#this isn’t well organised but I had to say my piece 👍 leave siuan alone or die by my blade. she deserved none of that.

[hauntedmoors]

spoilers for ep7 below the cut, beware that I discuss power balances, abuse and assault with book spoilers. I mostly discuss siuan, moiraine, rand, lan and elaida.

sooo much discourse about siuan and it’s personally very disturbing that people think it’s alright for the show to radically deviate from her established characterisation* (1. which is specifically, purposefully IN CONTRAST to elaida in the books 2. violates its own canon about siuan trusting Dreams, foretellings and prophecies wrt to the dragon more fervently than moiraine herself) or that she was reaping the consequences of her actions when she was deposed in tsr, ignoring how siuan isn’t unique in keeping secrets as an aes sedai or how gawyn and galad are intentionally treated like spoiled, privileged children who think they’re cleverer than they really are when they act without considering the consequences of their actions or how the books frame the whole sequence as a tragedy of errors on all sides. I’m pretty sure @/amemoryofwot made the breakdown on the black ajah to non black ajah sisters in the hall and it was very revelatory about the exact significance of the stakes set up against siuan. I also think it’s important to not ignore the gender dimension involved in the way people approach rand and mat as opposed to moiraine or egwene or siuan - male characters are always better tolerated when they make morally questionable choices while women are systemically taken apart and derided for being foolish.

that said. it’s very telling that the show is solely interested in moiraine almost to a fault; we’ve had 5 different expositions with significant screentime about moiraine pushing people away from alanna, anvaere and verin - and at some point it just becomes very bad writing. viewers are not juvenile. they don’t need to be rapped over the head over a concept that the show catches and chooses to explore.

this analysis segues into another conversation that we should be having - I do understand that framing lan and siuan in context of their relationships to moiraine as the protagonist of the series is inevitable, smart writing. but after laying the foundation for their characters in s1 and establishing their motivations there was absolutely no need to continue to frame them in context of their relationship to moiraine almost to the exclusion of all other facets of their characterisations. liandrin was clearly afforded a lot more generous writing and screentime and it’s a Problem and also very bad writing when an antagonist is afforded more screentime than your ACTUAL PROTAGONISTS. some of these writing choices are really racist, period.

with regards to discussions about assault and abuse in this episode I will say this once, and only once:

moiraine transferring lan’s bond to myrelle in the books was an act of desperation undertaken only because lan’s life was at stake. moiraine ACTUALLY asking alanna to forcibly take lan’s bond is akin to threatening him with assault. it’s bad writing meant to make her seem a lot more colder to justify the intervention that we see later on. lan offering an apology to moiraine at the end of the episode without any apology in turn displays the writers’ sheer lack of sensitivity in handling the whole conversation.

the show using the oath rod flippantly is another angle that really boils my blood because it clearly would’ve enabled worser amyrlins to exercise power with impunity. ELAIDA was famously the amyrlin who wanted to extract oaths of allegiance from her sisters.

ELAIDA was also famously the amyrlin who gave orders to have rand transported to the tower so that she could use him as a weapon and deny him any agency. the tower *has* no rules for dealing with the dragon in the books and the show chose to manufacture it to no real benefit except awkward, badly executed conflict. siuan and moiraine may have often attempted to control rand in the books - and they were at least partly right sometimes because they had more worldly knowledge and experience than he did - but it’s important to the story that they choose not to deny him his agency and give him plenty of leeway and that elaida specifically thinks of him only as a tool. rand also being physically restrained by the shielding weave and possibly sleeping in that position uncomfortably reminds me of the box sequence in lord of chaos.

siuan compelling moiraine to follow her orders, as a partner she’s been intimate with, is akin to assault. rosamund pike made very specific acting choices that are jarring and difficult to ignore. moiraine gave that oath to siuan in 1x06 implicitly trusting her with her bodily and psychological wellbeing and siuan specifically chooses to violate it. it’s a step away from using the weave for compulsion (which is explicitly also stated as being forbidden btw!)

rand’s scenes when he’s shielded by siuan being juxtaposed against egwene’s scenes with renna was a very bad choice and the editing was so fucking awkward. if the choice was intentionally meant to generate conversations about autonomy it was a very bad one to make.

you know what the kicker is? lan’s exposition to nynaeve about the damane deserving to be free in WH (or was it CoT or KoD? I don’t remember very well) because it was every human’s right despite the harm that they might be capable of causing explicitly positions ELAIDA as a bad person. what does it say about siuan after this episode? any person able to wilfully participate in taking away another person’s autonomy is not a good person, full stop.

theories about siuan being under compulsion (by liandrin) are. fine. it doesn’t explain the showrunners basically speaking from moiraine’s perspective of the tragic turn that the romance took or ignorantly comparing it to the kind of assault ishamael performed on moiraine without any selfawareness or the disconnect in liandrin apparently trying to get rand back in the tower because lanfear and ishamael clearly want him in falme but whatever (unless speculation that another forsaken is free is true). I won’t dismiss it right now, but I don’t think they’re correct. there’s enough clues in the show to make it a plausible theory, but not necessarily a probable one - and it doesn’t explain siuan’s faith in her judgement about treating rand like weapon earlier in the episode.

I’m just…. lol. exasperated. I’m indifferent to her but there’s a very obvious sense of people condemning tuon for being a horrible person in the fandom - and like yeah she IS a horrible person but that’s still textually acknowledged. what is also textually acknowledged is the difficult process involved in deprograming people. when your show can’t understand the textbook definition of assault I’m a lot more unlikely to trust the showrunners actually!

*characters like ishamael, lanfear and min obviously needed overhauling because they were very badly done but their fundamental, core characterisations and motives still remain intact so they work. siuan and lan aren’t even afforded the grace of well-considered changes to their characterisations.

#not that I’ve tagging book spoilers before. sorry I’m exhausted by the thought of using an extensive number of tags. #text #this isn’t well organised but I had to say my piece 👍 leave siuan alone or die by my blade. she deserved none of that. #wheel of time