#wilders

Lightburst

Wilders:

Heroes:

Echino:

Wilders:

Heroes:

Talia

Heroes:

Wilders:

(I'll do more when I finish the redesigns)

And here's the sheet for anyone who wants to use it:

(post may or may not live up to the pompous title)

Wilder is a word thrown around readily by Aes Sedai, usually as a pejorative, or perhaps a slur. The person calling names is trying to undermine the recipient by implying that she is not as good as a woman who learned from scratch at the White Tower. It's a phenomenon that we, the readers, experience in a sort of backwards order, though, and it colors our views of the women who so freely throw the word around.

In the prologue to The Path of Daggers, we learn from Verin that wilders' tricks almost always fall into two categories: listening to other people, or a way of making people do what they want. Moiraine herself has a listening trick, perhaps indicating that she did not dabble in Compulsion (though I have my doubts).

Here we have a basis for the prejudice against wilders: They have done something considered reprehensible, something illegal, something taboo, and yet they are welcomed into the White Tower as students and given the chance to learn alongside everyone else. It makes sense for them to carry a bit of social stench.

But we the readers don't learn this until deep into the series.

Nynaeve is the first wilder we meet. She has been channeling for years when she meets Moiraine and becomes aware of her ability. When she arrives at the Tower, she receives a lot of scorn from her fellow trainees, only some of which is due to her never being a novice. Her strength in the Power and her status as wilder make her an easy target. The people harassing her don't know that her "trick" was to Heal people; they assume that she is like every other wilder and has been compelling the people around her for years. The prejudice has a foundation, but is not being justly applied to her.

Of course, the most ridiculous use of wilder as a pejorative is when Liandrin uses it. She is a wilder herself, who developed and remembered a crude Compulsion, but who nonetheless looks down her nose at even Egwene, who is not by any reasonable definition a wilder.

The most frustrating wilder accusations occur when Aes Sedai begin throwing them at women from other cultures, all of whom entered training earlier and with more supervision than most Aes Sedai do. They have taken a somewhat reasonable prejudice and twisted it beyond meaning or relevance. It's another example of their extreme hubris blinding them to what other cultures can accomplish.

Does anyone else love Redback’s new design, it’s so fricking fluffy! But he looks more like a yeti then a spider but overall a really cool design

✨Handpicked original ingredients from the Lucent Tree 🌳✨