#ryma

[reformedmoth]

RYMA SEDAI & BASAN | The Wheel of Time 2x6

[nat111love]

THE WHEEL OF TIME ↳ Season 2 ↳ Episode Six |  Eyes Without Pity

[shutupineedtothink]

Ryma sedai?? Omg! Hey girl! I thought you died off screen last season! So good to see you! 💛💛💛

[made-in-manetheren]

I want to never see the moment again. I want to glue my eyeballs to it. I want to deny it. I want to study it as an art form. I want to chew glass

[theravennest]

Gonna get something off my chest...

I am mostly loving the WOT adaptation as a book reader and the last episode was certainly one of the best of the series but this last episode also did something that I don't see anyone talking about so I will, as both a show enjoyer and a Black book reader.

I think the optics of having Ryma be a darkskin Black woman is not great given how her story ends and how prevalent the colorism in the show casting has been so far.

They should have cast the actress as a different character and picked someone else for this role.

**Book Spoilers**

Like, Ryma's story is that she gets taken and enslaved as a damane alongside Egwene and is never set free all the way to the end of the series. So having the hopeless enslavement story done by Ryma as a brutal, violent contrast and foil to Egwene's eventually liberated enslavement story is kinda in poor taste. Egwene, who is not Black and who is lightskin.

Especially since Ryma's character was not Black in the books so they specifically racebent her when casting Nyokabi for the role.

IDK, it feels especially icky because most of the other named darkskin Black people so far in the show have been evil/villains/antagonists. Edit: The only "good" ones have been Elyas, who is a wolfbrother and Ihvon, both men. The only darkskin women so far have been completely unnamed or one off characters and we still have Tuon coming up.

There is already a colorism problem with the show's casting and they go and do this. If they had done a better job at fixing the colorist casting earlier they could've mitigated this but here we are.

It's just not a good look tbh.

I can only hope that they change Ryma's story some but then the narrative purpose of Ryma/Pura would be lost. Only other option is to lean into casting more good female characters who have hefty storylines with darkskin Black performers. idk...

I'm loving the show, truly, but this is so glaring and weird and I need the show to do better in this one aspect.

[lasaraconor]

[lakeofsilverpike]

Ryma and Basan have me thinking again about the Bond and the selfishness of love.

We saw Moiraine spend months hurting Lan terribly to save his life. She pushes him away because she thinks it will keep him alive. Even though this hurts Lan greatly. Even though it hurts Moiraine just as much. Even though it arguably means losing a weapon in her fight against the Dark. She does it anyway because she will sacrifice anything for the cause except Lan’s life.

The ultimate example of this type of love, where loving someone so much leads to removing their agency and not allowing them to make a critical choice about their life, is Basan and Ryma. They walk out to face the Seanchan together. She has clearly decided to sacrifice her life to save Nynaeve and Elayne. It’s in her mind so clearly that Basan knows that is what’s happening. He walks out to join her, and she winks, and they share a knowing smile. They will go down fighting. They will go down to together.

Ryma makes a heartbreaking choice. But it is a choice. And choice is what defines human life, what gives it meaning. She decides she will die rather than become a damane. She trusts her Warder to be the one to kill her, to give her a death with dignity rather than being captured.

In the last critical moment Basan cannot bring himself to kill Ryma even though they have clearly agreed to this through the Bond in the moment before the fight. They fight together. They die together.

In that last moment though, Basan can’t kill this person he loves so much. And his choice dooms her to a fate that she felt was worse than death. His inability to kill her is why Ryma ends up enslaved. Why she faces centuries as a damane being forced to use the power she devoted her life to using as a force of healing, instead as a force of destruction and harm to others.

It’s his love that does this. His love that strips away her agency. Ryma goes to fight trusting her Warder to kill her so she won’t be taken. And when he can’t, because he loves her too much, she is collared, condemned to a life without any choice at all.

[hexedmaniacs]

it is the fabled back on my bullshit.

i’m getting back into dragon ball pretty hard and as such things that means i’m gonna be redrawing old ocs and amalgamizing ocs into new ones

normally i put bios and stuff in the desc but normally whenever i do those posts don’t do well anyways so i’ll just leave it here lol. i love them