Tuon...oh Tuon... you are a hypocrite!

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Tuon is such a hypocrite! What does Mat see in her?

Confronted with the fact that she herself can channel, she still tried to train damane and enjoys it.

I totally despise her and feel so sorry for Mat.



(Currently reading the part where she tried to train Joline, Teslyn etc)
 

Nadezhda al'Lanahrin

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I can certainly understand the frustration with Tuon. But I think Jordan made the right choice from an author’s standpoint. Tuon was, her whole life, indoctrinated, that won’t go away so easily.
 
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Yeah, Tuon is a hard one ... on the one hand, what she does/believes is so truly horrible, yet on the other hand, it is what she is brought up to believe and her entire society is based on it ... it's not an easy thing to change your opinions about something in a situation like that. And as for Mat's attraction to her, there's the prophecy he's been hearing about who he'll be with for a long time and she fulfills that. Plus, sometimes you can really fall for a person in spite of the things you really dislike about them. I personally find Mat & Tuon to be a fascinating couple.
 

Boreas Silverfir

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Agreed that Tuon/Fortuona is an interesting wrinkle. It definitely does the world of service to ensure her mindset doesn't change too easily. If she near flippantly changed her mind just because she learned she could learn how to channel we wouldn't get the excellent confrontation and resolution to Egwene's Falma arc.
 
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I had a really good think about this - I am not so sure Tuon could overturn the norms and customs of the Seanchan. I am not so sure that the upper Echelons of the Blood would not rebel and bring along sufficient support to prevent the overturning of their political and moral systems of governance.

It's a really interesting thought with many real world parallels.
 

Catt Heckathorne

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I had a really good think about this - I am not so sure Tuon could overturn the norms and customs of the Seanchan. I am not so sure that the upper Echelons of the Blood would not rebel and bring along sufficient support to prevent the overturning of their political and moral systems of governance.

It's a really interesting thought with many real world parallels.
Exactly. When you spend years being part of a very specific culture it's extremely difficult to remove yourself from it and its belief ssystm. The Seanchan essentially have a slavery system similar to the system in the Handmaid's Tale, and they are being indoctrinated in that pedagogy from birth. It's a given: If you can channel, you are valuable, yes, but at the same time you are nothing. The psychology of the sul'dam and the damane are difficult, next to impossible, to change when you spend your entire life thinking that is the correct nature of things.
 
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Exactly. When you spend years being part of a very specific culture it's extremely difficult to remove yourself from it and its belief ssystm. The Seanchan essentially have a slavery system similar to the system in the Handmaid's Tale, and they are being indoctrinated in that pedagogy from birth. It's a given: If you can channel, you are valuable, yes, but at the same time you are nothing. The psychology of the sul'dam and the damane are difficult, next to impossible, to change when you spend your entire life thinking that is the correct nature of things.

Yes absolutely. I can envision young Seanchan girls that learn to channel actually handing themselves in because that is what their worldview would tell them to do.

It's easy from the outside looking in and applying your own moral virtue to a set of circumstances, but the Seanchans moral framework is completely different, I think Jordan always did a good job of portraying different cultures with different moral values and beliefs.

I think the revalation that Sul'dam can channel would be as destructive to the Seanchan as the Way of the Leaf revelations were to the Aeil, they have profound consequences for the ideological building blocks of their respective nations.
 

Catt Heckathorne

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I could see it taking at least a century or two to change that specific mindset, similar to the abolition history in the United States.
 
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