The hunt for the Black Ajah

[Taimandred]

*** Spoiler Alert ***

The small three (Rand, Mat & Perrin being the big), were the first to be tasked with hunting dark sisters. This even led to Egwene's capture, something she really hated.  Robert Jordan constantly reminds us how much Egwene hated being damane. 

 

So why don't these three think about asking Moghedien to point out who is black ajah in the tower? In fact, why does everyone in Salidar, including Siuan Sanche herself, just forget about them completely? I understand they have a lot on their plate, but their little disagreement with the White Tower pales in comparison to the fight to save time itself.

 

[Andra]

On 4/21/2024 at 12:03 AM, Taimandred said:

*** Spoiler Alert ***

The small three (Rand, Mat & Perrin being the big), were the first to be tasked with hunting dark sisters. This even led to Egwene's capture, something she really hated.  Robert Jordan constantly reminds us how much Egwene hated being damane. 

 

So why don't these three think about asking Moghedien to point out who is black ajah in the tower? In fact, why does everyone in Salidar, including Siuan Sanche herself, just forget about them completely? I understand they have a lot on their plate, but their little disagreement with the White Tower pales in comparison to the fight to save time itself.

 

I think you've got the timing a bit wrong.

What leads to Egwene's capture is her concern over Rand's wellbeing - played upon by Liandrin.  The Girls don't even know the Black Ajah exists at that time.  They aren't set to hunt them until they get back to the White Tower following her rescue and the Battle of Falme.

 

None of the Little Tower actually "forget about" the possibility of the Black Ajah either back in Tar Valon or with them in Salidar.  Rather, they actively avoid talking about them.  Partly because the possibility terrifies them completely.

 

Those are not the same thing.

 

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

I also think that in the story it is fairly well set-up that no one knows who the Black Ajah is. Like when Moggie is talking to Liandrin and lets slip that she has no idea who they report to, in the Tower or if another of the Chosen is involved.

 

So in the lore it is established that Moggie would not have been able to tell Egwene. Just as it is established capturing Liandrin and putting her to the question would not help.

 

I suppose there is the possibility they could have used Moggie to try and out suspected Black sisters, but that would involve letting people know who she was, and would risk her escape probably. I can see Sanderson engineering some sort of complicated so set-up where they cleverly trap Black sisters due to the wording of the oaths or so, but Jordan always seemed happy to leave things such as that no one could know who the Black sisters were just as is.

[Bugglesley]

The question has already been satisfyingly answered and nobody asked, but I just wanted to put on the record that under my roof, Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve are "the Wonder Girls" thank you.

[Taimandred]

6 minutes ago, Bugglesley said:

The question has already been satisfyingly answered and nobody asked, but I just wanted to put on the record that under my roof, Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve are "the Wonder Girls" thank you.

They certainly are. More so because Aes Sedai are so mediocre. Of the whole lot there are only 2 worthy of the title. To be fair to them though, most of the Forsaken are useless too.

[Samt]

4 hours ago, Bugglesley said:

The question has already been satisfyingly answered and nobody asked, but I just wanted to put on the record that under my roof, Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve are "the Wonder Girls" thank you.

But is Aviendha one of the wonder girls or not?

[Bugglesley]

1 hour ago, Samt said:

But is Aviendha one of the wonder girls or not?

 

Aviendha is wonderful but what really makes a Wonder Girl is running headlong into an incredibly dangerous situation you are in no way prepared for, sniffing at anyone who tries to explain the previous sentence to you, bumbling around aimlessly, and then somehow (and probably with the help of a long-suffering male companion or two) making it out alive and/or having largely succeeded in your mission.

 

See such fine outings as The Wonder Girls Take Tear, The Wonder Girls Tangle in Tanchico, The Wonder Girls Ebou Dar Escapade, or the Wonder Girls Salidar Skirt Smoothing Spectacular.

 

Later entries such as The Wonder Girls are In the Palace at Caemlyn dealing with the Kin and Sea Folk parts I, II, III, IV, up to IIIIVIVMIVIVIVICIVIXVIVIVID get a little bad and I don't count them.

 

If anything, the argument should probably be that Nyn and Elayne are the core members, Egwene is only along for one of those--she kind of takes the role as enabler/fixer as she keeps tabs on them in TAR.

