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I thought they were pterodactyls.
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Sep 5, 2019 23:12
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6 is good, 9 is good-ish. About half of 7 is good, about 1/3rd of 8 is good. You can skip literally all of book 10 and miss virtually nothing. The plot picked back up with 11, and then he died.
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Sep 24, 2019 10:05
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:Nah, that's still book 5. In terms of endings, 6 is good, but nowhere near as good as 5. I think a lot depends on when you started reading the books. I started reading them when book 4 came out, had read through 4 by the time 5 came out, and then had a longish wait for book six. In that context, the ending of six is this incredible world changing cliffhanger, with a years long wait to see how this whole new Black Tower thing is going to play out in book 7. Now, when you can jump directly into the next books and discover that actually the Black Tower never really gets satisfactorily resolved, it’s not nearly as satisfying. But at the time, holy hell was that an ending. Kneel or be knelt.
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Sep 24, 2019 16:18
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Data Graham posted:The boob ceremony There are multiple boob ceremonies you could be referring to.
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Sep 24, 2019 20:15
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Well, to start with the idea that there is such a thing as objectively existing, hardcoded “men” and “women “ is kind of bullshit.
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Oct 20, 2019 18:40
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The Aes Sedai politics section was amazing because it let Jordan take one of his major flaws -- the slow pace of the books and massive bloat of the series -- and combine it with one of his strengths -- the realistic appreciation for how rumor and information slowly travel through a pre-modern world -- and combine them in the best way possible. Watching Elaida make stupid decisions based on four-book-old information while everyone around her flits about using teleporting battle-mages and dream-networks of spies that she has no loving idea exist was immensely satisfying.
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Oct 31, 2019 00:42
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:On the other hand if this goes full Legend of the Seeker I'd be ok with that too. gently caress, he'd actually be a great Lews Therin. Bruce Spence appearing as a character only Rand can see and having long conversations no one else can hear. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Oct 31, 2019 |
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Oct 31, 2019 22:04
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Faile in the early books is great; she's a real counter-point to the rest of the crew when she first shows up because she's basically an example of one of the two types of "stock fantasy protagonist" that was popular at the time Jordan was writing and he uses her to gently lampoon the genre. "Mandarb is the horse's name" and all that. She's a great way to underline the bigger world Jordan is building; here's this princess with a mysterious secret on a mission for fame and glory who thinks she's the protagonist of her own novel, and instead she's a minor subplot in a thousand year cycle of tragedy and revenge.
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Nov 19, 2019 11:00
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Elayne is literally too dumb and self involved to have PTSD.
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Nov 21, 2019 14:16
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:It's, again, the difference between the POV internal narrative of these characters and what they actually do. For an entire readthrough, when you get to any Rand/Mat/Perrin POV, try to completely ignore their internal musing and parse for what's actually happening and what the other characters' reactions to them are. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Nov 23, 2019 |
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Nov 23, 2019 04:14
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silvergoose posted:I can't conjure it in my head. What's the issue? She enunciates both a's individually, and drawls the last one. It's something like Mess-ah-awna. It sounds like it should have an apostrophe in there somewhere.
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Dec 8, 2019 20:29
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And that was even after she was warned multiple times of the giant hole in her logic and she went ahead and did it anyway. Next time I reread, I'm going to try to keep a running count how many Andorans would still be alive if Elayne had supported Dyelin instead of vice-versa.
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Dec 9, 2019 11:07
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Libluini posted:I liked the gate cannons Those were good. I got really annoyed at the whole “super noble only good at making gates ashaman “ because if you’ve ever read any of his other books that is pure Sanderson and sticks out like a sore thumb on rereads.
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Dec 9, 2019 18:55
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Given RJ’s spanking fetish I always assumed it was butt stuff.
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Dec 10, 2019 14:11
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Patrat posted:Actually I do not think the latter part is true? The average strength of Aes Sedai is actually high due to them kicking out everyone below a certain threshold. There are a handful of very strong Kin, concentrated in their age based leadership likely due to powerful channelers living longer, but it is specifically called out later that it takes twice as many Kin as Aes Sedai to open a decent sized gateway for Travelling. Right. The Aes Sedai were shocked by the strength of many of the Kin not because the Kin were stronger than Aes Sedai, but because many of the Kin who had been kicked out for being too weak in the power to train eventually turned out to be strong enough, after many, many decades of practice, to be as strong as the lowest tier of Aes Sedai. The Aes Sedai believed that the ability to channel was going out of humanity because A) they set their standards so high in terms of both strength in the power and in youth that they were only pulling in girls whose channeling ability was so latent that they would have channeled anyway without Aes Sedai help and B) the Aes Sedai, due to lack of interest in the outside world, were only patrolling the more "civilized" regions of Randland looking for girls. If they had relaxed their standards and wandered into the rural areas, the Tower would have been several times larger than it was, but the average power level of Aes Sedai probably would have dropped a bit, although not by that much. They weren't culling the ability to Channel out of humanity, but they were culling the ability to find channelers out of the Aes Sedai.
