The Wheel Of Time – Official Teaser Trailer
September 3, 2021 6:07 AM   Subscribe

 
Would a kind mifian do a bit of a summary, I recall starting one of the books and just did not grab.
posted by sammyo at 6:26 AM on September 3, 2021 [7 favorites]


I was going to ask, are the books worth reading? Through the whole series? 14 books is a lot and I know some series (here a quick glance in the direction of George R. R. Martin and Frank Herbert) start strong and get less strong as time goes by.
posted by JDHarper at 6:31 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


> Would a kind mifian do a bit of a summary, I recall starting one of the books and just did not grab.

Some protagonist boys from a small town (one of them a magic boy) have to save the world from an evil entity. Lots of satisfying world building. The boys all get into geopolitics in some form or another, and that takes up a substantial fraction of the latter books, to a painful extent. The first sex scene is in book 6 or something. I assume they fix this in the show.

I got the chills from the trailer, because I read the first 8 books many times a long time ago when I had more patience for interminable fantasy novels, so I feel like the emotional response is a little unfair. But it looks like they are doing a good job with adapting the source material.
posted by serif at 6:36 AM on September 3, 2021 [10 favorites]


This series I always imagined would be more unfilmable than most fantasy. So much of the (really good) action takes place in the characters' heads.

What's it going to look like on screen when Rand reaches for the Source while trying to push through the rancid sheen of the Taint? Is he going to make a face? Will Morgan Freeman narrate his thoughts? Will we cut to some CGI? Will we skip that entirely and just show the magic happening? That's a pretty radical departure already because the book series has hundreds of pages of characters working out how to seize or embrace their powers and then figure out how to use them.

Then again, maybe that would be an interesting part of the show, like a whole new aspect of the story. What did this whole thing look like in-universe to non-channelers who just lived mundane lives and suddenly some madman walked into town, made a constipated face for 90 seconds, then everything exploded?
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 6:39 AM on September 3, 2021 [27 favorites]


Well this looks generic and overwrought. That makes it faithful to the books at least.
posted by Alex404 at 6:43 AM on September 3, 2021 [38 favorites]


I was going to ask, are the books worth reading? Through the whole series?

I never finished the series, which is something that teenager me who started reading them around when the first 7 books were out would probably not believe. (I stopped after book 11, I have book 12 on my kindle, have tried reading it once or twice, but never really cared enough.) However, I'm not sure to what extent that was the books getting weaker, and how much was me simply being fifteen years older, and having read more fantasy in the mean time.

However, I am interested in the trailer, and plan to watch it. It may even give me the impetus to finish the last three books - who knows!
posted by scorbet at 6:49 AM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


Metafilter: made a constipated face for 90 seconds, then everything exploded
posted by crocomancer at 6:53 AM on September 3, 2021 [22 favorites]


I tapped out somewhere around Book 7(?), when I realized I detested pretty much all of the main characters, and wanted the Forsaken to obliterate them.
posted by zamboni at 6:54 AM on September 3, 2021 [21 favorites]


I was going to ask, are the books worth reading? Through the whole series?

Uhhhhh it really depends. Yes, up to a point. Then very much no. (Book 10 can famously be entirely skipped without any impact on the reader's grasp of events.) Then very much yes because Robert Jordan died and Brandon Sanderson was brought in to bring the train into the station. Those last three books are basically where all the Questions get Answered and All The Toys get Played With.

The show itself is re-centered on Moiraine as the main character, which is a smart choice as she's by far the most intriguing and realistic of the characters. (At least until the rest of them level up and realize all the adults are shit.) Fascinated to see that Caemlyn? Might? Not have made it to the screen here?
posted by greenland at 6:57 AM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


> What's it going to look like on screen when Rand reaches for the Source while trying to push through the rancid sheen of the Taint?

Maybe through imagery. I'm assuming Egwene floating in the river with her eyes closed is some sort of visual metaphor for reaching into saidar. It's been more than 2 decades since I started the series but IIRC Robert Jordan describes saidar as a river that a woman must embrace, and that's what I first thought of when seeing that shot.

I'm more interested in how they're going to translate some of the authors... uh... ideas of gender into the book. What will they adopt, and what will they drop?

I'm especially (morbidly?) curious as to how the Seanchan are going to be treated, but I supposed that is for a later season.
posted by theony at 6:59 AM on September 3, 2021 [8 favorites]


Also how are they going to handle the constant spanking and does even Amazon have the costume budget it takes to properly put on a Robert Jordan production?
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:09 AM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


Pleeeeeaase let there be no braid tugging or skirt smoothing.

I'm cautiously looking forward to the show as I'm hoping they'll cut out all the extraneous junk and streamline the storylines.

I was going to ask, are the books worth reading? Through the whole series?

I don't believe so, no. I was 12 or so when I first started reading them and even at that age I thought they were a bit hokey. The overall story and the world are compelling, but the books (and series) are far too long and the characters aren't written all that well.
posted by Stoof at 7:10 AM on September 3, 2021 [13 favorites]


However, I'm not sure to what extent that was the books getting weaker, and how much was me simply being fifteen years older, and having read more fantasy in the mean time.

nah, the books from like 7 to 11 were slogs. at one point there were a dozen or so storylines each featuring a main character, and the forward momentum just stopped. i recall two 800 page books that covered the same period of time so Jordan could get everyone in position for the eventual Big Event. it started to feel like an exercise in bookkeeping.

the last three books were much better after brandon sanderson took over. a lot of the storylines were wrapped up with a quickness, and it was fun to read about things actually happening instead of about things being prepared so that things could happen... eventually.

i'm cautiously optimistic that the amazon series will not suck - since the books are finished and the story has an actual ending, it's at least possible whoever is in charge of plotting the series went through and cut out the cruft.
posted by logicpunk at 7:12 AM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


This looks better than the many streaming series of generic fantasy out there! I’m looking forward to it.

The books are doorstops. Agreeing with folks upthread about the intermittently good world building, nifty toys and magic, and the terrible structure. Multiple 1000-page volumes can barely even be counted as episodic advancement of the overall story, and they are in no meaningful sense of the word “novels.”

I, too, will be interested to see what they do with gender. I haven’t read them for many years (I stopped around 6 or 7? 8?), but I distinctly remember divides among friends as to how “realistic” Jordan’s portrayal of gender was. Friends to the left and to the right each found things to dislike about that, which I took as a good sign at the time and still do.
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:13 AM on September 3, 2021


The first sex scene is in book 6 or something. I assume they fix this in the show.

If they want to reproduce the success of Game of Thrones without the sex and violence, they don't understand why it was so popular.
posted by adept256 at 7:16 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


There's also an upcoming amazon series set in Tolkien's Valinor. I'm hoping for the best yet expecting the worst.

Besides that, fuck Amazon. Do the actors piss in bottles?
posted by adept256 at 7:21 AM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


I was going to ask, are the books worth reading?

No.

Through the whole series?

NO

nifty toys and magic

the magic system is based on biological gender dichotomy.

Jordan just folded Dune and other source material into Eddings, which was already retread Tolkien.

Rand and Garion are practically indistinguishable characters, except for Rand also being Paul Atreides.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:24 AM on September 3, 2021 [21 favorites]


I read the first book and found it just ok, and decided not to read any further. But sometimes that kind of thing can translate into fun tv, so I'll keep an eye out for reviews.
posted by PussKillian at 7:25 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Jordan just folded Dune and other source material into Eddings, which was already retread Tolkien.

Rand and Garion are practically indistinguishable characters, except for Rand also being Paul Atreides.


I read the first, I think, four WoT books as a teenager and this puts exactly into words why I didn't read further.
posted by gauche at 7:36 AM on September 3, 2021 [7 favorites]


I read the first book and found it just ok, and decided not to read any further. But sometimes that kind of thing can translate into fun tv

Given the level of hokum in the settings and characters, I'd be more interested if it had been a project to revive camp fantasy like Hercules and Xena instead of the grim/grand fantasy this is.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:51 AM on September 3, 2021 [8 favorites]


I thought WoT was pretty decent. I started reading in about 1995 and stopped in about 1999, having read all the books published up to that point (seven or eight). I then picked them up after Brandon Sanderson finished the series and started through the beginning, burning through them in a few months.

I don't know that I would "recommend" them as such. They are long and life is short and there are definitely a couple of books where nothing happens, but if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 7:53 AM on September 3, 2021 [9 favorites]


This better be the Perrin & Faile romcom I've always wanted.

I'd be more interested if it had been a project to revive camp fantasy like Hercules and Xena instead of the grim/grand fantasy this is.


Yes, I'd accept this too.
posted by Groundhog Week at 7:56 AM on September 3, 2021 [5 favorites]


I don't know the books, but the trailer certainly has a "no way are we leaving all that Game Of Thrones money on the table" feel to it.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 7:59 AM on September 3, 2021 [8 favorites]


Would a kind mifian do a bit of a summary, I recall starting one of the books and just did not grab.

