Regrettably, no. All the stuff I saved from wotmania before it went down was lost when a drive short-circuited. I have the notes and some rough drafts and have messed around with recreating them from time to time, but in their original form might only exist if Mike has preserved the stuff from the old site somewhere.

I ignore that kind of meta stuff and when doing character analysis, prefer to simply logically extrapolate and expand on what is given in the books. It's more fun that way. The RJ stuff I only consider for theories and predictions which are largely moot now that its amateur hour in the writing department.

For insane people maybe. To paraphrase one of my favorite cracked.com humor columnists on the subject of polygamy, having three wives means you can't get halfway into one, without two jars suddenly needing to be opened. From the RJ-meta perspective, I believe he had trouble deciding on an appropriate or preferable love-interest for Rand, his Ultimate Hero and chose to break her down into three different archetypes (or tropes, if you prefer), so as to have his cake and eat it too {See the link below for a more complete exploration of that notion}. Anyway, the important difference between Rand's situation and a harem fantasy is that in the latter, they are merely there for aesthetic and carnal purposes. Rand is supposedly maintaining three equilateral and complete partnerships. Rand has three partners, while a man with a harem is the boss. THAT is the fantasy, not the quantity.

That might be the overall result, but it is achieved by each group having near-total authority in discrete spheres of influence. For issues like marriage and family practices, the domination of the Womens' Circle would be absolute, even if they have nothing to say about the disposition of archers for the defense of the village or the economic policies of dealing with the wool merchants. For the very narrow area of human interaction with which my post was concerned, for all intents and purposes, they DO run the place. Even the books bear this out - when do we ever see the Mayor or Village Council concerned with such affairs? It WAS the Wisdom and Womens' Circle that punished the couple caught in flagrante in Rand's recollection, and they are the people who officiate and approve of marriages and whatnot. I even alluded to this in my post with my assertion that they were desperate to get some authority over the al'Thor household. Plainly if they ruled the village in truth and in totality, Tam & Rand would be susceptible to their laws. However, in matters with which the Womens' Circle is concerned, Rand & Tam are more or less immune to their usual ways of enforcing such matters. Note that whenever Cenn Buie or other men butt heads with their number, no overt legal punishment is threatened nor is the judgement of society passed upon them. They are threatened with their wives' displeasure.

While men might hold what we consider to be the obvious and real forms of power (law-making, combat & money) the women wield a more subtle and equally total influence elsewhere. This is a constant in almost all well-functioning WoT societies or micro-societies. The male positions of power among the Sea Folk are in charge of defense & combat and trade. The King of Tarabon is in charge of trade and the military. The First Prince of the Sword of Andor is trained in military matters and combat skills, and he also is made to learn the chief products of the different parts of Andor, to the point that when Gawyn meets someone from the Two Rivers, his first reaction is "wool & tabac". Even with Moiraine & Lan: he carries the sword and pays off people. Men have charge of external intercourse, while women have charge of internal domestic matters. For the purposes of this post, focusing exclusively on marriage and family matters in the Two Rivers, the Womens' Circle may be assumed to have absolute power.

Actually, I see those as simply enabling factors that cause the rules to be so strictly adhered to and customs followed so hard: there are no other options. As for why something is expected, well it is to the benefit of the women. Egwene even quotes her mother, a member of the Womens' Circle, who asserts that men can make do with just about any woman, while a woman has to have just the right man. Since there is no evidence of Marin al'Vere being regarded as some sort of heretical renegade, it is fair to say that reflects a prevailing mindset in the Two Rivers. With this perspective in mind, the selection process is not so much gender warfare as selecting matches that suit the preferences of the women. Those preferences are important to them, and less so to the men. With the compatibility issues being long settled by the closeness of the community, all that really remains of the important issues for a marriage is making sure the guys end up with the girls who want them, rather than letting them blunder along with the first girl they get involved with, and possibly messing everything up.

This is not gender warfare, insomuch as one gender cannot be bothered fighting or even to notice that there is a war going on. If there is any warfare it might be among the women for choice spouses, but in the Two Rivers, the selection process I alluded to in my original post would seem to prevent real competition as it is a system for recognizing proper claims and so forth.

