The Wheel of Time

Why would you assume that "Les Therin commits suicide and creates the Dragonmount" is something that has to happen in every iteration of the wheel? It's not that significant in the big picture.

Just because the end of the life of the Dragon seemed pretty important to me. I think that is an event with a lot of wriggle room, but it will end in suicide. I see it as coupled to events which are much more important with a lot less wriggle room (the patching of the Dark Ones prison and the tainting of Saidin or Saidar, depending on LTT gender in each third age).

Okay, but then it sounds like your argument about Rand being wrong is based on that assumption, which doesn't strike me as very strong evidence that the narrative's wrong about its own metaphysics.

Anyway, from a personal-choice perspective oblivion still sounds like a downgrade because even under the most restrictive interpretation of the Pattern it's still gonna let you choose whether to have ham or chicken for lunch, yeah? Smash the Wheel and you don't get that because there's no ham or chicken or lunch or you.

Edited by rikalous on Nov 13th 2020 at 5:05:35 AM

I have to admit I also don't quite follow the line of thought of "my personal choices don't impact the inexorable cycle of the cosmos? The universe might as well explode then".

I saw it as self explanatory, but i guess i´m alone with that interpretation (admittedly it makes for a rather depressing take on that universe). I find it even more cruel to have that small meaningless choices. Basicly having just enough free will to realize that the universe won´t let you truly make free choices. It´s like being fed only the rinds of bread each day, while looking and smelling a perfectly cooked steak just out of reach.

How about this take "personal choice can affect the turning of the wheel in only the most miniscule and insignificant ways, therefore what´s the point of life?" There would be no significant difference between that and a universe with no life in it, it would in essence just be a highly complex Rube Goldberg Machine, which resets itself.

By the way i´m about 85% done with Towers of Midnight and was just at Aviendhas visions of the Aiel future. Is there a word of god about the accuracy of that method of futuresight? I think it was stated that foretelling and Mins ability 100% come true but works on Exact Words, while dreaming only shows a likely but not guarateed future... Beat... Now while i´m writing this i´m starting to think about the implication of a non-perfect method of futuresight in a world with destiny. It...doesn´t really work, does it? I have to think about this...

p.s. I´m not going to change what i had written before this last thought, because i find it kinda funny that i found a counterargument against myself while i was writing this^^

Aviendha's visions of the future through the ter'angreal can be changed, as I recall. But to the other point, I don't see why having to change the turning of the wheel is necessary? It's not like your life is laid out, it's only the broadest, most world-impacting events that are really tied to the Wheel. Your mundane life or mine makes little difference to the weave, so it'd hardly be constrained by the Wheel.

The big world impacting events don´t happen in a vacuum, they are the result of all the small insignificant events and affect all events in the future. Therefore if one is predetermined all should be

There is a school of thought that says, in an infinite multiverse, where all things are not only possible but in fact occur in at least one version of reality, the only action that has any meaning, that is unique and unrepeatable and of ultimate consequence, is destroying the multiverse. It's also the only thing we can know with certainty hasn't happened yet.

Stuff like the tainting of Saidin and the Breaking of the World are probably set in sotne, but I don't see why lews Therin couldn't die during the Sealing of the Bore or fighting a mad male channeler, or simply committing suicide or stilling himself after realizing what's happening. There are other options besides "killing his family and then himself".

That the big, world-shaping events require certain more minor events as background doesn't necessitate that the fall of every sparrow needs to be taken into account. Divert a few drops from the stream and it flows the same direction, change a couple threads in the tapestry and the Pattern remains intact. Whether an army has 1003 soldiers or 1005 need not change the outcome.

(This, incidentally, ties into why I find it hard to grok your horror at the idea of only our insignificant decisions being free. All my decisions are insignificant, homes, whether you believe in fate or not. You could Wonderful Life my ass and hardly notice a difference.)

Wait, why would Gawyn ever break Egwene's neck? There's clearly something I don't remember.