Three boys of destiny are found in a small village, by a wizard (who is also a woman, because only women can use magic safely in this world). They go out into the big world along with some of their other friends and discover their destiny, which includes the fact that one of boys can use magic which means he will go mad. They all become great leaders, fall in love, do things thought impossible, spend most of books 7-10 sitting around agonizing over what to do whilst doing nothing, and then books 11-13 going through the checklist of all the prophecy things that have been hanging around, incomplete, for quite a while. Book 14 is largely one long massive battle on multiple fronts against the Big Bad and it feels pretty cathartic, honestly, and I found it quite enjoyable. Some of the (by now) vast cast die.

The woman in the books spend a lot of time sniffing, adjusting shawls, and folding their arms. The men are constantly uncertain about what the women want from them, but the heroic three are certain that each of the others understands women better than they do.

At the end, the Big Wheel of Time keeps on turning.
posted by nubs at 8:00 AM on September 3, 2021 [36 favorites]


the rancid sheen of the Taint

Fantastic username up for grabs
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:08 AM on September 3, 2021 [36 favorites]


The trailer does look generic, which is a shame. The book series is most definitely not, despite what anyone here says. The Wheel of Time: one weirdo’s take on gender dynamics and magic and fashion. Yes, I wanted to wring Jordan’s neck many, many, many times, and, yes, I did actually throw one of the books across the room in anger (book 9?), but the world-building is unique and well-executed.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:10 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Things that are good about the books:

- There are a whole lot of female characters. Great ones, terrible ones, ones with annoying tics, ones who are really good/bad/creative at politics, ones who stab people, ones who stab people but not with actual knives, and on and on. Probably the broadest range of significant female characters in any epic fantasy I've read.

- The geopolitics are, in my opinion, fascinating. This is not a Lost Heir narrative in the end - it's a deconstruction of the Lost Heir narrative, and a fairly serious look at medieval/mercantile era political structures, where they succeed, where they fail, what the significant variations look like.

- The series is chock-full of what WoT archivist Leigh Butler calls Moments of Awesome - points where the character setup pays off and they get to do something enormously, satisfyingly triumphant. Some of these are the best scenes I have ever read in fantasy.

- I think it more or less sticks the landing. It's a little overstuffed at the end, but minus a few quibbles, I felt like I got what I needed out of it. This is rare! (I'm looking at you, Malazan Book of the Fallen.)

Bad stuff:

- It sure does go on. As cupcakeninja says, a lot of the middle books aren't novels in any functional sense. The series is a survey history of the world leading up to a climactic inflection point. It's comparable to, although not as focused as, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, except about twelve times longer. (It is much less irritating when you can just read the books back-to-back and not wait years between, but... the bar isn't high, there.)

- The fundamental concept of the world is built around the gender binary. While it's set up that way as a critique of the problems that arise with a rigid separation of the sexes, it is... not modern in its concept of gender. It's also much happier, as a work, with queer female sexuality than queer male sexuality.

- The first book, especially the first hundred pages of the first book, are deliberately-written Tolkien pastiche. This bounces a lot of folks. I don't think it's especially representative of the writing style, and Jordan is actually pretty sharp with his prose on the micro scale. Sanderson is... less so, and the division between them I found pretty stark.

- There are some SERIOUSLY triggering plotlines around consent, and one in particular involving a man being sexually assaulted that is pretty much the poster child for trivialization.

This is not a generic series. It is a fantastically over-detailed, over-conceptualized, and wildly over-written exploration of a whole bunch of interesting things. It probably should have been one five-book series and a lifespan-limited number of offshoot books, so that there was some goddamn narrative momentum in anything, but hey, that was the market back then. And the TV show is doing at least one thing right - this is a series about a world, and Jordan was exquisitely clear on the fact that the world is made up of lots of different kinds of people, most of them not white. So hey, there's that.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:13 AM on September 3, 2021 [48 favorites]


I think I gave up around book 8 or so.

I'll bet they can get it down to seven seasons if they cut out two or three cities (except in passing) and five or six POV characters, maybe more.

The women in the books spend a lot of time sniffing, adjusting shawls, and folding their arms

Don't forget braid tugging!

It would be nice if they could work in at least something to indicate that the magic isn't biologically essentialist, like a trans man False Dragon or ageless NB Aes Sedai.

Also hope they spend way, way less time on Rand's Terrible Burden of Having All of These Women to Choose Between.
posted by jedicus at 8:16 AM on September 3, 2021 [13 favorites]


Wheel of Time is the thing that made my SO (they're the big reader - I waste my time on certain websites) create a hard rule of not starting books where the series has not been completed. We were just chatting about this this evening. Is it true that the count of named characters in the books (so far) is upward of a couple of thousand?

Probably a good source for a TV show, but like "inspired by the idea prompted by the name of" sort of thing.
posted by pompomtom at 8:18 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Wiki: List of Wheel of Time Characters.

I don't recall it being any worse than GRRM.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:21 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


I don't know the books, but the trailer certainly has a "no way are we leaving all that Game Of Thrones money on the table" feel to it.

Is there any GOT money left on the table? It seems like GOT shit the bed so badly at the end that it not only destroyed the show's own legacy (and greatly dimmed enthusiasm for the books), but also harmed public appetite for fantasy as a whole.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:22 AM on September 3, 2021 [11 favorites]


You'd have to out-GoT GoT, which to me says you'd have to option Abercrombie, not Jordan.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:24 AM on September 3, 2021 [9 favorites]


I don't recall it being any worse than GRRM.

From that wikip link:

The Wheel of Time has 2782 distinct named characters.

(so, ta for the link. I was a bit gobsmacked when SO said it, but too lazy to look anything up, really)
posted by pompomtom at 8:30 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Sorry for sniping a book series that many people like, I just couldn't help myself. I enjoyed the first three books as a teenager and then stopped for reasons. The trailer still leaves me cold.
posted by Alex404 at 8:31 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'll almost certainly watch this, because infinite lockdown...
posted by pompomtom at 8:43 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Per this reddit thread, there were also over two thousand characters in ASOIAF (criteria for them being "named" a bit unclear).
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:43 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Unfortunately I found the trailer cuts far too quickly from thing to thing to really assess it. I think they might have taken the idea of Aes Sedai dressing in Ajah colours a little too strongly, and I thought the music was pretty disappointing - I'd love a more unusual soundscape for the series - but there's a lot of potential here too. I've liked the casting choices as far as we can tell, and there are some scenes in there that look pretty cool, even if they seem to have taken architecture lessons from the Lord of the Rings sets.

But then I guess that's what Jordan did too, so...

...we'll see. I was a massive WoT fan and I'm curious to see what can be done in contemporary hands when they have the opportunity to really get into the important stuff and discard the filler and sort out the pacing issues in the books. There are some things I really do hope they just drop entirely, mostly because they don't serve any purpose, but some of them are also pointlessly controversial.
posted by mathw at 8:47 AM on September 3, 2021


JDHarper: "here a quick glance in the direction of George R. R. Martin and Frank Herbert)"

100% behind you in terms of Martin, I don't even know at which book I decided to drop the whole thing (and probably couldn't find my place if for some reason I decided to go back and finish them).

Herbert, though, I felt he had a good 2 or 3 more books in the saga at least before it started to really gel. Maybe 5 books? At least we're getting a movie. And no, there have been no Dune movies or TV shows before.
posted by signal at 8:59 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Started it as a teenager, petered out after about 4-5 books - basically started waiting for the series to complete. (I have a weird 'tic - I "have" to re-read a series from the begining every time a new book drops...) Then, the author passed - so, I basically never returned (because in my experience, "follow-on" authors never capture the writing style or overall "feel" or the creating author). But hearing that it was competently completed in this thread has put it back on my "to-read" list.
posted by rozcakj at 9:01 AM on September 3, 2021


As a person who doesn't know the books or anything about this, I'll say the trailer looks like Everything Fantasy crossed with Everything else Fantasy.
posted by Liquidwolf at 9:12 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


For my snarky tone, I apologize - I do it from a place of affection; I don't stick with a 14 book series over how every many years without having a deep sense of attachment.
posted by nubs at 9:13 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Rand and Garion are practically indistinguishable characters, except for Rand also being Paul Atreides.

Garion was likeable.

That's a bit unfair I suppose. I recall liking Rand and most of the other characters well enough for the first few books, but yeah, after a certain point I felt just like zamboni says: all the main characters were at best obnoxiously self-absorbed, if not outright detestable. I don't remember at which book I stopped reading, but it was when I realized that I was hundreds of pages in and it was still recapping the events of the previous book. It's the first series of books I think I ever failed to finish. The world-building is amazing and the characters have depth and variety, but if familiarity breeds contempt, after thousands of pages with them I was definitely overly familiar with them all.

