Live, from my laptop, it’s the Wheel of Time Reread Redux! APPLAUSE KTHXBI. Today’s Redux post will cover Chapters 48 and 49 of The Eye of the World, originally reread in this post.
All original posts are listed in The Wheel of Time Reread Index here, and all Redux posts will also be archived there as well. (The Wheel of Time Master Index, as always, is here, which has links to news, reviews, interviews, and all manner of information about the Wheel of Time in general on Tor.com.)
The Wheel of Time Reread is also available as an e-book series! Yay!
All Reread Redux posts will contain spoilers for the entire Wheel of Time series, so if you haven’t read, read at your own risk. And now, the post!
JordanCon 7, The Con of the Red Hand is seriously nigh, y’all. Like, as in, this weekend. I am Excite.
Ergo, scheduling note: There will be no Redux Reread post next Tuesday, April 21st. However, a report on JordanCon will be occurring within that general timeframe, so keep a look out!
Onward!
Chapter 48: The Blight
Redux Commentary
Ingtar’s bow was stiffer than his armor made it. “As you wish it, Aes Sedai. I must leave you, now, and ride hard in order to reach Tarwin’s Gap. At least I will be… allowed… to face Trollocs there.”
“Are you truly that eager?” Nynaeve asked. “To fight Trollocs?”
Ingtar gave her a puzzled look, then glanced at Lan as if the Warder might explain. “That is what I do, Lady,” he said slowly. “That is why I am.”
Which doesn’t exactly square with Ingtar being a Darkfriend, I must say. I suppose the easy answer is that Ingtar is just a very good actor, but honestly I’m a bit skeptical of that claim. Perhaps Jordan really hadn’t decided that Ingtar was a Darkfriend at this point. *shrug* Maybe it doesn’t matter at this point.
Re: the description of the Blight: it’s still completely gross, of course, but I sort of feel that as a resident of Louisiana I should take some offense to the very close analogy drawn between the Blight and a real-life swamp. Because look, okay, swamps can be pretty gross, I ain’t gonna lie, but they are also beautiful as well, not to mention vital to the wellbeing of the land’s ecology, and if you want to be nervous about what the loss of the wetlands are going to do/are doing to the nation’s economy I suggest you read up on it.
But okay, whatever, slimy decaying things are still slimy decaying things, and if we want to equate those slimy decaying things to Evil I suppose it’s not all that surprising. Plus I’m pretty sure that the wildlife of the Atchafalaya Basin doesn’t hold a candle to most of the nasty shit in Jordan’s Evil Swamp of Evil, i.e. the Blight.
“Couldn’t we camp down by the lakes?” Nynaeve asked, patting her face with her kerchief. “It must be cooler down by the water.”
“Light,” Mat said, “I’d just like to stick my head in one of them. I might never take it out.”
Just then something roiled the waters of the nearest lake, the dark water phosphorescing as a huge body rolled beneath the surface. Length on man-thick length sent ripples spreading, rolling on and on until at last a tail rose, waving a point like a wasp’s stinger for an instant in the twilight, at least five spans into the air. All along that length fat tentacles writhed like monstrous worms, as many as a centipede’s legs. It slid slowly beneath the surface and was gone, only the fading ripples to say it had ever been.
Rand closed his mouth and exchanged a look with Perrin. Perrin’s yellow eyes were as disbelieving as he knew his own must be. Nothing that big could live in a lake that size. Those couldn’t have been hands on those tentacles. They couldn’t have been.
“On second thought,” Mat said faintly, “I like it right here just fine.”
Wow, applause, because it was the detail that there were hands on those tentacles that really sent this image into Seriously Creepy Land. Because, what. No. Just no.
Also, how completely shitty that must have been for Lan, to see the famed lakes of his childhood home so profaned. Yuck.
“There,” Egwene said as if it were settled. “I know. I will make you my Warder, when I’m an Aes Sedai. You would like being a Warder, wouldn’t you? My Warder?” She sounded sure, but he saw the question in her eyes. She wanted an answer, needed it.
“I’d like being your Warder,” [Rand] said.
And ironically, Rand ends up becoming Warder to four other women… none of them Egwene. Oh, polyamorous mystery of life, at last I’ve found you. Snerk.
“Aes Sedai marry as seldom as Wisdoms. Few men can live with so much power in a wife, dimming them by her radiance whether she wishes to or not.”
In the original commentary, my remark on this was “My equality of the sexes is pasted on, yay!” and… yeah, my opinion has not changed in the intervening years.
This is (or should be) bullshit even in the real world, but it is especially bullshit in Randland, where supposedly the matriarchy has replaced the patriarchy… except where it actually matters, apparently. Because in a world where the inequality of the sexes is truly flipped on its head, Lan’s statement here would literally make no sense, because of course the woman would have more power than the man, right? But that’s not what we’re truly dealing with here, it seems.
This is not me being angry about this, per se, so much as it is me observing the pointed reminder that even in his attempt to show a world where sexism is reversed, Jordan still sometimes fell prey to the assumptions and prejudices of his own decidedly patriarchal culture, and had his characters make decisions based on that, rather than what should have been their own cultural biases and assumptions.
And yes, I acknowledge (as I did before) that Lan’s use of this excuse to Nynaeve was obviously not sincere, but rather a misguided attempt to push her away from his Noble Quest of Suicidal Nobleness, but even so I maintain that he would not have used that reasoning in the first place if he hadn’t thought that Nynaeve would buy it—which, ergo, supports the existence of cultural assumptions and biases that shouldn’t be there, if we buy the basic premise of Randland’s gender politics.
So, it’s a discrepancy, is what I’m saying. And while I’m not condemning Jordan for missing that nuance—because unexamined cultural biases are hard, yo—I still feel it is important to point out, so that others can hopefully realize why that gaffe is so significant.
Chapter 49: The Dark One Stirs
Redux Commentary
Is this the first time the same icon appears twice in a row? I’m not sure, but it might be. Not surprising, though, because what else are you going to put on chapters set in the Blight except an icon that was obviously tailor-made to represent it?