It's from the Shadow Rising, around the time of Elaida's coup. As for why, I'll just quote you the speculation on the wiki to save myself the trouble of independent thought. Spoilered since we got someone here not finished with the series.

Edited by rikalous on Nov 15th 2020 at 5:11:04 AM

Man, that just reminded me of how completely fucking pointless Gawyn was in the last battle and also in general. What a waste of page time.

I am now done with A Memory of Light. Before i started i saw so many posts online naming it the (or one of the) greatest fantasy series ever written and i can see where these people are coming from, but it´s a hard disagree from me. What i am willing to admit is that the series is probably one of the best "classical" fantasy series (from the stuff i have read it´s very likely the best). Not sure if classical is however the right word... I feel like it´s in the gray area between true sword and dragon fantasy and what i consider modern fantasy.

I have many dislikes with the fundamental characteristics of the story (cyclical time, excessive use of prophecy, a chosen one, etc) but the characterwork i found excellent. I also enjoyed the Dream-magic more than channeling. To the end i never got the feeling that i truly knew what channeling could or couldn´t do, but i felt like i understood TAR, which is kind of funny because in-universe TAR is supposed to be non-understandable, while the people get channeling.

My biggest regrets with the series:

1. Gawyn was pretty much useless, the only useful thing he did in the series was killing the bloodknife assassins... He was a sidecharacter angry at not being the main character, if he could channel i think he would have been to Rand what Demandred was to LTT

2. What was even the point at bringing back Padan Fain in the end... Would have been better to have him killed while giving Rand his second unhealing wound, or during the cleansing of Saidin, or just destroy him together with Shadar Logoth...

3. The fucking Seanchan never got their comeupance and with Jordans Death they never will....

All in all it was an enjoyable ride, but with a lot of moments where is just wanted to strangle the characters.

People making peace with the Shara and Seanchan was the dealbreaker for me, and the reason I will never reread the series. I have plenty of other gripes-Gawyn is fighting for top spot with Cadsuane, Tylin, and the general concepts of imbalanced relationships and impossibility of communication between people, especially the sexes. But the whole world rolling over and allowing two slaver empires to continue existing when they clearly have the means to crush them was the point where I wished Rand had killed the Dark One and destroyed the soul of the world.

Looking back on it, I am not sure what would be worse-this was Jordan's intended ending, or Sanderson had a free hand and went with that.

I´d say it would be worse if the ending is completly Sandersons creation, because that would mean such a thing would be possible in his stories. From what i heard however Jordan was extremly against the idea of someone else writing in his world and only changed his opinion on this when his health got really bad. So if i were him i would try to leave as many instructions about the end of the story as possible, which makes me think the ending is mostly Jordan.

I´m also not sure if the Westlands would be able to crush the Seanchan at that point. Seanchan have the advantage of unity (at least the return faction), while the Westlands would have a lot of factions and internal powerstruggles would weaken them considerably...

I definitely feel like Wheel of Time is hugely flawed, but gets a lot of credit for effectively being the first "epic fantasy" series (in the sense of "a dozen or more books telling a single story, each of which is a Door Stopper in and of itself"). Even compared to your typical Tolkienesque high fantasy novel, Wheel of Time has complicated and expansive worldbuilding, long and complex character arcs, and a bunch of simultaneous plot threads both running in parallel and intersecting with each other. In short, it's a big story, not just in the sense scope (defeating the ultimate universal evil, saving the entire universe) but in the sense of the narrative it covers: millions of words, thousands of pages, a dozen or more books released over a decade or more or real time. There's a unique appeal there that you can't really get from anything else.