[DojoToad]

On 5/2/2024 at 10:12 AM, Taimandred said:

They certainly are. More so because Aes Sedai are so mediocre. Of the whole lot there are only 2 worthy of the title. To be fair to them though, most of the Forsaken are useless too.

I think that you are correct that many of the Aes Sedai are mediocre, but I think that is because they had nothing to challenge them for hundreds of years - just border disputes and helping out with the blight on occasion.  I think many of the mediocre Aes Sedai would have risen to the challenge had they been dealing with trolloc armies, Forsaken, Seanchan over the previous decades.  The fact that the wonder girls did that so quickly was both unrealistic and a testament to their grit.

[Samt]

I kind of think of the Aes Sedai of the modern age to be a team of 20-foot-tall basketball players who play against regular sized opponents.  They don't really need to practice or discuss strategy or anything else.  They just win because no one else can reach the ball.  Naturally, they haven't really learned to dribble or shoot and they also haven't really decided to see if their twenty foot statures allow them solve other problems that they haven't considered.  They just really enjoy dunking on the little guys.  

[Bugglesley]

7 hours ago, DojoToad said:

I think that you are correct that many of the Aes Sedai are mediocre, but I think that is because they had nothing to challenge them for hundreds of years - just border disputes and helping out with the blight on occasion.  I think many of the mediocre Aes Sedai would have risen to the challenge had they been dealing with trolloc armies, Forsaken, Seanchan over the previous decades.  The fact that the wonder girls did that so quickly was both unrealistic and a testament to their grit.

 

2 hours ago, Samt said:

I kind of think of the Aes Sedai of the modern age to be a team of 20-foot-tall basketball players who play against regular sized opponents.  They don't really need to practice or discuss strategy or anything else.  They just win because no one else can reach the ball.  Naturally, they haven't really learned to dribble or shoot and they also haven't really decided to see if their twenty foot statures allow them solve other problems that they haven't considered.  They just really enjoy dunking on the little guys.  

 

These are both accurate to some extent, but let's be real they are not winning even the games they do play. The Green Ajah in particular is memed on for being the "battle ajah" but mostly hanging around the Tower having warder "parties." The blight is right there! Borderlanders are dealing with Trolloc raids on the daily. How is there not a Green Ajah quick response team? Why aren't they out there? The Greys are such master diplomats and the Blues such master schemers that the world is constantly at war and more than half of the established states have had a civil war-level succession crisis within living memory (Andor, Cairhein) or are functionally failed states (Altara, Ghealadan) or are completely controlled by insane religious fanatics that can and do regularly kill their members (Amadacia). (How has the White Tower just never really done anything about the Whitecloaks? They dramatically overextend in the Whitecloak war and the best the Tower could wrangle together, even with Tam al'Thor in his prime fighting for the Companions, was a return to status quo ante bellum? How are Whitecloaks not banned from any region where there is a Tower advisor?) The Yellows are so great at treating disease that they never once are shown to leave the tower to ever do so, the Reds are so good at catching men who can channel that the world is lousy with False Dragons, to the point where there's a retired legendary Green on standby who has to handle Taim (I'm on a roll but I do want to say, on the flipside, one could argue the Reds were unironically so good at catching men who could channel they eugenics-ed the spark out of the Randland population and the Tower's numbers were dwindling until the Pattern decided they needed some help (you could also argue the Salidar opening of the book shows how it was more accurately a downward spiral of the Tower turning inwards meaning they have fewer people looking meaning they have fewer Novices meaning they have fewer members meaning they turn more inwards)). The Whites and Browns get completely embarrassed scholastically by the first time an literal farmboy invests twenty four dollars and change into throwing together two "universities."

 

They are not good at their jobs! They are not even rising to the challenges set by themselves and for themselves in the Third Age. They're not dunking on anyone; and those they do dunk on are carefully selected for their dunkability. And that's before Gitara Moroso has her Foretelling.

 

To be clear, as I have argued vociferously in previous threads, this is not quite their fault. They're the 3,000 years distant descendants of whoever was left after an unimaginable apocalypse, 1,000 years ago a world-conquering hero tried his best to wipe them out, and they're absolutely riddled, completely run through with a secret murderous society that can lie that they refuse to acknowledge exists and that is intentionally making them bad at all these things on purpose by manipulating internal politics, by undercutting every decision, and by torturing and killing anyone who displays any actual competence in a leadership role.

