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The Aes Sedai in the Tower aren't the focus, so we don't see much of what they're up to. Just like we know that Verin is involved in a lot of evil plots because she tells about them, but you have to go back and read carefully to figure out exactly what she did because she's not a POV character. It is mentioned that every ruler has an Aes Sedai advisor, that there's Greens and Browns and Blues out in the world doing their things, and so on. We just don't see it because it isn't important.
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Sep 11, 2020 03:05
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The White Tower is.... collectively Radagast?
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Sep 11, 2020 03:10
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:The White Tower is.... collectively Radagast? That's not particularly wrong. And yeah a whole lot of them seem comfortable and useless, and that's kind of perfect; the wise ones are part of their community, the windfinders are part of their community, the kin are...and all of those actually do stuff. Aes Sedai do plots. The best example was Siuan yelling at Bryne to ask her why she embarrassed him in front of the court, and he asked, and she said it was to help a border lord who could have united Murandy. And then when he asked what happened to the guy, she said he was killed on a sheep raid. Useless!
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Sep 11, 2020 03:12
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Shoulda let the Black Ajah have the White Tower. Probably woulda hurt them more than trying to save it.
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Sep 11, 2020 05:05
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Invalid Validation posted:Shoulda let the Black Ajah have the White Tower. Probably woulda hurt them more than trying to save it. Y'know, if they had managed to get all the non black out, and then the seanchan captured all of them...
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Sep 11, 2020 05:07
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silvergoose posted:Y'know, if they had managed to get all the non black out, and then the seanchan captured all of them... Yeah but they already did that at Malden.
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Sep 14, 2020 15:39
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Once I'm done with my reread of Stormlight Archive I'm coming back to do my bianual reread of the wheel of time. Would anyone mind if I posted my thoughts on my reread? I'm going into it trying to hate Egwene and Elayne less.
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Sep 14, 2020 15:42
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Why would we hate that? There's not a lot else to do for a book series that's definitely finished, at least until the television series comes out.
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Sep 14, 2020 15:45
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RC Cola posted:Once I'm done with my reread of Stormlight Archive I'm coming back to do my bianual reread of the wheel of time. I posted my thoughts on my re-read last winter/spring
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Sep 14, 2020 16:02
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ConfusedUs posted:I posted my thoughts on my re-read last winter/spring yeah and i've been posting thoughts on relistening to the audiobooks...content is content
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Sep 14, 2020 16:05
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It's been a long time since my last complete re-read and I really don't want to do a quick one in full before the show comes out so I've been letting my current one sit.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:10
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There's a really cool blogger who's been doing a chapter by chapter blind readthrough and analysis, it's really well done and a great read; her commentary is incredibly insightful. It's taken her 5 years but she's currently up to Towers Of Midnight: https://neuxue.tumblr.com/WoT-liveblog She seems to have significantly slowed down in her reread since the Sanderson transition though.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:11
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I don’t think you’ll even hate them until the later books and for myself it was mostly relegated to Elayne (Also probably Gawyn too). Might be interesting to speculate at when the characters turned and what was going on in his personal life. Im sure there must be a reason he decided to delve so heavily into the characters that people didn’t necessarily want to read about.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:18
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RC Cola posted:Once I'm done with my reread of Stormlight Archive I'm coming back to do my bianual reread of the wheel of time. If they can tolerate my whiny reread about how much I'm disappointed with large chunks of the characterization, they can tolerate yours I'm sure. Finally got to book 8, which I think is the furthest I've ever read in the past? I'm starting to see the dragging. Like, why did we need an entire chapter of Aes Sedai, Windfinders, and the Kin riding up to Elayne to complain about "who manages this POW"? Why did we have this entire chapter, when the very next scene is the Aes Sedai taking over the POW within 2 pages?!? What are you doing RJ??? Which is a shame, because I actually find this point in the story to be very interesting. And at least RJ isn't still repeatedly having Matt be raped 
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Sep 14, 2020 16:25
