I quit. I really don't usually quit. I usually am perfectly happy to see a series through no matter how bad it is. But I just can't. Which is funny because I'm told that this isn't even the worst of it. I got up to 60-65% of the way through, but I'm not doing it anymore.
Okay, if you wnat to know my thoughts on WoT 1-3, I wrote them out here. By and large, my thoughts remain the same, though they've gotten harsher.
There are a few parts that make this just pretty unbearable for me, so I'm just gonna try to put them down, but it's late, so if my thoughts are a mess, I apologize.
First off, this prophecy bullshit needs to stop. The prophecies here are never really explored beyond what they are stated to do, meaning we (and the characters) are given no reason to believe they are valid or who they came from, but atleast 2 characters follow them through because that's what they heard the prophecies are.
What this translates to is "Why are they doing X? Because that's what the plot says so". I have no reason to care as a reader because the characters have no reason to care for themselves. This is different from prophecies in, say, A Song of Ice and Fire. There, prophecies never bothered me, and I only realized reading this book why: The prophecies mostly served as warnings and heralds of darkness, but they were never, in and of themselves, the reason the characters fulfilled them. In The Shadow Rising, atleast 2 characters are going to where their going and doing what their doing just because some vague unexplained force told them and they basically can't think of anything better to do. This is even different from the first 3 books, where Rand was following the prophecies because he himself was having an identity crisis over being the dragon reborn. I didn't think those books were great, but I atleast cared a little. Here, it's...it's nothing. I have read over 600 pages of this shit, and the places where I see Rand as a character are few and far inbetween, because he seems to be just moving according to what the plot told him, like someone following an instruction manual. Mat is in the same boat, unsure what to do, so he uses a plot device to talk to prophetic spirits, who tell him to go with Rand and basically is just following along the same path just because someone else told him that's where he needs to go. Mat himself doesn't have a reason to go, but since he lacks a reason to go anywhere else, he just follows along.
Meanwhile, Egwene and Elayne and Nyneave are STILL hunting the Black Ajah after like 2 whole books of this shit. I can't even remember if they made progress. I know they messed up their plans in book 3, but it's just frustrating to see them after hundreds of pages make such little progress on actually cornering them for so damn long. I decided to spoil myself, and apparently these black sisters stay on the run almost throughout the whole series. Like, jesus. The guys' PoV's have issues involving reader investment, but atleast they do in fact make progress in raising their abilities, however unearned. 80% of the girl's POV chapters seem spent on personal petty problems (especially Egwene, seriously, I know character development doesn't necessarily equate to improving as a person, but she somehow got less mature than how she started out as. She is given an offer with how she needs to earn her way in the Aiel, she agrees, then bitches about it in her head about how unfair it is because Rand doesn't have to do the same even though he's off being taught to do something else entirely.)
Perrin's plotline is probably the most well written and compelling of this book. It's got emotional investment by having Perrin coming back to save his home and how he views it as his fault and him finding out his parents were dead was one of the few actually, legitimately well written segments of the book I've read. Unfortunately, when asked the question of whether it's enough to make it worth my while, the answer is no. Perrin's is the least flawed of the 3 ongoing general narratives, but it's not good enough. I hate Faile, I don't like Loial, I don't really care about the Two Rivers folk, and I kind of hate Perrin too. The entire initiation segment between him leaving tear and arriving at the Two rivers is filled with his stupidity, passive aggressiveism and bitchiness.
I don't like ANY of these people. And normally that wouldn't be a problem if they were interesting, but their really not. I tried to figure out why, and I think I finally stumbled on the systemic problem with how all these characters are written: Their all unempathetic manipulative assholes. That doesn't mean that the characters don't care for one another, exactly. But it does mean every relationship every character has is a power struggle for dominance rather than understanding. It's easiest to exemplify this with the gender binary going on. Male characters are repeatedly baffled by the actions of women while making basically no real effort as to understand WHY they might do what they do any feel as they feel. And more than that, all the younger male characters are encouraged by the older ones to not even try. Women are just mysterious creatures that do random, incomprehensible things. Meanwhile, women also don't bother to make efforts to understand men, but they don't even admit their ignorance, they just assign every negative or confusing thing they do to their having a penis. If a man wants to do something and a woman disagrees, he's being stupid because he's a MAN, regardless of the reasons he gives. It feels outright misandrous at times, with how dismissive and contemptuous some of these female characters are. There's less of that when two characters are of the same genders, but this series has a notorious problem of the characters not communicating with each other, and I've seen that as early as book 1.
