Sure we know who did it now, but I figure this theory makes about as much sense as every other convoluted explanation that’s cropped up to explain Asmodean’s death over the years.

Edit: Hello to everyone streaming in from Tor Books and Reddit! I’m elated to have all of you visiting my little corner of the Internet. This comic is still very new, but I hope you’ll consider adding it to your bookmarks or RSS feed! Thanks again!

I originally posted this comic over at Avallanath where it got the attention of an editor at Dragonmount and got a good bit of attention. I’ve been mixing in new comics I’ve drawn with old comics from the Avallanath archive since relaunching the comic at this new URL and wanted to clear that up since this one got so much attention when I posted it at the old site. It’s very specific to The Wheel of Time readers but it still makes me giggle even after seeing it so many times.

In WoT the Choedan Kal is, to put it in Troper Terms, a lost superweapon of unimaginable power that definitely crosses the Godzilla Threshold, or the point at which the good guys are so totally screwed that the massive collateral damage of using such a superweapon is still a better alternative than letting the bad guy win. Let’s be clear about the power on display here. That line about challenging the creator comes directly from the novels and its implied with a literary sledgehammer on more than one occasion that a person wielding those weapons could melt the world without blinking.

In short they’re the fantasy equivalent of the Death Star, only more powerful and without any vulnerabilities like poorly placed exhaust ports or shield generators that are susceptible to carebear attacks.

And I’m taking the piss out of Wheel of Time with this comic but it illustrates a larger problem with science fiction and fantasy. These weapons are all over the place. The granddaddy of modern fantasy, Lord of the Rings, had the one ring, but Tolkien was smart enough to realize that placing a superweapon of unimaginable power into the good guys’ hands would make for a very short and boring curbstomp battle. So he made that power into the ring’s fatal weakness, added a layer of temptation, and boom you have a potential plothole flipped around and turned into one of the best pieces of character development the genre has ever seen.

That’s not the case with other series that bring up these superweapons. In Wheel of Time, to stick with the example in today’s comic, the heroes don’t use it to fight off the bad guys because they feel that it’s too dangerous. That’s it. Humanity’s savior has the potential to wipe every bad guy off of the face of the map in an instant by using these weapons but instead destroys them because he doesn’t trust himself with that much power. That’s the sort of thing that might possibly work if it was handled well, but in the books it comes across more as a last minute handwave because Jordan had an Oh Crap moment and realized he’d built this massive plothole into middle of his otherwise intricately woven story.

And Jordan still handles it better than most other authors. There’s a reason that he’s one of the most popular and influential fantasy authors of the last quarter century. If a master like Jordan has that much trouble handling introducing a superweapon into his story then just imagine how it’s handled by lesser authors. It usually isn’t pretty. Rowling, time turners, and an unsatisfactory handwave at the end of Order of the Phoenix comes to mind as one of many examples.

I like to think that today’s comic is a more realistic portrayal of what would happen when the good guys realize they have a consequence-free way of winning the series. It’s definitely what I would do if I found myself fighting an unambiguously unspeakable evil and someone handed me a button that would make them all go away.