The Wheel of Time Reread: A Memory of Light, Part 15

Re: Mat and Tuon: I would argue that for Tuon trust is far more important than love is, and I think it is clear, both here and in later chapters that she does trust him.

I liked the Rand / Tam sparring session, though I can’t say it was my favorite scene in the book (that would have to be Lan v. Demandred, although I have a soft spot for Nalasean’s scenes in Caemlyn in the prologue).

I do find it odd that you feel it’s necessary to have them notice what an enormous loss it is to have Rand lose a hand, but Mat seems not to be affected in even the slightest, tiniest bit by his loss of an eye, and everybody seems perfectly cool with that. As somebody who’s been gradually losing the use of one of his eyes since I was in grad school a decade ago, I can tell you that it’s a pretty huge pain in the ass, and although you get used to it over time, it’s still going to have a definite impact on, say, your ability to fight — which it never seems to for Mat. Luck aside, the way he carves up the Sharans later in the book lends creedence to the idea that he’s just as good a fighter as he ever was (i.e., significantly, massively superior to Lan in a sword-v-ashendarai contest).

People who don’t think Mat and Tuon love each other
/chinhands

(yes, it’s a weird, convuluted, mutual-loving-rivalry than a typical romance, but it totally works for them! They each needed someone who could balance out their worst faults and love/hate them enough to force them to improve themselves. Mat needed someone to kick his feet out from under him, and Fortuona is an extremely skilled and capable woman with more commanding abilities than Mat has in one… eh, I’ll be generous and give him a whole half of his body, because he’s so good at leading. Fortuona needed who could outwit her but still be trustworthy and remind her to be human sometimes while still being The Empress (may she live forever).
This is where I’d use Homestuck terminology because honestly they are the perfect example of blackrom. It is quite possible to love someone you hate).

Wcarter@13: Totally agree that Aludra would have made a much better love interest for Mat. I have never liked Mat and Tuon. I don’t understand why Mat seems determined to love her. Yes I get that he feels trapped by the prophecy, but I feel like it would be more in keeping with Mat’s character to keep to the bare minimum requirements rather than consciously trying to fall in love with her.

To me reading Mat and Tuon scenes has always been like watching love scenes in a movie where the actors have zero chemistry. You can see them going through the motions (in this case Mat more than Tuon, but I can see the arguments that from her cultural stand point she is trying too) but it is completely unebelievable and almost slightly cringey to you as the spectator/reader.

I just do not understand what they see in each other. Both of them (in text) acknowledge characteristics they like/admire in the other, but these seem at odds with the rest of their personalities and world views. I don’t think it is just a cultural thing, although I can’t imagine Mat who is such a good guy at heart could ever countenance Tuon’s attitudes to slaves, women who can channel, etc., as Aviendha and Rand have pretty different cultures, and we see how this influences their relationship without making it difficult to believe in.

I find the consummation in public scene totally cringey. I can’t believe that RJ would have actually written it, at most I feel he would have aluded to it very subtley. It just seems totally bizarre and pointless – why not go back to her rooms!?

Dear Leigh,

Count me as one who totally agrees with you on Rand & Tam’s sparring/healing session, but totally disagrees with with you on Mat & Tuon. I find them fairly believable in their connection despite their differences.

I say this from experience. I met this woman who was my preferred physical type, had my values, beliefs, etc. and was in a relationship with her that should have been perfect, but turned out a bloody shambles.

Even as we were going through some very bad patches, complete strangers would come up to us saying what a great match we seemed to be! Just goes to show you that we live in world of illusion.

My current partner is of a different faith, different political belief, and of a different body type than I am usually attracted to… but just looking at her fills me with warmth and Aludra’s entire chapter of Illuminators would be needed to equal the fireworks in the bedroom!

This is one of the best skeins of comments I can recall. Yes, Tam and Rand = SWEET. I’m rereading tEotW, and their relationship is well developed there, and Rand’s love for and anguish over Tam is laid out plain and strong. The cited passage is sort of the wheel turning on the opening chapter of the series, in which Tam gets to be the one to lead his boy back to safety.

