less rand as the books progress

[Guest JasonLeurquin]

Hi Wheel Of Time Fans,

As i'm currently rereading the wheel of time series i have started to realize that there is less and less Rand as the books progress. To me it's very disappointing due to that fact that all of the action happens around him and that his is the main character. I was just wondering if others found this to and felt the same way as I do.

[michellem]

I would more say he is one of the main characters, and he get's the space he needs.

[Alric]

He is not really the main character, he might be the most important character to the world, and he is the cause or center of many of the plots. But the story is about a disorganized and divided world (sounds familiar?), with too many problems of its own, faced with a challenge way larger than what it can be expected to deal with. It is also a story about the growth of a dozen or so characters that are caught up in these events.

 

I would guess Rand is still the character with the most chapters, but the cast of important characters grow in the first four books or so and then stay relatively stable. After that most new characters are minor, but they do take up space and quite a few pages too.

 

 

[LeeM.Erickson]

He's the main character. If you had a gun to your head and had to name ONE protagonist of The Wheel of Time, you'd say Rand.

 

And yeah, he does seem to get less screen time in some of the later books. The only one he REALLY is absent from is Crossroads of Twilight, however. In that book he's only in for two chapters (neither of which has him as the sole POV) and the Epilogue which is like two pages. In The Path of Daggers, he's not in very much at the beginning, but once he gets going he gets a decent amount of time. He gets a little less time in Winter's Heart, but when he's doing stuff, well, it's important enough to make up for it. He definitely takes center stage again in The Gathering Storm, though.

[kght22]

i'm actually hoping that we don't get a pov for rand at the start of the fom scene in mol. although i do look forward to getting a pov scene with zen rand, i think it would be awesome to just be on the outside while he speaks to the nations in that obviously going to happen scene at the field.

 

one reason rand shows up less in later books is the inclusion of more major characters, but another is rj's (or jr's) love of relating what is going on by showing it to us from a distance. but the primary reason seems to be the former, if you have pov's you have to do, or want to do, particularly in the case of primary characters, depending on how much of their life you want to show, you need to have room to show it. in the case of mat and perrin, he seemed to want to show nearly everything they do, and with all 3 of them away from each other you have to write about them each by themselves. not even including the wondergirls timelines that pretty much triples what you need to think out (not write, just block out because you aren't going to have as much going on for all 3). and of course that is how we end up near the end with one of the prime 3 way behind chronologically.

 

i'm basically saying that rand had a huge amount of screen time at the start, and in the middle, but that had to be tempered by him loosing screen time at other points in the story. he will likely be a star player in the last book, but we didn't even get a pov from him in the most recent (tom) until the very end, and that pov seemed pretty restrained, and it was very short.

[LeeM.Erickson]

And to be fair...some characters have been entirely absent. No Perrin in The Fires of Heaven, no Mat in The Path of Daggers, no Elayne in The Gathering Storm (I have no complaint with that, however).

[Naked~Frog]

Robert Jordan decided to write his book with a bit of a different tactic than normal.

 

What happened, was he decided to show us all of what was going on at once with Rand in his section of the world. Then he broke off and went a ways back in time to show us what was happening elsewhere with everyone else chunk by chunk. The problem was that he couldn't put all in at once and at the same time. If the chapters were switching around between too many characters we would get lost. So each book is generally centered around certain people and switching between them, as opposed to switching between ten people who are all wrapped up in tons of plot points all at once and losing the readers.

 

The problem here is that Winters Heart ended up losing a lot of readers because it was slower and contained less major plot points due to its lack of major plot points and in some cases, major characters.

 

I found this about it online:

He rejected criticisms of the later volumes of the series slowing down in pace in order to concentrate on minor secondary characters at the expense of the main characters from the opening volumes, but acknowledged that his structure for the tenth volume, Crossroads of Twilight (where he showed a major scene from the prior book, Winter's Heart, from the perspective of the main characters that were not involved in the scene), had not worked out as he had planned.

 

Source

 

I didn't spend that much time on it, so better quotes are probably out there somewhere.

[Naked~Frog]

(It was in the fourth paragraph of the section I linked you to.)

[Nightstrike]

I think there's about enough of Rand's POV. It can be interesting to see a variety of POVs. Mat and Forsaken/Shadowsworn are among my favorites.

[michellem]

He's the main character. If you had a gun to your head and had to name ONE protagonist of The Wheel of Time, you'd say Rand.

 

 

First among equals?

 

Yes, Rand is the big hero, the saviour. But half of what he has accomplished, couldn't be, without the others there helping him. No Egwene = no rebel Aes Sedai winning back the Tower = no Amyrlin that wants to help instead of imprisoning him. No Mat = No contact with the Seanchans leader = Eliminating the only hope of a peaceful soulation between Randland and the Seanchan. No Perrin = No peace and understanding with th Whitecloaks = One less army for TG, and one more unstable force run loose. No Elayne = An Andor with a ruler that may or may not be positive towards Rand = More world-problems and one less army for TG.

 

And so on and so on. So without the others, and without the others getting screentime enough to making their accomplishments seem believeable, Rand would be helpless.

 

Yes, some of the storylines are hopelessly long (so sick of Shaido and Andoran nobility), and may take up screentime that Rand could have used better.