#matlayne

markantonys:

mat throughout book 3: i want nothing to do with elayne! except she’s in trouble and needs me so i SUPPOSE i will be FORCED to help her.

mat throughout books 4-5: i want nothing to do with rand! except he’s in trouble and needs me so i SUPPOSE i will be FORCED to help him.

mat throughout books 6-7: i want nothing to do with elayne or rand! except rand wants me to go pick up elayne and now she’s running off into trouble so i SUPPOSE i will be FORCED to help both of them.

conclusion: mat should be rand AND elayne’s boyfriend AND warder

acos chapters 30-end: ebou dar crew

• “elayne had not been so glad to see anyone since…since mat cauthon appeared in the stone of tear. a horrendous thought.” I SCREAMED AT THIS matlayne rights!!!! elayne and mat have the hugest crushes on each other and are so mad about it! this is an enemies to lovers goldmine, and it was wasted! if rj had been more open to the idea of men sharing a woman instead of only women sharing a man (we do see myrelle and sort of sevanna having multiple men but both of those are framed as Bad And Scandalous), i truly believe mat and rand might have both dated elayne. the chemistry is there, and i swear they think about each other differently than, for example, mat and nynaeve think about each other (mat’s constantly thinking about elayne’s sun hair and dimples and how pretty she is, and elayne is doing a lot more internal acknowledging of mat being Maybe Okay Actually than nynaeve has in this book). and especially when you consider **future book spoiler i’m not supposed to know yet but do** that mat literally does end up in an “oh no i hate nobles but i’m falling for one” romance that, in my opinion which is based on my vague spoiler knowledge since i haven’t actually read a word of that romance yet, is just a walmart version of the gucci that is matlayne. we could’ve had it all dammit!!
• also, i 100% adore randlayne, but i’m hollering extra about the fact that elayne was also reunited with rand and made out with him a bunch of times since mat appeared at the stone, but does not count THAT as the gladdest she’s ever been to see someone jkfjgh (i know this line is just in the context of being rescued from a tense situation but let me have this)
  
• elayne asserting her dominance with the other aes sedai in ebou dar!! i say that’s my baby queen and i’m really proud!!
• when the aes sedai are now looking to elayne to make decisions: “all she had wanted was for them to admit she really was aes sedai. she fought a momentary urge to protest that she was too young, too inexperienced.” these characters are all just babies having to save the world :(((
  
• i forgot to mention in a previous chapter but my heart burst over aviendha taking off rand’s bracelet and refusing to wear it until elayne had one too, and now nynaeve recalls asking aviendha to borrow the bracelet: “aviendha had snatched it to her bosom as if it was her most precious possession, and of all things, elayne began comforting her. nynaeve would not have been surprised to see the pair fall weeping on one another’s shoulders.” MY HEART!!!! elayne/avi/rand triad is literally so good and sensible and natural, we don’t need romantic min/rand at all, that relationship is seriously starting to feel extraneous
• “there was something odd going on there, and if she had not known those two were too sensible for such nonsense, she would have suspected a man at the root of it.” Bi And Poly Behavior Baffles Local Monogamous Heterosexual
  

• nynaeve gets unblocked!!!!!!!! i’m so proud of her!!!!
• lanaeve reunion!! in the form of lan rescuing nynaeve from drowning and her immediately puking her guts out right at his feet. i love them so much.
• ok i have to take that back because nynaeve just slapped and punched lan a bunch of times after finding out myrelle got his bond once again i am asking for wot women to stop beating up their boyfriends, good god!
• but once lan explains and nynaeve realizes how dead inside he looks, she becomes more understanding, thankfully. “with an effort, she moderated her tone; he was ill, and harsh words never helped sickness.” mental illness being acknowledged by a character who isn’t experiencing it personally, in MY wheel of time? it’s more likely than you think! woohoo!
• awww nynaeve makes lan laugh for the first time since moiraine “died” ❤️❤️ “you will be my warder, and my husband, for a very long time. i will not let you die. do you understand that? i can be as stubborn as i have to be.” nynaeve really said i’m gonna fight god and win for this man ❤️ tho i do feel that this is all pretty rushed and that lan is not in a good mental or emotional place to commit to a marriage right now, but whatever, i learned long ago that i have to try my best to suspend disbelief when it comes to wot romances. and i suppose that in a world approaching the last battle, there’s no point waiting for “the right time” to marry someone you love.
• i already made a post about this when i first read it but i have to discuss it here too: one of the kin mistook mat for elayne’s warder and i screamed!!!! this is literally so mean!!!! at this point we have had 1) mat’s thoughts about how hard it is to keep elayne out of trouble getting interrupted by someone asking if he’s ever thought about becoming a warder, 2) mat in salidar receiving multiple offers to become someone’s warder, 3) mat spending an entire book and a half fretting about elayne’s safety (actually two and a half counting the old days of tdr), and now 4) mat straight up being mistaken for elayne’s warder. WHAT is the POINT!! why would you do this to me! what’s this all been about! add “mat as elayne’s warder” to “elayne/avi/rand triad” and “mat and rand both dating elayne” on the list of “things that are literally so obvious and perfect yet inexplicably do not happen”
• leaving the palace, mat is jumpy and afraid that tylin might spring out at him from anywhere. he mentions that she had half a dozen servants seize him in the hall the night before and drag him to her rooms and also that she used his scarf to tie his hands up “before he knew what she was doing,” says that she treats him like a toy and that she makes him feel helpless and has him “ready to jump out of his skin,” feels “strangled” and “frantic” at the thought of staying half a week longer in ebou dar, thinks that he would rather face MOGHEDIEN than tylin, and again feels like he’s about to cry. not much to say about this that i didn’t say in the post about the last chunk of chapters, but my heart is breaking :((( “against tylin, he had no more [protection] than he did against the daughter of the bloody nine moons, whoever she was” fuck this, i am picking mat up and gently setting him down into the polycule! THAT’S the romantic future he deserves!
  