The Mat/Tuon discussion is delicious (I feel like one of the Ael- or Eel-Finn savoring Mat, Rand and Moiraine at the same time: it’s awesome but painful, too). I think they love one another, but she won’t say it and he really never does say it, does he? He is the most mind-opening thing she has ever encountered; he’s told her all sorts of things that she disbelieved, and yet they just keep turning out to be true. He has the selected memories of thousands of men, in all kinds of situations – war, politics, dancing, etc. He can aid her in so many ways she could never be rid of him.

Outside of Perrin, he’s the only one of the SuperKids who has had any kind of high-level, agreeable dealings with the Seanchan, and in every case he seems to just keep on being Mat and chopping through their intensely structured and limited social construct (and he has witnessed that the common people actually are treated well within that system). I doubt that he will ever agree with or countenance the subjugation of Aes Sedai or other channelers. The voluntary subjugation of people in the Seanchan system is something that they have to work out, but Mat probably presents some sort of balance to that, because he won’t play their game.

He’s actually only raffish instead of a rake: recall the dance scene in the inn with Betsy(?) when the newly-formed Band was marching south to Tear (tLoC?). Despite all the insinuations from the SuperGirls in particular, Mat never forced any woman to do anything; they either come to him or they don’t. He won’t stray on Tuon; she’s the most fun he’s had.

And finally, “doing it in the road” so to speak, actually didn’t happen. The Seanchan simply turned their minds to something else and paid no attention to Mat and Tuon, or if they did, they will never, ever admit it to anyone. One has to respect Tuon’s appreciation of her own status/culture.

“And then they consummated their not-loving-or-maybe-loving-but-just-not-saying-it-but-no-probably-just-not-loving-yeah-I-don’t-know-I-am-so-confused bizarro telegram marriage by fucking in public, The End.”

Leigh, you continue to soar to new heights! Thank God I wasn’t drinking something when I read that.

@41 Macster: We’ll get to Min in a little while. Suffice it to say I disagree. As to the argument that Mat is going to “change it from within”, well, that’s certainly plausible, but he never actually plans that, and even if he did it’s…not a great foundation for a loving relationship. “Hi honey, I got milk. So…thought any more about freeing the slaves? No? Okay, let’s watch Marley and Me tonight then.”

More broadly, my issue with Tuon and Mat isn’t that I don’t buy that they do (or would) love each other, or that purely on a personality level I don’t like them as a couple, or that Aludra makes more sense in a lot of ways, though all of those things are true. It’s that Tuon is the unrepentant, unapologetic head of an institution that is dedicated to fascistic enslavement of thousands of people. There’s even a line from Tuon’s POV (in book *mumblemumble*) where she mentions how much she enjoys “training” damane. We see in book 2 exactly what that means in all its horrifying detail, and that, to me, is a complete moral event horizon (don’t click that). She doesn’t just condone and tolerate the systematic enslavement, degradation, and dehumanization of human beings–she enjoys it!

I thought during the whole last third of the series that RJ was setting up a come-to-the-light moment (pun sort of intended) with Tuon and the damane, so I was shocked when the whole multi-book Setalle Anan dialogue didn’t really go anywhere. Was RJ saving it for the outriggers? Maybe, but those don’t exist and never will, so all we have to go on is what’s actually in the Wheel of Time. And in the Wheel of Time, we never get any indication that she’s changing her mind. At all.

In the end, it seemed to me like the freedom-loving Matrim Cauthon ended up marrying the series’ equivalent of, like, Jefferson Davis*. I simply cannot get past that. Can you tell I feel strongly about this? I hate it, and I hate that I hate it as much as I do. I want to love everything about my darling WoT. But try as I might, I can’t get over this. Unfortunately.

(*Sorry for the mental image. I tried and failed to come up with a female historical figure prominantly involved in slavery/the slave trade. Anyone?)

@Wet 64

Oh yes, the old moral relativism debate. *Waves to old undergraduate classes on political philosophy*. I think we can pretty safely say I’m a little more morally objectivist then you, but give me a little credit–I’m perfectly aware of the history of slavery, and I understand that I’m taking an arguably unnecessarily objectivist stance here (no, not that kind of Objectivism. Away, Ayn Rand! Shoo! Despite your last name, you are not wanted here!). I get that you disagree with me, but I have considered the implications of my views.

