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Hyper Crab Tank posted:I guess on the upside, most of the objectivist bullshit seems to have been replaced with regular old bullshit in this book so far? A later book is basically The Fountainhead, With Wizards. It comes back with a FORCE.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:21
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:
This is true but only because it's going to get replaced with rampant misogyny.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:26
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Hodgepodge posted:Wait. In the Wheel of Time, male channelers go mad and need to be killed before they go on a murder/suicide rampage, and so the Aes Sedai have to seek them out and kill them. This is a big deal in the setting and is why male channelers- like the main character- are probably the scariest thing in the setting. Someone else mentioned that Sword of Truth was created and paid for literally to be a Wheel of Time clone in hopes of scoring some of the sweet sweet Wheel of Time cash that was desperate for a new book. At some degree I have to wonder if Goodkind was ever angry that nobody gave a gently caress about his books until he copied another writer. Then I remember his politics and figured he probably immediately deluded himself into believing his books actually were always all 100% original ideas. TheSmilingJackal posted:I take umbrage with Goodkind/ Richard classifying aspects of magic as 'nonsensical'. It comes across as both incredible pretentious and enormously stupid to say that magic shouldn't work a particular way because real life doesn't work that way. Yes, Goodkind, thank you, thank you for explaining why magic isn't real and wouldn't work. I surely wouldn't have figured it out if you hadn't pointed out to me. I totally would have thought I could use a wand to change rats into tea cup if you hadn't shown me the error of my ways. The thing that gets to me is that he made these rules. You can't write a magic system into your own books and then immediately turn around and go "who made THIS dumb poo poo?" You did! You made that stupid nonsensical magic!
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Dec 11, 2014 23:29
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. For example, say you establish that a character needs a plastic plant for magic to work. That's silly, yes, but it's magic. You can't go back later and say they don't need to chant magic words, then explain it as: "That's stupid. What did you all use before we had plastic, hmmmm? HA. 
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:
This book delivers Epic Takedowns of abortion, fiat money and welfare.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:30
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Oh, well, that's just excellent. I am completely looking forward to that. I feel like Goodkind doesn't really know how to get his characters to do things other than throw some magical threat at them and force them to react to it.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:38
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^^ An absolutely unstoppable* magical threat! Oh man I forgot about that, yes in fact it does so with a vengeance
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Dec 11, 2014 23:39
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Tezzor posted:This book delivers Epic Takedowns of abortion, fiat money and welfare. Please enlighten us on how Goodkind folds anti-abortion rhetoric into enlightened self-interest and individualism.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:51
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TheCenturion posted:Later books come right out and say that 3,000 years ago, über wizards set up EVERYTHING so that Richy-Rich would be in the right place, at the right time, with the right context, mindset, learnings, attitude and tools to do whatever. To the point of seeing to it that he's a contrary gently caress, then arranging things to trigger that, so if all goes JUST AS PLANNED.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:05
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Ladies and gentlemen, the post in which the story ACTUALLY BEGINS. Hey, remember that thing I said about Richard being a real dick about his name? quote:She angrily shook a finger at him. “I know you. You will want to take it off sooner. You always think you know best. Well, you don’t. You will just leave it on like I tell you, Richard Cypher.” What a jackoff. Something something the final Sister comes while Kahlan tries on her wedding dress, blah blah we are OVER A QUARTER OF THE WAY INTO THIS BOOK AND THE loving PLOT HASN'T EVEN BEGUN YET. I could describe this scene for you, or I could just save us all some time. Let's do that one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d8oqIXtjdo So he goes with Sister Viera. Remember how in the first book I mentioned I was cutting out A LOT of woods-guidery? Well, this