What was Moiraine's plan if the dragon was a woman?

[Jaysen Gore]

I think they have intentionally left out all of the differences between Saidin and Saidar from the story, because the AS are a helluva lot more ignorant about Saidin than they were in the books, and because it's redundant exposition. We'll get a lot on Saidar during the girls training next season, and we'll get Saidin from Natael in season 4.

 

Again, small changes to the show would have really helped this; can add the "Fish can't teach birds to fly" opportunity to Nynaeve's burnout make up, and her sneaking all the way to Lan to the list.

[WhiteVeils]

Except, like, they have a whole animated  addon feature just explaining this specific thing in detail in pure exposition. Just because it hasn't been fully expressed in the show yet to your satisfaction doesn't mean it's not there.

[DaddyFinn]

45 minutes ago, WhiteVeils said:

Except, like, they have a whole animated  addon feature just explaining this specific thing in detail in pure exposition. Just because it hasn't been fully expressed in the show yet to your satisfaction doesn't mean it's not there.

Season 1 would be full of exposition if everything was explained fully. I'm fine with waiting a while longer. It will become an issue if the basics are not explained at all

[ilovezam]

1 hour ago, WhiteVeils said:

Except, like, they have a whole animated  addon feature just explaining this specific thing in detail in pure exposition. Just because it hasn't been fully expressed in the show yet to your satisfaction doesn't mean it's not there.

Do we know if the animated add-ons are canon for the show? 

 

16 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

Season 1 would be full of exposition if everything was explained fully.

They don't have to fully explain everything, but in the time Moiraine took to tell Rand she wouldn't teach him because it'll make him go crazy, have her say this from the books:

 

"I know saidar, but I can teach you nothing of saidin. Those who could are three thousand years dead."

 

Would that have been too much? I think it's a neat bit of worldbuilding that would have been much less confusing than the way the show used "ta'veren" and "sa'angreal".

Edited January 26, 2022 by ilovezam

[DaddyFinn]

1 minute ago, ilovezam said:

They don't have to fully explain everything, but in the time Moiraine took to tell Rand she wouldn't teach him because it'll make him go crazy, have her say this from the books:

 

"I know saidar, but I can teach you nothing of saidin. Those who could are three thousand years dead."

 

Would that have been too much? I think it's a neat bit of worldbuilding that would have been much less confusing than the way the show used "ta'veren" and "sa'angreal".

Small thing like that I agree on. I really hope we learn more of saidin in season 2. Ta'veren took 8 episodes to explain

[VooDooNut]

10 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

Small thing like that I agree on. I really hope we learn more of saidin in season 2. Ta'veren took 8 episodes to explain

Yes, but, to your previous point:

29 minutes ago, DaddyFinn said:

Season 1 would be full of exposition if everything was explained fully. I'm fine with waiting a while longer. It will become an issue if the basics are not explained at all

ta'veren is an idea that's repeatedly visited/explored over the course of the book series. Same with The One Power. I'm ok with lightly touching on these concepts in season 1 with the expectation we will keep learning more about these aspects of the lore in future seasons.

[DaddyFinn]

3 minutes ago, VooDooNut said:

Yes, but, to your previous point:

ta'veren is an idea that's repeatedly visited/explored over the course of the book series. Same with The One Power. I'm ok with lightly touching on these concepts in season 1 with the expectation we will keep learning more about these aspects of the lore in future seasons.

It's a thin line to walk. Either it's too much exposition or too much is left out.

[ilovezam]

14 minutes ago, VooDooNut said:

I'm ok with lightly touching on these concepts in season 1 with the expectation we will keep learning more about these aspects of the lore in future seasons.

Yeah, but "there are rumours of four ta'veren here" did not seem to make much sense, and left both show-only viewers and readers utterly confused. I think saidar/saidin was more important to explain, and could have been explained on a basic level much more easily, especially since they wanted to deal with the taint and not being able to see each other's weaves. 

I'm also not sure why Moiraine would try to mislead Rand about not being able to teach him if she knew about saidin/saidar. It's just weird all around.

[king of nowhere]

9 hours ago, Andra said:

 

I would say that the simplest explanation is that in Rafeworld there's no such thing as male or female sa'angreals.  There really has been no clear messaging in the show that they use separate powers and would therefore also use different "amplifiers."

 

Even the explanations for why men can't safely channel don't actually say it's because they draw from a different Source.

