I'm roughly half way through the Wheel of Time

I love this series so much but those damn Aes Sedai are so annoying. They are self righteous idiots with their head so far up their asses that they make things worse than the actual villains. It's like they want Rand to fail and the Dark One to win, even outside the Black Ajah. That's probably because they had 3,000 years with no one putting them in their place. I'm not sure how they managed to maintain so much power when they constantly shoot themselves in the foot. Even Egwene, Elayne, and Nynaeve make stupid decisions regarding Rand and Mat, which they should know better given their history with them. As soon as Rand pulled Callandor from the Stone they should have started following him. Elaida is a fool and so are the Salidar Aes Sedai, the smartest thing they did was making Egwene the Amyrlin, and it wasn't because they were smart, they lucked into a smart decision. They are presented as these wise, old wizard types early but clearly that's just a lie everyone believes.

Anyways, my favorite character started as Rand but over the books Perrin has become my favorite, and Mat is right there with him. All 3 Ta'veren are great characters.

You're right about the part where you should just give up.

Or start skipping books, read online summaries, and then come back in for the last couple books as the finale.

7-11 is pretty much soul-killing.

And yes, the Aes Sedai are self-righteous bitches. That's never going to change. The one moment of hope the earlier books give you that they might actually have to face the consequences of their actions and cut that shit out never really pays off. They're pretty much arrogant egotistical harridans right up to the very end, who never really get any comeuppance for their BS... barring a few exceptions.

What makes it worse is that the non-Aes Sedai female characters at the start of the story who become Aes Sedai all pick up those same traits as they go. Which makes it harder to sympathize with them when they're being stupid.

There is one Aes Sedai who has her head screwed on straight. Though I won't spoil who, or how her storyline plays out.

Mat's the best character. He's basically the stereotypical rogue character if they didn't realize how damned charming they were, and wanted absolutely nothing to do with adventure but kept getting sucked into it anyway.

I have only read the first book, birthday gift from my brother many years ago. He did however have the man himself sign it at a fan event.

Pics or it didn't happen, I know. Have at you.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a9ce9524.jpg

I just got to the point in A Crown of Swords where Egwene sent Lan to Ebou Dar to be with Nynaeve, which was pretty satisfying, but we'll see where it goes from there.

And I like a lot of characters, even besides the 3 ta'veren you have Min, Aviendha, Loial, Amys, Lan, among others. And I like the Aiel as a whole, they have such a cool culture and aren't bitches like most of the wetlanders.

Some meth head looking lady tried to get me into this series at a bookstore once. She was like "I don't even like fantasy that's how good it is"

Never touched those books.

had most of these books at one point. thinking about getting them again, or just borrowing from the library when I can

fettster777 posted...

Some meth head looking lady tried to get me into this series at a bookstore once. She was like "I don't even like fantasy that's how good it is"

Never touched those books.

You are probably better off for it. Started off with great world building but he definitely hit a point where he was just dragging it out by introducing new characters and plotlines.

house of leaves is hard

rjsilverthorn posted...

You are probably better off for it. Started off with great world building but he definitely hit a point where he was just dragging it out by introducing new characters and plotlines.

"Holy shit, I am making so much money on these books. I'd better pad them out as long as I can so the gravy train never ends!"

It's basically the George RR Martin model, where a planned trilogy became five, then became seven. the more books you can squeeze out, the more money you make. Just keep adding characters and never get to the actual payoff. And then you die before finishing it.

The main difference is that Robert Jordan managed to turn his original "trilogy" into 14 books (and arranged for someone else to finish it after he was dead). Whereas George RR Martin never has to finish his because he tricked HBO into paying him metric shit-tons of money for the brand, which works out for him since he hates both the series and fans.

The only way we ever see A Song of Ice and Fire get completed is if Martin goes bankrupt and suddenly needs cash. He'll spontaneously find his crippling writer's block dry up PDQ and get a manuscript out pronto. Sadly, the odds of that happening are slim. Because he has made so goddamn much money off of it.

Though neither of them hold a candle to Piers Anthony when it comes to spinning straw into gold from what was originally mean to be a trilogy. The Xanth "trilogy" is currently somewhere around 48 books.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Though neither of them hold a candle to Piers Anthony when it comes to spinning straw into gold from what was originally mean to be a trilogy. The Xanth "trilogy" is currently somewhere around 48 books.

It has been over 30 years since I read any of those, but I remember them being more like Discworld, a series of somewhat interconnected but largely standalone stories in a shared setting. That being said, there is a reason I haven't read one in thirty years, even back then it was fairly obvious that he was milking the concept and scraping the bottom of the idea barrel.

Awesome, another Perrin fan!

Archgoat posted...

Awesome, another Perrin fan!

What really made me love him was when he went back to the two rivers and saved them all from the massive hordes of trollocs out of pure determination and then told the white cloaks to fuck off. It was pure badassery and he was humble throughout it.

rjsilverthorn posted...

It has been over 30 years since I read any of those, but I remember them being more like Discworld, a series of somewhat interconnected but largely standalone stories in a shared setting.

