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New Spring also has a very different style than the early novels, matching the time when it was written - I'd recommend any time after book 8.
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May 8, 2016 16:18
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Neat. I just finished up 10 last night, and I saw a few places that some people had a few disagreements with where it should be read, but the general thoughts were in publication order, so after 10.
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May 8, 2016 16:34
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Now, it turns out they were darkfriends, it was an attempt on his life, and there was a Grey man hiding among them, but none of this is known to Rand or available to his point of view. To the reader it just seems like he flips out a slaughters them for no reason. ...I mean, not that Rand wasn't obviously in crazy town given the whole "make the corpses bow," thing, but isn't the fact that a heavily armed party of 11 approached a lone man on the road in the middle of nowhere and "asked to share his fire," pretty fundamentally suspicious? I don't know about attacking them without warning, but Rand absolutely was correct to be immediately suspicious and assume they meant him harm.
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May 11, 2016 06:39
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Throughout most of the series the Dark has a "no kill" order on Rand. This is one of the few times they don't, so Rand is enduring constant nightly assassination attempts in his dreams, and has every darkfriend in the world looking to kill him at the moment.
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May 12, 2016 15:03
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How are u posted:No major TV player is going to buy WoT and make it a loving anime, sorry nerds. Wheel of Time is a shonen manga without pictures. Three boys and two girls run off with a great wizard and The Most Badass Swordfighter In Two Ages over a sprawling baroque melodrama with lots of tangential filler side plots and every physical description SCREAMS cartoonish     rand al thor is literally redheaded and buff Tenchi Muyo Its an anime. You like a story that's an anime. The anime story features regular katana fights, and heroes increasing their Power Levels. It's fine. Deep breaths. Wheel of Time in the style of something really straight faced like Legends of the Galactic Heroes would be amazing. LoGH even does the constant internal monologue and soliloquizing that WoT does all the time and is a pretty good template of how to handle a cast of like 300 characters with 2-3 unique quirks apiece in a way that's only a little bit of a mess. 
Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Jun 10, 2016 |
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Jun 10, 2016 02:14
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I just finished a first-time spiteread of WoT at the goading of a friend. I don't know if I should read through the thread to get a sense for how people feel about it (not like I'm not in the practice of consuming huge walls of text at this point  ), but do people generally find it fairly ridiculous at least?I don't know whether I should be letting myself laugh this hard at stuff like all the gratuitous spanking scenes and Sanderson's hilarious "You want spanking? FINE I'LL GIVE YOU SPANKING, NOW LET US NEVER SPEAK OF THIS AGAIN" maneuver
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Jun 10, 2016 02:36
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WoT is well seasoned with ridiculousness.
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Jun 10, 2016 05:28
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Oh good How about book 5 or whichever it was where Jordan suddenly became obsessed with punch? I was reading via ebook and I got like 54 matches for "punch" (the beverage) in that book only, whereas in every other book the only matches were people getting punched.
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Jun 10, 2016 12:51
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Data Graham posted:
You definitely should.
