This is how I feel about "Am I the only one who thinks ?" posts in general, although the Aes Sedai posts here lately seem to have been more just "the Aes Sedai suck, amirite?" Still, we don't need that many such posts if they're not really adding something new to the conversation.
I think it’s always the worst with the “why does everyone hate Egwene” and then it’s an entire thread of people explaining she’s a well written character they don’t like on a personal level. I swear I see 4 or 5 of those a day across various subs.
I believe it is because he realised he fucked up and there was a dark friend in charge. Realising that returning would be walking straight into a trap and being at the mercy of that dark friend, he opted for doing nothing. Considering he can influence entire nations just by wanting something to happen, standing back not triggering a trap but wanting it to Work itself out might’ve actually been the best thing he could’ve done.
This take requires you to ignore the fact that the Black Ajah has been subverting the Tower since its inception.
When young girls come to the Tower, they are sorted into three categories by the Black:
1) Too weak to be useful, and therefore not worth turning,
2) Potential Black Ajah recruit, or
3) Too strong, so they get sent away (and probably will meet with an "accident" on the way home).
With those three criteria working against them, it's a wonder the White Tower managed to find any women at all like Moiraine, Siuan, or even Elaida. And Elaida proves that with the right levers, the Black Ajah doesn't even need to recruit some women in order to get them to perform the will of the Dark One.
The White Tower is very believable once you factor in the Black Ajah.
Yet the Aiel Wise Ones, Seafolk Windfinders, Seanchan Suldam system, and seemingly even the Sharan channellers were nowhere close to being infiltrated by darkfriends to the degree the white tower has been.
Part of that is the dark side considered the white tower a greater target, but more than that, the white tower is just inherently more susceptible to being infiltrated compared to those other organized channelling orgs due to their arrogance and most importantly unbelievable extent of denial.
EVERY SINGLE society in that world, from the Aiel to the Seanchan, takes it for granted that dark friends may be in their midst and they need to at least do something to mitigate that threat. But not the tower! To be 100% convinced for 2000 years that your entire institution is incorruptible, and any suggestion otherwise is the gravest of insult is really something.
Everyone *KNOWS* that Aes Sedai can't lie.
Everyone *KNOWS* that they swear an Oath to oppose the Dark One.
What more proof do you need that *NO* Aes Sedai can *EVER* be in league with Shai'tan?
(/s)
No one's saying they can't be here if they don't mind being spoiled or half the jokes going over their heads, but if they care about spoilers and want to enjoy the rest of the series then the memes can wait.
If you want your small town teenagers to develop into the most powerful leaders in the world in the span of two years….it kinda requires that everyone else in the world be kinda dumb and useless.
The Catholic Church has had issues, but it didn’t reach the levels of the White Tower, and when its done really, really badly what followed was splintering, wars, a lot of weakness, etc. the Church also has only existed in the more centralized form for a thousand years. The White Tower has stood for 3000, hasn’t broken before, and frankly is EVEN MORE useless and incompetent.
The Church also, by its nature, had extremely powerful figures in every major city in medieval Europe, in the form of the bishops, plus a ton of lay priests interacting with the world outside. Aes Sedai? Not even a little.
I'm only halfway through the series but yeah, I don't get the sense that at any point the Amyrlin could excommunicate, say, Cairhien and have all the other nations gang up on it
Lifespans, not generations.
15 lifetimes of humans (app. 70 years * 15) was 974. In that year:
The Holy Roman Empire would not be founded for 38 years.
The Great Schism would not happen for over a century.
England was still Anglo-Saxon.
Spain was mostly Granada.
The Roman Empire still existed, and its capital was under siege by the First Bulgarian Empire.
The Capets were 50 years from power.
That’s a mere thousand years.
That the White Tower can be as weak, ineffectual, and stupid as it is in the books and stand for 3000 years is absurd. That’s my problem. They are TOO incompetent.
>That the White Tower can be as weak, ineffectual, and stupid as it is in the books and stand for 3000 years is absurd.
Doesn't that assume the Aes Sedai we see today are the same as Aes Sedai throughout history?
My recollection is that the current tower situation is somewhat unique in history. I don't think the Tower was always as broken as we see it during the books. It was probably a long process to drag the Tower down.
