First of all, the codes:

Arrogance or Pride

Selfish or Inconsiderate behavior

Tyranny / Abuse of power

Out of Touch mentality

Judgmental Attitude

Lust for Status / Envy

Lust for Power

Sycophantic behavior or cowardice. This applies to her acceptance of or requiring such behavior, as well as acting that way herself.

Betrayal of a personal nature

Dishonesty

Protagonist Syndrome {behavior that is absolutely contraindicated unless the character knows she is a main character in a fantasy novel and thus critical to the resolution of the crisis, or bound for greatness against all in-story expectations}

Hypocrisy

Foolhardiness / Reckless endangerment of herself or others

And some that are venial level sins, or not explicitly bad or evil:

Flat out incompetence or incorrect conclusions or assessments

Stupid or Clueless behavior

Sociopathic mentality or desire toward violence or to victimize others (as opposed to actual action)

Petty, nasty or spiteful words and attitude / General rudeness

Uncooperative, resisting doing her part.

The Pattern at work, sometimes against Egwene, sometimes her going against it

Not a fault per se, but a noteworthy point of interest or milestone

Taking the side of the White Tower, or a position of inherent Aes Sedai supremacy

To cope with the…issues…in the writing style of this book, I will be using to indicate points where I believe her problem or issue result from mistakes by the production team.

Also will be used to indicate an act that, while not bad or wrong, is also not nearly as heroic as many people make it out to be.

Part 16Towers of Midnight, vol. 2
1: Last time, I left off with the vote by Egwene to take over exclusive control over the Tower’s foreign policy and diplomatic activities, only discussing the idiocy of the Sitters to vote as they did. So let’s talk about the other idiotic aspect – Egwene’s reason for making that demand. The motivation is obvious for her, stipulating the overall characterization this work has been building to, she wants power and wants to feed her ego, and at this point, those ends are best served hob-nobbing with the elites of the world. And with her paranoid hostility toward Rand, she is terrified that anyone else who deals with him might end up on his side, or coming around to his point of view. They are her minions, not his, and he is wrong, bad, evil and stupid, so they shouldn’t listen to him anyway!

But, objectively speaking, what are her qualifications to undertake this sphere of activity solely on her own authority? Even if we stipulate the best possible experience and knowledge gleaned from her activities, what in there suggests she has any ability to handle foreign policy, especially at the levels of the game at which the Tower plays? The Aiel Wise Ones are aggressively ignorant of wetlander politics, as Perrin observes when Sorilea takes the report from her subordinate in Cairhien, and as Egwene herself notes when she is trying to ascertain their interest in Berelain. The notion that her Two Rivers upbringing imparted her any insight into international affairs may be dismissed out of hand, she would not have received any such tutoring in the Tower during her brief novitiate, and obviously the Wise Ones could not have taught her anything. She has spent her entire tenure as Amyrlin focused exclusively on internal intrigue, and every mention of her lessons from Siuan cites only Tower-related practices, history & legal theory. The one time we saw her attempting anything remotely akin to this sort of business, at the meeting with the Andorans in tPoD, she bungled her attempts to talk to an Andoran noble, and might have as well with Talmanes, had he not been following Mat’s orders to support her.

Finally, there is the familiar and firm hand Egwene speaks of the Dragon Reborn needing. Hers might be familiar, but a perusal of her conversations with Rand show he has not really taken her seriously or paid any attention to her objections or point of view in quite some time. She is almost always clueless in ascertaining his relationships and intentions, often disbelieving what he says outright, and being taken in by his attempts to deceive her or hide things from her every single time. The only way she gets anything out of Rand is because her treatment of him has inured him to the fact that he’ll get absolutely nothing from her, except her harshest treatment, so he just gives in when it is not sufficiently important to him, as in the case of bonding Asha’man. When it is important to Rand, he simply refuses to engage her, or else uses misdirection, as in their prior meeting in the Hall.

Between her inexperience in dealing with rulers, and her ineptitude at dealing with Rand, there might not be a single initiate of the White Tower less suited to hold the power Egwene has just wrested from the Hall!