With that in mind, I’m actually curious to see if the gnarled dead tree icon ever shows up again outside the context of Blight chapters—or even within them, in fact. I’m not actually curious enough to go check, mind you, but I’ll try to keep a weather eye out.
[Rand] wondered if women had a way of reading men’s minds. It was an unsettling thought. All women are Aes Sedai.
This is, I think, only tangentially related to my thoughts in the last chapter about the view in WOT about the relationship between men and women, but I suppose in the aggregate it’s all of a piece. Anyway: I confess to always being somewhat mystified (ironically) by the way women are made a mystery in stories (obviously, generally written by men), literary or otherwise. Like, women are so mysterious, how do their minds work, it is SO PUZZLING. Jordan does it here and elsewhere (even if here he’s mostly being tongue in cheek about it), but I see this all the time, and it sort of drives me nuts sometimes.
Because, you know, I don’t claim to stand in for all women by any means, but every time I read something like that, my general reaction is to frown in bafflement, because, dude, I am not mysterious, okay. I react to things like… people react? To things? And maybe how I react to something might not make total sense to you because you don’t have the same views or life experiences or perspective as me, but it’s certainly not because I have some wonky Woman Gear in my brain that (apparently) propels me into some estrogen-fueled acid trip that renders my behavior BEYOND COMPREHENSION, OMG.
Because, yes, if you are a guy, you might find a lot of what women do and say to be baffling to you, but perhaps you should consider that the reason for that is because women are constrained and pressured and conditioned by an entirely different set of social expectations than men are, and not that women are some bizarre species of alien whose rules must be arbitrarily negotiated rather than comprehended. At the end of the day, women are people just like men are people, so really, quit it with the rhetoric that “female logic” is just beyond your ken, man. It’s old and it’s lame, and at this point it should be beneath all of us.
Bloof. Anyway.
As if nothing truly solid was left to them, the trees seemed to tremble from the passage of the horses over the ground.
“Look as if they want to grab us,” Mat said nervously. Nynaeve gave him an exasperated, scornful look, and he added fiercely, “Well, they do look it.”
“And some of them do want it,” the Aes Sedai said. Her eyes over her shoulder were harder than Lan’s for an instant. “But they want no part of what I am, and my presence protects you.”
I don’t know if I can actually argue that this aspect of channelers got ignored later on or not. Certainly Rand was able to repel the Shadow just by existing, especially once he had his Come to Jesus moment, hahaha, on Dragonmount in TGS, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it demonstrated unambiguously by any other channeler after TEOTW. It seems to be one of the more hand-wavy aspects of channeling that Jordan later dismissed once he’d made his magic system more mechanical and less Tolkeinesque.
“A Worm”—there was a sharp difference in the way the Warder said it from the way Mat had—”can kill a Fade, if the Fade hasn’t the Dark One’s own luck with it. We have an entire pack on our trail. Ride! Ride!”
I had always hoped, as I said in the original commentary, that we’d get to see a Worm (aka jumara, as we later learn) at some point, but we sort of never did. Demandred defeats one in the short story River of Souls, if I remember correctly, but (a) technically that story is not part of canon proper, and (b) even in that story, the battle takes place “off-screen”, so we don’t get to “see” it anyway. Bummer.
The Mountains of Dhoom filled the sky ahead, black and bleak, and almost near enough to touch, it seemed.
“Mountains of Dhoom”, sigh. Yes, I know this was a tribute to Tolkien’s Mount Doom (as were the Mountains of Mist near the Two Rivers, and so many other things), but wow is this one cheesetastic. Maybe I’m terrible, but really, I could have done without this particular homage.
The Green Man, though, is awesome, FYI. I remember how cool it was to “meet” him in this chapter. Not least for what he said:
“A Wolfbrother! Do the old times truly walk again then?”
And:
“Strange clothes you wear, Child of the Dragon. Has the Wheel turned so far? Do the People of the Dragon return to the First Covenant? But you wear a sword. That is neither now nor then.”
We all know what both of those statements mean now, of course, but on first reading it was all very mysterious and thrilling and tantalizing. Just the thing to ensure we would read on, to find out what he meant—even if we wouldn’t completely find out for quite some time.
And that’s my story, morning glories! Come see me and all my totally sober shenanigans in my upcoming JordanCon Re-he-port of De-he-oom, and I’ll see you with a new Reread Redux in two weeks! Cheers!
Leigh re “the rhetoric that ‘female logic’ is just beyond your ken” — me thinks yea doth protest too much”. Throughout the series, we have often had viewpoints from women characters that state all men are this or all men do that. Nynaeve is a major offender of this. IMO, these gender generalizations are an intended theme throught the series. It is part of the larger problem that the protagonists have with communicating with one another.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewB
I laughed at the “totally sober” part. Perhaps sober for part of the day?
The blight is written out in such detail it sends chills of fear down my spine just reading about it. It took courage for the group to enter the spine let alone go through it (my chicken heart wouldn’t go within five hundred miles of it). No wonder some people enter the blight but never come out… if they aren’t killed they would go mad.
I look forward to reading about all the great fun to be had at JordanCon!
Here’s something that I never noticed until just now. With regards to the icon for both these chapters, with the way the tree covers the moon, the moon is kinda shaped like the Flame of Tar Valon, except upside down.
Re: Ingtar “acting” – when you and everyone else around you has a certain behavior that is expected and completely normal, “acting” that part is probably pretty easy. Ingtar was almost certainly more uncomfortable when DDD (Doing Darkfriend Duties) than he was while serving his Light side role.
Remember, his explanation for turning to the Dark wasn’t that he loved the Dark or anything like that, he just wanted to preserve SOMETHING and, in his hopelessness and despair, figured this was the best way to do so.
Re: Lanquote. I feel like you’re making assumptions here, and maybe you’re right, but reverse the sexes of his statement and it can still be true: “Few women can live with so much power in a husband, dimming them by his radiance whether he wishes to or not.”
