Lanfear One More Time
Recently I was doing some research when I found an interesting (and massive) write up of the late Wheel of Time author Robert Jordan's series notes. This part really captured my imagination:
At some point in these notes Robert Jordan did write down that he thought that Lanfear was at least as strong in the One Power as Ishamael and then almost made possibly as strong as Lews Therin. He made Lews Therin stronger than Ishamael. And this is not how the charts later turned on.
As it is in many different fandoms, the relative power levels of the various high-end characters in WoT is a parlor room topic as old as time. For example, on this wiki page about the Forsaken, the list of them is a table consisting of only three columns: Name, Strength Level, and Notes. Hah! Only the essentials...
Lanfear's power level in WoT was always a subject of much debate, because in the early books she is speculated to be as powerful as a woman can be in the One Power, and it is suggested that she is the second strongest of all the Forsaken, behind their leader Ishamael. Later on in the series, however, as well as in its aftermath, it is suggested that women are vastly weaker in the One Power than men, but that they make up for it in "agility." Lanfear's power level is thereby reduced from second place among the Forsaken to ninth, behind even the weakest male Forsaken.
That never jived with me, because it isn't supported in the story itself. She is untouchable by Asmodean if nothing else, and acts as if no one but Ishamael is a threat to her. Now, the revelation of these notes makes it pretty clear what happened: The farther back in real-world time you go, the stronger Lanfear is, originally being the strongest of all the Forsaken and possibly even the equal of Lews Therin himself.
I'm not actually here today to talk about WoT character relative power levels. As far as parlor room topics of conversation go, I fairly admit that this is one topic that I have gotten plenty of mileage out of in younger years, before largely outgrowing it on the grounds that I find it inane. Nor is it something that one of my stripe ever completely grows out of. I think as recently as the past year or two I was writing about how I think Nahiri might be the most powerful living Planeswalker. I'm sure I will tarry on such matters in the future, too.
But not today! Today, I've got a much grander topic to discuss.
The Curse of Inadequate Genius
Robert Jordan had this grand, incredible idea for a series: What if only females (or women as he would put it) can use magic; what if all males who have the gift of magic go insane and die due to an ancient curse by Satan himself (ahem, "Shai'tan"), who was imprisoned thousands of years ago? And what if a young, magic-wielding "man" emerges as the Chosen One to save the world? It's a very compelling premise. It's not one that I would conceive myself, but it's compelling all the same. And nowhere was it more compelling than in its connections to the ancient time period, the Age of Legends, where everything went down that eventually set the stage for the events of the present-day story.
By the power of deep magic (the Wheel of Time itself), Rand al'Thor, the aforementioned hero of the series, is the reincarnation of his Age of Legends counterpart, Lews Therin Telamon. Therin was the strongest and most gifted magic user in the world, and a major world leader. Rand, by contrast, is an inexperienced country yokel. And on the road to fighting Satan he also has to deal with Lews Therin's baggage, including not one but two of Lews Therin's archrivals (Ishamael and Demandred), as well as Therin's ex-lover, Lanfear.
This has all the makings of an incredible story. There's lots of worldbuilding both past and present, lots of books in the series, and lots of plot potential.
But it never comes to pass.
The Wheel of Time got away from Robert Jordan. And I don't just mean that he died before finishing the series. I mean that he wasn't able to live up to the potential of his own idea. In the third and fourth WoT books, you can see him getting caught up in the minutiae and losing momentum within the series itself. The plot slows down, character stereotypes become more pronounced, and the text that ends up on the page reads more and more like it was written second by somebody trying to describe a dream and failing, capturing only the body and never the spirit of it.
You can particularly see the spark of genius get away from Jordan when it comes to Lanfear. Other than Ishamael, she is the only Forsaken of consequence with a strong presence in the early books, which is partly what makes it possible to use her as a microcosm for Jordan's failure.
Lanfear is one of the only nuanced characters in the series, and was clearly intended in the beginning to be one of the main antagonists. The Lanfear in the early books is an enigma: Despite being on Team Shadow, she openly denounces Ishamael (whom Rand at that point incorrectly believes is Satan). She makes a point of not using the Shadow's viler powers and monsters. She appears to genuinely care about Rand. And she speaks honestly about wanting to overthrow not only Satan but possibly even God himself. Back in the Age of Legends she was the one who, in a quest to achieve magical equality between men and women, found a new power source independent of the One Power (i.e., the magic that God provides to the world), only for her efforts to end up releasing Satan into the world. Her entire presence on Team Shadow seems to be a matter of desperate circumstance.