2: Gareth Bryne is the first person to follow Egwene and freely offer her his support without being utterly devoid of other options, or a girlhood friend (which, honestly speaking, makes his allegiance less inexplicable than Nynaeve’s, Rand’s, Mat’s or Elayne’s). All he has asked since being dragooned into the service of the Aes Sedai has been that he and his men get appropriate support, and that their lives not be squandered due to the ignorance of the sisters. Egwene is in a position to reward his loyalty, and protect the one thing he requires…and she trades it away for power. Now the military and soldiers will answer to a committee, which is always a bad idea for military decisions, as the Tower’s own Law of War specifically cites. Again, trust Egwene to get that exactly wrong – under the Law, the Amyrlin has dictatorial powers expressly to serve the cause of efficiency; while Egwene abuses the Law to gain dictatorial powers, she will later jettison military efficiency in another trade for permanent power!

Egwene specifically speaks of the Hall taking over handling the logistics of the army, but that Hall is led by a couple of women whose few areas of agreement included the idea that the military budget is where you can save money, at a time when they are wasting coin on dresses and servants for the Amyrlin, and ensuring the novices have white clothing for their exclusively outdoor lives. Another issue Lelaine and Romanda see eye to eye is their disdain for Gareth Bryne, as we see in the preparations for the aforementioned meeting in tPoD.

That’s the reward for supporting Egwene – she literally tosses you to the wolves when she doesn’t need you anymore. Now that no one is going to vote her dictatorial powers, Egwene could not care less about fighting a war effectively. She no longer needs to fight for the Amyrlin Seat, so Bryne is expendable. The only fighting left will be against the Shadow, which isn’t really an area of interest for her.

3: Egwene then moves the discussion to another proposal of hers by wondering aloud how can the Sitters “not have learned the foolishness of acts like this?” Setting aside the absurdly pompous and uncharacteristic language, what was so foolish about their actions? They did not want the Amyrlin there, the Amyrlin came, and they ended up with an agreement they did not want! That suggests that they had very good reasons for trying to meet without her! What on earth could Egwene be referring to? What has been foolish in such attempts, or how have they failed, except occasionally in execution? But let’s write that off as and look at her actual proposal.

First, she places requirements on the Sitters that they not leave, or their Ajah will designate proxy voters in their place. The Tower did not have any such rules when they were unable to Travel, suggesting that there are specific reasons for only wanting actual Sitters to cast votes. The far more frequent voting rules in the real world, is that absent is absent, and that proxies are held by people who would be voting anyway. Congress does not have substitutes – the legislators show up or don’t vote. Absentee ballots are filled out by the voters themselves, they do not have someone else vote for them. Even more absurd is Egwene’s concept of having someone else pick the surrogate voter! In order to prevent her Ajah Head pulling an end run around her, no Sitter can safely leave the Tower now. Now the First Whatever can ignore the wishes of the few sisters who have the power to oppose her, by sending them out of the Tower and then having her patsies cast their votes on her behalf. The books have certainly made enough mention of how often the Sitters are not in accord with the Ajah Heads, and we have seen how the Heads took advantage of the split to place their own lackeys into the two Halls. And the worst part is, if there is ever a time when this notion is unnecessary, it is now, when Traveling minimizes the time a Sitter would be away from the Hall. The Tower got along fine when the Sitters might leave for months or weeks, but now that the same trip will only take hours days, suddenly we need substitutes in their absence! The concept of a quorum is acceptable for nearly every other voting body in the real world, but there is something underhanded about the Hall meeting with less than 100%?

Egwene has just served to further alienate the Hall from the rest of the world, raised another bone of contention in their internal politics and helped to further concentrate power un-democratically.

