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Prison Warden posted:He channels three times in EoTW, before the whole Eye of the World bit I can only remember two off the top of my head. One is the one you mentioned. One of the others is when Mat and Rand are trapped in an Inn later with Darkfriends about to break down the door, Rand channels lightning and blows the wall off and they escape I can't remember the other one. It's actually almost bizarre how much of EotW is foreshadowing. It's almost an entire book of just foreshadowing. As to those tipoffs, 1) Removing Bela's weakness. He later gets loopy and dizzy around the Whitecloaks and in the Inn in Baerlon, briefly. 2) Breaking loose the rudder on Domon's ship. He later gets loopy and dizzy up in the rigging. 3) Blasting the darkfriend with lightning in (Market Sheran?). Gets flat out sick in an inn and Matt takes care of him. Almost every single thing that happens in EotW is not just a plot point but also foreshadowing or part of some puzzle. It's really an amazingly intricate book.
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Jan 17, 2012 20:41
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Daedalus Esquire posted:^ To have information that exact, I assume there is some WoT website equivalent of the Game of Thrones website towerofthehand.com? This should be what you're looking for. Beware spoilers for well literally everything. http://wotfaq.dragonmount.com/
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Jan 22, 2012 04:39
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Jedit posted:Sorry, Sloth, but there's absolutely no evidence for that anywhere in the books and several pieces of evidence against it. It's just a Loony Theory. Maybe for the first sentence, but there's a great deal of evidence for the second, especially in the Big Book of Bad Art.
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Jan 28, 2012 18:07
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Quad posted:Yay, I'm on TGH and will probably finish it at work tonight! What DOES "IT IS NOT HERE"mean at thr end of book 1, anyway? It is not here that the last battle will be fought? Creator has weird syntax. Probably, yeah, it was the Creator telling everybody they have to go play over there, but that's probably the single weirdest and most ambiguously-interpreted moment in the whole series to date; it's sortof the Tom Bombadil of WoT, an ambiguous appearance by a maybe-Creator that mostly happened because it's the first book and stuff wasn't completely worked out yet. (Similarly, the Old Tongue passages in Eye tend to be "off" when compared to the old tongue in later books -- Jordan explained it in-universe by saying they were idiomatic useages, etc., but basically it was really first-book-itis. Best solution; accept that it's a moment you don't fully understand because the POV character didn't fully grok it either.
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Feb 6, 2012 22:13
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Cartoon Man posted:I'm at the part in book 2 where Rand, Hurrin, and Loial are travelling through the other side of the portal stone and Loial stops by a tree to make himself a Sungwood quarterstaff. I know Sungwood was talked about briefly in the first book, but are there any other examples throughout the series where Sungwood is mentioned or performed? Is this another example of Jordan coming up with a cool idea and not being able to find a good place for it to appear again? End of Book 1, Loial sings to the grave of the Green Man to prevent the site of the Eye getting swallowed by the Blight. And he talks about it some too in the Queen's Blessing I think. There are a few other points later on where it comes up as background flavor -- i.e., Aiel coming to a stedding to trade for sung wood, or loial being amazed to find a sung-wood bed at an inn they're staying at, but that's pretty much it. The ability to sing any given wood thing you want is pretty neat but kinda gets outmoded after a certain point. I think of it as a low-level ability :P
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Feb 13, 2012 15:43
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ZypherIM posted:How much do you all think that the journey by portal stone and viewing tons of their possible lives cemented Mat and Perrin behind Rand? Mat makes a comment right after, and at the start of 3 Perrin thinks about how the journey convinced him his fate was tied to Rand's. That's a good question. One of the really interesting things about WoT is how much the story changes when you think about it from outside the narrated PoV. Jordan does all kinds of neat stuff with point of view that gets overlooked because [fantasy novel]. What do Rand and Perrin seem like to other people who can't hear their internal monologues? What character changes are occurring even in the main characters, when they're on screen but not the PoV?
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Feb 14, 2012 15:57
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Zore posted:Minor characters coming back ramps up as the series goes on. Some are going to become important, others stay in the background and some will get POVs. Basically if they have a name, and it isn't the introduction, they're probably going to be a recurring character. I could be wrong about this, but I suspect Jordan wrote out names, histories, descriptions, etc., for almost *every* character, even the ones we never see on screen -- i.e., it wouldn't surprise me at all if somewhere in his notes there's a listed first and last name and description for *every* Aes Sedai and so forth.