Then she's killed off, in one of just two "hero sacrifices" in the series, and disappears for a few books. It was enough for me, in years past, to get "Lanfear Fever" as I chewed and speculated and fretted over her ultimate purpose in the series.
Eventually she is resurrected by Satan into a new body, from which point it's clear that she was supposed to become the principal threat among the Forsaken. I'm not just construing that, either: There are literally two prophecies in the books about her rise to power at the final hour. In the World of Dreams she is able to regain her old body through sheer force of will, and she nearly succeeds in killing Rand just before he is about to throw Satan back into his prison, only to be killed herself (this time for good) at the last moment by the power of love.
In practice, however, her "second act" in the series is awfully flimsy. There's almost no substance to it, nor is she ever convincingly presented as a genuine threat. All of the nuance is gone; she's just a cookie cutter manipulative baddie. I don't think I have ever been as disappointed in a character's handling and fate as I was in Lanfear's.
Robert Jordan really had something incredible when he came up with Lanfear. But he couldn't bring it to fruition. He couldn't put it on the page. It must've really gnawed at him, to the extent he was self-aware enough, and self-honest enough, to be candid with himself about it. Not just with Lanfear, but with his whole series. But especially Lanfear, and a few others like her who were meant to be key players but ended up being so much weak sauce in the end.
Others Didn't See It
These days, I am able to see something about Lanfear that I'd never thought to consider back when the series was still underway and I was fixated upon the character. Specifically, I am able to see that most other WoT fans didn't have the read on Lanfear like I did. What most fans saw in Lanfear was the "psycho bitch ex-girlfriend" stereotype, a misogynistic and deeply uncharitable interpretation of the text that Robert Jordan kept afloat with his bad writing of her. These people were not the least bit surprised by Lanfear's foolish and uncompelling revenge arc in the final book; on the contrary they felt all the more justified in their views, because the last book in the series makes it very explicit that Lanfear had never actually been nuanced, or affiliated with Team Shadow by desperate circumstance, or ethically inclined to refrain from using the worst powers of the Shadow, or any of that stuff. She was just in it for some ill-defined "reward" from Satan, which she was amply smart enough to know would never come yet for whatever reason chose to persist toward anyway.
Looking back on the series with this view of the character is quite jarring for me: Her obsession with Rand is creepy and even a little bit rapey. Her long-running feud with Ishamael is entirely one-sided, making her look both weak and (to put it sensitively) not in control of herself. And her refusal to stand on any sort of principle other than self-advancement means that her true motivation is the single most boring and overused one in all of storytelling: "power for power's sake."
It's possible that even Robert Jordan came to hold this view of the character himself, particularly in his final years (though, possibly, he'd always held it). He wasn't the one who wrote Lanfear's second act; that was Brandon Sanderson, after Jordan had already died. But it was Jordan's notes, especially his later notes, that Sanderson used to complete the series. If there had been any sort of saving grace intended for Lanfear, it would've shown up in some form in the final book. But no such grace arrived. By the end, she looked contemptible and pathetic.
Here's the thing, though: This dismissive, minimizing view of the character is wrong. Oh, sure, it's tenable insomuch as people are naturally free to construe narratives, but it's logically, thematically wrong. Robert Jordan didn't create Lanfear to be the ex-girlfriend from Hell. What he conceived of, and what most WoT fans missed, is that Lanfear was one of the most, if not the most, powerful characters in the series.
Ah, back to power level again, eh? Yes, but not in the kind of dopey way I talked about at the beginning. There's something much bigger going on here. You see, why do people find relative power levels in a franchise such an interesting topic in the first place? Why do people do that?
