Wheel of Time & the Art of Fantasy Writing: Character Development and Power-Scaling Go Hand-in-Hand (Part 1: Gaining Wisdom)

Okay, last week I talked about how Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series handles the concept of Love at First Sight in regard to its romantic subplots, which was super fun (you should read it). This week, however, we’re not talking about the gushy stuff, we’re talking about the hype as fuck stuff.

So, if you talk to any Wheel of Time fan, you’ll find two of the most praised aspects of the series are how it handles both long-term character growth for its enormous cast as well as the exploration of its rich, nuanced magic system. And I am here to tell you that those two things go hand-in-hand, which is why they both work so well. Jordan, and later Sanderson, do an immaculate job expanding our understanding of magic in WoT gradually through our characters and how they become more proficient in it and how that proficiency is tied to their character development.

But first, a quick primer: in the WoT-verse, magic is (mostly) derived from the One Power, a divine well of supernatural energy that mages called Channelers utilize. It is divided into two halves, Saidin (the male half) and Saidar (the female half), which is meant to invoke the Daoist Yin-Yang. In turn, the Power is filtered through five core elements: Fire, Earth, Water, Air, and Spirit. In keeping with the idea of the Wheel itself as a sort of loom of fate, weaving threads of life and destiny into the Pattern, Channelers draw on the One Power to create Weaves, essentially spells crafted through different threads of the five elements. Different combinations do different things, but in general, the One Power has limitations around what you can do with it, not to mention consequences for overuse. It’s possible to channel too much and burn yourself out, sometimes with fatal results, and that’s without getting into the whole ‘Saidin is tainted by the Dark One and drawing on it causes you to slowly go insane’ thing (we’ll circle back to that next week).

Everybody got that? Good.

We mostly talked about Rand last week, and we’ll be talking more about him next week, but first I want to discuss one of the very best characters in the entire series, and arguably the one who most immediately embodies this ethos of character growth intertwining with power scaling: Nynaeve Al’Meara, Wisdom of the Two Rivers, former childhood babysitter to the Dragon Reborn.

Nynaeve, and I really wanna emphasize this, starts off as THE WORST. You ever have that one friend, who’s maybe a year or three older than you, who just… Constantly thinks they know best? Just incessantly acts like this wise authority figure who is fully allowed to tell you what to do and judge your every decision in the most overbearing, patronizing way imaginable? And you’ve known them forever, and maybe at one point you did look up to them a little, but time goes on and you grow up and they refuse to acknowledge that fact even a tiny bit and you just kind of want to scream every time they say they’re just trying to help you but you know you can’t because then they’ll just take it as proof that you’re still a surly child who needs to be dragged out of trouble by the nose every five minutes? That’s Nynaeve in book 1.

I wasn’t joking when I said she was Rand’s babysitter, and while he definitely considers her something of an older sister, she basically acts like his mom. And Perrin’s mom, and Egwene’s mom, and Mat’s surly aunt, even though she’s only a couple years older than them. And this is very deliberate. Nynaeve needs to start out as frankly kind of an unlikable control freak in order for her character arc to work, and in order to give her obvious flaws to overcome in correspondence to her magical prowess.

What magical prowess is that, you say? Well:

The Wheel Of Time | Nynaeve Unleashes A Supernova Of One Power Magic

Nyneave is over-powered as fuck. Her specialty is Healing, but just in general she’s considered with one of the strongest natural Channelers of her generation and several others. She is a POWERHOUSE in every sense of the word.

Trouble is, she can’t get out of her own way. Which is true of a lot of characters in this series, but especially so for her. Nynaeve has a ‘Block’ on her powers, a psychosomatic impediment that makes it difficult for her to wield her immense strength. The only way past that Block is for her to get angry, which, given she has one of the biggest hair-trigger tempers in the entire cast (once again, no mean feat), shouldn’t be problem… Except her anger isn’t all anger. Her anger is over her inability to handle her own emotions, her tendency to get overwhelmed by them causing her to have knee-jerk temper-tantrums that strangle her ability to think clearly. It’s only when she’s able to focus her anger that she can overcome the Block temporarily. It’s only when she has a single-minded purpose and isn’t be overwhelmed or drowned out by her own feelings that she can allow herself to wield the One Power. Time and time again, her Block, her temper, prevents from using her immense power when it’s needed, and she realizes it’s holding her back, but she can’t bring herself to let it go either because it’s the one thing that gives her any kind of control.