• in happier news, elayne is dressed ridiculously fancy to for a trip to the seedy part of town in which they’re hoping not to attract attention, and i love her very much. mat says that the embroidery on her dress is “thickly emphasizing the oval that exposed half her bosom” he is shook by The Titties, as aviendha was in a previous chapter. he proceeds to say that elayne has a pretty face and to mention AGAIN her dimple which he claims she always expects to work as a method of persuasion. mat is literally the uno meme “stop thinking about elayne’s dimple or draw 25″
• “one thing he had to give her; she was too smart to go on with what obviously would not work” all i got out of this is that mat thinks elayne is smart
  
• mat says “i know rand’s afraid you [lan] are [dead]” mat is aware of at least one (1) of rand’s feelings! cauthor crumb!
• lan and nynaeve were married by the sea folk last night! i’m crushed that it happened offscreen, i want to know about sea folk marriage customs! i love marriage customs! and weddings! and love! mat being math lady meme about lan and nynaeve being married is killing me jkfgh
• mat tells elayne the truth about tylin and she laughs at him and calls it “a taste of his own medicine.” yiiiiiiiiikes. yikes!!!!! this is definitely elayne’s Worst Moment in the series so far. to her credit she does apologize a page later and offer to help him with tylin (though more because she realized “hey, mat’s being nice to me, i should be nice to him too” than because she realized “hey, rape is bad”). however, it is quite clear that the author doesn’t take mat’s situation seriously, so if the author doesn’t take it seriously, how can i expect a character to? and i’m calling ooc behavior as well, elayne “goes crazy trying to help anyone who shows the slightest sign of distress” trakand wouldn’t react like that to mat’s distress no matter how annoying she found him, that’s not her heart.
• when a character does something shitty, if it’s a character i don’t like it’s their fault, but if it’s my fav it’s the author’s fault. hope that clears things up <3
• but we have passed what i do believe is the worst matlayne moment of the series (i’m glad i knew about this ahead of time or i would’ve been a lot madder - at rj not elayne, of course) so we can move on to their sweet moments
• mat tries to give elayne the foxhead for protection against moghedien!!! like, this is HUGE! we know how scared mat is of channeling even from channelers he’s friendly with, let alone from a forsaken, and how tightly he clings to the foxhead and depends on it for his safety. and yet, he decides elayne’s safety is more important to him! i have a moment in a wip fic where mat gives rand the foxhead and it’s a major gesture of love (god knows when that fic will see the light of day (it’s part 4 of my putting mat in the polycule series and part 3 isn’t even done yet) so forget you read that), so imagine my pure joy when that Actually Happened in the book with elayne!!
• “she was tall for a woman, but she still had to look up at him. she might never have seen him before.” 1) every time elayne’s height is mentioned i feel like i’ve been punched in the face. she’s even worse than mat when it comes to giving off short energy. she is literally 5′2″ in my mind, what do you MEAN she’s tall? i’ll never give up my mental image of short queen elayne and short king mat + actual giants rand and aviendha. i know aviendha could pick mat up and bridal carry him, i know this for a fact (granted she probably could do that even if he WAS taller than her - which he certainly is not - because she is very strong. oh my god imagine aviendha giving mat piggyback rides!!! i have to lie down.) 2) “character A looking at character B like they’ve never seen them before” is a common wot phrase and every single time it makes me think Realizing Romantic Feelings and i go feral. i vividly remember an instance of mat looking at rand like he’d never seen him before.
  