I didn’t see this as something like “The Queen never marries.” or “A Governess never marries.” or even “The Empress never marries.” but more a commentary on how the One Power is viewed in Randland.
Also, as you stated, it’s clearly a bullshit line to try to push away Nynaeve (and that works out really well).
Re: ‘female logic’ as AndrewHB pointed out, we get the same sort of thing from female perspectives frequently. When Perrin says to Egwene “Nobody tells us how to be men, we just are.” and she retorts with the (awesome) “Perhaps that’s why you do such a bad job of it.”, it’s played for a laugh, but in general the (main character) women in WoT tend to think that most men are incapable of surviving without them for more than a week.
I for one love the fact that each of the SuperBoys thinks that he is the worst of the three when it comes to talking with women. Perrin is frequently thinking “If only Mat were here, he’d make a joke and have her dancing in no time. Or Rand, he always knew what to say.” Rand and Mat each think the same of the other two. Funny stuff.
Agreed on Worm-wanting, Dhoomcheesiness (I can see why Randlanders would name things like Blight, Blasted Land, and Mountains of Doom but why would they suddenly throw an ‘h’ in the word Dhoom other than to make it a little different from Tolkien), and Green Man awesomeness. Ah, Someshta, you left us too soon.
Re: Ingtar, he always struck me as actually sincere in this part, and in others like it. He joined the Shadow out of anger and hopelessness, but not because he thought it would grant him DOMINION OVER ALL like most other DFs. That, I think, is why he’s such a wonderfully tragic character. He really doesn’t want the Shadow to win, but he doesn’t see any other possible outcome because so many people aren’t as willing and steadfast (ironically enough) as he.
I have to say, I think Jordan does a great job of describing the Blight so that it seems like just about the creepiest place ever! I also like the fact that the Worms-the deadliest creatures in the Blight-make high-pitched, piping noises when they’re hunting. Not sure why that appeals to me, but it does. :)
And the Green Man is totally not what I was expecting, but is so, so cool. *sad about his fate*
“Because, yes, if you are a guy, you might find a lot of what women do
and say to be baffling to you, but perhaps you should consider that the
reason for that is because women are constrained and pressured and
conditioned by an entirely different set of social expectations than men
are, and not that women are some bizarre species of alien whose rules
must be arbitrarily negotiated rather than comprehended. At the end of the day, women are people just like men are people, so really, quit it
with the rhetoric that “female logic” is just beyond your ken, man.”
I agree with you and I disagree with you. And you know how that makes me crazy, right?
I agree with everything you said in your first sentence, but draw a different conclusion. Yes, women are people. Just because I don’t understand some things about women doesn’t mean I don’t consider them people. But when certain things are said or done that leave you confused and it seems that everyone you know who is female considers the thinking completely obvious and you (and your dad, and your brothers, and your buddies) all are clueless and discussion doesn’t seem to clear up anything, well… guys can do a few things.
We can get mad about it (destructive and foolish).
We can joke about it (fun sometimes, but often offensive and ultimately potentially harmful).
We can develop a fond attitude that it’s more a feature than a bug (i.e. “You won’t ever understand them, cousin, but you won’t care.” This tends to sometimes seem condescending. Heck, sometimes it is).
Or we can just shake our heads and remain confused and do the best we can. (This doesn’t usually last very long and usually gives way to one of the above reactions)
But not acknowledging the elephant in the room isn’t just silly, it can be actively harmful. Most guys probably will have some opinion on it and it doesn’t get magically whisked away by thinking “Women are people”. While true, that is not helpful in dealing with what’s happening.
Most guys I know need some kind of reasoning they can grok to explain what’s going on, even if only to themselves. Thus “Women think differently than we do.” Even though, of course, that is not true all the time for every guy or every woman or about every little thing. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it IS a thing. It happens. So we can’t really be “above” or “beneath” it. And it will express itself in writing. And that’s ok.
As Andrew pointed out, the gender incomprehension goes both ways in WoT. Lan’s bit about Aes Sedai is just him reciting the general belief in that world, specifically Tower propaganda. We see that for Lan, Thom, and Rand, the power of their love interest is not an issue. The latter two have problems with the political affiliations, due to their bad experiences with Aes Sedai, but not with their levels or degrees of power. And WoT pretty much demonstrates what a crock it is by showing how Aiel Wise Ones and Sea Folk Windfinders and sul’dam have no problems finding husbands (the last was according to RJ in an interview, that sul’dams are not removed from the breeding population so mareth’damane are more common in Seanchan).
What men don’t like are the Aes Sedai, not because of their Power, but because of their attitudes. Aes Sedai are infamously treacherous, and rigorously maintain separation between themselves and normal people. It’s not their power, but their behavior that makes them hard for normal people to relate to. There were a lot of problems with Egwene and Gawyn, but those were mostly manufactured by either Egwene or a ghostwriter who just did not get it, because everything Egwene said about requiring unquestioning obediance and submission in a Warder is completely different from every other Aes Sedai-Warder partnership we see in any detail throughout the series. But that was always a thing for Egwene – as early as tSR, we see her in the same chapter, wishing she could overcome Aviendha’s wariness to make friends with her…and at the same time, wracking her brain for a way to phrase her response to Aviendha’s question that sounds “properly portentious.” Egwene always bought the most into the standard Tower line of B.S. of the three Wondergirls, so we see her trying to maintain Aes Sedai ‘tude even with someone she wants to be friends with.
The Tower also discourages any and all connections that might come between the sister and the Tower. Why else would they forbid novices from relationships with men? Contraception is not a problem, and they could always confiscate the babies the way Aiel do from Maidens of the Spear, and maybe raise them in a Tower orphanage so see if they have the spark or can be taught to channel. They blather a lot about novices being too busy for the stresses of a relationship, but show no signs of interfering in homosexual affairs as a matter of course. Are such relationships less real or less affecting their hearts and minds? Of course not. But they are between women subject to the Tower’s authority and brainwashing, and thus are not a threat. Even if homosexuality is not opposed in WoT, neither is it institutionalized the way heterosexuality is. There are societal expectations of husbands and wives, while “life partners” can make it up as they go along, and thus there are no reasons or practices to go along with outside the Tower’s rules. The Tower also puts into place a number of social customs that impede friendships between women of different strength (see Siuan and Lelaine in KoD) or Ajah (Seaine & Pevara in aCoS), so that sisters find it easier to simply make friends among women of similar strength and the same Ajah. In other words, they vet their buddies through two artificial White Tower criteria!