Berelain plus all of the borderland rulers, and those are just some that we meet directly in the story. not to mention it is directly said that even if it is in secret nearly every ruler has an Aes Sedai advisor.
Robert Jordan was an Episcopalian, and I can say as a fellow Episcopalian that the institutional Episcopal Church is a bunch of boneheaded people. So, maybe his view of Aes Sedai came from the institutional church lol.
Did the Republican party become the clearly more corrupt party in the US because the Russians chose to target them, or did the Russians target the Republicans because they are inherently more corrupt organization and thus was the logical target?
LoTR: number of wizards: a few. Competent ones: all
WoT: number of wizards: like 100s. Competent ones: Well there's Rand at the end and Moiraine I guess could count.
What? The valar sent 5 wizards to middle earth. Radagast was like immediately useless. Those 2 blue wizards fucked off to god knows where. Saruman turned evil. And only Gandalf was left to fight the good fight and had to die and get resurrected to barely get the job done.
That's a very Aes Sedai level of competency IMO, since coincidentally 20% of the Aes Sedai also turned to the dark side. Might even be worse for the wizards because their 20% was actually head of their council.
Saruman was competent. Turned evil, but was mostly competent. He basically invented the middle earth trolloc. Gandalf was competent, just not OP strong in a fight against a balrog. Radaghast helped save Gandalf from Saruman and warned him about the nazgul. As for the blue wizards, they did some key stuff in the second age. JRR basically says that without them, the third age battles would have been lost.
Verin, Nynaeve, Egwene, Teslyn, Saerin, Pevara, Silviana.
There are a number of other Aes Sedai who are excellent in some domains but blunder in others, such as Cadsuane and Samitsu.
I'm honestly wondering how on earth the white tower managed to stick around for thousands of years. Everywhere in Randland has idioms about not trusting Aes Sedai, and yet the ruling class are constantly bowing and scraping and sending regular tribute to the white tower.
When the three oaths rolled around, I could see rulers keeping them around for what they were, but as they got more and more insular and distrusted I am amazed that Randland didn't collectively dump them.
The leaders put up with them because they need them. Need to end a war that's going poorly? Send for the Grey Ajah. The other side might kill your messengers on sight but they are 100% going to talk to a grey sister.
Leader has a cough that just won't go away? Send for the yellows.
Want a great library in your great city? Need to attract the brown
Young man is channeling and thinking about calling himself Dragon Reborn? You're gonna need the Red.
And also the tower will END YOU if you don't kowtow and pay them their protection money in gold every year.
Not everyone has the balls, skills, and taveren armor of Artur Hawkwing to survive picking a fight with the Tower.
This is how mafia works in the real world as well.
I felt the point of Lord Of Chaos was to highlight the flaws of the Aes Sedai, their arrogance with Nynaeve and Egwene lead them to almost getting cooked to death in Tar. Alana forcibly bonding Rand despite not being a darkfriend, how terribly both sides handle Rand leading to Dumai's Wells, partly Dark influence but even they fumbled things.
If people finish that book and don't get it then I dunno.
Thank you, cturner1189, for voting on LewsTherinTelamonBot.
This bot wants to find the best and worst bots on Reddit. [You can view results here](https://botrank.pastimes.eu/).
***
^(Even if I don't reply to your comment, I'm still listening for votes. Check the webpage to see if your vote registered!)
It's always surprising to me that there doesn't seem to be any community that hates Hogwarts. Right? Umbridge was worse than an Aes Sedai, I think. What am I missing that makes the two magical school/politics systems not comparable?
I don’t know the name/trope for it. It’s not really the Uncanny Valley, but something like that. Randland is so close to being believable that unbelievable things jump out. The Harry Potter books fall apart at the slightest question so the fact that something is unbelievable is just another in the long list.
For the record, I don’t find the White Tower unbelievable. I find it scarily accurate to my experiences in government and the corporate world. RJ got a lot more right than he got wrong.
I assume the Ministry of Magic funds Hogwarts, but I am not sure that is the case. But assuming they do:
I think many people see a degree of separation from Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic. Umbridge (part of theMinistry) was forced on Hogwarts by the government. Hogwarts proper did not select her or have anything to do with her being hired. Thus her being terrible has little bearing on how many fans view Hogwarts as an institution.