The desire for control, over one’s self, one’s faculties, one’s surroundings, one’s world, is a core theme in WoT. Time and time again we see characters undone and destroyed by their obsessive need to retain control, or rather, the illusion thereof. Because anger is not control. It is something that tricks your brain into thinking you are in control when in reality it is controlling you. And Nynaeve’s anger is born of that need for control. She isn’t comfortable with her emotions, because she can’t control them, so she falls back time and time again on the one emotion she thinks she has a handle on. Which is awfully convenient for her, because it’s also the one emotion that allows her to go on thinking she’s right all the time. And as someone who has struggled with anger management issues most of her life… Oh boy, that hits real close to home.

Fortunately, Jordan offers a simple solution to this particular issue: Nynaeve eating massive, MASSIVE plates of humble pie. It starts in book 2, with the legendary trials sequence in which Nynaeve goes through magical arches and sees worlds that might be and has to say no to each and every one of them (accruing some major trauma in the process):

The Wheel Of Time | Nynaeve Loses Her Dream Life

First of all: BRUH. If you can watch or read this sequence without crying, you’re even more dead inside than I was in high school (which is to say: extremely).

Second of all: oh, sweetie. You have no idea how bad (and humiliating) this will get for you.

The humble pie is played intermittently as both tragedy and comedy (the most notable example being when Nynaeve is on the run and is forced to disguise herself as a scantily-clad circus performer (not making this up)), and occasionally more trauma (such as when she’s very nearly captured an enslaved by the evil Seanchan Empire), for the next several books, all of which see Nynaeve become more and more skilled with her magic. As she learns to accept that she’s not right all the time, that her anger doesn’t automatically make her righteous, she becomes better and better at Healing. She invents new ways to Heal people entirely, evening doing the impossible by restoring the magical powers of someone who’d been ‘stilled.’ All while Nyneave finds herself increasingly put in situations where she has to trust her friends rather than bullheadedly charge forward like she normally would, even going so far as to as offer assistance to Rand during a battle in book 5’s climax when she normally would have tried to do it for him (leading to a truly awesome brother-sister kamehameha double-blast), and, in book 7, doing the unthinkable: apologizing to Mat.

I don’t want to step on it, because it’s one of the most genuinely hilarious moments in the entire series, but she sheer amount of rage and resentment Nynaeve feels at being pressured into finally apologizing for something she did five books earlier followed by her even more apoplectic reaction to Mat’s response sets the stage for what is in many ways the climax of her character arc.

Nynaeve is drowning. Trapped in a river, water rushing in, all while narrowly avoiding a fatal blast from her archnemesis. And she has to channel her way out of it, but can’t, because of her Block. And no matter how angry she gets, the weaves won’t obey her. She’s not in control, and her anger isn’t giving her that control anymore. All she has is herself, trapped and dying, realizing, to her terror, that her time is up. She won’t be able to help her friends. She won’t be able to save the world or prove to everyone that she deserves to call herself Aes Sedai. She won’t be able to marry Lan, the love of her life with whom she’s had a fairy tale romance for the ages. And she’s heartbroken and terrified and finally, FINALLY, she acknowledges it. She stops holding tight to the anger and admits her feelings have gotten the better of her.

And finally, she pushes through the Block and weaves her way out of there.

That’s the thing about the One Power, and especially about Saidar: you can’t really control it. You have to let it flow through you, let it overwhelm you, and then direct it in specific ways, much like emotions themselves. Nynaeve’s Block only existed because anger was the only emotion she let herself truly feel. By admitting that there’s more to her than that, that she wants to be more, that she’s not in control, she gains the power. And it is AWESOME.