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Jun 10, 2016 14:07
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I read all your posts in this thread and feel like it provides a decent enough cliff's notes. (Don't worry, that's not how I went through WoT) Here's my list of Greatest Hits: - Inns (each with five pages describing the fatness level of the innkeeper) - Folding her arms beneath her breasts - Insufferable woman! - Fool man! - Smile that does not reach his eyes - Bosoms - Bustling - There's like five hundred characters (mostly women) whose names follow the pattern M__R__N - Smoothing her dress, though it does not need it - Braid-tugging - Beard-scratching - Punch - Mustaches (like, I guess six or seven of them per face) Also I should mention that the friend who harangued me into reading WoT is going full-blown MRA lately, and I'm awfully tempted to tell him "Geez, I can sure see why you'd like this book" I mean, okay, so fantasy is traditionally a sausage party? I know, let's put ALL THE WOMEN into the book. But let's not stop there! Let's make it a WORLD GONE MAD where women control all real power—and where potentially cool men are unfairly maligned and feared and symbolically emasculated by ritual because they are all inherently a threat of RAPING THE WORLD! Let's make it a story of men overcoming the stigma against them and regaining their rightful place as the leaders of the world! On a micro level the audience gets to congratulate itself on how "progressive" it is, with so many women with agency everywhere, with country matrons hitting Trollocs with rolling pins and frying pans on up to women being ninjas and empresses and cannon engineers (even if they all wear long flowing delicately embroidered dresses for any and all purposes at all times, even the Aiel have to gather up huge skirts in order to sprint around the desert). But you step back a few paces and it's like, whoa nellie, what exactly are you getting at here. This redemption-of-men theme and the chip it seems to carry on its shoulder petered out toward the end, thankfully, but I can't help wondering whether that's because it's just another thing Sanderson quietly let sit buzzing in the rafters while he shut the door
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Jun 10, 2016 15:22
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I hope all of this stuff makes it into the show.
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Jun 10, 2016 15:33
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Data Graham posted:I read all your posts in this thread and feel like it provides a decent enough cliff's notes. (Don't worry, that's not how I went through WoT) How could you possibly forget about the sniffing?
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Jun 10, 2016 15:37
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For some reason sniffing never really jumped out at me. Well, except when Perrin did it
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Jun 10, 2016 16:10
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Willie Tomg posted:Wheel of Time is a shonen manga without pictures. Three boys and two girls run off with a great wizard and The Most Badass Swordfighter In Two Ages over a sprawling baroque melodrama with lots of tangential filler side plots and every physical description SCREAMS cartoonish Hogge Wild posted:imo the most fitting adaptation for wot would be a 70s style hannabarbera cartoon
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Jun 10, 2016 16:16
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Data Graham posted:I read all your posts in this thread and feel like it provides a decent enough cliff's notes. (Don't worry, that's not how I went through WoT) Yes. quote:Also I should mention that the friend who harangued me into reading WoT is going full-blown MRA lately, and I'm awfully tempted to tell him "Geez, I can sure see why you'd like this book" sssssssorta, mostly yes imo. I think you're correctly diagnosing a dysfunctional dynamic that the series itself also identifies as fairly dysfunctional in turn but does so less vociferously than it does the braid tugging hard-faces with smiles that never reach their eyes which is that everyone acts stupid without an external perspective head-checking them regularly. --Moiraine acts stupid and basically does everything to terrify the hell out of Rand until Lan flouts her a bit which actually helps her out some even if he's technically being insuboordinate. --Lan is a stupid idiot dummy who wants to kill himself out of sentiment until Nynaeve insists he at least do his dumb poo poo in a way thats vaguely productive for the overall war effort --Rand is an unchecked psychotic dumbass until Min starts telling him to stop acting so crazy, crazyboy, at which point he's then periodically able to shake himself together a bit long enough to be functional --The Aes Sedai are real real real real real dumb until Egwene, who regardless of what she says for legal reasons is absolutely not Aes Sedai in a cultural sense like the 150 year old sisters she's governing, yells at them such that they get their act together. --Rand is all set to pave the way for utopian forever