There are a few reasons, vicarious power fantasies being the most prominent. But the most important reason is that it is a form of play. Most commonly this takes the form of "social play." Like a kitten batting its legs at a ball of yarn, people talk about the "power" of fictional characters as a way to learn real-world hierarchy and arrange themselves into it. This is not conscious, let alone rational. It is purely social behavior, instinctive. Participating in the conversation and learning its minutiae is a form of social posturing that effectively situates oneself into the fandom and accumulates "insider" status points, while also conveniently staking out a particular position and thereby aligning oneself in the community. These actions establish or bolster for an individual their internal framework for social behavior in real life. And it all runs cleanly outside of the conscious mind; there is no need to dither upon it. It just happens.
For people like me, however, there is another level of "play" at work. I never talk power levels as a form of social posturing; that's just not who I am. I talk power levels because, for me, power is not about one's position in the social order. It's about illuminating and opening up new possibilities of existence.
Lanfear wanted to do things that no one else in the series talked about. She wanted to achieve magical equality between the sexes. She wanted to overthrow Satan and challenge God. She viewed herself fundamentally above the conflict between Light and Shadow. She pushed the limits of the world's metaphysical and epistemological possibilities in many ways. And in all the twelve or fourteen books or whatever it is in the Wheel of Time series, Lanfear alone did this, except for Rand in the very final battle with Satan.
Power illuminates possibilities. Robert Jordan, like many a Christian before him, was not prepared to accept a "Tower of Babel" premise or ever treat it credibly. For him, Lanfear's true true motivation never held any temptation. (Or, if it did, he kept it to himself, other perhaps than to give Lanfear such an elevated status in the first place.) But Christianity and its slave morality imposes these limitations upon the human condition by design, in an effort to suppress human drive. To me, what Lanfear was trying to do...gaining control over magic at the most fundamental levels, overthrowing the deeply flawed people running the Universe, bringing the sexes together, and developing humanity's full potentials...to me this is the only way forward for our species, or for any sapient species possessed of drive and imagination. Otherwise, our species will be trapped in a cycle of rapacious rises and fractious falls, not unlike the human civilization in The Wheel of Time, until we die out.
In Robert Jordan's oldest notes, Lanfear is given her proper due. More powerful even than Ishamael, and a true equal to Lews Therin himself! None of this "agility" crap.
I would really have loved to read that story. The one that flashed into Robert Jordan's mind as an inspiration.
Why a female, though? Why an ex-lover? Usually the "Join me and together we can rule the Galaxy!!" character is either a father figure or a mirror image / foil type villain. It's not usually (though it sometimes is) a "mate" type character. I think, here, we are probably seeing Jordan do a take on Christianity's "Original Sin." Not the fact of being born, that is, but the original Original Sin, back in the Garden of Eden, when Eve came along and ruined everything, leading to humanity's mortality and expulsion from paradise. (Jordan isn't too subtle about it, either: The city where Lanfear was working when she accidentally unleashed Satan into the world was named "Paaran Disen.") This is, by far, the most common tropic framework whenever the "Join me..." character is presented as a mate candidate. (And, because of patriarchy, the troublemaker non-POV character is usually female.) It underscores how poorly Jordan himself probably thought of humanity eclipsing the gods and taking control of its own destiny, but the fact that he chose this particular character framework (a mate candidate character type) to carry the messaging in perhaps suggests that he intended for Lanfear to be Rand's true ultimate threat. Not because she posed a physical danger to him (unlike all the other Forsaken, and other servants of Satan), but because she offered the one argument that might possibly have persuaded Rand to give up on Team Light. Indeed, Rand's declared intention in the final book of the series is to "Kill Shai'tan"...just like Lanfear wanted. Even if he was going to attempt it without her, the fact that he was on the same path as her is interesting. And for Jordan, as it is for many people, no one in the world is potentially closer to a person than their mate, making a would-be mate a very intimate, very dangerous character indeed when slided into the "villain" slot. It's a far cry from the cheap and tawdry psycho ex-girlfriend that many dismiss Lanfear as.
Robert Jordan, acting from beyond the grave through Brandon Sanderson, repudiated Lanfear's point of view in the end, by having Rand decide not to kill Satan (WTF?). But, under a different storyteller, well...under a different storyteller Lanfear might have been right.
Deprojection and the Curse of Avoiding Robert Jordan's Fate
I deeply sympathize with Robert Jordan's inability to live up to his own idea. And I grimace in the knowledge that he died before finishing his series.
