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highladyluck · 9 months

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Predicting Mat and Tuon's Character Growth

Mat’s character development is temporarily plateaued along with Tuon’s at the end of AMOL, because they have been developing together since book 9, and have more developing to do together/catalyzed by each other post-series.

Mat‘s arc is about not just accepting responsibility reflexively, but doing it willingly and strategically. To fully grow as a person, Mat needs to move through abandonment of responsibility, through avoiding responsibility, through reactive, passive responsibility, and finally to proactive agency.

Tuon's arc should be about not just delegating control, but giving up control willingly and strategically. To fully grow as a person, Tuon needs to move through obsessive, self-defensive control, through reactive, passive control, through abandonment of control, and finally to responsible, appropriate control.

Tuon’s role in Mat's development is to push him to not just stop running from responsibility (a thing he has already mostly stopped doing) but to actively choose responsibility & thus gain a measure of control over his life and actions. Reactive responsibility- diving into crisis situations without thinking- is only getting him so far, and by the time Tuon shows up I think he's kind of desperate for a strategic change.

(This is long, so the following sections are under the cut:

Mat's First Shift to Proactive Agency

Why Mat is Tuon's Catalyst

How Tuon Can Help Mat Grow

Mat's Second Shift to Proactive Agency

How Mat Can Help Tuon Grow)

Mat's First Shift to Proactive Agency

Choosing to kidnap Tuon after she is revealed to be the Daughter of the Nine Moons and his fated wife, and therefore choosing to actively pursue his fate, is a huge turning point for Mat. It is an echo and synthesis of both the last time he made a decision to steal something valuable and dangerous for his own gain (the Shadar Logoth dagger) and the last time he actively searched for guidance (going to the Aelfinn to ask what he should do now that his internal compass- his memories- are gone.) In choosing to take Tuon with him, Mat is marrying (pun aggressively intended) his impulsive curiosity & pursuit of self-interest to his desperate desire for direction and purpose.

We know Mat loves to be needed. He eats that shit up. He craves respect so intensely because it’s the thing he didn’t have growing up, and he’s also in partial denial about that being what he wants, because he’s a lying liar who lies to himself more than anyone else.

He takes on the hero role because he can’t not- his values demand it and Mat defines himself by his values because they are literally all he had at one point- but it’s also a thing he does to get what he craves, which is respect and attention. (Any attention will do in a pinch, but positive attention is best.) That’s the part of him that gets super shirty about not being thanked/acknowledged. Being reactively heroic is a compulsion for him, but by around book 7 he's realized it's not getting him what he really wants, which is respect and (self-defined) success. He doesn't really have another plan though, until he willingly steps into his dire fate by kidnapping Tuon.

Over the course of the series, Tuon continues to push Mat to actively take responsibility and accept the consequences. The promise he makes to get her home safely turns into his education in the personal uses (and abuses) of power. She is the catalyst that makes him use his personal army in physical warfare for his own purposes. Before he’s used it as a facet of Rand’s army at Rand’s direction, and when he did use it for his own purposes, it was lending it to Egwene for psychological warfare only.

This education in power is why Tuon approves of his war crimes even though she fully admits they are brutal and committed against her own people; they show he understands that his actions as a leader can have horrible consequences, and also that he can prioritize the mission at hand. She says she's just waiting for him to prove he's the person from the prophecy, but she's also clearly testing him to see if he can handle the power she'd be delegating to him, by seeing how he handles the power he currently possesses in his own right.

Why Mat is Tuon's Catalyst

Tuon is very hard to impress, but Mat impresses her- and he impresses her the most when he’s not trying to be impressive, when he’s just being authentic and pursuing his self-interest. She's not just interested in his military competence, although that's certainly interesting to her- she's also interested in his political acumen and ability to deescalate or escalate situations as needed. His ability to fit in everywhere and command a situation- especially when she thought he was losing- like when she collars Joline, or when he scraps his winning streak in the hell- is so compelling to her.

On one level she's no stranger to winning from a position of weakness, given that her default M.O. is apparently 'play dead'. But I don't think Tuon has fit in anywhere without a great deal of effort, and Mat's sprezzatura is a pretty different strategy from her disappearing acts or virtuoso compulsion tactics. I'm not even thinking so much about Tuon's constant fending off of assassination attempts; more along the lines that we know she had to train herself to have Resting Bitch Face and project 6 feet of presence from 4'11".

(Incidentally, I don't know if she knows the Crystal Throne is a mind control ter'angreal, especially since she seems to be canonically resistant to mind control, so it's possible she's been assuming her mom's magically-augmented strength of presence is natural. No wonder she feels inadequate.) She's also clearly incredibly weird to both normal Seanchan and other people in her social sphere, whereas Mat is a social chameleon coasting on instinct (and thousands of strategic geniuses).

Tuon is desperately envious of and fascinated by authentic people who pursue their own self-interest, since she can't pursue her own self-interest without cloaking it as her duty, and she can't be an authentic person except by either flying under the radar or using up social capital by being stubborn. Her life is circumscribed by so many forces outside her direct control, yet she believes she is supposed to control everything for her own survival and the good of the world.

Mat seems to be to Tuon what she longs to be- a responsible, independent, kind leader who forges their own path in response to changing conditions & who has earned the respect, loyalty, and competence of their followers. She’s completely baffled at how Mat got there from being... Mat... but she recognizes that it gets results. I think the end result of her development is ideally to become more like Mat- someone who is a person first, albeit one with an outsized sense of responsibility, who is able to act productively on her instincts to help people.

How Tuon Can Help Mat Grow

Meanwhile, Tuon is someone whose strengths, struggles, and shared values Mat can learn from. Like him, she's been brainwashed by a paranoid culture where the ends justify the means, and unlike him, she spent almost her entire life in it. Yet she still has a powerful sense of empathy, even if it's twisted in the service of the Empire and she mostly uses it for manipulating people. It's clear that what she thinks will help people most is her control rather than her empathy, so that's what she tries hardest to give. But the empathy seeps out even when it isn't deliberately being used to build power or influence, like when she caught that Jain was feeling guilty about leaving his wife to die. Mat should follow Tuon at her best, and not completely strangle his sympathetic impulses in the service of power.

(A note on terms: Mat's sympathetic- he's always putting himself in other people's shoes and imagining how he would feel in their situation, and that motivates him to action on their behalf. It's about saving himself in the shape of the other. Tuon's empathetic- she can imagine how someone else feels and mirror their feelings back, or manipulate them based on her accurate assessment of their feelings. It's about modeling her social/political environment and therefore exerting the correct amount of control for the reaction she wants.)

Tuon's also built and sustained a culture of personal loyalty- one of her and Mat's shared values- in an utterly paranoid environment. The degree to which her personal slaves care about her is unusual for imperial Seanchan- it was very surprising that Selucia wanted to stay with her, and notably unusual for Karede to request to work with her again. The loyalty her personal damane show her is largely due to her skill at manipulation and brainwashing rather than anything resembling charisma or personal virtues- the damane have vastly less choice about who owns them or commands them than Selucia or Karede do- but she seems to be less openly cruel to damane and da'covale than say, Suroth. (Yes, I know, the bar here is in the ocean.) She also has Setalle Anan of all people willing to protect her, and while Setalle has an agenda and isn't doing it just because she likes Tuon, I think Setalle does actually like her. Mat should also be making friends and allies in his enemies' stronghold.

Finally, Tuon's weirdly open to other people's input and correction, for someone in her position and with her background. Again, the bar is so low as to be at the bottom of the Aryth Ocean, but she did apologize for 'giving an order in anger', which is to say throwing a temper tantrum, which is to say abusing her power beyond acceptable-to-her limits. The limits she accepts on her power and agency are more stringent than what would be acceptable to her peers or advisors in her position. Related to this sense of integrity, she's very stubborn around anything directly involving either her survival or her responsibilities to others. And because she's spent so much time building her personal integrity and being open to criticism from trusted advisors, she's very comfortable with having and using power, at least in terms of judgement and delegation (her own Power is, uh, the major exception.)

Mat, on the other hand, starts out the series very uncomfortable with power- and that's good in some ways- but people with power who aren't comfortable with power are like people who carry weapons they don't know how to use. Those weapons are just going to be used against them. His time with Tuon is there to give him practice intentionally wielding power.

Mat's Second Shift to Proactive Agency

One thing that I think Tuon still has to teach him, though, is the strategic value of lying low, keeping intentions secret, and quietly building a power base in pursuit of a long-term goal. Mat's great at dramatic, impulsive, risky gambles; not so great at staying still and waiting for the right moment in an intentional way. He always wants to be DOING something, immediately. But just thrashing out reflexively is not going to work for taking on the Seanchan, as Rand found out. Mat gets a taste of the kind of strategic timing he needs, when working with Tuon to trick everyone into thinking the Seanchan are out of the fight, then having her come back in with the army at a critical juncture.

I'm convinced that Mat's path to full character development will be to fully accept his power base in the Seanchan military/political machine... and destroy it from the inside out, either intentionally or as acceptable collateral damage in saving Tuon from herself.

Even Tuon can tell that structurally, he's got 'military coup' written all over him. She just doesn't believe he would ever do it because she knows he's loyal to her, and ever since becoming Empress she can't conceive of a situation where "Tuon" and "the Seanchan Empire" are separated that doesn't mean her own death. She has a blind spot in the exact place where Mat is most creative and motivated: preventing Tuon-the-person from dying (physically or spiritually) when the Empire does.

There's all sorts of interesting strategic gambles Mat can take advantage of. The Empire has cracks all over the place. The continent of Seanchan is a hot mess of civil war and domestic infighting and that's going to prevent Tuon from using it as a power base immediately, and distract her from local issues. The sul'dam secret and Tuon's relationship to it is already out among her most dangerous enemies (her immediate peers) and Elayne's gambit to rehabilitate sul'dam and damane and send them back to Seanchan territory is also going to spread that info.

Tuon and Mat's kids are a ticking time bomb of 'likely to be involuntary channelers' and even before that, you think Mat's going to do nothing to mitigate the childhood trauma of 'everyone is trying to kill me'? This man raised an orphan in a war camp in a perpetual 'take your adopted child to work day'. He might not be able to get them out of the Seanchan cultural deathtrap altogether, but he's going to do his best to make it less dangerous for them, which could mean radical cultural change.

Oh, and the Aiel are going to want their Wise Ones back in the next year and a day, which has the potential to be a real diplomatic time bomb. Also, as far as I can tell, no one has yet told the Black Tower they can't make war on the Seanchan, who will be in a tight spot re: getting more female damane, and therefore very interested in anything they can do with male channelers, ESPECIALLY if they can be convinced saidin is clean. Also: Moghedien is there!?! And Elaida, for that matter. Creator help anyone who goes to Elaida for Foretellings.

Seanchan has 99 problems and I guarantee you Tuon is thinking that at least her man ain't one. She is wrong. She is so, so wrong. (And we haven't even gotten to Min, who could convince Tuon to do pretty much anything if she played her cards right, because Tuon is weak to prophecy and trusted advisors. Or Mat's private army, which is going to be both a point of political tension and a valuable asset for him.)

How Mat Can Help Tuon Grow

I don't think people who think that Mat has utterly surrendered and lost his moral compass by falling in (love) with Tuon are correct. Mat has a history of losing to win. And I think Tuon is going to teach him- by example and circumstance- how to take responsibility in the most deliberate possible way, for the biggest possible stakes. She's going to teach him how to win friends and influence people in his new environment. She's going to teach him how to wait for precisely the right moment for maximum impact. And she's going to teach him how to sneakily rescue the fuck out of an entire society or die trying.

But Tuon can't learn that she's a person, not an institution, until she's literally removed from the institution and it is removed from her. When it comes to damane and slavery more broadly, she IS the Empire, and her changing her heart and mind- even if it were possible for that to come first- does jack shit to actually help anyone enslaved by Seanchan without the material conditions for societal change.

Empires change by economic, military, social pressures combined. You have to break the Empire before you can break Tuon, at least if you're Mat and you like her, and also if you want her along to help you pick up the pieces and fit them into something that doesn't just kill everyone and create more massive collateral damage. Tuon's relationship with power is cancerous; her desire for control has metastasized through her life and the lives of others, and the entry point of that relationship is her self-image as The Empress (and before that, a sul'dam, and an imperial heir...)

Mat's the mature one here, for a change, and that means his character development has to come first; Tuon's will fall into place once you change the conditions around her. She's infinitely malleable that way, because she was shaped to be responsive to those pressures from birth, and she kept shaping herself to be responsive to them as a survival tactic.

Mat listens to his instincts and the dice in his head because he relies on them for survival; Tuon looks for the omens in the world and the shifting currents of power because she relies on them for survival. Once Tuon experiences the consequences of her overreach, if Mat builds Tuon a world where she and others can survive without slavery and exploitation, where she doesn't HAVE to have an iron grip on everything, I promise you she'll go for it. Above everything else, Tuon is a survivor, and I think she could surprise you by how much she would change to survive.

#wheel of time #wot meta #wheel of time meta #wot book spoilers #a memory of light spoilers #mat/tuon #problematic fave tuon #oh look it's another multi-page essay no one asked for #tl;dr: Tuon will accidentally teach Mat how to military coup her and then she'll experience Consequences and Therapy in that order

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an-s-sedai · 3 months

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I headcanon that since the Aes Sedai call the longevity that comes with channeling slowing, that it is a very literal term and they are slowed down biologically. Therefore a non-Oathbound saidar channeler doesn't have 300 or more years of monthly menstruation to dread, just like, a period a year till they hit magical menopause.

