Rand scores our first ever bingo! Great job buddy!

Artist credit: juliacarl_art

Submitted by: @clearancecreedwatersurvival

The usual suspects.

it's interesting that in the coup it's framed largely as the young trainees taking elaida's side vs. the older warders taking siuan's (though i'm sure there was some mixing and it wasn't a 100% clear-cut division, especially since plenty of older warders would've sided with elaida because their aes sedai did). the ages feel significant to me, because it feels like the kind of thing where the younglings are doing what's right in a by-the-book way (upholding tower law by preventing the jailbreak of a legally-deposed* amyrlin) because they are too young and too inexperienced with the world to be ready to question authority or see potential nuance in a situation. it's the older warders who are able to think "hmmm, this may technically be legal but it still doesn't feel right" because they have the life experience to know that tower law and aes sedai are not infallible and can make mistakes or act out of shady motives. whereas the younglings are still in the early phase of trusting the tower as an institution 100% no matter the situation (which we see later on too, when gawyn is growing disillusioned with elaida/the tower but knows he can't voice this to any of the other younglings because they'd kill him for being a traitor to the tower).

this makes me curious about the novices and accepted. i think some fled with the rebels since i remember nynaeve and elayne needing to teach classes in salidar, but how did that happen? was it only a small minority of blue-leaning students who went, or was it a more even split? i suppose that aes sedai students may have had more direct interaction with siuan and/or elaida and more opinions on the blue and red ajahs than warder trainees and so maybe they were more likely to have personal reasons for choosing one side over the other, while the warder trainees kinda defaulted to Tower Law As Written since they were pretty far removed from the politics & emotions of elaida deposing siuan (bar gawyn who did have plenty of direct interaction with both, which made him predisposed to trust elaida and distrust siuan).

*siuan was not legally deposed, but i don't think anybody fully realizes that until much later when they find out that some of the sitters who voted against her were black ajah. on the day of the coup, most inhabitants of the white tower have little to no reason to doubt the legality of the deposition; at most they would have a Bad Feeling about it but no real evidence that it was illegal.

Speaking of Beidomon it says he committed suicide at some point during the Collapse because it was widely known what he did in drilling the Bore, which I would assume follows people know that Mierin did it too. So it seems like we always say she joined the Shadow because she was scorned by Lews but that was really probably the only option for survival she had. Declaring it publicly in the Hall IS a flex tho

Remember how at the end of The Dragon Reborn, Ishamael wrapped Moiraine in black lightning and she screamed and Ishy hurled her across the room into a column where she lay unconscious for the whole duration of the book's final confrontation and then that was just never mentioned again and she was completely fine ?? Not on my watch 🤨

The thing about Wheel of Time is everyone in it is in an epic fantasy except the Forsaken, who are all in a workplace sitcom where everyone hates each other.

Seonid placed her fingers beneath Alliandre's chin and tilted her head up with a touch more akin to a suggestion. Alliandre complied without a trace of resistance. In the glossiness of dim candlelight with night fallen through the windows behind her, Seonid was shadowed and gold-wreathed, all gilded at the edges.  (x)

His emotions were a small knot in the back of her head, all steely hard determination. She knew the muted pain of old injuries, tamped down and ignored.

Rand al'Thor:

Ishamael, staring down at Lanfear's latest Resources Requisition Form: You want 500 gold marks. To start.....an inn?

Lanfear, who would sooner die then admit she needs Ishamael's help to live out her sugar mommy fantasies with Rand: An evil inn. Ishamael sighing, thinking that at least this way he'll know where she is: Sure? Why not?

Five months later

Lanfear: So bad news the evil inn caught fire. Good news, it caught fire because I gave LTT a sex dream so intense he channeled in his sleep and set it aflame.

Ishamael, who has been busy taking over the Seanchan court: you WHAT?

Everyone watch Wheel of Time, we have perfectly stable hinged milfy women who definitely love casual no strings attached relationships and have never ever made anyone into flesh balloons

HELLO???????