It took me ten years to get to a place where I was happy with my writer's voice, fifteen years to get the Prelude published. We're currently on twenty-one years and counting for the next installment. Granted, much of that latest delay is due to unrelated matters. But no one can ever argue that I'm not taking my time with The Curious Tale.
I want to avoid Robert Jordan's fate. No, not the fate of him dying before he could finish his series; I want to avoid the fate of not being able to live up to my idea. Ideally I wouldn't meet either fate, but if forced to choose between them I'd rather run out of time in life than publish such a weak sauce, disappointing story as he ultimately did. He really did wrong by his characters, and I think of that, sometimes, when I worry about doing my own characters dirty by dying before bringing them to life through publication.
I would love to do my own take on Lanfear. Believe it or not, there is no direct Lanfear analogue anywhere in my writing. Silence is the most obvious of course (though not the only one), but only in her capacity as a power elemental. The actual trope of this menacing, villainous character who is strangely ambiguous and whose ultimate purpose in the story is unclear, well...actually, that's also Silence, but not in a straightforward way. Lanfear is cast in a villainous light, leading to the possibility of her changing sides or perhaps breaking the whole box open; in my writing I don't generally do "villainous" and "heroic" lights in the first place: The box is busted open by default. RIP Box. But doing it my way deprives me of the chance to spring a big reveal on the audience. By presenting Silence as credible from the very outset, the reader is not able to be shocked down the road by the revelation of her potential credibility, nor her potential for serving a role seemingly opposed to what she previously appeared to stand for.
It's hard to do a Lanfear-type character well. You need to make them convincingly villainous but still outside the Ethical Event Horizon. You need them to be appealing, both to the audience and to the protagonist(s). You need hella time for their arc to play out; Jordan took several books for Lanfear's story and still rushed it. And, when it comes to whatever their metaphysical or world-breaking conceit is, you need to really deliver The Good Shit. It needs to be a doozy, and you need to show it being a doozy. I've found, in Galaxy Federal so far, that each of my story ideas is built around such a conceit, and a big part of what makes these story ideas so compelling is that the metaphysical conceit itself is very compelling. And The Curious Tale is likewise built around some deeply compelling metaphysical conceits.
There. I think that about does it.
At some point in these notes Robert Jordan did write down that he thought that Lanfear was at least as strong in the One Power as Ishamael and then almost made possibly as strong as Lews Therin. He made Lews Therin stronger than Ishamael. And this is not how the charts later turned on.
As it is in many different fandoms, the relative power levels of the various high-end characters in WoT is a parlor room topic as old as time. For example, on this wiki page about the Forsaken, the list of them is a table consisting of only three columns: Name, Strength Level, and Notes. Hah! Only the essentials...
Lanfear's power level in WoT was always a subject of much debate, because in the early books she is speculated to be as powerful as a woman can be in the One Power, and it is suggested that she is the second strongest of all the Forsaken, behind their leader Ishamael. Later on in the series, however, as well as in its aftermath, it is suggested that women are vastly weaker in the One Power than men, but that they make up for it in "agility." Lanfear's power level is thereby reduced from second place among the Forsaken to ninth, behind even the weakest male Forsaken.
That never jived with me, because it isn't supported in the story itself. She is untouchable by Asmodean if nothing else, and acts as if no one but Ishamael is a threat to her. Now, the revelation of these notes makes it pretty clear what happened: The farther back in real-world time you go, the stronger Lanfear is, originally being the strongest of all the Forsaken and possibly even the equal of Lews Therin himself.
I'm not actually here today to talk about WoT character relative power levels. As far as parlor room topics of conversation go, I fairly admit that this is one topic that I have gotten plenty of mileage out of in younger years, before largely outgrowing it on the grounds that I find it inane. Nor is it something that one of my stripe ever completely grows out of. I think as recently as the past year or two I was writing about how I think Nahiri might be the most powerful living Planeswalker. I'm sure I will tarry on such matters in the future, too.
But not today! Today, I've got a much grander topic to discuss.