That said, this is a case where I could imagine the TV show actually being better than the books, as heretical as that may be to say, just because a TV show can't get away with dragging in that way. I have no interest in returning to the books no matter how good the first few are (and yeah, I also reread them when each new sequel came out before I gave up, and the first two or three are really good), but I would consider watching it.
posted by biogeo at 9:16 AM on September 3, 2021 [6 favorites]


My mom had all these books, and more. I put them in a dumpster, along with the Rahda Soami Satsang Beas, stuff, because I could not find anyone who wanted the material. But a great line in the trailer, "The only thing that matters, is what you do." Oh yes. I will probably watch this.
posted by Oyéah at 9:21 AM on September 3, 2021


I read these books through to the bitter end, although after book 8? Book 9? I continued reading just because of my completionist compulsion, and not because I was enjoying myself.
posted by 1adam12 at 9:34 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


I've always been curious about Wheel of Time. It seems like "Start WoT. Be astounded by the world. Get annoyed by the pacing. Wander off around the middle. " is a sort of core media experience for my particular generation of nerds who were teenagers in the 90s, which I missed out on. It's just that I read around one (standard length) novel a month, so it'd almost certainly be two years of my reading life to get through the series and I shan't, Metafilter. I simply shan't.

So a somewhat abridged TV series is probably about my speed. I get that it looks slightly generic but I do love me some boilerplate high-fantasy. I'll check it out.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 9:49 AM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


I was going to ask, are the books worth reading? Through the whole series?

I made it to about book 6 before giving up. I started as a teen and liked the first book the best, but by #6 I was losing track of the literal cast of thousands and my interest was waning along with it. Also Jordan has some literary tics that I found unbelievably annoying. The women flounce, sniff, tug at their braids, angrily turn on their heels with skirts a-twirling, and are mysterious ciphers to the men, who are almost all universally dumb in the "women! such bewitching and confusing creatures! why can't they just say what they mean like us dudes! but argh they're so hot!" type of way. There's a lot of frustrating misunderstandings because the women are either sending nonverbal signals that the men fail to read or they're assigning hidden meaning to innocuous statements the men make and FEELINGS ARE HURT while the men are all "huh? what did I say?!" and the other women are rolling their eyes because wasn't it obvious, you bone-headed male?

My spouse did make it the entire way through the series, although towards the end he admitted he was slogging through it but the last book was pretty good. He only read the series once and then gave the books away, declaring it wasn't worth a re-read.

I am hoping the show cuts out a lot of this crap and streamlines the whole thing. I could see the TV series treatment being very beneficial if they get the right editing team. This may be one of those situations where the series ends up improving on the books.
posted by castlebravo at 9:52 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


I’ve found prime video to be utter dross, the very bottom of the heap for streaming video, and done in a way that is deliberately confusing. A GoT-alike that continues for many many seasons is probably one of the few things that they can do to drive prime subscriptions.
posted by The River Ivel at 9:55 AM on September 3, 2021


It probably should have been one five-book series and a lifespan-limited number of offshoot books

I hope the show runners feel the same as you, restless_nomad. If they turn 14 books into a 3-5 season story that takes us from A to Z, assuming it was well received they could have their pick of material that's good enough to produce a 8-15 episode mini-series until the shine wears off or the well runs dry.
posted by jermsplan at 9:57 AM on September 3, 2021


I started reading the series in 1993 when Robert Jordan was still alive. I used to restart the series every time a new book got published but I never read the last book. Most if the time I just couldn't get through that damned slog of books 7 to 11. And then after a year or so I just started over.

I guess it's time to start again...
posted by Pendragon at 9:59 AM on September 3, 2021


Honestly I sort of think they have to - they aren't going to cast anything like all the PoV characters that the series has, which must be close to three digits, and shoot all dozen+ cities and dozens of environments. If I were setting it up I'd write two or three seasons covering the first three books then, if the interest was there, split into miniseries covering the various adventures of the six(!!) primary protagonists, then do a full-length movie entitled The Last Battle.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:01 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


(Basically turn this into a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style property, which is in fact what Hollywood has been looking for for years, so...)
posted by restless_nomad at 10:03 AM on September 3, 2021


I've never read the books, but I really liked the video game that came out in 1999. It was an Unreal-based FPS using magic instead of guns but it had a lot of great environments and level design, an interesting story, and a protagonist and several other characters who were women (one of the first video games to pass the Bechdel test?)

the book series has hundreds of pages of characters working out how to seize or embrace their powers and then figure out how to use them.

In the game, this was mostly about working out good keybindings (including downloading mods to make it easier) to quickly use 40 different ter'angreal.
posted by straight at 10:20 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


My kids (particularly my 9 year old) have been looking for a new fantasy series. I wasn’t cool with watching GOT with the youngest. How would this fit on a kid- friendly scale?
posted by q*ben at 10:21 AM on September 3, 2021


Vastly more kid-friendly than GoT, although that's not saying much. No explicit sex that I recall (although quite a bit of implied/fade-to-black) and a fair amount of body horror/torture and violence. You could get through the first three books just fine with a little supervision, though, I think. (The first three books are very nearly a complete story.)
posted by restless_nomad at 10:29 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


I would cautiously recommend the books, but I also read at a pace where a stack of books 6 ft tall isn't super intimidating. As mentioned the gender politics are a little messy, and there's an entire culture where the female magic users are basically enslaved, and one of the POV characters experiences a significant amount of pages in that system.

Looking back most of the male female gender stuff doesn't offend me, but other commenters are completely right about how it's presented. I remember one issue of a male bad guy being reincarnated in a female body, that doesn't strike me as super problematic but was definitely confusing and poorly explained.

And oh God yes the character tics. Braid pulling especially sticks with you, although not nearly as offensive as my current champion of 'oh dear God who edited this' sword of truth books.

One character in particular is a culture tourist, joining like 15 different groups and becoming a superstar in all of them.

And it's entirely true that at least one full book could have been cut, probably two or three. The point of view characters do expand unnecessarily, and not all the plot lines that got page time really needed them. There's a lot of points, most of the series, where everybody is scattered all over the world doing their own thing. As much as I love Sanderson, he definitely struggled a little bit finishing the series, his tone is off most noticeably in the first book he wrote. But there was a massive amount of juggling he had to do to finish tying threads. The ending is reasonably climactic and fulfilling.

That said, the world building is good. There's a lot of stuff that isn't standard medieval fantasy Kingdom, no they're certainly has been more and better things done since. Most of the important characters stand out pretty well, even if you haven't seen them for a few hundred pages. There are about a dozen different cultures visited, and explored with reasonable depth. The magic system isn't super unique but reasonably well thought out and explored. Some of the characters are extremely fun, though the general consensus is one is way better than the others. There is a fair amount of brutality in the world, though I would certainly argue it's much less than game of thrones grim darkness.

Is it the best serious I've ever read? Absolutely not. Is it the best massive fantasy series I've ever read? Probably not. It's certainly not flawless, but I've read infinitely worse fantasy novels. On 100 points scale I'd probably give it about a 75 to an 80 depending on how generous I'm feeling. Which is higher than Harry Potter LOL.
posted by Jacen at 10:37 AM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


I read one or maybe two of these when I was a tween, but I never got into them. (And I loved Mercedes Lackey, so it's not like overwrought fantasy wasn't my thing.) I was looking forward to seeing Alvaro Morte (from Money Heist) in this, but I don't think he even made the trailer.

I'd give the series a try. Generally, I prefer the condensed version of fantasy series to the bloated books.
posted by gladly at 10:38 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: made a constipated face for 90 seconds, then everything exploded

when the exegesis is so good you have to go back to the source material to ensure a just distribution of upvotes
posted by elkevelvet at 10:52 AM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


I was going to ask, are the books worth reading?

To an annoying co-worker, yes. His testimonial to their greatness guaranteed my never bothering.
posted by Rash at 10:58 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


The GoT books are where I turn when I want to explain the sunk-cost fallacy to someone. Your ex-girlfriend made you read the first 6 books? Doesn't matter, you still don't need to read the rest. Especially not the one where literally nothing happens other than the weather changes.
posted by dmd at 11:19 AM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


I started reading the series in 1993 when Robert Jordan was still alive. I used to restart the series every time a new book got published but I never read the last book

This was kind of my M.O. as well, but at some point — and I really honestly could not tell you when — I began to view the books as a tedious obligation and gave up on them. It was while Jordan was still alive and grinding them out, though.

I do recall woestruck fans gnashing their teeth and rending their garments when he died, because “now there will never be any more Wheel of Time books!!”

If my memory serves me well, the #1 bestseller on the New York Times fiction lists that week was The Children of Hurin.

By J.R.R. Tolkien.

