She wanted to be the princess swept off her feet by the reincarnation of her old jilted lover
Right … and this is what you meant by Jordan intending for it to be low-tier fantasy! It’s a fantasy within a fantasy … Lanfear’s fantasy … I get you. And I like it more with that more precise framing … but still a bit on the nose, though in many ways that’s my fault for not thinking about it from Lanfear’s perspective enough … though, by this point in the book it isn’t really clear what Selene/lanfear is about so the perspective has to sort of come retrospectively.
Well yeah. Jordan was still writing for a teen audience in books 1 and 2. Selene was this older woman that was SOOOoooo obviously playing with the younger Rand’s emotions. But younger readers missed it like the Pianist joke in Animaniacs (if you missed it, our lovely Animaniacs were calling him an organist and he would scream in a heavy German accent “I AM A PIANIST!” and they would act offended because it sounded like something else).
Similarly, younger readers tend to “HATE HATE HATE” Nynaeve, where she is incredibly popular among 30- and 40-something readers. That was my experience, when I first read Eye of the World in 1994 vs rereading yet again today.