time it's riding horses across large chunks of the Midlands that get glossed over. The first stop: the tribe who they stopped from going to war the day prior. This makes Verna mad. quote:Sister Verna had her horse turned toward him, waiting for him to catch up. She scowled as she waited. Richard didn’t hurry his horse along; he simply let it go at its own pace. What now, he wondered. I don't think it is in any way a spoiler to say that Sister Verna is the lone "good" Sister who came on the trip. So, now that we're closer to the relevant bits, let's get into how completely schizophrenic religion/worship is in this series. I'm going to make some comparisons to Wheel of Time here, since they share a lot of the same "beliefs" of their general populace. In both settings, there's a Creator and an antithesis (Keeper/Dark One). The former made everything and is radio silent ever since, the latter seeks to destroy what the former made and has power over the dead to some degree. This is about where these things split between the two. WoT has people going "Yes, there is a Creator, but it stays out of our affairs since everything has been created already", and so there's really not any organized religion. (Children of the Light are questionable here, I know some people consider them one.) Meanwhile, the Midlands seem to be entirely untouched by religion, the Westlands never mentioned anything (but to be fair, they barely ever come up again), and D'Hara has people pray daily to the Rahl in charge. The weird not-quite-pocket-nation that the Palace of the Prophets is in is actually super religious and has a bible analogue, as you see above. The thing is, though, at basically every turn, the PotP people are going to be ridiculous strawmen in this belief. Meanwhile, praying to a Rahl literally saves the world multiple times as the series goes on. We'll get there. Then we have the not-Satans. The Dark One makes a lot more sense in WoT, a series that's got massive Buddhist/balance undertones from the first novel onwards, and we even see in the end that it would absolutely be the worst thing to kill him off because an imbalance in either direction fucks things up*. Meanwhile, SoT's Keeper of the Underworld is just a raging, rapey rear end in a top hat. He wants to destroy the world because ???, probably just for power. There are also like... seven veils to the underworld or something? And he only controls some of them? They basically all but state there is a heaven when we discover Denna's fate later, and people talk with the spirits of the dead all the time in this world. You'd think this might make things a little crazier as a result, but no. This society makes absolutely no sense when you factor in how death and the afterlife work here. The big part where all this falls apart, though, is that the divisions of land in SoT-land are BARELY OLD AT ALL. Palace of the Prophets kinda works, but to be fair, that place has entirely different problems on all sorts of levels. Spoilers: the land behind their borders is going to be where every other problem in the series will come from. LET'S GET BACK TO THE STORY THEN, but warning: we're going to revisit this topic later when some other details come up. quote:Sister Verna slowly shook her head; her eyes stayed on his. “We had been looking for you for years. Something hid you from us. If you hadn’t used the gift in the ways you did, I doubt we ever would have found you. Using the gift put that collar around your neck.” Okay, read the above. Read it one more time. Do you want to know how motherfucking stupid the Sisters of the Light are? They have been searching for Richard for twenty years, no lie, and when they find him, they're amazed he's a grown man. This post is too long already so next time we'll discuss what makes a wizard a wizard. Spoilers: it's not very well thought through and it's going to make you want to scream. * an aside, and this is why this was at the end of the post: this is why KotOR2 is the single best Star Wars story, because someone realizes that the Force is actively trying to keep a terrible balance on the universe, and sees it as a parasite, not the natural state of things. There is a difference between "baked into reality's base construction" and "horrible alien THING that inhabits a lot of life tries to puppeteer the entire universe to its whims". Star Wars is basically Parasite Eve but more insidious.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:13
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Now hold on just a loving minute. Those three conditions. Do those need to happen before the sisters realize they need to go collar your rear end, or don't they? Because now they're saying they knew about Ricky anyway, and the three conditions were definitely not fulfilled at the time they set out. What was their plan if they caught him early? Provide a handy wizard for him to murder so they can trigger this thing? Furthermore, their entire explanation for why they're doing this is that if not, headaches are going to kill him (in stark contrast to WoT, where male channellers are a danger to everyone). But Rick hasn't been suffering from any headaches before all this started going down. Were they planning on forcing him to trigger his gift just so they could collar him to prevent the horrible fate they themselves caused arggh this makes no sense.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:25