Oh, it's definitely that. But Anthony himself always described the first 9 books as a trilogy, and the "second trilogy" started with book 10 and never ended.

I was at least partly being factitious, but also going by the fact that "trilogy" doesn't always mean "one story told over multiple books" as much as it can also mean "three separate but interconnected stories".

Could probably throw the Hitchhiker's Guide into that as well. Douglas Adams always used to describe it as an "ever-increasingly inaccurate trilogy". But he only managed 5 books and a short story before he died. So he's an amateur.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Could probably throw the Hitchhiker's Guide into that as well. Douglas Adams always used to describe it as an "ever-increasingly inaccurate trilogy". But he only managed 5 books and a short story before he died. So he's an amateur.

Yeah, Douglas Adams played into it.

i read hte first few in high school. boring bioessentialist magic system, boring one-dimensional characters, villains who call themselves the damned ones or something and monologue about how evil they are.

it's like somebody wrote a completely sincere version of the fantasy world from thomas covenant. oooo im lord foul and this is my evil goon drool rokwyrm, and were gonna tap all your mana with eeeevil

just go read a plot synopsis on the fan wiki if you wanna know how it ends. 14 books could be so many different experiences

chelsea___wtf posted...

i read hte first few in high school. boring bioessentialist magic system, boring one-dimensional characters, villains who call themselves the damned ones or something and monologue about how evil they are.

To be fair to the series, the first book sort of starts out as a deliberate pastiche/rip-off of Tolkien-esque fantasy, and then slowly evolves into something else. That doesn't necessarily mean it evolves into something you'd actually like , but the first book definitely isn't fully representative of the rest of the books that follow.

It's sort of the same as the Sword of Shannara books, which started out as even more of a blatant Tolkien rip-off, and became... something else. Or even Discworld, which started out as blatant parody of the fantasy genre (and took a number of shots at specific existing franchises), but which evolved into something much, much deeper and more robust (part of why I never recommend the first Discworld books to anyone who I'm trying to get into Discworld - you're better off skipping ahead to at least the 8th book).

Though I suspect if you're using terms like "bioessentialist magic system", you might be looking for very specific things in fantasy that you're definitely going to have a harder time finding. ( On a hunch, are you a fan of Brandon Sanderson? )



chelsea___wtf posted...

it's like somebody wrote a completely sincere version of the fantasy world from thomas covenant. oooo im lord foul and this is my evil goon drool rokwyrm, and were gonna tap all your mana with eeeevil

Hah. Covenant and Roger Zelazny's Amber are my two favorite fantasy series ever.



chelsea___wtf posted...

and we're gonna tap all your mana with eeeevil

That's not very Donaldson of you.

You should be tapping the Illearth Stone to produce an inchoate fulminating viridian cynosure that seeps into your very osseous frame.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

On a hunch, are you a fan of Brandon Sanderson?)

i havent read any of his books and don't generally read fantasy that has complicated magic systems these days.

the magic system in WoT annoys me because its kind of odd to have magic tied to people's sex but not do anything weird with it.

i mostly like speculative fiction that meaningfully engages with the philosophy/sociology/anthropology of an imagined world (like le guin, butler, ada palmer, etc). So when i hear 'magic but women and men can access different halves of it' i am hoping the book will have an interesting idea about where to go with that. let alone a 14 book series.

I think the contrast between the aes sedai and the enslaved seanchan spellcasters is the closest thing to what I wanted the books to do with this. But what I really wanted would be like, effeminate men disguising themselves and sneaking into the aes sedai university or something. Or literally anything else that explores ways a magic gender divide might play out in practice.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Hah. Covenant and Roger Zelazny's Amber are my two favorite fantasy series ever.

I did really enjoy the thomas covenant books. the mix of very campy fantasy world and Deeply Tormented Serious Author Protagonist is a lot of fun

Do they ever try castrating the male magicians? What part of being a dude makes your magic turn evil? Are there intersex wizards? Has anyone tried using magic to fuck with their endocrine system? I'm not saying the book has to engage with any one of these questions in particular, but ignoring all questions of this type is very boring to me. it throws away the only interesting part of 'magic system with rules based on your sex'

I mean, it's pretty well implied that it's the soul that matters (hence why there's at least one male character who gets their soul shoved into a female body but who still uses "male" magic). And that everyone has an essential nature that tends to manifest automatically barring some form of outside interference (hence why the Dragon Reborn is destined to come back as a man, why all of Mat's past lives seem to be male, etc).

Granted, Jordan certainly could have used the opportunity to explore trans themes (having the magic itself "validate" someone who claims to have been born the wrong gender and seem to be tapping into the "other" side the One Power once they transition in some way), but that's a very "modern" outlook and he was writing a bit too early for that sort of thing. Though there are certainly stories now that do something similar.

