#wheel of time musing

[asha-mage]

I don't think this line is going to make it into the final draft of the essay but I still proud of it and wanted to post it here for posterity:

It’s no mistake that the opinions of various WoT characters about nobility are all over the map, running the spectrum from Mat ‘I will treat being called my lord like a slur’ Cauthon to Elayne ‘I could be the poster child for enlightened despotism’ Trakand.

[asha-mage]

Missing the Mark: Graendal and the Forsaken

One of my favorite things about Jordan as a writer is this neat hat trick he has, where every time he enters the PoV of a new character, from random one offs to Our Heroes to the most Dastardly of Evil Overlords, he sits down, sets aside his own biases and feelings, and makes them come alive as a fully realized human person.

This especially what makes his villains, and the Forsaken in particular, such memorable antagonists. Jordan has this remarkable ability to step into the point of view of people that we the reader are predisposed to hate and want to simplify and flatten, and force us to confront the fact that their multilayered and nuanced. Their still bad people, but their actions are presented with context, their personal narrative given weight. We see their foibles and their strengths, the ways they delude themselves and the ways that they sometimes see with far more clarity then the heroes, and we see motivates and drives them. Their personal narrative, the story they tell themselves where they are the hero, is given weight and heft, and we are even on occasion allowed to root for and sympathize with the Forsaken (Moghiden in Mind Trap, Asmodean during his time Forcefully Reassigned to Team Light, Dashiva/Osan'gar trying to talk reason to Rand during the Seanchan campaign), all without ever letting the reader forget that these are horrible people who have committed atrocities against humanity that are still felt three thousand years later.

This is entirely possible only because of Jordan's ability to set his own biases aside when writing these characters. The Forsaken are engaging entirely because they are human beneath all the mythology and horror and awe inspiring power, and Jordan works to portray that humanity.

Contrast with Sanderson.

All of the Forsaken get a degree of flattening underneath Sanderson's writing, with the exception of Demandred (who has appeared so seldom up to that point their isn't much to flatten or work with), though the one who gets the worst of it is Graendal. And if I had to wager a guess, it's Sanderson's biases coming into play, affecting how he depicts members of the Forsaken.

Graendal, from her appearances prior to TGS, is a incredibly nuanced and interesting character. A former ascetic who dedicated her life to helping the mentally ill, only to loose faith in humanity after years of service, and abandon her ideals in pursuit of total carnal pleasure. She remarks during ACOS that her first steps to the Great Lord where 'full of pain' and that she dosen't like thinking about them. And yet....when we see inside her head she's still using the terminology of a psychologist, still regarding people as patients and thinking in terms of disorders and neurosis. The implications of her skill at Compulsion- that it descends from her attempts (and failures) to use the Power to heal broken human minds-, and of her need to be surrounded by adoring servants consumed by overwhelming love for her paint a fascinating portrait of a woman attempting to bury her trauma and pain deeply, and using any means at hand to accomplish it. Notable, despite her instance of not being willing to die even for the Great Lord of the Dark, she is one of the few members of Team Shadow who truly seems to buy the party line that the Wheel needs to be broken, and suffering stopped, and in accordance with the old rule of thumb she is one of the most devastatingly effective as a result.

And then Sanderson takes over, and she just gets flattened into puddy. Which is WILD, because based on the structure and set up, where Rand's personal character arc was meant to come to head around the same time he was confronting Graendal, based on the fact they have so many parallel issues and problems, their is so much juicy stuff to dig into with that face off that just...dosen't get dug into. And that's partly because Graendal looses a lot of her nuance and depth under Sanderson's tenor. Graendal becomes squarely about the carnal pleasures she peruses and the control she exerts over her victims, and nothing else. Her tendency to use psychologist terminology in her personal monologue is lost, her ability to sharply read people and gain insight into their motives is reduced to guess work about where Demandred and the others are hiding, and what their plans are. The fact that her sultry hedonist persona is a persona used to fool her enemies (something Demandred himself noted back in Winter's Heart) is forgotten and instead she is written as just a sultry hedonist.

Their are a lot of reasons this could be the case, but as near as I can tell it boils down to bias, and Sanderson's inability to set aside his own biases. Graendal is inherently sexual, and Sanderson's works are somewhat famously rather sexless. His strong Mormon beliefs about Free Will will later crop up in how he re frames the 13x13 trick (being unable to mention it without mentioning that actually no these people probably weren't turned to evil against their will, but rather just soul murdered and replaced with an exact evil duplicate) and it's no mistake that Graendal's Compulsion is treated as On Another Tier of Monstrosity entirely, while other Forsaken atrocities: the subjugation of an entire continent's worth of people by the subversion of their Prophecies, so that they can be used as an army for Team Evil, or the mass torturing of waves of innocents to turn them to Team Evil, are minimized somewhat minimized, still treated as bad, but considered less bad because after all the Sharans choose to follow Demandred, and Semrihages victims to be give in to the pain. (This is particularly egregious, where Messana's worst crimes: creating schools to the Dark One and raising an entire generation of children to cruel, hateful, and monstrous thugs- something that's noted to have made the Breaking worse go largely unmentioned in the rundown of Why She is Bad in ToM). But Graendal's use of compulsion, which leaves no room for the illusion of free will or choice, is treated with a level of abhorence by both the narrative and the characters- the later of which might make sense, but the former of which is something Jordan never really stooped to.

While Graendal gets it the worst, all of the Forsaken are flattened to a greater or lesser degree, along with other key Darkfriends. Moghieden's steely courage even in the face of overwhelming odds is largely lost, Messana's twisted motherly/teacher nature become simple arrogance, Alviarian completely looses relevance showing up in a few cameos, even Moridin feels more shallow: becoming more generally sad and sinister, loosing much of the anger that had always paralleled Rand's.

The main exception? Sanderson's self professed favorite among the Forsaken, Demandred, which shows the pendulum of bias swinging the other way. But I'll save talking about that for when I actually get to AMOL.