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I'm guessing the answer is someone shouting PROPHECY while doing jazz hands, but I haven't read the books I'm only here for the train wreck.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:41
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Tommofork posted:I'm guessing the answer is someone shouting PROPHECY while doing jazz hands, but I haven't read the books I'm only here for the train wreck. More than one plot dump is wrapped up like this, yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZJIn7u9Cm4
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Dec 12, 2014 00:43
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This is also the point in which I noticed Goodkind forgot that he has to reintroduce things to characters that don't know what a thing is. The Westlands and Midlands do have a religion of informal ancestor worship, "May the good spirits be with you" or whatever. To this end, Richard doesn't know who the Creator is and thinks the idea is pretty stupid. He is the last character that ever has to have the Creator explained. At some point, Richard decides he is down with the idea of the Creator after all. He isn't as crazy fundy as the Sisters of Light, but he stops disclaiming the Creators existence. Everyone after this point, including people from the Westlands, worship the Creator. Hyper Crab Tank posted:Now hold on just a loving minute. Those three conditions. Do those need to happen before the sisters realize they need to go collar your rear end, or don't they? Because now they're saying they knew about Ricky anyway, and the three conditions were definitely not fulfilled at the time they set out. What was their plan if they caught him early? Provide a handy wizard for him to murder so they can trigger this thing? Furthermore, their entire explanation for why they're doing this is that if not, headaches are going to kill him (in stark contrast to WoT, where male channellers are a danger to everyone). But Rick hasn't been suffering from any headaches before all this started going down. Were they planning on forcing him to trigger his gift just so they could collar him to prevent the horrible fate they themselves caused arggh this makes no sense. I love you. Your confused rage makes everything better.
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Dec 12, 2014 01:37
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Minor spoilers: There's going to be a bit of hilarity a few books from now when Goodkind has to fit his cosmology around the fact that Objectivism is super atheist.
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Dec 12, 2014 01:52
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So if you're writing a book, and you constantly have characters saying "this is stupid, you're stupid, none of this matters I'm just hear to tell you you're stupid," etc, that's a sign that you should really rewrite things to be less dumb.
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Dec 12, 2014 02:25
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So does anyone else get the impression that the entire "New World" (Westlands, Midlands and D'hara) is, like, the size of Pennsylvania? The series does a bad job of making you think it's a big place with a lot of people to the point where I'm not sure if it's even supposed to be.
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Dec 12, 2014 03:00
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So maybe I missed this somewhere, but seeing as it's been only two weeks since they saved the world... Where the hell is Zedd?
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Dec 12, 2014 03:08
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The Moon Monster posted:So does anyone else get the impression that the entire "New World" (Westlands, Midlands and D'hara) is, like, the size of Pennsylvania? The series does a bad job of making you think it's a big place with a lot of people to the point where I'm not sure if it's even supposed to be. Goodkind really doesn't spend any time building up places. By now in WoT, you'd know more about Andor, especially Caemlyn, that you could visualize a society and the little quirks (Two Rivers thinking it ain't part of the kingdom, we don't go to Shadar Logoth, etc). Midlands receives less attention than a video game backdrop. I think I cared more about Amalur and that was an offline MMO complete with bear rear end collection. Like I'm trying really hard and can't remember any place of import. I haven't read WoT in half a decade and I remembered Caemlyn without wiki-ing.
