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Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006
Yes, yes. It's all fun and games now, enjoy it.


I'll meet y'all in Crossroads when we find out who the real fans are.

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Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006
It's so funny discussing Min's viewings and no longer being able to do properly nutty theorycrafting with them. If you've read up to book 13 you just read that part and its like "yes, that certainly is the plot".

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

One posted:

I was so angry with matt for taking that dagger from Shadar Logoth. It's the one thing he definitely should not have done and you are helpless as you watch him blunder ahead and do it.

Shadar Logoth stuff;

If you wanna be mad be mad at Mat suggesting they go out in the first place. Once Mordeth found them, Mat taking possession of the dagger is the only conceivable thing that would have gotten him to stop possessing one of them right there. It just so happens that grabbing the dagger carries a ton of extremely unfortunate side effects.

One posted:

I guess it's partly explained by saying that people from the 2 rivers are stubborn but there's a difference between stubborn and self destructively contrarian.

Not really.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Lascivious Sloth posted:

I thought there was a drinking game board where you win if you cross off 4 in a row, but looking for it I found this: http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/Drinking_game

Anyone who plays this will die of alcohol poisoning.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

DrGonzo90 posted:

This is my first reading so I'm not sure how often he's involved, but I'd like to see a tally of Thom blowing out or fiddling with his mustache.

I thought of a good one rereading the chapter in Fal Dara Keep: Count how many times over the course of the series a Big Manly CharacterTM crumples the metal goblet they're drinking from in their hands in lieu of an emotional outburst because Real Men Don't Show Emotion Except Through Displays Of Physical Strength.

Bonus points if you cross reference it with the number of times the goblet and drink are replaced immediately and without consequence or comment by onlookers/servants.

This happens on at least three distinct occasions by three totally different male characters I can recall off the top of my head.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

omnibobb posted:

Wowee zowee! We're onto book 2, The Great Hunt. (spoiler: This Book Rocks!)

Note: after the fanfuckingtastic prologue the first couple chapters of wacky oops-shoulda-left-town-a-month-ago-now-im-hiding-from-nobility-and-honored-guests-in-their-own-castle hijinx do not, in fact, rock. But it gets way better really quick!

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006
I've never done a Lets Read before but it sure is frustrating when people just decide to yak on about poo poo that happens eleven loving books down the line when there's a perfectly good general WoT discussion thread in this very forum, and we've had some pretty big dealings in the current readthrough chapters! Kinda makes me wonder what the attraction is to this kinda thread!

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

omnibobb posted:

What do you all think of taking a week off and reading a trash novel so we don't burn ourselves out on WoT?

Um. :stare:

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006
Myrelle is real, real bad and Nynaeve giving her the business immediately after attaining the shawl was unironically one of my favorite parts of ToM.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006
This part of the series is where it begins to "drag" according to a lot of people becuase by now the main characters are powerful and established enough in their own right that they can delegate stuff. Of the male leads, one of them is essentially an acknowledged Great Captain by two countries' worth of noblemen and the other two have credible claims on monarchy. This has the effect of taking the protagonists out of the action and making what drama remains a whole lot more abstract than "Perrin and Egwene are lost in the country and slowly starving to death" while also introducing twelve billion new side characters which gets most confusing with Aes Sedai and Aiel which are two groups that are very... Not Good at emoting distinctively. So in addition to no longer having the immediate drama of Rand and Mat living hard, sleeping under bushes and singing for their supper (a really distinctive and high point of the series) you have Rand making long term plans and Mat trying to deal with those long term plans and a bunch of middle managers carrying them out and a bevy of long standing Randland institutions trying to mess those plans up to maintain their power base.

"Which Whitecloak? Oh right, the intensely zealous one who doesn't care if innocents get hurt. Not to be confused with the stern Aiel Chief exasperated with wetlander customs, or the Aes Sedai with the frosty glare who tries to take charge everywhere."

Despite the lack of immediate sword-on-sword action, though, there's a lot going on. One thing that I'm surprised gets past most people is how balls out insane Rand has become by this point in the series. On a first readthrough, most people will just see that he's hearing voices in his head but more or less managing to hold it down, but he's really not! At all! Coming off the stresses of the last five books it's a gradual transition and it's not until I read to 13 and then restarted for my final hurrah through the series that I truly picked up on it--he's paranoid where he doesn't have delusions of hidden silent supporters that HAVE to be there they just HAVE TO BE! He changes tack on a dime when having conversations with people and the clan chiefs and generals and nobles all just kind of roll with it because who the hell is going to tell the Dragon he's not making any goddamned sense? He isn't sleeping, he isn't eating, and his To Do list is a ream of people and places who have to get killed/burned before he does... well he STILL doesn't know what he's supposed to do at Shayol Ghul precisely and he doesn't really have a whole lot of help figuring that out! He probably should, but he's fixated on old grudges because his insanity echoes Lews Therin's insanity, creating an endless feedback loop of unchecked crazy.

