#because they keep getting confused for the Not Sexist irony and social commentary

[scarletkaoru]

This is an awesome meta both of wot and its politics in general, and also of egwene and that scene

I love the realism of characters PTSD and the fact that they often react to it by making bad decisions. Trauma doesn’t necessarily make you smarter. Just more desperate. And the series portrays that beautifully. I think people are used to the idea that a well written female character is also going to be ‘good’, not just in the sense of having character depth but also being morally upstanding. The women in wheel of time that we spend most of the narrative with are politicians, women in power and often in situations where they feel threatened. Plenty of the side character women arent manipulative because they dont need to be. (Ie: barmaids) , and its really interesting to see how characters like Egwene get more manipulative as the series goes on. Like thats not bad writing its a really interesting worldbuilding quirk

Saw a post (not on tumblr) from a reader 4 books into WoT who was frustrated by their impression that every woman in the series was manipulative in some way, and that they found the bits where men talk about women & vice versa were offputting.

I didn’t spend too much time on the latter, aside from mentioning that any given character’s expressed opinion about gender tends to be undercut/complicated by the actual events of the narrative in the same scene, or directly after.

But the observation about gendered manipulation made me think about power in WoT, on the principle that anything about gender dynamics in WoT is subtextually about power dynamics. Manipulation is just exercise of power, and everyone does it.

In WoT both top dog and underdog are manipulative, just in different ways and with different levels of effectiveness, and this is expressed through structural privileges as well as individual personalities & context.

Characters with less structural power- often but not always male, non-channelers, lower class, weak channellers among stronger ones, or channelers in channeler-phobic areas- tend to manipulate via guile; characters with more structural power- often but not always women, channelers, higher class, strong channellers among weaker ones, or channelers in channeler-friendly areas- manipulate via implied or overt threat.

In book 3, traumatized Egwene gets scolded for using an overt threat (blowing up the ground in front of him with channeling) on a Whitecloak just outside of Tar Valon, when she was structurally in a position of power and should have have just ignored him/used the implicit threat of being near home territory. The Whitecloak was bluffing (using guile to manipulate) and she fell for it because it triggered her PTSD.

She was tricked into giving up her high ground tactically, and Verin is furious because she also undermined every Aes Sedai strategically by using the One Power as a weapon on someone who thinks she is full Aes Sedai. Egwene threatened the structural power of Tar Valon by making it look like the Oaths don’t work, which is exactly what the average Whitecloak believes.

We understand that a) Egwene didn’t actually plan to hurt him so she is within the letter but not the spirit of the law- guile again, she thinks she was working from a position of weakness & was trying to bluff the Whitecloak- and b) on a purely emotional level Egwene was correct to believe she was threatened because she is obviously extremely traumatized by her Seanchan enslavement- she expresses that she will not be captured again when she attacks the ground in front of the Whitecloak.

Verin, the Whitecloak, and Egwene are all exerting power to manage the situation- being manipulative, being agents- according to their privilege, personality, and general context. There’s so much interest and nuance lost when you boil it all down to one single lens such as gender.