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Dec 12, 2014 05:06
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alarumklok posted:Goodkind really doesn't spend any time building up places. By now in WoT, you'd know more about Andor, especially Caemlyn, that you could visualize a society and the little quirks (Two Rivers thinking it ain't part of the kingdom, we don't go to Shadar Logoth, etc). Midlands receives less attention than a video game backdrop. I think I cared more about Amalur and that was an offline MMO complete with bear rear end collection. Like I'm trying really hard and can't remember any place of import. I haven't read WoT in half a decade and I remembered Caemlyn without wiki-ing. Robert Jordan, for all his many, many literary faults, was actually pretty darn good about creating a realized political geography without every country defaulting to an identifiable real world analogue (except for Andor, which is basically fantasy not-England). The detail for each nation is usually barely an inch thick, but it's a mile wide. You can look at the Randland map, pick a country at random, and ask a WoT dork about it and they'll be able to reel off its traditional wardrobe, customs, local food, system of government, and dialect. Jordan was no Tolkein, but he did care about the details, which is why his books grew to be so thick they can be used as blunt trauma murder weapons. Goodkind doesn't give a poo poo, but still manages to actually exceed Jordan's wordcount; Stone of Tears is longer than the longest Wheel of Time novel. Let that sink in for a minute. Imagine the level of filler necessary to achieve that.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:05
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Robert Jordan, for all his many, many literary faults, was actually pretty darn good about creating a realized political geography without every country defaulting to an identifiable real world analogue (except for Andor, which is basically fantasy not-England). The detail for each nation is usually barely an inch thick, but it's a mile wide. You can look at the Randland map, pick a country at random, and ask a WoT dork about it and they'll be able to reel off its traditional wardrobe, customs, local food, system of government, and dialect. Jordan was no Tolkein, but he did care about the details, which is why his books grew to be so thick they can be used as blunt trauma murder weapons. Okay I'm honestly curious at this point, is Wheel of Time worth reading as an adult? I never picked up the books when I was younger, and even though I'm at the end of my pile at the moment I'm not sure if it is worth picking up such a big fantasy series considering the lovely nature of a lot of even the more famous ones.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:14
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:
Worse than simple apathy, Goodkind clearly looks down on the fantasy genre as a whole. That's why he doesn't try to make to world come alive. He thinks it's stupid. Those magic laws he calls out as distilled idiocy? They are mostly common magic tropes he rips off and shoves in his work so that he can rant about how dumb he thinks they are. Because he thinks fantasy is stupid and you are stupid for reading it.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:21
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Caros posted:Okay I'm honestly curious at this point, is Wheel of Time worth reading as an adult? I never picked up the books when I was younger, and even though I'm at the end of my pile at the moment I'm not sure if it is worth picking up such a big fantasy series considering the lovely nature of a lot of even the more famous ones. It's got issues. It's got a lot of issues. If you're not sure it's worth picking it up, don't bother, but if you think you'd like it you probably will.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:22
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Caros posted:Okay I'm honestly curious at this point, is Wheel of Time worth reading as an adult? I never picked up the books when I was younger, and even though I'm at the end of my pile at the moment I'm not sure if it is worth picking up such a big fantasy series considering the lovely nature of a lot of even the more famous ones.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:33
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The first five or so WoT books are pretty okay, but then the series just disappears up its own rear end for like four or five more whole, gigantic books where nothing loving happens. Also, there's some serious issues with women, they're just not the in-your-face, rapey kind. Edit: An important factor in making Rand a better character than Dick, is that he doesn't instantly master his poo poo. He's some kid from nowhere, and he's got to figure stuff out in more than an afternoon. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 07:37
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A lot of fantasy can't make good magical theory, or even okay magic-babble. Harry Potter, for instance, has terrible magic. Doesn't make the books bad, but the magic is just "stuff happens who cares". Sword of Truth also has terrible magic.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:39