 

So Moiraine brought something that either one could use, regardless of who it ended up being.

Doesn't hold. If moiraine had a sa'angreal that she herself could use, then she herself would have used it, in emond field.

 

The show did sacrifice a bit of consistency in the name of what looks good, but there's no plot hole of that level of magnitude, and i trust the writers that far: if moiraine had a super oowerful weapon, she'd have used it.

 

Now, the writers not having thought of a backup plan for a woman dragon, that's the kind of lesser plot hole i totally think they can make

 

[WhiteVeils]

The animated features are canon, I'm sure.  It's not fan content.  It's supplemental content.

 

Another thought on the sa'angreal.  It may be a sa'angreal+reservoir for the pure one power (saidin I would be sure but maybe bother?), like Cadsuains reservoir, or the eye of the world itself.  Moiraine may not have used it because she wanted to save the power in it for the Dragon.  It may be lower power now.  But I think it is fine as a normal sa'angreal too.

[notpropaganda73]

7 hours ago, ilovezam said:

Do we know if the animated add-ons are canon for the show? 

 

I would say yes, just from a business POV I don't know why they'd bother with them otherwise. 

 

I was extremely frustrated at Moiraine's conversation with Rand in ep8. It felt like they purposefully avoided distinguishing between saidar and saidin, and for no good narrative reason as it all came off clunky. 

 

If, going forward, we learn that the current-day Aes Sedai have lost huge swathes of knowledge to the extent that they don't know that the One Power is actually in two halves, then it could be interesting. But as things stand, it felt really forced in ep8 for sure. 

[nsmallw]

7 hours ago, ilovezam said:

Do we know if the animated add-ons are canon for the show? 

 

They don't have to fully explain everything, but in the time Moiraine took to tell Rand she wouldn't teach him because it'll make him go crazy, have her say this from the books:

 

"I know saidar, but I can teach you nothing of saidin. Those who could are three thousand years dead."

 

Would that have been too much? I think it's a neat bit of worldbuilding that would have been much less confusing than the way the show used "ta'veren" and "sa'angreal".

About the whole sa'angreal bit in the show. Do we think they are avoiding the whole explanation of the differences between sa'sangreal, angreal and Ter'angreal so as to not make things to confusing for tv audiences or maybe to avoid too many info dumps. I think the latter, most audiences today have the attention span of zilch and need action and drama to keep focused and thus pertinent information is left out in order to avoid that.

[DaddyFinn]

27 minutes ago, nsmallw said:

I think the latter, most audiences today have the attention span of zilch and need action and drama to keep focused and thus pertinent information is left out in order to avoid that

This could very well be true but I still hope they don't dumb down the lore to just bare minimum because of those people.

[ilovezam]

46 minutes ago, notpropaganda73 said:

If, going forward, we learn that the current-day Aes Sedai have lost huge swathes of knowledge to the extent that they don't know that the One Power is actually in two halves, then it could be interesting.

But the animated short between saidar and saidin was presented as though it was an Aes Sedai lecture though, which makes it even weirder. Maybe that was a pre-Breaking class? 

[AdamA]

It's not really a plot hole so much as a hole in Moiraine's plan. So far as we can tell, her plan was effectively get to the Eye and hope the pattern wants you to win. I think we all know what really happened. In order to allow for the possibility of a female dragon, they couldn't have the Eye be a pool of pure saidin, so they had to come up with something else, and they came up with a sa'angreal instead, which still couldn't have been used by a woman, which doesn't even help. It's exactly why I didn't believe the preseason rumors that they would allow for the possibility of a female dragon. Too much downstream impact that the writers would not be able to write around. Sure enough, that happened and they botched it.

 

I don't want to be as frankly mean as I see some of the pure haters here being. I don't think the writers are lazy or incompetent. It's possible to be trying, even to be fans, but still not be up to the task. This is reminding me of the discussion around Mike McCarthy right now for NFL fans, coach of the Dallas Cowboys. It's not like he's a worthless shithead. The team was inches from being the top seed in their conference. But they're also undisciplined and constantly losing to themselves. It's obvious he isn't a clearcut winner, even though he's won before (people can get lucky). But that is separate from the question of whether you should fire him. To do that, you need to know you can hire better. Same with Rafe. There is precedent for replacing show runners. I think Walking Dead did it twice. But it felt like spinning wheels and I don't think the show got any better because of it. Whoever else they got needs to be 1) a better writer, 2) not already signed elsewhere, 3) willing to work for 9 months a year in the Czech Republic for the rest of the decade, and 4) at least somewhat familiar with the books. That isn't an easy set of constraints.