Who died in 1973.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:26 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Man I forgot this series even existed. I was reading SF/F when it was coming out and there was always an aisle-end display of the series around in the bookstore and I just kept on looking at how *long* it was and not bothering to even pick up a book and read the back cover. None of my friends were reading it, or if they were, they weren’t talking about it. None of the magazines ever reviewed it. And yet it was apparently a best-seller.

Then I started reading the fantasy subreddit a few years ago and every damn week there was another post asking about this series. Or another lengthy apology for the series’ many problems that attempted to explain why, even despite these many problems that a fan of it was willing to acknowledge, it was still well worth trying to read this series that fills several shelves of a bookcase. None of them ever got me to pick it up, it just sounds like a collection of everything I don’t like about “epic fantasy”. Life’s too goddamn short.
posted by egypturnash at 11:31 AM on September 3, 2021


(After watching the trailer)

It seems sort of generically fantasyesque and very clean and pretty in a way that GoT definitely wasn't. Everyone in this trailer has had a bath recently, whereas I could practically smell GoT.

OTOH, I got that feeling about the books, too, so maybe they have that right.

Thumbs up for casting people of all ethnicities (Brandon Sanderson noted that there was a conscious decision to make Two Rivers be multi-racial but with a unified cultural identity. That's not really supported by the text, but it's entirely in line with some of the broader themes of the books. It's great to see it and if the tv show had been made a decade ago it would not have happened. Plus, it will piss off stupid people, and that's always fun).

Unfortunately, it's missing both explicit sex and Peter Dinklage, which were definitely important to GoT's early success. I hope it succeeds, because good tv series are a good thing and the more this sort of fantasy succeeds on tv, the more of it will be made and there's only a finite amount and at some point producers will turn their eye on That Series You Love That Would Make a Great TV Show and do it justice.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 11:36 AM on September 3, 2021 [5 favorites]


they are in no meaningful sense of the word “novels.”

LOL
posted by cron at 11:36 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


The contemporary epoch of genre adaptations and continuations that roughly started with The Phantom Menace in 1999 is now old enough to drink. It's been almost entirely drawn from beloved source material and antecedents and it is clearly hard to do well, given how thoroughly intermixed the great, terrible, and merely forgettable has been. Heck, you can compare the Hobbit trilogy to the LOTR trilogy, and the last GOT seasons to the first, and see how it can go from great to terrible in the same universe realized by the same people.

Source material like Wheel of Time -- hated by many, and hated in part even by its greatest fans -- has got to be positively liberating. Low expectations, no one invested in anything in particular, no character or plot point too sacred to modify or omit.
posted by MattD at 11:41 AM on September 3, 2021 [6 favorites]


I can't wait for the show. I read the books when I was a kid, and then listened to the audiobooks all the way through all over again in 2019 and 2020. Michael Kramer and Kate Reading (narrators, do a ton of work including a lot of Brandon Sanderson books, the author who was brought in to finish WoT after Robert Jordan died) are excellent and really made re-visiting the Pattern enjoyable again.

But yeah, holy shit are the books a slog. The sheer quantity of descriptive paragraphs of everyone's riding dresses and what they are made of and what color silk they are slashed with could stun a woolheaded sheepherder in his tracks. The Gender Magic aspect is just as outdated as you'd guess, and the quality and pacing are uneven at best.

But I don't care. There's so many moments that are just so kickass (by the way, that dress you are wearing..) and I cannot WAIT to see it on the screen. I have no expectations, I don't particularly care if they change stuff or whatever, I just want to see Edmond's Field and watch Lan train Rand in Cat Crossing the Courtyard and watch Nynaeve sniff and tug on her braid and and and.
posted by lazaruslong at 11:47 AM on September 3, 2021 [7 favorites]


"Pleeeeeaase let there be no braid tugging or skirt smoothing."

What about crossing one's arms under one's breasts?

I got through the whole thing. It took ab out 10 months. It did turn into quite the slog around books 8-10, but I thought the last book (with the Last Battle they had been preparing for for 13 books) was terrific. All the characters but four got good wrap-ups to their story arcs, and the wrap-up for them was stupid beyond measure.

Would I recommend it? Only if you give it a chance at first and can read the whole thing without going to something else and then returning to it. I had several starts and stops before I finally took the plunge and went straight through.
posted by Billiken at 12:01 PM on September 3, 2021


I also fell off around book 5 or 6, and I think there's good and bad about it. I agree that the characters are much more diverse than most epic fantasy. I think the yin-yang-with-the-names-filed-off magic system I think would work well enough decoupled from sex or gender, nobody's casting spells with their genitals so it's simply which of the two sides of magic you have affinity for. It remains to be seen if they're interested in actually going in that direction.

Robert Jordan once said early on he was interested in the idea of a hero who gets the call to adventure and rejects it, and that's something that's stuck with me. I don't think he actually delivered on that idea, since Rand more or less spends the first few books in denial and then when he finally accepts his identity the big innovation he brings to to the table is continuing to refuse to cooperate with pretty much anyone. So it's not surprising that folks find him unlikable. Still, I'm fascinated with the idea of an epic hero who straight up refuses to fulfill their heroic destiny, and making said hero a likeable and sympathetic figure in the process.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:10 PM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


Interesting Properties
Marvel? Disney
DC? WB.
Tolkien? WB
Rowling? WB
Herbert? WB
Martin? HBO
Brooks? - MTV
Prachett? - Also an Amazon Original
Gaiman? - Starz
Adams? - BBC and Buena Vista (Disney, right?)
Clancy? - Paramount NBC and now Amazon AND Netflix
Jordan? well that's what we're discussing...

When do we get Weis and Hickman - because if ever there was a high production value overly dramatic story...
posted by Nanukthedog at 12:19 PM on September 3, 2021 [8 favorites]


Still, I'm fascinated with the idea of an epic hero who straight up refuses to fulfill their heroic destiny, and making said hero a likeable and sympathetic figure in the process.

You could read UN LUN DUN by China Miéville. It’s YA and about Chosen Ones who aren’t on board and quests that need to be circumvented. Also very dorky humor.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:24 PM on September 3, 2021 [6 favorites]


And it’s under 500 pages
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:27 PM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


I think it more or less sticks the landing. It's a little overstuffed at the end, but minus a few quibbles, I felt like I got what I needed out of it. This is rare! (I'm looking at you, Malazan Book of the Fallen.)

Yeah, The Crippled God was depressingly unfulfilling. It doesn't help that the series arguably reached its highest point in the second book and slowly declined in quality while increasing in complexity over the next eight. On the other hand, it never reached Wheel of Time levels of filler.

I'm a bit weird in that I've read all of WoT except the last book. By the time it came out, I realized that I just didn't care any more. I have peeked at online synopses, none of which inspired me to consider picking it up.

Robert Jordan once said early on he was interested in the idea of a hero who gets the call to adventure and rejects it, and that's something that's stuck with me.

Paging Stephen R. Donaldson, though in fairness Rand never quite reaches the "Covenant" tier of self-absorption.
posted by Slothrup at 12:28 PM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


Love that droning pitch bend in the trailer. Adds a lot of moody character to otherwise cliche music.
posted by dephlogisticated at 12:40 PM on September 3, 2021


My impression after reading the first book was that Jordan was very good at writing novellas.
posted by Quasirandom at 12:42 PM on September 3, 2021


Back in the day, WoT inspired as much fan speculation and argument as the Game of Thrones TV show, and Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan was the epicenter. Shoutout to Mark Loy, John S. Novak III (the Humblest Man on the Internet) and the rest of the regulars. Everything I needed to know about the interest I learned from RASFWRJ.

FWIW, my recollection is that Winter's Heart was the last of the Jordan books where anything happened. I threw in the towel when the next book, Crossroads of Twilight took place over the same few months as Winter's Heart. It's one thing not to advance the plot, but to spend 847 pages and not even flip a page on the calendar?
posted by lumpy at 12:46 PM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


I just finished the series. Tore through all 14 books during the pandemic. Loved it, but I'm a complete sucker for high fantasy. I'll watch this show.
posted by rocketman at 12:46 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


When I started reading WOT, after the Dragon Reborn came out (how do I still remember that title?), the trajectory of the series seemed clear. Rand would get more powerful and each episode he would knock off some Forsaken until he was at the final battle. But once they started bringing Forsaken back from the dead as well as adding new boss-level baddies, maybe around book 7 or 8? I realized that Jordan was going to milk the series for as long as he lived, and it turns out it apparently went 3 books longer than that!, so I gave up.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:00 PM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Like many, I threw in the towel around book 7 or so. I've had friends tell me that the Sanderson books are worth reading, but I never bothered.

I'm getting more The Shannara Chronicles [fanfare] vibes than GoT.
posted by porpoise at 1:06 PM on September 3, 2021


I was willing to give the middle books a pass (in terms of not advancing things) because my impression was that Jordan was so committed to the writing that he could not possibly die until the books were done.

