It's amazing how of all the self-aggrandizing bits from the Forsaken's lips that people swallowed whole, this was brushed off or ignored, but was the absolute objective truth.
Yup.
Zzzzz...thud Ahem. Not to demean the work Terez and co did, not to mention Team Jordan, but from what was said in the prior post, it's all fairly irrelevant for anything significant beyond Aes Sedai interactions, and that only because of their moronic hierarchy, which I think was intended to be a commentary on people prefering structure and knowing their place to the uncertainty of freedom. Also an illustration of sort of structure women preferred, even if it would be intolerable to most men. The need for some sort of caste system where everyone knows her place resonates with most popular entertainment depictions of adolescent society. One of the things that always annoyed me about every TV show or film set in a high school was the explicit delineation of cliques and factions based on activities, looks, interests, and background. I felt it an unnecessary and unsupported melodramatic device, except I have been told by people who attended coed high schools that it is, in fact, based, at least loosely, on the reality of their experiences. My own school and work experiences were either centered on an overwhelmingly or entirely male population, or with minimal social involvement in more equally-gendered environments. And there was no social hierarchy, particularly not one that bled into other aspects of life, or affected school or work or anything else. I think the WoT notion was supposed to be that women want everything to be in its place, and to HAVE a specific place, even if the assignment of such places is arbitrary. I would presume the corollary would be that the male desire for structure manifests in a specific and explicit hierarchy (i.e. military ranks), but more strictly compartmentalized in its authority. Men would have ranks and not need something like strength as a constant and universal standard.
The latter attitude being more prevalent in modern society would, according to this mindset, be a result of that society being male-dominated, as opposed to one in which the ultimate power was the exclusive province of women.
Back to the original point of my disinterest in One Power strength, for me, it suffices to know that the system exists, and how it affects the important characters. The way most people cite the lists of strength levels strongly suggests their interest has little or nothing to do with RJ's intended purpose in specifying the differences in strength between various characters, since they are usually speculating or referencing individuals for whom the issue is largely irrelevant. So long as you have the minimum necessary strength and control to effect the death of a human being (and the presumptive knowledge, mental state and opportunity to apply that One Power ability) you are quite capable of killing anyone on the list. Since that criterion applies to just about every channeler who appears in the books with the possible exceptions of Morgase and Sorilea, for the practical purpose to which most people would put the list (Answering "who would win?" ) is useless. In fantasy-based video games, as your character progresses and gains more and more strength to use magic-like powers, for the most part, his threshold for injury will increase as well. An arrow that can kill a 1st level character will do no more than annoy that same character at 10th level. But an arrow that will kill a 14 year old novice on her first day after testing, will still kill a 300 year old Amyrlin Seat whose strength is at the top level if it hits her in the same place. A point Wheel of Time characters repeatedly allude to.
I diagree with a lot of the gender based motivations you give to a strength based hierarchy. I think a far likelier reason is that the early Tower was a very fractious place, with many allusions to assassinations and fights. In such a place, hierarchy being set on the basis of strength is not at all surprising, since you were most likely to survive and thrive if you were strong. Organizations like the Wise Ones and the Windfinders don't exhibit any such reverence for strength because they never came together out of disparate organizations with differing view points.
But I agree that there is too much reliance placed on OP strength by some readers.