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neongrey posted:It's got issues. It's got a lot of issues. If you're not sure it's worth picking it up, don't bother, but if you think you'd like it you probably will. The first novel is sort of self-contained, the way the pilot episode of a TV show is. Which means that if you read that and stop, you won't feel like you've completely wasted your time. And you'll know if you should stop, because the first book book is the whole series in microcosm - pretty well everything that's bad will continue to be bad for the rest of the series, and everything that's good will be the good bits going forward. By the end of Eye of the World you'll know if you want any more of what Jordan offers.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:41
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Bucnasti posted:So maybe I missed this somewhere, but seeing as it's been only two weeks since they saved the world... Where the hell is Zedd? Hahahahaha two weeks, that's rich. For RICHARD AND VERNA, it has been two weeks since they left the Mud People. Everything up to page 300 is in the three days since Darken Rahl died. That's right. Darken Rahl is literally the anti-Christ, rising in three days' time. (the actual answer is coming whenever I write up more novel) Also I highly support "read Eye of the World and go from there", but you should know that there is definitely a middle point where the series is sloggy, which coincided with Jordan's declining health and death. (The books were finished by a hand-picked second author, and his contributions really make the finale shine, he's great.) claw game handjob fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 07:51
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Caros posted:Okay I'm honestly curious at this point, is Wheel of Time worth reading as an adult? I never picked up the books when I was younger, and even though I'm at the end of my pile at the moment I'm not sure if it is worth picking up such a big fantasy series considering the lovely nature of a lot of even the more famous ones. I'm the wrong person to ask, because I devoured the first seven books as a kid and finished the remaining seven out of sheer bloody-mindedness. But I'd say the first six books range from okay to pretty good to occasionally great, as long as you like bulky fantasy novels and can tolerate 80's-era feminism*. Then books seven, eight, and nine experience major drop-offs in quality, book ten is outright loving bad, book eleven gets back to being almost-but-not-quite as good as the first six books, then Jordan died, and the last three were finished by Brandon Sanderson; they're okay, and they tie up the dangling plot threads to the point where I think most of the surviving fans were satisfied. If you like big, world-build-y fantasy novels, I'd give the first one a try and see if it grabs you. If you don't enjoy the first couple of books, walk away, because it doesn't get better, only worse. *Robert Jordan's views on women appear to have crystallized entirely around the time he married his wife. They're not actively misogynistic, and compared to Goodkind's rapestravaganza they're unbelievably tame, but because magic in the novels has a male/female duality, those views suffuse the books.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:53
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TheSmilingJackal posted:Because he thinks fantasy is stupid and you are stupid for reading it. Well, it really does fit with the personalities of most objectivists I've encountered to do anything they can to be able to shout "Stupid Sheeple!" at the world as loudly and as often as possible.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:57
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My take on the Wheel of Time: I read all of them up through Knife of Dreams (11th, IIRC). There are three major points I want to raise as criticism: 1) Literally every single woman in the entire series (with the exceedingly tentative departure of Min) is a complete and utter domineering rear end in a top hat who is utterly convinced that men are stupid, useless, can't do anything on their own, can't do anything right, and are generally tolerated at absolute best and usually snubbed at every opportunity. Everyone. Every. Single. One. Jordan must have had some real issues with women somewhere along the line. 2) Two full books are utterly pointless. Never mind the filler that bloats the individual books, which ranges from mild to several hundred pages. Literally nothing happens in books eight and ten. 3) Robert Jordan, by the end of the 11th book, had successfully managed to make me actively dislike every single character in the series bar one (Mat). The levels of dislike bounced around from "ugh not this again" to "holy poo poo I want to burn this book on your grave", but he wrote every single character into a horrid caricature of themselves where it was virtually impossible to like them. Your perspective may differ, I dunno! I'm a huge fan of Sanderson, so one of these days I'll probably read those, but I don't know if I'll be able to make myself reread everything up to that. I should also note that this was over seven years ago that I last read them, so perhaps on a reread my opinion would change.
