What is your LEAST favorite part about the books? (no major spoilers)

[solarz]

55 minutes ago, OlwenaSedai said:

I am on book 12 now, and I have to say, I don't really see what everyone hates about book 7-11. A lot of important things happen in those books: Egwene becoming Amyrlin, the battles against the Seanchan really kicking off, the cleanse of the taint, the weather thing... I didn't really find them slowpaced. The prologue to 12 was maybe the worst this far for me :P (also because transitioning to Sanderson's writing did take some time). 

 

Sure, there were parts that could've been cut in all those books, but that's true of all the books. 

 

I'm listening to COT on audiobook right now. When I first read it, after more than a year of waiting for it to come out, I thought it was the worst book of the series. Literally nothing happened.

 

Now, however, I'm enjoying it very much. I no longer feel the urge to find out what happened to the main characters, and can now enjoy all the interactions with the secondary characters.

 

The prologue to COT is literally longer than the first 3 chapters, but that was okay. Rodel Ituralde is awesome!

[szilard]

On 2018. január 10. at 6:00 PM, jack of shadows said:

@szilard,

"jordan fell in love with a certain heroine and a certain hero.."

 

*grinning*

would you care to elaborate who are the hero and heroine robert jordan

fell in love with?

 

No, I have to stay calm. *deep breaths after deep breaths* 

 

In short the plotlines of El and PerrinFaile (or rather FAILEperrin) are tiresome and unnecessary.

 

20 hours ago, OlwenaSedai said:

I am on book 12 now, and I have to say, I don't really see what everyone hates about book 7-11. A lot of important things happen in those books: Egwene becoming Amyrlin, the battles against the Seanchan really kicking off, the cleanse of the taint, the weather thing... I didn't really find them slowpaced. The prologue to 12 was maybe the worst this far for me :P (also because transitioning to Sanderson's writing did take some time). 

 

Sure, there were parts that could've been cut in all those books, but that's true of all the books. 

 

TSR was the first slow book, if you compare it with the later books...   (Many) people come for action, and not for endless lists of names, or plots which go into nowhere. Or meaningful interaction between the characters.

 

Not to mention the urging feeling in the first books: the seals, the seals!!! How many are them still stand??? Wait a minute, wait a minute... the seals DO NOT matter at all, so this whole pressing sense of 'the world will end in a minute!' evaporates into nothing

 

Or "the weather thing": this plotline is just terrible. Jordan tries to reach into so many directions that everything slips through his fingers; you could cut 90% of it. The ultimate goal was to keep El in a different place. That's it. And he gives us a very interseting character, Talaan, but does he use her? No. I do not expect Tuon level high quality plotlines, but please, Mr Jordan, do not give us terrible written sections.

 

See Ch 32 in ACOS: the first part is very good, the second good, the third one is terrible, because RJ does not find their voices. It is so badly written that sometimes I don't think that was written by Jordan. And he needs almost three books to get this plotline to its feet. Things like that never happened in earlier books! 

 

Look, the more you read the series, the more you see its faults. And as solarz says in another thread (I'm twisting their words a little bit), readers want to follow the original characters, the heroes, not to bog down with actor n732. Of course, he had no other choice because he ran out of plotlines. But, but, if you run out of plotlines, maybe you should end your story. Jordan had deadlines, and maybe he was too proud, or too smart pushing deadlines away, because he knew that his writing will not get better, and readers buy his books constantly (he was 'the' epic fantasy at certain point), so it really hard to stop. I had similar experience in a very small scale, one day maybe I will share it.

 

And if you look at other writers, you can see that now everybody builds megaworlds with 20-30-40 books. And they do not write what they want to write, they write what the market wants. If you try something new and the readers do not want it, they have to return their original series, expanding it with more volumes. And, as we know it, there is no ending, you could continue anything.