Making it even more subtle are a handful of events in this book which 100% justify his paranoia which, yep! Only serves to hasten the cycle.

Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 21:13 on May 19, 2012

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Jedit posted:

The problem with that theory being that the voice also starts telling Rand things he cannot possibly know himself, indicating that Lews Therin is real.

Spoiled for minor ambiguity that gets cleared up in later books;

To paraphrase Semirhage, that the voices in his head are actually REAL and having actual productive conversations with him and occasionally taking control of his actions just makes his insanity that much more serious than plain jane schizophrenia because that makes it much easier to listen to the crazyman in his skull.

Another male channeler would "merely" have to deal with reverting to a childlike state, or seeing myrdrall coalesce in the shadows but Rand's insanity is made worse by literally remembering his previous life via the manifested voice of Lews Therin who is, not "was" but IS, every bit as nuts as on the day he died.

Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 23:35 on May 19, 2012

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006
The problem with Elayne's character arc--not in the sense of "BRAWWRR SHE ANNOYING I NO LIKE" kind of quibbling--is that with almost every other character, even amongst the Supergirls, they transition into something they could not even have conceived at the beginning of their journey. Egwene's arrogance and know-it-all nature is because out of a given group of people which doesn't include Moiraine or Verin, she does kind of know it all and when she doesn't she pays for it really hard. Nynaeve's abrasive outbursts track her transition from a position of authority to a position of servitude, where it's then left to her to accept at long last that there are things she can't control so she can better handle the things that ARE in her control in ways that aren't being uselessly mad at them all the time.


Elayne doesn't have this. She's born into one of the most privileged families in Randland, destined by law to ascend the throne of one of the most powerful and prosperous nations, and at no particular point is she REALLY prevented from doing so. There are consequences because it takes her the space of three goddamned books to even meander to where she can put her butt in the throne and the Succession she fights is almost entirely borne of her idiotic reluctance to immediately travel to her country, especially when she's twiddling her fingers trying to stay busy in Ebou Dar.

The result is that by the end of the series, when all the major characters have completely transcended their starting limitations, Elayne is only just growing to fit hers. She isn't exerting herself, she's finally deigning to claim that which was practically handed to her on a plate. There's no drama there. There's no tension, and there's a very muted payoff compared to the other parts of the series.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Daedalus Esquire posted:

I think just about every warder is described as having those dead passionless eyes, every dark friend, and some of the children of light. The specific description is whenever someone grins/laughs and Jordan says something like "but his grin never reached his dangerous eyes" or whatever.
I dunno, maybe it's just my version of hair tugging/arm folding/spanking where it really sticks out to me and seems like everyone in his world is giving a perpetual evil eye to everyone they see.

I always kinda liked that little piece of description. It does a lot depending on the character. It could be a thousand yard stare, or an indicator of utter insincerity but it's really not hard to imagine. Its easy to see as a haunted or really intense look on a soldier or whatever, but really study Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney smiling in a picture.




It doesn't mean they're giving the stinkeye, it means that they're putting on a front for whatever reason. Maybe they're lying, maybe they just don't give a gently caress in the context of the scene. I dig it.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

I realize this lets read thing is derailed and desynched to hell and back and everyone's at a different point in the series but come on, really?

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006
The precise year is kinda irrelevant, showy horse-handling like described in that passage has been around for millenia. Especially considering the Saldaens are Saraceny-Persiany-Mongoly-Cossacky type culture.

Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Oct 24, 2012

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Gus Hobbleton posted:

I didn't hear about that. Did Jordan plan on ending it after three books or something?

Originally Eye of the World was written as an open ended stand alone title, which then got signed on for a trilogy. Which sold so well it became a hextology. Which ensnared such a large fixed fanbase RJ just started writing however the gently caress much he could until his death.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Charlz Guybon posted:

Read and Find Out

The other way's better. :colbert:

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

amuayse posted:

So what was the Creator doing the whole series?

Writing it.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Strom Cuzewon posted:

Sanderson never wrote the phrase "the die had been cast, if not yet thrown"

I must've blocked that one out over the years. Good lord that is terrible.

Sanderson does a servicable patch job, but homie really needs to print out a list of synonyms for "tempest" and "sword" and tack them up in his eyeline while writing and never look away from them for more than 30 seconds or so.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006
While doing three other things at the time I got to ruminating about these books again and got to thinking.