• “elayne reached up to pull his hat off and slip the cord over his had. she actually tucked the foxhead into his shirt and patted it before handing him his hat.”
  
• mat: “i made a promise too; i promised to keep the pair of you alive.” elayne: “you wear it. after all, you can hardly keep your promise if moghedien kills you.” 
  
• elayne tells mat he must be careful! she cares about him!!!! “sometimes i forget my duty to my subjects. you are a worthy subject, matrim cauthon.” oh my god elayne just admit you have a crush on him, would you?
• i realize i’m just typing out this entire scene wholesale but i’m having EMOTIONS
  
• elayne learning new swears from mat jksjdf i love her i love them
• elayne: fuck!
• nynaeve: [gasps]
• mat: where the fuck did she learn that?!
• “she understood? she understood, and not one acid little comment, not one cutting remark? and he was her subject. her worthysubject.” why do i feel like, despite all his harping on about not respecting nobility and not considering himself a subject andor, mat went when elayne called him her worthy subject. ohohoho he secretly has a Queen Elayne kink, doesn’t he? just like rand “light help me i did want to kneel and worship her” al’thor
• “sobriety. light, what a word to apply to mat cauthon! tylin must be scaring him more than he thought, if he was shriveling up this way.” hmm is THIS the intended purpose of the tylin thing? to traumatize mat into wanting a quieter, more settled life, so that he’s nice and tamed for his future wife to scoop him up? i like the greater maturity and sense of responsibility he’s starting to show, trying to keep the peace with the girls and keep his promises to them and protecting elayne from danger and feeling responsible for the band members’ safety, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of his joie de vivre :(
• “mat would have [followed elayne] if nynaeve and lan had not been in his way…he deserved to be there, at least, when this fabulous bloody bowl was uncovered.” we both know that the real reason is that you want to keep close to elayne. because you’re her warder. or SHOULD HAVE BEEN IF THERE WAS ANY JUSTICE IN THE WORLD i will literally never get over this.
  
• mat trying to get to the stairs while nynaeve and lan are arguing is the “can i please get a waffle” vine
• and now, we reach it. the best matlayne scene of all time, the highlight of the entire book, and one of my favorite scenes in the whole series to date!
• “his eyes went from janira’s crumpled corpse to elayne. he had promised to keep her safe for rand. he had promised. with a cry, he launched himself at the killer, ashandarei extended.” i screamed enough over this on first read, but then on the next page mat mentions something about avenging elayne and i realized: he thinks she’s dead right now. he comes into the room, sees “dead” elayne and the guy who killed her, thinks it’s too late to do anything to help her, yet, rather than turning and running to save himself since there’s nothing actually helpful he can do here, he stays to fight the killer PURELY to avenge her. because he promised rand he would keep her safe and thinks that she died on his watch. i am not okay!!!!
  
• and of COURSE i have to scream about the matrandlayne-ness of it all!!! even if the 3 of them are never in a scene all together at any point in the series (but maybe they will be? maybe??? i’m not holding my breath tho) we’ll always have “he had promised to keep her safe for rand.” if you showed me that line and erased all my memories of this book and of every matrandlayne fic i’ve read or written and asked me if i thought that line came from canon or from a fic, i 100% would’ve thought it was the fic. AAAHHH it’s just so much!!! i want that line tattooed on my forehead!!!
• “‘you can’t have her,’ he said loudly. promises. … ‘you can’t bloody have her.’ he started forward, keeping the medallion spinning. the first step was the hardest, but he had a promise to keep.” LITERALLY THE MOST ICONIC LINE EVER so far my top 2 most romantic lines in all of wot are matlayne “you can’t bloody have her” and cauthor “i won’t leave you, i won’t leave you no matter what.” romance peaked with those two lines. and the fact that mat again has his promise to rand in mind here, it’s SO matrandlayne i can’t. i can’t!!!!! the first step was the hardest but he had a promise to keep
  
• addition bc i just noticed something else: after the fight, elayne wakes up and calls mat’s name and mat hurries to her side and tells us “there was shouting from somewhere below, but nynaeve and the rest would have to take care of themselves for the moment” elayne is his #1 priority!!!
• “her eyes latched onto his, and if he had ever thought she looked at him as if he were a stranger, he saw it for true now.” USING THIS PHRASE AGAINST ME AGAIN!!! this would’ve been the PERFECT moment for a Big Damn Kiss™!!!
  
• “she drew a breath that did interesting things to that oval cut-out.” even in the immediate aftermath of them both almost dying, mat is shook by The Titties. me too mat.
  
