As can be seen from my blogroll, I intended to keep track of and participate in the Blog Challenge, but that never happened. So when Zhayena posted a new challenge at the NC blog, it didn’t take me long to decide to join.

The challenge is supposed be writing about a scene in a book or a film that made me cry, but the real challenge is to choose between all the nifty tear-provoking stuff I’ve read and watched in the last couple of years. Or, when I look more closely, I see that that would have been a real challenge, hadn’t Zhayena written that we could write about one or more such scenes. So let’s get this /freak) show on the road, shall we?

Also, I’ll thor in a “more” thing here, as this post will contain spoilers from book 11 of The Wheel of Time, book three of The Farseer Trilogy (also some small ones for The Tawny Man Trilogy, although that one’s tiny), season six of Buffy, and season 5 of Angel (this one’s pretty cencored, though), in that order. If you think you can do it, feel free to skip the paragraphs you don’t want to get anything spoiled from. But don’t complain if you see something you shouldn’t. (Also, I suspect that this will reduce the number of people who read this post to about 1, or so, as I doubt anyone but Lotta have read or watched all of this….)

The first one is actually a scene from WoT, and from the latest book, at that — Knife of Dreams. Half-way through or so, Nynaeve and Lan have a small quarrel (nothing abnormal there, and if it’d provoked any kind of crying, it would have been from frustration). This quarrel, however, have real consequences, as opposed to a lot of their other ones. Lan says that he has to go to the Blight to gather an army for Tarmon Gai’don, and Nynaeve agrees to take him to the Borderlands. He does of course believe that she is gonna take him to Fal Dara or something, when she in fact kicks him out of a Travel gate in World’s End. She then spends a day or so Travelling across the Borderlands, warning men of Lan’s coming, and urging them to join him when he comes. Maybe not something for people who aren’t Jordan fanboys, but I thought this was done with such pathos, in just the kind of way I like, that a couple of tears ran down my face. No amounts of retelling is gonna explain why, though.

Next, there’s the end of the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. It’s in the area of three years since I read it, but I distinctly remember crying during the epilogue (or possibly the last chapter), when Fitz travels back to the Seven Duchies all by himself, and when he sees how Burrich — the man who’s virtually his father — and his beloved, Molly, live kinda happily together. A lot of this was stuff that had built over time, too, but the epilogue summed up how everything went swell with everyone, except Fitz, who’d saved the kingdom, but lost the girl, his family, his friends, his life, and ended up living in a remote cottage all by himself. Was kinda sad, that, especially when I’d followed him in a first-person narrative since he was three years old or so.

Third, the death of Tara Maclay in season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This was even worse the second time around. She and Willow seemed to finally have overcome their problems, when Warren sends a stray bullet through her chest, splattering blood all over Willow’s face. I almost bawled like a babe.

Finally, the death of ******** ****** in season 5 of Angel. I cried even more here, the second time around. And no wonder, for this is an incredibly tragic scene, not only for the character who dies, but also for the character in whose arms ******** ****** dies. (I cencored the name so that my sister won’t happen to see it. I won’t have this spoiled for her.)