The Curse of Inadequate Genius
Robert Jordan had this grand, incredible idea for a series: What if only females (or women as he would put it) can use magic; what if all males who have the gift of magic go insane and die due to an ancient curse by Satan himself (ahem, "Shai'tan"), who was imprisoned thousands of years ago? And what if a young, magic-wielding "man" emerges as the Chosen One to save the world? It's a very compelling premise. It's not one that I would conceive myself, but it's compelling all the same. And nowhere was it more compelling than in its connections to the ancient time period, the Age of Legends, where everything went down that eventually set the stage for the events of the present-day story.
By the power of deep magic (the Wheel of Time itself), Rand al'Thor, the aforementioned hero of the series, is the reincarnation of his Age of Legends counterpart, Lews Therin Telamon. Therin was the strongest and most gifted magic user in the world, and a major world leader. Rand, by contrast, is an inexperienced country yokel. And on the road to fighting Satan he also has to deal with Lews Therin's baggage, including not one but two of Lews Therin's archrivals (Ishamael and Demandred), as well as Therin's ex-lover, Lanfear.
This has all the makings of an incredible story. There's lots of worldbuilding both past and present, lots of books in the series, and lots of plot potential.
But it never comes to pass.
The Wheel of Time got away from Robert Jordan. And I don't just mean that he died before finishing the series. I mean that he wasn't able to live up to the potential of his own idea. In the third and fourth WoT books, you can see him getting caught up in the minutiae and losing momentum within the series itself. The plot slows down, character stereotypes become more pronounced, and the text that ends up on the page reads more and more like it was written second by somebody trying to describe a dream and failing, capturing only the body and never the spirit of it.
You can particularly see the spark of genius get away from Jordan when it comes to Lanfear. Other than Ishamael, she is the only Forsaken of consequence with a strong presence in the early books, which is partly what makes it possible to use her as a microcosm for Jordan's failure.
Lanfear is one of the only nuanced characters in the series, and was clearly intended in the beginning to be one of the main antagonists. The Lanfear in the early books is an enigma: Despite being on Team Shadow, she openly denounces Ishamael (whom Rand at that point incorrectly believes is Satan). She makes a point of not using the Shadow's viler powers and monsters. She appears to genuinely care about Rand. And she speaks honestly about wanting to overthrow not only Satan but possibly even God himself. Back in the Age of Legends she was the one who, in a quest to achieve magical equality between men and women, found a new power source independent of the One Power (i.e., the magic that God provides to the world), only for her efforts to end up releasing Satan into the world. Her entire presence on Team Shadow seems to be a matter of desperate circumstance.
Then she's killed off, in one of just two "hero sacrifices" in the series, and disappears for a few books. It was enough for me, in years past, to get "Lanfear Fever" as I chewed and speculated and fretted over her ultimate purpose in the series.
Eventually she is resurrected by Satan into a new body, from which point it's clear that she was supposed to become the principal threat among the Forsaken. I'm not just construing that, either: There are literally two prophecies in the books about her rise to power at the final hour. In the World of Dreams she is able to regain her old body through sheer force of will, and she nearly succeeds in killing Rand just before he is about to throw Satan back into his prison, only to be killed herself (this time for good) at the last moment by the power of love.
In practice, however, her "second act" in the series is awfully flimsy. There's almost no substance to it, nor is she ever convincingly presented as a genuine threat. All of the nuance is gone; she's just a cookie cutter manipulative baddie. I don't think I have ever been as disappointed in a character's handling and fate as I was in Lanfear's.
Robert Jordan really had something incredible when he came up with Lanfear. But he couldn't bring it to fruition. He couldn't put it on the page. It must've really gnawed at him, to the extent he was self-aware enough, and self-honest enough, to be candid with himself about it. Not just with Lanfear, but with his whole series. But especially Lanfear, and a few others like her who were meant to be key players but ended up being so much weak sauce in the end.
Others Didn't See It
These days, I am able to see something about Lanfear that I'd never thought to consider back when the series was still underway and I was fixated upon the character. Specifically, I am able to see that most other WoT fans didn't have the read on Lanfear like I did. What most fans saw in Lanfear was the "psycho bitch ex-girlfriend" stereotype, a misogynistic and deeply uncharitable interpretation of the text that Robert Jordan kept afloat with his bad writing of her. These people were not the least bit surprised by Lanfear's foolish and uncompelling revenge arc in the final book; on the contrary they felt all the more justified in their views, because the last book in the series makes it very explicit that Lanfear had never actually been nuanced, or affiliated with Team Shadow by desperate circumstance, or ethically inclined to refrain from using the worst powers of the Shadow, or any of that stuff. She was just in it for some ill-defined "reward" from Satan, which she was amply smart enough to know would never come yet for whatever reason chose to persist toward anyway.
