My Apologies To The Wormies Following Me, But I'm Re-listening To The Wheel Of Time Audio Book(s) And

My apologies to the Wormies following me, but I'm re-listening to the Wheel of Time audio book(s) and I just got to the Seanchan and I'm going to explode if I don't talk about how much I fucking hate them. Spoilers for Wheel of Time (but honestly it's 15 books I'm not going to force you to read all of them first.)

CW: Fascists. Sexual abuse/violence.

They're fascists. Unambiguously. They enslave just about everyone and everything they meet. They expect complete strangers to know their intricate ways under pain of death. Anyone they can't kill for convenience they torture in their every waking moment. They conquer people, then let them walk around armed because of their brutal arrogance that lets them murder anyone not cowed into submission.

Damane are enslaved, treated like animals, have their hands and tongues cut off if there is a risk to their owner's secrets, and despite the apparent Seanchan cultural shame of having sex with one, treated akin to bestiality, I seriously doubt that there aren't members of the Blood that have raped Damane. When women are under institutional power to the degree that the Seanchan have placed women who can channel under, women who are already treated like animals, or as it's said in the text; "Like a piece of furniture or a tool", women are victimized. Some of these women have been enslaved for hundreds of years, some have been captured as teenagers, and the ones holding their literal chains are also women who can channel that simply didn't have the initial spark that doomed the other women in the first place. By all technicality, each and every Suldam, including the Seanchan Heir apparent are Marath'damane themselves. The only fucking reason that Tuon doesn't get collared herself is because the text needs her to commit her forces to the Last Battle. It would only take a little thinking and her entire court could supplant her.

I hate every single facet of their existence. Their empire is under constant rebellion, but not a single fucking one of the Seanchan characters thinks it's at all odd that people are constantly rising up in defiance of a totalitarian state as merciless and cruel as theirs. It's treated as a bad thing that darkfriends cause the collapse of the mainland Seanchan Empire, the death of the Empress, and the complete anarchy that follows.

My sole consolation is the knowledge that every empire falls, that my headcanon for the aftermath of Wheel of Time means that the Seanchan collapse entirely. Their mainland is embroiled in a total civil war, armed with rampaging, angry magical nukes, scouring everything of life. Their new empire is headed by a woman who can channel, and every enslaved and conquered person in their invader empire can theoretically flee into the free lands of the east, including any women who can channel. If anyone figures out that the A'dam would work on Tuon, she's fucked and so is Matt and the Seanchan settler empire. There is no way that the Seanchan can keep hunting Marath'damane with the entire rest of the world has organizations of channelers that they can flee to, and the Dragon's Peace to keep the nations from killing each-other.

The worst part about listening to the Seanchan chapters is having to pause every ten minutes or so and get angry about something new being so cartoonishly evil, while the Seanchan shrug off criticism as if it's somehow natural to murder and enslave everything you can see and people who don't just don't understand their ways, which are better than everyone else.

And we're supposed to accept that Tuon is somehow gentler with her Damane. As if that's a fucking high bar to clear. Hypocritical bitch. Fuck you.

Maybe they'll tone it down for the TV show, but I already have so many problems with the show that I probably won't watch it. Amazon will not do the books justice, and they've abbreviated and changed so much it's barely the same tone or characters. That can be another rant for another day.

I think wildbow should’ve stayed on track with Switch Hitter and kept introducing more lgbt characters named after increasingly controversial gay slang terms

Remember the Regent crickets post? I wound up speculating about the other combinations.

(Note: I'm assuming no relevant changes except the powers they end up with. Canon backgrounds, canon trigger events, inexplicably irrelevant power.)

General notes:

I can't imagine a timeline where Rachel gets powers and becomes a respectable member of society. Either she's ostracized for her inability to fit in, or she avoids society. Or both.

Alec's fate is defined as much by his environment as his power. Heartbreaker will try to make him a villainous minion if he can think of a way to do so.

By contrast, Lisa is suited for living in normal society. If her parents don't push Lisa away by trying to exploit her new powers, she might or might not become a cape. It's unlikely for her to become a supervillain without the right power (and others with her power aren't likely to become supervillains).

Like Lisa, Brian isn't predisposed to villainy; villainy is just the only clear way to achieve what he wants with the tools he ends up with. With a subtler or more aesthetically heroic power, he probably ends up on a different path. Unfortunately, most of the Undersiders also have unsubtle and aesthetically villainous powers, so most of these scenarios don't butterfly-effect much for him.

Aisha's parahuman career is warped by the fact that her brother started one before her. Aisha's path is different in an AU where Brian is a Thinker with an office job, than one where he wound up Birdcaged.

Taylor's the most flexible. She has something she wants to escape, and we know she'll try to find a way to use any parahuman ability she gets to escape it, one way or another.

the worm couple ever for valentine's day!!

The beat that always stuck with me in regards to Uber and Leet was when Taylor mentions that they beat up sex workers on livestream while LARPing Grand Theft Auto. Uber and Leet get a lot of mentions before they actually show up, and the drumbeat is that they're pathetic, they're fodder, "as incompetent as supervillains can be while staying out of jail." Leet is the butt of a rom-com gag where Brian gives Taylor pointers on how to choke a man out more effectively. But they made money by beating up sex workers on livestream. That's a non-negligible number of potentially ruined lives! That's not softball fun-and-games! It's like textbook misogynistic violence against the marginalized! It's awful!

The narrative doesn't really dwell on this, because it's told almost exclusively from the perspective of people who have the firepower necessary to get away with treating Uber and Leet like jokes. But I think that it's a useful reminder that if you aren't one of the initiated, so to speak, then an encounter with the C-list, D-list, Z-list supervillain can be life-altering if not life-ending. The dumbest listicle-fodder DC or Marvel villain you've ever heard of has probably ruined at least one person's life over their handful of appearances, if not more. And it's an early indictment of the broad concept of the unwritten rules as advanced by Lisa, where she calls out Uber and Leet as the textbook example of villains kept in circulation because they're "amusing but harmless." This is within parameters? This doesn't merit heroes and villains putting aside their differences to clean house of problematic elements? Of course it doesn't. Both examples that Lisa gives of that dynamic in 3.6 involve a cape transgressing against another cape.

how i look seeing u on the dash‼️