 

I do not care about Erikson (or his book), but his honest post is worth to quote (and his sales were always low):

 

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I've made a point of never dissembling to my readers so why start now? The reasons for this decision (delaying Walk in Shadow) are varied: the basic situation is as follows. For reasons unknown to me, my agent or my publishers, DoD and FoL have tanked in terms of sales. I wasn't even aware of that until we started marketing the First Contact novel, RKH, but when the details came out it took the wind out of my sails (putting it mildly). Now, if it was a matter of the style I employed for the Kharkanas trilogy turning readers off, then the sales of FoD should have been decent, only to then fall off for FoL. But that wasn't the case. Strangely, the Book of the Fallen series remains strong in terms of sales. Was it because it was a prequel? Possibly. Did FoD come too soon after TCG? Maybe. Or is there some kind of reader-fatigue going on? Could be. One theory I've been considering is a more general wariness among fantasy fans regarding trilogies and series -- having been burned by other authors waiting for books, are readers just holding back until the trilogy is done, before buying in? But then, Dancer's Lament sold brilliantly (and it too is a prequel). Anyway, the upshot is, given what we perceive as considerable enthusiasm for the Karsa trilogy, we decided to jump right in. The story picks up four or five years after the ten book series, so there'll be plenty of room to explore the fall-out, and room for favourite characters to make an appearance beyond Karsa himself. I do remain committed to writing Walk in Shadow and humbly apologize for you (few?) readers eagerly awaiting that novel.

 

Now the whole market is totally different from what it was 10-15-20 yeras ago.

 

One more thing to close this post: it is so easy to say that books after LOC are subpar. I say it so easily too. But nobody mention that writing even one, ONE good epic fantasy book is almost impossible task.  And Jordan wrote 5 consecutive books on excellent quality. FIVE excellent books. Not a good one, five excellent ones. And we should be thankful for that but we are greedy, we want more.

 

 

 

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1+ new reply    Go to first new post

 

This should be in the form of +1, don't you think? And where is my wink emoticon?

 

 

[solarz]

22 hours ago, szilard said:

TSR was the first slow book, if you compare it with the later books...   (Many) people come for action, and not for endless lists of names, or plots which go into nowhere. Or meaningful interaction between the characters.

 

Rather than saying TSR was the first slow book, I think it's more accurate to say that the first 3 books were very frantically paced. TSR wasn't really slow for a book that is part of a 14-book series, but the first 3 books were much more stand-alone paced. Hell, you can also say TSR is the first book where Rand doesn't kill Baalzamon at the end, LOL!

 

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Look, the more you read the series, the more you see its faults. And as solarz says in another thread (I'm twisting their words a little bit), readers want to follow the original characters, the heroes, not to bog down with actor n732.

 

Now I don't remember saying that, though I could have in certain contexts. Still, I'm of the firm belief that a good author writes for himself, not for his readers. People have different tastes, even the same person will enjoy different things at different points in his life. The way I enjoyed WOT when I read it as a teenager is vastly different from when I read it now as a 30-something.

 

 

Quote

 

One more thing to close this post: it is so easy to say that books after LOC are subpar. I say it so easily too. But nobody mention that writing even one, ONE good epic fantasy book is almost impossible task.  And Jordan wrote 5 consecutive books on excellent quality. FIVE excellent books. Not a good one, five excellent ones. And we should be thankful for that but we are greedy, we want more.

 

 

This I agree with. The WOT series has amazing books and books that are weaker by comparison. Personally, I feel that even the weaker books are enjoyable if taken in context with the rest of the series. Like any journey, there are ups and downs, and it's the downs that make us enjoy the ups even more.

Edited January 12, 2018 by solarz

[szilard]

1 hour ago, solarz said:

 

Rather than saying TSR was the first slow book, I think it's more accurate to say that the first 3 books were very frantically paced. TSR wasn't really slow for a book that is part of a 14-book series, but the first 3 books were much more stand-alone paced.

 

To the readers who bought the first trilogy (because WOT is a series of trilogies) in the beginning of the nineties it was extremely slow. We talked about many times in the old Usenet newsgroup. Of course, now we all look at TSR with a different eye.
 