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Feb 29, 2012 21:19
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ConfusedUs posted:The whole concept of Ta'veren is a really, really elegant piece of meta-fiction. All that ridiculous contrived stuff that happens in most fiction can and does happen in WoT. Ta'veren,n.: in the Old Tongue, "Protagonist."
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Mar 1, 2012 20:30
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werdnam posted:Eye of the World: This was not as good a read the second time through as the first time. For one thing, I noticed how derivative it is: We've got orcs (Trollocs), a race to the nearby village we never go to (Bree/Taren's Ferry), Gandalf (Moiraine), Aragorn (Lan), gollum, (Fain), nazghul (draghkar), ringwraiths (myrddraal), a dark and dangerous shortcut through Moria (the Ways), the breaking of the Fellowship (everyone splits after the attack in Shadar Logoth), a brave suicide battle against the forces of the dark (the Shienarans battle), ents (Ogier), ... I think Jordan said in some interviews that he'd deliberately written the first half or so of Eye of the World to be familiar to people who'd read Tolkien. So yeah, it is derivative, but it was a deliberate choice on Jordan's part. He wanted to set up the tropes of "standard fantasy novel" before he started messing with the formula. There are definitely some structural problems with the first book; the narration of the road to Caemlyn is all kinds of out of whack, and the final confrontation is more than a little confusing (though that's partly excused by the main characters themselves not fully understanding what's going on). The reason the first book has such a feel of finality is that Jordan didn't know if he'd get a contract to publish the second book when he finished the first one. So since it might've been the whole story, he had to have an ending that could plausibly end the whole thing.
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Mar 16, 2012 15:52
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Cartoon Man posted:The Yellow Ajah is pretty useless until book 7 or 8 when Nynaeve starts learning how to heal using other flows like fire and such. Who would want to be in that Ajah? There is only one way to Heal, everybody in the Ajah knows how to do it, just about everybody outside the ajah with moderate strength in the power knows how to Heal. Theres nothing for them to research. What do they do in the Yellow quarters all day long? I kinda wondered the same thing. I suspect that desperately sick people come to the Tower for healing fairly frequently, so that's probably what the Yellows take care of. If you get cancer in Randland it ain't like they have chemo.
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Mar 21, 2012 15:06
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veekie posted:Its always spanking. Jordan apparently had some sort of spanking "thing." It's one of those things about the books that's really easy to miss until you catch onto it, and then suddenly it's spankings everywhere.
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Mar 23, 2012 21:44
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I think the Jordan argument for lack of language variation is two things: 1) Long history of relative unity under the White Tower, and 2) the preservation of printing. This is a big deal -- the only reason we can read Shakespeare today fairly easily, but a lot of us have a hard time with Chaucer, is printing; the english language changed more between Chaucer and Shakespeare (200 years) than it did between Shakespeare and us (400 years). Randland has unified printing and books, which has kept things relatively uniform.
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Apr 20, 2012 18:23
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veekie posted:Galad does the same with his swordfights. Not even all that much more flowery. A lot of kung fu forms and stances have similarly flowery names -- "White Crane Spreads its Wings," "Parting the Wild Horses' Mane", etc.
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Apr 21, 2012 00:01
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wellwhoopdedooo posted:I'm pretty sure defeating another Blademaster is one of the legitimate ways to earn it, and he did beat Turak in a straight-up fight. Well, was it skill, or was it Ta'veren? Rand "cheats".
