Another WoT rant. Please skip if that's not your jam. I was so stoked for the Moiraine/Lanfear showdown. Big magical battle between powerful women, in flowy skirts, in daylight, high stakes. Battle scenes aren't always my favorite, but I do enjoy unhinged and fierce magical girls.
And it looked more amazing than I could've imagined. Especially Lanfear's unnatural and grotesque body movements. Natasha sold channeling harder than anyone I've seen yet, and yeah, that includes the ridiculously gorgeous scene of Moiraine trying the Sakarnen for the first time. Except I can't enjoy it now. I can't even rewatch it seeing clips of a bloody, bruised, battered, and subsequently beheaded woman who starts off her speech with a love confession (nauseatingly mixed feelings about that) interspersed. I'm a whump girlie, I am not even squeamish but I just can't do it with this one. I just feel revulsion and no desire to ever see it again. Kudos to the make up dept I guess I was sick. Rosamund and Sophie were both acting their asses off, I'm sure, but it doesn't register for me at all with the intense gore and pointless death. I'm so mad. This shit should've been right up my ally. I even want to like the drama of Moiraine feeling the oath be broken but I just can't. She could've felt it break from the stilling alone uhg.
I've been struggling so much to figure out my feelings on Moiraine after this. Because it's not like I hate her now. But I can't celebrate her badassery and not just because of the cost. If we're meant to assume that the Sakarnen put her on equal footing with Lanfear, then I would've infinitely preferred Moiraine to find the remaining courage or motivation or whatever she needed to win within herself and her mission, or with plotting and planning, anything without it being served up to her in the form of dead wife. I don't care if it technically makes sense in a real life scenario. It's cheap. I feel robbed for and of her. She's my favorite (along with Siuan) and I refuse to let this sour me on her, though it is definitely a struggle. Part of what made this so compelling is that Moiraine has always been afraid of Lanfear, and rightly so, but that never stopped her from taking the next step.
To be clear, "souring a cool and flashy moment," is just one of the many problems I have with this whole thing, the majority of which obviously focus much more on rep, Siuan's character and arc, and many of which have been covered by other posts. This is just the particular one of the many I'm thinking on now, as I'm trying to make sense of my feelings and figuring out how to continue enjoying the characters (Moiraine) I love when they were the beneficiaries of dead wife.
(Lowkey also trying to figure out how this makes me feel about Elaida's characterization too. Of course her predilection to beating is straight out of the books, and we've seen her kill other sisters this season. On the one hand, it further demonstrates her at odds with Alviarin, since Elaida looked a bit unnerved before Alviarin did the thing (so I'm told, I couldn't focus on anything at that point) but I still maintain we didn't need to use a Siuan death to do that when we've already established just how cruel stilling/gentling is. I dunno. Thoughts on that one are still soup. I guess it's a WAFO but I'm not sure I'm doing the 'W' after this ...)
