i donāt know if anyones ever considered this (they probably have these books are older than me iām reading my dadās copies) but iāve been wondering about galad being raised an aeil warrior bc tigraine went āiāll leave my husband happily but my son is coming the fuck with meā.
because as far as we know, the only constraints were that she couldnāt tell anyone where she going and couldnāt return to andor, so if she just. never told galad where they were going and just took him with her. technically, it would be within the bounds of gitaraās fortelling.
galad as we know him would take to be being raised to follow jiāeātoh like a fish to water. one of the main things elayne has to say about him is that his honour and drive to do the right thing is almost always at the forefront of his mind, even at the expense of himself and others. it would genuinely be perfect for him. he may not have the look of the aiel but he would certainly have the conviction of one.
plus, being able to see him and rand develop a real brotherly relationship while they are both with the aiel would make his fight against demandred in tarmon gaiādon ā He is not here, but his brother is! ā even more compelling. the siblings he didnāt grow up with need him, and he will be loyal to them to the end because not only is that how he was raised but, aeil or damodred or trakand, that is simply who he is.
furthermore a galad who didnāt have to suffer through taringail for longer than he absolutely had to would probably have a healthier childhood. janduin would have been able to have a pseudo/second?-son he would have adored. (though i doubt tigraine would have been able to directly raise galad after becoming a maiden, she would have still been in his life. he wasnāt born when she was a maiden so there would probably be some arguing but a compromise could be made i think)
post-rhuidean reveal galad would have jumped at the idea of a free first-brother and two free second-siblings. and maybe a even near-brother in mat, who would be a little freaked out but honestly has bigger problems at the minute so kind of just goes with it. galad and aviendha would have been bickering about the best ways to teach rand about aiel culture and poor rand would just be stuck in the middle of it. galad having a little sulk about the winespring brotherās shelter and not being able to go be with his baby first-brother.
i think i quite possibly need to write this now.
Thinking about this, I think ji'e'toh might if anything help moderate Galad's rigidity a little! Like, it is a very rigid system in and of itself, yes, but it also provides a very sturdy framework for atoning when you've incurred toh, including times when incurring toh is actually the best thing to do in a given situation. It's never actually stated explicitly, true, but I strongly suspect that it is actually physically impossible to go through life never incurring toh, so an upbringing where the process of making amends is explicitly laid out and explicitly followed could introduce some needed balance to him. If it's understood that you are going to incur toh at some points in your life, and even more so that sometimes incurring toh in pursuit of doing needful things is actually the best option and paradoxically can earn ji, that gives Galad an external framework to offload some of his internal rigidity onto. That's (imo) what he was trying to do by joining the Whitecloaks, only the Whitecloaks are the most un-nuanced evil in the entire series.
"only the Whitecloaks are the most un-nuanced evil in the entire series."
Uhmmm, what is the Shadow then in this statemnt? Nuanced evil?
In comparison with the Whitecloaks? Yup. If nothing else, the question of moral culpability with regard to Shadowspawn and a fair few of the Darkfriends gives the Shadow a level of complication that Whitecloaks lack. There's also no evidence of real differences of perspective among the Whitecloaks; even the Darkfriend Whitecloaks are visibly stamped from the same ideological mold as the rest of them, just with a palette swap. In contrast, the body of Darkfriends as a whole has a lot more variety to it, and therefore a lot more room for nuance to take hold and blossom. I'm not saying the Shadow is less evil overall than the Whitecloaks, but rather that it's painted in a diversity of shades and raised questions instead of a single smear of flat color.
It's something I've spent a fair bit of time contemplating, actually, during my several rereads of the series. In all other areas, Jordan's pretty thorough about showing us societies and organizations as made up of people who share some worldviews and goals but are ultimately all individuals with individual aims, priorities, and perspectives which can diverge or even directly conflict. But then every Whitecloak we see is essentially in ideological lockstep, with at most some minor variation in what methods they'll happily engage in and what they'll only look the other way about.
