I was looking at the post the other day about the relative strength of female forsaken compared to Nynaeve and I remember wondering why Semirhage still showed up on the list. With that as with this post, Semirhage is now irrelevant to me. I've liked the story all along as I've read it, but at this point I only care about the present and whatever the future might be.

Someone here said that the balefiring was irrelevant after the spanking. For me it's the opposite. The spanking is irrelevant due to the balefiring. She's done! And she ain't comin' back. In my mind her relative power strength now, for example, doesn't matter because she's not going to be doing anything else with it. And the fact that she got spanked before she died doesn't matter to me since she got zapped out of the pattern. Haven't thought about Be'lal or Rahvin since they bought it either. Moghedien was captured and temporarily humbled too, but that didn't bother me either. She escaped and, had she not become somebody's beeyotch in short order, would have been right back up to her old tricks, her humbling made irrelevant except for giving her a revenge motive. When Semi was freed, it wiped out the humbling for me, and when she was killed, it wiped it all out.

As for the scene itself, at the time I read it, I liked it. She was a puzzle for Cadsuane and there really was no way she was going to be broken by threats or pain or coercion, not by anyone. I was certain she'd be freed - Rand's no killing women rule was way too foreshadowy to not lead to another escape. She thought herself invulnerable, but everybody's got some kind of achilles heel and I liked that Cadsuane figured hers out, and that she never could have imagined being beaten like that. I will say that I felt she gave in rather quickly and started lapping up those beans unrealistically soon. But in terms of the outcome, I was fine with it. Each of the forsaken could be beaten by their weaknesses in some way and it's interesting to think about how to beat each.

But that quickly became irrelevant when the shadow once again freed a captive forsaken from the hapless good guys who didn't know what they were dealing with. She once again became a lethal loose cannon and almost enslaved our boy. But Shazam! Bye bye! I liked her sense of having been... wait for it... forsaken by the DO right there at the end. Won't try that again, will you, smartypants!

With all of that said, I understand what it's like to be annoyed at how a given plot thread gets resolved. I felt that way about Masema and Aram. I was like, "Wait...WHAT?! That's IT?! Boooo!" Semirhage's actual death was nice and dramatic and pivotal for the story (forcing Rand to channel the TP), enough to make the spanking a nonissue for me even if I hadn't liked it, but I hear you. It's like if Fain just decides to retire to a nice cottage somewhere in the Murandy countryside and sends Rand and Mat a no-hard-feelings-let's-have-tea-sometime letter. "Hey wait...!"