Rand getting put in bondage by a 3000 year old female Forsaken that's obsessed with him and dommed by her is actually foreshadowing for when a 3000 year old female Forsaken that's obsessed with Nynaeve gets put in bondage and dommed by her send tweet

still thinking about the wheel of time japanese art

[x] [x] [x]

i mean look at this

look at it

even this low res lan and moiraine one is great

It's fucked up how all the girl forsaken are 100% into BDSM but in wildly different ways.

Never over how “Nynaeve forces her stalker into 24/7 master-slave bondage roleplay after the stalker tries to force her into ponyplay but fails” is an accurate summary of part of the Wheel of Time (1990-2012).

yes, Moghedien's weaves look amazing, but the thing that really sells the spider motif for me is how deeply unsettled I feel knowing that she's on the loose but not knowing where she went

Nynaeve: You should know that we captured Moghedien and have been keeping her prisoner here. Egwene: You've what? Elayne: And we got her talking. We've learned so much about the Age of Legends from her. Only last night she was telling us about something called a "hedge fund".

I noticed a trend in wot show that I think should continue, so I proclaim now that every season should end with Rand being tenderly cradled by someone who just stabbed him/is ready to stab him. And every season the person cradling him should be the most unlikely choice, the only exception being Mat, who should and would cradle him multiple times. I foresee it!

It's great that the show is going all out to establish the Forsaken as the most powerful and scariest fuckers on thee planet because that'll just make it ten times funnier when they reveal Moghedien was an investment adviser, Graendal was a therapist, and Asmodean was a really insecure Ed Sheeran.

ok ok slightly feral post as promised.

first, some context setting: I think it's really interesting to analyse texts in terms of both what the author was trying to do (and whether they succeeded) and what they ended up doing (intentionally or not) and I think their cultural/historical context is vital if you want to do this. I'm not interested in whether Robert Jordan or the Wheel of Time are, like, morally correct in their politics or whatever. I'm interested in what the art is trying to do.

and the thing about Jordan, see, is that he projected this image during his lifetime of a Genial Older Man (see: beard and pipe) but he...wasn't actually that old! He was 42 when EoTW was published. He died at 58. He was a Baby Boomer publishing books at a time when Baby Boomers were the hip young generation taking over from stodgy WWII veterans (Gen Z: It Will Happen To You Too).

What this means is that he was a child and adolescent during the Civil Rights movement, in a then-majority Black city in the Jim Crow South*. He would have gone to segregated schools. The tertiary institutions he attended had only started to desegregate a year or two before he attended each of them. I think his war trauma in Vietnam gets a lot of attention because he did talk about it and also because that's a narrative we understand for white men, but I think we...skim over the impact on white men of growing up at this time because? Civil Rights only happened to Black Americans I guess? but it's his context too. Similarly, he was an adolescent and young man at the time the (white) feminist movement was really kicking off in the US. he was in his mid-20s when banks were first legally *required* to allow women to open accounts and have credit cards in their own names. he went on to marry a woman a decade older than him, who had left her husband to raise her son as a single mother while continuing a professional career in the early 70s; these were issues that must have been incredibly relevant for her.

and what we see in his writing is attempts to grapple with gender and race that are self-evidently of mixed success, but I think have to be contextualised in light of this period of immense change he grew up in. Think about the predominance of women as merchants and bankers in WoT, in the context of how recent their rights to even control their own money were in the US. The...everything...he was trying to do with the Seanchan, making them extra-canonically Southern American-coded. The Whitecloaks as the KKK (among other things, of course).

As an example, I think there's also something probably unintentional but fascinating in the way he presents the pre-Breaking Aiel: bluntly, they are a distinct ethnic group in hereditary servitude (always thinking about how that ancestor of Rand's in the Rhuidean sequence had to get permission from Mierin Sedai to switch to someone else's service so he could marry his girlfriend, this is...uh...super cognate to issues enslaved Black people faced). They're associated with agriculture through the Song sequence. And they're pretty much the ideal of what slave-owning Southern American culture WANTED enslaved Black people to be: completely happy to serve. Then, as the post-breaking Aiel, they become feared as a source of violence, which resonates with the way that enslaved people were feared by their slavers.

I don't think for a second that the intention here was to depict the AoL as a Secret Slavery Dystopia, I think we're meant to take the Rhuidean flashback sections pretty much as they read on the page. But I also think putting Jordan in his historical and cultural context does pose the comparison. Similarly, I find it really interesting that he positions Seanchan as riven by constant revolts and uprisings (because it's a fascist slaver regime) but he never ever goes so far as to link enslaved people in Seanchan (damane and da'covale) to those revolts and uprisings, even though that is fundamentally the deep fear *for real and obvious reasons* of all slavery-based societies.