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Dec 16, 2019 11:05
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Given that the Red Ajah has the highest proportion of Black Ajah it may have been less of a culling and more of a redistribution to Shayol Ghil.
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Dec 16, 2019 17:19
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Lews Theron screamed at him in his head literally the entire time he was around a male channeler or male channeling. Even if he’d wanted to be involved the physical fact of his madness made it functionally impossible.
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Dec 16, 2019 18:56
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Data Graham posted:I mean, Jordan is deliberately playing with people's pattern-recognition tendencies by using all these names that are deliberate references to names we already recognize from other sources, fictional and otherwise. But if your job is to read things aloud for money I'd think you'd be a little more careful with that ol' pattern recognition On a related note; it's amazing how many people recording fantasy audiobooks don't bother looking up the pronunciation of the word "geas".
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Dec 20, 2019 22:24
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Colonel Cool posted:I figured some of it was covered by the whole ta'veren thing. I was okay with them making him their leader, but I didn't care for all the awkward bowing and scraping that went along with it. Naw, it was perfectly in character for Emonds Field. They flipped straight from “We don’t need a Lord” to “gently caress your filthy foreign lord, we got our own Lord and he’s the lordiest Lord that ever lorded. He wears a crown and eats off doilies and poo poo!” “but I don’t want to eat off doilies “ “gently caress you, sir, You will eat off doilies and love it, your majesty!” I’ve known tons of country people like that. It’s all very Granny Weatherwax.
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Dec 23, 2019 17:25
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Also making arrogance out of humility is super on brand for a certain type of country folk. It’s the same spirit that makes “Bless their heart” into cutting words.
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Dec 23, 2019 18:55
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silvergoose posted:I guess? But she, unlike the rest of the non-black tower, has (again, because of new spring) known for certainty for almost two decades. Yes; known and kept absolutely secret for twenty years. Suian isn't saying that she can't get used to the existence of the Black Ajah, she's saying that she can't get used to the idea of saying it out loud.
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Dec 28, 2019 05:58
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:Still weird to me that (AMoL spoiler) Demandred convinced the entire nation of Shara to just up and join the shadow, fighting alongside trollocs and poo poo.. It makes a kind of sense given what we know of Shara. In the Jordan books, Shara was depicted as a vast authoritarian monoculture with tight information controls, whose population was purposefully kept almost entirely ignorant of the outside world. Sharans refused to admit that they had ever been invaded by any foreign power, despite the fact that we know that they fought off a Trolloc invasion during the Trolloc Wars and Artur Hawkwing's fleet; the average Sharan may have literally no knowledge of what Trollocs or the Shadow are. The Ayyad channelers who secretly rule Shara live in seclusion and have no contact with the rest of the country except to relay their edicts by pretending to be the voice of the Sh'boan and Sh'botay. A huge segment of Sharan society were slaves, many of them in service to the dual crowns. Assuming Demandred managed to get in and suborn the Ayyad without anyone becoming wise to it, he'd have basically the entire country at his fingertips.
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Dec 29, 2019 04:03
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Way way back, I believe to celebrate the publishing of Fires of Heaven, they split the first book in half and printed the first half of the first book as an individual volume that was given away for free with purchase at Borders-affiliated book stores I’ve still got mine somewhere. I’d swear that the last page has a tag line of “to be continued in the sixth and final book of the Wheel of Time saga”. I can never find anyone else who has a copy and when you google it you just get the later split printing. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Jan 9, 2020 17:26
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I think you need to start with the Prologue because without that, being The Dragon Reborn would come across like this cool fantasy chosen one thing, the way it would be in any other story. The prologue sets things up so that you understand that Rand is the reincarnation of the end of the Beast that’s ends the world.
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Jan 10, 2020 19:00
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:I was most gutted by Siuan and Bryne. They were just so good for each other For me it was Rhuarc . Not just because of the character, but also the way it went down and how quick it happened was an absolute hammer blow.
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Jan 12, 2020 16:43
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Yeah, the thing is, Graendel is portrayed almost as a comical figure through much of the story -- it's not that she's not evil, but she's constantly contrasted against Forsaken who are much more straightforwardly brutal than she is while she constantly, smugly thinks to herself how much cleverer and more manipulative she is than them, even when it's obvious to the reader that she's not -- which is why the whole Rhuarc thing hits so hard, because when the rubber hits the road, you realize that Graendal is just the loving worst. It's weird how Ishamael ends up being the most likable Forsaken.
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Jan 13, 2020 11:07
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NinjaDebugger posted:Yeah, the ending was sent western union. It was never going to be satisfying to me, but the rest of it justified reading. For me, it was way more about the journey than the obvious and mediocre destination. I thought that the actual mechanism by which Rand won was clever, if delivered in a confusing fashion. Callandor being a trap was this weird Chekhovs hun that existed for ten books while everyone scratched their head.