And to that last end is the major thrust of her proposal – that the Amyrlin be notified of all meetings of the Hall, with plenty of lead time. When Saerin ignores the major purpose of allowing the Hall to meet on their own (checking the power of the Amyrlin Seat), and cites instead past practice & tradition (a near-toothless argument to a teenager), Egwene sneers that this tradition has only “been used for treachery, backbiting and division”. She is directly equating dissent with treachery! Opposing the will of the Amyrlin Seat, which she lambasted the Hall for not doing under Elaida, is treachery! And she cannot see why the Hall might possibly want to meet without her?

The Amyrlin has the authority to kick Sitters out of the Hall, and punish them for mentioning her lack of experience, or for smiling when she doesn’t want them to! How on earth are they supposed to be able to vote honestly and without intimidation, if they are forbidden from meeting without the Amyrlin? Under those circumstances, how are they every supposed to get the unanimous vote that nearly everything of significance, including the deposing of a tyrannical or incompetent Amrylin requires? Egwene scoffs that the last time the Hall met without the Amyrlin, they raised “a fool in her place”, and never mind that they also effected the deposing of another colossal fool, whose own reign was fraught with blunders, whom even the women who rebelled over her deposition told she alienated sisters and mishandled the situation with Rand. How would the Hall get rid of another Tetsuan or Bonwhin? How would they get rid of another Elaida?

The list of tactics that the Hall is not permitted to employ against a bad or evil Amyrlin, according to Egwene since she first acquired her dictatorial powers, include armed rebellion, voting her out of office, and pointing out her inexperience or lack of qualifications in discussions in the Hall. What’s left?

The whole point of the rule of law, and making leaders and rulers answerable to the law, is that even with a saintly genius in power, there are no guarantees of that condition lasting. Egwene has just subjected the Tower to an effective monarchy, and has pulled the teeth of the democratic element of the Tower’s government, because she cannot abide being countered or checked. And maybe because a certain author has the political insights of a dog turd.

What on earth is the reasoning behind Egwene’s speech to sell her power grab to the Sitters? The Last Battle is here. I will not withdraw my proposal. Either you will stand now, or you will be known – through all time – as one of those who refused. At the dusk of an Age, can you not stand for openness and Light? Will you not – for all of our sakes – make it impossible for a meeting of the Hall to be called without your presence? What is the appeal here? What Aes Sedai, aside from Elaida, has shown the slightest concern for how posterity views her? And even if it was that important to the sisters, do they really think that people are going to look back at the days leading up to Tarmon Gaidon, and curse the name of the Sitters who refused to stand to change on the spur of the moment, a centuries old law setting forth procedures for meetings? Yeah, that sounds exactly what everyone is concerned about in the histories of a world-changing battle. The words are nonsensical, and yet persuade a group of politically savvy and experienced tricentenarians to vote away their power.

4: Egwene, not finished with her idiotic handling of Gawyn recently, delegates her subordinate to send him a letter, ordering his return. Since, from Egwene’s point of view, the whole problem with Gawyn is that he A. does not follow orders, B. sees their relationship as personal, instead of professional, and C. has no respect for her office and ignores Aes Sedai who relay her orders to him, could there be a more stupid method of communication to attempt, or more idiotic message to send him?

5: During their meeting with Nynaeve (Egwene does not allow lunch breaks – even your meal time belongs to her), Egwene criticizes Rand for not giving her specific details about saidin being cleansed when he came to the Tower and she refused to listen to anything he said, and kept objecting to anything he intended to do. She also gets pissed at Nynaeve for pointing out a parallel situation between her and Rand, and complains that Nynaeve & Siuan “should have seen (distrust between sisters) during Elaida’s reign,” when neither of them spent any time with sisters in the Tower during Elaida’s reign.

She also refuses Nynaeve’s offer to lead the fight against Mesaana, fully cognizant of the mistake she made in getting caught changing the harbor chain. As always, Egwene only pretends to take into account flaws or mistakes, so she can claim to have considered them. They never ever prevent her from making the same mistake twice, or from doing what she wants to anyway. And the grounds on which she refuses Nynaeve have to do with her alleged superiority in Tel’Aran’Rhiod. The woman has never faced a Forsaken there in her life, while Nynaeve has defeated the one most skilled in Dreamwalking, and captured her! As with her chasing Nynaeve and Elayne out of the room when they reined in Siuan back in Salidar, Egwene cannot stand to let anyone else have the credit and glory, even if they have the actual accomplishments.

