#unfortuona

[killldeer]

excitement for seeing the seanchan on-screen vs fear for how the showrunners at Amazon Dot Com will handle all of the (gesures vaguely) that comes with them as obligatory baggage. duality of man

SIGH. THIS IS, UNFORTUNATELY, THE VIBE

[show-only fans: i am about to discuss spoilery material that spans pretty much the entire series, so please skip this post if you don’t care for those!]

I have such a complicated relationship with the Seanchan. On the one hand they are absolutely fascinating when we get to see inside their heads in POVs during the books, and for a good chunk of the series Robert Jordan did a fantastic job of making them the most terrifying, loathsome force in the known world. They are so alien and fearsome and fun to hate. On the other hand, however… you are so extremely right. There are a lot of things I really, really wish RJ had done or not done when he wrote the Seanchan, a lot of which have aged pretty poorly (and if we’re being honest were already pretty iffy when they were written).

My opinion is that there are going to be several different sets of goalposts we’re going to have to get through, each of them very different in terms of how much awareness and context is needed, for me to consider the Seanchan a successful adaptation:

The lowest-hanging fruit, where the bar is fucking underground, is altering their aesthetic – which is largely composed of elements which have been stolen wholesale from existing cultures and slapped onto a horrifying imperialist tank of a country. I’ve been really happy about the costume design so far, and if those promo pics from today are any indication then I actually have a good amount of hope for this one!

Second is the way in which the sul’dam and damane are shown and contextualized – i.e. making it known, unequivocably, that there are no good Seanchan, because all Seanchan are responsible for and benefactors of the literal actual slavery that forms a cornerstone of their society. I am looking at you, Egeanin. This one’s going to need a little more tact; I’ve put my trust in the showrunners so far, but this fundamentally being an am*zon production still makes me really nervous about it either way.

The third and most difficult test, which is all the more nerve-wracking because we won’t know if wotonprime has passed it for a long while, is Tuon Athaem Kore Paendrag. Tuon, in my humble opinion, is the single biggest sin Robert Jordan committed while writing the Seanchan. She undoes so much of his hard work so quickly it’s almost comical; she continuously exists on the edge of realizing the Seanchan are The Worst but never actually does, and somehow takes like half the main cast with her into being Reluctantly Cool With Slavery. I do not even know where to begin on the travesty that is the end of Mat’s arc at her hands.

tl;dr: I Am So Scared!! Here Goes Nothing!!!

[killldeer]

post-amol good ending where mat just grabs talmanes and Leaves. tuon has her heir on the way and has made it clear she could just murder him for kicks now, and in the year or two since tylin mat has goddamn had enough. the finn said he had to marry her, but they didn’t say anything about sticking around. so he leaves her a chest of child support gold she doesn’t actually need and fucks off with his boyfriend, and potentially also min, if she asks nicely (she does more than ask – she almost begs him to get her out of there before tuon ships her to seandar. they’ve both agreed not to bring it up.)

and they sorta just roam the countryside together. they make a habit of avoiding the seanchan when possible, but mat’s personal guilt over his involvement with the empress still drives him to occasionally do things like bribe a couple of windfinders into going on a week-long camping trip with them, with the promise of a well-hidden spot from which to pick off as many sul’dam as they can (the atha’an miere remember who he is, but they also remember ebou dar, and more than one channeler mat released is willing to come back for round two).

tarmon gai’don is over. mat and his boyfriend and his dead best friend’s ex girlfriend (who totally did not ask to stay in the westlands so she can constantly sneak off to go visit said dead boyfriend) explore the westlands with no stakes except for when they’re occasionally doing guerilla warfare. mat is a painfully average gambler without the dice on his side and it’s okay. mat wins.