Comments | saithkar: Some thoughts on The Wheel of Time

saithkar

Some thoughts on The Wheel of Time

May 17, 2015 22:40

It was in late January 2000 that I embarked upon Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World - a millennial beginning to a millennial epic - and I finished the concluding volume, A Memory of Light, this February. This means that the 14 books have taken me almost exactly 15 years to read, literally half a lifetime in my case, and therefore I believe some ( Read more... )

Comments 10

tcpip May 17 2015, 14:23:26 UTC

Whilst this is getting to be a bit of a habit on completely different subjects, do you mind if I reprint this (duly credited, naturally) for RPG Review?

saithkar May 17 2015, 15:26:57 UTC

Not a worry, any discerning eyeballs I can get I appreciate.

A question, you said you were going to also "reprint" my previous post about Fraser, what form would this take, posting links, putting it up somewhere else?

tcpip May 17 2015, 21:20:14 UTC

Putting it up on isocracy.org

ironlord May 18 2015, 12:29:50 UTC

Seeing as you've been away from LJ for so long you'll most likely have missed the Hammer of Retribution Ogg-Cast I made at the end of last year on "fantasy metal that isn't from the world of Tolkien"...

http://www.4shared.com/zip/YjdIfIlrba/hammer51.html

Most of it is GRRM-based, but I've crowbarred quite a few others in there as well, including The Wheel Of Time. I had to bluff my way through all of these other fantasy worlds, and the Wheel Of Time wiki was very helpful. This post would have been as well at the time, as it'd have been a fine summary of the major plot points I was looking for.

saithkar May 18 2015, 16:40:32 UTC

I have been away and did miss that, but am now back and will track it down. Pity I couldn't contribute with this, but it had to wait for me to put down all those Martin Amis and Saul Bellow novels and get back to the sort of epic fantasy that enthralled me as a teenager but that doesn't any longer (as I'm sure you could tell from the above).

saithkar May 19 2015, 16:21:53 UTC

So I had a listen to this today, quite enjoyable stuff for the most part (saying that only because my tolerance for fruity power metal is even lower than yours). For a bluffer you did a pretty good job giving context to the songs based on books you hadn't read, and while some of your pronunciation of words from the Wheel of Time was slightly off it was a commendable effort. As this essay/rant was written for someone who has read all the books in the series plus accompanying volumes rather than for a general audience I'm not sure how helpful it would have been but glad you enjoyed it none the less.

By the way, great closing track, but not quite the most epic and wintery song called Winter out there:

carminalizarin May 19 2015, 00:08:24 UTC

Having heard the horror stories about how bloated, rambling, ponderous, vast, LONG, etc. this series was (not to mention the fact that we're apparently supposed to receive the term "darkfriend" with a straight face), with much of that consisting of boring crap, I never bothered trying to read it. (I similarly got burned out about 200 pages into the fourth ASoIaF book, though the first is definitely one of the better fantasy novels I've read). I've read a decent amount ABOUT it, though, and I find its backstory quite interesting. Particularly the Forsaken and how they are essentially "human arch-demons", with their names even reflecting this fact; the way myth swells as time goes by never fails to fascinate me (kinda like how I strongly suspect that the northern European concept of "trolls" has its origins in the fact that Neanderthals were still hanging around there for a long time ( ... )

saithkar May 19 2015, 04:18:04 UTC

While I realise the above has been quite critical there were aspects of the WoT that I did enjoy, but if I were to make a recommendation it would be that you press on with Martin. The Forsaken were a cool concept and I'd not heard that troll theory before, interesting and possibly true ( ... )

carminalizarin May 19 2015, 16:31:15 UTC

Aye, if I live long enough for WoT to enter "classic" status so someone releases an "abridged version" of it, I'd probably read that.

Even Martin, I feel, has been overloading his books with filler and meandering soap-opera stuff since the second volume of the series. Something like HALF of A Clash of Kings could easily have been cut or greatly condensed, as most of that consisted of what I like to call "opening and closing doors" (which also shows up a lot in genre films with modest budgets that are aiming to produce sequels, and, of course, in TV series): A character opens a door and goes into a building, says something cryptic to someone near the entrance, then closes the door, goes deeper into a building, opens the door to someone's office, closes the door, has a vague, cryptic, but portentous-sounding conversation with the person in the office to hint that they have a personal history with this individual, and in general to suggest that something important is happening, or going to happen, without anything actually happening; ( ... )

saithkar May 19 2015, 16:47:20 UTC

Haha, yeah, if they ever bring out the 7 book version read that, there's probably enough material in there for 7 solid, adventure packed books, but given that there's 14 shows you just how much wasted time there is (at least the way I see it, others disagree). That "opening and closing doors" is a good description of the idea. I too am normally opposed to long TV series, I figure most stories can either be told in a 2 hour movie or they'd be better off as a book. Apart from Game of Thrones (which doesn't really count since I first read the series in 2000) the only other serial TV show I've watched lately was True Detective which was, despite its flaws, excellent viewing (and only 8 episodes which felt about right ( ... )