But. Jordan knew how it would end. He had written the end. He had notes for the end. Sanderson didn't start from zero, he knew where the story was supposed to go. But as his own end approached, Jordan didn't want it, and tried to extend his time by extending the series. As his health declined, the books got written but the end didn't come closer. It's evidence of his denial.

It gave me that much more Matrim Cauthon though, and I can't complain about that.

Which reminds me: Do any of you think GRRM knows how GoT will end? Because if nothing else, I'd like to ensure Sanderson has the Cliff notes version. At his current writing pace, GRRM will finish the series by 2047; Sanderson would have the next 2 books done by mid-2023. I mean, it wouldn't be THE ending, but it would be AN ending...
posted by caution live frogs at 1:12 PM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Low expectations, no one invested in anything in particular, no character or plot point too sacred to modify or omit.

Look I'm not saying you're wrong, but if the tenth season doesn't include an entire episode that's just two characters taking a bath, I will be extremely disappointed
posted by Gerald Bostock at 1:16 PM on September 3, 2021


Rosamund Pike and Rafe Judkins Answer Questions About Amazon’s Wheel of Time
"For a lot of shows based on books, you often see a season tackle a single book at a time. In this case, season one will cover the entirety of book one, but it’ll also include some elements of book two, The Great Hunt, and book three, The Dragon Reborn. (But, some elements of book one will be held back for season two.)"
posted by bleary at 1:23 PM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Can someone who's read the books please describe the racial dynamic of the story?

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to address the longstanding whiteness (and often white supremacy) of fantasy worlds like Tolkien. A: race-consciously center non-white stories, a la NK Jemisin. B: tell a similar type of story, but be race-blind about it -- after all, if we can imagine magic, can't we imagine a black tavern owner in medieval-ish Europe?

I find B frustrating and potentially even tokenistic. But based on this trailer, the series looks a little bit like B.

In the novel, are there reasons why certain characters have certain skin colors? Are they aware of their differences and do they act as a result of them?
posted by lewedswiver at 1:34 PM on September 3, 2021


I gave up on the series somewhere around book 7. The time dilation of events was getting to be tiresome. It seemed like it took hundreds and hundreds of pages to advance the plot appreciably. I later learned that this was due to the author’s cognitive/mental decline.

I think it was when Book 8 came out that I decided to re-read them all to refresh my memory of what was going on. I gave up on that, because Un my second read-through, I became much more aware of a few different undercurrents of sexism in the book. The most irritating of which is that it seemed every woman in the room was written to be pretty manipulative, and nearly every man was written to be haplessly clueless about interpersonal dynamics.

Which, okay, but it seemed to be a really lazy, stereotypical trope for gender dynamics, writ across nearly the whole cast of characters.

But I’ll probably still watch the shows.
posted by darkstar at 2:04 PM on September 3, 2021


This WoT stuff reminds me a lot of my reaction to Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar books. In theory that should be my favorite thing ever: a sprawling, realistic attempt at what history would be like if aliens with First Gulf War American war technology arrived on spaceships in the middle of World War II. The books became such a slog, though.

Someone should make that series for TV.
posted by BeeDo at 2:06 PM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


When are these people going to stop fucking around and grow enough of a spine to take a swing at a decent Elric adaptation as already
posted by phooky at 2:11 PM on September 3, 2021 [10 favorites]


In the novel, are there reasons why certain characters have certain skin colors? Are they aware of their differences and do they act as a result of them?

My recollection, refreshed by some research, is that the Wheel of Time world is geographically large and diverse enough that there are notable climatic differences between the different population centers. Broadly speaking, skin color in the Wheel of Time follows climate and lifestyle: people who do more work outdoors in sunnier, more equatorial places tend be described as having darker skin. So it works out basically like it does in the real world. As in the real world there are a fair number of travelers and merchants, so people are used to at least occasionally seeing people who don't look like them, except for some xenophobic cultures or especially physically remote places.

In terms of acting as a result of them...many characters, especially those from xenophobic or provincial places, distrust foreigners and will sometimes indicate that they recognize someone as different by dint of their skin, hair, or eye color.

Slavery exists, but it mostly follows the "enslaved captives of war" pattern rather than racial slavery. There is a culture in the books with a slave caste, but it's based on enslaving people who are able to use magic, not race, if I recall correctly.
posted by jedicus at 2:12 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


In terms of race, the best way to describe the books (as I recall them) is "a bit complicated", and that's for reasons both in-Universe and out. I'm going to caveat this with the fact I haven't done a re-read since the series was finished, so I may be mixing up details in my head.

In the books, the people of the Two Rivers (where the main characters are largely from) are described as being dark skinned, and Rand (who is adopted) is noted as not looking like the rest of the people from the Two Rivers, being light skinned. There are a significant number of characters outside the Two Rivers who get described a variety of ways, but there isn't as much attention put on their skin color or other potential indicators of ethnicity.

However, characters focus on and discuss far more cultural indicators, like clothing style and mannerisms, than they do anything else. Somebody is "weird" because their traditions are unfamiliar, not because of their appearance - there are groups of people who look unlike most, but the things the characters focus on are their clothing choices, hair styles, and traditions. People are discriminated against based on their appearance, but not as much their body, if that makes sense - Rand was born to a distinctive looking ethnic group, but people seem to not realize the connection on average. That's not to say that racial characteristics aren't mentioned, but they aren't as heavily focused on as a lot of high fantasy usually does.

This sometimes is used to an effect that feels like a subtle critique of some contemporary fantasy writing at the time, and at other times comes off... not so great.

It's also worth remebering that in the lore, the WoT world has reformed a lot, and groups that many ages ago perhaps lived in very different regions have wound up living side by side for millenia by the time the story starts.

But it's important to remember that Jordan wrote the folk from the Two Rivers as broadly non-white, despite what certain people upset with the casting would tell you. There are a lot of aspects of Wheel of Time that were somewhat progressive for their time, woven into the story in a way that could feel subtle even though it was fairly blatant. Some of that does not really hold up (the perspectives and critiques of gender are not great, though there's some good intent in there), but I suspect Jordan would have been very open to updating many of these problematic areas if he was alive today, as it feels fitting with the spirit and themes of the world the books take place in.
posted by cidthesquid at 2:23 PM on September 3, 2021 [5 favorites]


To me, the society that has a slave caste feels far more like a critique of how systems and societies will happily use women for their skills and abilities at the same time they degrade them and treat them as objects, notably with the help of a few privileged women with the same skills/abilities bring elevated far above the rest.

It's heavily contrasted with the White Tower, a system built and run by women with the same abilities where those abilities result in political, social, and actual power. Some of these women have had heavy privilege most of their lives, and how they interact with the world is aggressively compared to freed slaves and the behavior of other similarly talented women who did not spend most of their lives in the White Tower. I'm probably reading waaaay too much into it, but it felt like an interesting comparison of how different cultures valuing different things can lead to incredibly different lived experiences and approaches to things.
posted by cidthesquid at 2:31 PM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


Interesting... it sounds like, if anything, the series is making the characters more white than the books, as opposed to the opposite.

It's hard for me to get a sense of much from the trailer, but my main impression is that the show has created a largely Europe-coded world (the mountains, the towns), particularly among the Hero Journey protagonists (the mostly white boys?). And that many of the major POC characters appear to be part of a geopolitical elite (the White Tower, which feels vaguely Eastern European or even Istanbul-ish?) who are possibly the antagonists to the heroes (?).
posted by lewedswiver at 2:35 PM on September 3, 2021


Now I want a poll showing which book people stopped reading at. (Halfway through book 2 for me, when I realized I'd read approximately the word-count of The Lord of the Rings and Jordan was still only setting up his chessboard.)

I do plan to give the Amazon series a try, though. A story that's too tropey and thin to justify 4.4 million words of prose might be just tropey and thin enough to make good TV.
posted by The Tensor at 2:37 PM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


my main impression is that the show has created a largely Europe-coded world (the mountains, the towns)

That’s a fair take on the trailer, which is really focused on the first part of the first book, but the cultural scope of the series gets much, much broader after the first book, as the plot expands to encompass the entire populated world. We’ll see how the show handles that.

There are also some sentient non-humans, though they don’t play a huge part in the story, for the most part.
posted by jedicus at 2:45 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


To clarify, the boys and girls of the two rivers, minus Rand, are not-white in the books and the show, but it is not really heavily remarked upon in the books. Moraine, who in the show is played by Rosamund Pike, is (I think?) white in the books, but I don't remember it being heavily remarked upon either.

The first couple books mostly take place in European coded parts of the world, but those parts are inhabited by groups that may not match our real-world expectations. In the world of WoT, there has been a lot of shifting of continents and populations that lead to things that make more race blind casting make a lot of sense. Again, this is not to say there is no mention of race, but it does not get the same level of weight as fashion. In terms of physical characteristics that are remarked upon, the most common one is a side effect of a certain magical oath.

