People Are Always Splitting The Trakand Family Dynamic Into Elayne Vs. Her Brothers, But If You Ask Me

people are always splitting the trakand family dynamic into elayne vs. her brothers, but if you ask me it's actually more like

Moiraine when Mat and Perrin make fun of Rand’s fancy clothes:

Dark One: Lanfear you need to wake up

Lanfear: …..

Dark One: Lews Therin has been reborn

Lanfear:

rand al’thor really is this repudiation of the idea of a Noble Sufferer, isn’t he

like, as early as book 2 he’s resigning himself to this trope. he decides that he’s going to Suffer In Silence, you know, he even tries to die for the girl he loves (and the first seanchan invasion but egwene’s a big part of it) at falme, he starts withdrawing from other people in book 3 and taking up the burden of the dragon reborn “because i must and there’s no one else who can,” and at every turn the narrative is showing that this isn’t possible. he tries to die heroically in falme and survives against all odds because the pattern isn’t done with the dragon reborn. he tries to kill ishamael three times before it takes, expecting the fight against darkness to be Over each time. by book 4 he’s becoming self-aware of his own trauma responses and they horrify him?? he can’t understand why he’s becoming angry and violent and struggling with lashing out. he still spouts off this whole speech to lanfear about how he was born to destroy the darkness in ostensible total acceptance of his destined role. he expects things to be simple in ways that they would be in another narrative. he tries to quash his entire identity to be the prophesied warrior of light, which includes ignoring his own trauma, because he can’t have trauma if he’s not a person, and we see how this does not work. he goes from dissociating sometimes to dissociating constantly, his Selfless Desire To Die mutates into a seesaw between fear of death and increasing suicidality. which is extremely, viscerally human. repressing his pain and never talking about it alienates most of the people in his life including people he’s trying to reach out to because they can’t understand what’s going through his head. he becomes cold and furious and difficult to be around despite his best intentions. he’s killed the boy who was rand al’thor but that doesn’t turn him into a fabled hero it just turns him into a miserable person he doesn’t recognize.

he WANTS to be the ideal stoic martyr, he WANTS to bravely face his destiny like people do in all the stories he read growing up, but he doesn’t understand that those are just stories and real people can’t live like that. 

“Make up a guy” tweets and Wheel of Time characters

Alright US mutuals, if you are interested in, morbidly fascinated by, or anxiously doomscrolling through AI news, including Stable Diffusion, Llama, ChatGPT or Dalle, you need to be aware of this.

The US Copyright Office has submitted a request for comment from the general public. Guidelines can be found on their site, but the gist of it is that they are taking citizen statements on what your views on AI are, and how the Copyright Office should address the admittedly thorny issues in rulings.

Be polite, be succinct, and be honest. They have a list of questions or suggestions, but in truth are looking to get as much data from the general public as possible. If you have links to papers or studies examining the economic impacts of AI, they want them. If you have anecdotal stories of losing commissions, they want them. If you have legal opinions, experience using these tools, or even a layman's perspective of how much human input is required for a piece of work to gain copyright, they want it.

The deadline is Oct 18th and can be submitted via the link in the article. While the regulatory apparatus of the US is largely under sway by corporate interests, this is still the actual, official time for you to directly tell the government what you think and what they should do. Comments can be submitted by individuals or on behalf of organizations. So if you are a small business, say a print shop, you can comment on behalf of the print shop as well.

Ars Technica

Thorny AI copyright questions have Copyright Office seeking public input

Should AI-created works be copyrighted? US regulators want to know what you think.