So the result of this is that all the characters are belligerent as all fuck. One character advised Perrin on how to deal with Faile as a wife (and wives in general) is to do what they say on minor things so they can stalk up in their resistance points and take control when it matters. Putting aside that taht sounds like a fundamentally unhealthy relationship, what does this mean for the characters? Their not trying to develop or work together in unity, there's no mutual understanding of another person happening here. This seems like people just pick their partners based on masochistic tendencies, or atleast how they are willing to suffer for the pleasures of company. The thing is, when EVERY relationship is like that, it just starts being predictable. Every character is just in a constant state of bitching out another. It just makes me dread any interactions that can happen, especially on the romantic side. But other relationships are affected too. Mat spends most of his time with Rand at a distance, either annoyed or suspicious that Rand is going to go insane at any moment. In no way does he try to actually help fix the problem of his supposed sanity. If I'm supposed to buy that Mat is a genuine friend to Rand, I didn't get much of a feeling of that in how he interacts with him on a day to day basis. We get him trying to save Rand while in the temple, and that's great and all, but there's little actual communication between them as characters.
The writing reflects that as well. I've already gone over that in my other post, and again, I haven't changed my position about how it draaaaaaaaaags on (did Jordan murder his editor or something), but one thing I noticed with this new read is how disconnected the descriptions are. I started noticing that "He/She gave a (emotive) look." comes up so much. The body language isn't used often or the emotion itself rarely described, it's just captured in a look of some kind, and we're meant to imagine it from there.
So yeah. The characters just fucking blow. And the villains aren't better. Look, in the first 3 books, Baalzamon was a shitty villain. Like, he wasn't threatening after the first book, he sure as hell wasn't threatening by the third, but the antagonistic opposition felt nature in this sort of story. Now, Rand has nothing and I went over why "because the plot told me to" isn't really a big center of tension, nor are the girl's unending hunt for the Black Ajah. Perrin does have a villain, but they suck because their too simple. Padan Fain is like every evil crazy person stereotype rolled into a character. He feels like a parody being played straight. He goes beyond what even cartoon villainy is. The whitecloaks aren't that great either, since Perrin only killed one or a few of them, and that's apparently all it takes for THE ENTIRE FUCKING ARMY to travel all the way to your home to burn everything down. I know that their being manipulated, but I argue that them being able to be manipulated into something this obsessively dumb is evidence of how poorly run they are.
And it all really stems from the Dark One. The most generic of all possible antagonists, evil itself. You know, I find this world really wierd. All 1 religion, all sharing the same basic belief system, under 1 language. Despite having difficult cultural norms with the Seanchan and the Aiel, somehow everyone knows that the Dark One is pure evil. This wouldn't happen, realistically. Beliefs would disperse and everyone would come up with their own idea of who the Dark One was and what it meant and blah blah blah. But it's not the lack of realism per se that bothers me about this set up, but the way it eliminates motivational and moral ambiguity. If you're a dark follower, you don't have good reasons, you don't have your own moral center, or just different beliefs. You're evil. This has been basically universally true and it doesn't change from what I can tell. The most variety you can get is that you can be evil in different ways, but the actual morality or lackthereof is never even in question. I....well, I don't really see how you make an interesting dynamic out of that. Lord of the Rings is a clear inspiration to this, and it definitely has a clear good vs evil thing going on...but honestly, the more I looked into it, the more I found reasons to sympathize with even the most abject of evil creatures here. Morgoth wanted to sing his own song. Sauron wanted to improve the world. Gollum...well, we know Gollum's tale.
With respect to WoT fans on here, I really don't see the appeal of this series. It has the feel of an epic in some ways, I can give you that. Big world destroying prophecies, an ultimate evil, magic, awesome weapons, different cultures, different races, the big chosen one, big romances....but it fails to pull any of that off in my opinion and is one of the least engaging fantasies I've ever read. The prose is some of the worst I've ever come across at times, I struggle to give a shit about any of the characters, and....I just quit. This is just really unusual for me, because I am usually willing to slog through even the worst things, but I can't take this anymore and I have no idea why I would subject myself to this any further. I might try Sanderson's Way of Kings book again. I had a few similar problems with him as I do with these books, which makes sense since he apparently loves WoT, but I remember Sanderson being better than this.
I'll say this positive though: I really hope that one day, a decent adaptation of this is made. Because the general structure of the plot isn't bad. But virtually....everything about the writing makes this a journey I can't go on. An adaptation will have the advantage of not just cutting all the filler in the text, but may even rewrite the characters in order to make them better. Maybe some people will disagree with me, but I do not believe it is the job of adaptations to merely recreate a work, but to improve upon it. Kubrick himself said he liked to pick mediocre books to adapt because there he had more freedom to turn whats decent into something great. Well, for anyone who believes in that, Wheel of Time is a golden opportunity that should not be passed up.
