#sorry to neglect Min here I just don’t remember her storyline well enough to feel like I can write on it

[halcyon-autumn]

I’ve been thinking lately about the romances in the wheel of time books. RJ gets a lot of (deserved) flack for the romances in his books, but I do think there’s some stuff I really like that I don’t always see in fantasy, especially in the 90s when RJ was writing. Massive book spoilers under the cut

Okay so for all that RJ was Not Good at writing romance build up (Egwene/Gawyn, Nynaeve/Lan, and Thom/Moiraine as maybe the crowning example) I absolutely LOVE how he wrote female characters who were 1.) deeply in love and 2.) primarily motivated by things that had nothing to do with their romantic partner.

Elayne falls rapidly in love with Rand in book 4, and then proceeds to have a bunch of arcs that have little to nothing to do with Rand - hunting the Black Ajah in Tanchico, solving fantasy global warming with the Bowl of Winds, and taking the throne of Andor. Even though Rand tried to “give” the throne to Elayne (which pisses her off), she still has to struggle for it and overcome significant hurdles. Nynaeve’s whole plot of learning to break her block while maintaining her passion and rejecting Aes Sedai serenity has nothing to do with Lan. Same with Egwene, Aviendha, Moiraine, Tuon, and even Suian (and personally the Suian/Garreth Byrne relationships is one of my least favorite relationships in the series).

It’s so refreshing! I devoured book after book as a kid in the 90s and early 00s and the romances were usually SO central especially for the female characters. Even when reading the books, I remember being 14 and going “shouldn’t Elayne be with Rand somehow? Shouldn’t he be helping her take the throne?” Simply because that’s what I was used to. Think of how much weaker the story and the characters would have been!

The crowning example is in aMoL (which I know was written by Sanderson, but I feel like RJ laid enough groundwork and precedent that he still gets a bit of credit) when Rand proposes the Dragon’s Peace and both Aviendha and Elayne have BIG criticisms of what Rand tried to do. They love him! They worry about how it will affect their relationships with him! But their devotion and responsibility to their own people trumps their romantic ties and the narrative *doesn’t punish them for it.* It’s a great scene and one of my favorite Sanderson chapters in the books.

Anyway, I was just thinking how interesting it was that the thing I like least and the thing I like most about RJ’s romances both come from his focus on individual character motivations over his focus on romance.