6: In his conversation with Elayne, Gawyn invents entirely new reasons why he hates Rand. Funny, he had none of those reasons before meeting Egwene, aside from the whole murder mix up, as he expressed mental regret that Rand turned out to be the Dragon Reborn, because he liked him.

His accusations are somewhat off-base, as well. “Casting down thrones” is the phrase Gawyn uses to describe occupying power vacuums – Rand neither cast down rulers, nor eliminated any monarchial offices, which is what ‘casting down thrones’ refers to among people who speak English; all the thrones that existed on the day Rand and Gawyn met are still there, albeit with the occupants removed, but none of them by Rand; rather, he is sort of responsible for the creation of a throne, in Tear.

Where before, Gawyn expressed liking, now he is driven to nearly-homicidal fury by the notion of Rand overreaching his birth caste and daring to interfere in national affairs. Who does that sound like? The girl who sneered at every manifestation of Rand’s authority, saying he’s a shepherd, not a king, and being upset that he commands the Aiel not to murder civilians, rather than politely asking them, seems to have conveyed her attitudes to her boyfriend. And he has the temerity to criticize Elayne’s affection for Rand as a mental illness symptom.

On the topic of the Trakands, who comprise Egwene’s love interest and general best friend, their common background goes a long way to explaining those relationships with Egwene.

Being raised with the loving attentions of the hypercritical Morgase, the Tiger-mom teaching style of Elaida, the snark and putdowns of Lini, and their primary paternal influence a man who only cares about the kids to the extent that he is sleeping with their mother, and not a minute past that relationship…this background makes Trakands very grateful for any crumb of affection that gets tossed their way. Gawyn all but worships Galad, whom everyone else finds off-putting at best, because Galad is the only person in the entire series who is nice to him, doesn’t criticize him relentlessly, boss him around or beat him up. Elayne, meanwhile, has, at some point or other, asserted her sisterly feelings for Min, Aviendha, Egwene, Birgitte, Careanne, Sareitha, Adealas, Vandene and Merilille. Reanne Corly stirs great emotion in her on more than one occasion as well, and of course, she falls in love with the very first eligible male she encounters who is not a relative, employee or subordinate. All of these are people she had never met three years before this book.

Trakands are kind of easy marks and desperate for love, is what I’m saying. That explains how Egwene obtains a husband and a best friend – low hanging fruit is all she is capable of picking.

Gawyn is annoyed with himself for not recognizing Marille’s Seanchan accent. The first Seanchan he speaks to in the entire series, and he should have recognized her accent? That’s almost as deranged as her Kinswoman escort nodding “sufferingly.” Which is not even a word.

7: Egwene mentally snarks that it would be difficult to hold Nynaeve back from attacking Mesaana if the Forsaken attacks Egwene’s meeting in Tel’Aran”Rhiod. Except for the time Birgitte kept her from attacking Moghedian with little effort, merely a reasonable explanation, and all the other times where she did NOT seek out or attack Forsaken in that medium. The only character who goes looking for fights with the Forsaken, aside from Rand, because that’s his job, is Egwene. But, as always, she paints her friends with her own brush.

8: Egwene apparently uses human decoys to hold a fake meeting in the Hall in the world of dreams, where no initiate of the White Tower is as capable as she, supposedly. That’s like Thor telling Hawkeye to wear his cape so the bad guys don’t kill Thor and deprive the world of thunder. If they try to kill Egwene, isn’t she much more likely to notice earlier, and be able to teleport to safety, than any of her “daughters?” Sure, she posts Nynaeve to attack if Mesaana makes an attempt, but with strict admonitions to be “very careful. (sic)” In other words, she makes sure Nynaeve will hesitate before coming to the rescue of Egwene’s poor decoy. Is this anything other than a dick move? Why doesn’t she just make a meeting full of fake dream people? Or are those only to be used to threaten to rape Nynaeve?

