The Wheel of Time

So, in an attempt to revive this thread, here's Chapter 8 of Towers of Midnight, which was just released following a fan contest: [1]

Looks good to me. Seems like Sanderson has a better handle on Mat than he did in the last book.

I still haven't read The Gathering Storm, my yearly re-read of LOTR has taken longer than I expected (I'm still on the 2009 re-read, stupid English Literature course). Does Sanderson wrtie the female caracters any better? By the end of Book 11 I utterly detested Egwene, Nynaeve, Elayne and Faile.

Egwene's parts are one moment of awesome after another, typically for her and occasionally for one of the other female characters.

Hooray! I liked Egwene in the early books before she got hit with the Character Derailment spade, so this is good. What about the other three? Do they get much Screentime?

Nynaeve is fairly useful, but the others don't show up much.

Min and Aviendha both get a fair amount of screen time. Elayne doesn't appear at all.

Oh really? That's good, I thought the whole Andor plot was sort of unnecessary. What about Rand, I disliked Jordan's approach in the later books of virtually excluding him and just occasionally throwing him in to remind us that yes, he is still the main character.

He and Egwene are pretty much the main characters this time out. At least, they're the ones who actually advance the plot.

edited 21st Sep '10 6:23:11 PM by Ironeye

Plus Rand's character arc from Moiraine's death to the present is very nicely resolved at the end.

I see. Well, this book sounds utterly awesome and I think I need to read it right now. Cheers for answering my questions folks.

I recently got into the series. By recently like a month ago. I'm almost finished with book 8. An interesting series. Does anybody get the feeling the books have Bullying a Dragon in spades? I don't care who you think you are, where you come from, or your political aspirations, you don't insult the walking nuke.

The series has that trope in absolute spades, especially in the case of the male Emond's Fielders. It's always highly entertaining however when they do finally snap and bring the pain (I recall Rand turned some Aes Sedai into his pets at one point for this very reason).

I find I do not like the Aiel. Anyone else with me?

I rather like the Aiel. I think their whole "Je'ih'toh" thing was overplayed. It sometimes seemed like their culture had been Flanderized until that was all there was to it. They did produce some very good characters (Like Rhuarc, Aviendha and that Wise Woman who spends time with Cadsuane and they're all old together, you know the one)however.

I'd like to bemoan the fact that "Flanderized" is spelled with a Z. Me being English and all, I think it should be S. Or at the very least have the S spelling direct to the relevant page anyway, so it doesn't catch out poor British tropers.

edited 25th Sep '10 7:05:38 PM by Wagrid

I really dislike Aviendha, her superiority complex got on my nerves pretty quickly.

edited 26th Sep '10 1:14:31 PM by Galeros

I though she had quite a few good qualities. Especially in comparison to Egwene who was always quite hopeless and bratty early on. I'd be more specific, but it's been some time since I read the series and I don't want to get sutff wrong and look like a dick.

yeah, not to start a flame war, but I only read the pov sections of Rand, Mat, and Perrin. Every other POV makes me go "Really? What a bitch," and then skip over it.

Even for the other male character?

Yeah pretty much. Especially the forsaken male characters. Really? Your best plan is to sit around doing nothing because -gasp- the others are planning against you! Are the forsaken really a threat anymore? I think they stopped becoming one around book 2 or 3.

Some of them came back to being a credible threat in Knife of Dreams.

I think the problem was that Jordan made Rand grow powerful to the point where he couldd obliterate the Forsaken in the blink of an eye. Which is fine, but it made the forsaken less of a threat, especially with Lannfear killed and Moridin sort of just. . . existing, somewhere, probably being evil.

lol that explains the entire series. The bad guys are just...somewhere. Being evil.

I mean, you have some of the most powerful channelers in history, an army of Our Orcs Are Different, A GOD, and what do you do? You play dress up and drink a lot of wine.

And the good guys aren't all that great either. All of Rand's 'secretive but genius plans' just involve him teleporting in and killing everybody. Which is why i love him. :P

edited 29th Sep '10 6:45:13 AM by Carbonpillow

The bad guys are clearly holding the Villain Ball for most of the books. Most of them seem to believe that other Forsaken are the primary threats, which they are for most part since Rands primary tactic is "teleport in and blow everything up" which isn't as hard to plan for as what everybody else is doing.

Well, before book 5 Rand wasn't a threat to the Forsaken compared to each other, and he was probably being protected by Ishamael and Lanfear anyway. During book 5, the Forsaken had a plan to kill him, but it was poorly conceived and they didn't back up Rahvin when Rand attacked him. And at the beginning of book 6, the Dark One issues an order to not kill him. They aren't actually trying to seek him out and kill him until they learn he's trying to cleanse the Source, and then when they do try at the end of Winter's Heart, they get their collective asses kicked. But yeah, they are stupidly overconfident.

One of the major points in the series is that the good guys spend all their time fighting each other and the bad guys spend all their time fighting each other. It's either lazy padding or a brilliant statement on humanity. Probably both.

It is padding as written, but if executed better I think it'd be a nice change of pace from the usual choices of "heroes rebel, villains conform (moral: beware of conformity)" or "heroes get along, villains infight (moral: don't infight)".