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Dec 12, 2014 08:03
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Plague of Hats posted:Edit: An important factor in making Rand a better character than Dick, is that he doesn't instantly master his poo poo. He's some kid from nowhere, and he's got to figure stuff out in more than an afternoon. MonsieurChoc posted:A lot of fantasy can't make good magical theory, or even okay magic-babble. Harry Potter, for instance, has terrible magic. Doesn't make the books bad, but the magic is just "stuff happens who cares". Sword of Truth also has terrible magic. 1) Wheel of Time has a plan. It uses a fairly traditional story structure that takes a farm-boy and traces his path to becoming an insane Wizard-Emperor, but it sticks with it. Occasionally it may meander to hel and back for multiple novels, but there's a clear line from beginning to end. Where Goodkind is clearly pulling a Lost and never planning further than the end of the novel, if that, Jordan managed to get three books published posthumously that made it seem as if he had at least the broad strokes of the ending planned out more than 20 years in advance. 2) Jordan mapped out a fairly original magic system in the first book and then loving stuck with it for thirteen more books. There's a few extra tricks added over the course of the novels, and a fair amount of escalation as more powerful threats get added, but everything you learn about the One Power in the Eye of the World still applies by the last page of the last novel. Rand is special to a certain extent, but he doesn't get to cheat the system. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 08:09
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:1) Wheel of Time has a plan. It uses a fairly traditional story structure that takes a farm-boy and traces his path to becoming an insane Wizard-Emperor, but it sticks with it. Also he writes insanity a lot better than Goodkind. Goodkind's insanity is comedic at best, offensive at worst. Mild spoilers, but Rand al'Thor straight up spends multiple novels battling with what might be the actual specter of a full psychotic break after he's tortured. Richard just doesn't want to wear a collar. WHICH HE IS DOING ANYWAY. THERE IS STILL AN AGIEL AROUND HIS NECK HANGING FROM ONE. Jordan never makes you feel like you're reading someone's wank fantasy, either.
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Dec 12, 2014 08:17
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I ended the last post with potshots about Star Wars. That was actually Goodkindian foreshadowing, because today? We're going to talk about Han.quote:"There is a force within us all. It is the force of life. We call it Han.” Richard frowned. “Lift your arm.” He did as she asked. “That is the force of life, given us by the Creator. It is encased within you. You have just used Han. Those with the gift can extend that force outside themselves. Such an external force is called a web. Those with the gift, like you, have the ability to cast a web. With the web, you can do things outside your body, much as the life force can do within your body.” Sister Verna has just demonstrated that poo poo a five year old does where they go "I can hit you with my mind!", slap you, and go "MY BRAIN MADE MY HAND MOVE HAH". quote:“How do you get this life force to go outside your body?” Luckily, Richard is also a five-year-old, and I DON'T WANNA BE A WIZARD YOU SAID I DIDN'T HAFTA BE A WIZARD. You learn to find your Han via meditation, because of course you do. Richard is so good at it that he accidentally begins scrying in the process. quote:He was about to try to force the image of the sword to come back when he smelled something. Burned flesh. The stench made his nostrils flare. He almost gagged. His stomach turned sickeningly. Despite LITERALLY SEEING HIS DEAD DAD TAUNT HIM, Richard is still believing Verna going "You were just tripping balls, your dead dad didn't escape hell and brand your chest. You probably fell into a fire." Yes, that's right, one of the things I cut out of this (we're now 311 pages in) is Verna undoing plot progression. Things I WILL transcribe, though: quote:“Do you wish to shave now? Now that I have shown you I only wish to help you.” Fantasy Movember. There's a long bit about how Verna destroys some books because they're not APPROPRIATE FOR YOUNG MINDS, and blah blah she can't control a horse without a bit so Richard destroys them and begins teaching her to tame the trio. It ends on actually making me laugh. quote:She swung herself up into the saddle. “The beam in the central hall. It’s the highest. Everyone will be able to see it.” Meanwhile, at the Palace of the Prophets: Sister Margaret figures out that there are Sisters of the Dark, that they have been murdering wizards, and watches them perform a ceremony in which a beast called (no joke) a "namble" rapes Subtractive magic into a new SotD with the aid of the quillion. Because that's how women have to earn it. In the process, they have Sister Black from earlier remove her hood, Margaret recognizes her, and STILL nobody names her, which is even more stilted now because at this point it's just there to tease us, the readers. Sister