Remember how Siuan would, since the Dark One started groping the world more than ever in tGS, start adding the word “fish” to random nouns, even if her dialogue subsequently failed to make sense? Well now the Wise Ones are doing it with sand. Remember all the references to sand-badgers among the animals of the Aiel Waste? The context of the whole comment is that the Windfinders do not belong in T’A’R, because “It is not an abandoned sand-badger’s den to be explored.” That is the Aiel go-to expression for a safe place? “This is T’A’R, it is very dangerous for people to come here, not at all like the perfectly safe pastime of exploring an abandoned sand-badger’s den!” What makes their abandoned dens so safe? Do the sand-badgers do a safety check to get their security deposit back before they leave? And how big are sand-badgers that people can “explore” their dens? What the hell are animals that big doing in a desert?

And why are the Wise Ones being so obnoxiously rude to the Windfinders right out off the bat? Even if Tel’Aran’Rhiod is dangerous (still waiting for it to actually kill someone at this point in the series), the Windfinder are coming at the invitation of experts, so they should be as safe as possible, right?

9: During their discussion, Egwene has the temerity to think that her experience being spanked and then Healed right away refutes the Windfinders’ claim that life in the Tower is softer than busting your ass on a wooden sailing ship, which one of the great writers in the English language compared adversely to imprisonment with the chance of drowning (fun fact, one of Samuel Johnson’s works unwrites itself every time Brandon Sanderson publishes one of his collections of magic system descriptions and randomly strung together words). There have been plenty of references to how the Sea Folk liberally use flogging and randomly hit people not moving fast enough. You know, exactly the way Katerine was reprimanded for hitting Egwene? Also, her so-wise Wise Ones sneered at White Tower training as coddling at Egwene’s first meeting with them.

But then, Egwene honestly seems to believe that she “understands ji’e’toh and the Three-Fold land.” Yeah, as well as anyone understands a country they see only through tent-flaps while living a sheltered and protected existence, and a belief system they spent every moment claiming they did not understand, when they were not randomly misapplying it to wetlander brawlers.

She also insultingly suggests that the Aiel send apprentices to the Sea Folk so that they can conquer their fear of water. All Egwene knows about that, is that the first Aiel she met talked very matter-of-factly about how they improvised a means to cross a major river. It is fairly certain that Elayne would not have revealed Aviendha’s discomfort, since she was careful not to mention it even to Aviendha herself. If there is anyone who needs to conquer fears of water, it is not remotely anyone of Aiel blood, as even Aviendha’s response to her fear was to deliberately confront it.

She describes the Sea Folk as increasingly belligerent, when in fact, they have behaved with remarkable forbearance, considering how many Aes Sedai have been bothering them the last few years, making demands, and then trying to weasel their way out of repayment. Including in this very meeting.
2

As in the case of her discussions during her captivity in the Tower, Egwene gets what she wants for absolutely no reason. In exchange for teaching two apprentices and a handful of Sleepweavers, the Sea Folk forfeit the teaching they have already been promised in exchange for saving the wetlands from the Dark One’s touch. Included in that teaching is “anything they want to know,” meaning they can demand to learn the technique of MAKING Sleepweavers. There was NO reason for the Windfinders to agree, all they did was surrender several advantages they already had, to gain nothing more. All Egwene offers the Aiel, and the Sea Folk that they were not already entitled to, is refraining from stealing ter’angreal from them! As she herself points out to the Sitters, the Tower’s claim to anything the other people had was effectively unenforceable.

The Tower is keeping every other stand lamp unlit…”to conserve oil”. This was ridiculous, when they were endangering their paperwork by using flaming lanterns in a crowded tent. Now, when there are homicidal consequences to having too many shadows, it goes beyond ridiculous to criminally incompetent. Novices make balls of light for practice! Tying off weaves leave them going forever! The Tower has access to infinite free light, but chooses instead to waste fuel, because they are too stupid to realize as much. Also, this sort of thing is what someone ( ) is supposed to be good at, so you can’t even write this off to authorial issues.