 

This is exactly the problem I see with Rafe. Again, I don't want to call him a "bad" writer, but there is a difference between someone who can adequately stage a scene, an episode, even a season, and someone who understands the downstream impacts of writing decisions and how changing one thing can force you into constraints years down the line. As far as I can tell, Rafe's plan for how to deal with this is basically the same as Moiraine's plan. Worry about it when you get there. That isn't good enough. Changing things is fine, but you need to have a fully thought-out plan for everything that is going to break and how you're going to fix it. It's the difference between a decent enough network television writer who just wings it season by season and invents new stories on the fly, and someone like Robert Jordan who creates the entire story as one coherent whole.

[ilovezam]

4 minutes ago, AdamA said:

It's not really a plot hole so much as a hole in Moiraine's plan. So far as we can tell, her plan was effectively get to the Eye and hope the pattern wants you to win. I think we all know what really happened. In order to allow for the possibility of a female dragon, they couldn't have the Eye be a pool of pure saidin, so they had to come up with something else, and they came up with a sa'angreal instead, which still couldn't have been used by a woman, which doesn't even help. It's exactly why I didn't believe the preseason rumors that they would allow for the possibility of a female dragon. Too much downstream impact that the writers would not be able to write around. Sure enough, that happened and they botched it.

This seems a good explanation of why they had to write this stuff so weirdly... They could have just had a pool full of both saidin and saidar though, but it also looks like they're trying very hard to avoid the distinction, for god knows what reasons.

[Skipp]

Despite how long it took them to explain Ta'veren I was ultimately happy with how the show did explain them.

[AdamA]

1 hour ago, ilovezam said:

This seems a good explanation of why they had to write this stuff so weirdly... They could have just had a pool full of both saidin and saidar though, but it also looks like they're trying very hard to avoid the distinction, for god knows what reasons.

It's exactly what I mean about downstream impacts. From the perspective of historical lore, the existence of the Eye of the World at all only makes sense because the Aes Sedai of the time knew for sure the dragon had to be reborn as a man. They wouldn't need to create a pool of untainted saidar because saidar isn't tainted. So changing lore to allow for a female dragon now means the storyline no longer matches the world logic, but they feel the need to include the Eye anyway because they want to hit the same plot points, so they shoehorn it in without ever coming up with any satisfying explanation of why the Eye even exists, let alone how it works. Apparently, the Horn of Valere isn't even there any more, so the Eye is just a seal. But there are many seals. So why does the fight even need to take place there? As far as we can tell, because that's what happened in the book is the reason, but the actual reason from the book is gone, so it no longer makes any sense.

 

I still sympathize with whatever happened in the writer's room. If they had people telling them that gendered souls denies the existence of trans and gender-fluid people and the savior has to be male trope is outdated and offensive, fine, but you have to weigh whatever you think you gain by changing that with the harm done to the story. You can't just assume you'll be able to rewrite all the parts that depend on the lore being what it is in a way that is equally coherent and satisfying. It's arrogant to think you can do that, given all the schedule constraints of television, when one of literature's all-time great world builders took decades to craft your starting point. At a certain point, you're better off just writing a different story completely.

[Skipp]

24 minutes ago, AdamA said:

It's exactly what I mean about downstream impacts. From the perspective of historical lore, the existence of the Eye of the World at all only makes sense because the Aes Sedai of the time knew for sure the dragon had to be reborn as a man. They wouldn't need to create a pool of untainted saidar because saidar isn't tainted. So changing lore to allow for a female dragon now means the storyline no longer matches the world logic, but they feel the need to include the Eye anyway because they want to hit the same plot points, so they shoehorn it in without ever coming up with any satisfying explanation of why the Eye even exists, let alone how it works. Apparently, the Horn of Valere isn't even there any more, so the Eye is just a seal. But there are many seals. So why does the fight even need to take place there? As far as we can tell, because that's what happened in the book is the reason, but the actual reason from the book is gone, so it no longer makes any sense.

