Hey everybody and welcome back to another Wheel of Time video. One of the most interesting things about the Wheel of Time series is the amazing depth of world building. Robert Jordan was an absolute master of not only building a large world, but giving a backstory and consistency to that world and also connecting it somewhat to our world today. In today's video we'll take a look at one of the most mysterious places in the Wheel of Time story, the Land of Mad Men. Well let's first thank our channel sponsor, audible.com. Audible is the world's largest depository of audiobooks and something I don't think I could go without right now. If you've never tried audiobooks in the past, it's an entirely different experience compared to reading. I've read the Wheel of Time books on paper but never experienced them through audiobook I highly encourage you to try. Kate Redding and Michael Kramer breathe life into the books in a very new way and it's a really cool experience. Just because you're one of my viewers, audible.com is going to give you a free audiobook. All you have to do is head to www.audibletrial.com, forward slash enables and sign up for the free trial. You're going to get a free audiobook that you can keep and you don't even have to keep their service. But I don't know why you wouldn't because you get a new audiobook each month and it's super cheap. But it's also hit the spoiler warning for the video. Today's video will carry a spoiler rating of yellow with very minor non-plot based spoilers for the entire series. I'm not going to mention anything plot related at all but I will be talking generally about cultures and locations from the story that are talked about later in the books. This isn't going to spoil anything for you but if you don't want any backstory whatsoever then I would save this video for later. So the Land of Mad Men is a location in the Wheel of Time that isn't ever visited and barely spoken of within the story. Yet it has a backstory and a history of sorts as well as indigenous peoples and possibly some ties to our world. It's certainly a location that I was very interested in as soon as I saw it on the world map for the Wheel of Time. So as there isn't a ton of information on the Land of Mad Men we're really only going to break this analysis down into two separate parts. First we'll talk about the geography of the Land of Mad Men and talk about why it really never is a part of the rest of the world. Then we'll talk about the indigenous peoples of the land and their social structures as far as we know them. So let's start by taking a look at the geography of the Land of Mad Men. The Land of Mad Men is actually a continent-sized island that lies in the southern hemisphere of the world of the Wheel of Time. The island is roughly 5,000 miles south of the Westlands, the area that the main story takes place. That's an enormous distance. To put this in perspective, I live in Columbus, Ohio here in the United States. London is only 3,800 miles from me. To go 5,000 miles away from where I live, I'd have to go all the way to Moscow. Additionally, the continent is roughly 8,000 miles from the continent of Sean Chan, the only other land mass to have a part of itself in the southern hemisphere of the world. That is roughly the distance between Columbus where I live in Calcutta, India. Needless to say, the continent called the Land of Mad Men is a very, very isolated place in the world of the Wheel of Time. In fact, outside of the sea folk, none of the people of the Westlands even know of its existence. The sea folk will not actually visit the island anymore, or map its edges, but they have sailed around it at great peril to themselves. The continent is roughly 3,000 miles across, and 2,000 miles north to south at its largest point, according to the sea folk. What's interesting is that the island also lies about 500 miles north from the southern ice cap of the world. To put this in perspective, a very tip of Chile in South America is 600 miles from the furthest reaching portion of the Antarctic Peninsula, and many more hundreds of miles from the mainland of Antarctica. The Land of Mad Men within the story lies very, very close to the southern ice sheet, and likely has a fairly cold climate. The sea folk report that the island has many visible active volcanoes on its shores that seem to be violently erupting often. There's also a great deal of seismic activity on the continent, and in proximity to the continent. Due to this seismic activity, the sea folk report many icebergs floating around the ocean north of the continent, and actually all around it. They believe that the earthquakes and eruptions break loose large chunks of ice from the southern ice sheet, and of course they float all over the place. This combined with the intense storms and winds make the area very treacherous to sail, and is the main reason why the sea folk have not attempted to visit often. So what do we know about the people on the land of the madmen? Well they're madmen, right? Well, we actually know very, very little about them. Again, what little information there is comes from the sea folk. What is known is that the continent has never really recovered from the breaking of the world, which took place roughly 3500 years prior to the start of the story. If you want to see a video talking about the Age of Legends and the events that led to the breaking, make sure to check out my two part series on the fall of the Age of Legends. I'll have those videos linked. It'll give you a little bit more backstory here. But during the breaking, male channelers went crazy and disrupted the world seismically, as well as any type of people organization. This appears to never have ended in the land of madmen. The people have reported to live in small, Hubble-type villages scattered around the continent. They're extremely violent and distant to outsiders, and if they see someone that's not from their clan or village, they're all going to try to kill them on sight. If you were to visit the land of madmen and not get killed on sight, you would likely run into channels of both sexes. One of the main differences between the land of madmen and the continents of the Westlands and Sean Chan is that there are no groupings of female channelers that ever came together to hunt down the male channelers. Without a central body to oppose them, the men went crazy and lived on in the world, putting the entire continent in a continual state of upheaval and destruction. In fact, it's believed that the male channelers on the continent are the main cause of the near-constant seismic and volcanic activity. Without a set of societal structures and norms, the land is essentially an anarchy and is never really recovered from what it was like during the actual breaking of the world when humanity almost went extinct. So because of that, in regards to the population on the island, obviously there's nothing that's really known here, no one's been any major amount of time on the island, but I would think it's a safe assumption to say that it's got a very low population despite the very large size of the land. The land of madmen appears to be roughly the same size as the Westlands, but I would assume an absolute fraction of the population without any trade or industry to support population growth and combine that with the instability due to the rampant, crazy, channelers running over the place. This sounds like a pretty awful place to live. Lastly, it's fairly obvious that the island is meant to represent the continent of Australia. The two continents are roughly the same size and given that the world of the Wheel of Time is meant to represent our world just in a different age of the turning of the wheel, it would make sense that various continents, although somewhat changed by time, would still exist. Thematically calling the continent the land of madmen may have had some connection with the origins of the non-aboriginal population of Australia, being prisoners from England, essentially England and Ireland used Australia for various penal location colonies during the late 1700s and early 1800s. Obviously, those prisoners aren't necessarily mad or crazy, but this seems to share a thematic similarity to the world of the Wheel of Time. In case you're curious, the land of madmen is not really mentioned at all in the main sequence of the story and the only real information regarding the continent comes from two companion books. With most of that coming from the big white companion book released back in 1987, long before the books were finished. So what do you all think about the land of madmen? One question I'd love to have answered from all of you is what you think will happen to the land of madmen after the conclusion of the story. I don't address it here because I kind of wanted to keep this video spoiler free, but I'm curious what many of you think. Please let me know in the comments below and while you're at it, join my channel's Discord server. We basically talk about the Wheel of Time all the time there. We voice chat, we have spoiler free channels for those reading the books. It's also a good amount of fun, especially while everybody's quarantined. You don't need to be an expert or anything on technology. All you have to do is click the link in the description of the video and it'll teach you everything you need to know about joining Discord. Most of the folks there never knew what Discord was before they joined it, so if you feel like your technology not inclined, you'll still be able to do it. I'm looking forward to talking to all of you there. Please like the video and subscribe to the channel to be updated when I release new Wheel of Time content. Check out the Patreon if you want to be one of the many that helps support the channel and the creation of the GreatPlight.com community website that we're building or currently building I should say. Thank you to everybody who supports me there on Patreon. You guys are super appreciated. Thanks everybody for watching and until next time, peace out. Tinker said the neighbor board can probably get it done. He's far too inexperienced. I never go that young. I'm sure he can be broken in or top, but he's too sweet. So Tinker, oh, did Tinker won't you mend above for me?