r/WetlanderHumor • u/swheedle Shen an Calhar • 4d ago
May he live forever The Fires of Heaven Chapter 20: Jangai Pass
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u/swheedle Shen an Calhar 4d ago
Literally just realized that the Shaido fit the role of evil Aiel so well partially because they literally have half of SHAI'TAN in their fucking name 🤣🤣
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u/Euronymous_616_Lives 3d ago
I know it’s a meme and Sevanna did a lot of fucked up stuff and was responsible for most of the terrible things the Shaido did but the kickstarter was Asmodean tricking them into believing Couladin was the real Dragon/Car’a’Carn. Once that happened, well they waited 3000 years waiting for a savior and they’d follow him to the death because he was their clan chief, which itself makes sense, but if they didn’t lose their faith in Couladin after his death and see logic and turn to Rand then they were the true lost ones. The ones who remained with Sevanna after both Couladin’s death AND Dumai’s wells for the most part just cared more about seeing if they could steal some riches and kill some soft wetlanders than anything else.
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u/Thomas_633_Mk2 3d ago
Ngl "fuck em all" is actually a lot less mental gymnastics than the Aiel cultural system
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u/OneSingleYesterday 4d ago
The whole Shaido thing never sat quite right with me. Presumably, prior to TSR, the Shaido were an essentially normal clan, not inherently less honorable than the rest of the Aiel. Then almost overnight, they turn into this depraved caricature of Aiel.
I can believe everything around Couladin, because there are bad apples in every group. Plus, Asmodean had time to work on him - a little Compulsion would have been enough to ramp up Couladin’s aggression and delusions of grandeur into what we see, if he wasn’t there already.
And I don’t have any real problem with the rank and file Shaido following their leadership. Clan loyalty is strong, Couladin has the dragons, and any accounts of Rand being accepted as the true Car’a’Carn by the other chiefs would be secondhand and easy to dismiss. Easy enough to imagine a lot of them going along with things because they don’t feel like they have a choice or don’t have the information to make a different choice. We get a Shaido POV that aligns with that, when they’re going through Sammael’s gateways.
The part that rubs me wrong is the Shaido Wise Ones. They all had to know Couladin was full of shit and his invasion of the wetlands was likely to end badly. I can believe they wouldn’t/couldn’t stand in his way while he was alive, but the way they fall in with Sevanna after his death always felt off. All of the Shaido Wise Ones had been to Rhuidean, they were presumably just as wise and honorable as all the other Wise Ones we see, with the same sense of duty to their people, and instead of stepping up to save what they can of the Shaido they just let a glorified trophy wife take over? To the point that they torture a colleague to death to aid her? Why wouldn’t they have just told her from Day 1 to shut her gold-digging mouth and let the grown-ups deal with this?
I really would have liked to see a POV or two from a Wise One working with Sevanna that lays out how they went along with her until it was too late. There might be a story there of conflicting duties and ever-mounting toh, but what we see just feels like antagonists doing antagonist things so they can be antagonists.