That said, while Wheel of Time absolutely has that appeal (and may well have been the first series to tap into it — I'm not familiar enough with the publishing history of the 80s and earlier to say), I would also say it doesn't do it particularly well. The cast is so large and so spread out that they often feel disconnected and irrelevant rather than expansive, and the various plot threads sometimes enter cul de sacs where they basically just waste a bunch of time doing nothing important, then emerge from it later, having done nothing to develop as characters or affect the main plot in the meantime. Plus there's some general shittiness, like... basically anything related to gender issues.

tldr, while I can see why people liked Wheel of Time when it was new, and I don't blame anyone for sticking with it until the ending and enjoying it along the way, I don't think it holds up very well in 2020.

A good part of my love for this deeply flawed series stems from being a mark for stories with lots of worldbuilding and half a dozen narratives running simultaneously, yes. And I'm very curious to see how the TV show in the works is going to handle some of the less great parts.

It's been a minute since I read the finale so I might be missing details, but I don't think rolling over two separate empires, one of which conquered a continent and can call its military the Ever Victorious Army with a straight face and the other of which is a largely unknown quantity, is such a trivial feat. Especially when your forces just finished getting bloodied in a war with Satan.

My take on the Seanchan still being around is that leaving that unresolved by the last page is probably intentional and thematic. The world's saved, but there are still major problems to take care of after we stop watching. And when the Seanchan's slavetastic nightmare is dealt with, some new horror will have sprung up. There will never be a point when everything is tied up neatly with a bow and everyone lives happily ever after. No beginnings or endings in the Wheel of Time.

Edited by rikalous on Nov 22nd 2020 at 1:01:05 AM

Wheel of Time is a good series, but I don't know that I'd call it a Great Fantasy Series. It is deeply flawed, and it's flaws are mostly in execution. It's extremely bloated. The world-building is great, but as sometimes happens with highly-detailed fantasy world, sometimes the author overwhelms the reader with detail. I didn't really care so much about the technical inner-workings of the One Power.

I think certain aspects of the world building come down to taste.

When I first read the series I spent a decent amount of time bouncing ideas off the friend who got me into it about how stuff worked. In particular things about the One Power.

Honestly the Power never seemed as well-defined and technical as people make it out to be, for me? We get a lot of jargon from the characters' perspective, but what it can and can't do is largely arbitrary. Like, as an example of the differences between Saidin and Saidar we're told that the former can just take the heat from a fire and redirect it onto stones while if an Aes Sedai tried that she'd get cooked alive, but there's not really a reason for that other than "that's just how it works". Or for another example, when they talk about "inverting weaves" — the characters know what it means, we have the effects explained, but it doesn't really mean anything in terms of the mechanics of the magic. We have no idea how it works or why, it just does. It's like the Power has the aesthetics of a "hard magic" system but in practice it's a lot more driven by narrative convenience than it seems.

And I thought that half of the point of Aviendha's flash-forward about the degeneration of the Aiel (one of the most harrowing sequences in the series, and one of my favorites) was about the threat of the Seanchan, the inherent divisiveness of people and how even after beating the Dark One and keeping reality intact the world's problems don't go away, especially with regards to different societies and natinos in conflict that were only briefly unified in fighting the apocalypse.

I love in-depth explanations of magic systems, the best usually are the ones were the magic can only do one thing and the magic user has to get creative (which is probably why i like Androl so much)

I like the idea that the magic can do anything, but the magician might be limited, by a variety of factors. That just feels more realistic to me.

A magic system which can do anything just seems unscientific to me (i mean that would be like expecting one medicine to be able to treat all diseases) and a well developed world with magic should know no difference between science and magic. I want my magic treated as a science, including having anyone be able to learn (though with varying talent). But that´s just different schools of thought regarding magic in fiction

Edited by Samaldin on Nov 23rd 2020 at 11:42:34 AM

I was just about to say, magic hardly has to be scientific. Even Clarke's statement "any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" doesn't say that all magic is necessarily highly advanced science. Still, your preferences are your preferences. I prefer it when magic is rare and mysterious, and not entirely understood.

Edited by Robbery on Nov 24th 2020 at 1:09:09 AM