RtDB. She IS DOING IT. She lies to herself as much as to anyone else, so she never thinks of it in those terms, but that's what she is doing, even in "Ravens". And it is not so much power as status and acknowledgment that she seeks. That is why she is so committed to her fictitious status as an Aes Sedai from their departure from Tar Valon, through her stay in the Aiel camp, even when it brings no real advantage. Egwene requires recognition of her stature and status. She had no real agenda or plan when she took the Amyrlin Seat (for which she would need power), she was simply annoyed that she was not being treated as she thought the Amyrlin Seat deserved. And that goes all the way back to Ravens, where she is focused on doing her job so well in order to achieve the recognition from her elders and get promoted to a new job as fast as possible. That is why she is so quick to lose the braid upon leaving the Two Rivers, when in her very first appearance, she had been conspicuously showing it off. Out of the Two Rivers, no recognition of status accrues to a braid-wearer, but sophisticated city-folk who recognize the braid might label her as a bumpkin.

In the Two Rivers, as a girl the only real status she perceived was degrees of adulthood. Even a grown wife and mother is still a relative child if she is living in the house of her parents or grandparents. Egwene wanted the status of being the head of her household, which would be most easily gained by marrying a man in Rand's situtation (even if Tam owned the land, crops, livestock and building and was the head of the family, his daughter-in-law would be the female head of the household - even Tam would have to wipe his feet before entering "her" house, and decisions about meals and cleaning and laundry and whatnot would all become her province - it might not seem like much next to owning the whole shebang, but to a WoT woman, that is everything that matters).

This does not require complex scheming, merely a simple subconscious recognition of the social mores and customs under which you have lived your entire life and a recognition of a gap that you have a chance to fill and the realization that doing so would place you in a situation that seems very satisfactory. All that stuff that every sister knows about every other sister in the White Tower, or that Aviendha and Liah know about their situation vis a vis ji'e'toh and their combat abilities in their LoC starring match ... that kind of thing is what is driving Egwene back in the Two Rivers. It is not a long-laid, carefully executed plot, it is simple recognition of all these factors and their convergence into an opportunity for Egwene. What requires analysis and logic for me to analyze is as simple to her as basic etiquette, because she has grown up in that society.

Yeah, she's good and she passed it on to her daughter. The problem with your scenario is that it presumes that Marin is looking for a match-up so well tailored to Egwene's personality, including traits that might not be so obvious in a place like the Two Rivers. We grasp her ambition because we are working backwards from observing her behavior in a situation where she has heights to aspire to. In the cramped environs of the Two Rivers, those traits that make the al'Thor household so appealing to her nature might not be apparent for what they are. The few and limited-in-scope opportunities she would have to express that aspect of her nature might present as dutifulness, rather than showing-off-in-hopes-of-promotion, and so on.

I think Egwene recognized subconsciously something that could partially fill the gaping maw in her soul that hungered for status. She then either let her mother know of her interest deliberately or through various unintentional cues, and then perhaps Marin acted to secure her claim in the Women's Circle and went to Tam to secure dibs on Rand, but it would still be Egwene's choosing Rand as her perfect dupe that got the ball rolling.

The point was, Mat was not the focus of the marriage-machine working to guide him to his chosen spouse. At point where the series begins, his good qualities might not be readily apparent to outsiders (or even to readers - he didn't really shine until book 3 when we got a look inside his head, and he was acting free of unnatural influences and could let his good qualities shine through), and thus not many women might be interested in him as husband material. Those few girls who succumb to his charms (to the extent permitted in the Two Rivers at least) would never be able to get their mothers and the Womens' Circle to go along with them for a few more years until Mat was definitively accepted as the diamond in the rough that he was.

It was not so much his Two Rivers upbringing that brought upon Rand the problems that I mentioned, but Egwene's early pressing of a claim, which then caused the marriage machine to set to work on Rand. While Mat was pranking the village girls, and driving housewives nuts, Rand was being conditioned to choose Egwene and cut off from any interactions with women who might be interested in him or willing to engage in flirtatious or romantic interaction. Only girl Egwene trusted would dance with him, for example. Egwene is obviously not to blame if it is his upbringing that skewed his chances at a healthy relationship, but she is to blame because the source of those issues is the attempts of Two Rivers society to fit him for a saddle and bridle so early, leaving him ill-equipped to fend for himself in the wild. He was being trained for marriage without ever having the chance to flex his relationship-developing muscles.

Exactly! In the Two Rivers, Egwene had him branded and registered as her property in the eyes of female society so he was never given the opportunity to learn about relationships. His relationship came pre-packaged so of course he never learned how to make his own. He was being trained to accept Egwene and nudged away from any girl who might deal with him as an eligible man. As I noted in my original post, he ends up falling for the very first woman to engage him on that level.