 

Still! It is by no means a stretch to point out that, by the time they officially gain the shawl, The Wonder Girls have surpassed all but a handful of modern Aes Sedai in effective use of the One Power, especially after Moggy and Lan break Nyneave's block for her. It's said outright by more than one character. What's always said to be holding them back is that they lack the Aes Sedai temperament. And what temperament would they have really have gained if they had stayed in the Tower as it was? Aes Sedai arrogance (they already had enough of that, to be honest), Aes Sedai ignorance, Aes Sedai complacency, Aes Sedai cowardice.

 

Thematically it's a fun mixture of "don't meet your heroes," "what would Lord of the Rings be like if Gandalf was just as confused as everyone else," and RJ's ambivalent approach to institutions; dangerous and can calcify into sclerotic uselessness or outright harm, but are still necessary and worth reforming.. if only they had the right people in the right places.

[Taimandred]

They are a real disappointment once you meet them in later books. Moiraine is rock solid and the Two Rivers gang is never in real danger with her around. She is truely Aes Sedai and sets the bar very high. 

 

Sadly, every other Aes Sedai we meet might as well be Woman's Council members. All they do is size each other and suck at everything.

 

Cadsuane is super annoying but also a breath of fresh air. She is certainly Aes Sedai and worthy of the title. She is out there kicking ass as only a true Aes Sedai can do. She is a prime example of what these women should be. 

 

Actually, the contempt she has for all other sisters is testament to how useless they are. I know RJ pushes the power rankings as reason to lord it over others, but I believe Cadsuane just hates how useless and ineffective the tower women are when it matters most.

Edited May 9 by Taimandred

[Samt]

For sure, part of the 20 foot basketball player analogy is that all they do is play basketball instead of figuring out how else being 20 feet tall would be useful.  

 

For all of the heat that the red ajah gets as the "bad guys," they are really the only ajah that:

 

• Have a clearly articulated goal that matters
• Have a goal that cannot be achieved with comparable cost and effort by non-channelers
• Actively work towards the goal in meaningful ways. 

 As was said about the green and yellow, they don't appear to actually be doing much at all in relation to their goal.  The white and gray don't seem to do something that non-channelers couldn't do just as well.  Also, how is "logic, philosophy, or truth" an ajah?  Those are tools and thought processes that we use to achieve other goals. They aren't goals by themselves.  The brown might be okay if they were actively pushing the extent of knowledge of the one power, but many of them are literally drawing birds.  And the blues, in spite of sort of being the "good guy" ajah, simply don't have an actual coherent purpose.  They are the ajah of "causes."  That's like saying that their goal is having goals.  It's so amorphous that it's basically meaningless.  The only way it makes sense to me is if we assume that it's the ajah for people that don't feel that they fit into any of the other ajahs.  It's the "none of the above" ajah.

 

The ajah system doesn't really make sense as a system whereby the white tower is balancing effort across a number of important areas.  Instead, it's just a system where each sister is given leeway to do what she thinks is most important.   It's not one person coming up with a list of the seven most important Aes Sedai goals.  It's seven people listing their top goal.  A sort of: "You do whatever you think is most important, because I'm going to do what I think is most important.    

[DojoToad]

14 hours ago, Bugglesley said:

 

 

These are both accurate to some extent, but let's be real they are not winning even the games they do play. The Green Ajah in particular is memed on for being the "battle ajah" but mostly hanging around the Tower having warder "parties." The blight is right there! Borderlanders are dealing with Trolloc raids on the daily. How is there not a Green Ajah quick response team? Why aren't they out there? The Greys are such master diplomats and the Blues such master schemers that the world is constantly at war and more than half of the established states have had a civil war-level succession crisis within living memory (Andor, Cairhein) or are functionally failed states (Altara, Ghealadan) or are completely controlled by insane religious fanatics that can and do regularly kill their members (Amadacia). (How has the White Tower just never really done anything about the Whitecloaks? They dramatically overextend in the Whitecloak war and the best the Tower could wrangle together, even with Tam al'Thor in his prime fighting for the Companions, was a return to status quo ante bellum? How are Whitecloaks not banned from any region where there is a Tower advisor?) The Yellows are so great at treating disease that they never once are shown to leave the tower to ever do so, the Reds are so good at catching men who can channel that the world is lousy with False Dragons, to the point where there's a retired legendary Green on standby who has to handle Taim (I'm on a roll but I do want to say, on the flipside, one could argue the Reds were unironically so good at catching men who could channel they eugenics-ed the spark out of the Randland population and the Tower's numbers were dwindling until the Pattern decided they needed some help (you could also argue the Salidar opening of the book shows how it was more accurately a downward spiral of the Tower turning inwards meaning they have fewer people looking meaning they have fewer Novices meaning they have fewer members meaning they turn more inwards)). The Whites and Browns get completely embarrassed scholastically by the first time an literal farmboy invests twenty four dollars and change into throwing together two "universities."