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Jan 13, 2020 18:59
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Soonmot posted:Yeah but Perrin has said to her, multiple times, that he's not interested in Berelin, and Faile is all, "well he hasn't screamed at me or tried to hit me yet, so he must be lying". The Faile/Perrin thing is a casualty of the long, slow spiral of the books and Jordan's death. Just like the extent of Rand's madness only really becomes apparent when you start getting outside viewpoints who can comment on his long silences punctuated by bursts of insane non-sequitur caused by arguments with Lews Therin, Faile's behavior mostly only makes sense when viewed from a non-Aiel impartial courtly observer, which we basically never got before Jordan's death. Faile is a result of training in Saldean courtly behavior, where everyone hides their true intentions behind false masks and the only words worth trusting are the ones spoken in violent, unmistakable passion. Perrin keeps saying that he's uninterested in Berelain (true!) but he also says that she isn't trying to seduce him (false!) and he blindly keeps her close to him no matter how brazen she is in her pursuit of him, as if Berelain is a friend-zoned backup-girlfriend in case this whole "Faile" thing doesn't work out. To make an analogy; Perrin is Dermot Mulrooney, Faile is Cameron Diaz, and Berelain is the completely loving untrustworthy Julia Roberts. Julia is not your best friend, Dermot. She wants to gently caress you. Stop trying to make her your best man. So Faile, stung by the apparent contradiction between Perrin's words and deeds and feeling insecure, constantly pushes Perrin to the emotional breaking point, hoping to spark a reaction that she can use to divine his true intentions. But Perrin, being a good Two Rivers lad, thinks that you should never, ever get angry at a woman (because Nynaeve will hit you with a stick), so he hides his anger, which to Faile reads as intentional insincerity (which it technically is), so she pushes him even harder, until eventually he explodes. And Perrin's anger reveals his love, which makes Faile happy, which confuses the poo poo out of Perrin. And then the books get stuck in a holding pattern and we repeat the cycle half a dozen times.
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Jan 22, 2020 01:52
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EvilTaytoMan posted:Wasn't there a scene with an Aes Sedai (maybe Cadsuane?) trying to determine if the taint was really gone by channeling saidin through an Ashaman? And she wasn't entirely convinced the taint was gone because she never channeled saidin when the taint was there and saidin feels completely alien to her? I assume that's why no Aes Sedai with Rand ever sent out any messengers about it, because they weren't convinced it worked and had no way of determining it for themselves. Yeah, Rand told the Ashamen and his pet aes sedai told the other aes sedai but basically nobody believed them. Even a lot of the Ashamen were unsure and they could actually feel it.
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Feb 7, 2020 14:15
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One of Rand’s triggers for his spiral into darkness in the latter books is that he did this one unambiguously good, incredible, world changing thing and no one believes or credits him for it. If he literally can’t be loved then he might as well be feared.
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Feb 7, 2020 17:09
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Zore posted:Moiraine stepping over the walls is definitely implied to be an illusion. Rand notes the door doesn't fully shut until after she's already out, so I always figured she walked out the gate while projecting the big Moiraine image. I hate that I know this from the rpg but yeah it was specifically an illusion weave. “Spinning the Mosts and Mirrors” or something similar. I think it’s main use later is as a means of public address. It’s probably also technically what Rand and Ishy use when battling in the sky at Falme.
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Feb 14, 2020 14:15
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The WAys were genuinely terrifying. That game had great sound design, for the time.
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Feb 17, 2020 17:21
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“The World of the Wheel of Time”. It was the only reference book published while Jordan was alive. It came out between books 7 and 8 I believe. The internal illustrations are almost entirely by the same artist who did the original covers for all the American books, which is why fans call it the Big Book of Bad Art. The Jordans must have been the only people on earth who liked that guy.
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Feb 18, 2020 17:18
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The Ashaman arriving at Dumai's Wells is up there. It's such an abrupt gamechanger. Every book after that is different in scope and tone. Mat's adventures with fireworks is one of my favorite running themes from the early books. I love when Thom loses his loving poo poo when Mat cuts one open. Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Mar 10, 2020 |
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Mar 10, 2020 02:14
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:Gaul fucks Not for a year and a day he don’t.
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Mar 17, 2020 13:15
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I know the audiobook readers made the choice to render it in a way no human being has ever spoken, ever.
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Mar 17, 2020 16:08
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“WHat if I took a big gulp of Diet Coke and just, like, held it in my mouth. How’s that for an accent?”
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Mar 17, 2020 16:25
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No the audiobooks are great though. Pro listen
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Mar 17, 2020 16:25
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Kate Reading and Michael Kramer (also husband and wife, weirdly enough) are absolutely pro tier audiobook narrators, and the decision to go with dual male/female narrators really helps keep a sprawling cast manageable.
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Mar 17, 2020 21:13
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awesmoe posted:What number was the one with the mat/tuon bit where he meets back up with the army? The mat bits of those books were good That's Book 11, Knife of Dreams, the last of the Jordan books. I would argue that everything but the Elayne and Faile bits of that bit were good, even the Perrin bits. Unfortunately, there's a lot of Elayne.
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Mar 20, 2020 12:36
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