I would not say the antagonists are majority POC in the show or the books, but again race is not as heavily focused on compared to culture in the books, for better and for worse. The trailer mostly shows people who are not antagonist's - the women in the court scene are the Aes Sedai, a group of women recruited from around the world, who are generally heroic, even when they conflict with eachother or (some) members of the main cast. Their leader in this trailer is actually a rather important secondary protagonist, and Rosamund Pike's character is a member of the same group.

I need to reiterate again that the books do not do an amazing job with race, since I came out of lurking to post this. It's interesting to compare to other books at the time, however, and realizing that Jordan was actually somewhat breaking the mold.
posted by cidthesquid at 2:46 PM on September 3, 2021 [5 favorites]


I made it to book 4 and then bounced. Something about the fact that there were ten more of these things ahead of me just made it unbearable. Book one was bad, IMO. Tolkien rehashed, but even more long-winded. Now, maybe the intention was to rehash Tolkien and then subvert it? No matter, it's Tolkien rehashed, but Gandalf is a woman who has Strider as her Right Hand. I remember about 100 pages of the kids staying at an inn, having long, boring dreams (a figure dressed in black robes, with eyes glowing like fire!) and then going on and on and on to each other about how frightened they were. 100 pages.

Anyway, I found book two much, much better, to the point where I enthusiastically read it and moved on to book three. I really thought I might enjoy the whole series based on book two! Book three was also better than book one, but less directed, more scattershot. I think this is where the young women are captured and enslaved for their magical prowess. They manage to get out of that predicament rather neatly. Their enslavement is bad (obviously) but not gratuitous in torture or pain, and it was an interesting concept. Book four introduced some new sea-faring culture and all the characters were going in different directions and, and, and... TEN MORE BOOKS OF THIS?

I can't say I strongly disliked any of it. I kind of liked that the main characters were selfish and not entirely likable. Sometimes fantasy tropes have "strong female characters" who are superstars who always do everything Good and Right. Here, even the female leads could be jerks, which was refreshing. The male leads are mostly dopes, but are jerks sometimes, too. Oh, and those long, boring dreams? They happen constantly. So many dreams. Long, detailed, boring dreams. So many characters awakening from dreams with a start—in a cold sweat!

I'm looking forward to the show, because they will be forced to heavily edit the source material. I'm a sucker for fantasy.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:36 PM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


Interesting Properties

They already messed up Cooper's The Dark is Rising, which I will always be mad about, but there's still Abercrombie, LeGuin, Rothfuss, the Locke LaMora guy and if they really want to reach for it, Gene Wolfe.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:44 PM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


Okay, I just was explaining WoT to my 13-yr old, and I got really excited to watch the show! Yay! I re-watched the trailer, and, hey, maybe it isn’t generic. Yayyyy!!!
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 3:51 PM on September 3, 2021


Yes, my synopsis took 30 minutes, and, yes, he was looking at his phone, but I think he’s excited too.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 3:53 PM on September 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


>Now I want a poll showing which book people stopped reading at.

I tell friends who are into fantasy that I'm allergic to dragons so on that score, I bounced off the first hundred pages like I bounced off like The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire (which taught me I'm also allergic to monologuing about politics while walking across plains).

So...
>The first book, especially the first hundred pages of the first book, are deliberately-written Tolkien pastiche. This bounces a lot of folks. I don't think it's especially representative of the writing style...
Oohhh. Golden Age of Televisuals, there's enough I don't watch so I'll put this on the "cake is a lie" list to see if it beds in over the five years' delay I give myself to catch up.
posted by k3ninho at 4:01 PM on September 3, 2021


Teenage-me dropped out in book six after noticing the exponential decay in plot advancement.

"The only thing that matters, is what you do."

Which is ironic, given the amount of not-doing-stuff which happens in the books...
posted by kaibutsu at 4:04 PM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


How would this fit on a kid- friendly scale?

The ladies need to spank each other for magic reasons, and there's f/f magic slavery, complete with collars and leashes. It's not necessarily unfriendly for kids, I mean, at least Littlefinger won't be there expositing and shouting directions.
posted by betweenthebars at 4:11 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Regarding race, the books are post-apocalyptic high fantasy and there's a cyclical element where everything that has happened will happen again, sometimes remixed... like literally the implication is that real world events happened long ago/far in the future and have passed into myth. So the world having this feeling of mashed-up cultures is a feature of that worldbuilding.

It doesn't say anything interesting about race, and like with gender, often strays into takes that feel... dated at best. It's basically like "gee whiz let's do LOTR except all the powerful people in the world are women, and Aragorn is a samuari" and doesn't really get more sophisticated than than that. But it does make a lot of room for awesome women characters and POC leads. So I do like that element and hope the show does something more sophisticated with these themes. I really enjoyed the books as a kid and hope the show is good.
posted by Emily's Fist at 4:20 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


I hope Billy Zane reprises his role.
posted by rodlymight at 5:13 PM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


I predict we will get an entire five season Name of the Wind series that finishes all three books before rothfuss actually finishes said last third book. My prediction is that grrm will put out one more book and die, while Rothfuss will put out nothing.

Meanwhile Sanderson will get out like 15 books, all fantastic and creative.
posted by Jacen at 5:41 PM on September 3, 2021 [5 favorites]


I bounced off WoT at book 3, I think - despite them ostensibly being right up my alley. I’ll probably watch, at least to start, but the trailer is pretty meh I think.

Sanderson is fantastic and I love his books, so I can see how him closing out the series made the last few books decent. I’d rather read his own stories, though.

If I had a choice of what I’d like to see adapted, it would be Malazan Book of the Fallen. The Chain of Dogs storyline on screen would be super interesting…
posted by gemmy at 6:20 PM on September 3, 2021


I’m a little surprised by the idea of Sanderson as some kind of savior of doorstop fantasy. I read Mistborn, and his “unimaginative TTRPG magic systems” and leaden plotting were a huge turn off. Has he learned anything in the intervening years that would make want to read him rather than, say, rereading Sarah Monette or Gemma File’s weird homoerotic cowboy wizard novels?
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:25 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Just because it's fun, good shows could be made of the series by Anne McCaffrey (Pern), Jennifer Roberson (the Tiger and Dell books) and Tamora Pierce (the Alanna books). Or Moorcock (the Elric stuff).
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:40 PM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


At his current writing pace, GRRM will finish the series by 2047; Sanderson would have the next 2 books done by mid-2023. I mean, it wouldn't be THE ending, but it would be AN ending...

I used to think exactly this, but now that we've had "AN ending" of Game of Thrones I couldn't be less interested, be it "THE ending" of GRRM himself or another "AN ending" by Sanderson or whoever. The best possible ending to Game of Thrones is the one each fan has already written in their heart, and I suspect Martin himself agrees. I just wish he'd do the right thing and actually say it out loud.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:49 PM on September 3, 2021


I predict we will get an entire five season Name of the Wind series that finishes all three books before rothfuss actually finishes said last third book.

Oh, I've already long-since accepted that we will never get another Kvothe book and I will go to my grave never knowing the rest of that story.
posted by Inkoate at 6:49 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


I love scifi, but never got around to the books.

I loved the game, based on the books. Unfortunately, it's now abandonware.
posted by annsunny at 7:46 PM on September 3, 2021


I’ve really been looking forward to this and know that I will be ultimately disappointed, but will still watch. I devoured all 14 books in a row (I’m a fast reader). What struck me was the amazing amount of female characters with different personalities, relationships, etc. So many books just have a token woman and if there’s more than one they are similar or very one dimensional. I read these at the same time as my boyfriend and it took him a few more years to slog through them. I know he didn’t like “all the descriptions of clothes” and other things about the female characters’ plots. I loved the immense amount of detail, world building, and descriptions.

But, yeah, there’s a few books in there that were not good and I’ll add to the chorus of feeling the Sanderson books being a big improvement at the end. But I also loved his mist born series (maybe the female lead helped).
posted by Bunglegirl at 8:03 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


stop fucking around and grow enough of a spine to take a swing at a decent Elric adaptation as already

with a soundtrack based on Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult options, I'm in.
posted by philip-random at 10:35 PM on September 3, 2021 [8 favorites]


grow enough of a spine to take a swing at

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

(ya, no, not gonna happen this cycle, just not appropriate at all, no way)
posted by sammyo at 10:49 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Can someone who's read the books please describe the racial dynamic of the story?

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to address the longstanding whiteness (and often white supremacy) of fantasy worlds like Tolkien. A: race-consciously center non-white stories, a la NK Jemisin. B: tell a similar type of story, but be race-blind about it -- after all, if we can imagine magic, can't we imagine a black tavern owner in medieval-ish Europe?

I find B frustrating and potentially even tokenistic. But based on this trailer, the series looks a little bit like B.