10: Setting aside that Egwene’s tactics are so inept that Bair talks to her like she’s a Windfinder or something, when she encounters Perrin, she starts blathering at him like an idiot, and then tries to tie him up and abandon him in the middle of a battlefield! With Darkfriends roaming free, she intended to leave Perrin tied up and helpless, explicitly telling him “I’ll be back for you.” And then she starts arguing with him over whether or not it is possible for him to do what he did. For someone who claims to be an expert in T’A’R, Perrin’s statement “It’s just a weave,” should more than suffice (if Brandon Sanderson can figure it out… ), but she still keeps trying to argue!

Whatever Mesaana taught, it was not writing or grammar. "Delightfully" is used to modify adjectives that describe a specific quality, rather than something as vague as “wonderful”. The first page of Google searches for the pair of words includes nothing published, just idiots making twitter comments and reviews. And if a rival does something for which you are grateful, you generally don’t describe her as wonderful, much less delightfully so. You’d think that connected as she is to the Dark One, Mesaana would be immune to that brain-warping thing plaguing so many good guys.

Egwene ultimately defeats Mesaana just as she wins arguments – because the other person stupidly accepts her absurd proposition. In this case, a significant contribution was Egwene being just as stupid that she believed her own claim that the Tower magically makes a person more than they are, or that by holding an office in the Tower, you become more than you are. I’m kind of getting the impression that in Egwene’s first conversation with Moiraine, she was lying like a rug: she was not afraid of the Tower changing her, she was ardently hoping for it!

Additionally, the confrontation only happened because of the fortuitous placement of the dreamspike trapping Mesaana and preventing her from taking the battle to the field of her choosing.

11: And Egwene only survives her victory, because the random oscillations of her boyfriend’s decision-making process happened to bring him into the Tower instead of challenging Birgitte to a duel, or going fishing, or seeking revenge on sand-badgers for causing his family tragedies, so he was there to guard her sleeping form. Because ONLY the most powerful of adversaries would dare challenge Egwene – surely no mere mortal could harm her!

12: In the conversation subsequent to Gawyn’s Healing, when he is barely functional, Egwene is forcing him to still grovel and promise absolute obedience in the future, in spite of his disobedience saving her life mere moments before, and the ensuing list of errant assumptions on her part that made his disobedience necessary.

13: As she sits on the field of Merrilor, still convinced of the efficacy of her plan to make Rand do what she wants because there are lots of armies there, Egwene notes how her games with the Hall and pretending to respect and listen to them have made them willing to work with her, even if she doesn’t do what they want. The parallel to Rand’s actual strategy, of course, never occurs to her.

14: When Morgase shows up, Egwene has two odd thoughts. One is that she knew Morgase was alive, and the other, is that when he sees the party in which she must be traveling arrive, Gawyn goes running off to greet his mother, whose supposed death has been the motivation for his entire character arc, making Egwene wonder that he is still impulsive and why is he running off. It should not really be a surprise to me at this point that she is A. bemused at a demonstration of filial affection, or B. keeping the secret of his mother’s survival from her fiancé and Warder. Interestingly, the last thing she heard on that topic was Gawyn blaming Rand for it, and being determined to avenge her. And here they are for a meeting with Rand, in which Egwene plans to oppose him…and she just happened to have forgotten to mention to Gawyn that he has no further need to avenge his mother? Note too, that despite her previous intentions to have sex with Gawyn, she’s been holding out even after they became bonded. Nothing like being sexually deprived for frivolous reasons to make a man that much more prone to lashing out violently…

One more to go. I'm going to really try to get it in one post, and one way or another, have it done within the next two weeks before I go on vacation. I'd rather not be trying to finish this up when I'm down the shore. But we'll see how it goes. Estimating how much time/space I'll need in the Sanderson books has been a lot harder than the Jordan ones, because I pretty much know those like the back of my hand.