All this works to put the Tower first and foremore in the minds of the sisters. So we get things like Faile’s little historical lecture on the appalling betrayals of family members committed by Aes Sedai in the past, or of subjecting themselves to relationships they did not want for the sake of the Tower. The Aes Sedai even run all their initiates through a trial, where if the subject shows any inclination to help a loved one, instead of follow a pointless Tower directive, they can murder her.
All Aes Sedai who reach the shawl know on some level or other that they can be called upon to sacrifice anything for the White Tower, up to and including their own wombs. I believe they deliberately cut themselves off from relationships so as to not have in their lives anything that would hurt too much to lose when the Tower demands. Thus they restrict themselves to casual affairs or marriage to Warders, who are also White Tower personnel, under the authority of the Tower (re: Siuan’s letters of authority that would let the Wondergirls “command Warders” ) It’s a good thing that Thom is so old and Moiraine has near-demigod status, and almost certainly the protection & support of Nynaeve, the strongest living sister, who managed to circumvent the outside-loyalty quashing process. Otherwise, a check in on that relationship down the road would not have had a happy ending.
The stuff about men not being able to deal with such power in a wife is just something the Aes Sedai tell themselves so as to not have to confront exactly what they are throwing on the fire for the Tower.
The real low blow was when the Blight was described as smelling like “Bourbon Street on a Sunday morning.”
Is removing the residues of channeling similar to unweaving? Moiraine doesn’t seem to be worried that it is dangerous.
Ahhh, two of my favoritest chapters in all of WoT.
The Blight is so tantalizingly mysterious…though to be honest, I’d probably enjoy it less if it weren’t. As it is, this glimpse only fuels the imagination and spawns innumerable questions.
Like, how the flame does the ecosystem work? Some animals must be able to eat some plants (even if some other plants eat them instead), but what eats which? What animals eat what? How does it support giant armies of Trollocs (and their parents)? Also, for what purpose were all those weird creatures made – or have they changed since going wild, from darkmagical mutation or hybridization or something? Gah.
(This is why I hate dystopic fiction but read the MaddAddam Trilogy anyway. And why the Rain Wild Chronicles are my favorite Robin Hobb series).
Oh look, aquatic Shadowspawn! We mostly see species which are inexplicably repulsed by water, e.g. Trollocs, Myrddraal, and Darkhounds.
Whoops, I’d forgotten about Moiraine’s camouflaging ward, and somehow thought Shadowspawn could sense and be drawn to such things. Now I feel foolish.
WoT characters’ opinions express equal-opportunity gender essentialism. *thumbs down*
The Green Man now makes me think only of this great song by Jennifer Cutting’s Ocean Orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niJRq3vDHL0 . Pardon the blurry video; the sound is better.
We eventually learn there is a city in the Blight, but did we ever learn how they feed all those Trollocs? At least Mordor had its Nurn. (My theory for how they produced huge numbers of Trollocs for the Trolloc Wars, AMOL, etc. was through use of portal stones to bring Trollocs over from parallel worlds.)
The “town” near Shayol Ghul, you mean? Not much of a city, and mostly populated by humans. “They” (Dreadlords?) could’ve imported prey via Portal Stones for the Trolloc Wars, perhaps. AMOL? Who knows. One of the authors said that the final massing for the Last Battle was “orders of magnitude” bigger than what the Blight could support, but didn’t explain how that was made possible or what “forces of the Shadow” (from the book) were in charge of the process. In the War of the Shadow, of course, there were people who could massacre cities to feed them.
Herb7331 @9:
Change that to “Bourbon Street on Ash Wednesday” (i.e. the day after Mardi Gras), and you’ve probably got a point. Ewwwwww.
Re: Ingtar
There’s isn’t much significant evidence either way, but I’d like to believe Ingtar hadn’t switched to Team Dark at this point. The first we hear of his conversion is the TGH prologue. So…maybe?
Random Observation Department
It didn’t stick, until this re-read, that Mat has a seriously weak stomach.
As far as gender relations go, I wouldn’t necessarily categorize Randland as a matriarchy simply because of the presence of Aes Sedai. Gender roles that are typically associated with a patriarchy are still very present throughout much of Randland, as indicated by the numerous baffled reactions to unconventional concepts like female warriors (Aiel/Seanchen), skantily-clad merchants (Arad Doman) and marriage-knife wielding lunatics (Altara).
Yes, there are certainly more women in positions of power, but if you take your eyes off the Randland nobility and peeps with phenomenal cosmic powers, most of the common folk are a pretty accurate reflection of our historical gender strucutre (ie. housewives and breadwinners/soldiers).
I thought you weren’t posting today so this is a fun surprise!
I think we (the re-read thread, not you and me specifically) had this discussion before, and I wasn’t totally convinced that Robert Jordan was trying to create a completely gender flipped society in the first place. I think he probably was trying to explore gender relations, and what happens when one gender is inordinately more powered (and his preferred mode seems to be a genders working together different-but-equal kind of thing) – but I don’t see him as trying to portray the entire society as a gender flipped society.
It’s probably also possible that the statement just meant that most people (regardless of gender) can’t handle having a spouse who is that much more powerful, and since Aes Sedai are all women, it then only applies to women. I’m not sure I believe that – since there does seem to be more of a taboo against men ‘marrying up’ than women (at least in our soceity)…but perhaps it could be so in Randland (especially since there actually IS a justifiable reason that the women would be seen as so much more intimidating, instead of the various prejducies/insecurities that would be the case in our world).