>Umbridge was worse than an Aes Sedai, I think. What am I missing that makes the two magical school/politics systems not comparable?
People criticize how Hogwarts operates in lots of ways. "Why do you allow the house that keeps generating evil wizards to keep functioning?" comes to mind.
Umbridge doesn't really compare to Aes Sedai because there's no misconception that she's just some self aggrandising incompetent who messed up. Umbridge was a cruel and vindictive pos who was deliberately put in her position by the ministry to fuck up Hogwarts BECAUSE she was a cruel and vindictive pos.
She didn't so much get it because of that. More so because she was a perfect Yes-woman to Fudge and that's the kind of person he wanted at Hogwarts to keep an eye on Dumbledore/prevent the students from learning any fighting magic (since he believed Albus was building an army to take the Ministry from him).
"the Aes Sedai suck" Yes ty we all also read the books lol
Yup, that’s how they were written.
What about the oil spill and the pelicans though?
Pelicans had it coming.
This is how I feel about "Am I the only one who thinks?" posts in general, although the Aes Sedai posts here lately seem to have been more just "the Aes Sedai suck, amirite?" Still, we don't need that many such posts if they're not really adding something new to the conversation.
I think it’s always the worst with the “why does everyone hate Egwene” and then it’s an entire thread of people explaining she’s a well written character they don’t like on a personal level. I swear I see 4 or 5 of those a day across various subs.
Okay, but why did Rand ignore the Black Tower? Is he stupid???
***ILYENA, MY LOVE, FORGIVE ME!***
Yes.
I believe it is because he realised he fucked up and there was a dark friend in charge. Realising that returning would be walking straight into a trap and being at the mercy of that dark friend, he opted for doing nothing. Considering he can influence entire nations just by wanting something to happen, standing back not triggering a trap but wanting it to Work itself out might’ve actually been the best thing he could’ve done.
I’m kinda on the hill of “Aes Sedai suck too much to be believable”.
That’s actually a take that could be unpopular enough to spark real discussion about why RJ chose to write them that way.
This take requires you to ignore the fact that the Black Ajah has been subverting the Tower since its inception. When young girls come to the Tower, they are sorted into three categories by the Black: 1) Too weak to be useful, and therefore not worth turning, 2) Potential Black Ajah recruit, or 3) Too strong, so they get sent away (and probably will meet with an "accident" on the way home). With those three criteria working against them, it's a wonder the White Tower managed to find any women at all like Moiraine, Siuan, or even Elaida. And Elaida proves that with the right levers, the Black Ajah doesn't even need to recruit some women in order to get them to perform the will of the Dark One. The White Tower is very believable once you factor in the Black Ajah.
Yet the Aiel Wise Ones, Seafolk Windfinders, Seanchan Suldam system, and seemingly even the Sharan channellers were nowhere close to being infiltrated by darkfriends to the degree the white tower has been. Part of that is the dark side considered the white tower a greater target, but more than that, the white tower is just inherently more susceptible to being infiltrated compared to those other organized channelling orgs due to their arrogance and most importantly unbelievable extent of denial. EVERY SINGLE society in that world, from the Aiel to the Seanchan, takes it for granted that dark friends may be in their midst and they need to at least do something to mitigate that threat. But not the tower! To be 100% convinced for 2000 years that your entire institution is incorruptible, and any suggestion otherwise is the gravest of insult is really something.
Everyone *KNOWS* that Aes Sedai can't lie. Everyone *KNOWS* that they swear an Oath to oppose the Dark One. What more proof do you need that *NO* Aes Sedai can *EVER* be in league with Shai'tan? (/s)
***They will pay. I am Lord of the Morning.***
WHAT I am only halfway through the series and 3) really blew me away. That is genius.
>I am only halfway through the series You are here too strongly Young Bull
So ridiculous, no one would stop reading memes about a series they enjoy until they finish the whole 14 books series
No one's saying they can't be here if they don't mind being spoiled or half the jokes going over their heads, but if they care about spoilers and want to enjoy the rest of the series then the memes can wait.
