WoT Reread New Spring Chapter 4

WoT Reread New Spring Chapter 4

I forgot how long this chapter is. It is so long.

Leaving the Tower

Siuan and Moiraine leave the Tower and travel to the camp where they are going to begin taking down names.

·Description of a room for no narrative reason. Look, if he was trying to set a tone, it would be one thing. If the characters were going to be in a room, it would be one thing, if it was an important way to characterize a location, it would be one thing! But Moiraine’s room is none of those things. In all honestly, I find this charming, but I am amused that this room is getting so much description when it meets none of the previous criteria. My dude.

·I have misophonia and it hates KR’s ‘sl-p’ words above all else. The sheer amount of ‘sleep’, ‘slip’, and ‘slippers’ I’ve been hearing is driving my nerves insane.

·Despite the fact that this is supposed to be an out of the ordinary event and the inciting incident of the series, it is giving us a lot more of what regular life for Accepted in the Tower is like.

·Strangely, knowing all of the stuff that Moiraine packed that will not be mentioned in this chapter is helpful to me. It is also a good way for us to get to know Moiraine by learning what she thinks is important.

·Siuan is not a horse girl, and I love that.

·There is a lot of description of the city, but not in the same way that made me so frustrated with it earlier. Here, it feels like it is contrasting the city of Tar Valon with the tragedy going on outside as well as showing off how so many people from all over the continent mix together here. Also it feels in character for Moiraine to notice what she does.

·There’s a brief non-scuffle with the white cloaks that I had forgotten about that ultimately just let’s us know that they are here and they are definitely taking the opportunity to heckle Tar Valon while so close.

·Moiraine and Siuan taking every opportunity that they can to use the power so they have excuses if anyone catches them.

·So here, Siuan tries to convince a guardsman to see her way and it doesn’t work, but she does seem to be considering him afterwards. I wonder if this is just us seeing how Siuan eventually becomes the Amyrlin that she does. Small little moments of her attempting persuasion, deception, and other forms of manipulation are done so she can see how different people interact with them and adjust her approach accordingly. Moiraine talks about how Siuan sees puzzles and patterns, so this would make sense. In essence, while this looks like Siuan utterly failing at browbeating a guard, it actually is Siuan making a mistake, realizing it, analyzing what happened and what went wrong, and filing it away for the future while observing her mark to guess what alternate approaches would work. I’m pretty sure I’m not just making this up either. Moiraine comments on Siuan liking puzzles once more and says she’s looking at the guard as if he was one of her puzzles, and then Moiraine makes a statement about how Siuan sees patterns. I just wish we got more of this in her POVs.

·I also think this could be a good comparison with Egwene. This book came out between Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams, so it was there after Egwene got captured by the White Tower, but before we got to see her begin manipulating people and events in the Tower. A lot of the next few books involve Egwene using the skills she learned (many of which were with the help of Siuan) to beat the White Tower from the inside. We get to see the origin of those skills here.

·There’s just some more back and forth with Moiraine being a disaster bisexual and thinking about pretty guards and pretty Accepted. Good for Moiraine. The chapter ends with them getting set up at the new spot.

One thing my Siuan rant reminded me about is when I first read this book, I was just thinking of it as a Moiraine and Siuan story, but on this readthrough, I’m also thinking of it as a Moiraine and Siuan and Rand and Egwene story. In the rest of the series, I kind of think of Moiraine as Rand’s mentor and Siuan as Egwene’s mentor and the two of them are reflected a lot in their students. I joked with a friend once that sometimes you can really tell that Rand’s leadership style came from a spy and it shows up in some not great ways. I love Moiraine, but she is a spy, not a leader. And no, I’m not saying she messed up Rand’s leadership, he did that on his own bless him. I’m just saying that sometimes he’ll do something, like make sure he is surrounded by people that he knows want to hurt him because he knows their intentions for sure and having people mess each other up so they don’t think about rebelling against him, and my brain says, “that’s a spy move”. I also know that Siuan was also a spymaster and then became a leader (and Moiraine received training as a leader before becoming a spy), but I’m pretty sure that she pushes back against some of those tendencies with Egwene and she had experience as a leader by then. Plus, she comments on how her spy tendencies screwed her. Egwene still has plenty of sneaky spy in her, but I think there is a subtle difference in their motives and actions that is hard to explain. I’ll probably get more into it when the two actually come up as characters.  

Somehow, I skipped putting chapter 10 on here. My apologies.

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