Oh man, the mysterious woman thing. I don’t remember what it was that sent me on an epic rant about that once – it might have been the movie Virgin Suicides, which I spent in a state of eye-rolling at the neighbors from whom the point of view the movie is. But it makes me kind of rage-y.
I can accept that women and men do think differently in general (with outliers on both sides, of course) – be it from social formation, differences in neurology/biology, etc – but it’s not SO radically different that you can’t use a bit of objective reasoning to figure out their perspective/motivations, and a lot of reactions probably have a lot more to do with non-gendered things anyway.
On the flip side, I’ve never really bought the ‘men are simpletons’ assumption that goes hand in hand with that, either.
As others have astutely pointed out, both genders in WoT are guilty of these assumptions, and that might be part of RJ’s point, since one of his themes seems to be the importance of actual communication and cooperation.
Yeah, I don’t think Jordan was trying to just gender flip society. Rather he wanted to take our gender norms (we I suspect he generally thought were “stickier” and more of a good thing than a lot of people) and introduce an external force that would propel women into a relatively much more powerful position without changing a whole lot about how the genders interact. And even that was anomolous (anomolous over a period of a few thousand years, but still), because men tended to be stronger than women in the power (explicitly compared to arm strength) with certain other advantages for female channelers that obviously didn’t even things out.
SomeOtherGuy @@@@@ 8: 1000% agree with your statement on why Aes Sedai are not liked because of the way they act. Yes, men (everybody, really) are afraid of the One Power because they have forgotten that it was the male Aes Sedai who broke the world, not the women.
And ditto on the Egwene/Gawyn relationship. My biggest problem with Egwene throughout the whole series was the way she totally (over)bought into whatever paradigm she was in at the moment. Yes, she did some awesome things but she also made a couple of awesome flips, particularly on the AS oaths, which I still maintain did much more harm than they did good.
A couple of things that didn’t occur to me until this re-read: why were the horses left outside the wards Moiraine put up? I can’t imagine that some of the blight creatures wouldn’t have totally eaten them! And is it possible that Rand trying to seize Saidin (or actually channel it) was what caused them to immediately find the Green Man? At least one person asked about that in the original re-read but was it ever answered? I suppose Moiraine’s (the world’s) need was enough to find it again but Someshta was surprised that she could find it again.
Oh, and I’m a fan of Egwene, but those criticisms are completely valid.
On Ingtar I agree with with @5 PallonianFire I think Ingtar was a “Darkfriend” in that he thought it was the only way to save his people.
I think he legitimately hated Shadowspawn and the like, but he also was a solider who saw the blight creeping forward every year while fewer and fewer borderland soliders could be marshalled to stop it. Meanwhile all the ignorant fools south of the borderlands thought of the Shadow as so much fairytale nonsense and killed each other endlessly.
The overall popluation of Randland was declining there were stretches of land hundereds of miles long that didn’t technically belong to any kingdom and others that were no longer actually occupied even if they were there on a map.
To Ingtar (and I’m guessing a pluarlity of borderland dark friends) surrending to the shadow and hoping for a quick end to the war might have seemed like the only way to avoid outright extinction.
The reaason I think that he was already a dark friend but a misguided one who just thought it was the least bad of a host of bad choices is that the minute he saw the Horn of Valere as an actual ,attainable goal he became obsessed with it. There was his chance for making victory possible for the light, not just a surrender that (might) not end in their complete distruction.
He wanted the light to win. And he was more than willing to give up his own life to make that happen. He just hadn’t thought it possible prior to that point. That is in no way the mentality of a true darkfriend as commonly presented in this series.
@@.-@
Dhoomcheeseborger, Dhoomcheeseborger, pepsi
The menu at the Queen’s Blessing
Did we even get an explanation, in-universe or out-, why the Randland population declined?
Herb7335 @23. What time period is your question related to? If it was just after the Breaking, Trolloc Wars or the Last Battle, the answer is obvious: beacuse of the death and destruction. After the Last Battle (post AMoL, I would also expect a decline in population. A signicant portion of the continent was ravaged and the population was sent off to war. The loss of land and war would affect the ability to farm the land resulting in increases in famine.
As to any other period, there may be other reasons.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewB
I think there’s sometimes a misunderstanding of the intent behind WOT’s gender politics. While they are certainly supposed to be different from the real world’s, I don’t believe it was ever Robert Jordan’s intent that they were reversed. I honestly don’t think he was ever trying to portray a “matriarchy has replaced the patriarchy” world at all. That just doesn’t fit a world with as many male rulers and generals and the like as he created. In fact I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a quote from him pointing out that Far Madding is supposed to be the only true matriachy in the story.
Hey, Off topic,but I ordered some things on Amazon and when I went to check out the WOT Companion was in my cart . Price was $30.57.
It says it’s due out in mid-November!
plum @3
Or a mirror-image dragon’s fang symbol, which appeals to my sense of continuity.
birgit @10
Moraine, being an experienced AS, should know the dangers of unweaving an active weave. I don’t believe she’d attempt it unless there was an immediate and very dangerous threat (which was not the situation here). Removing residues happens after the weave has done its thing, so it seems very different to me. YMMV.
BillinHI @19
Good catch there, sir. I wouldn’t leave my ride where it could be stolen, stripped or eaten. And perhaps it was Rand’s need that triggered the Green Man’s appearence.
wcarter @21
Ingtar’s obsession with the Horn could also support his not being a DF at this point. A magic wand that might cement a lightside victory was in hand. Bravo! Then the horn is sequestered. Did Ingtar know what was going on? I don’t recall, but the loss of it could be the straw that broke the camel’s back and sent him over to the Dark Side.
Walt Jones @26
Well, did you advance-purchase a copy?
On the gender equality thing, I feel the need to point out that equal (in non-mathematical terms) does not mean identical. I agree wholeheartedly that men are people and women are people and we should treat each other as equals and that neither gender is superior to the other. But that doesn’t mean that they’re the same. Women and men do think differently. Some of that is environmental (“an entirely different set of social expectations” as you say), some biological, and some individual. Both ways of thinking are important to society.
