Alicornutopia

I'm sensing an implication here that the 7 ages actually get to the end and then repeat over and over again, cyclically. Is that accurate?

For that and other reasons, I feel like this world would need a serious cosmological overhaul if we were going to do anything with it XD "Random chance stops being random around this person" seems like a property that pretty much can't exist in the same multiverse as a Joker.

sorry, I added them because this was the series that made me swear off reading fantasy series about straight white boys finding out they were the most important person in the universe. since i made that decision, which admittedly rules out 90% of the genre, i have read many new interesting stories that were about different demographics and it was like a breath of fresh air. i can edit the post if you want.

my favourite genres are science fiction and fantasy and pretty much all of the books i was reading were the same old "some guy finds out he's the most important person in the world and then saves that world from whatever" and it really got tiresome and stale after a while, like eating nothing but apples for weeks on end. no matter how much you like apples, you're not going to like them after those weeks are through.

well, because so much time passes, literally eons, before the cycle happens again, you could say that this is something the characters believe that isn't neccessarily true, afterall they have no legends about the previous 3rd age if this is the current 3rd age. you could also say that the cycle repeats in the way that the cycle of winter-spring-summer-fall repeats and that each winter has some properties that are the same as the previous winters (snow-cold-ice-blizzards) but it is nonetheless a new and different winter. if bell-et-al achieve immortality and they actually live through all those ages, probably billions upon billions of years, they would probably find that this 7th age is like the previous 7th age but different. or just a being living that long would be enough to make it different.

taveren are rare.

aes sedai don't lie, but they do lies of ommission and twisting the truth. They take several oaths when they become full aes sedai, to make their magic wielding less scary to the lay people. one is that they cannot lie, another is they cannot use magic offensively except against shadowspawn. the black ajah are freed from their oaths by the dark lord.

you could get rid of the made up words like you did with amariah's world.

in the wheel of time, there are actually three taveren, Rand is the most important one who is the dragon reborn who goes on to fight the dark one, but there are two others from his village, Perrin who is a wolfbrother -- he can talk to wolves and enter the wolf dream, and Mat who becomes a gambler (he can make the dice and cards turn however he wants them to.)

a lot of the taveren thing is just an explanation for why this one farmboy is so important. i think it's just a synonym for "protagonist". it's an explanation for why unusual things tend to happen around the protagonists.

EDIT: I guess that if you wanted a joker in this universe, you could just not currently have any taveren. most of the time there aren't any major taveren that are pulling on the fabric of the universe like that. or if you want Bella to be taveren -- which i think would make a lot of sense given how protagonisty she is -- it might be better to have this be a sherlock-tony-bella story.

No need to edit the post, and I don't mean to come down too hard on you in particular, this is just the first time it's come up.

it's fine; i already edited it. It's good to know these rules for future.

The 7 ages being like seasons is an interesting notion, but also seems like it would be thoroughly derailed by pealing a local Bell. XD

The thing about taveren is that Jokers are just such a force of chaos that random chance is kind of integral to their being, and if the anti-chance field can affect things like which way people jink to try to pass each other in the street, then either Jokers have to be immune to it on every level or there cannot ever be the possibility of such a thing ever coming into contact with a Joker under any circumstances.

...of course, "Jokers are immune to it on every level" is an interesting notion in itself... maybe if a pattern/fate person is handy to have around for saving the world from evil, an anti-fate person is handy to have around if you want to break the cycle entirely and stop the evil from ever coming back? XDDDD

What if the Joker were taveren, but maybe an unusual type of taveren in which random chance was more random around him. For example, he would get the kind of taveren where weird and unusual and unlikely things happen around him all the time. Like the 37 tries to pass each other on the street thing -- that would be everyday life for this joker. It's still random, and it's not in his control or anyone else's control around him, it's just weird things happen all the time around him. Rand eventually learns to control it and do these things on purpose but until he does, it's affected by his moods: more bad random chance stuff happening when he's in a dark mood and more good stuff when he's in a good mood. but the Joker wouldn't be motivated to learn to control it. He would prefer to live in a world where improbable things are more likely to happen around him, no?

or the joker could just be immune to taveren and when Bella-the-taveren walks by, he gets enthralled with her purely because she's interesting and jokers like interesting and not because he is being swept up by the pattern. or i dunno. whatever you come up with will be interesting to read.

in cannon, rand considers killing the dark one for good and breaking the cycle but he's shown a vision in which he meets one of his loves in a world that doesn't know the dark one and never has known the dark one (he wants to write him out of the pattern so completely that he never existed in past and future), and because Elaine from that possible world has never known sorrow, because there is no bad at all in the world -- not even food going bad when there's plenty of food anyway -- her character hasn't developped and she's just a boring simpering princess and all the things he loves about her, all the things that made her a good queen are gone. so he imprisons the dark one instead of killing him, because otherwise it really would be a world in which all coins always come up heads and everything is sunny and nothing ever hurts not even in a good way.

you could discard that bit of cannon if you want, but you should know that it is there when you make the decision.

I just wanna know why one of them didn't say out loud, "Let's both go to our respective rights!" after this had happened like three times instead of 37.

hah, me too. in cannon they just blush more furiously each time and look more and more embarrassed and keep saying sorry.

maybe if they'd tried that they would have said it at exactly the same moment but one of them would have said right and the other would have said left and they still would have gone on.

or "okay. i'm just going to stand still until you move." but then both of them standing still. but surely there must be a way around it.

EDIT: http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/Ta%27veren this page has a better explanation of Ta'veren than I was giving.

These people are spun out and used by the Wheel to correct itself when the weave begins to drift from the intended Pattern. Since the purpose of ta'veren is to influence life threads to create change, the destinies of ta'veren themselves are more strictly controlled by the Wheel of Time itself than those of an average person.

So yeah, a Joker is definitely not one of these. XD Or if he is, it's because the Wheel has decided this world needs to be thoroughly Jokered, and he exists explicitly to break the fate-like mechanism governing the ages and achieve (optionally in conjunction with attendant Bell) a world that lacks an explicit force of evil periodically breaking free and needing to be beaten back, but where people are still recognizably people and things are allowed to hurt in the good way. XDDDDDDDD

edit: Still watching that LP of Riven, and whoa, the water effects in this world are soooo cooooool.