Or then there's the changes to the Two Rivers in the books - like, both then and now I think it's actually pretty radical to present an influx of Muslim-coded refugees of colour as a thing that enriches the Two Rivers both socially and economically. Various characters are wistful that it's changed, but they don't think it's bad. The text here is really clear that welcoming the Domani and Almoth Plain refugees is both morally right and beneficial. And this is in a book being written and published shortly after the first Gulf War.

There's so many more things like this where I just have no real idea what he was trying to do on purpose and what was accidental and what was fun for him in fiction but did not necessarily link at all to his real-world political beliefs. but gosh it's interesting to turn over and poke at.

People complaining about the "Rand is lashed to a wheel" symbolism being heavy handed has got to be my new favorite flavor bookcloak delusion. In the books Rand is slathered in so much Messiah symbolism that the wiki has a subsection of his page dedicated to the different references. That man collects stagmata like Pokemon gym badges. He is every mythological savior archetype tossed into a blender with a healthy does of King Arthur, Baldr, and Achilles just to be safe.

The only reason Robert Jordan didn't crucify Rand "literally dies for the sins of humanity" al'Thor himself is because he probably couldn't find a spot to fit it in between him get Spear of Destiny'd and pulling the sword out of the stone. (Fun fact the ot Sword In the Stone was called Caliburn which you might note is remarkably similar sounding to Callandor. If you think that wasn't intentional I'd like to discuss some exciting bridge realty opportunities with you.)

Anyways lashing Rand literally to the symbolic representation of the enteral cycle of conflict in which all humanity is trapped, and Rand specifically is charged with preserving is dead on Jordan shit and I can't fathom anyone thinking otherwise.

Moiraine: Balefire is bad, Rand. You shouldn't use it.

Rand: I've seen you use Balefire before.

Moiraine:...

Rand: ....

Moiraine: that's beside the point

every chapter recently has just been insane. sex igloo. dragons exist. Elayne can make ter’angreal. Liandrin is shielded. Elayne bonded Birgitte. Nynaeve is passively suicidal. did I mention the dragons in Seanchan. Robert let me rest

Elayne and Nynaeve Book 4-5: THERE'S A FORSAKEN IN TANCHICO WE HAVE TO RUN. SHE'S FOLLOWING US WE HAVE TO RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN JOIN THE CIRCUS AND NEVER LOOK BACK OR SHE'LL FIND US Elayne and Nynaeve Book 6: Its your turn to walk the Forsaken. She's hiding under the bed again, you'll have to yank her out from under there.

Happy Neil Day! Please enjoy the very rare alternate Neil images!

Neil Banged out his tunes today, on a train you have the comfort and relaxation to bang out your own tunes

"Moghedien's insane"

the way I wanted to defend her. the way i wanted to be offended on her behalf but also Moghedien forgot the Dragon Reborn existed the second a girl was mean to her and then used the Dark One's resources to track down said mean girl so she can have a homoerotic rivalry that ended in pet play with her as the pet and she never actually tried to escape that and was just gonna live like that forever presumably. oh and she kidnapped two kids and made them pretend to be hers so that she could be a milf and follow around her mean crush. like Lanfear technically isn't wrong here.

Conclusive list of reasons why Nynaeve is best girl:

-has never taken anyone’s shit ever in her life.

-Lanaeve series long pining will they won’t they doomed romance stuff. You get it.

-she’s so fucking funny for real. Local 25 year old acts old and jaded and tells her maybe three or four years younger friends to respect their elders, wishes she had gray hair already so people will take her old woman coding seriously.

-spends several books trying to make herself angry in increasingly absurd ways in order to successfully do magic. She is the second most powerful being on the planet and she can’t do anything with it unless she’s in a strop.

-while being the second most powerful being on the planet, says fuck you to every other avenue for that power and stays devoted to using her crazy high power level to heal.

-refuses to show deference to any royalty she meets, eventually becomes royalty herself. Karma.

-the Moghedien thing. Oh my god the Moghedien thing. Here comes this ancient and powerful evil immortal out to play with the regular humans and cause chaos and almost immediately gets nerfed by a villager with some jewelry. Outstanding showstopping, one of the funniest defeats of the forsaken by far.