Here’s an analogy. Vanilla ice cream and chocolate cake. Both are dessert, and in my mind they’re equally good desserts. If I had to give one up forever I’m not sure I could choose between them. But they’re not the same. I’m not going to put chocolate cake in my root beer. Ice cream can’t sit out on the counter all day long for me to just eat a bite now and then as I pass by. Equal, different. But they go GREAT together. :) Just like genders in a society, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
As a dad with four daughters, I can say without a doubt that the differences in thought processes do exist, and that both sides experience the confusion. But I can also attest that good communication can clear things up (somewhat) and harmony is indeed possible.
“On the gender equality thing, I feel the need to point out that equal (in non-mathematical terms) does not mean identical.” – haha, my first thought was actually about javascript logical comparison operators, in which == (equal) and === (identical) actually do mean different things in certain circumstances.
In general I agree with your point, although I don’t know how much of the differences are individual because of personality reasons having nothing to do with gender, and also how many of the differences would go away if we really did treat the genders more fairly and without bias or preconceived notions about what each gender should be like. I do still think there would be some differences when looked at as a whole, though, but of course individuals in each gender will be all along the spectrum.
@27 Ways
I don’t think so. It’s strongly implied in TGH that Ingtar sort of made the raid that caused the Horn to be lost possible in the first place by circumventing security measures on the keep. And he was obsessed with getting the horn back once it was gone.
I could be wrong, but I’m thinking he was and had been a dark friend for a while by the time EoTW happend and was on his way to redeeming himself on some level or another pretty much from the Battle of Tarwin’s Gap on.
In many ways I think he was one of the more tragic characters in the series. He made a number of poor choices, but so did Rand. And in the end I think Rand had a lot more innocent blood on his hands.
Leigh
re: Lan’s power bullshit
I disagree. This is not a gaffe. As others already pointed out, Randland is NOT a gender flipped society. Power has shifted in a sense, there’s more equality, but traditional gender roles still very much exist.
As such, Joe the Randland plumber can deal just fine with his wife having more political/societal power.
But that’s not what Lan is talking about. He’s not even talking about “queen don’t marry”. He’s talking about something much more basic.
With all the changes in Randland gender politics, there is still one constant: men are stronger than women
Of course we’re talking physical strength here and of course there are exceptions, but in general it’s true. That’s why we mostly see male soldiers, male guards, male mercenaries…
But with an Aes Sedai, even that last refuge, that last piece of gender identity gets taken away. And in the most extreme way possible. An Aes Sedai can literally kill you with her brain. In this relationship even the last possibility of any kind of (self-asserted) dominance is taken away from the very start. It’s the most unequal relationship you could possibly be in.
If you’ve grown up with traditional gender roles intact, chances are you’ll have a hard time adjusting.
So, I think Lan is right. Unless they are inclined to it personality-wise (which, let’s face it, most men aren’t), they will be unable to deal with a relationship in which they are the lesser in every aspect, because it’s not how things usually are.
For what it’s worth, I think most women wouldn’t be either, but probably not quite as categorically, because traditional gender roles.
29. Lisamarie – I’m a programmer, so yes, the difference between == and === came to mind as well. :) I figured more people could relate to cake and ice cream, although you never know around here.
“individuals in each gender will be all along the spectrum” – that is exactly what I meant by differences due to personality. There’s not really a way to say how much of that is due to society and how much is just who a person is, but I’ve known identical twins where one was somewhat more feminine than the other. Same genetics, same culture, so the difference is just the individuality that makes us all unique.
@27 Ways: Yes I did
^^I should, haven’t yet.
Has anybody heard anything interesting from JordanCon 7? Did we get some crumbs about the upcoming WoT Encyclopedia?
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewB
I haven’t seen any postings or comments yet.
The bit with Ingtar is puzzling, but even setting aside what I and others have observed or posited before (he only joined the Shadow to try and save Shienar, he did it because it was “logical”, he wasn’t always of the Shadow), the simple fact is he could join the Shadow itself and still not be fond of Shadowspawn and want to work with them. Plenty of regular Darkfriends are shown to still be afraid of Trollocs and Fades, so I can easily imagine someone who grew up in the Borderlands and fought Shadowspawn all his life to still want to fight and kill them, even if he’d been forced by circumstances (in his view) to join the Shadow. Though I guess it could be this moment here, where he was being denied from fighting where and when he wanted for the sake of Aes Sedai and what he thought of as unimportant farmboys, that made him decide no one cared about the Borderlanders’ fight on their behalf so that he defected.
Speaking of the Border, I forgot that Fal Dara had signal mirrors on its towers. They didn’t seem out of place when they showed up at Heeth Tower in ToM, but seeing them here now makes it a continuity nod instead. Nice.
It’s funny, I never really thought of the Blight as a swamp despite the decay and the humid heat. After all, Rand had said it reminded him of the Mire, not that it looked exactly like it, and he seemed to be equating the heat and humidity, not its appearance. The decaying trees certainly didn’t make me think of a bayou, but then I didn’t grow up in the South. I will say that the heat and everyone’s reaction made me chuckle a bit when you compare it to everyone’s reaction to the Waste later. Of course that was a dry heat, and they still had to wear soaked headcloths and shade themselves, but even so it suggests to me two things: the unnaturalness of the Blight, and how the characters have grown stronger and more adaptable by TSR.
Also speaking of the heat: I had to laugh at poor embarrassed Loial having to unbutton his coat and shirt. Meanwhile, we have the women able to resist it because of the Power, Lan can because he’s a Warder, Perrin because he’s a wolfbrother (how does that work exactly? Do they just protect him the same way they do his dreams? You’d think his increased senses would make it worse, unless it allows him to selectively block or ignore). But Rand is able to mostly ignore it by focusing on the flame and the void. More foreshadowing of his being a channeler.