The racial dynamic of the books is basically that different skin colours exist, but racism isn't really a thing, and people have ethnically clustered into nations or groups of nations. Andormen are white, the various Borderland nations are mostly varieties of Asian, Domani are either Asian or Mediterranean or Latino depending on how you read "copper-coloured skin," the Sea Folk and the Tairens are both either black or Indian subcontinental depending again on how you read, the Seanchan are definitely black, the Aiel are very pointedly Irish white, et cetera and so forth. National identities are much more important to the people of the world than skin colour is: everybody who isn't a [member of the given nation] thinks Andormen are prudes, Borderlanders are honor-obsessed military lunatics, Aiel are crazy murder desert people, Domani are weirdos who let the women murder their husbands if they like, Tairens are greedy bastards, Illianers talk weird, Cairhienin are twisty scheming bastards, et cetera and so forth.

Because it's all one continent with a few major exceptions (the Seanchan being the big one for most of the series), everybody mostly knows people from other places because there's trade in between the nations and people (other than the Aiel) settle down in other countries regularly enough that people are generally familiar enough that ethnic strife really isn't a thing (again, other than the Aiel).

It's basically taking the European political dynamic that existed for most of Europe's history and removing the colonialism and religious strife, and also making it multiracial, and it mostly works - and the presence of the Tinkers (a Roma/Jewish analogue, but strictly pacifistic) and them mostly being distrusted or even despised by everybody else helps keep it real.

(Now, for the show, that might not be a winning move, because if you're creating a multiracial-but-mostly-segmented world that very firmly starts in one segment of it, you're going to have a cast whose most important characters from the beginning will be dominated by one ethnicity, which is just hamstringing yourself if you want a diverse cast that reflects the world in the first place.)
posted by mightygodking at 11:05 PM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


I was going to ask, are the books worth reading? Through the whole series? 14 books is a lot and I know some series (here a quick glance in the direction of George R. R. Martin and Frank Herbert) start strong and get less strong as time goes by.

Okay, I'm going to do what appears to be necessary here and act as the voice against the common wisdom: books seven through ten aren't bad. (Book one starts as a bit of Tolkien pastiche, as others have noted, but Jordan finds his own voice soon enough and it's a voice worth reading; after that, two through five are excellent, six is good, eleven is lots of fun and the Sanderson books are all just payoff after payoff after payoff after eleven books of build so they rock. Aside: Sanderson himself has said that "his" books are mostly just him compiling reams and reams of Jordan's already completed writing and doing some light editing.)

Would they be better compressed into two books rather than four? Yes, almost certainly, and if they were I don't think anybody would have ever had a problem. But the problem with them isn't that they're dull or that Jordan has forgotten how to write; trust me, I just re-read all of them this past year and there's lots of fun writing in all of them. Not enough plot progression (Egwene is the major exception), but some great stuff nonetheless.

The problem with them is that Jordan, for the midpoint of the series, had the idea of writing all of his various plot threads around a single Major Event in the timeline, and letting each plot thread's time play out slightly differently along that Major Event until it was time to bring them back together. This turned out to be a mistake and Jordan's decision was to just write through it rather than pull a George R.R. Martin and go on hiatus forever because he couldn't solve the problem he'd created for himself. Because at this point fans were waiting two years for each of these books (and three for Crossroads of Twilight, #10) after an earlier rush where Jordan had been pumping them out about one-a-year, the lack of plot progression really pissed off a lot of readers and that anger never really dissipated.

But, on re-read: they're fine. If you like Mat and Egwene then they're fun. If Perrin is your favorite character (which, for most of the fanbase, he always was, and by a large margin) then they're much less good because his plotline, more than anybody else's, gets dragged out by Jordan's self-created problem. But they're not bad books, Brent!
posted by mightygodking at 11:32 PM on September 3, 2021 [8 favorites]


I agree mightygodking - people might get scared off hearing that the later books become a slog, but I wouldn't let that turn anyone off checking out the first few. It was painful to wait through the sloggy books while they were being written but in modern times you can always just cliffnotes them and skip to the end where it gets snappy again. Even in the sloggy times I recall there being POV characters I would really enjoy and basically just skip to their chapters.
posted by Emily's Fist at 12:46 AM on September 4, 2021


What serif ↑ said.

I can't wait!
posted by james33 at 4:39 AM on September 4, 2021


Which reminds me: Do any of you think GRRM knows how GoT will end?

Vaguely? In interviews, he says he's a gardener, not an architect. All the plot-twists and pay-offs so far have been very carefully set up, you can't do all that forshadowing without any sort of outline, and there's a lot of forshadowing for plot twists and pay-offs yet to come. My interpretation is that Martin obviously uses outlines - he just doesn't always stick to them, if he gets a better idea in the process. (Which seems to have happend quite a bit so far; apparently an initial outline sent to the publisher inlcuded a love-triangle between Jon, Tyrion and Arya...Let's praise the Seven that Martin isn't married to his outlines.).

I suspect that's precisely his problem right now. He knows where he wants to end up, but no longer quite how to get there, having taken one detour too many on the way. The set-up no longer quite works for some of the planned pay-offs, he could either change the pay-offs or keep tinkering with the set-up and postpone the pay-offs even more, and my guess is that he's kinda hiding from those choices right now and not doing either.

But I get it, because we've seen what happens when the story grows away from the initial outline and the creators just power through. (eg. How I met your mother.) Personally, I rather have no ending than something like that - the proof's in the pudding, an ending that feels wrong can really undermine anything that comes before.

I would argue that applies to the ending of GOT. It effectively killed the buzz, killed the conversation, seems to have killed any rewatch-value the show might have held for most of the audience.

Added difficulty: the showrunners always claimed to have worked from a rough outline provided by GRRM which seems credible to me. So Martin is probably aiming for many of the same final beats - Bran ends up on the throne, Jon ends up with the wildlings, Dany burns down King's Landing and ultimately dies (possibly also at the hands of Jon, although I doubt Martin would make that read like quite such a purely noble, unquestionably necessary sacrifice on Jon's part; sure, Dany is believably set up for a darker turn in the novels, but so, argueably is Jon, which wasn't explored on the show at all, his resurrection seems to have come at no price - I bet that's not how it would shake out in the novels).

As a big Dany-stan I've of course hated her ending, but I guess, Martin might make it work. He has argueably laid a fair bit of groundwork already, but the devil's in the details, so all depends on the how, not the what. You don't just have to know the ending, you also have to make it feel right. You have to get your characters to the point where they will plausibly make those choices, and you have to get your audience to the point where they'll emotionally accept that yeah, this is what that character would do.

I'm quite certain that Martin would be better at this than the showrunners, should he ever get round to it.
The fact that the showrunner seem to have used some of Martin's ideas however and the reception those ideas have received from large parts of the audience can't be encouraging though.
posted by sohalt at 6:44 AM on September 4, 2021


I threw in the towel when the next book, Crossroads of Twilight took place over the same few months as Winter's Heart. It's one thing not to advance the plot, but to spend 847 pages and not even flip a page on the calendar?

This sounds like a packaging problem. I've read quite a few world building series where after the first 3-5 books several books are released that are litterally the same set of events told from a different view point and they worked just fine. There they do have the advantage that the original progression is complete though which maybe is comforting.

This is something that in general large swaths of people enjoy. Whether it is a life long study of WW II or even something as rapid fire as the instant replay from a dozen different angles.
posted by Mitheral at 6:57 AM on September 4, 2021


I'm still disappointed that Shannara Chronicles was canceled. You know what, I'm just going to wait for the Book of the New Sun adaptation.

(Yes, I was always the guy that answered Stargate when people asked: Star Trek or Star Wars?)
posted by Literaryhero at 7:15 AM on September 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


Ok, not gonna edit because my previous comment was basically comedic. But now that I think about it, Amazon with your literally endless piles of money, let's adapt some of that good Gene Wolfe stuff.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:17 AM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


This is something that in general large swaths of people enjoy.

Yeah, for all that everyone who reads in the genre loves to rag on these books, they sold really, really well. And they in large part gave us tor.com - the long-running Reread (which, I think, is a really delightful work of genre analysis in very long form) got enough hits to continue to justify spending the marketing budget on it long before it found its feet as one of the top publishers of short fiction and opened its print arm.

Can someone who's read the books please describe the racial dynamic of the story?

