The point is rather that Elayne hasn't granted herself the right, she was obviously within Andoran law to do that, or such a public act if it was shocking or unexpected would have had repercussions on Pelivar and co.'s support (she didn't even act as Queen, she was still High Seat).

She's not destroyed the checks and balance, there's still 18 Great Houses! Let's keep in mind that she was in a position after the fiasco of that attack to push out of the game board two Great Houses that put their ambitions far ahead of the good of Andor. Elayne acted as a ruler should, that move was expected of her. Morgase was too lenient with the Great Houses that opposed the throne (though Elaida implies she was playing the game of houses with the High Seat massively, which probaly didn't help Andor's stability), and she paid for it (before even Gaebril, Andor was fairly divided, with the WC gaining influence).




I disagree that we are supposed to cheer for them. I frankly don't think Jordan intended to portray everything Egwene has done in a positive light, not even when she perceived those as victories. It's all the more obvious with this specific issue when you look at how negatively he depicted Rand for bullying and silencing all opposition as a tyrant, and how now he's dealt with his problems, he calls a meeting where he will listen to the leaders even though for him the decision is made. It's the same with Egwene, several times before her capture by Elaida's cronies, Jordan has shown in situations where her frustration with the sisters has made her succumb to the temptation of using any mean at her disposal to increase her executive powers.

Mind you, in these specific cases, Egwene was adressing problems within the system (and I'm not saying she necessarily found the good solutions, she was patching leaks), because the Sitters were using rights/powers granted them to further their personal interests/ambitions and were further undermining the Tower. The Sitters are supposed to meet without the Amyrlin to see to Tower business, not to plot politics among themselves. They can't have a formal Sitting without the Amyrlin, the only ones allowed in Tower Law are sessions to depose or raise an Amyrlin. What Egwene did was merely forbidding the Sitters to use the Hall to give an official/formal appearance to meetings that are Sittings in all but name, and at which the Amyrlin byt law should be present, rules the Sitters got around willfully by not following procedures and pretending their meeting thus wasn't a Sitting. You're very keen to point out how Egwene destroys checks and balances, but I would remind you that among the Rebels it's far more the Hall that has sought to undermine the system and grant itself powers it doesn't officially have or sapped procedures that are there for a reason. Egwene most often limited their powers merely in reaction to their abuses of the system that nearly blocked it.


As far as we know, the Sitters normally have a say in the constitution of embassies - and it's expected the ambassadors from an Ajah will keep their Sitters/AH in the loop, though the order to send an embassy comes from the Amyrlin (and nominate he head ambassador, it appears). The Salidar Hall sent some on his own authority and that reported directly to them, but that was during the power vaccuum, when they were the highest authority.

Sitters are also the representatives of their Ajah, and normally they barely leave Tar valon, but they are not unreachable to political players from the land who wish to petition an Ajah.

What happened with the Salidar bunch is that the individual Sitters no longer dealt with rulers for their Ajah's business, but for Tower politics. They were stepping on the Amyrlin's prerogatives and undermining her authority. She's the one with the last word on diplomacy, and that's because for all its divisions, the Tower is supposed to talk to the nations with one voice, that of its leader. It was bad enough there were two Amyrlins, the Hall was making it worse by making Egwene appear to outsiders a weak Amyrlin controlled by her Hall.

A main issue/theme with the Tower is that the organization used to be a Guild dealing with channelling matters, and there was a federal government of some kind aside, with provincial/national rulers. Individual AS could take on roles in the political institutions like anybody else, but the organization wasn't political in essence, even if highly influential, for the services it provided and the popular respect it entailed. As far as Mesaana described it, the Guild had tons of punctual lobby groups that formed and dissolved according to specific issues (the Concord is merely the one ajah mentionned specifically) but the AOLers had a generally assembly of members, and one direction (no doubt with a big bureaucracy beneath it), it avoided institutional division by making groups of opinion into political parties.

The post-breaking Tower has rather sought to make itself an active political player in the land, one which had to protect its own interests (it was at some point a proper nation like the others, later reduced to a city-state) while at the same time painting itself as a supposedly neutral political power above and aside from the nations.

And the Tower could only come to existence by granting each group that found it a very great freedom. Many of the Tower's problems come from the failure to dissolve the Ajahs at the founding, but I would bet there would have been no agreement to form the Tower otherwise. Ajahs have their own agendas, their own rules, and they've become political entities of their own, and millenia later, these Ajahs are stronger in their divisions than in the central organization they form.

Egwene seems set to greatly reduce the power of the Ajahs (which would be a great thing, what the Tower needs is a real administrative structure, not internal political divisions that should be abolished), and without realizing it yet, she's already began the destruction of the obsolete system (and the largest Ajah has an obsolete role/philosophy that has to be eradicated for the common good, and the second largest Ajah will soon have fulfilled its purpose and will have to move on) . She's now inviting outside groups to join the system, but none of them will have direct political influence within the Tower like the Ajah have. They might negotiate something with the Amyrlin, only to see some Ajah blocking the application of the deal it in the Hall. Then there are the male AS who will no doubt integrate the Tower in some way, as full AS or as a separate group like the WO/Windfinders. The men won't want an Ajah system, it's a structure invented by women for women. Men are far more likely to want a job-based administrative system, that don't force them to adopt a political party at the same time.

Soon, you will have great Healers among the Asha'man, WO, Windfinders that don't follow the rules or regulations of the Yellow, and that's but one example. Elayne has also opened a pandora's box by making a national deal with channelers. Between that and the new alliances with groups that serve exclusively one nation/culture, it seems obvious Jordan has set up a situation that will be chaotic and unviable unless the Tower stops forcing the sisters to abandon their national ties, reduces a lot the role of the Ajah if not abolishing them altogether, and create new instutions to replace the Hall, where everyone can be heard, not as official groups, but as individuals sometimes formed into a punctual lobby group to present specific issues to the administration. The Tower doesn't need Sitters, it needs people in charge of specific adminstrative matters (education, medical, external affairs, engineering, knowledge and so on) and someone above them who is less a ruler than the top administrator.




I disliked the whole storyline a lot, but to be honest I didn't recognize Elayne or her thinking in much of anything, and I blame Sanderson completely for this. Elayne in KOD was getting more and more clever politically (and a great deal of her political thinking was from Machiavel - not the "evil" myth but the real political thinker!). In TOM like most characters she lost many IQ points all of a sudden. I'm sure Jordan essentially meant her to make the moves she made, for Cairhien, with Perrin, with the Kin, with Mat and so on, but I thought Sanderson executed this poorly for the most part (he also butchered it with his absurb book structure and Elayne's time travels, but it's mostly Elayne's character and her motivations - very poorly presented and dumbed-down, which broke away from what Jordan was building that I mean here). I managed to keep my interest in the Andor storyline though I'd wish Jordan didn't have to split it in small chunks overlapping from book to book as he did, but much like the rushed and oversimplified Tower resolution in TGS, I found Elayne's storyline in TOM very disappointing, the second part anyway (not all her scenes are bad, but the political ones for the most part were).