 

They are not good at their jobs! They are not even rising to the challenges set by themselves and for themselves in the Third Age. They're not dunking on anyone; and those they do dunk on are carefully selected for their dunkability. And that's before Gitara Moroso has her Foretelling.

 

To be clear, as I have argued vociferously in previous threads, this is not quite their fault. They're the 3,000 years distant descendants of whoever was left after an unimaginable apocalypse, 1,000 years ago a world-conquering hero tried his best to wipe them out, and they're absolutely riddled, completely run through with a secret murderous society that can lie that they refuse to acknowledge exists and that is intentionally making them bad at all these things on purpose by manipulating internal politics, by undercutting every decision, and by torturing and killing anyone who displays any actual competence in a leadership role.

 

Still! It is by no means a stretch to point out that, by the time they officially gain the shawl, The Wonder Girls have surpassed all but a handful of modern Aes Sedai in effective use of the One Power, especially after Moggy and Lan break Nyneave's block for her. It's said outright by more than one character. What's always said to be holding them back is that they lack the Aes Sedai temperament. And what temperament would they have really have gained if they had stayed in the Tower as it was? Aes Sedai arrogance (they already had enough of that, to be honest), Aes Sedai ignorance, Aes Sedai complacency, Aes Sedai cowardice.

 

Thematically it's a fun mixture of "don't meet your heroes," "what would Lord of the Rings be like if Gandalf was just as confused as everyone else," and RJ's ambivalent approach to institutions; dangerous and can calcify into sclerotic uselessness or outright harm, but are still necessary and worth reforming.. if only they had the right people in the right places.

I think we agree.  The reality of the Tower does not live up to the legend.  I think this is deliberate - art imitating life.  The Tower had its period of badassery from which the legend sprang and then it declined for any number of reasons.  Not very different from any number of real-life examples: Roman Empire, Mongol Empire, British Empire, Aztec Empire, Soviet Empire.

 

Kick ass, expand, nurture the legend, decline, change and/or fall.  There are neither beginnings nor  endings...

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

The White Tower as is it appears in the books is only a thumbnail sketch. A lot of it simply doesn't make sense - like the Yellow Ajah. On the face of it, very easy to understand - but when fleshed out it is absurd.  Healing is a single weave in which you have an innate talent. They do no investigating into any kind of healing, with the One Power or otherwise and strictly follow dogma as to how to act and Heal. There is no reason that the best healers could not simply prioritize healing if there was an epidemic or whatever. 

 

The Blues seem fine to me - as a concept at least. They are the ones that involve themselves in the outside world, the others are turned to specific Power-related goals or inwards at the Tower. It would be fine if in practice there seems to be no difference - Blues appear to have no concrete agenda or appear to be any more likely to be outside of the Tower than anyone else, and the other Ajahs certainly don't seem apolitical.

 

The Greens and "the Warders" in the Blight is something mentioned early in the series, but is never really given any substance. I seem to remember Suian asking what do "the Warders" report about activity in the Blight, but we never really see any Warders actually there - and at Tarwin's Gap, when Sheinar was facing extinction there was not a singe Warder or Aes Sedai that I remember. 

 

The Reds have a goal, but are one of the largest if not the largest as far as I remember (misandry is common in Aes Sedai apparently) so they are way overstaffed for their purpose. Nor does it really seem much of a philosophy as all Aes Sedai agree with them about men needing Gentled and again, it is not only Reds that do this anyway.