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The easiest of the harem characters to write
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Sep 14, 2020 16:25
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:The easiest of the harem characters to write What is the worst possible choice that this character could make right now -> submit chapter -> repeat.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:45
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By the middle of the series, there were simply too many PoV characters. Every additional PoV took up "screen time" that could have been spent on the others. The seeds for this were laid very early (I started noticing it around book 4), started to impact the pacing around book 7, and became drat near unforgivable by book 10. You can spend 600 pages where almost nothing happens because the author visited 50 different characters and each one only moved their plot a small amount. I'm sure there's a term for this, and it's killed more than one major series that I loved. A Song of Ice and Fire is probably the biggest and most current example. Anyway, back to Wheel of Time. A huge portion of Knife of Dreams is dedicated to chopping off these excess PoVs. Characters start to congregate, allowing for consolidated viewpoints. Other plots get killed (some of them literally) in a rather unceremonious fashion. More than a few were ignored. And it still took three more books for Sanderson to wrap everything up.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:47
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ConfusedUs posted:By the middle of the series, there were simply too many PoV characters. Every additional PoV took up "screen time" that could have been spent on the others. The seeds for this were laid very early (I started noticing it around book 4), started to impact the pacing around book 7, and became drat near unforgivable by book 10. You can spend 600 pages where almost nothing happens because the author visited 50 different characters and each one only moved their plot a small amount. It’s the corporate training effect. The first morning of any extended training is usually taken up by an introduction exercise. “Stand up and tel us your name, hometown, role, and something interesting about yourself” passes by quickly with 5 people, but groups of 25+ means you’ll be doing introductions until drat near lunch.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:54
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RC Cola posted:What is the worst possible choice that this character could make right now -> submit chapter -> repeat. Honestly, I'd take anything over manic pixie visions girl. Everyone complains about Elayne, but Min is the dark horse contender for most useless secondary character in the entire series. Famethrowa fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 17:44
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Famethrowa posted:Honestly, I'd take anything over manic pixie visions girl. Everyone complains about Elayne, but Min is the dark horse contender for most useless secondary character in the entire series. Weirdly she never gets any of the hate for doing not much of anything except sit there and be supportive of her man.
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Sep 14, 2020 17:54
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The Lord Bude posted:There's a really cool blogger who's been doing a chapter by chapter blind readthrough and analysis, it's really well done and a great read; her commentary is incredibly insightful. It's taken her 5 years but she's currently up to Towers Of Midnight: Might just have to have a look, thsnks
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Sep 14, 2020 18:07
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The Lord Bude posted:There's a really cool blogger who's been doing a chapter by chapter blind readthrough and analysis, it's really well done and a great read; her commentary is incredibly insightful. It's taken her 5 years but she's currently up to Towers Of Midnight: This is great, I'm reading this, and their enthusiasm for the series mirrors my own when I first read the books. Thanks a lot for sharing this, Lord Bude.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:21
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The Lord Bude posted:There's a really cool blogger who's been doing a chapter by chapter blind readthrough and analysis, it's really well done and a great read; her commentary is incredibly insightful. It's taken her 5 years but she's currently up to Towers Of Midnight: This is more entertaining than the old Tor.com readalongs, thanks for sharing this.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:30
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Honestly I like Elayne's chapters. She's often wrong, arrogant and absolutely bullheaded about things but she has a strong drive to accomplish stuff that a lot of other characters lack so her chapters tend to be really dynamic. This slows down and she stops doing this as much during book 10, but even then at least I can remember what she does during her chapters while I'd be incredibly hard pressed to tell you what almost anyone else does. Like yeah she makes bad decisions a lot, but characters who always make the right ones tend to be boring as hell. Zore fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 18:31
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:Weirdly she never gets any of the hate for doing not much of anything except sit there and be supportive of her man. given how ready and willing some people are with that poo poo i'm surprised they haven't already jumped in constantly with how much they simultaneously hate characters who do things and those that don't do as much