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Apr 21, 2012 15:34
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Minor detail, but the heron-mark swords aren't quite katanas, though they're close. If we go by the marketed "heron mark swords", which we probably can because Jordan approved the designs: http://www.designtoscano.com/product/wall+decor/armor+and+swords/heron+mark+blade+master+sword-+unsharpened+-+mr500058.do?sortby=bestSellers They look about halfway between a katana and sa european greatsword (compare with something like a kriegsmesser). So they have a slight curve for cutting, but also a point (if not a straight point) and possibly enough mass for chopping. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Apr 22, 2012 |
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Apr 22, 2012 13:15
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One other interesting thing is that there's actually relatively little conflict between the nations of Randland. The big wars are against external threats -- trolloc hordes, the Aiel War. There are a few exceptions, but not many -- the only one I can think of offhand is the Whitecloak War. There's so much empty land that territorial conflicts seem pretty rare, and the White Tower defuses a lot of potential conflicts before they get severe. So it does sortof make sense that training would be leaning towards the sword despite the existence of heavy armor, because use of heavy armor is probably pretty rare. The average Randland soldier seems more likely to be fighting on a small scale, doing something like defending a merchant's caravan or, at most, getting involved in a palace coup or something like what we see in the War of Andoran Succession. One thing to keep in mind is that the pikemen/archer formation is specifically mentioned in the Big Book of Bad Art as something that Mat's bringing back in the Band of the Red Hand -- it was apparently the standard under Hawkwing and the Trolloc Wars, but isn't that commonly used at the "start" of Eye any more, basically because military training standards have declined (like everything else). It's the "way to fight trollocs" but it's not the way that, say, Cairhien fought the Aiel, or Illian fought Tear.
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Apr 23, 2012 14:36
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I'm going to ret-conn this issue in my head as a transcription error and he's actually referring to volleys.
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May 10, 2012 18:14
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The Lord Bude posted:are these real world miles or in world miles? because If I remember correctly the unit of measurement that Randlanders refer to as a mile is not the same as a real world mile, just like a Randland week is 10 days not 7 All is explained: Randland seconds are longer
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May 11, 2012 22:29
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Yeah, it's funny to me to see how many people are going to WoT from ASoIaF when for many years it was the other way around -- Martin's series got its start because of positive jacket quotes from Jordan.
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May 12, 2012 16:56
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arioch posted:
Yeah, the problem though was it's a fantasy series where characters can be expected to come back from the dead, and where deaths offscreen are virtually guaranteed to not have happened, so it was impossible to truly rule out Lanfear until we saw in later books that she'd actually died and come back and was thus actually taken out of the picture. Overall it was a puzzle that was "obvious" to the writer, but not obvious to the reader, because the reader didn't know what the author hadn't told them yet (i.e, that Asmodean's death wasn't the first appearance of Mesaana, that Lanfear had actually died/been trapped beyond the doorframe, etc.) It was deductible but basically impossible to "know."
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May 17, 2012 14:34
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It's important to realize that Rand's going crazy for two entirely separate reasons: 1) the whole taint thing, and also 2) holy poo poo, you people expect me to do what? I'm just a guy! Part of what Jordan was trying to do in WoT is write "hero saves world" epic fantasy with a higher degree of psychological realism than had been done previously -- in the original concept, the protagonist was a war veteran (basically, that became Tam's character instead), with all we know now that implies. The idea was at least in part to show what that kind of pressure and stress would actually do to the Prophesied Hero. So sometimes Rand's crazy because he's got LTT in his head and sometimes he's just in the throes of epic-level traumatic stress disorder.
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May 20, 2012 01:03
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Minarch posted:Aside from Elayne, Perrin's character really is the most frustrating. Through the entire series, he never actually progresses like Rand and Mat (or even Nynaeve and Egwene). He starts off slow and whiny (but I don't wanna talk to wolves I liked Perrin the most of any of the characters initially, but he really suffers from the Slow Times in the later books -- he just sort of gets lost chasing Rand's left-over Shaido and doesn't seem to have a point for three or four books. It's a shame because he had a lot of potential. Casao posted:This, except Nynaeve is the worst loving character. She's actually showing some progress toward the end of Lord of Chaos -- she does things and says things that aren't "Men are horrible and women are wrong and I'm the only person with the right ideas" A lot of people find they like Nynaeve more on a re-read. When you read her when you're younger she's just "christ, this woman sounds just like my mom when she's angry, except ALL THE TIME", and when they're older it's "holy poo poo, I completely understand why Nynaeve is angry all the time, she's responsible for these kids that nobody else is looking out for, yet she's barely older than they are and nobody listens to her or tells her anything she needs to know or gives her any respect at all, so all she can do is constantly yell at everyone." Like a lot of Jordan's female characters, she's not particularly likeable but she's very understandable. And yah, Jordan does have some nasty gender issues going on in the text. To give him credit, he does have legitimately "strong female characters" like Moiraine that aren't just tits with attitude, which was pretty drat groundbreaking when he started writing (when Eye of the World came out, Piers Anthony was a major name). In the twenty-plus years since the books started, the genre's developed past him in a lot of ways, but part of the reason was that he gave it a push. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:25 on May 29, 2012 |