I feel like there's a big missed opportunity in this series that explores so much, but notably doesn't explore why anyone at all would want to become a Darkfriend. The closest the series ever gets is Ingtar's hurried partial confession before he runs offscreen and dies immediately. Sanderson gets into some really interesting territory with Demandred.... at the very very climactic of the series, mostly through indirect references to things that happened offscreen in conversation to a woman he's got Feelings for for reasons we learn about only in the most rudimentary ways. Graendal internally mulls it over a bit manipulating Moridin, but even that boils down to "we do things we know are awfulfor reasons we have trouble talking about during and after, and then we stop feeling bad about it and stops mattering and we mostly stop thinking about it ever"

It always falls back on some spiritual flaw in the person themselves. Liandrin is greedy and mean. Carridin is an rear end in a top hat and bully. Semirhage likes hurting people more than she likes healing them, and she LOVES healing.

Why. Why on earth would you seek these fuckin' people out. Why would you stick it out if the punishment for failure is catastrophic and the reward for success is, invariably, a more unreasonable and impossible demand from an absolute superior?

In a series that so meticulously plans out geology, history, economy, politics, climate and metacommentary about the structure and purpose of stories themselves, the series does a worse job of explaining why good people go to the Shadow than Warhammer 40k fiction talking about people falling to Chaos.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

How are u posted:

No major TV player is going to buy WoT and make it a loving anime, sorry nerds.


e: The reason being that whoever buys it is probably going to be putting down a fair amount of cash money, and, you know, they are going to want people to actually watch it when they produce the show.

Anime may be great and wonderful among you and your friends but the majority of the world is not going to take time to watch cartoons.

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

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

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)

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)

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"

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

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
Do you have family events?

HARRIET MCDOUGAL
Well we see them at Thanksgiving, Christmas—funerals these days—and also a lot of them, one main group are members of a very peculiar and politically not very correct—actually, it's getting more correct all the time—organization called the Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals, which is gaining considerably more attention as a very legitimate preservation society of a very important folk song ethic, and I love to sing the things.

MATT HATCH
Oh really?

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.

Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Nihilarian posted:

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.

Very much this. The entire Borderlander subplot is that its more important for the best armed forces on the continent at that point die trying to kill him if he's still messed up in the head, because the Dark One isn't going to kill the world despite what the Dark One promised Ishamael/Moridin. He won't actually destroy the world, he'll just make it lovely to live in for a few thousand years. Rand absolutely will destroy the world, and almost does on Dragonmount.

I 100% get it if you don't want to reread fourteen freakin' books Data Graham, but there's a reason that so many people talk about their perceptions totally changing on a reread, because while RJ's prose is voluminous and meandering and his attempts at classical-Epic epithets (i.e. white-armed Athena) sniffing-skirt-smoothing-hard-eyed-faces-chiseled-from-stone come off less as epithets and more as idiosyncrasies, he's actually really really subtle and good about playing with subjectivity in ways that make the overall product greater than the sum of its parts when you see how delicately the whole thing is constructed.

Like, on my most recent (and probably final) read of the series leading up to when AMoL was released, it really struck me that Rand was batshit crazy by the beginning of Lord of Chaos. Not stressed out and paranoid like in Dragon Reborn. Not occasionally loopy and forgetting where he is like Fires of Heaven. balls to the wall, extended-conversations-with-imaginary-people loving loving loving crazy. Only the shittiest and most vulnerable courtiers in Caemlyn and Cairhien will work with him because he's an unhinged crazyman who just exploded half the palace and inadvertently set off the Edwardian Syrian Civil War before ending it with an army of that nation's nemeses respectively, which fuels his delusions and furthers his isolation and loathing and scorn. Occasionally Min or Bashere or even Taim will get through to him in their respective ways which are all interesting in their own right, but until the epiphany on Dragonmount Rand is mostly isolating himself and making himself crazier and crazier and the more people try to get through to him the worse it makes him. Reread some of Mat's PoV of Rand, Rand is not well! He rants and raves and vacillates between morose and fatalistic and vague and delusional and Moiraine puts up with it because she has a mystical facade to maintain, and Perrin puts up with it because he's a big softie, and many nobles put up with it because he's the doomed prophet and they're just assuming this comes with the end-of-days territory, and Egwene uses him as practice for negotiation (this does not work well) but Mat has no patience for that poo poo at all which is a neat little detail. Faile too, actually.