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Sep 14, 2020 18:33
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Johnny Joestar posted:given how ready and willing some people are with that poo poo i'm surprised they haven't already jumped in constantly with how much they simultaneously hate characters who do things and those that don't do as much to be clear--it's a critique of RJ writing painfully sexist and 1d characters. I actually find Elayne to be fairly well-fleshed out so far, but I can already see her being reduced to a lovely sketch of a person.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:36
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Elayne also earns a lot of points for trying to utilize her prophecy plot armor because characters so rarely do in stories. She knows her kids are gonna be born healthy so she takes some insane risks because that fact is set in stone and it kind of owns both that she tries and that it backfires on her.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:37
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imo min is mostly just a victim of being one of the few relatively 'normal' characters when everyone else can blow poo poo up with their mind or is a highly trained warrior or has some special gimmick that's actually an active thing and not just 'sees things about other people'
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Sep 14, 2020 19:06
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:Weirdly she never gets any of the hate for doing not much of anything except sit there and be supportive of her man. Characters that do actively stupid (in terms of what we, the readers know, even if the characters in that case do not) things tend to generate way more rage than one that isn't doing lots of independent things but also isn't being a massive fuckup.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:07
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Johnny Joestar posted:imo min is mostly just a victim of being one of the few relatively 'normal' characters when everyone else can blow poo poo up with their mind or is a highly trained warrior or has some special gimmick that's actually an active thing and not just 'sees things about other people' which would be fine, except RJ writes her as a harem character. a more interesting choice, would be to let Min travel with the Aes Sedai, and offer an everyman perspective on what's going on. instead she's locked into a room with moody emo protag, and exists essentially to stroke his arm and have sex with him.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This is more entertaining than the old Tor.com readalongs, thanks for sharing this. There's actually also a new Tor read along; but this time by someone reading the series for the first time. It's relatively early on though, up to chapter 1 or 2 I think of book 5. They release one post a week, and each post does 1-2 chapters. But they frequently miss weeks, or post essays instead of new entries so it's progressing very slowly. I really like the Neuxue blog - she's incredibly genre savvy; she's correctly predicted a ton of stuff very early on (including the death of Egwene as early as I think book 3 or 4, the identity of Asmodean's killer, and pretty much accurately laid out the situation with Taim. Her level of literary analysis is excellent; and I also like the in depth way she was able to identify exactly how and why Sanderson's writing felt off; particularly with regards to Mat. I binged through her whole wheel of time blog over a couple of weeks - she's written roughly 50% of the word count of the actual wheel of time series and she's not even done yet. One thing I want to talk about is the whole Taim thing. She neatly expresses what I've always felt: I've always thought it was bizarre when people started insisting that actually Robert Jordan lied and Taim was meant to be Demandred in disguise initially, but RJ changed it. Because Taim is very clearly meant to be an analogue to Demandred, not Demandred himself - Taim is to Rand what Demandred was to Lews Therin; the point of the character is to show that Rand is making the same mistakes that Lews Therin was in how he treats Taim and effectively causes him to turn to the shadow just as Demandred did. Neuxue talks about it more eloquently and with greater detail than I could though.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:21
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The Lord Bude posted:There's actually also a new Tor read along; but this time by someone reading the series for the first time. It's relatively early on though, up to chapter 1 or 2 I think of book 5. They release one post a week, and each post does 1-2 chapters. But they frequently miss weeks, or post essays instead of new entries so it's progressing very slowly. She knew what Egwene was slated for as early as the introduction of her character by just linking her to the Manetheren story told by Moiraine. That's ... very ... roundaboutly clever.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:31
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The Lord Bude posted:
I agree that it works the way it was ultimately written but there is evidence in his notes he left behind that he did originally intend for Taim to be Demandred
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Sep 14, 2020 21:36
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minema posted:I agree that it works the way it was ultimately written but there is evidence in his notes he left behind that he did originally intend for Taim to be Demandred Yeah but on the other hand JRRTolkien's "notes"..
