#amol

One of things that I dislike about the Mat-Tuon relationship is that it feels like a narrative punishment for Mat (honestly, almost much everything in Ebou Dar and onward felt that way to me). But I’ve been thinking about that while I was reading CoT & KoD, and it made me wonder... what if it wasn’t the author who was punishing Mat here?

What if it was someone inside the narrative?

Mat saving Moiraine helps save the world, because she is able to help Egwene and Rand come to an agreement with each other. Mat living and dying also helps save the world by releasing him from the Horn and enabling someone else to use it (since he’s kinda busy and all). So, if two of Mat’s fates directly help save the world... what about the third fate?

Who does it aid that Mat marries Tuon? Does it aid Mat? Does it aid the Westlands at all? Why would marrying Tuon be part of his ‘fate’?

There not only does not appear to be a benefit to the Westlands & Rand, it actually seems to actively harm the Westlands -- Mat protects Tuon from being assassinated and considers ways to help the Seanchan Empire to survive past the shock of the sul’dam secret being revealed. Mat marrying Tuon also helps protect her/the Seanchan from Westlands retaliation for the invasion of their continent by putting the best general in history on the side of the slavers. Hundreds (potentially thousands) of people will end up staying enslaved as a result of the marriage, if Mat truly does mean to make certain to keep the Seanchan Empire alive in its current form.

It also doesn’t seem to aid Mat himself much -- he is trapped into a marriage where his wife’s way of ‘flirting’ is to constantly threaten to enslave or murder him, while he remains intensely attracted to many other women and obviously would not have chosen a monogamous relationship.

Mat does not end up being the key to the alliance between the Westlands and the Seanchan+ -- he’s much more important to Rand and Egwene reconciling (due to saving Moiraine) than he is to the Westlands and the Seanchan allying, because Rand is already pretty set on allying with the Seanchan at that point, no matter what the moral cost.

Ah, but Mat does... save Moiraine. From the ‘finn, the very people who gave him all his prophecies to begin with.

Mat is given three prophecies by the Aelfinn, in their last moments together in the doorway in Tear. Of those prophecies, two of them would happen no matter what as long as Mat stayed with Rand for as long as he did -- Moiraine made her choice to bodyslam Lanfear into the Eelfinn doorway based on what she saw in the silver rings, not based on what she heard in the Aelfinn doorway. And Mat would have gone to Caemlyn and gotten temporarily killed by Rahvin regardless of the Aelfinn prophecies as well (AMoL confirmed that this is the death that un-tied him from the Horn).

But their other prophecy -- that he would marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons -- is a prophecy that is only fulfilled based on Mat behaving according to how the Aelfinn have instructed him to act. Mat marries Tuon because they tell him to, no other reason. Before he finds out that she’s his prophesied wife, he was planning to leave her behind when he escaped; he was not attracted enough to Tuon as a person to consider bringing her with him on her own merits.

So this marriage seems entirely arranged by the Aelfinn and not by the Pattern*. Why would they do that?

Could it have been a punishment/price from the Aelfinn, who already know that Mat is destined to come back and steal Moiraine from them?

Tuon is perfectly calculated to be everything that Mat hates: capable of channeling, she’s a noble/royal, she abuses her power over other people and expects complete subservience from those around her, she threatens him constantly, she treats him as if he were her property, she would enslave his sister and other loved ones if she had the chance, and he doesn’t even want to be in a monogamous relationship to begin with.

In CoT & KoD, Mat talks himself into respecting and trusting her ‘because wife’ (which leads to her being able to undermine and betray him on multiple occasions such as attempting to leash the Aes Sedai in the circus or stealing his medallion) but even in their final scene in AMoL, he has to force a smile around her after she announces her pregnancy. This marriage is going to be a misery for Mat and yet there appears to be no in-text reason why it actually needed to happen. It happens because it happens because it happens.

We are warned that the Aelfinn and Eelfinn are tricky and that there is no way to beat them. It does feel much in the spirit of a fey sort of person if they gave Mat two types of prophecies: two true no matter what as long as he followed his thread of fate, and the third to exist as the price for learning the others.