 

One thing to remember is that the Tower is house of knowledge and continuity. If Manetheren had had libraries and schools of natural history, how would that have worked out? Gathering and protecting knowledge could be seen as something inherent in the One Power - given the cause of the Breaking and the Bore. Admittedly, it does not make a lot of sense that the do not include muggles in Tar Valon. Aside for elitism I cannot think really of any reason not to. The pursuit of knowledge and logic directly help Aes Sedai survive to Tar'mon Gaiden and it also makes surviving worthwhile. One thing which appears to be often overlooked is their life-spans. Take in the AoL if Asmodean was competing with a non-channeler, they would reach their prime at about 30-40 years old (10,000 hours) and then Asmodean would have another 500-600 years to develop, experiment and grow. A non-channeler would be taking retirement in 50 years at best if disease and the effects of aging were under control. This surely would lead to a domination of channelers in most fields, which could have carried on post breaking - what was the point of including those that were grubbing in the dirt to survive when they would never match an Aes Sedai? Not sure how much Jordan thought along these lines, but the effect would be considerable.

 

As I have noted before Jordan often seems to write with a protagonist and antagonist in each section. I think this is one of the reasons that people find his characters so relatable and human. And why such groups as the Seanchan are so troubling or enigmatic to some. The protagonist point of view is nearly always positive - the exception of the bad who have no redemption arc - and the antagonists are nearly always negative. This means that groups and characters are often full of contradictions. The Aes Sedai are very often cast as the antagonists - even when we have a point of view of one of them, they are often at odds with the rest of the Aes Sedai. 

 

I think Pevara is a revelation. Not only is she a victim of Darkfriends (who up til that point appear to have been nearly invisible in the story for all that everyone is hunting them) and she is also a Red Sitter, and yet powerful, funny, charismatic, thoughtful, willing to put personal and Ajah differences aside for the good of the Tower - something that up to that point seemed an unlikely occurrence. I'd argue that Jordan meant for the Tower to made up of more characters like Pevara, with the problems being that they were stalemated politically by the fear of the Black Ajah, where Suian was not really leading them but trying to contain them, with the Ajah Heads inexplicably deciding to overthrow the democratic rule, and of course that about a third were Black Sisters. But the very lack of detail allows us to see so much more than Jordan described, even if some of it does not bear looking at too closely.

[Samt]

The White Tower government system combines the oppression of an autocracy, the inaction of a democracy, the corruption of an oligarchy, and the inefficiencies of a bloated bureaucracy.  The failure of the White Tower to fulfill expectations is mostly the result of systematic failures rather than the personal failures of individual Aes Sedai.  I think the system feels very real and makes sense as something that was created to preserve what could be saved during an apocalypse.  It's a very conservative system created to slow the gradual decay from a former greatness that is now all but unimaginable. It has little capacity to take decisive action and create something new or confront new problems.  

[Taimandred]

Do we have a record of anyone asking what an Aes Sedai actually does in the books? I seem to remember Moiraine explaining what it means to be an Aes Sedai to Egwene. 

 

But I wonder what Novices are told when they ask this? All this training, I gain control of Saidar, then what? Just fancy dresses? 🤩 Maybe that's why they recruit young and avoid taking in girls that are too old. 

 

Hunting male channelers is a once in a generation event requiring no more than a handful of sisters. What do the rest do? 

 

Being advisers to powerful rulers is great and makes sense. The tower gets access to that power and influence events. Yet they still half-ass this effort too! They are only in the main continent, with no representation among Aiel and the rest of the world. Even of not worth the effort of sending a sister permanently there, they should at least know about regions like Seanchan, Shara etc. 

Additionally, this does not require channeling, so mostly just a power grab for the sake of it (no problem with that).

 

Fighting the dark one and his forces. The 3 oaths are very restrictive, but at least they allow this. And yet, aside from Moiraine, there is very little of active fighting from the tower. Some comments above have covered this. We would expect an Aes Sedai base in the borderlands at the very least! As things stand they just aren't ready for any assault from the blight. In fact, they ignore all these and leave them to normal soldiers to deal with. Why?

 

Ofcourse a simple explanation to all this is that Ishamael has been busy weakening the opposition and bogging them down to ineffectiveness. I think it's even mentioned somewhere that he may be the reason behind Aes Sedai binding themselves with 3 oaths (he wouldn't care what oaths as long as they bind themselves). 

Edited May 11 by Taimandred

[Bugglesley]

On 5/10/2024 at 10:58 PM, Taimandred said:

Do we have a record of anyone asking what an Aes Sedai actually does in the books? I seem to remember Moiraine explaining what it means to be an Aes Sedai to Egwene. 