That too is the evil of Egwene here - she did something that caused him to be artificially locked into her, when she herself was not all that committed to it. Thus, when she was ready to ditch him for the first new thing that came along to better satisfy her thirst for standing and recognition (a foreign Wisdom job), he would have been in trouble. Like a society that cannot defend itself from supernatural threats because the White Tower has not only taken that duty upon itself but in order to ensure its position, has stripped society of all other alternatives, by staking her claim on Rand without being genuinely committed herself, Egwene selfishly and carelessly allowed the Womens' Circle and female society to ruin Rand for any other woman on her behalf. Rather than allowing him to develop a general array of skills (i.e. dealing with women in general), he is made to specialize in a narrow field (i.e. Egwene) and when that option is closed off, he now lacks the skills to try something new.

Note his reactions in those first chapters - he is altogether uncomfortable with her and the presumption of their relationship, but when she tosses out the possibility of abandoning it altogether, he finds that even worse: he might not be all that sanguine about being bound to her, but he also subconsciously recognizes that he has no other options and cannot envision moving on to someone else.

It was not repression that caused Rand to reject Berelain (RtDB), but recognition of the lack of connection. That, at least, is one benefit to his Two Rivers background (in fact, aside from a certain unfortunate association with a certain obnoxious chick, that background is overall totally beneficial to him). He and all the other Two Rivers people know each other thoroughly and completely. The idea of an empty coupling as Berelain proposes is alien and shallow to him. He values the interpersonal connections to people and cannot imagine intimacy with someone he knows that little or that someone could truly do as she is doing. He does not refuse Berelain because he is repressed from being raised in the Two Rivers, but because he sees through her too well to accept the illusion of intimacy and connection she offers in exchange for his favor.

Since we are dealing with a world that occurs entirely in RJ's imagination, that assertion does not discredit the notion in the least. Trollocs and the One Power exist solely in RJ's imagination - should these be ignored in making assessments of characters and their choices, then? Just because the female hive-mind does not exist in the real world, does not mean it cannot in WoT. Most of my generalizations and theories concerning the sexes in WoT are not so much concerned with the reality of gender relationships, but with how they are presented in WoT. There is ample evidence of a "female conspiracy" in the Two Rivers but I would not even call it that. It is the same sort of consensus among people that can decide what look is "in fashion" at a particular time, or what have you. It only makes sense that in a small, close-knit and relatively isolated community, there would develop certain unspoken rules and understandings on how life was arranged and regulated. The harmony of the community is preserved through such means, so such a mechanism would be entirely in the interests of the people to maintain. It is not like there is a secret headquarters under Nynaeve's house, with big charts outlining their breeding plans, and files detailing how each man is to be handled, but the characters themselves perceive these shifts in the community consensus, whereby after actions taken by Egwene and Marin, the entire community began assuming that Rand and Egwene would marry someday. Rand himself notes subtle social ways in which this was supported (i.e. girls she did not like would not dance with him - why would such girls respect Egwene's wishes and leave her boyfriend alone, unless there was a greater social expectation that they respect the unspoken convention? ).

They are living in a pre-industrial world and for a time period like that one, and the backgrounds of most of them, they are all rather slow to be hitching up. They did not partake of the childhood-prolonging institutions of our society, like mandatory schooling, and so forth. As soon as they were physically capable, they began undertaking adult responsibilities. If they seem ignorant and too young in the early books, it is because they have suddenly been thrust from the communities in which they grew up into completely alien environments (in a time and place with no long range telecommunications or other means of learning ABOUT foreign places even if you have no experience with them - I probably know more about China and its culture, on the complete other side of the world from where I live and having never met anyone who has been there, than a Two Rivers person knows of Baerlon). Immaturity is not a biological constant, it is a function of upbringing and societal expectations. Had all their parents and teachers dropped dead on Winternight, the Two Rivers youngsters and their peers could have carried on just fine, with running their farms and other day-to-day survival stuff, though there might have been some cultural shifts and long-term mistakes caused by a lack of experience in judgement. Rand & Mat are more qualified to run a farm than your typical MBA is to do an entry-level office job upon his graduation, despite the MBA's greater age. They are all more than old enough for marriage. Even in the real world they are not that young. My parents were engaged at 20 & 18. Contrary to the opinions of the entertainment industry, the longer you wait for marriage, they more you develop on your own and the less adaptable you are to the demands of becoming a couple. The characters might be young, but they ARE more than mature enough.