I Literally Just Want to Talk About Stepin

Photo by Daniel Curran on Unsplash

CONTENT NOTE: DISCUSSION OF SUICIDE AND SUICIDAL IDEATION. Also book spoilers, and spoilers for the show through S1:E5. 

I guess I should preface this by saying that I am not okay, and I'm not entirely sure why. You guys, I haven't been this torn up by the death of a fictional character since the first time I watched Fullmetal Alchemist. It's been more than 72 hours and I'm still physically uncomfortable. I'm having nightmares. I feel like I've lost a Warder. It's bad. And I can fully account for why this is hitting me so hard. This has not been the best way to go through finals week. So instead of any kind of useful thoughts or analysis about the show, which I'm sure I'll want to go back and talk about at some point when I'm feeling less inexplicably devastated, we're gonna talk about all the ways that Stepin absolutely didn't have to die. 

First of all let me start by saying for fans of the show who have not read the books that Stepin's reaction to Kerene's death is 100% normal. Warders who outlive their Aes Sedai usually do so by seconds or minutes before managing to die in the process of avenging her death. You'll notice that Stepin tried his best to do exactly that back in Episode 4. Those who are unable to avenge their Aes Sedai, or who manage to survive doing so, are invariably suicidal, usually for years. So we're gonna start with that. Everyone, with the possible exception of Nyneave, as soon as they knew that Kerene was dead and Stepin had survived the battle, knew that he was going to try to kill himself. They knew, and aside from Lan and Nyneave, they apparently didn't care. When Lan brings it up, Moiraine says "Oh, don't worry, he'll make it long enough to return Kerene's ring." because the way most Aes Sedai see it, Stepin's death was a foregone conclusion as soon as Logain killed Kerene. 

That's all by way of saying that literally everyone involved was aware of the risks, and the most basic precaution, having someone keep an eye on Stepin at all times until either he accepted Alanna's offer or something else changed, wasn't observed. Absolutely no one was confused about the fact that he needed to be on suicide watch, and they just... didn't do it. Even Lan didn't until the very end. I'm inclined to give Nynaeve some leeway here, because she isn't as familiar with the mechanics of the Warder bond as literally everyone else involved, and because when she finally realized that something was more wrong than the obvious grief at the loss of someone his relationship with whom he had described as closer than husband and wife or parent and child, she makes like she's gonna follow him and then Liandrin talks to her and she does something else instead. Given that Liandrin has a "trick" of lowkey compulsion, where she can't exactly make people do what she says but she can make them want to do what she says, it's entirely possible that Nyneave's side trip into the garden wasn't entirely voluntary, and of course once Loial found her and told her Rand and Mat were in the city, that was going to take priority, at least in the short term. 

Photo by Paul Einerhand on Unsplash

Also in case a great deal of well-documented common knowledge about how the Warder bond works wouldn't have told again, almost literally everyone there, that Stepin needed supervision and whatever is available in terms of treatment, he tried to communicate this at least twice. Before returning Kerene's ring, when he tells Maksim and Ihvon that it's good that they'll always have each other, and then when he goes to talk to Nynaeve to ask for more goatstongue and he's got a bottle of Unspecified Alcohol with him, which he's openly holding in his hand until she turns around to look, at which point he ostentatiously wiggles it a few times before hiding it behind his back. He can't tell her, but he wants her to know. With that, and what he actually says, he is doing everything in his power to convey to the closest thing he has to a healthcare provider that he is absolutely not going to pull out of this on his own, that left to his own devices he is only going to keep getting worse. (As an aside, I don't think the getting the goatstongue was... entirely premeditated. He had lots of opportunities to kill himself before Lan decided to stay with him. He may have been thinking of it as a contingency in case, y'know, he reached the point of decision and then someone decided to get hovery (which is basically what happened), but I think he did also actually want something to help him sleep. I don't think he decided for sure until almost right before he did it, even though he knew for a long while before that that's the direction things were heading). 

On the subject of which, he was going to Nynaeve, who is a guest in the White Tower, for medical care. Where the hell was the Yellow Ajah? Where were any Greens other than Alanna, who was sort of validly trying to give him space after saying "Hey sorry that the most important person in your life died and in the process basically ripped out your sense of having any reason to exist, want to join my polycule?". (To be clear Alanna wanting to give him space does not excuse Maksim and Ihvon just...vanishing after he melts down Kerene's ring.). Like, even without them, the list of people who knew what was up and didn't have anything better to do was definitely long enough to supervise one guy who wasn't trying that hard, but he should have had access to support from the actual organization with which he was affiliated, and that was...nowhere in evidence. In the books, there are procedures for this situation, although to be fair in the books, the first part of that procedure is that normal ideas of consent where the Warder bond is concerned don't really apply to a Warder who's just lost his Aes Sedai. In the books he would have been re-bonded before he had a chance to sit down. That... it doesn't always work either. Nothing always works. With everything you can do, you lose most of them, because keeping someone alive who doesn't want to be for long enough that they can start to heal is not an easy thing to do, and this isn't like regular suicidality where getting them through this particular crisis likely means you have a minute, means you have more space to try and work on things. It doesn't stop. But you can, you know, respect someone's consent and still not make their first and apparently only responsibility upon returning to the White Tower be to go put something in the fancy ter'angreal right next to a convenient, unfenced ledge very high up in a very tall building,  leaving their friends far enough behind in the process that they wouldn't be able to get to them in time. 

Photo by Paul Einerhand on Unsplash

I don't know, it was weird as hell that we saw literally no other Aes Sedai, and I don't think the primary reason for that was for the sake of neglecting Stepin in order to make sure that, on a narrative level, he had room to do what he was gonna do, but it was even weirder seeing Moiraine and Alanna just kind of hang out in her room like it wasn't even a thing. I don't know where Lan was in the unspecified amount of time between Stepin returning Kerene's ring, which must have happened pretty much immediately, and the last couple of scenes. And to be clear, I know that keeping two people with him at all times wouldn't necessarily have been enough, probably wouldn't have been enough, and that his stated reasons for not becoming one of Alanna's warders had nothing to do with her polycule, his uncertainty about joining it, or Ihvon's obvious discomfort with the idea. So even if there was another Green around, he probably wouldn't have let her do it either, although I do wonder what would have happened if Nyneave had learned the weave. Also why was there still a rack of daggers in his room? They literally couldn't put together the necessary fucks to give to take the literal weapons out of his actual room where he sleeps? I don't know if any of it would have been enough. It usually isn't. But that doesn't make it any less upsetting that for the most part they didn't even try. 

NaNo stats have been compiled and scienced, so the next post, sometime in the coming week, will have graphs! Might or might not do a real Episode 5 post. Will do another Dresden Files post sometime in the soonish I promise. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.