This does, sadly, suggest that their menopausal symptoms would last for decades to centuries, but thems the breaks.

Idk where or how it fits with their wounds not healing any slower than normal, and they need more food to support their metabolically-intensive channeling.

#wheel of time #theorycrafting #wheel of time meta

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toomanylizzes · 9 months

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Pour one out for Tam al’Thor who somehow had to keep his enormous son fed and clothed.

#tam al'thor #rand al'thor #it’s a good thing all the clothes in the two rivers were probably hand-made #otherwise there would be no shirts that would fit Rand #wheel of time meta #wheel of time #fantasy book father of the year

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catknifetime · 8 months

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Some Wheel of Time thoughts: the way Aes Sedai treat men who can channel is even worse than it looks at first glance. No I’m not kidding.

I will be using severed instead of gentled or stilled in this post, I just think using 1 term is more simple.

So let’s start with some basic 100% true facts: 1. The men who are channeling out in the world are men born with the spark, they cannot help it. 2. Men who can channel will go mad, and 99% of the time end up hurting a lot of people with the power. 3. Even if men who can channel don’t kill other people or themselves with the power, they will inevitably die horribly of necrosis overtaking their bodies. 4. Severing men who can channel stops the madness and necrosis progressing. 5. Severed men become extremely depressed and suicidal, to the point that they almost always eventually starve themselves to death if prevented from committing suicide in a faster way.

The White Tower knows all of these things, as well as what happens to a severed woman.

Second collection of facts for my argument is what (as far as I can tell) The White Tower’s official plan of action for men who can channel is. And it is this this: 1. Find a man who is channeling, probably through an informant’s network. 2. Sisters from the Red Ajah go and capture the man, shielding him and bringing him back to the tower. 3. The man is tried in the court of The White Tower and severed. 4. The man is kept prisoner in the white tower in pretty nice conditions until he finds a way to commit suicide or starves himself to death. (Note: #4 may not be true for all men, I am primarily basing this off of Logain and he is definitely an outlier. But just letting them go is actually pretty much just as bad)

Now up until the source was cleansed, severing men who can channel was actually the best option to deal with the situation. Both for the men and the world. But the way they treat men after gentling is inexcusable given the information they have.

What is this information you may ask? That they know how to help a severed woman with the depression that comes after severing. In The Shadow Rising, after Siuan and Leane are gentled they either think about or discuss (I don’t remember which) that the best way to stave off the depression from severing is to find a new purpose that takes up all of your time and energy. The impression is that this is common knowledge about how to help a severed woman. I think they even mention some severed women being set up with families by the tower to try and keep them alive.

They do not help severed men. Not even a bit of advice like a “oh btw you should try and find a job or task that takes up a lot of your time, it’ll help.” (Assuming they do let most severed men go). And they sure as hell didn’t try to help Logain with the depression when he was being held captive in the tower. They basically just condemned him to a slow death. Like if you aren’t going to help the guy you’re keeping prisoner and who you know is so depressed he’ll eventually starve himself to death just execute him and speed things up.

So it’s not a “oh this is a tragic necessity, so sad these men just invariably die” like some Aes Sedai present it. It’s actually a “oh this is a tragic necessity, but we’re making it WAY worse for these guys because of the Reds”. Did I mention that btw? That this is all because the Ajah in charge of dealing with men who can channel culturally HATES them. Aes Sedai could reduce the harm of severing for men, but they chose not to. Because even within the Aes Sedai there is an incredible amount of fearmongering about, and among the Red hatred for, men who can channel. Even though they all logically know the men can’t help it, that the ones channeling have the spark, they still hold very uninformed-seeming and uncomplicated opinions on them.

I don’t really have a conclusion. I guess I’ll just say that this isn’t a plot hole, just another way the Red Ajah sucks. And that the more you dig into how the white tower works the more you see how it really doesn’t.

#the wheel of time #wheel of time #wot #wheel of time book spoilers #wheel of time meta #red ajah #logain ablar #the white tower #aes sedai #suicide tw #starvation tw

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cannoli-reader · 2 years

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Why the Sea Fok are That Way

So many readers hate the Sea Folk. Or, they think a lot of things about the Sea Folk are cool, until they get to aCoS, and the Sea Folk fail to bend over backwards in awe and admiration of Our Heroes, and Opinions regarding them take a sharp nose-dive. Even the occasional Sea Folk fave like Shalon having an affair with Ailil as they attempt espionage against each other, or Talaan wanting to run away to the White Tower, tend to be viewed as further reasons to hate on the Sea Folk, for suppressing Talaan’s dreams or condemning Shalon to a life of heteronormativity.

So why the hate for the Atha’an Miere? From what I can see, it largely has to do with their demeanor and lack of respect for the characters the readers identify with. Many also view the bargain they made with Nynaeve and Elayne as excessive and hate that it gives them a leg up over our girls the Aes Sedai and, to a lesser degree, Rand. Many readers make certain assumptions about the roles of those two parties, namely that they are supposed to be In Charge and leading everyone else at Tarmon Gaidon. Except, of course, that is because that’s how the characters see it, and Robert Jordan had other things in mind, and was now pulling the rug out from under their complacency. Because fighting the Shadow is supposed to be a cooperative effort, not a march to glory for the Dragon Reborn and Amyrlin Seat (and their best friends, of course). The Sea Folk coming into the story mostly in a book named after the pains and irritations of power, is not an accident, and part of Jordan’s way of telling us “Well, actually...” in regard to the aforementioned misconception. (Cadsuane shows up here too, is part of this same trend in the narrative, and is also hated by a great many readers for many of the same reasons). I’ll get into why they behave as they do, under a cut.

So why are the Sea Folk such pushy assholes? Because they are the Sea Folk. They live on the sea, almost entirely. Crossing the ocean is not a necessary evil for them, it is their home and lifestyle. Which means sailing on ships, with strict discipline and tight teamwork absolutely necessary for survival. In the wetlands, there is a lot of margin for error. The Coplins and Congars screw up in the Two Rivers, it doesn’t drag down the rest of the community too much, their neighbors can give them some minimal aid to get them over the hump, and look down their noses at them until they start pulling their weight. In the Three-fold Land, a screw up dies of thirst or exposure, or gets killed in battle, and life goes on. But in the ocean, the optimal operation of a ship is what protects you from death, and anyone who endangers that, can doom everyone else, no matter how good the rest of the team is, or how hard they are working. Bayle Domon is not being an asshole when he kicks Floran Gelb off his boat; failing to tie down a boom is lethally dangerous. It takes out a Trolloc in armor, so imagine what it would do to a smaller and squishier sailor or passenger. And that’s just with the ship anchored for the night. Imagine it suddenly swinging out of control while they are moving swiftly down the river. Even if all it does is distract the crew, that could put them on the rocks. At least that river can be swum if the worst happens. A comparable error on the ocean, and everyone is dead.

This explains, as is referenced in the text, their discipline and hierarchy and expectation of absolute obedience. It also explains the curt manner many Sea Folk authority figures have, that rubs the wetlander PoV characters the wrong way. When you need to give life or death orders, there is often no time for formalities and ceremony (for instance, the Aiel “I see you” greeting being used even when reporting to a chief in the midst of a battle) and they very often have to give orders in stressful conditions and in environments where hearing and sight are compromised (such as the middle of a storm). This could also explain the way they get snitty about courtesies being followed and displays of ceremony at other times. Displays of respect when life-or-death orders are not being given helps reinforce the status of the person with the authority so it sticks in one’s mind that this is a person to be obeyed, while also demonstrating to the authority figure that those showing respect understand the hierarchy. With outsiders, respect is necessary for equitable dealings, People who don’t respect you, will not feel compelled to hold up their end of the deal, hence the need for such demonstrations even in the real world, even between mortal enemies. A shorebound official who fails to honor the Sea Folk properly is one who might not feel compelled to honor their agreements, either. Maybe it is innocent ignorance or miscommunication, but ignorance and miscommunication can also ruin a deal with no malice intended.

The maritime lifestyle of the Sea Folk means that there are not a whole lot of crops or natural resources available to them on the ocean, and ships are expensive. So they make their living as traders. Not transporters, as in hauling others’ cargo and passengers, or selling their own goods, but as middlemen, buying low from one part, and selling high to another, which necessitates their famous bargaining skills, to buy goods at the lowest possible price and sell them at the highest possible price, to maximize their income. Where a transport business or a merchant in common commodities needs to adhere to the maxim that the customer is always right, because the former is in a service industry while the latter can be easily replaced by a competitor, the Sea Folk appear to specialize in trading rare and valuable commodities (silk, porcelain, ivory, lenses) not readily available to others, but which they can obtain with their ability and willingness to sail where others can or will not, and for which the demand will almost always overcome suspicion of outsiders when they offer them in trade.

However, being a mercantile culture also means that you need to be reliable and trustworthy. In a society where there is no enforcement of contracts or whose authorities lack the ability to fully enforce contracts, reputation is critical. If a merchant can’t be relied upon to deliver what they promise, or pay for what they want, doing business with them is ruinous, no matter the value of their goods. This means that however hard they might bargain, the Sea Folk need to earn and keep a reputation for delivering what they promise, especially on top of the resentment they face as successful outsiders. We get a few glimpses of this trait in their dealings with Rand and Elayne. Zaida persuades Elayne to allow the Aes Sedai in the Royal Palace to teach the Windfinders as a gesture of good faith while awaiting the completion of their bargain, but after the city comes under siege, she allows the employment of Windfinders in making gateways to supply the city and Palace, in payment for that teaching. It was not part of the original agreement and a strict-constructionist interpretation of the deal would say that they had no obligation to Elayne, since she set no price for the teaching. Though the extra teaching was given in token of the promise of Aes Sedai teachers, it was not part of their original bargain, so the Sea Folk felt an obligation to repay it. We see also in Harine and Shaon’s conversation that while earlier in the same book she had been stridently demanding her end of the Bargain made with Rand, she is also operating out of loyalty to him. While she wants to find Rand, it is not solely to nag him for the lands and other perks of the Bargain, she is also seeking to protect him from the machinations of the Aes Sedai, even, she claims, at the expense of retaliation for the inadvertent insult offered her (and by extension, the Atha’an Miere as a whole) by the First Consul.

“I would like to put Aleis’ eyeteeth on a string - walking away from me without so much as a word! - but not at the expense of letting Cadsuane mesh the Coramoor in some trouble here.”

Rand has not asked this of her, nor has he given her anything to make Harine feel she owes him in return. In the eyes of the Sea Folk, who adhere to a strictly delineated and unified chain of command, Cadsuane has to somehow be working for the Coramoor, so they approached her to demand his fulfilment of the Bargain, only to be subject to the wrath of Cadsuane, which makes both Aes Sedai and rulers nervous. While she may have set them straight on her relationship and subordination to Rand (or lack thereof) their experience with Cadsuane cannot have endeared Rand to them. If anything, his failure to provide an authorized spokesman to deal with them is another problem they have with him. But in spite of all that, Harine is still doing her best to help and protect Rand. She might have negotiated for a deal that requires more of him than he wishes, but she is committed to Team Rand, above and beyond the strict provisions of their Bargain.

The customs of the Sea Folk, and their necessity in following them, affects their perception of the shorebound, and that, in turn, informs their dealings. The first word we have of the Sea Folk’s relations with outsiders is their discussion of Jullin Sandar.

The thief-catcher is a good man, even considering that he is shorebound ...Twice he has found those who pilfered from us, and found them quickly. Another shoreman would have taken longer so he might ask more for the work.

We see from this, that despite sailing all over the known world, and staying as brief a time in foreign ports as they can manage (especially since they would not be using Tear for refitting or overhauling the ship), the Wavedancer’s crew has had multiple instances of theft in Tear alone, as well as presumably other shorebound ports, and have had sufficient experience of local hirelings that Juilin Sandar stands out to them for his competence and integrity. The forefront concept is the positive depiction of Juilin (which needs perhaps a small bit of buffering in the Wondergirls’ eyes after his [unwilling] betrayal previously), but how bad have their experiences with both thieves and law enforcement, been that basic good service is remarkable to Coine?

A modern reader might huff over the prejudicial assumptions which Coine shows no qualms of repeating to a couple of shorebound passengers, but this is not prejudice, this is experience. There is no “pre” about it. The Sea Folk do not have the full picture of the shorebound and their history and culture, as we see in Shalon’s ignorance of the history discussed in Far Madding, all they have to go on is their experience in dealing with the shorebound themselves.

Real world observation of mercantile cultures, or at least minority cultures whose members fulfil a mercantile function within a majority culture, shows us the Jews in Europe, Lebanese in Africa, Armenians in Turkey and the Chinese outside of China, in most countries with a Pacific or Indian Ocean coastline. Even a cursory knowledge of world history will show how the trading services of these peoples fail to be appreciated, and the ethnic groups in question not exactly embraced. The Sea Folk might have ships to escape the pogroms and other dangers of being a minority who profits from dealings with the majority, but they do still need to do business to make a living, and the high cost of acquiring their trade goods and bringing them to their customer means they need to push hard to achieve a sustainable income. Doubtless the endemic thievery the Wavedancer has encountered, and desultory efforts by local authorities to rectify these incidents, as well as extortionate services provided by local contractors, are manifestations of these resentments. It is noted in the Big White Book and in Mat’s stream of consciousness, that southerners have a reputation for hard work and industry to the rest of the wetlands, but this is not apparently the experience of the Sea Folk, whose major trading partners would all be coastal and southern nations of Tear, Illian, Mayene, Altara and Tarabon (as well as Arad Domon, who have their own issues with negotiation ethics). In many ways, the Sea Folk have a situation like the folk of Luca’s menagerie, who immediately begin packing to leave following a confrontation with Seanchan soldiers. Despite the local authorities cracking down on the attempts to cheat the show, and despite their warrants from the same authorities, in practice, an intolerant population will find ways around the most tolerant authorities, regardless of the long term detriment to the people themselves. When the Jews were expelled from Spain, it was the Catholic primate of the country who asked “Who will make our shoes?” His congregation did not care. Hence the Sea Folk habits of bargaining hard, and not trusting the shorebound any more than they have to and not giving Our Heroes the respect readers believe they are entitled to as protagonists, knowing that Rand and Nynaeve and Elayne would never be a party to such abuses (on the other hand, Egwene, whatever her personal feelings on war crimes, seems to lean toward the side of pragmatism and anti-authoritarianism when it comes to giving orders that might upset one’s racist followers or curtail their tendency to racially motivated violence; who can say how she would handle a crisis in her jurisdiction with her constituency attacking or cheating the Sea Folk, if she really thought it would endanger her political position - you can’t say for sure, even with the good guys).

