Wot Meta - Tumblr Posts
I just realized that Travelling wasn’t lost because all the people who knew how to do that died (though that certainly helped) but because you had to know where you are and where you’re going in order to do it, and the Breaking meant that no one knew where the fuck anything was anymore.
Major cities? Obliterated.
The ocean? Fuck you, there’s a land mass here now, and btw, another sea is now a desert so too bad for all the marine animals there.
That peaceful plain by a river? Oops that’s a mountain now and by the way the river has an island.
How can you figure out where anything is when a whole bunch of cities were just smushed together, a mountain range appeared out of fucking nowhere, and all the rivers and coastlines changed? It’s like trying to find your way with a faulty GPS that keeps changing languages, and all the roads are under construction so all the streets are rerouted in the most confusing ways.
(Which is also probably why all the Sea Folk were so good at navigating by the stars because at least those things stayed in place.)
Throughout the course of the Wheel of Time, Rand al'Thor is consistently gaslit into believing his trauma isn't real/or overblown by everyone around him and that all his PTSD symptoms are a result of the Taint. This in turn is the reason why he is unable to process any of his trauma, which leads to him believing his symptoms are a sign of personal weakness and causing him to hide them in this essay I will
Also at this point? I’m mad all over at people who write Min off as being nothing but a Rand tag-along.
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rand al’thor really is this repudiation of the idea of a Noble Sufferer, isn’t he
like, as early as book 2 he’s resigning himself to this trope. he decides that he’s going to Suffer In Silence, you know, he even tries to die for the girl he loves (and the first seanchan invasion but egwene’s a big part of it) at falme, he starts withdrawing from other people in book 3 and taking up the burden of the dragon reborn “because i must and there’s no one else who can,” and at every turn the narrative is showing that this isn’t possible. he tries to die heroically in falme and survives against all odds because the pattern isn’t done with the dragon reborn. he tries to kill ishamael three times before it takes, expecting the fight against darkness to be Over each time. by book 4 he’s becoming self-aware of his own trauma responses and they horrify him?? he can’t understand why he’s becoming angry and violent and struggling with lashing out. he still spouts off this whole speech to lanfear about how he was born to destroy the darkness in ostensible total acceptance of his destined role. he expects things to be simple in ways that they would be in another narrative. he tries to quash his entire identity to be the prophesied warrior of light, which includes ignoring his own trauma, because he can’t have trauma if he’s not a person, and we see how this does not work. he goes from dissociating sometimes to dissociating constantly, his Selfless Desire To Die mutates into a seesaw between fear of death and increasing suicidality. which is extremely, viscerally human. repressing his pain and never talking about it alienates most of the people in his life including people he’s trying to reach out to because they can’t understand what’s going through his head. he becomes cold and furious and difficult to be around despite his best intentions. he’s killed the boy who was rand al’thor but that doesn’t turn him into a fabled hero it just turns him into a miserable person he doesn’t recognize.
he WANTS to be the ideal stoic martyr, he WANTS to bravely face his destiny like people do in all the stories he read growing up, but he doesn’t understand that those are just stories and real people can’t live like that.
"And he shall wear a crown of swords"
Ok, so since my first read of the Wheel of Time, I’ve thought that that was one of the dumber prophecies.
The prophecy says he’ll “wear a crown of swords,” so when he gets a crown with little swords on it, people rename it so it will be the “crown of swords” from the prophecy. If the prophecy hadn’t called it that, neither would anyone else. It’s like Logain calling his army “the people of the Dragon.” Just calling it that doesn’t necessarily fulfill the prophecies.
However, after rereading Towers of Midnight, when Nynaeve learns to see and Heal the madness of the taint, she tries Delving Rand with this new insight, and sees “Thousands upon thousands of the tiny black thorns pricked into his brain, but beneath them was a brilliant white lacing of something.” (ToM 15) The swords in the supposed “Crown of Swords” are often described as pricking his temple like thorns.
So the Laurel Crown isn’t the true “Crown of Swords.” Rand’s madness is. The Prophecies are a list of things that are supposed to help Rand towards the Last Battle and to help humanity prepare for it. Did Rand really need the crown of Illian? No. He just needed them to fight in the Last Battle. But to win, he did need the memories of Lews Therin, which he gained through his madness…through the Crown of Swords.
Been thinking a lot about how carefully RJ considered his world due to how many little details just make sense when you dive a little deeper.
The biggest and best example I can think of is the little throwaway facts about the Aiel. They don’t use maps. They have, like, one chair per hold. They have an oral history. Books and sung wood are very precious. Peddlers are on the very short list of three kinds of people they allow into their land. Communication is almost always done by sending runners, so it’s extremely important to have systems where people can send messages without being straight-up murdered. All of these details - ALL OF THEM - stem from the fact that the Aiel live in a fucking desert.
Desert mean very few trees, and the trees they do have are put to much better use as sources of shade. So they’re not cutting them down to make paper or furniture. And even if they were going to use something else to make paper, the process still needs water, as would any kind of ink they would make. So that rules out making maps, or writing books to record their histories.