But there are other elements of the dichotomy in the story. Like how it's explained that men and women access the One Power differently (women having to sort of give in and submit to the flow, men having to seize control and force it to do what they want), and trying to access it the "wrong" way is pretty much a one-way ticket to getting burned out by the backlash. Or how the male half getting tainted sets up the entire justification for the matriarchal socio-political magic system in the setting, because men can't draw on the power without going crazy (and all of the complications that will later create). The story never hugely focuses on the complex mechanical differences between the two because that isn't really the point of the story.

Though it definitely seems like my hunch was right. What you seem to want out of a magic system is extreme crunchiness, so you're obviously not going to be as interested in a soft-magic system that basically only exists as a plot element to make the story happen (which is what magic is in a majority of fantasy stories/settings). What you're essentially asking for is for fantasy to be treated more like sci-fi, except with magic instead of technology. Which is fine if that's what you're into, but it's not really the point of the genre.

I always used to break it down as "Sci-fi wants to make you think, Fantasy wants to make you feel." Which is also why I don't really consider Star Wars to be Sci-Fi at all - it's "Fantasy in Space" (aka "Space Opera"). It doesn't really view the narrative through the same lens that Sci-Fi does, and being set in space doesn't really justify the categorization (any more than "technology" is strictly a requirement for Sci-Fi). Fantasy is all about mythological and epic (in the original sense of the word) storytelling, whereas Sci-Fi is generally interested in examining the consequences and implications of the changes it's making to the universe.

Stories that go for more mechanically complex magic and then delve deep into the granular nuances of said magic and the effect it would have on a given universe is like asking how Ant-Man can shrink and grow when mass should remain constant, or how Cyclops can fire eye-beams without giving himself whiplash due to Newton's Laws of Motion (action/reaction). It doesn't matter if all the author cares about is telling stories about a dude who shoots lasers from his eyes or a dude who shrinks down and talks to ants.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Granted, Jordan certainly could have used the opportunity to explore trans themes (having the magic itself "validate" someone who claims to have been born the wrong gender and seem to be tapping into the "other" side the One Power once they transition in some way), but that's a very "modern" outlook and he was writing a bit too early for that sort of thing. Though there are certainly stories now that do something similar.

left hand of darkness came out in 1969. and subverting gender/sex roles has been a theme of literature for hundreds of years. it's a failing of genre fiction IMO that the vast majority of it had nothing to say about this core part of human identity until ~10 years ago. like the best you got usually was a Badass Woman in Armor who uses a sword and isnt a huge bitch like your mom

also i didnt say anything about trans people ... there are a lot of weird edge cases on the idea "magic thats tied to your sex/gender", i wanted him to dig in on at least one of them

it soudns like he does and the answer is giga-boring tho, if it's like "you have a gender soul that determines what magic you have; every gender soul you see in the books is binary".

ParanoidObsessive posted...

What you seem to want out of a magic system is extreme crunchiness,

Sort of? I want it to explore how magic interacts with society in a way that has nuance. that's usually easier if there are rules about how it works.

But I don't think most Fantasy Books With a Big Map and Magic Rules actually use the magic system to say anything interesting to me. and some speculative fiction (terra ignota for example, or magical realism like disco elysium) do interesting stuff with "magic" whose limits and rules are almost undefined

ParanoidObsessive posted...

women having to sort of give in and submit to the flow, men having to seize control and force it to do what they want),

this sounds even worse than i remember it being, lol

to be fair tho the Aes Sedai matriarchy is at least something. its just not very interesting

chelsea___wtf posted...

the magic system in WoT annoys me because its kind of odd to have magic tied to people's sex but not do anything weird with it.

i mostly like speculative fiction that meaningfully engages with the philosophy/sociology/anthropology of an imagined world (like le guin, butler, ada palmer, etc). So when i hear 'magic but women and men can access different halves of it' i am hoping the book will have an interesting idea about where to go with that. let alone a 14 book series.

I think the contrast between the aes sedai and the enslaved seanchan spellcasters is the closest thing to what I wanted the books to do with this. But what I really wanted would be like, effeminate men disguising themselves and sneaking into the aes sedai university or something. Or literally anything else that explores ways a magic gender divide might play out in practice.

https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Aran%27gar
This is spoilers for the books big ones.
Halima was a man's soul reincarnated in a woman's body and they were in the aes sedai camp doing nefarious things with "seemingly invisible" male magic that the women could just not see. Everyone was confused for quite a while as to what was going on.

Is that kind of what you were hoping to explore?
chelsea___wtf posted...

Do they ever try castrating the male magicians? What part of being a dude makes your magic turn evil? Are there intersex wizards? Has anyone tried using magic to fuck with their endocrine system? I'm not saying the book has to engage with any one of these questions in particular, but ignoring all questions of this type is very boring to me. it throws away the only interesting part of 'magic system with rules based on your sex'

The spoilers I posted may touch on the subject you want.

chelsea___wtf posted...

Sort of? I want it to explore how magic interacts with society in a way that has nuance. that's usually easier if there are rules about how it works.

Maybe King Killer Chronicles might be up your alley? Arcanist magic is bound with tons of logic and the consequences of using such things in society. Hell they're even manufacturing magical products for sale at one point.