#mesaana

[kevin-sedai]

Lews Therin didn't wanna necessarily be the very best, but catching the Forsaken was his quest, and to seal them away forever was his cause.

[wot-tidbits]

The Forsaken by Anass Boumarag

[wheelofmeta]

It's interesting to think of how when Mesaana got rejected for a researcher's position she got in a sensed forced into (pre-turn to the Shadow) into a 'those who cannot do, teach' situation by being made a teacher rather than a researcher the way she wanted. This wasn't even her going 'well I guess I'll teach instead', this was what she was made to do.

And then you learn the dangerous thing about her.

She is an excellent teacher.

In no way shape or form was this a good thing.

[halcyon-autumn]

Rip to the possibility of seeing Mesaana as one of the Forsaken in the show, undoubtably written out because the idea of an evil public administrator is not cool enough. The irony that her whole angst in the books is “no one think that I, the most evil public administrator, am cool” is not lost on me. Sorry queen I would have loved watching you be the most organized bitch in Randland

[theravennest]

Which Forsaken do we think they're gonna keep?

Known:

Ishamael

Lanfear

Moghedien

Graendal

My guess about the rest:

Semirhage

Asmodean

Demandred

Rahvin or Mesaana

[anira-naeg]

Lady Forsaken

[dcbnam-aep]

ive decided that the forsaken are the marauders of the wot universe

[apocalypticavolition]

In lieu of any official WoT on Prime announcements, I instead bring to you knowledge I received in a dream last night that Sammael had made the cut of the eight Forsaken the show would be using and that while Mesaana hadn't, she would be appearing in an AoL flashback.

[fedonciadale]

Another chapter of my Asmodemption fic!

The Forsaken meet.... Writing them is always fun.

Changing faces.

[highladyluck]

a little late but alviarin and/or mesaana?

Alviarin

Mesaana

Unfortunately I think my opinion boils down to ‘the virgin Mesaana and the chad Alviarin’ 😔

[wot-tidbits]

The Chosen Party Composition

[wheelofmeta]

I'm contemplating again which Forsaken will likely appear in the show and here is both my list and reasoning:

(I think I've done this before but I'm musing on it again)

Ishamael/Moridin: Well he's already appeared, so like, this is a 'no shit Sherlock' one

Graendal/Semirhage: I think these two will get merged, though no clue which of the names they'll use. They're both the doctor Forsaken, and you can easily smush their falls to the Shadow as she was the greatest healer of the age and an ascetic, have the fact she's a torturer revealed, and then have her indulge in *all* her vices once gone Forsaken.

Moghedien/Mesaana: Merge them since tbh they're both the two most involved in causing problems for the Aes Sedai, and you can even make it that whichever name gets used, you make it so the cowardice aspect of Moghedien is why she hunkers down in the White Tower, where she's less likely to be noticed/able to do a wider array of manipulations.

Sammael/Bel'al: Okay seriously we all know exactly why these two idiots need to just get merged, and I would assume that it's most likely Sammael's name would get used since he appears longer in-series/has more of an effect. You can still have him based in Tear/Illian, just have it be he runs from Tear, barely avoiding Moiraine's attack and faking his death and go to Illian. You can even still have him use the same appearances between countries since due to how long he'd be a lord in either country it's not like the other would necessarily know.

Demandred: His storyline as a Forsaken is one of the better for point blank mystery of where the fuck he is, and honestly I think they'd want to keep the fact that there were multiple people who turned to the Shadow who did it for resentment towards LTT, plus he's the most competent general. By far. It also helps keep up the mystery of if Taim is a Darkfriend/Demandred or not (since Taim has to appear to be the opposite of Logain). I just truly don't think they'd merge Sammael, Bel'al and Demandred into one character.

Lanfear: Seriously they can't cut her. They literally cannot with the role she plays.

Asmodean: Since the mentor plotline/Rand accidentally acquires a pet Forsaken. Also so we get a sense of just how *petty* a reason people could have turned to the Shadow.

Ones you can cut from the show proper:

Aginor: They can just have references to dead Forsaken and have it be that he already long since died (assassinated by the Light in hopes of preventing creation of new Shadowspawn?). Honestly half his role really came across as 'I am in the present' for pretty much the entire series.

Rahvin: Graendal is known for mind control/Compulsion, just have that aspect of Morgases plotline be on her.

Which ever Forsaken name/literal Forsaken isn't used for the merged ones

Ones I'm on the fence about:

Balthemal: I was originally going to put him on the cut list, but then there's the issue of the Aran'gar stuff. Then again there, there's the issue of how he (nor Aginor) didn't appear during the Eye of the World stuff, and thus it's sorta a question mark over how he'd die in the show/timeline then of things.

[asha-mage]

Missing the Mark: Graendal and the Forsaken

One of my favorite things about Jordan as a writer is this neat hat trick he has, where every time he enters the PoV of a new character, from random one offs to Our Heroes to the most Dastardly of Evil Overlords, he sits down, sets aside his own biases and feelings, and makes them come alive as a fully realized human person.