And, side note and relevant to @markantonys: on rereading the text, the only ACTUAL prophecy that the Aelfinn specifically tell him will get him killed if he avoids it is that he needs to go to Rhuidean rather than going home to the Two Rivers (and it’s specifically because he will get MURDERED by people opposed to him fulfilling his fate if he doesn’t go there -- and this one is very believable! He gets the ancient memories and the medallion in Rhuidean and those are KEY to him being able to survive potentially deadly encounters with Shadowspawn & survive through dangerous battles).

He weedles the other three prophecies out of them at the end and there’s no direct implication that avoiding those three fates would lead to his death. I myself also thought that marrying Tuon was linked to him not getting killed but that implication is actually not in the text! And even if she is his ‘fated’ wife, it’s also clear in the text that he can avoid his fate, because this entire encounter is the Aelfinn warning him NOT to avoid going to Rhuidean because it would lead to him being vulnerable to being killed by his enemies. Mat decides that him ‘living and dying again’ (which he mistakenly thinks is about being hanged by the Eelfinn in Rhuidean, so there is also in-text evidence that Mat has misinterpreted at least one of his prophecies) is proof that it’s also impossible for him to escape the DotNM but there actually isn’t evidence in the text that this in the case. On the contrary, it seems like it IS possible for Mat to avoid this part of his fate and would, in fact, have been extremely easy for him to have avoided it (if he hadn’t known about the prophecy), since he would have just... left at the end of Winter’s Heart and never seen Tuon again, having absolutely no idea that she was ever meant to be his fated anything.

References from the text (The Shadow Rising):

“If you do not go to Rhuidean,” the woman on the right said. “You will die.”

...

Mat asks, “Why will I die if I do not go to Rhuidean?”

“You will have sidestepped the thread of fate, left your fate to drift on the winds of time, and you will be killed by those who do not want that fate fulfilled.”

...

He persists and asks, “What fate?”

“To marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons.” (which becomes possible as a result of going to the Eelfinn, which gives him his memory of Artur Hawkwing’s face, but also becomes possible because they just told him about it)

“To die and live again, and live once more as part of what was.” (this is locked into place just by staying by Rand’s side; which Mat would ‘sidestep’ by going home to the Two Rivers instead of staying with Rand)

“To give up half the light of the world to save the world.” (this is locked into place by Moiraine’s choices and by Mat going to Salidar by Rand’s command, as that’s what makes him meet Thom again)

Both of the second two prophecy fulfillments flow naturally from Mat’s character development and his nature; but marrying tDotNM remains a jarring departure from his previous characterization even when it happens.

+It’s possible that it was Jordan’s original INTENTION that any Seanchan alliance would hinge on Mat being married to Tuon (with him being a ‘binding cord’ like Aviendha was supposed to be between Rand & the Aiel due to their relationship, which Jordan also basically dropped as a concept) but that’s not how he ended up writing it, whether that was because he wanted to punt all moral issues to the outriggers or for other reasons, because in order to make Mat marrying Tuon key to getting Seanchan support for the Last Battle, there were two key mistakes Jordan made:

Jordan needed to not have Mat be the one making all the concessions in their ‘relationship’. Jordan just couldn’t bring himself to ever let Tuon be vulnerable, for whatever reason (maybe the same reason he glorified Cadsuane’s bullying). But, regardless of the reasons, making the Mat-Tuon relationship one where he never fights her on anything important means that it’s absolutely useless in political terms and doesn’t really count as a ‘marriage alliance’.

Jordan should not have ALREADY had Rand willing to make peace with the Seanchan no matter what the cost. Honestly, this one point is enough to render the Mat-Tuon marriage entirely pointless. Rand was already willing to bend on slavery and humble himself for Tuon, thus making it so that (once again, a familiar refrain with Tuon’s storyline) Rand must make all the important concessions while Tuon makes barely any at all and gets to keep on trucking along in her untouched slaver bubble where she never has to admit she’s anything less than perfect and The Only Real Person In The World. If it really did take Mat’s magic...skills in the bedroom... for Tuon to even be willing to listen to Rand, then the Westlands would have been much better off with her assassinated by Suroth anyway, because she’s already so far off the deep end that she’s unsalvageable.