Anyways, we could rehash the old debate–I say I’m troubled by the implications of the idea that there is no such thing as intrinsic evil, you say I’m arrogantly projecting my own uprbringing, I say that you’re essentially rendering morality meaningless, you use the phrase “Western cultural imperialism” a lot, someone (probably me) invokes the Nazis, etc, etc. Let’s save some time and agree to disagree.

However, what I was trying (and, apparently, failing) to articulate vis-a-vis Mat and Tuon is a little different. I agree with everything you say about Seanchan culture, I think it’s a fabulously (and somewhat diabolically) constructed fictional society, and I really do love the character of Tuon just so long as I’m not being asked to be personally invested in her. But the issue for me isn’t my problem with the Seanchan–it’s Mat’s lack of problem.

Mat, like almost all of the main characters, has a fairly contemporary American/British/Western moral worldview (relatively speaking, of course). There’s a reason Jordan chose to have most of the main characters come from the very English Two Rivers/Andor region. The various customs we as readers (or, at least, those of us in the States) find peculiar–Aiel polygamy, Seafolk toplessness, Saldaean domestic relations, Illianer syntax, etc.–are for the most part also somewhat alien to our main cast. Just think how strange Mat found just about everything the Aiel or Ebou Dari did. It’s a very deliberate choice that Jordan made to ease us into this fantasy world.

That is why I found Mat’s nonplussitude (it’s a word, dammit) over the damane issue in the last few books so offputting. He was at Falme, he knows what Egwene went through, he did everything in his power in Book 9 to free the captive seafolk and Aes Seadai…and then sort of seems to stop being more than mildly uneasy with the whole institution.

To put it another way, though I personally am repulsed by the Seanchan, the problems I have with the Mat/Tuon relationship wouldn’t exist if Mat himself came from a culture that embraced slavery. If Mat were Seanchan, I wouldn’t find his stated love for Tuon strange or offputting at all.

For another (poor) semi-historical/semi-literary analogy: Mat deciding he’s in love with Tuon would be like Robin Hood suddenly deciding that crippling taxes on the poor aren’t that bad and shacking up with the Sheriff of Nottingham. I personally felt it really undercut his character.

Does that make a little more sense?

Weird, it wasn’t until I read your description of Rand’s accepting the pain of not being able to save every person in the world as a comparison to the never ending pain of his side wounds that I realized that the resolution of his storyline neatly bypassed the whole issue of healing the never-healing wounds. I can now hear the death knell of thousands of theories on that subject crying out for vengence. I smile at their pain.

Borderline political, risking deletion, but can’t resist Freelancer’s pop-quiz @74:

Answer is “of course not.” I should have the right to own a nuclear warhead (or stockpile of Sarin) until I mis-use it, at which point I should be punished. Kim Jong Un agrees with me.

Wetlandernw @70. If you are insinuating that Hitler initiates the notion of racial superioirty, that is not correct. (If you are not, then I apologize for misconstruing your comment.) Hitler took beliefs/opinions espoused by others (including, but not limited to Wagner and Henry Ford) for close to a millenium. He then took such beliefs and opinions to a whole new level (and bloodthirstiness) when Hitler secured his power base.

Freelancer @74 re the morality of Seanchan leashing all female channelers under all circumstances. Excellent points. An excellent Hollywood example of your analysis is Minority Report (the Tom Cruise movie).

Thanks for reading my musings,
AndrewB

Wall of Text Warning:

A number of comments back we got on the topic of slavery (again) and the attitudes of those raised in a society that condones and justifies slavery and other “obvious” social abuses.