This especially what makes his villains, and the Forsaken in particular, such memorable antagonists. Jordan has this remarkable ability to step into the point of view of people that we the reader are predisposed to hate and want to simplify and flatten, and force us to confront the fact that their multilayered and nuanced. Their still bad people, but their actions are presented with context, their personal narrative given weight. We see their foibles and their strengths, the ways they delude themselves and the ways that they sometimes see with far more clarity then the heroes, and we see motivates and drives them. Their personal narrative, the story they tell themselves where they are the hero, is given weight and heft, and we are even on occasion allowed to root for and sympathize with the Forsaken (Moghiden in Mind Trap, Asmodean during his time Forcefully Reassigned to Team Light, Dashiva/Osan'gar trying to talk reason to Rand during the Seanchan campaign), all without ever letting the reader forget that these are horrible people who have committed atrocities against humanity that are still felt three thousand years later.

This is entirely possible only because of Jordan's ability to set his own biases aside when writing these characters. The Forsaken are engaging entirely because they are human beneath all the mythology and horror and awe inspiring power, and Jordan works to portray that humanity.

Contrast with Sanderson.

All of the Forsaken get a degree of flattening underneath Sanderson's writing, with the exception of Demandred (who has appeared so seldom up to that point their isn't much to flatten or work with), though the one who gets the worst of it is Graendal. And if I had to wager a guess, it's Sanderson's biases coming into play, affecting how he depicts members of the Forsaken.

Graendal, from her appearances prior to TGS, is a incredibly nuanced and interesting character. A former ascetic who dedicated her life to helping the mentally ill, only to loose faith in humanity after years of service, and abandon her ideals in pursuit of total carnal pleasure. She remarks during ACOS that her first steps to the Great Lord where 'full of pain' and that she dosen't like thinking about them. And yet....when we see inside her head she's still using the terminology of a psychologist, still regarding people as patients and thinking in terms of disorders and neurosis. The implications of her skill at Compulsion- that it descends from her attempts (and failures) to use the Power to heal broken human minds-, and of her need to be surrounded by adoring servants consumed by overwhelming love for her paint a fascinating portrait of a woman attempting to bury her trauma and pain deeply, and using any means at hand to accomplish it. Notable, despite her instance of not being willing to die even for the Great Lord of the Dark, she is one of the few members of Team Shadow who truly seems to buy the party line that the Wheel needs to be broken, and suffering stopped, and in accordance with the old rule of thumb she is one of the most devastatingly effective as a result.

And then Sanderson takes over, and she just gets flattened into puddy. Which is WILD, because based on the structure and set up, where Rand's personal character arc was meant to come to head around the same time he was confronting Graendal, based on the fact they have so many parallel issues and problems, their is so much juicy stuff to dig into with that face off that just...dosen't get dug into. And that's partly because Graendal looses a lot of her nuance and depth under Sanderson's tenor. Graendal becomes squarely about the carnal pleasures she peruses and the control she exerts over her victims, and nothing else. Her tendency to use psychologist terminology in her personal monologue is lost, her ability to sharply read people and gain insight into their motives is reduced to guess work about where Demandred and the others are hiding, and what their plans are. The fact that her sultry hedonist persona is a persona used to fool her enemies (something Demandred himself noted back in Winter's Heart) is forgotten and instead she is written as just a sultry hedonist.

Their are a lot of reasons this could be the case, but as near as I can tell it boils down to bias, and Sanderson's inability to set aside his own biases. Graendal is inherently sexual, and Sanderson's works are somewhat famously rather sexless. His strong Mormon beliefs about Free Will will later crop up in how he re frames the 13x13 trick (being unable to mention it without mentioning that actually no these people probably weren't turned to evil against their will, but rather just soul murdered and replaced with an exact evil duplicate) and it's no mistake that Graendal's Compulsion is treated as On Another Tier of Monstrosity entirely, while other Forsaken atrocities: the subjugation of an entire continent's worth of people by the subversion of their Prophecies, so that they can be used as an army for Team Evil, or the mass torturing of waves of innocents to turn them to Team Evil, are minimized somewhat minimized, still treated as bad, but considered less bad because after all the Sharans choose to follow Demandred, and Semrihages victims to be give in to the pain. (This is particularly egregious, where Messana's worst crimes: creating schools to the Dark One and raising an entire generation of children to cruel, hateful, and monstrous thugs- something that's noted to have made the Breaking worse go largely unmentioned in the rundown of Why She is Bad in ToM). But Graendal's use of compulsion, which leaves no room for the illusion of free will or choice, is treated with a level of abhorence by both the narrative and the characters- the later of which might make sense, but the former of which is something Jordan never really stooped to.

While Graendal gets it the worst, all of the Forsaken are flattened to a greater or lesser degree, along with other key Darkfriends. Moghieden's steely courage even in the face of overwhelming odds is largely lost, Messana's twisted motherly/teacher nature become simple arrogance, Alviarian completely looses relevance showing up in a few cameos, even Moridin feels more shallow: becoming more generally sad and sinister, loosing much of the anger that had always paralleled Rand's.

The main exception? Sanderson's self professed favorite among the Forsaken, Demandred, which shows the pendulum of bias swinging the other way. But I'll save talking about that for when I actually get to AMOL.

[amemoryofwot]

Was Moghedien hinged when she decided to abandon any plans for Tarmon Gaidon in favour of psychosexually stalking Nynaeve in her dreams?? Also how the hell is book Moggy Scottish but show Moggy French? Like Laia Costa’s accent is absolutely not French lmao. I really want to see the Mesaana/Semirhage merger too, like … what. Also Be’lal is NOT the “trans” Forsaken he’s not even resurrected lmao.