The primary issue that sets the Sea Folk at odds with Our Heroines, is the use of channeling by their Windfinders. As with their hierarchy and discipline, the Windfinders are critical to their survival. Deep sea sailing vessels need reliable winds and are at the mercy of the weather they encounter. Storms can destroy them in spite of the crews’ best efforts, and a lack of wind on the open sea can kill the crew. The Sea of Storms, south of the main continent is roughly an equivalent distance from the equator on the world maps, to what are called the “horse latitudes” in the real world, south of the cemaros, or trade winds, we see bringing the Seanchan invasion fleet to Ebou Dar. Horse latitudes are called such, because in these belts, there was little wind and calm seas, which slowed journeys across the oceans so much, that it was often necessary to kill the horses aboard to either save on watering them or in some cases, to eat. Traveling between the main continent and their islands might very well take the Sea Folk into those dead areas, where they need Windfinders just to move their ships. They are also needed to suppress storms, help defend the ships, and any number of other things for which the One Power is an irreplaceable or impossible-to-match resource. And beyond their value as assets, they are kindred and compatriots of the other Sea Folk. They love them and need them.

Officially, the White Tower does not recruit, but in practice, we see how Aes Sedai deal with a woman whom they want to train who does not reciprocate their eagerness. The White Tower prefers to be asked and petitioned, over asking themselves, but they have all sorts of ways to make people ask for something the Tower wants to do, and ways to make those who get stubborn about asking, regret it. In practice, the Aes Sedai perspective is that all channelers should come to the Tower for training, and the attitude of various PoV sisters who observe a population of female channelers who are not doing so, is not to lament their unwillingness, but a determination to see that they do come. Furthermore, Egwene and Elayne, the two main characters most sympathetic to the Aes Sedai, sincerely believe the White Tower could and would coerce would-be Windfinders to come to the White Tower as initiates anyway.

With that in mind, how can you blame the Sea Folk for believing the exact same thing, that the Tower wants all women who can channel, and can and will take them. This is a belief widespread in both the wetlands, the Three-fold Land and among the Sea Folk, whose perception is “Supposedly the White Tower was like some mechanical contrivance that ground up thrones and reshaped them to its will.” Their strategy is hide their channeling population from the Aes Sedai by keeping them away from sisters, and pretending they are not hiding anything, but that there is very little worth looking for.

So for Nynaeve and Elayne to show up at the flagship of the entire Sea Folk nation, asking to talk to the Windfinders, is both a power move and a threat. Any Aes Sedai doing as much to any ship would be like having a uniformed SS officer knocking on your door and asking to speak to the Jews hiding in your attic. The girls are just going to the top to get face time with someone who can authorize their request, as they have become accustomed ever since being sent out of the Tower carrying warrants from the Amyrlin Seat, and in their dealings with the Tairens as friends of the Dragon Reborn, with the Aiel as acquaintances of the leader of their expeditionary force, with the Panarch of Tarabon, the Prophet of the Lord Dragon and Tylin, but for the rank-and-hierarchy conscious Sea Folk, it comes across as sending a message. Then they lay the news on the Atha’an Miere leadership that they have a line on an artifact that appears as legendary to the Sea Folk as the Horn of Valere would be to the shorebound.

This conveys a sense of immense danger to the Sea Folk. Mentioning the Bowl of the Winds makes them seem impressive, and the casual demonstration of how much of what the Sea Folk thought were well-guarded secrets they already knew, signals the threat is not merely theoretical, but practical. Their primary defense is gone, the Tower knows their weakness. Now they have to prevent the Tower from doing the thing they have feared for 3,000 years, taking away their relatives (e.g. Harine, who would not just lose her closest advisor and most valuable member of her crew, but also the big sister who raised and cared for her and comforted her when she was afraid of the dark) and personnel assets they crucially need to maintain their lifestyle and economic survival.

When you boil it all down, that’s what the bargain they make with Nynaeve and Elayne is all about. The survival of their people, through a guarantee that the White Tower will not take their Windfinders. All the various provisions within are a means to that end. Ostensibly, it is a trade of knowledge, because in politics, it is rude to try to answer threats that have not been explicitly made, and makes you look fearful, and it’s bad bargaining to try to negotiate against a gambit that has not been played. So while the Aes Sedai, in the persons of Nynaeve and Elayne, are asking for the unique weather skills of the Windfinders to fix the Dark One’s alterations to the world’s climate, the Sea Folk ask in return, knowledge to balance what they are giving. Rather than a figuratively huge piece of lore that no other channelers can match (as we later learn from Moridin’s PoV, not even in the Age of Legends), the Sea Folk instead ask for a quantity of more common knowledge to match in scope what they will be giving the Aes Sedai in scale.

But how do you match one piece of knowledge against another? The thing about bargaining for knowledge, is that you don’t know, by definition, what is available. Imagine an alien from a high-tech society owes you a favor, so he gives you a credit marker for one item of technology that you can use freely and replicate all you want here on Earth. You walk into their workshop or warehouse or equivalent of Best Buy, and what do you ask for? How do you know what they can do? Do you ask for a space ship, only to find out after getting it that they have interstellar teleportation, or that the ship is not compatible with purposes we would want it for? What would you offer a primitive tribesman if the tables were turned? How would you know what you have that would most suit his needs? Wouldn’t he be the best judge of that? So the Sea Folk don’t bargain for a specific piece or area of knowledge, but instead for the service of a group of teachers for a time, to give them the opportunity to find out the capabilities of the Aes Sedai, and to better arm themselves against the day if and when the Tower comes for their girls anyway. They also obtain the right to go to the Tower to study, to keep the Tower from dumping a bunch of weak or ignorant noobs on the Sea Folk as teachers. They insist on the teachers living under Sea Folk law, because what if the teachers refuse to teach, or stall, until the year of service is up? They need to be able to enforce the repayment of their bargain.

All of this might seem extreme, but remember, firstly the general human experience of middleman minorities, and the particular Sea Folk experience of shorebound that they A. steal frequently, and B. don’t make honest efforts. Sure, there are Juilin Sandars among the shorebound (Nynaeve and Elayne, most notably) who would deal straightforwardly with them and make a sincere effort, but they have no way of identifying them. On top of this, is their perception of the White Tower both in its worldly power, and its trustworthiness. And they are not wrong in this matter.

First of all, while the Tower might not directly rule the nations or control the rulers, they can use various other forms of influence to make life difficult for the Sea Folk in any port. The Sea Folk, for instance, tolerate a Tairen pilot even though they don’t need his help, because they want to be welcome back in Tear. They want sovereign territory from the rulers they negotiate with, precisely because they want to be relieved of their constant worry about rulers interfering with their trade or local laws being twisted against them. The White Tower might agree to leave the Windfinders alone, only taking those who come voluntarily, and then all of a sudden, the Sea Folk might find that they are not allowed to dock or trade in any port, and Aes Sedai are murmuring sympathetically while dropping hints that they could use their influence to reopen the ports, if the Tower gets a sufficient quantity of “volunteer” novices from the Sea Folk...

And the Aes Sedai absolutely do negotiate in bad faith. We see an example when Coiren makes a deal with the Shaido. When Sevanna places a condition, Coiren says “...your service deserves what you ask.” Katerine’s perspective confirms that the wording was deliberate, to make the Shaido believe Coiren had agreed, when of course, she has done nothing of the sort. Here’s the thing, though. Coiren is bound by the Three Oaths. She can’t say something she does not believe is true. Coiren believes the Shaido deserve what they are asking for, but she still arranges for the Aes Sedai to cheat them. Later on, we see they do, in fact, fulfil their end, so it’s not like they had some objection to the demand, they simply leave themselves an out to cheat the Shaido of their reward if it had been convenient or more practical for the Aes Sedai down the road.

While the Sea Folk do not know about this particular incident, even remote backwater places like the Two Rivers have heard that “the truth an Aes Sedai tells is not always the truth you think you hear” and that “an Aes Sedai’s gift always has a hook in it.” Marin al’Vere, misandrist extraordinaire, and dispenser of awful relationship advice, tells her daughter that the stories about Aes Sedai are just fool men’s nonsense, except we see with Moiraine, considered by many fans to be the ideal sister all the others should aspire to be like, in her conduct with the Two Rivers folk, that those aphorisms are, in fact, dead on the money: Moiraine gives the three ta’veren a gift with a One Power weave that makes them susceptible to her orders and allows her to track them. If that is not a figurative hook, then nothing is. And when Perrin returns home and observes Tam & Abel trying to keep that saying in mind in their dealings with Alanna and Verin, he notes how in his experience, Aes Sedai set the hook anyway, even if you won’t take her gift.

If these sayings have penetrated the Two Rivers, and the Two Rivers’ characters’ experience has not changed their outlook by nearly the middle of the series, while spending more time with one of the best Aes Sedai, you can bet the Sea Folk are aware of that reputation and are keeping it in mind when negotiating to save their people, their kin folk and their way of life.

More than a few people complain about how the Sea Folk treat the Aes Sedai who teach them, but again, they are operating under the assumption that shorebound in general and Aes Sedai in particular, will try to cheat. What experience they have with what teachers they get, does nothing to change their minds, as the Aes Sedai make every effort to evade fulfilling their obligation, and Merilille, who made her own agreement to teach, actually runs away, while the sister they bring home from Caemlyn makes similar efforts.

And let’s not forget the White Tower’s view of the bargain, that everything else is “small potatoes next to” letting the Sea Folk sisters quit being Aes Sedai.

In fact, it was part of the bargain with them that Atha’an Miere sisters be allowed to give up being Aes Sedai and return to their ships. The Hall of the Tower would not half howl about that.

Most of what seems to get under the skin of the readers empathizing with the point of view characters, is their demeanor and attitude of superiority, but in practical terms, for the Aes Sedai, that’s not worth mentioning, usually. Egwene believes, and Siuan does not challenge this belief, that if they can get the Hall to accept letting the Sea Folk sisters quit, the rest won’t cause any problems worth considering. And honestly, it shouldn’t. Knowledge is the one commodity you don’t lose by sharing or selling, and one year of inconvenient service out of a life expectancy of three hundred equates to less than a summer vacation in a normal lifespan.

As a final note, I know some people have spoken huffily about the attitude of Sea Folk toward teachers in general (except it only seems to be shorebound teachers, see above re: cheating and shirking experiences) like teachers are some sort of elevated vocation or profession due great reverence. I can’t really understand this perspective. I spent 8 years as a high school history and math teacher and it was some of the easiest, most self-indulgent and low-input work I have ever done. I honestly felt guilty taking a paycheck for it. Maybe teaching children is something else, but no one is asking the Aes Sedai to teach people younger than high school age. Furthermore, if anyone deserves to be subjected to an abusive teaching experience, it is the Aes Sedai we see getting lessons in Tel’Aran’Rhiod from Nynaeve and Elayne. Not once is their arrogance and dismissive attitude toward their students, and demands for the respect due a superior even slightly suggested to be a personal idiosyncrasy Anaiya et al. having in common. Rather those attitudes are directly attributed to their being Aes Sedai, and the implication is that any other sister would be just as bad in receiving their lessons.

Some readers question the need for the Aes Sedai to be the ones to pay this price, considering their altruistic motives. After all, they are seeking the Sea Folk’s aid to save the world from the Dark One. But that is exactly why it is incumbent on the Aes Sedai to pay the price. By claiming for themselves a monopoly on channeling, even on objects of the Power which might permit ordinary people preternatural abilities, the Aes Sedai morally undertake a responsibility to provide preternatural solutions to any problems requiring them. If you disarm a person, you have a moral duty to protect them. Whether or not the Aes Sedai are justified in concentrating all authorized channelers under themselves, the fact is, they have stripped the people of the wetlands of their ability to cope with problems like the preternatural drought the Dark One is imposing, so it falls upon the White Tower to pay whatever price is necessary to make it right. Likewise, the Sea Folk had nothing to do with that situation. The Tower and the wetlands have done nothing to help them, and they stand to benefit less than the shorebound from a restoration of the natural weather, at least in the short term. Yes, eventually the famine will catch up to them, but you could also say the same thing about the Aes Sedai, who will be the last to go hungry in the wetlands, which no doubt has something to do with their willingness to foist off fixing the weather on a couple of new not entirely legitimate sisters with a couple of retirees monitoring them on the side while they engage in their primary mission of making sure no one who decided the Tower civil war was not something they wanted from their teachers, and departed, gets away with it. The Wondergirls aside, we are not talking about a benevolent organization or admirable group of people here! Expecting the Sea Folk to bend over backwards and put themselves at risk to help the Aes Sedai do what they should be doing anyway (although Romanda’s expressed attitude toward fixing the weather, and dissatisfaction with the results, should inspire horror in anyone with the slightest comprehension of meteorology, and gratitude that the bargain removes the Bowl of the Winds from her or anyone with her perspective) is kind of insane.