Margaret dies at the end of this chapter. I just saved you a lot of unpleasant reading by summarizing. Finally, almost 350 pages in... we see Chase again. Chase has been told of Richard's 'capture' and tries to track them, but it's now been three weeks. He's hosed. And Zedd finally got to Adie's place! He left for that AT THE END OF CHAPTER TWO, drat. Obviously we're going to go right into "The Keeper is rising", right? The thing he set out to see her for at the beginning of the novel? quote:Adie drew a long breath. “I be born in the town of Choora, in the land of Nicobarese. My mother did not have the gift of sorcery. She be a skip, as it be called. My grandmother Lindel be the one before me to have it. My mother be grateful to the good spirits she be a skip, but bitter at them that I be gifted.” SON OF A BITCH
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Dec 12, 2014 08:26
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DARKSEID DICK PICS posted:Jordan never makes you feel like you're reading someone's wank fantasy, either.  But yeah. I remember that even as a teen I found Richard Rahl to be insufferable because there was never any sense of effort or obstacle or accomplishment in the books. Goodkind clearly wants you to feel as if Richard is suffering at the hands of the Sisters, but as a Randian Superman he can't actually express unsuitable emotion or fallibility, so his smug stoicism comes off as cheap and unsatisfying. As a teen, I devoured my library's entire scifi/fantasy section without chewing or swallowing, in a spirit of total acceptance of all things dorky, but I quit the Sword of Truth books at either the 2nd or 3rd one (Which one has the evil empire where they play Jai Alai to the death? It was that one.) because even at 13 I knew these things were unutterably bad. Terry Goodkind basically taught me to have taste.
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Dec 12, 2014 08:38
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theshim posted:My take on the Wheel of Time: I read all of them up through Knife of Dreams (11th, IIRC). There are three major points I want to raise as criticism: Hey, pssst, over here... *whispers in ear* Nynaeve tugged her braid... :iamafag:
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Dec 12, 2014 08:41
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I also read the Wheel of Time books as a child, up to about book 7 (I think?), because Jordan hadn't written any more and I was reading translated versions since my English wasn't very good at that point. Anyway, because those books predate the horrible slump, I was still pretty hooked, and only went back and read the complete series as it was being finished up by Sanderson (which was only 2013). Really, the two worst offenders are Crossroads of Twilight and everything concerned with the Bowl of Winds. The latter is entirely a MacGuffin that instantly resolves a problem that was never mentioned before that book and is never mentioned again afterwards, and the former follows up on one of the most crucial events of the series by Jordan going "Hold on, I only covered about half of the astronomically sprawling cast in the previous book, so rather than build on this monumental thing that just occurred I'm going to write 300,000 words about the same past few weeks again, this time from the viewpoint of all the other characters that weren't in the last book!" I actually didn't read that one. I read a plot outline of it online and I don't feel my experience suffered for it. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 10:36
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:I actually didn't read [Crossroads of Twilight]. I read a plot outline of it online and I don't feel my experience suffered for it. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY THE RIGHT ANSWER. Seriously. I cannot stress this enough. That book is universally agreed upon to be awful and nothing really happens in it. There's a little setup at the very end so the next novel moves right along.
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Dec 12, 2014 10:38
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Speaking of Star WarsRick Rahl posted:Richard shook his head. “No. That’s not true. It just isn’t possible.”
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Dec 12, 2014 10:56
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Wheel of Time's filler gets 100% more depressing and horrifying when you realize there's a possibility that he was doing it intentionally because those books were paying for his hospital fees, and if the books ended...
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Dec 12, 2014 11:47
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DARKSEID DICK PICS posted:THIS IS ABSOLUTELY THE RIGHT ANSWER. Yeah, Crossroads was the one that broke me honestly. I still love the first half of the WoT series, enough that Rand or Matt are basically the archetypes I use to build all my PCs around (seriously, Matt is awesome) But the middle books broke my enthusiasm enough that I haven't picked up any of the remaining ones.
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Dec 12, 2014 11:54
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