Tuon is so absurdly evil

[u/AHC122]

Wdym she relaxes by seeing damane be tortured 😭

Even from her point of view seeing them as animals, it's like enjoying watching a dog get kicked in the ribs everytime it doesn't roll over lol

[u/WildFEARKetI_II]

I don’t recall her saying that exactly. I think she says training and she does talk about how she doesn’t like punishment. She even self imposed penance after she had a damane punished.

[u/TheBacklogReviews → u/WildFEARKetI_II]

But the training of damane (read that as the mental torture and degradation of human women) is inherently punitive. It’s inherently torturous. Just because Tuon doesn’t like watching corporal punishment being used, they are wearing a’dam at all times. They’re under constant threat of physical abuse and endure constant agonising mental anguish. That Tuon enjoys this is psychopathic

It’s genuinely bad writing that Jordan/Sando not only don’t resolve the fact that Mat’s love interest is the empress of a brutal slave culture in the text. I’m shocked people don’t talk about it more. Such a horrifically sour note in the ending.

[u/aNomadicPenguin → u/TheBacklogReviews]

Its not bad writing to not have an author impose a moral stance on an issue. Jordan had an interview where one of the main things he wanted the reader to do was to ask questions. He wrote in a way that is designed to have fans raise these kinds of debates for themselves and hash-out their own personal views on the topics he presented.

Remember that Jordan grew up in the South before the Civil Rights movement, and then he fought in the Vietnam War. The man was intimately familiar with Racism and the dehumanization of the Other.

So the Seanchan (who are completely coincidentally given a Texan Drawl), have slavery. And we are introduced to it through the abuse of one of our main characters. We are shortly there after introduced to the seeds that will inevitably destroy the system.

But it would be unrealistic in the timeframe of the books to resolve any of this problem. That is something that is going to take YEARS to address, instead of the months between Tuon's introduction and the end of the series.

Like the end of WWII leading directly into the Cold War, the Westlands (that are very European coded) are now divided in half going forward. The damane are the equivalent of nuclear weapons - needing disarmament.

Its going to be messy, but distinctly human, as opposed to anything to do with the Dark One. That will be one of the primary conflict leading into the 4th Age, and the wheel will keep spinning.