Okay, if you wnat to know my thoughts on WoT 1-3, I wrote them out here. By and large, my thoughts remain the same, though they've gotten harsher.
There are a few parts that make this just pretty unbearable for me, so I'm just gonna try to put them down, but it's late, so if my thoughts are a mess, I apologize.
First off, this prophecy bullshit needs to stop. The prophecies here are never really explored beyond what they are stated to do, meaning we (and the characters) are given no reason to believe they are valid or who they came from, but atleast 2 characters follow them through because that's what they heard the prophecies are.
What this translates to is "Why are they doing X? Because that's what the plot says so". I have no reason to care as a reader because the characters have no reason to care for themselves. This is different from prophecies in, say, A Song of Ice and Fire. There, prophecies never bothered me, and I only realized reading this book why: The prophecies mostly served as warnings and heralds of darkness, but they were never, in and of themselves, the reason the characters fulfilled them. In The Shadow Rising, atleast 2 characters are going to where their going and doing what their doing just because some vague unexplained force told them and they basically can't think of anything better to do. This is even different from the first 3 books, where Rand was following the prophecies because he himself was having an identity crisis over being the dragon reborn. I didn't think those books were great, but I atleast cared a little. Here, it's...it's nothing. I have read over 600 pages of this shit, and the places where I see Rand as a character are few and far inbetween, because he seems to be just moving according to what the plot told him, like someone following an instruction manual. Mat is in the same boat, unsure what to do, so he uses a plot device to talk to prophetic spirits, who tell him to go with Rand and basically is just following along the same path just because someone else told him that's where he needs to go. Mat himself doesn't have a reason to go, but since he lacks a reason to go anywhere else, he just follows along.
Meanwhile, Egwene and Elayne and Nyneave are STILL hunting the Black Ajah after like 2 whole books of this shit. I can't even remember if they made progress. I know they messed up their plans in book 3, but it's just frustrating to see them after hundreds of pages make such little progress on actually cornering them for so damn long. I decided to spoil myself, and apparently these black sisters stay on the run almost throughout the whole series. Like, jesus. The guys' PoV's have issues involving reader investment, but atleast they do in fact make progress in raising their abilities, however unearned. 80% of the girl's POV chapters seem spent on personal petty problems (especially Egwene, seriously, I know character development doesn't necessarily equate to improving as a person, but she somehow got less mature than how she started out as. She is given an offer with how she needs to earn her way in the Aiel, she agrees, then bitches about it in her head about how unfair it is because Rand doesn't have to do the same even though he's off being taught to do something else entirely.)
Perrin's plotline is probably the most well written and compelling of this book. It's got emotional investment by having Perrin coming back to save his home and how he views it as his fault and him finding out his parents were dead was one of the few actually, legitimately well written segments of the book I've read. Unfortunately, when asked the question of whether it's enough to make it worth my while, the answer is no. Perrin's is the least flawed of the 3 ongoing general narratives, but it's not good enough. I hate Faile, I don't like Loial, I don't really care about the Two Rivers folk, and I kind of hate Perrin too. The entire initiation segment between him leaving tear and arriving at the Two rivers is filled with his stupidity, passive aggressiveism and bitchiness.
I don't like ANY of these people. And normally that wouldn't be a problem if they were interesting, but their really not. I tried to figure out why, and I think I finally stumbled on the systemic problem with how all these characters are written: Their all unempathetic manipulative assholes. That doesn't mean that the characters don't care for one another, exactly. But it does mean every relationship every character has is a power struggle for dominance rather than understanding. It's easiest to exemplify this with the gender binary going on. Male characters are repeatedly baffled by the actions of women while making basically no real effort as to understand WHY they might do what they do any feel as they feel. And more than that, all the younger male characters are encouraged by the older ones to not even try. Women are just mysterious creatures that do random, incomprehensible things. Meanwhile, women also don't bother to make efforts to understand men, but they don't even admit their ignorance, they just assign every negative or confusing thing they do to their having a penis. If a man wants to do something and a woman disagrees, he's being stupid because he's a MAN, regardless of the reasons he gives. It feels outright misandrous at times, with how dismissive and contemptuous some of these female characters are. There's less of that when two characters are of the same genders, but this series has a notorious problem of the characters not communicating with each other, and I've seen that as early as book 1.