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Sep 14, 2020 21:47
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Famethrowa posted:Honestly, I'd take anything over manic pixie visions girl. Everyone complains about Elayne, but Min is the dark horse contender for most useless secondary character in the entire series. Never understood where the "manic pixie" is supposed to come from. Min is basically your normal, down-to-earth girl. Nothing manic or pixie-like. Posts like this confuse me to no end. 
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Sep 14, 2020 21:57
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Famethrowa posted:which would be fine, except RJ writes her as a harem character. yeah, she definitely does get the short end of the stick. i honestly do feel like it's the general consequence of being like. i dunno. an inevitable convergence of some weaker plot elements given how many things are going on at any given point? like rand having basically three wives in the first place is already hugely excessive, to be frank, even accounting for him being The Most Important Person Ever Conceived in-universe. i have to assume that min's main purpose is to remind rand of the 'worth of humanity' or whatever and basically be the one near to him for a stretch so that he can come to his senses. even with that, i have to wonder why that role couldn't have fallen on elayne or aviendha to whatever degree and still have them doing their poo poo otherwise. and then there's min's power which still mostly serves as a means for aes sedai and whoever to raise their eyebrows at her in some sort of incredulous manner 90% of the time while the other 10% is reserved for plot-important things. beyond that i feel her role would still mostly consist of being told to stay behind while the actually 'useful' people do things in a fight, barring maybe the one token moment where her ability to throw a knife is used to save a person who had previously assumed her to be unable to hold her own in a battle. i'm not sure if i fall on the side of just getting rid of her as a character or trying to retool her to function in some other way only to risk her still being mostly completely irrelevant. in any case i don't think she's handled that well, for multiple reasons.
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Sep 14, 2020 22:43
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Libluini posted:Never understood where the "manic pixie" is supposed to come from. Min is basically your normal, down-to-earth girl. Nothing manic or pixie-like. Posts like this confuse me to no end. A man going through his humdrum life of grand politics, prophecies, magic, war and fantasy. Suddenly a woman comes into his orbit who shows him the mundane world existing alongside the fantastic one he's been living in, he just needs to see it. Coming this Fall...
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Sep 14, 2020 22:45
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Libluini posted:Never understood where the "manic pixie" is supposed to come from. Min is basically your normal, down-to-earth girl. Nothing manic or pixie-like. Posts like this confuse me to no end. cute, quirky (woolhead farmboy!), tomboy, whose purpose in the story is to serve as reality-check and salvation for the brooding male lead. that's pretty much definition MPDG. quote:It's an archetype, I realized, that taps into a particular male fantasy: of being saved from depression and ennui by a fantasy woman who sweeps in like a glittery breeze to save you from yourself, then disappears once her work is done. https://www.salon.com/2014/07/15/im_sorry_for_coining_the_phrase_manic_pixie_dream_girl/ Granted, the article is talking about how the term is misused...but I think Min is a thin enough character in this case that it applies pretty well. e. perhaps, given the fantasy setting, she's an inside-out MPDG? Johnny Joestar posted:
Aviendha being a Wise Woman with the power could have easily been combined with Min. She was fleshed out enough thanks to her interesting belief system that she could have done very well in Min's role in keeping Rand down the earth. Hell, even could have given her auras so we could have stupid scenes of the Aes Sedai going "whaaaaa...??" still Famethrowa fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 23:00
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It kinda gets glossed over by the books, but Min does do a bit of philosophizin'. Well, the output gets glossed over, but they like to mention that she's always got Herid Fel's books on hand and Rand mentions that she gave him a clue to something for his Last Battle. I forget what precisely, and I don't have aMoL handy, but on memory it was either re: Callandor or re: the prison. Would've been cool to lean into that a bit more, show her and Rand talking about the whole metaphysical aspect of what's going on and whatnot. Heck, it's even a bit fun that the tomboy character ends up being the smartypants of the bunch.
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Sep 15, 2020 00:49
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Callandor, and yeah, I liked that she was always busy trying to stop him nuking entire cities and reading books to figure out how the gently caress to save the world.
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Sep 15, 2020 00:53
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