Earlier I made the analogy of the SS asking for the help of Jews on a big project (considering the Nazis labeled physics. among other disciplines, as “Jewish science” such a scenario is not entirely outlandish, had they faced a similar existential threat as the Dark One’s drought), but if such a thing were to happen, would anyone blame the Jews in question, and their allies, for demanding safeguards as well as the means of enforcing the agreement they come to? Would anyone accept “cross my heart, hope to die” in that case? Yes, yes, Three Oaths, but the books clearly show that they are bullshit at restraining the Aes Sedai from deceiving or breaking the spirit of a contract or slaughtering people en masse with the One Power, if they feel like it.

in summation, the circumstances of the Sea Folk, in both their lifestyle and dealings with outsiders, inform their ways of doing things, their perceived need to press hard for advantage and for their due, and the established behavior of the Aes Sedai demonstrates the need for them to do so in this case as well. They are not cheating, and if they ask for a lot, it is because their contractual partners cause them to need to do so. The bargain they make with the Aes Sedai through Nynaeve and Elayne obtains a reasonable price for the extraordinary and irreplaceable service they provide, at relatively little cost to the Aes Sedai, who are morally obliged to pay whatever the Sea Folk would ask for that service, and the part the Aes Sedai consider to be the worst provision of the bargain is nothing more than what should be the status quo. That they need to bargain for the freedom of three sisters to quit the White Tower, all on its own, absolutely condemns the Aes Sedai as the party at fault in their dealings.

#Wheel of Time #Sea folk #Sea folk bargain #Cultural analysis #Aes Sedai #Wheel of Time meta

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butterflydm · 2 years

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mat and tuon (amol spoilers)

Since I’m about to go into The Book That Introduces Tuon, I kinda wanna set out why I (when first reading the series) could never enjoy Mat & Tuon as a pairing and also set up some things that I’m going to try to look out for to see if maybe I see anything more appealing in it as a romance this time around (and, of course, this is all imo and not me trying to tell other people not to ship them, etc).

And, of course, this reread has transformed other aspects of my feelings about the series, so I will... keep everyone updated as I go and let y’all know if my feelings about this change too, lol.

Though I’m putting this in my reread tag because it applies to how I’m approaching my reread, this does have spoilers all the way through the final book, A Memory of Light. And I’m talking about the Seanchan culture, which is built on slavery, so content warnings for that as well.

The thing is, the actual basic trope set-up of Mat & Tuon is not something that I have any issues with -- there are three main tropes that they use: princess & rogue; hero & villain; enemies-to-lovers. Princess and rogue is a classic tropes, seen in such ships as Leia & Han or Jasmine & Aladdin. She sees the true worth of the man behind whatever mask it is that he’s put up, and he brings adventure and affection into her (romantically lonely) life. Rapunzel and Eugene from the Tangled movie also fits into this general shape. Enemies to lovers is also a classic trope, too many examples to list. Hero & Villain (aka ‘dating Catwoman’) is also a pretty classic trope that can be done well if effort is put into showing why these two people are on opposite sides but still drawn to each other.

It’s just that Jordan did it all in the laziest possible way. Which, in fairness, is common with Jordan’s take on romantic tropes. All three of these tropes require a delicate hand willing to do a slow burn so that the audience believes that the characters genuinely have emotionally reached new places with each other. And Jordan doesn’t... bother doing that. He doesn’t even really make an attempt. Instead, he basically just overrides it all with a fourth trope that is a favorite of his in the books: the fated romance. Because Destiny Says So, he has Mat inexplicably decide to take Tuon with him and inexplicably decide to start courting her, without ever emotionally justifying these decisions for Mat’s character, despite having set him up as someone who wanted to run away from his arranged marriage.

While Tuon does ‘see Mat with new eyes’ at the end of KoD (sort of), from what I remember this doesn’t seem to impact her worldview at all; she just goes placidly along with the way her empire works to the very end of the book series. She doesn’t grow as a person as a result of realizing that someone she misjudged was more than he appeared to be or ever become more than the slaver that we were introduced to in Winter’s Heart, because Jordan never lets Mat genuinely challenge her (from what I remember, people mostly don’t ever challenge Tuon... maybe because if they did, it would be too obvious how paper-thin her arguments are).

And, of course, most of the time, the villain in a hero-villain romance isn’t a slaver. Usually, they’re well, like Catwoman -- sure, she breaks the law but she’s not out there to deliberately hurt innocent people.

Mat’s initial introduction to Tuon is as ‘Tylin’s Toy’, which is to say, essentially as a piece of property that she finds intriguing (she attempts to buy him from Tylin the first time she meets him). She even thinks of him as ‘Toy’ for quite a while (though I don’t recall how long exactly and whether or not he ever gets to be ‘Mat’ before she takes his name away again and replaces it with a new one - and yes, I know she sees the new name as an honor, but I’m pretty sure Tylin also saw making Mat her pretty as an honor - the Tylin-Tuon similarities are also one of the things that make me dislike the relationship).

The fact that she persistently continues to call him ‘Toy’ is honestly something I find genuinely disgusting because she is a slaver, because she does view people as objects. So it can never be a ‘cute’ nickname with ‘sexual tension’ for me because a. the reason she calls him that is because his rapist treated him like a toy; b. she literally tried to buy him the first time they met; c. I believe that he repeatedly asks her to call him by his own name and she refuses.

And my final big thing is that Tuon’s sticking point in A Memory of Light, the issue that she WILL NOT back down from even when a ta’veren is trying his best to work his influence on her, is that she refuses to release any of her enslaved channeling women. She would literally rather let the Dark One take over the world than give up a single one of her new damane. Rand has to agree to let her keep all the women that she and her empire have kidnapped, tortured, and enslaved in the Westlands, before she will agree to help save the world. Nothing matters more to Tuon than keeping her slaves! And this is in the final book! As you can tell, it really bothers me!

This is basically the thing that makes me go 'well, I guess literally the only possible way to improve the Seanchan Empire is to depose or assassinate Tuon, because she's made her position on reform very clear'.

Overall, it is very difficult for me to look at Mat & Tuon as anything except Tuon doing her best to ‘break’ her husband to the leash (which was something Egwene Dreamed about back in book 4; a Seanchan woman leashing Mat) and make him accept his place as her property, while Mat tries to hold onto his sense of personal identity in the face of both Tuon and the Pattern itself trying to turn him into nothing but a tool. And I do not personally find any of that either romantic or Romantic. Instead, I find it really heartbreaking for Mat.

Things I will be keeping an eye out for during my reread:

1. Any signs that Tuon is capable of changing her worldview of viewing people as essentially proto-property, with their personhood as a status that can be revoked at any time. From what I remember, she flirts with the idea from time to time, but always comes down on the side of not allowing her worldview to budge an inch.

2. Any signs that she sees Mat as more than property (and sleeping with him does not count for this. Tuon condemning other people for sleeping with ‘their property’ does not mean she is not capable of justifying it for herself; we see her be a hypocrite about the sul’dam issue as well) -- I am uncertain if/when this ever happens for her. We know that she saw him as property when she first met him. Does she ever see him as a person or does she just see him as more useful property?

Things that I’m hoping that I won’t see:

1. Any signs that Mat is starting to share Tuon’s view of people as proto-property. Really hoping that I won’t see this. Honestly, one of the things that I dislike the most about both Mat and Perrin’s romances is how it feels like it damages them as characters (and the same for what the Rand x Min romance does to Min as a character). Their romances actively make them worse people. Perrin’s romance with Faile turns him into an obsessive, petty, frustrating person who shirks his responsibilities (he eventually gets... better-ish? after like ten or twelve books). Mat’s ‘romance’ with Tuon... makes him willing to use slaves, among other things. I do think that he does still tries to remember that they’re people, but he is willing to own and use damane during AMOL, if I remember correctly which...ugh.

Ugh, I have to admit, I am really dreading getting into the ‘How I Fell in Love (?) With a Slaver’ aspect of Mat’s storyline in the upcoming books. Perrin and Faile’s storyline starts out pretty terribly and they have horrible communication issues, but I do believe that they both at least see each other as human beings who are worth being treated as equals, even if they fail on the application sometimes. I do not get that vibe from Tuon and her relationship with Mat.

But of course, all my issues with Mat and Tuon also tie into my feelings that the Seanchan as a whole are narratively unsatisfying. We end up with a lot of build-up for them, and zero payoff. They were introduced in book two (empire-shaking secret included!) and there’s still no payoff by the end of book fourteen. Thirteen books of build-up and then no payoff!

Obviously, they don’t need to solve the Problem of the Seanchan but we could have gotten a Hope Spot of some kind (...and if Tuon being pregnant and ‘jokingly’ telling Mat that this means she can kill him now was supposed to be our Hope Spot, it very much fell flat with me).

We’re told multiple times that the secret of the sul’dam being channeling learners will rock the empire to its foundations but because this story wasn’t about that, because it was supposed to happen in The Next Story, instead it all ends in an unsatisfying whiffle as Tuon basically (and hypocritically) just goes, “nah, I don’t care, I’m gonna keep enslaving the people just like me (while denying that they’re people like me)”. The issue that was supposed to change the empire is dismissed as meaningless. All of the amazing set up that Egeanin’s character gave us goes nowhere in terms of cultural transformation and upheaval, which makes the entire Seanchan presence in the storyline feel pointless.

(the Seanchan ending is also frustrating because it feels like it undermines one of the main messages of the book series, that free will matters and is worth fighting for, so there’s that too; everyone giving slaver empress Tuon a free pass really feels like it undermines Rand’s ‘win’ against the Dark One and his realization about the importance of free will because, as Empress of Seanchan, Tuon is now the main symbol of stripping people of their free will and will be doing basically the Shadow’s work into the Fourth Age, as Seanchan culture already mimics the Shadow so closely in so many ways, as I’ve talked about before as I’ve gone through this reread: breaking people into desperately eager slavery, mindtraps vs a’dam, ‘lessers’ groveling to the Chosen/Blood above them, ravens and moons as their main symbolism)

And that’s essentially the issue with Mat & Tuon as well. Perhaps she was going to have character growth at some point, but if so, it all got punted off to the outriggers that never happened, and so we ended up with a terrible person who is allowed to treat one of the main protagonists poorly and get rewarded for it with his loyalty, who actively turns down every opportunity that she’s given to be a slightly better person, who gets to be one of the few people bodyguarded during the apocalypse, and who gets to dance off into the sunset with a bunch of slaves that she will get to abuse for years into the future.

Also, because Tuon never follows through on any character growth, it ultimately feels like her relationship with Mat was a waste of narrative space that could have gone to something that actually had a point, and a waste of all the (incredibly over the top) suffering that the books put Mat through to get him to a place where it would be even remotely believable that he would stay anywhere near Tuon long enough to ‘fall in love’ with her (ie everything with Tylin and Ebou Dar) or grimly accept his future with her or whatever it really is that happened.

Tuon could have believably made that same bargain with Rand even if she’d never met Mat, because she bends so little on the issue that matters most to her (keeping her slaves) that the Mat/Tuon relationship feels like it could be snipped out entirely and Tuon would have the same emotional ending point that she did with the relationship existing. All you would need is someone to rescue her from Semirhage, and then make the exact same crappy deal due to her ‘gratitude’ over the save. No autonomy-destroying romance required. But as it is, so much of her in-book storyline just feels like a waste of time because it doesn’t go anywhere.

All the way up until AMOL, I could say “okay, she has time to actually have payoff as a character; the relationship has time; the culture has time” and then the story was over and it felt like Tuon basically just jogged in place for five books, except now she’s pregnant.

From what I remember, Winter’s Heart is the best we'll ever get with Tuon, because she starts off as a horrible person but one who has flashes of almost-empathy. She had so much potential to be a great character and have an actual character arc because she is young and had a shitty formative childhood, etc. And then her potential just gets squandered over the remaining books as she actively chooses to stay the worst version of herself and gets rewarded for it by the narrative.

So, yeah. That about sums up my issues. It all feels like so much wasted potential and I’m frustrated by it.

And now I’ll find out if rereading Winter’s Heart and the following books changes my mind on any of this! Maybe I will have a mat x tuon epiphany akin to my cauthor epiphany. You never know.

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birgittesilverbae · 2 years

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doesn't map one-to-one to either Falme or Tanchico, but I'm intruiged by the Tanchico angle, seeing as Tanchico sits at the mouth of the Andahar River and Falme isn't on a river. However, Tanchico's three peninsula geography is pretty distinctive and somewhat plot-relevant

definitely not Tear (orientation of hills suggests left side of image is N, making this the west coast, and Tear the city not being directly on the coast is kind of it's Thing [Fingers of the Dragon being a buffer between sea and the city and complex enough to need a local pilot to navigate from city to sea])

so, all-in-all, leaning towards the Falme events actually occurring in Falme

#wot #wot s2 #wot book spoilers #mywot #wheel of time meta #wheel of time

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shunnao-addict · 2 years

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For the Ogier thing, they come from a separate world and it’s implied that the steddings are pieces of their own world and that’s why they can’t be away for too long. They can open the Book of Translation to go back, and they debate this at the Great Stump but Loial convinces them to stay and fight in the Last Battle. If you think about the First Age being our current world, they have to leave at some point before that because we obvs don’t have Ogier lol

Ahhh, thank you for explanation! I completely forgot that part xD

But TBH I'm not sure how I feel about Ogier being, well, aliens. There are so many weird creatures - sentient or not - in WoT that it kinda doesn't make sense Ogier came from some other world. I always thought that "now" we don't see them because they sealed and hid their steddings.