You say in this series "anyone can be Napoleon" but... can they?! Be'lal--a 3000 year old foppish wine snob--would've Rand dead to rights if it wasn't for Nynaeve and Rand spends the next two books procrastinating the invasion of Illian because Sammael is the only Forsaken Rand knows the location of by that point and Sammael is an Actual General where Rand is relying on an insane voice in his head telling him how to wizard less badly. The whole time every single Actual General in Rand's employ is screaming at him "WHY ARE WE SITTING HERE, DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MANY SUPPLIES THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND SOLIDERS USE EVERY DAY JUST SITTING HERE?!" And Rand retreats into his vague "plans plans plans" schtick because he is actually bullshitting! His PoV is unreliable and he is terrified! It's not until Min gets through to him (well, fucks him, but it works through a knot of "I'm terrible for the people I love/Everything I touch turns to poo poo so lets drive away everyone I love/I don't get to feel anything good in this lifetime so lets get it over with already) which brings him to his senses long enough for him to execute the actual plan which was: jump into Illian and shank Sammael which is the only thing Rand actually does as good or better than anyone else!!!

And the kicker--the twist of lime that makes it all go down smooth--is as a "distraction" you have these two massive, overdeveloped armies staring at each other for two books (hey, two male channeler tyrants diverting all the resources in their kingdoms to armies which ultimately do nothing? Rand... is acting like Sammael?! OH SHI) and they spend less than an afternoon fighting each other, because once Sammael is dead the Council of Illian comes to Rand and says "oh man, you killed that creepy crazy guy? Thank you!!" and then they hand him the only legitimate crown Rand ever earns in the series not because he invaded Illian, but because he offhandedly began food and aid deliveries to Illian while ranting and raving at the Lords of Tear in TSR and then spent so much time talking to the voices in his head he actually forgot about it and got so crazy about PLANS PLANS PLANS I HAVE A PLAN IM PLAYING CHESS NOT CHECKERS HERE that even his generals were too spooked to point out to him that he's wasting supplies on the army and wasting supplies sending them to the guy he was going to invade!

Rand is not Napoleon! He's Ban Ki Moon in desperate need of a Seroquel. Rand is not a rational actor and at no point does he do anything but grimace and nod when the actual professionals make the battle plans. By LoC Rand is certainly not sympathetic and you say you understand this but I really don't think you do!

Data Graham posted:

No seriously, I don't mean to say I didn't get that Rand was loving up his grand planning and grander execution of everything; that's all pretty obvious. Yet even so, what you see is a guy who you'd see on a list of famous fictional people on the ENTJ page of some pop-psychology website, along with other flawed and hated and forcefully charismatic figures like Napoleon and Trump and Jobs. People who can take one look at the world and pronounce judgment and start issuing orders for how to bring about their vision; whether those orders are stupid or not, that's kind of beside the point. These aren't people who nurture or who follow or who build communities. They're people who command.

I don't want to get too E/N about this, but this friend's theory is that anyone can be made into a Napoleon, you just need to give them the right series of whacks in the head, and getting to that goal is more important (to him) than whether the resulting person is really a good leader or not. And "X person just isn't cut out for playing that kind of role" is just not on the radar.

Your friend sounds like a prickish person who also lacks basic literacy and you've done this thing a couple of times now where you list things that WoT explicitly and repeatedly and often critiques and go "man, it would be nice if WoT addressed this" and I think it's because you're in denial that your "friend" is a garbage man who has garbage thoughts and belongs in the garbage, stinking and crying as the world passes him by, and he induced you to hate-read WoT as what *he* thinks it is and not read-read WoT as a text of words on a page which you'd enjoy much more, I think.

There's a pretty good pulp fantasy series out there that deals a lot with people who think they're acting rationally for reasons they're convinced are sane even though many people around them point out that that's not true, and I am actually, earnestly suggesting you reread it :iamafag:

Data Graham posted:

Well I mean, everyone except Rand comes out of it pretty well self-actualized, right?

Actually most everyone except Rand comes out of it dead or maimed in the final battle, and even Rand has a big ol' asterisk on his condition. Shortly after the protagonist transmogrifies into the Buddha of Compassion. I'm sure there's no larger meaning whatsoever to wiping out 2/3rds of a massive and baroque cast in the cataclysmic fight to save the world after that moment in the plot.

Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Jun 14, 2016

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Willie Tomg
Feb 2, 2006

Lpzie posted:

Just started reading this series. I'm at the beginning of book 2. Does Rand ever loving man up and stop getting punked by almost everyone around him? I'm getting tired of him being a big baby bitch when he should be a straight up G.

His entire arc is the story of him doing this

he casually takes control of kingdoms without even trying or wanting to, and beneath the po-faced presentation it's pretty funny tbh

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