What's up with all the Jasnah love?

[LewsTherinTelescope]

On 10/18/2021 at 3:54 PM, Tglassy said:

Every time someone mentions her, it's to talk about how perfect she is.  "She never had the sense to be wrong an appropriate amount of the time."  "In order to practice apologizing, you would have to sometimes be wrong."  These statements irk me. They aren't "Showing us" that Jasnah is always right.  They're "Telling us" that she's always right.  This is the author telling the reader how they need to view Jasnah.  She's beautiful, poised, elegant, brilliant, and all these things so much more than anyone else.

I feel like this is intentional. As she explains to Shallan, a large part of things is perception of power and authority, and she's excellent at projecting that. And yet we do see hints that it is indeed a projection—the scenes on the boat in WoR, the scene in OB with Ivory where she lets out a bit about her terror at the idea of losing her mind (which is presumably part of where her intensity about being "rational" comes from), the scene in RoW where we see how absurd a safety standard she holds herself to after being taken by surprise on the boat (she can only relax when she's in a locked room, in the center of the second floor, with no walls exposed to the outside, with nobody besides Wit in the room, with fabrial traps hooked up, with a boat in Shadesmar at her location, with gems sewn into her dressing gown... this lady is tighter wound than a spring), etc.

She's extremely good at presentation and putting up a mask because she has to always always always feel in control of herself and her situation (and each time this fails, it sends her even deeper into this idea), but when we see glimpses of her with it down, she's basically constantly in a state of tightly-wound panic and anxiety, and is just very good at repressing and hiding it from even herself and Ivory. We just don't really see her PoV often, so we mostly see her through people whose only exposure to her is that facade of perfection she maintains. Cons of not being a main character yet like Shallan, Kaladin, or Dalinar.

[NerdyAarakocra They/Them]

I will head up this post by saying that while I like Jasnah, she's a bit of a jerk.

 

First: Why I like Jasnah

Jasnah is a fun character. She's competent, overkill, and everything that you want in a Stormlight character. In Way of Kings, she's a one-dimensional, static, and very minor character. She feels sort of like a backdrop for Shallan. But she doesn't stay that way for long. 

At the end of Way of Kings, she starts to become more relatable. She starts getting pretty fleshed out in books 3+. She's not unreasonably perfect: she grapples with insecurity, as shown in the prologue of Oathbringer. She's afraid of not being able to protect her family, as well as being behind on the curve. She's walled off because of this, and as of Rhythm of War, she's only just starting to truly open up. Her shell is slowly breaking open, and I can't wait for her to get the relevance she deserves

 

Second: Why I think that she's a jerk

I could make a lengthy argument here, but let's face it: we've all read Way of Kings. As she opens up, mainly to Shallan and Wit, she becomes less of a jerk, and she's becoming less of one the more we see her insecurities. All the same, here's a quote: 

"How often has "hope" been the reason someone refuses to move on and accept a realistic attitude? How often has "hope" caused more pain or delayed healing? How often has "hope" prevented someone from standing up and doing what needs to be done, because they cling to a wish for everything to be different?”

-Jasnah Kholin, to Dalinar Kholin

 

So yes, I really like Jasnah. However, she definitely has a lot of character development in her future.

Thank you for reading this rant.

Edited May 17, 2022 by NerdyAarakocra

[cometaryorbit]

Jasnah honestly strikes me as a female version of an old-style SF "competent man" stock character.

Still, I don't know if she's really *unrealistically* good. She is definitely exceptional in a variety of ways, but I don't know that she's more so than some RL polymaths.