I wonder whose decision it was - RJ's or BS's?

#wheel of time #wheel of time meta #wot meta #ogier

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thewizardofozwel · 1 year

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Most relatable thing about Rand in the first 5 books is the dread and terror of being known by the world in a way you have 0 control over. As much of a cringe fail man he is I really appreciate how hard he's trying to claw out a sense of self in all this.

#the wizard speaks #wheel of time #wheel of time meta

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asha-mage · 22 days

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WoT Meta: Feudalism, Class, And The Politics of The Wheel of Time

One of my long standing personal annoyances with the fantasy genre is that it often falls into the trap of simplifying feudal class systems, stripping out the interesting parts and the nuance to make something that’s either a lot more cardboard cut-out, or has our modern ideas about class imposed onto it.

Ironically the principal exception is also the series that set the bar for me. As is so often the case, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is unique in how much it works to understand and convey a realistic approach to power, politics, government, rulership, and the world in general–colored neither by cynicism or idealism. How Jordan works the feudal system into his world building is no exception–weaving in the weaknesses, the strengths, and the banal realities of what it means to have a Lord or Lady, a sovereign Queen or King, and to exist in a state held together by interpersonal relationships between them–while still conveying themes and ideas that are, at their heart, relevant to our modern world.

So, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how he does that.

Defining the Structure

First, since we’re talking about feudal class systems, let's define what that means– what classes actually existed, how they related to each other, and how that is represented in Jordan’s world.

But before that, a quick disclaimer. To avoid getting too deep into the historical weeds, I am going to be making some pretty wide generalizations. The phrases ‘most often’, ‘usually’, and ‘in general’ are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. While the strata I’m describing is broadly true across the majority medieval and early Renaissance feudal states these things were obviously heavily influenced by the culture, religion, geography, and economics of their country–all of which varied widely and could shift dramatically over a surprisingly small amount of time (sometimes less than a single generation). Almost nothing I am going to say is universally applicable to all feudal states, but all states will have large swathes of it true for them, and it will be widely applicable. The other thing I would ask you to keep in mind is that a lot of our conceptions of class have been heavily changed by industrialization. It’s impossible to overstate how completely the steam engine altered the landscape of socio-politics the world over, in ways both good and bad. This is already one of those things that Jordan is incredibly good at remembering, and that most fantasy authors are very good at forgetting.

The disparity between your average medieval monarch’s standard of living and their peasants was pretty wide, but it was nothing compared to the distance between your average minimum wage worker and any billionaire; the monarch and the peasant had far more in common with each other than you or I do with Jeff Bezos or Mike Zuckerberg. The disparity between most people’s local country lord and their peasants was even smaller. It was only when the steam engine made the mass production of consumer goods possible that the wealth gap started to become a chasm–and that was in fact one of the forces that lead to the end of the feudal system and the collapse of many (though by no means all) of the ruling monarchies in Europe. I bring this up because the idea of a class system not predicated on the accumulation of capital seems pretty alien to our modern sensibilities, but it was the norm for most of history. Descent and birth mattered far more than the riches you could acquire–and the act of accumulating wealth was itself often seen as something vulgar and in many countries actively sinful. So with that in mind, what exactly were the classes of feudalism, and how do they connect to the Wheel of Time?

The Monarch and their immediate family unsurprisingly occupied the top of the societal pyramid (at least, in feudal states that had a monarch and royal family- which wasn’t all of them). The Monarch was head of the government and was responsible for administering the nation: collecting taxes, seeing them spent, enforcing law, defending the country’s borders and vassals in the event of war, etc. Contrary to popular belief, relatively few monarchs had absolute power during the medieval period. But how much power the monarch did have varied widely- some monarchs were little more than figureheads, others were able to centralize enough power on themselves to dictate the majority of state business- and that balance could shift back and forth over a single generation, or even a single reign depending on the competence of the monarch.

The royal family usually held power in relation to their monarch, but also at the monarch’s discretion. The more power a monarch had, the more likely they were to delegate it to trusted family members in order to aid with the administration of the realm. This was in both official and unofficial capacities: princes were often required to do military service as a right of passage, and to act as diplomats or officials, and princesses (especially those married into foreign powers) were often used as spies for their home state, or played roles in managing court affairs and business on behalf of the ruler.

Beneath the monarch and their family you get the noble aristocracy, and I could write a whole separate essay just on the delineations and strata within this group, but suffice to say the aristocracy covers individuals and families with a wide range of power and wealth. Again, starting from that country lord whose power and wealth in the grand scheme of things is not much bigger than his peasants, all the way to people as powerful, or sometimes more powerful, than the monarch.

Nobles in a feudal system ruled over sections of land (the size and quality usually related sharply to their power) setting taxes, enforcing laws, providing protection to the peasants, hearing petitions, etc. within their domains. These nobles were sometimes independent, but more often would swear fealty to more powerful nobles (or monarchs) in exchange for greater protection and membership in a nation state. Doing so meant agreeing to pay taxes, obey (and enforce) the laws of the kingdom, and to provide soldiers to their liege in the event of war. The amount of actual power and autonomy nobles had varied pretty widely, and the general rule of thumb is that the more powerful the monarch is, the less power and autonomy the nobles have, and vice versa. Nobles generally were expected to be well educated (or at least to be able to pretend they were) and usually provided the pool from which important government officials were drawn–generals, council members, envoys, etc–with some kingdoms having laws that prevented anyone not of noble descent from occupying these positions.

Beneath the nobles you get the wealthy financial class–major merchants, bankers, and the heads of large trade guilds. Those Marx referred to generally as the bourgeoisie because they either own means of production or manage capital. In a feudal system this class tended to have a good bit of soft power, since their fortunes could buy them access to circles of the powerful, but very little institutional power, since the accumulation and pursuit of riches, if anything, was seen to have negative moral worth. An underlying presumption of greediness was attached to this class, and with it the sense that they should be kept out of direct power.

That was possible, in part, because there weren't that many means of production to actually own, or that much capital to manage, in a pre-industrial society. Most goods were produced without the aid of equipment that required significant capital investment (a weaver owned their own loom, a blacksmith owned their own tools, etc), and most citizens did not have enough wealth to make use of banking services. This is the class of merchants who owned, but generally didn’t directly operate, multiple trading ships or caravans, guild leaders for craftsfolk who required large scale equipment to do their work (copper and iron foundries for the making of bells, for example), and bankers who mainly served the nobility and other wealthy individuals through the loaning and borrowing of money. This usually (but not always) represented the ceiling of what those not born aristocrats could achieve in society.

After that you get middling merchants, master craftsfolk and specialty artisans, in particular of luxury goods. Merchants in this class usually still directly manage their expeditions and operations, while the craftsfolk and artisans are those with specialty skill sets that can not be easily replicated without a lifetime of training. Master silversmiths, dressmakers, lacquer workers, hairdressers, and clockmakers are all found in this class. How much social clout individuals in this class have usually relates strongly to how much value is placed on their skill or product by their society (think how the Seanchan have an insatiable appetite for lacquer work and how Seanchan nobles make several Ebou Dari lacquer workers very rich) as well as the actual quality of the product. But even an unskilled artisan is still probably comfortable (as Thom says, even a bad clockmaker is still a wealthy man). Apprenticeships, where children are taught these crafts, are thus highly desired by those in lower classes,as it guaranteed at least some level of financial security in life.

Bellow that class you find minor merchants (single ship or wagon types), the owners of small businesses (inns, taverns, millers etc), some educated posts (clerks, scribes, accountants, tutors) and most craftsfolk (blacksmiths, carpenters, bootmakers, etc). These are people who can usually support themselves and their families through their own labor, or who, in the words of Jin Di, ‘work with their hands’. Most of those who occupy this class are found in cities and larger towns, where the flow of trade allows so many non-food producers to congregate and still (mostly) make ends meet. This is why there is only one inn, one miller, one blacksmith (with a single apprentice) in places like Emond’s Field: most smaller villages can not sustain more than a handful of non-food producers. This is also where you start to get the possibility of serious financial instability; in times of chaos it is people at this tier (and below) that are the first to be forced into poverty, flight, or other desperate actions to survive.

Finally, there is the group often collectively called ‘peasants’ (though that term is also sometimes used to mean anyone not noble born). Farmers, manual laborers, peddlers, fishers- anyone who is unlikely to be able to support more than themselves with their labor, and often had to depend on the combined labor of their spouse and families to get by. Servants also generally fit into this tier socially, but it’s important to understand that a servant in say, a palace, is going to be significantly better paid and respected than a maid in a merchant's house. This class is the largest, making up the majority of the population in a given country, and with a majority of its own number being food-producers specifically. Without the aid of the steam engine, most of a country’s populace needs to be producing food, and a great deal of it, in order to remain a functional nation. Most of the population as a result live in smaller spread out agrarian communities, loosely organized around single towns and villages. Since these communities will almost always lack access to certain goods or amenities (Emond’s Field has a bootmaker, but no candlemaker, for example) they depend on smalltime traders, called peddlers, to provide them with everyday things, who might travel from town to town with no more than a single wagon, or even just a large pack.

The only groups lower than peasants on the social hierarchy are beggars, the destitute, and (in societies that practice slavery) slaves. People who can not (or are not allowed to) support themselves, and instead must either eke out a day to day existence from scraps, or must be supported by others. Slaves can perform labor of any kind, but they are regarded legally as a means of production rather than a laborer, and the value is awarded to their owner instead.

It’s also worth noting that slavery has varied wildly across history in how exactly it was carried out and ran the gamut from the trans-Atlantic chattel slavery to more caste or punitive-based slavery systems where slaves could achieve freedom, social mobility, or even some degree of power within their societies. But those realities (as with servants) had more to do with who their owners were than the slave’s own merit, and the majority of slaves (who are almost always seen as less than a freedman even when they are doing the same work) were performing the same common labor as the ‘peasant’ class, and so viewed as inferior.

Viewing The Wheel of Time Through This Lens

So what does all this have to do with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time? A lot actually, especially compared to his contemporaries in fantasy writing. Whereas most fantasy taking place in feudal systems succumbs to the urge to simplify matters (sometimes as far down to their only being two classes, ‘peasant’ and ‘royalty’) Jordan much more closely models real feudalism in his world.

The majority of the nations we encounter are feudal monarchies, and a majority of each of their populations are agrarian farming communities overseen by a local lord or other official. How large a nation’s other classes are is directly tied to how prosperous the kingdom is, which is strongly connected to how much food and how many goods the kingdom can produce on the available land within it. This in turn, is tightly interdependent on how stable the kingdom is and how effective its government is.

Andor is the prime example: a very large, very prosperous kingdom, which is both self-sufficient in feeding itself via its large swathes of farmland (so much so that they can afford to feed Cairhien through selling their surplus almost certainly at next to no profit) and rich in mineral wealth from mines in the west. It is capable of supporting several fairly large cities even on its outskirts, as well as the very well-developed and cosmopolitan Caemlyn as its capital. This allows Andor to maintain a pretty robust class of educated workers, craftsfolk, artisans, etc, which in turn furthers the realm’s prosperity. At the top of things, the Queen presides over the entire realm with largely centralized power to set laws and taxes. Beneath her are the ‘great houses’–the only Houses in Andor besides the royal house who are strong enough that other nobles ‘follow where they lead’ making them the equivalent of Duchesses and Dukes, with any minor nobles not sworn directly to the Queen being sworn to these ten.

And that ties into something very important about the feudal system and the impact it had on our world and the impact it has on Jordan's. To quote Youtuber Jack Rackham, feudalism is what those in the science biz would call an unstable equilibrium. The monarch and their vassals are constantly in conflict with each other; the vassals desiring more power and autonomy, as the monarch works to centralize power on themselves. In feudalism there isn’t really a state army. Instead the monarch and the nobles all have personal armies, and while the monarch’s might be stronger than anyone else’s army, it’s never going to be stronger than everybody else’s.

To maintain peace and stability in this situation everyone has to essentially play Game of Thrones (or as Jordan called it years before Martin wrote GoT, Daes Dae’mar) using political maneuvering, alliances, and scheming in order to pursue their goals without the swords coming out, and depending on the relative skill of those involved, this can go on for centuries at a time….or break apart completely over the course of a single bad summer, and plunge the country into civil war.

Cairhien is a great example of this problem. After losing the Aiel War and being left in ruins, the monarch who ultimately secured the throne of Cairhien, Galldrian Riatin, started from a place of profound weakness. He inherited a bankrupt, war torn and starving country, parts of which were still actively on fire at the time. As Thom discusses in the Great Hunt, Galddrian's failure to resettle the farmers displaced by the war left Cairhien dependent on foreign powers to feed the populace (the grain exports from Tear and Andor) and in order to prevent riots in his own capital, Galldrian choose bread and circuses to keep the people pacified rather then trying to substantially improve their situation. Meanwhile, the nobles, with no effective check on them, began to flex their power, seeing how much strength they could take away from each other and the King, further limiting the throne’s options in how to deal with the crisis, and forcing the King to compete with his most powerful vassals in order to just stay on the throne. This state of affairs ultimately resulted, unsurprisingly, in one of Galladrin’s schemes backfiring, him ending up dead, and the country plunging into civil war, every aristocrat fighting to replace him and more concerned with securing their own power then with restoring the country that was now fully plunged into ruin.