So the result of this is that all the characters are belligerent as all fuck. One character advised Perrin on how to deal with Faile as a wife (and wives in general) is to do what they say on minor things so they can stalk up in their resistance points and take control when it matters. Putting aside that taht sounds like a fundamentally unhealthy relationship, what does this mean for the characters? Their not trying to develop or work together in unity, there's no mutual understanding of another person happening here. This seems like people just pick their partners based on masochistic tendencies, or atleast how they are willing to suffer for the pleasures of company. The thing is, when EVERY relationship is like that, it just starts being predictable. Every character is just in a constant state of bitching out another. It just makes me dread any interactions that can happen, especially on the romantic side. But other relationships are affected too. Mat spends most of his time with Rand at a distance, either annoyed or suspicious that Rand is going to go insane at any moment. In no way does he try to actually help fix the problem of his supposed sanity. If I'm supposed to buy that Mat is a genuine friend to Rand, I didn't get much of a feeling of that in how he interacts with him on a day to day basis. We get him trying to save Rand while in the temple, and that's great and all, but there's little actual communication between them as characters.
The writing reflects that as well. I've already gone over that in my other post, and again, I haven't changed my position about how it draaaaaaaaaags on (did Jordan murder his editor or something), but one thing I noticed with this new read is how disconnected the descriptions are. I started noticing that "He/She gave a (emotive) look." comes up so much. The body language isn't used often or the emotion itself rarely described, it's just captured in a look of some kind, and we're meant to imagine it from there.
So yeah. The characters just fucking blow. And the villains aren't better. Look, in the first 3 books, Baalzamon was a shitty villain. Like, he wasn't threatening after the first book, he sure as hell wasn't threatening by the third, but the antagonistic opposition felt nature in this sort of story. Now, Rand has nothing and I went over why "because the plot told me to" isn't really a big center of tension, nor are the girl's unending hunt for the Black Ajah. Perrin does have a villain, but they suck because their too simple. Padan Fain is like every evil crazy person stereotype rolled into a character. He feels like a parody being played straight. He goes beyond what even cartoon villainy is. The whitecloaks aren't that great either, since Perrin only killed one or a few of them, and that's apparently all it takes for THE ENTIRE FUCKING ARMY to travel all the way to your home to burn everything down. I know that their being manipulated, but I argue that them being able to be manipulated into something this obsessively dumb is evidence of how poorly run they are.
And it all really stems from the Dark One. The most generic of all possible antagonists, evil itself. You know, I find this world really wierd. All 1 religion, all sharing the same basic belief system, under 1 language. Despite having difficult cultural norms with the Seanchan and the Aiel, somehow everyone knows that the Dark One is pure evil. This wouldn't happen, realistically. Beliefs would disperse and everyone would come up with their own idea of who the Dark One was and what it meant and blah blah blah. But it's not the lack of realism per se that bothers me about this set up, but the way it eliminates motivational and moral ambiguity. If you're a dark follower, you don't have good reasons, you don't have your own moral center, or just different beliefs. You're evil. This has been basically universally true and it doesn't change from what I can tell. The most variety you can get is that you can be evil in different ways, but the actual morality or lackthereof is never even in question. I....well, I don't really see how you make an interesting dynamic out of that. Lord of the Rings is a clear inspiration to this, and it definitely has a clear good vs evil thing going on...but honestly, the more I looked into it, the more I found reasons to sympathize with even the most abject of evil creatures here. Morgoth wanted to sing his own song. Sauron wanted to improve the world. Gollum...well, we know Gollum's tale.
With respect to WoT fans on here, I really don't see the appeal of this series. It has the feel of an epic in some ways, I can give you that. Big world destroying prophecies, an ultimate evil, magic, awesome weapons, different cultures, different races, the big chosen one, big romances....but it fails to pull any of that off in my opinion and is one of the least engaging fantasies I've ever read. The prose is some of the worst I've ever come across at times, I struggle to give a shit about any of the characters, and....I just quit. This is just really unusual for me, because I am usually willing to slog through even the worst things, but I can't take this anymore and I have no idea why I would subject myself to this any further. I might try Sanderson's Way of Kings book again. I had a few similar problems with him as I do with these books, which makes sense since he apparently loves WoT, but I remember Sanderson being better than this.
I'll say this positive though: I really hope that one day, a decent adaptation of this is made. Because the general structure of the plot isn't bad. But virtually....everything about the writing makes this a journey I can't go on. An adaptation will have the advantage of not just cutting all the filler in the text, but may even rewrite the characters in order to make them better. Maybe some people will disagree with me, but I do not believe it is the job of adaptations to merely recreate a work, but to improve upon it. Kubrick himself said he liked to pick mediocre books to adapt because there he had more freedom to turn whats decent into something great. Well, for anyone who believes in that, Wheel of Time is a golden opportunity that should not be passed up.
.