I completely forgot about the creature with tentacle hands though. *shudders*
Rand as Egwene’s Warder: hah! And yet I can’t help wondering how things would have gone if this plan had worked out. On the one hand, I can easily see Egwene (in full ‘we must guide/control the Dragon’ mode) trying to use it to manipulate him (and failing just as Alanna did). And this would also have made her a target the same as Alanna was. On the other hand, it would have given her insight into his mind and feelings so that she would have worked harder to stop Elaida, help Rand, and understand his situation and suffering, not to mention knowing when he was healed of his madness. While her dying would have sent Rand into Warder rage, maybe she wouldn’t have been driven to that, since in this situation Gawyn wouldn’t have died (or been bonded to her if he did). Then again, having only her as his bond-holder might not have been enough to pull him back from the brink when dying, unless it was the link to Moridin that did that. Hmm. It’s probably best it worked out as it did. Still, the idea of the Dragon Reborn and the Amyrlin Seat being bonded is quite audacious to think about.
I had to laugh at Nynaeve’s obfuscating about why she wants to go to Tar Valon—not even in training yet and already twisting the truth like an Aes Sedai. Speaking of, Moiraine’s vague answer about finding “something for [Rand] to do besides shepherding there” is as hilarious as it is infuriating. She may not know for certain that he’s the Dragon Reborn, but we know from later that she already suspected he was a channeler thanks to Bela, and even without that he’s ta’veren. So she knows quite well what there will be for Rand to do (or have done to him). Of course she always intended to protect him from the other Aes Sedai, but even so…that’s some dry, black comedy there.
As for Lan’s commentary to Nynaeve: Leigh does have a point, but I’m not sure it’s as cut and dried as she says. For one thing, I don’t think Jordan meant his world to be a true matriarchy with all roles reversed and women possessing all power and respect—aside from what was observed before about places like the Two Rivers (with the Mayor’s Council and Women’s Circle being of equal power but the former being the one with the actual political power) and innkeepers being male rather than female for the most part, I don’t recall Jordan claiming women were in unassailable positions of authority like the patriarchy was.
It’s pretty clear that in matters traditionally assumed by men (having more physical strength, thinking they were more led by logic and women by emotion) the men of Randland match up with those in the historical real world. That what Jordan meant to suggest was women having authority simply by dint of their greater magical power, not physical or social, and that because the men with such power had gone mad and destroyed the world, this tainted (hah) all men by association, making people not trust them fully with power. Still, the respect given to male leaders like the Aiel clan chiefs or the fact there were as many noble lords in Tear, Cairhien, and Andor as ladies shows that it was never a clear case of men losing all authority entirely. There’s a tendency to defer to women, even to fear them, but mostly this is confined to lands where women truly have greater power (Andor) or places where Aes Sedai are prominent; in the hinterlands like the Two Rivers older views prevail, and men are still given respect and power when it comes to military matters (the Five Captains are all men).
And this is what lies behind Lan’s argument to Nynaeve—no one would like being outshone by a powerful spouse, but thanks to the taint, it hasn’t been possible for channeling men to make women feel that way in centuries, so really what Lan is referring to is men not wanting to be dominated by Aes Sedai spouses. And while it would be great to see a true reversal of power across the board when it comes to the sexes, it seems to me more realistic that the views of men toward women would still be lingering even in modern Randland, thanks to the sort of power we’re talking about being limited to the Aes Sedai and certain monarchies, thus resulting in the odd disjointed hybrid culture we’ve got here.
And on a side note that is actually somewhat relevant to this, I was always moved by the fact that Rand sympathized so much with Nynaeve here, and didn’t want to embarrass or upset her by letting her know of his pity (or that he aware of the situation at all). Since it not only shows us what a good person Rand is, it acts as a nice contrast to Lan who, even as he thinks he’s helping Nynaeve by sparing her the sorrow and suffering of his death, is being unintentionally misogynistic (or actually intentionally, since he’s trying to drive her away, but not in the sense of wanting to hurt her or lord it over her).
Plus it shows that even as men exist who do still demean women in one way or another, there are still men like Rand who truly give them respect and equality, or at least try to. Rand may have his own issues later with his chivalry (compounded by his madness), but at least he never bought into this idiocy—he may have deferred to Egwene and Nynaeve due to his upbringing and age, but he never once rejected his women based on them being more powerful than him. Granted they weren’t, but it was made very clear he wouldn’t have even if they were. And of course he never looked down on Min for not being a channeler, or placed Elayne and Aviendha above her because they were.
Second chapter, not as much to say about it. Just have to say I am still very curious about Someshta’s story, how he got his wound, and how Nym were made in general. Hopefully at least some of that will be in the encyclopedia. I also still wonder about the Eye. The whole bit with “need” being how you find it feels like TAR, but it’s never explained how that worked or how Someshta was part of it. I can only assume at least some of the Aes Sedai who created the Eye were Dreamers or dreamwalkers, and I guess one of them could have opened a gateway to let a Nym go there physically (since the danger of going there in the flesh presumably wouldn’t apply to a Nym, plus it wasn’t even known in the Age of Legends). Still, will be interesting to find out if there was more to it.
Leigh had asked before how much anyone knew of Perrin and his abilities. Obviously Egwene did thanks to traveling with him and Elyas, but all of them heard the Green Man call Perrin a Wolfbrother here. I guess it didn’t sink in for Mat or Nynaeve, but I suspect Rand did catch on. So while he never came out and asked Perrin, and Perrin never confessed directly, I think he was aware. I also always loved how casually Someshta drops the hints not only about Rand’s ancestry but also the truth about the Aiel’s past, something that won’t get revealed until book four. However Jordan may have let the tale grow with the telling and didn’t have everything planned, he certainly had plotted this part out well in advance.
Re: the icon, it is indeed the first time two chapters in a row had the same one. As for where it appears elsewhere, it is never used outside the Blight (except the very first chapter of AMoL, but in that one the whole land is so dead and dying it might as well be the Blight), but since characters end up there before and during the Last Battle, it gets used a lot in the latter third of AMoL.
As for whether men and women are so different…I’m afraid that yes, they are, whether in how they think biologically or in how they are raised to think and believe by society. However this is a generalization that only sometimes holds true, and even if it was always true, that doesn’t make it impossible to understand each other so that we can only resort to “Mysterious!” So in that respect, Leigh is right to call out such thinking. We need to acknowledge that yes we are different in many ways (including gender), but we shouldn’t let that stop us from understanding each other or treating each other with equality and respect.