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May 29, 2012 17:13
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Paracelsus posted:
Yeah, this is the relevant Jordan quote: quote:For Anonymous-George, long ago I saw one of the first, I believe, novels about a young woman who wasn’t allowed to use magic or whatever because she was a woman, and the thought occurred to me as to how it might go if men were the ones who were denied the right to do magic. Or whatever. I hate using the word magic. From that long ago thought grew the One Power divided into saidin and saidar with the male half tainted and the reasons for and results of it being tainted. Now in most of these societies — Far Madding is the obvious exception — I did not and do not view them as matriarchal. I attempted to design societies that were as near gender balanced as to rights, responsibilities and power as I could manage. It doesn’t all work perfectly. People have bellybuttons. If you want to see someone who always behaves logically, never tells small lies or conceals the truth in order to put the best face for themselves on events, and never, ever tries to take advantage of any situation whatsoever, then look for somebody without a bellybutton. The real surprise to me was that while I was designing these gender balanced societies, people were seeing matriarchies. https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1KC11jaLntu-qaywo1hVcCIcA8xGpiVi1ExvLAg4uUz8
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Jun 5, 2012 16:19
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Hobbes24 posted:QFT Terry Goodkind literally titled one of his books "Stone of Tears." At one point Tor actually published a book of Terry Goodkind short stories with a "copyright (C)1990 Robert Jordan" error on the copyright page. No joke, that seriously happened.
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Jun 26, 2012 16:18
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Roydrowsy posted:are those book, 9, 10, 11 really that awful? 8,9, and 10 are slooow. They're not bad if you really enjoy world-building but the plot barely even inches forward. I view them as kinda like the volume in the Aeneid that's just an extended description of Aeneas's shield.
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Aug 1, 2012 19:48
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Turin Turambar posted:A possibility: Part of the problem of the "annoying" characters is that they take too much space/time in the books so the reader hate them because it slow down the plot, Rand appears less and less because of them, etc. I think that's part of it, but part of it is also that the annoying characters, at least some of them, tend to be a little more psychologically realistic. Nynaeve is incredibly annoying on a first readthrough as a kid, but re-reading as an adult she's really easy to identify with -- she goes from Annoying Angry Mom Character to "I totally get where she's coming from now that I have kids" on a re-read. Elayne is annoying as gently caress but her characterization makes sense given how coddled she was growing up. The whole Faile/Perrin dynamic makes more sense once you realize that Faile's reacting normally and it's all Perrin's "nose" making him act strangely that keeps setting Faile off.
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Aug 5, 2012 19:43
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Paracelsus posted:Tall, handsome, and Ta'veren. With an emphasis on the latter. Probably has well-turned calves, too. He's also probably the first guy her own age she ever met who treated her as an equal right from the first moment. Largely because he had no idea who she was, but still. Look back over those early passages in Eye and it's pretty clear Rand is the only "dateable" (i.e., not Thom or her brothers) guy she's ever talked to who hasn't either been completely dominated by her, or tried to dominate her.
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Sep 26, 2012 19:47
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His Divine Shadow posted:I'm almost done with Knife of Dreams now and two things stand out, I guess I will spoiler them, it's mostly about the Seanchan and Tuon. I think the point with that characterization is that Jordan's trying to at least argue that a lot of the perception of "evil" is cultural. In Tuon's mind, what she does is a necessary evil; if someone didn't control Aes Sedai, there'd be another Breaking of the World! Now, the narrative overall is also very clear that those actions are evil. I think the ultimate point is "well intentioned, likeable, "good" people can still do horribly evil things if they don't know any better because of their culture."
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Oct 19, 2012 14:34
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I think the general implication is that skin tone, hair, coloration, etc., is a lot more generally variable in Randland than it is in present-day earth (possibly due to scattering of peoples during the Breaking). The Aiel are a distinct people, of course, as are the Sea Folk, and there's general regional trends (i.e., most everyone in Two Rivers has brown hair; Cairhienin trend small) but it's not the same degree of uniformity. I think with the Seanchan this trend is really exaggerated and it's all about power and rank, not race -- basically anybody can theoretically get demoted to abject slavery or promoted to the Blood on a moment's notice, so "blood" has become more a status marker than a racial marker. You could probably write a decent research paper on the Seanchan, slavery, and Jordan as a "southern writer." Overall Randland society doesn't seem to have much in the way of racial bias (apart from, oddly enough, everyone thinking the Aiel are crazy murderers), just a LOT of social/class and gender bias. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 17:36
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Charlz Guybon posted:
Yeah, that's one of the darkest moments in the entire series. It's also the point that sparks the whole "not going to kill a woman" thing.
