#whereas WOT is 50/50

[markantonys]

is ROP lacking in the female character department or have i just been way too spoiled by the plethora of them in WOT? lmao

like, galadriel's excellent, 10/10 no notes. but it feels like the others are always playing second fiddle in a storyline the source material designed to be about men (disa, miriel), or are bopping around on a charming sidequest that, while important as a breath of lightness amidst the heavy stuff, is nowhere near as compelling as the ring-related storylines (nori, poppy). (or had to get written out due to the actress leaving; such a shame because i imagine bronwyn would've been a big player in the southlands storyline this season.)

and i think it mostly comes down to source material. i have a vivid childhood memory of reading the hobbit and then the fellowship of the ring and then quitting because i got bored and cranky about there not being any girls except for arwen in like 2 chapters, so i would not be surprised if much of ROP's source material is similar, where the vast majority of the important players are men. and the show is doing what it can to add in more ladies, but it's just tough to make them feel like they're on an equal level of narrative importance as the men for whom the story was originally designed.

and that makes me so incredibly thankful for WOT and the huge amount of story-driving women RJ baked into the story. i give him flak for some things, but in this regard he was truly ahead of his time! and ahead of OUR time, even today it's rare to see a (mainstream) story with such a wide array of female characters. and that's made the show's job easy; it doesn't have to fight the source material to make women important in the narrative, because they already are. i saw a text post the other day about "tasting the good bologna" and how you can never be satisfied with a mid-quality thing again after you've had the most luxurious version, and boy have i tasted the good bologna with WOT and female characters.

[markantonys]

Who are your fave characters if gawyn is fifth? What is like your top ten wot characters i yearn to know

[cracks knuckles] all right let's go!

elayne

egwene

rand

mat (show!mat and pre-COT mat only, COT-AMOL mat is dead to me and i would fight him in a parking lot if i could. ACOS-WH mat is also on thin fucking ice. so basically, show!mat and then about 40% of book!mat lmao)

gawyn

i used to put rand above egwene, but i'm riding the high of my season 2 rewatch and so up she goes! to be honest she comes very close to unseating elayne too, but elayne is like.............she just is MY wot character, you know? nobody can unseat her ever.

after that it's more nebulous as we get into "characters whom i love but who do not Make Me Think" territory, as opposed to the above guys whom i'm constantly rotating in my mind. these include aviendha, nynaeve, faile, verin, and loial. my favorite villains are probably lanfear (only thanks to the show), graendal (stealth smartest & most competent forsaken you can't change my mind), and demandred (he's sexy, he's melodramatic to the point of comedy, he has a homoerotic obsession with rand, what more could i ask for in a villain).

i know it's sacrilege to list gawyn higher than the likes of nynaeve and aviendha, i KNOW, but listen, this boy is like a goddamn 24/7 rotisserie chicken in my brain and those two, much as i adore them, just don't have the same ability to occupy so much of my brain real estate. there's also definitely a recency bias at play, because the best portion of nynaeve's story happens in the first half of the series and then she's reduced to a background character in the second half, whereas the best portion of gawyn's story happens during the final 3 books. as for aviendha, it's tough to say because she was SO sorely underused in the books, i genuinely think she might have even less pov across the whole series than gawyn. okay i just looked it up and that is not true, she does have about 10k more words of pov than he does - which, considering that gawyn only even APPEARED in a few pages per book until TGS, is NOT as many more words as should be the case if she hadn't been so underused!

(i also learned that min has the highest pov wordcount after the main 6 (UPDATE: and moiraine, who's the next highest after the main 6 and right above min, although that's if new spring is factored in), which disgusts me, no WONDER i was so constantly pissed off in the second half of the series having to listen to her whine so much! i guess it makes sense she's so high when her sole function in the story is to provide Outsider POV of rand. i'm sure that of her 111k words, 110k of them are about him. i also learned that 50% of AMOL is narrated by non-main-6 characters, and wow, that really explains why emotional investment was so shit during that book. i get wanting to wrap up loose ends with as many characters as possible and trying to show the scale of the last battle by showing what a million different people are doing during it, but we should have spent WAY more than 50% of the final book in the series with our main 6 characters!)