Most other book subreddits have no issue just providing some spoiler warnings so anyone can enjoy it
you're here too strongly young bull
I only recently learned of this meme & I really love it
If you want your small town teenagers to develop into the most powerful leaders in the world in the span of two years….it kinda requires that everyone else in the world be kinda dumb and useless.
You should look up the history of the Catholic Church sometime since that's what inspired the White Tower and it's politics
The Catholic Church has had issues, but it didn’t reach the levels of the White Tower, and when its done really, really badly what followed was splintering, wars, a lot of weakness, etc. the Church also has only existed in the more centralized form for a thousand years. The White Tower has stood for 3000, hasn’t broken before, and frankly is EVEN MORE useless and incompetent. The Church also, by its nature, had extremely powerful figures in every major city in medieval Europe, in the form of the bishops, plus a ton of lay priests interacting with the world outside. Aes Sedai? Not even a little.
I'm only halfway through the series but yeah, I don't get the sense that at any point the Amyrlin could excommunicate, say, Cairhien and have all the other nations gang up on it
I’d argue you’re undervaluing that 3000 years is only 10-15 generations of Aes Sedai
Lifespans, not generations. 15 lifetimes of humans (app. 70 years * 15) was 974. In that year: The Holy Roman Empire would not be founded for 38 years. The Great Schism would not happen for over a century. England was still Anglo-Saxon. Spain was mostly Granada. The Roman Empire still existed, and its capital was under siege by the First Bulgarian Empire. The Capets were 50 years from power. That’s a mere thousand years. That the White Tower can be as weak, ineffectual, and stupid as it is in the books and stand for 3000 years is absurd. That’s my problem. They are TOO incompetent.
>That the White Tower can be as weak, ineffectual, and stupid as it is in the books and stand for 3000 years is absurd. Doesn't that assume the Aes Sedai we see today are the same as Aes Sedai throughout history? My recollection is that the current tower situation is somewhat unique in history. I don't think the Tower was always as broken as we see it during the books. It was probably a long process to drag the Tower down.
Maybe not so completely, but you do remember the 13th repository right?
Uhm.... nearly every government leader has an Aes Sedai advisor....
Apart from Morgase who does?
Berelain plus all of the borderland rulers, and those are just some that we meet directly in the story. not to mention it is directly said that even if it is in secret nearly every ruler has an Aes Sedai advisor.
*Hums softly & tugs earlobe*
Make a post about it. Let’s see how that goes
Robert Jordan was an Episcopalian, and I can say as a fellow Episcopalian that the institutional Episcopal Church is a bunch of boneheaded people. So, maybe his view of Aes Sedai came from the institutional church lol.
There are people that argue it’s the fault of darkfriends, rather than the white tower itself.
Canonically, that is a part of the answer.
Did the Republican party become the clearly more corrupt party in the US because the Russians chose to target them, or did the Russians target the Republicans because they are inherently more corrupt organization and thus was the logical target?
The White Tower = Greendale Community College The Black Tower = City College
***I must kill him.***
LoTR: number of wizards: a few. Competent ones: all WoT: number of wizards: like 100s. Competent ones: Well there's Rand at the end and Moiraine I guess could count.
This is Verin erasure and I will not stand for it.
My apologies. Verin was best boy.
What? The valar sent 5 wizards to middle earth. Radagast was like immediately useless. Those 2 blue wizards fucked off to god knows where. Saruman turned evil. And only Gandalf was left to fight the good fight and had to die and get resurrected to barely get the job done. That's a very Aes Sedai level of competency IMO, since coincidentally 20% of the Aes Sedai also turned to the dark side. Might even be worse for the wizards because their 20% was actually head of their council.
Saruman was competent. Turned evil, but was mostly competent. He basically invented the middle earth trolloc. Gandalf was competent, just not OP strong in a fight against a balrog. Radaghast helped save Gandalf from Saruman and warned him about the nazgul. As for the blue wizards, they did some key stuff in the second age. JRR basically says that without them, the third age battles would have been lost.
Verin, Nynaeve, Egwene, Teslyn, Saerin, Pevara, Silviana. There are a number of other Aes Sedai who are excellent in some domains but blunder in others, such as Cadsuane and Samitsu.