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Now I don't remember saying that, though I could have in certain contexts.

 

 

I wrote "I'm twisting your words" so we'd have a context, but it does not matter at all.

 

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Personally, I feel that even the weaker books are enjoyable if taken in context with the rest of the series.

 

That's the point! Jordan should have separated the main series/happenings from the rest, thus the readers are not forced to do mental gymnatics to keep WOT in shape. At least we did not go to the route à la HP, where many extremely long fanfictions have basically rewritten the whole story keeping the names only.

 

As József Attila says: "I am angry for and not against you" - because it is heartbreaking to see what could have achieved Jordan with WOT, despite being the uncrowned king of epic fantasy.

[Sabio]

I always have said, the biggest issue with the weaker books was the amount of time you had to wait for them.  You wait two years and you get a book that doesn't advance the plot much and then two years later it seems like Perin is still hunting for Faile.  Sort of frustrates you.

[solarz]

On 1/12/2018 at 1:17 PM, szilard said:

 

To the readers who bought the first trilogy (because WOT is a series of trilogies) in the beginning of the nineties it was extremely slow. We talked about many times in the old Usenet newsgroup. Of course, now we all look at TSR with a different eye.

 

I only started reading WOT in 1999, so I probably have a different perspective. :)

 

Before I read WOT, the most representative fantasy series I've read was probably Dragonlance.

[AsaroVincent]

As with all authors RJ had some "isms" that bother me. In fact, I'd say that these small flaws are all that keep me from declaring WOT a genuinely great work of literature.

 

+ Ending sentences with the word "though".

+ Obsession with describing "bosoms" (I get what he's doing here, reinforcing that some characters come from extremely conservative backgrounds, but it does get ridiculous/distracting after a while).

+ "Said" is all that needs to be said when  a character says something! As a novelist I know this gets tedious but I believe in never, ever, ever using anything but "said". RJ sometimes lapsed and had characters "husk" or "lisp" or "huff" or whatever. It really does mar the overall incredible quality of the prose.

+ Corporal punishment -- again I get where he's coming from, this has an historical precedent and wasn't really heard of before in fantasy unless it had a BDSM element (like the Gor books) but it gets old fast and does come across the wrong way to a lot of readers.

+ I get that the characters are young and inexperienced with romantic relationships, but many of the flirtation scenes were too cutesy-pie for me.

 

Apart from that I don't have many criticisms of the content in the books. I wasn't bothered by braid-tugging (a character trait) skirt smoothing (people do this to their clothes in real life all the time when they sit down), I enjoyed all the Aes Sedai intrigue and I didn't mind when major characters took a back seat for extended lengths of story (hey, this is an epic!), I also didn't mind when it "slowed down" -- personally, I thought the prose jumped up significantly in quality starting with Book 7 and got stronger with each succeeding volume, so the "slow down" wasn't painful, there was much pleasure in the simple act of reading his prose. 

 

I have not read the BS volumes yet so I can't comment on them (I know, I know...). I'm hoping to get to them this year. I read EotW in 1990, never followed up, then (starting in 2013, I think) read New Spring through Knife of Dreams, listened to the audio-books, re-read them with the Companion, and I guess I'm ready to rip myself away from the creator . . . . sigh.

[szilard]

On those bosoms: read carefully! Which POV uses that word? And how many times? Use a word finder, and you will be suprised!

on "said" I disagree

"the flirtation scenes were too cutesy-pie for me" - normal people behaves this way 

 

On 2018. január 16. at 12:11 AM, AsaroVincent said:

I have not read the BS volumes yet so I can't comment on them (I know, I know...). I'm hoping to get to them this year. I read EotW in 1990, never followed up, then (starting in 2013, I think) read New Spring through Knife of Dreams, listened to the audio-books, re-read them with the Companion

 

Tell us more!

[Illian Tear]

The Perrin/Faile storyline was so bland and annoying.

[OlwenaSedai]

2 hours ago, Illian Tear said:

The Perrin/Faile storyline was so bland and annoying.