Peddlers are literally their only source for books or paper, and they’re not exactly coming by every day. Any scraps of precious paper wouldn’t be wasted on writing letters, so it’s super important to have systems in place where even warring factions can still literally talk to one another. The only letter we’ve ever seen an Aiel write is the one the Wise Ones send to Moiraine at the Stone - information too important to be heard by anyone else, sent by one person trusted enough to deliver it to the right hands.
All of this? Is because the Aiel live in a fucking desert.
WoT Meta: The Difference Between Trauma and Adversity
I think one thing that both Jordan and Sanderson don't get enough credit for, Jordan especially, is how viscerally they depict trauma.
There's a trend, especially in fantasy fiction, of trauma being portrayed as a strengthening experience: something that makes the characters that are traumatized inherently stronger or more worthy people, or else reveals some innate inner strength that allows them to power through the experience. It stems from a conflating of trauma with adversity, depicting them as the same thing. A character's abuse, mistreatment, violation, even rape, are all treated as just another obstacle to overcome to prove the hero's worthiness, or else confer worthiness by virtue of their survival. It's a writing convention that has been around forever, but the extreme popularity of Game of Thrones has caused it's use to skyrocket.
Both Jordan and Sanderson defy this line of thinking however, by demonstrating the difference between trauma and adversity, in ways both subtle and overt.
Both Rand and Egwene go through very traumatic experiences at different points: Rand the Box, and Egwene her enslavement by the Seanchan. These experiences don't make either character inherently better or more worthy. They don't even make them stronger. Rather they create problems for both that last more or less the rest of the series.
Rand suffers from extreme claustrophobia, causing him to panic when he feels physically confined (Far Madding, the Seafolk Cabin, even his own rooms when wounded to a limited extent), and he also develops an extreme aversion to ever placing himself in the power of others, in particular women who can channel, causing to frequently go to extreme, often violent lengths to avoid being vulnerable to women who can channel, even ones he in theory is supposed to trust or love. This I think, one of the reasons he stays away so much from Elayne and Avihenda until near the end of the series, but doesn't try nearly as hard to avoid Min, who can't channel.
Egwene meanwhile develops a tendency to lash out wildly when presented with the possibility of being imprisoned again, reacting to mild threats with irrational terror and anger, from the way she attacks the White Cloaks in TGH, to the way she fights back tooth and nail against the Black Ajah to the point where they beat her senseless. Her hatred of the Seanchan is another symptom, even when irrational or dangerous to her cause.
What interesting is that, Rand believes, or tries to convince himself, that his trauma is just adversity to be overcome, that it's a 'forging' experience, that he went through in order to make him strong enough to do his duty as the Dragon. He echoes many sentiments from Lan and the Borderlanders in this fashion, like any victim of abuse, trying to find rhyme and reason for why he was hurt, and in so doing preventing himself from healing or confronting his pain. This leaves him vulnerable and also stuck in the same cycle of being hurt, lashing out, and convincing himself that the problem was just that he has not yet made himself 'strong' enough that trauma will simply not hurt him any longer. It's no mistake that this vicious cycle culminated in Rand nearly destroying himself, and the world. One of the key parts of Rand's development in the last few books of the series is being able to differentiate between his trauma and adversity, to stop trying to just repress his feelings in an effort to 'power through' and instead accept the pain and suffering he's endured and try and work through it.
Similarly the scars of Egwene's captivity are felt all the way through to the end of the series: even in AMOL it's effects are still showing up, tanking her meeting with Tuon, briefly allowing Messana to take her captive, and causing her to act irrationally in regards to Leliwin. The difference is that Egwene is far better at dealing with with her trauma in part because she experiences true adversity and growth during her time with the Aiel, and learns to tell the difference between the two.
The Wise Ones are harsh with her, but not unfair, they have extremely high expectations but they are not cruel or malicious when she fails to meet those expectations: her punishments are never useless or for their own sake, their is always a lesson or a benefit to them, from having to braid her hair like a child when she is caught acting like a child, to having to run laps in order to both punish her lateness and strength her constitution, to even having to dig holes so that she'll understand the futility of meddling with Sevanna. But most importantly, Egwene from the beginning is made aware that she can, at any time, walk away. That's one of the points of her and Amys's confrontation in TSR: Egwene is with the Wise Ones by choice, and at any time she could leave if she truly wanted too. It is a challenge she must overcome, not something being inflicted on her without her consent. Her meeting of her toh for lying to the Wise One's at the end is the culmination of this arc. At that point she has nothing to gain from the Wise Ones, yet she chooses to be held responsible for her actions anyways, to be accountable and to make right what she had done wrong. That's the difference between the beatings inflicted on her by Renna, and the beating used to help her meet her toh. One she has a chooses as part of accepting responsibility, the other she has forced on her in order to compel her obedience.
This fine distinction is one of the really great thing about WoT, and what to me at least, puts it on a whole other level from Game of Thrones. It shows a better understanding of people and trauma, of what makes people grow and what leaves them scarred, without devolving into cynical 'everything is suffering' nihilism. It neither substitutes trauma for growth, nor presents trauma as a inescapable state in which you will be forever trapped. Instead it presents it as something you can heal from, but only with time, effort, help and being honest about your feelings.
It also dovetails nicely with the ideological conflict at the heart of the series, but more on that in a bit.