 

I still sympathize with whatever happened in the writer's room. If they had people telling them that gendered souls denies the existence of trans and gender-fluid people and the savior has to be male trope is outdated and offensive, fine, but you have to weigh whatever you think you gain by changing that with the harm done to the story. You can't just assume you'll be able to rewrite all the parts that depend on the lore being what it is in a way that is equally coherent and satisfying. It's arrogant to think you can do that, given all the schedule constraints of television, when one of literature's all-time great world builders took decades to craft your starting point. At a certain point, you're better off just writing a different story completely.

But the Eye itself is still an oddity.  I don't believe the Eye is ever referenced to the Dragon.  We presume that the eye was made to give the DR a boost in power or some such but I don't believe that is ever actually stated.

[AdamA]

14 minutes ago, Skipp said:

But the Eye itself is still an oddity.  I don't believe the Eye is ever referenced to the Dragon.  We presume that the eye was made to give the DR a boost in power or some such but I don't believe that is ever actually stated.

It is a mystery in the EOTW the book, but they eventually explain it in Rand's flashbacks. So I guess it's just a question of whether they'll come up with some alternate explanation at some point for the show or just leave it hanging forever.

[Skipp]

11 minutes ago, AdamA said:

It is a mystery in the EOTW the book, but they eventually explain it in Rand's flashbacks. So I guess it's just a question of whether they'll come up with some alternate explanation at some point for the show or just leave it hanging forever.

That's right, during the pillar flashbacks in tSR the Dragon banner and Callandor are shown, a foretelling is mentioned and Someshta is there.  I think there is mention of a group of Young Male Aes Sedai that haven't channeled long enough to go mad, I suppose these are the ones that make the Eye.

 

But yeah the details of the foretelling are not revealed so we can still only guess as to the purpose of the Eye.  I don't think it will be an issue in later seasons.

[Andra]

9 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Doesn't hold. If moiraine had a sa'angreal that she herself could use, then she herself would have used it, in emond field.

 

The show did sacrifice a bit of consistency in the name of what looks good, but there's no plot hole of that level of magnitude, and i trust the writers that far: if moiraine had a super oowerful weapon, she'd have used it.

 

Now, the writers not having thought of a backup plan for a woman dragon, that's the kind of lesser plot hole i totally think they can make

 

We don't actually know she didn't use it in Two Rivers (Emond's Field doesn't exist in the show).  We know she had it with her, because we see her wrapping it up in cloth in the very first scene in the show after the cold open, when she's packing to leave the Tower.  Two years before she ever gets to Two Rivers.

 

Which means she either always knew the Dragon could only be reborn as a man, and all the lines that say the opposite are lies (and she can't lie) or it could be used by both men and women.  Or possibly she's got another one somewhere with her for women, which we never see.

[Andra]

11 hours ago, ilovezam said:

Yeah, but "there are rumours of four ta'veren here" did not seem to make much sense, and left both show-only viewers and readers utterly confused. I think saidar/saidin was more important to explain, and could have been explained on a basic level much more easily, especially since they wanted to deal with the taint and not being able to see each other's weaves. 

I'm also not sure why Moiraine would try to mislead Rand about not being able to teach him if she knew about saidin/saidar. It's just weird all around.

And then when Fain has his bizarrely long conversation with Perrin in Fal Dara after taking the Horn, he tells him more about ta'veren than we've heard in the entire show so far.  And he says all five of them are.

[Andra]

4 hours ago, ilovezam said:

But the animated short between saidar and saidin was presented as though it was an Aes Sedai lecture though, which makes it even weirder. Maybe that was a pre-Breaking class? 

I suspect that's the way they will play it.

The shorts all seem to know more about the world than any of the living characters do.

[Andra]

1 hour ago, Skipp said:

That's right, during the pillar flashbacks in tSR the Dragon banner and Callandor are shown, a foretelling is mentioned and Someshta is there.  I think there is mention of a group of Young Male Aes Sedai that haven't channeled long enough to go mad, I suppose these are the ones that make the Eye.

 

But yeah the details of the foretelling are not revealed so we can still only guess as to the purpose of the Eye.  I don't think it will be an issue in later seasons.

There are two (and a half?) links between the Eye and the Dragon Reborn.

The first is the pool of untainted Saidin.  The whole idea of "need" being used to get there, it pretty much guarantees that only the DR would ever be able to both find the Eye, and use it.

The second and a half are what's hidden in the pool.  The Dragon Banner, and the Horn.

 

I call the Horn only half a link, because though it's only used in the books to aid him, according to the lore it could be used by someone else.