara on March 13th, 2009 at 4:25 pm I understood that Egwene’s “true” dreams are not always literal in their detail, although they depict events that have or will really happen. Another example of this might be the dream of the raven and the Tower; she knows this truly foretells something but only after it happens will the meaning of the dream become clear. Same with dreams she’s had of Mat and Perrin; the details are often figurative or vague and not exactly what happens in the waking world. In the dream Egwene relates to Anaiya it could have been that the woman standing over Rand only meant that she was following him or stalking him, watching him without his knowledge. The flash and their simultaneous disappearance, to me, doesn’t necessarily mean that that was the sequence of events in the waking world. Were you picturing a Gateway causing the flash of light? At that time Egwene didn’t know about Gateways, so I guess she could have described its opening as a flash. Or were you thinking that Selene activated the Portal stone herself? If so, why would she bring Hurin and Loial along? (Don’t you love all the details? I had completely forgotten about that dream until you brought this up…)

Posted by Anita on March 25th, 2009 at 8:00 am It makes more sense to me that Selene activated the Portal stone than that Rand did in his sleep. Maybe she brought Loial and Hurin because they were sleeping close to the stone and she could not exclude them. She knows how to operate them, regardless of the “Oh so innocent me” act that she is putting on for Rand. And to randomly and accidentally end up in the same world?

Posted by Charlz Guybon on April 6th, 2009 at 7:15 pm The s’redit aren’t just like an Elephant, aren’t they flat out Elephants? They’re not “exotics”, they’re just native to Seanchan.

Posted by Virginia on April 20th, 2009 at 1:41 pm Good catch, Anita, I had totally forgotten that dream and never made that connection. Rand does a lot of channeling without knowing how he does it (or LTT does it for him, im a manner of speaking) so I thought it possible Rand activated the Portal Stone in his sleep or while near sleep. But it makes even more sense that Lanfear/Selene did it for him. She probably brought along Loial and Hurin both due to proximity to Rand while he slept and because she knew what a newbie he is and figured that he would need companions to survive in the mirror world. No point in hauling him there to seduce him and letting him get offed by whatever he doesn’t know about. Even later in the Stone she was constantly ragging on him to be careful and not go rushing off blindly, saying “even a testing might kill you”. I think it was that fear of him doing something foolishly fatal which made her decide to bring in Asmodean as a teacher. She usually worked alone, but she was afraid all her plans would be undone if he was foolish or Demandred or one of the others got to him before he knew enough to face them.

Posted by Virginia on April 20th, 2009 at 1:45 pm That seems odd that humans test out less likely to be innovative than monkeys, Bob. Can’t recall the last time I saw monkeys invent much of anything….and humans do it all the time, no matter how they are taught. I still say the Aes Sedai were fools not to experiment a little, especially as they KNEW some weaves existed but were only forgotten. That’s a lot less risky, to recreate something you already know works – not at all like random experimentation!

Posted by Kamarile Sedai on June 4th, 2009 at 11:01 am While you guys were talking about Seanchan creatures, you forgot all about the ogier gardeners. They’re very different from the ones in Randland. Why is that? They don’t mind engaging in battle along side humans, they join human armies, they seem like they dedicate themselves to being warriors instead of scholars. But one of the most interesting differences is that the gardeners don’t seem to suffer from the longing for a steading. What could have caused these differences? Do the gardeners and other ogier know about each other? What would a meeting between them be like?

Posted by Jonno on July 24th, 2009 at 11:29 am I’m late to the party, but I just listened to the episode and I’m fairly certain that the s’redit actually are elephants. The descriptions are matching just too close and they are not mentioned as exotics in the Big White Book. Additionally Cerandin isn’t called a morat’s'redit but as a s’redit handler, equivalent to an horse handler, not a morat’to’raken. As for population height, it is mostly dependent on how much protein there is in the diet, and not so much other nutritions. So any society with lots of meat, milk or milk derived products (cheese, soured milk, etc) in the diet will get closer their genetic potential than one with lots of barley, wheet and other grains. As the Aiel Waste isn’t good for growing things, but decent for herding goats and sheep in, you will get taller people (though not nearly as many per square kilometre). An example from history is the Scandinavians during the dark ages, who had a male average of about 1.75m (5″9′) while the Continental Europeans was much shorter, with males averaging about 1.50m (5″), even though food shortage and starvation was a much larger problem in Scandinavia than in Continental Europe. Genetics only count for about 5cm of that, as modern Scandinavians average 1.80m (5″11′) while Continental Europeans average 1.75m (5″9′), the rest was because of the diet, mostly Scandinavians dependence on milk and cheese (both from cows and goats), as well as a lower population density allowing for more hunting, while the poor soil in Scandinavia wasn’t too good at growing any grains. Rand being 1.95m (6″5′) and about average for an Aiel male is ofcourse not quite realistic, but then this is fiction, not a historic documentary.

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