I was wondering something.

In TGS, Rand balefires Graendals entire palace, killing not just her(probably) but also everyone who serves her. He also burns all those threads backwards a bit. During this event, both Min and Nynaeve are absolutely horrified at what Rand just did. Nynaeve actually is so disturbed that she actually goes to Cadsuane and becomes all submissive in the hope that Cadsuane will change the course Rand has taken. Surely what Rand did was a horrific evil on a grand scale. A true atrocity.

Or is it?

I was thinking about this and it occurred to me to wonder why exactly are Min and Nynaeve so absolutely horrified. Why is Rand so convinced that he has damned himself. Why does Min think that what happened must be destroying Rand inside. I mean think about it, what actually happened there?

We KNOW from several sources (LTT, the boy, forsaken scenes) that all those people in the fortress other than Graendal were just mindless drones. Min and Nynaeve know it too since Rand explains it to them. They were essentially already dead. Yes, they might have been moving around, their lungs breathing, their hearts pumping. But we can say the same for that little girl Rand tried to resurrect with Callandor. Is it then murder when Rand pulled back his flows and let the girls body die?

Without awareness and free will, without intelligence and sentience, things which Graendal has taken away from them, can the people in the palace truly be said to be alive?

And if they cannot, does that not mean that the ONLY person that was truly ALIVE in that place was Graendal herself? A monster by any measure. So really, is what Rand did evil at all? Did any innocent civilian actually die?

Now yes, Rand does use balefire and we know its dangerous. Infact, perhaps that is the real reason for the horror that Min and Nynaeve feel. But really does that make sense either? How many people were in that palace? A hundred? Two? Lets go for broke and say Graendal had three hundred people in his palace. Now we know that Rand knows the damage balefire causes, he does not yet want to destroy the pattern at this point so we can assume that he regulated the amount of power used to only burn the people back as little as possible. Let's say 15 minutes.

Now you could argue that 15 minutes is too little since Rand used the Choedan Kal itself to do the job. However I would argue that the reason he had to use the CK was to erase the entire palace at once and not to burn the people back days or weeks. Remember that at this point Rand still wants to save the pattern so he would not do this.

So we have 300 people balefired with each one burned back in time 15 minutes. This does produce a reaction. Min describes it as reality warping around them. Perhaps this then is the atrocity here. Rand actually damages the pattern itself, endangering everything. He comes very close to destroying the world here.

Or does he?

If all it took to damage the pattern in a way that was in any way significant was to balefire 300 people back 15 minutes, then why has Moridin not done that? I mean he could just travel to some obscure village or town and start blasting away. Given how strong we know Moridin is, he could easily balefire 300 people. Heck, there are a lot of villages so if Moridin wanted he could probably balefire more than 300 people easily. In a few weeks he could probably balefire 3000. Or more! And each one more than 15 minutes. And these would be people who would actually be alive and sentient. With more active threads than the drones in Graendals palace.

We know why the rest of the forsaken don't do this. They want to rule and as such don't want the pattern to unravel. But we KNOW that Moridin is different. During the dream-meet he openly admits that the DO is going to unmake the pattern, that he knows it and that he thinks this is a really good thing.

It seems to me than that when we take the fact that Moridin does not do this together with other facts such as Rands comment that he has seen many thousands burned from the pattern together with the fact that apparently during the War of power, balefire was used on entire cities, it seems to me that erasing 300 drones who probably had very little influence on anything, and one forsaken, would do very little real damage to the pattern. To have a significant effect would probably require tens of thousands of people balefired or Moridin would constantly be out there secretly balefiring people as fast as he could.

Nothing else makes sense to me. Yes, Min does have a reaction that is written as pretty freaky but we have nothing to compare this reaction to. It is entirely subjective to her. For all we know this is actually the pattern going "Meh!" because what Rand did was utterly insignificant.

So really, why is it that Min and Nynaeve are so horrified? What was so terrible about what Rand did? It may not exactly be a thing of sunshine and little dancing kittens but I would say that many things Rand has done before have actually been worse. Rand was correct to do what he did to get rid of Graendal and Min and Nynaeve are just being fools.

I don't deny that Rand does go psycho in TGS, and that many of the things such as threatening to rain fire on the borderlanders show that he has totally lost it. But is this one specific act, balefiring Graendals palace, truly as wrong as it is suggested? I think not.