Looking back on the series with this view of the character is quite jarring for me: Her obsession with Rand is creepy and even a little bit rapey. Her long-running feud with Ishamael is entirely one-sided, making her look both weak and (to put it sensitively) not in control of herself. And her refusal to stand on any sort of principle other than self-advancement means that her true motivation is the single most boring and overused one in all of storytelling: "power for power's sake."
It's possible that even Robert Jordan came to hold this view of the character himself, particularly in his final years (though, possibly, he'd always held it). He wasn't the one who wrote Lanfear's second act; that was Brandon Sanderson, after Jordan had already died. But it was Jordan's notes, especially his later notes, that Sanderson used to complete the series. If there had been any sort of saving grace intended for Lanfear, it would've shown up in some form in the final book. But no such grace arrived. By the end, she looked contemptible and pathetic.
Here's the thing, though: This dismissive, minimizing view of the character is wrong. Oh, sure, it's tenable insomuch as people are naturally free to construe narratives, but it's logically, thematically wrong. Robert Jordan didn't create Lanfear to be the ex-girlfriend from Hell. What he conceived of, and what most WoT fans missed, is that Lanfear was one of the most, if not the most, powerful characters in the series.
Ah, back to power level again, eh? Yes, but not in the kind of dopey way I talked about at the beginning. There's something much bigger going on here. You see, why do people find relative power levels in a franchise such an interesting topic in the first place? Why do people do that?
There are a few reasons, vicarious power fantasies being the most prominent. But the most important reason is that it is a form of play. Most commonly this takes the form of "social play." Like a kitten batting its legs at a ball of yarn, people talk about the "power" of fictional characters as a way to learn real-world hierarchy and arrange themselves into it. This is not conscious, let alone rational. It is purely social behavior, instinctive. Participating in the conversation and learning its minutiae is a form of social posturing that effectively situates oneself into the fandom and accumulates "insider" status points, while also conveniently staking out a particular position and thereby aligning oneself in the community. These actions establish or bolster for an individual their internal framework for social behavior in real life. And it all runs cleanly outside of the conscious mind; there is no need to dither upon it. It just happens.
For people like me, however, there is another level of "play" at work. I never talk power levels as a form of social posturing; that's just not who I am. I talk power levels because, for me, power is not about one's position in the social order. It's about illuminating and opening up new possibilities of existence.
Lanfear wanted to do things that no one else in the series talked about. She wanted to achieve magical equality between the sexes. She wanted to overthrow Satan and challenge God. She viewed herself fundamentally above the conflict between Light and Shadow. She pushed the limits of the world's metaphysical and epistemological possibilities in many ways. And in all the twelve or fourteen books or whatever it is in the Wheel of Time series, Lanfear alone did this, except for Rand in the very final battle with Satan.
Power illuminates possibilities. Robert Jordan, like many a Christian before him, was not prepared to accept a "Tower of Babel" premise or ever treat it credibly. For him, Lanfear's true true motivation never held any temptation. (Or, if it did, he kept it to himself, other perhaps than to give Lanfear such an elevated status in the first place.) But Christianity and its slave morality imposes these limitations upon the human condition by design, in an effort to suppress human drive. To me, what Lanfear was trying to do...gaining control over magic at the most fundamental levels, overthrowing the deeply flawed people running the Universe, bringing the sexes together, and developing humanity's full potentials...to me this is the only way forward for our species, or for any sapient species possessed of drive and imagination. Otherwise, our species will be trapped in a cycle of rapacious rises and fractious falls, not unlike the human civilization in The Wheel of Time, until we die out.
In Robert Jordan's oldest notes, Lanfear is given her proper due. More powerful even than Ishamael, and a true equal to Lews Therin himself! None of this "agility" crap.
I would really have loved to read that story. The one that flashed into Robert Jordan's mind as an inspiration.