happyland until the Dark One points out in what is actually the nicest possible way that that's a fuckin' nightmare world full of zombies and he should have thought about that for two seconds before literally walking into Hell, maybe talked about it some with his philosopher girlfriend or something, whatever. It's typically gendered and couched in the metaphor of a sexual relationship, but often is not, and basically the entire drama of the series derives from people putting too much stock in a view of how folk are pretty sure things should be rather than how they are and communicating shittily/not at all as a result--see: Rand negotiating the Peace of the Dragon in a roundtable meeting that takes like, an hour. Maybe. And in the context of the story it really works, because that's the first and last time everyone from everywhere gets together and has an earnest conversation about what the world should really look like now that everything's destroyed! Which still isn't entirely satisfactory for a Grown-Up reading, because this still fundamentally relies upon a foundation of Essential NaturesTM even down to saidin and saidar being literally-within-the-text aggressive/active/penetrative and passive/guiding/engulfing respectively, and in a series where the national, economic, and even loving geological basis of the world is given a fairly exhaustive exploration over the course of fourteen volumes the only motherfucking time anyone comes remotely close to questioning from whence these essential natures are derived is when Lanfear nee Mierin Sedai drills a hole into reality and releases the Sixth Power of Elemental Nihilism on the world. So... yeah, that's a thing that happens. In the plot. I'm not even gonna touch non-hetero sexualities but pretend I did. When the SLC Mormon pinch-hitter finishing the series is more sexually progressive than you that is some something right there.... Now here's the bit where WoT makes my head pop clean off my neck like a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot: Sure, The Author Is Dead and all that but Bruce Rigney/Robert Jordan is a Vietnam veteran from Real South Carolina. Old school South Carolina, posessed of considerable education and a sense of perspective, and to a considerable degree WoT was a personal project where he exorcised a bunch of thoughts he knew weren't quite sitting right, and he doesn't really ever proscribe solutions but he definitely has an awareness that Victorian views of gender and politics aren't quite up to capturing actually-existing reality and the characters struggle with that in ways I'm pretty sure are reflective of how he struggled with it. And even in its contemporary period, Randland is a technologically and economically and socially stunted continent, fractured by divisions stemming ultimately from the periodic interference of Lanfear's failed revolutionary unification of the two aspects of the actually-very-inaccurately-named-One Power (vietnam vet). This balkanized, third-world shithole gets invaded from across the ocean by an advanced imperial power with a stunningly large ethnically polyglot professional army who speak in variations of a slow, southern US drawl (vietnam vet) whose worst military performance in the series is when they fail to account for a relatively small guerilla force moving very quickly with the One Power using heavily forested terrain to mask their movements (vietnam vet) so they adjust their tactics and then force a draw and everyone walks away from that particular battle feeling like they lost (vietnam vet). I guess at Falme they also lost to a bunch of ghosts when Mat blew the MacGuffin Horn, but whatever. Unlike Randland which is patriarchy-upside-down, the Seanchan are fairly ideally gender egalitarian but their entire society and logistics and basically every material advantage they have is based on a system of subjugation and slavery and brutally enforced obeisance which is repeatedly, over and over again, coded as not just ethically repugnant but also particularly in the case of slave channelers is fated to inevitably tear the entire empire apart under the weight of its dissonance (vietnam vet who's lived his whole life in south carolina, a state which has considerable experience in the legacy of slavery and its consequences) RJ's widow posted:MATT HATCH And while the story ends somewhat ambiguously toward the ultimate fate of the Seanchan colonial project, the main continent itself is torn to shreds with only a little bit of the loving around by Lanfear's failed revolutionary project that Randland has been dealing with for 3000 years. Which somewhat recasts the mettle of the backwards, balkanized, feudal shithole which was oh-so-easy to invade but oh-so-difficult to conquer, and impossible to extract from. Vietnam vet. The Lord Bude posted:I hope all of this stuff makes it into the show.
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Jun 10, 2016 18:45
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Data Graham posted:For some reason sniffing never really jumped out at me. I was talking about it more in the sense of what various women did when they wanted to show their disapproval about something, usually toward men.