• “‘thank you, mat. i apologize for everything i ever did or thought.’ she sounded as though she really meant it. ‘i keep building up toh toward you,’ she smiled ruefully, ‘but i am notgoing to let you beat me. you are going to have to let me save you at least once to balance matters.’ ‘i’ll see what i can arrange,’ he said dryly.” elayne ❤️❤️❤️ she might be stubborn, but she admits when she’s wrong (so fuck you to all the elayne haters who use her being mean to mat as a reason to hate her - she apologizes! very genuinely!). i fully support a future scenario where mat is a damsel in distress and elayne rescues him. gimme!!
  
• “[birgitte] was the source of everything he knew about gholam…and he would not have revealed that on a hot grill.” i love their friendship SO much such a shame that mat had so much wonderful relationship development with various people this book and was then immediately sent away from all of them for, i’m guessing, the majority of the remainder of the series
  
• mat describes elayne’s eyes as “cool pools of deep blue water” add that to the list of “very platonic metaphors mat has for describing elayne’s appearance.” like, can you IMAGINE him describing nynaeve or egwene or birgitte as having hair like the sun and eyes like cool pools of deep blue water? (well nynaeve and egwene don’t look like that but you get the point)
• “were they trying to get back at him? was it just a case of ‘mat wants to be in charge so much, let him see how well he can do without us’? he might have believed it of nynaeve, any time but this anyway, but not of elayne, not anymore.” GROWTH!! and mat confirms a little later that he is now “in elayne’s good books.” this was one of the central relationships of the book, i honestly think they got more pagetime and development than lan & nynaeve and aviendha & elayne, and possibly even rand & min
  
• and one last mention by mat of elayne’s dimple, god bless. the man is obsessed.
• “elayne, though, just murmured ‘a most observantsubject’ in tones of rueful amusement.” queen and subject roleplay is totally gonna become a kink thing for them, i just know it.
  
• mat tells tylin he’s going to miss her and thinks to himself that it’s true??? what THE fuck!!!!!!!!!! i don’t want to spoil my matlayne euphoria so i am simply not going to think about this. but note my list at the beginning of this post, which are mat’s most recent feelings about tylin before this point, and observe the SUDDEN, WILD, AND UNREALISTIC change of heart.
• tylin pinches mat’s ass in front of the 4 girls, to his embarrassment, and while aviendha and birgitte both laugh at him (), elayne has an expression of “commiseration” and nynaeve of “glowering disapproval,” and tylin says that nynaeve thinks mat is a little boy needing protection. so elayne and nynaeve did at least make an effort to intervene with her on his behalf, okay, that’s a step in the right direction!
• and the reason mat gets separated from the gang for, i believe, the next several books is because olver left the palace to go wander the city and mat tells the girls to make their gateway and leave and he’ll meet them at the farm later. DAMMIT OLVER!!! friendship ended with olver! how could you do this to mat and more importantly to me! i know it’s not your fault but i’m literally so devastated at the prospect of how long it’ll be before mat sees any of the gang again. matlayne was the only thing that kept me going past the cauthor separation in the last book, but what do i have to look forward to now? at least there will likely be more avilayne next book, and they’ll reunite with rand soon (book 9 i think?), and i THINK mat sees elayne again a book or two before book 14 (which will have the cauthor reunion), so i suppose i’ve got my little crumbs, my little carrot on a stick leading me to get through each subsequent book. the great thing about wot multishipping is that if one of your ships is separated you’ll likely have another spending time together in the meantime! still, i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again, the characters and their relationships with each other are the heart of this series to me and i lose more interest the more split up everyone gets.
• for the show i’m instituting a ta’veren buddy system and declaring that no ta’veren should be allowed to go anywhere without being accompanied by at least one other ta’veren (this is counting egwene and nynaeve since they’re ta’veren in the show and should’ve been in the books. anon who told me after i finished book 1 that i would come to see that it’s empowering for the girls to influence stuff by choice instead of by ta’veren-ness, i do NOT see that and i still think they should’ve been ta’veren.)
• nobody expects the seanchan invasion! except me because i’d been spoiled. much as i wish this wasn’t happening, it’s certainly a cinematic scene imagining mat running through the war-torn streets desperately shouting for his son. one of those moments i can perfectly see a tv adaptation of in my head. also, these whole last few pages i found myself with the seanchan section of “from the west” stuck in my head, which is how you know it’s a good Villain Theme Tune.
• mat gets crushed by a falling wall, the evil foil to my beloved wall in the caemlyn garden, and that’s the last we’ll see of him until the book AFTER next book, much to my devastation.

MAT!!! RAND!!! LAYNE!!! MATRANDLAYNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mat every time he sees elayne