I both liked it and disliked it. I dislike that kind of coy disinterest that Faile worked at for a while, and the rigid gender roles she wanted in the relationship. 

 

But, if you ask me, the annoying part of the storyline was when they were NOT together. Because then they would constantly think about each other and try to get back to each other. But just the other night, I read a scene in the tent shortly after Faile and the others had escaped the Shaido camp, she and Perrin had had sex and he fell asleep, and Faile was awake, looking at him. That scene was actually really great, it added something to their relationship for me. It was so... intimate, showed a new side of Faile, and was quite relatable for anyone who's ever been in an "adult" relationship. In that moment, I felt that Jordan (or Sanderson, actually not sure who wrote that scene, seems they both wrote some in this book) showed a rare proficiency for writing relationships that seemed real.

[Faroresdragn]

I liked the perrin/faile relationship when they were actually together. I really liked that Faile expected Perrin to challenge her and treat her like an equal and not treat her like a delicate flower, even if they did seem to pound that concept into the dirt just a little bit. I felt like it was the most realistic or at lease relatable of all the romantic relationships, because it didnt involve either side falling helplessly smitten with the other at first sight and melting at the thought of them like in most of the other ones besides Mat and Tuon, which I also liked. 

 

I found the relationship between them (at least the parts not related to going into a parallel wolf-spirit dimension) to be comparable/relatable to my own relationship with my wife. Although I did not like the parts where Perrin and Faile were separated, specifically how god. damn. long it went on, I could see myself feeling the same way Perrin did if something were to happen to my wife, and I have often felt the same pride in a relationship where we both see eachother as competent and able to stand on our own even as we draw strength from each other. They definitely have the most healthy and functional relationship in the series in my opinion, and one that was actually based on a love for eachother as people rather than a fantasy infatuation that wouldn't last in real life.

[CthulhuChild]

So I got into wheel of time late. I burned through it over the last few months and pretty much just finished it: I can definitely see what people were talking about, both those who loved it and those who hated it. And I think much of the criticism that can be leveled at the series in recent years is unfair: some of the elements that now seem derivative or hackneyed were very fresh when they first showed up a quarter century ago. Overall I like it a lot, and I think Jordan should get full credit for great world building any excellent characterization. Very few fantasy authors manage to give each character a distinct "voice", they are all feel like variations on the authors own internal monologue.

 

I also think it's unfair to criticize it for being long, or their being "pointless" side plots. When you go to a steakhouse and don't like their Pad-Thai, your criticisms of the restaurant have to be taken with a grain of salt. If you want a tightly written and focused story, maybe you shouldn't be reading a 14 book epic fantasy series. I mean, statistics alone suggest you're going to find sub-plots unsatisfactory when there are literally hundreds of them. By all means, compare and contrast with other 10+ volume epic fantasies whom you feel avoid this problem. I'll be waiting. 

 

But it's a flawed series, for sure. My major complaints:

 

1) Inexplicable romance. Almost of the couples just arbitrarily fall in love. I have no frikken idea why Elayn loves Rand. It is simply stated that she does, full stop, and the plot roles on. And honestly, that's a pretty well developed romance compared to the others. Tom Merrelain? Nynaeve? Galad? Gawyn? Perin is probably the worst offender here: hey, this woman is horrible to me all the time, and wants me to be verbally abusive... *swoon*. What's jarring is that some of the romances DID work well. Matt and Tuon's situation was charming in part because they didn't arbitrarily fall head over heels. Ditto with Androl and Pevara. Min was alright as well, although Rand was predictably weird about it. 

2) Horrible Women. The problem here might be me, but I found a couple of the female characters to be absolutely odious: Nynaeve and Faille being the standouts. Characters who hold nearly everyone in contempt, but are supposed to be likeable anyway. Characters whose insane pettiness and stubborn obstinance is supposed to be endearing. To be clear, I'm not complaining about the male/female relations in general: there are lots of evil men and evil women, good men and good women. Some of the strict gender relations have in-universe explanations, and frankly I think Jordon doesn't get anywhere near enough credit for trying to explore gender in fantasy (indeed, he gets criticized instead). But like so many male authors, he falls flat on his face when confusing "strong woman" with "huge asshole, but supposedly likable because tits".