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Jun 10, 2016 19:02
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Willie Tomg posted:And even in its contemporary period, Randland is a technologically and economically and socially stunted continent, fractured by divisions stemming ultimately from the periodic interference of Lanfear's failed revolutionary unification of the two aspects of the actually-very-inaccurately-named-One Power (vietnam vet). This balkanized, third-world shithole gets invaded from across the ocean by an advanced imperial power with a stunningly large ethnically polyglot professional army who speak in variations of a slow, southern US drawl (vietnam vet) whose worst military performance in the series is when they fail to account for a relatively small guerilla force moving very quickly with the One Power using heavily forested terrain to mask their movements (vietnam vet) so they adjust their tactics and then force a draw and everyone walks away from that particular battle feeling like they lost (vietnam vet). I guess at Falme they also lost to a bunch of ghosts when Mat blew the MacGuffin Horn, but whatever. Unlike Randland which is patriarchy-upside-down, the Seanchan are fairly ideally gender egalitarian but their entire society and logistics and basically every material advantage they have is based on a system of subjugation and slavery and brutally enforced obeisance which is repeatedly, over and over again, coded as not just ethically repugnant but also particularly in the case of slave channelers is fated to inevitably tear the entire empire apart under the weight of its dissonance (vietnam vet who's lived his whole life in south carolina, a state which has considerable experience in the legacy of slavery and its consequences) Heh, thanks for this. I feel like I clocked a lot of the not-so-subtle and not-so-intentional allusions, but this one will be fun to bring up when said friend finds out I read it. (I plan to tell him first that "Oh yeah, I watched the TV pilot" and see if I can get the vein in his forehead to actually explode) On a tangent, I don't really want to find out how many people cosplay at cons as sul'dam/damane. I'm not sure if any answer would not trouble me.
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Jun 10, 2016 19:17
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EvilTaytoMan posted:I was talking about it more in the sense of what various women did when they wanted to show their disapproval about something, usually toward men. I know, just joshin' :iamafag:
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Jun 10, 2016 19:17
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Re: WoT and gender -- I won't disagree with any of the above but I think it's worth pointing out where the fantasy genre was, especially in America, when the first few books were written. 1980's fantasy, especially pulp fantasy, was an absolute wasteland, and having actual "strong female characters" in a popular audience, mass market fantasy was a much bigger and more revolutionary deal at the time than it seems now. I mean, I'm pretty sure that Eye of the World even passes the Bechdel test (I'm thinking of the scene with Moraine and Egwene). It probably does have a sort of unfortunate appeal to the MRA crowd today, and there's definitely a BIOTRUTHS element to it, but I think you can make a strong argument that at the time it first came out it was a positive step forward for the genre. Ultimately the WoT is a huge complicated mess of a story and there's enough material in there to both support and critique almost any given reading. Whatever else it is, it isn't short or simple.
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Jun 10, 2016 19:25
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So if the story was that the female half of the one power was tainted we'd be complaining about how the men are in charge of magic and are keeping the women down right?
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Jun 10, 2016 19:54
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RC Cola posted:So if the story was that the female half of the one power was tainted we'd be complaining about how the men are in charge of magic and are keeping the women down right? Whose complaining about the women being in charger of magic and keeping the men down (up until the cleansing, and afterward even so probably not the worst idea)?? The Red Aja did nothing wrong.
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Jun 10, 2016 20:15
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Re: WoT and gender -- Basically, Robert Jordan was a moderately old dude and that's why every man/woman interaction in WoT feels like it was ripped straight from the script of an episode of Moonlighting.
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Jun 10, 2016 20:27
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How are u posted:Whose complaining about the women being in charger of magic and keeping the men down (up until the cleansing, and afterward even so probably not the worst idea)?? Can't tell if you're deliberately triggering by misspelling ajah.
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Jun 10, 2016 20:38
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Yeah. The gender dynamics of the WoT have not aged well, but that's largely because societal accepted views about gender norms and sexual identity have shifted so loving much from Reagan's 1980's that you have to give the books a little leeway. What's funny is that WoT came about as an answer to Tolkien's male-dominated Bulfinch-esque mythos; I mean the predominance of women in it feels like such a deliberate riposte to "Arwen and Galadriel and .. uhh" that you know it was as self-conscious a move as the "jolly bearded man ter'angreal" and Loial the frustrated author who'll never get to finish his book before he dies  It was supposed to be the modern fantasy story, one that wasn't bogged down by Edwardian stage farce tropes or (especially) the pre-WWII cultish worship of blood purity and royal lineage, or Orcs/Southrons/other racial pastiches meant to be read as Zulu hordes But now, 20-30 years later, we're still making the same half-mast arguments against Tolkien but not really meaning it because the story's that good; but how well has WoT aged in much less time? It's arguably even more alarming, especially in the immediate present-day political climate E: Meanwhile I still think "no living man am I" has enough emotional payoff that it stands in for a good few castles full of Aes Sedai
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Jun 10, 2016 20:42
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Data Graham posted:E: Meanwhile I still think "no living man am I" has enough emotional payoff that it stands in for a good few castles full of Aes Sedai Eh, this has never had any real emotional payoff to me, it's always seemed like more of a loophole than anything else, and then after the kill she gives up on dreams of heroism to be a housewife for her rebound fling.
