Wheel of bonding time

[Aimless]

(alternate balefired title: Wheel of Daddy)

 

In the series, Jordan focuses a lot on portraying male characters' emotional tension or pain in relation to women in their lives—LT and Ilyena, Rand and Kari/Egwene/Elayne/Min/Avi/Ilyena/Every FDM, Perrin and Faile, etc. It appears to be his go-to method for injecting a nice shot of pathos.

 

I read a thread on Reddit where it was pointed out that it's a bit weird that LTT is so fixated on having killed Ileyna while practically never acknowledging his slain children.

 

One plausible explanation for this is that it reflects the much greater salience of women than of children, in Rand's awareness—but LTT doesn't think all that much about his children in the prologue, either. For storytelling purposes, a single named love may be easier to tie together thematically with the other women Rand encounters (Lanfear, his lovers, etc), whereas a dozen unnamed children might be much more difficult. But I think that, rather than reflecting Rand's life, this emphasis on women over children reflects Jordan's own inner world—a greater familiarity with relationships between men and women than with the bonds between parent and child.

 

I think the show is changing this. Instead of focusing on Ilyena, I think they'll focus on the daughter. The parent-child relationship seems to be highlighted throughout the show—Mat and his parents, Rand and Tam, Lews and the baby, Rand and dream-Joiya as well as Rand and Min's maybe-baby, Nynaeve and her dead parents, Lan demonstrating his daddy-chops, Siuan and her dad, Ila and her story about her daughter, etc. I think it's going to be much more effective than Rand's and Perrin's weird chivalry schtick from the books—which might tap into latent shonen-conditioned preferences in young male viewers but might be less appealing to a modern audience that's heterogeneous wrt age and gender. I'd definitely welcome such a change.

[EmreY]

I would welcome the changed emphasis.  I have always found the lack of reference to his children to be rather strange in the books, and even though I've tried to explain it away by saying Rand is a callow youth uninterested in children and that LTT's madness seeks the path of least resistance, but of course the TV Rand is slightly different.

 

Nonetheless, IMO Rand's Litany of the Dead is iconic and should be kept in.

[DaddyFinn]

4 minutes ago, EmreY said:

Nonetheless, IMO Rand's Litany of the Dead is iconic and should be kept in.

List of dead children would hit me so much harder. ?

[Lethira the second]

6 minutes ago, EmreY said:

I would welcome the changed emphasis.  I have always found the lack of reference to his children to be rather strange in the books, and even though I've tried to explain it away by saying Rand is a callow youth uninterested in children and that LTT's madness seeks the path of least resistance, but of course the TV Rand is slightly different.

 

Nonetheless, IMO Rand's Litany of the Dead is iconic and should be kept in.

 

I read LTT's constant search for Ilyena as him looking for his partner in a stressful time.  How many mentally healthy adults would go to their young children for succour instead of their spouse.  Maybe RJ should have mixed it up a bit, and included the children.

[Guest Cranglevoid]

Maybe Thom's song in the series is an indication of this.

 

"Little graves that gave no warning."

Edited January 7, 2022 by Cranglevoid

[DojoToad]

I never had a problem with LTT concentrating on grief for wife over children.  Noticed it, but always took it as a sign of his madness.  Not that he didn't care about the children but that he didn't know or remember.  Maybe Ishy was part of it?

[fra85uk]

Shifting the narrative a little bit towards the father/son relationship would be one nice change, if done properly.

[Katherine]

Agreed, it would also come full circle with Rand and Tam and the importance of their relationship in the arc of the DR. 

 

[Jaysen Gore]

I think there's lots of reasons why he (Jordan or LTT) focuses on Ilyena instead of the kids:

1. Patriarchal relationships to kids would generally have men reaching for their young children through their wives. So in the early years, the wife is the deeper emotional attachment.

2. It's bad enough having your character be a wife killer even by accident. If instead of Laila, it had been Perrin's 2 year old daughter, that's the ballgame for his character. the public would not accept him moving on

3. Rand would not have been able to talk LTT off the ledge. The first time LTT takes control of Rand, there's a new Dragonmount.

4. It would make for a much more distressing story to read to have LTT mourning his lost children. Lost love tropes are common enough (it was even a music sub-genre in the 50s) that it can kind of settle into the background. But childslaying?  It would smack the reader every time.