 

Mind you, he's in fine company here. David Eddings gave us Polgara. Orson Scott Card's Enderverse gave us Novinha. There are other examples, and they all strike me as manifestations of the same thing. I'm all for exploring gender differences, but a male who thought of women the way these women think of men would be a villain. There's a lot to be said for having women with agency, but this class of female character is the antithesis of a woman with agency: they are women who systematically try to deny agency to the characters around them, particularly men. And when the male heroes overcome this sabotage, their status as the true drivers of plot is inevitably reinforced. 

 

3) Idiot Ball. There are a lot of moments where a character becomes incredibly dense for no particular reason other than dramatic tension, or where really obvious moves are not explored. Tuon (who I otherwise adore) falls into this category (delaying arrival at important battlefields, or refusing to consider what the link between Sul'Dam and A'Dam means for herself or her empire). Arbitrary refusal to cooperate is such a recurring theme it went past tiresome and into the realm of aggravating. The other issue is applications of magic: a lot of these were eventually explored but took way too damned long and were inconsistently used (gateways+dragons should have been obvious. Ditto with gateways + lava). Actually, magic in general was annoyingly inconsistent: the bizarre inaccuracy of balefire got pretty ridiculous. Oath-rod shenanigans. Exhausted wizard... just kidding here's a last minute save! Incompetent usage of compulsion (Why would you ever pick Andor over Seanchen?). Outright stupid usage of the Golem (send it to fight the one person who can hurt it. THAT'LL SHOW 'EM!) Incomprehensible unwillingness to break the seals (on both sides). A lot of the conflict and tension in the plot was driven around seeking magical mcguffins or managing arbitrary constraints, while characters never seemed capable of considering the implications of their abilities. 

 

Related gateway gripes (anti-spoilers, things that didn't happen): Why didn't Moridin open a gateway to the sun and end the world? Why didn't Rand lavapocalypse Shayol Ghul? Why didn't the Forsaken lavapocalypse every major city, starting with the white tower? Why did no one open a deep sea gateway (15000 PSI waterjet cutter say what?). Why did so few people get telefragged? 

[Sabio]

The Tuon and Sul'Dam and A'Dam means for herself or her empire, annoys me from the point of it was all OMG this is going to shake the foundations of the empire so we must cover it up.  Then when it becomes known Tuon could care less.  All of this the empire might collapse and in the end it's no big deal.

 

Ummm for the sun there is probably a distance limitation, my guess is the sun would be way too far away, not to mention one gateway will hardly end the world, just the spot the gateway is at.  Just like a gateway pouring lava on top of the Stone of Tear won't simply flood the city, just pour down a gateway sized flow of Lava down.  You need to start linking etc to increase the gateway size.

[CthulhuChild]

42 minutes ago, Sabio said:

Ummm for the sun there is probably a distance limitation, my guess is the sun would be way too far away, not to mention one gateway will hardly end the world, just the spot the gateway is at.  Just like a gateway pouring lava on top of the Stone of Tear won't simply flood the city, just pour down a gateway sized flow of Lava down.  You need to start linking etc to increase the gateway size.

 

No distance limitation is ever even implied in the books. I'd have to play around with the math, but I think even a relatively small hole (10 square meters with an s'angreal is not unrealistic) would allow enough stellar material through (and at sufficient force) to be apocalyptic (remembering that the gateway can be tied off and left open).

 

As to lava-leveling tyr (or other cities), you have to consider that there is no reason to have the lava merely flow through at ambient atmospheric pressure. Flow volume, at the pressures existing inside the mantle, can be pretty catastrophic. And you have to consider the enormous amount of kinetic energy involved: as the magma piles up, it starts flowing out from the point of impact at a rate proportional to the impact velocity. And there is no reason not to put that portal pretty high up. I'm not sure what the terminal velocity of a 3 and a half meter wide column of lava is, but I expect it would be quite spectacular.