When Dyelin is supporting Elayne in the Andoran Succession, it is this outcome (or one very much like it) that she is attempting to prevent. She says as much outright to Elayne in Knife of Dreams–a direct succession is more stable, and should only be prevented in a situation where the Daughter Heir is unfit–through either incompetence or malice–to become Queen. On the flip side, Arymilla and her lot are trying to push their own agendas, using the war as an excuse to further enrich their Houses or empower themselves and their allies. Rhavin’s machinations had very neatly destabilized Andor, emboldening nobles such as Arymilla (who normally would never dream of putting forward a serious claim for the throne) by making them believe Morgase and Trakand were weak and thus easy to take advantage of.

We also see this conflict crop up as a central reason Murandy and Altara are in their current state as well. Both are countries where their noble classes have almost complete autonomy, and the monarch is a figurehead without significantly more power than their vassals (Tylin can only keep order in Ebou Dar and its immediate surrounding area, and from what she says her father started with an even worse deal,with parts of the capital more under the control of his vassals than him). Their main unifying force is that they wish to avoid invasion and domination by another larger power (Andor for Murandy, Illian and Amadica for Altara) and the threat of that is the only thing capable of bringing either country into anything close to unity.

Meanwhile a lack of centralization has its trade offs; people enjoy more relative freedoms and social mobility (both depend heavily on trade, which means more wealth flowing into their countries but not necessarily accumulating at the top, due to the lack of stability), and Altara specifically has a very robust ‘middle class’ (or as near as you can get pre-industrialization) of middling to minor merchants, business and craftsfolk, etc. Mat’s time in Ebou Dar (and his friendship with Satelle Anan) gets into a lot of this. Think of the many many guilds that call Altara home, and how the husband of an inn owner can do a successful enough business fishing that he comes to own several crafts by his own merit.

On the flip side both countries have problems with violence and lawlessness due to the lack of any enforced uniformity in terms of justice. You might ride a day and end up in land ruled by a Lord or Lady with a completely different idea of what constitutes, say, a capital offense, than the Lord or Lady you were under yesterday. This is also probably why Altara has such an ingrained culture of duels to resolve disputes, among both nobles and common folk. Why appeal to a higher authority when that authority can barely keep the streets clean? Instead you and the person you are in conflict with, on anything from the last cup of wine to who cheated who in a business deal, can just settle it with your knives and not have to bother with a hearing or a petition. It’s not like you could trust it anyways; as Mat informs us, most of the magistrates in Altara do the bidding of whoever is paying their bribes.

But neither Altara nor Murandy represents the extreme of how much power and autonomy nobles can manage to wrangle for themselves. That honor goes to Tear, where the nobles have done away with the monarch entirely to instead establish what amounts to an aristocratic confederacy. Their ruling council (The High Lords of Tear) share power roughly equally among themselves, and rule via compromise and consensus. This approach also has its tradeoffs: unlike Murandy and Altara, Tear is still able to effectively administer the realm and create uniformity even without a monarch, and they are able to be remarkably flexible in terms of their politics and foreign policy, maintaining trade relationships even with bitter enemies like Tar Valon or Illian. On the flipside, the interests of individual nobles are able to shape policy and law to a much greater extent, with no monarch to play arbiter or hold them accountable. This is the source of many of the social problems in Tear: a higher sense of justice, good, or even just plain fairness all take a back seat to the whims and interest of nobles. Tear is the only country where Jordan goes out of his way, repeatedly, to point out wealth inequality and injustice. They are present in other countries, but Jordan drives home that it is much worse in Tear, and much more obscene.

This is at least in part because there is no one to serve as a check to the nobles, not even each other. A monarch is (at least in theory) beholden to the country as a whole, but each High Lord is beholden only to their specific people, house and interests, and there is no force present that can even attempt to keep the ambitions and desires of the High Lords from dictating everything. So while Satelle Anan's husband can work his way up from a single fishing boat to the owner of multiple vessels, most fisherman and farmers in Tear scrape by on subsistence, as taxes are used to siphon off their wealth and enrich the High Lords. While in Andor ‘even the Queen most obey the law she makes or there is no law’ (to quote Morgase), Tairen Lords can commit murder, rape, or theft without any expectation of consequences, because the law dosen’t treat those acts as crimes when done to their ‘lessers’, and any chance someone might get their own justice back (as they would in Altara) is quashed, since the common folk are not even allowed to own weapons in Tear. As we’re told in the Dragon Reborn, when an innkeeper is troubled by a Lord cheating at dice in the common room, the Civil Watch will do nothing about it and citizens in Tear are banned from owning weapons so there is nothing he can do about it. The best that can be hoped for is that he will ‘get bored and go away’.

On the opposite end, you have the very very centralized Seanchan Empire as a counter example to Tear, so centralized it’s almost (though not quite) managed to transcend feudalism. In Seanchan the aristocratic class has largely been neutered by the monarchy, their ambitions and plots kept in check by a secret police (the Seekers of Truth) and their private armies dwarfed by a state army that is rigorously kept and maintained. It’s likely that the levies of the noble houses, if they all united together, would still be enough to topple the Empress, but the Crystal Throne expends a great deal of effort to ensure that doesn't happen,playing the nobles against each other and taking advantage of natural divisions in order to keep them from uniting.

Again, this has pros and cons. The Seanchan Empire is unquestionably prosperous; able to support a ridiculous food surplus and the accompanying flow of wealth throughout its society, and it has a level of equity in its legal administration that we don’t see anywhere else in Randland. Mat spots the heads of at least two Seanchan nobles decorating the gates over Ebou Dar when he enters, their crimes being rape and theft, which is a far cry from the consequence-free lives of the Tairen nobles. Meanwhile a vast state-sponsored bureaucracy works to oversee the distribution of resources and effective governance in the Empress’s name. No one, Tuon tells us proudly, has to beg or go hungry in the Empire. But that is not without cost.

Because for all its prosperity, Seanchan society is also incredibly rigid and controlling. One of the guiding philosophies of the Seanchan is ‘the pattern has a place for everything and everything’s place should be obvious on sight’. The classes are more distinct and more regimented than anywhere else we see in Randland. The freedoms and rights of everyone from High Lords to common folk are curtailed–and what you can say or do is sharply limited by both social convention and law. The Throne (and its proxies) are also permitted to deprive you of those rights on nothing more than suspicion. To paraphrase Egeanin from TSR: Disobeying a Seeker (and presumably any other proxy of the Empress) is a crime. Flight from a Seeker is a crime. Failure to cooperate fully with a Seeker is a crime. A Seeker could order a suspected criminal to go fetch the rope for their own binding, and the suspected criminal would be expected to do it–and likely would because failure to do anything else would make them a criminal anyway, whatever their guilt or innocence in any other matter.

Meanwhile that food surplus and the resulting wealth of the Empire is built on its imperialism and its caste-based slavery system, and both of those are inherently unsustainable engines. What social mobility there is, is tied to the Empire’s constant cycle of expand, consolidate, assimilate, repeat–Egeanin raises that very point early on, that the Corenne would mean ‘new names given and the chance to rise high’. But that cycle also creates an endless slew of problems and burning resentments, as conquered populations resist assimilation, the resistance explodes into violence that the Seanchan must constantly deal with–the ‘near constant rebellions since the Conquest finished’ that Mat mentions when musing on how the Seanchan army has stayed sharp.

The Seanchan also practice a form of punitive and caste-based slavery for non-channelers, and chattel slavery for channelers. As with the real-life Ottoman Empire, some da’covale enjoy incredible power and privilege in their society, but they (the Deathwatch Guard, the so’jhin, the Seekers) are the exception, not the rule. The majority of the slaves we encounter are nameless servants, laborers, or damane. While non-channelers have some enshrined legal protections in how they can be treated by their masters and society as a whole, we are told that emancipation is incredibly rare, and the slave status is inherited from parent to child as well as used as a legal punishment–which of course would have the natural effect of discouraging most da’covale from reproducing by choice until after (or if) they are emancipated–so the primary source for most of the laborers and servants in Seanchan society is going to be either people who are being punished or who choose to sell themselves into slavery rather then beg or face other desperate circumstances.

This keeps the enslaved population in proportion with the rest of society only because of the Empire’s imperialism- that same cycle of expand, consolidate, assimilate, repeat, has the side effect of breeding instability, which breeds desperation and thus provides a wide pool to draw on of both those willing to go into slavery to avoid starvation, and those who are being punished with slavery for wronging the state in some manner. It’s likely the only reason the Empire’s production can keep pace with its constant war efforts: conquered nations (and subdued rebellions) eventually yield up not just the necessary resources, but also the necessary laborers to cultivate them in the name of the state, and if that engine stalls for any sustained length of time (like say a three hundred year peace enforced by a treaty), it would mean a labor collapse the likes of which the Empire has never seen before.

A note on damane here: the damane system is undoubtedly one of chattel slavery, where human beings are deprived of basic rights and person hood under the law for the enrichment of those that claim ownership over them. Like in real life this state of affairs is maintained by a set of ingrained cultural prejudices, carefully constructed lies, and simple ignorance of the truly horrific state of affairs that the masses enjoy. The longevity of channelers insulates the damane from some of the problems of how slavery can be unsustainable, but in the long run it also suffers from the same structural problem: when the endless expansion stops, so too will the flow of new damane, and the resulting cratering of power the Empire will face will put it in jeopardy like nothing has before. There is also the problem that, as with real life chattel slavery, if any one piece of the combination of ignorance, lies, and prejudice starts to fall apart, an abolition movement becomes inevitable–and several characters are setting the stage for just that via the careful spreading of the truth about the sul’dam. Even if the Seanchan successfully put down an abolition movement, doing so will profoundly weaken them in a way that will necessitate fundamental transformation, or ensure collapse.

How Jordan Depicts The Relationships Between Classes

As someone who is very conscious in how he depicts class in his works, it makes sense that Jordan frequently focuses on characters interacting through the barriers of their various classes in different ways. New Spring in particular is a gold mine for this kind of insight.

Take, for example, Moiraine and Siuan’s visit to the master seamstress. A lesser writer would not think more deeply on the matter than ‘Moiraine is nobly born so obviously she’s going to be snobby and demanding, while down-to-earth Siuan is likely to be build a natural rapport and have better relationship her fellow commoner, the seamstress Tamore Alkohima’. But Jordan correctly writes it as the reverse: Tamore Alkohima might not be nobly born, but she is not really a peasant either–rather she belongs to that class of speciality artisans, who via the value placed on her labor and skill, is able to live quite comfortably. Moiraine is much more adept at maneuvering this kind of possibly fraught relationship than Siuan is. Yes, she is at the top of the social structure (all the more so since becoming Aes Sedai) but that does not release her from a need to observe formalities and courtesies with someone who, afterall, is doing something for Moiraine that she can not do for herself, even with the Power. If Moiraine wants the services of a master dressmaker, the finest in Tar Valon, she must show respect for both Tamore Alkohima and her craft, which means submitting to her artistic decisions, as well as paying whatever price, without complaint.

Siuan, who comes from the poor Maule district in Tear, is not used to navigating this kind of situation. Most of those she has dealt with before coming to the Tower were either her equals or only slightly above her in terms of class. She tries to treat Tamore Alkohima initially like she most likely treated vendors in the Maule where everyone is concerned with price, since so many are constantly on the edge of poverty, and she wants to know exactly what she is buying and have complete say over the final product, which is the practical mentality of someone to whom those factors had a huge impact on her survival. Coin wasted on fish a day from going bad, or netting that isn’t the right kind, might have meant the difference between eating that week or not, for a young Siuan and her father.

Yet this this reads as an insult to Tamore Alkohima, who takes it as being treated with mockery, and leads to Moiraine needing to step in to try and smooth things over, and explain to Siuan-

“Listen to me, Siuan and do not argue.” she whispered in a rush. “We must not keep Tamore waiting long. Do not ask after prices: she will tell us after we make our selections. Nothing you buy here will be cheap, but the dresses Tamore sews for you will make you look Aes Sedai as much as the shawl does. And it is Tamore, not Mistress Alkohima. You must observe the properties or she will believe you are mocking her. But try thinking of her as a sister who stands just a little above you. A touch of deference is necessary. Just a touch, but she will tell you what to wear as much as she asks.” “And will the bloody shoe maker tell us what kind of slippers to buy and charge us enough to buy fifty new sets of nets?” “No.” Moiraine said impatiently. Tamore was only arching one eyebrow but her face may as well have been a thunderhead. The meaning of that eyebrow was clear as the finest crystal. They had already made the seamstress wait too long, and there was going to be a price for it. And that scowl! She hurried on, whispering as fast as she could. “The shoemaker will make us what we want and we will bargain the price with him, but not too hard if we want his best work. The same with the glovemaker, the stockingmaker, the shiftmaker, and all the rest. Just be glad neither of us needs a hairdresser. The best hairdressers are true tyrants, and nearly as bad as perfumers.”

-New Spring, Chapter 13: Business in the City.

Navigating the relationship between characters of a different class is something a of a running theme throughout New Spring–from Moiraine’s dealing with the discretion of her banker (‘Another woman who knew well her place in the world’ as Moiraine puts it), to having to meet with peasants during her search for the Dragon Reborn (and bungling several of those interactions), to wading through the roughest criminal parts of Chachin in search of an inn, and frequently needing to resort to the Power to avoid or resolve conflict. Moiraine’s ability to handle these situations is tightly tied to her experience with the people involved prior to her time as a Novice, but all hold up and give color to the class system Jordan presents. It also serves as set up so that when Moraine breaks the properties with a different seamstress near the end of the book, it can be a sign of the rising tension and the complex machinations she and Siuan find themselves in.

