All right, so this thread hit pause several months ago, but it looks like it did so a few times and was revived, so I'll go ahead and put my 2 cents in now as well.
First off, I am definitely in the Love Cadsuane camp. She's not perfect and yes, at times I do want to slap her, but then sometime people you love do things that you disagree with and in an extreme case you may just want to slap them.
Even when she is wrong though (and her having been big enough to admit when that did happen was definitely a point in her favor) I don't think I would have done differently in her shoes--and by the way, I've never been seen as a bully by anyone. After the centuries she's been kicking around and kicking a**, she certainly does have a right to think she's going to be far more often right than wrong. When she looks at others with disdain, they usually deserve it (I said usually, not always), and sometimes it's not even real disdain but simply a method of quickly testing the person's mettle to see who they really are underneath the social veneer.
And she really is more about extremely high standards than about bullying. She is what far too few people in this world or in Randland are--competent. And yes, she's impatient with the incompetence she's found in humanity for the last few hundred years, rightly so.
A point was made early in this thread about "stoooooooooopid" actions by far too many of the characters and wanting the characters to not be so ... flawed I guess you would say. The fact is that you can write a story where the characters are more noble or you can write a story where the characters grow into their nobility from a lower state, and either way can work. I admire the Sword of Truth series a great deal, and it's one of the few series I've read where the author pulls off having some characters (namely Richard and Kahlan) show themselves to be far more noble and wise then your average humanoid on planet Earth, and yet still make them real and very lovable. In WoT series, RJ shows the world the way some of us need to really confront that it has degraded to--he is capable of showing its beauty and wisdom as well as its pettiness, selfishness and stupidity, and sometimes even show where those intertwine in a person. I think that is one of the most brilliant aspects of the series and combining this with my own experiences of traveling the world and living life from many different perspectives, it contributed to my own ability to quickly learn to adapt my views of people and life.
By the time Cadsuane found Rand, he was not the same Rand that Moiraine was dealing with, and frankly if Moiraine was still around at that time I'm not sure even she would have been all that successful with using her old tactics of submission (or at always keeping herself in check when she sees Rand about to willingly punch an iron spike with his naked fist (metaphorically). When you're dealing with someone who has degenerated to a point of losing his sight of what humanity is all about, of what he's actually fighting for, of why life is so important and deserves to be preserved, well you don't really reason with a person like that. They're not in a "reasonable" mind-set and therefor not open to being reasoned with. Her tactics took this into account.
Yes, her barging in on him for her first introduction was excessively rude and even unnecessarily so, or at least so it would seem. That's what made it so brilliant. Someone earlier quoted where she had said that if you want to find out what a man is made of, you push him from a direction he doesn't expect. I'm not going to say I totally agree with this, but if her experience has told her that it's workable then I would of course expect her to use it as a workable philosophy. She did the absolute last thing he would have expected and got his attention by it. Otherwise Rand would likely have seen her as just another self-important person trying to manipulate him and relegated her to the same position as all the other AS trying to achieve their ends with him. In this way she pushed her way into his reality, actually became a real person to him, not just another talking head.
Sure, it didn't come off without a hitch, and yes it was mainly Min's intervention that made Rand keep her around right off. But I'm sure that she would have worked her way in without that anyway, this was just the pattern's (RJ's) way of speeding up the process so as not to add even more time to the storyline. And let's not forget that while she did not really know Rand yet, she did know that he was the DR and knew therefor that he would be dealing with the madness of the taint, among other pressures, and also knew from the prophecies she's read that there was a strong chance he wasn't going to make it sanely to the LB, and therefor might even now be insane (and potentially in need of her disposing of him if he had grown too ridiculously mad and dangerous to the world).
I don't think RJ wrote her poorly at all. I think he wrote her perfectly. Even her flaws are perfect. And I'm sure RJ must have understood that a lot of people wouldn't be able to appreciate her. He had to have understood that. After all, he had a good enough grasp of humanity's failings to know just how far below Cadsuane's standard's most of us have fallen.
I personally might not use her methods (in fact I don't) but I admire her for having the strength to do so when needed and I like to think that if I was in her shoes and felt the way she felt that I'd have the guts to go through with what seemed to her like the only way to get the job done.