Plus, the fact that she immediately finds Lan waiting for her there on the surface and tells him right out that they are getting married TODAY is just icing on the cake.

In some ways, this is the end of Nynaeve’s character arc, but it’s also not, because we still have a full half of the series to explore what Nynaeve is like now that the chains are off of her. First of all, we get Husband Gal Nynaeve, who is just delightful in the way she turns into a blushing puddle of squee when she and Lan are alone together. I’ll probably do a separate Art of Romantic Subplots about these two at some point, because they’re Couple Goals, but for now I’ll just say that after seven books of non-stop angst it’s very satisfying to just see them be happy together.

Second of all, we get Ride or Die Nynaeve. She’s done being the overbearing Mom Friend. Now she’s the supportive Big Sister Friend, to Rand and Egwene especially. And this support in turn leads to entirely new feats of prowess, such as, and this is a massive spoiler: helping Rand cleanse the taint on Saidin, developing a way to cure taint-induced madness, and finally helping Rand and Moiraine wield Callandor, the Sword that is not a Sword (literally the most powerful magical artifact in the setting), during the final confrontation with the Dark One. All of this comes with her also retaking the Trials and passing with flying colors despite the deck being stacked against her, essentially disproving the test’s validity now that she has a handle on herself.

Basically, for the first half of the series, we see Nynaeve struggle with her powers and her emotions and her feelings, and once she gets past the latter, the former becomes significantly easier and allows her to do things never thought possible, all of which ties into the core theme of gaining power and agency through admitting that you’re not in control.

In turn, this leads to her softer side coming out more often, mostly around Lan, but also in how she treats Rand as an adult capable of making his own decisions while still expressing concern- not anger- over his growing mental instability. Additionally, her willingness to defer to others even goes so far as her being willing to listen to and swear allegiance to Egwene after she’s raised to the Amyrlin Seat (the Witch Pope, basically) and gains control of the White Tower (Witch Vatican). It’s not easy for her- there’s some clear teeth grinding involved whenever she has to call Egwene ‘mother’, but she also manages to play mediator between Rand and Egwene’s factions to a level nobody ever would have thought possible.

And all of this pales in comparison to her most selfless and giving act in the whole series: for the first half of the series, Lan says he can’t be with her despite their strong chemistry and affection for one another because his duty (heavier than a mountain) is to wage an assault on the Blight, the demonic death-lands that destroyed the kingdom he was prince of when he was just a baby. Nynaeve at first dismisses this as somewhere between macho posturing and a genuine death wish she can talk him out of, but as she grows, as she gives up control, as she becomes more powerful, she realizes how important this is to him. How the duty is important, because she’s accepted that sometimes life calls on you to give up what you have and face a higher purpose. She even adopts the customs of Lan’s people, the Malkieri, after they’re married, something that would have been unthinkable to the old fashioned, repressed country girl Nynaeve of book 1. And finally, she not only lets Lan go on his crusade, she helps him. She obeys his desire to be left in the region where his fallen kingdom is and to do this alone, but she also drops him off the farthest away from his kingdom that she can and starts teleporting around the region and rallying the survivors of the kingdom to Lan’s banner, reminding them of their duty to their king and helping raise an entire army of Malkieri to Lan’s cause over the course of book 13. She’s surrendered to fate, but that doesn’t mean she can’t negotiate terms. And that doesn’t mean she can’t do everything in her power, or her Power, to help Lan shoulder his duty even though it is heavier than a mountain.

And given that her story basically ends with her becoming Lan’s queen and acknowledged as one of the most powerful Channelers on the entire planet, it’s just one more example of her accruing more power through her arc of learning to let go of anger and accept the duties that the world has presented her with as well as the feelings that come with them. Every feat of badassery, magical or otherwise, that she accomplishes simply highlights how far she’s come in her growth as well as her level-grinding. And the results are heartwarming, awesome, and inspiring all at once. Self-actualization and magical training, woven together like threads in the Pattern, all culminating in one of the best characters in all of fantasy.

Next week, we’ll talk about the Rand of it all once again, but for now, remember that the Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills. Happy reading, lovelies!