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Jun 10, 2016 21:15
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On that note though, it really wasn't until the Sanderson books that WoT became emotionally engaging at all for me; it was honestly a real hard slog, not just for the usually cited dark swamps of books 7-10, but pretty much the whole thing. I found myself choking up at the Verin scene, and I was so caught off guard I was like "What the gently caress, when did they decide there should be characters in this book" And Mat / Talmanes suddenly became actually funny, instead of Mat just being tacked to the wall as "The Funny One" despite not ever doing anything except grouse tiresomely and swear
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Jun 10, 2016 21:19
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Jordan gets a pass from me mostly for not being Piers Anthony or Terry Goodkind
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Jun 10, 2016 21:54
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Nihilarian posted:Jordan gets a pass from me mostly for not being Piers Anthony or Terry Goodkind Basically this. It's a series where you need to keep a bit of perspective. It's not socially progressive by today's norms, but holy poo poo is it miles ahead of what was around when he started writing it.
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Jun 11, 2016 00:54
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Robert Jordan was a weird guy with a lot of issues that he worked out in his books. He also never titled one of his books "The Color of Her Panties".
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Jun 11, 2016 04:03
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Khizan posted:Eh, this has never had any real emotional payoff to me, it's always seemed like more of a loophole than anything else, and then after the kill she gives up on dreams of heroism to be a housewife for her rebound fling. Even Rand's 'harem' end up in positions of overall leadership that for the most part are not beholden to or dependent upon him. Brandon even found Min something to do that's not Rand's live-in.
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Jun 11, 2016 05:27
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Though to be fair that's because every single major character in WoT ended up being a military leader and/or ruler of something
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Jun 11, 2016 06:01
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Daedalus Esquire posted:Basically this. It's a series where you need to keep a bit of perspective. It's not socially progressive by today's norms, but holy poo poo is it miles ahead of what was around when he started writing it. One of the things that you need to take into consideration with the Wheel of Time is that it started in 1990 and finished in 2013. Society changed a lot in the yeas between the first and last book, and Eye is often being judged by the standards of 2016 and not the standards of 1990, which I think is rather unfair because it was an incredibly progressive series for the time it was written. Every book aside from the first smashes the Bechdal test, and the first book passes it. Lots of strong female characters, with their own opinions and goals and ideas. Skin tones other than white. Sure, the gender politics are a bit hosed up, especially by modern standards, but it was groundbreakingly progressive when it was written. I can only think of one fantasy series from that time period that did it better and that's Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books. Jhereg was written in 1983 and that series has multiple independent strong female characters(Sethra, Aliera, Cawti, Kiera, Zerika). Vlad's wife worked in the same field as him and she was higher-paid with a better reputation. Women soldiers serving alongside men like it's absolutely normal. All kinds of things like that, and without the weird gender stuff. Khizan fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Jun 11, 2016 |
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Jun 11, 2016 06:17
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One of the other things that stood out to me while I read it was the huge emphasis on self-determination and nurture vs nature. The aforementioned friend who pushed me into reading it is very much of the "you ain't a man unless you've killed someone with your bare hands" type; like, if you weren't a military brat, didn't know trigger discipline by age 5, didn't spend your preteen years blowing up illegal explosives and your teen years riding dirt bikes into the desert and loving every girl in the county, you may as well cut off your balls because you'll never need them. He's very much subscribed to the idea that you can take any moron kid and send them to boot camp for six months and they'll come out of it shouting HOOAAH and become a Man of Vision and Integrity who can make plans and execute tasks efficiently and competently. You gotta bring kids up right; there's no such thing as someone