WetlanderNW commented @70 that

“There’s a major difference between Hitler and Tuon.” She goes on to say Hitler “… was not the logical result of the culture of the past millenia in Europe; he was a psychotic aberration from the past hundreds of years.”
I beg to differ somewhat. Hitler obviously took things to the extreme, but the reason he achieved power in the first place was that he was hitting on anti-Jewish sentiments which WERE the logical result of the culture of the past millenia in Europe. In fact, the past two millennia in Europe. The history books are full of examples of both leaders and common people mistreating Jews. The major reason Jews were tolerated at all was that they did not have the Christian prohibition against Usury (making profit by charging interest on loans) and therefore the bankers and lenders who financed most of Europe’s wars were Jews. Therefore, when Hitler blamed the Jews for the rampant inflation in Germany during the 1920’s and early 30’s, and claimed that JEWISH arms dealers were the ones that had instigated WWI and devastated Germany to make a buck, his message fell on receptive ears who believed him because his message was based on the lessons the people had been hearing for generations.

I was born in the South in 1949 so I think I have a little different perspective than many of the younger folk here on the re-read. I was raised as a white child in a society which required “colored” folk to ride in the back of the bus, drink water from separate water fountains, use separate restrooms, sit in separate waiting rooms at the doctor’s office, attend separate (but equal??? not on your life) schools, etc. My father managed a movie theater and employed a “colored” janitor, but “colored people” were not allowed to buy tickets to see the movies (some places in the south the theaters had balconies with separate entrances for “colored,” but not our town). We “knew” (because we had been told often enough by our elders) that “colored” were lazy, dumb, and untrustworthy. They were physically dirty and stank to high heaven (physical fact, not opinion – most of them had jobs requiring hard labor, and seldom had access to air conditioning. Also, they had a culture –no doubt based on lack of resources – of not taking baths. My drill sergeant at boot camp (himself black) noted that numerous black recruits had to be forcibly scrubbed by the other recruits because they had never taken a bath or shower in their lives and refused to start in boot camp. That was in the early 70’s.)

Bottom line: when you are told from early childhood that you can get social diseases (i.e. syphilis) from sitting on a toilet previously used by a “colored” person, you don’t hit 21 and suddenly think to ask WHY “colored” have to use separate bathrooms.

And before you say “Well, that was the South. They’re all prejudiced down there.” When I was in the military in the early 70’s I was stationed in Denver. Very few blacks in Denver. Lots of ‘holier than thou” who made comments about the prejudice in the South. Until you got them talking about “Indians” (i.e. Native Americans) or “Chicanos” (now I believe the proper term is “Latinos”). Folks who gave me grief about prejudice against blacks in the South said they would kill their sister if she came home married to a “Chicano.” When I called them on it, they tried to tell me stories and experiences which established the stereotype as justification for their beliefs. Essentially the same type of stories and experiences which the South used to justify our beliefs. And those folk refused to recognize their prejudices as prejudice. It was FACT.

And just 30 years earlier, the US Supreme Court upheld the internment of thousands of US citizens just because they happened to be of Japanese ancestry.

Yes, we have come a long way in the last 70 years. And now we have people in power wanting to “profile” non-citizen Arabics trying to fly on US airlines. And more people trying to take guns away from citizens because one of them might become a wacko.

Who do you let have nuclear weapons? So far, only the United States has ever actually used one against the people of another nation. Does that make US the terrorists? Who do you let have guns? Who do you let Channel? Who do you let hold the leash of the A’dam? It is all the same question.

@111 freelancer

also the belief shared by the majority of founding fathers, even some of the current slave owners, that was subsumed by a bigger, as they saw it, issue: freedom from a repressive country.

@112 birgit

good point, it might even be said that seanchan is in a better position to change its ways than some of the randland countries. They (read tairen, illian nobles) consider peasants to be little more than slaves anyway and no amount of “laws” will make them behave differently because their positions are pretty much guaranteed. However a country in civil war with no leaders and most of their army across the ocean would be very easy to reform

I thought Mat’s luck was part of the Ta’veren nature. Even without it he’s still got the experience and knowledge base of 200 years worth rattling around in his head.

The secret, it turned out, had not been to harden himself to the point of breaking. It had not been to become numb. It had been to walk in pain…and accept that pain as part of him.

It was these few sentences that gave me the key I needed to dealing with my grief. I had tried hardening myself, I had tried denial/numbness. Those didn’t work. I was slogging through day by day, trying to fight it off so I could function.