I don’t recall offhand if any Aes Sedai repel Shadowspawn later by their presence, but that very lack of obvious memories suggests it didn’t happen. Still, I’ll keep an eye out for it. And to be fair, after TEotW we didn’t have Aes Sedai encountering Shadowspawn very often any more. The attack at Fal Dara mostly happened off-screen while Rand was running through the fortress to find Mat and Egwene, so we didn’t get to see if any of the Aes Sedai there were doing any repelling, and the Shadowspawn attacks in the Stone and the Waste involved large hordes of them vs. only one Aes Sedai. It may be a case of number and proximity, since this is the only time until the end of the series that an Aes Sedai (or group of them) was up close and personal with a small number of Shadowspawn. Also the repelling may only work against Blight Shadowspawn and not Trollocs and Fades, who go out into Randland far more often and thus may be of sterner stuff or have built up a resistance of sorts.
@1 AndrewHB: Very good point. As annoying as it may be to see women dismissed for their ‘logic’, we need to keep in mind our biases—and when we discover women making unfair generalizations about men we either should get equally annoyed with that, or we should then retroactively realize the men’s thinking about women wasn’t as glaring and isolated as we thought it was.
@3 plum: That is interesting! And the withered tree looks like the Dragon’s Fang.
@@.-@ KalvinKingsley: Spot on for all of it, but especially Ingtar and the context of Lan’s statement. Also, I always responded to the “if only X were here, he knows so much more about women” statements from the boys with the same hilarity as you. I know some people were annoyed by them or thought it got old fast, but I always saw it as less a man/woman thing and more how you think you know someone better than you really do, while simultaneously downplaying your own knowledge or skills because you know yourself too well. It’s funny because it’s often sadly true.
@5 PallonianFire: He’s very much a tragic villain (inasmuch as he’s a villain at all). And indeed, highly ironic.
@8 SomeOtherGuy: A lot of wisdom and insight there I can’t disagree with. Though I do feel I should point out I don’t think the problems between Egwene and Gawyn were manufactured by Sanderson—they were either present in the series beforehand, or the information about them was in Jordan’s notes.
@10 birgit: No one ever says removing residues is dangerous, just specifically unweaving weaves so there aren’t any residues in the first place. However both reading and removing residues is said to be a rare Talent, so this not only proves the Wheel was weaving powerful channelers into the Pattern in preparation for Tarmon Gai’don, but that Moiraine is as rare in her own way as Aviendha. Not that we didn’t already know that.
@12 Herb: No, although I expect there are some areas right around the Town where food can be grown. Also, it’s pretty likely that Shadowspawn raids of the Borderlands don’t just kill and carry off people, but also steal food and supplies. Your Portal Stone idea has merit through: Lanfear knew about them, which means you can bet Ishamael did, and he was around to make use of them well before the start of the series.
@16 Amaryce: Exactly.
@19 BillinHI: Interesting, I’d not thought of that before, but you’re right that he was trying to maintain the void (i.e. channel) right when they found themselves there. I suspect him being ta’veren/the Dragon was as much responsible since his influence over the Pattern and him being one with the land could have made the Eye show up. Not to mention his overall need for the Eye so as to stand his ground against Aginor/get a Power boost without going mad/obtain the Horn, seal, and banner. But channeling probably didn’t hurt their chances and may have had an effect, especially with him being a dreamwalker and the Eye apparently being in TAR or a dreamshard.
@21 wcarter: Your reading of Ingtar matches mine.
@31 Nick: That analogy is funny, insightful, and heartwarming all at once, especially the ending and how you tie it back into Jordan’s point about communication. Bravo.
@31 Randalator: Very well said. And as to your last point, I agree, but as I pointed out above, we haven’t had the chance for women to be in an unequal pairing like that since the Age of Legends thanks to the taint. Whether non-channeling women could resent channeling men for being stronger than they is unknown, since the Age was supposedly an egalitarian utopia, but since well before Rand integrated with Lews Therin and told us things weren’t as perfect as they seemed on the surface, we already knew they weren’t thanks to the Guide and hints in the books. And the fact there are traditional gender roles still lingering means they had to have been established at some point. That all got upset by the Breaking.
The first relationship we’ve seen like that is Min with Rand, and that’s an anomaly all across the board since them being fated for each other is involved and Min is more unique and generally more awesome than a lot of other characters. The closest we’ve seen since then is Pevara and Androl, where despite being a channeler herself she had to get used to different relationship dynamics due to the double bond (which made up for Androl being so weak in the Power apart from his Traveling Talent).
So we need a larger sampling to make a better analysis, since the women having trouble adjusting we’ve seen are all channelers themselves and thus their problems are about them losing the power they’d previously enjoyed through equality being established again, rather than never having had it as a non-channeler who marries a channeling man (or finds out their husband is a channeler after the fact thanks to him learning later in life). Sora Grady was upset about her husband because of the taint madness, not because he was suddenly more powerful than her, and we never got an indication she didn’t support him as an Asha’man once saidin was cleansed. She isn’t enough to tell us how women overall react to this situation, but I think you have the right of it.
AndrewHB: RE: Population Loss
I actually expect the opposite after AMoL. With the land healing and the blight now fertile, combined with the normal post war “ebulience”, I expect there would be a Rand-land baby boom for the next several years. Think about the U.S. after WWII. Or even Japan: In 1950, there was a 15.4% population increase from the last census (which was in 1945 and represented post-war numbers), as the country rebounded from fire bombings and nuclear bombings with a baby boom.
Or even the USSR, which between 1941 and 1946 lost 26 million people, but by 1951 had regained 12 million of those. And by 1959 had not just gotten back to the 1941 level but added 13 million more people (for a total growth since 1946 of 25 million people).
Interesting that I never equated the Blight with a swamp. I always thought it was more desert-like, but cold.