At the end of The Wheel of Time season 1 finale, we get a brief scene where a large fleet of ships arrives on “the western shore.” They are dressed very differently than anyone we have seen so far, and clearly are from a different culture. There are channelers on board the ships, who use the One Power to create a massive tidal wave.
Who are these people? They are a civilization known as the Seanchan, who come from across the Aryth Ocean from a continent that is also called Seanchan. They are a major antagonistic force within The Wheel of Time, so we’ll be seeing a lot of them starting in the second season.
The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins described what his team was going for when they came up with the aesthetic for this new civilization. “The biggest challenge in depicting the Seanchan was trying to find something — we have so many different worlds in The Wheel of Time, you have the Borderlands, you have the Two Rivers, you have Tar Valon, you have Tear, you have all these places that are really different within our world, and have different clothes and costumes and makeup and all of this, that we built — because the Seanchan needed to come in and visually tell the story that they are apart from that world,” he said. “They are from someplace that is very different than where any of our characters that we’ve met this season are from, but still feel like they exist within the world of The Wheel of Time, that they don’t feel like they’re from a different show, essentially.”
"So that took a lot of really careful modulation the whole way through, to get the aesthetic of the Seanchan correct so that they give to new audience members this flash of — we always talked about it as like the Spanish galleons coming ashore in the New World. Except our characters are the people living in the New World and seeing these ships arrive and go, “Oh, my God, what is this culture? They seem technologically advanced. They seem incredibly dangerous.” And so that’s what we were trying to really build with the Seanchan."
Mission accomplished.
How do the Seanchan use the One Power?
The Seanchan are a brutal society that makes extensive use of slaves. Any woman who can channel on Seanchan is affixed with a magical collar called an a’dam, which is controlled by a slave master called a sul’dam. Through the a’dam, the sul’dam can direct the flow of the One Power to cause the channeler pain, or compel her to obey demands. The channelers are known as damane, and are trained from a young age to be living weapons for the empire. They are considered the lowest of the low in the ranks of Seanchan society, about on par with animals.
Seanchan society itself is strictly divided by class, with the damane on the bottom and the Blood, who rule the continent and claim descendance from a great leader named Artur Hawkwing, at the top. Hawkwing was from the Westlands, and the Seanchan are invading the Westlands now because they feel they have the right to conquer it in his name.
The Seanchan are ruled over by an absolute monarch. We’ll be getting to know them very well over the course of the show, beginning in the second season.
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