[Sabio]

A portal from Randland to Seanchan empire one thing, the sun is a lot further away.  Which would explain need for portal stones.  Since making a gateway to another world would probably be impossible, so the stones were made for such great distances.  The most important thing is whether insane or not, Ishy and the Forsaken weren't going to simply kill everyone without the DO's ok.  Ishy might kill the world but when dead he still gets to face the DO.  Ishy wanted the DO to make it so Ishy was never reborn again, Ishy didn't simply want to die, but never be reborn again.  I think it's also clear the thought of gatewaying lava or anything else never occurred to the Forsaken.  Just like using gateways to spy from above they never tried.  Look at the devestation the insane male Aes Sedai caused, it could be back in the AOL they had such power to use that things like lava gateways would of seemed a waste to them.  As we have seen the Forsaken were not free with teaching BA and Asha'man weaves.

Edited March 30, 2018 by Sabio

[Faroresdragn]

Well you have to realize that they don't understand the world the way we do. Or even if we understand their world the way we think we do. 

 

If we assume that the sun in Randland is a star in the same way it is in real life, there's no way that they would understand it's nature. There's no way that people who wonder at the idea of a steam engine would understand the sun is actually a flaming ball of gas millions of miles away. It shows in the last book how there is a solar eclipse and everyone basically loses their shit, so they obviously dont have a super good understanding of space and the bodies in it. In order to make a gateway, they have to have a good understanding of the place they are trying to build a gateway to, and I doubt even androl could actually comprehend the millions of miles from here to the sun to make a gateway there. Even if he understood it enough to even comprehend weaponizing it, there's just no way that's plausible.

 

And you also mention using things like the pressure and forces in the mantle. And it should be evident by androl making his gateway to the inside if dragonmount, the one active volcano anyone knows about, that they don't understand that there is magma in the earth or any pressure to be utilized there. I mean they are in the middle ages essentially. I think androl thinking to utilize the lava at all shows he's pretty clever, you can't really fault them for not thinking of travelling to the damn sun. 

 

I also agree with the idea that since the forsaken has SO MANY tricks at their disposal, like compulsion, and balefire, which literally erases anything from existance, all their terangreal, not to mention semirahges 1001 ways to torture people, they they really took gateways for granted and never saw their potential. I mean if you already knew how to shoot lazers that made any knows substance (basically) get whiped from spacetime, you dont exactly need to think "hmm. What i really need is a more effective weapon." I think seeing as the Channelers of Randland had gateways for about one year after thinking it was fantasy for 3k years, the amount of innovation they DID manage to come up with for them was pretty impressive. 

[Jagen Sedai]

I just want to pop in and say I'm really enjoying your guys' discussion :D

[szilard]

CthulhuChild, do not let that Sanderson's fan fictions carry you away.

 

A few things. (I will not go along with your list.)

 

Their Sun is not like ours.

Moridin does not want to end everything, he is not Ishy anymore. By the way, there are other ways to destroy 'everything'.

There are limits.

 

Faroresdragn, Forsaken are nothing special. They have two weapons: they do not trust anybody (that's the bigger one), they are ruthless (that's the smaller one).

[Guest]

rofl at the assertion that the last three books of the WOT are fan fictions. Perhaps szilard would like to have a chat with Harriet McDougal about that?

[OlwenaSedai]

@Faroresdragn

You are forgetting that the AOL is in our future. A hyper-modern world. Sure, they relied on magic, but they had cars, planes, tall buildings, you name it, things that show they understood the laws of physics. The Randland in the book is equal to the middle ages, but the age the Forsaken left when the Bore was drilled, was a futuristic one. 