Why a female, though? Why an ex-lover? Usually the "Join me and together we can rule the Galaxy!!" character is either a father figure or a mirror image / foil type villain. It's not usually (though it sometimes is) a "mate" type character. I think, here, we are probably seeing Jordan do a take on Christianity's "Original Sin." Not the fact of being born, that is, but the original Original Sin, back in the Garden of Eden, when Eve came along and ruined everything, leading to humanity's mortality and expulsion from paradise. (Jordan isn't too subtle about it, either: The city where Lanfear was working when she accidentally unleashed Satan into the world was named "Paaran Disen.") This is, by far, the most common tropic framework whenever the "Join me..." character is presented as a mate candidate. (And, because of patriarchy, the troublemaker non-POV character is usually female.) It underscores how poorly Jordan himself probably thought of humanity eclipsing the gods and taking control of its own destiny, but the fact that he chose this particular character framework (a mate candidate character type) to carry the messaging in perhaps suggests that he intended for Lanfear to be Rand's true ultimate threat. Not because she posed a physical danger to him (unlike all the other Forsaken, and other servants of Satan), but because she offered the one argument that might possibly have persuaded Rand to give up on Team Light. Indeed, Rand's declared intention in the final book of the series is to "Kill Shai'tan"...just like Lanfear wanted. Even if he was going to attempt it without her, the fact that he was on the same path as her is interesting. And for Jordan, as it is for many people, no one in the world is potentially closer to a person than their mate, making a would-be mate a very intimate, very dangerous character indeed when slided into the "villain" slot. It's a far cry from the cheap and tawdry psycho ex-girlfriend that many dismiss Lanfear as.
Robert Jordan, acting from beyond the grave through Brandon Sanderson, repudiated Lanfear's point of view in the end, by having Rand decide not to kill Satan (WTF?). But, under a different storyteller, well...under a different storyteller Lanfear might have been right.
Deprojection and the Curse of Avoiding Robert Jordan's Fate
I deeply sympathize with Robert Jordan's inability to live up to his own idea. And I grimace in the knowledge that he died before finishing his series.
It took me ten years to get to a place where I was happy with my writer's voice, fifteen years to get the Prelude published. We're currently on twenty-one years and counting for the next installment. Granted, much of that latest delay is due to unrelated matters. But no one can ever argue that I'm not taking my time with The Curious Tale.
I want to avoid Robert Jordan's fate. No, not the fate of him dying before he could finish his series; I want to avoid the fate of not being able to live up to my idea. Ideally I wouldn't meet either fate, but if forced to choose between them I'd rather run out of time in life than publish such a weak sauce, disappointing story as he ultimately did. He really did wrong by his characters, and I think of that, sometimes, when I worry about doing my own characters dirty by dying before bringing them to life through publication.
I would love to do my own take on Lanfear. Believe it or not, there is no direct Lanfear analogue anywhere in my writing. Silence is the most obvious of course (though not the only one), but only in her capacity as a power elemental. The actual trope of this menacing, villainous character who is strangely ambiguous and whose ultimate purpose in the story is unclear, well...actually, that's also Silence, but not in a straightforward way. Lanfear is cast in a villainous light, leading to the possibility of her changing sides or perhaps breaking the whole box open; in my writing I don't generally do "villainous" and "heroic" lights in the first place: The box is busted open by default. RIP Box. But doing it my way deprives me of the chance to spring a big reveal on the audience. By presenting Silence as credible from the very outset, the reader is not able to be shocked down the road by the revelation of her potential credibility, nor her potential for serving a role seemingly opposed to what she previously appeared to stand for.
It's hard to do a Lanfear-type character well. You need to make them convincingly villainous but still outside the Ethical Event Horizon. You need them to be appealing, both to the audience and to the protagonist(s). You need hella time for their arc to play out; Jordan took several books for Lanfear's story and still rushed it. And, when it comes to whatever their metaphysical or world-breaking conceit is, you need to really deliver The Good Shit. It needs to be a doozy, and you need to show it being a doozy. I've found, in Galaxy Federal so far, that each of my story ideas is built around such a conceit, and a big part of what makes these story ideas so compelling is that the metaphysical conceit itself is very compelling. And The Curious Tale is likewise built around some deeply compelling metaphysical conceits.
There. I think that about does it.