I don't think RJ would have thought this would create "huge problems" in the series, it's more a question of pride or perhaps annoyance at feeling he let fans down or somethign like that. RJ always gave the impression of someone who really hated being caught making mistakes or giving a wrong answer, or letting people down maybe. Harriet confirmed this was more or less the case. He was really pissed off about inconsistencies escaping editing and stuff like that, and annoyed at himself when this was repeatedly pointed out to him by fans that this character vanished between two scenes, or that he got the wrong Ajah for a sister and stuff like that. There's even cases where he denied a mistake and "miraculously" the mistake was corrected in a next printing (he did that notably about Tom's knives). Of course we don't know if RJ at the Q&A denied the mistake because he was convinced it didn't exist and upon checking he had the change made, or if it was bad faith (I suspect it was the former). It look like RJ took pride in keeping everything as consistent as he could and that his reader could trust that.

It's still unconfirmed if RJ included the Forsaken women in his 21 levels system. We know for a fact he developped that tool to simplify keeping track of deference levels and make it easier to determine on the go as he wrote what a sister can and can't do and to which degree loosely. It would have been useful for creating and "casting" scenes too, selecting which AS he should include in a group to be able to pull a specific outcome/plot point. A look at his file (he had two, the extensive one and the short form), and he knew how to describe a weave in a scene, or knew he couldn't have a sister do something and she must link to do it (eg: the Namelles).


The system would not have been terribly useful for the few cases were he had to compare Moghedien to Nynaeve and so on, or to keep track of how Lanfear stood versus Graendal. He simply had to determine for all the "freaks" above and below the AS their % of strength, with Lanfear standing at 100% and Morgase.. well, very low or 1%.

I tend to agree with you that the list and the intentional vagueness of many descriptions left RJ room to manoeuver. We don't know (and likely never will) when RJ created the list. He would have had fairly little need for a work tool like this very early on. If created it around book 4/5 (that's what I think), when he could no longer easily keep track of all the women's strength in their character file, he possibly has chosen to devote some levels (the highest or the lowest, we still don't know) to the Forsaken women from the onset, just to make sure he kept things consistent in case it got more complicated than he thought at some point. There's obviously some variations within a level itself but probably not that much as RJ increased his freedom by adding more factors when sisters are too close in strength, such as how many years they spent as Accepted and Novices and so on. The more details he gave, the more constrained he became with some characters, but for the most part this affected levels of deference and the impossibility to choose sister X for one scene/storyline, but RJ introduced so many sisters he had no shortage to cast any scene, especially when sisters went by groups of 40, 13 or in the Tower and the Rebel camp. Beside, if he felt the need for a sister to be able to do a specific weave for which he's constrained about her strength (possible eg: Verin and her compulsion), the time had come to create for her a backstory about an undeclared angreal. Angreal provided RJ with another mean to be even more vague about the strength of anyone in any given scene.

Perhaps differences between each level aren't necessarily even. For the middle levels, those I think RJ used for the AS, this would have been much easier to keep it even, for the level numbers gave him the level of deference automatically (the deference someone of level 6 gave a level 9 would be the same someone of level 3 gave a level 6, I mean.

OTOH, there's really no reason, if the 21 levels cover all women, why RJ would have kept it even for the levels above the AS (eg: is Lanfear truly on a level of her own, of is she sharing the level with several other weaker "freaks" including Graendal, Semirhage etc. for whom RJ chose to determine a specific strength percentage, whereas level 21 (or 1) is merely a very quick reference to loosely situate them. Characters like Lanfear, Nynaeve, that old grandma novice are so few that Jordan could assign the specific reference strength percentage to every last one of them and use that for the rare cases he needed to compare one of them with a sister part of the 21-level system.

Of course, a good case could also be made that Rj may have devoted the 21 levels to the AS because they're the only ones for whom this reference tool was really useful and for each character introduced whom he wanted to stand below or above those levels (there's not a ton of them, they're all exceptional in some way, from Morgase to Lanfear), he more simply determined the specific strength in %, with Lanfear being at 100% and Morgase very low.

It's possible dividing 100% (or the number above which the ability was meaningless, eg: all those under 16%) by 21 provided RJ with the ideal number of levels, 8, 10 or whatever to spread the AS on.

But I must say that the 21 levels covering a non "friendly" range of the 100% scale, like 13% to 48% (I use these numbers purely for illustration, I can't be bothered to venture a realistic guess for the real range!) would sort of make sense and explain why RJ chose to use levels instead of sticking to strength percentages. It would mean they only simplified things for him for matters of deference among AS, reducing a larger % range into a more convenient 21 levels on which he could regroup the sisters. Much easier to set up scenes if for 8 AS involved he has two level 6, five level 3 and one level 8 than if they each have a unique percentage, and the gap between the level would simply be the % he found arbitrarily convenient and that left him enough wriggling room. He could have, but didn't need, to be more precise and assign everyone an exact strength percentage. Not for deference, and not for known skills either. The levels could also have simplified a little the initial distribution of the AS to loosely reflect the zone of the bell curve they covered.

It's not impossible the 21 levels cover a range which is simply enough a multiple of 21, most likely 84% in the case, thus with 4% increment between levels. Outside this range in both directions, there's possibly no one (For all we know, Lanfear isn't a true 100% but perhaps she's really just the most powerful woman born during her Age, not the most powerful in the absolute) and that anyone below a certain percentage at which stands Morgase can't do anything at all with their ability are got excluded.


I don't think the notion that he initially distributed the AS on the 21 levels than later changed the value of each level to spread it to all the channelers makes much sense. It would have been a lot of work, and there was a big risk he'd create discrepancies or reduce the usefulness of his system, eg: sisters who stood 3 levels apart initially were suddenly all on the same level under the new distribution.

Brandon did mention RJ kept a similar file for the Asha'man. He didn't say RJ also used a level system for the men, though (someone at the signing asked him, he didn't know for sure. He clearly had not used it nor more than took a peek at it at the time).