[Tribute] From a fan.

[Vordreller]

I feel that, before I start looking at everyday general life on the forums, I owe it to the man to pay my respects.

 

Through TWOT, Robert Jordan had a profound influence on my life. Not just that I finally had books I actually liked reading for my book reports at school. No, that was a side effect. Though it was the last step in wanting to read the series.

 

At age 14, I had a friend at school who sometimes sat on some stairs and was reading a really thick book. Biggest thing I'd ever seen besides dictionaries. I asked him about it and he told me it was called "The Wheel Of Time".

 

"Awesome read." He said. He then made a comparison to "The Lord of The Rings", which I am not going to repeat as it contained harsh language that 14-year boys aren't supposed to know. ;D

 

It wasn't until next year that I needed a serious book for a book report, and I was reminded again of TWOT. So I went out and bought the first book. That was 2003.

 

The Prologue was a bit odd. It took so long describing how everything looked. Furniture, clothing, buildings, etc...

I wasn't used to this... and it just kept going.

 

At the end of the prologue, I didn't really know what to think. It didn't really catch on, but I decided to continue reading. Nowadays, I consider that prologue a gem among all the moments in TWOT books.

 

I started to read the first chapters, I just kept reading. And kept reading.

 

I remember one night, while reading Path of Daggers, I did a total of 120 pages per day. Nowadays I can read 200 pages per day from any book(which does take a full day and an actually interesting book...).

That's actually just the most I remember ever having read in one night.

 

 

The stories, characters, environments and situations of TWOT pull me to them every day. Things happened in these books that I knew happened in real life, yet at the time I was convinced nobody dared utter such thoughts.

 

You see, my childhood was a somewhat troubled one. (There was a large bit of text here. I was writing about some details of my past, but I decided not to hang out my dirty linen. Suffice to say it wasn't the most pleasant childhood. Not that I got beaten or anything like that. My family firmly believes that hitting your children shows that you have no real authority. They're strongly opposed to violence as a way of getting your children to do what you want).

 

I've been re-reading the books in anticipation for the next release, and I keep on noticing hidden metaphors and life lessons. Things that make me think "that's how I would do it.". It's vital to understand and accept that it's not because this is something written in novel-form and published by a commercial company as a book to read in your free time, that what happens in the book is nothing more than "kids fantasy". Reality is what you allow it to be.

 

Which makes me realize, it's not just how I'd do it, it's how I learned to do it. From these books. While not a bible dictating wrong and right, TWOT gives a lot of stuff to think about. Never is something outright said to be good or bad, you can feel along with the characters, understand their decisions, agree or disagree with them, yet still take them for who they are. Jordan's characters, be it Rand or be it one of the Forsaken, they all have their motivations, their drives and their personal background. It's interesting to see how adding or taking away a small cog makes a machine work in a different way.

 

This series opened the way for other series and the Fantasy-genre and more alternative things in General, such as my liking for Heavy Metal. It made me who I am today.

 

I am eternally grateful for the nice reads and the world that Robert Jordan created.

 

May he rest in peace, Robert Jordan, present and future king of Fantasy.(I got that from a movie. It's supposed to symbolize how even though the person died, there will always be another like him, even though we do not immediately recognize it.)