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Nov 24, 2012 16:16
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Wait, if you're cut off from the Source, can you still see weaves? What if you're severed?
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Nov 30, 2012 18:35
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Boofchicken posted:I am pretty sure in the flashback that Rand has in The Shadow Rising when he is learning about his ancestors, shows one of them talking to "two ancient aes sedai" who were incredibly old. This was showing the building of Rhuiden. One of them is talking about the prophecy, implying she was around for all of the breaking and then some. So I would imagine some survived. I mean, they even talk about making The White Tower. So every Aes Sedai died and now random women who learned to channel again are going to make a city to live in? There had to be some who made it. The impression I got there was that those particular Aes Sedai were the last living pre-breaking Aes Sedai, and that the Breaking was still going on (perhaps in its tail end) while Rhuidean was being raised. There seem to've been a few places like that (the Stone of Tear, the White Tower, Rhuidean) that were actually built during the Breaking by Aes Sedai.
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Dec 13, 2012 20:03
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My personal theory re: failing nations is that it's been because of the dark one's touch on the pattern; after all, his prison is just patched, not sealed.
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Dec 20, 2012 15:57
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What are those maps from?
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Dec 25, 2012 08:04
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Chamberk posted:Just in the first section of Knife of Dreams, it's better than the books have been for a long time. I loved that. For some books you can still find the WoTFAQ for that particular book but some of the earlier ones have dropped offline. Otherwise I think that kind of precise tracking is best saved for a re-read. It's kinda neat knowing which Aes Sedai turns out later to have been Black all along or whatever but it's not necessary on a first reading.
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Apr 5, 2013 20:16
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Chamberk posted:It's so tricky to keep track of who's a Darkfriend among the Aes Sedai, but (mid-book 12 spoilers) Sheriam was a surprise. Other than that, I never can remember if a character is Black Ajah unless I've seen her have a conversation with a Forsaken. The weird thing is, that's foreshadowed as early as Book 3 or so. Somehow while I was reading I managed to figure out that Verin was probably "reformed black" but didn't manage to figure out that Sheriam was black. I think I just refused to believe it because Sheriam is such a likeable character early on.
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Jun 7, 2013 17:00
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Blind Melon posted:The best part is that they had a gray man with them, and were probably darkfriends, which only serves to justify his insane paranoia. Yeah, that's the touch that makes the scene. A lesser writer than Jordan would have just had them be innocents and that scene would mark his descent into DARK and EVIL and GRIM. Instead, wait, he's right! That was a gray man! Maybe he's not paranoid and they are out to kill him! Maybe he really needs to be that violent and edgy just to stay alive! In some ways it's the darkest scene in the whole series, and it's the little touch of the gray man that really shows what a masterful writer Jordan was.
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Oct 18, 2013 04:22
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I'm pretty sure it's an attempt to implement this, narratively: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_theory_of_love Min is "companionate," Elayne is "Romantic," Aviendha is "passionate."
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Oct 28, 2013 15:11
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There's also the fact that, let's face it, we actually know Jordan had an actual spanking thing because he made jokes about it at conventions etc. It's not exactly a secret. Jordan pretty clearly had some issues with women and discipline. That said, there are a lot of worse things in the fantasy genre than an author with a spanking fetish, especially when compared to really objectionable writers like Goodkind. A work of fiction doesn't have to be perfect to be good. At least with Jordan there's a backstory and rationale to the BDSM and it never gets horribly rapey like such things all too often do in the hands of too many lesser fantasy writers.
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Nov 1, 2013 21:33
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theblackw0lf posted:I think one of the problems the books have, especially the mid-range ones, is that Jordan repeats so many things over and over again. It's like he's writing to someone who is just picking up the series for the first time and is coming in late. If you cut back all the exposition from a book that goes over material from previous books, I swear you'd cut the book in half. My guess is that stuff is in there for more casual, slower paced readers who might have forgotten most book 3 by the time they got to book 9, etc.
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Nov 5, 2013 02:58
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