They might have been gearing up for a long-term stay, but they didn't really have a clear plan of dissent or agenda to regain their places. The notion that they were separatists is beyond absurd (as it would be for any woman raised pre-EotW), and Siuan's ideas to seize legitimacy were obviously completely new to them. I think without Siuan's arrival, Tarna would have found them a lot more receptive to her negotiating them back into the Tower, with assurances that there were not going to be any penalties for their fighting and maybe no more show trials or anything like that, that they'd just put the whole mess behind them and move forward. And that was what Elaida was still offering. Ironically, I would not be surprised if in an alternate timeline, the former rebels turned out to be more cooperative and amenable to what Elaida would call reforms. Grateful to be back in the Tower, embarrassed at having rebelled, they'd be less persnickety about the limitations of her office and authority. The way the Ajah heads' youth movement succeeded so well at such remove suggests they are no more anti-authoritarian than any sisters. They were, after all, on strike against the removal of an Amyrlin who had exceeded her authority and acted in a high-handed and unilateral fashion.
BTW, while "keeping secrets" might not be grounds for stilling, that IS what is done with deposed Amyrlins. And Siuan's performance was definitely grounds for removal. The Hall is there for a reason, and the Amyrlin does not get to unilaterally govern the Tower as a dictator, without the Hall's permission. Much less on something as important as the Dragon Reborn. Keeping secrets is one thing, hiding the signs of the apocalypse is something else entirely. Her rationale for doing so was utterly ridiculous anyway, since Siuan herself was the one who reasoned out that the Black Ajah must be aware of the Dragon's Rebirth. The only people in the dark at the point Moiraine found Rand, were the forces of the Light. The news started reaching the rest of the Darkfriend community before it got to the Dragon Reborn himself, as we see in the Darkfriend social, from which Ingtar returns before Moiraine and Siuan tell Rand.
Largely through Siuan's efforts.
enough that Tarna saw it as fact, and sent a missive back to Elaida confirming that there was going to be no quick reconciliation. They gave her no hint of budging, remember? This is probably very strongly due to Siuan's lie, of course.
Whatever cause they think they had, it was certainly not fully legal. Her deposing alone was. Her stilling without a trial was not. Had Elaida had the sense to have her exiled or something, she would have had a much more easy reign.
These are Aes Sedai. They don't think outside the box well. Every other Amyrlin who was deposed was stilled, so of course Siuan had to be as well. Given her later behavior with Meidani, I would bet that Elaida, given her druthers, would have preferred to keep Siuan in the kitchens, or enjoy the idea of her working a farm, if Siuan was right about the grudge Elaida bore her. Had Siuan fallen and broke her neck, been replaced by Elaida and then the united Tower decided to pull Elaida down for transgressions akin to Siuan's, and no more deserving of stilling, they'd have done the same thing. It's what people have done with deposed Amyrlins for 2,000 years, and they're not, by the Light, going to change now.
But she overextended, as usual, and I'm sure Alviarin and Galina gleefully acquiesced at this chance to really divide the Tower as they had been ordered, while also making sure Siuan could never reveal anything she may know of the BA.
Too true.
She certainly did with the lies about Logain and her initial desire to see the Reds completely dissolved. But I never found much doubt that she also genuinely knew Elaida would be a disaster with Rand. I think she had a firmer grasp of how Elaida saw herself than most other people around her.
But it was also based on an extreme overreaction and a grudge from her training days not unlike Joline's toward Merilille. Elaida was not punished for being too hard on Siuan and Moiraine, but for coming too close to the real stresses of the test, because she wanted that badly to see them succeed. Recall too, at that point she had been the ONLY woman in the Tower (except maybe Gitara) who was working towards Tarmon Gaidon. Elaida would have had ample motivation to want strong, promising sisters being raised to the shawl. Cadsuane expressed a similar rationale for keeping an eye on Moiraine. This all makes the version they were told about Elaida's punishment fairly plausible, but Siuan wouldn't let it go. Twenty years later, she's surprised when Elaida proposes something she herself wants to do, and only in hindsight does she realize it is a perfectly natural response. While the Mistress of Novices at the time deserves her share of credit for exacerbating the breech (foster division between two of the strongest young sisters in the Tower and poison the good will that existed [if only one way at that point] between a Red and two Blues? Black Ajah jackpot! ), but there's no excuse for Siuan taking a ghetto mentality to the affair. I think Siuan did most of her growing up after reaching the shawl, and her immaturity at the time of her raising is probably an unspoken factor in the Ajah taking her in hand and forcing constructive work down her throat at the outset of her career. Recall that she had no agenda or cause at the time (aside from finding Rand, though that was both new and a secret), and just wanted to go out and have adventures, despite being well past the age at which people in their society are supposed to have settled down to a grownup lifestyle. In the normal course of affairs, she'd have probably matured into a very capable sister, but in the pressure cooker of the Tower's internal politics, her development was warped and calcified into something of an extreme personality, and she was given too much authority way too young.
At the time Siuan was raised, Elaida could possibly have made a much better choice, with more than a dozen years advising the ruler of the most powerful country in the world. She might have still needed her wakeup call about the limitations of her office (the downside of being away from Tower politics for so long), but not coming to power in an aberrant and aggressive faction, she would not have the opportunities to blunder as she did in real life. Once on the Amyrlin Seat, I think she'd have been more in touch with real world stuff, and her Red Ajah pragmatism might have been a better quality in an Amyrlin than Blue idealism (which all too often has intolerance as a flip side; even a Black Red like Liandrin has something of that quality, especially given what she says to Nynaeve and Egwene about having to work with people you don't like. Not a very Siuan thing to say at all - note how she appointed her closest friends as Keeper & Mistress of Novices, rather than balance her inexperience or pick a complementary personality type; I'm not saying she CAN'T work with enemies, she just doesn't really seem to, ever).
