#On paper I love the idea of her as Rand's mentor/curator and as an anti-Aes Sedai who will jolt them awake

[onaperduamedee]

I finished reading Nynaeve's Aes Sedai testing and this chapter is bugging me: for a culmination, it's a clunky conclusion to Nynaeve's arc. Nyn is a pragmatic even when she's prideful: it feels odd that her big moment of warning the Aes Sedai about their connection to the world would come to the surface in a test that's very much made up.

The point of the test is to show she can keep her head under stress, which she did. The AS were dicks about technicalities, as always, but it's in these circumstances that Nyn would point out their isolationism and not in Kin dealing for example?

And there's the matter of why she wants to be Aes Sedai: Nyn doesn't care about that recognition from Aes Sedai, she still would be able to channel without it, and she's doing it to help Egwene's position, but she also explicitly says wants to be Aes Sedai.

Why? Is it because despite all their flaws the AS' initial purpose to serve all is strongly in line with her value of community? Probably, but we don't get that explicitly. We only get this middle ground where she's both invested in and rejecting this group.

I feel like this chapter would not feel like 3 different important Nyn plot points (testing, isolationism condamnation and Lan's bond) jammed into a chapter if the books had deigned giving her an actual arc that's not about helping Rand or Lan after the BA hunt and ter'angreal search.

Both RJ and BS love writing detailed dives into the psychology of the characters except Nyn for the last few books and it's really frustrating. The chapter in itself is quite nice, but it's the crystallisation of my dissatisfaction with Nyn's arc.

The reason why no one but Nyn could have delivered that judgement about AS is that in some ways Nyn is a reflection on the Aes Sedai's inner tensions on a micro and individual level: as a Wisdom, she holds a position of power and knowledge. Yet she fights constantly for respect and appears a bully with too much pride and too little awareness to others. She's fiercely anchored in her beliefs. Once you go on a systemic level with these elements, you get the Aes Sedai. Nyn grows, the Aes Sedai very slowly.

So this character who is all about people and healing, and still says she wants to be Aes Sedai, a rot of a public service, pretty much washes her hands of them and doesn't even work with the Kin, the actual more functional Aes Sedai entity she dreams of?

In the end, it's merely frustration because her character started as the most fascinating but ends up on the back-burner by book 8. Arcs that should have been hers are just featuring her, like the cleansing and the Kin. She has key moments but the connective tissue or word count isn't there, like a tertiary character like Siuan is used. The result is something like this chapter that feels surface level for a main character, especially in comparison with other main.