Rand/Avi real??????????? also DRAGONS?????? but more importantly RAND HAD SEX??? WITH AVIENDHA?? DID I START READING A FANFIC ON ACCIDENT what theeee fuck. (positive)

wotseries posted an alleged elaida audition script about 1) her telling presumably leane that she's at the tower to look for elayne and also that siuan's in a big mess and she could use elaida's help in cleaning it up, and 2) her discussing prophetic powers with min.

the first scene is pretty standard with what we've been predicting for elaida and the white tower plotline in s3, so i don't have any commentary on that one for now (though it does imply that, indeed, we'll be setting up the coup to be a slowburn season-long event with elaida weaseling around for a while before making her big move, rather than a shock event that happens early in the season, but i think most of us were thinking this already anyway).

the second scene is interesting because a different leak had placed min in tanchico. wotup's leaks have been flagrantly incorrect before (said faile would be in s2) and wotseries' audition scripts have also been flagrantly incorrect before (said gawyn would be in s2), so at this point it's just a question of which source i distrust more, and i can't answer that haha so for the time being i'll treat both Min Locations as equally plausible. (i'm assuming it'll only be one or the other because i find it hard to imagine that she could make an appearance in both locations during the course of the season, but i suppose you never know.)

looking at where s2 left off, both are equally plausible. min is in cairhien, and both siuan & co and liandrin are also in cairhien. i could see siuan snatching min back to the white tower because she knows about her powers and wants to use them, and i could also see liandrin snatching min over to tanchico because she considers her a liability after min betrayed her/didn't follow through on the deal/figured out she's a darkfriend.

looking at min's established story in the show and where her story goes in future in the books (lmao at the statement that min has a story in the books), both are equally plausible. tanchico would put her back into contact with liandrin and mat to follow up on her story with them in s2 and set up for her future seanchan story with mat (and doubly so if there's a seanchan presence or even tuon herself in tanchico in s3). the white tower would return her to her book storyline and, based on this scene with elaida, potentially give her the opportunity to have a storyline exploring the nature of her powers and her relationship with them. either storyline would allow her to go on to cross paths with rand in the next season or two.

(edited to add that tanchico would also have min interacting with elayne to help set up the polycule. i've so thoroughly made the polycule rand/elayne/avi/mat in my mind that i kinda forgot min is the canonical fourth member when i was making this post djkfg)

i will say that in the books, the tower coup has absolutely 0 bearing on min's overall character/story because she has 0 stakes in any of that stuff and 0 connection to aes sedai. it makes for an interesting 1-book storyline for her, but it's never relevant to her again (vs. someone like gawyn who is dealing with the repercussions of the coup in his storyline for pretty much the rest of the series), and so for that reason i wouldn't be sorry to replace her book storyline with an invented tanchico storyline that might have more long-term relevance to her (re: seanchan stuff). however, if the show expands her white tower storyline to include an exploration of her powers, i'd love that because min actively struggling with and trying to navigate and learn more about and figure out how best to use her powers is something that should have been part of her current story rather than her pre-series backstory. and compare/contrasting with elaida and how SHE uses her prophetic abilities would be super interesting!

that being said, i will never again trust any wotseries audition scripts after the utter betrayal that was the gawyn one, so i'm taking this all with a grain of salt! every time they post a new one they're like "disclaimer that scenes could be invented just for auditions and won't appear in the actual show, but most of our past audition scripts have appeared in the show pretty close to the audition version" and i'm like "what about that time you misled me to believe a whole-ass boy would be present in s2 and then he wasn't???? is gawyngate a joke to you???" lmao i wish they'd be a bit more cautious with their audition script disclaimers bc *i* think they've been pretty hit or miss, not Usually Accurate (even the aviendha one, only 1 of 2 scenes made it into the show iirc).

I know some people think that Mierin drilling the Bore takes away from the core WoT tenet of reversing original sin, but I think it actually enforces it to have a more analogous event that ends up not even mattering in the text. Like, no one outside of a handful of Aiel and the Forsaken would even remember what she did, and the Forsaken don’t even talk about it. There’s maaaybe some folklore about this that has been misconstrued throughout the years, as in EotW Thom says he will tell the story about how Lews Therin and the 100 Companions tried to free the Dark One from his prison, but this is also some early instalment weirdness that never comes up again, whereas the Breaking and the taint are always at the front of people’s minds.

And I mean Beidomon was very much a part of the Bore drilling too, we just never talk about him.

Moiraine coming to live with Lan and Nynaeve in Malkier bc it is what they deserve ;-;

prints available here!

Robert Jordan making a character who should be a perfect self insert power fantasy for young men (chosen one, powerful sorcerer, king, chief of the Proud Warrior Race Guys, master swordsman, had three hot girlfriends,) and just giving him severe mental illness and the worlds most miserable heroes journey was such a power move