Commenters above have covered it pretty well but I want to point out that one of the things the story is doing is keeping up with the "world turned upside-down" theme of the worldbuilding by making the white, red-haired, blue-eyed protagonist a racial minority in his hometown and in most (although not all) of the places he visits. I don't think this works especially well as any sort of statement on modern US culture, because it's just too easy for your average white reader to elide the fact that most of the world isn't white, but the TV show prevents that particular bit of aggressive blindness, and I'm excited for it.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:22 AM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


The sheer quantity of descriptive paragraphs of everyone's riding dresses and what they are made of and what color silk they are slashed with could stun a woolheaded sheepherder in his tracks.
This! I read the entire series, but after book 4 or so I was almost skimming for dialogue or for indications that some action was happening, and began to resent all the lush descriptions of costume changes, architecture, and body language (it felt as if Jordan didn’t trust my imagination to fill in anything in the right way). Then as I got older I began to resent the middle-school gender interactions, and by the time I got around to resenting the constant diversions from the central plotline by the frequent introduction of new POV characters, I was almost hate-reading. I was hooked by the world, though, and needed to see how it all ended.
posted by disentir at 8:08 AM on September 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


Do any of you think GRRM knows how GoT will end? Because if nothing else, I'd like to ensure Sanderson has the Cliff notes version

GRRM has stated numerous times that if he dies, nobody else is allowed to finish GoT.
posted by Pendragon at 8:33 AM on September 4, 2021


GRRM is a great writer, but a bad novelist. Sanderson is gifted in competently turning out reams of inoffensive and popular Product. Jordan is somewhere in between and needed a heavy handed editor.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:38 AM on September 4, 2021


That's a little unfair to Sanderson, I think. The Cosmere is big and uneven in quality, but my favorite world (Stormlight Archive) is basically a giant story about mental health and colonialism. The way depression and substance use are portrayed, and how social structures succeed and fail at helping people deal with those, isn't something I've gotten from high fantasy anywhere else so far. It's wonderful and challenging and dark and hopeful and complicated.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:45 AM on September 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


OK, ok. That came off as snotty. I tried Sanderson a few times. Made it mostly through the one where the slaves had to put planks over the giant cracks in the earth, and there were Spren? Can't remember the name. I just found it overly long and pointlessly detailed. And the characters were pretty cardboard. I know GRRM goes crazy with sex, but Sanderson's characters don't even seen human. Sanderson is a Mormon and his writing seems like it comes from a conservative religious writer with... ideas about human motivations. It's certainly not outright Mormon propaganda or anything! But I get that vibe from everything I've read of his (I've tried some of Mistborn, and some other novel, too.)
posted by SoberHighland at 9:02 AM on September 4, 2021


You know what, I'm just going to wait for the Book of the New Sun adaptation.

I can not imagine this being anything other than a massive train-wreck and I'm sort of morbidly curious for it to happen just to see how much fans of the books would freak out.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 9:43 AM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


Is that for real? Don't get me excited for nothing! But you're right, it'd be horrible.
posted by Rash at 12:21 PM on September 4, 2021


Wolfe would be perfect for some streaming service that doesn't have Amazon's budget because he's constantly getting right up to the big flashy action scene, skipping it, and continuing with another conversation where the characters allude to but do not describe what happened.

Wolfe's one of my favorite writers but I've never ever read anything of his and thought, "I'd love to see a movie of this." Like, the whole drama of the scene with Severian and Typhon is that you can't see what words Piaton is mouthing. Seeing Patagonia with every single mountain carved into a statue of one of Urth's autarchs would be cool, but not in the same way as slowly realizing Severian wasn't being poetic when he talked about snow on the head and shoulders of the mountains and picturing what it means when he says he'd never seen a mountain before that wasn't carved.
posted by straight at 1:06 PM on September 4, 2021 [3 favorites]


Race/ethnicity is an area where Jordan’s ambitions don’t live up to his execution, and what we’ve seen of the TV series so far seems more in line with his intention than the books.

In principle, the world of Wheel of Time depicts a post-post-apocalyptic, barely-pre-industrial society with a variety of ethnic groups whose cultural practices are a bit of a mix-and-match from our real world expectations. For example the white Aiel live in the desert, the mostly dark-skinned Tairens have a lot of SE/E Asian influence in their clothing and architecture, etc.

In practice, almost all the characters anyone cares about are either clearly white/light-skinned or are described ambiguously in a way that allows white readers to imagine them as such. Cover art and other official illustrations depict almost all main characters as white. Ditto for the execrable comics, at least up to where I stopped reading. When Jordan was asked on Usenet to fantasy cast the major players, nearly all the actors he chose were white. Jordan appropriates the aesthetics and in some cases (notably Rand and the Aiel) the racialized experiences of POC to create a world that appears multiracial but still centers white folks.

That said, according to people who knew him in life Jordan would have been in favor of the show’s casting approach and definitely against the racist and misogynist backlash directed against the actresses of color who’ve been cast in some of the biggest roles. The Wheelworld depicted in the trailer feels more like what I wanted it to be reading the books as a teen versus what actually existed on paper and in supplementary materials, and I’m cautiously excited!
posted by bettafish at 1:50 PM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


I read a lot... when this first released I waited until the third book dropped to buy them figuring it must be a trilogy and I could safely read it... it took 18 months to 2 years for each installment to end up in my hands. Years later I finally finished it (after Sanderson stepped in to write the finale).

It was a mental juggling act to stay up with the story since there were a lot of characters and not all of the critical ones got a lot of page time so you couldn't guess from that aspect.

The ending was not how I had imagined it all along, but was ... acceptable. He was a detail writer which meant that descriptions got involved and complex. I found myself having to go back ad reread the books I had before the next installment dropped to refresh my mind of all the details. Yes, by the last book I had read the earlier ones... a lot. I might add that it was the last set of physical hardbacks I bought even though by volume 4 or 5 I had taken to reading it all electronically.

Looking forward to this and hope to not be disappointed. The potential is certainly there, but that does not mean they knock it out of the park. Fingers crossed.
posted by twidget at 5:11 PM on September 4, 2021


For example the white Aiel live in the desert

yeah, about that....
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:59 PM on September 4, 2021


I thought Mat was by far the fandom's favorite male character, with Perrin falling a distant third. Go figure
posted by Jacen at 11:35 AM on September 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


It's been a very long time, but I seem to recall Perrin being one of the very few characters I didn't totally hate before I quit reading. I seem to remember Mat and Rand both becoming pretty misogynistic and unpleasant after a few books, but it's been maybe 20 years so I could be misremembering.
posted by biogeo at 12:48 PM on September 5, 2021


Jordan is somewhere in between and needed a heavy handed editor.

IIRC, his wife was his editor so that may have been the crux of the problem.


Would a kind mifian do a bit of a summary, I recall starting one of the books and just did not grab.

It's a Chosen One story, only everyone is aware that the Chosen One may or may not go insane and destroy the world instead of saving it. (It doesn't help that the last Chosen One nearly did and instead at the last moment funneled all his life force into the earth resulting in the very large mountain that appears in the background of one of the city images and serves as a permanent reminder to everyone.) The successful ones have simply sealed The Big Evil back into Hell allowing him to eventually attempt to break out again.

There's also a complication that this Chosen One's destiny is intertwined with some of his friends and his success is dependent on them being around for the series finale.


Can someone who's read the books please describe the racial dynamic of the story?

It's explained that a previous Chosen One broke the continents. People in this world have had centuries to adjust to it.
posted by dances with hamsters at 12:50 PM on September 5, 2021


Mat is inverse George Costanza. Always feels in over his head, yet prat-falls repeatedly into greatness. I always viewed his arc as an on-going comic relief.
posted by Groundhog Week at 3:45 PM on September 5, 2021 [3 favorites]


I loved Mat! But I'm a sucker for the charming rogue who gets in over his head. Agree all the men in the series can be a bit weird about women at points, I think he's a good friend to the women in his life in practice. Weirdly, I feel like he was the one character Sanderson couldn't write well - in all other ways I liked Sanderson's books but he totally failed to capture Mat's charm, for me.

I also think he has a fairly interesting character arc that involves him being unlikeable for much of the first 2-3 books, so I'm interested to see how he comes across to TV viewers.
posted by Emily's Fist at 11:27 PM on September 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


when you think about it, the arc for most of the two rivers folk is pretty grim. a cultist and her hired muscle abduct 5 children/young adults from their home and attempt to indoctrinate them. the females develop Stockholm syndrome: one of them identifies with the cult even to the point of turning on her childhood sweetheart - and is rewarded with rapid advancement through the ranks. the other falls in love with the hired muscle, whose own childhood trauma left him vulnerable to the cult's methods. he is now an emotionally unavailable man with multiple murders to his name.

two of the males develop serious dissociative disorders in response to being thrust into the violent world outside their peaceful farming community. one of them starts hearing voices, and the other comes to believe he is part wolf. the third turns to substance abuse, gambling and promiscuity as a means of coping.

by the end, two of the original five will be dead, two will be trapped in marriages with abusive spouses, and the last will essentially be the property of a foreign government.
posted by logicpunk at 10:50 AM on September 6, 2021 [7 favorites]


Metafilter: trying to push through the rancid sheen of the Taint
posted by stevil at 6:01 PM on September 10, 2021


« Older Whatever Kind Of Mood You're In Tonight   |   OverDriven? Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments