I am starting to get a little sick of this notion that Rand somehow went bad. Yes, he was a bit messed up in the head and made some bad choices, but what did he actually do that was so evil? He killed Graendal and there was collateral damage. Oh well. Too bad. He was playing it safe and not being foolhardy and charging in to warn her. He did not put those people in Graendal's place, so he is not responsible for their deaths. You have a perfect moral right to kill a human shield when it is an ordinary criminal who is merely trying to rob you. To get a Forsaken? Meh.

As for his threats regarding the Borderlands (why didn't he kill that guy pretending to be Hurin, BTW? The REAL Hurin would remember seeing and commenting on grolm in Falme), they had it coming. They were diserters displaying hostile intent and evading his own reasonable compromises in attempting to place him in an even more hostile and dangerous situation. They were palcing themselves in a hostile position, and had abandoned their duties, leaving Rand's friend and mentor to sacrifice himself doing their job. Rand might have forced himself not to care about Lan's potential death, but that does not mean it doesn't hurt him as much as it could. At this point Rand, for some pretty good reasons, has just about exhausted his toleration of hostile forces in his rear. No matter how noble their intentions, the Borderlanders did cross a line and ran smack into the consequences. They knew that such an end was extremely probable, and quite frankly, who the hell do they think they are? Rand owes them nothing. His whole reason for being is to do what they are incapable of. They should be approaching him in humility and thanksgiving, if they are really true to the Borderland ideal. Their ignorance of Rand & his true situation is not Rand's problem, anymore than Gawyn's misguided and unrelenting desire for revenge. If Gawyn tries to kill Rand, he has the perfect right to defend himself, and I doubt even the man's siblings would hold it against him if he did end up killing Gawyn. The Borderlanders are in the same situation. Rand cannot possibly find out the truth of their peaceful or noble intentions (if in fact they are so, instead of the whining of spoiled children who have not gotten the recognition they seek) without unreasonably endangering himself, and by extension, the cause of the Light. For a Borderlander to endanger that is about as close as they can come to blasphemy. Even if Rand HAD gone all the way and blasted them to death, they had it coming.

The point of this, his killing of Semirhage and Elza and his threat to Cadsuane were all to show how much he had changed from who he used to be. And possibly Sanderson and/or Jordan might be moralizing idiots, but regardless of their opinions on the matter, aside from the first blow or whatever against Tam, he did not really do anything bad, and actually stopped himself the once or twice he almost did something evil.

They only thing more annoying than people defending the morally indefensible is people attempting to morally condemn that which is not immoral, because they do not understand the entirety of the concept or cannot reason things out. So let's have an end to this arrant nonsense about Rand committing atrocities or acting evil in this book.