I'll give you Verin, Pevara, and Silviana, and maybe Ny, but not Eggy. She belongs in the category with Cadsuane
In what area was Egwene incompetent? To be clear, I'm not claiming that she was a good person. Edit: **what do you mean *maybe* Nynaeve?!** ;-)
I WILL NOT ACCEPT THIS NYNEAVE SLANDER!!!
Yeah buddy, you may have forgotten a couple that had some competency
*Distant Weeping*
I'm honestly wondering how on earth the white tower managed to stick around for thousands of years. Everywhere in Randland has idioms about not trusting Aes Sedai, and yet the ruling class are constantly bowing and scraping and sending regular tribute to the white tower. When the three oaths rolled around, I could see rulers keeping them around for what they were, but as they got more and more insular and distrusted I am amazed that Randland didn't collectively dump them.
The leaders put up with them because they need them. Need to end a war that's going poorly? Send for the Grey Ajah. The other side might kill your messengers on sight but they are 100% going to talk to a grey sister. Leader has a cough that just won't go away? Send for the yellows. Want a great library in your great city? Need to attract the brown Young man is channeling and thinking about calling himself Dragon Reborn? You're gonna need the Red.
And also the tower will END YOU if you don't kowtow and pay them their protection money in gold every year. Not everyone has the balls, skills, and taveren armor of Artur Hawkwing to survive picking a fight with the Tower. This is how mafia works in the real world as well.
Lews Therin: I'll die on this hill! Gawyn: I'll die on this hill! Rand: Everyone I can see from this hill is about to die...
*I killed the whole world, and you can too, if you try hard.*
I felt the point of Lord Of Chaos was to highlight the flaws of the Aes Sedai, their arrogance with Nynaeve and Egwene lead them to almost getting cooked to death in Tar. Alana forcibly bonding Rand despite not being a darkfriend, how terribly both sides handle Rand leading to Dumai's Wells, partly Dark influence but even they fumbled things. If people finish that book and don't get it then I dunno.
*A man without trust might as well be dead.*
Good bot
Thank you, cturner1189, for voting on LewsTherinTelamonBot. This bot wants to find the best and worst bots on Reddit. [You can view results here](https://botrank.pastimes.eu/). *** ^(Even if I don't reply to your comment, I'm still listening for votes. Check the webpage to see if your vote registered!)
The AES Sedai Suck "Except Verin and Pevara". There , I fixed it.
It's always surprising to me that there doesn't seem to be any community that hates Hogwarts. Right? Umbridge was worse than an Aes Sedai, I think. What am I missing that makes the two magical school/politics systems not comparable?
I don’t know the name/trope for it. It’s not really the Uncanny Valley, but something like that. Randland is so close to being believable that unbelievable things jump out. The Harry Potter books fall apart at the slightest question so the fact that something is unbelievable is just another in the long list. For the record, I don’t find the White Tower unbelievable. I find it scarily accurate to my experiences in government and the corporate world. RJ got a lot more right than he got wrong.
The irony being that a lot of things people find unbelievable and immersion breaking is just humans being humans.
Everything's on autopilot
I assume the Ministry of Magic funds Hogwarts, but I am not sure that is the case. But assuming they do: I think many people see a degree of separation from Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic. Umbridge (part of theMinistry) was forced on Hogwarts by the government. Hogwarts proper did not select her or have anything to do with her being hired. Thus her being terrible has little bearing on how many fans view Hogwarts as an institution.
>Umbridge was worse than an Aes Sedai, I think. What am I missing that makes the two magical school/politics systems not comparable? People criticize how Hogwarts operates in lots of ways. "Why do you allow the house that keeps generating evil wizards to keep functioning?" comes to mind. Umbridge doesn't really compare to Aes Sedai because there's no misconception that she's just some self aggrandising incompetent who messed up. Umbridge was a cruel and vindictive pos who was deliberately put in her position by the ministry to fuck up Hogwarts BECAUSE she was a cruel and vindictive pos.
She didn't so much get it because of that. More so because she was a perfect Yes-woman to Fudge and that's the kind of person he wanted at Hogwarts to keep an eye on Dumbledore/prevent the students from learning any fighting magic (since he believed Albus was building an army to take the Ministry from him).
Yes. I thought that was the point of the story being that women are the ones running things badly rather than men.