Re: I think that is a little unfair - Edit 1
Before modification by RugbyPlayingAshaman at 31/08/2011 07:24:20 PM
But, yes, I hated rape being used as a form of punishment by Shaidar Haran and the Dark One. It downplays the importance of the female Forsaken while simultaneously making the ultimate evil of the Shadow look completely brutish and petty. There are more imaginative punishments that beings with these types of powers should be able to inflict. So failures among the male Forsaken are punished with a slap on the wrist and ironic punishments while the females are raped and tortured? No wonder Lanfear tried to get rid of the Dark One and made her own plans. It's the ultimate glass ceiling. But the entire WoT universe is preoccupied with arbitrary traits conferred by sex, and there is a lot of biological determinism involved, so when critically reading the series, it really seems gross and sophomoric.
I don't think we've had much time to see the male Forsaken punished. We're only really left with Demandred, and he's not the type who makes mistakes - he's cautious by nature. The others are all dead.
The important thing is that although SH is a myrddraal, he's also a man. Fades have been raping women since the Breaking. It makes sense that he would do the same to a female Forsaken who has failed.
I would hazard to guess that he would physically harm a male Forsaken, much like the Fade did to Carridin. I could imagine him beating someone like Demandred to a pulp and then not allowing him Healing. We just don't get that chance. The males are too hasty, and are all but dead, and the women generally work from the shadows, so when they fail they run away and he waits for them.
It is the fourth part of this paragraph that I think really brings into focus my ultimate disappointment with the villains. For beings with their powers, the fact that we think a major punishment for S.H. would be rape or physically bludgeoning another character, is simply not interesting and it kind of makes S.H. redundant. The same punishment could be meted out in Far Madding by some random bad guy. And that makes me wonder about the assignment of this passive mindset to all of the female Forsaken. They have the power to kill, warp reality and get what they want, yet there seems to be a broad commentary about the "nature" of women, if you will, that can be summarized in an indirect approach to get what they want besides having the motive, aggression, capability and opportunities to do so. This approach seems to work against the series in that we find the female Forsaken staying in the background, even when direct intercession would increase their likelihood of success; effectively cutting down the pool of major villains in half. Also, I don't think a convincing case has been made that a character with the superhuman powers granted by channeling could honestly be said to need to favor one approach over the other. This becomes a big problem when we look at the villains in this series and why I think the nature of Graendal's punishment exposes overall weaknesses in the story that happens to reveal other trends that I saw as problematic before, esp. in regards to Shaidar Haran and his place in the story. I'm not really sure we can say the Fades are "men" - they were produced as a result of blending human genetic stock, but part of the monstrous part of their rape is that there is an element of bestiality to it.