These sentences gave me direction. There is only one thing to do with unbearable grief . . . embrace the pain and accept it as part of you.

I am thankful I read AMOL, in spite of associations that are painful for me, because this one nugget was a revelation for me.

BMcGovern: Oops. My 124 was under construction when your 122 was posted. I did not intend to defy a ban. Still, I do think the discussion was polite, and even useful in that issues were clarified, if perhaps politically far from WoT.

I think the most intriguing thing about the Mat/Tuon relationship is just how different it is. A lot of the relationships in WoT are really cut and dry. This relationship isn’t clear, it has the potential to work, but it’s never really confirmed. That’s what I like the most about it: it could work, but it could also blow up in their faces.

That being said I don’t think anything could be worse than the Thom/Moiraine relationship from Towers of Midnight.

I didn’t understand the “empress does not love” thing. Like people quoted, in an earlier book after they got married she mentioned that her mother loved her father (or so it was said). Not sure if Sanderson forgot about that or just made her say it this way.

I mentioned in that chapter’s comments that I believe Tuon does love, or at the very least is on the path to loving Mat. I noticed that she looked behind her the first thing before he mentioned it too. Her POVs have suggested her mindset focuses on him more than normal. Don’t remember which book where she came back to Ebou Dar and was in the palace thinking about him and wishing he were there, which she described to herself as an odd/curious feeling. I honestly don’t think she’s holding back her feelings out of fear of giving him leverage as you suggest. I mostly think she just doesn’t understand that type of feeling. You’re in a culture where people you love can stab you in the back (literally) and you can’t trust anybody, especially other nobles (and those related to you), so love is definitely not fostered among them. She was fond of one of her brothers I believe but he died, and she didn’t care for her mother too much. I don’t think she knows what love is, but the way she acts and thinks regarding Mat show to me that she does have feelings that she can’t put into words or really sense for what they are. I think one day she’ll put 2 and 2 together, thoughts and feelings, and realize that she enjoys having him around just for the sake of having him around, and come to realize that’s a sign of real affection. I also remember in her earlier POV that she also thought it was odd that she really thought it’d be a “shame” to train him to be a proper Seanchan royal member, presumably because she likes him for who he is. I have confidence that she does harbor feelings that she doesn’t know how to explore but will grow into them one day. The first read-through I was disappointed, but re-reading these makes me have hope for those two scamps.

I like that Mat has totally fallen in love, and that Fortuona pretty much hasn’t. Think about it. Mat comes from a fairly humane, egalitarian culture where people are, for the most part, trustworthy. Like most Two Rivers men, Mat’s a bit of a softie at heart, so he fell in love easily. Love in the Two Rivers is just so natural and normal. And for all his grumblings about lords (ladies, ladies’ maids, women etc.), you have to understand that fundamentally, Mat likes people.

Tuon is a completely different kettle of fish. She comes from a culture of domination, slavery, hierarchy and intrigue. Her own brothers and sisters tried to assassinate her. More than once. Nothing about her is soft, or gentle. Where Tuon comes from, softness is weakness, and if she had been softer, or more trusting, or even more merciful, then frankly, she’d be dead by now. A woman like this isn’t going to fall in love, not easily, perhaps not at all.

And that’s the beauty of it. If the Outrigger novels had ever been written, the Mat / Fortuona thing could have become a great romance. None of this “I fell in love because I am a woman, and every woman in fantasy instantly falls in love” crap that is the norm in this genre. Their love story could have really meant something, especially given the scope for conflict between these two characters. Imagine it: Mat gets caught up in opposing the status quo; at first, by dispensing power and titles to those who have demonstrated competence/excellence, and taking power from those who merely inherited it; later, perhaps, by freeing damane and da’covale, etc. Earning him the wrath of the Empress (may she live forever). She does what a good Empress would do, sentencing him to death by hanging, thereby upholding the status quo, and he has to hide for his life. But by this time, they have a love that’s really strong, Fortuona respects him immensely, not as a pawn, but as a human being, and it is this love that, in many ways, spells the beginning of the end of the Seanchan Empire. Now THAT would have been a love story worth reading.