The Subtleties of Cadsuane
in Wheel of Time Books
Posted
All right, so this thread hit pause several months ago, but it looks like it did so a few times and was revived, so I'll go ahead and put my 2 cents in now as well.
First off, I am definitely in the Love Cadsuane camp. She's not perfect and yes, at times I do want to slap her, but then sometime people you love do things that you disagree with and in an extreme case you may just want to slap them.
Even when she is wrong though (and her having been big enough to admit when that did happen was definitely a point in her favor) I don't think I would have done differently in her shoes--and by the way, I've never been seen as a bully by anyone. After the centuries she's been kicking around and kicking a**, she certainly does have a right to think she's going to be far more often right than wrong. When she looks at others with disdain, they usually deserve it (I said usually, not always), and sometimes it's not even real disdain but simply a method of quickly testing the person's mettle to see who they really are underneath the social veneer.
And she really is more about extremely high standards than about bullying. She is what far too few people in this world or in Randland are--competent. And yes, she's impatient with the incompetence she's found in humanity for the last few hundred years, rightly so.
A point was made early in this thread about "stoooooooooopid" actions by far too many of the characters and wanting the characters to not be so ... flawed I guess you would say. The fact is that you can write a story where the characters are more noble or you can write a story where the characters grow into their nobility from a lower state, and either way can work. I admire the Sword of Truth series a great deal, and it's one of the few series I've read where the author pulls off having some characters (namely Richard and Kahlan) show themselves to be far more noble and wise then your average humanoid on planet Earth, and yet still make them real and very lovable. In WoT series, RJ shows the world the way some of us need to really confront that it has degraded to--he is capable of showing its beauty and wisdom as well as its pettiness, selfishness and stupidity, and sometimes even show where those intertwine in a person. I think that is one of the most brilliant aspects of the series and combining this with my own experiences of traveling the world and living life from many different perspectives, it contributed to my own ability to quickly learn to adapt my views of people and life.
By the time Cadsuane found Rand, he was not the same Rand that Moiraine was dealing with, and frankly if Moiraine was still around at that time I'm not sure even she would have been all that successful with using her old tactics of submission (or at always keeping herself in check when she sees Rand about to willingly punch an iron spike with his naked fist (metaphorically). When you're dealing with someone who has degenerated to a point of losing his sight of what humanity is all about, of what he's actually fighting for, of why life is so important and deserves to be preserved, well you don't really reason with a person like that. They're not in a "reasonable" mind-set and therefor not open to being reasoned with. Her tactics took this into account.
Yes, her barging in on him for her first introduction was excessively rude and even unnecessarily so, or at least so it would seem. That's what made it so brilliant. Someone earlier quoted where she had said that if you want to find out what a man is made of, you push him from a direction he doesn't expect. I'm not going to say I totally agree with this, but if her experience has told her that it's workable then I would of course expect her to use it as a workable philosophy. She did the absolute last thing he would have expected and got his attention by it. Otherwise Rand would likely have seen her as just another self-important person trying to manipulate him and relegated her to the same position as all the other AS trying to achieve their ends with him. In this way she pushed her way into his reality, actually became a real person to him, not just another talking head.
Sure, it didn't come off without a hitch, and yes it was mainly Min's intervention that made Rand keep her around right off. But I'm sure that she would have worked her way in without that anyway, this was just the pattern's (RJ's) way of speeding up the process so as not to add even more time to the storyline. And let's not forget that while she did not really know Rand yet, she did know that he was the DR and knew therefor that he would be dealing with the madness of the taint, among other pressures, and also knew from the prophecies she's read that there was a strong chance he wasn't going to make it sanely to the LB, and therefor might even now be insane (and potentially in need of her disposing of him if he had grown too ridiculously mad and dangerous to the world).
I don't think RJ wrote her poorly at all. I think he wrote her perfectly. Even her flaws are perfect. And I'm sure RJ must have understood that a lot of people wouldn't be able to appreciate her. He had to have understood that. After all, he had a good enough grasp of humanity's failings to know just how far below Cadsuane's standard's most of us have fallen.
I personally might not use her methods (in fact I don't) but I admire her for having the strength to do so when needed and I like to think that if I was in her shoes and felt the way she felt that I'd have the guts to go through with what seemed to her like the only way to get the job done.