Hi! I'm HUGE WoT fan, AND The Untamed fan! Thank you for amazing work with liveblogging on both! I have a question, since I read your answers about Whitecloaks and Untamed: do you think Galad and Nie Mingjue are in a way similar? Becase NMJ is a very unusual character to me - man of principles, but not without heart. He reminds me heavily of Galad! Just curious, because your comments are very spot-on!
So, my immediate thought process here looked something like:
If Nie Mingue is Galad then who is Gawyn?
Wait Nie Mingjue has three siblings if we count the sworn ones
Galad also has three siblings if we count half-siblings
Literally any mapping of Nie Huaisang, Lan Xichen, and Jin Guangyao to Elayne, Gawyn, and Rand (not necessarily in that order) is hilarious
I’m so sorry. But if I had to think it, so do you.
Real answer though... it’s an interesting comparison; not one that I think would have occurred to me, but I think that’s partly why I’m finding it interesting to think about. But also finding it difficult to put together a cogent answer, because I feel like I’m kind of... hm.
It depends on the angle I look at it from. When the light catches it just right, yeah, I can see where you’re coming from because man of principles, but not without heart is kind of a startlingly good description of Galad. And probably not one I’d have come up with, because I’m not particularly fair to Galad (he’s one of those characters I know I have blind spots and ‘I just don’t get it’ points around, and so then to compensate for that I end up approaching him almost... methodically, and I think I then lose something, because I’m trying to analyse him by a rule-set but without heart. Which is, I suppose, extraordinarily ironic).
And I can see that as a very good description of Nie Mingjue as well -- in his case I feel like I still don’t know him well enough as a character to be certain, but one of his most interesting scenes so far, to me, is the one where he exiles Meng Yao, and thinking about it as a kind of tension between principles and heart is actually kind of fascinating. Would a man of fewer principles have so punished an apparent betrayal? (Would a man of less heart have felt so betrayed?) Would a man of fewer principles have held back from a killing blow? (Would a man of less heart have cared to?). And I have to wonder what Galad would have done in a similar situation, and I wonder if we’d have had a chance to ever meet Jin Guangyao.
But then from other angles I struggle to really draw a solid line of similarity between the two. One of the immediate things that stops me is just the way they present themselves, and the way they wear their anger. Nie Mingue’s is there to see, kept in check by decorum but with the sense of a ferocity beneath the surface that, in Galad, is... deeper, perhaps, or slower. Though both, when they issue a challenge or step onto a battlefield, do so definitively and absolutely, stillness and patience (Galad) or tension and fury (Nie Mingjue) resolving into clarity and purpose (then he did dance, all his grace turned in an instant to fluid death...).
I guess it’s sort of... to borrow your phrasing again (it’s good phrasing), a question of how that balance or tension or not-quite-conflict between principles and heart manifests in each of them; how they approach it in themselves, and how that plays out in all the times outside those moments.
I also wonder if some of the difference is due to their roles: if a Galad raised as heir, a Galad who claimed the throne of Cairhien in his father’s name, perhaps, might look more like Nie Mingjue. Or if a Nie Mingjue left to find his own way in a world that stopped making sense, who came from a family of influence but had no truly defined place in it, might have looked more like Galad.
I feel like this deserves a better answer (I like questions like these, the sort that take me by surprise with something I’d never have considered, and force me to think from a different angle), but that’s what I’ve got.
