Chosen Hobbies

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

and also in many ways have her be the moral center. the one who advocates running into danger for a purpose. who wants to save the world in a visceral way. who already understands what it is to be a servant of all even when she isn’t yet at the white tower.

In This Life (Or The Next)

“your life isn’t going to be what you thought”

I was as frustrated as any every Nynaeve fan in 2x08 when Elayne had to prompt her to remember she was a Wisdom and could heal people without the One Power. Book Nynaeve doesn’t struggle with that, and it felt like the back half of the season just kept working to make Nynaeve look bad.

But then I started thinking about her overall arc, and about how eventually she’s in a cave, unable to use the One Power, and has to save a woman’s life to keep the world from literally ending if she doesn’t. This season, this episode, and this moment in particular could be a fabulous parallel/contrast to season 8 Nynaeve (willing it into being!!).

Season 2 Nynaeve is afraid of the power she could wield and doesn’t have a clue how she fits into the world any more. Like Moiraine said in 1x05, she can’t go back to who she was before, and she won’t be able to relate to the people she knew before in the same way. But she still hasn’t learned to appreciate it for the gift it is. Everyone has been telling her how special she is, but she hasn’t been able to demonstrate any actual results yet. In the arches she watches as everyone she loves is killed or lost because she’s unable to save them, with or without magic. And then in the back half of the season she trusts the wong person and gets betrayed, gets her best friend tortured and enslaved, accidentally exposes Ryma and she gets enslaved, and can’t seem to get back on the right foot from the moment she heads for Falme. Plus the bloody Daughter Heir of Andor got dragged along and gives her zero respect. She’s learned she really doesn’t know anything of this world and that it’s so much bigger than she thought. So when she’s faced with death and injury on the battlefield she’s paralyzed. She’s forgotten what’s she capable of, she’s afraid of failure, and she’s lost her confidence.

But season 8 Nynaeve will have mastered her powers, done the impossible more than once. She will have traveled the world and experienced so much of it. She will have been humbled by powerful women, and humbled powerful women herself. She will have earned her place in the world. And this time, when faced with the literal end of the world she will know that she is more than her magic powers and she won’t doubt or be paralyzed, she will be able to just act. And she’ll be amazing.