 

But I wonder what Novices are told when they ask this? All this training, I gain control of Saidar, then what? Just fancy dresses? 🤩 Maybe that's why they recruit young and avoid taking in girls that are too old. 

 

Hunting male channelers is a once in a generation event requiring no more than a handful of sisters. What do the rest do? 

 

Being advisers to powerful rulers is great and makes sense. The tower gets access to that power and influence events. Yet they still half-ass this effort too! They are only in the main continent, with no representation among Aiel and the rest of the world. Even of not worth the effort of sending a sister permanently there, they should at least know about regions like Seanchan, Shara etc. 

Additionally, this does not require channeling, so mostly just a power grab for the sake of it (no problem with that).

 

Fighting the dark one and his forces. The 3 oaths are very restrictive, but at least they allow this. And yet, aside from Moiraine, there is very little of active fighting from the tower. Some comments above have covered this. We would expect an Aes Sedai base in the borderlands at the very least! As things stand they just aren't ready for any assault from the blight. In fact, they ignore all these and leave them to normal soldiers to deal with. Why?

 

Ofcourse a simple explanation to all this is that Ishamael has been busy weakening the opposition and bogging them down to ineffectiveness. I think it's even mentioned somewhere that he may be the reason behind Aes Sedai binding themselves with 3 oaths (he wouldn't care what oaths as long as they bind themselves). 

 

A couple of thoughts;

 

When we have PoV chapters of the Wonder Girls in the White Tower, they are basically told that they are being groomed to manage the world. "Even Kings and Queens bow to the Amyrlin Seat." They're just, like you said, kind of bad at it; the Sea Folk and Aiel have managed to play on their Wetlander/shorebound biases to convince them that they are just "savages" that there is no need to engage with. Shara is really just impractically far and locked-off, not a lot to be done there; nobody in Randland is interacting with them meaningfully, not even the Sea Folk or Aiel who are the conduit through which that interaction would happen, and who are (as mentioned) dismissed. As far as Seanchan, maybe a Brown here or there knows that one of Hawkwing's sons sailed off into endless ocean and never came back, what is to be done there? (It does kind of stretch credulity that the Seanchan, or none of their political opponents in the 900-year-long series of wars that led to their hegemony over the continent, ever contacted Randland proper in an entire millennia, as they were clearly aware it was still there and it was clearly not a huge technical challenge to do so with trained damane.)

 

I think the big thing they lean on as advisors kind of does require channeling; to me, it feels like an essential part of the value proposition for a temporal ruler. Rulers are not people in the regular habit of ceding authority. What do they get in exchange for an Aes Sedai "advisor"? In actual history the main value proposition is legitimacy, as an advisor from the Vatican (the clear parallel here) is a sign that your rule is blessed and supported by the Almighty and His representatives on earth. I don't know if the White Tower really has that valence for the average person in the same way. So what does the ruler get?

 

Well, if your kid falls off a horse, your line no longer is ending. If there is an assassin about to harm you and your whole party, your advisor feels in danger of her life and the assassin now has to contend with magic. To me it's no surprise that the place that clearly most consistently has advisors is the Borderlands, as the gloves are always off when it comes to the DO's creatures and that is a major occupational hazard up there. The other big thing isn't really channeling itself so much as the oaths, which were intended by Ishy to shorten their lifespans, restrict their power, and create the illusion of safety that lets the Black flourish; but does end up providing value. What historical leader would not have jumped through anything to have access to an advisor that physically cannot lie? (the problems with that sentence are explored thoroughly in the text itself so let's leave it there).

 

The more I sit in this thread the more I disagree with my first post when it comes to Reds. They're done dirty by the narrative to some degree, and I think anyone who's worked IT can identify with the "if you do your job right, everyone thinks you're slacking off." False Dragons are relatively rare (until the Pattern decided it's time and popped out 2 of them at once), but it's textually not uncommon for a random shopkeeper's son to start having funny things happen around him, only for a fine lady in a red silken dress to show up and take him away for a bit. It happens to people connected with multiple characters, not least of which is poor Thom. Ironically enough, the designated antagonist (as @HeavyHalfMoonBlade points out) for the Tower sections.. are, to some degree, the only Ajah actually doing their damn job.

 

All that said it's believable! I think, like @Samt says it's a great example of "managed decline." It's one of Jordan's complicated, believable characters but it's an institution.  And it does have an institutional redemption arc!