Notably, Moiraine and Siuan’s relative skill with working with people is strongly related to their backgrounds: the more Moiraine encounters people outside her lived experience as a noble daughter in Cairhien, the more she struggles to navigate those situations while Siuan is much more effective at dealing with the soldiers during the name-taking sequence (who are drawn mostly from the same class as her–common laborers, farmers, etc), and the people in Chachin, where she secures an lodging and local contacts to help in the search with relative ease.

Trying to navigate these waters is also something that frequently trips up characters in the main series as well, especially with the Two Rivers folk who are, ultimately, from a relatively classless society that does not subscribe to feudal norms (more on that below). All of them react to both moving through a society that does follow those norms, and later, being incorporated into its power structures in different, frequently disastrous ways.

Rand, who is not used to the complicated balance between vassal and monarch (which is all the more complicated as he is constantly adding more and more realms under his banner) finds imposing his will and leading the aristocrats who swear fealty to him incredibly difficult. While his reforms are undoubtedly good for the common folk and the general welfare of the nations he takes over, he is most often left to enforce them with threats and violence, which ultimately fuel resistance, rebellion, and more opposition to him throughout the nations he rules, and has down-the-line bad ripple effects on how he treats others, both noble and not, who disagree with him.

Rand also struggles even with those who sincerely wish to serve and aid him in this context: he is awkward with servants, distant with the soldiers and warriors who swear their lives to him, and even struggles with many of his advisors and allies. Part of that is distrust that plagues him in general, but a big element to it is also his own outsider perspective. The Aiel frequently complain that Rand tries to lead them like a King, but that’s because they assume a wetlander King always leads by edict and command. Yet Rand’s efforts to do that with the Westland nations he takes over almost always backfire or have lasting consequences. Rand is frequently trying to frequently play act at what he thinks a King is and does–and when he succeeds it’s almost always a result of Moiraine or Elayne’s advice on the subject, not his own instincts or preconceptions.

Perrin, meanwhile, is unable to hide his contempt for aristocracy and those that willingly follow them, which leads to him both being frequently derelict in his duties as a Lord, and not treating his followers with a great deal of respect. Nynaeve has a similar problem, where she often tries to ‘instill backbone’ into those lower in the class system then her, then comes to regret it when that backbone ends up turned on her, and her leadership rejected or her position disrespected by those she had encouraged to reject leadership or not show respect to people in higher positions.

Interestingly, it’s Mat that most effectively manages to navigate various inter-class relationships, and who via the Band of the Red Hand builds a pretty equitable, merit-based army. He does this by following a simple rule: treating people how they wish to be treated. He accepts deference when it’s offered, but never demands it. He pushes back on the notion he’s a Lord often, but only makes it a serious bone with people who hold the aristocracy in contempt. He’s earnest in his dealings, fair minded, and good at reading social situations to adapt to how folks expect him to act, and when he breaches those expectations it’s usually a deliberate tactical choice.

This lets him maintain strong friendships with people of all backgrounds and classes– from Princes like Beslan to horse thieves like Chel Vanin. More importantly, it makes everyone under his command feel included, respected, and valued for what they are. Mat has Strong Ideas About Class (and about most things really), but he’s the only Two Rivers character who doesn't seem to be working from an assumption that everyone else ought to live by his ideals. He thinks anyone that buys into the feudal system is mad, but he doesn't actually let that impact how he treats anyone–probably from the knowledge that they think he’s just as mad.

Getting Creative With the Structure

The other thing I want to dig into is the ways in which Jordan, via his understanding of the feudal system, is able to play with it in creative and interesting ways that match his world. Succession is the big one; who rules after the current monarch dies is a massively important matter since it determines the flow of power in a country from one leader to the next. The reason so many European monarchies had primogeniture (eldest child inherits all titles) succession is not because everyone just hated second children, it’s because primogeniture is remarkably stable. Being able to point to the eldest child of the monarch and say them, that one, and their younger sibling if they're not around, and so on is very good for the transition of power, since it establishes a framework that is both easy to understand and very very hard to subvert. Pretty much the only way, historically, to subvert a primogeniture succession is for either the heir’s blood relationship to the monarch or the legitimacy of their parent’s marriage to be called into question.

And yet despite that, few of the countries in Jordan's world actually use primogeniture succession. Andor does, as do some of the Borderlands, but the majority of monarchies in Randland use elective succession, where the monarch is elected from among the aristocratic class by some kind of deliberative body. This is the way things are in Tarabon, Arad Doman,Ghealdan, Illian, and Malkier, who all elect the monarchs (or diarchs in the case of Tarabon- where two rulers, the Panarch and the King, share power) via either special council or some other assembly of aristocrats.

There are three countries where we don’t know the succession type (Arafel, Murandy, and Amadicia) but also one we know for sure doesn't use primogeniture succession: Cairhien. We know this because Moiraine’s claim to the Sun Throne as a member of House Damodred is seen as as legitimate enough for the White Tower to view putting her on the Sun Throne as a viable possibility, despite the fact that she has two older sisters whose claims would be considered superior to her own under primogeniture succession. We never find out for sure in the books what the succession law actually is (the country never stabilizes for a long enough period that it becomes important), but if I had to guess I would guess that it’s designated,where the monarch chooses their successor prior to their death, and that the civil war that followed the Aiel War was the result of both Laman and his designated heir(s) dying at the Bloodsnows (we are told by Moiraine that Laman and both his brothers are killed; likely one of them was the next in line).

One country that we know for sure uses designated succession is Seanchan, where the prospective heir is still chosen from among the children of the Empress, but they are made to compete with each other (usually via murder and plotting) for the monarch’s favor, the ‘best’ being then chosen to become the heir. This very closely models how the Ottoman Empire did succession (state sanctioned fratricide) and while it has the potential to ensure competence (by certain metrics, anyways) it also sows the seeds of potential instability by ensuring that the monarch is surrounded by a whole lot of people with bad will to them and feelings of being cheated or snubbed in the succession, or else out for vengeance for their favored and felled candidate. Of course, from the Seanchan’s point of view this is a feature not a bug: if you can’t win a civil war or prevent yourself from being assassinated, then you shouldn’t have the throne anyways.

Succession is far from the only way that Jordan plays with the feudal structure either. Population is something else that is very present in the world building, even though it’s only drawn attention to a handful of times. In our world, the global population steadily and consistently rose throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance (with only small dips for things like the plague and the Mongol Invasion), then exploded with the Industrial Revolution and has seen been on a meteoric climb year over year (something that may just now be stabilizing into an equilibrium again, only time will tell). This is one of the pressures that led to the collapse of feudalism in the real world, as a growing aristocratic class was confronted with finite land and titles, while at the same time the growing (and increasingly powerful) wealthy financial class of various countries were beginning to challenge the traditions and laws that kept them out of direct power. If you’ve ever read a Jane Austen novel (or really anything from the Georgian/Regency/Victorian eras) this tension is on display. The aristocratic class had never been as secure as people think, but the potential to fall into poverty and ruin had never been a greater threat, which had ripple effects for the stability of a nation, and in particular a monarch who derived much of their power from the fealty of their now-destabilized vassals.

In Jordan’s world however, we are told as early as The Great Hunt that the global population is steadily falling, and has been since the Hundred Years’ War (at least). No kingdom is able to actually control all the territory it has on a map, the size of armies have in particular shrunk consistently (to the point where it’s repeatedly commented on that the armies Rand puts together, some of no more than a few thousand, are larger than any ‘since Artur Hawkwing's day’), large swathes of land lay ungoverned and even more uninhabited or settled. Entire kingdoms have collapsed due to the inability of their increasingly small populations to hold together. This is the fate of many of the kingdoms Ingtar talks about in the Great Hunt: Almoth, Gabon, Hardan, Moredo, Caralain, to name just a few. They came apart due to a combination of ineffective leadership, low population, and a lack of strong neighbors willing or able to extend their power and stability over the area.

All of this means that there is actually more land than there are aristocrats to govern it; so much so that in places like Baerlon power is held by a crown-appointed governor because no noble house has been able to effectively entrench in the area. This has several interesting effects on the society and politics of Randland: people in general are far more aware of the fragility of the nation state as a idea then they would be otherwise, and institutions (even the intractable and mysterious White Tower) are not viewed by even their biggest partisans as invulnerable or perpetual. Even the most powerful leaders are aware, gazing out constantly, as they do, at the ruins of the hundreds of kingdoms that have risen and fallen since the Breaking of the World (itself nothing more, to their understanding, then the death of the ultimate kingdom) that there are no guarantees, no promises that it all won’t fall apart.

This conflict reflects on different characters in different ways, drawing out selfishness and cowardice from some, courage and strength from others. This is a factor in Andor’s surprisingly egalitarian social climate: Elayne and Morgase both boast that Andorans are able to speak their minds freely to their leaders about the state of things, and be listened to, and even the most selfish of leaders like Elenia Sarand are painfully aware that they stand on a tower built from ‘the bricks of the common folk’, and make a concentrated effort to ensure their followers feel included and heard. Conversely it also reflects on the extremely regimented culture of the Borderlands, were dereliction of duty can mean not just the loss of your life, but the loss of a village, a town, a city, to Trolloc raids (another pressure likely responsible for slow and steady decline of the global population).

The Borderlanders value duty, honor, and responsibility above all else, because those are the cornerstones holding their various nations together against both the march of time and the Blight. All classes place a high value on the social contract; the idea that everyone must fulfill their duty to keep society safe is a lot less abstract when the stakes are made obvious every winter through monsters raiding your towns. This is most obvious in both Hurin and Ingtar’s behavior throughout The Great Hunt: Hurin (and the rest of the non-noble class) lean on the assurance that the noble class will be responsible for the greater scale problems and issues in order to endure otherwise unendurable realities, and that Rand, Ingtar, Aglemar, Lan (all of whom he believes to be nobly born) have been raised with the necessary training and tools to take charge and lead others through impossible situations and are giving over their entire lives in service to the people. In exchange Hurin pays in respect, obedience, and (presumably) taxes. This frees Hurin up to focus on the things that are decidedly within his ken: tracking, thief taking, sword breaking, etc, trusting that Ingtar, and later Rand, will take care of everything else.

When Hurin comes up against the feudal system in Cairhien, where the failures of everyone involved have lead to a culture of endless backstabbing and scheming, forced deference, entitlement, and mutual contempt between the parties, he at first attempts to show the Cairhienin ‘proper’ behavior through example, in the hopes of drawing out some shame in them. But upon realizing that no one in Cairhien truly believes in the system any longer after it has failed the country so thoroughly (hence the willingness of vassals to betray their masters, and nobles to abandon their oaths–something unthinkable in the Borderlands) he reverts to his more normal shows of deference to Rand and Ingtar, abandoning excessive courtesy in favor of true fealty.

Ingtar (and later Rand) feel the reverse side of this: the pressure to be the one with the answers, to hold it all together, to be as much icon and object as living person, a figure who people can believe in and draw strength from when they have none of their own remaining, and knowing at the same time that their choices will decide the fates and lives of others. It’s no mistake that Rand first meets Hurin and begins this arc in the remains of Hardan, one of those swept-away nations that Ingtar talks about having been left nothing more than ‘the greatest stone quarry for a hundred miles’. The stakes of what can happen if they fail in this duty are made painfully clear from the start, and for Rand the stakes will only grow ever higher throughout the course of the series, as number of those ‘under his charge’ slides to become ‘a nation’ then ‘several nations’ and finally ‘all the world’. And that leads into one of the problems at the heart of Rand’s character arc.

This emphasis on the feudal contract and duty helps the Borderlands survive the impossible, but almost all of them (with the exception of Saldaea) practice cultures of emotional repression and control,spurning displays of emotion as a lack of self-control, and viewing it as weakness to address the pains and psychological traumas of their day to day lives. ‘Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather’, ‘There will be time to sleep when you’re dead’, ‘You can care for the living or mourn the dead, you cannot do both’: all common sayings in the Borderlands. On the one hand, all of these emphasize the importance of fulfilling your duty and obligations…but on the other, all also implicitly imply the only true release from the sorrows and wounds taken in the course of that duty is death. It is this, in part, that breaks Ingtar: the belief that only the Borderlands truly understand the existential threat, and that he and those like him are suffering and dying for ‘soft southlanders’ whose kingdoms are destined to go to ruin anyways. It’s also why he reveals his suffering to Rand only after he has decided to die in a last stand–he is putting down the mountain of his trauma at last. This is also one of those moments in the books that is a particular building block on the road to Rand’s own problems with not expressing his feelings or being willing to work through his trauma, that will swing back around to endanger the same world he is duty-bound to protect.

I also suspect strongly that this is the source of the otherwise baffling Saldean practice of….what we will call dedicated emotional release. One of the core cultural Saldean traits (and something that is constantly tripping up Perrin in his interactions with Faile) is that Saldeans are the only Borderlanders to reject the notion that showing emotion is weakness. In fact, Saldeans in general believe that shows of anger, passion, sorrow, ardor–you name it–are a sign of both strength and respect. Your feelings are strong and they matter, and being willing to inflict them on another person is not a burden or a betrayal of duty, it’s knowing that they will be strong enough to bear whatever you are feeling. I would hesitate to call even the Saldaens well-adjusted (I don’t know that there is a way to be well-adjusted in a society at constant war), but I do think there is merit to their apparent belief in catharsis, and their resistance to emotional repression as a sign of strength. Of course, that doesn't make their culture naturally better at communication (as Faile and Perrin’s relationship problems prove) but I do think it plays a part in why Bashere is such a good influence on Rand, helping push him away from a lot of the stoic restraint Rand has internalized from Lan, Ingtar, Moiraine, et al.

