Moiraine Damodred

Siuan Sanche I will never tire of your fish talk. You left home and family behind when you were still just a kid and you were just a poor girl from the river training alongside nobles and princesses and you were smart and clever and good and you didn't let them look down on you and they loved you so much they made you their mother and even when some of them rejected and betrayed you, you got right back up and into the fight where most women just lie down and die and through it all you never stopped with the fish talk because you never stopped being the girl from the river and even though some tried to hold that against you, you knew your home was where your strength came from and you never forgot that for even a moment.

"But when you don’t have an oar, child, any plank will do to paddle the boat ashore."

it’s as if jenny holzer is sitting in the oval office

"average green ajah survives 3 deadly injuries a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average green ajah survives 0 deadly injuries per year. Impalements Alanna, who loves being thanked & survives over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

adhd will get you thinking "i should make this doctors appointment" every day for 7 months and counting

none of us are making those appointments huh

ENOUGH social interactions. i need to go in the river

Best addition was left in the tags

3x06 crystalized something essential about what Moiraine is able to offer Rand in this moment of his journey. Presence in the darkness. A person who sees all of him and accepts him. Rand asks if Moiraine saw him kill her in the rings, and she smiles fondly at him and says yes. And he smiles back, because he knows that this doesn't frighten her away. Most people would run. Most would find the prospect of him going mad, no less him hurting them, too much to stay. But Moiraine won't leave. And where before that annoyed Rand to no end, now it has become a comfort. He is beginning to realize what he must do, what he must experience and how that will change him, to fulfill his destiny. And now the idea that there is a person who also fully knows that and accepts it and will remain by his side is a comfort.

Rand is reckoning with both the madness that he fears channeling will bring and also what he perceives as a darkness inside himself. Egwene tells him that loving Lanfear means he's given into the madness. But Rand knows the truth, that his love for Lanfear isn't about the madness from channeling. It's about there being one person he knows will see him at his darkest and still love him. Up until this episode she really is the only person who he knows can see that darkness and accept it.

I think that shifts at the end of the episode for Rand. When Rand channels to try to bring Alsera back from the dead it is a moment that feels for him like his evilness as a man and his madness from channeling come together. They're both him. It's hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Because he channels recklessly, but then that channeling brings the taint, and it changes his perception. And that feeling that he can do anything, that he is a god, is that him or the madness? Or does it speak to both the darkness within him and also the madness from channeling?

Egwene, Aviendha, and Lan have expressions on their faces as they watch Rand that speak to varying degrees of fear, disgust, and pity. But Moiraine looks at him only with understanding. Where the others recoil from the darkness, from the intensity of the pain of that moment, Moiraine goes to Rand in that pain.

There are a few aspects to what she can offers him. First, I imagine, a shared experience as a channeler learning the limits of channeling. Surely most Aes Sedai have raged against the idea that with all their power they cannot heal death. The have felt angry and helpless and despairing that despite their power, death exists, that they cannot change that.

Second, she grounds him. She understands the pull of the One Power, and she knows how to bring Rand back. Not with words or reasoning, but with touch, with human connection, with a hand on his shoulder, then quietly crouching beside him and encouraging him to look at her and come back from the seductive place the One Power takes him.

And third, and I think most importantly, she sits with him in the darkness. In his darkness. Not just the madness of channeling. But the moments after. When Lan looks at him with pity, Avienda with disgust, and Egwene with fear. Not because he channeled, but about the horrific human experience he just had, the messy, raw human experience of grief. Where he was out of control, overwhelmed by despair and rage, where he is lashing out, where his feelings are big and dangerous.

Moiraine touches Rand in that moment when he is loathing himself. She crouches down and looks him in the eye unflinchingly, sees him and offers herself. Her face holds understanding, but also an openness for him to give himself to her, to let her hold his feelings, to be the person who sees what he is feeling and holds it with him. And when he looks at her you see his face shift from this blank mask to all the complicated difficult emotions he has in that moment - the self-loathing, despair, rage. Moiraine is the person willing to wade into that with him, to see him when he feels his worst and be with him in that pain. She probably has always been that, but Rand finally sees it and accepts it, and that feels like a massive shift in this tiny moment of eye contact.

She's cute

I love Moiraine she’s got her resting Sedai face on but underneath she’s having anxiety attack after anxiety attack

Lan is her therapy dog

Text ID: I observe how much I have matured since last year despite my belief that I was losing myself, how something strong was born from the painful experiences survived and from the numerous minutes that I believed were wasted.

I have the Rand and Moiraine conversation seared onto my mind: the way the roles are reversed and Moiraine asks advice to Rand, the way Rand seeks her out when she is unraveling in a corner, the way she starts to grasp what the power feels like on his end, the way he just knows what she saw because he may contain it but he feels deep down what the madness is doing to him and the likely outcome.

I talked about it before in regards to Egwene and Moiraine watching Rand train in 302 but it is a reality than women, be it partners or mothers, can end up the victims of the man they take care of, especially when they are ill, and it's very much hovering over their conversation here. Yes, she will follow him despite knowing it might take her life.

It's not easy though, because dying during the Last Battle as she stood beside Rand as she believed when she guided him to the Eye of the World is not the same heroic death as this new fate of hers.

Her reaction to his questions about Rhuidean guts me because Moiraine probably saw Rand killing her as often as she saw Lanfear killing her, and we know she is terrified of Lanfear. She must be terrified of him as well.

But the trick is that Rand doesn't ask once if Moiraine saw Rand dying at her hands because he knows what is happening already inside him. He knows that killing him to save the world is a reasonable option.

Moiraine answers "sometimes" to all his questions knowing very well she kills him just as many times, trying to prevent the madness, Eggy's death, hers.

Knowing this is the worst outcome still for the world.

There is so much that passes between them behind the words.

I will be haunted by Moiraine's little almost smile after she tells him he sometimes kills her, as if saying "it's okay, really" and the way he looks at her afterwards because he starts to understand what she's willing to give to protect him: a form of unwavering trust that isn't about trusting his decisions and actions but about informed acceptance of who he is.

They are the best mentor/student relationship I have seen in a while.

Our poor Siuan, I can’t with her sad little faces… I’m not ready, I just want to wrap her in soft blankets and keep her safe until Moiraine comes for her and takes her to Tear to live a peaceful, happy life.

You better start getting comfortable with the idea of an extremely broad anti-fascist coalition that includes tons of people who you strongly disagree with, because buddy, you're in one

THE WHEEL OF TIME 3.06 | The Shadow in the Night

loss of third spaces like opium dens and brothels

Alanna Mosvani, literally dying, crying tears of joy as her latest set of pupils literally burn a man to death in front of her. Name a more iconic magic teacher I'll wait.