[ForsakenPotato]

Yeah, I am actually super curious to see how the show ends up portraying men defending vs. harming women and how that is contrasted with children.

 

Both Perrin and Rand frequently take the approach that the best way to protect women is to prohibit them from being present in any potentially dangerous situation, and they don't generally acknowledge that by doing so they are removing women's agency to make decisions about their own lives. It often backfires -- the women in question feel they aren't trusted or considered capable, and instead of never being in danger they just do stuff on their own because they know Perrin or Rand will try to block their plans rather than assist. Their approach, at least for the first 2/3rds of the series, is that the best way to protect men is to give them the tools and skills to protect themselves and to collaborate to plan effective strategies, and the best way to protect women is to make sure they aren't involved at all. Yes it's an understandable impulse, everyone wants to protect the people they love, but love also means trusting your partner to do what needs to be done. Perrin and Rand mostly eventually get there, but it takes a very long time.

 

That's why I enjoy Lan and Nyneave's book relationship a lot more than Rand or Perrin's romances -- they are older and a bit more mature about risk and danger, and mostly treat each other as equal adults who are smart and capable. They accept very early that they are choosing a partner who will not always be safe, and that asking them to avoid danger would be asking them to give up who they are, and where possible they help each other succeed.

 

My expectation of the show is we will see some of the same dynamics at play with Rand and Perrin but that it some cases it will be a bit less gendered. Rand is already making choices for his friends (running off with Mo in the finale to try to protect them), but he also already recognizes and respects Egwene's ability to make her own path in the world. I imagine Perrin's extreme protectiveness of Faile will be accounted for by his traumatic past with Laila instead of a belief that it's a man's duty to protect his woman...but the way he touched her stomach in ep. 1 means he might have also killed his unborn child.

 

For the kid stuff, I agree it's weird that LTT doesn't seem as concerned about his children's deaths -- especially because Rand is very upset by children dying, even ones he doesn't know. That scene where he tries to resurrect the little girl in Tear was heartbreaking. It could be that book LTT fixates on his wife because thinking about his dead kids even more painful and beyond his comprehension, and he's been mad for so long that he's almost fully blocked out those memories. But I agree the show may also put more weight on his children -- I think we already saw foreshadowing of that with the nursery cold-open scene. In the books we see the breaking of the world before we really understand much, so it's easy as a reader to forget the details by the time LTT comes back into play. Whenever we see it in the show, we're going to understand the characters and events much more -- I think it would be very jarring for a TV viewer to see him kill his family and then within a relatively short amount of time (for the viewer) not seem concerned with his dead kids. Unless of course the show gives a more explicit reason for why.

[Guest Testeria]

"They will leave their women and children, for men know that anywhere in the night they can find women and make children."

 

Jorge Luis Borges:  Hengist quiere hombres ?

 

[Andra]

I always viewed this as a measure of LTT's madness, or at least of his comparative lucidity at any given moment.

 

At his least lucid, he thinks of Ilyena without remembering she's dead.

A bit more lucid, and he remembers that she's dead, but not that he killed her.

A bit more than that (his most common state throughout the books) he remembers that he killed her and hates himself for it, but doesn't remember the rest of his family.

More lucid still, and we get this bit from Lord of Chaos, ch.42 "The Black Tower":

 

I will kill him, and then them. They must serve him. It is plain; they must serve him.

 

Go away, Rand shouted back silently. You are nothing but a voice! Stretching toward the Source.

 

Oh, Light, I killed them all. All that I loved. If I kill him, it will be well, though. I can make it up, if I kill him finally. No, nothing can make up, but I must kill him anyway. Kill them all. I must. I must.

 

No! Rand screamed inside his head. You’re dead, Lews Therin. I am alive, burn you, and you are dead! You are dead!

 

Somewhere around that level is when LTT is at his most dangerous to Rand, because it's when he starts reacting to the world around him, and trying to seize saidin for himself.

 

Also, please note: Though Lews Therin in his madness may usually ignore his children, the lore doesn't (though the lore never knows their names).  Those children are the reason he's called "Kinslayer" and not "Wifekiller" or something similar.

 

And given how long channelers lived during the AoL, I don't find this all that surprising.  His wife would have been a part of his life for much longer than his children.  So a patchy memory would focus on her more than it did them.

Edited January 11, 2022 by Andra