It also demonstrates that a functioning feudal society is not dependent on absolute emotional repression, or perfect obedience. Only mutual respect and trust between the parties are necessary–trust that the noble (or monarch) will do their best in the execution of their duties, and trust that the common folk in society will in turn fulfill their roles to the best of their ability. Faile’s effectiveness as Perrin’s co-leader/second in command is never hindered or even implied to be hindered by her temperament or her refusal to hide/repress her emotions. She is arguably the one who is doing most of the actual work of governing the Two Rivers after she and Perrin are acclaimed their lord and lady: seeing to public works projects, settling disputes, maintaining relationships with various official groups of their subjects.

The prologue from Lord of Chaos (a favorite scene of mine of the books) where Faile is holding public audience while Perrin is off sulking ‘again’ is a great great example of this; Faile is the quintessential Borderland noble heir, raised all her life in the skills necessary to run a feudal domain, and those skills are on prime display as she holds court. But that is not hindered by her willingness to show her true feelings, from contempt of those she thinks are wasting her time, to compassion and empathy to the Wisdoms who come to her for reassurance about the weather. This is one of those things that Perrin has to learn from her over the course of the series–that simply burying his emotions for fear they might hurt others is not a healthy way to go about life, and it isn’t necessary to rule or lead either. His prejudices about what constitutes a ‘good’ Lord (Lan, Agelmar, Ingtar) and a ‘bad’ one (literally everyone else) are blinding him, showing his lack of understanding of the system that his people are adopting, and his role in it.

Which is a nice dovetail with my next bit–

Outsiders And the Non-Feudal State

Another way Jordan effectively depicts the Feudal system is by having groups who decidedly do not practice it be prominent throughout the series–which is again accurate to real life history, where feudalism was the mode of government for much of (but by no means all) of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, but even in Europe their were always societies doing their own thing, and outside of it, different systems of government flourished in response to their environments and cultures; some with parallels to Feudalism, many completely distinct.

The obvious here are the Aiel who draw on several different non-feudal societies (the Scottish Highland Clans, the Iroquois Confederation, the Mongols, and the Zulu to name just a few) and the Seafolk (whose are a combination of the Maori and the Republic of Piracy of all things), but also firmly in these categories are groups like the communities in the Black Hills, Almoth Plain, and the Two Rivers.

Even though it’s an agrarian farming community made up primarily of small villages, the Two Rivers is not a feudal state or system. We tend to forget this because it looks a lot like our notion of a classic medieval European village, which our biases inherently equate to feudal, but Jordan is very good at remembering this is not the case, and that the Two Rivers folk are just as much outsiders to these systems as the Aiel, or the Seafolk.

Consider how often the refrain of ‘don’t even know they’re part of the Kingdom of Andor’ is repeated in regards to the Two Rivers, and how much the knowledge of Our Heroes about how things like Kingdoms, courts, war, etc, are little more than fairy tales to the likes of those Two Rivers, while even places unaffected directly by things like the Trakand Succession or the Aiel War are still strongly culturally, economically, and politically impacted.

Instead of deriving power and justice from a noble or even a code of law, power is maintained by two distinct groups of village elders (The Village Council and the Women’s Circle) who are awarded seats based on their standing within the community. These groups provide the day-to-day ordering of business and resolving of conflicts, aiding those in need and doing what they can for problems that impact the entire community. The Wisdom serves as the community physician, spiritual advisor, and judge (in a role that resembles what we know of pre-Christian celtic druids), and the Women’s Circle manages most social ceremonies from marriages to betrothals to funerals, as well as presiding over criminal trials (insofar as they even have them). The Mayor manages the village economics, maintaining relationships and arbitrating deals with outsider merchants and peddlers, collecting and spending public funds (through a volunteer collection when necessary, which is how we’re told the new sick house was built and presumably was how the village paid for things like fireworks and gleeman for public festivals), while the Council oversees civil matters like property disputes.

On the surface this seems like an ideal community: idyllic, agrarian, decentralized, where everyone cares more about good food and good company and good harvests than matters of power, politics, or wealth, and without the need for any broader power-structure beyond the local town leaders. It’s the kind of place that luddites Tolkien and Thomas Jefferson envisioned as a utopia (and indeed the Two Rivers it the most Tolkien-y place in Randland after the Ogier stedding, of which we see relatively little), but I think Jordan does an excellent job of not romanticizing this way of life the way Tolkien often did. Because while the Two Rivers has many virtues and a great deal to recommend it, it also has many flaws.

The people in the Two Rivers are largely narrow minded and bigoted, especially to outsiders; The day after Moiraine saves the lives of the entire village from a Trolloc attack, a mob turns up to try and burn her out, driven by their own xenophobia and fear of that which they don’t understand. Their society is also heavily repressed and regressive in its sex norms and gender relations: the personal lives of everyone are considered public business, and anyone living in a fashion the Women’s Circle deems unsuitable (such as widower and single father Tam al’Thor) is subject to intense pressure to ‘correct’ their ways (remarry and find a mother for Rand). There is also no uniformity in terms of law or government, no codified legal code, and no real public infrastructure (largely the result of the region’s lack of taxes). This is made possible by the geographic isolation and food stability–two factors that insulate the Two Rivers from many of the problems that cause the formation or joining of a nation state. It’s only after the repeated emergence of problems that their existing systems can not handle (Trolloc raids, martial law under the White Cloaks, the Endless Summer, etc) that the Two Rivers folk begin adopting feudalism, and even then it’s not an instantaneous process, as everyone involved must navigate not just how they are going to adopt this alien form of government, but how they are going to make it match to their culture and history as well.

This plays neatly with the societies that, very pointedly, do not adopt feudalism over the course of the series. The Aiel reject the notion entirely, thinking it as barbaric and backward as the Westerlanders think their culture is–and Jordan is very good at showing neither as really right. The Aiel as a society have many strengths the fandom likes to focus on (a commitment to community care, a strong sense of collective responsibility, a flexible social order that is more capable of accounting for non-traditional platonic and romantic relationships, as well as a general lack of repressive sex norms) but this comes at a serious cost as well. The Aiel broadly share the Borderlander’s response of emotional suppression as a way of dealing with the violence of their daily life, as well as serious problems with institutionalized violence, xenophobia, and a lack of respect for individual rights and agency. Of these, the xenophobia is probably the most outright destructive, and is one of the major factors Rand has to account for when leading the Aiel into Cairhien, as well a huge motivating factor in the Shaido going renegade, and many Aiel breaking clan to join them–and even before Rand’s arrival it manifested as killing all outsiders who entered their land, except for Cairhienin, whom they sold as slaves in Shara.

And yet, despite these problems Jordan never really suggests that the Aiel would be better off as town-or-castle dwelling society, and several characters (most notably the Maidens) explicitly reject the idea that they should abandon their culture, values, and history as a response to the revelations at Rhuidean. Charting a unique course forward for the Aiel is one of the most persistent problems that weighs on the Wise Ones throughout the second half of the series, and Aviendha in particular. Unlike many of the feudal states faced with Tarmon Gai’don, the Aiel when confronted with the end of days and the sure knowledge of the destruction of their way of life are mostly disinterested in ignoring, running from, or rejecting that revelation (those that do, defect to the Shaido). Their unique government and cultural structure gives them the necessary flexibility to pivot quickly to facing the reality of the Last Battle, and to focus on both helping the world defeat the Shadow, and what will become of them afterwards. This ironically, leaves them in one of the best positions post-series, as the keepers of the Dragon’s Peace, which will allow them to hold on to many of their core cultural values even as they make the transition to a new way of life, without having to succumb to the pressures to either assimilate into Westlands, or return to their xenophobic isolationism.

The Seafolk provide the other contrast, being a maritime society where the majority of the people spend their time shipboard. Their culture is one of strong self-discipline and control, where rank, experience, and rules are valued heavily, agreements are considered the next thing to sacred, and material prosperity is valued. Though we don’t spend quite as much time with them as the Aiel, we get a good sense of their culture throughout the mid-series. They share the Aiel’s contempt for the feudal ‘shorebound’, but don’t share their xenophobia, instead maintaining strong trade relationships with every nation on navigable water, though outside of the context of those trade relationships, they are at best frosty to non-Seafolk.

They are not society without problems–the implication of their strong anti-corruption and anti-nepotism policies is that it’s a serious issue in their culture, and their lack of a centralized power structure outside of their handful of island homes means that they suffer a similar problem to the likes of Murandy and Altara, where life on one ship might be radically different then life on another, in terms of the justice or treatment you might face, especially as an outsider. But the trade off is that they have more social mobility then basically any other society we see in Randland. Even the Aiel tend to have strongly entrenched and managed circles of power, with little mobility not managed by the Wise Ones or the chiefs. But anyone can rise high in Sea Folk society, to become a leader in their clan, or even Mistress of the Ships or Master of the Blades– and they can fall just as easily, for shows of incompetence, or failures to execute their duties.

They are also another society who is able to adapt to circumstances of Tamon Gai’don relatively painlessly, having a very effective plan in place to deal with the fallout and realities of the Last Battle. The execution gets tripped up frequently by various factors, but again, I don’t think it’s a mistake that they are one of the groups that comes out the other side of the Last Battle in a strong position, especially given the need that will now exist to move supplies and personnel for rebuilding post-Last Battle. The Seafolk have already begun working out embassies in every nation on navigable water, an important step to modernizing national relationships.

How does all this relate to feudalism and class? It’s Jordan digging into a fundamental truth about the world and people–at no point in our own history have we ever found a truly ‘perfect’ model for society. That’s something he’s constantly trying to show with feudalism–it is neither an ideal nor an abomination, it just is. Conversely, the Two Rivers, Aiel, Seafolk, and Ogier (who I don’t get into to much here for space, but who also have their own big problems with suffrage and independence, and their virtues in terms of environmental stability and social harmony) all exist in largely classes societies, but that doesn't exempt them from having problems or make them a utopia, and it certainly doesn't make them lesser or backwards either–Jordan expends a lot of energy to show them as complex, nuanced and flawed, in the same way he does for his pseudo-Europe.

Conclusion

To restate my premise: one of Jordan’s profound gifts as a writer is his capacity to set aside his own biases and write anything from his villains to his world with an honest, empathetic cast that defies simplification. Feudalism and monarchy more generally have a bad rep in our society, for good reasons. But I think either whitewashing or vilifying the feudal system is a mistake, which Jordan’s writing naturally reflects. Jordan is good at asking complicating questions of simple premises. He presents you with the Kingdom of Andor, prosperous and vast and under the rule of a regal much loved Queen and he asks ‘where does its wealth come from? How does it maintain law and order? How does the Queen exert influence and maintain her rule even in far-flung corners of the realm? How did she come to power in the first place and does that have an impact on the politics surrounding her current reign?’. And he does this with every country, every corner of his world–shining interesting lights on familiar tropes, and exploring the humanity of these grand ideas in a way that feels very real as a result.

The question of, is this an inherently just system is never really raised because it’s a simplifying question, not a complicating one. Whatever you answer–yes or no–does not add to the depiction of these systems or the people within them, it takes away. You make someone flat–be it a glorious just revolutionary opposing a cackling wicked King, or a virtuous and dutiful King suppressing dangerous radical dissidents, and you make the world flatter as a result.

I often think about how, when I began studying European history, I was shocked to learn that the majority of the royalists who rose up against the Jacobins were provincial peasants, marching against what they perceived to be disgruntled, greedy academic and financial elites. These were, after all, the same people that the Jacobins’ revolution claimed to serve and be doing the will of. Many of the French aristocrats were undeniably corrupt, indolent, and detached from their subjects, but when you look closer at the motives of many of the Jacobins you discover that motives were frequently more complex then history tends to remember or their propaganda tried to claim, and many were bitterly divided against each other on matters of tactics, or ideals, or simple personality difference. The simple version of the French Revolution assigns all the blame to the likes of Robespierre going mad with power, and losing sight of the revolutions’ higher ideals, but the truth was the Jacobins could never properly agree on many of their supposed core ideals, and Robespierre, while powerful, was still one voice in a Republic–and every person executed by guillotine was decreed guilty by a majority vote.

This is the sort of nuance lost so often in fantasy stories, but not in Jordan’s books. The story could be simpler–Morgase could just be a just and good high Queen archetype who is driven by love of her people, but Jordan depicts her from the beginning as human–with virtues and flaws, doing the best she can in the word she has found herself. Trying to be a just and good Queen and often succeeding, and sometimes falling short of the mark. The Tairen and Cairhienin nobility could just all be greedy, corrupt, out-of-touch monsters who cannot care for anything beyond their own pleasures–but for every Laman, Weairamon, or Colavaere, you have Dobraine, Moiraine, or Darlin. And that is one of the core tenets of Jordan’s storytelling: that there is no system wholly without merit or completely without flaw, and no group of people is ever wholly good or evil.

By taking this approach, Jordan’s story feels real. None of his characters or world come across like caricature or parody. The heinous acts are sharper and more distinct, the heroic choices more earned and powerful. Nothing is assumed–not the divine right of kings, or the glorious virtue of the common man. This, combined with a willingness to draw on the real complex histories of our own world, and work through how the unique quirks of fantasy impact them, is what renders The Wheel Of Time such a standout as a fantasy series, past even more classic seminal examples of the genre, and why its themes of class, duty, power, and politics resonate with its modern audiences.

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