who is just not suited to leadership, just someone who wasn't given the right cues early on, or failing that, wasn't sent through the crucible of war a little later. The thing WoT seems determined to pound home is that anyone, from bucolic farmboys to cosseted princesses, is just one Moment of Truth away from transforming from an introverted nobody into someone poised to throw the world off its axis with their grand visions. Rand starts out as uninterested in anything outside his farm as Frodo, quite a lot less so in fact; but after book 3 where he spends the entire narrative offscreen shedding one personality for another one entirely, all he does is stomp around and shout about his PLANS, I HAVE PLANS, YOU MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO DISRUPT MY PLANS. He goes from "sheep sheep tabac sheep" to "here is how to arrange my naval formations, now bring me the heads of all the 3000-year-old kingdoms on a plate" overnight. And the impression I'm given, considering that everyone from Egwene to Mat to Perrin follows the exact same trajectory, is that this is a good and desirable thing to have happen. All you need is to be told you're a Chosen One, and hup, guess it's time to put a dent in the universe. Rand post-book-3 (until Sanderson gets involved) never shows a momentary hint of self-doubt—just frustration and rage at everyone else's failure to share in his GRAND VISION. And what's funny is that I was told to read WoT because if I had illusions about writing some fiction of my own, well boy howdy I sure don't know a drat thing about character development until and unless I come to know Rand and his quest from quiet obscurity to be elected Pope-President. It's supposedly some kind of self-help thing to turn a person from a pussy into a general, through the power of inspiration or something. I don't know if I was too on my guard while reading it and that's why this all rang so hollowly to me, but it sure seems like the kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy that would appeal mightily to someone who thinks everyone is equally capable of greatness at birth, it's just that some are given the right upbringing and the right opportunities, and others are raised by hippies and read books about elves.
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Jun 11, 2016 21:30
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Everyone knows Rand is loving insane and he's a monumental fuckup when left without input from others, though.
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Jun 11, 2016 21:35
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Except I guess some readers take his rear end in a top hat King of Chicago phase and say "yup, that's the man I want to be"
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Jun 11, 2016 21:47
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sure, if you're a pre-pube
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Jun 11, 2016 21:50
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Data Graham posted:Except I guess some readers take his rear end in a top hat King of Chicago phase and say "yup, that's the man I want to be" Yeah, and there's even a bit of that in this thread iirc.
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Jun 11, 2016 21:59
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The context posts above are really interesting, thanks! Also reminded me that I read Sheri S. Tepper when I was a teenager (at the encouragement of a pretty cool female english teacher I had at the time) and wondering if they're actually poo poo or not (I liked them at the time).
El Grillo fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Jun 11, 2016 |
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Jun 11, 2016 22:03
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Rand never becomes anything resembling a competent general and he leaves most of the military poo poo up to his military people, he even mentions that it all sounds like gibberish to him. Being the chosen one sucks and drives him loving insane, literally, and whatever good his "do everything myself" approach did is offset by the times he failed or made things worse. At no point in the story are you supposed to be going "hm, Rand's bitterness, paranoia and rage make him a good leader, I'm glad he's already ready to fight Satan". He's barely human by the time he has his epiphany and is brought back from the brink of cracking the world like an egg and it's posited a few times that if he'd actually beat the Dark One in that state things might have gotten worse.
Nihilarian fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jun 11, 2016 |
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Jun 11, 2016 22:46
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Data Graham posted:One of the other things that stood out to me while I read it was the huge emphasis on self-determination and nurture vs nature. well it's a fantasy book for teens
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Jun 11, 2016 23:19
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