To the contrary, had Siuan been left where she was, Rand would never have ended up distrusting Aes Sedai as much, and given that Perrin, and Mat remember their meeting with her as being insaney scary but also very blunt and open, compared to other Aes Sedai, he might have been a lot more open to her.
Mat noted her strength and intensity, but did not trust her a hair, and beat feet as soon as he could. Whatever good impressions Rand and Perrin had of Siuan, it certainly gave Rand no confidence in her leadership of the Tower. He had no confidence in her ability to pull off the strategy Moiraine revealed, and which in hindsight, seems hopelessly naive. "Oh, we'll just tell everyone the truth and they'll cooperate!" Rand's own experiences in Tear alone put the lie to that, and the real Dragon Reborn might very well have inspired enough terror or worry or lust for power to overcome the usual diffidence toward the White Tower. I don't even think Siuan would have been carrying out that plan by the time Rand became public news. She gave no sign of it, and her own chagrin at the state of the world as she expressed to Moiraine in tGH suggests, she might have hesitated or moved more slowly in springing news like that when push came to shove.
In any event, the idea that taking the Aiel across the Dragonwall might discredit Siuan and ruin her coalition made not the slightest impression on Rand. Had it been Egwene, he might have thought twice about it, as we see him take care not to defy her more than he has to.
They both trampled on laws and customs. But Elaida almost exclusively did so to live her dream as the most important woman in the world. For Egwene, a big part of it was about the job well done, and RJ even had that terribly unsubtle prologue to Ravens to show us that. Egwene doesn't ever have a thought about being glorified in history books. And that difference in intent informs also their different approaches, and ultimately the results.
Because she'll be dead. She won't care. Other than that, she does, even as far back as Ravens, want to be the most important woman in the world.
Hardly. Siuan had much better reasons to resent Elaida than Joline did Merilille. More importantly, till Elaida deposed Siuan, Siuan didn't do anything with her resentments. Elaida was the one who let her resentment over her belief that Siuan told on her to Merean guide her actions, which played right into Alviarin's hands.
And yet, she never thinks of it once. Even Siuan doesn't go that far, claiming it is resentment of Siuan getting the Amyrlin Seat ahead of her. Elaida had enough insight on Siuan and Moiraine to figure out that they were up to something.
And there are tons of actual issues of disagreement between Siuan and Elaida. Rand, of course, is the most glaringly obvious one. If you can imagine Elaida ever being pleased he took the Stone and had Callandor, do let me know what alternate version of the story you've been reading. Siuan had no issues with Rand being free, nor any delusions that he was some sort of crutch for her to gain fame. She knew how dangerous he was, and never showed any inclination to imprison him.
IDK, she might have if Moiraine recommended it. She had no ideas anymore than Elaida did.
Once she knew the Foresaken were free, she tossed any plans of educating him in the Tower as well, and conspired to have him become more or less the ruler of Illian.
A Tower puppet ruler, you mean. And Rand figured out near the end that he was letting things like that tie him down. It was the wrong track, and one that Moiraine got him started on, though understandably, because from the point of view of the circumstances in which he took Callandor, it was the natural progression.
This is very much a practical difference between her and Elaida, as is how they dealt with the Hall, or anyone for that matter.
You brought up Fain, and his own assessment is both perfectly valid and very telling:
“He had been surprised to find Elaida on the Amyrlin Seat. Better than what he had expected, though. In many ways she was not so tough, he had heard, as the woman who had worn the stole before her. Harder, yes, and more cruel, but more brittle, too. More difficult to bend, likely, but easier to break.”
And that refusal to bend is very much a practical difference. It totally differentiates how they deal with any number of situations.
Again, not necessarily a bad thing, especially from the PoV of the Dragon, who has to buck the established institutions to get his job done.
Yeah. Sanderson really botched a lot, and his inability to have two people be right in the same scene, and the need to have one trump the other all the time definitely did not help either. I'm always flabbergasted by the people who claim he got most characters just right.
I frankly don't care about that "debate". It is meaningless unless we could have at least divined where RJ was going with the character. Maybe what you see as earlier flaws were set up for major redemption. Or what I see as earlier awesomeness is set up for a later fall. That Egwene al'Vere died at the end of Knife of Dreams with honey in her tea. Some flashes remain in the clearly RJ chapters of tGS, but that's the end of that.
Brandon has even been cagey with whether RJ intended for Egwene to die. The manner of her death, while thematically paralleling and mirroring all the right stuff, is still clearly something RJ only barely outlined, since the writing there was clearly not him at all.
In some ways, she is the most effective character to kill off. Of them all, she had the most plans for the future, and the greatest ability to guide the flow of the future. Seeing that cut off can really hit home the fact that the Last Battle matter, token though her death may be, in some ways. There's even a long term balance, seeing how Latra Pose outlived Lews Therin for so long after the end of the last age. But I can't really debate the character with a straight face once we move past KoD.
Me, either. I had a huge grin the whole time. As far as the post-KoD stuff goes, my thing was really about half an exercise in absurdity and farce and the other half trying reconcile the B-Sand crap with the real series as a sort of thought exercise or "fannon" development.
Thanks for this *NM*