[Faroresdragn]

4 hours ago, OlwenaSedai said:

@Faroresdragn

You are forgetting that the AOL is in our future. A hyper-modern world. Sure, they relied on magic, but they had cars, planes, tall buildings, you name it, things that show they understood the laws of physics. The Randland in the book is equal to the middle ages, but the age the Forsaken left when the Bore was drilled, was a futuristic one. 

 

Right, but like I said, they had so much at their disposal, they never thought to use gateways for more than their immediate practical use, which was travel. They had become blinded by their progress. They mentioned it many times in the books that one of the main reasons for the corruption of many of the Forsaken (specifically aginor and Lanfear) were because they had done so many things with the power they believed there was literally no more discoveries to be made, which led them to wanting to experiment with the TP. So it is very understandable they would just think "if there was something else to be done with gateways, someone would have done it already."

 

I forget what they were talking about specifically, but I remember a few instances where channels did things that the forsaken thought were impossible, and dismissed them out of hand when their cronies tell them about it. They were blinded by arrogance. Which should have made them wonder how much more they could have achieved in the age of legends if they had just approached things with an open mind.

[Talmanes]

II'm kind of late to the party, but to comment on a few things mentioned:

 

Men/woman - I think something to keep in mind here is that the main cast are all basically sheltered teenagers from a small town so the way they act can be explained to some extent. There are plenty of more mature characters throughout the series that don't act nearly the same.

 

I was always annoyed at how easily characters seem o fall in love a lot, but especially with more rereads, there is usually a level of details/reasons (i.e. as someone mentioned in the early books you see a lot of reasons between Nyn and Lan).

 

You have to keep in mind too the whole idea of the Pattern and ta'veren. I've heard a lot of people complain about how many things just seem to work out, or life altering things just sort of happen, but the Pattern is said and shown to actively try to find a way to make things happen. People have free will still, but the Pattern can push people one way or another. I mean look at TDR where Rand passes a town and literally everyone gets married. People falling in love quickly is a lot smaller scale than something like that.

 

Elayne (and the rest of the three who fall in love with Rand) we know is destined to fall in love with Rand, Min viewed it. And keep in mind once again, teenagers. They meet, are both attracted to each other. Elayne might have forgotten about it (even though it was a very memorable experience) but then meets all these other people who know him and he is constantly brought up, but still thinks of it as more of a fancy. Then they see each other again, and wouldn't you know it, act like horny teenagers. All makes sense, and sort of blossoms from there.

 

I'll note too in the early books Rand mentions and thinks about both Min and Elayne and has strong feelings for them even if he didn't understand them. If you want get technical, he doesn't even think twice about Avi for the most part until they have sex, but that's the relationship that people seem to hate on the least lol.

 

For the whole Forsaken/science thing: The Forsaken don't want to destroy the world, they want to RULE the world. This is even a plot element where the DO wants to destroy the Wheel and reign, but the Forsaken are blind to the fact that if he wins, they don't actually have anything to rule.

 

As for futuristic world, you are forgetting one major thing: virtually all advances relate to the OP, not actual science. After all if you have literally magic, why bother with conventional science? (Side note BS actually explores this in his Way/Wayne books and it's an interesting thought). Why create complex machines when you can create ter-angreal?

 

Current Randland shows a world where all of that power is literally a thing of Legend, and they know next to nothing about what can be done with the Power (even though they are finding out more and more).

 

I'll note though that Randland does take place on Earth, our Earth is just extremely far away on the Wheel where legend has faded to myth and even myths are long forgotten. I've seen this all hut confirmed in several places and through little tidbits in the books.

 

[vysterian22]

not a fan of the whole describing things over and over again, got to the point that I found it annoying. Don't need to go into great detail 500 times or more on describing something that has been described several hundred times before

[Jagen Sedai]

9 hours ago, vysterian22 said:

not a fan of the whole describing things over and over again, got to the point that I found it annoying. Don't need to go into great detail 500 times or more on describing something that has been described several hundred times before

 

Good point, yes.

[TheSociopath]

thats easy enough to skip over without losing any of the story.

Edited March 31, 2018 by TheSociopath
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